brand new

Where are the new radicals?

(and no, this is not a post searching for those (admittedly good) one hit wonders).

Last night, I was lucky enough to be in Toronto thanks to an invite from the terrific people at the ICA.

And it seems apt perhaps, on the week of the 30th birthdays of two agencies who in many ways were responsible for me working in advertising (BBH and Wieden and Kennedy), that I wanted to try and make a rallying cry for the industry to return to its radical roots.   Not simply radical as in different, but radical in its truest meaning - going to the root or origin of what we can do and what we exist to do: make stuff that is the best solution to a client's business problem.

It was lovely to meet a bunch of really smart folk here;  thank you for making me so welcome.  For anyone else who's interested the slides are below.

Time for true radicals

View more presentations from Gareth Kay

What came first...

There was a piece today on Ad Age about facebook.  The conversation turned to ROI and the 'value' of a fan.  This is what Carolyn Everson of facebook said:

"It's undeniable that a marketer wants to understand their best customers, their biggest fans who will become their brand advocates. … So the notion of what's the value of the fan, we have very specific metrics around that -- Nielsen and ComScore both studied this. Starbucks know fans spend 8% more when they go into Starbucks. Bing knows that fans do 60% more searches. American Express knows fans spend 28% more on small businesses."

Now at first blush that sounds pretty impressive.  But read it again.  Could it be perhaps that your most loyal customers/heaviest spenders are more likely to be a fan of your brand than the average person?

Two brands (and one thing) that nailed it this year at SXSW

So, it's pretty much the end of SXSW Interactive (well at least for me).

I think, as I mentioned earlier, one of my issues this year is it felt bigger brands were 'crowding out' the startups.  But two got it right.

American Express refreshed their positioning of 'membership has privileges' for a digital age.  By allowing attendees who synced their Amex cards to twitter to get tickets to Jay Z they created an amazing event. (Oh, and if there's any doubt Jay Z is incredible live).

 

And he put on an amazing show - here's some typography in full effect.

 

The other brand that hit it out of the park was Nike.  They were singular in their focus on Nike Fuel.  They created a pop up store that was one of three places you can buy the band in the world.  The purchase experience out-Appled Apple.  The people were amazing.  They had basketball courts and skateboard parks.  An interactive, motion responsive billboard that was crazy.  And built a beautiful pop up store that turned into an amazing live venue at night.  Fuel band wearers got a VIP line.  And full attention to detail - Sleigh Bells came on right at midnight as your Fuel Band reset for another day.

 

Finally, hats off to the good people at Made By Many who rather than talked actually made something; a beautiful and useful app called Picle.  

 

The problem with innovation

Well it's my last day at this year's SXSW.  There has been some amazing stuff to consume and participate in (great talks by Google UX folk, the RIG extended family, the GE Garage and the amazing TED salon) but what has struck me is how it felt like there was little innovation here.   I worry that perhaps the success of SXSW interactive will be its undoing; that big brands are crowding out the smaller, nimbler innovators.  And perhaps that's a reflection on the noise here of the big boys and a culture that is now less reliant on the big visible firework launch at SXSW for a startup.

Perhaps the greatest debate (well it seems outside Austin) has been around BBH Labs' experiment to innovate in new ways for the homeless to generate money.  There have been some nasty (and I think in many cases unfounded) attacks (see this one for example) which seem to be a case of a reaction to something new.  The idea was to empower homeless people in Austin to 'manage' their own wifi hotspots; an attempt to update and innovate the old street paper model. Perhaps the execution and the handle of the idea (homeless hotspots) had some issues but the idea (at least to me) feels a worth experiment.  It's about letting homeless people manage and sell a valuable and useful good.  It's just that wifi in Austin is more valuable than selling a paper in NYC for your commute.

In many this reaction is the dark edge on innovation.  I remember a similar reaction when back in the UK the Big Issue was first born.  But I think we should judge this idea on what the people who will benefit from it think and their seeming keenness to get involved.

Hopefully the reaction to the new will die down (as it seems from this article in The Atlantic) and people will begin to respect this for what it is - an experiment to create a more relevant way for the homeless to generate money rather than either something that is 'morally offensive' or something that will not be the magical cure to the far more difficult and fundamental issues that create homelessness in the first place

(NB I should disclose I know many of the folk at BBH Labs.)