Quick thoughts from @jensonbutton & @cannes_lions Chimera sessions #canneslions

If you follow me on Twitter or Instagram you’ve probably figured out I’m at Cannes this week.

There’s a great collection of posts on the PHD blog, including one from me that made it to Campaign as well.

Here are some more thoughts from sessions on Monday:

Collaboration in a complex world

I wanted to briefly mention a few things that came out of a couple of sessions I attended at Cannes on Monday, the Maclaren session with Jenson Button and the Cannes Chimera session by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

-       A quick route to good ideas: they are more easily arrived at when you know what does NOT meet your criteria of ‘good’; it makes excluding the bad stuff easier than before. Maclaren use this in their daily operations to evaluate which ideas are worth carrying forward into execution and which not to.

-       The importance of teamwork: Jenson Button mentioned how he depends on his team to give him the right information at the right time in order for him to be able to perform to the best of his ability. We actually saw a Maclaren team simulate what they did during an F1 pit-stop live on stage (it passed in seconds) – during a live race the team monitoring the car evaluates the multitude of available information on a minute-by-minute basis to help the driver perform to maximum efficiency.

-       The importance of collaboration in a lean world: because we all have so much information available to us all the time, it is much easier to work with people towards a positive goal (i.e the client’s best interest) even when multiple parties are involved. Nick Emery, Mindshare’s Global CEO mentioned that that mindset helps them work with AKQA, R/GA and Wieden + Kennedy to make Nike the marketing powerhouse that it is.

-       The benefits of collaboration to solve complex problems: Nick Law, Chief Creative Officer of R/GA made a comment during the Cannes Chimera session (well worth your time to take a quick look at by the way – a concerted effort to channel the advertising industry’s creativity towards solving problems larger than itself (joke)): many of the Nobel Prizes of late have been achieved by multiple people working on solving a problem. Similarly putting the brains of the industry to work at tackling complex problems might help to break them down into achievable goals.

All things to mull over as you have your evening’s glass of rose. Over and out for now.

Inspiring @pttow videos: @gtwhitesides on Virgin Galactic & @esthersoolee on #itcanwait

I’d like to share 2 videos I was pointed to today, talks from last month’s PTTOW conference in California.

The first one is by George Whitesides, the CEO of Virgin Galactic. I’ve always been a bit enamoured (as anyone would) with the idea of flying into space. I read every word of Wired’s March cover story on Virgin Galactic’s current efforts in the desert of New Mexico, so I found this video absolutely thrilling. Mr. Whitesides actually shows a clip of the first rocket-powered flight that took place a few weeks ago (the video was premiered at the event): essentially an aircraft with the rocket-powered spaceship attached flew to 52,000 feet and then released the rocket into space. It’s taken them 8.5 years to get this far, but get there they have. They expect to send the first commercial flight into space within 2 years; 570 people have signed up. How lucky are they. Anyway, anyone who’s interested in this should watch this talk:

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The second talk is by Esther Lee, SVP of brand marketing and advertising for AT&T in the US. She speaks about their #itcanwait campaign to stop texting and driving. I don’t think anyone can not be moved by the change they are effecting, not least through things like the Drive Mode app which automatically sends a customized message when the vehicle starts moving at 25 kmph. They are even pre-installing it on AT&T phones. People have come out to share their stories in droves, celebrities have volunteered to spread the word, and even competitors are working with them now on this campaign.

She mentions one thing that a lot of brands would do well to take to heart:

Movements require purity of purpose.

.@muse in concert. The future is bright.

Two shots I took at the Muse concert I went to weekend before last. Phones + bulbs + robots = elements of a bright future. Or something.

 

.@phd_uk @phdworldwide are launching #wincannes @cannes_lions this year. Are you in?

Yesterday I did a short 5-minute presentation about PHD’s Win Cannes campaign at Innovation Social so I thought it made sense to share the information here too.

I first saw Jane McGonigal present at SXSW back in 2011. ‘Gamification’ was one of the buzzwords of the year and contrary to the meaningless accumulation of points that the word came to be associated with (no) thanks to the marketing industry, it was good to see someone knowledgeable explain what games and the application of gaming behaviour to real-world events could achieve. Jane’s personal story is worth a listen – she got me hooked on to SuperBetter for quite a while, a game she released a few months later.

Last year, her ‘Reality is Broken’ was one of the better books I read. Mark Holden, PHD’s Worldwide Strategy & Planning Director thought so too – it heavily influenced the creation of PHD’s new planning system Source, which was introduced to the agency at the beginning of the year.

The Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity celebrates some of the best work in the media and marketing industry every year. This year, PHD are bringing Jane McGonigal to Cannes to speak about the subject she loves so much, how it’s changed over the last couple of years and to introduce to a new audience the logic of games and the benefits game design can bring to the world. Here’s the event blurb:

According to Gartner, by 2015, 50% of organisations that manage innovation processes will gamify those processes, and that by 2014 more than 70% of global 2000 organisations will have at least one gamified application.

In this provocative session, visionary game designer Jane McGonigal reveals how we can harness the power of games to solve real-world problems and boost global happiness. Having created games for the World Bank, the Olympic Games, the American Heart Association, the New York Public Library, and many more, Jane explores the application of game-design principles to real-life challenges.

Introduced by PHD’s Mark Holden, Global Strategy and Planning Director – who was inspired by Jane’s book to add a game layer to the media agency’s very own global operating system, Source, meaning the 2,500 people in the network are also part of a massively multiplayer game – the seminar shows what motivates one billion gamers worldwide to spend seven billion hours a week connecting and playing.

Learn how to tap into the same positive emotions and deep human cravings for blissful productivity, urgent optimism, social capital, and epic meaning. See the science behind how these gamers are developing real-life superpowers and rewiring their brains to be more resilient – and explore how we can work together to harness gamers’ extreme-scale collaboration skills for socially positive ends.

By the end of this inspiring talk, you’ll know exactly why the future will belong to those who can understand, design, and play games.

In addition to Jane’s talk (and even more exciting), PHD are also the sponsor of the official Cannes Lions app for the third year. This year, in keeping with the game design theme, we are also running the Win Cannes campaign. It can be accessed through the PHD section of the app, and gives participants the chance to collect what we call ‘pings’ (pings are also awarded to PHD’s employees for contributing to and participating in Source, so that’s the background) by doing various activities at Cannes, from attending seminars and scanning beer mats in bars to visiting exhibitions on location and favouriting interesting content within the app. Every day will also see ‘mystery power-ups’ (fun!). The prize? A free 2014 VIP pass to the festival, apart from daily prizes for high scores including phones, tablets and tickets to parties. Quite decent I think, but I’m biased!

I’ve attended quite a few conferences over the last few years and as much as I go for the content, I’ve always thought there could be something else to make the events more fun. This is what we’re trying to do with Win Cannes.

If you’re going to Cannes, make sure you download the Cannes Lions app and click on the purple PHD button at the top right to explore and start playing. You’ll need to be registered with Cannes Connect on the Cannes Lions website. Also, come and say hello while you’re there.

Last but not least, I’ve created a Twitter list of people going to Cannes this year. If you’re going, hopefully you’re on the list already. If not, do let me know.

Happy pinging!

Win Cannes from PHD Worldwide on Vimeo.

We live in a world where…privacy guarantees become a selling point. Even if it’s pot calling kettle. #picpost

Excited to see the progress towards @better_futures Internet of Things Academy by @superflux and partners

I’ve been following Sony’s Futurescapes project for a while, as well as what Superflux are doing with them. (I think it’s one of the best things Sony are investing in as a brand). Superflux have just blogged about the second phase of the work they are doing with partners like Technology Will Save Us and the Forum for the Future to build an Internet of Things Academy, something that is much needed and at a time when the vast amount of knowledge out there, such as the content produced by the Internet of Things meetups and the EU Internet of Things website and council can be taken to an actionable next step. There is a growing audience of people interested in and equipped with the knowledge to explore the internet of things, as well as kids growing up now who have an appetite to build and hack using technologies like Arduino and accessible devices like the Raspberry Pi. The larger community can have a role to play in making sure the future for IOT is bright through initiatives like the IOT Academy. Well done, all involved.

Safety in numbers?

This morning I was listening to a Monocle podcast (don’t judge me) where they were interviewing Steve Jones, a UCL emeritus professor and author of a new book called ‘The Serpent’s Promise’. I haven’t read the book yet, but it examines the Bible from a scientist’s point of view. A disclaimer up front: I am not particularly religious nor am I Christian, so my comments below are purely from the point of view of a layperson. Here’s a review in the Telegraph.

Jones mentioned how organised religion originally came about when farming became an occupation for human-beings; it gave them something to do as a group. From a purely individualistic and rational, non-moral point of view he said that it made sense for individuals to become criminals to achieve what they want. But from a group’s vantage point, that behaviour is not to the group’s advantage and religion made that choice easier.

He then mentioned chimpanzees and how there is a group threshold (30 or 40) at which even they start killing each other and splitting off into different groups. For humans, that number is obviously much higher – thousands, even millions in many cases – but at some point even we, to put it frankly, start losing it.

When I think of the vast amounts of crime happening today in the name of religions of all kinds in many different parts of the world, that perspective somehow makes sense to me. I guess we can’t conduct ourselves the way we ideally should when we grow as a group beyond a certain number. That is absolutely not to rationalise it or condone it, just an observation. A very simplistic one perhaps, but there it is.