i [love] marketing.

In 2009 ...

... I have written 250 posts that had elicited 358 comments. 

Read 34 books. Zadie Smith's essays "Changing My Mind" was my favorite.

Met in person some smart and interesting people: Amber, Johanna, Faris, Mike, Lauren, Bud, Clay, Chad, Jonah, Michael, Adam, Ivan, Alan, and Michael Lebowitz. Also met a lot more of them online.

Worked for some smart and interesting people: Rick, Benjamin, and Noah at TBG and Gene at HUGE.

Read 52 issues of the NewYorker. Favorite articles: "Hellhole" by Atul Gawande, "The Fifth Blade" by Adam Gopnik, "Nightmare Scenario" by Margaret Talbot, "Searching for Trouble" by Ken Auletta, and "Offensive Play" by Malcolm Gladwell.

Wrote 88 pages of my dissertation.

Ran probably around 400 miles, and swam around 50.

Published 2 articles in AdAge.

Went to Croatia and back.

Ate 26 lb of meat.

Read countless blog posts and articles. I found a lot of them noteworthy and organized them by topic: digital; design; branding; user experience; finance; economics; psychology; sociology; fashion; theory; social media; and marketing.

As a result, spent 2,920 hours in front of the computer this year.

Bought 1 iPhone. Also bought 1 computer chair. 

Attracted 612 Twitter followers, and 46 new Facebook friends.

Got into ? unnecessary conflicts with people.

Enjoyed Diana Hong's blog.

Lost 1 internal organ (appendix).

Took 563 photos.

Spent $321.21 on iTunes.

George Parker attacked me 1 time on his blog.

Saved 2,188 bookmarks on Delicious.

Spent $$$ on clothes and travel.

Went out 200 times.

Was 1 time a guest speaker at BeanCast.

My articles in AdAge attracted 63 and 94 comments. 50% of them were vicious and personal.

Saw 130 movies this year. Went to movie theater 26 times. Favorite movies this year: "Anvil: The Story of Anvil", "Fantastic Mr. Fox", "12" by Nikita Mihalkov, "Up", and "New York, I Love You".

Got 78 points in 1 Scrabble move.

Made 2,206 Twitter updates.

Had a lot of fun in 2009. Happy New Year.

recombination is not enough.

Yesterday, I've seen Adrian Ho's post "Blending Skills in New Ways" over at Zeus Jones' blog. It reminded me of stuff that I read in organizational theory a few years back. Mostly, it reminded me that recombination is not sufficient for innovation.

Instead, it is a productive friction between multiple perspectives that secures continued adaptation in the face of complexity. While Joseph Schumpeter did say that innovation is recombination, he also said that innovation is deeply disruptive of the things that we, as professionals, take for granted in our work. This means that the more disagreements and disruptions we can create in our organizations, the better off we are.

Why is this the case?

More often than not, we start client’s challenges these days without really knowing in advance what the solution will be. We also don’t know which solution will succeed. This is because we are not addressing a specific, neatly formulated problem - we are addressing the whole complex brand’s environment.

Innovation involves bringing together incompatible and diverse points of view, and this process is not harmonious. Every time there’s a successful recombination (think Twitter, for example: it’s a combination between people’s tendency to lifestream and a txt-like technology), it is only because the technology and strategy worked from the starting point of their differences. The Twitter team didn’t know what they will come up with, simply because they didn’t in advance formulate the problem as “let’s make Twitter.”

If they did, then the question of innovation would be the one of mere implementation - which is what people who are savvy in both strategy and technology do: they  are capable of implementing their ideas. But, these days, we need a hell lot more than just implementation.

So, rather than altering your production staff or replacing your strategic resources, it’s better to let them keep their differences and make them interact as much as possible. In the resulting productive friction reside solutions for the complex problems.

Google doesn't advertise? Think twice.

In the past month, I have seen two very good examples of online marketing. Today, Adrian Ho shared the third one. All done by Google.

First, there is "Send a Christmas Card", for free - courtesy of Google. It works like this: there's a selection of Google-themed Christmas cards, you pick one, enter your email address, your friends email and mailing address, and you are good to go. Google sends a postcard to your friend (and collects A LOT of emails in the process).

I have just checked the page now, and the initiative apparently worked - all Christmas cards are out. (Ah, the people are so predictable ...). What in fact happened is that Google combined people's perception that the brand doesn't advertise with giving stuff away for free, which is what people love the most. Good job, Google!

Then, there is "Give Chrome for the Holidays." The promo tagline is: "Google Chrome is Now Really Easy to Share. So if you are looking for gift ideas, why not wrap up Google Chrome with one of our shiny artist themes and give the gift of super-fast browsing. Google Chrome is so simple to use, even your grandma will love it." Well, I don't know about the grandma, but I am sure that geeks and their friends everywhere have already bit the bait. This is a lesson 101 of how to spread the word (and make people adopt your product faster) by being "helpful." Again, Google doesn't advertise. It just really invests in its customers. Good.

And then, Adrian took a photo of Google's gift - "We're the favorite place" from Google maps. This one is real simple and easy and very very promotional. It's a nice touch that just makes us love Google a bit more. After all, who doesn't want to be a favorite place?

What's interesting here is that, if any other brand have done the same thing, it would be sneered upon as a marketing gimmick. But - by carefully playing by the rules of online marketing (don't shower people with ad messages, create a lot of interlinked services to lock-in customers, expand the category by spreading to adjacent markets, and yes, don't be evil), Google managed to position themselves as the brand which does not advertise - but the one that invests in customers.

And, as we know, all good investments pay off.

hello.

From the lovely blog that I re-discovered this morning.

buttons for emergency situations!!!!!!!

 A perfect discovery for a silly Monday afternoon. Thanks to Daniel Granatta, I stumbled upon a this goldmine. My fav so far is Drama button. I need to remind myself to press it frequently and a lot.

(Also worth mentioning: Sad trombone via Mike Arauz and Nooooooo! via the Internet).

the evolution of cute.

I finally got around to reading Vanity Fair's article "Addicted to Cute". The article makes quite a few interesting points about our (Western) obsession with "cute", all of which revolve around human's evolutionary wiring towards protecting everything that has big eyes, round face, and button-like nose. It also makes an argument about our need to regress to the safety of childhood when faced wit difficult social/economic times. And there's also a bit about how we use cute photos when we want to present ourselves in a non-threatening and likable way. The article claims to be inspired by a recent wave of movies like Fantastic Mr. Fox, Up, Wall-E, Ratatouille, WTWTA, etc. which are aimed to adults as much as they are for kids (if not more). That is, it seems like grown-up, complex emotions, are communicated via heartbreakingly cute animated characters.

This is interesting.

All of this it's surely not that new, since anime and manga have been around Japanese culture for almost a 100 years now. But still, popularity of cuteness in the Western World seems way more recent:

"For generations, kids couldn't wait until they reached adulthood, so they can smoke, drink, eat four-course meals, make money, drive cars, have sex. Now we would rather log on and tune out, preferably in the womb-like comfort of a Snuggie, which is the perfect thing to wear as we gaze the photos of kittens while gnawling on delicious cupcakes."

My quick and dirty take on this trend is that it's somehow related to digital technology or, to the fact that everything we do today is to some extent digital. But rather than thinking that cuteness is a way for humans to avoid "coldness" of the digital, it's actually quite the opposite. Digital teaches us instant gratification, immediacy, constant novelty, a million possibilities, split attention, and playing with stuff. Which are all child-like habits and behaviors and values.

So, if cool was the culture of the 60s, and cheesy was the culture of the 80s, cute might as well be the culture of digital. If we all behave like kids online, we need, well, some cute toys to play with there.

i don't care about why people do things, i care about how they do them.

On my way back from Thanksgiving, I read some chapters from Malcom Gladwell's new book, "What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures". In this case, the "book" is actually a collection of his NewYorker articles + a preview. Something like a "greatest Christmas songs" mix ...  I have no idea why I actually picked that book up, since I am not really a fervent reader of Gladwell's (mostly because I think that his very good observations are way too often disguised as a true insight). Anyway. It was a fun read.

In the book, there's a chapter on hair color and advertising and getting the consumer psychology right. Gladwell writes about the relationship people have to the products they buy, and about advertisers realizing that "unless they understood the psychological patterns of that relationship - unless they can dignify the transactions of everyday life by granting them meaning - they could not hope to reach the modern consumer." Hence the focus groups: "Focus groups are aimed at discovering people’s motivations in buying products. Up until 1940s, advertising research had been concerned with counting heads - with recording who is buying what. Motivational researchers are concerned with why: why people buy what they do? what motivates them when they shop?"

This reminded me of how much the things in advertising have changed.

In digital, we surely think about the relationship people have to the products they buy. But we try to figure it out more through observing people's behavioral patterns then through thinking about often obscure consumer motives. In a sense, our job is easier - online, almost every action and behavior is visible. Which frees us up to replace tricky psychological "understanding" with a simple observation. Often, do we really need to know what people think, if we can see what they do?

And this is why we are focusing the question of "how." Thinking about why people shop/run/use services/enjoy content can be a tricky game, but designing conditions so people shop more easily, more often, and in a more fun and functional and social way, is indeed going to make them shop more, run more, consume more content, and to want to do all of it more often. 

And so it is.

people under influence.

 

I find it interesting how the question of influence is always addressed from the influencers' point of view. It's always, how big is someone's social network? how many people they reach? who is the most connected?

Very rarely, we talk about following.

This is, of course, not entirely surprising. In our culture, influence is equaled with originality, creativity, uniqueness, creation, and all of that. In contrast, following is about imitation, receptiveness, replicating, adopting, etc. Naturally then, everyone wants to be (or to think about themselves as) an influencer. No one really wants to say, "I am a follower."

Yet, we all are.

Some of the people I enjoy following on Twitter the most are those who are easily influenced themselves - they are curious, they like exploration, and they always discover unexpected things. Everything seems to influence them - new ideas, new stuff, new content. They don't really create any of that, they are just really receptive, really imitative, and really susceptible to influence. Truth is, if they weren't so easily influenced, they would be able to share so much stuff with others.This is of course not incredibly new. My friend Duncan has been talking about "easily influenced people influencing other easily influenced people" for a while now. But what reminded me of all of this is actually a recent Fast Company article "Is Imitation the Hidden Key to Creativity?", and its (much better written) original source, "The Curious Threshold for Creativity". They talk about a social study that explored how ideas spread and discovered that about "30% of people should create while the rest imitate." This may sound weird taken out of context, but it points out to a bigger idea of the article: "organizations and societies that spend too much time on ideas see their overall fitness decline." Which then reminded me of the exploration/exploitation balance thing from some time ago...

More interesting, tho, is a conclusion that creative ideas can spread if they are actually adopted by others. This means, in order to encourage adoption of an idea, you don't need a handful of influencers, you just need a really lot of followers.

p.s. And sometimes, a mere exposure to something actually works really well. Which makes all those "let's create a cool ad campaign", "make something interesting", and "do big ideas matter?" discussions a little bit, well, irrelevant. Too much creativity and not enough imitation "makes ideas die, because there are so many of them and few ever catch fire." Imitators, as it turns out, play an important role in society: they act as a kind of memory, storing the successful creative stuff for the future. I'd really like to hear someone to say, let's reach the followers.