i [love] marketing.

network leading itself

Awhile ago, I read Duncan's article in HBR on Occupy Wall Street movement, where he asserts that the role of leaders is to serve as an image, a projection, and embodiment of values of a movement, thus making it easy to understand. I find that nothing summarizes the leader-less movements and the idea of the network-as-influence-machine better than the sentence above. Found here.

happy new year.

the 100 things I liked in 2011

In lieu of the year's ending (and with some free time on my hands) I went through stuff that I noted last year and picked things from culture, web, ideas, apps, fashion, etc that I liked the most in 2011. Here they are, in no particular order:

Iris Apfel's appartment  Digby  The Meaningfulness of Lives  Naked Hiking  Carousels  3 main lessons of physchology  Savage Beauty   Think Quarterly   Bayes' Theorem   Jonathan's card  What was there  The Breakthrough Myth & The Myth of Innovation Hero   Not without salt  Designing for tomorrow  Instagram   Why being certain means being wrong  The App Internet  Totokaelo  Spotify top tracks of 2011  Home Plus grocery store  Seth Priebatsch's TED talk  Code & Story   Wicked Problems  Runkeeper's Health Graph  Misfit Ideas  Down time  Pitfalls of Certainty   The cognitive cost of expertise  Collaborative consumption  Design Research  Redistribution markets  Bill Cunningham New York  Square  Good design  Certified Pre-Owned  Mohawk General Store  Kevin Slavin's TED talk  Satisficing vs. Optimizing  Dissonance  Online fashion marketplaces  The year in reading  Social Flow  Kinfolk  Curisma  Gimme Bar   Arrested Motion  How consumers interact with Facebook  Delight by design  Why we are not hiring creative technologists  MIU MIU Glitter-finish sandals  Facebook makes brands stupid  Sharing economy  The Fancy  Foursquare + Square  Apple TV  Innovators share their thoughts  Bucketlabs  Drunken online shopping  The never ending story  The Economics of Happiness  The obvious, the easy, and the possible  Strangers and groundbreaking ideas  Creatures of comfort  MNZ Store  Social Games  Disruptive hypotheses  La Garconne  GroupMe  Svpply sets  1Q84 TaskRabbit  Le Havre  This isn't happiness  Maurizio Cattelan at Guggenheim  Venmo  A brief rant on the future of interaction design  Lanvin AW 2011  Shop Terrain  Retromania  The world's biggest family  The power of metaphors  Mikkat Market   Bicycle curriers   Retronaut   Give a smile  On the edge   Talent is nothing without focus and endurance   Henry the Worst   Wantful   Puppy Elite   7 major problems   The isolator   Koi pond  The history of high five  Brands are simple   Trendland   Cereal Couture   Idea Mensch Its this for that

McLuhan is right (again)

The other day I came across this image (regretably, can't remember where), and it striked me as a lovely way to summarize the problem of fitting digital media into marketing thinking. Yes, we still have that problem. We are collecting Likes and views, measuring awareness, and resizing content - all instead of accepting that the rules of the game are through and through new and trying to understand them. 

What is Digital Strategy and Why Agencies Need It?

A couple of Fridays ago, I thought a Digital Strategy Workshop together with Farrah and Ale. It was an all-around awesome experience: participants were smart and wonderfully engaged, my co-teachers were super-inspiring and insightful, and finally, we put together a really fun (and informative) presentation - a section of which I am including here. That's the part I presented, to kick the workshop off. 

Speakers' notes are below:

Slide 3: Every conversation about the topic, area, or practice starts with its definition. Well, one of the great strengths of digital planning is that we haven’t settled on a single definition. As it goes, if you ask 10 people what digital planning is, you will get at least 11 different answers. And that’s a good thing, because if Richard Buchanan is to be trusted, we know that we are alive. After all, all the great, revolutionary shifts in culture, science or society didn't have names at first - think postmodernism (hell, i still don't know how to define it), innovation, DNA research, etc. We always have to rely on what's already out there to define a new field, and more often than not, what's out there is not enough.

Slide 4:  At the same time, there is clearly a need for digital planning thinking and tools, otherwise there wouldn't be there workshop. From your own experience, you know that you are dealing with things that you didn't have to deal with before. Above all, you are dealing with the need to think about how to create value for both customers and clients. This means you need to think how to create a relationship between them that doesn't benefits clients only. A related question is how to make new forms of relationship between buyers and sellers work for us. To clarify this point, the very idea of who buyers and sellers are is different. Sellers are not only brands anymore as collaborative consumption and redistribution markets can attest. Just think AirBnb, Etsy, Getaround, Neighborgoods, etc. Group buying and flash sales are also an example. Speaking of group sales, we are dealing with interconnected individuals that share, review, comment, and are able to make or brake brand's reputation by introducing unprecedented transparency of information.

Slide 5: Case in point: Community and technology, in combination, reshape marketplaces by changing dynamics between supply and demand, buyers and sellers, consumers and products. They have the capacity to create new markets by focusing on the previously unaddressed segments - all of the above being examples.

Slide 6: Venturing into unaddressed segments has proven to be rewarding. We are not dealing with someone’s side project, but with the emerging industries.

Slide 7: Why is all of this important? All of the new value models change consumers' expectations and shape their habits. They expect from brands the same thing they have been tought to expect from online services and tools - immediacy, convenience, transparency, competitive offering. Above all, they expect to be in charge themselves.

Slide 8: Our job as digital strategists in this context is the following: create a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose. First, I stole this definition from Charles Eames, who was talking about design when he said the above. Design analogy is especially convenient here, because if we are to be successful, we are to shape and format the digital environment. Also, design is not about end product, but it is a systematic process of identifying problems, and then researching, creating, testing, and implementing solutions. This is the second thing that's important - a problem solving approach. We address our clients through this problem-solving prism - every assignment has to be reformulated as a particular problem that the brand is focusing on - either it is the sales problem, the audience problem, or the brand perception problem. Lastly, talking about arranging elements leads us to systems approach, a system that connects people and technology, products and content, brands and services. 

Slide 9: The best digital campaigns have been built around the innovative connections between buyers and sellers that are characteristic of the new models of exchange. Pepsi Refresh project connected the brand with the community. New Balance teamed up with the long-distance runner (and a certified weirdo) Anton Krupicka, Uniqlo created Lucky Counter which combines group dynamics with people's desire for discounts, Lufthansa came up with utility, Burberry connected their brand to everyone with a trench, etc etc.

Slide 10: Often, we think that the client brief is about advertising or promotion, while we should be thinking about the brand or about the new ways to reach audience in digital space. What is brand's real problem? How to connect with audience in the digital space in order to solve it?

Slide 11: And now, onto practical stuff. First, start from the consumer. Here, we see a traditional advertising model of brand/product/category and consumer. Traditional (or brand) planners start every assignment from a competitive landscape, from thinking about the brand (what does it stand for? what's at its core?), the product (what are its benefits? what are the barriers to adoption?). Then they often look into surveys and numbers about the audience, and conduct focus groups to confirm their thesis. It's the thesis-support thesis model, as Noah reminded me the other day. And this is not wrong. Where digital strategists start from, in contrast, is a consumer. They are putting it at the center, as a starting point for framing a hypothesis, then they then test against brand, product and category insights. The benefit is seeing something that we have previously missed - instead of getting answers on our questions, we are letting consumers tell us what they want.  We are seeing the world through their eyes. And in order to do that, we have to reach a true understanding of their habits, culture, social context and their motivations space.

Slide 12: How do we reach that understanding? Well, we inquire: how do we think about the category? how do they talk about the brand? how do they perceive the product? Observing, monitoring and listening to customers can often reveal a different set of needs that escape the traditional quantitative methods. Here, social listening tools become very useful - they offer insights into the barriers to category and barriers to wider adoption of the brand. They offer insights into the context of consumers' life and role of priducts and a brand within it - they help us define the problem and come up with possible solutions. Through considering how to reach out to these people, it becomes possible to come up with the ideal brand experience that is conveyed across diverse touchpoints. Visualizing and codifying human motivation gives us opportunity to beter understand and direct human behavior. Deep seated or hidden needs and cultural trends can all be identified from dialogue with customers. It uses personas as a vehicle for introducing a user perspective and adds input from a wide selection of user-centered methods.

Slide 13: And how do we go about that? People leave digital traces everywhere: they talk, share, connect comment, track and update everything (or almost everything they do), but the difference is that now we can see all of that. It's all laid out for us to explore. 

Slide 14: For example, personas are one useful way of mapping and visualizing our learnings - they are a great communication device to visualize who our audience is, and to clearly communicate it to creatives, experience designers, content strategists, and technologists. They bring everyne on the same page in regards to the audience we are talking to. Moreover, they help us clarify the goals and tasks of our different target groups. Best yet, tey lay out the touchpoints for a sound media strategy, content strategy, paid media buy - because we know where we can find these people.

Slide 15: Now that we get acquainted with out target, we can start making our digital brief. No matter what format our digital brief uses, it has to revolve around the following: a) the idea (this is our response/problem formulation for the client's challenge), b) the tasks (how are we going to go about solving this problem?), c) connections plan (tactics and system access points), and d) success metrics. Digital is not everything, but it somehow gets into almost everything - it's got to be part of our objectives, our brand, our audience. The main and defining characteristics of digital briefs is not what we are going to communicate. Instead, we are thinking what kind of system we are going to build, and how we are going to draw people into it. Another thing to remember is that digital brief is means to an end, rather than an end in itself - which is always the case when you are dealing with the traditional agency process. Planners take too much time to write the brief, then they hand it over to creatives, who are at that point pissed off because they aren't left with enough time to come up with an idea, etc.

Slide 16: Adopt a systems approach, with a brand behavior at its center. Brand story defines the brand experience and helps us decide how to convey it through different touchpoints. This is not an integrated campaign (while it may look like one), and there are two reasons for it. First, I have never seen a successful advertising campaign. Second, at the system's core is a brand behavior, rather than a message. We are not simply pushing out a message through all different touchpoints in the "matching luggage" (thanks Farrah) way - instead, we are carefully considering how each touchpoint conveys a part of the story, and how all of them combined convey consistently and seamlessly brand behavior. Each touchpoint is the starting point for the experience and not the end point for the messaging. Brand behavior informs also how touchpoints should be designed, and which touchpoints we should choose to focus on. It defines the tone of voice, look and feel, and content, and interactions for each.

Slide 17 and 18: Our next task is to visualize the brand experience flow - for example, here we are visualizing customer journey for product trail. It helps us define the importance of each media touchpoint. We are deconstructint the marketing process into discrete touchpoints and interactions. Each touchpoint creates a "brand movement." A typical consumer journey is multi-channel and time-based. The second example is for the challenge of brand affinity. Again, we have brand moments that are experienced according to the context of each touchpoint.

Slide 19: Finally, and we are going to cover this in the separate session of this workshop, our task as digital strategists is to make each point work for us. This means assigning monetary value, expectations and success benchmarks to each touchpoint. This is going to help us dynamically optimize the campaign as we go, and foreground the importance of the most effective touchpoints, all the while minimizing the exposure of the less successful ones. In other words, we are assigning metrics of success to each touchpoint, so we can monitor and optimize them as the campaign unfolds. 

Slide 20: And now, it's important to understand that these four things: starting from the consumer, writing a digital brief, visualizing the brand experience flow, and assigning metrics of success to each touchpoint are not theoretical exercises. The reality is messy, but it helps to have a few useful tools and useful guidelines. It’s the experience, the process of trial and error, and figuring things out as you go. 

View more presentations from Ana Andjelic.

 

 

Retromania

Good old Roland Barthes had a point. If only he could see this year's lineup of movies, he would probably allow himself a smile. Think Muppets, Star Trek, Tron, The Smurfs, True Grit, Arthur, etc. In this day and age a "humiliating repetition" assumed a form of a "retromania," or obsession with the cultural artifacts of one's own immediate past. Brian thinks it's the aversion to risk that drives the culture industry (film, TV, music, fashion, design). Why would a studio/designer/TV producer invest a ton of money into something new when they can invest it in something that worked so well the first time around? The strategy seems simple enough: to reach your target, the only think you need to do is to dig up things that have been popular in that very same generation's childhood. Other generations follow because there is nothing like a nostalgia for something that we have never experienced (how many times have you heard a lament about how awesome New York was in the '70?). I think there's more than risk-aversion to it, though. I think the trend has more to do with a macro social and economical trend that can be best described as "the end is near" and "catastrophes are reality." Faced with uneasy facts of global warming, economic breakdowns, political insecurity, and - above all - a lack of a clear path to overcome these hardships, people look for comfort of their not-so-distant life that they recognize and feel safe in. I only wonder what kind of movies Chinese make these days. I bet you Karate Kid ain't one of them.

p.s. there's an interesting book on "retromania." I've read only a few pages but it looks promising. You should check it out.

Digital Strategy and Few Other Things

Some time ago, I did an interview for IdeaMensch, which describes itself as a "community of people with ideas." It turns out a lot of people found it interesting, so I figured I might as well copy it here. Enjoy. 

Ana Andjelic is digital strategist at Droga5, an independent advertising agency that is best described as creatively led, strategically driven, technology friendly and humanity obsessed. At Droga5, Ana brings contributes her digital knowledge and skills to a super-talented team of creatives, strategists and technologists. Prior to joining Droga5, Ana worked as digital planner at HUGE, Inc, The Barbarian Group, and Razorfish, where she combined consumers’ behavior with technological trends to help brands in digital space. Ana’s specialties are digital branding, digital marketing, social media and experience design. Ana sometimes speaks at industry events, and was a guest lecturer at Miami Ad School and HyperIsland. She also occasionally writes for Ad Age, and regularly shares her thoughts on her blog, I [love] marketing.

Ana Andjelic is a graduate of Columbia University, where she earned her Ph.D. in Sociology, and New School University where she got her M.A. in Media Studies. She is from Belgrade, Serbia and lives in New York City.

What are you working on right now?

I am working with an amazing team on the really fun projects at Droga5 and also plotting a website that would tell a story about things that I have learned in New York in the past 10 years. It would an interactive story told through photos, videos, quotes, maps, things, and people. I am excited about it.

Where did the idea for I [love] marketing come from?

As a professional in the evolving digital marketing industry, and having an academic background in technology and organizational studies, I felt a compelling need to combine my academic knowledge with the insights from my practical work. Often, there’s a yawning gap between academia and industry. Which is a bummer. But my blog was conceived mainly based on my need to provoke people to think differently. Or just to provoke them.

What does your typical day look like?

I get to work around 9, and from then on, it’s a fast-moving train. Sometimes I am on it, and sometimes under it. There’s a lot of thinking and talking to people on my teams. There’s also a lot of work on coming up with structured arguments for clients. Then, a lot of revisions and making my thoughts clearer and better. There’s also a lot of constructive friction in this process, which I love.

How do you bring ideas to life?

It’s a collaboration. It’s about recognizing the seed of an idea, testing a few of those with the creatives, and then working together to turn those into something that people will get excited about.

3 trends that excite you?

1. Redistribution markets. It’s an amazing new space where people can connect directly to satisfy their needs, either through products or experiences. They barter, borrow, swap, rent, exchange. It’s an uncharted trade territory.
2. Human irrationality. People are super-irrational creatures, and they respond to the most subtle clues and information designs and the choices of others. I’d love this to be explored more in digital marketing.
3. Data as marketing. I always like to say that digital technology is society made visible. I can think of a lot of ways to turn this enormous data repository on human behaviors into useful and fun marketing.

What is the worst job you ever had and what did you learn from it?

I was once in an ad for some Internet provider in Belgrade. A horrible idea. I had to wear a skin-tight silver dress made of some super-polyesther material, have a really, really heavy makeup and some space-y hairstyle. But it’s not the Star Trek look that got me, it’s all the waiting around at the shoot for everything to be ready. I don’t know if I learned anything from it, really. Maybe that every job requires patience.

If you were to start again, what would you do differently?

If I could give myself advice now, going back, it would be one word: CHILL. I’ve always been in a horrible frenzy. If I gave myself more time to take things in, stop and think more, I would probably end up being happier. And would have driven people crazy less!

What is the one thing you did/do as an entrepreneur that you would do over and over again and recommend everybody else do?

Always meet new people. You never know who knows what and where an idea can come from. People are wonderful repositories of knowledge and insight. They are also fun to be around.

Tell us a secret…

I used to be terribly scared of awls. I am still wary of them.

What is one business idea that you’re willing to give away to our readers?

Stop making things. This world doesn’t need any more stuff. It needs smarter systems. It needs better ways to connect things that already exist. Become obsessed with connections, all sorts of connections – useful, fun, unexpected, helpful, informative. Then think how to insert things into them so that you create something new.

What is the one book that you recommend our community should read, and why?

The Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande. He talks about decision-making and problem-solving in complex environments. Everyone who ever wanted to make something in the digital space would find his thinking useful.

If you weren’t working at Droga5, what would you be doing?

I would probably be writing. I’d be writing more on my blog, for industry publications, I’d write a book. It would be a mesh of organizational thinking, technology, media, and human behavior. And it would be set in New York City.

Three people we should follow on Twitter, and why?

Noah Brier, @heyitsnoah – because he is the most wonderful, curious, humble and innovative person I know.

Diana Hong, @dddiana – because she is the coolest girl ever and the most amazing industry professional.

Bud Caddell, @bud_caddell – because he is really passionate about knowledge and isn’t shy about it.

When is the last time you laughed out loud? What caused it.

My boyfriend makes me laugh all the time. He has a wonderful way of looking at the world and the most articulate way of conveying his observations on life’s curiosities.

Who would you love to see interviewed on IdeaMensch?

Dan Ariely.

How do you see digital strategy evolving in the digital world, where things are hard to assess and predict?

I think that we need to come up with a way to think about strategy a bit differently. Less linear, more system-like. More improvisation, more trying things out, less prediction and less singular answers.

Connect.

Follow me on Twitter at @andjelicaaa. Also check out my blog, I [love] marketing and my presentations on Slideshare.

 

Everything about digital strategy ...

I am co-teaching the first-ever, all-day digital strategy course on November 18 in New York City. Along with the two amazing ladies (and the super-accomplished professionals), I am going to cover everything that ranges from how to write a digital brief, what are success stories and why there were successful, how collaboration between digital strategists and creatives should look like, to how to sell digital strategy to clients. More information about the full day agenda is here: http://digitalstrategycourse.eventbrite.com/

You should come, it's going to be fun! And bring friends :)

is stale economic logic behind digital marketing hampering its success?

This article got me thinking. The shortcomings of the neoclassical economic theory have been known for a long time now. It's also well known that many new currents emerged as a response to this failure. What's less explored - if at all - is what this means for marketing and advertising (and by this, I don't mean academic exploration, but the adoption of the new economic learnings in practice). Here and there, we use segments of behavioral economics, economic psychology, and economic sociology but overall seem to ignore the very reality that deemed traditional economic theory obsolete. Think monetization opportunities in redistribution markets and/or business models that can emerge from collaborative consumption. Our marketing frame is still not the one of a dynamic economic world. In all our rush for the re-invention of marketing, we seemed to have forgotten to change the economic logic behind it.

The image above is from Trashr, which connects supply and demand of discarded goods. Everyone who's lived in NYC for a while knows what gems can be found discarded on the street. Why not create a market around it? One man's trash is another man's treasure, after all. 

A social media strategist?

There are a lot of social media strategists around. I know and like quite a few of them. The trouble is, this role can be viewed as a canvas for the ad industry's struggle to capture and define its own evolution.

The main problem with all roles revolving around social media is the limited (and limiting) career path. Just imagine: one can be a community manager; then a senior community manager, than a director of community management, and then ... what? Narrow specialization prevents this person from both assuming a higher managerial role (as he/she doesn't have the necessary breadth of expertise in leading multi-disciplinary teams) and from playing a more important client-facing role (since he/she can't help client with a broader brand and business strategy). 

It's inherent in the role that people assuming it will inevitably, sooner or later, move onto something else. But how? Being pidgeon-holed by their tactical tool belt, social media strategists despite their title, rarely get to actually do very little strategy. In the unfortunate agency process, they come in once insights have already been formed and ideas have already took shape. But it's not only the process to blame: the social media people, themselves, are hardly able to bring to table brand and consumer insights in a way that planners do.

So what's to do? It would be wrong to say that any specialization is undesirable. It's only tactical, and not strategic specialization that sucks (think Flash designers).

Advertising strategists have the most diverse backgrounds, interests, skills and knowledge and these - if formulated as a specific strength within a wider context of understanding digital behaviors - can prove to be invaluable areas of specialization. But specializations we talk about are those like digital branding, e-commerce, gaming, digital communication, or behavioral economics. These are vast, dynamic areas, and they don't suffer from the danger of becoming obsolete when some new tool or tactic or behavior shows up.

And right there - in posing the problem as a challenge of understanding digital behaviors - is the possible way out. Viewed in this context, social media become the question of interactions, interpersonal and group dynamics, influence and movements. The catch is to redefine the specialization not in terms of social media, but in terms of social behaviors.

Because, social media strategy that starts from behaviors is never going to become obsolete. We only have to ask how social media makes our consumers' behaviors more informed, more fun, or better. Will placing customer service on Twitter achieve our brand's goal? Will activating community achieve it? Or, should we use social media for advertising? The answers - and the tactics selected - all depend on what behavior we want to modify. 

The way for social media strategists of today to survive is to start thinking less about the toolset they have on their disposal, and more about the social dynamics they are trying to create or influence. My bet is that it will become easier for them to operate on the strategic level, to envision the path to brand and business objectives, and to advance their career path further.

Honesty in Advertising

This one is interesting. Out of sheer fun, during a dinner at this past SxSW, a few of us thought that would be fun to create a panel with a sole purpose of talking about something no one talks about because it is off-boundaries. Well, thanks to Matt Van Hoven, a persistent guy, this became a reality and we are submitting a panel proposal that does exactly this. 

An honest disclaimer: I never thought that it would become a serious thing until I saw Matt's email this morning ... copied here below:

from Mathew Van Hovenmvanhoven@skinnynyc.com to Brian Morrissey <bmorrissey@dm2media.com>, Alessandra Lariu <alessandra.lariu@gmail.com>, James Cooper <james.cooper@gmail.com>, Ana Andjelic <andjelicaaa@gmail.com>, Liron Reznik <lreznik@skinnynyc.com> date Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 9:27 AM subject SXSW Voting Ends Friday - PLS RT Important mainly because of the people in the conversation.

Brian, Ale, James, Ana, Liron, 

Friday marks the last day to get votes for our panel "Is There an Honest Day's Work in Advertising?"

We'll explore the ethical decisions we make in our efforts to get projects, produce them etc – and the perceived effects our work has on the audiences we target. 

This is sure to attract a lot of people in the business, and outside it and you will all have the chance to come out as thoughtful, aware, socially-conscious members of the industry. But we need to band together to get the word out about this topic/panel.

Ale – your latest work with SheSays and the creation of SHOUT indicates you see a disparity and are working to change it. Baller. 

Ana/Liron – your approaches to strategy are unique, if not symbiotic – focusing on the product, forcing the marketing strategy to extend from it, and seeking to convert the public into media channels for products they appreciate - a shift in honesty – in that you believe in seeking the right people rather than casting a net. Badass.

James – building out TechStars, an incubator for tech, represents a shift in advertising thinking and you're leading it. Our industry is known for stealing and co-opting great ideas. You're working to build actual products by incubating these start-ups. Sheeeeeiiiiiiiiiiiiiit.

Brian – Your move to DigiDay represents, to me, your desire to find new ways of understanding the business. I tip my hat to you. 

Let's show the industry that honesty and advertising can co-exist. You all have immense influence in the social sphere. Please take a minute and share this link: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/11254?return=%2Fideas%2Findex%2F10%2Fcategory%3AJournalism++%2Fpage%3A2

Let's flip this thing on its head, yeah?

Have a great weekend -

M

What got me is how nicely Matt summarized panelists diverse roles and strengths. Which, in return, got me thinking whether there's really something in the topic of honesty as addressed by this particular group of people.

 

Suspension Culture

I just came across this quote which, although it is meant to originally apply to NFL, is in fact a lovely description of the way we experience events these days. Just think time spent on Twitter or Instagram or YouTube yesterday in anticipation of the hurricane Irene. More fun and interesting that the rain outside was the wonderful suspension that conversations, photos, and updates exposed us to.  

I found this quote here.

Voting!

Keep it Complex, Stupid.

The mantra of our increasingly complex world has, oddly enough, become "think simple." As interconnections multiply and problems become messier, we are encouraged to reduce them to a single answer, a single solution, or a single killer insight to address an unpredictable web of moving parts. This panel is going to convince you that simplicity is a false god, especially when it comes to creating things in digital. Making digital stuff starts with interactions between data, people, and things. It mixes technology and storytelling. It produces a mesh of small, iterative experiments that work together to create new behaviors. We promise to explore why and how a new model of creativity must champion agility, adaptability, experimentation, noise, and most of all, relationship building.

Questions answered:

1. What's the difference between a simple and a complex problem?

2. Why does that difference matter when making digital things?

3. What does a creative process look like that respects complexity?

4. How do you build, launch, manage, and learn from many small experiments rather than one big product/campaign/message?

5. How should complex relationships shape creative strategy and execution?

Level: Advanced.

Supporting Material: Ana & Bud's past talks on complexity: http://vimeo.com/19634070 (Ana) and http://vimeo.com/20537703 (Bud)

Category: Design/Development

Tags: Complexity, Creativity, Design

Link for voting: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/10045?return=%2Fideas%2Findex%2F10%2Fpresenter%3AAna+Andjelic

Post-Resume World

This is the presentation I was carrying around on iPad to my job interviews in June, instead of my resume. I realized that, more than a list of places, clients, and projects that I have done in the past, nothing inspires a conversation like talking about the way I think about things, what I find interesting/important, and what I am passionate about.

Having a social object at the meeting makes the assessment of the work fit easier because two parties are involved in an equal-footing exchange (instead of one-sided conversation style that's a staple of interviews). It also allows a person to tell a story in a personal way that puts work & extracurricular accomplishments in the real-life, relevant context of someone's life (always more interesting than just listing stuff that someone has done). It shows, too, a person's presentation skills and ability to build an argument (which is potentially super-useful for client presentations & meetings). Finally, it's a tangible display of someone's simple know-how of how to put a beautiful-looking deck together. 

And it worked out for me, in the best possible way. 

p.s. For the obvious reasons, I took out the  four case studies that are part of the original deck; they served as examples of my past work & my thinking approach to specific client tasks + deliverables. But everything else is there!

p.p.s. The part of "data mining" is taken from Julian Cole and the part of it is mine. 

 

i like this.

Every discovery by definition is unpredictable. If it were predictable it wouldn't be a discovery. Creativity exposes unpredictable things to be discovered. - Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

SxSW Panel Proposal: Creativity for the Complex World

Bud and I would love to talk about complexity at the next SxSW, so we started thinking, plotting, and writing, and this is what we came up with... It's basically a summary of everything that he and I have been obsessed about in the past months, and is an attempt to get more people to start thinking about complexity. Hope the panel happens!

In a nutshell:

Have you ever been to a kid’s birthday party? It’s chaotic, unpredictable, fast-moving, and fun. It’s either the best thing or the worst thing, but you can’t know in advance which of the two is going to be.

Today’s digital world is a little bit like kids’ parties. It just involves a lot more people. And anything that has to do with a lot of people doing a lot of things is complex. To create something in the complex space forces us to think differently about the approach to, processes, and products of creativity.

This new creativity starts with interconnections between data, people, and things. It deals with the web of a bunch of small moving pieces that create intricate feedback mechanisms and new behaviors. It mixes code with the story and it’s open and iterative. It’s methodology relies on complexity’s own tools for solving problems. It's not about coming up with the new creative formats, but in making new connections. It’s a medium, not the product.

Complexity can be scary when connected with creativity. But it’s also unbelievably inspiring. It offers the maximum creative flexibility and the maximum executional options. It makes us realize that simplicity is a false god and that the new rule of creativity is looking for intuitive solutions that don’t reduce complexity but that thrive in it.

This panel is going to answer the following questions:

1. What's the difference between a simple and a complex problem?
2. Why does that difference matter when making digital things?
3. What does a creative process look like that respects complexity?
4. How do you build, launch, manage, and learn from many small experiments rather than one big product/campaign/message?
5. How should complex relationships shape creative strategy and execution?

You can see the revised & submitted proposal here.

 

digital world provides solutions for its own complexity*

*Or, why the holistic approach works better in digital.  

It doesn't reduce the complex situation to a causal, simple explanation. Instead, it's looking for intuitive solutions that seamlessly fit into people's behaviors. All well-designed products, services, and games are intuitive. Again, they are not simple - they intuitive.

The popular belief is that the contrast to complexity is simplicity. It's not. It's making things intuitive.

It helps that holistic approach inspires thinking through associations, both in their literal and metaphorical meaning. Literally, associations-as-in-connections are everywhere and exist between everything (people, information, tools, ideas). Metaphorically, associative thinking inspires us to make unexpected connections between things; and to recognize the innovative opportunities in the process.

Since it forces us to look beyond the obvious, holistic approach encourages "what if," rather than "why" and "how." It's non-linear and allows for the unexpected - both of which are in stark opposition to reductionist agency thinking a.k.a. "find the best strategy for solving a problem, discover one key dimension of consumers' behavior, define one thing that this advertising message is about." Instead, it's pushing for imagination and creativity: both in concepting and in execution.

Embracing the complexity of the whole situation is in fact a necessity in digital space. What we are dealing with are unexpected, ever-evolving movements and unpredictable connections. They generate micro-tensions and antagonisms that are ripe with cultural potential that has a direct consequence for brands. We are grappling with a networked social influence, and detecting "accidental influentials" in a given situation is as critical for campaigns as it is unpredictable. Irrationality of human behavior doesn't help matters, either: people's sensitivity to the design of information environments and activities of others is a powerful engine for behavioral change and needs to be utilized more in digital marketing campaigns. Then, there is data about individual and collective patterns of activities, and their aggregates act as a shared communication object with powerful storytelling potential. These sorts of stories disrupt the traditional model of authorship over advertising narratives. And finally, collaborative consumption and redistribution markets are constantly showing us where consumers' behaviors and needs are going: they represent a compelling lab for finding new sources of value that brands can deliver outside of their usual production/consumption value chains.. 

There are all challenges that resist obvious solutions and cannot be reduced to a single-cause explanation. So what to do? If complexity of the environment prevents one way of responding to the client task and if it prevents predicting the success of a single creative solution, then the best is to put all this complexity right at the center of the strategic problem-solving process.

This is hard. The need for strategy comes from our, human, anxiety in the face of uncertainty. Strategies are "anticipation machines" designed to help us know what the future will be before it happens. Complexity prevents this - but at the same time the problem is not unsolvable. If we can't have foresight, we can have hindsight. And a lot of those. The hindsight comes from standing close to the edge, which in plain language means merging strategy with its execution.

The good news here is that yes, while complexity creates a lot of challenges, it at the same time gives us tools to solve them. All one needs to be is crafty. (Big ups to the most brilliant Julian Cole for sharing some of his ideas about all of this).

In practical terms, this means that methodology for dealing with complexity needs to revolve around complexity's own tools. And, believe it or not, these tools are everywhere. Forget about eMarketer, and Forrester, Sysomos, and all that stuff. They won't solve the problem of originality of your campaign or of a real behavioral challenge that you want to create with your target audience.

What will solve the problem is a little game called digging for clues. I often use Wordle to run customers' reviews of the product/service/brand through it. It lets me uncover the common themes and the possible sources of tension or cognitive dissonance that are useful as insights for a campaign. GoodReads and apps like WANT! uncover what people identify with, how they define themselves, what is important to them, and what captures their collective imagination - all of which provides context in which a campaign is going to be received and what can make it resonate well with its target. Sites like 43Goals on 43Things and Daytum give us insights in human motivation, in different roles people are playing, what are their strivings, how they make choices and what are their frustrations. This helps come up with the ideas for inspiring and facilitating behavioral change for our target. 

Our understanding of the wider context of our audience's lives allows us to recognize cultural micro-tension, sources of influence, data that we can use for marketing, or needs that allow us to create an exchange market around. 

It lets us capture the new territories for our brands and to come up with the "what if." A new way of looking at things, perhaps, but that's exactly the point.

Data as Marketing

There's an interesting white space to be explored that goes beyond just visualizing data. A ton of online retailers (and just about any e-commerce site) has enormous amount of data on people's affinities, likes, purchase patterns, sharing patterns, communication patterns (and all other possible patterns), all filtered by time and location. That's a lot of information.

Sure enough, retail brands use this info for personalization and better targeting. But they are missing out, big time, tho: if only they turned this "individual-focused" model upside down and used their data for all sorts of community dynamics, they would be able to influence & inspire people's behavior on a much larger scale. In other words, they'd be able to turn their vast data repositories into marketing. 

The simple truth behind using data as marketing is that people are sensitive to the design of information environments and that others are instrumental in individual motivation (yes there are plenty of wonderfully self-motivated people but we are ultimately social animals). Combine those two things and you get a powerful engine for behavioral change. And this is hardly new: personal fitness industry has become an expert in pulling personal + community info and turning it into a motivation & statistics engine. Transport the fitness industry's approach to retail and all of the sudden there's an opportunity for creation of a data-driven feedback loop revolving around products instead of one's body.

The outcome is a shared communication object - a story around products' use based on aggregated information about all possible individual patterns and discrepancies among them. These stories provides a powerful shopping context - and a bonus marketing message. Since brands are all about fitting into the context of people's lives, why not also make a story on how this is actually happening.

A bonus feature: some ideas on how to combine 43goals, daytum, dailymile and runkeeper all in one to create information context with a storytelling potential.

Sharing motivations. Renovating kitchen? Buying stuff for the party? Going through the first 3 months with a new baby? Motivations help. There's no need to create a personal profile; it's enough for an individual purchase bundle to be  displayed in the "recent purchases section" so others can react to it. (Yes this requires sharing, but this being FB age, we may need to get over it. Besides, think of the grotesque things that runners' share on DailyMile or Runkeeper after long-distance races). 

Rating purchases on emotional scale. Shopping is equally passion-driven activity as fitness, so let people share how they felt after different purchases: some of them are "blah" as they are a pure necessity (toilet paper), some leave us feeling good (i finally got that Drano), and some of them we are really really enthusiastic about (in my case, clothes, shoes, and books). So, why not share the feeling [the forbidden word in e-commerce site design]?

Personal infographics (weekly, monthly, yearly, lifetime).  Enrich the basic shopping account data on how many objects by category a person has purchased this week/month/year so they have insight on how their household shopping budget is distributed. Or, give a weekly/monthly breakdown of how many times a site was visited per person; how many savings in discounts and deals a person accumulated and what it means translated in a dollar figure (bet it will make a lot of people feel good about themselves). The interesting part is that brands can aggregate all this information and publicly display it for everyone (of course, you can also filter it just by your friends, via FB connect). It allows us to see where the happiest shoppers live (which zipcode, state, country), where the busiest ones are, and where the most eclectic ones; which product category has the most passer-bys, etc. 

"Screen time." Filter and display product categories/times/locations by the longest and shortest "screen times" on the site/section/page. Distill it down to the individual level and give a scoop in what times of the day warrant the longest screen times and which ones the shortest (a lot of insomniacs shop at 2am, you know who you are). 

Goals. People often shop with a specific goals in mind, like "clean out my closet" or "clean my bathroom" project and a brand can come in here to help people achieve them in the best and fastest possible way by display a number of people who want to do this at the same time as you do, and share experiences of those who have done it. Add here progress tracking and challenges, and a "complete a task" function becomes something with an individual context and meaning.

Face-Off Time. This one can be called "passive game," because people are not always dying to play. But, they do like to compare themselves to others and see how they fare. Simply displaying data about which neighborhood has bought the most green products or which one saved the most or which one donated to charity the most can spur a competitive spirit (not to mention instill a sense of achievement). Rewards can come in here too: reward everyone in the same zipcode with a surprising discount at the checkout because they hit the X dollar amount in green products or in savings or simply display the rewarded neighborhoods for everyone else to see.

Retro Future

 "Utopian images that accompany the emergence of the new always concurrently reach back to the ur-past" - Walter Benjamin

This morning, NYT ran an article about GrubWithUs. I've seen this service some time ago - it basically gathers strangers around the dinner table - but now it reminded me of this wonderful Benjamin's sentence above. Every new tool and service is simultaneously new and old: it has a sort of nostalgia that let us glimpse in the way things might have been. While some people find it sad, GrubWithUs reminded me of the old-world tradition of travelers eating together in the road taverns and sharing stories of their journeys over food. That's what modern travelers do: come together for a brief moment, exchange their stories over food, and continue their journeys. Romantic, nostalgic, and amazing. 

To stay with Benjamin a little longer, these sort of experiences/chance encounters are contained in his concept of a "flaneur" (wanderer) which he used in the 1920s to describe a modern urban experience defined by casual connections: "The flâneur has no specific relationship with any individual, yet he establishes a temporary, yet deeply empathetic and intimate relationship with all that he sees." Sounds crazy familiar, and not so rare: there are other services that exploit the potential of these casual, weak ties to the max. Skyara that  defines itself as 'a marketplace to offer fun things to do, meet new people, and share experiences' [just like a children's playground] or Dodgeball/Foursquare, or Hash where strangers gather to run together & solve clues on the route [a tribe].

I really, really like this Benjamin's idea of nostalgia. I see it happening over and over today, where old-fashioned routines, forgotten customs and rituals are revived in ways that we are too often tempted to view as "alienating." That's where the lovely paradox is: the behaviors that existed way before any modern communication technology are brought back to life precisely because of it. So the things that we deem the most innovative - and uniquely digital - may as well turn to be the most nostalgic of all.

searchable world

A while ago I came across the Where To Get It app that helps us identify + find stuff others are wearing. It's basically a searchable database of street fashion. Then, a few days ago, Amber posted the LeafSnap app that identifies trees by their leaves. Take a photo of any leaf, and the mystery of its name and origin is solved. I did a bit of search and found out that there's also a thing called IntoNow that identifies TV content that you are currently watching, right down to the episode (I guess TV Guide does the same thing, but this seems faster). And then, there's imaginatively named IdThis which strives to identify anything, as long as you submit a photo of it. 

A possible useful ID tools that I'd like to see: take a photo of your skin and get a recommendation on the SPF you need to wear. Or a skin care you need to get. And no, this is not based on the lame "diagnostic tests" that cosmetics companies offer, but on an actual searchable database of people's real skin types and their characteristics. Or take a photo of a stain and it's immediately matched with a database of all possible stains to offer an answer. 

Shazam was of course the first in this territory of transparent information, and when you think about it, it makes a complete sense to warp a number of processes (search, asking others, inquiring with the experts, looking up our own old stuff) into a single scan. Of course, it usurps the question of expertise (in the cases above: fashion, arborism, music, entertainment), but that's another story.

It just crossed my mind that someone will come up for a "Shazam for people" where you can just snap any random person on the street and learn ALL about them. Hey, just a thought.

the game of pretending

The other week I read this great post by Russell Davies called "Playful."  It reminded me of my general approach to marketing strategy based on not telling people stories, but making them feel they are part of stories. 

And that's really not that hard. People are already part of each others' stories anyway.

Data tell wonderful stories. If displayed right, they at the same time make the imagined communities visible and make us feel part of them, by sheer human drive for comparing themselves with & competing with others. They also tell us something broader about ourselves as a group - what we like, what we find romantic, popular, cool, what's the best of, what's the worst of. It's a story that's is simultaneously personal, communal, and open-ended. 

Details on interfaces [on any interface] also can tell great stories - they give us subtle cues that help us pretend for a moment that we are doing something else, that we belong somewhere else, that we are someone else. We don't need more than a few clues/details to start playing a role. That's how our brain works by default - we fill out the missing pieces of a situation based on our own memories and experiences. 

Then, of course, there are objects. Luxury brands figured this out a really long time ago that even a small luxury object can become this big symbolic thing for a person. Buy a mere Burberry scarf or a Marc Jacobs keychain, and you already feel part of a club - of a movement of those who are fashionable, stylish, cool, trendsetting. It simultaneously gives us a pretense and identifies us as part of something bigger. It's not a mere graspable escape from our "ordinary" lives that movies or Real Housewives of all zipcodes lend; it's having an actual, tangible cue for playing a role. Fast-shift from fashion objects to all stuff, and you can achieve the same thing: give a commodity a wink, a story, a myth, and it instantaneously transforms its use into something richer, more complex, and more imaginative. Apple does it; BMW does it; even J.Crew has gotten pretty good at it. Imagery and possibilities for pretending are all around us. Digital didn't kill the imagination - it made it impossibly and wonderfully accessible. 

And yet, and yet.

For some reason, the operative word of the web is 'functional' and not 'fun.' Without the doubt, functionality is a sine qua non and the lowest common denominator, but the problem is, it's really not a competitive advantage anymore. It's not 2002, after all. Utility trumps aesthetics online, but why, almost by the rule, does it need to trump the human imagination, too? Every time I go to any e-commerce site, I want to die of boredom. Yes, I "complete the task" and I dutifully go through "the user flow" without much noise. But sadly, together with the noise, any signal has vanished, too. That's to say that I simply don't care which e-commerce brand's behind the site, because they all work the same. What they can do is to play differently. 

On the opposite end are the obsessively *fun* marketing campaigns. There seems to be some sort of compulsive need create hyper-intense entertainment where everything is clear, everything is obvious, everything is simple. Don't let people think for a second! Tell them the story! Make sure that they really, really get the story right! I wonder where that totalizing marketing instinct came from. There's the imperative that, after watching a video/visiting a minisite/seeing a billboard, "people need to come out with a single clear idea what the brand is about." Um, why? A game with a single rule is boring as hell, and a game where everything is laid out in advance is equally dreadful.

The problem is, both campaigns and websites demand 100% of our attention; and imagination works on clues, details, open spaces, on possibilities, not actualities - on filling things in. Clarity and simplicity kill credibility, because they take away any opportunity for participating and pretending and imagining. After all, things are not fun if you don't work for that fun a bit. People never finish a video game and say, oh how unbelievably straightforward and clear this has been. Or see a movie, or spend their time on Facebook and Twitter and conclude the same thing.

Most likely, they don't know what made their experiences so fun. And you know, they don't even care. 

Brands & cultural tensions: Own them, don't wait until they are over.

Brands have a role in culture. This statement sounds even better if framed as brands' role in some cultural tension. This how they achieve their broader relevance and social meaning: they help people identify with it, tell their own story about it, participate in it, understand it.

I wonder. There’s a trap here.

By the time a brand jumps on a cultural tension train, the chances are it has already left the station. Once recognized, the tension is not so tense anymore. It becomes a story. It’s quite a safe position for brands. It’s also a passive one, and not only because it deals with a something that has happened, but also because it’s based on reconciling people’s behavior with an already established cultural frame.

But tensions are interesting.

They are their most interesting when they are still brewing. That’s the moment before they become a culture and a behavior – the moment of suspense, ambiguity, and murkiness. And that’s when brands need to capture them: before it’s clear what’s going to come out of it and well before there’s a story to be told.

Luckily for us, cultural tensions are brewing all around.

For example, think car brands: there’s a pressing need to recognize the tension between the millennials driving less and them being the 40% of the car market; of digital gadgets and apps replacing cars as markers of identity; of in-car technologies lagging behind their digital expectations; of car pollution and them being green. All of these are real, brewing tensions that create a serious antagonism between people’s judgments, tastes, and motivations and the ways car brands are managed and marketed; and if they are not yet big enough to be considered a behavior, they are the most certainly real enough to make brands reconsider ther strategy.

Or think retail brands. Privacy, intimacy, sexuality, self-expression, ambition, or ownership are all spaces of tension. Digital exposes so many brewing & contradictory tensions that’s unclear how we should think and feel about what’s beautiful, sexy, successful, or creative. In most cases, though, retail brands are not those leading our understanding of any of this. Their voice is lost among all the tools, information, and others’ choices that ubiquitously surround us and help us navigate the world around us. In this scenario, brands’ waiting for something to become a trend is a losing proposition.

What does this mean for brand strategy?

All the brewing micro-tensions give brands the unique and unprecedented opportunity to capture the underlying antagonism, turn it into a zeitgeist, and elevate it to a topic of a conversation. Brand strategy becomes less about tension solving, and more about tension setting: taking a cultural current that’s not known enough, broad enough, or mainstream enough and turning it into a bigger cultural movement.

Like amplifiers, they put the emerging tension right at the center of their brand strategy.

A true usefulness of brands is to help us recognize & exploit all the micro-tensions around us. By getting to own a cultural tension, brands go beyond just telling a story about it in a “help people participate in culture” way. They let us explore the white space that cultural tensions open & make us an active part of any conceivable story that comes out if it.

Now, this can really change behavior on a larger scale. 

ah, little prince.

Brand Complexity

The other week, I got a brilliantly challenging question from Stuart Smith. He saw my presentation on Creativity and Complexity and asked me how to reconcile semantic & emotional complexity of brands with the need for the consistency of their global deliverables.

That's a nice one. After all, what's the benefit of complexity? Well, the human experiences are rich and nuanced and often really ambiguous. There are no two people that experience a same thing in the exactly same way. So, if human experiences aren't simple, why should brands be? The best brands are indeed those that are able to keep this complexity intact, without falling into the trap of reducing it the only one narrow aspect (the statement, the medium, the audience).

Think Apple. The most famously elegant brand around is, in fact, pretty complex. Where does this complexity come in? Counterintuitive as it may sound, it's in design. The design of Apple's products is intuitive enough to appeal to everyone. Steve Jobs never defined the "target" for his products. He never exclaimed that he wants to "appeal to 18-24 year old men," for example. And intuitive is not the same as simple. In fact, it's pretty far from it. Intuitive things retain the complexity of experience without simplifying it to a single dimension.

Or, think Converse (I have some sort of emotional hangup with this one). Thoughout the years/decades of being around, Converse created a rich & multidimensional brand, based on layers upon layers of accumulated cultural meanings & signifiers. Instead of being part of some pre-designed brand experience, these cultural connotations come from memories that are simultaneously personal (mine) and that cross the boundaries of country and audience (everyone's). This sort of collective memory can only be created from associating products with experiences that are so deeply personal that they become universal.

Both of these cases remind me of boundary objects. They are things that "have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable, a means of translation. They are plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of several parties empoying them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identitiy across sites. They are weakly structured in common use and become strongly structured in individual use. The creation and management of boundary objects is a key process in developing coherence across intersecting communities."

So people have thought about this one before.

Good. Because, in my own experience, complexity is great for creatives. It gives them the maximum inspiration & creative flexibility and the maximum executional options. It also creates thinking/outputs that are emotionally robust and nuanced enough to provide a backbone for many years of creative work for the brand (and removes the on-off campaign mentality) - you can go back to the well many times without repeating yourself. Second, complexity breeds many executional options, and secures that they are adaptive and adaptible to the fuzzy digital environment. Third, complexity has really become the only way, when you think about it. The old school planning mantra, narrow everything down, make things obvious, make things clear, doesn't get today's brands' problems solved. It just ignores them. Not the risk I'd take.

And besides, clarity is the enemy of magic.

 

branded filters on instagram

Now that Instagram has reached a considerable early adopter base (more than 4 million users in 7 months since its launch), there's a good question of how/when brands can jump in. (Not that they have to). Truth to be told, some brands are already there, in a very obvious way - they're having their own streams, with their own photos. But what if, instead, they came up with filters for everyone's photos?

For example, the image above screams "Coca-Cola" to me. Currently, Instagram offers only "the most popular" filter. The Barbarian Group created Screenstagram, which combines popular & your friends' photos. Now, any brand can create something like this and display it wherever they want. It's just another way to navigate through the bunch of users' uploads. Now, why woud people care about branded filters? First, if brands like to claim that they want to "own" a category of human experience (running, cooking, fashion, grocieries, going out, extreme sports...), this is one simple way to do it. And even simpler than this, maybe they manage to filter some really good content that people just simply wouldn't come across otherwise. 

I found this screengrab here.

The Real Agency Talent Challenge

 

At the crux of never-old back-and-forth of “who is going to win, digital or traditional?” resides a misplaced belief that organizational change is easier than it seems. All it takes for us is to declare that boundaries between digital and traditional are, in fact, artificial and that they shouldn’t exist in the first place and that “brand experience” strives to break free of channels and roam wild in the world.

That’s simple to the point of being simplistic. It overlooks the fact that organizations are different because they interpret the world differently. Transformation depends more on those in the agency who welcome the newcomers than the newcomers themselves.

This is to say that we need to think about this transformation above and beyond people changing jobs in this industry. Organizations are accounts of the change that is happening around them. They are sense-making tools. Their ability to adapt – and absorb – changes around them take way more than a simple hire. How they adapt and absorb depends on the already existing organizational structure and dynamics, which in turn emerged from the need to most efficiently and adaptively interpret the world around them. When those interpretations start to fail more often than they succeed, organizational change happens. Or not. In any event, it’s the question of slow, laborious, and highly managed process that spans to all and every department and their interrelations – and not of the HR department alone, as we are too often led to believe.

A digital agency that was building websites, and then platforms, and then ecosystems, has an inherent and strong revulsion for anything that has to do with advertising. A newly hired “traditional” person mentions brand behavior, and the organization scoffs at it as unmeasurable. That person pushes for a brand story, and the organizational culture pushes back. The same goes for traditional agencies: unless a “digital” person has a strong and unflinching support of a CEO, she won’t last long. Even with this support, it’s a daily struggle. And that’s the fact.

Case in point: saying that “user experience and engagement are the new art and copy” is an attempt – if you grew up in a traditional agency – to interpret the world through the concepts that you are familiar with and that make sense to you. For people who are outside that interpretative framework, this makes absolutely no sense, simply because they have never interpreted the world through art and copy.

Trying to find the answer in “ideas” that “transcend” execution, media and technology neither helps our understanding nor brings an insight. If digital teaches us anything, it is that there are no ideas that are separate from their executions, and that the best ideas are about how to execute, how to design technology, and how to transform the media. They are not what, they are how. And who comes up with the how? Well, you guessed, it – it’s the organizations, traditional and digital. Media, creative, stories, tech, software and experiences are not all one and the same simply because they are generated by organizations that make sense of the world differently.

In this context, a solid organizational consultant may be a better bet than a newly minted title (Chief Digital Officer? Chief Innovation Officer?) that's supposed to signify how transformative an agency is.

Unknown unknowns.

I am pretty late with this, but figured I should put it here anyway. It's the story behind my Creativity & Complexity deck. It starts with me saying that advertising creativity has always been a branding vehicle, and if we are talking about branding (my fav subject) we can't avoid thinking about creativity. And now, as everythone's trying to figure out what's going to work online and why and how and all of that, it's useful to backpedal for a sec and remember that evolution of creativity is the evolution of media. So here we are now, in 2011, stuck with digital media. What helps?

When talking about creativity, everyone thinks about creative talent, creative agencies, or creative deliverables. But my starting point was not the words of wisdom from Weiden or Goodby or any other famous ad creative.  Oddly enough, here's the quote that (I think) captures the best the snafu situation that we have today with creativity: "... because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know." (the live version of this statement is here, for those who are into it).

What makes the unlikeliest of all quotes so relevant here is that the infamous "unknown unknowns" are in fact the core property of complex adaptive systems. (Worth noting: CAS is the term that showed up in biology and that has since been widely used in organizational and technology studies). CAS are the systems that are built around, and thrive, on unknown unknowns. That's what makes them different from merely complicated systems: in the latter, there are a lot variables and the catch is that there's just too many of them. But luckily, they are all known. Think airline cockpit for example. Here, it's a shitshow, but if we simply follow a sequence, we are going to be just fine. The sequences don't change and they can be broken down into a series of simple problems - so the learning curve is probably, possible, and likely. Experience and expertise count big time here: the more times someone has done some complicated thing (like preparing for a pitch or making a media plan or managing client relationship), the better they are going to become in it.

But complex systems are no such walk in the park. They are like organizing a kid's birthday party: full of crazy towns, unexpected developments, left-field surprises (someone cries in the corner, someone doesn't want to play, someone got too sugar-high and is off the rails). This situation can't simply be broken down into its essential components and analyzed. And even if we could do that, complex situations are un-repeatable so the insight won't help us much. If anything, experience almost becomes a liability. Expertise here can be valuable, but far from being sufficient: the next bday party, for example, may ask for a completely different approach than the one right now. Current successes are no guarantee - and much less a predictor - of future sucesses. Thus, what makes complex systems hard to deal with is a deadly mesh of unknowns and unpredictability. The main take-away is that complicated environments are rife with risks; complex ones with uncertainty. Risks are calculable, uncertainty is not. So there.

Advertising industry - as it seems right now - has always dealt with complicated environments. And it's been incredibly good at this (think media buys, ad unit sizes, length of TV spots, and creative solutions that are meant to fit these formats). It's been good because it operates as a simplification machine. Think simple has become a mantra and a signpost: we were thought to come up with a single killer insight, a compelling idea, one single business solution. Then we take it and multiply it throughout different touchpoints without paying attention to the complexity of each (no matter what transmedia planning claims).

Our solution to complexity has been simplification and multipliction. We have been fending off complexity through offering coherence. Even if we don't want to admit it, we end up in the business of resizing: how does this solution fit on the billboard; ok now, how does this same solution fit on an iPhone?

This approach worked for a while, no doubt. It still largerly works. To see how and where it may fail, the best is to use quote from Apple's CEO. No, not Jobs - the other one. The one that most of people would rather forget. When comparing Coke and Pepsi, John Scully said something along the lines, "Coke always focused on the drink. Pepsi focused on the person using it." Now, the catch here is that contexts - and people - using products have become incredibly interactive, networked, info-rich, collaborative, and all of that. Think the activity of cooking for example: it used to be pretty known where we get out inspiration/advice/resources. Not so much these days: there's always a new app, source, filter, community that become part of our cooking experimentation. People and their activities have become complex behavioral networks. 

And our challenge is to align our thinking as an industry with the complexity of this environment.

The first step is not to try to simplify complexity. Instead, build things that can in this complexity thrive. Instead of awareness, acquisition, products, sales, media buys, prices, promotions, budget, and ownership, change deliverables (and language) into connections, generative relationships, interactions, new combinations, systems, renting, etc. The best online creativity is alive - it's a medium for a ton of other things, not the end result. Sticking to thinking about creativity in terms of the creative talent, creative agencies, or creative deliverables is bound to make us seek results that are efficient and repeatable (and, in fact, it is this repeatability that accounts for efficiency) - which in turn is bound to disable us, organizationally, from solving complex problems.

In the world of unknown unknowns, the idea is "to be less wrong than yesterday." This may mean focusing less on abstract goals (drive brand engagement/raise awareness) and more on concrete behaviors (how does this particular design solution lead to desired activity and business result). In this context, it will turn out that the best digital creative solutions are always about something else. Not everything is creativity. But creativity is everything.

What's in the name?

Creative X (and I will make a bold assessment here that's not his/her real name) claimed yesterday that the ad industry is becoming nameless. While I get his/her point that collaboration, new media formats, and an evolving industry relationships are changing what an industry name means today vs. in David Oglvy's time (oops, I used a name), the whole observation strikes me as naive.

Names matter. Otherwise, this person wouldn't put Bogusky in the title. From what I've seen, the industry is as name-driven as they were in the past, albeit the names are different: in place of the old boys Goodby, Weiden, or Lubars we now have Nick Law, Jeff Benjamin or Ben Palmer. The truth is, it won't evolve differently. Simply replacing one group of individuals with another, only gets us entangled in the tired old debates of idea vs. execution, "who owns what" and who should have won in Cannes.

What we are really asking here is not the question of names/namelessness but of the value attributed to them. And when we enter the territory of value, we start talking about appraisals, prizes, and prices associated with the individuals: or, about the tangible questions of talent, awards, and monetary compensations. The critical difference with the tired names debate is this question is not simply another industry navel-gazing exercise. In fact, it's not the ad industry that defines value attribution. It's everyone else around it: the clients, the media, and the consumers.

This industry has been grappling with the definitions of its own value for quite some time. It's also been dealing with the interpretations of how and where to find value in its changing environment. This is mostly because its value judgement found itself at odds with everything else around it. Just think about all the obsolete ways of evaluating consumer behavior; the unjustified value attributed to fitting storytelling into technology; and the equally obsolete value judgements about campaigns' budget allocation, timing, and success metrics. Where is value? We won't find out if our debates stick to Names, Whose Idea Was It, and An Honest Letter to The Industry type of things.

The real challenge is to come up with the new metric of what's valuable: what and how to praise, award, and pay. The new metric come from evaluative criteria that are not discrepant and irreconcilable with the value judgment of those the ad industry is working for and making money off, like they are now - as the amount of bad advertising shows. If there's anything to learn from startups and tech cos, that's how to be more aligned with the environment, and how to extract value because of it. The focus on customer experience, openness, dynamic budget allocation, and new marketing success criteria are some examples. They offer access to the alternative - and because of it, incredibly valuable - judgments made by consumers and by technology.

The main takeaway from the digital ecosystem is not that names don't matter (because that's simply not true) but about the new metrics for valuing things, processes - and yes, people. It's safe to say that in the future there will be people whose names are going to be more prized, paid, and recognized than others. That's not going to change. What is changing is how we get there.

My fellow countryman.

There's an article on Nikola Tesla in the latest issue of GOOD magazine, where he's described as a dreamer, mad scientist, a person who clashed with his environment and one who didn't do things for money. Just the opposite from Edison, who - while of often inferior inventions to Tesla (see the paragraph below) - in a systemic way created a whole support network (infrastracture, laws, regulations, behaviors) for his inventions that helped them to prevail.

"Tesla hoped to wow Edison with his prototype for alternating current, but Edison merely put him to work around the clock refining the existing DC motors. The Wizard of Menlo Park did promise to pay Tesla $50,000 should the immigrant manage to build a practical AC motor. However, when Tesla accomplished just that, Edison not only refused to pay, but embarked on a smear campaign against Tesla’s system—thus begetting the infamous War of the Currents, in which Edison depicted Tesla as an unreliable dreamer and alternating current as dangerous. Ultimately, after Tesla’s Westinghouse Corporation–backed AC-powered “City of Light” wowed onlookers at the 1893 World’s Fair, his model became the dominant electrical paradigm. Since then, 80 percent of U.S. electrical devices have used variants of his alternating-current model."

And

"When Guglielmo Marconi earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1909 for the invention of radio—giving the Italian scientist the name the Father of Radio—Tesla was livid. He had been poised to send radio signals using his eponymous coils as early as 1895, though a fire at his studio set him back a few years, and he only filed  a basic radio patent in 1897. For the next few years, he  and Marconi worked independently of each other, but it was Marconi who sent and received the first successful transatlantic radio signals, using 17 of Tesla’s patented inventions, most notably the “Tesla oscillator.” The U.S. Patent Office, however, refused to enforce Tesla’s claim."

The dude was obviously not good with patents.

"It wasn’t until 1943, after Tesla’s death, that the Patent Office reversed its decision, and recognized him as radio’s true father. That outcome is perhaps fitting, as the story of his life unfolded more like something out of Nathanael West than Horatio Alger—his financial troubles at times rising in direct proportion to his ambitions."

Uh-oh.

"Tesla’s other innovations include the first version of modern hydroelectric power (a dramatic and successful harnessing of Niagara Falls), an early version of radar (too ahead of its time to be immediately implemented), the first examples of neon and fluorescent lighting, and the first instance of wireless remote control. Rarely is Tesla credited as the father of robotics, but it was his invention, a battery-powered “tele-automated” boat that responded to wireless radio signals, that gave birth to the discipline. He envisioned an era in which man could harness energy from the sun and a “‘world system’ of wireless communications to relay telephone messages across the ocean; to broadcast news, music, stock market reports, private messages, secure military communications, and even pictures to any part of the world.”

Top that, Edison.

What strikes me as interesting is that Edison with his famous definition of genious as "one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration" may represent an old-fashioned and today quite obsolete approach to innovation. It is true that, back at his time, it was more important to persistently focus on doing the legwork and making sure that his innovations become part of the everyday life. But, is that still true in the 21st century? Tesla embodied a dichotomy of simultaneously being a creator of game-changing technology and a visionary sensitive to "the spectacular poetry of human life." As such, he perhaps would have fit better in the messy and unpredictable world of today's innovatons.  Because, what's considered innovative today goes well beyond just refining - and making better - what already exists. It revolves around coming up with a radically new frameworks and concepts for interpreting the world, and dealing with solutions that simply don't fit in anything we know.

There, the dreamers count. More so than the prespireres.

In 2010 ...

... I wrote 38 blog post that elicited 248 comments.

Read a mere 15 books. Peter Hoeg's "The Quiet Girl" was my favorite.

Enjoyed meeting in person: Matt, Conrad, Celestine, Marci, Adrian, Saneel, Scott, Aaron, Ben, Edward, Daniel, Tim, Helen, Jon, Gareth, Adam, Seth, Richard, Andrew, Teressa. Enjoyed meeting a lot more of them online.

Started working for the best agency in New York. Also started working with the best planner in New York, Nicole.

Presented 1x at Miami Ad School.

Went 1x to Creative Social in Amsterdam.

Since May, I ran + biked 526.05 miles for 76.04 hours. That burned 15lbs, powered 74.42 TVs, saved 27.69 gas and burned 293.01 donuts.

Embarked on the 86-mile adventure with Brian, from Tom's River to Ocean City, NJ.

Read 52 issues of the NewYorker. Articles that spurred my interest: "Food Fighter," "The Truth Wears Off", "A Widow's Story," "Cancer World" "The Cleopatriad" "Counterfeit Roth" "Missing Woman" "Finest Hours: The Making of Winston Churchill," and "The Pink Panthers"

Wrote a 204 page dissertation. Got one doctoral degree.

Published 3 articles in AdAge.

Went 2x to Serbia. 1x to Amsterdam and San Francisco.

Moved 1 time, to a different borough.

Read a lot of blog posts and articles. Saved 1,500 bookmarks on delicious, best of which I put here.

Made one visit to emergency room. Got 32 stitches on my right hand.

Was confused for 2 months on what I wanted to do next.

Made 2,361 Twitter updates. At least 10% of them ridiculed a campaign, an idea, or a person.

Ran one half-marathon, in Queens. It took me 2h to do it. The temperature was 96F and humidity 70%.

Spent 4 months cooped up in my appartment, writing.

My favorite movies this year were "Mother," "The Ghost Writer," "The Secret in Their Eyes," "127 Hours," "Toy Story 3", "Winter's Bone" and "The Social Network."

Won 3 times in Words With Friends.

Learned a lot in 2010. Happy New Year.

Delicious 2010

This post can double as a farewell to delicious and a breakdown of what people in the industry were talking about in 2010. Plus some stuff I was into last year. I went through a million of my bookmarks that I saved over the course of the last 12 months, and here is the hand-picked result. Prominent topics (and this should come as no surprise) were: geo-location, mobile, gaming, social retail, virtual goods, and a few really really dumb initiatives. If you missed any of these articles, have a look.

My fav topic of digital creativity

Creativity in digital goes way beyond advertising

Words, pictures, and everything else.

Digital may be everyday, but it's not effortless

Brands & Branding

Value of brand names

Nike Write the Future social media strategy

Facebook brand pages pay off

Compression

Google hasn't built anything interesting in over a decade

Competing with heroes: Domino's case study

Coke drops campaign sites in favor of social media strategy

Starbuck's formula for social media success

A big picture look at google, microsoft, apple, and yahoo

Social objects

Brands' social media casestudies

Do brand loyalty, commitment, and engagement metrics work

What Apple needs to do now

Kickpatrick Talks about Zuckerberg's World

P&G Pushes Design in Brand-Building Strategy

Digital Storytelling

Use social media to tell interactive stories

10 real-time twitter games

Geo-location and its discontents

Foursquare, Gowalla, stop pretending it's fun

Marketing experiments emerge using Facebook places

Foursquare fatigue and how to fix it

5 ways Foursquare is changing the world

Check-in royalty, customer loyalty, and Foursquare evolving strategy

Facebook vs. Foursquare: It's game time

Beyond Foursquare: The next generation of customer loyalty

Foursquare marketing hits and misses case studies

Location: How check-ins speak louder than words

Foursquare, Gowalla, Whirrl and MyTown case studies

Gaming

Gaming for behavior change

Achievement, Game Mechanics, and Social Software

Can games theory explain culture?

Engagement via gaming

Learning from game design: 11 gambits for influencing user behavior

Just add point: what UX can and cannot learn from games

Of lucky cats, lameness, and game-like logics

Steal other things

Incentivizing social media participation: points, giveaways, and other reward schemes

Complexity & Strategy

Cognitive edge: articles by Dave Snowden

Margaret Wheatley writing

Adding controlled serendipity to the web

Influencing business strategy through design

Platforms or campaigns? Both. AKA Platform-centric campaign model

Generative relationships

Serendipity is unexpected relevance

The $300 million button

Who needs agencies? A social platform just says "no" to Madison Avenue

Groupon and the future of web business models

Maxima/list

The science of sharing: platforms inject data into the art of going viral

Apply the rules of improv to digital

The overreaching vision

11 tips on how to apply social interaction to design thinking

Do you know what your biggest risks are? Really?

The next level

Mobile & Social Retail

Amazon now allows you to send gift cards to friends on Facebook

Impact of mobile on retail

The future is the mobile web, not the mobile app

Facebook likes bring Walmart deals

The 25 largest brand Facebook pages with the most likes

Study shows Facebook's retail appeal

Barcode Hero scans products to personalize physical retail

"It" Startup Grouptabs

The Groupon clone industry is so big, it now has its own exchange

Agregate market's shopfans bring social retail storefronts to Facebook

Facebook's plan to take over the web

Online consumer generated reviews have big impact on offline purchases

The Internet of Things

Tweet street: 7 extraordinary Twitter uses in the home

Emerging trend: physical-digital interaction evolves

How a physically aware internet will change the world

Digital Visibility

Mint data

How personal metrics can change our lives

Google facts and figures

Wealth distribution in the US

Personal informatics tools

Stupid Ideas

Forbes crowdsourcing names we need to know in 2011

MySpace unveils new, artsy logo

Gap pulls a Tropicana, nixes new logo

Are you ready to blow your million dollar idea away?

Mobile Apps

Less than half of brand managers use mobile apps

13 branded apps that got it right

How important have apps become?

Advertising

Top effectiveness ads

How the internet has changed advertising

25 internet marketing facts

How to translate a big idea to the masses

Digg's empty search results promote Burger King's double cheesburgers

Where is online advertising most powerful?

The ivory tower conversations (a.k.a. the future of advertising and the future of agencies)

The agency of the future

Mayhem on Madison avenue

My talk on future of advertising models

The future of advertising agencies

Virtual Goods

Madison avenue and the land of make believe

Virtual goods boom in 2010

Loneliness, happiness, and other interesting things

Mark's scrapbook of oddities and treasures

Joys of solitude

Sometimes I am happy

Happiness aint all its cracked up to be

From prices to prizes: competitions

What's valuable? Top 10 lists

Things you didn't know about happiness

Where the smart people live

The riddle of experience vs memory by Daniel Kahneman

Behavioural economics reading list

The immitation economy

Optimism bias

Bonus: Hand-picked posts from I [love] marketing

Rules to Execute by

Do we need a new definition of creativity?

The problem of strategy

The problem of ego

Why Nike's Write the Future is rewriting the past

Marketing's industry cognitive blindness

Why brands should NEVER think like media companies

Don't build an old brand with the new tools

Enjoy!

Presentation: What is Digital Creativity?

Last Monday, Diana and I have given this presentation at the Miami Ad School. It was pretty fun. To make things easier to understand, adding here the notes for each slide.

Slide 2: The arch of the story here is that ad agencies creative solutions are by default the product of the media of communication they use. The simple evolution of advertising creative supports this logic: when there was only print around, logos were important. With radio, slogans (jingles) took the center stage. With television, it became all about brand image communicated through the 30-second spot. Simply, creative has always been interchangeable with a specific media technology. Change this technology, and the rules of advertising creativity crumble. Why is this the case? Above all, it’s really hard to classify digital media as a communication channel. They are more of a behavioral platform. What is regarded as creative here? First, everything and anything that can modify, inspire, and introduce behaviors (think big behavioral platforms like Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, or smaller ones like thousands of Tumblr blogs, individual Facebook profiles, or just about any tool we interact with or interface that we come across online). Second, what’s regarded as creative is something that’s an inherent part of our activities. Messages are not part of our behavior, and not only because they are interrupting whatever we are doing at the time. They are external to it simply because they are not part of interactions that form that behavior. Do I need to click on an ad to complete some task, like booking a trip, online? No. Do I need to click on it in order to connect with my friends? No. Do I need to see it in order to explore maps, look at the photos, or read blogs to get inspired? No.

Slide 3: Now a quick trip down memory lane. First “forms” of advertising creative used to mark ownership (cattle branding) and to serve as assurance of quality (early product branding and logo design, like Campbell Soup, Coca-Cola, Quaker Oats) in comparison to no-name products.

Slide 4: Ok, let’s focus on mass media. Rumor is that mass media are on decline. People watch content on Internet. People fast-forward through commercials. Ads have become boring. There’s an interesting twist here, thought. It’s core is in the belief that while mass media (and traditional advertising) may be dying, but advertising creativity is here to stay. Simply, we just continued to apply the very SAME principles of advertising creativity to the new medium, and we are on our road to success. I will come back to this later, but for now, let’s see what these principles are.

Slide 5: What is advertising creativity in mass media based on? It can be boiled down to the following:

Slide 6: A creative solution is always a “thing” - a commercial art piece, an image, a great copy, a jingle, a slogan.

Slide 7: Leo Burnett also said that “big ideas come out of big pencils.” According to the mass media concept of creativity, creativity equals making something tangible: a great copy, an idea that makes a twist on the popular culture, or that captures the Zeitgeist, a piece-of-art logo and/or a print ad.

Slide 8: Bill Bernbach had a big faith in the individual talent of people working in advertising.

Slide 9: Mass media creativity also asks for and rewards the individual creative genius. If advertising award shows are to be trusted, there are people among us who are very talented in making pretty and funny stuff.

Slide 10: David Ogilvy believed in the killer agency - that its competitive edge resides in having the best-in-class creatives.

Slide 11: Finally, mass media creativity also asks for an advertising agency. Now, this being an unfair world, there are some agencies that are deemed to be more creative than others. That usually means that they are considerably better in making commercial art pieces for their clients that guarantee those clients meeting sales, brand, and audience goals.

Slide 12: Mass media creativity can be summarized in three simple steps.

Slide 13: Now, let’s fast-forward to the creativity in the digital world. If mass media fail to deliver brand messages - either because people time-shift through television commercials or because they spend more of their time online - then, the rationale goes, advertising creativity should reach them through digital media. Digital, it turns out, offers an unsurpassed opportunity for customer targeting: “we can deliver the right message to the right people at the right time.” That is, if people care to see that message at all - but that’s another story. In this approach, digital technology is treated as yet another channel for communication. The reasoning behind this approach is: we can still develop advertising creative, and now we have an additional venue where to display them. The only challenge here seems to be how to add this new channel to the already existing rooster of mass media channels traditionally used for advertising (i.e. how to create an “integrated” marketing strategy: “the question today is of how and why to integrate traditional go-to-market tactics with digital tactics in order to support the brand promise.”).

Slide 14: The truth? Think 4Chan, or Tumblr, or Twitter, or Foursquare. Or, as a matter of fact, think whatever any startup is building right now. In this setting, an “advertising genius” holds no chance against the bulk of digital people who make their creative talent visible - and available - the moment they turn their computer on. Worse yet, the traditional creatives focus on coming up with witty, funny, pretty or smart piece can turn into a liability: this is not a templated world, and thinking limited to 30 seconds or 50x100 pixels or in any other given frame is bound to fall short. For an ad solution to be successful, it needs to fit with the network of stuff that people are already doing, talking about, and acting upon. With all this collective creativity connected in a network, what are the handful of creatives holding fort in agencies to do? When no one knows where a good idea is going to come from, why limit it in advance to a creative team?

Slide 15: Traditionally, development of advertising ideas has been the domain of creative; their implementation has been the domain of media. Complexity of digital technology tests this dichotomy. It exposes the challenge of strategy versus its execution, and the problem of making predictions in an uncertain environment. Instead of facing a simple task of coming up with a creative idea and then strategizing its implementation via media channels, marketing teams today have to come up with solutions that mirror complexity of the entire digital environment. In traditional advertising, everything is templated. There is a set format, and there is a certain way that an ad spot has to be done: it has to have audio, and it has to have visuals, and it needs to go on for thirty seconds. But, in digital there are no guidelines.

Slide 16: I gathered here some campaigns/digital efforts that I think can serve as good examples of what best creativity DOES - and that creative solutions should do - in digital media. My criteria were simple.

Slide 17: The best creative solutions inspire community - enable people to gather around the idea, contribute to it, mix it, and pass it along.

Slide 18: Pepsi Refresh mobilized meaningful contributions from the community both in terms of submitting ideas and of voting for them. It represents a collective & collaborative platform that makes visible issues that local communities deal with, and help solve them through crowdsourcing.

Slide 19: Another version of the community idea is for a brand to connect with the most passionate fans of an activity (running, cycling, endurance sports, or in this case, minimalist running) and work with them to make the brand better. Out of collaboration with Anton Krupicka, a minimalist ultra-runner, New Balance came up with its minimalist running shoe. Passions of exceptional people ignite passions in others.

Slide 20: Group dynamic & ad-hoc collectives can also be utilized for a purely commercial purposes. Group Tabs created a win-win situation, where if enough people check-in at some venue, all of them get a deal. The model creates incentives for consumers to come in groups, and for venues to offer deals to boost their traffic and popularity. Good for business, and good for customers.

Slide 21: The best digital creative solutions do not start from scratch - they build upon, re-invent, and remix things that already exist. After all, the history of art is the best proof of this evolutionary dynamics.

Slide 22: To promote its new POPPY handbags line, Coach came up with the Poppy Project, where plugging-in a code on a blog connects it with everyone else who have done the same thing. A simple plug-in creates a network of diverse content destinations. It also creates a highly interactive and engaging web “trail.”

Slide 23: These days, The Art of the Trench is almost as iconic as the Burberry Trench itself. It also proved the point that some brand stories can provide the endless collective inspiration. A combination of crowdsourcing, beautiful imagery, quality product, and individual creativity contributed to the popularity of this creative solution.

Slide 24: Visa RightCliq turned the best of the web - data visualization & community & taxonomy - and turned into a super-useful decision-making resource.

Slide 25: Best digital creativity combines things that no one thought of putting together before. For example...

Slide 26: A simple solution that utilizes the possibilities of digital media to the max, Stickybits finally made the interactivity between people and products mainstream. It also turned products into media. 

Slide 27: Small things are usually the best. How many times have you been annoyed by having to type a nonsensical text into the little box? Well, nonsensical no more. Instead of random words, now you’ll be asked to type in ad slogans. There’s even a cognitive theory behind this idea: apparently, people tend to remember things better once they have written them down.

Slide 28: Zynga’s unlikely partnership with 7-Eleven created something new: use codes on products to accrue Farmville credits. Other retailers, like Target, have since jumped on the virtual currency bandwagon: Target recently started selling $15, $20, and $50 Facebook giftcards.

Slide 29: This is my personal favorite: never before have we been able to see actions, opinions, and emotions of others on such a scale than with digital media. An instant sense of community, a comparison tool, and a mobilization device, digital visibility helps us to literally and figuratively, see things differently. What are the benefits? From getting an immediate feeling of belonging to getting a map view of the trends as they are forming, we have never been more social.

Slide 30: Simple things, like exposing where a pack of chips originated, provides context for consumer goods and products. Behind every object, there’s a story. Why not tell it?

Slide 31: OK Cupid’s trends based on personal profiles reveals all our differences and similarities. And it’s quite hilarious, too. Update: Mint.com has last week also jumped on the digital visibility wagon, see here.

Slide 32: Now a classic, Netflix Queue Visualization map exposes what your neighbors like to watch. That sort of collective information has always been every anthropologist’s dream. Part ethnographic study, and part statistical analysis, exposing taste and sentiment-based data is as business useful as it is satisfactory to our curiosity.

Slide 33: There’s an enormous untapped area for marketing innovation, and it’s called people’s behaviors. Transforming some mundane and ordinary activity into something that’s more fun/easier/better is a sure guaranty of both brand loyalty and product sales.

Slide 34: This one is not yet used by brands, but it should be. “How About We” matches people based on their shared interest in doing some activity: going for a walk in a park, solving a crossword puzzle, or biking through the city. No more boring obligatory dinner dates: now you can get to know someone by actually doing something you are both into.

Slide 35: One day, a free wi-fi will become a norm in air travel. In the meantime, Lufhansa will take care of your social networks while you’re stuck on the plane.

Slide 36: Probably the best product/marketing idea of this year, Groupon offered deals with a social twist: it provides venues with a guaranteed mass audience, and because of it, it allows everyone searching for discounts an opportunity to save big. Now, the model is spreading to other areas, most notably travel.

Slide 37: While games have been an inherent part of human behavior since forever, only with digital media they were allowed to achieve the scale needed for marketing to pay a serious attention. The findings of behavioral economics, sociology of role playing, and incentive system studies started offering inspiration for and useful insights into ways to direct and shape human behavior.

Slide 38: Old Spice entered the hall of fame with the never-seen-before churn rate of videos that respond to users’ requests. While we often may think of digital interaction in different terms, this was interactivity at its best: it utilized the possibility of the medium to further a creative idea. It doesn’t get better than that.

Slide 39: Always a darling of marketing people, Uniqlo failed to disappoint yet again: it created an enormous WOM campaign by simply telling consumers that their tweets lower the price. Both brand buzz and discounts soared.

Slide 40: What is the best way to promote an already established (and loved) brand name than to launch a giant blimp? A simple sighting gets you a badge - and right there’s the motivation to look up at the sky. Of course, the whole thing has been made more fun/interactive by employing Google Maps, livecam, and through tracking & broadcasting the blimp’s movements via Twitter.

Slide 41: While all these solutions are getting a lot of attention (and customers), at the same time they represent a perspective critically opposite to ad industry’s view of creativity.

Slide 42: Case in point.

Slide 43: The missing link here is that there is the equation between marketing and creative. Creative solutions of 2010 and beyond have to have a business plan incorporated in them. In other words, they need to be able to make money (and to prove that they are making it) in the most direct and causal manner. Inspiring pictures and funny stories may indeed change customer perceptions and give a boost to brand equity, but when it comes to the moments of truth (buying a product/using a service), it is what customers do that matters.

Slide 44: This means that today’s advertising creativity has as much to do with observing, utilizing, amplifying, aggregating, and curating, as it does with storytelling.

Slide 45: This new definition marks a critical shift of creative solutions from messages and stories to actions and experiences. Best creative solutions of 2010 are all trying, with some success, to provide value. This is a very different approach to advertising creativity. Not a single example above demonstrates creativity in terms of “image,” “message,” “trust,” “expectation,” or “perception.” Instead, they peruse dynamics that’s best described in terms like “search,” “explore,” “discover,” “learn,” “discuss,” and “experience.” In the place of advertising creativity as something tangible, we now have creativity as the long network of tools and actions that, in one way or another, become part of our behaviors.

Slide 46: Borrowing from Charles Eames, I came up with this definition.

Slide 47: Think of advertising creative as a medium of behavior. No matter what solution you come up with, always ask: is it going to somehow change people’s behavior? is it going to become part of that behavior? is it going to be flexible enough to evolve with that behavior?

Slide 48: What does it take for digital creativity to happen? If the list above offers any evidence, the task is not about creation of brand images, storytelling ideas, and media strategy for distributing them. It is about creating conditions that allow something unexpected, fun, informative, communal, or helpful to happen. Also, almost by default, a lot of successful digital solutions have marketing built into their product. To take the definition of digital creativity as a plan for arranging elements further, I offer here the possible routes for executing this plan.

Slide 49: Management consultant Warren Bennis said: “There are two ways to be creative. One can sing. One can dance. Or one ca create an environment in which singers and dancers flourish. At the end of the day, to create something needs both.”

Slide 50: Well, that’s a good question. Digital space is rife with unpredictability. With each new technology, the unexpected behaviors only multiply. There is so much going on simultaneously and things change so quickly that no one, absolutely no one, can know everything that is going on. Making predictions on what people are going to like and respond to, in this situation, is close to impossible.

Slide 51: Still, it may be good to remember a few things.

Slide 52: It’s not enough just to release some commercial art piece and count on it to stir up consumers emotions; the hardest part always happens afterwards. In order to get a brand to be talked about and interacted with, an idea is only beginning of the job. The rest of the job here means coming up with solutions that build upon emotions long-term: for every idea that plays upon consumers' emotions, there needs to be a set of follow-up tactics that give it legs. Sometimes that means 24/7 engagement (Twelpforce Best Buy), sometimes facilitating a community (Ford Fiesta Movement), sometimes making something useful (Lufthansa's MyFlightStatus) or informative (Frito Lay's Chip Tracker).  Same token, I wonder where New Balance is going to take its Anton Krupicka partnership, and how Old Spice is going to continue interacting with its now considerable fan base.

Slide 53: Having a very narrow view consumers’ actions based on them rating something, updating, RTing, checking-in, clicking on, etc. prevents from seeing impact that our solutions have on the larger behavior that we want to change/inspire. Too often we think about the most effective communication channels for reaching consumers instead of asking how to align diverse behavioral tactics in order to achieve a desired change.

Slide 54: It’s always useful to wonder how different creative solutions will help consumers choose between different products/services/brands. That’s a good perspective that shifts the focus from the brand and its story to consumers and their point of view. To avoid the over-simplified model of consumers as beings with “limited info-processing capabilities” leading to the “cut through the clutter” requirement, the best is to think about creative solutions as resources. How do you help people make decisions? This sometimes means aggregating and curating stuff that already exists online (eBay, Lookbook, Nike+ Foursquare), using group dynamic as a resource (Groupon, Pepsi&Food52 recipes on Stickybits, Barcode hero), visualizing info (OK Trends, Hunch Taste Graph), or amplifying some behavior (Don Q’s Lady Data).

Slide 55: This means always think what comes next: how some particular tactic or solution can be linked to the next one, and the one after that. Think the rules of improv, and apply them to digital (COACH Poppy Project and Jonah Peretti’s Start The Adventure are good examples). The point is: address a campaign as an interconnected system, not as a story (DonQ’s Facebook page, DonQ’s Lady Data on BuzzFeed). Then, keep it alive.

Slide 56: Rather than chasing the latest digital gimmick, it’s always good to think about digital as a network of relationships that are made both of behaviors and technology. Then it’s possible to explore how to make some relationships visible (Netflix Rental Queues Visualization), how to create new relationships between people (HowAboutWe, RunKeeper, SKVNGER + BuyWithMe), how to create a new relationship between people and products (Tesco iPhone app, Uniqlo Lucky Counter), or between people and the brand (GroupTabs, Best Buy Shopkick), how to amplify/improve existing relationships (Pepsi Refresh Project), or how to simplify them (Rightcliq by Visa).

Slide 57: Any combination of digital/physical (Nike Livestrong Chalkbot, Schnitzel & Things iPhone app), brand/community (Burberry Art of the Trench), communication/behavior (MTV VMA’s Twitter Tracker), mobile/web (7-Eleven + Zynga partnership), game/activity (RunKeeper) is allowed. Especially the unexpected ones. The point is to stick together different things to develop something new. It would be easy to think of it as a simple recombination: what’s great about bricolage is that it uses bits and pieces of radically different media and behavioral dynamics to create new formats.

Slide 58: If you remember one thing here, it should be this: instead of facing a simple, clearly formulated task of creating an advertising campaign that “extends delivery of what the brand promised” to digital media, digital creatives are challenged to develop something new whose value they have yet to discover.

Slide 59: Or, in Mark Zuckerberg’s words: “We don’t know yet what it is. It’s like fashion. it’s never finished.” The same applies to our creative solutions. Never forget that web doesn’t have an expiration date. 

I have increasingly started to think that there isn't such thing as a "creative best practice in a digital age" and that proclaiming something as such is merely advertising talk. First, the idea of the "best practice" inherently contains replicability. It contains a certainty that, all things being equal, the results are always going to be the same. For this to happen, the environment needs to be stable, predictable, and controllable. Then, there's also measurability: deciding in advance on criteria for measuring success, and applying the same criteria across the entire environment. Tricky. Oh yea, there is also comparability. How is best practice compared to other, not-so-best ones? To claim that A is more successful than B, A and B need to be the same in all aspects except a single one, which critically contributes to the success of A vs. B. 

Just because some effort turned out to be a success - or because we proclaimed it as such post-fact -it doesn't make it the best practice. Why? Because digital environment relies on principles that exclude the very idea. You can't have it both ways.

Rules to Execute By

Once I put together a list of the best examples of digital creativity, I started wondering what does it take for digital creativity to happen. If my list offers any evidence, it is not about creation of brand images, storytelling ideas, and media strategy for distributing them. It's about creating conditions that allow something unexpected, fun, informative, communal, or helpful to happen. Also, almost by default, a lot of successful digital solutions have marketing built into their product. Groupon has done it really, really well; so has Pepsi Refresh Project, GroupTabs, and Best Buy Shopkick. To build upon the definition of digital creativity as a plan for arranging elements, I offer here the possible routes for executing this plan. 

1. There are no shortcuts. It's not enough just to release some commercial art piece and count on it to stir up consumers emotions; the hardest part always happens afterwards. In order to get a brand to be talked about and interacted with, an idea is only beginning of the job. The rest of the job here means coming up with solutions that build upon emotions long-term: for every idea that plays upon consumers' emotions, there needs to be a set of follow-up tactics that give it legs. Sometimes that means 24/7 engagement (Twelpforce Best Buy), sometimes facilitating a community (Ford Fiesta Movement), sometimes making something useful (Lufthansa's MyFlightStatus) or informative (Frito Lay's Chip Tracker).  Same token, I wonder where New Balance is going to take its Anton Krupicka partnership, and how Old Spice is going to continue interacting with its now considerable fan base. 

2. Build Media Behavioral Plan. Having a very a narrow view of consumers actions based on them rating something, updating, RTing, checking-in, clicking on, etc. prevents from seeing impact that our solutions have on the larger behavior that we want to change/inspire. Too often we think about the most effective communication channels for reaching consumers instead of asking how to align diverse behavioral tactics in order to achieve a desired change.

3. Enter decision-making game. It's always useful to wonder how different creative solutions will help consumers choose between different products/services/brands. That's a good perspective that shifts the focus from the brand and its story to consumers and their point of view. To avoid the over-simplified model of consumers as beings with "limited info-processing capabilities" leading to the "cut through the clutter" requirement, the best is to think about creative solutions as resources. This means aggregating and curating stuff that already exists online (eBay Lookbook, Nike+ Foursquare), using group dynamic as a resource (Groupon, Pepsi & Food52 recipes on Stickybits, Barcode hero), visualizing info (OK Trends, Hunch Taste Graph), or amplifying the behavior (Don Q's Lady Data). 

4. Get rid of dead ends. This means always think what comes next: how some particular tactic or solution can be linked to the next one, and the one after that. Think the rules of improv, and apply them to digital (COACH Poppy Project and Jonah Peretti's Start The Adventure are good examples). The point is: address a campaign as an interconnected system, not as a story (DonQ's Facebook page, Don Q's Lady Data on BuzzFeed). Then, keep it alive.  

5. Digital is not about the tools. Rather than chasing the latest digital gimmick, it's always good to think about digital as a network of relationships that are made both of behaviors and technology. Then it's possible to explore how make some relationships visible (Netflix Rental Queues Visualization), how to create new relationship between people (HowAboutWe, Uniqlo Lucky Counter), how to create a new relationship between people and products (Tesco iPhone app) or between people and the brand (GroupTabs, Best Buy Shopkick), how to amplify/improve existing relationships (Pepsi Refresh Project) or how to simplify them (Rightcliq by Visa).

6. Think bricolage. Any combination of digital/physical (Nike Livestrong Chalkbot, Schnitzel & Things iPhone app), brand/community (Burberry Art of the Trench), communication/behavior (MTV VMA's Twitter Tracker), mobile/web (7-Eleven + Zynga partnership), game/activity (RunKeeper) is allowed. Especially the unexpected ones. The point is to stick together different things to develop something new. It would be easy to think of it as a simple recombination: what's great about bricolage is that it uses bits and pieces of radically different media and behavioral dynamics to create new formats.

*My title is an obvious play on Bud's "Words to Strategize By" post that I very much recommend. But here's a twist: instead of being interested in the ideas that may guide our thinking, I was more into coming up with the possible rules of thumb for their execution.

Examples of digital creativity

I am very excited to be presenting as part of the Miami Ad School program in October (thanks, Mehera!). As part of my presentation on digital creativity, I have gathered here some campaigns/digital efforts that I think can serve as good examples. Because I believe that digital creativity can best be described as a "plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose" (Eames), I settled on the following criteria: a) ideas that enable/facilitate/inspire community well, b) ideas that curate/aggregate stuff that already exists on the internet instead of creating something new, c) ideas that combine things that were previously unconnected (this can mean digital/physical or app/web connections), d) ideas that make stuff visible so as to reveal collective trends/tastes, e) ideas that help people do something in the easier, better, and more fun way, and f) ideas that encourage some sort of behavioral dynamics (games, interactions, points, etc.) I also included some good ideas that are not used by brands, but that are executed well, and that solve some problem and/or respond in a new way to some need. This is just a preliminary list, and I'd love to add more based on your suggestions. 

a) Ideas that enable/facilitate/inspire community

Pepsi Refresh Project 

Ford Fiesta Movement

Groupon

Anton Krupicka + New Balance 

b) Ideas that curate/aggregate stuff that already exists online

Don Q's Lady Data on BuzzFeed 

COACH Poppy Project (disregard the visuals; the idea of the sites' trail is cool)

eBay Lookbook 

Rightcliq by Visa 

Burberry Art of the Trench

c) Ideas that make new combinations

Nike+ Foursquare

Best Buy Shopkick

Pepsi & Food52 recipes on Stickybits

Schnitzel & Things iPhone app

Tesco iPhone app

Nike Livestrong Chalkbot

Barcode hero 

d) Ideas that make stuff visible

OK Trends - data from OK Cupid

MTV VMA's Twitter Tracker

Netflix Rental Queues Visualization

Frito Lay's Chip Tracker

Hunch Taste Graph

e) Ideas that help people do something in the easier, better, and more fun way

HowAboutWe 

Don Q's Lady Data 

Twelpforce Best Buy

Lufthansa's MyFlightStatus

f) Ideas that encourage behavioral dynamics

Jonah Peretti's Start The Adventure (why can't brands come up with something fun like this?)

Old Spice

Uniqlo Lucky Counter

RunKeeper

7-Eleven + Zynga partnership

GroupTabs

Image found here.

Bright shiny things.

Apparently, there's a new trend in the advertising industry. I sadly missed it, but some people claim that the top creatives are getting bored. 

Now, I am not sure what exactly they are getting bored of, but I have a hunch. If I weren't belle de jour anymore, I'd probably also be annoyed and likely to blame everyone else for it: "oh, my job consists of too many meetings. This is no fun," "clients are 'know-it-all' assholes" and/or "people don't talk about my campaigns anymore." Absolutely heartbreaking, and I would be willing to shed a tear in that name, if I actually didn't know quite a few traditional ad creatives. Interesting breed. One told me a few months back that he'd love to go to Davos. Like, why? You make ads, my friend, and your only link to the world's economic imbalance is that you get 500K for it.

So when a dissatisfied traditional ad creative leaves their mother ship to create their own "incubator of breakthrough commercial ideas," I can't help but think that this 'new' trend in fact is masking something else. Because, when was the last time that a breakthrough commercial idea - the one that truly transcends the format of the medium - came from a traditional ad creative? Was it 2006? Was it 1993? A few days ago, I couldn't remember a single campaign of note. Instead, I could remember a lot of smart marketing ideas.

What it is masking is the fact that traditional advertising creativity has largely been marginalized. The "kick-ass" creative director and what he/she does is no longer culturally relevant as it used to be. Today's creativity is way more collective, iterative, and yes, humble. To deliver it, creatives got to move away from "I have an idea, and it's brilliant" MO: the artistry today is in creating environments where collective creativity can flourish.

Are the spin-off boutiques bearing the names of their founders such environments? Hardly. They, despite their fashionable mission statements, to the large extent replicate whatever David Droga or Gerry Graf have been doing all their careers and what they know how to do well.

It takes more than creating your own shop to catch up with creativity circa 2010. "For the unhappy creative mind still toiling in a big agency," Ad Age writes, "There are two choices: You can either, in Freudian terms, sublimate that ego or, in Lebronian lingo, you can take your talents elsewhere." Or - here's a crazy idea - you can realize that your creative talents need some serious updating. To be fair, there are notable exceptions: Edward Boches, an avid student by his own admission, did not decamp to create his own shop. Successfully, he is turning Mullen around from inside-out. 

As for others: rather than being misunderstood geniuses unappreciated in their time, traditional creatives resemble more divas well past their prime. When they complain they are not having fun, I think: that's too bad. Because, the rest of us are having a ball.

Image credit: "This painting is not available in your country" Paul Mutant, 2010. Acrylic on canvas 12" x 10"

The game of catching-up.

Agencies have an uneasy relationship with the "new generation of consumers," to say the least. Sure, stats like the above have become a must-have in any client presentation, there are slides on the trends of their behavior, there are audience insights and landscape overviews. But still, these consumers ("millenials", "gen Y", "superconsumers") are treated more as some special species from the future than as the everyday marketing reality.

Ok, this may not be completely fair. Agencies have been getting better in marketing to these people online - that is true. At the same time, the question is: do they really, truly understand how today's young consumers behave online, why and how they use the web, and how to resonate with them? Because if they did, would they still been doing what they are doing? This is, to the great extent, still brand-dominated world. The campaigns are approached from the brand's point of view, and retrofitted into consumer behavior. This is only understandable, since it is the brands that are paying for campaigns. Got to make a living. Still, how long this can go on, until the new generation of consumers completely slips out?

First, the "kids" who grew up with the Internet are not kids anymore - they are way past college, with a completely new set of needs, and consequently products, services and brands that can respond to them. What they are not past is their media habits and behaviors. You don't crucially change the way how you use the web and behave online just because you grew up - you further it and build upon it. The expectations that have been formed earlier stay. Don't expect that someone who watched TV shows online all of the sudden signs up for Time Warner - they may just hook up their computer to a flat-screen that they can now afford. Someone who shopped on Etsy may upgrade to Net-a-Porter, but the deal is the same. And so on.

Second, and more important for this present moment is that whoever is in touch with this generation changed their own media habits, too. Parents (and grandparents) are now on Facebook to keep tabs on their kids (or just plainly to connect with their long-lost high-school friends or play Farmville); they watch YouTube; they go to Twitter (can't beat all those coupon deals); and maybe even occasionally take a peek on Foursquare. And this is where the real challenge is: what we thought of as typical "suburban" parents are hardly such anymore. If we thought that we knew trends and behaviors of a certain demographics, we actually can't claim that today. All bets are off.

The point is that the change that new generation may be leading spreads way too fast to all other demographic segments. It impacts how other generational demos are consuming media, shopping, reading news, communicating, and interacting with brands. Because they all live in the same home, the gap between early adopters and the mainstream rapidly narrows.

So while agency teams are still building personas (btw, do people still do that?) with a photo of some edgy teenager, they may as well replace it with a young professional, college graduate, or whomever else fits the bill. Soon, it's all going to be the same media habits, brand expectations, and consumption patterns. It may finally be time to stop talking about the millenials, and start thinking about the millenial behavior. 

Note: this post was inspired by a brief conversation with Edward Boches and by this MediaPost article.

Small (Marketing) World

 
Marketing people love lists. They love making them, and then they love criticizing them. While the purpose of these lists is often unclear and their selections by default arbitrary, they can be said to offer a way to sort through people and bubble up those that are - by some criteria - better, more interesting, or more worthy attention than others.

Lists remind me of mass media. If you want to draw an instantaneous attention to something, put it on TV. If you want to draw attention to something or someone online, make a list. And here's the problem: web is not mass media. Web hates lists: it is a network, and if are to believe the bulk of research on how influence spreads there, we should value more a portfolio of "regular" individuals versus those who are somehow exposed (or, should I say, have a "voice"). Web is a cacophony of voices - and it likes it that way. 

In practical terms, that means that we would be better of with a number of lists, or better yet, with no lists at all. Alas, things don't work that way. If we brush off all ego-grudge aside, there's something to lists. Why? Because people also display herd behavior, are easily influenced by others, and are prone to do what everyone else does. It just makes their life easier and simpler: why think, when we can just imitate?

I myself am prone to the same faulty reasoning, as it has recently been fairly pointed out to me. For example, only 20% of people I follow on Twitter are women. Why? Well, let's see. If people imitate each other, and if same people are consistently promoted, than the likelihood that they as hubs are going to get bigger can only increase. Nothing succeeds as success, as the saying goes. This also leads to decreased diversity and to so-called echo-chamber. In network terms, the world can only become smaller.

And that's exactly where the problem is. Are we, as a marketing industry, becoming an increasingly shrinking world? If so, the future is not bright: we are in the vast - and expanding - distributed network of the web that does not operate on the principle of lists. So why do we, whose job is to understand this world? As anthropologists would say, the best way to understand a culture is to become part of it.

For the sheer fun (and fairness) purposes, I put together yes, a list, of people that amuse me, inform me, educate me, and entertain me on a daily basis online. I'd prefer not to have a list at all, since I love serendipity and chance of the web, but I gathered people who rarely, if ever, make any other marketing list. But since it's Friday, let's make marketing world a little bigger.

@its_amber

@dddiana

@michelletripp

@adbroad

@JBatistaa

@jesskimball

@colleddy

@alelariu

@fortheartofit

@soulkat

@cindygallop1

@marciikeler

@amalucky

@brainpicker

@tokyohanna

@marisazupan

@amklaassen

@luckthelady

@annaobrien

@NakedNY

@mikearauz

@koopstakov

@bud_caddell

@bmorrissey

@adrianho

@edwardboches

@Malbonnington

@copymatt

@peretti

Do we need a new definition of creativity?

 There are a few things that ad people like more than to call out for someone's portfolio when in disagreement with that person. In a more modern version of the "show me your portfolio" theme, this means asking the question: "yes, but why listen to him? what has he actually done? I mean, what has he ever made?" 

Beyond its occasional cameo in the spats that are advertising world's joie de vivre, this question is meant to mark a long-living perceived divide between people who make stuff - a.k.a. the creatives - and people who merely observe and talk about stuff - a.k.a. the strategists. Because, the reasoning goes, creativity is about "producing." In other words, to be creative, a person actually needs to make something tangible.

Hate to bring it up, especially because I don't have a portfolio to display, but this question doesn't make any sense.

First, it asks for a static commercial art piece (or a "portfolio" of these). Last time I've checked, those were very popular on television. Creativity regarded as a great copy, as an idea that makes a twist on a popular culture or that "captures the zeitgeist," or as a piece-of-art logo and print ad may indeed belong to the same era as those media that defined it. 

Second, the question asks for an individual creative genius ("show me what you've done"). Because, if advertising award shows are to be trusted, there are people among us who are very very talented in making pretty and funny stuff. Sometimes they even earn the title of "Sir" for it, but if the Queen is busy and that falls short, at least they get to be called a "Guru." Which may be, in spiritual sense, even better.

And third, it asks for an agency ("why would I listen to this guy?"). Now, this being an unfair world, there are some agencies that are deemed to be more creative than others. What that usually means is that they are considerably better in making commercial art pieces for their clients that guarantee that those clients will make a pot of gold based on them. To prove this point, Crispin - in a streak of its usual genius - created a campaign that revolves around measuring girls' butts for Old Navy. Don't expect of advertising to get more creative than that.

Ok, let's fast-forward now to creativity of the digital world. Here, most creative stuff that people create are relationships, connections, and interactions (think 4Chan model, or Tumblr model, or Twitter, or what any startup is building right now, for example). They connect tools with behaviors, with geo-locations, and with objects. They create networks or systems, if you will. To be creative there, you need to be, well, strategic: you need to figure out who connects to whom, when and why, and to what result. Simply, you need to plan for a chain reaction. 

So what happens next in this scenario? These networks then give way to a collective creativity to become visible for all to use it, build upon it, change it, and add to it. In the same way as the concept of "lone inventor" turned out to be a myth and the concept of "big idea" turned out to be hoax, the notion of "big name" in advertising may turn out to be a fake. 

Simply, an "advertising genius" holds no chance against the bulk of digital people who make their creative talent visible - and available - the moment they turn their computer on. Worse yet, their focus on coming up with witty, funny, pretty or smart piece can turn out into a liability: this is not a templated world, and thinking bound to 30 seconds or 50x100 pixels or in any other given frame is bound to fall short. For the ad solution to be successful, it needs to fit with the network created by stuff that people are already doing, talking about, and acting upon. Again, without a template to hold onto, one needs to be strategic. 

Finally, with all this collective creativity connected in a network, what to do with a handful of creatives holding the fort in ad agencies? As Edward Boches told me on Twitter the other day, "the most interesting stuff has been done with individuals: Lemonade, Uniform Project, Vaynerchuck - all better than brand farts." Why do we pay attention to them? Well, because they are doing something new, interesting, fun, and meaningful. And because no one knows where a good idea is going to come from, why limit it in advance to a creative team? 

The bottomline is that digital creativity may as well end up having to do as much with observing as it does with making.  Or, as Warren Bennis put it, "there are two ways to be creative. One can sing. One can dance. Or one can create an environment in which singers and dancers flourish." At the end of the day, to create something needs both.

All of this is fun stuff, and it's best to let people who face these challenges every day answer it. This is why I created an all-girl + a super-woman SxSW panel where one creative and three strategists talk about this stuff. Why all girl panel? Well, not to be all bra-burning about it, but hanging out only with guys can get so boring sometimes.

The future is uncertain, live with it.

The title (and the text below) don't come from me, but from this guy.

"Build yourself a network fast, by blogs, tweets or whatever, outside of the the organization. Find the intractable problems that face the people who run the organization: what keeps them awake at nights. Use that network to get ideas, adapt them to your context, use principles. Build capability, let the structure emerge, don't impose it."

While all of this sounds awesome, I'd have yet to see it in practice. Has anyone ever done it??

the problem of strategy

Once upon a time, everybody knew the answer to the question of strategy. But, don't be fooled: this fact has nothing to do with strategists' definitions of their own discipline; it actually has everything to do with an environment where strategies were executed. That environment was really predictable, clear, and stable.

There, strategists - not avid doers by nature - assumed a comfortable position of mostly observing the field from their elevated spot. Tricky as they are, they took pride in their talent of seeing everything that is going on in their business, brand, and consumer landscape. They were confident in predicting the next business move, and the next one, and the one after that. The whole strategic wisdom resided in optimizing a given set of alternatives, specifying a particular course of action, and committing to it. They knew what resources they had, they knew what their goal way, and simply enough, that their job was to connect the two. Sweet & simple, yet so antiquated.

At that ancient time, it was easy to say, "strategy is how you create value," "strategy is how you make money," or "strategy is how you use your finite resources to achieve your goal" (oh, actually: for some people, it's still easy to say that).

Ok, now, let's rewind to the present. What we are dealing with is messy, unpredictable, and hard to measure. It's complex. It's no longer possible to observe and predict enough to map out courses of action that guarantee desired outcomes. If you commit to a certain alternative, you may end up being dead. Turns out, a solid strategy may as well be your biggest liability.

In this context, we can't say anymore that strategy is "how we create value" and here is why. Simply, we don't know in advance what's valuable - or what may turn out to be valuable - to people online. Our criteria and our definitions of value don't work there. What the sources of value for people there are - free access, sharing, creating, participating, interacting - may not necessarily be valuable to business itself. In fact, it may seriously undermine it. Yet, there's ton of sources of value online. Best businesses of the past few years focused on making visible the network of connections between people, between things, and among the two. They didn't know in advance if there's any businesses value in those connections: they mostly believed that, if they create conditions for all those ties to be exposed, that new sources of value will emerge. And they did. How fast we run, how much gas our car uses, where do we go, what do we buy, what do we like, who do we talk to - all turned out to be potentially lucrative. Truth is, making this info visible also created new behaviors, changed how people do things, make product decisions, and form brand preferences. All of this unforeseen and sometimes not very obvious, yet very relevant. What these new businesses knew is that their strategy is a process of not creating, but understanding value: where it resides, how it has been exercised, and how it's distributed through this space.

And this is precisely why we also can't say anymore that strategy is "how we make money." Web certainly doesn't lack an entrepreneurial streak: people create value for themselves, and for each other; start-ups create value for people and for themselves. Is what's valuable on the web always (if at all) aligned with brands' money-making goals? Not necessarily. More importantly, should it be? Where exactly in this system either people or startups need to worry about if an advertising agency or a brand makes money? Further yet, why would they want them to make any money at all? And then, there's this trick: does the business of making information and connections visible - no matter how valuable - equal to making money? Not always the case. Facebook, for the longest time, didn't know what's its main source of revenue (our privacy?), Twitter didn't know (early bird?), and Foursquare still doesn't know. What they know - and know it well - is to react to opportunities that arise quickly and unexpectedly. And because these companies deal mostly just with creating conditions that make possible for the unexpected value to show up, they don't restrict their money-making options to a limited number of alternatives. Nor should they.

Then, here's why we can't say anymore that strategy is "how you use your finite resources to achieve your goal." Hate to break the news, but the resources are finite only if you make them so. What's worrisome here is the possibility that someone working online would even consider relying only on their own, by default limited resources, instead of utilizing the bulk of existing ones, or even creating conditions for new resources to show up? (No, I am not talking about crowdsourcing here, but basically about everything that people are doing online; all their actions can be used/amplified/facilitated/turned into a resource). At the end of the day, we are dealing with a hybrid behavior of people and technology, and the more distributed our resources, the better off we are. But, there's also something else here: on the web - it being so tricky with value and moneymaking and all - we often really don't know in advance either what resources we are going to need to achieve some goal or how to allocate them. Those who think they do, are either already out of business, or delusional (or both). For the rest of us, the best we can do is to see which connections have the biggest generative potential, and pour more resources into those.

So if strategy based on value predictions, projections, and finite resources doesn't make much sense anymore, what are we left off with? We got to accept that value online comes from very different and unexpected sources, and that we should not restrict our understanding if it in advance; that value is not always going to equal money on the short-term, and that this thus may not be the best way to inform our actions; and that our resources are as vast as we make them, and that how we allocate them depends more on the environment than on our strategic plan. Having all of this in mind, the best we can do is to try to work on providing conditions to make things happen: things like new behaviors, new connections, new sources of value, and new resources. The money will follow. Or not. But one thing is certain: the world that strategists work in is under active construction and there's no blueprint. For the first time ever, we are part of the construction crew: we are not directing it. And we need to reinterpret a lot of things that we have been regarding as fixed, and also probably come up with a new language to describe what the hell we are doing.

are you ready to blow your million dollar idea away?

If so, here's an amazing opportunity. MDC Partners offers you a million dollars for 51% stake in your new ad agency. Sounds like a sweet deal. A sweet deal for MDC, that is.

There's at least one problem with this whole idea. First, I can't help but think that it came a decade too late; back then, ambitious and smart people were obsessed with founding agencies, and the hefty amount would be more than welcome in those dot-com bust days. (A side note: even back then, doubt that someone would be happy with a 51% cut, but anyway).Today, ambitious and smart people fund their own tech startups, and in what may come as a great surprise to MDC execs, none of those startups deal with advertising business.

Simply, "great talent" today has actually figured that money's not in advertising. It's in many, many other things that you can create, build, and execute online. If brands wants to use those things - that's great. But MDC's criteria that, in order to be considered for their contest, you need to do "brilliant work, you want to make brands famous, and you want to drive results for clients" sound, in the context of digital innovation, close to arrogant. Guess what, smartest kids in town are a little bit more ambitious than making some brand famous.

Second, if the idea is so awesome, why VCs or angels haven't already thought of it? VCs are notorious for NOT investing in agencies. Now, those guys are entrepreneurial, money-making oriented people, willing to invest in anything and everything with a potential to return their investment. So, if they are investing in plethora of start-ups, yet curiously leave agency business aside, there must be a reason for it. Hint: not enough money.

And third: there may be, after all, some people who, in MDCs own words, say "let's spend our lunch hours for the next three weeks putting something together." I am sure there are plenty of those who dream about having their own agency during their lunchtime (for the rest of us is still hard to simultaneously sleep and eat, but those are very talented individuals). The main problem is that those people are going to have their own agency almost always through client relationships, or to put it more crudely, by stealing a client away from their current employer. Worse things have happened.

The bottom line is that all those smart, entrepreneurial, and driven people whom MDC wants to entice with a lucrative 49% offer are already doing something else. That something else is curiously unrelated to marketing communication, and now may be the time for MDC to ask themselves why (maybe someone should offer them a million bucks to figure it out, too. Wouldn't bet, tho.)

Not only those people are doing something else, they manage to find money for it without help of a traditional industry middleman, be it in advertising agency or a publishing company. Just ask Bud Caddell. Instead of asking a publisher to back up his first book, Bud has secured the funding according to the true rules of the web, by asking people to contribute through KickStarter (Bud's book itself is a collaboration, too.) 

But the biggest, and a very real problem is that brands have also figured this out. They are starting to give money to startups directly (think PepsiCo10) in exchange for collaboration in the relatively new marketing areas of mobile and social media. Some industry people have apparently figured some of this too, as they created Victors&Spoils. These things are new, interesting, and where the money and action are.

So, yeah, an awesome idea, MDC. I'd almost say "a million dollar one," but that brings me too close to home.

the problem of ego

 

It's not rare that advertising and ego go together. Just look at the recently ended Cannes Ad Festival - amid all that mad twittering about how many times someone has seen Ben Stiller, how hungover a person is, or whether someone has lost their voice from all those drunken conversations at the Gutter Bar - it is a celebration of individual creativity, personal talent & genius, and creative accomplishments in advertising. Yes, in advertising. You are not helping people do something better, you help companies to sell more products. Congratulations.

Yet, it seems incredibly hard to keep this perspective in mind, and to sort of realize that advertising celebrity is, well, not a "real" celebrity - if that still means anything. Just an example: the fact that Jeff Goodby is finally on Twitter even has become a recent news item in an industry trade publication. You can follow him here, if you get over the fact that, as a primer of sheer advertising genius, his name there is Jeff Badby. I am, personally, blown away by the creative twist.

Or, if you want to know Alex Bogusky's globe-trotting whereabouts, just go to the new MDC site. There, in Alex's own words, you can, with a little help of time slider, follow around MD execs. That is, if you really want to know. (I wonder if a paid team of paparazzi is next, just in case we are curious what David Doft ate.) Alex adds that MDC highlights great individual talent, and apparently, high-tech stalking is the best way to convey it. 

And exactly there resides the biggest problem of turning people who are successful in advertising into something of a rare and special species (of course, aside of the apparent obnoxiousness of that whole deal). And that problem is: if digital media offer any lesson, it is that creativity, talent, and an accomplishment are not an individual thing. Gone are the days of David Ogilvy and Bill Bernbach fame (actually, they are still alive and well in Cannes, not that anyone cares); new things are now are created incrementally, collaboratively, and interactively. The same way that small ideas fare better than big ones online, small contributions combined into something new and interesting that grows over time and through even more contributions, may as well replace a lone "creative genius" of the past.

So what do we have now? Aging "gurus" with their agency machines well oiled to generate "big ideas" vs. hundreds of startups with their small ideas + the digital environment that is exceptionally good in creating a shared value and in continuously introducing new forms of cultural capital. Who has, in the long run, better chances in succeeding? 

Of course, if everything else fails, ad execs can always put themselves in an ad.

The World Cup Coaches Remind Me Of ...

How big is "The Chance"?

Nike followed its "Write the Future" with the new online contest called "The Chance." Using soccer superstars featured in their (almost) universally loved spot "Write the Future", Nike hopes to inspire young soccer-wannabes to create their fan pages on Facebook, promote themselves there, and build a following in order to be selected for the Nike Academy Football Trials.

While this sounds like something coming straight from Simon Cowell's manual and thus may be thought to succeed just by sheer association, I still have my doubts. The idea for engagement is, in itself, not bad at all - it has a potential to generate a considerable buzz for Nike, and it has equal potential to solicit participation. 

Here comes a question, though: the requirement for participation is to be at least 18 years of age. At that point, most soccer-talented youngsters have already either achieved some prominence going beyond their high school soccer league, or are signed up by a team. So, why do they need to Nike soccer academy? Sure, some of them may come from the gravely disadvantaged regions, and this is their chance to raise to global prominence. I'd like to think that those disadvantaged regions offer regular high-speed Internet access required for participation in the contest.  

Where does this leave us, then? Will all those people who play soccer as a hobby, soccer fans, and amateurs. Can Nike academy turn them into next Ronney or Ronaldo at the age of 18 and more? Perhaps, but I wouldn't bet on it.

There's another thing, too. If research is to be believed, the Internet activity around the World Cup has reached the new high. Which means that people are actively looking up online for ways to express their fashion for soccer, connect with other fans, get information and commentary, and just participate in the discussions surrounding the World Cup. They are interested, motivated, and active target for all brands, and especially for the sports brands. Why not do something to help THEM instead have more fun, cheer their teams better, feel greater participation, and engage in a bigger debate? Granted, brands are doing some of this, albeit rather shyly.

At the same time, a simple Twitter update about the attire coaches choose to wear for the games has a potential to solicit a lively debate, like it did last night. Comments like "USA coach looks like a gym teacher," "British coach looks like he is on a museum board," or "German coach is an ad guy," poured from everywhere, adding up to each other. If I knew how to make things on the Internet, I would make a site where people can fill in who all coaches remind them of. At the end, there's a winner based on the most frequent association. Small and silly, but apparently something that spurs people's imagination and passionate responses.

This only reminds me that rarely brands encounter a target group of scale, passion, and participation than the World Cup gathered this month. I can't help but think that, this time around, Nike's missing its chance.

The problem with rich media ads

In fact, there are two problems. 

The first is content - it is really expensive to create an elaborate rich media ad. Also, the bargain is the same as with TV ads: invest a lot of money into something that you are not sure that people are going to like. The web environment also doesn't truly support it: there is already way too much content floating around, and people choose to talk about and share stuff they are interested in (yes, sometimes that content is brand content, but more often it isn't). And, shared content is viewed content. 

Instead of pushing for "brands should be publishers" idea, maybe we should instead push for "brands as connectors," where places like Buzzfeed monitor, amplify, and most importantly, sort content into categories like "soft drinks," "cosmetics," "food," "sports," "retail," etc. and brands get to pick and choose which content they would like to connect (and be associated with). Then, in real time, they distribute that content through ad networks, on Twitter mobile ads, or Twitpics, or however else they want. Renting is sometimes cheaper than owning, and also brands are renting something with a proven "shareable" value, because the content is something that people already like - and talk about.

The second, and more important one, is metrics. To me, it seems that it makes way more sense to use VEM (viral engagement metrics) instead of current PPC and SEM metrics. PPC and SEM metrics are rarely revealed, making it hard to really know what ROI of the ads were, and how they should be priced outside of cost of placement. Switching to VEM metrics however requires making rich media ads shareable, which is something that a horrifically little number of brands (if any) is doing right now. And if brands don't make their rich media content easy to share, how will people ever going to view it (outside of the page where it's displayed, which is a tough call anyway). The VEM idea may be a far fetched thing, but the one that makes sense nevertheless. 

At least it would be good if someone tried it.

digital product dev = branding

 Digital product development equals branding. 

If this view is not more popular, it's because digital marketing industry is dealing mostly with pre-Internet brands, trying to retrofit them for the internet. In this situation, they end up doing marketing instead of product development.

A few words about product development: it's based on solving problems, it's aligned with what people are already doing/talking about/behaving, and it's creating something that let's people do/talk/behave in a different, better way. It's awfully similar to the way web operates.

Why is this sort of thinking so hard to apply to brands? 

Sure, old brands are big, slow, complicated, and all of that. But what makes them truly different from digital brands is the fact that their product development and marketing are separate, and come in a "create a product"-"market the product" sequence. 

To make Coke relevant, P&G relevant, Walmart, or Nike relevant in digital is something that keeps many a CMO awake at night. In fact, it is R&D management that should be awake. Once digital becomes part of the product development process, then marketing those products is a breeze.

The problem here is that the burden of digital can't fall at the end of the value chain: to marketing, advertising, and promotion. When it does, then ... well, we have already seen what agencies can come up with. If they are stuck in "why aren't we more creative" limbo, it's because they are entrusted with an unfair task.

To really be relevant in digital requires taking a step back and realize that value chain is more of a Venn's diagram, where business plan intersects with user behavior, strategy, technology, user experience, and visual design. It's about keeping all those different views in play while making things. 

This is something that all start-ups and digital brands already know. They invest in their products, in making it relevant and continuously evolving: not because they want people to talk about those products, but because they want people to use them. Which means that they spend most of their time doing R&D. 

Digital is really not a marketing challenge.