Every day we use technology to find answers, from Google processing billions of searches, through to emailing colleagues or sending a question on twitter. We are increasingly relying on algorithms, communities and the fact that our colleague’s eyes may pass over our request at the right time.

On top of this, users have to contend with the filter bubble. This selective distribution of information based on a web user’s location, search history and previous clicks relies on a previous viewpoint and won’t necessarily reflect what somebody wants to know *now*.

This reliance on a fast digital response leads us away from existing relationships and habits and all too often we forget the value that can be provided by people with decades of experience, thoughts and stories. For example, when my ninety-four year old Grandad listens to my fairly trivial stresses and comes back with the maxim “You can only give it your best shot son” it resonates because I know he fought in World War II, worked for 40 years, opened a lodging house aged 60 and has been through plenty of loss and happiness.

Online searches may be able to supply the facts about historical events, but it will never be able to replicate the emotions and feelings of someone who was there and witnessed an event first hand or the personal delivery of that information. A status update asking for help is just as likely to illicit sarcastic responses as actual, useful advice. In fact, sometimes the best reply is sitting in a lonely old chap up in Scotland who is just waiting to be asked, whatever the question.

Hugmail is a partnership between BBH Zag and Touchnote, a British technology company whose aim is to bridge the increasing digital divide and making it easier for different generations to keep in touch.

That’s why Labs & Zag are excited to announce ‘Search for a Sage’, the hunt for Britain’s most interesting grandparent. We’re looking to find a great character that’s seen it all, with plenty of stories and a unique slant on life.

We’ll ask a Sage to answer the nation’s questions via regular webcasts and take it from there.  We want to put real wisdom on a pedestal in a place where modern society is likely to look for it.

So if you know a grandparent that fits the bill then send a nomination to hugmail.com.

Our sage will be unveiled and start answering questions and laying down wisdom from 21^st November.

‘The future… doesn’t arrive all at once.’
—Sid Mead, futurist, visionary, creator of Bladerunner

Booting up a PC

When we first boot up a PC, we take a step back in time.

The very first instructions that a PC executes when powered up are, in computing terms, ancient history. Called the Instruction Set, they were etched into the modern PC’s chip by its distant ancestor decades ago, like hieroglyphics on a pyramid chamber wall. And like hieroglyphics, they are understood by the very few.

The next step a PC takes is to invoke its Microcode. Microcode is fascinating. When a PC first flips on, it is phenomenally stupid. It has no memory, no instructions to execute and isn’t even aware of what devices it is connected to.

It’s a little like the film Memento. The computer wakes with no memory and a few arcane instructions written onto its hand. These very few instructions tell it how to follow more instructions, and so on until the computer gradually becomes less stupid. It all starts with these microscopically small lines of code invoking the 1978 Instruction Set.

The majority of the Microcode is written by the designers and engineers of the chip. So the PC starts to run code from a chip designed a few years ago, but running an instruction set from a time where Jimmy Carter is one year in, the Berlin wall is yet to come down, no-one has heard of the internet, and MC Hammer is 10 years away from being famous.

Forward to the BIOS

So the modern Microcode tells the PC to load the BIOS. Suddenly we leap forward in time to 2005, in the case of my home PC, to when the BIOS was written.

Invoking the BIOS is a little like putting the PC into a coma state.
The basic things like breathing and heart rate get started but that is all. In other words, there’s power on in the basement but nothing on in the control room. The BIOS also tells the PC where its arms and legs are (or where its keyboard and screen are), and how much memory it has and so on.

Back to DOS

Then the BIOS tells the PC to load DOS. Now we really jump back. Suddenly it’s 1982, I am 12 and Spandau Ballet’s ‘True’ is top of the charts.

Actually DOS was written way back in the seventies and changed very little after about 1995. It’s a quick simple language that allows the PC to load a modern operating system like Windows 7. Hence its original name ‘QDOS’ which stood for ‘Quick and Dirty Operating System.’ That lasted until Bill Gates acquired it for Microsoft, and changed the letter ‘D’ to mean ‘Disk,’ presumably for commercial reasons.

So DOS loads, sets a few environment variables, loads whatever version of Windows, and we’re transported to somewhere in the aughties. It’s taken us 45 seconds to come 30 years. But it’s not over yet.

Forward to Windows

Windows 7 is itself a mishmash of inherited components, device drivers and other stuff. Some parts of it are very modern. Other parts are years old.

For example, if you’re unlucky enough to use Explorer 6 as your browser, you’re basically using a badly restored antique which has been nailed to another badly restored antique. Explorer 6 is a kludge of old browser code, tacked-on components and obsolete modules. Firefox, Chrome and the new Explorers were all rewritten from the ground up, but still have to navigate an internet that was designed decades ago.

Back to the internet

No matter which browser you use, you are using a system running on TCP/IP which was designed in the early 70‘s and perfected in 1983, accessing a modern webpage which contains a markup language first designed in 1990, plus CSS first introduced in 1994, and javascript (1994).

It’s a veritable UN-building’s-worth of mismatching languages, out of date protocols, and well-meaning inefficiency.

Why?

So it begs the question, how on earth could our most advanced technology actually be such a shockingly complex, inefficient system?

The answer lies in how new technology arrives.

People often think new technology replaces the old. In reality it rarely does. To Sid Mead’s point, the problem is that it arrives, but not all at once.

New technology has– to some extent– to be compatible with the past. So rather than replace it, it often lays over the old system and encapsulates it. In doing this, it has a firm foundation but it also means it inherits some of the characteristics of the old technology.

It’s exactly the same process with trees. Every year a ‘new’ tree encapsulates the old tree like an overcoat, yet it relies on the old tree to support this new layer. Every knot, branch and imperfection is reproduced by each successive layer.

This process of encapsulation is prevalent everywhere in technology. The question of what encapsulates what is absolutely essential to the growth and/or failure of a technology.

When a technology is encapsulated by another, it stops or slows in development. The technology dies or becomes fossilized. We move on. This is because the ‘new technology’ layer requires that nothing changes in the old layer, in case it stops functioning.

When Windows 3.0 arrived it wasn’t really a new operating system. It was basically still using DOS commands, but had a cosmetic layer of graphics over the top. Windows was pulling the levers, but the work was still being done by DOS behind the curtain.

But the moment this happened, DOS became fossilized. DOS couldn’t change significantly because it had become encapsulated in Windows. Windows developed, DOS remained still. We moved on.

Nowadays the players have changed but the game is the same. There is a belief that the browser and cloud will encapsulate desktop software as in Chromebooks. There is also a belief that social media will be encapsulated into search, as +1 recently showed. Perhaps paid media will be encapsulated by social media. I don’t have the answers. But the overall dynamics of the marketplace are clear.

Life is a layer

This process of reiterative encapsulation is so pervading, it can even describe our life and place in the universe. The fact that 98% of our DNA seems to have no function, seems to point to a similar process going on in human development.

Just like the inner older rings in a tree, we are the product of our latest layer of DNA technology, but the old stuff still remains. The term ‘Junk DNA’ is a little misleading because in the same way the old layers of tree are vitally important to the current tree, this ‘Junk’ has made us what we are. It’s not Junk. Perhaps they are just old layers of code.

So, here’s the point: life is a layer. All life on earth can be seen as a string of encapsulations. Elements were encapsulated into compounds, and those compounds became encapsulated into more complex compounds, then proteins became encapsulated into DNA, DNA into cells, cells became encapsulated into multicellular life and these life forms began a highly accelerated form of adaptive encapsulation called evolution.

Given the scale of all these events, it’s difficult to state conclusively that humans are the last stage of this.

It is clear that something is going on here. It’s tempting to think we are slowly arranging ourselves into something more complex, wonderful and greater than our sum. But it is equally difficult to imagine that we would be able to see it, in the same way that an individual cell cannot comprehend it is part of a Jellyfish.

But, if one could view the world with different eyes, say eyes that respond to the entire electromagnetic spectrum. You would see biological life in all its exotic complexity – but you would also see a huge, highly complex global brain of electrical connections spanning the earth like silk filaments, encapsulating the thoughts and activities of the creatures that live in it.

The observer might well conclude that this Being, and not the Human Being, is the real life on Earth.

Please donate here: http://keepaaroncutting.blogspot.com/

A few weeks ago we started the UK edition of The BBH Barn program (@BBHBarn).

The Barn is a program for our interns: its aim to expand and mix both the power advertising wields and youth’s inherent energy, then channel both for good.

As our team went about trying to find a problem they felt passionate about solving, we were all surprised by the absurdity of the past week’s riots in the UK.

With the riots came all of the negativity towards todays youth and the use of social media technology to mobilise people.

There it was, we had our problem. We wanted to show the world that youth and technology could also be a force for good, this was exactly what The Barn was about.

The team came up an idea. Why not use the force for good to help someone that was neither young nor technology savvy.

We set up Keep Aaron Cutting.

Aaron is an 89 years old barber who has been in the Tottenham area for 41 years whose business was ransacked during the riots. He has no insurance and no way of rebuilding his shop. His livelihood is devastated.

“I will probably have to close because I haven’t got insurance and I can’t afford the repairs,” – Aaron

If we could restore Aaron’s faith in youth and technology that might not solve the problem, but would be the perfect way to start.

If you want to help, please donate or share. And if you’d like to, follow the story via the site and via #keepaaroncutting on Twitter.

If you have any questions about BBH Barn in the UK please contact me @pablo_marques or via email.

For media enquiries about BBH‘s involvement, please contact Sarah Pollard.

The Team:

BBH Barners

Bjorn and Sophie @bjornandsophie
Omid Fard @OmidFard

Mentors

Kimberly Gill @kimmeh_gill
Mareka Carter @marekacarter
Simon Pearse @ThisIsMurray
Ben Shaw @BenShaw
Mel Exon @melex

An edited version of this post was originally published for Fast Company here.

Fairy lights at Google Creative Sandbox, Cannes, June 2011

I suspect 2011’s festival may be looked back upon as the year advertising and technology agreed to meet in Cannes and get married on the beach.  Sure, previous years have seen tech co attendance (Yahoo! are regulars to the festival) but this year the commitment to one another was unprecedented, visible and visceral.

Unquestionably, the two industries have much still to work out about each other. Nonetheless, the re-branding of that bastion of old school ad cool, Cannes Lions, as a ‘festival of creativity’ this year signalled a broadening mindset. And Facebook’s VP of Global Marketing Solutions, Carolyn Everson, took a big step towards agencies, speaking compellingly about Facebook as a “platform for creativity” and the company’s desire to “stay small and empower agencies.”  On the very same day, Eric Schmidt was on stage declaring that “hell has frozen over..we would never have thought there was value [in a Super Bowl ad].. We strongly believe advertising has value.” Importantly, the brand also picked up a pride of Cannes Lions this year, thus proving again that the appreciation flows two ways.

This shared acceptance spilled out beyond the seminar speeches and awards. Having done some early reconnaissance at last year’s Cannes, Google’s Tom Uglow came to the conclusion that “people want decent wifi and fairy lights”. A year later, surveying an array of geeks and ad types happily mingling on the beach at Google’s Creative Sandbox, it’s hard not to agree.  The generosity inherent in designing a space like this (masterminded with great care by Google’s Head of Events, Amy Brown) for all comers is laudable, but more than this, the approach said loud and clear that the company values its relationship with the creative community and has something to show them about giving back; about being open, versus closed.

The ubiquitous bottles of Rose lined up on tables along the Croisette may be delightful, but finding uniquely useful, entertaining ways to enhance each other’s experience is a lot more fun and well, different. As John Hegarty’s speech on Friday spelt out, as humans we’re hard-wired to respond to difference (technical term is dishabituation, apparently): in short, “difference wakes us up”.

At Cannes this year, advertising and technology finally woke up to one another, properly and in public. I’m looking forward to 2012.

Google are a client of BBH.

@tomux at Google Creative Sandbox

Don at work by abbey*christine, via Flickr

Author: Matthew Kershaw, Content Director, BBH London

I talked here yesterday about a near future in which TV advertising would become fully targetted, completely measurable and highly interactive.

So what are the implications of this prediction for agencies?

Without getting all Harold Camping on you, here are five things I believe agencies should do to craft the advertising of the future:

1. Be action oriented not message oriented

The briefs we gave teams historically were geared around message – what did we want to say to consumers?

Nowadays, this has evolved to discussions which treat communications as a product to be shared, remixed, commented upon. (BBH briefs ask, “Why are the target going to want to seek this idea out, spend time with it or share it?”)

But beyond this, the new landscape will require us all to think about, in a much broader sense, what action we want the viewer to take. For sure, it will be a simple, light action that they can take there and then, rather than anything complex or time-consuming. Viewers are in on-sofa lean-back mode after all.

But nevertheless, the ‘light action’ can be pretty broad:

You get the idea. Bookmarking is interesting because there is often latent interest in a product or service in an ad, but not to the degree that you want to stop watching your  favourite show. The ability to ‘save it for later’ seems very appealing (this is born out by work done by Thinkbox).

‘Add to basket’ is also interesting because it has the power to disrupt the relationship between product and retailer, giving advertisers the ability to drive viewers straight from TV to supermarket.

2. Bring sales closer to advertising

Talking of actions, the most important action to most advertisers is the decision to ‘buy’.

The road to ‘t-commerce’ is littered with failures. And you can see why. Imagine inputting all this on your TV using a remote control. Nightmare.

People don’t want to be taken away from the programme to a simple voting interface, much less a complicated e-commerce journey. But luckily, in this new connected era, people on the sofa are interacting with the shared screen using their phone, tablet etc as the management tool.

Linking the incredible motivating power of TV with the ability to buy there and then could be the single biggest change in the advertising model since – well, since the introduction of TV advertising itself. The process by which a consumer becomes aware of a product through advertising, decides to purchase, goes in store to buy the product and then becomes an evangelist might have taken a number of weeks or months in the past.

Now, the whole process can theoretically be compressed into a matter of minutes.

3. Love Data

And, as that buying process compresses, so advertisers will become less interested in the fact that x million people had the ‘opportunity to view the ad’, or what a bunch of people in a focus group said sometime later about their brand.

Instead they will increasingly measure the success of their campaigns by the response they get right there and then, on the spot.

One consequence of this is that understanding and analysing consumer responses, and ever more complex results and tracking will be vital. Especially if it helps you understand better which of your creative is having the best impact. It will determine what contribution your agency is making to ‘the final click’ as opposed to all those other agencies.

If you’re not already, time to start building your data offering.

4. Prepare for a world targetted and varied

In a world where TV ads can be targetted, clients need multiple variants of the ads tailored to different audiences. Agencies need to consider multiplicity in their strategy, which has important implications for the production process. We need to do more for less. Big clients like Unilever are already starting to decouple the production side of what agencies do to get economies of scale. The pressures that all agencies are facing at the moment will only be exacerbated by this internet-ising of television.

5. Be always on

Tracking instant, real-time results inevitably means instant real-time copy changes and tweaks. For ad agencies, this requires analysts who are ready to set up and manage this information. And, as mentioned, a production process that allow for constant, on-the-spot-changes and A/B testing.

In summary

TV is changing due to increased targeting by broadcasters, and – as viewers themselves are more connected – more social activity around TV content. The impact of this is that TV advertising will to become more like advertising on the internet, more measurable and interactive.

One fear is that this will channel creativity into a singular expression, “so is advertising going to be purely about direct marketing techniques from now on?” one colleague asked me.

I hope that isn’t case.

Standing out in an ever-busier media landscape will rely more than ever on creativity. But what I also hope will happen is that as the advertising gets closer to the sale – the moment of truth –  agencies will start to have a broader commercial remit. Something which can only help increase our relevance to our clients.

There is a scene at the end of Series 2 of Madmen where Don Draper fights it out with Duck over the future of Sterling Cooper. Don wins the day with his line “I don’t sell advertising, I sell products”.

Connected TV potentially offers the power to sell products to an unheard of degree.

It’s what Don would have wanted.

TV stencil by USB, via Flickr

Author: Matthew Kershaw (@mattski2000), Content Director, BBH London

There is a frothy bubble of excitement growing around the future of Connected TV.

At CES back in January, it was announced that the connected TV category is forecast to ship over 123 million connected TVs  a year by 2014. With overall ownership to reach 1 billion by 2015.

Just this month,  Philips announced that they have 1 million active Net TV users.

And all the major players are piling in: Google are still behind Google TV, YouView are finally preparing to launch with the ultimate boss, Lord Sugar, Virgin have just launched their Tivo service, Sony made a commitment early and even Apple are still just about in the game with their AppleTV device. And then there’s Anthony Rose, the genius behind the  BBC iPlayer and ex CTO of YouView, now championing two-screen interaction.

With all this hype and excitement, you’d think that us ad folk would be talking about nothing else, combining as it does ad land’s two big obsessions: the power of television and the interactivity of the internet.

So why are we holding back?

Is it just a hangover from the ‘red button’ experiment? Or perhaps, having got on board with the message that ‘TV is dying! The internet’s the future!’, combining both of them is just too big a step to get our heads around.

There is certainly a problem with the way it’s being sold to us.

Since its inception, television has had a delightfully simple and focused proposition: you turn the box on and you are pushed rich, engaging video content. If you’re bored, you can change channel and watch something else.

Recent developments like Sky+, HD, 3D and especially video-on-demand are all effectively enhancements of the same principle. TV, but better (or more convenient).

Too often though, the way Connected TV is marketed obscures and complicates all that is great about TV.

It gets in the way of the video content; displaying a bunch of stuff over the programming. Or worse, turns what should be a shared screen into a one-viewer experience.

I wonder whether people really want to get a Twitter stream cluttering up their TV screen. Or surf Facebook. Or get the weather. Particularly when there are better screens available to do it on.

But don’t get me wrong, underlying all of this there are two incredibly exciting developments in the world of TV. One is being spontaneously driven by audiences, in a completely uncontrolled way.  The other, in complete reverse, is being created by The Man, the conglomerates who control television.

The first is that, without any official prompting, people are grabbing their smartphones, laptops and iPads and using them to interact with the TV to unheard of levels:

• 42% of American consumers surf the internet while watching the television (Deloitte)
• 86% of US mobile Internet users are using their mobile devices at the same time as watching TV (Yahoo!/Nielsen)
• 72% of under-25 mobile internet users in the UK post comments on TV shows using Twitter, and 56% do it on Facebook (Digital Clarity)

So people definitely want to interact with their TV – they just don’t necessarily want to do it through their TV.

In other words:

It’s not about people watching connected TV.

It’s about connected people watching TV.

At the same time as viewers are spontaneously socialising around TV, the powers that be are also adding some extraordinary technology, using broadcast infrastructure to do incredible things.

Broadcasters like Sky, Cablevision and DirectTV are all on the verge of being able to play out targeted advertising using demographic data they hold on their customers.

We’re talking here about proper TV ad breaks, targetted at specific households.

Taken to its extreme, in this new world, the Royal Household might think that the new face of Robinsons is Sophie Dahl while the rest of us get Stacey Solomon.

Or while we’re getting adverts for the Audi A1 (on-the-road price £13,950)  the Abramovich family see adverts for the Audi R8, (on-the-road price £87,350).

Put simply, all the behaviours that currently accompany advertising on the web are going to be brought across to TV advertising:

• The formats, the measurement and analysis
• The real-time changing of copy and iterative approach to creative
• The laser-like focus on ROI and direct response

In other words TV advertising is about to become; fully targeted, completely measurable and highly interactive.

It’s like the Brian Cox of advertising. The rock and roll of his ex-band D:Ream married to a career as a theoretical astrophysicist. And everyone loves Brian Cox, don’t they?

And that my friends is a revolution. It’s the future we’ve all been promised. The winners will be those who can change how they plan, create and produce their output to engage with consumers in this new world.

So what does this mean for agencies specifically? More on that in the next instalment, which will be about five actions creative agencies need to take to contend with the TV of the future.

“This is of mythical proportions. We have to deal with it, even if it turns out not to be true.”
~ Kevin Kelly

Sarah Speake introduces the 'Transcendent Man' screening

Regular readers of this blog will know we have an abiding fascination with what technology may bring in the far flung future (see our The Coming Age of Augmentation post and, most recently, Greg Anderson on Asimov’s First Law).

So it’ll be no surprise to hear we got *extremely* excited when an invite arrived, courtesy of Google, to attend a screening of Barry Ptolemy’s Transcendent Man at the Science Museum in London, followed by a Q&A with the director and the film’s subject, the futurist, author and engineer Ray Kurzweil.

The documentary is an elegant stringing together of a series of points and counter-points voiced by an extraordinary cast of technology sages, providing a coherency to the controversial Technological Singularity debate previously lacking (see our amateur knitting together of different points of view here, for example). It’s slick, impressive stuff. The film also contains a classical and wholly human theme which Ptolemy chose to highlight during the Q&A – Kurzweil’s complex relationship with his father, to which I would add: his overriding preoccupation with (avoiding) death.

Nonetheless, I can’t help but think these themes are the director’s attempt to lend some day-to-day humanity to what otherwise becomes a circular debate about whether technology will bring about a future Dystopia or Utopia. For brevity, the extremities of the debate can be summed up in sound bites from the film:

“People routinely underestimate the law of accelerating returns… in about forty years the pace of change is going to be so astonishingly quick that you won’t be able to follow it, unless you enhance your own intelligence by merging with the intelligent technology we’re creating.” ~ Kurzweil

“We always use the latest technology to create the new technology… we will create AIs that are real people.” ~ Kurzweil

“There will be a major war in the late 21st century between two human groups about whether to build or not build AI..the Artilect War” ~ Hugo de Garis

And, finally, the impossible-to-argue-with perspective: “The biggest implication of the Technological Singularity is that we don’t know the implications”  ~ Dean Kamen

At the very end of the Q&A we were lucky enough to ask Kurzweil a question that’s been vexing us since we first came across it:

“If we’re to believe we will live forever, it follows there will be no need to procreate and hence no evolutionary need for love… so what exactly are we transcending to?”

His response was swift and fluent; the practised, polite putdown of a professional used to deflecting tricky questions:

“To be creative. To have relationships, to give to one another..”

Music to an optimist’s ears, perhaps: who wouldn’t want to eradicate poverty, disease and death if they could? And replace all of that with a pure and harmonious focus on creativity?

Nonetheless, I cannot help but think this isn’t a future I want. Give me the messy, heart-breaking, silly and all-too-short side to human life. And the joy brought about by children; not in terms of the hypothetical future they represent, but the way they are right now, in front of us, making us laugh and cry with their indescribable brilliance. What do you think? Do the laws of evolution dictate a future coloured by unending cyborgian perfection, or will we fight to wallow sentimentally in our flawed humanity?

The Science Museum looking suitable sci-fi last Monday night

Author: Greg Andersen (@gandersen), CEO, BBH New York

In the last couple of weeks I’ve read two specific articles that made me really stop and think about our future as a creative industry. The first was the March 26th New York Times article “In a New Web World, No Application is an Island”. It paints a picture of a silky smooth, boundary-less web full of open and interconnected apps thanks largely to HTML5. The creative palate and resulting experiences made possible by the likes of HTML5 are truly thrilling. The second article was “Nine jobs that humans may lose to robots”. On the list are occupations you’d expect to see left to machines, like soldiers and astronauts. But taking a step back and considering the all the advances in marketing technology I can’t help but wonder if advertising people, including creatives, will be appearing on that list when the article is inevitably written again in a few years time.

To be clear, this isn’t an anti-technology rant. That would be odd on the BBH Labs blog and flies straight into the face of tons of BBH work and investments within the agency. Rather, it is one guy’s view of a potential future brought on by a lot of very well intentioned innovations and advances, marked in my mind by said excitement around HTML5.

On the surface, what HTML5 offers to creativity and brand experiences is nothing short of amazing. Things like immediate video playback and better video tagging and search-ability will help to further accelerate content adoption and open exciting new creative uses of video. It also means that it will be easier to connect specific video content to other related content like articles, photos, data, etc. In short, HTML5 will make for brand experiences that can go both broader and deeper while maintaining a high quality user experience. Done well, these experiences will be good enough to be searched for and sought out…even if they are really just marketing.

Another positive side of HTML5 is its openness; providing the ability to create vastly better experiences on the free range of the web not penned in by walled garden technology companies. But this also means an incredible open flow of MUCH richer user data around preferences and behaviors. In itself, that’s not a big deal. Agencies and marketers and media owners constantly seek out better information to make better things and better decisions. But marketing is now also swamped with new marketing technologies to take advantage of this data. Coupled with tools for behavioral targeting, tools for social media monitoring, tools for conversion optimization, tools for automated bid optimization, tools for CRM marketing automation and tools that make it much easier for rich creative automation… I wonder what the role for us humans really is.

The best brands and their creativity make people both do and feel. To accomplish that we must not lose humanity in marketing creativity regardless of what is possible technologically. Human creativity is a special thing and when applied to brands there is still something oddly reassuring knowing that behind most any piece of brand communication there is a human engaging another human through a discourse of persuasion.

Asimov’s First Law states “a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” Man, I hope he was talking about advertising people.

Poor 3D.  It’s been around forever yet we still don’t seem to be able to make up our minds on whether it’s any good or not.

It’s exactly one year since we partnered with Burberry to stream their show live in 3D to 5 VIP locations. Everyone was excited about Avatar. We wanted to give the fashion elite from Paris, Dubai, Tokyo, Los Angeles and New York a real-time experience of the show that trumped watching a standard webstream at your desk. It was the first ever global live simulcast in 3D.

However I doubt Roger Ebert would have bothered.

He argued recently that our brains just can’t handle 3D visuals and it gives us all a headache. ”It doesn’t work with our brains and it never will” he categorically states.  He quotes a letter from Walter Murch who argues a fundamental convergence/focus issue when watching 3D that “requires us to focus at one distance and converge at another. And 600 million years of evolution has never presented this problem before.”  As far as Mr Ebert is concerned, that’s it. “3D doesn’t work and never will. Case closed.”

Except with 508 comments on his post and counting, it seems the case is not completely closed for the rest of us.

Now, these guys are clearly dons. Ebert is a Pulitzer prize winning film critic who’s written for the Sun Times forever and Murch, an award winning editor and sound designer who won an Oscar for his sound editing on Apocalypse Now and the English Patient.

But is it that black and white?

Does it have to be 2D versus 3D?

The main points leveled against 3D in this debate are worth digging a little deeper on.

1. 3D doesn’t work with our brains and gives us headaches

Look, I feel sorry for the dudes who get headaches, but that’s clearly not the case for everyone. Personally, Avatar and Tron at the IMAX were extraordinary to watch. Full feature length viewing, completely headache free. Sure, these films won’t win Oscars for their plots, but for the pure visual epic-ness of it all, they were stunning.

2. 3D doesn’t enhance the emotional experience of watching a film

Sure, there are films which have no reason to be in 3D. But studios are hard wired to make money and making a film like Yogi in 3D might just make the difference between box office success and failure.  When watching Tron at the IMAX, billed as a 3D film, a lot of the scenes were actually in 2D. The 3D was used where it could create most impact. Similarly, for the VIP guests watching the Burberry show, the format suited the content.  A long catwalk with models striding out towards you and the shortness of a show made it an ideal 3D viewing experience. 3D can still work well, when used well. The detractors seem to be in denial that there is emotional impact in the sheer wow factor of a great 3D experience.

3. Is 3D here to stay or is it today’s betamax?

Dramatic falls in DVD sales will require Hollywood and TV manufacturers to push whatever the next difficult-to-pirate camera technique is. Other than Cameron, few of the top Hollywood directors have gone for it though. 3D’s real home might be end up in gaming. I can’t wait to see the Nintendo 3DS (which looks amazing – you can even turn it ‘up’ from 2D to 3D just like turning up the volume).

Bring on the future I say.

Bring on different types of visual and sonic exploration.

Why not explore all the ways we can use the senses to give a heightened viewing experience (what did happen to smell-o-vision?). There may be some betamaxes along the way, but going to see a 3D film is still a special shared experience.

For a start, we get to laugh at each other looking goofy in the glasses (for the time being at least)…