Marketing quote of the day

David Simon, creator of hit TV series The Wire:

There's an obligation to be entertaining, but if all you are is in entertainment, then shame on you.

He says that in relation to the compelling nature of truth in story-telling. I was saying something similar to Jules as we wandered around Sydney on Tuesday looking for a place to eat, the idea currently rattling around in my head being if our efforts for the brands and companies we work for are only as large as the products they sell, then we're all doomed to failure. Seth spends his whole book Tribes (as well as the free three-hour audio version) banging on about this very idea - succcessful companies form around movements, and engineer their offerings to encompass a sense of belonging when you use them.

One of my basic gut-checks when considering ideas for clients is this: how does the user experience improve when another person joins? And another? And another? If the answer is "It doesn't", find better ideas. David Armano has a great piece I've pointed to before which arranges the idea very nicely...



Simply put, there's an obligation to be useful, but if that's all you are, then shame on you.

Now...off to the beach to read some GQ...

I aorde tihs

Via bad banana blog.

Strategy | Intent | Persistence (and tigers and bears OH MY!)

Digital strategy is a business decision, not a marketing decision. That doesn't mean your marketing team shouldn't be in the room, it means everyone else should be there with them.

Julian Cole wrote a piece a few months back saying "Don't trust an agency with your digital strategy." It does then beg the question (if I may, for a moment, speak client-side) "Then whom shall I trust in your festering cesspool of sharks, narcissists and hopeless egomaniacs?

Good question.

A single unit needs to own a company's strategy, and they need to be able to talk about each channel with authority. That sounds like a no-brainer I know, so I'm going to put this out there and see how it feels: you won't find it anywhere where the last name of an ad giant from yester-year hangs their name on the front door. That isn't because they don't have intelligent folk from all disciplines working for them, that is because their business models and internal practices will not permit the structural changes required to achieve genuine innovation and next-generation creativity for their client's businesses, let alone their own.

If anyone is hearing that for the first time, I promise I'm not the first.

I can't say I know all of the answers, or even any of them. But not enough people are asking the question. Or questions; you can phrase them in a myriad of ways, let's maybe start with something like this: why does Clemenger BBDO in Melbourne now have four people in its planning department, none of them digital natives? Tim, who worked there as a member of the planning team up until a week ago, had this to say:

I’ve been arguing for a long time now that as product, advertising, sales and service, all get closer together, advertising agencies really need to become creative marketing consultancies...some drastic restructuring needs to take place.

Drastic restructuring then did take place, though perhaps not along the lines he was thinking.

David Armano has talked about a move away from the silver bullet, much like Tim has. I took a personality test recently that told me I rated close to 0 when it came to perfectionism, but was a polar opposite when it came to creativity and a love of thinking. Call me biased (I won't argue), but that sounds like something very different to where we're currently at, and given that test it is no wonder I'm a fan of this new direction. I'm also a fan of offering substance, something advertising doesn't do very well at all.

I've talked a lot about intent, and I think this chart speaks to the heart of the same thing I'm on about. It is also the same thing Seth Godin means when he says the following:

Persistence isn't using the same tactics over and over. That's just annoying.

Persistence is having the same goal over and over.

My friend Michael Hewitt-Gleeson calls it SDNT: Start Do Notice Think.

I call it intent, and when I talk about it, I talk about constanty refining the work we're doing to ensure the outcome is matching the intent; if it isn't we change it until it is.

Intent is at the heart of everything we do, and the group that owns your strategy should have it etched onto their brains, directing nothing less than strategy that delivers the intended result tomorrow better than it did today. Starting here I'm advocating a move away from the single-minded proposition to the statement of intent; it is fluid and flexible, and it ensures the goal is forever just over the horizon. It will keep you and your organisation passionate and motivated and restless.

And that is how it should be.

Social capitalism

I have an obscene habit of opening tab after tab after endless tab until Firefox starts to resemble an attempt to learn about everything there ever was to know. People spend their time playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, I can get you from Miami Art Basel to Dave Eggers talking about after-school-learning projects (watch that by the way, it is amazing) to NASA's space imagery without currently needing to open any new links. I can get you there, but I can't tell you how I myself wound up on them in the first place.

I love teh interwebs.

Anyway, one of the tabs open is a piece I've been meaning to blog about since it was posted, instead I'm just going to give you the link and tell you to go read it. It is from Tamir over at Frank Thoughts and it is to do with TAXI's 15 Below Project. When I bang on about experiences facilitated by brands but not about brands, this is what I'm getting at.\

Fantastic stuff.

More than skin deep

Image by Capitan Giona via Flickr

So a while back I got up on a high horse (I know I know, say it isn't so) about story-telling in advertising. I identified the three ways stories get told in advertising, and was making a case for the third way (giving your consumers tools to tell their own stories) as being by far the most powerful. I want to get side-tracked for a second on this and look at two Dove commercials. One made by them, another made by Greenpeace.

The first: Evolution.



Everyone agrees (I think...) it's a great piece of work and the conversation is continued over at The Campaign For Real Beauty which doesn't seem to have an Australian presence but is all over Europe and the Americas. It's a play at talking about something much bigger than the products they produce, which should really go without saying these days. Two years on and it is still a compelling piece of work.

How hollow does it ring though when followed up with this: Onslaught(er)?



Onslaught(er) brought such incredible public pressure to bear that Unilever, Dove's parent company, had little choice but to work with Greenpeace to help save the very forests they had been destroying to create their product. They began a 6 month program in May of this year to work together to bring the plight of the forests in South East Asia to all companies that were destroying the forests for palm oil.

So here there are two very different stories being told, one the company wants to push about its products and one someone else wants to push about the company. Admittedly the former offered up a platform for consumers to have a discussion about beauty, but when the message is re-framed with the second piece of footage, the whole exercise falls pretty flat for me.

Perhaps it is a cheap or easy shot to take, but it has been repeated this month in the US with a company called Motrin whose light-hearted poke at baby slings backfired out of sight. The first move was a company telling its own story, the next was the community telling one entirely different.

Anyone else have some good examples of this sort of thing?

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Creative Is Not A Departure

(Yes I have been waiting to use that)

It is with great pleasure and some trepidation (along with a dash of in difference and a sense of humour) that I announce a shift of not the blog this time, but the person behind it (one of them anyway, you guys on the comments are doing brilliant work all your own).

11am on December 26th I will board a flight which will land 28 hours later in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Actually that's a lie, it will land 3 hours later in Auckland, New Zealand. Then it will land 12 hours later in LA before making me wait 5 hours to fly on to Toronto. But the point is, I'm moving, leaving an Australian summer for a Canadian winter, and along with it almost everyone I know on this Earth. I'd tell you al what the plan was, except that there isn't a plan, I just woke up and needed a change, so decided to change everything.

While the posting may become a little intermittent during the move, I look forward to getting it all back on board and regular when I've setup my North American HQ. At some point be looking for work so if you or someone you know is wanting to hire folk for their digital strategy offering, you should get in touch.

There'll be more time for goodbyes and reminiscing in the next couple weeks, for now it is back to business as usual though. We resume our regular programming in 3...2...1...

Draw a line

When making a decision, you can get there in two ways:

1. You can define what you want.

OR

2. You can define what you don't want.

Now, those two things are not the same, and one is far more limiting than the other. Take a look at the two, odds are your natural reaction will be the same as everyone else's. It's unfortunate for us, but human nature is to go with the first option and be blinded by what we want, as opposed to what we don't want.

Look at this image:



Here we have a visualisation - say the circle is the entire range of possibility. In the one on the left  we've nailed down exactly what we want, which is shown by being coloured in. In the one on the right however, we've nailed down exactly what we don't want and filled that space in. In the first diagram, the remaining space may as well not exist, because we don't consider it. In the second, while what we want takes up slightly more space, what is left over is nothing less than a far larger opportunity for success.

The next time you're working through an issue, a brief, a life-changing decision, try focussing instead on what you're not willing to accept, decide what you're not willing to compromise on.

Draw a line, and then revel in the opportunity left over. You might be surprised.

The Google Flow

I was sketching business models the other night (I know I know, there's a reason eveyrone wants to party with me...) and drew the below diagrams while thinking about how people use Google and Facebook. It struck me that Google benefit as much from people leaving their site as they do from entering it - maybe even more so! Contrast this with Facebook, who derive no value from people getting to anywhere else.

With next-gen strategy in mind, Google are so far ahead of the curve it boggles the mind. Not only that, but the flow of users through their system is engineered into their core DNA - it isn't an idea they have to get stakeholders on board for. Sure they have occasionally dabbled in other fields, like their ill-fated attempt to take on Wikipedia, but for the most part they can focus on things other than strategic innovation as there are so very few people even playing in their league.

Strategy for the next revolution

At the risk of this becoming a Fred Wilson love-in, I'm catching up on my unread items and he mentioned a conference coming up focused solely on creating add-ons for browsers. I'm a BIG fan of add-ons that make it easier for what I'm trying to do - as I've said before this revolution we're going through is based around making it easier for the majority to express themselves (which is subsequently why there are now businesses around organising information - see what we did?).

What is happening in this space though is people are harnessing the notion of the web as the platform and getting away - slowly but surely), from operating systems as we knew them.

The moves that Microsoft, Google and Mozilla have been making though are ones towards the inevitable (and closer than you think) point where there is no such thing as an offline experience. At that point the browser is the experience, with different plugins and views for different things (word processing, spreadsheets, etc.).

Where we're also headed is the recovery of our personal data away from the social networks and back to a central repository, one we are in control of. I wrote the following for Marketing back in May this year:

(Facebook are) desperately trying to maintain hold on user data, under the daft assumption it was somehow their's to play with in the first place.

That idea, and the moves MS, Google and Mozilla are making, brings the online experience back to the user, it takes the data back to the source, rather than downstream where it currently resides. Facebook exists as a repository for personal data, wrapped up in a layer of communications software that shares it with your friends. Nothing more, nothing less. Facebook gambled - and rightfully so - on that information being worth something; they've made a fundamental mistake though in attempting to build a business around something they do not own or control: your information.

So, in playing the game of would-be gate-keeper, distracting you long enough with werewolf bites and status updates, Facebook are trying to build a profitable business around supplying access to the owners of the information.

...stop me if you've heard this one...

Meanwhile, people innovating in the browser space are building out their own platforms - ones that exist at a pre-site level. By doing this, they will tap the water supply at the source and not down-stream, and while yes we will still be the ones handing over the information, they know we need software to facilitate interaction with the web, that isn't changing any time soon.

Facebook's strategic advantage could be in opening up its system and allowing people to build Facebook applications that reside in the browser and not on their website. But in order to do that, they have to make some fundamental shifts in strategy and philosophy, and move from a siloed-mentality, the kind that built businesses in the 90's, to an open one - the kind that builds businesses today. They have the scale, what I doubt they have is the will to become, almost overnight, one of the largest publishers of web applications on the planet and give a massive boost to the fledgling economies of browser plug-ins. In Facebook Connect they half-heartedly attempted to extend the reach of their platform beyond their own domain, and it plays like it is: an attempt to be a little bit open, but not too much.

Meanwhile companies like Zemanta, and like Adaptive Blue with Glue, are building businesses for the next revolution by creating technologies that do not require something as decidedly old-fashioned as a website to exist. Indeed they more than anyone recognise there is limited value in pushing a destination, but endless value in pushing content.

As soon as the hardware conversation goes away, the website-as-destination will quickly follow as we embrace the distributed web. So too, I imagine, the gross over-valuation that came and went with everyone's favourite social network.

This year's one anyway.

--

Props to Alisa Leondard who got me thinking about this, you should go and read Socialised. Wait, she's American, so it's SocialiZed. Dig.

Image courtesy of Digger Digger Dogstar, with thanks to compfight, who've just had a facelift. Go tell them they look pretty - they'll put out. Promise!

Tools for the linked economy

Last week I was talking about business opportunities that exist around the aggregation and sorting of information, something Fred Wilson just wrote about:

This gets me excited. Because someone could do so much more with this idea. We have a few companies that are trying to extract meaning out of content on the web. Adaptive Blue recognizes pages about things (books, music, film, stocks, wine, people, etc). Outside.in recognizes posts and articles about places (neighborhoods, schools, parks, etc). And Zemanta recognizes concepts in blog posts and recommends content to add to your post.A VC, Nov 2008

I'm digging this notion of building a business around the curation of content right now - not that I'm looking to start one, but there are opportunities to leverage this moment with the right execution and the right brand(s).

Which of course means the race is on to see which ad agency fucks it up first.

(Incidentally, I use Zemanta in regular posts as well as having used it to re-blog the above quote from Fred. It is a fantastic service, any blogger reading this should go check it out - you'll see the little re-blog image in the bottom-right corner of this post)

How to draw a car by Dave Gray

I adore this, so cute and simple.

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posted with vodpod

I'm finding myself increasingly drawing pictures to get my ideas across to clients, definitely on a bit of a visual-thinking kick (I've even created an Amazon wish-list... *whistles nonchalantly* Jingle bells, jingle bells...).

I am an atrocious artist, and can only claim to follow the Impressionist movement as justification for drawings that don't look even remotely like what I'm attempting. Watch this space for a story about a seahorse, which will be (poorly) illustrated by yours truly - thanks to Alysha who gets partial credit for having been on the other end of the conversation when I came up with the idea.

Marketing quote of the day, take 2

Image via Wikipedia

When you fall in love with the system, you lose the ability to grow - Seth Godin

He says this in his new book Tribes. A little more conventional than Bob, though perhaps a bit more obvious.

So...are we there yet?

Creative Is Not A Digital Marketing & Media Summit

Never the less, I shall be there this Friday with my favourite partner in crime, Julian Cole. Also along for the fun will be Peter Wagstaff and Zac Martin, who will join me in assisting Julian in a somewhat unusual but hopefully engaging presentation.

And now to the good stuff.

After the summit, we'll be hightailing back into the city for drinks at Madame Brussels from 6pm. You don't have to attend the conference to come along for a drink, I've arranged for a special room, so upon arrival ask for (and you have to say it in the most sultry voice you can muster, lest Pearls, the proprietor of Madame Brussels not let you in!) "The parlour up the rear of Madame Brussels." Take my number --> 0404 078686 <-- in case you get into any trouble (knowing you lot this is bound to happen) and come out for a drink to kick-start the weekend.

I should also add our lovely location would not have been possible without the assistance of Michelle Matthews at Deck of Secrets who this week launched their own iPhone app. Entitled DRINK, it is a handy guide to the best bars in Melbourne, soon to be rolled out across all the cities her cards have appeared in. Go say hi. Go on, it's polite.

Now get outta here.

Make your problem somebody else's

Experiences facilitated by brands but not about brands - David Gillespie (broken record).

Entertainment, content of all shapes and sizes, offline, online, anywhere you like it. The problem could be a lack of conversation, and when you give the community around your offering the tools and platforms to make themselves heard, you take a step towards something much bigger than where you've been before. As I said when I called social media out, the exciting thing about where we are in our digital evolution is for the first time in our history it is as easy to create content as it is to produce it.

So what are you doing with this opportunity?

User-generated content was the first ham-fisted attempt to do something creative in this space, but it is only going to get better as organisations get more comfortable with the conversation going on about them. There is no silver bullet when trying to harness the enthusiasm of your tribe and align it with an organisation's goals, this quote from Henry Jenkins though will steer any effort in the right direction:

The key is to produce something that both pulls people together and gives them something to do…I don’t have to control the conversation to benefit from their interest – Henry Jenkins - MIT

If your problem is nobody knows about you, make that the community's issue and give them a reason to talk. Rally the tribe and give them purpose, make your anonymity their problem, let them solve it in their way. If you've been good to them along the way, they will reward you more than your own efforts ever will.

--

Image courtesy of paf triz, with thanks to compfight.

Keeping the main thing the main thing

I have a new piece up over at Marketing Magazine, thinking about marketing as business strategy and encouraging everyone to dig a little deeper into the businesses they work with and on:

Look at Google. They weren't always Google, not like we know them. They created one of the most remarkable services the world has ever known and built their empire on being remarkable. Products and services do not get more remarkable than that. Where are those products? The ones that don't require a clever tagline and a media spend to get the attention they deserve? Why are we not sitting with our clients and challenging them on what is actually remarkable about their work?

Hope you enjoy!

Stephen Conroy boxes glacier, loses

See the below clip for Stephen Conroy being questioned on his Internet filter by Green's Senator Scott Ludlam from Western Australia.

[youtube=http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=OUohfIhFET8]

It always struck me that one of the best backhanded compliments you could give a person in public office was that they were an excellent policitian. The criteria for such a remark is generally an innate ability to avoid answering a direct and obvious question, and to finish speaking leaving your audience feeling somehow diminished for having listened in the first place.

With this in mind, Stephen Conroy strikes me as a masterful and utterly natural politician. My hat is off to Scott Ludlam for taking it to Mr. Conroy, Scott anything you need from the folk out here, just ask.

Calling Social Media Out

I've had enough. I'm done with social media and I'm calling you, you and particularly YOU out on it. I'm nailing it to the wall for the crock that it is. UGC was the first to cop it, social media is next.

I'm looking at what Jules is doing with The Population, my friend Matt's work with DP Dialogue, whoever else is out there. Yes, we have the Beersphere tonight, yes I blog, vlog, put music on MySpace, I comment, bookmark with del.icio.us, I use compfight to search Flickr for Creative Commons-licensed imagery, I discover new music via Last.fm and Pandora, and I Twitter. I do all that, and I'm telling you right now social media will be, in the great history of the web, hell in the great history of the next three years (if that long), the 2.0 equivalent of Pets.com.

And here is why.

First, we have to agree on something. You can choose to disagree, and I welcome that, but my stance is this: the web is inherently social. Not for everyone, particularly not for older generations, but from me back to the babies it is inherently, indiscriminately, and unavoidably social.

Next, we have to agree that the web is young. The web is still figuring out what it is, what it wants to be. You know movies? The name comes, need I remind you, from moving pictures. Photos that seemed to come to life, truth 24 times a second. Web 1.0 was moving pictures, we're now in the Talkies. Imagine if film had stalled when talkies came along and we suddenly found the actors had horrible voices?

That is where we are; social media is "the talkies" of the Internet.

Social media isn't anything special, it is just the Internet in its current form. All media is social - Julian says this himself. It is a period that will forever be known as a time where it became as easy to create content as it was to consume it. THAT is the important part of what is going on.

Not Web 2.0, not new media, not digital media, not post-media and certainly not social media. If all media is social, media must be inherently social and if we agree the web is inherently social then the Internet is, my friends, just a collection of media (we need to separate that idea from the business of media). We have created a new taxonomy in an attempt to somehow describe the "otherness" of this new space, which is itself not a recent development; we've separated movies and TV for years even though they showed us essentially the same thing (like FM radio and Pandora do now). Watching video online is no different, and soon we won't treat it like it is.

In fact, thank God (or Dawkins for the atheists) we're rapidly coming back around to a place where we're not stuck on discussions of platforms and mediums; there will only be one platform where everyone produces and, once again, content will be king. That platform is the Internet, and, dear client folk, if someone comes to you with a digital strategy that does not have a focus on creating 1-to-1 connections in your audience, then run for the hills. But do not be caught up in the myth of social media, that is just the interwebs as we know it.

As Iain Tait said much more succinctly than I, digital is not a thing anymore.

Now, let's talk about something interesting for a change.

**Update** I got the name of Matt's social media company wrong as he points out below. Apologies to him and the good people at De Pasquale.

New businesses reside in the linked economy

 

Image via Wikipedia

I spend a lot of time with friends thinking about where tomorrow's businesses lie, and I'm on the record that great content with good intentions and an open philosophy will be at the heart of the real money-makers in the next decade.

With that in mind, I've just read a fascinating post from Mark Ury who is an Experience Architect at Blast Radius. Mark ties together a few loose strands of thinking and comes out with something entirely his own. I particularly love the below principles he borrows from Jeff Jarvis...

Can applying “link economy” strategies work for “traditional” companies? Here are Jeff Jarvis’ four principles. And below is a modified version, applied to companies in pursuit of innovation:

1. All companies must be transparent. Your talent base and IP must be exposed and connected. They’re not useable unless they’re linked.

2. The recipient of IP and talent is the party responsible for monetizing them. The more you enable the flow of IP and talent AWAY from you, the more it comes BACK—with greater value and skills to monetize. Just watch how Hollywood operates.

3. A porous organization is the key to efficiency. In other words: do what you do best and link to the rest.

4. There are opportunities to add value atop the IP and talent layer. This is where one can find business opportunities: by managing abundance rather than the old model of managing scarcity. The market needs help finding the good stuff; that curation is a business opportunity.

...which he applies to Threadless during the course of the post...

The result: a business that manages abundance (t-shirt ideas), provides value through transparency (the audience becomes both editor and consumer), and values the flow of IP and talent through them—rather than by them. (Doc Searls calls this kind of value “a shift from “making money with” to “making money because.”)

Great piece. And it contains some links to some other fascinating reads on "the linked economy". Mark also takes the time to talk about opportunities that exist around monetising the aggregation of information and content, of which Threadless is a prime example (as is Flickr, YouTube, MySpace etc.).

The idea here is this: find the verticles in seemingly well-mined markets, and you will open up doors the rest of us never knew existed.

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How simple is Web 2.0?

I like making sure we draw lines between simple and accessible, but could Web 2.0 really be as easily explained as this?



The only fault I'm thinking is the x100 - connections are still one to one, just on a mass scale.

Image courtesy of my mate Alex - if anyone knows the original source please let me know so I can give proper credit.

**Update** Turns out I thought the image must have come from someone other than Alex, when it did in fact originate with him. This is not because I thought him not capable of extraodinarily insightful cartoons, more so because, much like Jesus having walked the Earth, the idea deities occasionally walk among us is somewhat hard to believe. There you go. Alex White, genius personified!

Mission accomplished - SMS Coffee

It was a sweet victory for Hyde who will be opening the Dancing Goat Cafe on King Street in the city in two weeks, after having run a drive-through "cafe" from a caravan in Preston for the past four months. Half of his clients ordered their coffees by SMS.

I went along to the Victorian barista championships on Saturday to cheer on Talor Browne who makes one of my favourite cups down at Brother Baba Budan. She got to the finals, which is a fantastic effort for her first competition, I'm more so excited about theemergence of SMS Coffee.

Now that that's sorted, time to get back to saving the world.

Viral; one connection at a time

Earlier this year in one of my regular guises as copywriter-to-the-stars, I wrote an EDM piece for a competition that began "Oh hai." It was a pure-play in my mind at the folk who would know instantly what I was talking about and at none of the people who wouldn't. In hindsight it perhaps wasn't the brightest move to make, but I was feeling something in my gut at the time that Seth articulated really well recently - in order for people to feel like they belong, some people have to feel like they don't belong; to have insiders you have to have outsiders. I wanted the people who got it to understand a fundamental truth about the brand I was writing for. They did, but I also learnt very quickly that the audience I had in mind was smaller than I thought it was - at least for that particular brand.

We live and learn.

Anyway, for those that don't know, "Oh hai" has its roots in LOlcats, made most famous over the past 18 months by the emergence of I Can Haz Cheezburger. Their CEO, Ben Huh gave a talk this year at the Web 2.0 conference (the same conference featuring the inimitable Gary Vee) about the success they have achieved - almost 100 milion page views a month! His take on things is really simple and a great lesson lies herein for marketers, Ben is focused on two things:

1. Facilitating 1-to-1 connections


2. Making people happy for five minutes a day

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Take some time to watch it this morning, it'll make you smile. Oh, found via Dino who is organising this week's BeerSphere in Toronto.

Happy Monday everybody.

Beersphere comes to Melbourne on Thursday, November 13th!

Your friend and mine, Faris Yakob decided to organise a get together in New York of Planners, social media folk, general riff-raff the kind of which your mother warned you about. Obviously we can't all attend that gathering so instead November 13th is International Beersphere Day, where a gathering just like that goes on in your own backyard (if your backyard happens to be one of the places it is being organised.)

Those who call Melbourne their backyard should come along to Red Hummingbird, 246 Russell Street, just up from the corner of Lonsdale from 6:30pm. We'll meet on the rooftop as I'm banking on the weather being lovely (currently predicted to be 29 degrees!), if you haven't been there before you will see a red birdcageover the entrance.


My friend Tim will be there, as will a bunch of others whose blogs I do not know the addresses of. Wait I can probably steal them from Jules...here we go, I am pleased to offer an extra-special invite to:


Pigs Don’t Fly, I Hate Ads , Simon Says , The Gruen Transfer , ProBlogger, Brand DNA , The Wayfarer , PR Disasters , Pixel Paddock, In my atmosphere, The Zeitgeists, Current Issues in Marketing Strategy , FRANKthoughts, Wonderwebby , Marketing Today, Gen Y Marketing Podcast, Marketing Geek , Marketing Easy, A blog about digital media, The Body Shop Activist

...as well as anyone else who'd like to join. Pre-requisites for attending are a) you are not an asshat and b) you like alcohol.

If you're not in Melbourne, take a look below to see if a gathering is happening near you, otherwise you can organise one! Get in touch with Faris or myself, we will steer you in the right direction.

View Map

The Date: Thursday November 13th 2008

[That's next Thursday]

The places - well....

New York [with me]: Obivia, 201 Lafayette Street from 6pm. [Happy hour runs until 8pm and there should be some free Ketel One splashing about too. Don't say I don't look after you.] MAP.

London [with Rachel and Co]: Will meet 6.30pm onwards at the Commercial Tavern, 142-144 Commercial Street, London E1 6NU. We've got the upstairs bar. See you there! Details.

Toronto [with Jason and Dino]: 6:30pm The Bedford Academy, 36 Prince Arthur Avenue. [Featuring interpretive dance by Dino, and late evening partial nudity by Jason.]

Sydney [with Julian]: Sydney Beersphere at 6:30pm, at The KB, 26 Foveaux St, Surry Hills right next to Central Station so there is no excuse. Details.


Berlin: [with David]: Berlin Beersphere is from 7pm at PonyBar (alte schönhauser strasse 44 10119 berlin-mitte). MAP.

Boston: [with Conner and Gareth]: Bukowski’s @ 50 Dalton St, Boston, Map.


Shanghai, Brisbane, Bucharest also going to take part hopefully - will update you once I have details confirmed.

See you Thursday, call me on 0404078686 if you run into trouble. I look disturbingly like the guy in the Facebook link to the right of this post.

Oh, and drop me a line if you're going to come along and I'll add you to the list of blogs above.

A lesson in being remarkable from IDEO

They say: IDEO's Gobal Chain Reaction Experience.

I say: Show me a more remarkable business card from a design and engineering firm.

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Posted with vodpod.

I forgot to say - found courtesy of FRANKthoughts' Tamir, who will hopefully be Beersphering with us on Thursday.

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Three of the best for Marketers

My friend Matt put up a great post - The Ten Best Marketing Tips Ever. I'm not crazy about all of them, but these three are gems:

1. Make your customer service truly remarkable. No, seriously, you don’t understand. Not good. Not brilliant: remarkable.


2. Find time to get active in your industry association. Offer to be secretary and do an amazing job. Do extra stuff that no one wants to do and do it really well. You’ll be a captain of industry in six months.


3. Engage your customers properly, start conversations with them online and offline (you know, like, when they’re in your store) and do it because you want to, not because it’s the latest fad. Smile like you mean it.

Some thoughts:

• Remarkable is such a good idea, and so under the radar still. Take it, eat it for breakfast. Own it. Be it.


• I was telling my new friend Lisa, there's always an opportunity to be a thought-leader, and she's reaching out to small businesses on Queensland's Sunshine Coast and making a really positive impact by just being good. If you're in that area and need a hand, get in touch with her.


• Passion counts for more than degrees and experience and networks combined. Full stop. Look at my friend Jules for proof of that.


• Matt references Gary Vee's brilliant talk from the Web 2.0 conference, which is required reading watching if you're a reader here ("Stop watching fucking Lost!"). The other great insight from that talk is (and I'm paraphrasing) "Listening is one thing, giving a shit is a whole other thing."

OK. Go enjoy the weekend.

Love & Marketing

So it seems Bob Dylan isn't the most obvious place for a lot of people when it comes to great marketing quotes and thinking, I however think there are few better places to start (and let's face it, it's a hell of a lot more fun than mining the books everybody else is looking at.

There's a short piece below expanding on why I think "You can't be wise and in love at the same time" is a great marketing idea.



Also check out:



Love Jones (fast forward to 5:20)

And The HughTrain Manifesto...

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="400" caption="The Hughtrain Manifesto"][/caption]

A open letter to Stephen Conroy

Many international readers will not be familiar with the goings on of the Australian political landscape. Back in January I wrote about some unfortunate measures Australia's recently-elected Government was planning to introduce, suffice to say our elected officials are engaged in a well-meaning but ill-informed program of censoring the access Australians have to the Internet. While looking in to the issue I've come to learn I reside in what is by law the most heavily censored Westernised nation, something I find rather ironic considering Sex & The City ran free-to-air here while it was confined to cable State-side.

Regardless, I have written an open letter to Stephen Conroy, the honourable member behind the intiative. Let it be known his intentions are good, but in practice his methodology is flawed, and imposing unnecessary (not to mention ineffective) rules upon the lives of ordinary Australians will achieve few, if any, of the aims of the program.

To read my letter to Mr. Conroy, please head on over to Marketing Magazine. If you feel as strongly as I do, please also visit Keep Your Filter Off Our Internet to learn how you can get involved.

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Stories ripe for the telling

About 6 months ago a wave of posts flooded the blogosphere with the phrase "context is king". I was convinced I'd started it, only I couldn't find the post (turns out I'd written "candour is king", which is different, but still fairly royal, particularly in social media). Regardless, I was thinking about this last night, particularly in light of the story-telling frame of mind I'm in at the moment.

Jeremy, one of the other Account Directors at IE needed to traipse out into Central Victoria in order to get earrings for his wife from a fantastic jeweler, Lisa Kennedy who lives in a small town called Maldon. It struck 5pm, and with the kind of look I his eye that only those who know Jeremy will recognise, he said "Do you want to go on a road trip tonight?"

Off we set along a highway I hadn't travelled down in the three years I've been living in Melbourne passing town after town that were clearly now the by-products of progress; closed shops could be spotted from the highway, better days clearly visible from a distance of 10 or 15 years.

Anyway, I digress. We got the earrings from Lisa (who is fantastic) and then headed up to a lookout the locals know as the Rock of Ages (I'm promised it has nothing to do with the Def Leppard song, I'm sceptical none the less).

[caption id="attachment_432" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="The view from the Rock of Ages in Maldon, Victoria"][/caption]

(It was incredible to be standing there just a couple hours after leaving work, to think most nights are spent a home with a glass of wine and old episodes of The West Wing, which in itself isn't all that bad, but you get the point.)

Anyway, we stopped off in a pizzeria in Castlemain for dinner on the way back. It was called Capone's Pizza and had such delicacies on the menu as the Bonnie and Clybe (we had this, I may never feel right about pizza again) and Mugsy's Meatballs (we didn't have this, I am OK with that). While Jeremy and I remarked on various things about the place that stood out as being vastly different from our inner-city Melbourne haunts, the thing that struck me most was the front counter which was covered with certificates of hospitality training the staff had undertaken.

[caption id="attachment_433" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Capone's was the kinda joint tryin'a do goodin a no good woild..."][/caption]

5 or 6 of the certificates were from the one family, two or three were from another. Jeremy and I talked about how you would never see that in Melbourne, these kinds of certificates displayed proudly. In addition, to have so much of one family's story tied up in the place, there was something really nice about that. It got me thinking about the conversations I'm having about story-telling right now, and telling a story your audience wants to hear versus the one you feel like telling. That is rarely what we feel like doing, but there's a story here about the Cutlers of Maldon I'd like to know.

Maybe remarkable isn't as far from the every day as we think it is, maybe it's just not the story we want to tell all the time.

Marketing Quote of the Day

Image via Wikipedia

Courtesy of Bob Dylan.

You can't be wise and in love at the same time.

That is all.

Australian GQ are listening...

A quick visit to Australian GQ's website reveals some changes afoot. It's not a complete about face on the things I called them out for, but it's a start.

I wonder if they've made the magazine worth reading as well? A trip to Border's might be in order to find out...

Fundamentals 2.0 - Open beats closed. Every time.

Image via Wikipedia

This is the sixth post in my series on The A-Z of 2.0.

As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

I can't get it out of my head, I hope you can't get it out of yours. If you're managing then you're not trying hard enough, you're not grasping it deeply enough, you are, as I've recently stolen from the great Ralph Waldo Emerson, relying on methods as opposed to principles, where one leaves but a handful of tools at your disposal, the other gives you the knowledge to decide whether you want to use tools at all.

Advertising is dead, long live advertising. Where are we as opposed to where we were. Five, ten, fifteen years ago? What has changed so drastically at the level of sheer corporate, psychological and emotional DNA that those who get it are in many ways mutants, and those who don't spend their time wielding traditional authority while looking nervously over their shoulders for what might be coming, deep in the night, right when they least expect it.

The fundamentals of what we're doing are shifting. The A-Z of 2.0 isn't about marketing or business, it is about everything. Everything is changing, and we all have two options: we can run with it or we can stand still and be taken along with the tide; we ride the waves or get caught on the reef below.

I can appreciate why this causes consternation among most people, we're not naturally geared for change, we're ostensibly creatures of habit, we make our lives familiar and manageable through a routine devised for us thanks to titans of media deciding when we'll be inside thanks to the scheduling of Lost or Grey's Anatomy. I don't watch TV anymore, and in the generation coming up behind me that is going to be more of the norm than anyone who does not grasp open beats closed realises.

Because a TV schedule is a method of control. And because open beats closed is a principle that circumvents it. We're changing the fundamentals of the methods used to entertain us for the last forty or fifty years, but what the big media companies are failing to understand is that does not mean we are forsaking the principles; we still need to escape, to live vicariously through characters on stage and screen, in books and music and art the way we have for thousands of years; to define ourselves through a greater collective consciousness. A song downloaded illegally is a challenge to an outdated method of distribution and value exchange; it is not a challenge to the principle that music is valuable and worth something, it is simply being couched in different terms, and we're working with different currencies.

The crux is all business as we know it is founded on method and not principle. Almost every business anyway, I can think of one we all know, one with a principle of "Don't be evil". Where's the method in Google that consistently trumps principle? With the understanding that no brand, business or person is ever perfect, show me a company that does it better.

We are more than a hundred and fifty years on from Ralph Waldo Emerson's great insight, yet so many are still decades from grasping it that it has taken the invention of the internet and to some extents the rise and proliferation of social media for that to really take shape and force.

For businesses of all shapes and sizes to not only grasp the Fundamentals of 2.0, but move with them and avoid the reef below, they are going to need to adhere to higher standards, to move out of the quagmire of method and practice and habit, to step away from routine and the way we have always done it, and not only understand but be excited by the idea that we can do better. America 2.0, Borders 2.0, Celebrity 2.0, Dogma 2.0, Everyone 2.0 - these are all ideas based on principle, they frame the discussion and force us all to higher ground.

Principles beat method. Open beats closed. The way we have been is not the way we will be.

What is the point otherwise?

Using consumers to tell your story for you (or "Hey diddle-diddle to the people in the middle")

So last week I identified the three ways stories are getting told in advertising. Today I want to talk about the second one: A narrative with the brand at the centre of the story but with the story being generated by consumers, leaving the direction of it loosely defined, usually through a particular campaign moving in a very particular direction. Also known as: User Generated Content.

I said this last week in the office and came under fire for it, but I'm going to wheel it out again because I think it's true: user-generated content in its current context is a crock.

An absolute crock.

Marketers: you don't want a UGC campaign. Agencies: stop telling them they want them, they don't, not if they really understood the trade-offs. And in fact if you really understood them too, you wouldn't recommend them either.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote the following:

As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.

The methods are simple: give people a platform, incentivise their involvement, and then let them get on with it. The problem here is the principles of user-generated content stem from people behaving in their natural state, creating work because they want to and not manufacturing it for a purpose other than self-expression and social currency. Brands see the natural enthusiasm people exhibit in their daily lives and and hope to co-opt it into their own work, which is like U2 showing up at an indie rock gig, deciding they like a song and then wheeling it out at Wembley Arena the following night.

In the above scenario, U2 wins by bringing the indie band on stage with them, playing the song together. U2 gets kudos for being hip and championing the next generation, the new band gets exposed to a new audience, everyone wins. Everyone wins. That is a principle of user-generated content, of social media. Mutual gain and that being a good thing is a principle - method is acquiring content for a campaign; that is neither cutting-edge nor insightful and increasingly out of touch.

I could go on, but instead just read this great synopsis of a terribly poor effort on BMW's part, which sums it up perfectly. Brands need consumers more than consumers need brands. Without them their stories mean nothing, and without meaningful stories, there'll be nothing to tell anyone else about anything at all.

Ambiguity in narrative, in advertising

Yesterday I was at my friend Tim's place where we waxed lyrical over beers on how we can make a squillion dollars - look for an announcement on retirement shortly. While there he fired up GTA 4 on his Xbox 360 as I hadn't actually seen it in action (the gamer kids are asking for my dog tags back, it's really quite tragic). I was incredibly impressed, it seems all the learnings about the balance between a sandbox and a story had been compounded into an experience equal parts open ended and focused. The biggest issue in games like GTA 4 (aside from the mammoth amount of technology they have to wrangle of course) is giving the users who want it an open ended universe to explore while at the same time delivering a taught experience for people who just want to play a game.

Tim actually took exception, saying it hinted at a completely open universe but didn't actually deliver as he couldn't run into any shop he wanted, rob them and then go next door to rinse and repeat. The pragmatist in me thinks that is unrealistic, but only because I'm coming from the perspective of a person who once had to generate content for people like Tim to run into every nook and cranny they could find; that is not a fun job to have.

I digress though. Ambiguity. Who did their homework and checked out the HBO Voyeur site? If you haven't please go look at it now.

OK, what did you think? What did you see? A series of apartments spread across New York City, all with their own narratives going on. To my mind, what the agencies involved have done is take the essence of what they were promoting and asked themselves what the best way to tell the story would be. The other day I said the best examples of narrative in games are the ones where people think first about the story they want to tell and then settle on the style of game that suits it best; marketing can learn a lot from that approach, one of being platform-neutral and making sure the main thing is the main thing. No egos, no hidden agendas, just the desire to deliver the work in a way that suits the project best.

Sure, saying no egos in advertising is like asking the Pussycat Dolls to share vocals equally, like it was a vehicle for five careers and not one. The point remains though: we overcook so much on the way to delivering creative, we lose sight of what the brief was in the first place: to get the brand, product or service talked about.

Not the advertising around it.

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Image courtesy of xeophin, with thanks to compfight.

Everyone 2.0 - Remember you're unique; just like everybody else

This is the fifth post in my series on The A-Z of 2.0.

Needs. Need and wants. Things I desire that nobody else does, at least not the way I do, in the form I do, with the pre-conditions and checklists I have for them. Everybody has them, but we don't articulate them quite into the detail they need to be in order to make them actionable. I could say I want to make music for a living; what I mean is I want to earn enough to be very comfortable from recording and performing my own songs; anybody with half an ear for music can go earn a couple grand a week playing covers, but that wouldn't satisfy my criteria, regardless of whether I take the time to define it or not.

Andy Warhol's most famous quote is "In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." At the time there'd only been a decade or two where it was actually possible to be famous just for being famous, prior to that you actualy had to be extraordinarily good at something for the word to spread enough and genuine fame to be acquired.

Fame in itself is a funny thing, one I feel, for most people, is entirely undesireable. To be endlessly recognised simply for being anywhere you went does not strike me as the kind of thing a lot of us would wake up in the morning with a burning desire to achieve, even though there are folk out there who do. With the assumption most people desire the money or lifestyle that comes with the kind of fame people find appealing, then I think, regardless of the dreams and desires you have for your life, people seek the conveniences being in that sort of position can bring with it; and in The A-Z of 2.0 a lot of those things are possible.

If you own a car, pause for a moment the next time you're in the driver's seat. Look at the dash, the airconditioning, the (if you have them) power windows. Seat adjustments, cruise control, airbags, CD, MP3, DVD players. All of those were once the province of the wealthiest of wealthy individuals. Movie stars and musicians and big business men and women had access to these features. They would be released in the top of the line Mercedes and BMWs, and slowly, via the wonder that is trickle-down economics, make their way into the lives of ordinary people.

This is true of most things around us. I have a Macbook Pro sitting on my lap as I write this, holding computational power that, in my father's lifetime has gone from being the sole domain of Government to an item available at the cost of a month's salary for the middle-class. In our personal lives we seek the same thing in the automation of services; bills going out when they're due, a cleaner every fortnight, a laundry where they will wash and iron 5 shirts for $12.50, the only decision I have to make being "Is two hours of my time on the weekend it would take to do that worth $12.50?". I don't know about you, but the ability to spend two hours on a weekend to do something other than washing is worth at least $12.50.

The ubiquity of products and services trading in an ever increasing commodity (money) to allow you more of an ever decreasing commodity (time) is an idea born from the same place as the DVD player in the backseat of an Audi. I can't afford a full-time personal assistant, but I can set up an account at Remember The Milk which will automatically send me reminders and help me get through a to-do list. Get Friday takes it a step further, with staff on hand to assist with mundane tasks - I currently have them helping me roll all my superannuation into one account, we'll see how that goes. For more on this though, read Tom Friendman's The World Is Flat - you'll be amazed at what you find.

There exists right now, in Everyone 2.0, an opportunity to provide products and services that were previously the domain of the rich and famous. It is commerce for the empowerment of others, as opposed to commerce for the empowerment of commerce itself. What we're seeing right now in the global economy is the collapse of a system infected, at its core, with DNA doomed to rot from the inside out because it had blinkers on and couldn't see how the world around was changing. Even if it had, there's no evidence to suggest it would have cared, not when a bail-out for companies in need of it is, for all intents and purposes, socialism for the wealthy and capitalism for the poor. Everyone 2.0 is taking the personalisation the web affords us and moving it offline into the every day lives of every day people, where you don't need a screen and a keyboard to feel the impact.

Capitalism, entrepreneurism, commerce as we know it hasn't for a single moment meant that open beat closed, but in Everyone 2.0, it is the only way you win. Put the empowerment of others and genuine happiness at the core of your business model and watch as the opportunities for the life you wanted to live come to fruition.

Just like everyone else.

**Update** - October 25th, 2008

For those interested in thinking a bit more about Everyone 2.0, watch this fantastic talk by Paola Antonelli, Curator of Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

[youtube=http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=iNEGiPXhiAY]

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Image courtesy of kygp, with thanks to compfight.