i [love] marketing.

Saks Fifth Avenue brings its holiday display to your inbox

Saks Fifth Avenue is pretty famous to NYC visitors for its holiday window display. So famous, in fact, that there are crowds lining up to see it and that its unveiling is an event. This year, Saks decided to bring its window display to its customers. This premium department store created a video of the holiday display launch moment and the full program (while I am not a fan of this sort of entertainment, some parts of it are pretty good). Some parts of the entire video-launches-in-another-pop-up experience are definitely clunky, but the idea of bringing a small piece of luxury to consumers is valid. Smart part is adding product recommendations together with the video, so inspired customers can turn to transaction immediately. A great example of content & commerce combo.

See the video here.

Amsterdam to become Europe's first shareable city

Dutch have proven to consistently be the most open-minded, innovative nation around. The latest: unlike New Amsterdam (ahem, New York), Amsterdam embraces AirBnB on the following grounds:

"A phenomenon like holiday rentals fits a city that values freedom of choice and connecting to the rest of the world. It also makes better use of the housing stock, can be a touristic economic stimulus, and apparently fills a need of today’s tourists. Because of this, apartments are not empty during absence and the city’s tourist offering is more diverse. It also fits the strong development of social media and the tourist preferences to “live like a local.”(Amsterdam, 2013)

Keep innovating, Amsterdam. Source: Collaborative Consumption.

Burnout

Found here. 

"The stories and legends of the great end-ups that inspire most great start-ups – think of HP, Apple, IBM"

"End-ups have learned to manage scale, and have accumulated wisdom over time; start-ups have the benefit of the agile beginner’s mind. The challenge for both is to seek greatness by learning from each other."

A great John Maeda read.

"We have to innovate innovation itself."

 "Why are we funding these really silly internet companies and not major life changing innovations? Why is it that all of my peers are inventing little dinky iPhone apps instead of planes, trains, and automobiles?

I feel like this is a really important question. Because, if as a country, America is going to continue to lead in innovation, we can’t be spending our time developing toys. We have to innovate innovation itself. In fact, I’m actually not the first person to bring this up. There are a lot of thinkers surrounding the entrepreneurial space who have been asking this same question: Why are so many startups today creating such meaningless products?"

See the rest of this excellent read here.

Technology is society made visible or, why Amazon Reviews are your next next digital ethnography tool

One more thing from the digital enthography department. Read Amazon reviews, and read them carefully, as that's apparently quite a lucrative business. FC has recently written about a mysterious company named C&A Marketing which does exactly that. They have an entire team who read Amazon reviews, screening them for comments like "I wish this speaker were rechargeable," and then makes exactly that.

For those less entrepreneurial, it still provides a goldmine of ideas and inspiration. How does it work? Well, pick some brand's product and also pick competitors products. Read what people are saying about what works. More importantly, read what they are saying about what doesn't work. Build your strategy around it. 

In this age of digital visibility, planners don't need anymore to wreck their heads to come up with a competition/brand/product/category thesis and then do everything in their power to prove it. They can merely generate a hypothesis and turn to a load of visible, human, freely volunteered information to either confirm it or not. 

Simple.

Your next digital ethnography tool

Planners, rejoice. Here's the new spiffy tool to quickly find out what people are saying about a brand across social media platforms (the engine searches Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook, Vimeo and Flickr), what kind of content they are associating with a brand and what's the context of the brand mentions. All in one place. I'm a fan.

 

The pattern of disruption

I came again across Clayton Christiansen's pattern of industry disruption this afteroon while reading some article. Christiansen summarizes this pattern via three simple steps (I advise writing them down or else remembering them).

1. New competitors with new business models arrive.

2. Incumbents choose to ignore the new players or to flee to higher-margin activities.

3. A disrupter whose product was once barely good enough achieves a level of quality acceptable to the broad middle of the market, undermining the position of longtime leaders and often causing the "flip" to a new basis of competition.

Applied to AirBnB as a distruptor and the hotels as the incumbents in the hospitality industry, these three steps look as follows.

1. New competitors with new business models arrive. AirBnB's innovative business model revolves around creating a platform that connects supply of available accomodation and demand for this accomodation in a new way (by defining available accomodation in terms of people's owned or rented properties), and collecting a fee in the process. 

2. Incumbents choose to ignore the new players or to flee to higher-margin activities. Major industry players like dismissed AirBnB and sometimes even say things like this: "Quite honestly, I had to google what [Airbnb] actually means, which shows you how much we pay attention to it," "It's a gnat on the dog's tuchus. "It might itch, but it's not a game changer" and "I think it’s serving people who didn’t travel because they were scared, or couldn’t afford it, or use it because it’s an antidote to loneliness." 

3. A disrupter whose product was once barely good enough achieves a level of quality acceptable to the broad middle of the market, undermining the position of longtime leaders and often causing the "flip" to a new basis of competition. AirBnB has recently hired founder of the Joie de Vivre boutique hotel chain, Chip Conley, as its Global Head of Hospitality and Gowalla's co-founder to joing their mobile team. AirBnB today has more than 10 milion nights booked and there is a rumor of a $2.5 bilion valuation. The start-up is expected to overake both Hilton Worldwide and InterContinental Hotels Group in 2014 as the world's largest hotelier. Take that.

Utility wins. Utility always wins.

GAP has recently unveiled its "Reserve" program, allowing shoppers to place a claim on a piece of clothing online, and pick it up in store. Right now, the program is in its pilot stage, with only selected stores participating. Once it becomes a standard practice, however, it will probably prove to be a successful way to counter the ever-growing practice of showrooming.

There is a ton of other benefits, too. The program reduces the risk of online shopping, which is still a factor in online purchases, despite numerous product exploration tools. Users can simply try on their selected item at a nearby store. The program also drives shoppers to store, where they will continue browsing, and very likely, add items to their purchase. Finally, there is a big element of exclusivity and good customer service. The "Reserve" program, above all, makes things more seamless for the user - ensuring their brand affinity and loyalty.

I find it interesting that best innovation in retail comes from mass retailers (think H&M and Target collaborations, Walmart's Lab, Zara's monthly catch-it-or-its-gone trends, or Macy's recent introduction of Shopkick) vs. premium and luxury ones. It's the matter of incentives. But, the more affluent people have, the more money's to be made on the less affluent ones. There's more of them, too, anyway.

All in one

Or, more precisely the Multi-pass will be coming to your town in 2015. This all-your-transportation-in-one-place is the latest in the trend towards end-user consolidation of services. From travel (Kayak) to banking (Coin), innovation revolves around aggregating multiple information streams into a sleek, clean, easy-to-use interface human-facing interface. In its best form, this is reduction of complication, while keeping complexity of the system intact.

The idea behind Multi-pass is to fold in one single ticket your train, metro, bus, car parking and possibly air passes (think the Fifth Element situation). Everything that has to do with moving a person from point A to point B now is in a single ticket. The secret is in e-ink screen, that displays barcodes for relevant transportation operators to scan and let you go through.

Let's just enjoy this idea for a moment before starting to think about all the challenges that it's bring for our privacy.

The ultimate cooking app for the people who don't care about cooking or, why innovation sometimes isn't about constantly making new things

This app is pretty smart, and it comes from the "how to make people's lives better in a way that makes sense and that doesn't make them consume more stuff" department. Su Chef is an app that helps random/busy/untalented/uninterested food shoppers combine the random food they just purchased into something non-random, a.k.a. a meal.

At the core of the app is the filtering mechanism that scouts through millions of recipes by criteria of the available food, allergies that one may have, or a key ingredient. As always, systemic serendipity leads to learning, so I wouldn't be surprised if the app gets to unlock some kitchen creativity even among the most disinterested users. 

Innovation is not about making new things, it's about making better connections among the things that are already out there. Get your Su Chef here.

Place Pins or, another map over the territory

Last week, Pinterest decided that it's time to make its pinboards into something with a more of the geo-location relevance. This new "map," made out of photos and reviews and images and information in the form of Place Pins, works like this. Users can create boards around a specific location or with a specific theme in mind (think along the lines of Fourqsquare's "Best Martinis in NYC" lists) and whatever information they place pin in on the board gets displayed on the map. Hey, isn't this a nice way to share your recent trip to Mexico City? Equally nice is exploring the city you were just about to go to, all in one place. This is quite a nice addition to users' online planning process, where quest for inspiration and location-related information beats all other steps in the funnel.

More interesting to me, however, are the partnership opportunities that place pins offer. As of now, Pinterest banded up with Foursquare to use its API (Foursuare allows users lists and also shows them on the map, but information is limited to photos and reviews) and Mapbox, which provided the maps.

In the works are partnerships with Disney, BBC Travel, Conde Nast Traveler and the load of other travel-related publications and hotels. Four Seasons, for example, has pulled its Foursquare reviews and photos and turned them into place pins for its "Gastronomic Travel" board. You can check it out here. Conde Nast traveler, on the other hand, pulls info directly from its magazine for its "Top 100 Hotels in the World" list.

Fun times will start when place pinboards get to be embeddable, so all the above mentioned partners can display thematic itineraries on their own sites. 

I am curious to explore all the new maps over the territory, fueled by the great content and a lot of existing user activity. Can see them being quite useful.

Join Grant McCracken's Minerva Essay Contest

Grant McCracken is running an essay contest, starting today at 2pm over at his site.  The topic is juicy: Kim Kardashian and Lena Dunham, Compare, contrast, explain.

The contest is described as a test of your knowledge: 

"Who are Kim Kardashian and Lena Dunham?  As young American celebrities, they are conspicuous parts of popular culture.  They express trends already in motion “out there.”  This makes them cultural “effects.”  But they also shape and clarify things that are beginning to emerge.  This makes them cultural 'causes.' Who are these women and what do they say about our life and times?  What are the causes (trends, events, developments) of which they are effects?  And what are the effects (trends, events, developments) of which they are causes?  What shaped them, what are they shaping? Review them, please.  At the very least we are looking at very different visions of femaleness.  Give us the what and the how.  And the why."

The rules are: no ridicule, and 1000 words. Your essay will be evaluated by some venerable judges: 

Caley Cantrell, Brand Center, Virginia Commonwealth University

Noah Cruickshank, AV Club

Janet Kestin, Swim

Leora Kornfeld, Harvard

Adrian Ho, Zeus Jones

Ruby Strong, Lord Byng

Nancy Vonk, Swim

And you can win a Minerva prize and statue! Don't wait for 2pm, start now.

 

TOMS keeps giving, and giving some more

 

TOMS is a company based on a simple exchange: buy a pair of this brand's shoes or glasses, and the company gives a pair of the same to kids who need them. 

 

For a long time, TOMS was an example of a sustainable brand that combines a viable business model with social consciousness. The brand itself accumulated significant equity in the process: wearing a pair of TOMS shoes means that you are a responsible, caring consumer who puts benefits of others over their own vanity.

 

Now, TOMS upped the ante on giving back. The brand recently launched TOMS Marketplace, a  platform for social entrepreneours to promote and sell their environmentally conscious, sustainable goods. Yes, this effectively means that a brand sells other brands under its turf.

 

The thread that makes this actually make sense is the unifying mission between the TOMS brand one one side and all those emerging entrepreneurs and the goods they are selling on the other. The more TOMS can unite other companies under its mission of giving, and the more  ways to give it can find, the stronger its own brand becomes. Simple.

 

As of now, TOMS Marketplace features about 200 products from 30 companies. Products range from jewelry to tech, home hoods and accessories. Best part is, one can search by the region, product, cause or brand. Check it out, each listing includes a story and the social impact of the company, and there are some cool product curations by TOMS founders, too.

Michael Kors loves Instagram

Michael Kors loves Instagram so much that it became the first brand to advertise there. And Instagram loves it back. Barely a day and a half after debuting its sponsored pic (above), Kors' Instagram account acquire about 34K new followers. After crunching some numbers, this means that a single sponsored post gained 16x more followers than a regular one.

This should be such a shocker, regarding the fact that sponsored posts are seen by people who do not already follow @michaelkors on Instagram so gaining followers is easier than exposing the already existing fan base to brand content, but there you have it.

The budding love affair between this fashion brand and the photo sharing platform didn't stop there, it should be noted. It continued in the elegant halls of the Tokyo National Museum, where Mr. Kors' promotional campaign for the Selma bag reached its glamourous ending on November 13.

But let's start from the beginning. The Instagram campaign went like this: to promote the label's Selma bag, MK created #JetSetSelma hashtag and users were encouraged to take pics of their Selma in the context of their lives - you know, their ordinary, globe-trotting, Madison-avenue strolling, art galleries'-visiting life. Once uploaded to Instagram, images are added to the Destination Kors gallery on Michael Kors website. (Not that all of this effort was for nothing. Kors has been giving away one bag per week since September to the most diligent photographer.)

So, in Tokyo National Museum, these photos were projected in the kaleidoscopic format, mixing locations, lifestyles, and different ways to wear a bag. Not to be forgotten, images were also printed and displayed on the museum walls. 

Ah, l'amour.

Twitter, next digital commerce platform?

There's a new partnership in town. Twitter and Starbucks joined their forces to enable users to gift each other Starbucks coffee via tweets. Bestowing a $5 latte on someone has never been easier. One just needs to include @tweetacoffee and the recipient's Twitter handle in their tweet, and the above mentioned latte is on its way either through adding the gift amount to the Starbucks card or printing the eGift.

Twitter has already proven in its partnership with Amex that it can be a quite robust digital commerce platform. Starbucks partnership takes this premise further. It is not hard to imagine how Twitter can evolve from current deals & discounts to gifting and to actual monetary exchanges. The critical advantage that Twitter has as a platform is a load of existing social relationships and content, both of which are highly coveted context for online transactions. 

The mechanism seems simple enough, and it will only get simpler. Neither technology nor user behaviors are a barrier here; it's the retailers that are slow-moving.

Next frontier for wearable technology: fashion

 Move over, Nike Fuel, you are not good looking enough. 

From Google Glasses, through Fitbit Flex to Sleep bracelets, we are extending our minds and bodies. Looking good while doing so has never priority for our networked, cyborg-ed selves. That is, until now.

Coming under the name of MEMI is a silvery, pretty, goes-with-everything bracelet that discreetly lets its female owner know when someone important is calling their cellphone. Subtle vibration of the bracelet is enabled by bluetooth connection with a smartphone. 

More than MEMI's particular functionality, it's its foray into fashion market that makes it newsworthy. Imagine if a fashion brand added a Nike Fuel to their next line of accessories, and made it out of bespoke, customizable leather made in Italy. While leather actually may not work for a sweaty wrist, the idea can be applicable to Sleep bracelets.

It's not like this hasn't happened before. Google Plus has already tapped into Warby Parker designs for their Google Glass. But the ball is now in the court of fashion brands, who only too well know the "what's next" and "i want to be first" sensibilities of their customers.

It's time for fashion brand to get techy. There's an enormous market waiting.

Not so unnecessary, after all.

Phillippe Starck is staying true to his word.

Some years back, Starck famously declared that designers of the future are "a personal coach, the gym trainer, the diet consultant." In other words, people who deliver utility.

He didn't stop there, though. He started pursuing a new, democratic, accessible design approach, the one that's made for sustainable environmental impact rather than for the pleasure of the priviledged few. 

Enter the Pibal bike. 

The city of Bordeaux  needed a bike sharing program. Peugeout and Starck partnered to help. They created a fancy - and functional - combination between a scooter and a bike, great for both the light cruising and for the heavy pedaling. 

As for the bike/scooter design process itself, it was democratic. Starck solicited suggestions from residents of Bordeaux and incorporated them in his design concepts. 20 volunteers are now testing the bikes, and will send their feedback.

The Pribal bike sharing program is set to start in January 2014. More importantly, Phillippe Starck can't claim anymore that "everything he's ever designed is absolutely unnecessary."

Can we be PiePals please?

There quite a lot of wires sprouting up from this button, but the idea is pretty good. From the Avian fridge to the push-the-button-get-the-pizza, we are happily using digital to enhance our physical experiences. Powered by JavaScript, the idea behind the PiePal is simple: turn the dial and push the button. Turning the dial selects the number of pizzas to be delivered, and pressing the button puts the order in. LED light is a confirmation that the order has been received.

So far, now only pizzas you can order are by Domino's. PiePal creators reverse-engineered Domino's ordering system and included features like locating the nearest store and tracking the order. You can sign up to be a beta-tester here. 

800 Cannes Lions later

In his "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Walter Benjamin lamented loss of art's appeal due to infinite reproducibility of photography. The time was early 20th century and the promise of mechanization enticed and mesmerized humanity. It only made sense that its enormous potential was, for some, the jeopardy for originality. In its place, we got entertainment industry, consumerism, kitsch and mass culture. 

Rewind to Canada, circa 2013, and ask what happens when an ad agency gets its hands on a 3D printer? As the unavidable British accent (this is advertising, after all) in the promotional video states, "3D printer allows us to bring any object to life with a click of a mouse."

Indeed. Yet, faced with abundance of human life-improving options, what does an ad agency do with its treasured, rather pricey, possession? It starts printing advertising awards. To be more precise, 800 gold Cannes Lions and 194 One Show's Silver Pencils.

Why? 

The official story is that this is a stunt to promote a local ad show. The unofficial story can be easily interpreted either as a serious case of award envy or yet another proof of ad industry's egocentrism. Or, most likely, both.

But I am not interested in the whereabouts of Canadian ad agencies. I wonder what happens with the award-winning work in the age of 3-D reproduction, to paraphrase Benjamin.

Cannes Lions are not exactly objects of art, although some would definitely deem the rewarded work as such. Reproduction of a symbolic object takes away that privilege. 

But it's not about the awards, even if their commoditization ruffles our feathers. Truth to be told, ad award have already lost so much of its allure so it's not like reproducing them can be deemed responsible  for that.

It's about the values, and this little Canadian agency inadvertedly throws it into our faces. 3-D printing is the doman of The Maker: a domain of solving problems like word hunger, infant mortality in the third world, and sustainable energy. It's created by The Maker, for The Makers. With each printed objects, this technology spreads values of humanity, collaboration, democracy and progress.

Advertising awards are reflection of the values of entertainment, consumerism, kitsch and mass culture. To 3-D print a Cannes Lion, and a gold one in that, is to crush these values. That's why it's so bothersome to the industry.

Our optimism about 3-D printing is the same the optimism that spread through the early 20th century with mechanization. It's only natural that someone's going to show up and point out how it eats away at our values. In this case, it's a good thing.

 

Gotta love the humanity.

From the project "The Comfort Zone" by photographer Tadao Cern. 

Tokyo, Italy

 

Italy is famous for many things, but high-speed Internet isn't one of them. To believe that fast Internet is possible in Italy, it may actually need imagining that you are somewhere else. And that's precisely what Fastweb, Italian telecom company has done. To show how their speedy broadband compares to that of Tokyo, it turned the entire Milan train stop into Tokyo's Shibuya. In this elaborate stunt, the station became equipped with everything from Japanese newspaper kiosks, teenagers and screens streaming Japanese programming. The shock of Italians stepping out of train into this faux-Shibuya is probably going to commensurate with their surprise of having the faster web.

Lady Gaga does engagement planning right

Lady Gaga has proven herself to be an excellent engagement planner. To promote her upcoming album, ARTPOP, the pop-icon turned to her most abundant resource: her fans.

Carefully cultivated over years, Lady Gaga's relationship with her fans is notorious. She affectionately calls them Little Monsters and often personally responds to their notes. This summer, the fans took the promotional matters into their own hands. 

This meant everything from crafting album flyers to a YouTube show called Radio ARTPOP, which revolved around discussing the upcoming album.

And that where her majesty herself comes in. Tapping into 1% of her audience (which measures 40 million Twitter fans and 60 million Facebook fans), Lady Gaga employed the "Accidental Influentials" approach based on "influencing easily influenced individuals who influence other easily influenced people."

Namely, she did what a smart engagement planner would recommend. She invited moderators of her Gaga Daily website "into the brand," i.e. to hang out with her closest entourage; she used UGC platform to spread the word, by leaking parts of her album on Radio ARTPOP and promoting the channel on Twitter; and she promised the first sneak-peek to a selected few of her final selection of songs to be included in the ARTPOP album.

All of this comes from the first truth of engagement planning: know thy audience. She nailed it.

If you ever wondered what a real-life Instagram filter would look like

In other Instagram news, a Brazilian artist placed transparent filters, not unlike those that Instagram uses (think EarlyBird or Hefe), at London's most popular tourist destinations. People can take photos through them.

Or, they can just use Instagram.

A new frontier for art, brought to you by a tech startup

Make no mistake, this invention couldn't have easily emerged anywhere but in China.

For some years now, it's been widely known that Chinese painters are excellent in creating reproductions of paintings. They are incredibly meticulous and work fast. There's an entire industry created around this speed and meticulousness. 

But now, the digital and physical world collided and expanded the definition of what a coveted object of a reproduction may be. Would you like that Instagram photo you are so proud turned into an oil painting? No problem, Pixelist can do that. 

Pixelist is a start-up founded by an American who ended up in China in 2005, and never returned. With a good reason, in that: he managed to spot the right need in the digital photo market and the right opportunity in the abundance of Chinese painters very skilled at reproductions. Just like that, the custom-made oil paintings once available to the selected few are now within the mass reach.

As of now, Pixelist has reached and surpassed its funding goal on Indiegogo. Still debating whether to order something. 

Get us faster horses.

Never to be the one not to innovate, Toyota came up with the concept "car" around the idea of mimicking the symbiosis between the rider and the horse. Similar as with the horseback riding, drivers of the new Toyota vehicle can steer it by simple shifting of their their body weight.

Driving a car becomes an intuitive and not a learned task. Gestural interface is augmented by voice and facial recognition sensors that provide all the possible driving assistance, like destinations, distances and other data. This information is presented in real-time on a windscreen, augmented reality style.

Toyota's innovation comes at the heels of the fact that the next generations of would-be drivers can't - or don't want to - afford the costs associated with the cars, their maintenance and insurance. Environmental issues are another concern among the millennials, as is their pervasive perception that cars are an old-fashioned technology. 

While Toyota's FV2 is still in the experimental stage, it may offer a sustainable alternative to all the objections above. After all, this automaker was the one who first introduced the idea of a hybrid vehicle back in the late 70's. In this case, FV2 may show that the future of transportation can, after all, turn out to be faster horses. 

The sad truth of the spotlight effect or, just like Mr. Oscar Wilde said...

... "You wouldn't care about what other people thought about you if you realized how seldom they actually did."

From: "The Spotlight Effect" and  "The Spotlight Effect in Social Judgment" 

KITTENS!!

I Can Haz UberKITTENS is a pretty amazing idea on so many levels. To celebrate National Cat Day (and to drive awareness and downloads of its app, cough cough), Uber partnered with Cheezburger site to deliver kittens to your doorstep. For 15 minutes, the kittens are yours to cuddle and play with. Then off the Uber driver goes to the next destination.

A pretty neat idea that benefits both the Uber, as it promotes its service, and forCheezburger network, an online content platform that entered the Internet Hall of Fame for its cat memes of unlimited variety.

The promo was priced at $20 and the money was donated to NYC, SF and Seattle's animal shelters. The kittens were also available for adoption, if you were feeling inspired.

Smart & business savvy PR stunt.

Practicing behavioral science or helping you find a sugar daddy? most likely, both.

It's true that any publicity is good publicity, and newly launched Carrot Dating app knows a thing or two about public outrage. 

The app doesn't even try to disguise the main social dynamics it offers to people who are looking for a date or, just for a nice dinner at a fancy restaurant. It's premise is simple: let's not pretend that dating is all about good looks and the ever-elusive chemistry. Most of us don't mind a bit of bonus features, too.

Carrot made those "bonus features" the crux of its dating platform. Instead of displaying your six pack or your interest in digital anthropology or the books you read on weekends, the app prompts you to actually pay up for a date. The exchange is simple: offer a dinner, a movie, a concert ticket or something equaly tangible, and the date is yours. That is, if she or he chooses your offerings.

This is old school barter, brought back by design. You are what you have, and far from being a shocking poster child of digital culture, it's actually a new playinground for creativity. Just like How About We dating app lets its users come up with the fun ideas for the first date, Carrot Dating does the same: it let's you express yourself through what you are willing to pay for.

In the time of the sharing economy, paying forward, and creating new ways to connect abundant demand and scarce supply, Carrot Dating may be seen just as another form of generosity enabled by digital media. After all, random generosity breeds serendipity, and serendipity may lead to love. 

 

be smarter or, at least, more interesting in your online advertising

An ad made an unexpected turn on the Wired site. It announced Wired partnering with Absolut to sponsor #TransformToday, a contest where Wired readers are invited to submit their dream text project for a chance to work on it with the "WIRED Insider." Nothing new, surely, but what is Absolut doing there? Alcohol and innovation anyone? The unsurprising truth being is that for Absolut this is nothing more than advertising, per usual. Still, brands can take cue: there are a lot of worthwhile causes and a lot of ways to make people's lives better, and if a brand's spending money on advertising, might as well chip in on a meaningful initiative, like endearing vodka to emerging tech entrepreneurs.

this just blew my mind.

How to make a content platform grow?

How to make a content platform grow? One way is to give legs to its content by adding new, adjacent content. Also known as economies of scope, it's an efficient growth strategy (just ask Netflix) and is exactly the one that Spotify is doing right now.  

It started with Spotify Landmark, a show featuring original content like interviews with surviving creators of Nirvana's "In Utero." The occasion was fitting: it was the album's 20th anniversary. 

But what's happening now is that Spotify's going beyond a dedicated original programming "channel" and starts to compete with publishers. All the better for the users: having a stream of songs, discovery mechanism, and related articles all in one place is a definitive experience win. It is a business win for Spotify, too, as it allows charging advertisers more for their ads, and charging more per subscription because of additional value it offers. 

The question is whether it makes sense for Spotify to stop there. Already a valuable and scalable distribution platform, it can easily venture in other types of content beyond songs and music-related articles. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what content it chooses to stream - as long as the content makes sense for its users.

Designing for sharing economy as the new creative frontier

The role of ad creatives may change quite a lot, and quite soon (and that's a good thing). With sharing economy churning out success stories like AirBnB, Uber, Rent My Ride, Barklay's Ring or Asos Marketplace, the creative challenge is going to revolve less around the needs and habits of individual consumer and more around creating something that facilitates creating new value out of existing resources in groups. The new creative tasks can be coming up with an infrastucture, motivation, and reward for sharing, collaborating or contributing. The interesting part? Designing for the social dynamics revolving around abundant supply, unmet demand and the possible links between the two.

The graph found here.

This store shelf is stalking you.

The rumor has it that shelves can now track age and gender of passing customers. That is, in the global supermarket Mondelez they can, thanks to Microsoft Kinect. Sensors placed on the shelves stacked with groceries will track who’s looking at the goods, how old they are, and what’s their gender. The data is intended for marketing purposes, like tailoring specific messages to the target demographic or offering real-time utility as Hellmann’s mayo did in Brazil. Hellman’s used data to assemble recipes on the fly for the customers who put Hellmann’s mayo in their cart. The utility of data doesn’t have to stop there, though: it can potentially be a really good source of research on human decision-making and the influence of the context on the way we choose, making marketing both more efficient for the brands and more useful to consumers.

Further reading: Future of Retail by FactCo Labs

Follow the Penguin

Sunshine Aquarium in Tokyo is a lovely place. The problem is, not a lot of people know this. Distracted by their everyday lives, they all but forgotten about the aquarium.

This is where the Japanese ad & PR agency called Hakuhodo comes in. Hakuhodo's creative team took human distractibility as the starting point in coming up with their solution. The aquarium is only 1km (0.62miles) from the closes public transit station. To help people not get disinterested en route, they created the Penquin NAVI app: an augmented reality penguins that guide visitors right up to the aquarium's gates. This is where the second behavioral insight comes in: humans are enamored by cute animals and NAVI penguins move like the real things. Cuteness overload basically prevents people from looking anywhere else.

App downloads are encouraged at the public transport station, via QR codes. The results of this campaign are nothing short of impressive. Aquarium attendance increased 152% in a month the campaign was ran; and people who downloaded the app spent an average 9mins with it (which is way longer that it takes to walk 0.6 miles!).

Barklays Wants Your Bike Ready to Roam

It looks like tomorrow's going to be the last day of Barklays Bike Clinics, pop-up bike repair stores strategically placed around busy roads of London. Sponsored by Barklay's bank, these temporary repair shops offer free check-ups, tune-ups and safety info to bikers. Apparently, after running a survey and crunching some numbers, Barklays discovered that 57% of Londoners are riding bikes unfit to be on the road and that 18% cycle in dark without bike lights (um, guilty as charged). Behind the entire Bike Clinics initiative is the idea to get more people to cycle, and to do so safely.

Where you at, Citibank?

Complex Magazine goes Sky High with Danny Brown, displays one of the best uses of parallax so far

For its recent interview with Danny Brown, Complex magazine broke out of the article mold and crated something truly fun. In its Sky High feature, Complex invites us to scroll down the memory lane of Danny’s life, from his childhood, fall and consequent rise, his love for Adderall, and finally to his famous on-stage fellatio. (As for that, Danny says “People get their d%^&s sucked every day, B. It shouldn’t be a big deal.”).

Out with the ads, in with the content

Denny’s and Percolate created something extraordinary. Denny’s is better known as the America’s Diner for the past half of the century. Percolate is better knowns as the content publishing platform for brands. Combine the two and you get an impressive 680% increase of consumer social engagement with 55% less time invested.

The social content campaign created in collaboration with Percolate was a result of Denny’s recognition of social media as an increasingly important consumer touchpoint for the brand. The challenge that followed this realization was equally big: build and expand brand’s digital presence without diluting its widely known and beloved “classic diner feel.”

By mapping Denny’s interests, visual guidelines and key events, Percolate managed to distill this brand’s social DNA that informed all further content selection and distribution decisions. The results are clearly impressive. You can read more here.

 

What business is AirBnB in?

Rather than defining themselves as part of the struggling-to-innovate hospitality industry, AirBnB smartly embraced the dynamic of digital economy that revolves around finding a new way to connect abundant supply with the underserved demand and to build a business around this connection. AirBnB’s laser-sharp focus on making accommodation accessible to global travelers anywhere now allows it to explore monetizable adjacent lines of its business, without diluting its original business model. The latest initiative of this mold is to make homes of notable LA people open to anyone with enough of healthy dose of curiosity and affection for design. In partnership with Sonos and a few other LA-based brands, AirBnB created an immersive series of events named Hello LA that make the most interesting people, places and experiences in LA accessible and bookable through AirBnB. Spending a night at the home of James Franco, anyone? (Let’s just hope the night doesn’t pan out as in “This is the End” movie…) Those who are into this kind of thing can submit a love letter to LA through Facebook, or enter to win an overnight stay via pop-ups around the city of LA. As far as the market-building strategies go, this is a pretty smart one. 

the book lover's dilemma

Found here.

Guest interview

I gave an interview to a French blog called Les Francs Publicitaires couple of moths back. It was a fun conversation, and my favorite question was to describe my job to Samuel's 9-year old brother. You don't know what you are really doing until you have to explain it to a child. 

Rendez-vous with Ana Andjelic from Les Francs Publicitaires on Vimeo.

 

Strategy Playbook: Designing Responsive Strategy for Creative Agencies

 

Strategy in creative agencies often isn’t taken seriously - and deservedly so. We aren’t doing it right. In a world that’s connected, open and interactive, strategy needs to be the same. Strategy isn't an isolated discipline or a tucked-away department that makes a cameo in the agency process by drafting a brand architecture or summarizing a competitive opportunity. It's a problem-solving approach and a methodology that can help companies grow. It can turn agencies into growth hackers for brands by pointing the way for their business in the emerging digital markets. To get into this value matchmaking game, we first need to expand what strategy (and strategists) must do.

My Year in Review

I like to think of 2012 as the year of a lot personal and professional insights.

The biggest professional insight of the past year was coming up with the Digital Design approach. It came from my experience of working with people who think of digital strategy only in terms of practices they are familiar with: engagement planning, communications planning, propagation planning, you name it. Nothing can be further from the rich and broad digital reinvention of the ways we do business and live our daily lives. I became convinced that more than a gap in knowledge, there’s a rift in values between those who understand digital and those who merely use it. 

I realized it’s important to emphasize that digital insights need to be the hub of any solution and/or idea. Enter Digital Design. It’s an approach and methodology focused on solving problems in a way that improves human lives. It thinks of digital as a new source of value for both the business and the user. As an approach, Digital Design is behavior-first, collaborative, additive and evolving. It’s driven by making the world a more open, social and sustainable place. It's based on the fact that we've run out of time for solutions that are not sustainable, that hyper-consumption is a waste, and that we need a much more efficient economic activity. As a methodology, Digital Design is human-centered. It’s a set of tools and methods oriented towards creating and capturing economic value through helping people do things in a more playful, human, sensible and efficient way. 

In practice, Digital Design informs strategy. The focus of strategy is on understanding problems, not enforcing a particular solution. Strategy's job is to outline the experience that connects the business and the user. Best strategies help solve problems by generating an idea on how to creatively improve human life. Best experiences are holistic: they grow business and bring value to users.

In theory, Digital Design draws on design thinking, business modeling, organizational analysis, sociology of innovation, systems thinking, complexity studies, experience design, behavioral economics, and cultural studies. Think of Digital Design as Design Thinking 2.0, updated for the dynamics of the digital world. 

To bring Digital Design to life, I drafted a Digital Business Gameplan. It's a tool meant to help businesses identify new market opportunities in the digital space. I also made an overview of digital business in 2012. Coming up next are a Digital Design Curicullum and Digital Business Models. In my everyday work, I want to combine marketing and business ideas, new business modeling and revenue streams, and service design. 

I had a chance to share my take on Digital Design with a lot of curious and interesting people in 2012. I was a panelist at a well-attended SxSW conversation this past March. Shortly afterward, I found myself in a good company of other keynotes at a Croatian advertising festival, IdejaX. And then, in September, I had an opportunity to realize how hard (and great) it is to guest-teach a graduate class at SVA. In December, I was again part of the fun crowd of IAB judges. Throughout the year, I had teamed up with the amazing Ale Lariu to teach Digital Strategy course. In between speaking and teaching and working, I put my thoughts in writing for Fast Company and also went back to contributing to AdAge. I plan to continue to make speaking and writing as part of my monthly routine. I look forward to teaching an online digital marketing course with MediaBistro in March.

I enter 2013 quite content. There's a lot to be done in the next year, but the past 12 months provided a solid ground for me to build off. I look forward to the fun and excitement of 2013. Wishing the same to you.

Avis buys Zipcar. So what?

There's a flurry of reactions around Avis' purchase of Zipcar. The most daring of those proclaim how "sharing economy's entering mainstream." Wait, what? Let's get this straight. Zipcar is an hourly B2C rental car service, not a P2P collaborative consumption platform. There's nothing about it that screams sharing economy. 

Zipcar's true innovation was the car rental model based on the insight that in the age where people buy music by the song, they'd probably want to rent a car by the hour. And they were right. Alas, while they were first, they were not the only one. Hertz On Demand is an hourly car rental platform launched to take advantage of the fact that increasing number of people value access to cars more than their ownership. And get this: Hertz on Demand is the same as Zipcar, but no one calls it sharing economy. 

More important, however, is that Hertz On Demand has, and Zipcar doesn't, a giant fleet of vehicles and already established and profitable operation. That's where the Avis deal comes in for Zipcar. At the time of its acquisition, Zipcar's costs of maintaining its fleet are at about 65% of its total expenses, which is massive. Its operational costs are high. There's a frequent shortage of available vehicles. So, while Zipcar may be known as a leader of the hourly car rental category, in reality it's not. It's hard to compete with Hertz.

It's hard to compete with Hertz for Avis, too. Avis' On Location hourly rental service is tiny, focused on corporate renters and all around lame. It doesn't have convenient pickup locations and a substanital car fleet. So when faced with "build or buy" dilemma, Avis choose "buy" in order to remain competitive. Zipcar's acquisition will solve at least one of Avis' problems.  

The conclusion is that Zipcar has created a market that has been consequently penetrated by more powerful entrants. To stay competitive, Zipcar had to become bigger. And it did.

There's nothing innovative about that, neither in economic nor in social terms. If you want to talk about real sharing economy, look at what Getaround, RelayRides, Whipcar, and Wheelz are doing. But no one's lining up to buy them, lest Steve Case. There's still a long way for P2P innovation to prove its profitability and penetrate mainstream - and for sharing economy to become a norm. When it does, it probably won't happen via acquisition. 

Economics of value-based pricing

"One prominent feature of information goods is that they have large fixed costs of production, and small variable costs of reproduction. Cost-based pricing makes little sense in this context; value-based pricing is much more appropriate. Different consumer may have radically different values for a particular information good, so techniques for differential pricing become very important."*

It's no wonder that traditional marketing and advertising don't work in digital space. Customers' perceptions of value of a product/service and their expectations of the value they'll gain are completely unrelated with the cost of creating that product/service. Companies' value proposition thus needs to be correlated closely with consumers' value perception. This value perception is shaped by Google-led commoditization of products/services, transparency of pricing, and social information - to a greater (much greater) extent than advertising. Key to success? Staying close to customer's perceptions and expectations of value. That's the path to sustainability; everything else has a short shelf life, literally and figuratively.

* From here.

State of Digital Business in 2012

State of Digital Business 2012 from Ana Andjelic

 In lieu of end-of-the-year recap traditions, I assembled a little overview of brands' digital efforts through the prism of business growth. I wanted to see how brands are using digital to grow their businesses, and what strategies and methods they adopt. As you can expect, most brands are still heavily market-focused. Brands that focus on human needs and behaviors as a starting point in their sustainable growth strategy are still exceptions rather than a rule. Enjoy.

 

There's no good digital strategy without solid digital thinking

Digital Thinking from Ana Andjelic

 

Being close to customers is your only sustainable advantage

Or, what Michael Porter learned the hard way. Great article on the demise of the Monitor Group. This part is my favorite:

"Why go through the hassle of actually designing and making better products and services, and offering steadily more value to customers and society, when the firm could simply position its business so that structural barriers ensured endless above-average profits? Why not call this trick “the discipline of strategy”? Why not announce that a company occupying a position within a sector that is well protected by structural barriers would have a “sustainable competitive advantage”?"

The Fast Follower Advantage

"The Airbnbs of the world are business manuals for companies to learn from and apply to their businesses. Forget Six Sigmas and Five P's. In a volatile environment, it's more important to have the agility necessary for incremental growth, a laser user focus and ability to view business through a problem-solving perspective. As digital-first companies grow and move up the value chain, their definitions of quality and value become the norm. With no barriers of entry left, big companies have no choice but adopt them."

The rest of my Ad Age article is here. 

Digital Business Gameplan

Companies seem frustratingly slow in using digital for innovation. The problem is they invariably think of digital as a value-add to their existing business. They'd rather spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on their online "presence" than invest in figuring out how digital opens up their revenue streams and transforms their value chains. 

I drafted this table as a tool for brands to identify new value and growth opportunities in digital space. The four quadrants are, clockwise:

Addition: Making legacy business more valuable by using digital to add a new revenue stream to the core business. This means adding digital as a sales and marketing channel to brands' existing products/service marketing and sales. In this scenario, digital is considered as a value-add in the company's traditional value chain. Examples are Target, Walmart, Barnes&Noble e-commerce platforms.

Systems: Connecting products and services to create new value by assessing company's existing offerings and bundling them together via digital technology. Value that's created as the outcome is outside businesses' traditional value chain and counts as the new revenue source. Think Barnes&Noble Nook, American Express digital initiatives, Nike Fuelband.

Design: Customer-led business solutions are an incremental value-add as they make the existing products and services better from the end-user standpoint. They use laser user focus to serve their existing customers better and/or to overcome the current consumer barriers in the category. Examples are Patagonia, Simple.

Distruption: Disruptive solutions create a completely new value in the industry. Disruptive businesses have their own value chain, different from the one their industry's built around. Think AirBnB, Square.

Looking at this chart is clear that, more often than not, clients and agencies expect Disruption from digital, but are thinking of it only as Addition.