Remember It’s Gary Shandling Show? It was lauded for it’s ground-breaking style, of “breaking the fourth wall” between the characters and the TV audience at home.  Around the same time, a band from England called Pop Will Eat Itself had a couple of hits, Including ‘There’s No Love Between Us Anymore’ and ‘Def Con One.’

I was thinking of these two late 80s bits of pop culture recently in relation to today’s current pop culture themes and styles. First up, the Neil Patrick Harris commercial for Old Spice:

Note the line: “As a former make-believe doctor.”

It’s not enough to use  a former make-believe doctor (everybody remembers him as Doogie Howser), they through in the added twist of saying, “We know you know he’s a former make-believe doctor, so let’s have some fun.”

That’s fine, that’s Old Spice and their new brand identity. Hip and young with a self-referential wink. But I saw something else this weekend that really made me pause. It was an episode of the Disney Channel program The Suite Life of Zack and Cody. Cute, harmless show that features a pair of twins, hijinks ensue, yada, yada, yada. But wait, it gets interesting. The show also features Ashley Tisdale, the young actress probably better know for her role in the wildly popular High School Musical franchise. This episode revolved around the characters putting on a performance of… High School Musical! Check out this promo:

That’s right, Ashley Tisdale’s character tries out for the role of… Ashely Tisdale’s character!?!  Throughout the episode she keeps trying to tell everyone how much she looks like, well, like herself.  I thought this all seemed pretty sophisticated for a kid’s show, but my 9-year old followed right along and got the joke.

I guess my point here is, Pop will indeed eat itself.  What’s left when a kid’s shows cross promote in this manner?

Keep telling yourself: "It's just a game."

Aaron Dignan, who works at Undercurrent, is going to get all philosophical on us:

“A surge of entertainment options (web, mobile, gaming) have trained a generation to approach nearly every aspect of life as a game. What’s that like?”

FYI, tickets for Interesting New York on now on sale. Get ‘em while they last.

Can you feel the beat pulsing at 180bpm? Would you “put your hands up for Detroit”? If you have no idea what I’m talking about, Colin Nagy is coming to the rescue at Interesting New York with his Brief History of Techno presentation. Join us to find out more about the sound all the kids are listening to, from Chicago to Berlin and everywhere in between. Here’s Colin:

“A quick history of techno music, its evolutions and mutations, and where it finds itself now. With each time period, I’ll play a representative sound snippet and talk about it.”

That should be cool, I love the multimedia aspect of it.

Fantasy Football players put a lot of time, effort and energy into one of the least important aspects of the game: The name of their team. Here’s an example: Peter Kim recently posted about his venture into fantasy football.  One of his main concerns? The need for a better team name. Well, when your league contains squads like Favre Beans (Joseph Jaffe), Munoz Mustache Club (Dan Cordella) and The Viral Gardeners (Mack Collier) you can get a sense of inferiority. 

But the true insight for me wasn’t that people are too focused on their team names, it’s that they wanted to put too much focus on their team names.  As a marketer you want your consumers to focus on product benefits and unique selling propositions, but sometimes they just want something that sounds cool or funny or mysterious.

My team? EyeQB. Pretty good, right?

Joel’s going to talk about how today’s technology allows one to find out so much about their family history, maybe too much sometimes. Here’s Joel:

Online tools make reclaiming family history exponentially easier. However, the journey into one’s family history often reveals family secrets and lost knowledge that can tell you more about yourself than you may want to know - the good, the bad, the ugly.

The saga of Mad Men and Twitter continues to grow. Check out this site: We Are Sterling Cooper, which is chronicling the story as it happens. Here’s their manifesto:

Fan fiction. Brand hijacking. Copyright misuse. Sheer devotion. Call it what you will, but we call it the blurred line between content creators and content consumers, and it’s not going away. We’re your biggest fans, your die-hard proponents, and when your show gets cancelled we’ll be among the first to pass around the petition. Talk to us. Befriend us. Engage us. But please, don’t treat us like criminals.

This site exists to catalogue the conversation around AMC’s Mad Men and its fanbase across the social web. But it’s just the beginning. ‘We are Sterling Cooper’ is a rallying cry to brands and fans alike to come together and create together.

This is a casestudy in Deeply Immersive Narrative Universe (DINU) behaviour. I’m sure Henry Jenkins, Grant McCracken and others are seeing this and nodding their heads.

Somewhat along the lines of being followed on Twitter by TV characters, PSFK has a couple of interesting posts on social media worth checking out:

FriendFeed lets you pose like you’re following someone when you really aren’t.

What exactly to all these Facebook status updates and Twitterings add up to?  Does this Ambient Social Activity provide real benefits? What does all this passively active behaviour mean for brands? (The second link is to Noah Brier).

Don and Betty Are Watching You

By now, you’ve probably seen the various posts about the Mad Men-Twitter hooha. You’ve even seen the posts suggesting you’ve probably already seen the various posts about the Mad Men - Twitter hooha.

Now I can add my only little piece to this marketing meme. After replying to DJ Francis’ post on the subjet, I now am being followed on Twitter by one of the Mad Men characters. DJ then had one too.  Somebody out there is monitoring the online conversations pretty closely and hustling.

Here’s another Interesting New York speaker I’m looking forward to, Faris Yakob, whose talk is entitled: Ideas are New Combinations: A history of recombinant culture, from Locke to Linux:  

“Everything is made up of mashed up other things: the philosophy of mash ups from John Locke, cut ups, remixing, jungle music, girl talk, and reality remixing.”

Bad hair day, Faris?

That’s worth the price of admission right there. And any guy with a Facebook avatar like this (on left), well you just know he’s going to be Interesting.

So of course by now you know all about Interesting New York, the event scheduled for Sept. 13 that is sure to be fun, thought provoking and chock full of cool people. Cool people like Noah Brier  (yes, THAT Noah Brier). Here’s what he’s planning on sharing:

“In March I taught myself PHP and I’m pretty sure there’s a few basic ideas of web programming that are worth sharing.”

A typically unassuming and modest proposal from Mr. Brier.  You know that he’s going to be insightful and entertaining. He’s one of more than a dozen bright young things planning on dropping the 411 at Interesting New York. I hope you’ll come and join the fun.