Innovation feeder

Well Scion have done it again. After being the first car manufacturer to stage a virtual care launch in Second Life in 2006, this time they’re letting users design their own crests for the car. A new campaign put together by Strawberry Frog [based in NY & Amsterdam], lets users pick from a range of graffiti inspired symbols designed by Triston Eaton and put together their very own coat of arms. Users can print out the images, save them to a gallery or [for for a few thousand dollars] actually get them customised for their cars.

Check it out at scionspeak.com

Piers has called the Emperor’s bluff and now he’s naked . . . . Here’s a sneak but check it out for yourself, it’s a good post.

There’s something wrong in the trends business. It’s broken. It’s broken by lack of imagination, lack of collaboration and secrecy. Below we’ve listed some major areas that need fixing, not for our competitive sake, but for an industry to evolve and become useful enough to inspire its clients to make things better.

Trends services have an unhealthy reliance on control, restriction of information and perception. Trends companies put up gates that guard this mystical information that somehow only they could gather. This presentation from Henley Center’s d_Code is an example of how the trends industry attempts to scare companies into thinking how little they know. There’s no explanation of why d_code knows better, just that they somehow know a lot more than you do (and they’ve got the graphic designer to prove it). AgencySpy gave this great reaction to the presentation in 2007:

“No ideas. No dissection of new cultural movements to help you on your way. No outlay of creatives, organizations, thinkers that are shaking up the underground to shape the future. Nada. Every one of their clients should feel like they just got punk’d.”

Whether you work in advertising, marketing, innovation or new product development, one of the most difficult things is having to come up with new ideas & perspectives all the time. There’s often a mad scramble to find innovation examples, social commentary or macro trends when we have pitches on or a presentation due, but the reality is that this kind of information is most useful & valuable when it’s applied consistently throughout the entire working process.

When we’re exposed to a bunch of different points of view, different modes of thinking & different models of expressing that thinking, we approach things differently from the start. We interrogate the client’s brief in more detail, we set the boundaries for the strategy more decisively, we look for creative & strategic stimulus in places others may not necessarily have thought of & think outside the intellectual systems & structures that we would normally fall back on when we just ‘use what we have’ or even worse, ‘what we’ve done before’.

So why don’t companies take this kind of role more seriously? My guess is because it seems like a role that anyone could do & everyone should do. And they’re right. Except that nobody does. The reality is that every advertising planner or innovation strategist can read ten blogs a day, keep up to date on general social trends & emergent media & keep abreast of what the trendy trendspotters like to call ‘contemporary cultural zeitgeist’ but they don’t. It’s human nature to get bogged down in the projects piling up on our desk & the whoosh of the deadlines as they go rushing past. To jump from one mindset to another in normal day-to-day work is extraordinarily difficult. Of course it can be done, by any smartie pants in fact, the difference is that the state of mind needed to write clearly defined project presentations, manage clients & the creative process is quite different to the open-ended permanently curious & steadily expanding mindset of the researcher or the information geek. It’s almost as if one mindset is about connecting the dots (those who have a
formal planning or strategy role), whereas the other is about drawing new dots, which take a while to be connected, sometimes if at all.

The definition of a “Feeder” is one who stimulates people’s minds with a constant supply of new trends & ideas. At least that’s how the big cheeses at Business Week define it. So how can you get around this in your own company?

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In an earlier post I profiled Lynette Webb, the Insights Manager at Google who created a Flickr site called “Interesting Snippets”.

She calls it “my personal dumping ground for various cool quotes, the odd stat, as slides to talk around when describing how things are changing online and in media & communications generally” and it’s jammed with a bunch of great stimulus about the way technology is changing the world in which we live. It’s a Flickr collection online but she’s also published her slides in a book which you can buy on Lulu.

This is a new slide she just posted which I thought was worth a look. Whether you’re in advertising or not, companies are going to need to find new ways to communicate with people. Innovative communication tends to focus around a ‘better digital strategy’ or a new content format or a sexier podcast, when will we start finding new ways to have conversations & relationships with people?

Check it out, it’s a must see Interesting Snippets 

 It wasn’t so long ago that viral marketing was all the rage. It was trendy, irreverent [wasn't everything irreverent for a while there?] and we even thought consumers could just make it for us. After all, isn’t Generation C all about user generated content? Clients wanted it and agencies delivered it. Then some clients had the idea that they could get the consumers themselves to create virals which could be shown on TV or posted online. Further to this, we’ve seen the advent of Super Virals created by the guys at 12:20 which I believe has had great success. Courtesy of Faris Yakob I’ve just stumbled across Ann Summers Viral Academy and what a great idea it is.

Here’s the explanation on the website of how it all works:
 In A Nutshell
Viral advertising is a very important part of Ann Summers communications strategy. However we don’t retain a creative agency; instead we welcome ideas from talented creative people who contact us directly. These are people who want to bolster their show reel with some advertising that will be seen by millions (it’s not unusual for our virals to be seen by 20 million people), or want to do some work with an ideas led brand they can have some fun with – or just people who have a cracking idea.

However the ideas we get are not in response to a specific brief – are not necessarily true to our brand values or business objectives. We have created the Ann Summers viral academy to formalise the process – and to give people with great ideas more of a chance to get their work made.

Briefs will be posted up to 4 times a year and we have committed to making a production budget of up to £25k available for each brief to make the winning idea or ideas happen. We are also going to be awarding soon to be covetable black and gold rabbits. As well as that we will create a lot of trade PR for the winning submission, the creative mind or minds behind the submission and their agency homes – so professional kudos shall be forthcoming.

We expect most of the ideas to be for short films – like the ones you can find here but we don’t want to limit you in any way. If you have a great idea for a game, a song, a comic – anything at all – we’d love to hear it.

Our Commitment
We will make up to 4 new ads a year, for which we have put aside a significant production budget. We will then seed/place/distribute these ads. They will be first be seen as exclusive content at handbag.com, who are our online partners in this venture. They will then feature on our website and be sent to our sizeable database. We will work with you to try to ensure that the winning viral idea is a success and is widely seen.

Unlike other user-generated viral campaigns which invite the average user to create a viral for Jeans West or some other FMCG client, Ann Summers opens her briefs up to the creative industry, to those people who are keen to get some cutting edge work on a reel or try a new idea for their own portfolio.

A well considered approach to viral marketing and worth a look.

I’ve been reading a lot of posts recently about whether advertising agencies need to innovate, do they need to get a better handle on digital and interactive media?, do they need to position themselves more innovatively? do they need to innovate in their perspectives on communication and more broadly speaking, marketing? If I could flip that for a minute and pose a different question which has been stalking me; what space is it that the innovation companies themselves occupy?

Once there was a time when you needed an MBA, a thicker waist and a sound understanding of Hamel, Prahalad or Christensen to talk about real innovation but it seems now that any Tom, Dick or Barry with a new creative hotshop can play their quarter in the innovation game. When I used to think about innovation companies, big cheeses like McKinseys came to mind, now it seems that innovation companies are springing up quicker than moles in a hole. And whose running these new innovative and creative hothouses? Ex-agency people. Ex-planners. Ex-MDs.

Don’t get me wrong I’m not objecting to this in any way. I think it’s time “innovation” came out of the textbook, decreased the amount of models it presented build by build in powerpoint and struck up a friendship with natural creative strategists.

It makes you wonder whether ex-agency style innovation companies will eventually settle into the realm of new product innovation and brand / communication innovation briefs and business consultants will move into a more creative space to deliver innovative scenario planning and creative business model innovation.

It has always seemed to me that the perfect balance would be the rigour and robustness of a company like McKinseys together with the intuitive, disruptive and sometimes cowboy-style of some of the great creative strategists found in agencyland.

My question is this. Are many newly birthed innovation companies destined to become the ad agencies of the future? and if so, where does that leave the ad agencies of now?

Thoughts . . . ?

Check out the rest at Gaping Void

An interesting post from Whistle through your comb I thought I would share with you ::

The “Big Idea Model” is dead from a business perspective. The big idea points in a direction and says, “Charge!” Resources are poured into it. It’s a boastful model built on force. And more often than not, it’s a Pickett’s Charge. (The movie industry is suffering from this as well)

On the other hand, having many small ideas is a cheaper, faster, lower risk and a more diverse way to create. After all, little ideas can out grow their fish bowl. You only need a few successes to really make it big. The Recording industry has operated this way for years.

As CMO’s tenures dip below 2 years, it seems they would be much better off working with agency operating on the Many Small Ideas model. After all, failure is more common than success and there are only so many big ideas you can execute in two years.

That said, maybe ad agencies should mimic companies like Y Combinator, Curious Office Partners, Obvious, Tech Stars and Hit Forge who incubate and execute lots of little ideas (typically Web 2.0 startups). Each idea out with a small bit of financing and once it proves itself, it receives more. This means that all the time and money wasted worrying about and researching whether a new idea will succeed is unnecessary; you simply try it out.

This offers up an interesting paradox: the agencies who thrive in the future will be those who do not just outsucceed other agencies but outfail them as well. They will grow not in spite of failure but because of it.

Here I was sitting quietly at my clickboard minding my own business surfing some porn..just kidding, surfing some more boring research sites looking for demographic data or innovation examples and up pops this puppy…www.drivecleaner.com …what the?

You can almost hear the marketing thought process of some bright spark

Q :: Who would most benefit from a drive cleaner?

A :: People with stuff on their hard drives they don’t want anyone to see, people who surf porn

Q :: How do we tell them about our service?

A :: I know! we interrupt them while they’re doing boring mundane everyday things and simply say that we know what they get up to when they’re not doing boring mundane things and that we can keep their secret safe…

When this baby popped up with it’s scaremongering tactics about “files that could compromise your career and your marriage” I was thinking, crap! I better get that sorted, and then I thought to myself…why would my husband care about temporary site files downloaded from Bernard Salt or Innovation Central?

Wouldn’t the place to put these pop up ads be..um…on porn sites?…