Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

Ok, so what would you do if your Chief Creative Officer comes to you and goes: “We need to set a creative benchmark here. We can’t be dilly-dallying around anymore. If we want new clients, we need to show we are worth the money! So, I got some cash to spare to prove we can pull of amazing stuff. But I can’t do, like, 7 different things. I need one killer thing.”

Well, you would have to think about it, wouldn’t you? There is so much a digital agency can do these days, on top of having opinions about everything, especially when collaborating with specialists. There are so many digital culture trends to be partaking in.

“So, hmmmm…,” you would say to your CCO “… definitely need some kinda Urban Digitalism statement, right? Or something with Gaming - better yet Retro Gaming (’cuz only kids play 3D shooters, and our target are those guys with the cool hip Atari T-Shirts), Mashup Culture (’cuz that’s the lifestyle, mate!), or something Meme-based like they did with Snakes on a plane, so it gets fun and viral, you know? Right! But definitely gotta have Mobile-Something in it, because digital isn’t for couch potatoes anymore. Oh, oh… and, and you can’t go without fancy projection technology these days if you want the wow effect. But also, we need to marry some of the old school stuff like guerilla tactics with insane programming. Which one should we go for?”

“What do you mean ‘which one?’” says your CCO, “I want ALL that, but it’s gotta be simple, fun and demonstrate our creative and collaborative capabilities at the intersection of media, entertainment and technology - cuz I’ve been wanting to get quoted with that phrase for a heck of a long time.”

Well, I made that story up, but that’s certainly how it could have been for the team at Mojo Sydney. And, obviously, that’s an impossible briefing.

Impossible? Not for these guys.

Here is what they did.

SNAKE THE PLANET

Congrats to Publicis Mojo, MPU and Finch for pulling that off. Because, indeed, it does demonstrate the intersection of media, entertainment and technology. Let’s hope it catches on and the experience does become planetary at some point.

Great demonstration of technological R&D in the retail environment, way before its time. I hope the smell of “we’ll prototype it because we can” will dissipate quickly through some implementations very soon. I can’t wait to experience this for real. It would be a shame if it turns out to be just another one of those future technology scenarios that don’t see the light of day, or just sit in a few flagship stores because people don’t necessarily see the the benefit in adopting this type of shopping behavior.

Razorfish Connected Retail Experience Platform (codename “5D”) from Razorfish - Emerging Experiences on Vimeo.

Remember the Tipp-Ex Bear? A campaign that was lauded for its ability to garner millions of views of Youtube, allowed people to interact with the brand and created awareness for the Tipp-Ex and rejuvenated the brand. Effectively, the attempt was to reposition the brand from a routine category to an entertainment category brand. Watch their case study, if you don’t know it.

If the idea was to entertain millions of people for a few weeks, it certainly worked. According to the agency’s case study film, sales went up 30%. Assuming this is true, it was a stunning sales success. However, the question remains: did it solve the business problem in a sustainable manner?

In a world that is more and more digital, correction fluid simply has a more fundamental business issue: no one needs it anymore. And, while the campaign did create awareness, it did not credibly claim a new territory for the brand in which its new role in a digital world became apparent to people. Even after this case study, would you look to office supply companies for entertainment? Probably not. As a result, people still do not know why they need the Tipp-Ex brand.

Along comes Edding, another German brand with pretty much the same problem. Highlight markers, too, suffer from the same business issue as our working lives become more and more digital.

Edding, however, choose a different route. Highlighting text with highlight markers, just like correcting type with correction fluid, is a routine office behavior, not a fun entertainment behavior. Instead of trying to reach awareness through entertainment, it focused on a competency the brand credibly had in analog times and brought it online. In other words, the brand is trying to solve the problems people have at the office and make their lives easier, just as decades before.

With their digital highlighter you can highlight text on website, save articles as PDF, share them on twitter or facebook. The website still calls it a “release candidate” and I hope Edding will include Dropbox, Evernote, delicious and other existing services, if they want people to actually use it. However, strategically, this direction tries to credibly solve for their business in the business they are in, instead of pretending to be something they are not.

via uncrunched

via Dirk Schönfeld

Check out a good dozen logo evolution such as FIAT’s on Retronaut.

Interesting example of providing game dynamics in what is usually a “Gimme Number 3 without Anchovies” process:

Via Dustin Rideout

Apparently, the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) is doing some PR for itself. The age of social media has led to a blurring of the lines between marketing and corporate communications. In fact, so many things brands need to do nowadays puts even creative agencies in the territory of PR or vice versa.

The change agent being social media empowered consumers, the effort to redefine PR is quite aptly also a social media crowd-sourced effort in which people can submit their definitions on the PRSA website. A new definition (last updated 1982) may be overdue, but even so, the NYT speculates it may also be an effort to disassociate the industry from the notorious PR Eff-ups of the last couple years:

Among the more notorious examples are BP’s mishandling of the aftermath of its accident in the Gulf of Mexico; Facebook’s hiring of a public relations agency to try generating articles that would criticize the privacy practices of its rival, Google; how ChapStick increased complaints about a new campaign, which asked consumers to “Be heard at facebook.com/ChapStick,” by repeatedly deleting negative comments about the ads from the Facebook page; and how Netflix lost hundreds of thousands of members with a plan, later rescinded, to divide into separate businesses.

Nevertheless, I wonder how an official redefinition can help. In the de facto world of the communication business, PR is no longer the top-down message manager of yesteryear. Just like ad agencies cannot be the top-down message creators of yesteryear any longer.

Making this fact official may help in giving the industry a bit of common purpose and feel-good. Something, that ad people have, frankly, been kind of struggling with for their profession as well. How fitting then that its the PR folks taking the lead on this, staying true to the old PR mantra: If you don’t like the conversation, change it.

Just came across an article on the Washington Post’ Social Reader entitled “Why brainstorming doesn’t work”. I think most of us had the experience of failed or lackluster brainstorm sessions. In agency cultures, usually team-spirit and teamwork are often sought-for and proclaimed character traits that foster believe in a shared process of coming up with ideas. Territorial posturing aside, there are also some other issues at hand, that make brainstorming ineffective, as discovered by a recent study.

But according to a recently published study, the real problem may be that participants’ get stuck on each others’ ideas. Researchers asked undergraduate students to contribute ideas for improving Texas A&M, both individually and in collective groups. They shared the ideas on a computer, either in small chat groups or alone, but combined together after the fact. As expected, the “nominal” groups, or those made up of individual ideas that were later pulled together, outperformed the real chat groups, both with the number of ideas and the diversity of them.

The cause might be due to “cognitive fixation,” or the concept that, when exposed to group members’ ideas, people focused on those and blocked other types of ideas from taking hold. They experimented with this by manipulating the number of ideas participants saw in their chat windows, with some getting a few cues and others getting more. Their hypothesis was right: When exposed to many cues, the undergrads offered up less creative, diverse ideas. The numbers improved when the students were given a five-minute break during the exercise.

I am not sure the topic needed a study, because the insight is pretty common sense. However it reminds one to question the behavior to just pile a bunch of people in a room to create ideas.

Apart from the fact, that Louis CK is always hilarious, he has some pretty awesome observations on people’s behavior when it comes to social media