iPlot

Anthony Weiner, the Demise of Guys, and the Comfort of Strangers

Is it perverse that your boss might know more about your life than your best friends? That you spend more time with your desk neighbor at work than with your spouse? That your colleagues experience you in more emotionally extreme situations than most of your friends, in moments of utmost success and failure, triumph and defeat?

Perhaps it is not. In times of uber-connectivity, constant stimulus, and near work/life congruence, it is no surprise that work relationships can often provide more emotional and intellectual kinship (true intimacy requires an actual “meeting of minds” rather than just bodily pleasures, as any psychologist would submit) than other social institutions (such as marriage, family, or church) which are deliberately designed to meet the human need for intimacy.

Ironically, with distances between objects shrinking, the distances between subjects seem to increase. It is a remarkable paradox of our radical age of transparency, where everyone virtually knows everyone, that intimacy is now mainly enabled by publicity, computed by social technologies, and personalized through digital “touchpoints” which are anything but personal. From US Representative Anthony Weiner’s “sexting” to Facebook friendships, and other forms of digital interactions with virtual companions, it seems as if we’re increasingly unable to find and nurture intimacy with people we know, and increasingly seeking for it in encounters with people we don’t know. The proverbial “comfort of strangers” has become the rare intimate moment disrupting the many mundane moments in our entangled webs of social connectedness.

And Anthony Weiner’s bizarre internet adventures may be symptomatic of a more pessimistic broader phenomenon. Philip Zimbardo, the scientist who carried out the infamous Stanford prison experiment in the early 1970s (read this interview with him in design mind), argues that intimacy has all but disappeared from modern life, at least male modern life. In his short TED talk this year, entitled "The Demise of Guys," he presented some astonishing statistics. Apparently, teenage boys now view an average of 50 porno clips per week. Zimbardo therefore concludes that gaming and porn digitally rewire boys’ brains for constant arousal, eventually leading to their failure as men, both sexually and socially, because they’re no longer able to establish and sustain intimate loving relationships with the opposite sex. He thinks that the proliferation of "guy bonding" movies, in which adult men are portrayed as adolescent, immature beings that are more interested in bonding activities with others than in more serious pursuits, is one of the indications of how widespread the phenomenon of immature male-hood has become.

Where does that leave the concept of intimacy? You could argue that it is best cherished in reclaimed analog spaces, in those “hiding in plain sight” settings that are small enough not to be “socialized,” serendipitous enough not to be “personalized,” and public enough not to intrude our sense of privacy. From the artificial closeness of ad-hoc individual encounters such as the casual chat with the barista in your coffee shop or the conversation at an exclusive conference, or in communal moments such as a flash mob – intimacy becomes possible through coincidental “meetings of the minds” that literally catch us off guard. Outside of our comfort zones the paths less traveled cross more often, and the comfort of strangers makes us intimately and acutely aware of whom we are.

India: Urgent Emergence

This was India’s year. Obama visited, as did Sarkozy, and many other statesmen of lesser political weight or star appeal. With an annual growth rate of close to 8.9% and foreign direct investments projected to exceed $100 billion, the booming Indian economy defied the global recession. For the first time ever, eight Indian companies made it onto the Fortune 500 global list. And even PR crises like the ill-organized Commonwealth Games and political corporate scandals that were an easy target for India’s cynical media did not eclipse the nation's staggering rise – in fact, these events just seemed to magnify the spotlight. Without a doubt, the sub-continent became ready for primetime in 2010, and to many outside observers a new confidence appeared to take hold of India’s economic and intellectual elite.

This year also marked my first visit to India. I had the privilege of assuming leadership for a team in Gurgaon (New Delhi), Bangalore, and Chennai, and to immerse myself in a country I had never been to before. I vividly remember the first five minutes after my arrival at Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi in September, the dusty air, the thick fog, the vanilla scented perfume tree in the car, and the calm driver whom I, for lack of any alternative, decided to wholeheartedly trust as he was racing me to my hotel amidst the polyphony of honks. Other countries are in your face or slowly creep into your soul with their mores, oddities, and sensations. India is around you, all the time. It is simple as the tourist cliché of itself (especially when you live in the airport-lounge-and-luxury-hotel bubble of the global business traveler) and yet complex as a vertical staggering of infinite parallel worlds which make sense each by themselves but fail to strike a consonant chord – like in the movie Inception.

When I attended the India Economic Summit in Delhi in November a few weeks after my first trip, jointly hosted (for the 26th time) by the World Economic Forum and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), President Obama had just passed through India, leaving an indelible mark on the Indian collective psyche with his now famous line that “India is not emerging, it has emerged.” The mood was bullish, if not exuberant, and many considered the visit a breakthrough moment for India. The economic reality had not changed but the awareness of the sheer scale of the opportunity ahead and the self-assurance that it might indeed be feasible to accomplish it, had moved to a whole new level, seemingly overnight. No wonder the optimism was palpable at the Summit.

The official theme was “Implementing India” but the actual theme that emerged during the three conference days was “Inclusive Growth” – how can India sustain its tremendous growth and at the same time narrow the social divide? While India’s growth numbers are impressive, many of the speakers acknowledged that its so-called “demographic dividend” (a term coined by Harvard demograph David Bloom) is a double-edged sword. By 2020 half of India’s population will be below 25, and it will account for 25% of the global workforce. But this demographic trend is unevenly distributed. India’s northern states, with their high fertility rates, are the main contributors to population growth (by 2025, the median age will be 26) whereas the south faces rapid aging (a median age of 34 by 2025). This means that “India’s demographic dividend is actually a double hump, one of which is already nearly exhausted,” Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekan writes in his seminal book Imagining India.

This “double hump” makes capitalizing on the remaining, “unexpensed” demographic dividend rather urgent. Experts foresee a demographic disaster unless India’s young workforce is properly skilled and employable by global standards. Unfortunately this is far from being the case today: For starters, 300 million people live in extreme poverty, that is, they live on less than one dollar per day, and 90% work in the informal economy. 70% of India’s 509 million-strong working population has not received a primary education, and only 11% of those aged 17-23 receive a higher education. India has the lowest education indicators among the G20 economies and the world’s highest number of illiterate people. One of the main challenges for India will be to create jobs for the 270 million people expected to enter the working-age population over the next 20 years. Will these people become the world’s workforce, as some predict, or the world’s worry?

Sustainable growth, many argue, will come from frugal (or reverse) social innovation, through public-private partnerships that scale at the base of the pyramid. It is well known that IBM has more employees in India than in any other country, and many of India’s big IT outsourcing companies (e.g. Wipro, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services etc.) have long been competing with multinationals. But no longer is India just the development center of excellence of the world or an emerging consumer market of massive scale; it is increasingly home to bottom-up innovations in areas such as energy, healthcare, and automotive, spurred by the urgency of structural change. Crisis has always proven to be a hotbed of innovation, and the need to improve the livelihood of a society is a powerful driver for entrepreneurship.

India is already the front of some radical product and service innovations such as the $3,000 car or the two cents per minute nationwide cell phone service. Moreover, with the deep penetration of low-cost telephony, the country’s emerging middle class could be a testing ground for the burgeoning mobile health (mHealth) technology market, in particular telemedicine and rapid diagnostic services. Globally, mHealth revenues are projected to grow by 25% annually, from $1.5 billion in 2010 to $4.6 billion by 2014. India is seeing many of its pioneering efforts, for example start-ups such as mDhil and eHealthpoints. The Indian healthcare industry, in general, is one of the fastest growing sectors of the economy, growing at 23% per annum.

A basic enabler of “inclusive growth” is to provide the rural population with access to information- and communication technologies and financial services. Although India is the second largest telecom market in the world and tele-density has increased to 56.6% in 2010, 44% of rural Indian households are still unwired, and of India’s 6,000,000 rural villages less than ten percent have a local bank branch. Microfinance, long heralded as an able solution to this shortcoming, has recently suffered a serious setback. The rapidly growing private microcredit industry faced imminent collapse when almost all borrowers in Andhra Pradesh, one of India’s largest states, stopped repaying their loans. Critics accused microfinance institutions of making “hyperprofits off the poor” by extending loans to poor villagers at exorbitant interest rates and without enough regard for their ability to repay. It will take some time for the industry to restore trust (and some more regulatory oversight from the state will help, too). But again, this crisis may spur much needed innovation in the Mobile Money space.

India’s villages are increasingly becoming a breeding ground for innovation, as its rural poor develop inventions out of necessity. Mansukhbhai Jagani, Mansukhbhai Patel, Mansukhbhai Prajapati, and Madanlal Kumawat, and three others are on a recent Forbes list of rural Indian entrepreneurs (compiled by IIM-Ahmedabad professor Anil K. Gupta) “whose inventions are changing lives” of the people across the country. Jagani developed a motorcycle-based tractor for India's poor farmers, which is both cost effective – costing roughly $318 – and fuel efficient. A farmer, Patel invented a cotton stripping machine that significantly cut the cost of cotton farming and revolutionized India’s cotton industry. Prajapati, a potter, invented a clay non-stick pan that costs Rs 100 and a clay refrigerator that runs without electricity for those who cannot afford a fridge or their electricity and maintenance costs. Madanlal Kumawat, a grassroots innovator with no more than a fourth-grade education, developed a fuel-efficient, multi-crop thresher that yields cleaner grains, which can be bagged directly and eliminates the cost of cleaning.

Design and design-driven innovation are quickly entering the business vocabulary here, too, and when I met with editors of business publications in Delhi a few weeks ago, their interest in design was as keen as their conviction that India will soon become a powerful innovation engine with global impact, propelled by a distinct national design style and a throng of young, ambitious, and fearless entrepreneurs. It will require a mix of national policy and education providing the economic framework, global design and innovation firms bringing quality standards and best practices to India, and – perhaps most importantly – Indian companies embracing design as a key differentiator and value-driver, with some quick and visible market successes.

Whether you’re strolling through Old Delhi or driving along the campuses of Bangalore’s IT firms, you can’t help but marvel at the tremendous pace with which the country and its people are happening. The whole country is on the move, which offers plenty of opportunities for upward social mobility but also disrupts traditional lifestyles and cultures. New high-rise developments for the burgeoning middle class (91 million urban households are projected to be part of it by 2030, up from 22 million today) stand in stark contrast to the poor villages right next to them, which are in the progress of upending their local identities and cultural roots. According to the United Nations Development program, it is expected that 41% of India’s population will live in cities by 2020, compared to less than 30% in 2010. That is 590 million people, nearly twice the population of the US today. A recent McKinsey report (“India’s Urban Awakening: Building Inclusive Cities, Sustaining Economic Growth”) estimates that 70% of net new employment will be generated in cities by 2030 and that 85% of total tax revenue will come from the urban economy.

Needless to say, that this migration will further contribute to stresses on the already insufficient infrastructure. McKinsey expects 68 Indian cities to have a population of more than one million by 2030 (up from 42 today vs. 35 in Europe). It warns that the current urban policy framework will lead to urban decay and gridlock. Today, India is investing eight percent of its GDP in infrastructure, which is a high number by international standards. And as much as $300 billion are forecast to be devoted to urban infrastructure over the next 20 years, a twofold increase in per capita spending of $17 today. But McKinsey believes that $1.2 trillion capital investments are necessary to meet the projected demand in Indian cities. The firm proposes fundamental city governance reforms to ensure these funds are not only raised but put to work efficiently. Unlike China, India cannot issue sharp policy shifts to appease a young population that may not be satisfied with the living standards of their parents. If urban policies fail, social upheaval, fuelled by underlying religious and ethnic divides, will likely be the result. Or as Nandan Nilekan puts it: “This is our biggest, but also our last chance.”

India is aware of its “moment” and understands that the window of opportunity for inclusive growth is limited. The government is seeking to balance the hustle, the frenzy, and the urgency with calm and confidence. It is the only possible attitude when you have to govern what seems to be genuinely ungovernable. I thought of a line from a song by Thom Yorke: “You have all the time in the world. Don’t squander it.”

[picture: painting by Vangobot. Vangobot is "a robot who paints with the soul of the human artists who taught him how to see."]

Disrupt and Disrupted - Notes from The Great Indian B2B Marketing Summit

I had the great pleasure of speaking at The Great Indian B2B Marketing Summit in Bangalore yesterday, organized by Jessie Paul, the former CMO of Indian outsourcing juggernaut Wipro, author of the book “No Money Marketing,” and founder of Paul Writer, a marketing consultancy cum hub that runs an influential online CMO Roundtable and other formidable programs to facilitate the exchange amongst the Indian marketing community. The program was quite an eclectic mix of topics, ranging from social media and digital marketing trends, to market development, to marketing leadership, to personal branding.

The two latter topics appeared to be the most popular, based on the audience’s response. Jessie herself provided a good overview of the main tenets of personal branding, and her session was a great reminder of the importance of creating a “personal brand map” to identify (following models by Geert Hofstede and Jim Collins) one’s “values, heroes, symbols, and rituals,” and derive one’s unique brand promise at the intersection of “passion, excellence, and profitability.” In addition to establishing personal thought leadership platforms tailored to the respective career level (entry-level execs may want to focus on processes, best practices, and creation; mid-level execs on opinions, forward-looking statements, HR issues, and organizational vision; whereas CXO execs typically address industry frameworks as well as macro-economic and policy issues), Rajeev Suri, CEO of Liqwid Krystal, offered some helpful advice for aspiring marketing leaders: 1. Stay close to the leadership; 2. Stay close to the money; 3. Never get into cruise control.

None of those are easy, and I can certainly empathize with Sangeeta Sundaram, head of marketing and communications at Capgemini India, who remarked that “marketing is notoriously over-stretched and under-resourced.” But then again, as Kiran Mani, head of industry sales for Google India, pointed out in his presentation: “Effective marketing does not have to cost much.” Jessie, with her penchant for “No Money Marketing," would agree, and ad agency executive Jon Bond goes even one step further, as quoted in a recent Fast Company article: "Marketing in the future is like sex. Only the losers will have to pay for it."

While that is a perfectly viral line from a Twitter and SEO viewpoint and might cheer up some CMOs in light of dwindling marketing budgets, it of course posits an existential threat for advertisers and other marketing services firms. "Creating more work for less money is the big paradox," says Matt Howell, president of the Boston agency Modernista, in the same Fast Company piece that depicted a rather gloomy scenario for today’s Mad Men (“Mayhem on Madison Avenue”). Both client and agency side are facing a more and more strenuous battle for attention and engagement in the light of fragmented media usage, always-on connectivity, and social media: "The irony is that while there have never been more ways to reach consumers, it's never been harder to connect with consumers," explains Brad Jakeman, now chief creative officer at Activision, the gaming company.

No wonder new models are popping up left and right. Forrester calls for “Adaptive Marketing,” and the Harvard Business Review (HBR) recently ran a comprehensive report on “Social Media and the New Rules of Branding." In one of the report’s articles, McKinsey’s David C. Edelman suggests that marketers need to respond to today’s more nuanced customer journeys. Far from systematically narrowing their choices, Edelman argues, today’s consumers take a much more iterative journey of the three traditional customer journey stages: consider, evaluate, buy, and spend more time in the additional stages of enjoy, advocate, and bond. Edelman’s main revelation: If the bond becomes strong enough, consumers enter an enjoy-advocate-buy loop that skips the consider and evaluate stages entirely.

That all makes sense, but it strikes me as unlikely that tomorrow’s marketing innovation will come from reading a McKinsey piece in HBR. These days, domain expertise ages quickly, and doing is replacing saying. Marketers increasingly have to develop added-value ancillary products, services, and apps in order to sell their core offering. Traditional marketing is disrupted by disruptive marketing, which itself is disrupting interruptive advertising. Yet - in the best tradition of Clayton Christensen’s “innovation dilemma" - yesterday’s win can become tomorrow’s burden as disruptive viral campaigns are quickly absorbed by an army of me-too’s. Benchmarking, best practices, and new theoretical frameworks often just eclipse a lack of imagination, a lack of customer empathy, and a lack of courage to be creative: “There is no one to copy, no one to follow,” says Richard Branson.

And yet here I was at a marketing conference sharing my own playbook. Jessie had invited me to present on “What B2B Marketers Can Learn from Design-Driven Innovation for B2B,” and I definitely enjoyed my role as the somewhat eccentric outlier in the line-up. I was surprised how many people in the audience knew frog when I conducted a mini brand audit at the outset of my presentation, and I was flattered by their interest in frog. I took the attendees through a quick overview of frog’s history, philosophy, and approach, before elaborating on the seven design principles that I thought might be applicable for B2B marketers. The subsequent Q&A yielded some incisive questions, although, as usual, I wasn’t able to answer the “ROI of design” one satisfactorily. If anyone can, drop me a note. Oh well. Sometimes you just need to believe (or have a stellar sales team).

Here are the slides from my presentation:

What B2B Marketers Can Learn from Design-Driven Innovation

 

 

 

(Good) Movies and The Three Dimensions of Meaning

I haven’t seen The Social Network yet. But the recent debate about the movie that, characteristical of a successful product, quickly transcended the original artifact and evolved into a broader cultural discourse (a “third meaning”), made me think about how dramatically my own movie experience has changed over the past 30 years. I’ve been fascinated with movies ever since I was a young boy. At the age of 10, I completely immersed myself into films such as Jungle Book, watched them again and again, learned the dialogues by heart, and accumulated an encyclopedic knowledge of the characters. A couple of years later, I became obsessed with the Bond series (I still know the entire filmography in and out). Films were my reality, and my life took place in a parallel universe for the most part.

A few years later, after watching more and more films, and learning more about the arts at school, I began to appreciate films from a different perspective. I now watched them as a wanna-be expert, recognizing the craftsmanship and the many subtle narrative and cinematographic twists and tweaks that I had not noticed before. I began seeing films with the eyes of a filmmaker. I co-created them, re-enacted them, and even wrote screenplays myself that were more or less overtly inspired by the movies I had watched; some of which I turned into Super-8 movies (the most notable one was “Battle in the Universe,” in which my poor brother had to play a deranged alien; you may easily guess which blockbuster this one was based on…).

And then, as a student of cultural sciences at college, I finally saw movies in a whole different light, examining philosophical questions of authorship and identity, and reflecting on political and social issues that were part of the movie’s cultural fabric. Hitchcock’s films were emblematic of all three stages of my movie experience: Rear Window for example, was first a captivating whodunit thriller to me, then a brilliantly directed masterpiece playing with time and space, and then a thoughtful study on issues of privacy, identity, and gender. And so were the movies by my other great filmmaker hero, Francois Truffaut: charming and light initially and on the surface, highly (self-)referential and contextual for connoisseurs, and yet eye-opening, literally, as cultural commentary and timeless statement on the “human condition.”

Today, however, as I am writing this, I seem to have abandoned the ability to embrace even just one of these three dimensions, and I wonder if the innocence, naiveté, and passion with which I experienced movies when I was young, the adventurous spirit with which I adopted them into my own creative ventures later on, and the intellectual fervor with which I explored the cultural “big picture” are irretrievably lost. It seems as if I have regressed back into something even simpler than being the mere viewer I was at age 10. I now only consume movies – and do so mostly on planes (the absolute lowpoint was watching Avatar lately on a tiny little screen on a flight from Doha to Beijing). I feel entertained by movies, I sometimes blog about them, but I no longer co-opt them or consider the movie experience to be a portmanteau of things to be discovered, explored, and spun further. Movies have become less meaningful to me. They are no longer the disruptive, life-changing events that challenge my world view the way they did before. They are now neither escapism nor intellectual discourse. I don’t analyze them anymore, and I don’t discuss them with friends (I used to spend entire evenings arguing over certain scenes). They have just become flat to me, and it’s probably not because movies are not as good as they once were, but because I lack the ability to make as much sense of them as I could when I was younger.

I realize that’s a severe loss. Without your own imagination (your “Eyes Wide Shut”), there’s only so much to see. The creation of meaning is a two-way street, a creative act that involves both creator and viewer. But it needs stimulation. True masterpieces combine all possible viewpoints into one’s experience, all at once: the fully immersed literal view (me as young boy), the analytical “how did they do it”-view that spurs creative co-option (me as an adolescent), and the meta-view that understands and plays with the broader cultural connotations (me as a young adult). This applies not only to movies. Any meaningful art, pop culture, marketing, design, and branding always encapsulates all these three dimensions of meaning: the literal, the analytical, and the philosophical. They need to be effectively designed, staged, and communicated. We, the masterminds of meaning in business – the innovators, designers, and marketers – have the great responsibility to create brands, products, and services that engage the “audience formerly known as the audience” as consumers, co-creators, critics, and philosophers – anything else is just a B-movie, easily consumed and easily forgotten.

Touch / Nature

 

“I am against nature. I don't dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can't touch with decay.” - Bob Dylan

Old Spice and the Return of Ad-Power: Are "Transformats" the Future of Marketing?

Silver Fish Hand Catch! As the social web’s echo chamber is gushing about Wieden+Kennedy (W+K)’s masterful Old Spice campaign (actor and former football star Isaiah Mustafa wowing viewers with his smooth-talking delivery in video replies to hundreds of online queries or comments tweeted to him by web users), first spoofs are manifesting its pop-cultural credentials, and the meta-story is increasingly becoming the story ("how did they do it?"), both practical and philosophical questions arise. The jury is still out on the campaign’s commercial impact (various news sites and blogs are reporting that sales have fallen by 7%, which various other news sites and blogs dispute). I’m more interested in the campaign as a cultural phenomenon and its lasting implications: Is it a one-off nifty idea or are we witnessing the emergence of something bigger than that, a whole new paradigm for marketers and content producers, as Mashable claims?

Without a doubt, several things are remarkable about the Old Spice campaign. First of all, the numbers: A total of 183 individual video responses have been posted to the Old Spice YouTube channel, and to date the videos have attracted more than 38 million individual views. During the campaign, the Old Spice channel was the most viewed channel on YouTube, and it is now the third most subscribed channel ever on the site’s “sponsor” category. Total upload views for the channel, a metric that includes the original TV ads, currently stand at over 92 million. The final video reply, addressed to “everyone,” has amassed 3.3 million views and over 20,000 comments alone. As of today, the brand’s official Twitter account has grown to 92,000 followers.

Secondly, the campaign has exposed a key ingredient of viral content - disruption, in the form of a classic “What If” proposition that challenges conventional views: What if the main character of a commercial suddenly takes on a life on its own and starts directly responding to viewers?

Thirdly, Old Spice has probably been the first campaign to be both hyper-individualized (Mustafa's individual replies to Twitter users) and hyper-social (spreading virally as people have forwarded and embedded the replies). In fact, the very personalization of the responses has made them so unique and worth sharing. And all of that at hyper-speed: Seldom before has an advertising campaign produced so many highly personalized pieces of content in such short amount of time.

Lastly, the campaign has beamed us back into an age of Mad Men superpower, perfectly coinciding with the imminent launch of the new season of our favorite TV series this weekend. Ironically, though, rather than by relying on traditional persuasive ad-power Mad Men’s clout has been restored by an ad agency using social media of all things. Or, to be more precise: Transmedia. After already toying with them for their 2008 “Somebody Else’s Phone” campaign for Nokia, W+K borrowed the principles of Transmedia again for Old Spice – but this time augmenting them to much more visible effect.

Consider Transmedia a variation of social media. The term is commonly attributed to Marsha Kinder, who premiered it in her 1991 book Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Communication scholar Henry Jenkins (author of Convergence Culture, formerly at MIT, now with the Annenberg School in L.A.) then made it popular by crafting a theory of “Transmedia Storytelling” in a Technology Review essay, depicting it as a cross-platform narrative where each platform adds something meaningful to the fictional world – whether it’s more back story, deeper stories for secondary characters, the interactive dimension of a game, or new opportunities for the fans to participate in telling the story. More specifically, Jenkins laid out the “Seven Core Concepts of Transmedia Storytelling”: Spreadability vs. Drillability, Continuity vs. Multiplicity, Immersion vs. Extractability, Worldbuilding, Seriality, Subjectivity, and Performance.

Over the past ten years or so, Transmedia has again and again been considered the “next big thing” without ever really breaking through into mainstream. Battlestar Galactica, the Batman series, or The Matrix were sporadic examples of innovative Transmedia entertainment plays, but only as of late, the proliferation of games, social media, and mobile platforms has given rise to a more widespread adoption of the concept.

Transmedia is now increasingly popular for content producers who are facing economic pressures to maximize their assets across platforms. The NBC series Heroes is often cited as a watershed moment, and Tim Kring, its creator, is widely seen as the man who made Transmedia plausible for a mass TV audience. Kring is also one of the forces behind Conspiracy for Good, a large-scale cross-platform movement that attempts to use Transmedia to support social causes – Lina Srivastava calls this “Transmedia Activism.” At the heart of the Conspiracy for Good experience is a locative event over the course of three weeks in London, starting in mid-July and running until August 7th. Another recent example of Transmedia Storytelling is the comic franchise The 99, Naif Al-Mutawa’s vision of Muslim superheroes that he has extended to multiple media formats. Moreover, Wired UK recently hired agency Six to turn its latest issue – featuring a cover story on Transmedia – into a transmedia Alternate Reality Game (ARG). There are even some who call the iPad “the world’s first transmedia device” – a questionable notion given the rather retro lean-back mode of consumption that the iPad encourages.

Before this backdrop, the Old Spice campaign is arguably the most comprehensive use of Transmedia in an advertising context to date, and it serves as the blue print for what I call “transformats.” I would pinpoint their three main characteristics as follows:

- Transmedia: Transformats use a multi-modular presentation of narratives that extends the story across various media and allows a social web-enabled “audience formerly known as the audience” to participate in the story development. In the case of Old Spice, it went full circle: from YouTube to Twitter and back.

- Transcendent: Transformats transcend not only the original medium but also the original story, creating new meaning beyond the conceived plot. In the case of Old Spice, the main protagonist was given a life on its own and the power to directly interact with members of the audience. Thus, the story became an open-ended conversation, and the initial message faded amidst a chorus of issues (user-)generated by the cultural fabric of the social web.

- Transformative: Transformats advance marketing best practices and lift the state-of-the-art. Key here is that the design of the marketing program itself is the story (see meta-marketing), or at least an integral part of it. Case in point: The majority of coverage on the Old Spice campaign heralded its innovative quality, and many stories were background stories that shed light on “the making of.” Perhaps that’s the most powerful thing about innovation, from a marketing perspective: True innovation always is a story in and of itself.

Transformats may indeed constitute a whole new framework for state-of-the-art marketing. They may span even more media (TV, social web, movies, radio, print, AR, etc.), zig-zag more artfully between virtual and real world, and incorporate more gaming mechanics that incentivize users through “achievements” modeled on behavioral economics. Besides advertising, transformats may also have a place in media outlets: Imagine direct video responses from reporters to readers’ comments or interactive maps that enrich stories by pulling in user-generated real-time data and commentary, as a hybrid of professional and citizen journalism. Or reporters who post their intent to run a story and publicly ask for input and feedback (a moderated WikiLeaks, if you will, where readers can follow the genesis of a story). Or articles that readers can “park” after the morning read of their print newspaper, just to pick them up in the evening on their TV screen (as envisioned here by the NYTimes R&D lab). All of this would make the newsroom of the future a social media-savvy, super-convergent, real-time multimedia production studio, with the release cycles of stories shrunk to almost zero, and various media and engagement modes extending their life cycles to X.

It doesn’t require too much imagination to see transformats also play a seminal role in transforming education, healthcare, civil society, and even politics. Already, Gwynne Kostin, director of new media and citizen engagement at the General Services Administration, examines on GovLoop how to “adopt ‘Old Spice’ success to government” by embracing what she extrapolates as the campaign’s main tenets “speed, planning, talent, and trust.” While this ambition appears to be perhaps a bit of a stretch at this point, the overarching trajectory is evident: In an economy where attention is as scarce as commitment to action, stories that transcend their original storyline, set new standards for their genre, and engage people across various media can make a difference. As the complexity of our societal challenges is increasing, our solutions are becoming more open-ended. In other words: To tackle X-problems, you need to have X-conversations. Old Spice was just the beginning.

GER vs. ESP: Subtle Signs

After all the anticipation, controversy, and analysis, it all comes down to a simple formula: Germany versus Spain. Before the mouth-watering semi-final in Durban, the German media is having a blast. I guess it's one of the beauties of the World Cup that it can convert deeply rooted stereotypes into more subtle narratives...well, sort of. :)

This one might be more subtle though than intended. Did the German press really not notice that the fruit it picked is Orange - Orange like the "Oranjes," the Dutch? Might that be a subtle sign of what is in the cards?

One thing is clear: If it comes to a Netherlands-Germany final, one of the biggest arch rivalries in the history of football, it will be an indirect contest between our two European studios in Amsterdam and Munich (after our Milan studio had really nothing at all to cheer about in this tournament). One of them will suffer, and previously fruitful relationships across offices might run dry.

One last subtle hint: The infamous octopus Paul has predicted Spain will win. Note though that he has already erred before - when he predicted a German victory over Spain in the EURO final two years ago...

Losing In Style

In the very last minute of extra time, Dominic Adiyiah headed what should have been the winner for Ghana. The ball, without doubt, was going in. But Uruguay striker Luis Suarez got in the way – with both hands: “The best save of the World Cup," he said later, not the hand of God, “the hand of Suarez.”

It was a decision that would keep Uruguay in the World Cup and would change many lives forever. Suarez was sent off and Ghana was given a penalty. The penalty before the penalties, as we know now. When Ghana’s forward Asamoah Gyan was about to take the shot, a whole continent held its breath. Seconds later, the silence in and outside of the stadium was eerie - after he had only hit the crossbar.

It will go into the annals of the World Cup as the crossbar that broke Africa’s heart. The historic weight of the moment was disproportional to the margin of error that tilted the psychological balance in Uruguay’s favor. Ghana had literally been inches away from becoming the first African nation ever to advance to the World Cup semi-finals. But it was not meant to be.

The ensuing penalty-shoot out was nerve-wrecking and heart-wrenching. Gyan himself showed tremendous character when he stepped up again and coolly converted the first of Ghana’s penalty kicks. But two of his team mates failed to score, Ghana eventually lost, and the scenes of inconsolable players as they broke down overwhelmed by a sudden and all-consuming fatigue were hard to stomach. It was – as the ESPN commentator put it – the cruelest tournament exit ever witnessed at a World Cup. Even some neutral spectators shed tears. And how could you not?

In sports as in life, losing is part of the game. Yet football might be the sport with the biggest emotional roller coaster-rides. Because there is so much room for human error (of both referees and players), victory and defeat, drama and tragedy co-exist in close vicinity. No other sport is so unjust and stirs so much controversy. No other sport can shatter dreams and throw a whole nation into mourning within just seconds. There is no other sport with such a fine line between heroism and embarrassment, euphoria and depression.

But there is also no other sport in which losers can win so much respect and compassion. As much as winning in style is admired by football fans, losing in style is an art in and of itself and will guarantee a permanent spot in football’s hall of fame. The most legendary teams all excelled at losing, often in dramatic defeats: FC Barcelona’s bitter loss to arch rivals Real Madrid in the European Cup final 1960, Germany receiving the infamous “Wembley Goal” 1966 against England, the Netherlands losing the World Cup final in 1972 against Germany, Bayern Munich losing by two last-minute goals against Manchester United in the Champions League final 1999, a deflated Brazil losing to France in 1998, and so forth. And at this World Cup: the spirited US against Ghana and now Ghana against Uruguay. The history of soccer would be poorer without these epic battles and the infinite sadness of those who lost them.

Of course this won’t console the Ghanaian players and fans. As Africa’s World Cup dream has come to a harsh end, here’s a reminder of how the passion of this proud team, which produced such entertaining football at this tournament, evoked the hopes and dreams of a whole continent: a poem called "The Soccer Fanatic" by the Ghanaian poet Prince Mensah, from the collection One Ghana One Voice (presented, yes, by the Ghanaian Football Association):

Goal! That is the word we want to hear for here In this sea of deafening cries Our emotions reach their highest altitudes Through good music, good people, good attitudes – Our team must win, no way around that – We need goals, goals, more goals: We must prove that we did not come here to play, We came to conquer, to seize the day, To make victory our mainstay

Goal! I love the sound of that four-letter word, the sod On which our rollercoaster moods play - Our affinity to spectacular goals, The infinity of a good match, The divinity of our soccer-love drive us Into states of consciousness where each kick, Each dribble, each foul, each whistle eat away Away our patience but still our flags sway Whether chances go green or gray

Goal! The euphoria never abates, always lightening The pensive mood, never failing the ears As we expect a pass, a shot, a goal Sudden like bright-afternoon thunder and lightning – As flashes from a thousand cameras capture When the ball crossed the line and kissed the net – The players know that they carry our hopes in each kick, They know their misses make us sick, They know only winning will do the trick

Goal! Love for this game propels the vane of our energies We will not cease now, we will not sing in vain As we scream on top of our lungs, veins drawn on our necks Losing is not an option because too much Has been invested in this, too much life and love - If eleven men can send us to soccer-heaven, We will give them our all, we will stand tall As they kick the ball, as they rise and fall, As they win in the long haul

A Goal is Not A Goal

After today's dramatic 1-4 defeat against Germany, English fans will complain about their disallowed goal, while German fans will argue that it was the long overdue compensation for the controversial English "Wembley Goal" in the World Cup 1966 (see video below). As you can see below, at least for today, there is clear evidence that it was not a goal.

The Germans and the Beautiful Game

What does it say about the World Cup when the most beautiful football is played by the Germans? Is the quality of the competition so low or are the Germans so good? After the 4-0 thumping of the Australians, pundits are heaping praise on the "Mannschaft" and declaring it (somewhat prematurely) to be the favorite for the title. No one really knew what to expect from Joachim Loew’s young side (average age is 24.5), but the Germans are, as former national coach Juergen Klinsmann put it on ABC, “always ready when it matters.” Well, we’ve known all along that the football god is at least half-German, and no one has described the deeply rooted respect for German teams better than Gary Lineker’s famous quip: “Football is when 11 men play against 11 men and Germany wins.”

What was different though about the win on Sunday was the way it was achieved: Granted, the “Socceroos” are by no means a football powerhouse, but still, the German team impressed with its fluidity, sharp combinations, and well-choreographed movements that one may associate more with Barcelona’s elegant style of “total football” than with the “tanks” as British tabloids often ridicule German football players. Or, as Goal.com commented: “Before Germany’s World Cup opener in Durban, coach Joachim Loew must have told his team to paint the town orange. There was something distinctly Dutch about the Germans.”

On the way to work this morning, however, this bus station ad reminded me unequivocally that it will take more than just one beautiful game to overcome the stereotypes...