thinking time!

Haven't had time to sort out my thoughts and write these things down. But have been meaning to get my thoughts down about:

• Social Network - Filmmaking, like. Story, like! Justin Timberlake, not like!
• Fox as a model for monetization
• The first successful brand viral in the Philippines - Cebu Pacific ftw
• Social networking - As Facebook goes multi-function, other SNS must specialize.
• Group buying follow up!
• My lifestream - personal, social, public spheres
• The ABCs of music management
• Teens have built-in branding & marketing skills

Maybe things will slow down somehow and I'll find time to sort my thoughts out :)

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

A piece of Internet history that underlies the free, generous and open culture that has made the web thrive.

In the BBC documentary, The Virtual Revolution, John Perry Barlow of Grateful Dead fame recounts his stand on the new world that is "cyberspace".

Part of our collective digital roots.

(via)

***

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
by John Perry Barlow


Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts. 

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

Davos, Switzerland
February 8, 1996

photo by pedro.custodio	via PhotoRee

say vs. DO: how digital strategy should be like product development

what brands should SAY 

vs. 

what brands should DO

One of the biggest challenges I have with strategic planning

is that we are set up 

to figure out

what brands should

SAY.

When in fact,

digital

is,

or should be,

more about

what we want people to

DO.

What can we get them to do?

Share a video? Sign up? Tag?

What do they need help doing?

Getting free books?

Planning their garden?

Getting their kids to school on time?

Digital strategy

needs to become more like 

PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT.

Insight + Function

Whether we are creating 

a website,

an app,

even a Twitter feed

or Facebook profile,

we need to think about

what we want people to do.

The web is action-based,

and people want to 

click,

zoom, 

play,

share.

But we need to make stuff that helps them DO stuff,

instead of continuing to tell them "who we are", what is interesting "about" our product and "where to buy" it.

Digital Strategy = Insight + Function

What do we think?

Go! Do!
(Just kidding.
We don't need another ad.
Or another Cylon.)

brands in the webvolution

Wired's latest buzz piece boldly declared that "The Web is Dead". Not the Internet, but the world wide web that is currently the main medium of transaction - linked web pages accessed by browser. They argue that the web is declining as we move toward a browser-less internet - "think apps".

This is right in line with the evolution of Webs 1.0 to 2.0 and soon, Web 3.0.

If 1.0 was about information and static pages, 2.0 is characterized by user participation and real-time data streams. The singular thesis of Web 3.0 has yet to be determined but it will center around portability, cloud computing, semantic and intelligent data.

For brands, especially local Philippine brands, where are we now and how are we ever going to keep up? This is something I've been thinking about and hope to write more about in the next few weeks:

• Which key Web 3.0 developments will have the biggest impact on brands
• Which (or are there any) brands are poised to win in 3.0
• How to move forward and who should spearhead the movement

Keeping track of where we are and where we need to go...

all the small things

Pitches
are about
big
EXPLOSIVE
ideas.

Comparing
agencies
side-by-side,
it becomes pretty clear
who has
the
biggest,
MOST EXPLOSIVE
ideas.

When it is time to think about
big
DIGITAL
ideas,
we tend to think
EXPLOSIVE.

CRITICAL MASS,
VIRAL,
CROWDSOURCED
EXPLOSIONS
of
BRANDED
GOODNESS!

Are we kidding ourselves?

Digital is
short-form,
slow-burn,
micro,
one-to-one.

It happens every second,
every minute,
every day.

"Online customer support"
Nothing new.
Twelpforce?
Works!
The magic is in the everyday,
one-to-one.

I don't know.
Am I wrong?

There can be magic,
in a great content plan.
Except,
that document
would be full
of little ideas
that might
make an impact,
but
over
time.
EXPLOSIVE
ideas?
Not quite.

I don't know.
Am I wrong?
(Hmmm this could be a song!
Ok clearly went on
haha
for too long.
Already.
Stopping
Now
!!!)

photo by Craig A Rodway	via PhotoRee

digital 101: digital concept adoption test

I often struggle when evaluating digital ideas during our creative internals, then got an idea for a super-basic litmus test:

be your digital best: digital 101:: not to be taken too seriously, bytes to keep in mind when planning for digital

Mad Men "The Suitcase": Don Draper's advice for breaking through a mental block

Just saw "The Suitcase" (Mad Men Season 4, Episode 7), and it is one of my favorite episodes in the series so far. Peggy has gotten more and more empoweredly awesome this season and gets major screen time — one-on-one with Don. She asserts herself and gets Don to see her as a contemporary. They get drunk and Don doesn't hit on her. Sort of.

The best thing about this episode was finally seeing Don desperately trying to come up with a stellar creative concept.

Matthew Weiner doesn't usually show him trying to come up with ideas, or banging his head against the wall when he can't come up with anything. They usually show him rejecting concepts from his team during creative internals, cut to the client presentation when he suddenly sells a campaign like "The Carousel". Or even better, he comes up with an insight + idea on the spot while presenting — obviously, "It's toasted".

Besides the very first episode, which opened with Don solo brainstorming for Lucky Strike at a diner (the challenge was that it had just become illegal to promote cigarettes by calling out their medicinal properties, go figure, see above re toasted), Don's creative process has been notably absent from the four season-old show. Without seeing Don writing or working on ad concepts has made me wonder if Weiner really understands, or cares to show, the often frustrating process of advertising development.

Peggy’s creative struggle is well-documented, but Weiner seems to attribute this to her being a woman in an ad man’s world. Don, on the other hand, is hardly ever shown at a loss for ideas and thus he has become an iconic advertising superhero who has brilliant flashes of insight as the need arises, even if that moment is midway through a client presentation.

So I was happy that "The Suitcase" finally showed Don trying to tackle a standard advertising challenge - a mental block. For most of the episode he and Peggy attempt to crack a brief for Samsonite, trying to find an idea that shows how much tougher their luggage is. Don is, as usual, running away from something. In this case, a social client call that is going to be sans alcohol (client and copywriter are recovering alcoholics). Gasp. So he demands that Peggy stay behind after work hour so they can figure the brief out. They work all night trying to find an idea that works.

Mental blocks are also a major woe for planners. Was thinking that if I follow Don’s lead in this episode I can isolate a few tactics about what to do the next time I'm struggling with finding an idea or insight:

1. Ideate intoxicated.
2. Get a brainstorming buddy, preferably someone you like but definitely someone way more junior than you, so you can feel superior when you start feeling defeated about not having arrived at that brilliant idea.
3. Insult said brainstorming buddy (when she accuses you of never saying “thank you”, tell her that's what her salary is for).
4. When really stuck, try brainstorming over dinner.
5. Start getting personal with brainstorming buddy even if you've hardly done that in the past four seasons; you never know what ideas it might generate.
6. When all else fails go somehwere darker, i.e. a bar, even if you were already drinking at the office anyway.
7. No matter how many units of alcohol you’ve consumed, try not to get hammered! You will absolutely fall asleep and not get any work done.
8. Were you raised in a barn? Even if you've thrown up on yourself and in front of much more junior and, let's face it, inferior, brainstorming buddy, start the work day with a fresh shirt from your fresh shirt drawer. In the absence of a good idea, at least you can look like Don Draper.
9. Draw inspiration from current events
10. Be Don Draper! Cause as inferior brainstorming buddy leaves from all-night overtime looking like yesterday's trash you reveal the mockup of your groundbreaking idea.

***

hollywood goes mad for parfum?

Have seen three YouTube web materials for perfume with actors and/or directors usually associated with film. What gives?

BLEU DE CHANEL
Hollywood factor - Directed by: Martin Scorsese


DIOR HOMME
Hollywood factor - Stars: Jude Law, Directed by: Guy Ritchi


GUCCI GUILTY
Hollywood factor - Stars: Chris Evans & Rachel Evan Wood
Extra points for the decked out YouTube page, Chris Evans wallpaper, and music by Friendly Fires. Jump in the pool!

#sentisabado

SENTI: In the Philippines we say "senti", short for "sentimental". When someone listens to Boyz II Men, or reminisces about an ex-boyfriend, their friends might retort with "senti naman!" ("how sentimental!").
+
SABADO: Filipino for Saturday :)
=
#sentisabado



I've been trying to find out just how many people tweeted to this hashtag today. But searching for it will show hundreds of new entries in a few seconds, so at least a few thousand today alone! Just like - 

@tonyocruz Today is #sentisabado. Philippine portion of Twitteria is on a "time space warp". To non-Filipinos, allow us to go sentimental today :)

@saabmagalona Sobrang angas mo pag kaya mong gumawa ng double star sa rubber band #sentisabado

@makilingmiracle Gentxt R U 1 F US? #sentisabado

@eclectickitty10 5110 #sentisabado

@cez8 Coney Island bubble gum ice cream :) #sentisabado
@ANDREWdecastro Coney Island German Chocolate Crunch #sentisabado

@catmarasigan Trapper Keepers! #sentisabado

@MissIzaCalzado New Kids on The Block!!! :p #sentisabado

@bevsss and my last #sentisabado for tonight is Eduardo Dalton. Goodnight, folks.

My tweet? @beaa Jem and the holograms! #sentisabado

Simple but truly viral :)

More about the origin of the #sentisabado hashtag via GameOPS.

crowdsourced group buying: philippine potential?

Online group buying has become a popular trend in the United States. Websites offer group deals - discounts, gift certificates, etc - that are activated once a minimum number avail.

Users are alerted on daily deals with promotions for restaurants, spas, stores, home services, etc. Each announcement includes the original price, discounted price and the minimum number of people that need to avail for the discount to be activated. Crowdsourced group buying.

Groupon is the most popular group buying site. Founded in 2008, it now operates in 150 cities worldwide. Its sizable user base guarantees a good chance for participation and its website claims that it has saved users almost $450 million.

I subscribed to their updates while in New York recently and got offers for discounted gym classes, maid service and restaurant gift certificates. Would probably have tried something if I'd been around long enough!

Would the same concept work here?
Have been wondering if this would work in the Philippines. Breaking it down, the operation would require

• Merchant partners
• a digital Distribution Platform
• Critical Mass - interest and participation, and an 
• Online Payment Facilities

And looking at how well we would do in each area —

The verdict?
Maybe not yet. While the right marketing could drive enough interest and participation in GMA, this might not be enough to constitute critical mass.

Who could capitalize on the trend
As internet penetration grows though, you never know! And maybe the offer needs to be put forth before demand grows.

• Coupon companies, e.g. Enjoy 
• Credit card companies who want to build the online shopping habit. Hmmmm!

Kindle conundrum

The funny thing about the Kindle is that I have no idea how long books are.

I've just finished Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII. Over breakfasts, bedtimes and while waiting for meetings to start, I finished it in just a few weeks. It felt like a pretty long book, or at least it covered a lot of information, from Wife 1: Katherine of Aragon to Wife 6: Katherine Parr, so I'm kind of proud that I finished it. Okay I am a lot proud! (This is one of the first non-business, non-fiction books I've ever read.)

The thing is, I can't be sure how valid my feelings are. The Kindle doesn't show page numbers, only page "locations" - I imagine this is because pagination changes depending on selected text size. So I have no idea how long the book actually is, and as a result, how accomplished I should feel about finishing it.

Book Completion pride
I never realized this until this Kindle problem came about but I think I feel different levels of pride or accomplishment depending on the type and length of book I've read. So to speak...

Frustration!
So I feel like I've completed something quite voluminous... though maybe it falls more squarely under Non-Fiction. But I definitely feel a sense of accomplishment. But it really frustrates me that the Kindle does not give me the satisfaction of knowing that I've read something long and hardy. As a result I wonder if the pride I feel for finishing this book could actually be misplaced.

To get to the bottom of this, I went back to Amazon to find a photo of the actual book, where I was disappointed to find only an image of the book cover. Bah.

Level of pride affirmed.
But upon browsing the Customer Images I found a photo of Weir's Henry VIII set, including (on the far right) The Six Wives.

Am relieved to see that the book looks positively serious, and as I assumed, quite "voluminous". Also the old-school binding makes it look completely bona fide!









Vicious cycle
So I have some ill feelings toward my Kindle since it doesn't allow me to feel as certain a level of accomplishment and satisfaction upon completing a long, real book.

This seems to be a digital shortcoming - when things are made of bits, bytes, ones and zeroes, how do we know what, or how much, we are really holding in our hands?

Then again I also wonder, given ownership of the physical volume, if I ever would have finished the book. Would I have brought it with me to the breakfast table, held it up every night before sleeping, and lugged it around in my bag in case of lull times at work? Probably not. Point, Kindle.

I also tend to get intimidated by said voluminous works. I think I get pressured by books that look long since it seems like it will take awhile to read them. In fact, while I just bought the Kindle edition of Jon Steel's Truth, Lies, and Advertising: The Art of Account Planning and have barely started into reading it, a fellow planner showed me her real-life edition of the same book - thick and hardy! I now feel a little like I won't be able to finish it. Who knows.

Oh digital world, when will you stop changing the rules of the game on us.

YouTube & Twitter show-and-tell

Monetization - the ultimate challenge for web platform hopefuls. Once they've reached critical mass, how to make money? The most obvious answer is to offer some form of web advertising, whether display or Google Ad Words.

But given the increasing banner blindness in consumers everywhere, social media sites like YouTube and Twitter need to show advertisers that deeper engagement can be achieved through their platforms. After all, credibility is an imperative for real communication or persuasion.


To help advertisers see how they can play a role in this, YouTube has launched a Show & Tell channel that showcases best-in-class case studies. Users can browse the latest in Interactive Videos, Brand Channels, Homepages & Viral Hits. The Creatives' Corner is hosted by the Art Directors Club and includes materials on storytelling, viral videos, opportunities, etc.

Twitter is also showcasing their most maximized accounts, but going less branded. Twitter Tales asks "How do you use Twitter?" and shares content in the categories of Life, Community and Humor.
I really like this effort, especially after attending the New York chapter of the 140Conference last Spring, where teachers, NGOs, TV personalities, humanitarians, musicians, comedians, and more shared their best uses of the real-time web (mostly not branded!).

mccann answers mad men

I wasn't sure what to make of Ken Cosgrove's dig at McCann Erickson in the latest Mad Men episode except to think that there aren't very many old school agencies that hold as much clout then as it does now. Besides that, well, I guess there are probably ignoramuses everywhere and somebody acquired in a hostile takeover would be the first to notice point it out.

But in the spirit of competition?, here is McCann's reply.



More from NYMag and the Times.

law of diminishing productivity

The longer you work, the less productive you are!

In celebration of all my recent overtime!

open....

This week was crazy. Insane. Impossible. Sick.
But things worked out somehow.

I think we're finding our groove.  I'm getting better perspective.

So before anything else happens I want to write that this is great. Best mood ever.

photo by Buttersweet - PLEASE REMEMBER OUR FRIENDS IN CHILE	via PhotoRee

Inception for Marketers... and Planners

Inception resonated with me because it hit on many of the challenges I face as an advertiser. Characters in the film mentioned inspiration, ideas and creation, which advertising folks tackle everyday.

The Team

In a new kind of corporate espionage, Leonardo di Caprio's Dom enters people's subconscious (so marketing-aptly referred to as "targets") to extract guarded bits of information. A challenge is posed to him by Saito (Ken Watanabe), a leading energy trader with a unique request: "If you can steal an idea from someone's mind, why can't you plant one?".

The idea is controversial even for other characters in the film. "True inspiration is impossible to fake," asserts Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Dom's long-time partner. But of course Dom accepts because [see film for sub-plot], and puts his team together by recruiting an architect, a forger and a chemist. Enter charming (but manly walker) Ellen Page, very hot Tom Hardy and Dileep Rao.

The Brief

Saito briefs them on the task at hand: a strong competitor is about to take a monopoly on energy trading. This competition is a family-run business threatening to buy Saito out. The only way to prevent this is to target the magnate's son and convince him to split up the empire, which he is soon to inherit since dad is about to kick the bucket.

The Strategy

My favorite scene in the film is when the team gets together to discuss their strategy - how to translate a bigger business issue into an idea that will take root? I loved this part since it felt  similar to the process of strategic planning in advertising.

When we start a new project, we outline the objective and target market then try to figure out an insight that will make our brand or product resonate. Another major part of the strategy is the Engagement Plan - this echoes the journey we would like to take the consumer on for their path to purchase. The plan is usually split up into phases, each with a different objective: e.g. Awareness, Trial, Loyalty, and corresponding messaging or executions.

This is an important tool since consumers increasingly need to be remidned of a brand or product's relevance in their lives. This is often a lengthy process that requires many phases of communication to increase the brand's relevance on many different layers. Just like in the film, there are often barriers that each layer has to address before a brand or idea will truly adhere.

The Engagement Plan

My favorite, favorite part was when Eames (again, the hot Tom Hardy) was taking the team through his thinking on how to reduce the complex outcome (of splitting up father's empire) into a much simpler idea. I imagine that if Saito, as the "client" had asked for a one-pager summing up the task at hand and executional phases, it would have looked something like this:




***SPOILER ALERT***
Inception EP

What do you think?!

I imagine that other advertisers and planners would have noticed that intersection of the concepts in the film with the meat of our daily professional lives - the art of persuasion.