It's been quiet for a long time courtesy of the killer combination of craziness at the good ship GSP and not really having anything to blog about. So must start New Year by getting back in to the routine.
Anyway thought I'd point to a couple of things I'm loving very much at the moment which have a common theme of learning by doing.
The first is the Proof site by the good people at Zeus Jones. There's a great write up from Fast Company here but I love how they have turned the intimidating pursuit of learning about great whisky into a fun, beautifully designed social game. It creates a lovely obkect to learn around and has beautifully elegant UX. (And the whisky packaging is gorgeous)
The second thing is the brilliant simple idea of codeyear from the good people at code academy. Lotshas beenwritten about this but I love the way they have taken one of those things you put off because it feels difficulat and intimidating and truned it into a simple weekly pursuit that you know your friends are doing (200,000+ signups already and I'm seeing a whole tranche of signups on twitter). Sign up for it - it's brilliant and coding is one of the things we are all going to have to learn to be fluent in culture and marketing.
Oh, and codeyear was designed in a hour. Something to perhaps bear in mind when looking at the next timing plan....
I was never lucky enough to meet him but he changed my life. And millions, probably billions, of others.
In 2005, he gave the Commencement Speech at Stamford. I can't think of a better tribute to post.
Thank you Steve.
This is a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
I sense this might be a rehash of a lot of the stuff Neil has written around agile planning but thought I'd share anyway.
I have just finished reading Eric Ries' excelent new book 'The Lean Startup'. Esentially it's a very readable, down to earth, practical crash course in lean development. It's about working out how you can accelerate thorugh a loop of validated learning as quickly as possible with the minimum amount of waste.
Now there has been a lot of stuff written decrying the sloppy way lean (and agile) processes have been misapropriated by the marketng world. But I think there is an important lesson in the lean process for planners and the development of strategy.
At the heart of the lean process lies the idea of the minimum viable product: the most basic thing you can put out into the world to test a hypothesis or assumption and get validated learning from the real world. I believe that in the faster world we live in today, and the relatively ponderous way we (the ad agency industry) produce work, what needs to lie at the heart of communication development is minimum viable planning.
What is this?
It's about doing the minimum amount of work needed to get to, or inspire, an idea. It's about cutting down the waste - things like deliberating adjective soup and brand vegetables for 3 months.
It's about generating hypotheses that can be tested, not sitting in an ivory tower with a damp towel on your head waiting for the answer to appear like divine inspiration.
It's about making stuff that can be tested in the real world, not running weeks of focus groups to hear people talk about how they think they think or might behave.
It's about making as few charts as possible to explain a strategy or idea - get to the work
It's about understanding that strategy has to evolve and morph over time (whilst being aware there's a danger that this could become an excuse for superficiality).
It's a bias to doing over thinking.
It's about doing stuff to learn stuff.
It's more like experimentation than planning as we know it.
I've been privileged to have served on the Board of the VCU Brandcenter for the last three or so years. I've also been lucky to have mentored students there (whether they think the same is a fair question) and visited to teach some guest clasees.
It's a terrific school that, for the last 8 years, has been brilliantly led by the Director, Rick Boyko. He's helped build an amazing program, full of great students and helped the Brandcenter reside in a brilliant, purpose built home. As a result, the students from the school are far more ready for agency life.
The time has come for Rick to leave the school and the search is on to find a brilliant individual to be the next Director. If you, or someone you know, feels right for this job please encourage them to think about applying. It's a huge job; the site perhaps aptly describes it as the biggest job in advertising. The brief for the role is below and more details are available here.
Thanks Rick for all you've done. And let's hope the Brandcenter gets the Director it deserves. Here's the brief:
We are seeking a nationally recognized, high-energy, high profile leader who has the vision and ability to work to inspire faculty, staff and students as well as advertising agencies, marketers and the brands they represent.
We seek someone who has earned the respect of their peers over the course of their professional career. Someone who understands that the business of marketing communications is one built upon the integration of different disciplines working together collaboratively. We seek a strong communicator who understands the importance of transparent decision-making. One who will strive to share the responsibility of continuing to evolve the academic program with the Brandcenter’s professionally accomplished faculty. Experience with advertising or marketing education is desirable, as is experience with and a capacity for development and fundraising.
Interesting piece in the Independent about Adele, the British singer who's new album has shifted 5 million units so far. As the sun headline says: "Soul superstar reveals how staying small has made her massive". Here's the article:
The secret of Adele's success? No festivals, tweeting – or selling out
Soul superstar reveals how staying small has made her massive
By Adam Sherwin
Tuesday, 24 May 2011
She refuses to headline Glastonbury, bans her hits from advertising campaigns and won't turn her life into a soap opera. Adele has revealed the five-point plan which turned the singer into the world's most successful – yet reticent – pop star.
The Tottenham-born singer's latest album 21 has sold 5 million copies and currently sits atop the US Billboard chart for the ninth consecutive week. At 11 weeks, she holds the record for the longest consecutive stretch at number one by a female solo artist.
Yet relatively little is known about Adele, 23, who stopped sending personal tweets two years ago, just when her celebrity contemporaries began using Twitter as a confessional.
In an interview with Q magazine, Adele says that, despite huge commercial offers, she refuses to "sell out" and despises artists who exploit their fans for financial gain.
Rule number one in the singer's plan is no advertising tie-ins. "I think it's shameful when you sell out," she says. "It depends what kind of artist you wanna be but I don't want my name anywhere near another brand. I don't wanna be tainted or haunted." Adele attends every "strategy meeting" and approves every decision personally.
Rule number two is to restrict interviews and avoid Lady Gaga-style ubiquity. "I don't want to be in everyone's face. I'm a big music fan and I get really pissed off when it gets like that ... and I don't want people to get like that with me."
She won't tolerate the traditional marketing scam of record labels re-releasing albums with extra tracks to make fans buy a record twice. "I was furious when they did that on [her debut album] 19. I said 'No' and they did it anyway. Just mugging off your fans."
Rule number four: Adele won't play Glastonbury or another festival. "I will not do festivals. The thought of an audience that big frightens the life out of me. I don't think the music would work either. It's all too slow."
And finally arenas, such as the 18,000-capacity O2 Arena and their ilk, are also out. "We had three nights on hold at The O2 and I was like 'I wont play a festival. You think I'm gonna play a fackin' arena? Are you out of your mind?' I'd rather play 12 years at the Barfly [small venue for indie bands] than one night at The O2! So I've made all those decisions and some people are pretty mortified. They think I'm mad."
Paul Rees, the editor of Q, said: "What's become lost in the Lady Gaga-era is the confidence in the idea that less is more. A large element of Adele's success is that she remains something of an enigma and we don't know everything about her."
There's an infamous story in music. It's about this:
Van Halen's infamous tour rider from the 1980s contained the immortal line: "M&M's (WARNING: ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN ONES)."
Many have quoted this as a sign of arrogance and excess in rock. But there's perhaps a different reason; a very smart piece of small thinking. Van Halen were the first major act to really tour secondary and tertiary markets in the US and were unsure about how good and safe the venue organizers were there. If they got to the venue and found Brown M&Ms they could deduce either the rider hadn't been read carefully or was being ignored. And this means the more important aspects of staging - lighting, safety, sound, security - could have been screwed up by an amateur (or arguably criminal) promoter. It was the proverbial canary in the coal mine. It was a brilliant bit of thinking small.
So the final ramble about the presentation I did last week at Future Flash. It's the most navel gazing one of the lot as it's about what I think agencies, and particularly planners, need to do if they want to make small ideas happen. Here goes:
1. Build brands from the bottom up rather than the top down
Brands aren't how we define them but are things formed in people’s minds. As Jeremy Bullmore said many years ago, "Consumers build an image [of a brand] as birds build nests. From the scraps and straws they chance upon." So wouldn't it make more sense to perhaps, for once, build our brands from the bottom up rather than the top down; from actions rather than brand vegetables or mission statements. It's again about being action, rather than word, driven. Making real things and see how they do in the world rather than spend 3 months thinking about whether your brand is amusing or funny.
2. Be useful,interesting, entertaining and playful in the service of people
Preferably all four of the above, at least three.
3. Think about what communication strategy can learn from UX design
Whether we try to sweeten it or not, communication strategy tends to be built on the assumption that interruption is best. Maybe we can learn from UX design and think about communicating in a way that removes friction in a near invisible way and get credit for that, rather than shouting more cleverly. At the very least let's focus on the right 3 degress not 360 degrees. I still think we have a tendency as an industry to deploy the 'Dr Seuss Communication Strategy' - to put it on mats, on hats and on cats. (Thanks Mr Robson for the inspiration for Seuss).
4. Do something and interesting things will happen
Again be action oriented. Make communication products, not PowerPoint. Be biased towards actions, not meetings
5. Build a culture of experimentation not planning
Do stuff and learn from it rather than learning and doing. It's more realistic and the cost of trying stuff is getting lower and lower. Place lots of bets and think about your Communication R&D strategy and budget - or join the 5% Club as Contagious likes to put it.
6. Realize perfection is the enemy
We spend far too long trying to make things perfect - the words on a brief, the layout - rather than getting ideas out there in to the real world. As Lorne Michaels says of Saturday Night Live, "the show doesn't go on because it's ready; it goes on because it's 1130." We need to realize that good enough is more often than not good enough.
7. Be rewarded for good behavior
Finally this controversial one as it's about money and how we get paid. The way agencies by and large are compensated - time plus - encourages bad behavior: get as many people as you can to work really slowly. On one thing. Repeat.
What if we got rewarded in a way that encouraged better behavior. What if we got paid for outcomes rather than outputs or inputs? What if we got paid for business results driven by our portfolio management? What if we got paid for being more efficient in the way we work and prodigious in our output? What if we learned from builders and contractors, of all people, and got bonused for finishing stuff ahead of time?
This talk was all about need to break the tyranny of big and embrace small. I genuinely believe it's what we have to do in order to remain relevant. We have to stop conflating the outcome with the means.
As I've said before I think the agencies of the future will combine the storytelling skills of Madison Avenue with the inventive, purposeful experimentation and speed of Silicon Valley. Small ideas, and big success, will live here.
I think small ideas tend to have most (if not all) of the following characteristics:
1. They tend to be in the service of people
Sounds like rule one of marketing, but too often we forget this (probably calling people 'consumers' doesn't help). Far too often we get narcissistic about the brand (people must be interested in what we make) rather than be humble, empathetic and interested in their lives.
As I've talked about before, the great brands today understand what people are interested in and work back from there. Great communication ideas act as a bridge. A bridge between what people are interested in and what you make/ sell. A bridge between your world and theirs; real life/culture and commerce.
2. They reduce friction
I wrote about this last month - how brands today seem to be learning from design and thinking about how they can remove friction between themselves and people; between what people do now and what they want them to do. Great examples of this are the Museum of London app from Brothers and Sisters that gets art out of the museum and in to people's hands, the Epic Mix app for Vail that uses RFID technology rather than check ins and even an idea like Battle of The Cheetos that created a game where people went online rather than try and get people to visit your own site (which is a fairly futile thing to do given the average Amercian goes to 3-5 sites a day).
3. They're one of many
This is something I've talked about for a while but still believe is critical - the need for brands to do lots of things, not one big thing. It ties back to the point about placing little bets and is about managing portfolios rather than playing roulette. Google is a great example of this type of prodigious brand - search to Google 411 to Chrome (the list goes on).
Creating brands built around a coherent stream of small ideas makes them stickier (the velcro analogy Russell Davies has used that I still think is an incredibly helpful metaphor) and more powerful - being the brand of new news and seen as having momentum and energy is the best leading indicator of future preference and usage. It also means you are more likely to thrive in a world where 95% of things die.
4. They do rather than say
It's about making communication products, not communicating a product
5. They build long ideas
The long idea is a brilliant thought first articulated (I think) by Jon Williams of Grey. The long idea is a better objective than the big idea. They're created by a stream of small ideas. It creates participation and realizes that the launch of the campaign is, in reality, the beginning. It creates real pervasiveness in culture
Tomorrow I'll write about how we can think, and make, small ideas
I think small matters for three fundamental reasons:
1. Big problems don't require big solutions
One of the most important pieces of academic work in the last few decades has been in the field of behavioral economics. It's hugely important to advertising (Rory Sutherland made it the focus of his two year Presidency of the IPA) but despite this and increasingly popular books on the subject (Nudge by Sunstein and Thaler is as good a place as any to start) we tend to ignore its most basic premises.
One of these is that big behavioral change can occur through small actions. Perhaps the most famous example is of the huge impact the default setting is on an employee's 401k enrollment. More often than not the default is set to opt out. When this is changed to opt in as the default, participation and saving increases dramatically.
Rory Sutherland talked about the issue of people not finishing their drug prescriptions - a waste of tablets and in some cases (eg antibiotics) patients who aren't fully treated (with the ensuing further days off work, medical costs, erc.) So why not change the instructions to read, for example, "first take the yellow tablets for 10 days and then take the red tablets for the next 10 days"). Same medication, much greater likelihood for the treatment course to be finished (this is, I believe, called "chunking").
2. Culture is increasingly small
When I worked on Palm, I was lucky enough to interview Matias Duarte the Head of Human Interface and User Experience (he's now doing amazing work at Google on Android). When I asked him about the goal of his work he quickly replied, "make it invisible".
The same is true of Jack Dorsey's work on Square. An article in the MIT Tech Review said this about the design philosophy: "Square is elegant. The user's flow through payment or application has been reduced to the fewest possible steps; the app has minimal features. This emphasis comes directly from Dorsey, who says, "I'm really good at simplifying things." He espouses a tremendously attractive belief that good industrial design wins customers' trust by disappearing."
This seems to make intuitive sense: we know from experience that the best customer service, for example, is the service you don't notice.
So, in the increasingly well designed world we live in, the advertising beliefs of bigness, interruption and 'grabbing attention' seem rather at odds with an ethos of smallness (to the point of invisibility).
3. Small is good for business
In his book 'Little Bets', Peter Sims talks about how great companies stumble upon greatness. It comes from experimentation and learning from placing little bets rather than ponderously trying to birth perfection. Google's a great example of this (originally a project to index Stanford's library). as are Starbucks and the way comedians and musicians try out new material. It's what gets Pixar from "suck to non-suck" through huge amounts of early iteration and feedback sessions every day around rushes.
But being small isn't just good for start ups, it's great for big brands. At the PSFK conference in New York last year, the designer Andy Spade made the terrific point that "a bigger a brand gets, the smaller it has to act". It's kind of the common sense version of Coke's 'think global, act local'. More importantly, doing lots of small stuff is what makes a brand feel personal and, more importantly, gives it energy and momentum, the best leading indicator of future preference and usage. So being small creates unfair advantage.
Tomorrow, I'll talk about what a small idea looks like.
It may seem odd for an ad person to talk about the importance of thinking small. After all, one of the most transformative ads for any brand (and an ad many argue changed the industry) carried this thought as a headline.
Yet I think as an industry we are defined by another ad. This one:
We believe, the bigger the better. We want a big idea . We want to launch it in a big way to create a spectacular firework display. We want to shout and show our stuff in front of big audiences (hence the love of the SuperBowl).
The problem is 'big' isn't working. Andrew Ehrenberg has shown that it most categories a brand's market share is stationary. Copernicus Consulting have reported that people find brands and ads far more similar than different. McKinsey reports that CPG marketers are spending three times more on price promotion than they are on brand building.
The issues, I believe, is that we have confused the end with the means. Of course we want big business results and brands and communication that feel big, pervasive and central to culture. But, perhaps counter-intutively, we need to think and act small not big. We need to break the tyranny of the big idea and embrace small.
Thanks to the folks at Contagious for curating such a great day (big shout out to the awesome as always Nick Parish), to the Institute of Communication Agencies for inviting me and all the incredibly friendly people who were there.
I've just got back from Boulder Digital Works. I love the time there - great conversation, amazing students (every agency should have one), terrific participants in the two day session and brilliant speakers - Edward, Matt, Tim Malbon, Kim Laama, Daniel Stein and many others.
I rejigged my usual schtick on digital strategy ie it's not about strategy for digital channels but strategy in a digital world. The slides are below. I hope that this is the last time I'll rejig this - hopefully the industry is thinking more and more like this - as it's time for a new schtick. It'll be unveiled at Future Flash next week in Toronto, a collaboration between Canada's Institute of Communication Agencies and Contagious magazine. It's all about small.
One of the thoughts that really crystallized in my mind judging the Clios was that there is an increasing amount of work that sets a new role for communication - to remove, or at least reduce, the friction between brands and people. They attempt to create frictionless brands. This can be done in a number of ways - from doing something for a group of people and then using communication to amplify it (think things like H&R Block or Dulux's Let's Color project) to using media and technology to remove barriers between the product and people (think Jay-Z's Decoded campaign or Epic Mix).
It really felt the best work this year had really simple ideas that removed the barriers between people and brands; between what people do and what you want them to do. Yes, there was some amazing execution and amazing use of technology but it finally seems that we are in a world where elegant solutions trump elegant things.
Flying back from the Clios, I was reading a piece in MIT's Technology Review about Jack Dorsey. It talks about the ethos behind Square and says this: "Square is elegant. The user's flow through payment or application has been reduced to the fewest possible steps; the app has minimal features. This emphasis comes directly from Dorsey, who says, "I'm really good at simplifying things." He espouses a tremendously attractive belief that good industrial design wins customers' trust by disappearing."
Maybe advertising is finally catching up with industrial design. But if it is, we are going to need to think about our models and measurement. Intrusion and noticeability (the AIDA model we tend to default to and most research companies measure by) are rather at odds with ideas that feel a little more invisible in nature.
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