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.

 

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. 

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.

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.

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.

ah, little prince.

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.

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!

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"

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 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.

The World Cup Coaches Remind Me Of ...

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.

V is for victory.

After I finished and defended my dissertation, I did not have a remote feeling of accomplishment. It was mostly a job finally done, after four solitary months of thinking, some more thinking, and writing. It was a project between me and my dissertation adviser. I didn't even feel a relief, and was wondering when the excitement and pride are going to kick in. 

And then, they did. Big time. For many people (me included) graduation ceremonies may seem corny and silly. But when I put that cap and gown, and had my name called in front of everyone on the graduation day, it hit me: this is pretty AMAZING. I wore the same clothes as my professors; our caps were octagonal instead of square. I am now one of them. 

All of the sudden, that single brief moment when I stood up and waved to a giant auditorium made everything worth it. For the first time in my life, I felt like I have something that no one, ever, will be able to take away from me. Ever. I accomplished something that not a lot of people can achieve.

This accomplishment may seem unnecessary. As my friend put it, getting a Ph.D. is like climbing: it's not useful, it doesn't help anyone, but once you do it, it's such a f*ing BAD ASS. Once you are at the top, you forget all the pain and sacrifice that got you there. The only thing that stays with you is the deep and overwhelming knowing that you, after all, have done it. 

And you feel a little bit like a bad ass yourself.

online, causality doesn't exist.

By default, the web is a network. When we say web today, we don't mean only "stuff online," but the whole digital ecosystem of interactive interfaces, smart objects, phones, and whatever else can interact. Now, if connections between people and things are like a network, then the difference between a "behavior" and a "mechanism" becomes a little bit irrelevant (just think Foursquare, Twitter, Nike+, or just about any app these days).

If every behavior is a bit of technology and a bit of our action, then we are actually talking about a network that is a combo of both. And when we start talking about networks, then causality becomes slightly problematic. In other words, digital really doesn't give us a reason to believe that either behavior or technology is something separate that causes immediate and apparent changes in one another. It's all about small & gradual changes.

This would all be cool if the marketing models haven't been based on causality or, on questions like "how is this effort going to impact behavior of this particular target?" or "how many impressions do we need?" or "how much media buy is going to cause this particular sales lift?" Everything people in marketing do is to create causes that (they hope) will result in certain effects.

But what if things don't work in this way? In everything we do, and in all (or most) decisions we make we look up to either to others or to an immediate context. We often do things because others have done them, or because they are easy and convenient to do, or because "one thing led to another."

This is where visibility of aggregated individual behaviors comes in: knowing how many people have already done something inspires and coordinates our own behavior. In turn, the ability to see actions of others, immediately and in aggregate, sort of changes how we talk about mobilization, organization, collective action, and movements. It's all about adding scale to the small & gradual.

Blue State Digital knows this, and a very few smart brands also know it, too. They let people to directly communicate with each other, organize their own events, and then record and share stuff they have done with the online community. Instead of dealing with the question of causality - "how is this message going to change this behavior," they focus on the widespread sharing of information about all the local, individual actions that happen. This visibility of collective "traces" then inspires a larger collective behavior.

The fun part is that, in the past, it took us years or even decades to gather this sort of composite data. At that time, when we could not see each other (literally), operating according the principle of causality (this brand/cultural/political representation caused people to behave in a certain way: shop, identify with something, or vote) may have been an useful social/economic invention. But today, choices, preferences, and actions of others are collected and exposed at an almost immediate speed. Networks and patterns made of small and local stuff form. Make that visible, and the whole new world opens up.

Still, for now, the only few times when we have seen this sort of local-actions-turned-networks that change our perceptions and behaviors were media events like Winter Olympics (Twitter Tracker), Super Bowl (reading Twitter was more interesting than watching a game), or MTV Music Awards (not sure how relevant that one was). 

Why don't brands do this? To remain important in today's world, the best strategy may as well be to expose a bit of it.

the marketing industry's cognitive blindness

In a recent NYT review of her new book, "The Art of Choosing," Sheena Iyengar says that "Human beings are born to choose. But human beings are also born to create meaning. Choice and meaning are intertwined. We use choice to define our identities, and our choices are determined by the meanings we give them, from advertising-driven associations to personal relationships and philosophical commitments."

To this, behavioral psychologist Dan Ariely, responds: yes, we may use choice to define our identities. But we are also hopelessly irrational. We may think that our choices are determined by the meanings we give them, but in fact, this is an illusion.

Why? We have, as humans, a need to create meaning. To do so, we tend - the same as with sight and memory - to fill the stuff in in order to close the gaps that we can't see, remember, or make sense of. And what we can't see or remember or make sense of, we simply invent. We do the same thing when it comes to our choices: we make a decision first, and then tell stories about it after the fact.

This is interesting. On a daily basis, each one of us make incredible amount of decisions based on limited information. Because we are not quite aware how we do it (cognitive blindness), we often resort to some form of rationalization and/or to claiming that we trusted our gut. And this is precisely what gets us into trouble: it opens up an incredibly vast space for systemic, predictable mistakes. In other words, out of our craving for meaning, we submit to illusions.

Alright, but how do we really make decisions then? Ariely claims that we in fact turn to local context to infer what we like and don't like. When situations are complex, defaults have incredible force on behavior. In other words, when there is a lot to choose from, we submit to people who make interfaces: who gather, organize, and present information to us and who opt to make some of that information a default. (Have you ever wondered why Amazon managed to sustain a continuous growth in the past two years when all other business suffered, or why in Fresh Direct-s "natural" navigation there isn't a single item that belongs to low-priced grocery?) Beyond just mere defaults, it turns out that social and cognitive clues in our immediate decision-making context count more than, for example, brand associations. A study titled "Rethinking Brand Contamination" demonstrated that people value luxury brands based on whether an individual carrying it wears expensive clothes or has a look of a rich person. Without these additional cues or context, observers were less likely to differentiate between regular and luxury products. Additionally, they were willing to pay a way higher average price for a luxury bag when they saw if against a neutral background. Another study, conducted by Nielsen Bases unit, found that in-store marketing has significant advantage over television as a leading medium for creating awareness of new products. What does this tell us about the way we define brand equity?

Then, in situations when people don't have anchor how to behave, which is the case when we create something new or design new environments (think Apple iPhone and iPad and Twitter and Foursquare), the latitude of defaults and design clues becomes enormous. When we make decisions, we make them in silos, and we don't compare them across categories. All it took Starbucks to establish its empire was to call its coffee a different name to separate themselves from other coffee shops (and to make us pay 3 times more for a cup of coffee than we normally would). Similarly, the genius of Apple was not to lose sight of elements of design of environments it created (including naming its product, iBooks being the latest example) - knowing that's an incredible force in people's decision making. While eBooks may have had been a failed concept in the past decade (and while consumers were ready to pay no more than $9.99 for an "e-book"), the books that we can now download on our iPads are called "i-books" (something associated with Apple) and they will cost more - as much as $14.99 - which we are ready to pay for.

While these insights might have had a limited business and marketing power at the time before digital media (brand advertising is what counted back then), today we encounter a digital interface in almost any decision that we make - from choosing two products in a store, to deciding how much money to donate to a political campaign, how much time to spend interacting with some brand or how much personal information to reveal while doing it.

This is to say that findings like above cannot anymore happily remain in the domain of "interesting things to think about" but should be taken seriously. Defaults, social and cognitive clues, and designs all have a powerful impact on our behavior. They steer us towards "self-herding", which refers to our tendency to, once we made first decision, stick to it. Our first choice also influences all consequent ones, and the reason we do so is that we don't remember our emotional states or why we made a decision - we only remember our actions. The only think we need to do then is to repeat them, and this is how habits (or, brand loyalty) are formed. In other words, it our actions create - they do not reveal - our preferences.

Ok, now back to Sheena Iyengar and brands. Results of her famous jam experiment started a powerful trend of thinking that too much choice is not good for us. But neither is less choice. Interesting part is that the way we talk about brands in digital environment today fits here perfectly: James Surowietcki and Umair Haque claim that too much information about products kills brands; Erick Schmidt and others, claim that information abundance, in fact, makes brand more important than ever. Those who are in-between say that we should think of brands as filters for all this information, which is just another way of saying that the only reason that shoppers don't suffer a nervous breakdown in a cereal isle is that they, in fact, eerily recall all those awesome brand associations that make their hand reach one box of cereal over another.

Where does all of this leave us? Instead of thinking like the little Goldilocks who wants "just right" amount of information to simplify things, we should in fact embrace complexity full-force and turn to exploring the ways we gather, organize, and present the crazy amount of information that we encounter every day. In other words, when we talk about choice today, let's talk now about defaults, social clues, product categories, and a design of our decision-making contexts.

People indeed do have cognitive limitations that skew their choices in certain ways that we are not aware of - that's a fact - but now they also have this powerful digital tools that can act like our decision-making scaffolds and that can make us aware of all our mental illusions that we could not see before. And our ability to see all those factors that influence how we choose may reduce our need to invent explanations for our behaviors.

The same goes for marketing. The way things are still largely done in the industry is make decisions first, tell enticing stories about it after the fact (which only left us with a profound disagreement on what kind of advertising slogans and marketing campaigns work and what doesn't). It is not surprising then that, when we encountered way too many gaps in behavior of people and technology, our solution was to fill them out with what "makes sense" to us based on what we already know (all cognitive errors work in the same way.) This, in turn, opened a vast space for systematic, predictable mistakes ("let's create another brand video game, and to hell with it.") Our craving for meaning as an industry allowed us to submit to powerful illusions - such are brand image and brand promise and our definitions of brand equity and brand value. This sort of cognitive blindness opens up some uncomfortable questions. But so what.

fun times

Just reading about the ideas behind these start-ups made me feel more excited about digital than any online marketing campaign i have seen last year. It really interesting how all those people are recognizing opportunities in the every possible combination of people's behavior and technology while ad industry is still sticking to doing what they have been doing for the past 100 years. (see Bergdorf Goodman ad above, for example). The full slideshow is here, and you can read the accompanying article here.

what is the color of a word?

I've just came across this little game over at Times Labs Blog. The game is fun enough, but what caught my attention was a description of our tendency to associate colors with objects: "Sometimes our color associations are “diagnostic” - heat being red, for example - but they can also be semantic, a product of culture: we associate red with danger because our society has tended to make warning signs red." I started playing with colors, and for me "stylish" is purple. For most people, it's black.

best find of the day.

This is incredibly true. What are the most popular marketing books?

(the quote found here).

Thinking about adventures.

That's my brother on this photo (no, not the bird). He is a credit derivatives structurer-turned-adventurer. Right now, he is in La Paz and has also recently visited Patagonia and traveled around Bolivia as well. I have eerily little interest in his travels, and I this morning I started wondering why. 

Of course, I love my brother and am interested in his life. It's just that talking about long stretches of traveling into awkward territories bores me. I also display minimal enthusiasm to be part of them. This is nothing short of crazy, since everyone loves to travel and everyone loves experiences.

Turns out, not really. I prefer being cooped up at home, reading the Internet or other forms of written word. That sounds horrible and also slightly sad. But that is what I really enjoy; I love learning about new things, and more than that, I enjoy finding out about unexpected connections between stuff that I already. Making new knowledge discoveries - that's something I could do all day.

So I guess both me and my brother are exploring new territories. It's just that mine are invisible.

Not sure if that's supposed to make me feel better, but it did.

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.

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.

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.

in the search of an ideal coffehouse.

Last week, I came across a WSJ article "Bringing the Buzz Back to the Cafe". The piece would have remained one of those "save for later, maybe read" things, if the subtitle of the sentence haven't captured my attention. It said: "Once they plotted revolutions, now they're typing blogs. Today's cafe society is a weak decaf."

I found it annoying.

It reflects a thoroughly modernist blindness in which cafes represent a physical blueprint of intellectual debate. More importantly, it reflects thinking that things should not change; and if they do, it's probably for the worse: "At any given moment, a typical New York coffeehouse looks like an especially sedate telemarketing center. Recently, there's been a movement afoot to limit the use of laptops. The laptoppers hog the tables, but they do the coffeehouse experience an even deeper disservice. They make it a solitary one, and it's a different kind of solitude from the stance sung by Hemingway. You're not just alone—you're in another universe entirely, inaccessible to anyone not directly behind you."

"They do the coffeehouse experience an even deeper disservice"? I find it strange to think that there is THE coffeehouse experience. I don't find it surprising, though. The idea of a coffeehouse as the iconic playground for rationality has most famously been immortalized in the Habermas' concept of the "public sphere". In public sphere, men come together to freely exchange their opinions and engage in a rational debate. It's a space free from both the materialistic confines of the market and bureaucratic confines of the state.

And if public sphere is a space of pure and unbiased reason, the coffeehouse is its physical manifestation.

Great.

In reality, Habermas' idea is narrow and hopelessly bourgeois (the women, the poor, the minorities are suspiciously missing from rational debate). It is also inexplicably stubborn.

From the article: "In the late 19th century, the global nexus of café culture returned to Vienna for arguably the greatest stretch of coffee-fueled creativity known to man. This is when every convention of the modern coffeehouse—the many-antlered coat rack, the marble tabletop, the day's newspaper spread Torah-like on bamboo holders—fell into place, and its role as the intellectual sparring ring was cemented." 

Intellectual sparring ring? Why? Just because a specific period of time (19th century in Europe) gave rise to a specific class (bourgeois) which find it convenient to gather at the specific public places ("salons" and coffeehouses) to do something (exercise their "rationality") does not mean that at all times, all people, all places and all activities possible there will display the same "intellectual sparring ring" quality.

This is obvious, and I think that more interesting is the question whether rationality should be used at all as a prototype for any debate. Debates are, more often than not, messy, opinionated, personal, and emotional. This certainly doesn't mean that their topics are such; only the way we address them regularly are. There is less than slight possibility that people are not so rational even in the situations when they are debating things that require the use of reason.

And finally: "And yet it seems that we're losing the coffeehouse—less to the usual suspects like the Internet and Dunkin' Donuts than to our own politeness. We've brought the noise level down to a whisper and are in the process of losing even the whisper: Enter the modern café and the loudest sound you'll hear will be someone typing, in ALL CAPS, an angry blog comment. We've become a nation of coffee sophisticates—to the point where McDonald's feels compelled to roll out some semblance of an espresso program—but we're still rubes when it comes to the real purpose of the place: It's not the coffee. It's what your brain does on it."

Human brain on caffeine can do a lot of wonderful things. Debate is just one of them.

proto-pie chart

A simple math to keep in mind tomorrow. The image found here.

instructions.

This, like many many other surprising and impressive things, was first discovered by a remarkable explorer of the Internet, Diana Hong.

i like this situation.

Something happened here. More good stuff on this blog.

New ownership?

A couple of days ago, I came across this site, Rent The Runway, done by Hard Candy Shell. The concept seems simple enough: pick a piece of clothing, order it + wear it, and then return it via mail. Something like Netflix model applied to (expensive) clothes.

I talked a bit over Twitter with my all-time fav creative director, Diana Hong about the idea (we said all good stuff). There are a few things that come to mind when you see something like this: maybe it can spur less consumption (after all people are not really buying, they are just renting); it democratizes luxury fashion by making it more available to everyone who pays a rental fee; it quickly surfaces popular stuff so it can be a great research tool for fashion brands; and it takes away the whole social/emotional vibe of buying (and owning) a piece of wonderful and expensive clothing. After all, the concept "retail therapy" has not been invented for nothing ...

But all these thoughts may be beside the point. What services like this (and Bag, Borrow, Steal and ZipCar before it) actually show is that people today are way more comfortable with sharing than any previous generation was. They are used to mixing, combining, and renting things when and if they need them.

It all may have started in digital, with music and movie downloads and content mashups on YouTube, and gradually evolved into a relationship with tangible goods. And this also means a different relationship to the whole notion of "ownership". Something to keep in mind if you are a brand ... and also if you are in marketing (reminded me of a pretty good post that I've seen a few months back, "Does Your Brand Rent or Own?" )

And ... as for this service encouraging less consumption: if music online is any indicator, people who download free stuff end up buying more music, not less, than those who don't ... Another lesson for brands?

An update: NYT's published today an article on Rent The Runway.

Three New Yorks.

I found this quote here.

this is why you should never ask people anything.

I believe that best ethnographic insights come not from questionnaires, but from observing people. A few weeks back, I saw this NYT article, "Calorie Postings Don't Change Habits, Study Finds", which explored if and how posting calories in fast food restaurants impacts people's choices of what to order.

The results showed that people made less healthy choices in spite of visible nutritional information (or, maybe because of it?). That is, before the labeling law took effect, fast food restaurant orders had a mean of 825 calories. After the info was posted everywhere, this mean climbed to 846.

Here's a more interesting part, however. The study found that about half the customers noticed the calorie counts, which were prominently posted on menu boards. About 28% of those who noticed them said the information influenced their ordering, and 9 out of 10 of those said that they had made healthier choices as a result.

But when the researchers checked receipts afterward, they found that people had, in fact, ordered slightly more calories than the typical customer had before the labeling law went into effect, in July 2008.

Really? I don't think that those people intentionally concealed the truth - I think that they simply scrambled to rationalize why they choose to disregard the nutritional information.

First, when faced with a choice: healthier and more expensive vs. less healthy and less expensive, people choose the latter. For study participants, buying food is a price-sensitive situation, and while they certainly notice any information added to the price, it does not affect the choice. It's simply not relevant.

Ok, so this explains why 50% of people reported they noticed calorie information. But why almost 28% of them said that they made healthier choices as a result?? Well, they either: a) truly believed that they made a healthier choice, all information notwithstanding or, b) because they simply adjusted their responses based on their assessment of the survey expectations. Simply, they offered what they deemed to be a desired response.

And this is why surveys suck more often than not.

Also worth noting: information does not change habits. At best, it creates a temporary cognitive dissonance. What changes a habit is creating another, conflicting, habit. That, or peer pressure.

(the image above is Windows 7 Whopper, sold in Japan).

balloons in the sky (no, not that one)

Sometimes, the only thing to you need to do to cheer yourself up is to lift your head.

random archeological discovery

On Saturday, I was doing my first get-serious-and-clean-your-kitchen thing. Like, get-really-serious. This seriousness included climbing over kitchen elements (even the hanging ones) in order to reach places where sun doesn't shine. In one of the forgotten cabinets, I found this.

The moment I saw a tape my imagination started reeling, like "oh, did someone leave it on purpose?", "did someone put it there and then forgot and then desperately searched for it for years to follow?", "what's on it?", "a message for future tenants of this apartment?", "a riddle?", "one of the worlds greatest mysteries?", "the best song ever made?"...

And then I realized there's no way I will ever find out. I don't have a cassette player. I am not even sure where to buy one.

That's what happens when a technology dies.

Message in a bottle, on the other hand ... well, that's timeless.

If the wrong person always wins, how do you know who's the right one? And more importantly, do you care?

The other day I came across this very amusing article, "The Case Against Awards: Why the Wrong Person Always Wins", published in The New Republic. The basic idea of the article goes something like this: the awards system is by default flawed and, more importantly, so what? "So what" - exactly. 

Funny enough, those who are the most vocal about the unfairness and/or futility of the awards, the author observes, are those who - paradoxically, perhaps - care the most: "Those most convinced that, say, the Oscars do a horrible job of rating films are the very people who cling to their emotional investment in the outcome," he writes. And, a bit later: "Magazine writers tend to be both obsessed with who wins and convinced the process is a pathetic joke." I can't help but see a parallel to advertising industry. But again - so what? It's all for the show anyway.

The question here is not one of the awards at all - it's the one of sociology. The organization of human groups are rarely chaotic for a long time, if at all. There's always some form of order based on horizontal or vertical distribution of authority, power, and accountability. Games people play to reorganize the ties of power and authority are, for me, one of the most interesting domains of sociology and psychology.

Best part here, though, is that a game becomes increasingly more complex as the objective criteria of authority/power decrease. That is, as we move from matters of survival (where the winner is obvious - just think Darwin Awards) towards the matters of taste, the ranking becomes arbitrary. In short, there's no way to prove it.

Who judges these awards, at the end of the day, is really not important. Either way, we won't like the outcome.

(the image is from the Creative Faceoff.)

something out of ordinary.

Yesterday, I've come across a NY Times article "How Nonsense Sharpens The Intellect". It talks about how unusual things, anomalies, and absurdities prompt the brain to (frantically) search for meaning, and thus facilitate discovery of patterns that would ordinarily remain unseen. In short, when faced with the inexplicable, the brain scrambles harder to find some order.

A quote from the article: "The brain evolved to predict, and it does so by identifying patterns. When those patterns break down - as when a hiker stumbles across an easy chair sitting deep in the woods, as if dropped from the sky — the brain gropes for something, anything that makes sense. It may retreat to a familiar ritual, like checking equipment. But it may also turn its attention outward, the researchers argue, and notice, say, a pattern in animal tracks that was previously hidden. The urge to find a coherent pattern makes it more likely that the brain will find one."

My first thought was that these findings can be taken in so many directions. Like, looking for inspiration in unexpected sources, for example. A few excellent planners I know never actually read other planner's blogs or marketing-related stuff. They read sociology, psychology, economics, design, fashion, and a lot of crazy, super-creative stuff on the Internet. Why? Well, in a way, an unknown/unpredictable situation is similar to an absurd one (in that they both lack a pattern) so, somehow, it makes more sense to look for its meaning elsewhere. Brain indeed does scramble to put a coherent situation together, and one way to do so is to re-cognize patterns that it seen/heard somewhere else. So reading about various stuff not only helps inspiration, it also offers a pool of latent knowledge that help us make sense of the unknown when a brain sees fit.

Then, another thing is that we tend to remember more - and longer - things that violate our logic and expectation. Like David Lynch movies, or Bunuel movies, or some of Murakami's stories, or that stupid Dennis Lehane novel that ended unexpectedly and didn't make any sense and that I still occasionally think about two weeks later. We simply invest more of our resources - time and mental energy - to reach (any) closure. And when we think hard about something, we are likely to reach an explanation (even a very far fetched one).

And now I am curious why the brain can't stand absurdity.

nerdiness has just reached a new level

Google outdid itself, to celebrate 60th birthday of a barcode. Nerds everywhere approve.