Came across an atypically typical Parisian occurrence last week on the second of my two one night layovers in Paris.
We grabbed some Velib's (the bike share scheme whose continued membership is my most beloved extravagance) for a night ride along Canal St. Martin.
We rode down my favourite haunt, rue Bretagne, and stopped for a little projection performance on the bare wall overlooking Marché Enfants Rouge; the oldest covered market in Paris.
The performance was watched by a couple hundred well dressed, coiffed and camera'ed up Parisians spilling out of Café Charlot onto the street.
The sort of event that seems to happen with great frequency in Paris; jammed together Parisians being Parisians making the most of their city streets to soak up a cultural spectacle that doesn't require tickets or a theatre. Brilliant.
The track banging through the neighbourhood sounded, to obnoxiously quote myself, "like a French Kanye West."
Turns out it was Kanye West's new track New Slaves.
This was one of 66 such events around the world that night, the same day the track was first performed on Saturday Night Live in America and streamed on kanyewest.com.
A fact I learned two days later, just now.
It reminded me that a few years back "trans-media" narratives were a bit of a thing, but they seem to have gotten lost under the umbrella of integration.
Inherently, good and fresh media with a perspective on our world is transmedia. Even if it only existed originally in one place.
Transmedia isn't the chart with all the plumbing of the internet - it is the real way creative things flow. The way them permeate all channels in ways that cannot be 100% predicted.
It is the idea over the technique. Both are important but technique is meaningless without idea.
Sure it was marketing, what isn't - but if it wasn't interesting and genuinely compelling to begin with, I wouldn't have stopped on Saturday and taken some shots, publications wouldn't have written about it and I wouldn't be caring about it now.
There was no branding or "messaging". I had to figure it out for myself. How atypically memorable.
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