Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

Why are visualizations always so fascinating, putting a spell on us seeing the whole?

Eric Fischer visualized Twitter and Flickr geotags of major cities and continents.

via Grant Zemont

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Beautifully done.  Create and explore a virtual archive of your social life.

A wonderfully crafted, rich experience - but I wish you could have a little more control over the navigation.

Via Adverblog

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Leo Burnett Worldwide CCO Mark Tutssel sent us this inspiring video today. Jay Denhart also blogged about this from a semantic point of view here a few weeks ago, but I felt like talking about its relevance to the study of human behavior and brand management.

In this TED talk, research Deb Roy talks about an amazing project in which he recorded every word and image in his house, as his newborn son grew to learn how to talk and walk. Every bit of human behavior recorded, tracked. He has also found ways of visualizing this data in interesting new ways, unveiling patterns that may not have been apparent before.

Taking this approach the connected mass media world, he has used the tools available to him to show how people, mass media, content and contexts can be interlinked in 3D models, so that we can observe human behavior in the form of new social and interaction structures.

As a creative agency that has declared people and their behavior as the starting point of all our work (and with it behavioral planning), the sheer amount of MIT Media Lab computing power, long-term research vision and prowess to study human behavior makes me drool in envy. But also, as we move away from the brand era of mass media messaging to the people era of connected experiences, the work of Deb Roy reconfirms that continuous and deep study of human behavior - and the endeavor to create tools that help us understand it - is a worthwhile cause. Simply finding out about people’s attitudes and values, and inferring their preferences, just doesn’t cut it anymore. Rather, not only does behavioral planning unveil new patterns and types of insights that we wouldn’t have seen before, it also inspires us in ways to help brands make a qualitative difference in people’s lives that the tools of the TV and Brand era could never have.

While unfathomably complex to unravel and to look at, behavioral insights are much more substantive than traditional “consumer” insights, as they do not express an inferred interpretation about what people think or say about a brand (and how we then may be able to manipulate their perception) but rather, behavioral insights are building blocks to people’s journey through different product categories that paint a much more complete picture of how they actually live, and what they actually do. In other words, finding out what people say or think isn’t nearly as interesting or inspiring as what they do. Not only because those two things are rarely the same, but, more importantly, because today brand management and creating brand engagement isn’t so much about saying something to people but doing something with or for people along their whole customer life cycle. Observing behavior and understanding the drivers of behavior (as beautifully visualized by Deb Roy) therefore leads to not only to a completely different way of creating communications, but also to more purposeful interactions and experiences that allow brands to play a meaningful role in people’s lives.

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Nmap just created a visualization engine based on Alexis.com data which lets you navigate the web’s most trafficked websites. Definitely worth a look even though the servers seems to be over capacity right now, due to all the traffic from Mashable.

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Do you know bestiario.org? If you don’t you should check it out now. Bestario features the latest in visualization techniques, displaying boring data in mind-boggling arrangements

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Sam Lawrence of Jive Software has a blog and some mad visualization skills. Good thing we don’t have him as a client, he’d make better flow charts that the lot of us.
Check out his awesome visualizations on types of human connectedness.

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As far as interactive 3D visualization goes, this animated tour of the restored Grand Palais in Paris in one of the best I’ve seen lately. It features a super-realistic flythrough with call-outs, an easy movable timeline and on-demand narratives. On The Favorite Website Award, it made Site of the day.

Grand Palais

http://www.grandpalais.fr/visite/en/#/the-exploration/

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