Webconomist

 

Brands Are Afraid to Succeed Anymore

 I'm sure you've come across the ads from a major bank? Even a supposedly cutting edge MMOG game like World of Warcraft...that annoying Chuck Norris ad that won't stop and suffers so badly because they play the same damned ad on TV? And you have to suffer through the first 5 seconds on YouTube until you can "skip this ad"?

Isn't that sad? Lame? Pathetic?

I mean, here you've got an incredible opportunity to create something powerful, a wicked chance to execute some powerful creative in an online channel that doesn't have near the restrictions of broadcast television and well...same old. Nothing new. Nothing innovative. Nothing creative. Yet consumers flock to really creative content online.

Why haven't major brands picked up on this? Why are they so afraid? Success?

What would a brand do if it created some powerfully awesome advertising message that...oh shit, actually worked?

I find this aspect of creative so incredibly sad. So, well, incredibly failing.

Brands keep getting trumped by consumers creating infinitely more powerful messages. At a time when we should be seeing Nike, MacDonald's, Coca-Cola and others producing some wildly creative content. Yet they don't.

Are consumers so disinterested? I suspect not.

What do you thunk?
 

Why So Many Marketing Campaigns Are Just Boring, Boring, Boring

 When was the last time you got excited about a Tide detergent commercial? How about Sunlight? Pampers maybe? Ah, depends. Nope, not them either. How about a Sony TV...hmmm, maybe a little. The prospect of a new Apple product, like the predicted actual television set everyone is drooling in anticipation for? Ah, now we're talking...

So much marketing is boring. I think it's because of two reasons:

Fear of Success: Once a company reaches a certain size it likely has a lot of shareholders and stakeholders. It can reliably predict a certain annual volume of sales. As more people are involved, process trumps everything else. The product must be produced. Apple bucked this trend, so has Samsung (the only company pushing and nipping at Apple's heels, which is good for innovation) ah! And that comes to the second reason marketing campaigns  become boring...

Innovation: The company grows so large it is afraid to innovate. Not just in its products and service, but all aspects. Once a process is established and systems are in place, innovation becomes evil. Innovation might disrupt. Steady process means predictable ways to manipulate for cost-controls and margin maximization and other complex corporate-speak words. Innovation stops. Small, tiny, incremental innovations might happen. Might.

Apple, Samsung, Benetton. These are brands that innovate in different ways. Even Google has found its innovative soul again with it's products...not that it really stepped away, but it was. Schmidt is an excellent CEO - when you need to focus on process and being boring. Certainly it may be that sometimes a company needs to focus on boring stuff. But when innovation is lost across the board...everything becomes boring.

I always used to cringe when I would hear a client say "we want to be like our competitor, to look like they do..." well, why not just sell your business to your competitor? That way you'd make more money in the short term. If you sound like everyone else in your space...well, how is anyone ever going to know your better or different? If it walks like a duck...

I suggest the main drive of all companies it to innovate. Not just with products. But right across the board...innovate your hiring practices, innovate production processes...just, innovate. Especially your marketing. Please Tide...get with the times. it's 2011 and men do laundry now too. And when you innovate, customers get interested in whats next and employees enjoy their work more as well...
 

Walk & Talk With Me in 2012

I so look forward to the next 10 years and the technologies that will evolve. The ones that draw our world closer together. The technologies that help us connect even more as humans. Across cultures, religions and other divides. I look forward to seeing how we use these tools in ways the creators of them never imagined, but you did and you made a difference. The technologies that help us understand each other better, connect, create, share and reinvigorate our world and find new economic and political systems. That promote greater democracy, hopefully shatter more dictatorships and move us ever forward to understanding our world, our universe and each other.

 

The less ignorance there is, the less racism there is. The less ignorance there is, the less hatred and violence there is. The more we laugh, the more we share and understand, the less we see divides and the more we see similarities. Between races, creeds, religions and gender. The more borders become irrelevant.

 

To do this, we must keep sharing, creating, discussing, debating, laughing, crying and being. Being human. This is the first time humanity has had the opportunity to understand one another better and to find the commonalities which truly bind us all - that we are ALL human. That we all love and want to be loved, beyond anything else...no matter where we came from or where we are going. Perhaps we will truly discover that we are all far more alike than we are different.

 

This is our time. This is your time. Reach out. Connect. Share. Discuss. Debate. Think and reflect. Make 2012 the year we start to find how much we are all alike. No matter our religion, race, creed, gender, sexual preference. Together, in dialogue, we can make this world an incredible, exciting, vibrant and energizing place. So in 2012, stop, take a breath. Walk and talk into a brilliant future...it is ours to share.

 

I'd like to walk and talk with you, just to hear your thoughts and ideas, just to, well, talk. Will you join me so we can explore? It will be a great adventure, filled with new wonders, I promise you that much.

 

It's Occupy 2.0 We Need to Think About

 It's a shame really. The whole #Occupy or #OWS (if you're a Twitter type too) could really have been something. The cold hard, factual and economic reality is that the 1% are getting wealthier and the middle class is eroding. The marginalized are getting more marginalized. The world is incredibly interconnected, as are all its monetary systems. Wealth begets wealth. When the whole Occupy Wall Street started, well, pretty much all of the disenfranchised stood up and thought it was pretty cool, even Obama and Canada's top finance guy, Carney, agreed, among others. But Occupy has failed. Miserably.

No revolution, no significant change, ever, in any way, shape, form or how has ever succeeded where there has not been a clear rallying message. Ever.

This is the single and one salient, undeniable fact of why Occupy Wall Street failed. When it started, it had a message "we 99% are feeling screwed over by the 1% who keep getting richer" - and you know what, they had a point. Even Warren Buffet agreed...even though he just bought 5% of IBM for a few hundred million and despite the fact he lives in the same house he did before he became even a millionaire. I digress.

Ask any public relations professional, marketer or communications practitioner. I've been a marketer for over 20 years and if you don't have a "hook" that one, simple, easy to grasp and communicate message - you've failed before you've begun.

This is human communications 101 folks. Nothing more complicated than that.

Occupy Got Hijacked.
Then the unions showed up because it fit their generally socialist agenda. Then the homeless discovered a meal ticket....and perhaps a side of weed and the odd shot of rum and the tent cities grew. Not true? Well, that, folks, is what became "public perception". But before we knew it, all most people saw was either union rallies or tent cities and soon the stories of drunken parties and stoners permeated the media.

The Media Didn't Help Either
Then the media just loved all the drunken, pot-filled, drug-induced frenetics of the protesters. All we saw was ragged, bearded and hippie-eque types chanting peace slogans from the 60's that they could barely understand. They got camera time and they loved it. And mainstream media snickered and rolled the cameras. Mass media is as much to blame as the Occupy movement. The original story, the message that got us all wound up...it vaporized in a haze of doobies and booze.

The Middle Class Aren't Pissed Enough. Yet.
And then the middle class stayed home, still in their homes, snuggled up on their comfy couch from The Pottery Barn and gazing at their 53" LCD HD screen while tapping away on their iPad on Facebook. That's about 94% of the 99% - so the middle class aren't pissed enough yet. When we hit 12% unemployment and many are losing their homes and they can't afford to watch HD cable anymore...then that will change.

It's Occupy 2.0 We Should Think About
But the fact is, there is craploads of cash and liquidity out there. Companies are making wicked profits, dividends are still juicy and the bankers are laughing as they collect their bonuses. There is NO austerity in the corporate world. Profit is not bad. Because of capitalism we have more and better jobs than ever in the history of mankind and overall, humanity IS progressing. This is a FACT.

But It Could Go Very Wrong
But there is also a significant danger point here. It could all go south. Much will depend on how the 1% deal with things to come. If they keep hoarding cash, if they don't innovate, advance R&D, put money back into the economy...we are truly screwed. When the 1% fails to re-invest and simply hoards to see how high they can rack up their deposit accounts...well, one word: Depression.

If the 1%, corporations and ultra high-net worth folks don't start moving liquidity back into the markets...then we will have Occupy 2,0 and then it will be really bad....all they need do is look to the Great Depression and the French Revolution and well, history can and often does, repeat itself. I doubt this is something the 99% can influence. It's just one of those things we have to hope that the 1% realize. if they don't, then they'll have the pleasure (or not) of seeing their empired torn to shreds and insane economic and social changes occurring...and a very dark age for humanity. I hope we pass this point. I'm not sure we will, but the jury is out. I have hope. These are smart people these 1% and so at some point, they will realize the best way to increase their wealth even more is to let some go now, invest it in opportunity. Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com sees this and they consistently perform. In a recession they hired MORE people and built up infrastructure - now THAT is innovative capitalism that works for everyone. Build a desire to improve society through capitalist actions; perhaps that is the mix we need to move mankind forward? I hope so. Then we all win....unions too, cause they keep the membership that pays the nice fat wages of their management. Hopefully, along the way, a union leader or two will take an economics course to help them out.

To The Occupy 2.0 Folks
Find a bloody message. Saying "99%" was cute. Now it's old and it failed. You all failed. Instead we're right back to where we always were....so if you're going to start another Occupy Something Or Other...enlist a student studying communications. Perhaps then you'll get somewhere and cause some real change...otherwise, us 98.75%, well, we're going to just change the channel on our nice big LCD HD screens, especially cause by then we'll have 3D (without the silly glasses.)
 

A Fundamental Truth of Social Media

 I think there are likely several "fundamental truths" about social media. This is one of my theories based on all the research my firm has done on social media and people in the past three years;

Fundamental Social Media Truth #1:
People Love to Talk
Tell me that isn't true! Ever since cave drawings we've wanted to share information. It's why we invented the printing press, then the telephone (Because Alexander Graham Bell wanted to share opera with the world.) And now the Internet and social media channels.

Elements that frame this truth are:
- We love tell secrets
- We love to feel peer acceptance
- We love to be heard (the self as celebrity complex)
- We love to be heard wen we a) know the audience and b) especially the thrill of not knowing the audience, but that one is there

This I think, is one of the Fundamental Truths of Social Media. I'm just philosophising here at random. Feel free to add to this our argue against. Are there other "Fundamental Truths of Social Media"?
 

What The Media Missed About Ships Start Here

 Last week, Halifax received some of the best news in decades; we won a contract worth around $25B to build some naval ships at Irving Shipyard. It didn't take long for the news media to pick up on defence minister Peter MacKay's comment that the money spent promoting the Ships Start Here campaign was an utter waste.

I couldn't disagree more. It was a very sound and logical investment. I'm glad they did it.

Why?

Because it builds excitement, it gets people thinking about what a great future we have ahead of us in Halifax. People start to get ideas. They begin to dream. When the moment arrives, those dreams and ideas are closer to reality. I heard the downtown bars were booming after the news. People were celebrating. It was the talk of the town...propelled in no small part by the PR campaign leading up to it.

Because of that campaign, all of the citizens, all of us who have a vested interest in the city of Halifax, truly understood we had a) won on merit and b) we can start to be more positive and stop whining.

Without the hard work of the Greater Halifax Partnership and the province helping educate the public on the deals implications, we understood not just the local opportunity, but how it impacts the entire region of Atlantic Canada. The whole campaign was an investment of perhaps .0001% of the project win and the tax revenues the city and province will see. That's a good ROI.

Creating a positive "vibe" and energy in the city is a good thing. Somewhere along the lines of Bhutan and their Gross National Happiness Index. Is there something wrong with being motivated? Is there something wrong with energizing a population of giving people hope in a positive future? If there is, then we are in a sorry state of affairs.
 

Why The Mobile Phone is the Switchblade of the 21st Century

 From the 50's through to the early 90's, the switchblade knife was an icon of the rebellious youth. The Fonz in Happy Days mocked it with a switchcomb to keep his greased hair, well, greased.

The riots in the UK this past week showed how looters used BBM via their Blackberry's and txt messaging to coordinate where and when to hit. In Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain and other parts of the Middle East, the mobile phone played a key role with social medias to motivate and coordinate protestors. In 2005, txt messaging featured prominently in organizing the Orange Revolution. In Haiti during the aftermath of the earthquake, citizens coordinate help via their mobile phones. Flash mobs are possibly, good and bad, due to mobile phones.

And it is those seeking change in society who are using them in these ways. Perhaps then, the mobile phone has become the icon of the rebelluous in the opening of the 21st Century and as they are increasingly in use, one can only suspect they will play an even greater role in the changes of our society?

What do you think?
 

We Still Have Privacy So Stop Whining

 With the launch of Google+ the privacy debate rages on yet again. I wish people would stop whinging on this issue so much. We still have a fair bit of privacy and neither Google, Apple nor Microsoft really care about what you had for lunch. Here's my rant on the issues of privacy;

It's Your Choice So Smarten Up: if you as a human, decide to post photo's of yourself in compromising states online, either in Facebook or anywhere else, that is your responsibility. Not Google's or anyone elses. Own up to it, take control of yourself and what you upload. If you're that daft to not understand the consequences at this point of the Internet in our society, move to the mountains and chill with Grizzly Adams. Hopefully the grizzly won't see you as a snack.

They Don't Really Care: If you're suffering from paranoia, seek medical help. None of the big corporations like Apple, Google or Microsoft really cares about you, or me, and the minutae of our lives. They care in terms of "aggregate" data or larger pockets of data. As individuals, we're just not that much value. As a demographic or psychographic group/segment, we become more valuable.

Real Private Stuff Stays Private: For your personal things that really and truly matter, they stay quite private. Yes, there is a lot of information online, but not ALL information. We're pretty savvy at keeping the stuff that matters private - for all the data online, there's much more that has never and will never, make it online.

Our lives are more visible now, but not all aspects of our lives. Yes, there've been some grave errors by companies posting content online or not enabling enough privacy rules, but they are learning or being forced to (rightly so in my opinion) through government regulations.

My point here is, you have more privacy than you may think. You are also responsible for what you place online. You also have a responsibility to shout out brazen violations by online providers. Just put your privacy into perspective. This is the reality we live in today; understand it, deal with it.
 

The Amazing Time We Live In: A Mini-Manifesto

 Have you ever stepped back for a brief, lucid moment and thought about the incredible time in the history of humanity that you and I live in?

OK, no perhaps? Then stop. Stop whatever you're doing. Look around you. Look up at the sky.

You don't feel the millions of bits of data that have slipped through and around your body do you? Never felt even a slight shiver, no goosebumps raised? No hackles stiffened?

Yet as you took that moment to stop and...do nothing, trillions of bits of data zipped across the ether, evanescent in their path, to destinations around the world...and they never stopped.

We've txted, SMS'd, Aim Chatted, emailed, blogged, vlogged, tweeted, commented, liked, ranked, rated, checked-in and checked-out...and you don't really even care. I don't....okay, well, if a "tweet" hits my Twitter DM channel I might care or I get an email or BBM...

Just Ponder a Moment: Never, ever before, in the history of humanity...have we been able to connect across timezones, languages and cultures like we can today. Ever.

Hold that thought, let it slip across your neural paths for a moment, savour it as if it were the best coffee or meal you'd ever had, let it draw you in for a moment.

Do you see that now? Did you feel the slip and slide of the ether moving though and about you? Connector and receiver? Sweet in winter, sweet in rain?

Even you. Are a connector.

Think of the Arab Spring....it started in Tunisia and quickly sparked in Egypt, as a simple protest over police brutality that ended up in regime change...and we in the western democracies are still standing slackjawed as we suddenly realize our Arab brothers and sisters also want democracy and the right to express the views of the majority.

We started communicating from one to many with cave drawings....hundreds of thousands of years later...drawings pass through our very bodies unheard until they coalesce as words and images on the screens of whatever device we hold in front of our eyes...only now we can add sound and make the images move...digital cave walls?

Not matter how dull or mis-directed our mind, we are all seeking access to this global knowledge.

It is our ideas and the thoughts in our mind that translate into actions...and those actions are increasingly reflective of what we are seeing and hearing not just on TV and radio...but the Web that delivers richer, vastly complex information to our brain.

Those who comprehend and understand the complexity of the vast amount of information now available to us as a human race, will be the leaders of the future. Those who think money/capital is the answer will ultimately lose...those who capture the resources to create the technology that enables us to share and those who master the distribution channels of information and then those who can interpret that information to leverage it, are the ones who will be truly wealthy and take the wealth of those who don't.

This is another vital, perhaps critical, phase in the evolution of mankind...for once we have learned to harness, store and process this vast amount of data, we will have insights others cannot comprehend and we will move and checkmate unlike ever before. We have, truly, undeniably and hopefully entered, the digital age. My hope is that means the erasure of prejudice and the move toward a non-denominational bias and a true human race with no racism based on the banal argument of skin colour and the true harmonization of women and men working equally, understanding each others strengths and weaknesses and making them work for the better of mankind...that perhaps we may join silicon and flesh and create a truly amazing world, with renewable energy unphased by todays' morals codes and transcending past physical map borders and being democratic.

Isn't our ability to share our world with each other across all divides amazing? Those, like the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Burma's interim dictators...well, they will all die some day and we shall move forward.

Will you join humanity in this great, unknowable leap forward?
 

 

Unions Need to Go To China & India

 When unions came into being, they were sorely needed. They changed, for the good, the face of industrialism. They worked because humans were being unfairly exploited and I suspect, they helped stopped the spread of communism in the industrialized nations of the west. Unions, 50+ years ago, worked well in the capitalist system. They were the social concience critical to a decent society in the face of greedy industrialists who lost their moral way. Today however, they have become a deadweight, hanging like choking bling on the neck of Western society. Not only do they drag down the spine of society, they are leeching us. Perhaps even worse, Unions are now a decaying corpse feeding on the uneducated, fragile hearts and minds of the blue-collar worker. They foster a form of dissent that is insipid and rotten. Unions bosses spin tales of conspiracy, of evil plots of the business owner, the be-suited and bespectacled entrepreneur conniving the slow, painful and twisted deaths of the worker.

They use threats, fear and Nazi-style propaganda tactics to bring their members to heal and provide little truth, just twisted facts. They have nurtured a generation of laziness demanding full pay for no or little work. Demanding outrageous wages far beyond what a reasonable economy can manage. They are slowly choking the very life-blood out of our society so China and India who desperately need the unions of 50 years ago. CUPE, CUPW, IBEW...go to India and leave Western enterprise alone; or at the very least, change your ways. Adapt, come into the new world.

Today we have Human Rights councils and Workers Compensation Boards, we have Ombudsmen and we have MLA's, MP's and other watchdogs like the Department of Labour or Human Resources Canada. Today, we, the people of Canada, have universal suffrage and we have a voice. We have implemented processes and policies at the government level to handle the heinous labour crimes of the 20's and 30's. Unions - your are irrelevant in your practices.

How about instead you focus on building value? Like I and other small business owners do for our employees? Provide benefits and encourage a positive, working environment. Instead of a hate filled, negative workplace.

Your time here in the processes you still nurture from the 20's and 30's are done. This is the 21st Century. Get with it. Understand what burdens we small business owners carry to ensure you all have jobs.

Unions, you are done here. Go to India, China, Pakistan, Taiwan and South Africa...go where your policies of the 20's and 30's can save lives, improve living conditions and give people a hope.

If you want to stay here, become a partner and a collaborator, be open and welcoming. Find intelligent ways to evolve our Western society. Or leave.

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To Posterous, Love Metalab