As the New York Times Book Review reports today ("Noise Off"), three books have been published within the past month that all cover silence as a technological, cultural, and social phenomenon (my favorite line: "A person who says 'My noise is my right' basically means 'Your ear is my hole.' ").
Coincidentally, last week, frog design founder and industrial design legend Hartmut Esslinger shared with me an anecdote from his time working with then-Sony CEO Akio Morita in Tokyo in the 70s. Hartmut described how Morita had once summoned him to a large quiet room filled with wooden-bodied Sony television sets stacked up against the wall. Hartmut inquired why they'd been locked away, to which Morita replied: "They will be here for a while. The wood has to find itself."
"It's all Zen," Hartmut told me, "Morita got it, Steve Jobs gets it, but there aren't too many other leaders out there who do." Apple's design, in its simplicity and profound knowledge of the value of absence, indeed has an air of Zen, a confident and reassuring calm that exudes mysticism, dignity, and timeless quality.
Hartmut's story made me think of Robert M. Pirsig's book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which made an indelible impression on me when I first read it in my early 20s. An expansive philosophical treatise on the question of quality, it includes a quote from Socrates' Phædrus Dialogue: "What is good, Phædrus, and what is not good... need we ask anyone to tell us these things?"
Steve Jobs obviously acts upon this maxim. Quality is an act of distinction but brands are like people: they’re inherently different, but only rarely distinct. Most of us work hard to make the right noise amidst all the white noise. Silence, in the way we think, lead, and design, may give us more time to truly distinguish ourselves.
Over the course of the past twelve months, I wrote several blog posts and articles about the Chief Meaning Officer, a role which I envision as an innovative leader who employs the new social power of marketing – provisioned by Social as a governing principle of all business interactions – to transform his/her organization (Charlene Li also elaborates on this theme in her new book Open Leadership). I presented this concept at some conferences including next in Hamburg, mostly to fellow marketers or representatives from digital agencies, and you can also hear me riff on it in this podcast produced by Dutch brand agency Energize. I received a ton of feedback: encouragement, endorsements, and consent, but also skepticism suggesting that this model might just be another marketing fad.
Invited by BIDC, the Beijing Industrial Design Center, I was extremely grateful to have the opportunity to introduce the idea to a group of Chinese designers at a workshop in Beijing a few weeks ago. It was the first time I shared the Chief Meaning Officer framework in a different cultural and professional context, and it was a welcome reality check.
I was a bit worried that the topic might be a stretch, both because product designers would not really care that much about marketing innovation, and also because I wasn't quite sure how relevant the gospel of the social web might be for a Chinese audience.
The attendees, however, repudiated all my concerns. First of all, meaning seems to be a timely denominator for a generation of digital natives that demands more self-governance, quality, and accountability in its interactions with brands, no matter what the cultural and regulatory parameters are. The appetite for “betterness,” as Umair Haque would call it, is a global phenomenon.
Moreover, because both my audience and I were outside of our comfort zones, we ended up having a very open and animated discussion that nicely bridged marketing and design. One can’t exist without the other. Marketers’ task, you could argue, is to make tangibles intangible, whereas designers make the intangibles tangible. Both orchestrate time and space to create meaningful experiences that transcend a unique value proposition based on scarcity by pointing to a higher mission, a greater cause that is universally appealing.
This is the unique “soft power” – the ability to shape a brand of cultural principles and behaviors – that marketers and designers have in common and that nowadays is mostly facilitated by the mechanisms of sharing and collaborating on the social web. If economic growth stagnates, currencies deflate, and institutional systems fail, this social soft power might be the only power remaining to hold our societies together – in Greece, California, or China.
Now this is just brilliant. Adobe has found the only possible way to respond to the lack of love it is getting from Apple – EVEN MORE LOVE.
To counter Steve Jobs' recent rant that Flash wasn't "appropriate for mobile devices" (justifying its ban from Apple products like the iPhone and the iPad), Adobe launched a new ad campaign today in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and several other newspapers and online news sites. The ad sports the headline "We ♥ Apple" and continues with: "We love creativity," and "We love flash," but "What we don’t love is anybody taking away your freedom to choose what you create, how you create it, and what you experience on the Web."
What’s so interesting about this campaign is that it bridges traditional media with social media, making advertising conversational (again). There’s already a ton of buzz on Twitter and blogs about the ad.
Edward Boches has described it most aptly: “Adobe’s ad (...) becomes just one more reminder that social media isn’t something separated from traditional media. Even more importantly it’s further proof that our consumers don’t simply read, they create, distribute and best of all, amplify. We may not all have a subject as juicy as the rivalry between Adobe and Apple. But it doesn’t mean we can’t use our offline efforts to “start” conversations. After all, there’s nothing to join if someone doesn’t initiate it.”
“Journalism is not a profession anymore, it’s an activity,” I heard someone say at a conference in Paris a few weeks ago. Assuming that’s indeed the case – with news breaking on Twitter, commentary provided by popular bloggers, and both distributed via aggregators and social networks – you can imagine newsrooms becoming panic rooms, and the gatekeepers of the public turning into the horsemen of the apocalypse in private.
The profession’s common objection to the burgeoning social web paradigm is “We may all be publishers, but we’re not all editors.” But that claim can be easily countered: Do we still need editors? “If the news is important, it will find you,” asserts Marissa Mayer of Google, and she refers to the emergence of hyper-personalized (maybe also hyper-local) news streams that you can opt into without an intermediary and that come to you via one of the myriad social channels. Just one data point: In January 2010, visitors to nytimes.com spent an average 14 minutes on the site, whereas Facebook users stayed on Facebook.com for an average of seven hours. This begs the question of what’s more important to the newly empowered news consumer: Speed or credibility? Social aggregation or expert curation? Location-based delivery or correspondents on location?
Moreover, content farming (i.e. Demand Media) and other forms of on-demand journalism (i.e. Spot.Us) are fundamentally challenging the agenda-setting oligopoly of traditional media. Then there is the rise of the Mobile Internet: A recent Morgan Stanley report forecasts that it will have outgrown the Fixed Internet by 2015. And of course there is now the iPad and other tablets.
The future of journalism will be social and mobile, whether you like it or not, and it might likely require cross-platform storytelling. Consequently, news organizations are not only rushing to launch tablet versions, they are also shifting their expectations towards reporters: “Aggregating and curating content with attribution should become part of a BBC journalist’s assignment; and BBC’s journalists have to integrate and listen to feedback for a better understanding of how the audience is relating to the BBC brand. If you don’t like it, if you think that level of change or that different way of working isn’t right for me, then go and do something else, because it’s going to happen. You’re not going to be able to stop it.’” Said Peter Horrocks, Director of Global News, BBC.
In light of all these trends, innovation is no longer an extracurricular activity for newspapers; it has become a mandatory task for rescuing the profession of journalism. “Innovate or die” seems to be the only real option. Or, put more mildly: If newspapers don’t just want to age (and ultimately die) with their traditional readership, how do they render themselves relevant for future readers, that is, the generation of digital natives, and their vastly different media consumption habits? (see the random sample of interviews below, polled on the streets of Munich: “How do you receive your news?” – in German).
The good news is that the future of journalism doesn’t have to look all that grim. Every abundance creates scarcity, and for every asset given away for free there are assets for which you can charge. Whether these assets will still be content, well, that’s another question – one of the many questions we asked in an all-day digital innovation strategy workshop that frog held last week at the headquarters of Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Germany’s largest newspaper, in Munich. The paper is read throughout Germany by 1.1 million readers daily and boasts a high circulation abroad. Attendees of the workshop included, among others, the paper’s managing directors as well as the managing editors of the print and online newsroom (which are – unlike at many other news outlets – still separated at Sueddeutsche). The discussion was animated, critical of buzzwords and easy solutions, with lots of food for thought for both sides, and ultimately very encouraging.
With its stable circulation and ad revenue, its strong brand, and its immense popularity both among readers and journalists (Germans call it a “Leitmedium” – an agenda-setting publication that in recent surveys was even ranked ahead of the venerable SPIEGEL in terms of “authority”), Sueddeutsche Zeitung is uniquely positioned to view the digitization of content and the transformative principles of the social web less as an existential threat but a historic opportunity to reinvent journalism.
My talk from the Re:Publica 2010 conference in Berlin is now live. Titled "Innovation By 10," it presented 10 observations, provocations, insights, and questions on the elusive topic of innovation, based on 40 years of frog design and my 4 years with frog design. Note: it's in German.
