The Rabbit Hole

When the video of the door that unlocks with Foursquare check-ins went viral, I decided to go see how it works--and whether I could get my own.

It was tempting to whip out my phone, check in and walk right upstairs, announcing that I didn't know where I was--just that I was blindly following my MapQuest. Instead, I fired off a tweet ahead of time and was greeted by Nick Hall, a Brooklyn Web developer at Apartm.net who happens to have built this little piece of Foursquarey magic right up the street from me in Brooklyn.

Hall and his brother Erin Sparling, also a Web developer, installed the Foursquare door a couple of months ago as a way to let their underlings neighborhood friends and allies enter the office. He took me through the door system and the rest of his uber-wired stuff, which include a home-built touch-screen media system, improvised satellite T1 connection, and a coffee table made of an Apple X-serve.

Here's how the door works. The key to the Foursquare door is a little Web relay device, which actually hosts its own little webpage (aw!) that the brothers use to run some Javascript. "The relay is supposed to be for industrial use," says Hall. "I think it's meant to be used to control pumps." Here it is:

A Mac Mini chills out near the door and makes requests to Foursquare's API every three seconds, looking for new check-ins at Apartm.net. When the computer finds one, it contacts the Web relay, which sents a simple binary bbzzzz! through a little copper cable that has been soldered to the intercom button in the hallway. The intercom is fooled into thinking the button has been pressed, and it unlocks the door via the building's existing buzzer system. It's shockingly quick. (Right now, only white-listed Foursquare users can get in, but all that will change when the brothers throw their New Year's Party: it'll be open to all.)

Their ISP is a satellite dish aimed at the Empire State Building. See that hole in the wall below? That goes to a satellite dish on the roof of their northside Brooklyn apartment, which is pointed at another dish on the Empire State Building. Using this line-of-sight connection, the brothers were able to get an industrial T1 connection beamed straight to our sleepy Polish neighborhood. Now that better ISPs have arrived, they're transitioning to a hardline connection, but Hall doesn't sound like he's ready to let the satellite go just yet.

They built a homegrown touch-screen media server. Below, you'll see Nick and the office media center to his right. That monitor mounted on the wall? It's a touch-screen that operates the Mac Mini they use as a media server, which you can see  on the shelf below the AirPort base station. The touch-screen also powers the projector over the couch, and the stereo. Unfortunately, this system wasn't hooked up, because they're in the middle of upgrading the system to run entirely off an iPad.

Oh, and check out their Nintendo exhibit below the A/V stuff, and the obligatory bucket of bike parts: This is Brooklyn, after all.

This is the coffee table that you do not spill drinks on. It's an X-serve that one of Sparling's students converted into a coffee table for them (he teaches an HTML class, in addition to heading up front-end development for the Wall Street Journal). "Originally, we just put the X-serve here and rested things on it. So we figured we might as well make it a real table," says Hall.

Below, that's a new MacBook Air, for scale (and envy). The Canon 5D on the table isn't the same one they used to shoot the viral video; that's the work of his brother's 5D Mark ii. Oh, and it's worth mentioning that this coffee table is the Web server the brothers use to host the Apartm.net website -- so if this article gets too much traffic, it'll generate a meltown in their living room. (A new HDD is on us, Nick.)

Here's the actual office space where "work," at some point, gets done. The Mac Mini that runs the Foursquare door operation is to the right, outside the frame. Next to it are a few terabytes of backup storage.

Yes, they might sell the Foursquare door system. "We haven't figured out quite how to commercialize it yet," says Hall, but he and his brother are certainly considering putting together a DIY kit. If you think they should, let us know below in the comments, and we'll be sure to follow up with their progress -- we've even been promised Beta tester status. Maybe there's a Kickstarter project waiting in the wings?

really dig the thinking on this and the mentality Nick has on just doing things. and his website layout. its annoyingly awesome.

PROPAGANDA AND THE EDUCATED

 

1. It is almost certainly the case that the ultimate achievement of higher education for the great majority of people, is to open them up and prepare them for bigger and bigger lies and to make them receptive to being part of a group that simultaneously sees itself as above propaganda, and also as a member of a semi-elitist class. As Ellul suggests, however, education, at least as its referred to in the modern sense of the word, is an "absolute prerequisite" for propaganda.

 

2. In fact, education is largely identical with what Ellul calls "pre-propaganda"--the conditioning of minds with vast amounts of information, already dispensed for ulterior purposes and posing as "facts" and as "education." Ellul follows through by designating intellectuals as virtually the most vulnerable of all to modern propaganda for three reasons:

 

            a). they absorb the largest amount of second-hand, unverifiable information;

            b). they feel a compelling need to have an opinion on every important question of our             time, and thus easily succumb to opinions offered to them by propaganda on all such             

            indigestible pieces of information;

            c). they consider themselves capable of "judging for themselves."

 

For these reasons, they literally need propaganda.     

Posted 22 September 2010 17:23pm by Chris Lake with 0 comments

Jake Nickell is the founder of Threadless, a brand that has become synonymous with t-shirts, design, community and crowdsourcing. Somewhat disturbingly, Threadless is this year celebrating its tenth birthday. They grow up so quickly these days! 

Jake has commemorated this double-figure milestone by producing a rather lovely book, called Threadless: Ten Years of T-Shirts from the World's Most Inspiring Design Community. It features some of the best t-shirt designs ten years and also provides a step-by-step history of Threadless, which makes for an interesting read. 

I interviewed Jake to find out more about the company’s approach to community engagement...

I still think of Threadless as a startup, so it's bewildering to realise that you have been around for a decade. Do you still have a startup mentality?

Very much so! I still try to do most things on an extremely barebones level, trying to do as much as we can with as little as we can, while maintaining a fun, energetic, startup office culture that is challenging and rewarding for everyone involved. 

I think that's why I'm still around after 10 years… it's just as fun as it was when we started.

Can you explain how the business grew the community, and what your focus was in the early days?

We didn't grow the community, the community did. We just made sure it was a fun place for people to interact with each other, fostering creativity, by being real people and members of the community ourselves. 

In the early days our focus was all about making cool things with our artist friends online. It started as a hobby and for two years we didn't take any salary, just kept making shirts with the money that came in from selling the previous batch of shirts. 

I think just how simple and basic we kept it was the best thing we could have done to grow the community. No funny business going on.

How has that focus changed, as you have grown?

It's mostly just gotten more and more aspirational. Every year I wonder: How many more opportunities can we bring to artists? How many more people in the world care about t-shirt art, can be inspired by it and find the drive to try making it themselves? And now we're wondering, what other things would artists want to design for and how can we bring those opportunities to them. 

So the focus is really the same, it's just on a whole new level scale-wise.

As a pioneer of crowdsourcing, what advice do you have for brands that want to make the most of community-generated content?

The biggest thing I would suggest is to not look at crowdsourcing as a way to outsource your work to a crowd but more a way to help a talented group of people find productive, fun and fruitful things to do with their talents. 

It's so much more natural when the 'work' being done by the community is things their passionate about. That's why we have no spec of what needs to be submitted. It's just artwork: it can be a 100% personal art piece, it doesn't need to meet a specification.

How has community participation evolved over time? Does the Law of Participation Inequality apply to Threadless?

I am not familiar with that law, but the biggest change we've seen is just in ways people use the web to communicate socially. 

When I started online it was BBS's, then chat rooms, and when we started Threadless it was all about forums. Now it's all about real-time social things like Twitter and Facebook along with mobile starting to become much larger. 

Who knows what will happen next but I think it's important for you to be where the people are if you are looking for a community to interact with you.

What are the best tactics you've used to boost customer and community engagement?

The best thing we did is to trust our community. To constantly ask them for advice, to show them we are listening, and to change things based on what the community is feeling. We also wholly invest ourselves in being members ourselves.

How important are incentives? What does your community value most? Kudos vs cash?

I think the incentives are important for some and definitely a nice perk at the very least for everyone. But I believe that the real motivation for submitting is something else. Things like being a part of a movement bigger than yourself, or growing and learning as an artist from a vast, talented community, or finding a creative release outside of whatever your day job is.

The tone of voice you use on Threadless really contributes to the general feel of the site. How important is this in terms of defining the brand?

I think it's super important... if we spoke really stiff it would come across fake and with a community based business that just doesn't work.

With such passionate fans I bet the social media thing to some degree managed itself? How are you using platforms like Twitter and Facebook?

Yeah, for a long time it did. We didn't embrace Twitter and Facebook fully until really last year. But once we got on there we found a lot of success really fast. 

We have more than 1.5M followers on Twitter and 150k+ fans on Facebook, and it's one of the best ways we've found to get the word out on new stuff. We just use them to tell people what we're up to... it's a great way to communicate with a massive amount of people really easily.

I've seen the Threadless site almost fall over when you announce time-limited sales on Twitter. Can you share some numbers on the volumes of traffic you need manage when you see spikes?

It gets ridiculous sometimes. At times we can be pushing nearly 1 Gigabit/sec between our servers at Rackspace and our CDN... that is absolutely insane traffic and it can definitely take out our servers sometimes. We've gotten pretty good at handling the load recently and haven't had any complete shutdowns in a good six months.

You added PayPal to the site recently. What did this do for the business?

We found it to be a great move especially internationally and with our younger customers. It wasn't staggering but we did find a really nice incremental addition to our sales. 

You ship internationally, or at least to the UK... how did you approach the internationalisation of your business? 

Yeah, we ship all over the world. London was actually the number one city we shipped to for a while, even including the US. 

From the very beginning we have had a very international following and to this day we ship more than 50% of our orders outside of the US. 

We haven't really done anything special though other than just shipping from Chicago, although just a few months back we did launch some translated versions of our site in French, Spanish and German.

So what's in store for Threadless in the next decade? 

Lots more of hanging out with our community of artists, making cool things together! I try not to put together too comprehensive of a plan because things always change, especially when you have such a vast variety of people helping drive where Threadless should go as we work with our community on nearly everything we do.

Chris Lake is Director of Innovation at Econsultancy, an entrepreneur and a long-term internet fiend. Follow him on Twitter or connect via Linkedin.

well said.

Raging Against The Machine: A Manifesto For Challenging Wind Tunnel Marketing

16th September 10

Posted by Mel Exon

Posted in Brands, Insight

4 comments

Author: Jim Carroll, Chairman, BBH London

This is the second of a two-parter by Jim. For the introduction to Wind Tunnel Marketing, check out his earlier post here or read both pieces in today’s Campaign magazine (available on campaignlive.co.uk next week). As always, we’d like to know what you think – please share any thoughts in the comments.

***

1. Seek Difference In Everything We Do

“Is it different?” has been relegated to the last question, the afterthought, the bonus ball.  But the last should be first.

We should tirelessly seek difference in the people we talk to, the questions we ask, the processes we follow. “Is it different?” should be the first question we ask when we look at work  – both in terms of content and form.

2. Kick Out the Norms

We’ve become addicted to backward looking averages. But norms create a magnetic pull towards the conventional. Norms produce normal.  The new frontier doesn’t have norms, but it does have endless supplies of data, and a rich diversity of tools with which to mine it.

We should create a data-inspired future, not a norm-constrained past.

3. Only Talk to Consumers who are Predisposed to Change

Where there is change, there are people that lead and people that follow.  In research we mostly talk to followers, because there are more of them and they’re cheaper. But ultimately they are less valuable.

If we’re seeking to change markets, shouldn’t we talk exclusively to change makers?

4. Embrace Insights From Anywhere

We’ve lived for too long under the tyranny of consumer insight. Of course consumer insight can be engaging, but it can also be familiar.

Surely insights can come from anywhere and we’re just as likely to find different insights from an analysis of the brand, the category, the competition, the channel, and, above all, the task.

5. Don’t Iron Out All the Creases

The Wind Tunnel abhors rough edges.  It likes to smooth over, iron out, edit away.  But people are drawn to the irregular and eccentric.

Let’s treasure, protect and nurture the happy accident, the illogical flaw.

6. Test in the Market, Not in the Test Tube

We have known for years that the optimal way to deal with complex communication needs in a fast moving, volatile market is to test in beta.  The gamers know it and the retailers knew it before them. Now all markets are fast moving and volatile.

Let’s learn from and with the market.

7. Practice Foresight

We’ve become too accustomed to considering the world as it is now.  We need more often to be considering the possible worlds of the future.

Let’s lift our eyes to the horizon.

8. Learn to Love Risk

The Wind Tunnel is risk averse.  We have come to consider risk as something to be feared, minimised, eradicated. But risk is integral to innovation and change.  It’s integral in fact to success.

We need to learn to feel comfortable with risk again, to calibrate it, to embrace it.

9. Value Expertise, Value Inexperience

Our risk aversion has led us to overvaluing category experience and undervaluing communication expertise. But an excess of experience predisposes to the tried and tested.  Relevant difference occurs at the intersection between expert judgement and naïve enthusiasm.

Let’s listen again to the experts, whilst opening the process up to the inexperienced.

10. Hurry Up

For many years Agencies have argued that they need more time to protect quality.  But too much time compromises quality because it creates room for caveats, committees and complacency. And we’re often late before we’ve arrived.

Speed can be liberating, exciting, invigorating. Come on. Let’s go……

more likes!

words to strategize by

September 21st, 2010 • posts i've written

These are some strategic marketing principles that shape how I think. Most, if not all, of these principles are stolen. P.S. This is a list in progress, so do your part for the empire and jump in the comments.

Think of the list as a simple set of heuristics to be mated, recombined, mutated, adapted, and evolved for specific needs. Also, feel free to debate the hell out of them. Here we go, in no particular order …

DEFINE INSIDERS & OUTSIDERS
Mike used to say this like a broken strategic record. Strong brands are bold enough to define who’s in and who’s out, who makes the cut, and who is left behind. Most brands, and most marketing managers, aren’t willing to do this. Your product or your marketing message can’t be designed for everyone, and it shouldn’t be. Gareth Kay also says, “have a point of view on the world, not a position in the market,” and without a strong point of view, you can’t decide who’s in and who’s out. Simon Sinek also reminds us that people don’t buy what we do, they buy why we do it.

PROMOTE IDEAS THAT CAN BE ADVERTISED, NOT ADVERTISING IDEAS
Gareth Kay brought this one to life. To me, this means that we can’t fall in love with the technology or the medium itself. I’ve seen this countless times, people pitching clever manipulations of a medium, fidgeting within the borders of the ad space, instead of thinking broadly about culture. This kind of thinking is responsible for the cult of clever that permeates digital advertising shops. And this thinking produces the type of advertising that advertising people love, but not messages that spread through culture and ultimately impact behavior. I’ve also found that clients that simply want advertising ideas (and protest anything beyond that) are clients that I’d rather not work for. To me, it’s a shibboleth for both clients and new hires.

IF IT DOESN’T SPREAD, IT’S DEAD
Originally coined by Henry Jenkins and fellows about spreadable media, to me this says something profound about what I do. Advertising and marketing isn’t art for one important reason – we can’t afford to be Emily Dickinson, toiling away in obscurity only to be recognized for our genius decades later. Our work is successful if it’s actually distributed by networks of real people and can impact their behavior. Of course, how advertising works is mysterious and complicated, but we have to endeavor to understand it and to make it work for our clients. I try not to pay attention to award shows because they tend to do a disservice to our true goal. Chase business objectives not aesthetic trends.

IDEAS THAT AREN’T CONTENT, IDEAS THAT CREATE CONTENT
Faris promoted this one. Brands are increasingly talking to generations that are read AND write, that know how to use their voice, and practice these skills when their passions call for it. This doesn’t mean run another UGC contest, it means find intersections between your needs and your customers’ needs, and mine that overlap for opportunities in co-creation. Marketing must become increasingly symbiotic.

FIND NETWORKS THAT NEED FEEDING
Grant dreamed up these words during a discussion between the two of us regarding The Fiesta Movement by Ford. Instead of reaching out to “the influencers,” Ford (and partners) went out searching for content creators that had accumulated significant following all on their own, but they were people that would benefit greatly by opportunities to create more content. The Fiesta Movement helped them sustain, care for, and grow their networks. In turn, the content creators went above and beyond creating content and promoting the program.

NEVER ANOTHER SANDCASTLE
Aaron says he deserves credit for this one, and I agree. This one’s pretty obvious: quit building micro-sites. Fish where the fish are, and other such sporting metaphors. If your big idea is to build an experience completely orphaned from the social platforms that customers actually use, and use to share things with others, then you’re doing it wrong. Basically, if your idea ends with “and then we drive traffic to it,” you’ve failed.

PARTNER WITH EXISTING PATHWAYS
If you want to reach 18-24 year old dudes online, then there’s really no one better to partner with (to both create and spread content) than CollegeHumor. If you want your new soul-uplifting novel to reach housewives across America, then you can do no better than Oprah. Whatever your objective, seek out partners that have assembled the most powerful pathways across networks of your audience, and make their strengths your own.

REAL-TIME RESPONSIVENESS TO CULTURE
Once upon a time, a time in which not every product was a pretty good product, brands stood for consistent goods that were responsive to consumer needs. You drank the branded milk because there was a better chance it wasn’t rancid. Today, every product is branded and every brand is a part of culture. And now brands owe responsiveness to that culture. We call brands that do not respond to culture “antiquated” or “uncool” and when these brands do finally choose to make a statement, we often dub them “inauthentic” because of the delay in their messaging. Of course, by now, W+K and Mr. Old Spice have completely proven how effective a brand can be once it embraces a more responsive attitude to culture.

So, what’d I miss?

Related posts:

1. words to think by
2. what’s the point?
3. you are what you link

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Ask marketers and advertising experts why Mac users are so loyal, and they all cite the same reason: Apple's brand.

It's no coincidence that during the late 1980s and early 1990s it was a marketing executive from Pepsi, John Sculley, who turned Apple into the biggest single computer company in the world, with $11 billion in annual sales. Sculley marketed Apple like crazy, boosting the advertising budget from $15 million to $100 million.

"People talk about technology, but Apple was a marketing company," Sculley told the Guardian newspaper in 1997. "It was the marketing company of the decade."

The current CEO, Steve Jobs, spent $100 million marketing the iMac, which was a run-away hit. Apple continues to spend lots of money on high-profile ads like the "Switch" campaign, and it shows.

"It's a really powerful brand," said Robin Rusch, editor of the Brandchannel.com, which awarded Apple "Brand of the Year" in 2001. "The overwhelming presence of Apple comes through in everything they do."

Marketer Marc Gobe, author of Emotional Branding and principal of d/g worldwide, said Apple's brand is the key to its survival. It's got nothing to do with innovative products like the iMac or the iPod.

"Without the brand, Apple would be dead," he said. "Absolutely. Completely. The brand is all they've got. The power of their branding is all that keeps them alive. It's got nothing to do with products."

Gobe, who hails from France, formulated this view while researching his book, in which he tells how brands have established deep, lasting bonds with their customers.

Apple, of course, is the archetypal emotional brand. It's not just intimate with its customers; it is loved. Other examples are automaker Lexus, retailer Target and outdoor clothing line Patagonia.

"Apple is about imagination, design and innovation," Gobe said from his office in New York. "It goes beyond commerce. This business should have been dead 10 years ago, but people said we've got to support it."

Gobe is of course referring to Apple's financial tailspin during the mid-1990s when the company looked in danger of going out of business. At the time, its products were lackluster, its branding a mess.

"Before Steve Jobs came back, the brand was pretty much gone," he said. "That's one of the reasons Apple has been rebranded -- to rejuvenate the brand."

Apple abandoned the old rainbow-hued Apple logo in favor of a minimalist monochrome one, gave its computers a funky, colorful look, and streamlined the messages in its advertising. It's done wonders, Gobe said.

Gobe argued that, in some cases, branding has become as powerful as religion. "People's connections with brands transcend commerce," he said. Gobe cited Nike, which sparked customers' ire when it was revealed the company's products were assembled in sweatshops.

"They were not pissed about the products," Gobe said. "It's about the company's ethics. It's interesting how emotionally involved people are."

According to Gobe, emotional brands have three things in common:

* The company projects a humanistic corporate culture and a strong corporate ethic, characterized by volunteerism, support of good causes or involvement in the community. Nike blundered here. Apple, on the other hand, comes across as profoundly humanist. Its founding ethos was power to the people through technology, and it remains committed to computers in education. "It's always about people," Gobe said.

* The company has a unique visual and verbal vocabulary, expressed in product design and advertising: This is true of Apple. Its products and advertising are clearly recognizable. (So is Target's, or even Wal-Mart's, Gobe said).

* The company has established a "heartfelt connection" with its customers. This can take several forms, from building trust to establishing a community around a product. In Apple's case, its products are designed around people: "Take the iPod, it brings an emotional, sensory experience to computing," Gobe said. "Apple's design is people-driven."

Gobe noted that Apple has always projected a human touch -- from the charisma of Steve Jobs to the notion that its products are sold for a love of technology.

"It's like having a good friend," Gobe said. "That's what's interesting about this brand. Somewhere they have created this really humanistic, beyond-business relationship with users and created a cult-like relationship with their brand. It's a big tribe, everyone is one of them. You're part of the brand."

The human touch is also expressed in product design, Gobe said. Apple's flat-screen iMac, for example, was marketed as though it were created personally by Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive, not by factory workers in Asia.

"People are anxious and confused," Gobe said. "Technology is accelerating faster and faster than we can keep up with. People need to find some grounding, that human touch, the leading hand. There's a need to recreate tribes that give people a grounding."

Writer Naomi Klein is a leading critic of branding, especially Apple's. Klein, author of No Logo, argues that companies like Apple are no longer selling products. They are selling brands, which evoke a subtle mix of people's hopes, dreams and aspirations.

Klein notes how Benetton used images of racial harmony to sell clothes, while Apple used great leaders -- Cesar Chavez, Gandhi and the Dalai Lama -- to persuade people that a Macintosh might also allow them to "Think Different."

"People are drawn to these brands because they are selling their own ideas back to them, they are selling the most powerful ideas that we have in our culture such as transcendence and community -- even democracy itself, these are all brand meanings now," she told the Guardian newspaper.

Klein's analysis of branding finds a receptive audience in the marketing community. Jean-Marie Dru, described by Adbusters as the "ad industry's current wonderkid," also believes that brands thrive or perish based on the ideals they espouse.

"Apple expresses liberty regained; Pepsi, youthfulness; Oil of Olay, timeless beauty; Saturn, the American competitive spirit; and AT&T, the promises of the future," he wrote in his book Disruption.

To Dru, brands are more important than products. Products have limited life cycles, but brands -- if managed well -- last forever. "The battle of brands and products will be, above all, a battle of ideas," he wrote.

Ryan Bigge, writing in Adbusters, said: "Our dreams and desires for a better world are no longer articulated by JFKs nor generated through personal epiphanies -- they are now the intellectual currency of Pepsi and Diesel. We used to have movements for change -- now we have products. Brands may befriend us, console us and inspire us, but the relationship comes at the highest price imaginable -- the loss of self."

Apple's famous "1984" Super Bowl ad, for example, was expressly political: It's message was, give power to the masses. The power, of course, was computing power.

"Macintosh was always bigger than the product," Steve Hayden, the ad's copywriter, told AdWeek. "We thought of it as an ideology, a value set. It was a way of letting the whole world access the power of computing and letting them talk to one another. The democratization of technology -- the computer for the rest of us."

The "1984" ad began a branding campaign that portrayed Apple as a symbol of counterculture -- rebellious, free-thinking and creative. According to Charles Pillar, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, this image is a calculated marketing ploy to sell expensive computers.

"Expressions of almost spiritual faithfulness to the Mac, although heartfelt, weren't a purely spontaneous response to a sublime creation," he wrote. "They were a response to a calculated marketing ploy to sell computers that cost much more than competing brands.

"I'm not making this up. Members of the Mac's original engineering and marketing team told me all about it. They did it by building a sense of belonging to an elite club by portraying the Mac as embodying the values of righteous outsiderism and rebellion against injustice. It started in the early '80s with the famous '1984' TV commercial that launched the Mac, and continued with 'The computer for the rest of us' slogan and several ad campaigns playing on a revolutionary theme."

Steve Manning, co-founder of Igor, a brand consultancy in San Francisco, California, said even a seasoned professional like himself is seduced. "Even though I understand this stuff, I’ve bought into it," he said. "I own four Macs. They’re more expensive, but the advertising and marketing works."

Seems we've been having the same discussion around this topic (specifically Apple) for some time now. Hopefully one day we decide to move on.

"I STARTED painting graffiti when I was about 14 or so, and people always ask, yer know, what makes you do it?

"But the question was always really, why would you not do it?"

These are the words of one of the world's most famous artists, and most elusive characters.

Secret ... Banksy's true identity has never been revealed

Bristol-born Banksy is hugely popular worldwide, his guerilla-style graffiti his calling card.

Yet for 18 years he has succeeded where The Stig failed - and kept his identity totally secret.

Who is he? That's the question on the lips of everyone from trendy youngsters to the snobbish art world elite.

Rat'll do nicely ... Banksy uses stencils to create art quickly

For the first time ever, the street artist has spoken at length about his amazing rise from a spray-can-toting youth, to someone whose work sells for £1million a time to Hollywood's A-listers.

And The Sun is the first to bring you the interview.

His openness coincides with the DVD release of his film Exit Through The Gift Shop on Monday.

Explaining where it all began, Banksy says: "You're 14, 15. It's a big world out there, you wanna make your mark, and no one listens to a word you say. Whereas, yer know, one night, one spray can, all of a sudden people notice you."

Banksy was plugged into the trendy street scene, and gives a nod to fellow Bristolian, 3D from dance music outfit Massive Attack.

"There was always a lot of graffiti in my home town growing up, urmm, I think 3D from Massive Attack had brought it back with him off tour in America and he'd been painting all over the city.

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"I started painting graffiti in the classic New York style of big letters and characters but I was never very good at it. I always used to get things too close together or too far apart and it used to take me ages.

"So I had to come up with a way of making it quicker, otherwise I was gonna get nicked."

The works that catapulted Banksy into the spotlight almost all involved black and white stencil drawings, such as the iconic image of two policemen snogging.

"I mean they're very efficient, stencils. You get to put something up in very little time and it's hard to mess it up.

"When I moved to London I just carried on painting. I never saw that there was anything bad in it.

"You live in the city and all the time there are signs telling you what to do and billboards trying to sell you something.

"And I always felt that it was all right to answer back a little bit, I suppose. That the city shouldn't just be a one-way conversation "I didn't see why you'd settle for just walls. So I started vandalising statues and that led to vandalising parks. It just kept going really.

Elephantastic ... decorated live elephant used for his LA exhibition

"So I'd come up with this idea of painting graffiti over oil paintings instead of on walls. And I was completely convinced it was a genius idea nobody had had before."

Banksy began producing his own versions of classic paintings, his most famous being Monet's Water Lily Pond with discarded shopping trolleys under the bridge. In 2003 he snuck into London's Tate Britain gallery and added one of his creations.

He explained: "I thought, 'How do I stop people from stealing this idea?' And I reckoned the best thing to do was to get it hanging up in the Tate with my name next to it.

Maid to order ... stencilwork and skill are combined in his iconic street art creations

Rex

"But obviously if you were waiting for them to come to you, you'd be waiting quite a long time. So I thought I'd just go in the Tate and stick it up.It was funny. I was going to all these galleries and I wasn't looking at the art, I was looking at the blank spaces between the art.

"So I thought it was probably about time to have a gallery show. But I don't really like galleries, so I, er, ended up renting this warehouse instead."

One of the most memorable moments in Banksy's career was when he sabotaged the launch of Paris Hilton's music album.

Opportunistic ... Banksy's work uses the urban environment

He managed to replace 500 copies with his own CD in September 2006. On the cover he superimposed a picture of a dog's head over Paris's and added a sticker that said it included tracks Why Am I Famous?, What Have I Done? and What Am I For?

For the first time he explains how he pulled it off. "I'd been talking to the DJ Danger Mouse about trying to vandalise some pop act or hijack somebody who was in the charts.

All those in favour ... Bristol council made the public vote on whether to keep the art

"And then suddenly we found out that Paris Hilton was going to make a record. And we had like three weeks to turn it around before the CD was in the shops.

"It was an idea that was just waiting for Paris Hilton to happen. I messed around with the visuals then Danger Mouse sort of turned the album into this one long track where she just repeats herself over and over again.

"We packaged it up, we put it in the cases and then me and two other guys split up and went across the country reverse shoplifting.

"We put out 500 of 'em, which I think probably turned out to be a fair percentage of what she actually sold. I mean, what can they do you for? Littering? Maybe? I guess?"

Just a short time later Banksy caused controversy by staging an exhibition in LA that included a live painted elephant.

He says: "I guess I fancied going somewhere a little bit warmer. So we ended up in Los Angeles and, yer know, it's this really glamorous town that also has this dirty side to it.

"But... above anything else it's the easiest place in the world to rent an elephant." Today Banksy's works can fetch £1million, with Brad Pitt famously picking up a piece at a London auction with a phone bid in 2007.

Small pieces regularly command six figures. But it wasn't always that way.

Keeping it reel ... DVD of Banksy film comes out on Monday

Banksy says: "When the paintings suddenly started going for, like, really big money it definitely weirded me out, and I kind of went away to the middle of nowhere and I stopped making any more paintings. But... er... the whole time the auction houses were just selling paintings that I'd done years before and sold for not much money. Or paintings that I traded for a haircut or, yer know, an ounce of weed and they were going for like 50 grand.

"It's great, I guess, when your paintings are hanging up in a museum.

"But I can't help feeling it was a bit easier when all I had to compete against was a dustbin down an alley rather than, you know, a Gainsborough or something."

Despite success beyond his wildest dreams, Bansky remains endearingly modest about his work.

"Graffiti's always been a temporary art form. You make your mark and then they scrub it off. I mean, most of it is just designed to look good from a moving vehicle. Not necessarily in the history books.

"But maybe all art is about just trying to live on for a bit.

"I mean, they say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time."

If this is true it will be a very, very long time before Bansky finally gets to rest.

n.francis@the-sun.co.uk

one of the greats.