7 pedradas do Gareth Kay

1. Build brands from the bottom up rather than the top down.

Brands aren’t how we define them but are things formed in people’s minds. As Jeremy Bullmore said many years ago, “Consumers build an image [of a brand] as birds build nests. From the scraps and straws they chance upon.” So wouldn’t it make more sense to perhaps, for once, build our brands from the bottom up rather than the top down; from actions rather than brand vegetables or mission statements. It’s again about being action, rather than word, driven. Making real things and see how they do in the world rather than spend 3 months thinking about whether your brand is amusing or funny.

2. Be useful,interesting, entertaining and playful in the service of people

Preferably all four of the above, at least three.

3. Think about what communication strategy can learn from UX design

Whether we try to sweeten it or not, communication strategy tends to be built on the assumption that interruption is best. Maybe we can learn from UX design and think about communicating in a way that removes friction in a near invisible way and get credit for that, rather than shouting more cleverly. At the very least let’s focus on the right 3 degress not 360 degrees. I still think we have a tendency as an industry to deploy the ‘Dr Seuss Communication Strategy’ – to put it on mats, on hats and on cats. (Thanks Mr Robson for the inspiration for Seuss).

4. Do something and interesting things will happen

Again be action oriented. Make communication products, not PowerPoint. Be biased towards actions, not meetings

5. Build a culture of experimentation not planning

Do stuff and learn from it rather than learning and doing. It’s more realistic and the cost of trying stuff is getting lower and lower. Place lots of bets and think about your Communication R&D strategy and budget – or join the 5% Club as Contagious likes to put it.

6. Realize perfection is the enemy

We spend far too long trying to make things perfect – the words on a brief, the layout – rather than getting ideas out there in to the real world. As Lorne Michaels says of Saturday Night Live, “the show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 1130.” We need to realize that good enough is more often than not good enough.

7. Be rewarded for good behavior

Finally this controversial one as it’s about money and how we get paid. The way agencies by and large are compensated – time plus – encourages bad behavior: get as many people as you can to work really slowly. On one thing. Repeat.

What if we got rewarded in a way that encouraged better behavior. What if we got paid for outcomes rather than outputs or inputs? What if we got paid for business results driven by our portfolio management? What if we got paid for being more efficient in the way we work and prodigious in our output? What if we learned from builders and contractors, of all people, and got bonused for finishing stuff ahead of time?

Daqui

VRA. Ou John V. Willshire é foda!

Já ouviu falar em VRA?? Eu odeio esses termos babacas, mas esse vale muito a pena.

– Verb is the thing a company does

– Reverb is the reverberations of that action across social media spaces (twitter, facebook, blogs… the ‘oooo, did you see what they did’…)

– Amplify is when you take the story of what you did, and the reaction to it, and turn that into stories to tell through advertising.

Basically, advertising is not the thing that you do, it’s the story of the things that you’ve done.

It’s easy to turn interesting things into advertising stories, it’s hard to make advertising interesting enough to reverberate though.

Calma que vai ficar melhor.Tem até equação!

r1 = reverberations

v = the thing you do

q = quality of your product/service

b = brand warmth

r0 = reverberations of the last thing you did

It means that there are four ways in which you could make whatever it is you do reverberate more…

Pretty obvious, right? People are endlessly twisting the “advertising is a tax on…” prefix to fit with ‘shitty products’, ‘bad design’, ‘poor customer service’ and so on, but it’s right… the modern age is a place where advertising can’t even sell a bad product once, to paraphrase David Ogilvy.

Brand warmth measures; gotta love ’em, eh? The best way to increase them for a lot of companies is not to spend more on a new repositioning, or more ads, or a funnier scriptwriter. It’s to be human, generous and lovable. To be able to respond to people when they say ‘ooo, I like that thing you did…’.

The action you take, the transformative thing you do. Be it as large as the Pepsi refresh move, or as locally important as Converse saving the 100 Club, as technologically astute as Best Buy’s Twelpforce… what’s the thing that’s going to set you apart from not just competitors, but how everyone else acts. If you want “earned media”, you’ve really got to try and earn it.

So, finally, my favourite bit…

The way the equation works is that the reverberations of the last thing you did feed in this time too. So if you’ve not done anything before, then sorry, but you don’t get anything here.

Which means if you give up after one or two attempts, you’re really not giving yourself a chance. The sorts of companies that get talked about in the social space are, seemingly, the usual suspects. The people who’ve done various other things before. Because they try again and again, and the reverberations from what they’ve done before play back into what they do next time.

That’s where I am so far… I know it’s still a bit ‘fat’ in places (‘verb’ for instance conatins so may different variables, like ‘culture’, ‘company type’ and so on), but would love to hear what you think.

É mais ou menos isso aí

it’s about looking for gaps that brands can occupy and fulfil a function in people’s lives.

Via

Boas premissas

Eu ODEIO o termo “digital strategy”. Odeio mesmo, com todas as minhas forças. Mas o rascunho aí embaixo vale o post.

Partners & Spade

Eu já tinha visto alguma coisa dessa empresa, mas esse vídeo aí de baixo impressiona. O case da Liquor Store é estupendo.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

more about “Partners & Spade“, posted with vodpod

E agradeça ao Piers Fawkes por ter liberado todas as apresentações do evento que rolou em NY. Só palestra maneira!

“One word: Networks”

Excelente post do Mike Arauz acerca de um post do também excelente Bud Caddell.

The difference between what everyone has been doing, and what everyone needs to do is networks. We no longer create messages and experiences for groups of individuals; rather we create integrated experiences across all media environments that are specifically designed to serve and empower networks of connected people.

Bud describes an emerging creative capability that he sees as a viable future service: Platform Builders. I’d go further. I think that all groups of people who come together to offer creative services to companies in order to help those companies communicate with people about their products or services, need to organize their ideas around a deep understanding of the communities of connected individuals who are drawn together by their shared values, goals, and interests.

Uma conclusão foda:

There is no longer any interaction that an individual may have with a brand, company, product, or service that disconnected from all the people they know, and the people that share their interest in that experience.

Sem mais.

A matemática do Spotify

Spotify only needs a 10-12% conversion rate of free to paid users in any given territory to give the labels a decent return. Wells also revealed that Spotify was the fourth largest digital partner in terms of revenue contribution in 2009. The top three weren’t named, but it’s likely Apple’s iTunes and Google’s YouTubeare among them. Spotify has already taken over iTunes in terms of revenue contribution in its native Sweden.

O detalhe é que o Spotify ainda não entrou no mercado americano, o que deve acontecer ainda neste semestre.

SVP of Digital for Universal Music Group International Rob Wells revealed some of the financial details of the licensing agreements it has with Spotify for the first time. In the UK and Spain, Spotify pays a per stream royalty for each track users listen to. In its other four territories (France, Sweden, Finland, and Norway), the labels instead get a cut of the revenue generated from subscriptions and advertising. “That to me equates to a sustainable business model,” said Wells.

E quem fala que o Spotify oferece uma matemática financeira sustentável para as gravadoras é o manda-chuva da Universal Music Group, não é nenhum deslumbrado com a internet, não. Mas a matéria do Telegraph também traz um porém, por sinal muito bem resolvido.

Mr Wells said it was “lagging behind” in the UK and Spain because of the extremely high quantity of people using the service for free – meaning it was a more difficult task to convert 10 per cent of a much larger number into subscribers. Spotify has recently re-turned on the ‘invite only’ mechanism in the UK to limit the amount of users on the site.

Na Inglaterra, por exemplo, o cara ouve o que quiser por pouco menos de 10 libras, e não precisa aturar nenhuma propaganda. Na Suécia, por sua vez, o Spotify rende mais grana para as gravadoras do que a iTunes.

Do Mashable

Levando a performance do cliente a sério

Li no New York Times uma idéia muito louca, que merece muitas palmas e elogios. Funciona assim: a agência K.B.S.& P. comprou ações de seus clientes negociadas na bolsa e criou um mini-fundo para seus funcionários. Quanto mais os clientes crescem, mais os funcionários lucram.

What makes the index interesting is that it is not a fanciful construct but a real portfolio, a mini-mutual fund that will have its own ticket symbol, KBSPX. Agency executives are opening a brokerage account with another client, the Vanguard Group, into which will be deposited 300 shares of each of the 18 companies.

The 300 employees of Kirshenbaum Bond will be offered long-term cash and compensation incentives to mirror the performance of the stocks in the index, which they will be able to track each trading day on an intranet on the agency’s Web site.

MDC is spending an estimated $500,000 to start the index, which includes contributing four restricted shares of MDC stock to the fund for each Kirshenbaum Bond employee, for a total of 1,200 share.

É nessas horas que você vê que o mercado brasileiro, viciado em BV (muitas vezes sem o cliente saber, não é verdade, publicitários cariocas?), é muito fodido.

The index is a version of efforts by a growing number of agencies to put skin in the game by showing clients they are willing to be paid based on how their work performs in the marketplace. Other examples include agencies taking ownership stakes in client companies or sharing revenue from the sales of products they advertise.

We all can be manufacturers

Os pontos abaixo foram tirados de uma apresentação do Chris Anderson, da Wired. Instigante.

The Web revolution is hitting the real world. “We are entering a new manufacturing age,” said Anderson. “I’ve been thinking about being analog and the world of manufacturing.”

Manufacturing businesses are utilizing a lot of the techniques pioneered on the Web.

Tools of production are being democratized. Exhibit A: 3D printers will now run you $750. Anderson has one in his basement. Laser cutters and circuit boards can all be designed in your basement using world class industrial technologies.

If you want scale, a Chinese factory will work with you where ever you are. “I can click a button and make robots in a Chinese factory move,” said Anderson. “These factories want to work with smaller companies because there’s the flexibility to do so and higher margins. You have access to the same factory as Sony.”

Via

Uma das paradas mais fodas que eu li recentemente

Texto do RWW sensacional!

Today, the real-time Web is associated with social networking status updates via services such as Twitter and Facebook. But whether this will be the killer app for this generation is not clear. As we enter a period of “social update exhaustion” (as in, “I really do not care what you had for breakfast”), the real-time Web may evolve into things that we really need to make a living or to get essential stuff done. The killer app matters, because the winner at the platform layer will be the company that hosts it.

The free, abundant digital domain is mirrored by an expensive, scarce physical domain.

Online, we tend to focus on the free, abundant digital domain. The debate on Freeconomics rages today, but the basics are simple. The Internet is an enormous, almost-free copying machine for anything digital, so price will tend towards $0. Air is the most precious commodity in the world (try going without it for a few minutes), but it is free (notwithstanding negative externalities).

But all that free stuff must be paid for by something that people would pay for. That is where the expensive, scarce physical domain comes in. People pay more for things when the demand is high and supply is low. So to make money, you need to sell products and services that are scarce… and in demand.

Or you could make money by connecting supply and demand using the real-time Web.

Agora a parada começa a ficar interessante. Muito interessante:

But it has to be real time. That is the whole point of scarcity. A hotel room may be available for $75 right now, but 10 minutes later it could be $125 (or $50). Acme’s services are available right now for $150 per hour, but 10 minutes later it is charging $200 because it is more booked up. You see a hand-knit cashmere sweater available right now for $350; it’s the only one, you want it, and it might be gone in a few minutes. Premium ad space is available right now for a CPM of $15… no, make that $17.

I could go on and on. This affects almost every market in the world. Plenty of untapped opportunity lies here for enterprises, startups, Main Street small businesses, and individual free agents.

E como todo bom texto, esse fecha muito bem.

Inventory is the curse of any business in the expensive, scarce physical domain. Think of what Dell did in the PC business: it used real-time supply chains to eliminate inventory, building each PC to order. This is as close to magic as you can get in the expensive, scarce physical domain. You turn negative cash flow (working capital that you need to expand) into positive working capital cash flow: you get an order, get paid, and then you pay the supplier. Perhaps on the real-time Web this all happens close to simultaneously, so the very concept of working capital begins to disappear.

Explaining the business value of trading scarcity using the real-time Web is not difficult, then. Ask any company, “Do you want to eliminate inventory?” You will get its full attention. This is not technology looking for a problem to solve. This is the biggest problem that most business people in the expensive, scarce physical domain (i.e. the real world) face every day.