When I received the email above I knew the name sounded familiar but I couldn’t remember how I knew this person! Then after a couple of seconds I realized it was Don Drapper, the main character from the TV series Mad Men following me on Twitter! I really liked the idea of following him and working in the industry I even imagine meeting him at a random industry event!

Checking the Twitter feed was great as well, posts like “Looking at my newly monogrammed watch and thinking that I should do something nice for Betty soon” are into the spirit of the series!

Then I saw that the website of Don’s agency (Sterling Cooper) URL! I thought great, what a site of an advertising agency in the late 50’s would have looked like if the Internet existed!! And then everything fell apart! No fake website to continue the great stortelling they started but the landing page of AMC…

They’ve ruined my experience! Maybe I’m being picky but they did the hardest part, they got my attention… and I wanted more. Attention to details my friends, that’s what is lacking there! (Great idea anyway!)

I have been working on the future of the blog for quite a while now! Although the whole thing should only be live at some point in September, I will give you a flavour of the design! Below are my new Moo cards…

Brilliantly designed by Clemence.

Context is one of the most important things a planner or anyone else trying to look for some truth, should endeavour to understand. Context enables you to recognise how things operate and how they are linked or disconnected from each other, in effect it is the glue that binds together all the different sources and research you have done on a project.

I have the strongest conviction that if you understand the context of your brief, client, brand or research- you have done the biggest part of the job.

I also believe that the most common problems brands are facing these days are due to the loss of cultural context. If you think about it, it isn’t marketing that has dramatically changed but the context we live in.

However, I wasn’t really happy with my definition of what is wrong with context… until yesterday, when I watched Dr Mike Wesch’s video called Digital Ethnography of YouTube- suddenly everything became crystal clear. At some point in his presentation he talks about the concept of ‘Context collapse’. Enthusing about YouTube and vlogging, he develops his theory about the context collapse when people are posting a video they don’t know who is going to watch it, how they’ll watch it and where.

Here is what he has to say about it: “The problem is not lack of context. It is context collapse: an infinite number of contexts collapsing upon one another into that single moment of recording. The images, actions, and words captured by the lens at any moment can be transported to anywhere on the planet and preserved (the performer must assume) for all time. The little glass lens becomes the gateway to a blackhole sucking all of time and space – virtually all possible contexts – in upon itself.”

This is what’s difficult with digital communication these days! We are like someone about to post a video on YouTube, we don’t know who is going to see our content, how they will view it and if it is going to be remixed or misinterpreted. This is the beauty and the difficulty of digital: less control and more genuine actions!

You can watch the entire presentation- An anthropological introduction to YouTube (55 minutes!) below.

[Pic Via]

I have been working on a couple of brands recently and one thing that came often form the client mouth was: we want to be more ‘premium’!
As if being a premium brand was the ultimate achievement in life! Of course as Richard Huntington pointed out on his presentation about brands, operating in a monopoly allows you to fix your price and therefore to be more profitable. However there isn’t only one business model, no frills chic, premium brands, commodity brands, luxury brands and also unnoticed brands all have ways to stand out of the crowd and stand for something.

I guess this last thing is what most of the client I talked to are actually missing. It is not about being premium or low cost… you name it but it is about cre    ating genuine values. Values that are meaningful for your audiences: people, stakeholders… Most brands are struggling to define what they stand for because they only stand for making more money!

As Marie-Claude Sicard pointed out in her book Les ressorts caches du désir, There are no more than10 to 15 brand values out there: Proximity, Confidence, Authenticity, Innovative, Dynamic, Quality, Passion, Transparency, Responsibility, Performance, Professionalism, Effectiveness, Ethical, Bold, Ambitious…
You won’t build your brand by being ‘more premium’ and stick a bunch of empty words next to it but by thinking in depth about what you believe in!

[Pic via]

Below is a very interesting talk from Jon Steel at the ‘Planning at 40‘ conference. His words are very wise as always and I love the fact he is using the past to move forward. More than anything I couldn’t agree more with the fact that we have to focus more on long term visions…

Well worth spending 15 minutes of your time! Others presenters include: John Grant and Jeremy Bullmore

I’ve never been a huge fan of Twitter, mainly for the same reasons Asi blogged about a while ago… It wasn’t for me! I suscribed to a bunch of friends feeds though and sometimes I discovered some interesting nuggets!

Until yesterday I decided to use my Twitter feed with the following idea: one site / link a day! If I don’t feel confortable takling about me and what I am doing, I can surely share what I am discovering! I think that my twitter feed sits somewhere in between my blog and my delicious, it will push me investigating and discovering new stuff on a daily basis and doesn’t require the involvement of blogging… even lazy blogging!

I Hope you’ll enjoy it and ultimately find it useful! And great new, even Asi has started to use Twitter!!

http://twitter.com/organicfrog

[Pic Via]

Ted Parker and Matt Stone, South Park creators, have a real talent to find interesting cultural patterns and write great episodes about them. They have done it again with this episode called ‘Over Logging’. (Watch it above)
“On last night’s South Park, disaster struck. The Internet disappeared. Stan’s father couldn’t look at porn! His mom couldn’t check her boring old email! And, most ominously and amusingly, television news was unable to find any information to report on. It was a pretty funny horror movie panic homage, even if it felt a tad dated.”

Internet failures are indeed appearing more and more often. As Francis Pisani points out, Sao Paulo didn’t have any Internet for one day last week. Problems have appeared in the United States as well, some people in Houston didn’t have any Internet for 5 days after an electrical explosion in a Web hosting company. And even Twitter was down for 37 hours…

As many people are now storing important information ‘in the clouds’, the problems may become even bigger…
Well, a solution could come from Gears, a beta software developed by Google to enable offline access to services that normally only are available online.

[If the video has been removed, you can still watch it here]

To celebrate the new logo, the lovely guys from Duke Paris have created some T-shirts. Have a look at them below.

Other slogans include: ‘Ich bin ein Duker’, ‘Spiderman is the best webdesigner’ and ‘Internet killed the video star’!

We are also looking for a mid-weight planner in London, so if you think Duke could be a good place for you and for us, drop me an email: corentin [at] duke-interactive [dot] com

You’ve always wanted to know if you could type faster than your colleagues/friends? Now there is a way to stop these never ending debates: SpeedTest! You choose your language and have one minute to type as many words as possible!

Here is my result below; I guess it won’t be too hard to beat me for most of you as my fingers aren’t as fast as my legs!

Speedtest

[This is a tag cloud of my contribution - Via Wordle]

The Age Of Conversation author list has been released for the 2008 edition. 237 bloggers are participating this year and I am truly exited about the whole thing!

As I didn’t share my subject on my previous posts, here is my title: “Marketing is in the Eye of the Beholder” and a short paragraph of my contribution: “From my experience, marketing is disconnected to the rest of the business. Some people, and they are ones taking the decision at the end of the day – aren’t aware of the cultural reality anymore and it is our role to educate them by not restricting our conversations to a group of like-minded peers.”

If you’ve got some spare time, make sure to discover new blogs with the list of all contributors below!

Adrian Ho, Aki Spicer, Alex Henault, Amy Jussel, Andrew Odom, Andy Nulman, Andy Sernovitz, Andy Whitlock, Angela Maiers, Ann Handley, Anna Farmery, Armando Alves, Arun Rajagopal, Asi Sharabi, Becky Carroll, Becky McCray, Bernie Scheffler, Bill Gammell, Bob LeDrew, Brad Shorr, Brandon Murphy, Branislav Peric, Brent Dixon, Brett Macfarlane, Brian Reich, C.C. Chapman, Cam Beck, Casper Willer, Cathleen Rittereiser, Cathryn Hrudicka, Cedric Giorgi, Charles Sipe, Chris Kieff, Chris Cree, Chris Wilson, Christina Kerley (CK), C.B. Whittemore, Chris Brown, Connie Bensen, Connie Reece, Corentin Monot, Craig Wilson, Daniel Honigman, Dan Schawbel, Dan Sitter, Daria Radota Rasmussen, Darren Herman, Dave Davison, David Armano, David Berkowitz, David Koopmans, David Meerman Scott, David Petherick, David Reich, David Weinfeld, David Zinger, Deanna Gernert, Deborah Brown, Dennis Price, Derrick Kwa, Dino Demopoulos, Doug Haslam, Doug Meacham, Doug Mitchell, Douglas Hanna, Douglas Karr, Drew McLellan, Duane Brown, Dustin Jacobsen, Dylan Viner, Ed Brenegar, Ed Cotton, Efrain Mendicuti, Ellen Weber, Eric Peterson, Eric Nehrlich, Ernie Mosteller, Faris Yakob, Fernanda Romano, Francis Anderson, Gareth Kay, Gary Cohen, Gaurav Mishra, Gavin Heaton, Geert Desager, George Jenkins, G.L. Hoffman, Gianandrea Facchini, Gordon Whitehead, Greg Verdino, Gretel Going & Kathryn Fleming, Hillel Cooperman, Hugh Weber, J. Erik Potter, James Gordon-Macintosh, Jamey Shiels, Jasmin Tragas, Jason Oke, Jay Ehret, Jeanne Dininni, Jeff De Cagna, Jeff Gwynne & Todd Cabral, Jeff Noble, Jeff Wallace, Jennifer Warwick, Jenny Meade, Jeremy Fuksa, Jeremy Heilpern, Jeroen Verkroost, Jessica Hagy, Joanna Young, Joe Pulizzi, John Herrington, John Moore, John Rosen, John Todor, Jon Burg, Jon Swanson, Jonathan Trenn, Jordan Behan, Julie Fleischer, Justin Foster, Karl Turley, Kate Trgovac, Katie Chatfield, Katie Konrath, Kenny Lauer, Keri Willenborg, Kevin Jessop, Kristin Gorski, Lewis Green, Lois Kelly, Lori Magno, Louise Manning, Luc Debaisieux, Mario Vellandi, Mark Blair, Mark Earls, Mark Goren, Mark Hancock, Mark Lewis, Mark McGuinness, Matt Dickman, Matt J. McDonald, Matt Moore, Michael Karnjanaprakorn, Michelle Lamar, Mike Arauz, Mike McAllen, Mike Sansone, Mitch Joel, Neil Perkin, Nettie Hartsock, Nick Rice, Oleksandr Skorokhod, Ozgur Alaz, Paul Chaney, Paul Hebert, Paul Isakson, Paul McEnany, Paul Tedesco, Paul Williams, Pet Campbell, Pete Deutschman, Peter Corbett, Phil Gerbyshak, Phil Lewis, Phil Soden, Piet Wulleman, Rachel Steiner, Sreeraj Menon, Reginald Adkins, Richard Huntington, Rishi Desai, Robert Hruzek, Roberta Rosenberg, Robyn McMaster, Roger von Oech, Rohit Bhargava, Ron Shevlin, Ryan Barrett, Ryan Karpeles, Ryan Rasmussen, Sam Huleatt, Sandy Renshaw, Scott Goodson, Scott Monty, Scott Townsend, Scott White, Sean Howard, Sean Scott, Seni Thomas, Seth Gaffney, Shama Hyder, Sheila Scarborough, Sheryl Steadman, Simon Payn, Sonia Simone, Spike Jones, Stanley Johnson, Stephen Collins, Stephen Landau, Stephen Smith, Steve Bannister, Steve Hardy, Steve Portigal, Steve Roesler, Steven Verbruggen, Steve Woodruff, Sue Edworthy, Susan Bird, Susan Gunelius, Susan Heywood, Tammy Lenski, Terrell Meek, Thomas Clifford, Thomas Knoll, Tim Brunelle, Tim Connor, Tim Jackson, Tim Mannveille, Tim Tyler, Timothy Johnson, Tinu Abayomi-Paul, Toby Bloomberg, Todd Andrlik, Troy Rutter, Troy Worman, Uwe Hook, Valeria Maltoni, Vandana Ahuja, Vanessa DiMauro, Veronique Rabuteau, Wayne Buckhanan, William Azaroff, Yves Van Landeghem

“I’m encouraging young people to become social business entrepreneurs and contribute to the world, rather than just making money. Making money is no fun. Contributing to and changing the world is a lot more fun.” - Muhammad Yunus

I have recently discovered Muhammad Yunus (Nobel Peace price 2006 and founder of the Grameen Bank) work via Philosophie Magazine and I think it should be a must read for everyone working in marketing! It is indeed very rare to have someone having an in depth analysis and balanced view on modern capitalism. Muhammad Yunus offers new perspectives and help us to see beyond classic capitalism.

His model, ‘Social Business’, isn’t just about profit and is developed around three main phases: social objectives, community ownership and non-profit distribution.
“A social business is driven to bring about change as opposed to profit driven. Although from a strictly capitalistic perspective it seems foolish to pursue a goal other that profit, social businesses aim to meet certain social and environmental goals. The Grameen bank is an example of a business that combines two of these business models into one; it offers social services and goods to the poor and in addition is owned by the poor.”

If you want to find out more about Muhammad Yunus work, you can watch the lecture he gave at Google below.

Ideo’s CEO, Tim Brown wrote a very interesting article called ‘Design thinking’ for the Harvard business review where he urges us to “think like a designer to transform the way we develop products, services, processes and even strategies.”

This is in a nutshell what the article is all about: “In the past, design has most often occurred fairly far downstream in the development process and has focused on making new products aesthetically attractive or enhancing brand perception through smart, evocative advertising. Today, as innovation’s terrain expands to encompass human-centered processes and services as well as products, companies are asking designers to create ideas rather than to simply dress them up. Brown, the CEO and president of the innovation and design firm IDEO, is a leading proponent of design thinking - a method of meeting people’s needs and desires in a technologically feasible and strategically viable way. In this article he offers several intriguing examples of the discipline at work. One involves a collaboration between frontline employees from health care provider Kaiser Permanente and Brown’s firm to reengineer nursing-staff shift changes at four Kaiser hospitals. Close observation of actual shift changes, combined with brainstorming and rapid prototyping, produced new procedures and software that radically streamlined information exchange between shifts. The result was more time for nursing, better-informed patient care, and a happier nursing staff. Another involves the Japanese bicycle components manufacturer Shimano, which worked with IDEO to learn why 90% of American adults don’t ride bikes. The interdisciplinary project team discovered that intimidating retail experiences, the complexity and cost of sophisticated bikes, and the danger of cycling on heavily trafficked roads had overshadowed people’s happy memories of childhood biking. So the team created a brand concept - “Coasting” - to describe a whole new category of biking and developed new in-store retailing strategies, a public relations campaign to identify safe places to cycle, and a reference design to inspire designers at the companies that went on to manufacture Coasting bikes.”

Here are a few advices he gave to have a ‘design thinker’s personality profile’
I love the introduction as it breaks a few clichés!  “Contrary to public opinion, you don’t need weird shoes or a black turtleneck to be a design thinker. Nor are design thinkers necessarily created only by design schools, even though most professionals have had some kind of design training. My experience is that many people outside professional design have a natural aptitude for design thinking, which the right development and experience are unlock. Here, as a starting point, are some of the characteristics to look in design thinkers:
Empathy
Integrative thinking
Optimism
Experimentalism
Collaboration.”

You can dowload the whole article as a PDF here.

[Pic Via]

The guys are Lazy oaf are not only doing some great T-Shirts but they’ve also produced a funny film for their necklace range! I really like small compagnies communication skills because they are the ones that really get their brand inside out and produce interesting stuff with low budget… Enjoy!

I received this email/spam (delete were appropriate) the other day. I just love the way they totally missed the point… It made me laugh!

It all started with Brokeback to the future in 2006, remember? The video has nearly 5 millions views on Youtube.

This is one of the thing I like the most about the Internet, how people are easily creating their own experiences and series from a successful hit.

Basically, since the Brokeback to the future video, people have created trailers of other films using Brokeback trailer and music.

Have a look at the videos below:

Harry Potter

Star Wars

Rocky

Lord of the ring

Top Gun

I am going to let Quentin Tarantino have the final word with is Top Gun monologue from Sleep with me!

After the article about the ‘books You Haven’t Read’, here is another one about the Internet content you haven’t read either!
A recent study from Jacob Nielsen demonstrates that users are reading on average only 20% of the words on a visit. They are indeed more likely to scan the text in order to find the information that interests them.
This is actually what I am doing most of the time, I find an article / post I like on my Netvibes, and then I save it to Delicious if I think it can be useful for later. At this moment I would have only read 20% of the content of the article. I will then read it more carefully if I need the article for a specific reason.

If you really think about it, reading articles on the Internet is pretty similar to read a newspaper, you scan information for titles, what you consider as important and then dig deeper once you’ve found something interesting. This study shouldn’t be interpreted as people reading less because of the Internet but that people are actually looking for information not reading online for the sake of it. It would be interesting to see the number of people printing online articles to find out if they are less likely to read long articles on screen…

Anyway, as Pierre Bayard demonstrates in his book, it’s not because you have read the entire content of a book (or article) that you would have understood it better than someone that hasn’t!

[Source via - Pic via]

I wrote a few lines on the subject a while ago and I have decided to continue this post after I saw the rather interesting ‘Know your limits’ campaign from the NHS. This campaign will definitely have an impact on binge drinking and on people’s perception of the different measures however I am still sceptical that this kind of communication can have an impact on the roots of the problem in the UK: ‘casual drinking’.
By ‘casual drinking’ I mean consuming alcohol on a regular basis and necessarily in enormous quantity. “In England in 2005, 73% of men and 58% of women reported drinking an alcoholic drink on at least one day in the week.” (Source NHS)
Another problem comes from the fact that notions such as fun or entertainment are, in a way, being assimilated to alcohol. To plagiarize Polaroid, alcohol serves, as a social lubricant in the UK and this is the main problem communication should try to tackle.

If you look at the recent London Underground drinking party, what struck me was that people went into the street (or tube) and fought for their ‘freedom’ in the name of alcohol! You haven’t that many recent demonstrations examples in the UK apart from the war in Iraq so it gives you an understanding of what alcohol means for people!

Just to clarify, I am not saying that I have all the answers and that changing people behaviour on this subject is easy but from what I’ve witnessed they are two main problems: a short term and a long term one and only the first one is on the radar at the moment.
Anyway I am going to do more research on the subject and start to think how to answer this problem. If any of you is interested in the subject, you can drop me an email and we’ll go for a coffee!

[Pic via]

The science of wining or the science of doping?!

Just a thought I had when I saw this campaign!

I bought the Postmodernism a graphic guide to cutting-edge thinking book the other day and it is a very good read. The cartoon format of the book is great for planners as it gives you a multitude of quotes, visualisations and material to use for future presentations!

You can find a few visuals from the book below (sorry for the pics quality) they will give you a flavour of the content.

The first one is “Karl Marx’s dialectical materialism provided the classic historicist formula. Marxism established a structural difference between society’s traditional or cultural institutions and its economic productive forces”

The second one is an example of “minimalism postmodern? Carl Andre’s 120 Fire-Bricks (1968 ) at the Tate Gallery offered a notorious example. Minimal art eliminated all elements of expressiveness – which left only the aesthetical process itself on the shrinking borderline of non art.”

The third example concerns Jean-Francois Lyotard. “ He has unravelled and identified one alternative strand of postmodernism which is anti-modernist. It has been heard since the 1980’s calling loudly for an end to experimentation.”

The fourth example deals with the virtual reality: “Derrida asks himself, why has Fukuyama’s book of ‘Good news’ become such an instant best-seller in the west? Why precisely at this moment of capitalist victory is the reassurance of its survival so critically important?

The latest one is ‘endgame’ “Can we imagine how postmodernism might end?

1- The disappearance of a player, ‘Communism’, from the scene – foreseen in the late 50s but not really believable.

2- Cyberspace – the sum total of information technology and megamedia – is the product of hyper-modern developments.

If you want more information about the ‘Introducing books’ have a look at their website or MySpace page.

I just wrote this article for Duke’s newsletter and it was a good training for my Age of Conversation article.

It was nearly a decade ago that David Weinberger proclaimed, “Markets are conversations” in the ‘Cluetrain Manifesto’. Lots of things have happened since then, the internet has matured, people more advertising savvy and marketing folks more concerned about their impact on society!

However, ten years after the ‘Cluetrain Manifesto’, the “conversation” concept generates more debates and passions than ever before in the marketing field.
Last year, Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan launched a book called, ‘The Age of Conversation’ asking 100 marketing professionals what their view were on the topic? The book was a real success and started conversations across the internet, so many that they have actually decided to launch a new book expending the debate further.

Reading this first paragraph, it must seem that conversation is all about digital… but it isn’t. This is where most marketing people fail to make a difference, of course the medium is important, remember “the medium is the message” from Marshall Mcluhan, but your content, your point of view and the way you talk are actually the things that matter most. Actually no, there is one thing even more important than all the ones above; it is our capability to listen. Great brands work on cultural interactions, they don’t throw a message out for the sake of throwing a message out, they actively enter the circle of cultural context. This mindset could be nicely summed up by a quote from Lynetter: “…brands that win will be those whose consumers tell the best stories”
And there is a great new: size doesn’t matter! It’s all about the way you launch or take part in a conversation.

Things you will need to make the most out of it:

Find a bigger enthusiasm
If you want to be still relevant in a fast moving context you will need to realize that being a brand with great products isn’t enough anymore, it’s also about you ability to connect with like minded people.

Be human
Most brand theorists will tell you that your brand personality is important but when is the last time you saw a brand acting with human attributes without saying how great it is?

Be opinionated
It’s not how good your brand positioning is; it’s about how relevant what you bring to the table is.

Let it go
Accept not to be in control anymore, that people have now more tools than ever to tell their own stories.

Sometimes content isn’t the best thing for conversation but aggregating is
Understand that we live in an age of information where people barely have the time to catch up so creating content isn’t always the best solution.

Let the idea find a medium
One thing will never change in our industry it is the need for great ideas whether it is a cultural, design, experiential idea… and for each idea it’s medium.

Ten years ago a bunch a visionary amongst them David Weinberger believed that conversation was going to be the future of business. The present seems to make them wise with more and more marketing professionals interested in creating a two way relationship. However some people may think this conversation ‘thing’ is just another “marketing is dying” type of idea. Well this is actually going to be the new topic of the Age of conversation - Why don’t people get it? The timeless debate new
vs old has started! Is conversation just another fade or will it change the face of our industry forever?

Sources and further reading

Cluetrain Manifesto

Age of Conversation

Lynetter

Marketing Enthusiasm: John Grant

Being human: Faris Jacob

Do Brands Need to Create Content Anymore? Faris Jacob

Convergence Culture