a hundred avatars

Planning killed the connections star

Maybe or maybe not. No time to respond really (and i've been meaning to read this for weeks anyway) but I quite liked this presentation from Gareth and Jason. Apparently connections planning needs some fixing. Hear hear. What doesn't? ;-)

Connections Planningness

View more documents from Jason Oke.

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?

Measuring the Universe

I thought this was a really fun way to encourage interaction between museum, artist and viewer. The artist created the concept, initiated the performance and then let it go.

I'm looking forward to seeing it at MoMA. An interesting take on crowdsourcing and perhaps a guide to non-art related entitites interested in opening themselves to others.

SPEWing good ideas

Tom O'Brien recently tweeted a link to Neal Stephenson's Spew, a piece in WIRED from what is essentially the dawn of time, 1994. What's crazy about it, given when it was published, is how prescient NS was on where we would be 15 years later.

Go ahead. Read the piece. It's really good, in the way that a cyberpunk piece called 'Spew' from 1994 is good. I know sometimes the links don't come through when these blogposts pop up on Facebook, but Google it if you don't see the link and read it.  I'll wait...

OK, it's not the Baroque Cycle or even Snow Crash, but it's sort of what we do for a living (or should be), right?

Anyway, a few things occurred to me while reading the piece:

1. Why don't people move more quickly? TV networks, publishers or advertisers don't respond to niche opportunities anywhere near as quickly as they do in the piece. I don't understand why, unless ennui, inertia or fear are fair explanations. There's no good excuse why, and we can accelerate how we move against opportunity. We just need a better infrastructure.
2. Try harder to find it: finding insights that are actionable.  Frankly in this day and age it's not hard to find information that matters, but honestly a lot of what we see in the business world is more often than not the result of outdated models that measure something that we all agree matters as opposed to the things that actually are happening. Not sure why this is the case.
3. WTF? Do you think anyone who read this piece 15 years ago really understood what NS was talking about? Did he? Did pieces like this create our reality (which is pretty spot on, at least from the perspective of what is possible) or was NS just so hyperaware that he intuited the next 15?
4. DIY: NS captures where culture really comes from perfectly.  As much as in his future there seems to be some sort of corporate-entertainment-technology complex that produces 'everything' they need to be culture vultures to find out what is really happening.  Technology that centralizes culture doesn't actually centralize culture creation but rather paradoxically just seems to help figure out what's really going on. Then the 'centralizer' can figure out how to take advantage (or not) of what's going on.
5. Intuition and in person: As much as the character in Spew has access to all the information out there, he's not purely quant driven in his approach.  He knows  "something is there" without being able to put his finger on it and really can only find out by going to where the target is and seeing it in person. Data feed doesn't replace human touch.

I'm on a panel about 'Multicultural Millenials' and...

...and I figured I would try to get your help.

The nice folks at the NY Latino International Film Festival have been kind enough to invite me to speak on a panel next week. The topic is 'Multicultural Millenials' or as they've put it in the description:

Bilingual, digitally fluent, “Multicultural Millennials”, particularly bilingual Latinos, have emerged as the nation’s most powerful population segment, strongly influencing mainstream culture, lifestyle and media consumption. Here we discuss how this population shift has created great opportunity for content producers, distributors and advertisers, and how these groups can effectively dialogue to create and promote compelling programming for the new, multiethnic face of America.

It's at 3 PM on July 30 at HBO (1100 Ave of the Americas b/w 42/43rd Sts – 15th floor) but I'm not writing this post to shamelessly plug.

I'm posting to elicit some ideas.  Sure, I'm going to follow Guy's advice. And yes, I have some opinions on the subject already: the fluidity of identity, multicultural or not; lack of importance of authority; they don't twitter or pay for music; Univision isn't producing content for them, which is why they're going to UGC; blah blah blah...

OK, I have some more homework to do to prepare. But as part of that homework, as the panel is a week away, I thought I would see if anyone else has found resources or info online that are particularly enlightening about these so-called multicultural millenials.

I'm very open to stealing your ideas...I'll give credit, of course...

Twitter is for old people and apparently so is boring research

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6703399.ece

I thought this article was interesting, as much for the (half baked) insights this kid has as for the idea that one kid, texting a bunch of friends can make a piece of research that is more valuable that all the other stuff a huge investment bank is generating.

Kind of makes you wonder if we or our clients are using our intuition to dig for consumer insights or letting 'corporate constipation' stand in the way of digging for good ideas.

Anyway, it was interesting and sparked some very good ideas. (thanks Eliza for sending it to me.)

More advice, these via the armed forces

From a random conversation with a friend who's an ex-Marine (can you be an 'ex' Marine?), via a friend of his (I think) who is a full bird colonel in the Air Force.

Two pieces of advice:

When the balloon goes up it goes up fast

• in other words,  when change finally happens or when the thing you think was about to go down finally goes down it goes down fast. So always be prepared for the worst and be ready to move fast.

When the shit hits the fan, wind your watch.

• Pause before moving.  This is a lesson I've been remembering getting into playing tennis this summer. the first thing to do is wait, not swing. It reminds me of something Bruce Lee would say (yes, I just quoted Bruce Lee) about what made him a great fighter. He had the instinct and the speed to beat almost anyone, but what made him great was the learned ability to hang back and watch where others would attack.

Lunch with a legend (Pedro Font)

My boss and I had the great pleasure of meeting and having lunch with Pedro Font, a true legend in  (multicultural) marketing and advertising yesterday.

For those of you who don’t know who he is, he’s the man who put the Fo into the FoVa that still appears on my paycheck. (17 years later, WING is technically a dba).

He founded the predecessor to Wing in 1979, 30 years ago this year. Say what you will, he was a major force in making the Hispanic market and multicultural marketing the multi-billion industry that it has become. If you want to read a decent overview of the agency back when Grey acquired it, check out this link.

He, for lack of another word, es un personaje. Since leaving the agency he has run a business responsible for selling Televisa’s content and other companies’ films distribution rights all over the world. In other words, Don Pedro is doing just fine, thanks. For all the stories I’ve heard through the years, and I'm sure the rest of you have too, I found him quite gracious, full of ideas and interested in what we’re up to at the agency.

Put a different way, Don Pedro is on our side.

As a true personaje, Don Pedro was not hesitant to regale us with stories and to give us advice. Some of it should be taken with a grain of salt, some of it is useful. All of it is worth reading.

I took notes, and figured I’d share what I gleaned to be Don Pedro’s rules of the road with you. Some of it he said, some of it was observed....

1. Keep it simple. Not everything needs to be a home run. Simple solutions can go a long way
2. Know your business, know your client and make choices focused on that conocimiento
3. ‘Hay que dar’: always have ideas and always share them. Be helpful. Some will stick. Don Pedro took the time to pitch us several potential business ideas. He certainly doesn’t have to, but he didn’t get where he is by ever stopping pitching. Having ideas and sharing them is a habit to be cultivated.
4. There’s an opportunity in the market for the perfect combination of media, creative and promotion. Why is it all separated? We should create whole experiences.
5. Pitch to the top. Font & Vaamonde was successful because Don Pedro pitched AG Lafley, John Pepper and the big dogs with ideas. When they didn’t listen, he literally banged his shoe on the table until they did. Banged. His. Shoe. On. The. Table.
6. ‘Hay que pensar como consumidores piensan. No, no. Hay que pensar como consumidores consumen!”
7. Don’t be afraid to teach people how to do something. 
   
8. “Hay que hacer algo diferente, no solo porque es diferente pero porque esta basado en tu conocimiento del consumidor”
9. Do your homework. Don Pedro had a little file on the us and the agency and where the Hispanic Market is today. Most people don't take the time to plan ahead.
   
10. Don’t be afraid of regionality or getting your hands dirty. FoVa was successful because they regionalized ads in local offices (TX different than CA different from NYC, etc) and did local local promotions to move product. I know in this day the tendency is to go national or network, but we can learn a lot by being on the street.
11. Get out of NY. Hispanic market or not, the consumers we talk to in our careers aren’t eating at La Esquina or BondST or even in Queens. Get out, drink some beers with real people, be in the real world.
12. “yo soy de la vieja escuela. Ustedes son de la nueva.” acknowledge differences between the new and old and learn from both.
13. There’s always money out there. If you have a good idea, just go and prove it once and then go try to get the money. Make results happen
14. You only need one client to say yes for a good idea to become a reality.

Oh, and if you can, get your own table at 21.