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On TED.com: “3 Ways To (Usefully Lose) Control Of Your Brand”

I am super-thrilled that my TED University talk from this year’s TED Global conference that took place in Edinburgh in June made it onto the TED.com homepage this morning. It’s very flattering and, like being on the actual TED stage in person, also a bit nerve-wrecking.

Titled “3 Ways To (Usefully Lose) Control Of Your Brand,” the 6-minute talk explores – as much as that is possible in such short amount of time – how companies can respond to evermore demanding customers and employees who are empowered by hyper-connectivity and the ‘radical transparency’ of social media. Popular belief holds that commitment is fickle, reputation volatile, and loyalty scarce. In short: Companies have lost control – over their workforce, their customers, and as a result, their brands.

But have they really? In my talk, I argue that companies have never been in control, and that they actually have more control over the loss of control than ever before – in fact, they can design for the loss of control…

Also see this great summary on the TED Blog.

...and a related, longer article on design mind (republished by Rotman Magazine)

...as well as a brief reflection on my experience at TEDGlobal…

Humanity in the Code

My South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) experience began on the “nerdbird” – the flight from San Francisco to Austin. At high altitude and in even higher amplitude, the techies sitting a row behind me were speed-outsmarting each other, jumping from database mining, the UX challenge of creating a human-friendly pixel resolution, the myth of interferences for avionics, to the “stupid-smart Nathans” in their lives (sorry, guys, it was hard not to eavesdrop). I first listened with intrigue (because these guys were really, really smart, and I might as well just transcribe their conversation into a comprehensive SXSW summary post), but after a while I began to resist the unsolicited expertise, and browsing through the conference program I couldn’t help but think of my two favorite session titles this year: “Co-Founder Speed Dating” and “The Evolution of the Douchebag in Modern Cinema.” Giving up on my way-too-thin headphones, I craved an enclave that would offer asylum from the forced intimacy of all the power-chatter, a simple switch-off that would disconnect me from verbal deluge and provides some kind of digital refuge from the very human analogue conversation. With all the new services that enable ‘controlled serendipity,’ it seems ironic that social filtering assumes we constantly want to meet people. I wanted to un-meet. Now. And there was no app for that.

Obviously, the signs of the times are different. Social discovery was a main theme of SXSWi this year. Start-ups from Uberlife, Sonar, to Crowded Room were vying for the pole position in the race to become the de-facto in-situ connectors. The winner, I would submit, will be the one service that manages to balance the need to “find the like-minded” (predictability) with the desire to “discover the unexpected” (serendipity). The path between the two is where true meaning occurs. Being a social utility is not enough – the best matchmakers understand that their job is to put on a great game, not to predict its outcome.

Another theme was the browser vs. OS war, extending the conversation from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that had preceded SXSWi. In light of the emergence of HTML 5 and Mozilla’s recently announced, much gushed about Open Web Devices (OWD) partnership with Spanish carrier Telefonica, the browser-OS web apps vs. native apps showdown drew a lot of attention. As Wireless Watch writes: “HTML5 is coming close to delivering the same quality of experience for web apps as native ones, and with its cross-platform nature can, theoretically at least, break the ties with the OS and allow non-platform owners such as operators or web service providers to create their own brand and distinctive offerings for any device.” My colleague Scott Jenson, creative director at frog, and a speaker at SXSWi, expects this trend to deliver on the promise of “just-in-time interaction,” allowing a far more seamless, personalized, and localized user experience than the super-fragmented native apps ecosystem can deliver today.

SXSWi was bigger, noisier, and messier than ever, and it was hard not get frustrated by the abundance of options and the scarcity of seats. But while there were some pleasant surprises (e.g. a session with “Catch Me If You Can” con artist Frank Abagnale), some panel topics are apparently evergreen. You could still find panels on crowdsourcing and branding in a social media world. The tone, however, was distinct this time: the digital literacy has increased exponentially, far beyond the tech in-crowd. The confidence and techno-swagger were staggering. And everyone, I mean, really everyone, was in town – hardcore digerati, outliers, cultural observers, and more and more business bigwigs. Location matters, and there is no place like SXSWi. Somewhere between hubris and pragmatism, the tech pilgrimage to Austin forms a unique geekipedia, a vast knowledge library, a mega-download of the future to come.

Speaking of which, the “Future of Work” was subject of a dedicated program track this year, and strikingly, eight years after the release of Thomas Malone’s seminal book, the main takeaway from the sessions was that the Future of Work may have already arrived – without us noticing it and indeed not evenly distributed. This became most apparent in a panel on “Decentralized Organizations - Do They Work?” with representatives from Zappos, Burning Man, Second Life-founder Philip Rosedale’s new company Coffee & Power, a marketplace for “small jobs”, and Malone himself. After several failed attempts to get a discussion going beyond just sharing anecdotes, a simple show of hands by the audience made clear that the session title was a rhetorical question. Of course decentralized organizations work. At least for a crowd like SXSWi, for which job title is oh-so-yesterday and even the online social status seems antiquated. The new currency is your latest venture.

Most of the people in the room appeared acutely aware of what Malone described as the historic opportunity in front of us: “For the first time we can combine the benefits of large organizations with the benefits of decentralized individual decision-making.” Indeed, if you combine economies of scale with the value of intimacy, you yield the “Economics of Emotion,” as Alan Zorfas coins them. In his recent article, he references a recent IBM survey poll of 1,700 CMOs who emphasized that building an enduring emotional connection with consumers is fast becoming a top business imperative.

Ironically, the very emotional bond, the very humanity we espouse as value in organizational designs, may be threatened by the technology we create: “True love is a lack of desire to check one's smartphone in another's presence,” the ever witty philosopher and writer Alain de Botton poignantly tweeted during the conference (perhaps during a date gone awry).

Keynote speaker Baratunde Thurston (The Onion) heralded the power of “laughter against the machine,” the importance of “artful ridicule,” of “comedy in the code”, and presented examples from various countries – from China to Afghanistan, Iran to Egypt. Not just coding or decoding, aggregating or analyzing, but “reading the world,” he argued, was an ever more important task in this day and age of big data, and as both institutions and experts experience an erosion of their authority, he demanded comedians step in as the new sense makers, the new interpreters who laugh off the tragic with humor. Thurston cited an Old Roman proverb, and his points were not breaking new ground by any means. But his humble and genuine delivery captivated the audience and was touching. As history has told us, it is the fools who speak the truth and foresee the future. Or you can just use Forecast, a social tool that asks “What are you going to do?” and thus captures a valuable aggregation of the likely future based on intentions.

Aside from all that, another key insight from SXSWi this year was that, as with every human enterprise, the effects of horserace politics have begun to kick in. It is now the Super Bowl for tech marketers. From political theatre to tech theatre – the backstory has become the actual story: Egos, plots, gossip, and campaigns trump the actual program. This year’s most controversial “meta-story” was BBH Lab’s Homeless HotSpots campaign – a “social experiment” that had been launched before SXSWi but reached a broader and more critical audience here that was quick in dismissing it as a ludicrous exploitation of homeless people. It is interesting to read The Atlantic’s analysis of how the public’s reaction went through all of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' five stages of grief, but whatever you think of the appropriateness of the idea, the HotSpots campaign presented a welcome counterpoint to the dominant techno-optimism at the show – a gloomy and inadvertently comical question-mark amidst all the exclamation points. The same audience that had laughed about Baratunde Thurston’s irreverence was irritated by the absurd theater of the Homeless HotSpots, and the discomfort expressed in many blogs represented an underlying sentiment that may have gotten lost otherwise at SXSWi: social technology has invaded our lives, but it may not be the great socializer. Or as a colleague admitted over dinner: “Here I am with 17,000 like-minded souls and a dozen of social discovery tools, but when I wander through the halls, I couldn’t help but feel lonely at times.”

[image credit: Digital Journal]

Futurist CMO Conference: Unpredictability is the New Consistency

 

A lot has been written lately about the changing profile of the CMO, a role which faces an increasingly complex set of stakeholders and expectations (“10 Great Expectations: What CEOs Want From Their CMOs”) as it is engulfed by empowered consumers, big data, digital media pervasion, and accelerated technology innovation cycles. While CMO tenures have slightly increased to an average of less than four years, the role remains a hot seat. Technology savvy, analytics prowess, and strict ROI measurement are almost unanimously heralded as the key attributes of a successful marketing leader. The CMO is expected to be a business strategist, innovator, and change agent, while at the same time also acting as the brand evangelist, inspirational communicator-in-chief, and cross-functional collaborator. Tough one. How can today’s CMO succeed in times of hyper-connectivity when long-held beliefs are shattered, audiences are transient, and “software is eating the world” (Marc Andreessen)?

The Futurist CMO conference, hosted by former Wipro CMO Jessie Paul and her indefatigable team in the high-tech cluster of Gurgaon, near Delhi, last week, discussed this very question. Paul Writer, the name of Jessie’s venture, is devoted to fostering the Indian marketing community, and provides online and offline forums for a lively exchange on emerging marketing trends. Their newsletter is a fantastic resource for marketing professionals worldwide, and the equally sophisticated conference gathered some of India’s brightest marketing minds (from brands such as Coffee Day, Citibank, Essar, Reliance, Godfrey Phillips, NIIT, Aircel, Makemytrip.com, IBM, and Capital Foods) for an exhilarating two days of thought-provoking presentations and panels.

In my presentation in Gurgaon, I took a slightly contrarian view, outlining the idea of Smart Brands to debunk the four big marketing myths of strategy, control, consistency and data. I proposed a super-flexible portfolio of readily adaptable initiatives instead of a single-strategy approach, argued for understanding marketing as a state of permanent crisis only to be tackled with a deliberate design for the loss of control; made the case for unpredictability as the new consistency, and contrasted Big Data with Big Intuition. My talk spurred an animated debate. One attendee objected: “If we follow your advice, we will never have a seat at the table.” But which table do you want to have a seat at, and at whose mercy? Our expertise runs broad not deep, and by the nature of our role we are comfortable with ambiguity and paradox, can make sense of disparate information, and turn data into meanignful stories. We are the "air traffic controllers" of the connected age, as Pinstorm’s Mahesh Murthy aptly put it. It’s time for us marketers to determine our own fortune and capitalize on our unique strengths: insight, intuition, and imagination.

Here's my deck on Slideshare: 

For a comprehensive write-up of the conference, check out this blog post by my colleague Mitali Darbari Prakash.

Photos from the conference (by Naina)

Press: 'More than 60 Percent of Google Searches Are From Rural Areas'

Image credits: AP (above), Naina (CMO conference)

Smart Brands in the Connected Age

Social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn yield unprecedented actual or virtual valuations. Social media empower and propel social revolutions such as the ones we are witnessing in Arab countries (yes, Malcolm Gladwell, you were dead wrong). Enabled by broadband technologies and mobile devices, entire industries are connecting with customers – and each other – in entirely new ways. Clearly, the Connected Age has arrived. A world population connected through ubiquitous, real-time, and social computing, and through more than 50, 75, or even 100 billion devices. A world where every thing is connected with everything.

Connectedness has become a cultural and business meme. Clay Shirky’s seminal Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age sparked it, and several authors elaborate on the concept. Peter Merholz has repeatedly written about it, and he cites other voices such as Dave Gray’s musings on the “Connected Company” and Social Business Design, or Tiffany Shlain’s new film, Connected, a documentary that explores “the visible and invisible connections linking major issues of our time” and relates them to personal interconnectedness.

The internet of things with its unprecedented level of connectivity does not only catalyze the rise of “social” but also the rise of “smart.” And smart means complex. Increasingly, products and services are multi-functional, multi-layered, and connected to a broader ecosystem of services, serving as a platform for added-value applications. Companies, across industries, are beginning to develop smart solutions – from smart phones, smart energy, smart healthcare, smart housing, to smart mobility, and more. Smart ecosystems have emerged as the lynchpin of innovation – as the holy grail for user experiences that brands can truly own.

But what about the brands themselves? What do the new paradigms of “connectedness” and “smart” mean not only for the products and services companies bring to market but for the way they behave and interact as brands with their constituents, employees and customers alike? What if “connectedness” was a new modus operandi for brands and required them to be “smart brands”?

By textbook definition, smart systems are self-organized systems with built-in feedback mechanisms and the ability to constantly reorganize themselves in order to adapt to their ever-changing environment. They are capable of describing and analyzing a situation, and taking decisions based on the available data in a predictive or adaptive manner, thereby performing smart actions.

How can brands do that?

Here are some initial thoughts:

Networks: In the networked economy, marketing’s value lies in identifying and activating valuable connections, in networks inside and outside of the organization. These networks include other brands, which constitutes a whole new type of B2B marketing: brand-to-brand. Marketers need to ask themselves the question: Which brands’ company do we want to keep? Which halo do we want? Which brands should we market to (both for partnerships and talent)? In the business-to-business space, and in particular in professional services, this kind of lateral marketing is almost as if not more important than the typical buyer-targeted marketing. And the concept of brand-to-brand goes even further: brands must not only treat other brands like partners, they must also market to consumers as if they were brands. Consumers have their personal brands to project and cultivate, and the image rub-off, the brand value transfer they earn by interacting with a brand is as important a motivator as any material or utilitarian gain. Smart brands map out the “network of brands” of which they want to be part, and it doesn’t necessarily include only competitors. Smart, connected brands reach out beyond their own industry, constantly, to forge unlikely alliances at the fringes of their own networks, because today’s edges are tomorrow’s core. Or as Allison Fine, author of Social Change in the Connected World, puts it aptly: “It is counterintuitive but true; the more decision making we push away from the center, the more powerful our social networks become. That’s the power-to-the-edges concept.”

Social intelligence: Connected brands are social brands, and if they are smart, social for them means to be “socially intelligent.” The term “intelligent” comes from the Latin “intelligere,” which literally translates to “to connect” or “to interlink.” Social intelligence, in the most wide-ranging definition, is the capacity to “get along with people in general, social technique or ease in society, knowledge of social matters, susceptibility to stimuli from other members of a group, as well as insight into the temporary moods or underlying personality traits of strangers.” Applied to brands, social intelligence can be interpreted as the art of detecting the most subtle cue in understanding an individual’s behavior, and the ability to not only receive constant feedback but to convert it into changed behavior. The socially intelligent brand can link the social desires and motivators it identifies in the “Other” and respond to them with its own palette of social interaction modes and stimuli. Isn’t marketing all about the “Other,” understanding “Otherness” in order to be different(iated)? The socially intelligent brand is empathetic, trained in detecting behavioral cues, and has what I call the “network affect” (yes, with an “a”). It can identify and easily join conversations, and therefore recognize, activate, and move networks through its behavior.

Platform: I know it’s become a cliché, the notion of “being a platform,” but most clichés are truths that recur. And it is definitely true that smart brands need to be not only trusted but also built upon, in other words, be a platform. If you are a platform, you have the “power of pull,” and the evolutionary forces work in your favor. This means opening up for outside influence, and it means sudden directional shifts if necessary. This means that your service is a utility others can leverage to create their own assets. The line here is fine, as you can imagine. Being a mere utility is the opposite of being a brand. Smart brands provide just enough value to the ecosystem to defend their position in it, but they also make sure to retain the very source code of their value.

Super-flexibility: Smart brands operate like software organizations in the way they structure themselves and operate, shifting from a linear, static, and robust model of planning and executing on strategy, to a more fluid, non-linear, agile, and distributed approach that allows knowledge, the capital of the 21st century, to quickly flow through their networks. Stuart Evans, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and Homa Bahrami, a professor at Berkeley Haas School of Business, have coined the term “super-flexibility” to pinpoint this new set of capabilities and define it as “the capacity to transform by adapting to new realities, underpinned by the ability to withstand turbulence by creating stable anchors.” They propose that instead of thinking about strategy as a single best approach, “developing super-flexible strategies involves switching between a portfolio of initiatives.” Smart brands ‘maneuver’ their strategic trajectory, like changing gears in a car.” Further: A super-flexible brand is “multi-polar, with several centers of gravity. Today it is white, tomorrow it is black. It is not the form that matters, it is the substance. It is much like a living organism with multiple brains, but these move in the same direction, like a flock of birds or a school of fish. Just like an individual, a super-flexible brand has “three core building blocks: the ‘anatomy’ (the accountability and reporting structure), the ‘personality’ or its culture and identity, and most important of all, its ‘circulation’ or how people interact and how information moves throughout the organization. The biggest challenge in a dynamic world is to monitor and synchronize the three building blocks, and make appropriate adjustments as priorities evolve.”

Presence: Sherry Turkle coined the term “Distributed Presence” in her 1995 book Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, describing a multi-channel, always-on marketing strategy to reach target audiences. Subsequently, marketing shifted from broadcasting to narrowcasting, from mass communications to social distribution, from prime time to real time, from paid media to earned (or increasingly) owned media, and from awareness to engagement. With the burgeoning age of hyper-connectivity, it may evolve further: Presence is now the non-plus-ultra of all marketing efforts. Brands that are highly connected are able to be at the right time at the right place as they are omnipresent not only because they deploy multiple channels but also because they are able to cover all their relevant networks. They are like a rubber band stretching in multiple directions while not breaking. This concept of presence allows brands to master what my colleague Adam Richardson calls “preemptive knowledge management” – the awareness of knowledge inside or outside of the organization before it becomes externalized. This gives them a crucial competitive advantage: Smart brands are “in the know” about the lives of their customers, but in a different way than before. It used to be that knowledge was power. In the connected age, the real power comes from fast knowledge, faster than real-time. Presence, in this case, is the absence of visibility, it is all intuition.

Unpredictability: Smart brands are also good at dealing with events that are unpredictable. As Peter Merholz writes: “Businesses must grapple with the messiness of humanity, because when people are freer to interact, unpredictability occurs. And the decentralized networks that form the substrate of the Connected Age lead to emergent properties that, by their very nature, are also unpredictable.” Unpredictability is the new brand consistency. Good brands stay unpreditable and help their organizations embrace the unknown. Management performance shall not be measured by how much uncertainty it can eliminate, but how much uncertainty it can tolerate.

In summary: Is your brand adaptable, connectable, and sociable? Can it be easily upgraded? Does it, like a smart system, bring together interdisciplinary approaches and solutions in an “integrated design”? And does it have the courage to ignore the formulas offered by analytics? It seems counter-intuitive but the Connected Age is not the Age of Data. Smart brands remain ephemeral for they know that brands, despite the deluge of data at their disposal, are more substance than form, more chaos than structure, and more intuition than knowledge. They are viral because they are driven by passionate people, and their passion spreads through the connections they activate. They make a lasting impression because they have the ability to connect people with people, people with brands, brands with brands, stories with people, stories with brands, and stories with stories, all the while constantly evolving their repertoire of interactions based on their intuition and the real-time feedback they receive from the members of networks they own, activate, or join. Hyper-connected, hyper-social, and omnipresent, they can anticipate desires, sense mood shifts, pre-empt knowledge, and quickly direct attention to significant events and conversations – because whenever something happens or is being talked about, they are already there.

A final note: You may wonder why I don’t give any examples of smart brands. Rightly so. I don’t know of any. If you do, please comment below. I am more interested in the concept at this point.

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.

Edelman's Six Digital Trends to Watch

From “marketing in the age of streams” to the “Googlization of media” to “situational awareness” to “location, location, locaton” to “business becomes social” to “private becomes public” – in their latest report, Edelman’s digital mavens Steve Rubel and David Armano provide a solid overview of the six key digital trends to watch.

Six Digital Trends To Watch by Steve Rubel and David Armano

 

Digital Innovation Workshop for Germany’s Largest Newspaper, Sueddeutsche Zeitung

“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.

"Game Changers": next10 Conference in Berlin

The next conference is one of the most important conferences for the European digital industry. On May 11 & 12 next2010 is taking place in Berlin. I had the pleasure of speaking last year (when it was still held in Hamburg) and will be speaking again this year. The speakers line-up is very impressive (featuring, amongst others, Dennis Crowley from Foursquare, Louis Rossetto from TCHO, Andrew Keen, and Umair Haque), so it's quite an honor for me. The theme is "Game Changers," and I have a feeling that I may have to step up mine. :)

On the Eve of Marketing 2.0, the Dawn of Marketing 3.0?

I’m en route to the Marketing 2.0 conference in Paris, one of the most respected gatherings of marketing executives presenting and discussing the latest trends in their field. In a way, the story of the conference is the story of marketing itself. The somewhat yesteryear name indicates that a few years ago, when Marketing 2.0 premiered, it was conceived as a forum for pioneers who were early on embracing digital marketing and social media. Times have changed. What used to be at the fringes of the profession has moved into the mainstream, and both program and attendees of Marketing 2.0 reflect that. That’s not a bad thing. Digital marketing IS marketing, social media IS media. You would think..

According to data from eROI and eMarketing & Commerce (eM+C), US marketers spent 13% of their online marketing time on social media in 2009, the second-largest share of any tactic. And yet, a recent eMarketer article claims that social media is still not fully integrated into the marketing mix and in many cases remains an ad-hoc activity that is siloed in the organization and under-budgeted. The level of integration varies vastly depending on the tactic. The publication cites research from marketing management firm Unica suggesting that a majority of voting features, product reviews, user-generated content and RSS feeds are integrated with other campaigns, however, less so social networking sites, blogs, or micro-blogs. Paul Verna, eMarketer senior analyst, suspects (in an earlier report called “Five Reasons Why Marketers Need to Have a Social Media Strategy”) that marketers often neglect an integrated strategy because they – mistakenly – believe that social media is easy and cheap, ignoring that “much of the real cost of social campaigns is in the people-hours spent fostering and maintaining social conversations.”

The full integration of social media is only a matter of time, but the next frontier of marketing innovation is not yet on the horizon. In many ways, we still live in a marketing 2.0 world: marketing programs that leverage social networks, blogs, mobile, Twitter, real-time conversations, social content, viral memes, crowdsourcing, and so forth have become the norm. Just this week, I had a meeting with the online marketing team of a leading German automaker, and it is hard to imagine anything that would be news to them. They have it all figured out, really, as have almost all big-brand marketing departments. Most of the conversations I have with marketing professionals these days are around tactical issues – budgeting, staffing, monitoring, and, of course, measurement, which is a sure sign of a market-wide saturation. In Gartner Hype-Cycle speak: social media has reached a plateau, and it will soon reach the trope of productivity, as the enterprise-wide implementation of social media collaboration tools is on the rise. You will be hard pressed to find anyone these days who would deny the profound change social media presents for all customer relations; the new need for openness, agility, and hyper-sociality; as well as the call for “networked” (or “federated,” as Forrester calls it) organizations. David Armano (with Edelman), Francois Goisseaux from Beeline Labs (and his upcoming book on The Hyper-Social Organization), or Charlene Li and her Altimeter Group are just some of the pundits who have very succinctly articulated these themes.

But where’s the next hype? Looking at the usual industry augurs, Forrester has produced some good thinking on interactive marketing (with its ‘new 4 Ps of Marketing’: permission, proximity, perception, and participation), and BBH Labs clearly is the thought leader when it comes to the confluence of advertising, social media, and digital storytelling. But all that is an apt description of state-of-the-art practices rather than breaking new ground Augmented Reality and Transmedia may rise to the occasion, and there is the exciting possibility that the iPad finally enables brands to become full-blown publishers. And the whole notion of “Marketing with Meaning” has certainly introduced a new perspective, injecting the dusty CSR model with a more tangible and Millennial-friendly proposition of cause-driven social innovation. Chief Culture, Chief Experience, Chief Meaning, and Chief Convergence Officers and other variations are heralded as the manifestations of innovative marketing models, but at the end of the day all they represent was already stated – loud and clear – by the Clue Train Manifesto in 1999.

Notwithstanding the lack of new paradigms, the marketing function is definitely better positioned than it was a few years ago. It has benefited from the growing convergence of disciplines, media, and formats that shape today’s company-customer interactions: Product design firms are moving into advertising. Advertisers are launching product innovation offerings. Marketers employ design thinking. Design firms are adding go-to-market services. Innovation consultancies are selling iPhone apps. Interactive agencies take on mobile advertising. PR firms are offering branding services. And so on. While creative disciplines are converging, the modes of effective (digital) interactions are converging as well: the combination of real-time, social, mobile, location-based, augmented, and gaming elements are the secret sauce of almost every integrated program these days. Campaigns are becoming products (as just one example, look at AKQA’s recent launch of its Digital Products Group), and marketing innovation is evolving into marketing IT. Marketers, as the renaissance men of 21st century business, can be at the heart of this all, if they’re smart.

Fig. The Great Marketing Convergence

BBH Labs describes the tremendous opportunity ahead: “It’s not just the marketing organization that needs to reorient itself given the now normal digital age, but the company itself should consider how it reorients itself around its marketing organization. In most progressive companies, it is the marketing function that has most quickly and deeply engaged with the new interactive toolkit.”

Marketing is back at the table. Now it needs to demonstrate that it has the chops to innovate and really drive change in organizations.

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