My talk at Google Firestarters yesterday. Thanks again @neilperkin for inviting me to speak!

Yesterday I was one of 8 speakers at the latest event in the Google Firestarters series, curated by Neil Perkin. It was wonderful to be able to share the stage with some very smart people, who all brought interesting approaches to the ‘agency innovation conundrum‘, as it was billed.

My slides and what I said (more or less) are below.

A couple of weeks ago I was at the Museo del Prado in Madrid. It’s an impressive place, but what really enthralled me was the work of the Caravaggisti, the group of painters influenced by the works of the Baroque artist Caravaggio. Caravaggio, as most of you probably know, was the leading proponent of chiaroscuro in the 16th century, a form of art that focussed light and shadows around key characters to make them stand out.

To me this is similar to the role of innovation specialists in agencies. As a race, we now produce over 800 exabytes of information a year. To put that in perspective, and I always find it fascinating when I see this bit of information, we created only 5 exabytes of information between the dawn of civilization and 2003. We are now a data-obese generation, as Google’s chief economist Hal Varian says. To make sense of all this data, we need filters in agencies as much as we do in our daily lives – and that information needs to be distilled and translated into a usable form.

I also like to think of people who have innovation as a key part of their role as in-house creativity defenders.  I came across some research on the impact of client relationships, agency culture and structure on creativity recently. There were a few interesting things in the report but a couple of things stood out for me. One was the impact of the agency’s willingness and ability defend creative ideas on creativity itself. In a typical agency structure, there are multiple specialists – digital, SEO, social, client services, planning, art direction – who are extremely talented at their specific roles. Planners especially need to have the breadth of interest and knowledge that the others often don’t. But it isn’t their day job to have multiple fingers in multiple pies, to know at a given time what is going on with almost all agency clients. It’d be great if they could do that, don’t get me wrong – but it means stretching them too thin. That, again, is where innovation heads come in.

‘Innovation’ has today become a catch-all phrase that almost means nothing. It’s reached the point of semantic satiation for me at least, where a word is repeated so often that it loses meaning.

I think it’s useful and important to step out of the agency bubble to get perspective. Many years ago I was working on a strategy for implementing a system of accountability in government schools in Bangalore in India. It was something that was being done for the first time to shake up a system that was completely inefficient and worse, irresponsible. We used guidelines that were based on the US Government’s Accounting Standards Board to evaluate a set of schools as part of a pilot programme. It was very successful, with learning rates going up from 20 to 50% in the schools surveyed. There were multiple stakeholders in the process: government bodies, the non-profit that I was part of, a policy institute, and a citizen’s collective. Each funded their bit of the project. The majority of the employees in the non-profit I was working at, who were all very talented educationists, had crucial roles in keeping the charity’s other education initiatives going. They simply got on with what they did best. We couldn’t have achieved what we did without them, but we were the only ones who had the bandwidth to work on this wide-ranging project. I see a parallel in what the small group of us did – it wasn’t called innovation but that’s pretty much what it was, process innovation – and what I do now.

When someone mentions the phrase ‘agencies and innovation’, the first thing I’d like to know is what’s the context? Are we talking about a market-facing issue or an internal one? A process or a product? The second thing I’d like to know is what the frame of reference is – what kind of agency are we talking about? Capabilities are very different depending on whether we are talking about a traditional group agency or a small design agency, which means what they can achieve will be different. PHD is part of Omnicom, so we are able to leverage the size of the network to forge relationships with startups and technology companies across the world on behalf of clients – that would fall within our definition of innovation. A small design agency might be much more adept at creating, say, a game-changing mobile service, which is a different kind of innovation altogether. Both are innovative, it’s just that one is process innovation and the other, product.

A couple of researchers at Copenhagen Business School said something about product, process and organizational innovation that I thought made a lot of sense for agencies too: that it is a reductive exercise to talk about innovation at the expense of how it was done in the first place.

The last thing I’d like to mention is this phenomenon of agency innovation snobbery. (I wished I invented the phrase but it already exists with regards to business innovation!). What is important is that agencies keep pace with the thinking that underlies the creating – they should design an agile, sustainable product, campaign, business or strategy that makes a difference to people, and therefore to the client and the agency. Joseph Schumpeter is known to have said that whether it’s product or process innovation, what matters is whether you can bring an innovation to market.

Michael Schrage, a researcher at MIT Sloan’s Centre for Digital Business and the author of a book on business innovation called ‘Serious Play’, builds on this and puts innovation snobs in their place.

At PHD, earlier this year we launched our proprietary planning system called Source. It pulls in research and trend documents from multiple sources, helps planners brainstorm on creative briefs with a global hive mind, and even helps calculate media spend by channel. We’re pretty proud of it as both a product and process innovation.

Thank you.

My talk to @merlinthementor scholars last week

I rambled on to a bright group of Marketing Academy scholars last week. The presentation is below, notes are written up at the PHD blog here.

PHD marketing academy talk on innovation from Anjali Ramachandran

My @metaphwoar talk: Why popular Indian culture is like a successful startup

[UPDATED 23rd February 2013 with video below]

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Last week I spoke at Metaphwoar, organised by Andy Whitlock, as part of Internet Week Europe. It was an absolute blast.

I’d been to Metaphwoar in 2010 and knew the format: entertain and educate people through metaphors (broadly, that is. As Andy said in his introduction to the evening, nitpickers who pointed out the difference between similes, metaphors and analogies weren’t welcome!), but wasn’t quite sure how my talk would go down with the audience. In the end I think it went off well. Whew!

I decided to compare popular Indian culture to successful startups, in the following ways:

1. They are both all about personality

In India, filmstars are a huge part of modern culture (always have been). Rajnikant is a Tamil film actor who does inexplicable things like stopping bullets mid-air:

….and the audience just laps it up. One of the many websites built for him actually runs without the internet. I tried it and it really doesn’t need a working internet connection to be used!!!

The masses in India also identify themselves with filmstars to the extent that they have fan clubs that wield a lot of power politically. Early in my career, I was working on a development research project that assessed the link between social groups and associations with politics and I had to interview people who ran the most influential social groups in different urban and rural areas in the South. Unsurprisingly a lot of them were filmstar fan clubs. That’s another reason so many filmstars enter politics, they sort of come with a readymade vote bank. Their opinions are so revered that people build temples and worship them in some cases. I’m not kidding. Look at this, this or this.

Similarly, good startups have founders with personality. One of the most well-known examples is the Y-Combinator programme in the US, where founder Paul Graham is widely known to favour startups whose founders’ personalities shine through even if they have ideas that aren’t quite there yet, the logic being that an idea can be changed but you can’t really change someone’s personality that easily. As this article says,

Graham is much more interested in the founders than in the proposed business idea. When he sees a strong team of founders with the qualities that he believes favor success, he will overlook a weak idea.

The philosophy of good startups having strong personalities extends to the whole company as well as the founders. Mailchimp is a service that I think really brings this to life – the monkey’s messages always make me laugh.

2. Both give people their money’s worth

The best example of people admitting they got their money’s worth is after they watch a Bollywood blockbuster. When news crews talk to audiences in India outside theatres after a blockbuster film, more often than not you’ll hear the term ‘paisa vasool’, which essentially means that the audience felt they got their money’s worth. These are typically films with lavish song-and-dance routines that make people feel 100% entertained.

Truly successful startups also give investors and users their money’s worth, whether it’s Facebook or Twitter. Whether it’s Series A or B or further, investors want to see whether a startup is worth investing in: what’s its potential, what kind of audience growth is it looking at, and so on. This is even truer when it comes to users of a startup’s service: you’re not going to get millions of users with an offering that doesn’t add value to their lives. The productivity app Things for the iPhone and iPad costs $9.99 while Things 2 for the Mac costs $50, but people see value in it. Angry Birds was entertaining enough for people to buy enough paid versions of the app to contribute  to 70% of Rovio’s revenue by the end of their 2011-2012 financial year, with 648 million downloads. And then there’s Kickstarter, where people only really back projects if they think the resulting product will be worth it.

3. They step in when the system fails

In India, causes like fighting corruption are taking up the imagination of millions of people – ipaidabribe.com is a site where people report encounters with corrupt government officials, which at a very grassroots level affects people day in and day out.

The Ugly Indian similarly, is another campaign run by citizens where they take pictures of dumps in public areas and take it upon themselves to clean it up.

We all know about the pretty involved debates and discussions that happen in the US around healthcare – and over here in the UK about the NHS as well, for that matter. Startups like Sherpaa in the US, which allow people to get access to qualified doctors round-the-clock by phone or email, save them time and effort because they can’t get that access with government services. Similarly, Mint enables Americans to track their expenses online and identify where their biggest spends are. Ideally you’d think all banks should do this for their customers – some, like Lloyd’s Money Manager, actually do this now – but I’d argue that it’s startups like Mint that made them sit up and take notice.

4. They both understand their audience so they can fit into their lives

The Indian campaign I showed resonated with me a lot: as a high school student in Tamilnadu, I actually taught myself Tamil by reading the titles on local film posters. Doorstep is an NGO in India that achieved stupendous results by using a similar insight to solve a huge social problem. It won a Silver Media Lion at Cannes.

Startups have to similarly understand what need they fulfil in their audience’s lives if they are to be successful. If they don’t, then they pivot. With agile and lean startups, continuous user-testing will show this up. Fab.com started out as a community for gay people, it’s now an incredibly successful flash sales site for design-lovers. Color started off as a closed photo-sharing community, it’s now a video-sharing site for Facebook users.

5. They know the difference between growing their audience by adding value, and by pandering to the base

In India, in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, there were a lot of pulp fiction magazines in local languages that were incredibly popular. These tales of vampires and sirens, villains and detectives, could get quite lurid – sex always sells. A couple of years ago, a small publishing house in India took it upon themselves to translate some of those short stories into English so they could reach a new generation of audience – like me. And typically you always lose something in translation but I think they did a great job of keeping the cultural sentiment intact and picking exactly the right stories, as one Amazon reviewer of the book said ‘It’s heartening to see that the remarkably prodigious authors of the stories (some of whom have written thousands of tales and novellas) are often capable of superb and sophisticated imagination, refusing to pander to the base…’

Outbrain is a content marketing startups whose plug-in is used by publishers the world over, from CNN and the Guardian to Forbes and Fast Company. What they do is based on what you read, they throw up other articles you might like, but it could include those from other advertisers as well. I recently met them as part of my work at PHD, and one of the things my colleagues and I were concerned about was how they were going to control spammy text marketers. And lo and behold, recently I heard that they’re sacrificing revenue for quality. Which is a no-brainer really if you want to build a company with any integrity.

All in all, a great event and a really fun evening!

 

@antimega on authenticity and trust on the web

I found this talk of Chris Heathcote’s at NEXT Berlin recently rather timely because it mentions an issue I’ve been thinking about lately: how some sites look inherently untrustworthy and others much more convincing. On the web, what you see is what people think you are – and so looking unprofessional will simply lead to less business. Also how *showing* what you’re doing as you’re working on something shows proof of action and therefore engenders trust – Kickstarter is a great example of this, as he says.

Authenticity & trust on the Internet from antimega

The future of work cc @juzmcmuz @namelyinc @gap_jumpers @sandoz @armano @fredwilson

As part of what I do at work, I’ve been observing a rise in the number of startups that are trying to tackle some aspect of organisational productivity in some way or the other. I thought it would be useful to put all these linked things I’ve noticed in a presentation, which I’ve made to people within PHD a few times internally lately. So I thought I’d share it here too.

The siloed way of working is obviously no longer relevant – the web has rendered the flow of information not just between teams in one company but also across domains of expertise and borders pretty much seamless. Whether it’s Skype, Yammer or Google Talk, people within an organisation have access to resources within and outside their company like never before. This impacts the way we work, but also how we think: collaborative working is more important than ever before, not least because there’s a business case for it.

Technology is also impacting how people recruit and retain employees, how they are evaluated and rewarded. I used to work with Somewhere’s co-founder Justin McMurray and I think it’s revolutionising the usual CV-interview application process. I’m also keen to see how Namely plays out, and continue to be amused and impressed at how agencies like Work Club are using platforms like Pinterest. I don’t think reality shows like The Pitch or this one in China are really going to yield much more than mild entertainment (or boredom, as the case may be!), but it demonstrates one thing for sure: technology’s only going to make the race to be more productive and produce better work more interesting than ever.

.@google’s Squared 2012 State of the Industry report

Recently, Google launched an initiative called Squared in partnership with Hyper Island and the IPA, which aims to train young graduates in the digital media industry to become tomorrow’s leaders.

The first batch of students, which included people from a range of creative, media and digital agencies as well as brands, has just finished the course. They’ve produced a report titled the State of the Industry 2012, which you can read here. I was interviewed by a couple of young people from PHD who went on the course, so there’s a bit from me in there as well, specifically about how the industry can best capitalise on youth and give opportunities to young talent in the industry.

There is a clear gap in progression from entry level to more senior level; people are becoming disconnected as the hierarchical structure becomes harder to navigate. Employees do not necessarily want to job-hop, but in order to avoid the best talent getting enticed by higher pay and more satisfying roles elsewhere, agencies need to make roles more engaging and more of an enriching experience. Arena Media recognise that new starters should be exposed to the business much more broadly and can build relationships across the agency as they progress. This will also avoid young people developing a myopic view of the business. Taking this a step further, Jody Shilliday, Associate Director of Social Ads, Starcom MediaVest Group says that ‘agencies need to be willing to invest in youth, not just financially, but with time and trust’. From PHD’s perspective, Anjali Ramachandran, Head of Innovation suggests that this can be achieved by allocating  ‘mentors who take the time to sit down and chat with them regularly…providing feedback on their work so they can learn and grow’.

Neil’s written about the report here, so go there for some background on the kind of questions it tackles before you read the report itself.

The future of marketing by the always smart @willsh. Read.

The Future of Marketing: Make Things People Want or Make People Want Things?

View more presentations from John V Willshire

What is a story?

Yesterday at a company offsite, I was asked to do a short presentation on what a story is, to get people thinking outside of the usual definitions of a story.

I’d just been to The Story on Friday, so a lot of what I said drew on what I’d heard there, naturally. As a quick aside, Matt Locke did a fantastic job with lining up speakers for The Story, I’ll definitely go again next year.

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When anyone asks a child what their favourite story is, they’ll most likely think of fairy tales. The brilliant thing about fairy tales is that it opens our imagination up to different possibilities. A favourite exercise of mine is the ‘what if’ game. What if Cinderella didn’t lose her glass slipper, how would the prince have found her? What if Rapunzel had short hair instead of long hair?

And then you grow up and you get cynical, because you realize life isn’t a fairy tale. And most of us stop being inspired by the stories of our childhood. That’s because we still think stories are only told in the form of fairytales. But they aren’t.

Think of magic. A good magician is an excellent storyteller who keeps you gasping at each big reveal. I sat enthralled watching Derren Brown on TV just the other day. Each magic act is a story, with a beginning, a middle and an end – if a magician can’t tell a good story, that’s the end of his career. You’re not going to get a magician saying just ‘Here’s a hat. And I’m pulling a rabbit out of it. The end.’ At The Story, Anthony Owen, a magician who has the wonderful job title of Head of Magic at Objective Productions, told us the story of one of the ‘magic’ shows he worked on in the ’70′s, where a girl convinced her friend that she was a psychic when she followed the instructions on a BBC 3 show. Except that it wasn’t magic, it was rigged.

Journalism. A journalist needs to be able to weave a good story with his words if he wants to keep his readers coming back to the newspaper for more. The same story told in 2 different ways can influence public opinion very easily. So, instead of ‘Terrorists bring down Twin Towers’, if the story was ‘Government involvement suspected in 9/11 conspiracy’, people would react very differently. So think of how you structure your argument.

Urban landscapes. The designer Stefan Sagmeister was asked by urban strategist Scott Burnham if one of his quotes could be used in an artwork in Amsterdam (Sagmeister writes down a quote a day in his daily diary). And Burnham used millions of penny coins to get people to fill in beautifully outlined letters in a large square. It was part of the story of the city for all of one night, when someone alerted the police and they took it all away. Each city tells its story with its buildings, its roads, its people, its food, its public spaces. Even its name. And when you think of it, a city is huge. Yet people feel connected to them. New Yorkers are New Yorkers for life even if they move away, and if you meet a Londoner they will always talk about the weather. So what anchors your story in a way that will make people remember it wherever they are?

Music. People who listen to music as albums will understand this a bit more than those that don’t. There is a logic to the way a music album is structured, usually mandated by the producer. They want to make sure that when people listen to an album, it flows naturally, and that every song is in its place. Simon Thornton and Matt Sheret had a lovely conversation about music as a story last Friday. When you think about it, hit songs sometimes have two of three versions – it would be very strange if they were all placed one after the other. Instead they are interspersed throughout the album. So think of how you structure your story.

And activism. The Occupy movement had a story: that of the 99%. It leveraged the anti-capitalist sentiment that a lot of people still feel, thanks to the economic crisis. If it didn’t tap into the story of the majority, no one would have given it this much attention. In fact, Cowbird used the Occupy movement as it’s first key storytelling thread. Ellie Harrison spoke at The Story about activism, along with her work as an artist, and referenced her role in Bring Back British Rail, a small but growing movement to act against rising train fares. An example of how activist stories don’t work is the groups of people always hanging around outside the Houses of Parliament in London, who certainly don’t capture people’s imaginations and are probably seen as more of a nuisance than anything else. So what over-riding theme is your story rooted in, and do people really care about it? That’s always a fair indication of whether your story will be a good one: will people give a shit?

I ended with a quote from a brand that to me tells a fantastic story: Blake Mycoskie is the founder of TOMS shoes, who donate a pair to a child in the developing world for every pair they sell in the Western world. To him, people don’t just buy Toms shoes, they tell the story of the brand. I think it is vital to think of how we can tell a brand story, rather than focus on the more narrow perspective of a one-off campaign.

@tommorton on brands and data

The internet of things: coming ever closer

Last week I went to a talk at NESTA where Usman Haque and Matt Jones mentioned some interesting quotes in their presentations that I wanted to note down:

Personal data is the new oil of the Internet and the new currency of the digital world : Meglena Kuneva, European Commissioner for Consumer Protection (from this 2009 speech)

Lying about the future produces history: Umberto Eco

When you cut into the present, the future leaks out: William S. Burroughs

Be as smart as a puppy: IDEO via Matt Jones

Image from Usman Haque's recent presentation on IoT

Amidst all the talk of open data, Haque made an interesting point when he said that we’re not quite in the ‘internet of things’ yet, where machines are interconnected to each other. We’re still in the machine-to-machine phase (one-to-one) where data is in silos. Nike controls the Nike+ data, for example (see his presentation from earlier this year).  He mentioned the Natural Fuse project as an example of people controlling machines: the survival of plants in the project is dependent on the community.

Matt Jones showed us this funny video about Siri and mentioned the difference between smart devices and smart pliable devices.

As Usman Haque said, there is an increasingly blurred line between ‘digital’ and ‘physical’. Most digital things still need some physical input from humans anyway, so they aren’t truly digital in that sense of the word.

I was reminded of Matt Webb’s talk at the Royal Institution a while ago when someone at the NESTA talk (I forget who) mentioned that the real internet of things will be when we are able to buy easily operable devices at Argos that pull in useful digital data.

Today, the BERG folk released Little Printer and the BERG Cloud. As Russell Davies said, it took them 5 years to get from an initial prototype to this, so we shouldn’t underestimate the amount of effort involved. But the fact that there are projects like Little Printer and Twine happening at shorter intervals these days is a good sign. Maybe we will see them in Argos soon.

In the meantime, I’ve backed Twine and signed up for updates on the Little Printer. Take a look at the two here:

Hello Little Printer, available 2012 from BERG on Vimeo.