Archive for the ‘culture’ Category
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So what exactly is a Chief Culture Officer?
21st April 10
Posted in culture, social media
I first met Grant McCracken a long long time ago when he was writing on the anthropology of consumer culture.
Grant (@grant27 on Twitter) now splits his time between his academic research into the anthropology of American culture, and consultancy work with big brands focusing on the area of the role of culturally aware visionaries and leaders within organizations.
His most recent book is Chief Culture Officer. McCracken argues that every company needs a chief cultural officer to anticipate cultural trends rather than passively waiting and reacting. CCOs should have the ability to process massive amounts of data and spot crucial developments among an array of possibilities; they will be able to see the future coming, no matter which industry they serve, and create value for shareholders, move product, create profit and increase the bottom line.
In this video, brought to our attention by We Are Social’s Nathan McDonald, McCracken outlines in brief what a CCO is, and why it matters.
Challenging stuff; who is the Chief Culture Officer in your business (or which group performs this function)?
Do you think you need that function in the first place?
Did you *ever* have someone or a group performing that function?
Who does it well, which companies?
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How The Masters Changed the Game
12th April 10
Posted in culture, technology
Author: Steve Peck, Art Director, BBH New York
If you follow golf, then you know that the Masters and the word ‘innovation’ don’t usually belong in the same sentence. In many ways, that still holds true – The Masters certainly isn’t changing the game in how it’s played. But, in the way the Masters site functions, it is changing how it is experienced. Here’s how:
Multi-Camera Live Streaming Coverage - Choose one of five cameras to watch a live broadcast (full screen if you prefer). You can also view an additional camera with the picture-in-picture feature and swap back and forth between the two. Not a bad live viewing experience.
Time-Based Viewing - Watch tagged highlights throughout the day for each of the set cameras. If you’re watching the camera for holes 15 and 16 live at 4pm, you can scrub across the timeline to see thumbnails of previous highlights earlier in the day. So you can go check out that long birdie putt that Mickelson laid in at 11:30 am. You can return to live viewing at any time.
Scorecard-Based Viewing - The leaderboard offers another unique feature; not only does it provide updated scores in real time, but the score from each player on each hole, but a yellow outline around the score denotes a video. It allows you to track an individual player’s highlights throughout the round as it’s played.
User-directed Viewing Experience - Essentially you can view the tournament from a specific vantage point through a live camera; historically in a timeline throughout the day; or through any one individual player’s round. The Masters iPhone app further provides a multitude of features including: live mobile tv; video highlights; streaming radio; leaderboard; news; photos; and a course overview. The mobile app extends the Masters reach and is available for free. It is very useful for the audience since most people are at work during live coverage throughout the day Thursday and Friday. The web and mobile features allow the audience to stay current and decide what and how they want to experience the tournament.
Take a look at how the site felt to experience in this film:
So how did they make all of this happen?
The Masters has a limited media and sponsorship structure and is fully supported by only three (admittedly large) companies: AT&T, ExxonMobil, and IBM. The Masters doesn’t run many commercials and all of them come from those three companies. While AT&T and ExxonMobil operate like traditional sponsors, IBM’s participation is unique and extends further than pasting logos around the event and running television media during live broadcasts. In fact, IBM actually utilizes their technology and expertise to power the masters.com website. Rick Singer, VP of client executive marketing at IBM says, “We provide virtually all of their technology needs from beginning to end. That includes a wide range of tasks such as: core infrastructure and data center management; website design and interactive content development; networking and security; and golf scoring and player statistics, a.k.a. “data management.”
More information about the technical specifics are available here.
An important thing to note is that IBM is actually proving their product functionality through this sponsorship. They are demonstrating their technology management capabilities in providing an engaging experience online and in the mobile space. It’s about *doing it*, not just saying it.
The Masters is a great example of how the interactive space can change and enhance the viewing experience. It’s way more dynamic and personalized than broadcast and provides more useful tools and information. This would have been outstanding for the Winter Olympics earlier this year; you might have been able to see earlier ski races you might have missed, for example, or watched Shaun White in training. It will be exciting to see how implementing this technology will develop into the future. When watching football, you could go and view a video clip of each touchdown or scoring drive (let’s wait and see how the coming World Cup in June turns out – there’s surely innovation to come there). When watching baseball, you could click on your favorite player to see clips of all his hits for that game (or any game).
We say kudos to the Masters and to IBM for taking up the challenge and setting an exceptional benchmark in changing the game for live events.
What did you think? What might have been different or better? What did we miss?
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TIE: Exchange For Good
9th March 10
Posted in culture, transformational change
When we first heard about The International Exchange (TIE), we were immediately impressed and a little scared in equal measure. TIE is a rare and radical thing: a magical combination of social change and personal development, with a difference. This isn’t a series of talks in swanky conference centres: TIE puts you on the ground where you’re needed, testing everything you think you know about the communications industry along the way.
In a sentence, TIE marries the skills of an individual in the communications industry looking to be stretched professionally and personally, with a project in a developing country needing their time and skill (at this point in time TIE’s focus is Brazil). The experience is like no other, as people who’ve taken part so far testify:
Check out more case studies on TIE’s site: they are an inspiration and an education in equal measure.
We’re happy to say BBH has signed up to take part, so we caught up with Philippa White, TIE’s founder, to hear more about the idea. Read full post
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The Economies of Small
1st March 10
Posted in business models, culture
'Frenzy' by Amayu, courtesy of Flickr
“The money on the table is like krill: a billion little entrepreneurial opportunities that can be discovered and exploited by smart, creative people.” Landon Kettlewell, fictional CEO Kodak/Duracell in Cory Doctorow’s “Makers”
I’ve finally finished reading Cory Doctorow’s new novel “Makers” and – like a lot of people I suspect – needed to take a little break afterward to put my brain back together again. It’s the usual Doctorow high octane cocktail: stuffed full of imaginative near-future action & immutable human frailty, at times the plot veers close to depicting a post-capitalist, economic Armageddon. I’m not going to spoil the book for anyone who hasn’t read it by saying more. Instead, against an ever-increasing backdrop of recent pieces examining crowdsourcing (here are two of our own, here and here), I wanted to dig quickly into a single thought that the book provoked in me within its first few pages.
What if, instead of thinking about sourcing from the crowd, we reverse engineer that thought. In other words, why not send the company out into the crowd?
As Doctorow’s character Kettlewell (more force of nature than human being) puts it:
“Our business plan is simple: we will hire the smartest people we can find and put them in small teams. They will go into the field …capitalized to find a place to live and work, and a job to do. A business to start. Our business to start. Our company isn’t a project that pull together on, it’s a network of like-minded, cooperating autonomous teams, all of which are empowered to do whatever they want, provided that it returns something to our coffers. We will explore and exhaust the realm of commercial opportunities, and seek constantly to refine our tactics to mine those opportunities, and the krill will strain through our mighty maw and fill our hungry belly. This company isn’t a company any more: this company is a network, an approach, a sensibility.”
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Burberry Global 3D Fashion Show – Watch it live here at 4pm GMT / 11am EST
23rd February 10
Posted in creativity, culture
BBH Labs will be streaming today’s Burberry London Fashion Week show live in the below video players from 4pm GMT / 11am EST. Thanks to some clever player tech, the show will be broadcast on 73 other websites including Vogue, Grazia, CNN, Sky News, The Times, The Daily Beast and Yahoo. The player is also optimised for iPhone viewing.
High Definition
Standard Definition
Over at http://live.burberry.com the video stream will be complimented by live comments from global Burberry fans. Visitors can log in with their Facebook / Twitter sign in and post comments live as the new collection comes down the catwalk.
Finally, in a fashion and technology first, the show will also be broadcast live in stunning 3D to global VIP events in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Dubai and Tokyo. You can read more about the project here:
In Vogue.
In Grazia.
Thanks to VideoJuicer for some very clever player technology.
BBH is a strategic digital partner of Burberry.
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Can you lend us your room for an exhibition?
22nd December 09
Posted in creativity, culture
We need your help.
We’re after a big room, studio or small stage in NYC for three days in January (14-16th). We’re trying to find a space where we can re-create the Chrome Features short films we’ve just made for Google.
For a start, we want to have a little party, and January seems like a good time to be doing that. But we’d like to open it up to anyone who wants to come along and have a look at how they were made.
The space needs to be around 60 x 40 ft, with – ideally – some good height to the ceiling. If you have somewhere you can lend us, or you know someone who might, please email me at ben.malbon@bbh-labs.com
THANKS & HAPPY HOLIDAYS
Here are the films:
And here is a film about how we made them:
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Will The Web Make Us More Honest?
3rd September 09
Posted in culture, social media, transformational change
In a world where it’s too easy to get used to things coming in 140 character-sized packages, everything happening in real time, and thinking about the future and what it might bring means having a debate about whether Tumblr is better than Posterous, it’s always refreshing to have something more substantial to chew on. A proper three-course meal versus repeated, ultimately unsatisfying, trips to the snack cupboard.
We’ve been digesting – and debating – a post by Walter Naeslund on his very excellent blog. Naeslund is, in his own words, ‘an internet freedom fighter and CEO of the Stockholm based communications agency Honesty. [He] also give lectures and runs workshops on Internet Trends, Modern Communications Strategy and Social Media.’
Naeslund’s post, from Tuesday, was grandly-titled “What the World Will Look Like in 25 Years“. The whole thing is worth a read (it’s not long). He offers a range of more speculative thinking around the way the world might be going, and the emerging role of the web within those scenarios; as I said, a welcome contrast to an increasingly myopic focus on the now.
But what struck me in particular was a short paragraph in which Naeslund speculates on what one might call future ‘ethics’:
It’s an interesting contention, that there are fewer hiding places in a world of instant access to perfect information, and total transparency. Even if it is likely to never be that flawless in practice (& actually, would we want it to be?), the pronounced increase in sharing of everything about one’s personal life in digital form (what Naeslund characterizes as the merging of physical and digital identities) will undoubtedly bring both costs and benefits.
It’s the last line of that paragraph that intrigues me and that has stuck with me.
Is there any evidence of better behavior and less cheating?
How do we think that might manifest itself, if and when it does happen?
On one hand it all sounds a little Utopian (and some might argue, less fun). On the other, it does sound rather attractive.
What do you think?
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GOOD Magazine crowdsources world-changing ideas
13th August 09
Posted in creativity, crowdsourcing, culture
We like this, and look forward to seeing what comes from it.
GOOD Magazine are asking people: “If you were to invent anything to push the world forward, what would it be?”
The jury’s still out on whether collaborative creativity can provide a viable business model (high enough quality; low enough costs) for creative businesses, but this seems to us to be a smart way of focusing the minds of artists, inventors and other thinkers on some of the more important questions.
We’ll watch with interest – what would your idea be?
(Thanks to John Winsor of CP&B – @jtwinsor – for the heads-up).
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(Un)classes – community powered learning
10th August 09
Posted in crowdsourcing, culture
We just stumbled across (Un)classes (thanks to Julius Solaris | @tojulius).
A potentially strong application of collaborative intelligence . . . with a twist.
(Un)classes starts with the premise that everyone has something to teach, and much to learn. But, pragmatically, few of us are going to sign into formal programs. Casual learning (as they frame this form of education) is aimed squarely at people who lead hectic lives but still want to satisfy their intellectual curiosity.
(Un)classes is thus in effect a marketplace for matching interests with passion, simply connecting people who’d otherwise have few ways of directly collaborating in this way. It’s deliberately informal, with few rules and none of the stuffiness that could surround what is in effect a ‘learning’ service.
(We’re also reminded of the campaign BBH New York helped create for one of BBH’s clients, NYC & Co, around using one’s skills, passions, and willingness to help address some of NYC’s most important issues: What’s Your Blank?)
The depth of the (Un)classes offering seems quite shallow at the moment, but as people sign up, and choice and quality deepen, it will be interesting to see whether the idea takes off. We wish them luck.
More details at: http://www.unclasses.org/about
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Plugging into Reality: APIs to connect the physical world
27th July 09
Posted in culture, mobile, social media, technology
Author: Richard Schatzberger, Director of Creative Technology, BBH New York
This weekend saw the first Town Holler, a meeting (and pub crawl) of foursquare Mayors in New York City. From the photos, it may just look like another fun Saturday evening, but what’s special about Town Holler is that it’s whole reason for being is to create a direct physical world connection using digital platform. Organized by Conrad Lisco (@conradlisco) and myself (@schatz), our goal was to use an existing digital platform to facilitate and enhance a physical world experience, in real time, which, to be frank, should be the goal of any great digital creation.
With so many checkins we had to bring our own power supply
Imagine five years ago, where a party organizer would, perhaps, illegally take over a warehouse in Brooklyn and throw a rave. Well, using foursquare, we (playfully) squatted on a social platform and threw the party on top of their digital service. We didn’t have to build any software, spend any money, ask permission (the foursquare creators did come along for the journey), or risk being arrested! We hooked into a passionate group of people who had the tools to connect in their pockets–on their iPhones–leveraging someone else’s software and data to curate an event which blended the digital and physical worlds.
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