a hundred avatars

Fun! (or, media that is really social)

I loved this video from Volkswagen, which goes to show the power of a brand going beyond its purview to bring a benefit greater than itself to people's lives. (as well as the power of what Thaler and Sunstein's Nudge calls libertarian paternalism). More brands should really think about how to help people, beyond just RTBs.

 

It also raises an interesting question with viral videos as to what credit (or blame) an agency in Sweden should get for changing brand perception of a global brand in the US. For me, this video does more to improve my opinion of VW than anything Crispin has done for them here in the US.

Tribes and Members, by a Member of the Tribe

Two TED talks I recently came across and an interesting article from Ad Age.

The first, of Dave Logan on Tribal Leadership 

 

 And the second, the inimitable Seth Godin 

 

And the article:  No More Joe Consumer

All are interesting (and flawed, in their own way, but who cares, they're interesting), with the main point being the importance of tribes (and individuals with unique backgrounds) in the spreading of ideas over the 20th Century model driven by mass production, mechanization and advertising

Good stuff. Guess I picked a good time to go back to the fringes, since that's where it all is happening.

Although the whole 'Tribes' motif could be negative (you aren't you, you're your group) the most interesting interpretations are humanistic and empowering. 

1. Tribes are self selected, not just inherited. Great point that Godin makes: you don't need everyone, you just need 1000 people who will spread your message.
2. Tribes aren't really as much about their leaders as they are about the group. If the point he makes is true (leaders have charisma because they lead, they don't lead because they have charisma), tribes are a matter of will?
3.  Godin: You don’t need everyone, you just need 1000 people who will spread your message 
4. Good questions Godin ends his talk to move us forward that every 'tribal leader' should ask: Who are you upsetting? Who are you connecting? Who are you leading? 

What's great about this? Well in Adland all of it begins to upends the  notion of the USP and the WHO. Less single minded ness, less always trying to answer the question "do we have their permission to do X' from people who are worried that the answer is no.  All of this means that you don’t need people’s permission to lead them, just a good idea that you can convince people to coalesce around.

Hybrid thinking @ P&G and beyond

Check out the piece that Dev Patnaik of Jump Associates wrote for the Fast Company blog recently.

In it he argues that the growth due to innovation that happened at P&G over the last 6+ years was the result of integrated thinking that launched their design revolution.

As a planner who has always succeeded by being a bit of a round peg in the square hole of advertising/media/technology I have to agree of the importance of this type of thinking, especially at P&G. Of course many planners (and designers and artists and creatives and my wife) who benefit from such holistic/hybrid/integrated/lateral thinking tend to come from slightly strange or mixed backgrounds which explain the predominance of funny names, bizarre ethnic mixes and odd personal histories in all of those professional creative communities.

Diversity breeds inventive minds. Fortune favors the hybrid mind.

But one question is why that thinking hasn’t spread throughout the company.  I have the great pleasure of working with P&G for the last few years in both advertising, ethnic marketing and PR.  And while I never cease to be impressed by the quality of the minds with whom I’ve had the chance to work in marketing and research, I can only wonder how those great minds would benefit from being unleashed by a similar desire for integrated thinking further downstream in the product development process than described in Dev's piece.

In other words, as Dev says, hybrid thinking or "the conscious blending of different fields of thought (has helped )to discover and develop opportunities that were previously unseen by the status quo” 

You could say that this hasn’t happened in marketing or communications at P&G in the same way as it has in product development.

I know we’ve started to try at my agency, with some success (to cite one example among others I can't quite share yet). If I have one promise to make or one goal to set for myself for the coming year, it’ll be to unleash what this kind of thinking can bring across the board to make these products or brands to live in the world.

To do any less would be to do less than this great company deserves (even if they haven’t always realized it themselves) and less than we ourselves deserve.

Let's see how this works out. Have you tried in your sphere of influence?

Just one personality, please.

Loved this description of the new digital life we lead from an introduction to an article about The-Dream written by Sasha Frere-Jones in the New Yorker.

One way to understand social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace is to consider that  younger digital natives are not necessarily being exhibitionists when they post photographs of themselves and share personal details there. Instead, these users are living a life in which consciousness is spread out evenly over two platforms: real life and the Web. Rather than feeling schizophrenic or somehow pathological, digital natives understand that these two realms divide the self much as speech and the written word divide language, a division that humans have lived with for a long time without going bonkers

Based on some new research I've seen lately, I think there is an increasing unification of behavior and thinking between the mobile and 'wired' world as well.

The Future is Bright, But Badly Distributed

Hard times lead to great ideas. Business Week sat down some futurists to predict what the next 10 years will bring. Their guesses were interesting but nothing that would shock you if you're a regular reader of, say, PSFK.

Still, a fun exercise, which led to some things I want. Only one thing you can be sure of:  the real future will be much better and much worse than you see here. We can do better.

Lots we can do to make some of this happen today. Doing your part?

Branding the Economic Recovery

Steven Heller's covering  the Obama administration's effort to put a stronger visual identity behind the economic recovery in his blog.

Interesting since the last solid example of this kind of work was arguably the strong graphic and visual elements that formed around the WPA and other elements of FDR's New Deal. 

So as the New New Deal moves forward, I think it's smart that the attempt is being made to give people a visual element to coalesce around.  The jury is out if this will really be effective or frankly if these logos are strong enough to garner greater support or to give people a solid flag to stand behind.

Regardless, it's interesting to see it happen. Bigger question is if 'design thinking' and other experts on the application of creative thinking to solving business and social problems are going to consistently going to be invited to the party.  The lateral thinking Obama has shown in staffing a number of his cabinet posts suggests that this may be the case, but only time will tell.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized

I thought this was particularly well done visualization of how the credit crisis went down. It's more entertaining than that sounds. Surprisingly after watching it it turns out I had a good idea of what was going on.

Still, this makes it crystal clear and goes to show the importance of good visualization and simple storytelling in communications and public affairs.

Hopefully we'll all start looking at things, really looking at things, deeply and with creativity ahead of time so that we stop painting ourselves into these corners. Or maybe it's just human nature.



The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Problem perspective

Phone blogging to fill time i'll update this properly with links and pics later

Yesterday I had the chance to quickly go through MoMA's retrospective on German artist Martin Kippenberger. I may have seen some of his work before but didn't know him at all. I liked some of the work more than others but was profoundly impressed by the show. I'll be going back and so should you.

Why?

Relentlessness: the curator's overview discussed Kippenberger's constant pursuit of defining and redefining what is art. Despite dying fairly young after only a 20 year career MK produced thousands of pieces across media.

From invitation cards to posters to installations to collaborative pieces with other painters, MK was an artist who would have drunk deeply the juice of our hybrid times.

It's amazing how that drive and sheer prolificness (a word?) can make such a difference.

Profoundly productive problem maker. The curator's description, again. Beyond the quantity I really enjoyed his take on the role of the artist as provocateur. I know thats become a cliché, but...

As we shift into an economy driven by creative destruction and rebuilding we all owe it to our society and ourselves to take on this role.

As we live through what urban sociologist Richard Florida calls the Great Reset, every act becomes a creative act.

That's all I can do on the iPhone. More later.

Real Change

Perhaps as inspiring as President-elect Obama's election and message of change has been his campaign's ability to execute along the way.  As much as change, his candidacy and prospective presidency (now no longer prospective) have been about the possibility of competence we believe in and need.

The campaign was as professionally and well run in so many ways, as many others have documented along the way. So will it continue?

If this site launched hours after the election was final is any indication, you ain't seen nothing yet. Let's hope so.

I could quibble and say that the functionality isn't quite there. That it's no My Starbucks Idea or Member's Project but it's a great start. 

Visualizing Everything (your world just changed)

This article from a High Productivity Computing newsletter (via PSFK) covers something I've been very excited about for quite a while. I've only read the article twice and glanced at Manovich's site, but still. Wow.

In so many ways the usability of information technology and the sheer quantity of data that we produce (like this very blog post or all the places I went with my mobile phone today) create a trail can help define how we do everything we do. What's great is that since we can do anything now and look at anything all we need to figure out is what the right question is.

Oh, that's all?

This is also clearly related to the approaching 'singularity' where businesses and agencies that were in very different businesses from one another oh, about three minutes ago are now very much treading on their toes. The race is already won by the swiftest designers. Remember elasticity?

The ability to read and render that data easily has the potential to liberate those of us in the business of creating culture from decades of mediocre (let alone bad) research and free us into a space where ideas drive understanding and data is not a sample, but a given.

I particularly like Lev Manovich's coinages in the article, 'Big Humanities' and 'Cultural analytics.'

Both terms, I think, nicely capture what's so different about this approach and how it is powered by ubiquitous and powerful computing.

As has always been the case, technological change puts more pressure on everyone to do what we do better, more beautifully and more creatively. Especially the culture creators and especially the quant jocks.

So, does our world change if you can see more of it?