Month: November 2010

“Not a bad technique. If all of your friends are voting, you’ll want to as well. Or at least lie about it. 🙂

“Super smart and useful idea from Google for the holidays. Shows what consumers are searching for, what products they’re interested in, etc. Pretty cool.”

http://www.google.com/thinkholiday/

Closing with 10 new communications commandments:

1)    START WITH AUDIENCE
With a deep understanding of your target audience’s lifestyle comes unique opportunities to reach them. Don’t settle for hollow demographics covered up with a clever name.  

2)    BE A MEDIA PERSON WHO SAYS ‘YES’
Media finally has a seat at the table, so let’s not mess it up. The best communications people are idea chasers who won’t take ‘no’ for an answer. Duct tape, spit, bungee cords… doesn’t matter how; remember, your job is to find a way to make ideas happen.

3)    MAJOR IN POP CULTURE
Want to be a great communications thinker? Get busy living. Understanding the myriad of ways to connect today requires staying current on culture, sports, entertainment, and the arts.

4)    BUILD IT, DON’T BUY IT
Increasingly, the best ideas aren’t for sale. So remember to start with the idea, and figure out how to build it, rather than starting with the media and figuring out what you need in order to fill it.   

5)    EMBRACE THEMATIC COMMUNICATIONS PLANS
If your media plan looks the same every year, you’re not doing enough. To avoid communications complacency, be sure your plan is unique enough to have a title, theme, or T-shirt tagline each year.

6)    DON’T BE A BUTCHER, BE A CHOREOGRAPHER
Slicing up the media budget like a pie is a blue-collar sport. Higher value contributions like assigning channel roles top to bottom and staging rollouts left to right are the future of the craft.

7)    LET THE CHERRY ON TOP BE THE MEDIA PLAN
Don’t relegate the bells and whistles to merchandising credits and the occasional PR stunt. Instead, find a way to have the most interesting bits lead the plan itself.  

8)    USE YOUR CENTRE BRAIN
There is real value to being an expert, a specialist. Media has its own language, numbers, and acronyms. But tomorrow’s media person will be as good with concept as they are with a calculator.

9)    HAVE AMBITION BEYOND ADVERTISING
Too much time is wasted trying to alter campaign ideas that weren’t designed to be anything more than a TV script. For better results, identify a brand ambition beyond advertising and work to extend that.

10)     BE GENEROUS
Modern branding is learning to give as much as we take. Does your plan create value for the target audience? Does it build an idea in the world? Does it leave something behind?

The next idea will come from anybody who cares to share them.

Webroot’s Social Media Sobriety Test puts an end to embarrassing late-night posts that follow a night out. Download the browser extension and stay protected.

1. Don’t give people what they want—give them what they never believed possible. A considerable amount of research is structured to seek conceptual permission from consumers. But given the chance, most consumers are going to revert to familiar constructs and ideas. As Dan points out in this interview, the most powerful work is stuff that people never saw coming. 

2. Research early, research late, boycott the middle. Conducted in the right way, research can be a powerful enabler of creativity. We love exploratory research—research with influencers and opinion-leaders, ethnographies—anything and everything that can lead to stronger, more insightful briefs. When it comes to the creative itself, however, we rarely test animatics or ideas prior to production. An ad isn’t an ad until it’s done and a storyboard just isn’t going to do the work the justice it deserves (see #3).

3. Animatics are scary (a.k.a. production = magic). W+K strongly believes in high-production values. Directors, editors, producers, talent—all of these pieces can elevate and transform an idea from the page. Testing an idea in animatic form ignores the creative contribution these folks bring to the party and fails to account for the magic that typically happens on set. I shudder at the thought of “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” as an animatic. The idea would have never made it out alive.

4. An “acceptable” ad is unacceptable. Be provocative, entertaining, polarizing, and disruptive. Have a point of view. Move someone. Do something that people will talk about, debate and discuss. Take, for example, the latest LeBron spot. My least favorite focus group maneuver is to ask for a show of hands to see how many people liked an ad, as if this metric is the ultimate barometer for success.

5. No diagnostic or predictive test is better than the real world. One of the most exciting aspects of the new media landscape is that you can experiment with lots of different ideas and executions at a relatively low cost. If we live in a world where engagement and shareability are key, then why is most research conducted in solitary confinement with positioning statements or half-baked concepts? To truly understand an idea’s potential you have to make something and release it into the world.