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.

Thoughts on @forrester’s Mobile Mindshift Index

Photo Credit: » Zitona « via Compfight cc

Forrester Research recently released the Mobile Mindshift Index, a study that looks at the attitude of mobile phone users rather than just activity. It also allows brands to assess where they stand with regard to how mobile their audiences are in terms of thought processes and behaviour (the expectation that I as a female belonging to a specific age-group have, that information should be available to me in a mobile-ready format whenever I want, for example – whether that is through responsive design or mobile-specific content). This in turn will affect how quickly they need to evolve their communications plan to include mobile and how involved their efforts should be.

Whenever I think of so-called ‘brand mobile strategies’, the first thing that comes to my mind is a quote I read last year by David Armano from Edelman about the difference between mobile and mobility. It’s from this Harvard Business Review piece:

Mobility trumps mobile. The difference between mobility and mobile is like the difference between hardware and software. Mobile is linked to devices — it is always one thing, wherever it is. But mobility changes with context: cultures incorporate mobile technologies differently.

Forrester’s Mobile Mindshift Index helps to take this discussion forward. It is high time that we as an industry stopped discussing mobile strategy as linked to the device and started thinking and talking about how people’s attitudes and behaviours change with the context in which they use the device. It will help cut down on app myopia, for one. It will force utility on to the agenda rather than being ego-centric. As we provide more utility as brands, people will seek us out rather than treat us as a one-night stand. Benadryl’s Social Pollen Count app might be yet another app to some people but as a hayfever sufferer it provides enough utility for me to actively seek it out and open it when I don’t feel all that well so that I can assess if other people feel that way too, and which locations I should be avoiding. And the more I do that, the more benignly I feel towards the brand and the more I am likely to think of them during my next visit to Boots – in fact, I might even make a visit specifically to seek them out the way I sought out their app.

Another valid point the Forrester Report discusses is the importance of paying attention to the data generated by mobile content. Creating content is only the first part of the answer (if that is indeed the answer, that is – remember that it may very well not be what is right for your brand). Most brands today invest in content production without taking the time to do their due diligence and invest in the analytics and the data output simultaneously.

For too long mobile has been the ‘next big thing’. I think we are all agreed that it is here to stay and it is part of the mainstream as a communications tool and channel already; the ‘Year of Mobile’ is not 2013 because that time has passed. Given this, what we need to do is consciously shift gears, think of it in keeping with the context and behaviour it comes with for our specific audiences rather than everyone as a whole, and not treat it as an add-on or vanity metric.

For a long time after the introduction of mobile phones, my uncle would stand with his mobile in one place, similar to how he used to use a landline, and have long conversations with family or friends as if he had to be rooted there in order to be able to talk. His son saw this one day and said, ‘You do know why it’s called a ‘mobile’, right? You can actually walk around with it, you don’t have to be stuck in one place!’

Time to apply that thinking to brands – mobiles are more than anything about a behaviour, not just a device.

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Cross-posted on the PHD blog

93.5% – I’ll take it! Massive thanks for a valuable learning experience @danariely & team! @coursera

So the Dan Ariely behavioural economics course I did? I got 93.5%, and a statement of accomplishment signed by the master himself. YES!

I did better than I expected, which means I prove one of the experiments I read about during the course, that women undervalue themselves when in a group, which coincidentally was also proved in a recent University of Massachusetts study that I heard about on Wired UK’s podcast that I listened to this morning.

I’m already getting better at this sort of thing

.@HUL_Connect’s Missed Call campaign for Active Wheel

I randomly heard about this campaign a couple of weeks ago for Active Wheel, a Unilever detergent soap in India, which I liked as soon as I heard about it. And then last week I got to know it was by PHD India, so I felt a transferred sense of joy.

The insight was that rural consumers in India use the missed call as a way of communicating with friends, family and business associates (especially business associates) at low cost. It’s something I used to see a lot of myself when I worked in the country years ago. Unilever created a massively successful campaign around the missed call, getting people to voluntarily give missed calls to a Unilever number, and then be called back to hear funny stories. Very high cut-through in areas that are just not served by usual modes of advertising.

netCORE for Hindustan Unilever from Arnab Majumdar on Vimeo.

The closest I’ve seen in the UK to @helpremedies simple packaging #picpost