MOST CONTAGIOUS 2011 Cover image: Take This LoLLipop / Jason Zada most contagious / p.02 / mosT ConTAGIOUS 2011 / subsCripTion oFFer / 20% disCounT FuTure-prooFing your brain VALid unTiL 9Th JANUARY 2012 offering a saving of £200 gBP chapters / Contagious exists to find and filter the most innovative 01 / exercises in branding, technology, and popular culture, and movemenTs deliver this collective wisdom to our beloved subscribers. 02 / Once a year, we round up the highlights, identify what’s important proJeCTs and why, and push it out to the world, for free. 03 / serviCe Welcome to Most Contagious 2011, the only retrospective you’ll ever need. 04 / soCiaL It’s been an extraordinary year; economies in turmoil, empires 05 / torn down, dizzying technological progress, the evolution of idenTiTy brands into venture capitalists, the evolution of a generation of young people into entrepreneurs… 06 / TeChnoLogy It’s also been a bumper year for the Contagious crew. Our 07 / Insider consultancy division is now bringing insight and inspiration daTa to clients from Kraft to Nike, and Google to BBC Worldwide. We 08 / were thrilled with the success of our first Now / Next / Why event augmenTed in London in December, and are bringing the show to New York 09 / on February 22nd. Grab your ticket here. money We’ve added more people to our offices in London and New 10 / York, launched an office in India, and in 2012 have our sights haCk Culture firmly set on Brazil. Latin America, we’re on our way. Get ready! 11 / musiC 2.0 We would also like to take this opportunity to thank our friends, supporters and especially our valued subscribers, all over the 12 / world. We look forward to another great year together. video The more information there is out there, the more the filters are 13 / reTaiL important – and we like to think Contagious is the best filter in the Contagious / Full of Tomorrow / ad business. Future-proof your brain with the Most Contagious. Magazine / Online / FEED / Special Reports / Consultancy / Events / 14 / gaming Think about it. Talk about it. Share it with everyone you know. Special Offer to readers of the Most Contagious 2011 report – Subscribe to Contagious Magazine/Online before 9 January 2012 and save 20%. 15 / Enjoy! pubLishing Visit http://shop.contagiousmagazine.com/subscriptions.php to subscribe now / The Contagious Team www.contagiousmagazine.com / E: [email protected] / 16 / design supported by most contagious / movements / p.03 01 / mosT ConTAGIOUS / movemenTs / The new worLd order chapters / What a year. It’s difficult to grasp what caused UK, a group of disenfranchised young people The internet did not create the Arab Spring, or 01 / such momentous change around the world took to the streets to burn and steal, for reasons the riots in London, or even Occupy Wall Street. movemenTs this year, but it’s certainly been contagious... still not entirely clear. (The operative failure of However, there’s no doubting it has forever government, education, policing, the family and changed the ways in which we make ourselves 02 / One by one, most power structures came proJeCTs society as a whole can be a difficult thing to pin heard. Initially, the web provided a discussion under pressure from the torrent of information, down.) platform for like-minded souls to connect. Then, 03 / collaboration and distribution afforded by the it was a communication tool, as protestors serviCe web. First came the music industry, where frantic As governments, police forces and armies around the world took to Twitter (and in the 04 / attempts to ringfence a product widely available faced their own citizens, other smaller reminders case of the UK riots, BlackBerry Messenger) to soCiaL for free led to the establishment of newer models of the new world order have come to light. The rally and organise. We then turned to the web to and younger players amid talk of its own demise. fact that a man as powerful as Rupert Murdoch 05 / rationalise events happening in the real world, idenTiTy Then, the news media, which was forced to can be held accountable and forced to answer faster and more thoroughly than before. The share the limelight with digital-only players, to his own board, as well as a government 06 / Guardian’s timelines of the Arab Spring and live TeChnoLogy some of whom are now more influential than inquisition, for the phone-hacking scandal taking coverage of the phone hacking scandal set new the stalwarts they were created to usurp. Then place at one of his myriad publications sends a 07 / standards for the reporting of intricate and fast- daTa Hollywood. Then the TV networks. Then the high very clear message: nobody is untouchable. moving issues. street. Then. Then. Then. 08 / augmenTed 2011 will be remembered as the year this gradual 09 / disintegration shifted away from entertainment money and consumerism towards something altogether 10 / more profound. haCk Culture The motivations for this shift are extremely 11 / complex. Throughout the ongoing Arab Spring, musiC 2.0 in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and the other Middle 12 / Eastern nations in which uprisings occurred, video years of oppression forced political and 13 / ideological change, sparked, in part, by the reTaiL democratisation of technology. 14 / Meanwhile, Occupy Wall Street and the other gaming happenings it spawned have been criticised for 15 / being unfocused, but, over time the discourse of / www.flickr.com/photos/wheelzwheeler/6255028088 aydn h pubLishing wealth distribution, the 99% versus the 1%, has 16 / become the dominant organising ideology. In the hoto / design p Supported by most contagious / movements / p.04 Many web pundits were the first to lay out From a brand perspective, the implications of all They don’t actually embody any of those things. in simple terms why, exactly, the Wall Street this are obvious. When everything is changing, They just emulate. It’s scary man, this simulation Protesters were so very angry. Others followed, be consistent. When everyone is confused, be life that we’re living. It scares me.’ essentially creating a coherent narrative on behalf transparent. And when the world seems bleak, Pitchfork’s analysis of the Tumblr phenomenon chapters / of those too busy trying to garner consensus to be good. is recommended reading. The argument against do it for themselves. 01 / Tumblr / is that Tumblr could wreak as much intellectual movemenTs damage as it provides dumb entertainment. In September, blogging/reblogging/image- 02 / proJeCTs sharing platform Tumblr announced that it had Democratisation – be it of technology, reached its 10 billionth post, up from one billion information or pictures of cats on trampolines – 03 / one year previously. That’s ten times as much apparently always comes at a price. serviCe content in the space of one year, created on In the meantime, be distracted by the rise 04 / 28.5 million blogs and averaging 36 million posts soCiaL of single-usage Tumblrs – blogs created to per day. In the same month, Tumblr also closed aggregate images around one theme only. From 05 / an $85m round of venture capital, valuing this ‘Accidental Chinese Hipsters’ to ‘Shit that Siri idenTiTy moodboard machine at close to $1bn. Says’, we’ve aggregated as many as possible 06 / TeChnoLogy The appeal of Tumblr is obvious. Essentially a over here. Enjoy: http://singleusage.tumblr.com curated channel of bits and pieces that you find (For next year’s niche-gone-mainstream 07 / around the web – images, other Tumblr posts, daTa As the global pendulum swings towards the technology, look no further than image-sharing music, video – it’s an easy way to project the kind rising BRIC countries, Western nations, faced network Instagram’s iPhone app; it has been 08 / with the decline of their own industrial heft, of person you are, or the kind of person you’d like augmenTed downloaded 14 million times, and an average of to be, with very little effort. Never one to ignore a are focusing their efforts on the burgeoning 50 photos per second were uploaded over the 09 / popular platform, Barack Obama has launched Innovation Economy. All of this is happening recent Thanksgiving holiday in the US. Not bad money his own crowd-sourced Tumblr to grab images while a generation comes of age having taken for a company with a staff of six. Anxious Android 10 / its moral code not from the individual laws that and sentiment from the 2012 campaign trail. haCk Culture users can expect their own version next year.) govern the country in which they live, but from But there’s always a flipside to popularity. To 11 / a more collective and instinctive mindset that get an idea of why it’s so popular, you could musiC 2.0 prevails online. This is a generation that grew do worse than read confessional hip-hop artist 12 / up with the internet, has two decades worth of Drake’s comments, posted on his own blog in video conviction that global warming is real and entered November this year: ‘I’m really scared for my 13 / the job market in the middle of a global financial generation, you know. The thing that scares me reTaiL collapse. Faced with undeniable evidence that most is Tumblr. I hate what Tumblr has become… 14 / the people in charge – politicians, bankers, Instead of kids going out and making their own gaming educators – have failed to adapt, millennials are moments, they’re just taking these images harking back to concepts of pride, community, 15 / and living vicariously through other people’s pubLishing honour, labour and decency instead of the flabby uney Cuceloglu / www.flickr.com/photos/guneyc/6208557363 moments. It just kills me. Then you’ll meet them g consumerism that ate their boomer parents.