Out on Good Behavior Mark
Pollard, VP Brand Strategy - @markpollard Modified with subtitles for Slideshare. Read with an Australian accent. JULY 18, 2012

Last Saturday, I was playing
frisbee with my six-year-old son at Coney Island beach when Frankie, a local eight year old, joined in. After a few minutes of play, I asked Frankie why he had a black eye. He said that a kid had cursed him at school so he hit the kid in his stomach but got headbutted in return.

A few other boys joined
in and we switched to volleyball with a soccer ball. About ten minutes in, I turned to pick the ball up only to return to the kids racially slurring each other and threatening to beat each other up. Frankie’s teenage brother was coaching him to stand his ground against three other wild kids saying: “It’s a cold world out there.”

Sometimes, the ideas that help
you survive trap you These kids are trapped in a cycle. Their ideas will keep them in fights that sometimes they will win; and sometimes they won’t. It made me realize how ideas that help you survive can also trap you.

Subtitle Here Title Here Like
in advertising: the politics, the competing, the infighting, the sex, the beheadings. Advertising is engorged with people who have survived with ideas that are trapping them.

Ideas compel behavior Why are
they trapped? Well, their ideas compel their behavior.

There is so much research
about this. This classic business book shows how good management necessarily leads to worse performance unless you can create a new culture and an approach to innovation outside the everyday approach to business.

New behaviors compel new ideas
The only way to get to unexpected new ideas is to encourage new behaviors because new behaviors beget new ideas. And it’s this focus on new behaviors that I want to discuss with you today.

What happens after advertising? Which
brings us to this question: What happens after advertising? It’s important to me for two reasons. First, a lot of great people I know pose this question to themselves every day because they’re tired of the toxicity and bad behaviors of the industry. Second, this question shapes our behavior at Big Spaceship.

I. How we behave e
culture and structure of Big Spaceship

1. There’s no creative department
Less politics leads to less noise and more focus on issues at hand. Creative Commons: Darwin Bell http://www.flickr.com/photos/darwinbell

2. There’s no production department
Teams bleed into each other’s realms and everyone expects to contribute to the making of a project - through whatever skills one has at hand.

Cross Disciplinary Teams This is
how we sit. And each team has its own name.

Creative Commons: T Krueger http://www.flickr.com/photos/55249741@N06/
3. Culture is critical to the CEO There are 2 types of CEO: one who fixates on money almost at the cost of culture, and the other who creates a culture in which great work happens.

Creative Commons: Gage Skidmore via
Wikimedia Commons 4. Values trump process Much of Big Spaceship is a self-organizing organism. Tools and systems exist but each team works the way it wants to.

Four Principles Collaborate. Produce exceptional
work. Take care of each other. Partner with your client. e rest is up to you.

5. It’s a very self-aware
culture What we stand for and what we are good at is a constant discussion. On every project, we try to bring the best of our culture to the work. Creative Commons: Leonard John Matthews http://www.flickr.com/photos/ mythoto/3943777830/sizes/o/in/photostream/

6. It’s a quiet culture
Much of our culture happens through Gchat, AOL chat, Basecamp and on our internal blog. Loudness doesn’t indicate anything; making stuff does.

You know you’ve made it
when this happens to you.

7. If change matters, don’t
service it with lips Jazz hands and lip service can only get change so far. We’ve made several changes over the years - from making movie websites in Flash, to now, where a majority of our work involves products and platforms. Creative Commons: Cobalt http://www.flickr.com/photos/coblat/525132270/ sizes/l/in/photostream/

II. How we focus on
behavior An unprocessed approach to strategy in 5 slides

Ideas compel behavior If we
take this as an obvious given...

Purpose is the new idea
How does the business serve humanity? Then purpose - because of its ability to compel behaviors - is the new idea.

And the planning is in
the behavior How will the business behave? What behavior are we trying to affect? What behavior can we play to?

The future of planning is
in the experience Stage Step Actions Insights Content Metrics

III. Make-behaving Turning behavior into
made things

Wrigley Skittles Understanding that Skittles
lovers enjoyed certain types of bite-sized content led to a never-ending rainbow of absurdism.

Before

Lucasfilm Starwars.com Understanding that Star
Wars needed to engage superfans as well as less involved people, led to a website that allowed depth as well as simpler exploration.

stronger screen
VW add

Google What do you love?
Do You Love Understanding that people learn by doing and that their passions are key to their online behavior, instead of a messaging campaign, we created this tool for Google.

Before

Big Spaceship Most Awesomest Thing
Ever Understanding that people love comparing random things and debating which is better led to this: The Most Awesomest Thing Ever.

So, that’s how a focus
on behavior affects our culture, our approach and our work. And, while I hope that Frankie from Coney Island escapes the cycle that his ideas may trap him in, and if we treat Frankie merely as a metaphor, then our industry doesn’t need more Frankies.

Can good behavior get you
out in time?

Mark Pollard, VP Brand Strategy
- @markpollard www.bigspaceship.com