a hundred avatars

This is information

I got this post (including a well done video mashup) via email from Peter about open source innovation at IBM.   This quote got me thinking:

To paraphrase the Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christenson, exceptional disruption gives birth to exceptional opportunity. Harnessing that opportunity is the goal. And utilizing it for the common good, the solution.

Got me thinking about the inspiration for the title of this blog, from Patrick Leigh Fermor's wonderful A Time of Gifts.  Fact is, in times of great change, now as ever, require people to operate on many levels and in many places at once. Eras when systems change require living in multiple times and applying a different set of tools to different types of problems. Minds have to be flexible to be the right type of mind at the right time.

The post also led me back to The Information Machine from Charles & Ray Eames  in 1958. 

This is information. The proper use of it can bring a new dignity to mankind.

Sushi Ann is very good

I've been fortunate to have some very good sushi through the years. Yasuda, Nozawa and even Daiwa have all been very good to me. And now I add Sushi Ann to the list as some of the best traditional sushi in New York.

The rundown on an excellent meal, courtesy of Yamagisawa-san at Sushi Ann

Shiso hamachi scallion handroll, Chūtoro, Kanpachi, Sayori (Halfbeak), Anago, Tairagai (Pen shell clam, first time, very good), Shiba ebi, Uni (2X), an amazing mackerel/ginger/shiso nigiri-sushi, Fluke, Fluke Fin (amazing & layered), Toro/oshinko maki, Katsuo, Gobō.

Domo arigato gozaimashta. Very good.

Shooting for Accidental Failures

The debate over whether influencers are influential popped as a result of this article in Fast Company covering Duncan Watts’ research, and is increasingly relevant.

The question is whether trends and ideas spread from the top down or from individual to individual, without sense of hierarchy.

The answer is ‘yes.’  Neither a focus on the top 0.5% nor the tremendous waste that proponents of mass advertising have inflicted on both consumers and shareholders is right.

The answer lies somewhere in between. If we’re smart we, we can influence the most in the most meaningful way. Five thoughts on how to spread influence in all directions:

1. Begin with a meaningful insight. Timeless, but more important than ever. The insight behind Pantene Beautiful Lengths that women are more afraid of hair loss than they are cancer is clear, deep and universal. There are superficial examples, but I like that one.
2. Steal a page from Pixar. Great kids movies—all great art--work on multiple layers. Make ideas that are layered: special to specific audiences and that work in more democratic ways.
3. Inverted pyramid:  Old hierarchical media (even web 1.0) enforced a perception of idea propagation that felt more top down than reality bore. In other words, it’s always worked both ways, social networks have only put the means in the hands of more of us.
4. Accidental influentials:  Trends/memes still start somewhere, right? This is Watts’ term for the people who happen to wind up becoming influential in one area and it is instructive. At their best, we should make sure that we provide the means to help happy accidents happen.
5. Fail often. Stories with more hooks and ways in have more chance of survival. Gareth Kay mentions one analogy, that of options trading. Rather than betting all on one investment (in our case, TV spot, web site, a big event, etc) steal an idea from traders who structure their bets under the assumption that most will lose money. Spreading out risk also allows for  greater upside when one  idea hits  it big, and lets you scale into the ones that are working.

Pure Imagination Is Dangerous

Recently Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory has been making the rounds on TV. The original, with Gene Wilder. 

This scene, Willy's theme (the Wonka-festo?) always fascinated me, since the first time I saw this movie when I was a kid.  Seeing it now, it's clear that what makes it compelling beyond the beautiful singing--really, you can tell Gene's heart is in it--and the lyrics. There's a tension between what you're hearing and the simmering threat and wistfulness lying just under the surface, contrasting the lyrics that say there's nothing to it.

There's an edge, blended with an acknowledgment of mastery, of the sacrifice it took to create and of the danger and risk inherent in the creative enterprise. Imagination is dangerous, because it creates and because after leaps are taken, there's no going back.

He says it earlier, doesn't he: "There's no going back. You have to go forward to go back."

Five things the future has already learned from SYMS

You know SYMS? Maybe you’ve seen those bags in midtown and you maybe have even walked into the store, felt overwhelmed or disappointed and left. Maybe you stayed and bought something.

Maybe you love it.

Either way, here are five things the future has already learned from SYMS and why we should all be paying more attention to SYMS:

1. “The educated consumer is our best customer.”—No escaping this anymore. Transparency keeps us honest. Syms figured that out years ago.
2. Good design isn’t only about a lack of clutter: Believe me, I would happy live in Farnsworth House or an Apple store, but all other indicators are pointing to a future of texture and clutter, with beauty found in surprising pockets. Like Tokyo. So just as we have to dig through all the Sansabelt slacks at Syms to get to that great Davide Cenci suit, new modes of information architecture via tags and social bookmarking change how clutter is navigated and even make it beautiful, or at least surprising.
3. Everything communicates: from the somewhat threadbare stores, the black bags that remind you how smart you were, the geographic placement of the stores, everything, for better or worse, defines the experience and spreads the message and reminds you of their 'cause.'
4. Finding someone to help you is purely luck, but if you stick around, you can get really lucky.
5. Only suckers pay full price. See #1.

Not sure if any of this is intentional or just by luck, but I saw the bags and it struck me that there’s a lesson in there somewhere.

Creating Currency

Double post from work blog in an effort to centralize ...

I promised Stephanie Smirnov I would answer this question since I joined DeVries late last year:  why would a strategic planner with roots in advertising take the challenge to work at a PR firm and help start a Strategy + Innovations practice? What role could planning play in a PR environment? In other words - why now - why did I leave advertising and does it really matter?

This is first in a series ...

Reason #1.    The Rise of the Snack: It’s been happening since I started  in the online world in 1998, but with the growth of social media and lives of continuous partial attention content consumption has become more like  snacking, and less like a meal (and when it is a meal, it's often ad-free). And what has that done?

To steal economist Hernando de Soto's term out of his context, the articulation of brands' values and value via television advertising and other traditional forms of communications (including most web sites) has become  dead capital. In other words, brands and their advertising avatars have become assets that cannot be used to their fullest.

And so, the value and values of brands need to be unlocked in new ways.

That's where the question of craft comes in to understand who is best able to make 'dead capital' regain its currency in this environment. We hear that 'Great ideas can come from anywhere.' or "There's only one job in advertising (and why use that word, 'advertising' anyway, Alex?). It's true in theory, but does it hold in practice? Have most constituents of the brand-er ecosystem really contemplated what The Rise of the Snack means and the impact continuous partial attention has on what we do?

At the last Account Planning Conference, I was struck by the dichotomy of the optimistic view of the brand new world (or is it the New Brand World?) and the great malaise a lot of the (really really good) planners I spoke to there felt. Why is that? It was more than just envy for that guy who quit planning to found Method, right?

It's likely it has something to do with the pressure that Snack-sized content culture has put on the context and utility of the tools and teams most agencies use to solve the problems we're paid to solve.

It would be arrogant to say that any one agency or type of agency is positioned better for this change. But...bringing together the craft of planning with that of PR is wonderfully poised to unlock brands' capital.

Others (and that's only one example) have discussed how planning has changed recently. This is just the start for us...

The next few posts are going to talk about why the ground in PR is especially fertile to lead new directions for strategy + innovation and why I'm here: the new ways brands work (not exclusive to PR, but think molecules, not pyramids!), what Darren from Bewitched has to do with it and how a business model makes a tremendous difference. I'll probably cook up a few more things too as the writing goes on... 

Making things that work in a snack-centric world doesn't mean thinking small, nor does it mean creating only massive efforts that people have no alternative to ignore. The onus is on us to craft ideas that live on both levels, as morsels consumed quickly, with other dishes, some bigger than others, all of which add up to rich, tasty narratives.

back, again

Once more into the breach.  After a hiatus, and some degree of experimentation (enough for the subject for a future post), I’ve decided to get back online and write more often. I guess Facebook status is an insufficiently robust platform from which to articulate oneself.

Thanks are due to work, and Jon specifically for the impetus to write.