Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

Here's a very useful mash-up that combines Google Maps with extensive video.  Had I seen something like this for the hotel in which I recently stayed while in San Francisco, I probably would have selected a different place to stay.

Unfortunately, it looks like it only covers Europe for now.  I'm hoping we get it soon in North America.

http://www.trivop.com/

Mike Felkey

Building community around music is nothing new. But this site allows you to compare your music list with others and get matched up to people with similar musical tastes.  The design and user experience are nice too. 

There is an excellent tour function that really helps you get oriented and you can choose to interact with the music either by listening to it, watching music videos, or reading user reviews.   Even without joining you can take a look at what others are recommending.

http://www.mog.com

Bill Camp

What happens when one of the worlds finest virtuosos dons street clothes, takes his $3.5 million Stradivarius down to the DC Metro and starts playing?

The Washington Post journalist goes REALLY deep into his thoughts on the subject, but the overall effect of the experiment he’s covering is still amazing…

I kind of feel…heartbroken.  But it was amazing to watch, definitely.

The article, with video, is here.

Erika Propst

Canada's Framework Foundation has a unique way to tap into social consciousness.  Each year they hold a silent auction, but instead of money for art pieces, they sell them for time.  You bid a set numbers of your own volunteer hours and then fulfill your commitment over the next year.  Once complete, you get the art work.  Artists are compensated by corporate donations at market value.  A truly win win scenario.

Very cool idea.

Vito Greto

So it stands to reason that a certain automaker must be feeling a little guilty. Or at least conflicted. Much like myself. I love cars and always will, but I also know that exercising this fetish can do some pretty terrible things to the earth. But I'm from Berkeley and thus a little more comfortable with hypocrisy than most. Well, especially when it is well meaning hypocrisy, and at least in some way in the service of the greater good.

Which brings me to Honda. This year their F1 team is running some rather shocking vehicle livery: the cars are painted to look like the earth from space. There are virtually no sponsor logos, just the blues and greens of the home planet. What's more, they set up a website where interested "environmental sponsors" can pay a small fee to charity and make a pledge to become in some way more eco-conscious in daily life in exchange for having their name placed on a 2mm x 2mm pixel on one of the two cars. With more than 1.2 million pixels available on Jenson Button and Reubens Barrichello's rides, this loot could add up to something. And a good number of people pledging to ride a bike to work won't hurt either.

Of course none of this changes the fact that the vehicle upon which all of this goodwill is riding gets four miles to the gallon, has next to nothing in the way of emissions controls and  competes in a circus that hopscotches from continent to continent by jumbo jet. Perhaps even worse--and a bigger clue to Honda's motivation--is that Honda was previously sponsored by BAR (British American Racing), a wholly owned subsidiary of BAT (British American Tobacco). BAT's primary purpose for existence was to provide advertising space for their Lucky Strike and 555 cigarette brands. With tougher laws against tobacco advertising on race cars throwing a Molotov cocktail at their raison d'etre, they bailed.

Anyway, all this shouldn't spoil the fact that for a small contribution and a promise to install some light bulbs that I should have put in a long time ago, my name is now going to be emblazoned on the nose cone of an F1 car. How I lucked out and got such primo real estate is beyond me, but maybe I underestimated the power of karmic restoration.

Now if Jenson Button would just let me drive.

Daniel Turman

www.myearthdream.com

IDEO's Diego Rodriguez and Ryan Jacoby have written a new article on design thinking and risk in the Spring 2007 issue of Rotman Magazine (download PDF here. Article starts on page 57).

"Embracing Risk to Learn, Grow and Innovate" speaks about how design thinkers openly acknowledge, embrace, and often times, amplify risk as a key part of any engagement. Rather than fearing the risk of failure, designers view failure as part of an iterative process involving repetitive cycles of feedback and innovation.

While designers openly embrace risk, they are also careful to mitigate their actions through a systematic approach to design thinking. This approach is based on three building blocks: empathy, prototyping, and storytelling.

• Marketing things people don't want substantially increases the risk of failure. Design thinkers listen, emphasize, and co-create with customers through ethnographic research, persona creation, and collaborative workshops/insight sessions. Furthermore, design thinkers obsess unreasonably about what is desirable: from the visceral, to the behavioral and emotional.
• Prototype early and often to accelerate feedback and failure. Design thinkers engage in different forms of prototyping to gather feedback before an idea or concept is considered "finished."
• Use stories to communicate intent. As discussed extensively in Dan & Chip Heath's Made to Stick, telling simple, emotional, and concrete stories is a means of inspiring action and ensuring team members are working towards a common vision.

At Organic, these elements form the foundation of our approach to creating exceptional experiences, from gathering three minds, to listening for insight, and embracing risk through multiple rounds of ideation and prototyping, where ideas freely diverge and converge.

Audrey Carr

Digg has been feeling the power of Web 2.0 this week. AACS, the encryption used for HD DVD and Blu Ray, has been cracked and the processing key has been leaked all over the Net. Once the key was leaked, the lawyers took their time, but eventually sent out their cease and desist notices. Digg was one of many sites to receive the notice, and started to pull stories that mentioned the key. Soon afterwards, users started to notice their missing stories, resulting in a flood of new stories being submitted, many of which were dugg to their main page. Eventually, the first four pages on their site were almost entirely about the processing key.

Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, finally caved in and made the following blog posting: http://blog.digg.com/?p=74

Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0
by Kevin Rose at 9pm, May 1st, 2007 in Digg Website

Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts…

In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Even though the code requires both technical expertise and specialized software to actually use, it's a powerful lesson in the futility of censorship in the digital world.

Frank Ribitch

Whether you love it or hate it, grids are very much part of graphic design and web design, and to be able to create designs that "breaks through" one must know what they are breaking. The grid is such a system. Much debated, much ignored, much hated and even less liked than loved, the grid is necessary.
At SXSW this year Khoi Vinh (Design Director for the New York Times online) had a presentation on "the grid", its history, and how it can make things better for designers, IAs and even people who just want to know how to loosely design a site so that its INTELLIGIBLE.

I found this helpful, and although I'm sure the presentation was an exceptional experience, this might not be (because you have to read it).

Where it would come in handy, is in helping you, the designer, IA, client, etc, create and/or recognize an exceptional experience, whether by following the grid or by breaking the grid.

Enjoy: http://www.subtraction.com/pics/0703/grids_are_good.pdf

Lawrence Ardelean

Apple has pledged to phase out some of the most toxic chemicals in its product range, including Brominated Fire Retardants (BFRs) and Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC).

Their target date of 2008 is also a year ahead of the competition.

Bravo Apple!

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/agreenerapple/

Jim Bachalo

A couple of weeks ago, Forrester hosted their first Marketing Forum in Miami.  It was a great conference.  We were a sponsor and had a speaking slot where Chad Stoller and I talked about futurecasting our personas.

Kerry Bodine is a Principal Analyst at Forrester, and she covers our space.  She gave a great keynote entitled How To Deliver A Great Customer Experience which goes well beyond the usual suspects to discuss brands like LensCrafters and MasterLock.  She also called out our work for Geek Squad as a best practice. 

You can watch Kerry's presentation here.

Mark Kingdon

Don't you hate it when you lose the battery cover off your remote control?

IdeaLab says in a few years, you could just download a file and print one out. The NY Times ran an article about a technology called rapid prototype printing, which has been in use in the industrial sector for several years. Using a layering process, a 3-D printer can produce a three-dimensional object out of powdered polymers.

Once the domain of science fiction (remember the replicator from Star Trek?), this technology is expected in a few years to become as affordable to home and office consumers as desktop laser printing was about fifteen years ago – within the range of $1000. One of the companies pioneering this technology, Desktop Factory, lists potential applications for such a device as creating sculpture using 3-D software, one-off toy production and custom replacement parts for household objects.

One thing's for certain though – as with all printers, those replacement cartridges are going to cost a fortune.

Daniel Modell

Rupert Murdoch (owner of Fox Business, media mogul extraordinaire) has been in the news the past few days following his controversial $5 Billion bid for the Dow Jones Company, whose flagship property is The Wall Street Journal.

I found his following commentary on the changing nature of the media world to be very refreshing, insightful and quite unexpected.

After the jump, here's a glimpse into the mind of a man whose News Corp continues to dominate media properties and media channels globally.

David Feldt

A client recently forwarded me a link to Vivian Lives, a lifestyle site for young women that was founded in 1999. Users follow the life of Vivian, an animated character who lives the kind of fantasy New York lifestyle (sizeable apartment that she lives in by herself, perfect little dog, non-demeaning job in the fashion industry) that young women around the country dreamed about long before Sex in the City and Paris Hilton made it a cliché.

What fascinates me about the site is not the content, which has not been updated in several years, but the glimpse it provides into the way marketers thought about avatars, rich media, and online communities just a few years ago.  We are finally getting to a point where the web is old enough to provide an archeological record of our earlier ideas.

Vivian is one of the better early attempts at creating a community around common interests, in this case focused on a virtual character.  It's like a bridge between the Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.  How would this kind of site be different if we built it today?

It would be video-based rather than illustrated & animated, to take advantage of broadband.  If the illustration-style was deemed central to the brand, maybe a e-newsletter like Daily Candy.  But think of the product placement opportunities in Lonely Girl.

It wouldn't be based on a fictional character.  Sherrie Krantz, the founder, would probably feature herself as the expert, and maybe start a vlog (like Ask A Gay Man) or even a plain old blog like Perez Hilton.

It would be based on a fictional character, but Vivian would be an avatar in Second Life.  It's clear from interviews that Vivian was the younger, hipper, more popular alterego of Sherrie, a real-life fashion publicist.  As Phillip Rosedale told an Organic audience a few months ago, your physical body is one of the few things about yourself that you cannot really change.  Second Life is a chance to physically express the person you want to be inside - it's no surprise that Second Life is full of beautiful, sexy people.

It might not rely on a "star" at all.  In the last few years, the web community has discovered that building a community of interest- in this case around fashion and youth culture - doesn't necessarily require a star (or a virtual star).  From Digg to Slashdot to Flickr, the community itself takes center stage.

Can you think of other sites that were early attempts at today's successful online experiences? What about sites that managed to change with the times?

Misha Cornes

After several tough years as an industry, interactive marketers clearly have the wind at our backs.  According to a TNS Media Intelligence report on US Advertising Expenditures for 2006, Internet display advertising grew by 17.3% in 2006, vs. a modest increase of 4.1% for the industry as a whole.  Marketers continue to shift budgets towards targeted, digital media.

So who are we stealing our ad budget dollars from?  Network Television grew only 2.5%, although total spend was off-set by a big jump in Hispanic TV ads.  As Forrester analyst Peter Kim writes, "consumer behavior has made the shift to Internet from TV unavoidable - they've tied companies to the gas pedal with no choice but to keep on going."  Newspapers and TV radio are also hurting. 

It's an open secret, and I think the traditional advertising agency community is finally catching on.  Ad Age has just released its second Digital Fact Pack, which is a great compendium,  and has launched a separate Digital Channel on AdAge.com.  But to me, the coverage still treats interactive as a side-show.  Page after page of the print publication still covers the latest in glossy TV campaigns.

On the other hand, I recently realized that we are not the only marketing players who are dreaming of the day when we take center stage.  An Organic alum sent me an article by Matt Shaw, VP of the Council of Public Relations Firms: Advertising Posing as PR: Why They Want to Be Like Us (and What to Do About It).  It's a great read.  His pitch is that social media (buzz generation, publicity, influencer outreach, blogging, viral online activity) has long been the provenance of PR firms, and that he and his peers shouldn't be seeded "earned media" work to other marketing agencies.

I think this is the point where I am supposed to say that it's all about the client, that ideas should be media neutral, and that it doesn't matter which agency owns a particular campaign.  Taking the high road.  But I do think that interactive agencies were the first marketers to really understand user-centricity and the need to engage customers in a two-way dialogue.  Everyone else is still playing catch-up.

Misha Cornes

Amnesty International Puerto Rico launched "La Casa del Horror" site which is in fact, a house of horrors, illuminating the shocking global human rights violations that exist throughout the world.

The site's intro relies heavily on sound as a navigation device so put on those headphones before entering. The dark, murky visuals and frightening soundscape scared me senseless (and that doesn't happen very often online).  If users are shocked into taking action against these atrocities then the site will have done its job very well indeed.

http://www.lacasadelhorror.com/english/casa.html

Angela DiPietro

http://www.yourclubworld.ba.com/

In the world of consumer and product marketing we all know the customer is the driver behind a products ultimate success or failure. The power of both word of mouth, good or bad, and customer insights are key to ensure a brand and product succeeds in the marketplace. British Airways understood that they needed to connect emotionally with their target audience when launching their new new Club World product in creating the “Club” feel.  The interactive site brings customer insights to the user and aims on winning over the premium customer in the ever competitive airline industry, where premium fare paying customers are still key revenue drivers to the bottom line.

What better way to spread the word on luxury travel and comfort then by having your own customers speak to the product and why they like. Sure, the scenes have been staged, but they are believable nonetheless because it creates an emotional experience for the user. Each customer talks about what features they like in the new Club World cabin and which ones make the new product relevant to their needs and wants during business travel. Each scene is actually filmed on board the aircraft while in-flight, thus adding to realism of the experience.

Listen to our own Chad Stoller talk about the ins and outs of social media.

Mark

Rick sent this to me.  I generally love maps and I really love this one.  I don't know who created it but its been passed around for awhile so I thought I'd put it up on ThreeMinds for posterity.  Its definitely an EE.

Mark

I’ve always been fascinated by clocks – these devices used to track an abstract concept….that perhaps does not exist until it is tracked?  The master of time analysis, Albert Einstein, once referred to what he did, with typical whimsy, as “combinatory playing”.

I feel the work of this sculptor reflects that spirit of ‘playing with time’ very well.

Check out www.klockwerks.com

What do you guys think?

Tim Willison

Back in August of last year, Sprint came to Organic looking for a way to create buzz and raise awareness for their recently launched Music Store.

We went in knowing two things:

1. the space was very crowded – Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T/Cingular and even Walmart offer music downloads. Whatever we did, it had to stand out.
2. the audience we wanted to reach, called "Advanced Connected" in Sprint terminology, is extremely averse to traditional advertising and blatant promotion.

Our solution was to create an entertaining and engaging online destination featuring two “music experts”: Ian and the DJ. Each has a back story – Ian is a washed up pop star from the 1980s running a record store on Melrose and DJ is an aspiring turntablist, working in Ian’s store. Users participate by creating playlists and getting a personalized “expert” review of their choices.

To further embellish the story we created a music video for Ian’s one and only hit from the 80s, “Under the Moon”. Launched simultaneously on YouTube and Ian’s MySpace page, the video has gone viral, currently appearing on 25 sites. Music video legend Nigel Dick, (Tears For Fears, Guns N’ Roses, Britney Spears) directed both the “Under the Moon” video and the Mix Sherpa video performances.

Visit the site:
http://www.mixsherpa.com/

See the entire Ian experience:
http://www.sprintspecialoffers.com/ian/index.html

Dave Sylvestre and the Sprint cast and crew

We're continually having conversations across the agency about how to help our clients create experiences that ultimately go beyond advertising and marketing to give something valuable, meaningful and relevant back to the community.

Here's a wonderful story that takes this concept a little further, utilizing a simple outdoor billboard at the MC Weiler School in Alexandra Township on the North Eastern borders of Johannesburg.

Nedbank, a national financial services organization, and its agency (Net#work BBDO, one of our sister agencies within the Omnicom family) came up with an innovative idea - utilize the abundance of sunlight in South Africa to generate energy to give school children a hot meal every day.  The school has over a 1,000 students and the majority of them receive their only meal of the day at the school - a hot meal that ensures they are focused and energized to reach their maximum potential at school.

Ms Flaki Ramothata, principal of the school, says that the power generated from the  solar panels attached to the billboard is sufficient to run all the lights and fridges and provides hot water for their kitchens.

“This kind of communication is really close to my heart,” says Net#work BBDO's Creative Chief Mike Schalit. “Why shouldn’t advertising, especially in SA, pioneer ways of putting something back into the community - even more so when it comes to outdoor billboards, the ugly duckling of advertising? Billboards are often seen as the biggest perpetrator of crimes against urban landscapes. Here’s our chance to lead the world in showing how we can convert urban pollution into urban renewal.”

David Feldt