The bee. We slather its delicious vomit on bread and muffins. We send colonies out to pollinate our crops. Now Colin Henderson and his University of Montana colleagues have partnered up with bees to “locate buried land mines” and do it more quickly and thorougly than any dog.
“We can survey in one day what takes more than a week with dogs,” he says, “and humans stand 300 yards away.”
Bees can find not only land mines, but also drugs and decomposing bodies. Oh, and they are smart enough to recognize a sugar daddy when they see one.
Here’s the full article. Read it. Enjoy. Things like this are part of the wonderfulness of life.
Here, watch this book trailer for Scott Westerfield’s Leviathan.
Yeah, I know you want to–go ahead, watch it again.
Miller looks at book trailers, sees that the vast majority of them are lame, lame, lame (actually, this is the FIRST I’ve seen that’s any good). Sees that they reach no markets and then concludes that all trailers are silly. It’s true: lame trailers ARE a waste of time and money. But ANY advertisement (print, video, audio, whatever) that’s lame is a waste of time and money. Making killer trailers that nobody sees is an even bigger waste of time and money. But that’s true of ANY killer advertisement that nobody sees.
Look. I’ve never read Westerfield. Don’t know much about him or his books. But I saw that clip and now want to read that book. Hum, trailer worked for me. I AM a reptoid mutant, but I suspect there are others out there like me. I mean, come on. Good gravy, woman–“Do you oil your war machines? Or do you feed them?” Killer!
Movie trailers, book trailers–any advertisement–isn’t about delivering what the person is going to experience on the spot. If that were the case, then you’d never show a print ad of a meal at Olive Garden because it doesn’t deliver the goods right there on page 10 of Woman’s Day. Nope, all you’d do is go around giving out samples in places with Italian mood.
Miller’s error is not understanding the difference between making an offer and delivering on one. What an ad is supposed to do is make the offer. Let you know this thing is available. Because you’re not delivering the actual experience, you can make the offer via all sorts of media. Now, if you can give them a taste, that’s great. But you don’t need to deliver the full deal right there.
So what do you need in an offer? You need the offer to say, “Hey, I’ll deliver this type of experience.” It needs to call to some action, either directly or by implication–“buy this” or “be here.” You also need it to say, “You can trust this will be worth it” and make the consumer believe that’s likely to be true. It communicates this last bit by being a quality piece of work.
Making an offer is exactly what book covers do–they make the offer and give the consumer a little taste. And book covers matter. This has been proven over and over. Just like most people, when I see a cool cover, I pick up the book and check it out. When I see a lame one, or one that offers something I’m not interested in, you’re going to have to threaten me to pick that book up. Or it better dang well have some righteous word of mouth. It’s that simple. We all judge books by their covers because the cover is making an offer. And lame offers don’t get very many takers.
Book trailers are nothing more than deluxe book covers. The cool thing about them is the cool thing about movie trailers–you can make the offer by providing a little taste. You do that by giving the audience the story situation, the pitch. You do it by communicating the feel of the experience and raising curiosity. You do it by making it a pro job. The good ones make you laugh, say cool!, or raise curiosity and expectation.
And that Westerfield trailer does that.
Dang, “Do you oil your machines? Or do you feed them?”
Run that on TV. Run it on the radio. Put it up on sites where people are likely to see and click. Confirm it in print. Make the offer to real people. Get it infront of young readers. I’ll stake my eyebrows that ad can sell as many books as a good movie trailer can sell movie tickets.
Very effective advertising for the book. I think the content of the book is crap, but that trailer made me pick it up just to see what it was all about.
Do you notice that this one and the Westerfield one combine extreme professionalism AND they make the pitch in a clear and grabbing way? The pitch for both was what the book was about. For fiction it’s the concept. For non-fiction how to it’s the promise.
So many of the book trailers lack one or more of those things. For example, look at the book award finalist for THE FALLEN: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsLE6bNaIrk. I don’t know what the heck the book is even about after a long 2 minutes. They’re trying to make a movie.
Something else. On both of these you have a voice over PITCHING the book to you just as someone might do it in person or to an editor. It’s a powerful method, I think.
Notice also how short the Westerfield one is. Just over a minute. Westerfield’s really is like a query pitch or cover copy–in just a few lines tell me what your story is about. We get genre, setting, character, and the story problem or concept.
No, I’m not coming out of any closet. I’m talking the annual Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) forum. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).
For example, here’s Richard Dawkins’ “Queerer than we can suppose: the strangeness of science.”
Or how about Howard Rheingold’s “Way-new collaboration”There is, if done well, very few things as stimulating as an excellent speech. Thank you TED for providing a way to revive this marvelous genre by sharing it on the internet.
Go to TED. But beware: you may end up unable to stop listening to one fascinating idea after another.
How would you like to eat cuts from slabs of meat grown from stem cells?
Give the cells some water, glucose and natural proteins. To make sure you have something that feels like meat you “exercise” the muscle with electrical pulses.
As with all zing, post story ideas in the comments.
6 Comments
I showed this to Kierce (my 17 month old). he didn’t move a muscle the entire song. It was like some sort of incredible lava lamp. He watched it again this morning with the same result. I’ve never seen him stand still for anything, so I now call this video “the three minute babysitter”
I play this song at my DJ gigs! Awesome song!
Bryce, I think you could use it to babysit me.
Translation is a bit difficult because it is sampled from an older song. You only get a piece of the original lyrics which make it hard to translate context.
I speak 3 regional Italian dialects and Neapolitan isn’t one of them. However, it is close enough that I can make a go of it.
here is a rough translation.
“You pretend to be an American. Listen to me! What do you think you are doing? You think you are stylish, but you drink whiskey and soda. You are bothering me.
You dance to rock and roll. You play baseball, but where did you get the money for Camel cigarettes? Your mother’s purse!
You pretend to be an American, but you were born in Italy. You are Neapolitan.
Why do you think it is so great to speak American? When you make love under the moonlight do you say I LOVE YOU?”
repeats
Wikipedia says it best.
The lyrics are about an Italian who imitates the contemporary American lifestyle and acts like a Yankee, drinking whisky and soda, dancing to rock ‘n roll, playing baseball and smoking Camel cigarettes, but still depends on his parents for money.[1] The song is generally considered a satire on the process of Americanisation that occurred in the early post-war years, when southern Italy was still a rural, traditional society
Great video.
RyanV,
That is great. I like that song even more now. Thanks!
Call the Nestle Hotline at 1-800 295-0051.
I showed this to Kierce (my 17 month old). he didn’t move a muscle the entire song. It was like some sort of incredible lava lamp. He watched it again this morning with the same result. I’ve never seen him stand still for anything, so I now call this video “the three minute babysitter”
I play this song at my DJ gigs! Awesome song!
Bryce, I think you could use it to babysit me.
Translation is a bit difficult because it is sampled from an older song. You only get a piece of the original lyrics which make it hard to translate context.
I speak 3 regional Italian dialects and Neapolitan isn’t one of them. However, it is close enough that I can make a go of it.
here is a rough translation.
“You pretend to be an American. Listen to me! What do you think you are doing? You think you are stylish, but you drink whiskey and soda. You are bothering me.
You dance to rock and roll. You play baseball, but where did you get the money for Camel cigarettes? Your mother’s purse!
You pretend to be an American, but you were born in Italy. You are Neapolitan.
Why do you think it is so great to speak American? When you make love under the moonlight do you say I LOVE YOU?”
repeats
Wikipedia says it best.
The lyrics are about an Italian who imitates the contemporary American lifestyle and acts like a Yankee, drinking whisky and soda, dancing to rock ‘n roll, playing baseball and smoking Camel cigarettes, but still depends on his parents for money.[1] The song is generally considered a satire on the process of Americanisation that occurred in the early post-war years, when southern Italy was still a rural, traditional society
Great video.
RyanV,
That is great. I like that song even more now. Thanks!