T shaped people & forming Voltron

This is a couple of years old now but it seems relavant to the topic of the remastered account handler. The point that we make again & again around not just being digital but wearing, thinking, breathing, sleeping & eating digital is a hygiene factor for us.

With the explosion of content marketing maybe a better expression is ‘integrated’. Being integrated means that digital is much more than a state of mind & that new behaviours & new skills are required. Being integrated doesn’t simply mean ‘integrated marketing’ – it means an integrated mindset for the team to work colloboratively, iteratively & in a non linear way. Why is this important? Because ideas aren’t linear & nor is the process of generating ongoing content for a connective experience.

What we produce  has evolved. And so how we produce it needs to evolve too. The above presentation has a great slide in that talks about the ‘Then’ state or how we used to work i.e strategy, creative, production, media. The process is step by step, its pre-configured, its clear for clients & they’ve been used to paying hourly rates for resource etc.

This is still – unfortunately – the incumbant operating system in the majority of – and particularly big – network agencies. It’s a dinosaur model that doesn’t work for quality ideation. The ‘Now’ model where outside collaborators, technology, influences, opinion, media, production, creative, research, strategy are fed in as ‘inputs’ through a cyclical, iterative , non linear process tends to lend itself to the best work. But this approach is tricky for account handlers to get their heads around & even harder for clients who need to understand what they are paying for. It’s like a magpie building a nest, a scrapbook, pinboard, freewheeling, free associative kind of thing that gets the best stuff done today. Why? Beacause inputs come in all directions & influence the workgroup in all shapes and sizes. The creative process is a miasma. A soup. But all soups need ingredients, somewhere to be prepared, someone to chop, simmer, strain, decorate & serve. Who does what in the process is mattering less & less as roles overlap – but what matters more is that the soup is freaking awesome.

If we charge for the value of the process & the value of the approach then surely we need to be clear about how to get from A-B in that process. Right?

Wrong.

The hardest part here is persuading your client that a basejump in the dark is exciting, exhilirating & that the great unknown is where the best ideas are found. Then we can look at a connective experience for that idea & how to deliver it. If ‘Then’ is about the Linear. The ‘Now’ is kind of about Voltron. Voltron for those don’t know is a Japanese anime character whose real power comes from the combined force of cool robot lions. It’s about collaboration & how the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts.

Forming Voltron requires that people are fluent in many ‘languages’ but literate in many, many more.   The modern account handler needs to be T shaped. Colloborative across the top & awesome in project management/client relationships.

The colloboration needs to be fuelled by a natural enthusiam, curiosity & empathy for other disciplines. The area of awesomeness is your core skill as a contribution to the creative process.

For the remastered account handler this could be as simple as writing a great timing plan to explain to clients the importance of a good process. Or it could be the organization of a briefing somewhere interesting & relevant for the planner to inspire the creative teams. Or it could be negotiating with the legal teams at the advertising clearance centre on script approval, managing a difficult cost situation or explaining why this photographer or that director will make a difference to the work. It could be as simple as persuading them to come with the agency for the journey to awesome.

How do you know when you are looking a T shaped person? A T shaped person says We not Me. A T shaped person is Open not Closed. They believe they can keep learning not teaching & most important they are networked not linear. This sense of networking comes back to the idea of account handling entrepreneurship that I talked about here. 

T shaped people are not enough on their own. They need the right operating system. And other T shaped people. If this isn’t ready then all the best T shaped people in the world will fail. They are no better than I shaped.

If the agency is constantly embracing change, building the right values, the right culture, the right processes & the right resources it has a chance of success in today’s landscape. It also helps if it’s vision & financial reporting systems are aligned too.

Being T shaped, with a good colloborative process for idea making is one thing. But the remastered account handler needs to take its core expertise in project management & figure out what resources are needed when to do the best thing for the relationship.

When you’re getting the workgroup together – try sharing with them the idea that Voltron is forming up. It doesn’t matter to the remastered account handler if you are the leg, hand or head. Just as long as it forms.

Everyone is a cool robot lion after all.

More interactive art

Just riffing off yesterday‘s post I stumbled across the below. It’s lovely.

 

Interactive art

So after a hectic, culture packed weekend at the fantastic Louisiana (outside Copenhagen) & also visiting Hamlet’s castle at Kronberg I snapped the attached. I noticed that even though attendants were pretty much everywhere it was still possible to snap your own stuff in the gallery. This is pretty interesting from the perspective of reinterpreting your own cultural experience & sharing it with others. Will an art gallery actually embrace this remixing of our own experiences? Or keep the attendants from letting you take pictures. It’s an interesting tension that is starting to pop up in galleries all over the world I would think. The dominance of the hipstamatic/instagram led apps would defintely make it possible & the filter culture would make it a really interesting exercise in reinterpretation.

As I was trudging through the casemates, in the underground vaults at Kronberg & then following the guide through the royal ballrooms I thought of the below.

Sure – our ruddy faced Danish guide was interesting but imagine taking your smart phone & using QR codes to activate the tour yourself together with augemented content.

I’m sure we’re only weeks away from this happening somewhere in the world. And next stop brands, retailing & RFID integration…

We’re smarter than you

These guys are awesome. They are called Chaotic Moon & they know – without bullshit – who they are:

Their pitch to clients:

1) We’re smarter than you.
2) We’re more creative than you.
3) We can make you more money.

To prove it they’ve made a skateboard that you can control with your brain.

Told you: freaking awesome.

Chaotic Moon Labs’ Board of Imagination from Chaotic Moon Studios on Vimeo.

Open label

This caught my eye this week. With mobile narbing (jargon watch: ‘narrative bits’) forming the new currency for the intercloud it was only a matter of time before something like this popped up.

What’s brilliant is the way that it aggregates the conversation around your boring, everday shopping & connects you into the chatter.

Hear that? It’s the sound of brand managers across the world letting out a psychic scream….

Personalized ticker for your network notifications

The must have desk accessory for every remastered account guy/girl. Love those VIGETS.

 

Clik this

It had to happen. It get’s my vote for the first essential app of 2012. Check it here. And it riffs nicely with what I was chatting about back here too.

House rules

There is a list on my bookshelf that was put up by my wife to ‘gamify’ domestic chores. I’m the first to admit that I’m pretty poor at this kind of important life stuff but it was a last resort.

It’s pretty low tech our list but now thanks to high score house this experience has been gamified.

Primarily set up to help parents motivate their kids with the chores – it’s also being trialed to help wifes manage lazy husbands.

It’s fun, interactive & rewarding. Check it here.

Emotional content pt 2

I read an interesting article this week about the one innovation that’s driving the facebook valuation more than any other. The like button.

Simple as this may seem – it’s actually an extremly powerful lesson in how to drive emotional content for the multiverse. The like button not only turns information into communication at the touch of a button – but ‘emotes’ the social layer of the web. I really hadn’t thought about it in those terms  before & as soon as that connection was made I started seeing not just ‘emotional content’ but ‘emotional interactivity’ pretty much everywhere.

Check this:

It’s from the same dudes that brought us this awesomeness:

What can cooler (or more emotional) than having a song written about you. Or connecting through a social network to inspire a real life interaction over coffee or lunch.

It also strikes me that emotional content is becoming the defacto product for connecting through social layer – the what but not the why of the multiverse.

The why seems to be more about being in the relationship business & it’s something that the guardian wrote a great article about this week here. As ever with the relationship business it’s about not just being relevant but staying relevant. Or better still – staying interesting & relevant. Without relevance your not going to be talked about.

This means that if you’re not part of the conversation then you basically don’t exist.

So what’s the secret? It used to be that brands had to have control over their look & feel. But today – with the social layer – it’s got to be about influencing the character of a brand through a connected experience. Sure – managing more emotional content is one tool in the kit bag – but it’s just one aspect of being able to influence brand character in the multiverse. Without an organizing thought or an idea there is no bonfire. There are no fireworks. And there is no emotional content.

But – and this is the important learning for me this week – without understanding the relationship between brands & their customers the idea & therefore the emotional content will always lack relavance & be less powerful at affecting the coversation.

Obvious? Maybe. But in trying to think through these hyperconnected times sometimes stating the blindingly obvious isn’t a bad reminder of where to put the focus.

 

Who owns culture?

It’s the question that keeps popping up. With the future UI of You Tube gathering pace & a continued movement to a more ‘lean back’ experience it’s raising some pretty big questions about how we’ll  interact with next generation smart/touch TV’s & the content provided through them.  Google are already making a lot of noise about future interactions here.  And it’ll continue to ramp up as the battle for your living room intensifies. Multi-viewing (laptop/tablet + TV) is now very commonplace & this is already proving problematic for media planners/agencies to secure an ever dwindling attention span. But what happens when you buy one of these:

And these services become increasingly smart & part of your own social ecosystem:

And this type of art get’s even easier to make, share & promote yourself:

And the new Tay Zonday’s & Rebecca Black’s are born, remixed & reborn to infinity. Where garage studio’s in Hollywood are full of micro-content producing web tv stars. These guys are even more at the mercy of a disposable celebrity culture than ever before. But are they papped & breaking news on TMZ? Are they getting tables at the best restaurants in LA? Are they making money to go along with the 85m hits gained after the last comedy short? Will we pine for Clooney? Or wonder where the real stars actually went rather than just another You Tube clip that made us laugh. Is this phase of ‘social stardom’  a Bieber bubble – the same trend that Facebook is allegedly tapping? What follows this group? Is it self sustaining? Can we continue to produce, remix & recreate original output? Sure – we’ll still get angry about the Star Wars prequels but have we all really got a stake in what we’ve paid good money to actually watch? Will the cultural mash up machine start making real money or will be left looking at the George Lucas’s of the world who told us they were right. That it’s their ball.  Can we really rent culture & then mash it out of all recognition? Or is Lucas actually correct when he says that they are his movies & he’ll do what he wants with them.

It’s an interesting one & with the pace of change accelerating, platforms/tech converging & with agencies/advertisers grappling with where ‘the value’ is – surely there’s an industry debate to be had about what the boundaries are between creation, interaction & authorship. Or maybe we’ll just ‘lean back’ & wonder where all the real movies, stars & quality entertainment went? Is it a cultural doom loop? A black hole that’s eating all the quality content & spitting out disposable, user generated ‘stuff’.Or is the most creative time to be around with a hyper connected network of creators, critics & curators.

Would Truffaut or Goddard ‘lean back’? What would they make of the kind of home brew, bedroom superstardom? Will the auteur rise again? Probably – yes. Remixed – certainly.