Build Better Experiences

Found this video floating around on the Internet, more specifically at the Propagation Planning Blog.  It’s one of the few PG rated applications I’ve seen for the mysterious and addictive Chatroulette craze. It makes me wonder about building brand relationships through better experiences, as oppose to content.  I’m just saying.

Yahoo! Gets It

 

A while back, I wrote post about what I call the human engine and its importance to business and the changing dynamic of consumer power.   However, the see this idea come to fruition in the new Yahoo! campaign is a gratifying validation and it shows that someone there in marketing ”gets it.”   But more importantly, it shows that business as a whole is truly beginning to understand that consumer-centric advertising is the basis for generating brand loyalty, consumption and other awesome metrics that go along with relevant and resonant advertising.  I’m beginning to feel that the time has come for other companies to jump on the wagon and have a clear acceptance that in reality, consumers own and define a brand.  That intangible equity is only valuable if the consumer appreciates and connects with a brand’s identity.  It’s insane to not grasp this concept and beneficial to act accordingly.  But, I’m beginning to observe that time is now.  Starting with Yahoo!, and kudos to them for being all about “You” or I guess “Us.”

The brands that will be successful in the future, will understand and accept that the new paradigm is to relinquish control for one’s brand, encourage deep engagement with and ambassadorship for your brand and communications.  So what does this look like?  In a few short lines:

• Awknowledge the consumer’s influence and invite them to a conversation with your brand, truly listen and respond – advertising is a two-way street IE social strategy.
• Develop web friendly content, suitable for propagation IE the remix video.
• Give them something to do or engage with that allows deeper interaction with your brand, which does not necessarily force feed the product IE the transmedia storytelling utilized in the Dos Equis “Most Interesting Man” campaign.  It’s mostly about the “Man” and his “Truths” but, oh yea, there’s beer too.  Also, Cheetos’ “Orange Underground” – these are both relatively oldies, but goodies!

I realize I’m saying a few words, but in essence this translates into a lot from a executional perspective.  But, I feel it’s truth worth telling and look forward to developing (and witnessing) more campaigns that utilize some of these basic truths.  I’ve also included below a talk by Yahoo!’s CMO, Elisa Steele, which shows some additional creative and gives some brief insight into the thinking behind the new campaign during Advertising Week in New York City.

 

Identifying Consumer Gaps

 

I had the opportunity to see Jan Chipchase (@janchip) speak at the @PSFK Good Ideas Salon this past thursday evening.  Hosted by JWT at their New York office in Midtown.  Jan is a principal researcher for Nokia, and basically his job is to travel the world and study behavioral patterns of global populations for identification of consumer gaps.

The presentation in which Jan spoke to is that included above.  You won’t find much text in the slides, however, the images tell quite a profound story.  My takeaway from the talk, as a brand strategist, was a more keen appreciation for ethnographic research methodology and data collection.  Jan takes an incredibly deep dive into cultural trends by entrenching himself into the lifestyles and behaviors of people, who normally would be ignored by mainstream business.  Nokia has taken an interest in predicting how their products will fit into growing consumer segments.  In that respect, the fastest growth will be among populations in urbanized areas, especially among the impoverished.

It makes sense that Nokia has the vision to find value in this particular consumer segment.  Most industries and companies believe in the top-down model for product penetration.  Thus, they typically market to consumers of the mid and upper ranges in the socio-economic ladder.  However, it becomes a different story when mobile access is more prevalent than electricity access, and even water access in some areas of the world.

In developed nations the web is seen as the most important of the digital channels for consumer communication.  However, mobile represents a significantly more important and viable platform in nations or urbanized sectors where populations don’t have the means to access the Internet or electricity to even power a computer.  Just as the web is changing the way we socialize, mobile is changing the manner in which billions of people globally connect and communicate.  There’s even a theory, growing in acceptance, that mobile can replace the old method of identifying households – by moving from home address based to mobile address based.

Anyway, have a look and enjoy.

Earn Your Social Media Time

A colleague sent this link to me.  The web page is pictured above.  It’s a simple and transparent thought, but just maybe there’s something more to it.  I believe what this could represent is our online selves becoming a bit too dominant.  Maybe, every now and then we need simple reminders to feed our offline selves something tangible, something natural.  Maybe they’ve figured out something here, and maybe it’s time to circulate more blood and less data?  Or maybe I’m reading too much into this.

You decide.  But first, I think you owe me 5 pushups.

Blog Cloud – A Short Case for People Time

 

This is a word cloud.  It’s a creative representation of the most commonly utilized words from a set of text.  That text just so happens to be from a few of the most recent post on my blog, which you are reading now.

I stumbled onto this website, Wordle, that creates “beautiful word clouds” utilizing an algorithm developed by IBM Senior Programmer, Jonathan Feinburg.  It’s fun, interesting and accurate – give it a try.  After creating my word cloud and being quite happy with the resulting image, I became curious as to not only who, but why someone decided to create this site when there are obviously no financial incentives involved.  So upon further reading I found this excerpt under the credits tab for Wordle.com.  Written by the developer, Jonathan, one short paragraph reads:

“I acknowledge my employer, IBM Research, for extending me the extraordinary privilege of using code, which I wrote on their time, for this personal project. While I did develop this web site on my own time, I developed the core algorithms for laying out and displaying words on company time.”

And so this brought me to another relevant thought.  Companies should must afford employees more people time and less company time.  Let’s define people time as the that part of one’s work day that is attributed to independent projects in which the inspirational motivation is from within – the catalyst here is an intrinsic drive to utilize ones talents to create something that is fresh or innovative.  Now lets define company time as work completed to drive a singular organization towards a unified goal for the purpose of enterprise prosperity, otherwise known as revenue, profit and stock price – the catalyst driving this function is financial incentives.

People time is important because it stimulates a greater sense of self worth.  Self worth begets confidence.  Confidence begets action.  Action begets productivity.

Company time is less important because it does not stimulate self worth, however, it breeds company worth thus smothering self worth.  Following the same course of logic as above, you can understand how this is counter productive.  In fact I would declare that a nearly equivalent composition of people time and company time is the better model for motivation, innovation and productivity.

A very interesting case for this is put forth in this TED Talk by Dan Pink.  He has developed a profound argument for the dynamics of motivation and application within enterprise.  For a great example much like the Wordle.com site, skip to 13:50 of the video, since many of your are on company time now and don’t have 20 minutes to view in entirety.  Those who are afforded people time, I encourage you to watch the full talk.

 

 

So it’s safe to say that:

1. motivation is organic and will flourish if provided the proper catalyst
2. people time is equally important to driving productivity as is company time
3. innovation is people-centric and business should act accordingly

I believe companies such as IBM understand this concept and live this philosophy.  If you are familiar with IBM ad campaigns, you will also notice it’s a part of their brand DNA.

Your thoughts?

AR at Your Fingertips

 

The new iPhone 3GS has unleashed some really awesome user capabilities.  But this latest piece of software, Bionic Eye, is one of the best augmented reality applications I have seen and it’s currently available for $1 at the App Store.  Not that this technology is overly sophisticated, however, the accessibility to an AR tool by average users is a breakthrough trend.

As the app is currently designed to operate, it locates various points of interest (subways, food locations and such) overlayed onto video in real time.  Network or Wi-Fi connectivity is not currently needed to run, but there are endless possibilities to integrate data and geotility into an app similar in nature (think Tom Cruise in Minority Report).  There is room for some more innovative use by brands and retailers, especially.  As you may remember from this previous TED talk.

Digital’s Impact on Volunteerism

I came across this post on the CultureWaves blog.  To summarize the context, “launching this month are the two drinks, LemonAid and ChariTea.  They form a unique venture, where most of the profits from the activity will be used for social purposes, managed by the company LemonAid Beverages GmbH.  In addition to the ingredients being all fair trade -supporting farmers in South America- LemonAid Beverages Gmbh donates a reasonable part of their turnovers to worthy causes.”  The spawning of this genre of products satisfy a two fold need for consumers, which are a desire for 1) a product to serve a rationl purpose, in this case thirst and 2) an intangible positive emotion brought about by contributing to a greater good.  Although I greatly applaud the effort, I think there’s a void to be filled that can be satisfied by and hosted on a digital platform.

This CultureWaves post inspired me to bring back an idea a couple of us at McCann NY have put in to motion.  Using some observations from Millenial culture and changing behaviors catalized by the social web, we came up with the term Instant Goodification.  What does this mean you ask?  In short, it is the new form of volunteerism that is a mash-up of instant gratification and doing good.  So what’s the observation?  We have found that entrepenuerial, uber-empowered Millenials of today are reshaping the landscape of socio-economic responsibility.  There are emerging signs of a segment that are no longer satisfied with mere symbols of participation (IE livestrong bracelets, red/pink ribbons, product [red] swag), this generation expects to see real-time impact and real connection with the people they intend to serve and/or impact.  So to fill such a need, in steps innovative organizations like Charity: Water.

The significance of Charity: Water is that it is a prime example of how modern ambitions and the information age have shaped the new era of volunteerism.  This particular NPO has utilized technology to satisfy those with the need for Instant Goodfication.  People who donate to the Charity: Water are helping global communities to supply themselves with the most essential resource, H2O.  It’s not about donating water, however, they seek to assist in the construction of ground water wells – which is much more practical and sustainable than sending pre-packaged water.  Once wells have began construction, donators are provided real-time access to their contributions at work.  Contributors are given contextual background for the people whom they are helping, but most importantly also provided GPS coordinates so that the(ir) wells can be viewed via Google Earth or any other global geographic charting system.  To me, this is mash-up of all sorts of dope *ish, powered by the digital revolution, of course!

Charity: Water understands the need for volunteers to have a global impact as well as real-time connections and results, so welcome to the age of Instant Goodification.  A shout out goes to Kevin Kim of the TheBlindProject, for ideating this new urban dictionary golden nugget.

So what’s the implication for brands with a cause like LemonAid and ChariTea?  Essentially, utilize web tools (as in the Charity: Water case) to create deeper engagements and stronger advocates for your product or brand by establishing connections with the audience and the impact population.  Your audience will thank you for it.

The Human Engine: Fueled by We.

I really love this video, Sour’s Hibi no Neiro, for one simple reason:  It’s a beautiful and creative testament to the power of the human engine.

 

 

With the rise of consumer power through collective strength and collaboration, the web undoubtedly being the catalyst, we’ve seen some pretty interesting and innovative ways brands have harnessed this human engine.  For example, Apple has revolutionized software development by opening up their App Store to anyone that a) has a vision b) can identify a consumer gap and c) understands how to write code.  In its wake the App Store has helped to fuel the iPhone, which is easily of the greatest successes in the smart phone category, and cell phones in general.  We’ve also learned that the open source encyclopedia model, Wikipedia, has proven to be exponentially more rich in content and speed of information exchange than traditional publications.  But what is most impressive is the fact that Wikipedia is as accurate as printed volumes as well, this study shows.

It seems as if the brand paradigm is evolving.  I think it’s safe to say that our (people’s) collective intelligence and innovation represent a powerful and compelling resource and provides good reason for more and more brands to allow consumers to involve themselves in product development and brand communications.  This is actually a change in personal opinion from a previous post of mine, I too have been converted.  In conjunction with the undeniable power of the human engine, allowing consumers a sense of ownership will also provide deeper engagement with and ambassadorship for a brand – it’s the pride of contributing to something greater than yourself that creates this sense of deeper loyalty and connection with ‘stuff’ (brands, products, ideas etc).  The ‘Yes We Can’ campaign is a great case study for this model as well, as this Huffington Post column details.  So, what are some things brands need to understand, before taking the crowd sourcing plunge such as Apple, Wikipedia and other cutting edge companies have done:

1) It’s ok to not be in complete control

2) A brand is not what you say it is, it’s what they say it is

Understanding these two profound truths about brands and the people who support them is the first step to adopting the new human engine model.

Changing the Way We Socialize

Social media is officially changing the game we play.  The landmarks we have experienced in the past 5 years have been monumental.  This short video synthesizes what we all know, but leaves you with some very provocative truth nuggets.  Just one note – I’m glad they noticed the abandonment of the Iranian election crises due to one little pop star passing away.  Anyone with any interest in all things social should give it a view.

 

The Truth in Data

Click here to explore the data tool.

I stumbled onto another amazing data visualization tool, this time brought to you by Hans Rosling of Gapminder.  The above picture is a static image as an example, however, graphs the relationship of per capita income and life expectancy for various Nations (those that have accessible data), including the scales and trends for each.  The Gapminder philosophy is centered on the utilization of data to reveal human truths.  I’ve also included a link to a guest lecture from Hans’ TED talk which goes into much greater detail on the utilization and implications.

After engaging with this tool for some hours what really became apparent in the data visuals  is that we are truly becoming a connected global society – we’re all connected, in more ways than we realize.  The beauty of numbers is that they don’t lie, they can’t lie.  Numbers have been used to show that the days of siloed agendas are dead,  developing nations are growing exponentially in social, political and economic influence.  I think this is also a profound testament to the “super power” illusion our Nation has so long enjoyed.  It’s a good thing that the global playing field is leveling as the result is a need for stronger international relationships.

At the human level, we are also more connected as “global citizens.”  The Internet has been a tremendous catalyst for starting conversations across oceans, however, there also exist an almost forced interaction among Nation’s citizen simply due the closing “gaps” as shown by Hans’ data tool.  I’ve also referenced this “global shrinkage” in another post on advertising.