Influx Insights Weblog

harley says screw it

Influx Insights — 2008-05-02T16:52:21Z

Picking up a copy of USA Today this morning it was easy to be struck by the negativity of the content.

- Nelson Mandela is a terrorist

- Jet fuel prices set to make air travel a luxury item

- Fed rate cut does nothing to change Wall St. sentiment

Basically, doom and gloom all around.

Then there was this Harley ad, which offered a contrary point of view.

It reminded us that America is a strong nation and it's bounced back from tough times before.

It took the long view and reminded us not to be fearful with the simple statement:

"We don't do fear"

Some might say this irresponsible, but I say it's brilliant to seize on the moment and offer a counter point that's so true to the brand and its ridership.

It's brave and gutsy, just like the brand.

I don't have the ad, but there's a taste of it on the Harley web site.

Posted by Ed Cotton

clay shirky's talk about the cognitive surplus

Influx Insights — 2008-05-01T05:12:25Z

Lots of smart thinking in this from Clay Shirky's presentation at the Web 2,0 conference and therefore, plenty to steal, or use and build upon, depending on where you stand.

Posted by Ed Cotton

how far can you go with an idea that's bigger than your product?

Influx Insights — 2008-04-30T16:59:51Z

AEG Electrolux has embarked on an interesting campaign in Europe, the company sells quieter washing machines and has developed a campaign about noise pollution to sell them.

I've often talked about the need for brands to rally around a big idea that transcends their products, but I am not sure about this one.

It certainly works great in the cities where AEG's innovative interactive billboards inform citizens of noise levels, but it seems a little far removed from the washing machine that creates a fraction of the noise compared to construction work and of course, transportation.

On the positive side, it demonstrates good citizenship in helping drive awareness about an important and often ignored topic. I also wonder if AEG has got themselves wrapped up in an issue that's too big for them to make an impact?

When Unilever celebrated the goodness of kids getting dirty and playing, they could demonstrate their belief in the idea by taking urban kids on trips out to the countryside.

Other than pointing out the issue, I am not sure what role AEG can play?

While Unilever's kids can get their clothes clean with Lever detergent after playing in the dirt, I am not sure how quieter washing machines really help city noise levels.

Perhaps AEG needs to close the loop on this for us?

Any thoughts?

Posted by Ed Cotton

psfk conference in san francisco july 17th

Influx Insights — 2008-04-30T05:23:39Z

The PSFK empire knows no boundaries and it was just a matter of time before it landed in San Francisco.

On July 17th, Piers is hosting a conference here in town and I am flattered to have been asked to speak.

It looks he has already lined up a great bunch of presenters, including some friends and people I've been wanting to meet for some time;

Adrian Ho, Zeus Jones, Andrew Hoppin, NASA, Chris Riley, Apple, Eric Ryan, Method, Jean-Marie Shields, Starbucks, Mark Lewis, DDB, Polly LaBarre, CNN, Rohit Bhargava, Ogilvy PR.

NOTE: This is a partial list.

More details on the event can be found here.

Posted by Ed Cotton

starbucks and crowdsurfing - the ideas are flooding in

Influx Insights — 2008-04-30T05:12:14Z

Back in March, Starbucks asked their customers for ideas, it created a website and the ideas have been been flooding in, exceeding the expectations of the company.

It makes me thing that every brand should be doing this, why not?

Here are the top 20 ideas that are being considered.

It's a great list that includes new products and experiences, ways to reduce waste and more healthy items.

Option to not print Receipts

Complimentary Wi-Fi

The Road Trip

Great Conversations at Starbucks

Starbucks Facts on Cups

Punch card system

Coffee Ice Cubes

Dark Chocolate Mocha

Flavored Foam

More Sugar Free Syrups & Sauces (more than 180 posted ideas for this!)

Increased Personal Cup Discount

Healthy, High Protein Breakfast

Smaller Portion Sizes

More Whole Grains

Gluten Free Options (almost 150 posted ideas for this!)

Vegan Options (almost 75 posted ideas for this!)

Electronic Sign showing Song Now Playing

Birthday Brew

Name Tag / Sewn Apron (almost 50 posted ideas for this!)

Encourage commuter & in-house mugs (More than 200 posted ideas for this!)

Posted by Ed Cotton

does you data viz fit your brand?- current tv's does

Influx Insights — 2008-04-28T20:11:34Z

Interesting data visualization exercise from the folks at Current TV.

It's a technique that fits the brand.

In 48 seconds they cover the 500 most popular images on current.com.

The length of time the image stays on the screen represents its popularity.

Done as an experiment for the Web 2.0 conference and spotted here.

Posted by Ed Cotton

the brits and american culture

Influx Insights — 2008-04-28T21:17:40Z

"Grand Theft Auto IV is such a simultaneously adoring and insightful take on modern America that it almost had to come from somewhere else.

The game’s main production studio is in Edinburgh, and Rockstar’s leaders, the brothers Dan and Sam Houser, are British expatriates who moved to New York to indulge their fascination with urban American culture.

Their success places them firmly among the distinguished cast of Britons from Mick Jagger and Keith Richards through Tina Brown who have flourished by identifying key elements of American culture, repackaging them for mass consumption and selling them back at a markup."

NYT

Posted by Ed Cotton

Notes from Web2.0 Expo 2008 (SF)

Influx Insights — 2008-04-28T20:05:48Z

This year felt a lot less hectic than last year. Crowds were noticeably smaller than last year, probably because of the economy. Discounting the crowd size as a factor, the buzz seemed more controlled and thoughtful than last year. The question has shifted, thankfully, from how do we make a mashup and put it on Facebook to how do we make the cloud smarter, easier to use and the same regardless of how you access it. Open standards are the rallying call of the day.

Tim O'Reilly’s keynote was nothing short of inspiring in my opinion. The takeaway: we are at a critical juncture in human technological advancement and we should all concentrate on how to use any and all of the various inputs around us in new and unthought-of of ways to get people useful information in real time, without regard to desktop vs mobile vs refrigerator. He’s encouraging us to all look at the big picture and do something amazing with the mountain of technology that surrounds us. Obviously O’Reilly loves the open source methods for doing these things, as should we all.

From Joseph Smarr’s Web2.0 presentation

Most exciting new technology (stack): OpenId, OAuth, OpenSocial, Google Social Graph API. I attended a great session hosted by Joseph Smarr of Plaxo where he talked being able to login to a site that you’ve never been to before using OpenId and having the site auto-populate your profile with content from your friends already on the site based on your social graph. The need to maintain a spreadsheet full of username and passwords goes away. The need to manually find your friends on the 27th social site you join is gone. The need to give your google login to an application so it can scrape your contacts is gone. You maintain control over how much of your information the site can use via OAuth. Permissions to use your data can be revoked at any time. Eventually everything works this way - one cloud working seamlessly from the user’s perspective with complete control over the profile data. There’s been a lot of coverage about OpenSocial and OpenId already this year, but to brainstorm about what these technologies could actually do together is exciting.

Mesh from Microsoft makes your data available 'anywhere' you want it and should be interesting. It was kind of funny how much prominence the mac user had in the promo video they showed though. Can’t wait to have my files synced everywhere I go. The little bit they talked about the smarts built into the technology sounded interesting as well.

How to make money by the pallet: Dash’s ability to glean (and then sell) specific search queries from in car GPS units to companies wondering where they should build their next franchise as demo’d with aggregated Starbucks searches along an Arkansas highway.

Posted by Josh Brewer

food stockpilling in the us

Influx Insights — 2008-04-28T17:07:12Z

The Daily Show puts the idea that Americans are now hoarding and stockpilling basic supplies like rice, into very sharp focus.

Sam's Club now restricts rice purchases to four bags per visit.

Of course, we know The Daily Show's stock in trade is satire, but the WSJ?

"I don't want to alarm anybody, but maybe it's time for Americans to start stockpiling food.

No, this is not a drill.

You've seen the TV footage of food riots in parts of the developing world. Yes, they're a long way away from the U.S. But most foodstuffs operate in a global market. When the cost of wheat soars in Asia, it will do the same here.

Reality: Food prices are already rising here much faster than the returns you are likely to get from keeping your money in a bank or money-market fund. And there are very good reasons to believe prices on the shelves are about to start rising a lot faster.

"Load up the pantry," says Manu Daftary, one of Wall Street's top investors and the manager of the Quaker Strategic Growth mutual fund. "I think prices are going higher. People are too complacent. They think it isn't going to happen here. But I don't know how the food companies can absorb higher costs." (Full disclosure: I am an investor in Quaker Strategic)

Stocking up on food may not replace your long-term investments, but it may make a sensible home for some of your shorter-term cash. Do the math. If you keep your standby cash in a money-market fund you'll be lucky to get a 2.5% interest rate. Even the best one-year certificate of deposit you can find is only going to pay you about 4.1%, according to Bankrate.com. And those yields are before tax."

Could Americans be so scared and fearful of rising prices that this Summer we will see mile long lines at gas stations and riots in the grocery aisles over bread, pasta and rice?

Posted by Ed Cotton

the congnitive surplus

Influx Insights — 2008-04-28T04:03:46Z

Some great thinking from Clay Shirky on the real threat to established media content, the idea that people start doing something useful with their cognitive surplus.

"And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads....

And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you? "

It's a great new way to think about the 2.0 world and consumer generated content, at last!

From a version of the talk Clay gave at Web 2.0 last week.

Posted by Ed Cotton

consumers are feeling it

Influx Insights — 2008-04-28T03:52:02Z

Consumer confidence sank to a quarter century low in the April 2008 survey.

The decline was due to high fuel and food prices as well as shrinking income gains and falling home values. “The recent acceleration in the loss in confidence indicates a longer and potentially deeper recession,” according to Richard Curtin, the Director of the Reuters/University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers. Rising inflation, higher joblessness, and smaller income gains has made most consumers more cautious spenders. “Rising uncertainty about future living standards has caused consumers to adopt more prudent spending plans and become more wary of incurring new debt,”Curtin said.

Press Release from Reuters

Posted by Ed Cotton

wanted: planners for the world's largest planning network

Influx Insights — 2008-04-24T15:35:02Z

This isn't a new plan by Sir Martin for global domination.

Instead it's an experiment to try and see if a global network of planners can come up with fast/smart thinking in close to real time.

The IPA (the UK's AAAA's) are doing something very interesting this Monday April 28th.

They have a conference on Fast Strategy.

It's basically planning as you know it, on speed. No time for weeks of research, this is all about coming up with ideas and platforms in hours, not months.

Mark Earls, one of the brains behind Planning for Good is taking part in a live contest against some of the sharpest minds in the London Planning scene and needs to build an army to tackle a brief from the UK Government.

In short, Mark needs you and your brain.

The time difference is a killer for those of us in North America, but perhaps sleep means nothing to you and you will welcome the challenge.

The brief will be available at 10am, London time on Monday 28th and he needs your responses up on his Wiki by Noon, London time.

If you are interested in joining Mark's virtual planning army, please email me at ecotton@bssp.com and I will connect you.

Of course, you need to be a member of Planning for Good to participate.

You can join up here.

Details about the IPA event below..

How can you come up with the right strategy fast? A selection of Adland’s finest will be giving practical advice on how to achieve this at the IPA and Times Media Strategy Conference on Monday 28th April.

Speakers will include:

- Tim Lindsay, President, TBWA Group: 'How taking the disruption approach can help you get to the right answer fast.'

- Tim Hames, Assistant Editor & Chief Leader Writer, The Times: 'What planners can learn from those that write the news and the pressures of doing it fast and accurately.'

- Gurdeep Puri, Head of Effectiveness, and Janey Bullivant, Board Planning Director, Leo Burnett: 'How, counter to popular belief, data can help you to get to the answers fast'.

- Jon Wilkins, Founder, Naked: 'Fast strategy in a media environment'.

- Stuart Smith, Head of Planning, Wieden & Kennedy London: 'Strategic and creative dovetailing - Fast'.

- Rob Forshaw, Founding Partner, Grand Union: 'How to develop thinking quickly from a digital perspective'.

These short, sharp and fast presentations will be presented throughout the morning, whilst leading communications consultant Mark Earls; Phil Georgiadis, Chairman of Walker Media; Johnny Hornby, Founding Partner of CHI & Partners, and their respective teams, will be putting into practice what they do best and responding to a highly realistic but fictitious COI brief, set and delivered by Peter Buchanan, Deputy Chief Executive, COI.

You, the audience, will then get the opportunity to vote for who you think is the fastest strategist in town, when these three teams return to the stage in the afternoon to pitch live in front of the audience.

Says Guy Murphy, Chairman IPA Strategy Group and Worldwide Planning Director, JWT, “The most important skill that strategists need to learn in this era is speed. The quality of a strategic answer is now partly determined by the time taken to create it. Slow-baked strategy, no matter how good, can never be great.”

The conference will take place between 9am-5pm on Monday 28th April at the Royal Society of Medicine, 1 Wimpole Street, London, W1G 0AE.

Posted by Ed Cotton

the death of the faceless corporation

Influx Insights — 2008-04-24T14:51:10Z

Social networks are now becoming corporate and if you are a company there's no hiding.

This trend means the people behind the company get to show themselves and interact with other human beings in the real world.

The idea of one-on-one interaction can happen. If you trust your employees you can let them out of their cages and cubicles and empower them to represent your brand in the real world.

They can solve problems, answer questions, entertain and inform.

They can become friends with customers and in short, they can be your pure brand ambassadors or the best ads you ever had.

Of course, this all depends on how brave you are.

It also depends on how much you value and believe in your employees.

If they are merely dispensable drones who you believe are stealing from you, you know only by their employee number and zip code, you may have some work to do.

Welcome to the death of the faceless corporation.

There is no nowhere to hide and if your people aren't out there interacting, you are missing a massive opportunity.

It appears that Zappos gets this idea big time.

Who else is brave enough to follow its lead?

Posted by Ed Cotton

play is the thing- dopplr's matt jones

Influx Insights — 2008-04-24T14:57:09Z

Matt Jones, one of the founders of the hip, travel-based social network, Dopplr, spoke at last night's IXDA event in San Francisco.

His presentation was a sort of biography meets sources of inspiration ramble, but it was good.

Jones, worked for three years (2003-2006) in Nokia's design research team spent a lot of time talking and learning about play, a core project he'd been involved in for a couple of years.

Nokia started by searching for universal human experiences something that required no research, just a book, Human Universals by Donald Brown that lists all the commonalities that exist in the human world. Matt and his team discovered there was a lot of global commonality in play which suited Nokia because at the time, it was searching for its own space in gaming.

While Jones and his gang came up with a lot of trend-right directions/themes (social networking, hacking, just-in-time situationalists, reclaim the streets,mundane is the new fun, etc) it appears the only thing that Nokia had on its mind was the doomed N-Gage.

This play project seems to have informed Matt's philosophy for design, he used the idea/quote of Play= Improvisation + Exploring, to make the link back to the design world.

He suggests that most people don't take play seriously, but play is the best way people learn and is all around us. It's the thing that can make experiences sticky and compelling, if you know how to use it right.

He had some nice examples;

The Prius dashboard "makes MPG, the new high score"

Dopplr's brand identity that is personalized for each user and changes as their behavior changes

Playfulness in copy on Dopplr- "July, no trips, we envy you."

As a distraction, Jones talked about his sideline projects for Welsh clothing company, Howies; a computer meets printer meets conveyor belt thingy that spits out Flickr images tagged with Howies. (Russell Davies is a co-conspirator on this).

Another project revolves around creating a map chest for the Howies London store complete with bugs, mid wind speed monitors and web cam feeds from Welsh surfing breaks. His inspiration was to stop the Howies people from becoming homesick for their roots when they were in Central London.

He ended with an interesting thought about the current vogue for the Big Idea, which he doesn't really believe in, instead he feels it's much more about the details and nuances, which are hard to get right and hard to copy.

Posted by Ed Cotton

what can your brand learn from van gogh?

Influx Insights — 2008-04-23T21:17:00Z

What can your brand learn from Van Gogh?

He never went to art school
He didn't start painting until he was 30
He started a movement called expressionism
He wasn't an elitist
He wanted everyone to see art differently

Take a look at this painting

It breaks the rules

He rewrites the history of landscape painting
He reverses perspective
He scrambles our assumptions
Are the crows flying towards you or away from you?
What are the green things- trees, hedges?
He makes paint talk

All this has been stolen from Simon Schama's excellent BBC series "The Power of Art."

How can your brand behave more like Van Gogh?
Can it challenge conventional thinking?
Can it change our assumptions?
Can you start a movement?
Can it make us see the world differently?

Posted by Ed Cotton