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SXSWi Day 1: Doug Rushkoff Vs. First Day Tactics

Sam Martin — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:38:57 -0600

It happens every year. The bad weather thaws or rains itself out just in time for Austin, Texas, to become known as The Place With the Most Amazing Temperatures On Earth. Today it was all big blue sky and 75 degrees and blinding 8 a.m. sunshine, giving SXSWesters another reason to break out the shades (the first being that for culture-savvy, social-Web tech geeks, SXSW Interactive [#SXSWi] is the coolest place in the world to be).

And yet, the Austin convention center was not the picture of cool. It was all voluminous convention center rooms with registration lines snaking along the corridors (so many people!), and heavy first-day goodie bags (conferences require you to use an entirely different set of muscles). The 2pm and 3:30pm panels and talks seemed to have been booked in a backwards fashion — the enormous presentation rooms were not even half full while the small panel or workshop rooms were jam packed and standing-room only.

Could the organizers have planned incorrectly or could this just be first day jitters by the attendees. It seems to me that on opening day at SXSWi, which has always had the tone of “how can we make money with this crazy technology we’re inventing,” people need tactical stuff, not philosophy. Hence the scramble to squeeze into tiny rooms to experience “Content Strategy: What’s in it for you?” and “What are Analytics? A Guide to Practical Data,” and the modest showing for Doug Rushkoff’s high minded critique of the Digital Age or Kaiser Kuo’s meta analysis of Google in China.

The theme of the first day, as far as I can tell among the chaos, was “I’m trying to find my footing,” and most people who are trying to find their footing usually head to subjects that they may already be familiar with, not those that require a further tilt of the imagination.

I wish it weren’t so. Rushkoff, the former cyberpunk and current new media expert, was invigorating. His latest book is Life Inc.: How the World Became A Corporation and How To Take It Back. In it takes a look at the degrading cultural influence of the corporation. At SXSWi, he talked to a modest crowd about what he called the Ten Commandments for a Digital Age, and had quite a few Tweetable comments on the unsustainability of “free.” “When there is no social contract [between the digital world and users], openness can continue until there’s no one left to take from,” was one. “Content is not king; contact is king,” was another. I left the room as wobbly as I entered, but in a good way.

Tonight there will be parties, lots of parties, and then the weekend will arrive, and the official kick off will be Saturday night at the frog design soiree. By then people will be in a familiar SXSW rhythm, which is to say, they’ll realize that since they’re here they might as well throw caution to the wind and learn something they didn’t already know.

Social Entrepreneurship at SXSW

Jon Kolko — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 08:15:21 -0600

I suppose one can officially claim a “movement has begun” when the movement has a party at South By Southwest, and so we can now call Social Entrepreneurship officially “started”. The Good Capitalist Party will be Monday, March 15th, 2010, from 7:00pm – 9:00pm, and 1500 of your closest friends have already RSVPed. The party is free, run by @Montero with the generous support of sponsors like Social Edge, Kiva, and my very own Austin Center for Design – an educational institution in Austin that combines interaction design (IxD) and social entrepreneurship (SocEnt) to make some awesome SocEntIxdFtw. You’ll probably be recovered from the frog party by this time, and so come out and say hello. I’ll be there, talking about frog’s efforts in social innovation – including Project Masiluleke – as well as promoting Austin Center for Design.

See you there :-)

Remarketables 3.11

frog Marketing Team — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:23:43 -0600

This week's collection of remarkable marketing links, curated by the frog marketing team.

Customized ads on Facebook seem creepy not endearing

Entrepreneur State of Mind: Now You're the New Dork, a catchy video remake of Jay-Z and Alicia Keys' Empire State of Mind

Stars exercising naked? CEO blending golf balls and iPhones? Guys catching laptops with their butts?: The Wackiest Viral Marketing Campaigns

Radian6 Launches Powerful Social Media Engagement and Monitoring Console For Brands and Agencies

The Move from TV to Twitter

Video Chat used to Humanize Brand

Find and Follow Top Business Execs on Twitter

How Companies are using Social Media to Make Better Decisions

The Psychology of Influence and Sharing: Cialdini’s concepts against a social media context

Facial Recognition App: First ever socially augmented reality tool

Image from Flickr user Max-B (cc)

On Social Business, at the Dachis Group Social Business Summit

Jon Kolko — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 12:29:01 -0600

It’s both amazing and hilarious to consider that being human, or treating people well, or interacting with one another, is now in-vogue in big business. We did a turn with quality (“we need to make things well!”) in the 80s, optimization (“we need to track the supply chain and distribution chain!”) in the early 90s, the internet (“bricks and mortar is dead!”) in 2000, and now it’s All About Social. But when you unwrap “social”, you start to realize that it’s a container for some major, powerful, and fundamental aspects of human life. It’s not a business construct, as was six-sigma or ERP. The stuff we mean when we talk about “social” is the stuff of life, and it’s natural. And so I find it both amazing and very, very funny to observe how fundamentally hard it is for some people to “manage social” and to understand the role social plays in the context of business.

I’m at the Dachis Social Business Summit, and I’ve heard from some very eloquent speakers in some very impressive positions at the large brands in our lives. Speaker Jaime Punishill is the Director of Strategic Planning at Citibank. Frank Eliason is the Senior Director at Comcast. Rick Maynard is the Manager of Public Relations for KFC. And the problems they are all struggling with relate to the nature of some pretty fundamental things, most simply put as “people like to interact with one another”. Some of the talks described how to limit the way people talk to each other. For example, Jamie, from Citibank, described that 200 of the 280,000 employees at Citibank are allowed to use social media at work. Other talks focused on how we can increase our abilities at work to change corporate culture. Kate Niederhoffer, of the Dachis Group, presented how the use of empathy – a social psychology phenomenon – is critical to changing a company’s culture, as you have to feel what it’s like to embrace the old culture prior to proposing a new one.

But the most fundamental talk, and one of the best talks I’ve heard in a few years of conferencing, was the kickoff from author Doug Rushkoff. Doug, who wrote (among other things) “How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back”, presented an overview of the current “ways of doing social”, and the fundamental problems with these methods.

As he explains, social is a thing marketers are using in order to get consumers to hype their products. It’s a way of generating buzz or message, and it emphasizes a void between consumers and marketers – the void that’s been there for 600 years, since the end of the middle ages. He painted a picture of business owners – in many cases, land owners – who created the rules, the monopolies, and then hired (or inherited, as the case might be with serfdom) people to work under those rules and monopolies. Those in charge then acted to maintain these monopolies, rather than create new things; all efforts went to maintain a set of control, and in this controlled environment, the best worker was one that was not necessarily skilled but instead replaceable. That is, a worker who could easily be swapped out for another was of more value than someone with a highly refined skillset, and so tasks were established that were essentially intended for the unskilled.

There’s an obvious allusion made to corporations of today, where many large corporations no longer actually make anything; instead, they simply manage the books and finances, and rebrand white-labeled goods or services. The example of note is a TV manufacturer, who doesn’t actually manufacture televisions – those are created by an OEM in China. They don’t design them, either – that’s done by a vendor. The marketing? Handled by a consultant. The entire large corporation of television making, then, doesn’t actually make televisions, and from one perspective, doesn’t really do anything at all. As Rushkoff describes, the corporation is now in a position of hiring the unskilled serfs of the middle ages, because they are replaceable, and there’s no need to train them to actually do anything.

Yet the various financial issues that plague our country and world are calling attention to the fundamental problems of this model, and the model is now shifting. Doug explains that “We are finally in an environment where the way to make money is to actually be good at something! That’s the story, and it’s not a brand story.” As people talk to each other – as they do the things social people do, enabled by the technologies of twitter and blogging and facebook – they are talking about the story. And if there isn’t an authentic story to talk about; if it’s all marketing and brand and artificial and contrived, they either aren’t talking about it at all, or calling it out loudly as what it is.

In Doug Rushkoff’s view, the way to succeed in business now is to make things, not brand them. It’s expertise and passion – management and the larger corporate structure is there to protect people’s abilities to make things and be passionate. It’s truthful, and real, and it should be good. In his words, “We are no longer in a universe of messaging and marketing. It’s a universe of doing.”

China Awaits Doctor Appointment System

Emma Zhu — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 03:48:29 -0600

From last October, all the tier-3 hospitals in China, the highest ranked and best equipped public hospitals, were required by the Ministry of Health to provide clinic appointment services. The national initiative of building the clinic appointment system aims to reach these objectives: 1) arrange doctors' agenda better, 2) reduce patients' wait time, and 3) provide better medical consultation. In shorter words, in face of pressing healthcare issues, the government kicks off a service initiative to improve the healthcare efficiency as well as work quality.

Making doctor appointments is common in most developed countries, but it hasn't been put into public use in China before. You can go to the hospital anytime and get a queue number at the outpatient counter. The counter staff then dispatches you to a medical division and you wait outside the diagnosis room till your number is called. Waiting is not a nice thing in any scenario, not to mention when you are feeling sick. Seeing a doctor is like going on a blind date. You don't know who you'll meet and what you would expect in the hospital. All you know is that you feel not well and probably nervous in the medical environment.

So building an appointment system is a good idea for Chinese patients. It's good to arrange agenda beforehand and saves a lot of time for patients. But the advantages of the system are larger than that. If a doctor knows that a patient comes the next day, he or she may provide some pre-clinic tips to the patient and the patient, on the other hand, may be more aware of useful medical information or more prepared for the coming test if needed. More importantly, the appointment system sets the foundation of an active network between doctors and patients. Both parties can be connected closer and communicate more efficiently with the aid of other widgets on top of the system. Take Hello Health for example. The new online service targets to bring the doctor and the patient back together through its online system and reinvigorate the person-oriented bond by giving participants email and mobile tools.

Breaking the complex and stagnant healthcare system boundary and connecting real people together is a trend gaining increasing momentum. This trend has been recognized and valued not only by medical professionals but also by healthcare marketers. A.D.A.M., Inc. partners with a team of online health service providers to design an iPhone application called Medzio to allow users to navigate the local healthcare resources such as pharmacies and clinics. Johnson & Johnson sponsors an online community called Strength for Caring and makes an affiliated iPhone application called Care Connector that helps users manage medical profiles of those whom they take care of and connect with care givers' conversations.

Looking back to the toddling appointment system that China is promoting, we lack those tools. We don't even have the foundation system ready yet and the population is unfamiliar with the potentially much-nicer experience. Currently, hospitals are trying to set up their hotlines to deal with the appointment scheduling. Only a few started to play with the very rough html web pages. Even the private health management companies like iKang offers not much more than a nice-looking list of hospitals and a good call center.

Opportunities lie in the opening door of a good digital appointment system and its extended applications. Before grounding those opportunities into meaningful businesses, the siloed efforts of hospital hotlines need integrating as a whole. The technology part itself is not as hard as devising a smart game plan for platform partnership. Any potential winner must not only think of how to create a good product that fits in the local context and simplifies user experience through the patient-doctor touch points, but also weigh the value proposition it offers to the medical professionals and hospitals, in terms of either sharing profit or digging in the information treasure or improving performance. I'm positive to see the changing landscape in China's healthcare, though it takes time and vision to translate incremental efforts into a breakthrough. I don't know yet who's stepping up to fill in the role. But I know that none of the other digital and wireless applications or services in healthcare could pick up the trend easily in China without one setting up the foundation for the ecosystem.

Ten Steps to Becoming the Designer You Want to Be

Laura Seargeant Richardson — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:25:39 -0600

Photo (cc) by Flickr user Leo Reynolds.

An open letter to the next generation of designers, part 1.

Everyone has moments in their career when they look back and think, “If I had only known then what I know now....” After 15-plus years as a designer and design researcher at places like IBM, Trilogy, M3 Design, and now frog design, I know I certainly have. Which is why, now that I’m a veteran, I'd like to give share some advice with young designers just starting out. If I could be your mentor, this is what I would tell you:

1. Get the book

We all have a book that grabbed us by the throat and never let go, forever changing how we look at our profession. For me, that book was Sparks of Genius, The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People. The design process is, ultimately, the ability to creatively solve problems—and in our profession, we need to be better at it than most.

2. Get the obscure book you've never heard of

While it's an older book, The All New Universal Traveler – A soft-systems guide to creativity, problem solving and the process of reaching goals is still juicy today. It was written by architecture professors from California Polytech and the School of Architecture and Environmental Design, and presents a ton of research condensed into a tightly packed form.

3. Choose a topic that fascinates you and learn it inside out

This is how you become an expert. Your topic might be as broad as sustainability, or as narrow as a specific method like body storming. Over the last 10 years, I took on three provocative topics—emotional design, design research, and participatory design—and I just recently look on another: synesthesia.

4. Write, blog, and speak on that topic

You’re an expert once you feel comfortable calling yourself an expert. Take Jakob Nielsen, who began blogging about usability back in the late 1990s. He became recognized as the source on usability because he was consistently churning out information on the topic. Were there other experts on usability? Sure. But Nielsen developed the early point of view, and wrote provocatively about the subject.

5. Learn Something New Every Day

Every designer should be on a quest to see the world with fresh eyes every day. This might be learning something—a bit of trivia, perhaps—that helps you see the world a little differently. For example, today I learned that cats can’t taste sugar. This may sound trivial, but it could lead to a whole host of ideas. And so could the fact that they have hooks on their tongue to lap up water.

6. Create a New Idea Every Day

At one point I was twittering a new idea every day. (Example: “Product Idea #1: Skin Pens > did you ever write notes on your hand? i still do. i want a pen for skin writing on the go.”) Now I file them manually. People will say that ideas are a dime a dozen, but I think they're wrong: I think the first 10 might be worth a dime, but the last two could be worth their weight in gold. I would suggest that the designer without an idea isn’t a designer. Record them, capture them, and go back to them.

7. Experiment

Good designers experiment. One of my favorite examples is from fellow frog Michael McDaniel, who conceived of portable housing after Hurricane Katrina. When he didn’t get immediate interest from government agencies, he built a full prototype in his backyard. I’ve experimented with measuring emotion through sound, and a scent alphabet, to name a few. When you do experiment, push the edges.

8. Learn as many frameworks as you can

In 2008, a design team at M3 (where I was working at the time) went through 400 design research methods, reduced the redundancy, and then sorted the remaining 250. This exercise, while daunting, was incredible: For the first time, a designer could see the research methods, or "frameworks," that existed in the design space. The point is, you should get comfortable moving beyond just brainstorming and start structuring data in such a way that it drives insight and innovation. When you get comfortable with many frameworks, you’ll start creating your own. The only caveat is not to rely on them, because not everything can be modeled in a framework that already exists.

9. Choose variety over anything else

I turned down an offer that paid more to come work at frog. I’ve never regretted that decision. If anything, frog has made me crave variety in such a way that I doubt I’ll ever be able to commit to just one industry. I’ve done everything from cell phone interaction design to social networking strategy, and from the future of electric vehicles to emotional medical identification. I would recommend to anyone that when you stop learning, it’s time to move on.

10. Model or draw (all the f*@#ing time)

To be good at anything, you need to do it a lot. And to be really, really good, you need to do it all the time. I don’t care how great an idea is, if you can’t model it, prototype it, or draw it, then you're screwed. If you learn nothing else from this blog post, please find a way to learn how to make your ideas tangible. This can be through graphic design, sketching and rendering in Alias, a flash prototype, photography, video, whatever. Just learn the tools of the tangible.

To be continued…

Google Launches Bike-Friendly Maps

Adam Richardson — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:55:37 -0600

Google has launched a long-requested feature: an overlay of suggested routes for cyclists.

NY Times reports:

Much like the driving and walking directions on Google Maps, the service selects a route and calculates estimated cycling times after a user provides start and end points. The routing algorithm attempts to select optimal directions that avoid freeways and busy roads and intersections, and take into account bike paths, bike lanes and bike-friendly streets. They will seek to route around hills, whenever practical. Google Maps will also offer a “view” geared for cyclists that will display bike-friendly routes. A mobile version is likely to follow soon, said Shannon Guymon, a product manager for Google Maps Directions.

Dedicated bike paths and streets with bike lanes are highlighted in solid green, and streets with wider lanes that are slightly more bike friendly are shown in dotted green. Above is my route from Montgomery Street BART station down Second Street to frog's offices on Third. Second is shown as dotted green, though it's not really a fun street to ride on. Google tries to keep you honest by not suggesting a shorter route that involves going the wrong way for half a block down a one-way street (Third)... If I try to cut across to Third on Brannan then Google dutifully circles me around another block.

Still, this is a great resource for urban cyclists (currently it's available in 150 cities in the US).

The Remembering Self Reflects on Happiness and Morality at TED

Tim Leberecht — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 19:20:37 -0600

TED conferences, you might think, are happy affairs. You get up early, meet the most fascinating people, listen to jaw-dropping talks (each followed by a standing ovation), have deep conversations, and party until dawn – and all of that for four days in a row, safely remote from your usual daily routine. The reality, however, is more complicated. The event is a physical and mental stress test, an emotional rollercoaster ride that challenges you with constant over-stimulation, extreme cross-pollination, and tidal waves of acceptance and rejection as you navigate the social networks in the conference’s “social spaces.” To slightly paraphrase Heidi Klum: “With one group you’re in, with the next group you’re out.” And yet you will never hear anyone who was lucky enough to attend TED come back and not rave about their experience. Why is that? Daniel Kahneman, the mastermind of Behavioral Economics, provided the answer – at TED2010: TEDsters are happy because they expect to be happy. Let me explain, or rather, let Daniel Kahneman explain.

The future as anticipated memories

In his talk, the first of the conference and for me the most memorable, Kahneman sharply distinguished between “being happy in one’s life" and “being happy about one’s life,” and fervently debunked the “myth of the one self.” Instead, he introduced two different modes of “self” – the Experiencing Self and the Remembering Self. Their notions of happiness can be very different, he stressed, so that happiness cannot just be viewed as a substitute for well-being. The lack of money buys you misery, as Gallup surveys regularly indicate, but an abundance of wealth, as often reported, does not necessarily make you happier. To illustrate his point, Kahneman explained why people relocating to California are reported to be extraordinarily happy – before they even move, their Remembering Self imbues their experience as a happy one, which indeed might make them behave happier and thus infect others with more happiness (Connected co-author Nicholas A. Christakis showed in another TED2010 Talk that happiness, like other emotions, is highly contagious and spreads like wildfire through social networks). While the Experiencing Self is in the moment (and might feel good about it), it is the Remembering Self, the reflective self, that qualifies experiences as memorable experiences. There are 600 million moments in one’s life, Kahneman stated – “the Remembering Self tells us which of these are relevant, meaningful, and worth remembering.” “We choose between memories of experiences,” he concluded; in fact, “we think of the future as anticipated memories.”

It is intriguing to think about the implications of Kahneman’s model for policy-making, business, and also design, especially with regards to product and service experiences. If designers followed Kahneman’s theory, they would design user experiences not only for the Experiencing Self but also for the Remembering Self, which puts experiences into perspective by inferring and deferring. You could also say: the Experiencing Self values usability; the Remembering Self attaches itself to a brand. Users are usually happy when the Remembering Self finds out that its anticipated memories (brand promise) match the Experience Self (user experience). Great brands connect the Remembering Self with the Experiencing Self to make consumers happy, inspire behavior change, and make the world a better place – not a simple feat.

Counting what counts

Speaking of simple, there are other gestalts of happiness: George Whitesides proposed the beauty of simplicity as one. In his definition, “simple components are reliable, repeatable, and predictable” – thus they can be “stacked” to create remarkable systems. “Academics like complexity and emergence. The real world wants simplicity,” he contended, and borrowed some of Thomas Jefferson’s wisdom: “When the subject is strong, simplicity is the only way to treat it.”

Simple – in a good way – was also the happiness formula that Chip Conley, founder and CEO of hospitality chain Joie de Vivre, presented: “Wanting what you have divided by having what you want.” Gratitude plus gratification. Conley evoked the principles of Positive Psychology and re-imagined Maslow’s pyramid of needs as a new hierarchy of “survival, success, and transformation,” suggesting that we start “counting what really counts” – intangible values, spiritual fulfillment, and meaning. 90% of business leaders believe in the value of intangibles, Conley remarked, but the way we run our organizations does not yet reflect that – for we rely on myopic models and metrics: Pareto optimality, shareholder value, ROI, and GDP (of which, according to Conley, only 36%, is made up of tangible values). A metric for meaning, anyone? On the macro-economic level, the government of Bhutan has come close by introducing Gross National Happiness (GNH) as a new national currency that attempts to measure “quality of life” and “social progress.” France and other countries have begun adopting it. When will the first company implement its micro-equivalent?

Spiritually present during Conley’s talk was Enrique Peñalosa, who in his three years (1998-2001) as mayor of Colombia’s capital Bogota made “promoting happiness” the main directive of his governance, boosting the common good in a city characterized by vast disparities of wealth. During his tenure, he improved slums, built schools and nurseries, new libraries, and hundreds of parks and other pedestrian spaces. “We live in the post-communism period, in which many have assumed equality as a social goal is obsolete,” he once said. “Although income equality as a concept does not jibe with market economy, we can seek to achieve quality-of-life equality.”

Science and compassion

Quality of life may be a moral obligation not only for elected officials but for all of us. In this vein, Sam Harris, the zealous atheist, in his TED talk proposed a concept of “objective morality” that would make life better for everyone. In his eyes, the separation between science and human values is an illusion; for him there is only a rather artificial division between values and facts. “Belief is the default state,” as fellow TED speaker and professional skeptic Michael Specter, author of the book Denialism, observed. It was ironic though how Harris fell prey to his own convictions; his belief in the universal validity of “facts” is just that – a belief. ”Do the Taliban have any point on physics worth considering?” Harris asked. No. So why do we consider their views on morality? “Certain opinions need to be excluded from the discourse for morality to flourish,” he requested.

This is, frankly, a scary thought. If those scientists who present themselves as naïve believers in absolute, measurable truths were to determine the tenets of a universal morality, this would constitute a tyranny of science, with some very subjective outcomes imposed on the rest of us. Values need to regulate science, not the other way around. The essence of morality is “compassion,” as Schopenhauer put it: respect for the “other” – the other being and his/her values. Morality, per se, is an open concept with myriad interpretations. It needs to remain an ambiguous space that tolerates divergent values and opinions – if it doesn’t, the concept of the “other” will become obsolete. “Difference,” in other words “quality” (and “quality of life”), will fade, and “moral scientists” will fill the void with a regime of a default absolute morality.

But morality is relative, by definition. No one said it better than Oscar Wilde: “Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.”

Sometimes it just takes one true word to make you perfectly happy.

[Photo: TED / James Duncan Davidson]

Walking Into a Forest With a Match

Tim Leberecht — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 12:38:13 -0600

For Wired UK’s “Work Smarter” issue (just released), I had the pleasure to speak with John Winsor, co-founder and CEO of Victors & Spoils (V&S), the world’s first creative (ad) agency built on crowdsourcing principles. You can find a shortened article in the Wired UK magazine. Here’s the interview in full length.

Q: V&S launched a few months ago. How is it going so far? How many clients do you have, and can you share some of the work that you are doing?

It's going really well. We're working with a half dozen clients and have done a dozen projects, thus far. We've been doing everything from brand strategy work, to developing digital tools, to design projects. We've just started working on a couple of TV spots and an industrial design project. It's been a fast three months. You'll see the work start rolling out the door in the next few months.

Q: I guess it's one thing to have a bold idea like crowdsourced advertising and another to actually do it. What made you believe that this might be a viable business model?

I think what we're doing is bigger than just crowdsourcing. The rise in digital connectivity has fueled new ways to use co-creation, mass-collaboration and open-source innovation as powerful tools for business. I've been a firm believer in these disruptions since I wrote my first book about co-creation, Beyond the Brand, in 2004.

Likewise my career has benefitted from several disruptions. First, the rise of desktop publishing allowed me to start a publishing company, Sports and Fitness Publishing. Without the revolution that Apple started with the Macintosh, along with Quark and Adobe's help, I would have never been able to afford to go into the magazine publishing business. Likewise, the rise of other digital technologies allowed me to build Radar Communications, by combining the worlds of anthropology and journalism to provide a new way to do brand strategy and market research. And now, Victors & Spoils wouldn't even be possible without the communities of talented people that are aggregating online.

Of all the disruptions I've had the opportunity to build businesses upon this is the greatest opportunity in my career.

Q: With Starbucks, Best Buy, and other big brands launching crowdsourcing platforms, some industry observers seem to believe that crowdsourcing has jumped the shark. Is V&S the logical end of the line or are we going to see more crowdsourcing, across other creative disciplines?

I think we're seeing a bigger and deeper change going on in the way we work. Every time a new technology disrupts an industry, there are those who try to protect the current way of thinking. While this current digital disruption might seem like a new and frightening trend to those how hold on deeply to the current paradigm.

Just look at history. During the Renaissance, in the middle of the 15th century, there was a similar disruption happening that was shaking the pillars of the then current media world. The methodology of using movable type on a printing press, developed by Johannes Guttenberg, was spreading like wildfire, making books more accessible throughout Europe, allowing a whole new generation to have the tools that only a few held. At the time, books were produced by an elite group of monks in a few monasteries. These scribes were the media elite of their day. As it became more obvious that the new disruptive technological changes produced by the printing press some felt the need to turn the page back. In 1492, Johannes Trithemius, the Abbot of Sponheim, a well-known monastery, wrote, In Praise of Scribes. In it he wrote, "We must preserve the old order at any cost." Yet, he had a problem. If he used scribes to produce the book it might take too long to stop the tide of the disruption caused by the printing press. Instead, he used a Guttenberg press to print In Praise of Scribes, only accelerating the change.

The same thing is going on now. Agencies are trying desperately to protect the old way of doing business while bigger cultural trends are shifting the sand below their feet.

Q: If the crowd turns out to be more creative than specialized professionals, will that be the end of the creative industry?

It's only the beginning. How much creativity was there when only monks could write books? Likewise, Apple and Adobe have ushered in a new age of democratization of creativity. The current trends of mass-collaboration, co-creation and crowdsourcing, based on mass connectivity are only further democratizes creativity. Just look at You Tube. When digital tools become cheap enough everyone can gets involved. Now, it's a question of what's good content and what's bad content. But often, that's a matter of personal taste.

Q: Some people say that your radical crowdsourcing approach might just be a PR stunt to get some publicity around the launch but that V&S will eventually become a more traditional creative shop or at least a hybrid of crowdsourced and expert services. What do you tell them?

For us, it's been unbelievable. It's been like walking into a forest with a match. Sure, we wanted to start a fire and build a business. The cultural conditions have been right for something much bigger. We've gotten calls from several of the most progressive CMOs in the world. They are tired of paying too much money for too few good ideas. They want change.

It used to be that creative quality and price were diametrically opposed. The more you paid, the better quality you could get and vice versa. It was an "or" relationship. You could get quality or price. Certainly, that's been the way the current advertising and design world works. What we're seeing is the opposite. Two things are happening. First, with our own projects and with projects like Unilever's Peperami's crowdsourced scripts project on Ideabounty, talent rises to the top and wins. Our contention has been that in truly free markets, the best work produced by the most talented people rises to the top. It's not blocked by internal politics or hierarchical competition that can smother the best ideas inside big organizations. And, it's only accelerating, many of the most talented creatives and strategists are starting to play around and do work on the new digital networks that are emerging. We've also found that in an apple to apple comparison with the projects we're working on, clients typically save 75% in their creative fees for the same quality. Projects that used to cost $100,000 now can cost $25,000 (or $1,000,000 is now $250,000) for the same quality. We're seeing that with the same strategic and creative direction, results are very similar. Clients are telling us they want to leverage the power of "and." They want the best creative work and pay the best price. That's what we're trying to do. We're using the latest digital tools to provide the best creative product for the best price. Crowdsourcing is only one of the tools to accomplish that goal.

Q: How do you hire, and how do you manage the crowdsourced creative department? Is it limited to a submission of "big ideas" or do contributors collaborate on projects from start to finish?

The first thing we've noticed is that there are lots of different ways to use co-creation and crowdsourcing to solve marketing and product design problems. We've run projects on Crowdspring, 99designs and GeniusRocket. All of these platforms are good for different things. They get a lot of people involved in a project. But it's easy to get overwhelmed by the number of entries. And, Sturgeon's Law, that only 10 percent of any large group of creative output is good, definitely applies. In these large community crowdsourcing projects it takes a lot of creative direction. One of our core principles is "Victors" instead of "Victor" or paying many winners instead of just one. We do this with every project we run.

Another way we've been using the community for projects is by selecting small groups of people from our 500+ strong creative department, a global network of some of the best creatives and strategists in the world. In these projects we've been inviting 50-100 folks to participate in a project, selecting between 6 and 12 finalists to compete. In these cases, the finalists get a fee for participating. There is then another fee for the winner of the competition. These smaller, swat team efforts have been working well with all kinds of projects from more complicated design projects to strategy and brand platform projects. One of the advantages has been the ability to keep projects more tightly controlled confidentiality and the ability to creatively direct more complicated projects. But, unlike the larger public projects, the sheer number of ideas is more limited. There are lots of tools in the toolbox and surely more are coming.

It still comes down to the strategic and creative direction to make sure the work produced by any crowd, either internal or external, pushes the work forward in the right direction to accomplish a client's objectives.

Q: How do you pay your crowd(s)? Do they receive a percentage of the client fees? Are there several layers of contributors with varying payment levels? Do contributors have any influence on V&S' strategic decisions?

Yes. We have many different payment models, as described above, and are constantly developing new ones. People in our creative department have a ranking based on their reputation. And, we constantly ask the department to participate in decisions. This space is bigger than all of us and is constantly evolving.

Q: You previously worked at Crispin Porter + Bogusky (CP+B), a legendary firm with a distinct brand. With V&S, how can you develop a creative identity over the long term when your creative is crowdsourced? How do you maintain your quality standards?

Working with guys like Alex Bogusky and Chuck Porter was an honor. Alex and Chuck are fearless the way they approach work and life. The attitude is the key ingredient of making CP+B what it has become. Quality and consistency of the V&S brand comes from great strategic and creative direction. My two partners, Evan Fry and Claudia Batten, are two of the best. The three of us spend a lot of time developing the V&S brand. So far, we feel like it's going pretty well.

Q: You write on your blog that "Brands need an alternative to current ad agencies and crowdsourcing platforms. One that offers the strategic direction, engagement and relationship management that agencies deliver today but one that also delivers engagement, connectivity, creativity, and ROI that crowdsourcing platforms have the potential to deliver." How does V&S measure ROI?

We believe that marketing and product design should be judged on how it affects sales and profits for our clients. At the end of the day, that's what they're being judged on. We do work with clients to develop goals for every project. Each project has a different ROI metric. That said, when clients are saving 75% on their creative investment to start with they can achieve their goals much more easily. They also have the ability to try a lot more creative ideas.

Q: At CP+B you launched a product innovation group, and now you have set out to innovate the entire creative industry. In your opinion, what are the biggest barriers and challenges that stand in the way of organizations becoming more innovative?

When Alex Bogusky and I were doing research for our latest book, Baked In: Creating Products and Businesses that Market Themselves, we noticed that the biggest stumbling block to being more innovative for most companies were the internal silos that have been created. Marketing is a silo. Product Design is a silo. Innovation is often its own silo. To be more innovative companies must knock down the internal silos and start to get everyone working together.

Q: What business innovation are you still waiting for?

I'm really looking forward to even more collaborative digital tools, especially video conferencing technology.

[photo credit: David Sykes for Wired UK)

Penguin Books Innovates in Publishing...Again

Adam Richardson — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:34:03 -0600

Penguin, the fabled English publisher, is plunging head first into the world of iPad content. Not iPad books, exactly, as these things are not recognizable as books in the normal sense - they are closer to games and full-fledged apps. Even in the case where they are adapting existing print books, there is enough new stuff going on where it diverges significantly from what we normally think of as "book". A Kindle ebook these are not. Check out the video above for an intriguing peep into what they have planned.

Dan Nosowitz at Fast Company observes:

[P]enguin doesn't even think these things are books. I know that because Penguin intends to sell this digital content in the app store, as individual apps, not in the iBooks bookstore. There's nothing wrong with that--these apps look great, and the prospect of enriching the definition of "book" is exciting--but as companies take advantage of the iPad, the publishing industry is going to have to expand in ways we don't quite understand yet.

This is actually not the first time that Penguin has taken such a radical view of books. In fact, the company was founded 75 years ago on an innovative approach to book publishing and distribution. I talk about it in my own book, as it is a terrific early example of disruptive innovation.

Penguin Books came into existence because of a realization on a train platform. Penguin’s founder, Allen Lane, was returning from a weekend with the famous mystery writer Agatha Christie, and looked in the train station’s book stall for something to read on his journey back to London. Finding only popular magazines and poor-quality, luridly written novels, he wondered why there was not anything for the reader who wanted some good-quality ﬁction at a low price.

Penguin Books began with a range of biography, crime-writing, and novels, all by contemporary authors and selling for a ﬁfteenth of what hardback books usually sold for. Within a year, Penguin sold three million paperbacks by satisfying a need that traditional book publishers saw as off-limits. They were focused on a more upscale category, and assumed readers were warmly ensconced in a drawing room with plenty of time to spare.

Penguin even experimented with a purpose-built dispensing machine for train stations, wonderfully named the Penguincubator (since penguins lay eggs), which, sadly, seems lost to the mists of time.