I'm condemned to ask questions

I remember the battle of big thinking conference where we spoke about the generation Y. Apart from being very comfortable with new technologies and more likely to change career and country frequently; findings said that they also seem to question themselves and the world a lot more than the previous generation. If I don’t know how much these findings are true, I actually recognize myself pretty well in this description. If this was not enough, I’m working between two industries: the communication industry, which struggles redefining itself and the digital industry which is disturbed day in and day out with continuous changes. It seems that, in this environment, I’m really condemned to only increase the number of questions I have in my mind.

Why is there a gap between what we say and what we do?

In my day to day job, I mainly involved with resolving communication issues for my clients using the interactive medium; but, on the other hand, I spend my time reading articles from my peers which don’t really seem to go in that way. Liz Ross, “To win, don’t hide behind false brand pretenses” which rightly supports the fact that appearance without true innovation is meaningless; Mike Follet, “Use or Ornament” which explains how being useful makes business sense for Tribal and our clients; Matt Dyke, “When worlds collide” which supports the fact that over the next ten years, all agencies will need to elevate their focus around the application of technology; or even my own “Experiment with experimentation” which supports the importance of experimentation to better use start-up ideas and maybe later challenge our time based model. For me, all these articles don’t really speak about either the communication industry or what I’m supposed to be involved with on a daily basis. And still, these were just few examples among many more from R/GA, Anomaly, IDEO, up to management consulting firms. The result is that I’m getting more and more confused because of the gap between what I am supposed to do on a daily basis and what I’m reading or am excited about.

Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to question whether or not we can reduce the gap between what we talk about and what we do?

Can we close this gap?

By understanding a bit more why so many people seem to be talking about these challenging thoughts as well as why it seems to be difficult to then apply these in our daily business, I might be able to get a better sleep. This gap is, from my point of view, mainly due to a misunderstanding on the buzz world “integration”. As in every business, you can see integration horizontally or vertically. It’s the same here in the marketing world. You can either say I’m in the communication business and I will develop my knowledge across all media. Or say I’m expert in digital and will develop my expertise across the other marketing disciplines. I don’t think we figured out which path to take as, for now, we definitely work in the former but speak more frequently about the latter. If I’m personally more excited in the latter because I think it could be an opportunity to come back to what an agency looked like in the 60’s where we were much more an extension of the marketing department, I don’t think one is better than the other for Tribal DDB.

In today world, marketing managers struggle to be listened to in board rooms because of the increasing pressure of financial markets and the financial discipline they impose. As a result, they are pushed toward the soft world of communication and reduce their influence over other marketing Ps. New products and services development, distribution and pricing strategy are now often controlled by other departments of our client’s organization.

As an agency, by going beyond the communication and using digital to create new products or services, explore new ways of distribution and why not ultimately developing new business model opportunities that change the pricing strategy, we might help them get back some influence in the board as well as allowing ourselves to go beyond the fixed marketing budgets. Of course, it is not easy and it would require new skills within your organization but it’s seems to be challenging isn’t it.

Digital convergence is not only about technology anymore. In the convergence 2.0 report, the Boston Consulting Group said: “Convergence involves a series of ongoing discontinuities in technology, infrastructure, consumer behaviour and competitive dynamics that are creating new competitors and business models and are redefining a wide range of industries besides media, telecommunications and technology. These shifts are already starting to ripple through many sectors of the economy, including health care, banking, advertising, and consumer goods.”

That’s where I think we should help our clients and use digital disruptive changes as a source of innovation for their businesses. It is the idea that advertising shouldn’t be used as a band-aid for a poorly thought through product or service. As we are customers too, we should ask ourselves: What’s the point of having the best piece of communication if the retail experience either in store or online are painful? What’s the point of having the best piece of communication if, when you ultimately buy the product, you don’t have a good experience using it? I think that digital can allow our clients to better integrate these customer experiences as it is now omnipresent in the entire buying process.

So then, if it seems very valuable for us and our clients to adopt such an approach and go beyond communication to use disruptive changes that digital offer to create integrated customer experiences, why it seems to be difficult to apply in our business?

Why would we?

First, as Lynda M.Applegate, teaching the challenges of building new ventures and business innovation at Harvard Business School, said: “Established companies often approach innovation and disruption much differently. Having worked hard to align strategy and organization to support the current business, they develop tunnel vision, encouraging employees, clients, suppliers, and partners to work together to deliver today’s business results. Even when disruptive opportunities are identified, tightly aligned organizations, business models, and industry relationships make it tough to respond quickly and effectively. As a result executives in established firm often frame disruption as a threat. When they see changes happening, they work to defend their existing business model and ask How can I insulate against these disruptive threats and preserve my current business model?”

By convincing digital agencies to focus on communication, the communication industry, which we are part of, thinks it can preserve their current business model as well as taking some advantages of the growing digital advertising market.

Second, in the short run, it might indeed not be legitimate to redefine our role because, as Mike Follet pointed out, “Business is going fine as it is, thank you very much”. Indeed, why would we change our business and risk to go in unknown areas whereas we are around a 20% PBT margin and a yearly 40% growth in revenues?

Third, as pointed above, there is currently only a few percentage of our workforce with the skills to go beyond communication which would require important changes in our organization.

Can we at least give it a try?



Well, it seems I don’t have much rational argument against what we do then. Therefore, I still have no real explanations apart from personal motivation and the fact that we might feel it is more valuable as a business in the long run. Hang on a minute; is it not what we call “entrepreneurial intuition” though?

Then, maybe we should at least give it a try and help agencies to build an innovation team to experiment this slightly different model. An agency where management consultants, technologists and experience architect would work among us, partners and newly created joint ventures. They would focus on resolving business problem using a creative thinking and digital technologies.

In the long run, this could give agencies a broader experience in the digital age, a better legitimization in other consulting areas and last but not least reduce the gap between what they do and what they say which will help me to get a better sleep.

If you think “Advertising shouldn’t be used as a band-aid for a poorly thought through product”, help your clients make better thought through products or services then.

Aurora is a concept video presenting one possible future user experience for the Web, created by Adaptive Path as part of the Mozilla Labs concept browser series. Aurora explores new ways people could interact with the Web in the future based on projected technological trends and real-world scenarios.


Aurora (complete video without commentary) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

At the 2007 EG conference, Kevin Kelly shares a fun stat: The World Wide Web, as we know it, is only 5,000 days old. Now, Kelly asks, how can we predict what's coming in the next 5,000 days?

Google I/O is two days of in-depth, technical sessions on how to build the next generation of web applications with Google and open technologies.

Copies of presentations and videos from Google's I/O developer event from last month are available online. Its pretty geeky but there's a few good bits here that is worth sharing.

Jeroen Matser, senior planner and colleague at Tribal DDB talked about the challenges for brands and the creative industry in a landscape of colliding worlds. This presentation was part of the 2008 Cannes Advertising Festival.



For those who are interested in that topic, you can see the presentation "When worlds collide" that Tribal DDB did last year as well as this post about design thinking.

I’ve always been interested in open innovation. If we are in the early days of collaboration in the agency world, I think that we should try to learn to work with others.

We all speak about UGC, social network, sharing and so forth but what do we do ourselves? We work with the Internet everyday and are immersed in a world of widely distributed knowledge and don't use much of these advantages.

We don’t spend much time innovating but have a lot of clients. We cannot afford to rely entirely on their own research, but should instead buy or license processes or inventions from other companies [that spend a lot of time experimenting but don’t have enough clients to take these innovations to market].

In Think Like a Venture Capitalist and Change the Marketing Model, Mark Kvamme said: “When it comes to the ways technology is changing the world, marketers would do well to think like venture capitalists: invest upfront in opportunities with potentially huge payouts and help new technology companies define novel ad models.”



I also wanted to share this presentation from Nokia about open innovation. I hope the case studies will get you excited about trying to open the way you work a little bit.

For more reading you can check:

• How Nokia Users Drive Innovation
• Innovation through Global Collaboration

I’ve recently come across this thought from R/GA saying that “as marketers realise the power of digital, our industry is going from telling stories to designing experiences - experiences that deliver information, entertainment, and applications for online, mobile, or physical environments. Applications create utility and engagement that, when relevant, result in deeper brand experiences.”

If agencies are going to design experiences, then it might be the time for us to have a closer look at design thinking.

Tim Brown, CEO and president of IDEO, recently wrote an interesting piece on Harvard business review on how thinking like a designer can transform the way you develop products, services, processes—and even strategy.

Here are key points on how to make design thinking part of the innovation drill.

• Begin at the beginning
• Take a human-centered approach
• Try early and often
• Seek outside help
• Blend big and small projects
• Budget to the pace of innovation
• Find talent any way you can
• Design for the cycle

Then you might be interested in seeing this video conference on the same topic that Tim Brown gave at MIT about innovation through design thinking.

About a month ago I was in Southbank to visit the O2 Memory Project, an installation by Jason Bruges Studio. The work explores the temporary nature of our digital memories, drawing on the theme of ‘nothing is lost’. The structure camera-captures panoramic moments in time and stores them within its digital memory bank. Inside, visitors can explore the stored history of the installation and interact with the displayed 360 degree images.



Simultaneously, the Memory Project has a significant online element. All the panoramic images taken are time-coded and instantly uploaded and can be viewed as ‘memory rings’ – unique 360 degree images that can be scrolled through. Lessrain wrote about the development.



“Over the years, physical diaries, photo albums and shoe boxes have kept our personal memories safe. A generation from now, printed matter might not exist. We are already relying on hard drives, websites and mobile phones to store our digital memories. Our lives will be downloaded as a matter of course for future generations to examine, adore or even ignore.”

For more see this great video from the BBC.

Adaptive Path's Brandon Schauer and David Verba, recently gave a presentation on Subject To Change. It’s a good overview of the main points of their new book. "The way most organizations think and work on products and services isn't suited to the unpredictable world we live in. Instead, companies need new ways of thinking and working to adapt into innovative, agile, and commercially successful organizations who creates great products and services".



As David Armano pointed out: "The biggest challenge that today's marketers face is understanding how to overcome the obstacles that get in the way from creating user/customer/consumer experiences that people want to make part of their everyday lives."

I also wanted to share this slidecast, The long wow. This presentation lays out an experience-centric approach to fostering and creating loyalty by systematically impressing your customers again and again. The Long Wow challenges creators of customer experiences to plan across channels, time, and disciplines to identify a progression of seduceable moments.



For more on that topic, you can check Adaptive Path's blog.

With over three billion mobile phones in use globally, the mobile space is three times as large as television and twice as large as PCs and it is the most personal device.

Success in mobile marketing will require that marketers think differently. It is not a web experience that we transfer into a mobile neither another digital channel we push content to.

To be right, we will have to offer useful information, tools and services at the right moment and in the right place to enrich lives, better enable consumers to make decisions and help them to save time and money.

Nokia recently announced the winners in the annual 'Mobile Rules!' competition, the world's leading awards for innovative mobile business plans and cutting-edge applications, services and technologies from developers and entrepreneurs from around the globe.

For me, a very good overview of the mobile space today. One of my favourite is NiiMee, a package of projects developed in Python that exploits the accelerometer present in some high-end mobile phones.



With NiiMe you can move the mouse, drive a car using the phone as a steering wheel, play drums in the air, play Mario Bros and more games with the phone in the trouser pocket, and soon much more. There are a lot of funny and useful projects under development.

Uniqlo UT find its unique way again to promote their latest series of tshirts. I couldn't resist to post the widget.

For the fans of Soulwax, I was yesterday at the film premiere of Part of the Weekend Never Dies at the Royal Festival Hall in London. The editing was amazing and the sound will probably give me energy for the whole weekend.

Pangea Day taps the power of film to strengthen tolerance and compassion while uniting millions of people to build a better future.

In a world where people are often divided by borders, difference, and conflict, it's easy to lose sight of what we all have in common. Pangea Day seeks to overcome that - to help people see themselves in others - through the power of film.

On May 10, 2008 - Pangea Day - sites in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro will be linked live to produce a program of powerful films, visionary speakers, and uplifting music.



The program will be broadcast live to the world through the Internet, television, digital cinemas, and mobile phones.

Of course, movies alone can't change the world. But the people who watch them can. So following May 10, 2008, Pangea Day organizers will facilitate community-building activities around the world by connecting inspired viewers with numerous organizations which are already doing groundbreaking work.

More on Pangeaday.org

It is not a new trend but it is still largely untapped and misunderstood by organizations and I thought it was a great talk with nice stories. Then, as I'm too busy to blog these days, I thought it was an easy option too. The rise of the amateur professional is a casual talk from Charles Leadbeater that weaves a tight argument that innovation isn't just for professionals anymore. Passionate amateurs, using new tools, are creating products and paradigms that companies can't. He describes the rising role of serious amateurs ("Pro-Ams," as he calls them) through the story of the mountain bike.

I guess it will be one of the best crowdsourced projects of 2008.

As a fan of Daft Punk, I was disappointed when they confirmed that there will be no official Alive 2007 DVD. I bought the tracks on iTunes but no videos were included. On the other hand, you had thousands of small mobile video extracts taken from the concert that you could find on Youtube.

Mathieu decided to use this legion of fans and these thousands of extracts to create a fan DVD. “The World Is Daft” is to be a full length film of the Bercy, Paris homecoming gig. This is the same performance where they recorded the show for the Alive 2007 CD. The editors are piecing together bits of fan mobile filmed footage to create a seamless film of the entire performance including the glow in the dark encore that we all love. The footage is synced to the live audio recording to ensure proper sound quality.



This is totaly unofficial. The final goal of this project is to create an unofficial DVD, viewable and downloadable for free, of the Paris Bercy live show the Daft Punk produced on June the 14th 2007. At anytime, if the Daft Punk wants to stop this project, it will be stopped, no questions asked, no regrets. It is only the gift of a Fan, with the Fans and for the Daft Punk. Mathieu collected about 15 GB of good videos from many fans.

Thanks to my mother who sent me the info.