2. Change
is Good“If too many people know your name, change it, then change it again.”
With all due respect to Diddy, we like “Ogilvy” just fine, thank you. But
we’ll admit that he’s got a point. Swap the word “name” for “business
model,” and it starts to sound like the mantra of our industry—and for that
matter, his. “It’s not the industry that fails,” Diddy said, “It’s the business
model.” Ok, we get the hint.
Do agencies need to grow comfortable with letting go and opening up
to harness the creative genius that’s out there? That’s what one Young
Lion took away from the Academy today. She felt the disconnect with an
industry that has historically tried hard to protect it’s ideas and venerate
total originality over improvement and iteration. Facebook called us on
that yesterday. Maybe it’s good to remember what Kirby Ferguson told us
(on the web, not here) a couple of years ago: Everything is a remix.
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3. Onlyconnect
Anselmo Ramos of O&M Sao Paulo and John Mescall of McCann
Australia, the supergeniuses who brought us Dove Real Beauty Sketches
and Dumb Ways to Die schooled us all on how to develop ideas that go
viral. 1) Be subversive: take a convention and play with it. 2) Enable
Sharing: make it bite-sized. 3) Harness Emotion: but go for only one of
them, pinpointing the one feeling you want to elicit in viewers.
Maybe it’s two feelings, because you certainly want to evoke authenticity,
says Conan O’Brien. “Younger people today,” he said, “are hyperaware
of phoniness.” They want the soft sell, at least in social, otherwise it
will be seen as tainted. Love it or hate it, Twitter is becoming the social
soundtrack for for our lives. We share an experience, like an amazing
web video, and then connect around it. Those connections, says Deb
Roy of Twitter, are the “most meaningful.”
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4. Trendingword...
ContentRight now, someone in a bar along the Croisette is threatening to
punch the next guy who mentions content right in the mouth. That
cantankerousness belies some industry insecurity. We’re a little freaked
out about content because we don’t really know what it is, how it works,
what people want, who should do it, where they should work, how to pay
them, or even if it’s a good idea in the first place. If we follow LinkedIn’s
approach, we’ll just dive it. The network poured effort and cash into
content marketing and publishing with acquisitions, a bespoke magazine,
an influencers platform, and its SlideShare partnership. Content is
missing it’s fully-realized commercial adjunct, but that’s coming.
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5. Personalized
DataDiscontent is now aimed at being personalized. As the world grows,
as IBM says, more instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent, we
are leaving monolithic big data behind in favor of dynamic, adaptable,
and personalized data. R/GA, in the person of Nick Law, sees the next
creative revolution on the horizon. And it is personalized data. That
makes sense for the FuelBand guys to say, of course, but our tolerance
for content overload is reaching the breaking point. Marketers need
to use smart data to accurately cater to people’s needs. And we will
measure our success through participation.
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6. Balance
TalentContent and it’s discontents will need a special person to bring the
parties together. John Maeda, President of RISDI, is up to the task. He
spoke at a Fast Company/Ogilvy & Mather summit about redefining
leadership into a creative mode and looking not just to bring opposing
ideas together. He wants to find those rare folks who, with one hand on
the cracked and one on the conventional, “form a bridge between them.”
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