Idea agencies and research institutes were first to sport a lab blog of sortss for more efficient knowledge exchange. Economy and politics will rush to follow suit.

 

Curriculum: An industry leader, MRM will want to take the concept further, turn it into an innovation along the way and achieve a user driven knowledge exchange and the involvement of stakeholders at all levels including a mechanism to validate results and honor result oriented conversation drivers.

 

Involve stakeholders from all levels of the organization starting with the early product development including manufacturer, their agencies and customers.

 

• autofspace—digital automotive campaigns
• autofspace—Facebook
• Rolf Jäger (Foto)—Facebook
• MRM Worldwide—credentials
• MRM Worldwide, Frankfurt—Facebook
• Digital Reputation or the Tree Concept: what Forest is it Hiding?—Youmna Ovazza, MRM Live

 

 

 

Inspiration, innovation, collaboration—Anjali Ramachandran, Nov. 26 2010, made by many

 

 

By helping brands engage in honest and meaningful conversations in social media, we believe they’ll earn the credibility to participate within these communities, gain advocates and increase sales through word of mouth.

 

excerpt from ‘why we do it’, © 2010, we are social. All rights reserved.

 



Social shop: AMSJ, Berlin

 

• we are social—credentials
• made by many—cedentials
• Agency profile: Made by Many—Agency Future
• AMSJ Berlin—cedentials

 

 

Walk through London’s Marylebone and you may notice a new Italian eatery that is opening with little publicity. Cocorino will sell ice creams and snacks. The focacceria has soup, stuffed focaccia, ciabatta, sourdough, thin Italian wraps (piadina) and hot panini. The gelateria is still testing the more than 20 ice creams and sorbets to be made on the premises. The people behind Cocorino are Linda Yau (sister of Hakkasan founder Alan Yau) and the chef Francesco Mazzei. The address is 18, Thayer Street, W1U 3JY and the phone number will be +44-20- 7935-0810 or you might try http://www.cocorino.co.uk/html/cocorino.html which should be back up in a few.—excerpt from Bloomberg, find the article here.

 

 

Briefing: Create a socially enabled brand building website including e- commerce for both Cocorino businesses on a local budget within 4 weeks or less.

 

Technical specifications: We are looking at a custom brand site using the exisiting URL to run on a WordPress installation at a WordPress enabled internet provider preferably out of London. A custom child theme based on the Hemmingway theme must be developed on budget. The local budget allows for a custom shop page in conjunction with a WordPress E-Commerce plugin with options to order through Paypal or direct debit. A solution allowing the use of Mastercard or Visa is currently not available within the fiscal limitations. It could however become available at no costs in the near future.

 

 

 

Ads: Place an ad in the broshure of nearby London Zoo. Promote your daily menu: Have school kids distribute lunch menus at Regent Park Zoo. Have your artist friend illustrate the menus with animals parading from Regent Park to Cocorino. Have animal footprints spray painted in vivid colors illegally on the pavement from the Regent Park exit to Cocorino’s doorsteps. Document all on video and take photos as you will be needind plenty of content for your WordPress blog. Enter Twitter and have an employee tweet your daily delicatessen specials. Reward Twitter followers with free gelati and sorbees (see Dean and Deluca tweet below. Reward the people of Marylebone to refuel on their way home after some hard shopping in Selfridges with incentives.

 

TV documentary: Allow me to try convince a friend of mine to come visit your store and do a documentary of your two businesses as part of his ongoing documentaries of contemporary craftsmanship currently airing on Bavarian television, which I feel has become a close match to the much adored BBC documentaries. You can then most likely make use trailer versions on YouTube and include them with your blog entries. Have a look here at the blog my girlfriend and I initially set up from one day to the other. I will see to it that your logo typeface is to be used as system font readable by search engines. Do let me know what you think. We have great opportunities for school kids to make a run for Cocorino Gelati and get to know Adam Ant who happens to live in the neighborhood. I am also thinking of asking you to get involved with a facebook account so you can post daily delicatessen served fresh via facebook, which will make it easy on you to assign an employee with the task of posting an entry each day. And your facebook friends can now purchase the delicatessen product right on facebook.

 

 

 

Double-fisted management in the new world

This is great. By taking Oren Frank on board as global chief creative officer, the long needed shift to being transformative is taking place with one of the five largest digital marketing agencies. Something to look forward to for an entire ailing industry.

 

It’s in the fabric of this elegant and sophisticated credentials site, it’s the story being told with lasersharp focus, which thus far closely reflects the set imperatives of an easy-does-it quintessential process. What a relief in contrast to the former ESSEE process.

 

 

 

Will MRM eventually eat their own cooking and do what they preach? Will McCann’s unkown soldier conquer Europe? Questions that where raised two years ago. I hear Sean Condon say his famous words: “We are getting there”.

 

I was a member of the Frankfurt management team for a decade, from the very beginning as Thunderhouse through various gernerations of zentropy and through the early stage of MRM emerging. Frankfurt was first to market customer utility™ in a straight forward fashion by building tools for the consumer such as Germany’s leading car configurator for Opel, web services and all kinds of practical mini apps.

 

 

 

I now wish to see MRM become the flagship creative agency for our industry.
A flagship agency for the new world. Returning trust in our communi-
cation industry in a very big way.

 

Will McCann’s unkown soldier conquer Europe?

 

1. One of a kind. Think of hiring an outlier as culture officer with the aim to make the transformation happen from the inside out -or- appoint a CD you trust and who has the willpower and capabilities to closely follow your lead. The pressure must come from inside.

 

2. One Voice. Opt for a unified web presence, the wording must reflect the meaning of the dotcom site, as much as each site must reflect local language customs. Currently the country websites are a far cry from what dotcom has to offer in elegance, sophistication, clarity and ease of being. Kill them, they litter the beauty of a company that has arrived in the new world.

 

3. One Truth. Invite, encourage and enable all stakeholder [clientele, agency, collaborators, and customers], even the consumer to actively participate in the development process

 

4. One Future. Take your MRM curriculum online alongside MRM Live, replace your defunct MRM Lab with a lab open to all. One that works hard on returning trust to the industry. This is the place for stakeholders to share insights and participate in the development process in an open transparent fashion. Reason to believe in MRM will come from here.
   You may want to appoint a small team of bloggers. Proven and tried believers in being digital.

 

 

 

• MRM Worldwide—credentials
• MRM Worldwide—Facebook
• MRM Wordwide Germany—Facebook
• Think Technology Will Bring You Closer to the Consumer? Think Again—Oren Frank, Advertising Age
• Why Data Visualization Is About to Become Very Important for Your Brand—Oren Frank, Advertising Age
• i don’t care about why people do things, i care about how they do them.—Illustration courtesy of Ana Andjelic

 

 

 

 

Utilitarian world

Offering utility on the web has become the most thought after marketing solution for brands to become meaningful for people. Amazon offers readers evaluations for buying books online. Apple has recently integrated ping with their iTunes apps so users and manufacturers [bands] can exchange their hitlists and get in touch with one another. Car manufacturers offer car configurators to help sell their models. Facebook offers the ‘Like’ button to help spread the word of ongoing conversations. You know all that.

 

 

Sociable Utility

It seems a given, that companies offering the most popular utility on the web, demonstrates the most marketing muscle. With the social media buzz and conversation taking over the role of advertising, manufacturers now must take on the role of being enablers to help people accomplish whatever they aim to do. It appears logical to help them with communication enablers to keep the conversations going.

• Brands help communities grow with communication enabling utility
• Brands use proven and tried communication enabling utilities to invade new communities, thereby expanding the brand reach reach

Reason to believe replace bold messages

In the pre digital era it was a sport amongst ad agencies to craft universally applicable messages to reach the largest number of people with whom the message should ring a bell, be meaningful and utterly relevant to. Today it has become a sport to invent or steal utility to become a commodity for the highest possible number of users. Conversations being the commodity.

1. Number of followers being the currency for the brand.
2. A portion of the number of followers will eventually become the currency for leads.

Utility to offer most marketing muscle

By default any utility becoming a commodity for the horizontal market outperforms a utility for any given vertical market by numbers alone. However, for any given marketer or manufacturer the opposite may well offer greater value, since the vertical market is made up of people with an inherent interest in the offerings of the enabler. Your choice. The other good news is that trial and error is not too bad an approach since the digital age on one hand demands immediate action with users demanding utilities which offer immediate results. On the other hand our digital age invites and tolerates development by trial and error as long as it becomes apparent and allows for participation in the process.

• Explore and expand your brand reach with the usefulness of the utility you invent and offer
• Continuously keep optimizing your utility or suite of utilites according to how people make use of it
• Enhance your utility to take on greater roles when it proves successful
• Can your utility be modified to take on the role of an aggregator?

Assuming success factors

Again a multitude of assumed success factors determine over success or failure. Old fashioned brand truths come to the aid. Know your name, know your brand pillars and ensure a close reflection of brand attributes to come through in the fabric with your choice of utility. They do with the afore mentioned examples. As long as the majority of people have their status determined by how they are being viewed in society, old world image related assumptions hold true and methods to manipulate these image assumptions keep serving brands. Bold messages are replaced with reasons to believe delivered more subtly by utility of immediate value to the population. Every little helps and what helps people helps the marketer create value for the brand. Just think of the lousy little ‘Like’ button and what it did for Facebook and how popular it became with the digital population.

• Calculate your brand’s historic market reach realistically
• Expand your brand reach by invading communities with an assumed need for your utility despite no affinity for your product or brand.

Conversations becoming commodity

Today brands are taking on the role of content providers on top of designing, administering and producing their product or lines of products.
They do this not by providing content themselves but by acting as technology providers for enabling conversations throughout the digital age.

• Craft your utility with care

1. Does it help the user do what they aim to do?
2. Does it reflect your brand ambition and truths?
3. Does it adhere to the 10 social principles?
4. Can your utility or suite of utilities eventually take on a greater role?

 

 

Source:
commoncraft—our product is explanation
Voice-over by Lee LeFever

 

Twitter in Plain English

 

 

Blogs in Plain English

 

 

 

Dido Victoria Millinery The accomplished milliner, my older daughter Dido, recently returned from a visit to her sister in Caldwell in the South of England, with the claim for her brand. “Hello Beautiful”. For profitable distribution of her hood fashion, Dido is inventing ordinary sweat shirt hoods for American Apparel to take on. For soccer fans she designed a three color hood in ‘Schwarz-Rot-Gold” aimed at distribution for the soccer world cup series. With GAP in mind, she is busy designing denim hoods. You get the idea. Sisters, Caldwell GB Slow Marketing You can’t hurry love and Dido is in no great rush for her ideas to take of. Practicing her hipster approach to desktop marketing, she settled on tumblr for being in touch with you fashion people. Occasionally selling a hat, a hood, or accessories to close friends, family or colleagues at the reputable ‘Landestheater Linz’, where she proudly holds a day job iin the city of Linz, Austria where Dido resides in a lovely chamber close to the blue waters of the danube.   love.hugs.kisses Your Father

Julia with her grey croc-print velvet Riding Hood; Linz Alturfahr, moments before the storm broke.   Dido, Saturday, July 4 2010

 

• Visit DidoVictoria.com—Dido Victoria Millinery
• Visit Dido’s profile on facebook—Facebook
• Become a hat giver—Facebook gifts

 

• Landestheater Linz—on Facebook

 

• Install DISQUS you hear?
• How To Add Disqus Comments To Tumblr—tumblring, all things tumblr
• 20 Great Widgets to Enhance Your Tumblr Blog—mashable
• Hack Your Tumblr Blog—Quite useful
• 10 Tips For Problogging On Tumblr—BLOGGINGPRO, Darnell Clayton

 

• Install Feedburner you hear?
• How to Use Feedburner with Tumblr—searchmarket
• Add FeedBurner to Tumblr—6ix Passions
• Using FeedBurner with Tumblr—ScottOS

 

• Install Google Analytics you hear?
  Take it from the bloggingpro: Tumblr makes it dead simple to insert Google Analytics in your blog, and unless you fear the Google Borg or enjoy tinkering with code, you should seriously consider inserting this within your blog.

  This feature is located underneath the “Appearance” tab, and make sure you include the “UA” letters in the appropriate field (example: UA-XXXXXXX-X) to ensure that your stats are tracked accurately.

 

 

Elizabethan Days Modern day storytelling is my younger daughters claim, now that she refers to her business as Elizabeth Blue Illustrations. How tell a story about a young woman who seems perfectly happy and together? Where is the conflict? What issues need be resolved? Farmer's wife idea of farming Pork rocks Years ago, Elizabeth came up with a sketch of a death head with crossed spade and pitchfork. Last year she married a fine young American, Douglas Courier and became the farmer’s wife. Organic farming is perhaps the most inventive of todays super businesses. love.hugs.kisses Your Father

Misty Waters. In the flesh- or rather, the clay. Heroine of the upcoming comic book, The Micanopy Murders

 

• Visit the Elizabeth’s blog—Elizabethan Days
• Visit Cornwall—via buggerlugs fb wall, the British Racing Green & UT99 queen
• How To Add Disqus Comments To Tumblr—tumblring, all things tumblr
• 20 Great Widgets to Enhance Your Tumblr Blog—mashable
• Hack Your Tumblr Blog—Quite useful
• 10 Tips For Problogging On Tumblr—BLOGGINGPRO, Darnell Clayton

 

• Install Feedburner you hear?
• How to Use Feedburner with Tumblr—searchmarket
• Add FeedBurner to Tumblr—6ix Passions
• Using FeedBurner with Tumblr—ScottOS

 

• Install Google Analytics you hear?
  Take it from the bloggingpro: Tumblr makes it dead simple to insert Google Analytics in your blog, and unless you fear the Google Borg or enjoy tinkering with code, you should seriously consider inserting this within your blog.

  This feature is located underneath the “Appearance” tab, and make sure you include the “UA” letters in the appropriate field (example: UA-XXXXXXX-X) to ensure that your stats are tracked accurately.

 

 

“It’s not what we do, it’s what people do with what we do.” —Gareth Kay, Goodby Silverstein and Partners

Gareth Kay coined ideas that do. Watch Gareth address the advertising world here. I have quickly come to trust that ideas that do offer a universal, most practical solution for the advertising industry to be transformative and overcome the creativity crisis by just doing it. This is your call to action. Show your support and post your ideas that do as brief case study.

 

Snowmen against global warming

 

ideas
that
do

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Entega: Snowmen against global warming—Coloribus, global advertising archive
• Snowmen on the move—Sebastian Neumann DDB blogger
• Denkanstöße—Endega campaign site
• DDB Germany—watch the campaing summary in English here.
• Ideas that can be advertised—Graeme Wood, geek media
• Entega Snowmen Against Global Warming—Google search results

 

This is great! All you got to do is listen in and wait for others to come along and express likewise feelings toward your long felt insights. And they will come.

I am blessed with a rather extensive list of favorites. Heroes of mine. To expel, deny or ignore proven masters and their contributions, was never a good idea and of course nothing could be more true than what David Ogilvy. Leo Burnett, Bill Bernbach, Clause C. Hopkins, John Powers… have believed in all along.

 

 

Excuse me while I digress

With the exception of Christoph Schlingensief, Michael Schirner, Thomas Meinecke, Heinz Schwaiger, Amir Kassaei and Peter Kruse, international references outweigh personal local heroes. By which only 3 are directly involved in marketing, while Meinecke and Schlingensief are thought leaders in cultural affairs to be taken seriously. Christoph Schlingensief then died of cancer only four days ago on August 21. With every appearance on German TV and widely distributed videos, Schlingensief exemplified how putting ideas first and taking action accordingly have an immediate impact on an ever growing following in a population wishing to contribute and share. ‚If you reach for the stars, you might not quite get one, but you won’t end up with a handful of mud, either.‛ as Leo Burnett long stated. And boy, did Schlingesief start off with a handful of mud when I left Germany for the US. And boy, has he made ideas that do popular even before Gareth Kay coined the phrase for marketing when I returned to Germany to go to work for McCann Erickson in Frankfurt.

 

 

Back to the future

I am back from the living dead, furthermore expressing my condolences to the dead living, the large number of advertising zombies who have failed to put ideas first… Dead mad men and their dying advertising businesses. Now there is plenty of evidence that ad shops which never expressed doubt to keep their focus on creative and ideas have been laughing on their way to the bank despite the economic recession. BBH to name just one. Followed by a good number of emerging marketing businesses, sporting new business models altogether are doing rather well. Victor & Spoils with crowdsourcing, Edward Boches with Mullen or Gay Gaddis with her T3 think tank besides many shining stars carrying meaningful names such as mother, naked communications, anomaly, barbarian to name a few. I hold dear Edward Boches, Ana Andjelic and Gareth Kay. Here is why:

 

1. Gareth Kay—for his ever insightul comparison of the bower bird and the peacock by which the later defines much of what David Ogilvy wished to see in the trumpeter swan [speak: Creative Director]. Gareth Kay has coined ideas that do which I most seriously regard as direct call-to-action for the entire ad industry as the most practical of universal solutions.

 

2. Ana Andjelic—has pointed the way for our ad industry to gain greater efficiency without sacrifice of effectiveness.
   “i don’t care about why people do things, i care about how they do them.” How rude! – How insightful! It is no longer necessary for our ad industry
   

   long tail
   fresh ideas come your way
   when the time is right

   research to try and define why the consumer does things and focus instead on how the consumer does things. Trusting the convenience of the evolutionary path, digital is offering, deeper insights will present themselves when the time is right. All eyes on how the consumer does things for now. Find Ana’s entry here.

 

3. Edward Boches is all over the place and doing so makes his agency look good. It get’s us interested in other people he converses with. I may not do Edward justice, yet following each other around is most important
   

   Boulder Digital Works

   for people of the ad industry for their industry to become transformative. Mullen’s website was first to market with using wordpress technology. Mullen is of course at it with ideas that do. And they have digital footprints as a service offering.

 

4. Peter Kruse. It took me half a year of blogging to finally come across a German thought leader who’s actions I can believe in. I was about to shut down my blog for lack of interest when Peter Kruse offered an explanation and good reason to move on. Apparently it is the clash of digital visitors versus digital beings that make blogging out of Germany feel cumbersome as if writing a diary in solitude. It’s my prejudice to cast German marketing practitioners as digital visitors rather than beings and I used to share much of the fear of publicness with my peers. The lack of connected people within the German ad marketplace was as obvious back in industrial times, unless perhaps one is willing to fraternize and join the ad club. Which of course I am not inclined to do. Besides Peter Kruse’s efforts, Jeff Jarvis came a long way to make friends and convince the German people of security risks when restricting publicness in general and Google street view in particular.

 

5. Amir Kassaei—Germany’s acclaimed top creative leads the way with ideas that do. You find his fun theory for VW here. I’d be interested to know if you arrive at my conclusion that these in fact are ideas that do. I’d be likewise interested in learning if Amir and the creators at DDB appreciate their ideas to being ideas that do?

 

 

• Christoph Schlingensief—Your condolences here
• David Ogilvy – prophet of the digital age?—Ogilvy interactive, United Kingdom
• Mullen—7 Modes of the Mind
• Bolder Digital Works—marketing aggregator of sorts [mountains of creativity]
• The Fun Theory—Ideas that do by Amir Kassaei and DDB?
• What you can learn from Volkswagens fun theory video—SHEGEEKS
• Victor & Spoils—V&S crowdsourcing
• The German Paradox continued [incl. comments]—the Buzzmachine