Archive for posts i’ve written

smart portfolio strategy is smart

02 Feb, 2012 • posts i've written • 3 comments

Agree/Disagree?

this video did not go viral

22 Jan, 2012 • posts i've written • 1 comment

Above is a video we released last week at Deutsch LA for Volkswagen.

In a matter of a few days, with only one broadcast airing, we’ve already picked up over 6 million views.

The LA Times wrote a nice complimentary article, with the headline – VW’s Super Bowl teaser video ‘The Bark Side’ goes viral.

The headline is untrue. We did not go viral.

This video is popular because people chose to spread it – not because the video shared itself.

We attempted to pack the video with cultural currency targeted at specific communities on the web that actively share content. We paid attention to the kind of content they share. And then we put the video where they would find it. But none of that guaranteed us success before hand.

You can design for popularity, but you cannot guarantee it. Popularity is a stochastic process. There is no such thing as a viral video, no matter how hard we as an industry want to believe it or try to sell it.

I’ve written on this subject before, and suggest you read this article if you want to follow me further down the rabbit hole – stop saying viral video.

the measure of our work

17 Jan, 2012 • posts i've written • 4 comments


Our new Like Sign – visit our livestream, click the Facebook Like at the bottom right corner, wait for 3-5 seconds, and see the sign trigger.

In addition to our shiny new dot-com, a small team here at Deutsch has just finished creating what we call our Like Sign. For every Facebook Like we receive on our new site, this sign lights up in the office.

For now, we’ve installed the sign directly in front of the office of our Chief Digital Officer, Winston Binch, where it nearly blinds him with every click.

Why we built the sign:

As advertisers, our mission is to engage networks of consumers, connected by shared interests, to accomplish a measurable business objective on behalf of our client.

Or, in other words, we try to make people do things while influencing their friends.

We do this, largely, by creating cultural currency – things that can be passed on and shared. These were once solely passive experiences, but now we build products, services, and utilities in addition to media.

The first challenge for all of our work, interactive or not, is how far our reach can extend beyond our paid placement. If we can’t create experiences that are actively passed along through networks of consumers, we likely won’t be successful in achieving business results.

We built this sign to be a reminder to ourselves that the measure of our work begins at how it’s passed along. It’s a physical manifestation of our goals. We thought it would be a nice touch to put the sign in front of our webcam for curious visitors to see, but the sign is really for ourselves. The idea is to build a sign for every client team in the building, to host in their section of the office (we sit in teams now, not by discipline) so that we’ll all think more consciously about designing things that people want to share. If the signs create a bit of internal competition, that wouldn’t be a bad thing either.

It even looks like our signs will travel beyond our building. The first client to get a sneak peek at the sign has already asked for their own Like Sign for their office.

Admittedly, sharing is but the first step toward achieving a business objective – but it’s a crucial one. Perhaps we need a physical manifestation of business results right next to the sign. If only sales metrics were as easily accessible as Facebook’s Open Graph … but that’s another project.

How the sign was made:

The hardware: Arduino Uno + Ethernet Shield, and a PowerSwitch Tail II.

The code: We used the Arduino development environment to create a simple web server. And then we used Javascript and Facebook to interpret the “Like” event.

The physical sign:

Frame: 3-1/2 x 3/4  pine, 1/8″ plexiglass, Wood Screws

Electrical: 18 gauge wire, 6 – plastic light socket (for standard household lamps), 6 – 25w refrigerator bulbs

Finally, a huge thank you to Mary Toves, Dan Cluff, and Bernie Santos for pulling this off so quickly.

what is beautiful design?

16 Jan, 2012 • posts i've written • No comments

Daisey interviews dozens of (former) workers who are secretly supporting a union. One group talked about using “hexane,” an iPhone screen cleaner. Hexane evaporates faster than other screen cleaners, which allows the production line to go faster. Hexane is also a neuro-toxin. The hands of the workers who tell him about it shake uncontrollably.

- Your iPhone Was Built, In Part, By 13 Year-Olds Working 16 Hours A Day For 70 Cents An Hour

I own an iPhone because I value design – but perhaps all of us, myself first of course, should question where beautiful design begins. In this case, it begins in the hands of children, working under conditions we would never condone in our own society. I believe in trade, and I understand that the issue is complex, but I know that holding this device in my hand, knowing what I know now, being confronted with it more than ever, that I wouldn’t feel right asking that worker to work in those conditions, for that wage.

My hope is that services like Kickstarter make us more conscious of how our products are made, that journalists keep asking difficult questions of complex systems, and competitors deliver products that don’t require such human sacrifice, near or long term.

fan strategies

12 Jan, 2012 • posts i've written • 3 comments

As a passionate fan of numerous media titles, I’m fascinated by how digital technologies have enabled fans to work collectively to express their passions and, when called on, to attempt rescuing those titles from oblivion.

It’s led me to write extensively on this blog about fandom and modern fan movements – and to dabble in fanon works myself. I’m also proud to be a Futures of Entertainment Fellow, as well.

For this year’s conference I pitched the idea of building an online community dedicated to collecting past fan attempts to save or resurrect their favorite shows, and to host interviews with major network executives to discuss these movements from the perspective of someone attempting to balance a complex portfolio of titles and advertisers. Unfortunately (and fortunately) there was an embarrassment of riches when it came to other panel ideas and diverse speakers. So this idea was never realized.

Today, io9 published a short list of such successful fan movements.

I still think future fans could use a centralized resource to advise or inform their decentralized movements. I think having execs from major networks take part in a site like this would help humanize the often contentious movements. Someone like Craig Engler from SyFy Networks is a perfect example of one such exec. Sabrina Caluori at HBO is another.

I know a handful of brilliant media scholars that could help moderate interviews and discussions, people like Flourish Klink, Sam Ford, Nancy Baym, or Josh Green.

Additionally, in my past consulting for a trio of media companies, I explored listening strategies that could help these organizations vet scripts and pilots of new titles based on fandom behavior. This sort of predictive analysis would make such a site a valuable place for media companies to participate as well.

For now, I’m just releasing this idea into the wild for anyone to potentially run away with. To me, an idea shared and realized always beats an idea hoarded. I’d love to hear your feedback if you have any.

By the by, SaveMyShow.tv is currently available. Just a thought.

roundup: 2012 predictions, adaptive businesses, and candy corn

11 Jan, 2012 • posts i've written • No comments

I write these roundups as emails for my company from time to time, and I thought I’d share one with you. Let me know if you’d want to see these on a more regular basis.

Welcome to 2012. We now have jet-packs, augmented reality contact lenses, and time cloaking, though sadly still no hoverboards. Still, the future is pretty awesome. And you might as well be hopeful, only neutrinos (maybe) get to move backward in time, the rest of us are stuck moving forward.

First off, I thought I’d wrangle together the usual suspects of 2012 predictions and 2011 best-of’s for your perusal.

In other news, if you want to get a whiff of what happens when you combine business intelligence with real-time adaptation (where all businesses are headed), Wired’s exploration of Zynga and its competitor, Wooga, is a must read.

College Humor used to say that one of the easiest ways to make content that people share is to put candy corn in it. Not the actual treat – something mildly nostalgic and curious. The Restart Page is a great example of nerd candy corn.

A 20-hour work week could save the global economy. It would be extremely difficult, but I think I could sacrifice some of my time in the office for the good of the world. Just sayin’.

Go forth, and be awesome.

what’s my book about again?

05 Jan, 2012 • posts i've written • 2 comments

Strategy as we know it should become an emergent phenomenon of a lean organization co-evolving with its environment, seeking to map its internal and external networks, gain nodes, create shared value, and cope with unintended consequences.

Yep. In a nutshell. It’s ok if that just sparked more questions than it answered. That’s why it’s a book.

For a world that’s more connected, and inherently more complex, I think we need to question our old assumptions about strategy and organizational management.

Sign-up here to get updates as it progresses.

With a new year comes a strong re-commitment to this project. I appreciate everyone’s patience. My life has been a bit more chaotic than I would have liked and progress hasn’t come as quickly as I want, either.

Writing has been an adventure – one I’m incredibly fortunate to be afforded by very kind, supportive, folks.

how big is it?

19 Dec, 2011 • posts i've written • 1 comment

I feel like something becomes blog post worthy fodder when I’ve heard or thought about it for the 100th time.

In a meeting last week I was talking about an opportunity with a new start-up to a CPG client and they asked, “Well, how big is it?” and some bell went off in my head signaling that sentiment’s 100th utterance.

Brands like to buy big audiences. Buying big audiences is just easier to manage than courting lots of small groups, especially for a brand team member that’s probably juggling more responsibilities than they reasonably should. It’s also easier to expand the top of the funnel (by buying mass awareness) than it is to make the product better.

Louder advertising is easier to buy than better marketing. We have to change that.

Clients should be courting smaller communities, crowds, and audiences on the web. With smaller groups you get exponentially greater intimacy. You can negotiate truly bespoke partnerships. And you can even garner some free PR just for doing something novel. Creatively, you get to experiment with the brand in a new way. And you gain access to influential early adopters (the kind of people that glom on to new start-ups) who are about a thousand times more likely to talk about your brand’s partnership than the light web user who just ignored your banner ad on espn.com.

The opportunities most often outweigh any risks – but they rarely outweigh the cognitive and administrative costs.

That’s why agencies have to step up and become the connective tissue between the brand and the emerging tech scene. Some are definitely already doing this and pretty soon it will just be a parity product for any digital team worth a damn.

Moreover, we have to become masters of small. Bets, projects, audiences, and communities. We have to become better at tracking small before it becomes big, better at getting to small (projects) faster, and better at spinning smaller plates concurrently. We have to because our clients won’t or don’t have the authority to refocus.

Clients can call up a media department and ask for 5 million eyeballs like it’s a Happy Meal. Most of the time the buy is produced a bit like the meat in a Happy Meal, too.

We have to make small that easy.

Bonus points: work for clients that actually spend time checking out new stuff on the web, educate your clients about emerging tools, create a measurement system that rewards more than box filling, take partnerships out of media’s realm and make it a creative assignment, be good enough, and persistent enough, to influence product not just ads.

what is a digital strategy?

01 Dec, 2011 • posts i've written • 15 comments

I was flipping through Ana’s new deck on digital strategy, re-stumbled onto Mike’s Tenets of Digital Strategy and decided to take a crack at defining digital strategy, as pithily as possible, for myself.

Here goes …

Thoughts?

It’s funny how I’ve been doing this for at least the last six years and I’ve never tried to define it.

help create the definitive inspiration engine for the creative community

23 Nov, 2011 • posts i've written • 5 comments


it’s probably best to view this fullscreen

I’ve been doing a good deal of thinking around improving this site and what my readers (that’s you!) actually need from a site like this. The document above goes into depth about my ideas. I’ve taken inspiration from sites like PSFK and Buzzfeed, and from people like Noah Brier.

I’d love to hear reactions and suggestions. Moreover, I’m interested in finding people that want to bring this to life with me. Editors, writers, and developers that want to own part of this and dedicate their time. My time is very limited, especially now that I’m back writing on the book, so in order to move forward I have to find a group of passionate people that want to build this together from scratch.

Behind the ideas are some trends or concerns I have about the state of publishing:

  • RSS is the new QR Code – With Google Reader killing the community aspect of their product, I worry that the super user group inside Reader is scrambling like I am to find a new way to source content, new ways that involve algorithms like Percolate that sort content and not RSS readers that merely present it. Also, my site has taken a traffic hit since Reader lost its community. I see RSS still being functionally very useful, but less and less of a consumer facing technology.
  • We’re Building Tools of Distraction – Flow content, the rush of ephemera on sites like Buzzfeed, is more and more the norm across the web for brands and publishers. We’re reinforcing a shallow attention span and we’re not innovating on long-form pieces with the same creative effort.
  • Archives are Graveyards – When I consulted for CNN, I was interested in making their archive of content more useful to readers and the content more valuable to the brand. Think about it, in the way most sites work (in reverse chronological order), content has a shelf life of a few minutes. The efforts of editors and writers are worth more than that and every publisher should be experimenting with making their archives more useful and valuable. I’m calling my idea the Inspiration Board, but it’s just one possible outcome for content.

In essence, I’m proposing a massively collaborative project, powered by a small community. Are you interested in joining our little cabal of editors, writers, designers, and developers? If so, hit me with a comment or shoot me an email.

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