Transparency’s Touchy Battle with Concealment

My colleague, Kaylin Goldstein, found this cartoon and I laughed out loud when I read it. Can we be the only ones seeing this issue with clients? It’s understandably scary to let the truth just come out and thus potentially damage reputations, but then again what choice do they have these days? There’s not a lot that you can hide anymore.

And with that in mind, why not use it to your advantage? The transparent brand is seen at first as flawed, but then rapidly as self-aware. Honesty is as incredibly liberating for brands as it is for people. There’s an initial sting, but the floodgates of trust then open and new avenues of communication and participation magically appear.

We’ve had some recent success with Domino’s, who have been courageously open about having mediocre pizza. They recognized that this was needed to release the tension before people would be willing to try their new recipe. By contrast, Toyota has been getting skewered by this massive recall, when you imagine that it would not have been so bad if they’d be transparent about it early on. Patagonia’s Footprint Chronicles ( http://www.patagonia.com/web/us/contribution/patagonia.go?slc=en_US&sct=US&assetid=23429) speak enormously to a company willing to lay their shortcomings out in public. Just a few examples, but it overwhelmingly seems like where the world is going.

Seems like energy would be better spent figuring out how to make it great than resisting it.

Why Can’t I be Mayor of Something Cool?

I’m Mayor of Rosewood Dental, for God’s sake…

Not to mention FirstBank of Boulder, Boulder Vision Associates and Gunbarrel Liquor.

That is some lame shit.

My other Foursquare friends are hanging out at cool cafes. They are visiting interesting book stores and trendy restaurants. They’re going to Art museums and flying to glamorous places. They’re getting massages and sipping port.

By contrast, it turns out I’m a family guy with a mortgage, substandard eating habits, dental issues and a drinking problem.

If the digital world is supposed to be helping me hone the new, perfect, super version of myself, then apparently Foursquare is not part of the solution. Facebook lets me masterfully orchestrate what pictures go up: the beautiful wife and kids, the holiday in Italy, the mountain biking, the cool bastard shooting targets with the .45 caliber rifle.

Foursquare says no, I’m a regular guy.

I may start putting up fake stuff, pronto. Something my ego can handle.

Being a Student of Culture. The @FearlessQA Video with @bogusky + @DagnyCPB is Now Up.

Watch live video from FearLess Q+A on Justin.tv

via justin.tv

Think it went well. We certainly had a lot of fun doing it. The viewership stats seemed great too: Total impressions: 74,268, Unique viewers: 21,489. Thanks everyone for your awesome questions. Please hit me with more.
Colin

Being a Student of Culture. Some Notes for the Thursday Noon MST @FearlessQA Session.

I’m looking forward to appearing on FearlessQ+A with Alex and Dagny (http://www.justin.tv/fearlessqa. Twitter: @fearlessqa). I know some peeps are interested in more detail on the topic, so they can formulate questions. Here are my notes, in case it tweaks some ideas. Have no idea how much of it we will touch on. It’s divided roughly into 3 areas: being a student of culture, applying that to marketing and finally, applying it to interactive. Fair warning, they are just notes, so they may be a cryptic.

1. Being a student of culture.

• There are a number of skillsets that can hone your ability to be a student of culture: anthropology, sociology, psychology, journalism. Anything that tunes you into the forces that drive culture and pop culture. These disciplines will help you stand outside culture, so that you can observe it without getting fooled by it.
• the ad schools and college communications programs are good in that they try to teach you how to actually “make” ads, but it would be a mistake to only do that stuff. Planners and creatives can make the mistake of focusing exclusively on the specific target, product and competitors. When you do, you end up with strategies in a vacuum. You need other skills like the above to find ways for your brand to not just participate in culture, but to actually change it.
• Culture can be defined as the implicit rules that everyone lives by. Culture has inordinate power of over us, much more than we realize.
• There are things in culture that always change and things that never change. Universal cultural values or hard-wired primitive human patterns at odds are always with the constant change of pop culture. That tension is one way to create real energy to work with.
  

2. Applying culture to marketing and advertising.

• The secret: remove yourself from culture.
• Tension: making people tense with ideas that challenge culture’s implicit rules. When you challenge the rules, it makes people tense. When you make them tense, it gets them talking.
• Always start with the product truth and build out from there.
• Tweak culture around the brand, so that people can see brand in new light.
• CP+B examples: man chicken, I’m a PC, etc.
  

3. Applying culture to “interactive.”

• Plan around a broader definition of interactivity. How it’s been co-opted by the digital world, but it’s really about any interaction: digital, retail, product, customer service, etc.
• Create a platform for participation among multiple people and brand (not the one-way model of agency communication, where you tell them the benefit repeatedly until they absorb it).
• CPB has always been interactive. MINI fold-up magazine stuff, etc.
• Shockingbarack as risky venture absolutely dependent on participation.

Let’s Start Planning Around A Broader Definition of Interactivity

It’s funny, somewhere along the way the word “Interactive” got co-opted by the digital world. If you talk about doing something interactive, people immediately assume you’re talking digital. It’s at the point where the 2 words are used interchangeably. It’s even confusing to use the term more broadly. Ironically, CP+B has always been interactive, but only started digital pretty much with Subservient Chicken in March 2004. A lot of our best work for MINI and Truth was interactive, for example. We were always creating stuff to be ripped out or worn or assembled.

I’d like us to return to the broader definition of interactive: a two-way communication, users and creators inter-dependent, the total experience not nearly as useful, interesting or entertaining if it’s only one-way. In fact, we’ve been experimenting with experiences that are SO dependent on participation that they flop if people don’t get involved.

Shocking Barack (www.shockingbarack.com) is a great example of taking that risk, of the experiment depending on participation. The idea was for our 2 riders to retrace the Detroit automakers trip to Washington, relying on the kindness of strangers along the way to get there and for people to spread the love on Facebook and Twitter. Big risk, no way of knowing what would happen. The press has finally picked up on it now. Craig Brammo joined Secretary Chu’s White House Roundtable. But at this time of writing, we still don’t know if the President will accept.

Designing for that same kind of co-dependence makes even more obvious sense when you think about retail and products. What the heck’s the point of a retail store or a product if there’s no one to interact with it? As advertising and marketing people, I think we can get stuck in this idea of a one-way communications: that we can stop at deciding what we want to SAY about a brand. That’s an important step, establishing a voice and POV, but it’s only a first step. We need to design for what we want people to DO. We need to think in terms of creating PLATFORMS for brands and users to do their thing together.

So it’s not a question of interactive NOT being digital. Digital is at the center of what we do. It’s that our best thinking will come if we think of interactivity more broadly.

Planners need to take responsibility for providing the insight underlying this broader definition of interactivity. Why the separation between planning and user experience design? Our insights and strategy need to all of these types of interactions, be they brand interactions, retail interactions, product interactions or digital interactions. We need to tap into the fields of experience planning, anthro design, design anthropology, call it what you will.

We are now working to bring this skillset into our department. CP+B’s Cultural and Business Insights department (we are nicknamed “Cogs”) is currently made up of 3 killer disciplines, collaborating together because we believe it makes for the best possible thinking. We are Account Planners, Investigative Journalists and Anthropologists. So different skillsets, but working in teams as generalists. This area of experience planning will be our 4th discipline. It’s still early days, so would love to hear from people about who the best people would be to work with.

Social Gaming Based on Facebook Behaviors

via adage.com

This is a 10 minute video interview with Kevin Slavin from Area Code, an online game developer. He uses a lot of overly technical lingo to say some really smart things.

(Starting around 6:00 mark) What I especially like is the idea of creating experiences based on how people actually use Facebook everyday: ie. We are rarely on it at the same time that our friends are. So their successful online game, “Parking Wars”, is based on that: you try to park in a friend’s street when you think they are not online. You get points when they are not online, but they can fine you if they are online. Normally, games – by definition – need everyone in the game to be available.

Alex Bogusky: Is There Enough Kindness and Electricity?

http://alexbogusky.posterous.com/is-there-enough-electricity-and-kindness-to-r

How to Change Culture: Review from AdLounge’s Conversuasion Event

via onedegree.ca

Had an awesome time last week in Toronto. Neil McOstrich each got 20 minutes to interpret the theme of the evening: “Conversuasion.” My interpretation was the kind of conversation that happens among billions of people, cultural conversation. So I got to talk about my favorite topic: how to change culture.

Culture can be understood as a set of implicit rules that we all agree to live by. So, if you want to ignite cultural conversation, you need to challenge culture’s rules. If you challenge the rules, it makes people tense. If you make people tense, it starts them talking.

Consumer Electronics Now Represent 15% of Household Power Demand Worldwide

And Americans now have about 25 consumer electronic products in every household, compared with just 3 in 1980. Given that our digital world will only become more interesting, indispensable and integrated into our lives, we will need to get smarter about how we power it.

 http://bit.ly/gngFA

A Little Late, Egypt Spots The Flaw in Kiling All Its Pigs

via nytimes.com

Pigs were the champion consumers of Cairo’s garbage. Goats just don’t seem up to the task. Classic story of messing with nature’s balance, even if the balance involved humans and pigs.