colindrummond’s posterous

I’m looking forward to appearing on FearlessQ+A with @bogusky and @DagnyCPB (http://www.justin.tv/fearlessqa. Twitter: @fearlessqa). I know some peeps are interested in more detail on the topic, so they can formulate questions. Here are my notes, in case it tweaks some ideas. Have no idea how much of it we will touch on. It’s divided roughly into 3 areas: being a student of culture, applying that to marketing and finally, applying it to interactive. Fair warning, they are just notes, so they may be a cryptic.

1. Being a student of culture.

• There are a number of skillsets that can hone your ability to be a student of culture: anthropology, sociology, psychology, journalism. Anything that tunes you into the forces that drive culture and pop culture. These disciplines will help you stand outside culture, so that you can observe it without getting fooled by it.
• the ad schools and college communications programs are good in that they try to teach you how to actually “make” ads, but it would be a mistake to only do that stuff. Planners and creatives can make the mistake of focusing exclusively on the specific target, product and competitors. When you do, you end up with strategies in a vacuum. You need other skills like the above to find ways for your brand to not just participate in culture, but to actually change it.
• Culture can be defined as the implicit rules that everyone lives by. Culture has inordinate power of over us, much more than we realize.
• There are things in culture that always change and things that never change. Universal cultural values or hard-wired primitive human patterns at odds are always with the constant change of pop culture. That tension is one way to create real energy to work with.
  

2. Applying culture to marketing and advertising.

• The secret: remove yourself from culture.
• Tension: making people tense with ideas that challenge culture’s implicit rules. When you challenge the rules, it makes people tense. When you make them tense, it gets them talking.
• Always start with the product truth and build out from there.
• Tweak culture around the brand, so that people can see brand in new light.
• CP+B examples: man chicken, I’m a PC, etc.
  

3. Applying culture to “interactive.”

• Plan around a broader definition of interactivity. How it’s been co-opted by the digital world, but it’s really about any interaction: digital, retail, product, customer service, etc.
• Create a platform for participation among multiple people and brand (not the one-way model of agency communication, where you tell them the benefit repeatedly until they absorb it).
• CPB has always been interactive. MINI fold-up magazine stuff, etc.
• Shockingbarack as risky venture absolutely dependent on participation.

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It’s funny, somewhere along the way the word “Interactive” got co-opted by the digital world. If you talk about doing something interactive, people immediately assume you’re talking digital. It’s at the point where the 2 words are used interchangeably. It’s even confusing to use the term more broadly. Ironically, CP+B has always been interactive, but only started digital pretty much with Subservient Chicken in March 2004. A lot of our best work for MINI and Truth was interactive, for example. We were always creating stuff to be ripped out or worn or assembled.

I’d like us to return to the broader definition of interactive: a two-way communication, users and creators inter-dependent, the total experience not nearly as useful, interesting or entertaining if it’s only one-way. In fact, we’ve been experimenting with experiences that are SO dependent on participation that they flop if people don’t get involved.

Shocking Barack (www.shockingbarack.com) is a great example of taking that risk, of the experiment depending on participation. The idea was for our 2 riders to retrace the Detroit automakers trip to Washington, relying on the kindness of strangers along the way to get there and for people to spread the love on Facebook and Twitter. Big risk, no way of knowing what would happen. The press has finally picked up on it now. Craig Brammo joined Secretary Chu’s White House Roundtable. But at this time of writing, we still don’t know if the President will accept.

Designing for that same kind of co-dependence makes even more obvious sense when you think about retail and products. What the heck’s the point of a retail store or a product if there’s no one to interact with it? As advertising and marketing people, I think we can get stuck in this idea of a one-way communication: that we can stop at deciding what we want to SAY about a brand. That’s an important step, establishing a voice and POV, but it’s only a first step. We need to design for what we want people to DO. We need to think in terms of creating PLATFORMS for brands and users to do their thing together.

So it’s not a question of interactive NOT being digital. Digital is at the center of what we do. It’s that our best thinking will come if we think of interactivity more broadly.

Planners need to take responsibility for providing the insight underlying this broader definition of interactivity. Why the separation between planning and user experience design? Our insights and strategy need to inform all of these types of interactions, be they brand interactions, retail interactions, product interactions or digital interactions. We need to tap into the fields of experience planning, anthro design, design anthropology, call it what you will.

We are now working to bring this skillset into our department. CP+B’s Cultural and Business Insights department (we are nicknamed “Cogs”) is currently made up of 3 killer disciplines, collaborating together because we believe it makes for the best possible thinking. We are Account Planners, Investigative Journalists and Anthropologists. So different skillsets, but working in teams as generalists. This area of experience planning will be our 4th discipline. It’s still early days, so would love to hear from people about who the best people would be to work with.

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http://alexbogusky.posterous.com/is-there-enough-electricity-and-kindness-to-r

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And Americans now have about 25 consumer electronic products in every household, compared with just 3 in 1980. Given that our digital world will only become more interesting, indispensable and integrated into our lives, we will need to get smarter about how we power it.

 http://bit.ly/gngFA

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