Hands down the best presentation this year on Digital Planning and Strategy. It's a must read!
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
The Meaning Organization
The Meaning Organization
Traditional businesses are struggling to recover from the economic downturn. They'll need to shift their focus from profits to authentic social engagement to have meaningful impact in the world.
Welcome to the roaring teens. We’re in the aftermath of the worst economic crisis, many people argue, since the Great Depression. As mightily as governments, central banks, and scholars have labored, a jobless, fruitless, and suspiciously meaningless recovery has begun.
Perhaps that's because the so-called Great Recession wasn't truly a recession at all. What if the downturn was actually a Great Transformation instead?
Ponder, for a moment, a troublesome paradox: The noughties (2000–2009) were a lost decade for America. Net job creation, wealth creation, shareholder value creation, and median wage growth were not just marginal, but nil or negative. Today, the ranks of the long-term unemployed have exploded, and their jobs seem to have simply vanished. Yet, corporations are hoarding cash, struggling to figure out where to invest it. Yesterday’s jobs, already replaced at lower and lower cost, won’t pass muster and neither will yesterday’s factories, fleets, brands, “products,” or “outputs.” So what might?
A better and very different global economy made up of novel, more beneficial industries, more purposive types of organizations, and more passionate work will bring radically more fruitful approaches to commerce, trade, and exchange. We’re in the midst of a bumpy, lengthy transition from a lackluster present, to an uncertain future. The grinding gears and titanic motors of the industrial age are coming, finally, to a clattering, juddering halt. What you might call the age of wisdom is being painfully and noisily born.
In this era, it’s the ability to make up for the shortcomings of the prior decades—the belching, wheezing, crashing economic engine that gave us plenty materially, but has left us spiritually, relationally, emotionally, and developmentally empty. The age of wisdom is about attaining a more authentic prosperity, one that doesn’t just “grow,” but that sustainably nurtures the growth of people, communities, and society.
Consider an analogy: Just as we’re learning to improve yesterday’s internal combustion engine, radical innovators in the age of wisdom are learning to build better economic engines and novel, disruptive institutions. What do they look like? Let’s delve into history to gauge the future of organizations. First, there was what you might call the executing organization that capitalized on the industrial age factory. Success was about churning out the most commodities. Then there was what the eminent author and MIT lecturer Peter Senge famously called the Learning Organization. Success was about integrating knowledge faster than rivals. Yet, the great crisis of yesteryear that includes mass unemployment, growing distrust in business, and the evisceration of community, to name just a few, all suggest that neither learning nor doing are sufficient for 21st-century prosperity.
Enter, the Meaning Organization. Meaning Organizations create micro- and macro-structures that fuel radically meaningful work, life, and play. They’re concerned first and foremost not just with making goods, or learning to make goods, but with ensuring that production, consumption, and exchange scale ever more meaningful peaks of prosperity.
Here’s a brief overview of the Meaning Organization: what its competencies are, what its potential is, and why a business might want to think about becoming one.
Significance. A product or service is meaningful only when it has a positive economic impact. Impact happens when an organization creates what I call thick value or authentic economic value. We’re all-too-familiar with thin value—value that’s merely transferred from others rather than created anew, which is essentially an economic illusion. CDOs (collateralized debt obligations), for example, were a value transfer machine, from homeowners to banks, and their example illustrates that thin value builds a house of cards liable to come crashing down. Thick value is more than the immediate, isolated value of a thing to shareholders, managers, the tuned-out market or consumers; it’s the deep, enduring, human worth of a thing to everyone.
Outcomes thinking. The wise general, it is often said, is one who can see several moves in advance. The Meaning Organization is one that has mastered deep vision: it can see several steps into the distant future, to the outcome of a product, service, or business model. Did the solution actually make people tangibly and authentically better off? It’s a vital question for organizations to ask because the industrial age created negative outcomes, like Big Macs, SUVs, and McMansions. So, did the outcomes of your organization reach only a local optimum, or did it truly help people scale a higher peak? We’re used to thinking that being “customer-centric” is the ideal companies should seek, but Meaning Organizations go further. They are outcomes-centric, seeking not merely to satisfy consumers, but to better them.
Harmony. From outcomes-centric thinking flows harmony. In music, harmony happens when notes and chords fit together, to create a “good” sound. For the economy, harmony is a state in which outcomes fit together, to create a common good. Companies often put financial interests first. A Meaning Organization puts people first, on an equal footing with communities, society, and tomorrow’s generations. Mastering the art of positive impact means understanding the outcomes of a product, service, or business model on all. Where there is a negative impact, the organization must strive to ameliorate it, so harmony, instead of discord, is retained.
Purpose. Solely pursuing near-term profit will always yield discord by elevating the immediate rather than the sustainable interests. What harmonizes an organization is a higher purpose. What, beyond profit, knits the company, shareholders, individuals, and society together? What is the common goal that is meaningful to all and that everyone can be enriched by? What is the larger, more enduring conception of prosperity, whether it is happiness, wellness, or worthiness, that an organization can contribute toward? Those are the questions of higher purpose.
Peace. Higher purpose cannot be created through economic violence like the hardball tactics of intimidation, brinksmanship, and unfairness that are part and parcel of industrial age business as usual. The costs imposed destroy the bond with stakeholders necessary to discover, create, and renew a higher purpose for the organization, therein turning the thickest of value vanishingly thin. So Meaning Organizations must learn to become masters of economic nonviolence. They must master not just free trade, but fair trade; not just enterprise, but ethics; not just innovation, but integrity.
Love. Nonviolence, purpose, harmony, and impact can’t be created by de-skilled, frightened, disengaged workers, bought and sold in bulk by the lowest bidder. Nor can they be created by calculated, soulless talent. Meaning Organizations aren’t just composed of a bigger brain or cheaper muscle. Meaning is about what industrial age business always lacked: a bigger heart. The stuff of meaning can only be created, maintained, and re-created by people who are passionate enough not just to love what they do, but to do what they love.
Ambition. Yes, organizations can start by taking small steps—and many organizations should. But to tightly knit these threads together, organizations must take the quantum leap in the final analysis. Instead of focusing on how to outperform competitors in terms of operational efficiency and customer service, they need a larger ambition. How are we to change the world radically for the better? Organizations are a cause, so what is the effect they want to have?
No doubt, to some, this approach sounds a bit soft. But then again, perhaps the dictates of yesterday’s dogma were suspiciously hard. We were told that greed was good, penury was the price of progress, plenitude had to be exacted from nature’s bounty, and efficacy demanded the dulling of the heart and the deadening of the soul. Today, these commandments of a tired scripture seem less like apothegms for sowing a more fruitful harvest and more like the faded myths of a rusting yesterday.
Perhaps, then, like me, you believe that we must do better. This is neither easy nor, I suspect, acceptable for most organizations. But then again, revolution rarely is. We’re in the midst of a historic structural transformation. Its challenge isn’t merely revival, or recovery, but revolution: building the novel, unseen institutions, like Meaning Organizations, of a 21st-century economy. The age of wisdom won’t happen courtesy of Ben Bernanke, Lloyd Blankfein, or Paul Krugman. Rather, it begins with you.
I’ve sketched the barest portrait of seven competencies here. But, it’s the renegades of tomorrow who will ignite, deepen, and develop them, by staring down the complexities, difficulties, and fine-grained nuances of each. So if you yearn to be a revolutionary, it’s time to get radically meaningful. Be one, become one—or contend with one.
Thursday, July 19, 2012
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Coca Cola Security Cameras
via youtube.com
I love this campaign for Coca Cola. It's so generous It kinda reminds me of their 2007 Superbowl campaign "Give a little love". It's in the same spirit.
Nice stuff @cocacola
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Connected Personal Objects: Getting Intimate with the Internet of T...
via slideshare.net
A great framework to think about the Internet of things. by @gee3
Bright Light by Ray Ban
via vimeo.com
Spring is finally here again, which means that people are getting back outside to hang out in the sun. But finding the right sunspot isn't always easy, especially if you live in a big city where buildings are covering the sun. To show that Ray Ban is a brand that cares about their customers we introduced "Bright Light", it's an application that helps people to get the most out of the sun and their sunglasses.
Friday, May 11, 2012
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
Ikea launches 'snap a napper'
Ikea launches 'snap a napper' Facebook competition
by Matthew Chapman, 03 April 2012, 9:16am
Ikea is extending the 'Sleep Like A Princess' positioning used for its beds range with a Facebook competition encouraging customers to upload images of sleeping friends and family.
Ikea: launches snap a snapper competition on FacebookThe competition will be open only to the 1.3 million Ikea Family loyalty scheme members and is designed to show that if you sleep like a princess at night, you will not fall asleep during the day.
Direct and digital agency Lida created the campaign, which will kick off with the Ikea Family members being sent an email today (3 April) headlined "Sleep like a princess every night".
The email will direct recipients to the Ikea Facebook page where members can enter a competition to win everything they need from Ikea to get a "perfect" night's sleep.
A video at the top of the Facebook page will show humorous scenes of people falling asleep and is designed to encourage people to "snap a napper", with the best entrant winning the competition.
The video will also appear on video-sharing sites including Vimeo and on Ikea's YouTube channel, in order to drive people to the Facebook competition page.
Digital activity is supporting a press campaign featuring a real-life princess sleeping on an Ikea bed, as well as radio activity on Absolute Radio.
Carrefour Market | Back to 1961 - YouTube
via youtube.com
In times of crisis, people yearn for the past.Re-Rooting in to times without economic pressure and where unemployment problems are not rising. To celebrate Carrefour Italyʼs 50th anniversary they brought back the 60`s. Carrefour changed labels, prices and even the currency went back to Lira which symbolized times of economic growth.
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Culture Networks
via slideshare.net
Probably the best presentation I've read in a long time. I'll need a few re-reads to digest this properly...by the brilliant @Timstock
Monday, March 5, 2012
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Don’t Create An Ad, Create A World
‹ BACK TO NEWS...
This article was first published at IHaveAnIdea where we provide content.
I was fortunate enough to be in New York a couple of weeks ago for a DDB global chinwag. We talked about advertising and DDB’s philosophy towards advertising, which the network has in spades thanks to its founder Bill Bernbach. He revolutionised the industry, he taught us that advertising was about insight, originality and engagement. Everything he said back then is still powerful and true today. One of my favourite Bill Bernbach quotes reads:
“The real giants have always been poets, men who jumped from facts into the realms of imagination and ideas.”
He’s right. You will never find the answer in the brief. Planning will not tell you how to write an ad. You’ll get the facts, an insight, some research – but the rest is up to you, the creative. Always has been, and will be for a while yet.
One of the themes we keep coming back to in this ‘post-digital’, ‘neo-brand-network,’ ‘always-on’ age is, “what does an idea look like? How do you judge an idea?” Bill Bernbach talks about imagination and ideas. Creatives know how to use their imagination, they know how to come up with ideas – but what’s an idea? Do we still need Big Ideas, and if we do, what is a Big Idea? I’m not going to pretend to have the answer, but I can hopefully shed some light on the discussion that took place in New York and takes place in agencies all over world, every day.
Let’s try a bit of philosophy ourselves. What is a Big Idea not? It’s not a TV script. It’s not a key visual. It’s not an iPhone app. It’s not a QR code. It’s not a Facebook app. It’s not a tactic. I could go on…
A Big Idea is a thought that keeps giving. A Big Idea is a world you can occupy and keep drawing on. Let’s jump out of advertising for a moment into the realm of the novel. I don’t know if you’ve read Fatherland by Robert Harris. It’s essentially a gumshoe thriller with a twist: what if WWII had ended with a truce rather than an allied victory? What if Hitler was still alive in 1964? What if the regime had covered up the Holocaust? When Robert Harris had this idea he said he couldn’t sleep because of the possibilities that flowed from this construct. The idea kept giving enough for him to write a novel that sold 3 million copies.
Movies create worlds that the studios can draw on film after film. It used to be all about ‘High Concept’, now it’s about the world – which is why Harry Potter was such a gift. (It has, unfortunately, also led to Pirates of the Caribbean, Transformers and the Star Wars prequels.)
The Big Idea gives creatives a world they can occupy. They can almost physically enter it and see the possibilities surrounding them, like the Robert Harris novel. What’s more, once the client has bought your Big Idea and entered into your world, they are with you for a while. There’s no shopping around the back alleys for tactics from any old tin-pot agency, they are your client for as long as you can keep mining your world. And the awards cabinet should also benefit – being able to go back to a well thought-out rounded strategy that keeps giving is never a bad thing.
DDB Amsterdam won endless awards and built the strongest insurance brand in the Netherlands with their world “A for Apeldoorn” – an everyday Dutch town, where unlikely and surprising mishaps happened to its residents. Every ad ended with the name of the insurance company and the line, ‘Just Call Us.’ Whatever happened, the insurance company was only a call away, and whatever happened, creatives could come up with idea after idea within this world.
‘The most interesting man in the world’ by Euro RSCG even has the thought in the title. It’s the Chuck Norris Internet meme taken to a classy place and it’s a world that the creatives and consumers online all enjoy playing inside.
A Big Idea is not a line, but it can be a line, ‘Have a break, have a Kit Kat” (created in 1957 at JWT, made impotent in 2004 by Nestle when they changed it to ‘Make the most of your break’, and now changed back) shows the power of a Big Idea wrapped in a line. But it’s still a world – the world of stress and the need for breaks. Which creative wouldn’t still love to be let loose on that line? …Oh, the ads you could create, the apps you could come up with – it’s a fun world we all want to immerse ourselves in.
W+K have created a world for Old Spice. There isn’t a consistent line that holds it together in the eyes of the consumer – but I bet you any money they have the brand idea written down and stuck on the wall. But these days the consumer is more surprised, more intrigued and more likely to share the work when the work isn’t landing a heavy line every time. Instead they are invited into a world, into a surreal and modern place where men are on horses and bears are in sidecars. The Big Idea doesn’t have to wear its heart and its message on its sleeve – as long as the clients understand it, the creatives can work with it, and the work is consistently great.
The acid test is always Nike+. How does it fit into this theory? Simple, Nike+ opens up the world of running. It still uses the Bernbach powers of persuasion to bring you in – it promises you that if you enter this world you will get more out of running, run more often, be fitter etc. It may be a product, a service and advertising bundled together – but it’s a world the creative can play in, the client can understand and the consumer enjoys being a part of.
A final case for creating worlds, not ads, is that it will change your agency. It will break down the walls between traditional and digital; an app will be as much a part of the world as a TVC. And your clients will keep coming back for more.
It’s a theory you can stick in your David Ogilvy pipe and smoke. We all love Big Ideas, we like to be a part of new worlds and these worlds have the power to unite and ignite.
But I’ll let Bill Bernbach bring me back down to earth:
“Rules are what the artist breaks; the memorable never emerged from a formula.”
Written by Chris Baylis, ECD, Tribal DDB Amsterdam.
via tribalddb.com
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
NIKE+ FUELBAND - COUNTS
via youtube.com
How the hell do Nike do it again and again! Fresh! Nike rocks!
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Japanese Band Finds a New Way to Make Money: By Selling Parts of Its Video
The Japanese band androp has released a new video for their catchy single "World.Words.Lights." with an interesting commerce component to help them make benjamins in this new digital era. The ten high-tech toys dancing in the video are being auctioned off on ebay. #1/10, the androp WWL rocker, is currently up for bidding at a price of $5,000. Get your checkbook ready. Agency: Party.
Friday, January 20, 2012
POSTER RELIEF WITH IMMEDIATE EFFECT
via youtube.com
I love this because this poster campaign creates an entirely new and novel experience using one of the oldest techniques available - not flying high tech technology involved here - just the age old scratch away system. Watch and enjoy
TALK ABOUT NEW BUSINESS MODELS
via brinx.it
Brinx is a new URL shortening service that lets you brand your links for only 0.99$ a month. A small price to pay to ad existing face value to your brand. What a simple and wonderful idea.
http://brinx.it/?firstlook
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
