Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

The interwebs have been full of eulogies and tributes to Steve Jobs - but some of my favorite articles have been the ones that talk about what people learned from the man behind the Apple.  Because you don’t have to like or own his products to see and respect the many lessons he learned and principles he lived by.

My favorite (and I realize that this might look like an odd choice) was this: 10 Lessons The Restaurant Industry Can Learn From Steve Jobs.

Ok - I know - I’m not in the restaurant industry, and probably never will be, but you can’t tell me that these don’t apply to your everyday work and couldn’t make things better for everyone.

The customer-user experience trumps everything else

Keep the brand simple and contemporary

Get inspired by the small things

No man or woman is an island

And list goes on and on…

It’s sad to have such an innovative leader pass away young, but it may be a comfort to some that he leaves a legacy of powerful business practices we can all learn from.

Photo: Zimbio

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While Apple is busy planning its new grandiose headquarter offices in Cupertino and celebrating its recent successes, some voices have words of admonishment. Using the example of the lack of success of the iAd platform, Brandt Dainow points out:

The point is Apple runs a restricted, tightly controlled environment in a world that loves the free market. History has shown us, over and over again, that free markets always win out over closed ones.

A rule, that most people seem to have forgotten when it comes to Apple. So far the exceptional innovation culture at Apple has delivered products that people finally really wanted, more or less making people forget that they are buying into a closed system.

Now, Apple is protecting questionable aspects of their innovations, such as the rounded corners on iDevices by filing patent law suits. Is this a sign of having reached their innovation plateau, or is it just good business practice?

Granted, there are many more companies that should worry about their state of innovation than Apple, but, still, in a sense, Apple has reached a plateau that may require a look at its purpose beyond having revolutionized the consumer electronics space. With having proven they can, what is the next thing we can expect from Apple? I doubt creating more types of iDevices or living from iOS updates is the topic here. Some say, in the midterm, Apple could deal with the much neglected enterprise and B2B markets, but that doesn’t necessarily mean new revolutionary innovation on the scale we have witnessed with the introduction of iPhone and iPad.

And maybe, just maybe, with whatever the “next thing” is for Apple, it will have to be a bit more open.

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Saw a video by Hubble Innovations, via Florian Geiger today.

The video outlines the well-know problem of traditional media’s slowly but surely failing business models and claims to be able to solve it.

The Future of media brands - Case Study from Hubble Innovations on Vimeo.

The solution isn’t exactly new: it’s a super-aggregator idea that totally personalized to me, my location, my social network and content/event preferences. Even though they claim rights to the idea, it’s preposterous. This idea already exists in partial solutions already in existing synching and SM integrator solutions. In fact, some could argue: “Isn’t this what Facebook is slowly becoming anyway?”

My take on this is: The concept is a fairly logical and tempting conclusion based on the insight that people would like to have everything in one place and like location awareness. Apart from the title of the video being a misnomer (it doesn’t address the future of media brands but rather paints a picture of a desired user behavior), it will still take quite a while to build its proof of concept.

1. First of all, as we have seen with previous aggregator solutions, it takes a while for people to completely disband their existing behaviors of going to single source. For example, even though RockMelt had a pretty good start through social buzz, actual usage after initial sign-up have dropped. People tend to go back to their fragmented user behaviors until the user experience has matured. For complete adoption of an aggregator idea, the individual moving parts AND their respective user behaviors have to be quite mature. I don’t think this is the case just yet for this concept.  But it probably will in the future, after some other ideas have trailblazed these behaviors, failed on the way, and generated learnings that will ultimately benefit some 20-something entrepreneur who will become a billionaire, again.
2. Apart from the fact that the idea remains quite abstract and hidden behind a fancy animation, it also fails to address how exactly this is supposed to save traditional media, or at least revolutionize or evolve the media and publishing space. Who in fact would be a qualified media partner to build and propel this concept?  The concept does mention how people will pay for this experience, but not who gets paid for it and how. Assuming that the concept can repeat an Apple-like success of starting to pay for content (which is lofty enough), I still think this is the key point in terms of business maturity that will make or break this concept. Which content producers (old media or new) will come together how, produce how, and get paid how. In fact, since so much of news, information and entertainment is based on actual people (users) sharing and producing content without getting paid for it, wouldn’t you have to find a way to have them get a share for their content production and dissemination activities (see flattr) as well? So much of their behavior is about sharing (old) media content that the benefit of doing it just in one place might not be enough (ironically, in a way they are actually responsible for keeping those traditional publishers in business through their activities). In fact, this important social sharing aspect would probably have to be addressed as part of the business model, otherwise it will just remain one more aggregator solution. A solution that until now has no user base (such as Facebook) or no real competence in traditional content creation (such as NYT) and no competence in new content creation (such as Gizmodo or Mashable), and which is my point: no real strategy on HOW to pull it together. It’s a user experience vision, not a business idea, is my point. And, unlike other aggregator and synching solutions such as Read It Later, Instapaper, Dropbox and others which very defined user goals they serve, this solution would have to solve for it all. And we know how many attempts it takes for even the big players (think of Google’s long list of abandoned Betas) to pull it off and how many product ideas need to fail before maturity sets in. So keep trucking, but prepare to wait a while.
3. Also, the concepts just assumes people will behave this way. But when you look at those early adopters who are responsible for initial successes of of new web offerings, you can quickly see that they are quite different from those who come in when a certain maturity has set in. In fact, early adopter behavior is (to some extent) one of not managing and aggregating their experiences, but rather seeking new ones, so that those become trends that then lead to being reaggregated in new experiences again. Therefore, the game facebook plays is a type of tug of war of those users that they need to innovate, while maturing an experience for the large mass to keep them happy while also making sure the innovator group doesn’t get bored.  Facebook has, by and large, played the game the best in comparison to for example local market solutions in Germany and other places. The point is, aggregation happens after innovation. And they are different things to different types of users at different maturity levels. The concept fails to address this (at least in the video). There seems to be no go-to-market strategy.

So, in conclusion: thanks for the video, but a) aggregation itself is not an idea, it’s about how you aggregate, with who and when, and b) the big players have been working on it for a quite a while anyhow and c) you can’t pull it off if you don’t have some background at being expert in at least one area that is key to business success: i.e., producing worthwhile content, or making people pay for content, or innovative payment technology, or maturing a user experience for disparate user behavior profiles.

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Check out the @jeeppuzzle Twitter account and YouTube video where Jeep has found a way to make the order that you add followers add up to a beautiful snapshot…

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Very cool interactive execution for AXA:

I’m assuming that you set your phone on the ad and then load a website to see the video (they left out this detail in the video).  It’s a nice way to build intrigue around your app, but a little mono-intentional.

Fun video, though!

Via Michael Metcalf

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Head on over to the TechCheck download page to check out the latest in technology and digital marketing or download it right here.

TechCheck is a quarterly publication from Leo Burnett/Arc Worldwide that highlights emerging technology and digital services that can enable engagement, conversation or transaction.

Enjoy!

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Check out the latest from Contagious - an article about how some tweeting cows picked the new milk flavor for the Norwegian dairy brand TINE.

DIST Creative from Oslo launched the campaign largely by social media - setting up a Facebook and Twitter account for each cow.

The new milk flavor ‘rice pudding’ was selected by the cows grazing more in one specific area of their field.

The new drink will be launched in January 2011.

via www.litago.no/kuenebestemmer via PR Daily Europe News Feed

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After what I thought of as a frankly lackluster program for Sportweets a few months ago, one of my favorite retailer’s latest effort for the relaunch of their UK website is a good example of Uniqlo getting right to the heart of consumer desire in the social space.

The “Under Construction” page for the UK site (which relaunched on the 9th) featured their ‘Lucky Counter’ which offered to bring the price down in exchange for tweets about your favorite items.

What’s not to love here?  The virtual immediate gratification, the built-in need to return to check on the price, the tantalizing view of how low the price could go, the focus on the launch date as the payoff, and on and on.

Another smart move from the innovative retailer.  Read all about it here.

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As more pressure is put on marketers and their agencies to do more with less, some of the most interesting opportunities for connecting with people come not from creating marketing campaigns, but finding new ways of creating value for consumers outside of the delivery of marketing messages.  This situation is an exciting new charge we feel today in our agency, as we look to find creative ways to have Brands participate in society with our consumers.  It’s not just reinventing ourselves as an advertising agency, but actually reinventing this reinvention into our begin a whole new kind of partner for our clients and their business.

Razorfish recently grabbed such an opportunity in their participation of a venture with Citigroup and Microsoft - linking content (in Citi’s case consumer data), with computing power (in Microsoft’s case) to create Bundle.

Interesting and inspiring - and I can’t wait to see where they go with this!  It also raises some fascinating questions in terms of what an agency model should be when the output is not a creative asset, but a business strategy, or even a new company.  I have had the chance to work on some projects like this with our clients, and I can honestly say it is as challenging and eye-opening as it is rewarding.  Check out the Bundle beta here.

Read about the venture here.

Source: AdWeek

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Playing with lasertags in front of MI6 building

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