I spoke at the Inc. 500 conference today and came away totally inspired. Jim Collins' kick-off was fantastic when he talked about finding a quest and make a career out of it. Likewise, Seth Godin and Tom Peters had a inspiring debate about the need for decency ad grace when it comes to leadership.
The point was especially poignant today watching Paulson and Bernanke offer such global financial leadership and change the coarse of history.
Fellow CP+Ber, Todd Walker, writes a nice blog, Designing Innovations. I loved this Chuck Close quote he posted:
Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work and the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will, through work, bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never dream up if you were just sitting around looking for a great art idea. And that a belief in that the process, in a sense, is liberating and that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel everyday.
I always get stuck at the start of a project. When tackling something, like a new book, the task always seems too large to get my arms around. I guess the best solution is to just get to work.
Thomas Friedman has knack of capturing the essence of a situation I've had in the back of my mind for a while:
We can’t afford to keep being this stupid! We have got to get our groove back. We need a president who will unite us around a common purpose, not a common enemy. Al Qaeda is about 9/11. We are about 9/12, we are about the Fourth of July — which is why I hope that anyone who runs on the 9/11 platform gets trounced.
I couldn't agree more. Let's just hope that we can all think about 9/12 over the next year as the political rhetoric heats up.
Check out Rob Walker's, author of the Consumed column (I never miss it!) in the New York Times Magazine, interview with Core 77. Rob always has something interesting to say.
I’ve got some big news.
Crispin Porter + Bogusky (CP+B) has acquired Radar Communications. One of the things that attracted us to join forces with CP+B was not only their fearless approach to advertising and marketing but also the way they approach business itself.
CP+B shares our passion for bringing clients exceptionally close to current and potential customers. Radar will join CP+B’s very talented Cognitive and Cultural Studies (Cogs) department to form Cultural Radar. The Cogs department has become known for providing CP+B clients with a unique perspective on understanding culture and what drives and motivates consumers, by engaging leading minds from outside typical planning culture including cultural anthropologists, sociologists and other engaged people from all walks of live that had a spirit for cultural exploration.
All of us at Radar are thrilled about this unique opportunity and look forward to combining Radar’s research methodologies of ethnography, storytelling and the powerful hybrid of anthropological and journalistic practices.
The new Cultural Radar team will offer a powerful combination of Radar’s research tools with CP+B Cogs unique cultural insights. With this amplified depth, resources and skill sets we will now be able to offer more strategic direction and creative execution
Along with leveraging these combined Cultural Radar tools, I am also excited with the opportunity to put into practice more of the principles, like co-creation, that I explored in Beyond the Brand and Spark.
I’ll keep you posted as things evolve. It’s going to be a fun adventure!
Just when I thought I was pretty good about not getting stuck in a routine, always able to notice change, I drifted into Organica Coffee Shop, a block from my office. It's cool little place with a great vibe. As I ordered lunch, I asked how long they had been open. "A full year, next week" was the response.
Where had I been? As observant as I thought I was, how could a year go by without me noticing? Ah, self-deception is powerful stuff!
Is there anything right under your nose that you haven't noticed, lately?
Here’s part two of my conversation with Alex Bogusky about CP+B’s new book, Hoopla.
John: So much of the work in Hoopla is innovative. The work is cool, gaining “insider” status with the audience, without trying to be cool. Usually, when a brand exhibits such a progressive attitude, trying to be cool, it can come off as arrogant and inaccessible. Conversely, I found the CP+B work featured in the book very accessible. For example, the GT work in the book brought back memories of my bike racing days. They feel very insider. Yet, the message is broad enough that anyone looking at it will get it. How do you balance being innovative and pushing the culture with being accessible?
Alex: I’ve never really thought about that but it’s a good point. It probably starts with the fact that none of us are really very cool. The agency is made up mostly of cast-offs and mutts. And none of us is really very socially evolved. So these relationships we have with people though the brands we work with are too valuable to screw up. We get to pretend to be popular and fun and likable even though we’re squirreled away on our laptops. Yet at the same time we get to try to move things forward. So we try to be relevant. And for us the definition of relevance is being part of the conversation that pop culture is having with itself about which direction to go next. That probably helps the work be progressive without getting inaccessible.
The other way we try to strike that balance is to use most of our formative time doing an exhausted archeology on the history of any company we work with. So the personality and voice isn’t that of CP+B, it’s the voice of the brand.
John: Lastly, with increased power people have to amplify their voice the message to brands is: “Let me in.” People want an honest dialogue with the brands with which they interact. Unfortunately, many companies are afraid to open their doors and let people in. They shroud themselves in secrecy and obsessively try to control every interaction with the outside world. Consumers are so leery of the perfect message and fear it’s not believable or, even worse, dishonest. The work in Hoopla is different. It feels human, engaging and, in the end, honest. Publishing all of the internal emails in the front of the book certainly helps! How do you think about honesty when trying to deepen the conversation between brands and consumers?
Alex: There has been a term that marketing people have been fond of saying for a long time, “The consumer owns the brand.” I think it’s been so easy to say because nobody really believed it. But now that the tools are in place for the consumer to prove they own the brand, most marketing people are terrified by the loss of control. It used to be you could put something on TV and be blissfully unaware of the conversation surrounding it. It didn’t mean it wasn’t out there. It just meant there was not real-time feedback loop. If consumers were calling you “Taco Hell” instead of “Taco Bell” you didn’t have to read it on blogs every day. If you can have a relationship with a brand then why do we expect this relationship to be completely different than the others people have in their lives? Nothing and nobody is perfect. That’s a good place to start.
So don’t act like you’re perfect. It’s boring too. Then decide to have a conversation with the consumer. And model it after any other interesting conversation. Don’t just repeat everything they just said. Don’t be a mirror. Be willing to disagree. That’s interesting. Make up nick names for each other. If they call you “Taco Hell” it doesn’t mean they don’t like you and that they don’t come over. The consumer wants to play. But the stuff they want to do with the brand it often so far out of the bounds of traditional advertising that the brand is unwilling to go there. The brands that commit to and explore this new space first can gain a huge advantage. But that have to be willing to really loosen the reins or it can backfire.
Thanks for talking. There’s no doubt that Hoopla points the way to the future of marketing.
A couple of weeks ago Alex Bogusky sent over a copy of Crispin, Porter + Bogusky’s new book, Hoopla. I hate to say it, but I’ve grown weary of many marketing books. I know, as a business and marketing author myself, that might be hard to believe but I find so many books boring, rehashing the same old stuff from an ego-centric point-of-view.
So, it was with that lens that I opened Hoopla. What I found was something totally different. Instead of another branding/advertising book, it was a cultural exploration into a journey of storytelling through the eyes of CP+B. And, what a wonderful journey it is!
CP+B’s philosophy is relationship-centric, focusing on building a dynamic relationship between brands and people, instead of being media-centric, like so many agencies today. This relationship-centricity is what makes Hoopla magical.
To get the story behind the book I thought I’d ask Alex a couple of questions.
John: I loved the book. Great job! It made me feel hopeful about the power of brands and their ability to promote positive change in their relationships with people. Today, many agencies and clients have a hard time keeping up with the radical media changes happening and the empowered customers of today. They seem to be driven by fear. Yet, Hoopla, CP+B and your clients are infused with fearlessness, always finding a new and bold way to deepen a relationship with people. How do you stay so fearless?
Alex: Wow, I’m not sure we’re quite fearless but fear is something many of us identified a long time ago as having a negative impact on creativity. Being afraid is okay and it can help. But fear is different. Fear paralyzes people and organizations. As a company we try to protect our people from the fear that seems so prevalent in corporate life. Seems like fear often passes itself off as wisdom. The idea being that to avoid risk makes you a hero to your bosses and your company. But fact is there is no reward without risk. They are two sides of the same coin. So to minimize risk is to minimize reward. That’s not to say that any risk can bring reward. That’s obviously not the case. But when the potential gain is huge and the risk is low, that’s a time for action. Not the paralysis that fear brings.
And in adverting the concept of what kind of work is risky is completely upside down. The biggest risk when you’re spending millions of dollars is to not be seen or noticed at all. Yet somehow all that invisible advertising that gets created is seen as “safe.” I may be crazy, but in my mind, to flush 50 million dollars down the toilet without anybody noticing is the only real risk.
If you saw the Fiesta Bowl last night, you know that passion matters, a lot. Here's how Sports Illustrated described the game:
When it was over, even Hollywood couldn't have scripted a more dramatic ending. This was the ultimate underdog story of a team that believed from the start, refused to give up even when it looked bleak and pulled off the improbable. It's one thing for a Cinderella team to upset a heavily favored opponent, but c'mon, this was ridiculous.
As we begin 2007 we can all be inspired by the kind of raw passion that Boise State exhibited. No matter what you do, passion matters.
Happy New Year!
Karl points to Nokia's very cool World 24h project. The project is displayed as a world map that goes and gets photo’s from flickr that have been taken with the Nokia Nseries phone and displays thumbnails of them using Geotags to map the time and place around the world.
The power of sharing is expanding geometrically.
