The Brain of Inderdeep Gill
Best #WordOnTheStreet in Time Out magazine this week.

Best #WordOnTheStreet in Time Out magazine this week.

The best product does not win, the best marketed product wins.
Scott Middler

The Great Gatsby

New York. 1922.

The tempo of the city had changed sharply. The buildings were higher, the parties were bigger, and the liquor was cheaper. I found myself at a party at a grand mansion. I didn’t know how I wound up there, but the acid I was tripping on gave everything a brilliant neon polish like a Baz Luhrmann movie.

“Who is this Gatsby that everyone keeps talking about?” I wondered aloud.

“Do you know him?” a girl in a horse mask asked me. Or maybe she was a horse wearing a girl body suit.

“I’ve never met him. Have you?” I said, shouting to make myself heard over the thumping Jay-Z and Kanye West track.

“Gatsby is—” she started, but was interrupted when a debonair gentleman in a three-piece Tom Wolfe approached us.

“Well if it isn’t Daisy Buchanan,” the man said with the southern drawl of a plantation owner. “I’d recognize that shapely ass anywhere.”

“Speak of the devil,” Daisy said three-dimensionally, removing her mask. “I’m certainly glad to see you again.”

“I’m certainly glad to see you as well,” the man said. “And I don’t believe we’ve met, Mr….”

“Parker,” I said, shaking his hand. “Peter Parker.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Parker. They call me Gatsby. The Great Gatsby.”

“Mr. Gatsby…. I’d like to know, exactly who are you anyhow? What makes you so great?”

“My money, numb-nuts.”

“Inheritance?”

“If only. About ten years ago I was on a boat that crashed into an iceberg.”

“The Titanic!” I said.

“The unsinkable RMS Titanic,” Gatsby said. “I met Daisy onboard and when the ship went down so did we. It was all very romantic until she wouldn’t scoot over to make room for me on this floating door.”

Daisy rolled her eyes.

“She left me for dead in the freezing northern Atlantic Ocean waters,” Gatsby continued. “After I was finally rescued, I received an enormous settlement from the boat manufacturer in a class-action lawsuit. I’ve been squandering the money ever since on fast cars and fireworks.”

“You and your damn toys,” Daisy said.

“You never used to complain about my…balls,” Gatsby said, smiling at her with wicked intentions flashing behind his eyes.

“Oh, Gatsby! I was a fool to leave you. I don’t want to go home,” Daisy said.

“Then don’t,” Gatsby said.

His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to her rapid breathing. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed like a flower—

“Um, guys, I’m still right here,” I said, feeling very much like I’d become a secondary character in my own narrative.

“Sorry, Parker,” Gatsby said, breaking their liplock. “We’re going to make sex now.”

He took the horse mask from Daisy’s hands and slipped it on his own head. Daisy leapt onto Gatsby’s back. She was a fine woman but no small girl, and Gatsby struggled under her weight. “The poor son-of-a-bitch,” I thought, wondering if a door really could have supported their combined weight in the Atlantic Ocean. Probably not.

I waved goodbye to them, and Daisy slowly rode Gatsby off into the sunset as some Beyoncé and André 3000 cover of an Amy Winehouse song played….

Swedish House Mafia leave the world behind them, where you see them go their separate ways in a Volvo XC 60. The brand content campaign from Swedish agency Forsman & Bodenfors and director Adam Berg is the swan song for the band, which announced it would split after a final appearance in Miami in March. The campaign includes an interactive site and making-of video. 

Swedish House Mafia leave the world behind them, where you see them go their separate ways in a Volvo XC 60.

The brand content campaign from Swedish agency Forsman & Bodenfors and director Adam Berg is the swan song for the band, which announced it would split after a final appearance in Miami in March. The campaign includes an interactive site and making-of video. 

(Source: fastcocreate.com)

Everyone’s heard the famously wry admonition that “there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.”  In an amusing irony, even this trusty condemnation of statistical dishonesty is itself of shadowy origins. Some say Twain, some Disraeli, and some attribute it to various others.   The dusty historical sentiment, however, has never been truer. Even as we’ve developed incredibly sophisticated technologies to slice and dice and count the numbers, the distortions, manipulations and fabrications still abound. Whether characterized as statistics, metrics, data or quantification, the old saying still stands: figures don’t lie but liars figure.    Social media is a perfect example. For Facebook and Twitter, the digital world places heavy emphasis on the importance of large follower numbers. But are such numbers reliable? Skewed numbers and statistics affiliated with social media accounts have recently stirred controversy both in the political and entertainment realm.   During the 2012 presidential election, Mitt Romney bought “followers” on Twitter via an online buying service[DR1] . Romney miraculously managed to increase his follower count by 117,000 or nearly 17 percent. But there were nagging doubts.  So Barracuda Labs, an IT company based in  California, analyzed Romney’s new “followers.” Barracuda found that 25 percent of these claimed devotees had never tweeted, and 10 percent had suspended accounts. Twitter-buying services such as TwitterTechnology.com can provide any account with 500 new “followers” for as low as $4.     Nor are such practices confined to the anything-goes world of political campaigns. In fact, it’s even more common for celebrities to try to boost online clout with purchased fan numbers. Justin Bieber was crowned the “King of Twitter[DR2] ” earlier this year after surpassing Lady Gaga as the most-followed person on the social media platform. But a recent joint study [DR3] conducted by statistics portal Statista, SocialBakers and Twitaholic discovered that nearly 17 million of Bieber’s followers are fake.   Although Bieber still has over 18 million legitimate followers, these inflated numbers can be incredibly deceiving for marketers, who use this information to target budgets for ad-buying. Such falsified followers can cause a significant problem for ad-buying agencies and sponsors. Advertisers understand how powerful social media can be as a medium for reaching a target audience. But digital marketers now have to be much more wary when using platforms like Twitter or Facebook. Advertisers spending substantial sums to reach large numbers in targeted markets are understandably unhappy when ad expenditures disappear into nothingness.     Similar falsifications and inaccuracies arise in calculating Facebook “likes”. Fortunately, there are resources that can help determine whether Facebook “likes” or Twitter “followers” are real. Online tools such as Crowdbooster or Simply Measured can be beneficial in monitoring whether users are engaged and if social media data is authentic.   The simple lesson is clear—it’s good to have a healthy skepticism and informed awareness about statistics, metrics, and data. Sometimes the numbers do lie. Even about Justin Bieber.
Everyone’s heard the famously wry admonition that “there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.”  In an amusing irony, even this trusty condemnation of statistical dishonesty is itself of shadowy origins. Some say Twain, some Disraeli, and some attribute it to various others.
 
The dusty historical sentiment, however, has never been truer. Even as we’ve developed incredibly sophisticated technologies to slice and dice and count the numbers, the distortions, manipulations and fabrications still abound. Whether characterized as statistics, metrics, data or quantification, the old saying still stands: figures don’t lie but liars figure. 
 
Social media is a perfect example. For Facebook and Twitter, the digital world places heavy emphasis on the importance of large follower numbers. But are such numbers reliable? Skewed numbers and statistics affiliated with social media accounts have recently stirred controversy both in the political and entertainment realm.


 
During the 2012 presidential election, Mitt Romney bought “followers” on Twitter via an online buying service[DR1] . Romney miraculously managed to increase his follower count by 117,000 or nearly 17 percent. But there were nagging doubts.  So Barracuda Labs, an IT company based in  California, analyzed Romney’s new “followers.” Barracuda found that 25 percent of these claimed devotees had never tweeted, and 10 percent had suspended accounts. Twitter-buying services such as TwitterTechnology.com can provide any account with 500 new “followers” for as low as $4.  
 
Nor are such practices confined to the anything-goes world of political campaigns. In fact, it’s even more common for celebrities to try to boost online clout with purchased fan numbers. Justin Bieber was crowned the “King of Twitter[DR2] ” earlier this year after surpassing Lady Gaga as the most-followed person on the social media platform. But a recent joint study [DR3] conducted by statistics portal Statista, SocialBakers and Twitaholic discovered that nearly 17 million of Bieber’s followers are fake.
 
Although Bieber still has over 18 million legitimate followers, these inflated numbers can be incredibly deceiving for marketers, who use this information to target budgets for ad-buying. Such falsified followers can cause a significant problem for ad-buying agencies and sponsors. Advertisers understand how powerful social media can be as a medium for reaching a target audience. But digital marketers now have to be much more wary when using platforms like Twitter or Facebook. Advertisers spending substantial sums to reach large numbers in targeted markets are understandably unhappy when ad expenditures disappear into nothingness.  
 
Similar falsifications and inaccuracies arise in calculating Facebook “likes”. Fortunately, there are resources that can help determine whether Facebook “likes” or Twitter “followers” are real. Online tools such as Crowdbooster or Simply Measured can be beneficial in monitoring whether users are engaged and if social media data is authentic.
 
The simple lesson is clear—it’s good to have a healthy skepticism and informed awareness about statistics, metrics, and data. Sometimes the numbers do lie. Even about Justin Bieber.

(Source: worldpremierhiphop.com)

Blurred Lines.