The Planning Lab

You ' re not innovative

This guy is.

Change starts from within

The internet has gone from an information society to a knowledge society. From being a huge database of information, today’s internet is full of prepackaged insightful knowledge in terms of blogs, tweets, slideshare, and so forth. Theoretically, the easy access to knowledge can change the whole world. Or can it? 

There are masses of people who believe so. Usually, the same people are communication consultants or self-proclaimed evangelists who claim to have the solution right in their pockets. Be innovative like Apple! Use social media! Reinvent your company! Imagine this! 

If the world was easy to change it would look different from what does today. But even though inspiring ideas are abundant, these are hardly solutions to the problems companies face today. 

Instead of dumbfounding companies, we as providers of creative services should think about how we can achieve change rather than what we want to achieve. There’s a huge difference. Achieving real change is as difficult as ever, because it’s about changing people’s behaviours. And until you’ve managed to do change people, talk is cheap. 

Change starts from within

The internet has gone from an information society to a knowledge society. From being a huge database of information, today’s internet is full of prepackaged insightful knowledge in terms of blogs, tweets, slideshare, and so forth. Theoretically, the easy access to knowledge can change the whole world. Or can it? 

There are masses of people who believe so. Usually, the same people are communication consultants or self-proclaimed evangelists who claim to have the solution right in their pockets. Be innovative like Apple! Use social media! Reinvent your company! Imagine this! 

If the world was easy to change it would look different from what does today. But even though inspiring ideas are abundant, these are hardly solutions to the problems companies face today. 

Instead of dumbfounding companies, we as providers of creative services should think about how we can achieve change rather than what we want to achieve. There’s a huge difference. Achieving real change is as difficult as ever, because it’s about changing people’s behaviours. And until you’ve managed to do change people, talk is cheap. 

How to connect everything to everything else

You've probably seen the twittering cat door, the twittering office chair and the twittering bakery. These lovely examples have one thing in common: they all use home-made devices that connect to Twitter. And while these application may seem like novelty, I do think they represent something something brilliant: off-the-shelf technology that allows anything to be part of the internet. 

Standardised low-tech means one thing: it's cheap and simple enough to be spread widely across the whole physical world (see previous post). 

A simple schematic shows how this works: most pieces of the puzzle exist today – the only missing link are standardised input-output devices and a community for developing plugins. And instead of using twitter as a frontend interface it can be used it as a backend dataflow that allows for interfaces to be built on top. 

The perspective here is not technical (since everything is based on existing ones), but from a user-perspective with one thing in mind: how technology can be packaged for maximum dissemination.

Does this make any sense? 

And btw, I'm not a techie, so my apologies for getting nomenclatures mixed up.

How to connect everything to everything else

You've probably seen the twittering cat door, the twittering office chair and the twittering bakery. These lovely examples have one thing in common: they all use home-made devices that connect to Twitter. And while these application may seem like novelty, I do think they represent something something brilliant: off-the-shelf technology that allows anything to be part of the internet. 

Standardised low-tech means one thing: it's cheap and simple enough to be spread widely across the whole physical world (see previous post). 

A simple schematic shows how this works: most pieces of the puzzle exist today – the only missing link are standardised input-output devices and a community for developing plugins. And instead of using twitter as a frontend interface it can be used it as a backend dataflow that allows for interfaces to be built on top. 

The perspective here is not technical (since everything is based on existing ones), but from a user-perspective with one thing in mind: how technology can be packaged for maximum dissemination.

Does this make any sense? 

And btw, I'm not a techie, so my apologies for getting nomenclatures mixed up.

Risk, creativity and innovation part 2

 

Today I had a meeting with the nice people at PhD, a media agency, to discuss the possibilities of having a more innovative approach for one of our client’s media setups. 

Conclusion: while it is possible to tweak media formats, you’re basically stuck with these if the client has paid for certain number of impressions. In other words, reallocating the media budget towards developing new-to-the-world contact points (such as the Whopper facebook utility) is tough if there are no figures on this (a.k.a. the discussion about impressions vs engagement). 

A company that invests millions in media will simply want a return on it, and what it ultimately comes down to is risk – something that clients hate. 

As long as we don’t have industry-level measuring standards to fuel the risk discussion, traditional bought media will unfortunately be the standard for larger media investments. 

Unless somebody out there has an answer to either the measurement problem or a different approach to risk in marketing management, I don’t see how innovative communications can be anything else than small one-off search-of-excellence projects or nothing-to-lose scenarios such as pro bono work. 

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. The pursuit continues anyhow...

Previously: Risk, creativity and innovation

Risk, creativity and innovation part 2

 

Today I had a meeting with the nice people at PhD, a media agency, to discuss the possibilities of having a more innovative approach for one of our client’s media setups. 

Conclusion: while it is possible to tweak media formats, you’re basically stuck with these if the client has paid for certain number of impressions. In other words, reallocating the media budget towards developing new-to-the-world contact points (such as the Whopper facebook utility) is tough if there are no figures on this (a.k.a. the discussion about impressions vs engagement). 

A company that invests millions in media will simply want a return on it, and what it ultimately comes down to is risk – something that clients hate. 

As long as we don’t have industry-level measuring standards to fuel the risk discussion, traditional bought media will unfortunately be the standard for larger media investments. 

Unless somebody out there has an answer to either the measurement problem or a different approach to risk in marketing management, I don’t see how innovative communications can be anything else than small one-off search-of-excellence projects or nothing-to-lose scenarios such as pro bono work. 

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. The pursuit continues anyhow...

Previously: Risk, creativity and innovation

Dissecting the creative agency

The Operating System is an attempt to visualise all the screws and bolts of our ad agency. 

Our ad agency (like most other creative agencies) looks like this: a number of different key functions such as account, creation and planning, various support functions such as administration, IT/HR, etc. Culture is important at our agency so that's why it's included. 

Visualising all the structures, activities and tools across three levels (organisation, project and micro-level) you'll end up with something like this: 

You can also visualise processes in the Operating System. Below is the planning process:

 

Opposite to what outsiders think, the creative agency is far from a black box. There are loads of mechanisms in place – some created for efficiency, others to optimise creativity (the trick is to achieve both). So getting the full picture of how the pieces fit together is a good start for discussing what to do and not to do when thinking about spending time and resources on new structures, tools, activities or processes. 

Dissecting the creative agency

The Operating System is an attempt to visualise all the screws and bolts of our ad agency. 

Our ad agency (like most other creative agencies) looks like this: a number of different key functions such as account, creation and planning, various support functions such as administration, IT/HR, etc. Culture is important at our agency so that's why it's included. 

Visualising all the structures, activities and tools across three levels (organisation, project and micro-level) you'll end up with something like this: 

You can also visualise processes in the Operating System. Below is the planning process:

 

Opposite to what outsiders think, the creative agency is far from a black box. There are loads of mechanisms in place – some created for efficiency, others to optimise creativity (the trick is to achieve both). So getting the full picture of how the pieces fit together is a good start for discussing what to do and not to do when thinking about spending time and resources on new structures, tools, activities or processes. 

Finding real use for social media

Instead of using social media to find new ways of basically selling chocolate bars to people (aka advertising), shouldn't the power of these wonderful tools be used for something good instead? 

Obama used social media to mobilise a whole generation of people. This proves that the infrastructure can provide a great deal of momentum that cannot be stopped. And the more people that are connected, the more feasible it is. 

Imagine using Twitter and other social media for:

* Starting an elite university for everyone

* Finance a microcredit system for the third world

* Starting direct-democracy movements

* Igniting resistances and revolutions, and overthrowing regims

When everybody is connected to everybody, the only thing that's required is will, and the only limitation is the imagination. 

Related: The Piracy Lab: Will the crowd bail them out?