In my article about “Brand Improv” above, I used “improv comedy” as a metaphor for how marketers should think about such realtime communications. Realtime communications, like improv comedy, has no script and requires careful combinations of spontaneity, information, and entertainment. But the Kik “brand bot” announcement has me thinking “improv” has moved from useful metaphor to literal plan of action. And I’ve got some science to prove it. A fascinating study was conducted last year on the improvisational skills of freestyle rap musicians. Neuroscientists, Siyuan Liu and Allen Braun, from the US National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders in Bethesda, Maryland, took a look at the brains of 12 freestyle rappers in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. Turns out, they think different. As Allen Braun put it in Scientific American: We think what we see is a relaxation of ‘executive functions’ to allow more natural de-focused attention and uncensored processes to occur that might be the hallmark of creativity. These rap artists were somehow able to detach themselves from the logic forces in their brains so that the creative forces could come through. That, my friends, is a serious skill.
Posted on: Wed, 06 Aug 2014 23:51:01 +0000
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