Photo: Dunechaser, Flickr, http://j.mp/c6kd2o

I went to the ‘Crowdsourcery Potions 101′ event at JWT yesterday as part of Social Media Week in NYC. Not so sure about the event name, but the content was great, and the panel line up was genuinely stellar.

We watched John Winsor (Victors & Spoils Founder) lead a discussion that featured Ty Montague (Co-President & CCO, JWT North America), Saneel Radia (Alchemist / Chief Potion Master, Denuo), Michael Lebowitz (Founder & CEO, Big Spaceship) and the inimitable Faris Yakob (Chief Technology Dude, McCann NY).

Thanks to the appliance of science, the whole thing is viewable at the bottom of this post, on video. Lots of useful, practical discussion around the kind of cultures, systems, and processes that would enable new forms of creative collaboration. I particularly liked the metaphor of ’scaffolding’: the structures that are required for successful collaboration efforts (the filters, the creative direction, the incentive model, the access requirements, and so on).

Anyway, I was struck by one area of the debate in particular, and I’ve been reflecting on that since. There were a number of observations about how business models (around agencies, and how they construct themselves, most specifically) were being challenged, and indeed how the definition of what constituted ‘the agency’ was evolving rapidly in new and interesting ways.

As Ty Montague suggested, ‘we’re on the verge of a remaking of business and what a company is’. Bold and exciting words from the leader of one of the largest and most powerful agencies around. In particular, Ty was talking about a point John Winsor had made just a moment before, around the idea that the distinction between JWT and *beyond JWT* was blurring, and would continue to blur. As creative businesses continue to experiment with new models of creative collaboration, and explore different approaches to maintaining a creative arsenal comprising the highest quality individuals and partners, it is inevitable that which was once almost wholly contained within an agency will become, to some extent, located outside the formal confines of that business.

Creative agencies need to move towards becoming permeable organizations. Those in networks need to be reconfigured as networked organizations versus simply organizations within networks. Creative business must be able to draw on not just the talent within the building, but the many skills and areas of expertise that lie beyond those walls. And they need to be able to draw on this external resource. Like immediately. Certainly within BBH Labs we believe this is the *only* way the future can look; and of course it comes with challenges.

For us (probably like many, I’m in no way suggesting we’re unique here), this means building and curating a broader group of people and companies with whom we create and produce ideas, and of course, we’re busy doing just that. It was an ex-CEO of Sun Microsystems who once said, ‘no matter where you work, most of the smart people work somewhere else’. Whilst challenging to orthodoxy, there’s definitely something in that.

Back to Crowdsourcery Potions . . . Ty was hinting that one logical manifestation of this philosophy would be the formation of a broader pool of potential creative collaborators, perhaps more akin to the curated creative group put together by the team at Victors & Spoils. I also sometimes think the Alessi example is helpful here. Alessi occasionally put together hand-picked ‘crowds’ outside their company to help them on specific projects. So for example, on their program to create new ‘postmodern’ style product designs, they curated an invite-only ‘crowd of around 200 postmodern architects to submit work. This seems smart. It also signals a potential way forward for agencies looking to innovate new modes of creative collaboration.

But it also raises what for me is *the big question*. In fact, two related sets of questions.

1. CULTURE: If the culture of an organization is one of the key elements of differentiation between one agency and another, when does the definition of an agency blur to the point of intangibility? When does JWT (or BBH, or Victors & Spoils, or IDEO for that matter) cease to be JWT? When does JWT become Victors & Spoils? When does it simply become a set of senior and experienced curators of skills, talent and partnerships? And does this matter, if it does happen?

2. INCENTIVES: What kinds of models are right for incentivizing the crowd? If the model of the future is going to involve fluid boundaries between ‘working for’ and ‘working with’, what does that mean for how people are incentivized? Not just in the crowd outside the agency, but within the crowd inside the agency? And linked to the first point, what value does one place on the cultural DNA found within agencies (which surely *must* have a commercial value) versus the more flexible and emerging skills found outside?

Early days, but exciting days.

All ideas, challenges, thoughts or builds welcome.

—-

Notes

For more coverage of the debate check out Jonny Makkar’s (@jsmakr) neat summary blog post here, Faris’s here, or John Winsor’s short but kinda sweet piece here.

For more on the critically important role of culture, see Grant McCracken’s excellent and provocative new book: “Chief Culture Officer: How to create a living breathing corporation“.

In the early weeks of 2010, there’s already been considerable debate (and indignation) around brands, businesses and even bands incentivising users for Tweets. Twincentivisng, if you like (and I must admit I can’t resist a pun).

Is everyone an advertiser? Image by Mike Cogh, Flickr, under a creative commons license

Should brands pay for tweets? Should twitterers take the cash or resist? Is there a sustainable paid for media model here or a fundamentally misguided reaction to the rise of social media? Is pay-per-tweet the end of the Twitterverse as we know it?

In many ways this is an inevitable response to a number of factors:

• The extraordinary rise and equally extraordinary media profile of Twitter
• The increased premium placed on peer to peer recommendations
• The collapse of on-line display advertising and the rise of SEO
• The socialisation of search

Any and all of these factors suggest a pressing need for brands to find a way to harness the power of social media and for media agencies to find a way to monetise it. Viewed from one perspective, the asymmetric nature of Twitter relationships make it particularly ripe for the adoption of a “broadcast” model.  1 in 5 tweets already mentions a brand so monetisation of these mentions seems, from that perspective, to make eminent sense.

So it’s inevitable that  businesses will experiment with a range of commercial models in this space from pay-per-tweet to pay-per-click to promotional access for tweets. I don’t personally feel huge moral indignation (perhaps it’s the ad-girl in me..). Brands will experiment with these businesses. If we don’t experiment we won’t learn. Some initiatives will be more successful than others and the ones that have a measure of success will probably involve some combination of:

• Transparency: Are the brand and the user open about their commercial relationship?  Disclosure policies are becoming an increasingly important aspect of the pay-per-tweet business
• Authenticity: Does it sound like the user is talking? Is it something they would say or a product they would endorse?  (Quite a challenge with auto-tweets and a point in favour of those services allowing users to generate their own copy)
• Complicity: Does the brand feel like they understand the platform and its users? Does it feel like a tech-savvy brand talking to tech-savvy individuals? Early FourSquare drinks/dinner promotions for example tapped into users’ mania for checking in and racking up points and so, although fairly basic, felt like they “got” it.  Playing with the currency of the Platform-the mayorship-also created that sense of complicity and playfulness. Likewise, the Pearl Jam tweet-for-download mechanic felt like a way of engaging and rewarding fans rather than anything more cynical.

Four Square promotions

Yet while I don’t feel outraged or betrayed, I do feel a little disappointed and a lot sceptical.

The ease with which we can identify influencers and super-users is a hugely welcome benefit of the social web. Once upon a time, identifying opinion formers was something of a dark art (usually involving lurking in hipster bars). Now there are any number of algorithms designed to map patterns of influence, identify lovers and loathers of brands and quantify their sway.  If we’re feeling unloved, we can even quantify our own Twinfluence.

But if identifying the influencers has become a science, influencing and activating the influencers remains an art. There is a huge opportunity in marrying the skills of PR experts and cultural mavens with hardcore data analytics to deliver robust, strategic, quantifiable (and cool) peer to peer programmes.  Yet pay-per-tweet feels like a fairly blunt instrument.

Treating users as media spaces to be bought and sold seems to me to impose an old world model on a very new medium-and as we are constantly reminded, the old model is broken. The age of interruption is over. Where it still scores is when we need serious scale (10s of millions of eyeballs), seriously quickly. But to impose an interruption model on Twitter seems to offer the worst of all possible worlds-interruption without scale.

So as business model, paid-for Tweets seems fraught with problems. But it does arise from a set of very genuine problems and opportunities. So what more exciting uses could we make of these opportunities?

Co-creation: If we want smart, engaged and opinionated people talking about what we’re up to, why not involve them early? We are Social’s “The Marmarati” work for Marmite is a great example of how bringing super-users into the development process pays dividends. Using a brand’s super users as its consultants, collaborators and Beta-testers drives genuine excitement and dialogue.

Social gaming: I’m pretty sure no money changed hands, but boy did Spymaster pop up in my Twitterfeed a lot at one point. Likewise FourSquare. Imagine if either one of these properties-or the juggernaut that is Farmville- had been branded. A surefire way to rise through the social search rankings in an organic and entertaining way.

Surprise and delight: Now we can identify who’s talking about our brands most and quantify their sentiment surely there is much greater opportunity for pro-active, real world customer service? Take the recent Eurostar PR traumas. Or any of the many airlines experiencing delays or cancellations in the poor weather. It’s relatively easy to spot the most vocal and influential users of social media and to see when they’re experiencing peak moments of frustration. So upgrade them. Give them free lounge access. Give them a cupcake (please). I guarantee they’ll tweet about it-we all love surprises.

The Marmarati campaign

Simple social sign up should become a no-brainer and of course, if we want to get people talking the fundamental imperative remains to do something interesting. But what else could we do with the data now at our disposal, with the ability to spot influencers, quantify sentiment and micro-target? Am I missing something and is pay-per-tweet the wave of the future? Or are there more interesting futures out there?

One of the things that caught our eye last year was a blogpost from Len Kendall sharing the plan for a simple, yet audacious lifestreaming project. Every day for 365 days, Len and co-founder Daniel Honigman were going to get a different person to write about their experience that day. If you will, a crowdsourced diary for 2010: the3six5 Project.

Just under a month in and c.250,000 site views later, the project is growing into something with real currency AND potentially long lasting value. Before we get into the interview with Len and Daniel, here are a few early thoughts on why we think the project is turning out to be so interesting. As always, we’d love to hear other points of view, so please let us know what you think.

1. Currency: the3six5 mashes up three communication themes - crowdsourcing, curation and lifestreaming - neatly in one idea. (At the same time it’s a simple journal. The combination is very seductive: it feels experimental and familiar at the same time).

2. Cultural value: if the entries continue in the vein set down so far, it’s a time capsule of intensely individual thoughts. One year seen through 365 different minds, gathered in one place.

3. As communication models go, a continuous, virtuous circle. Fresh, surprising content, which in turn its originators & their supporters want to promote and propagate.

4. Great content: none of the above would mean anything if the words didn’t leap off the page. And boy, do they. A lot of writers have taken Daniel & Len at their word and taken risks, others have brilliantly evoked the day and their state of mind, often to profound effect.

5. Success or failure depends on the community: The project has the chance to go wrong at any point, all it takes is a missed post. If we’re honest, that adds to the frisson around the project. It also proves yet again that crowdsourcing is no cop-out for the curators. As wonderful as everyone is, we suspect it can still feel like herding cats at times. As one of the contributors so far, I can also testify to a what-if-you-fail-to-come-up-with-anything? feeling in your gut as you sit down at the end of the day to write a post to an immovable deadline.

We caught up with Daniel and Len, to hear how it’s going so far from their perspective, as well as their hopes and expectations for the rest of the year.

The 3six5 project is nearly a month in. What’s surprised you so far?

LK/DH: We’ve been pleasantly surprised at how personal these posts have been. Often when it comes to blogging, people write about their observations of the outside, or what they suggest OTHER people should do. We encouraged our authors (listed here) to examine themselves on their day and share something that would let the reader walk away knowing a bit more about who THEY were. This is something we feel is lacking in today’s world of “social media” and are happy to see our writers are stepping outside of their comfort zone while they have the spotlight.

How are you personally finding it running the project? What have you learned?

LK/DH: One might think that having other people write a blog for you is really easy. It’s not. In fact it’s probably 10 times harder to do it this way because managing 365 people is quite difficult. Not only are we in constant flux in terms of our schedule of writers, but some of our more “famous” writers are hard to get a hold of when quick deadlines are approaching.

One of our most recent challenges was receiving a post from one of our authors in Haiti. He was there helping with providing medical treatment to a rural village (one day before the earthquake) but didn’t have access to the internet. We ended up writing the post for him as he dictated his writing to us via the local phone. Things like this put us “on call” quite a bit. It’s extremely important that we don’t miss a day because it will take away from the macro result this project is aiming to produce.

That being said, there’s a laundry list of things we’re learning (only 22 days in) about this project, by the end of this, the case study on how we managed it will probably be just as interesting as the 365 day story that ultimately was created.

Content-wise, do you think there are some themes emerging?

LK/DH: There are two themes emerging in this launch month.

The first is the past. We’ve stressed to our authors that we don’t want them pre-planning their posts or picking days like anniversaries, birthdays, etc because it will cause them to write about something that happened earlier in their life, rather than what is happening that day. As the project is meant to be a chronological story, it is key that people reference how the present influenced their life and thoughts. That being said, we cannot escape the past either. People have done a great job with taking anecdotes from their earlier lives and weaving them into the present.

The second theme has been technology. Based on our set of authors, and the age we live in, the topic of technology is going to show up. It’s a utility in our life just like water, electricity, or transportation, it’s just a lot more fun to talk about because it evolves faster than any other utility out there.

What do you hope to achieve by the end of the year with this?

LK/DH: We have a few basic goals for this project right now, but they will obviously continue to evolve as we learn more.

First of all, If we reach success by day 365, then that will not be the last day of the project. We’ve received far more applications from people wanting to be authors than we could possibly fit into a mere 365 days. That being the case, if the demand to read/write these posts is still high, then we will begin again in 2011. (That’s when interns become a very serious consideration for us in effort to maintain our sanity).

Secondly, we want to be able to create something tangible out of this digital project. We’re already having discussions with other artists about collaborating to create a creative mash up of our words and their visual/audible works of art. Additionally, if it is financially viable, we would love to turn the end project into a book for all our authors. The 365 people who create this story deserve to have some kind of memory on their shelf. It would be incredibly rewarding to be able to give them that for free.

Thirdly, we want to walk away knowing 365 people a little bit better. This current iteration of the web has made it incredibly easy to meet people, but it has made it much harder to KNOW people. Through the posts, and the correspondences we have with our authors on the back-end, we’re developing new relationships with people that we never would have encountered in life otherwise. This alone, makes the project worth managing.

**

Check out the 3six5 project here and follow the project on Twitter here

Follow Len on Twitter

Follow Daniel on Twitter

Look out for Ben’s post, due up on February 2

And, for a great introduction to the project ahead of its launch, we strongly recommend you also check out @Brainpicker’s interview last year with them both.

‘Myspace is dying’. How many times have you heard or read that in recent months? It’s not a hard conclusion to reach from recent visitor trends.

But speak to some of the guys here at BBH London and they’ll tell you a different story. For the past few months they’ve been working with our Myspace clients on the UK relaunch of Myspace Music. It’s a revolutionary platform for the stream and share generation, and they’ve created some really smart and engaging work to promote it. Will that be enough to kickstart a turnaround? Only time and data will tell. But it’s a good excuse to share some wider thoughts on the kind of work we get excited about at the London office.

The campaign started back in December, when 9 artists revealed the music they love in a series of interactive films showcasing the new music player. The idea was to bring fans closer to their favourite artists, reinforcing the core Myspace offer of music community.

Building on this idea, the team have created a new set of films starring Fiddy, Florence, Furtado - and you. Visitors to Myspace.com/fanvideo can create a playlist of videos, log in with Myspace ID or Facebook Connect, then sit back and watch as the artists take turns to make a personal dedication. If you’re feeling friendly, you can also give a load of your Myspace / Facebook pals the super-fan treatment.

Sure, most of us have seen personalised video apps before. But I do think the Fan Video app moves things on a bit. In fact, I think it’s made with three fresh ingredients that will be part of the mix in most of our best BBH London work this year.

1. LOVEABLE MAGIC

Agency types get very excited about whizzy new technologies. Apparently, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. And boy, do we love magic. It’s what our clients pay big bucks for. We spend countless hours trying to conjure up little bits of it. So when ACME Tech serves up another massive blob of ready-made magic there’s a rush to give it a branded twist. AR bog roll? Awesome!

Problem is, some of this pure techy magic is losing its allure. Out in the real world people are suffering innovation fatigue. They’ve seen a thousand tech firsts and the give-a-fuck bar is iPhone high. You can dress that bog roll up in in AR magic clothes, but it’s still just bog roll. Where’s the good stuff? The funny, emotional, cool stuff? What’s there to LOVE?

With the Myspace Fan Videos, the magic isn’t in the tech. It’s in the moment when 50 Cent hangs a picture of you on his wall, or Alicia Keys sings you a song. Sure the magic is tech-fuelled, but it’s the twisted cultural content, the playful reference to things I love or hate, that really makes it. Tech is the means, not a magical end in itself.

Tech magic is out. Loveable magic is in.

2. COLLABORATIVE CRAFT

One of the things we’ve become more and more sure of as an agency is that we can’t do everything. Not on our own, anyway. And certainly not to the ‘best in class’ standard our clients demand. We’ve got bags of creative talent in the building, but to make truly awesome, loveable magic, we need the help of great craftsmen from outside BBH. These aren’t just suppliers or production companies. They won’t settle for a white label. These are creative partners who respect the vision, shape the execution and share the credit.

I spoke to Dom Goldman, the BBH Creative Director on this project, and it was refreshing to hear him say that the Myspace Fan Videos couldn’t have been made without Pulse Films (who shot them), Absolute Post (who did the post production), and Domani Studios (who built the application). More importantly, they couldn’t have been made without genuine collaboration between that network of partners. Let’s call this process ‘collaborative craft’.

If you watch the Alicia video carefully, you can see the reflection of your Facebook profile pic in the glossy piano surface. That isn’t off-the-shelf tech. That’s collaborative craft. Dom’s creative team obsessed over those art directional details. Absolute advised on special filmic effects. And Domani coded away until they were subtlely, perfectly achieved.

3. SIMPLE SOCIAL

We sometimes fool ourselves into thinking that people can’t wait to participate in marketing, and will happily jump through branded hoops.

Most personalisation apps I’ve used in the past have asked me to answer several questions or find and upload an image. Sharing has tended to mean entering lists of email addresses or choosing from lists of buttons. Those are pretty big demands at every step of the experience.

By focusing on the simple and specific request for your Facebook Connect login, the Myspace Fan Video app makes that experience faster, simpler and more spreadable (auto-post your fan video to newsfeed, batch-create fan videos for your friends). The use of Connect also amplifies the magic. You don’t know the app has scraped your Facebook profile image until you see it spinning round on David Guetta’s turntable.

Stepping back from the content, it’s just very cool to offer Facebook login for a Myspace promotion. That’s confident, user-centric behaviour. It makes my life a little more convenient. It says “we’re not trying to replace Facebook, we’re different”.

And isn’t that all Myspace need to say, really?

Check out the work here and let us know what you think:

myspace.com/getrealclose

myspace.com/fanvideo

Ed: We loved Peter’s winning talk on mobile for the UK APG’s Battle Of Big Thinking (#bobt) at the end of last year so much, we managed to persuade him give us a little more background to his thinking. For the slides and unmissable video of his presentation on the day, please go here.

The Context

The annual APG Campaign Battle of Big Thinking event puts the fear of god into its participants. Speaking to 200 of your peers is bad enough, but then having them vote on whether you were any good - well, it focuses the mind somewhat.

Knowing I would be the 18th presenter of the day, and the audience would have just enjoyed a decent lunch with a glass or two of wine, I suspected that a slightly less sober approach might appeal.  I think I hoped a little humour might impair rational evaluation whilst promoting positive feedback. That’s my excuse for being light on intellectual content.

The Title

Most of it is, isn’t it?

Year of Mobile?

Mobile Marketeers are pretty smug about their chosen medium.  They’ll present graphs going up - massive penetration…..increased usage…most pervasive technology on earth….never more than 1 metre away, 24/7. They wear these stats like a cloak of invincibility but the numbers serve only to highlight the meagreness of mobile marketing efforts to date.  It has rarely been worthy of the hype.

Perhaps though this IS the year. In the last few weeks $1 billion has been spent acquiring mobile advertising networks. The most successful advertising operation in history has launched a device to go toe-to-toe with the game-changing iphone.  C E (-reader) S was all about leveraging the ubiquity of connected life.  Apple are about to launch a mobile, 3G/Wi-fi tablet thing.  We know the turning point has arrived because the Analysts have arrived in force.

The year mobile begins to deliver on its marketing potential happens to be the same year consumers decide they can rely on the channel to be more than a pure messaging tool. We’ve now got connected services that ‘just work’.  To voice & text  add google maps, mobile facebook, twitter clients and Jamie Oliver.  Every time you reach for your iphone and check the weather/train timetables/what else that bloke from The Wire was in - congratulations you’ve just brought the year of mobile a little closer.

I remembering questioning the credibility of a company without an email address, then without a website. That will soon happen as users start getting used to optimised mobile experiences, and shun brands/services that don’t operate via the channel.

If you work in one of those traditional digital agencies prepare for a lot of work on that presentation layer.

Futurologists

I wish I was a futurologist.  Or an analyst.  The Mystic Megs in this business are able to fantasise with impunity.  At least Arthur C Clarke made it interesting - space elevators anyone?  Predicting the future is incredibly easy.  Getting it right is incredibly hard. A reminder: pontificating about the distant future does not establish an agency as ‘cutting edge’.  I recently read a collection of the best technology writing from last year.  None of it was about the future. In the words of the editor “who needs the future? The present is interesting enough on its own”. I’m not even sure we have the time to speculate any more.

Gambling

My time as a pro gambler taught me a number of things. I don’t enjoy gambling was the main thing.  Clearly our business is nothing like gambling.  Clearly.

Advertising + Mobile

Confession.  I find banner ads quite dull. On this issue I find myself at one with the consumer.  Given that $1b has been bet on mobile banner ads this position may prove to be acutely naive and detrimental to my career development.  No matter.  Banner Ads never made any one happy.

Csikszentmihalyi

Psychology is back in fashion. It’s cyclical.  In times of crisis we get back to basics. What do people really want?  How do people actually behave and make decisions?  There is an intuitive sense that mobile is such a personal medium that understanding human motivation is key to its use.  Isn’t it obvious? I do do stuff with my phone - it is used to fulfill some pretty fundamental needs.
I have done Csikszentmihalyi a tremendous disservice of course and one of his Optimal Experiences could never be delivered by a mere mobile campaign. However if you believe that experiences are heightened through the act of participation, rather than as a passive witness, then mobile does offer an intriguing opportunity to engage.

Happiness

Moments of real delight are rare.  So rare that sharing a chuckle with your family whilst watching an animated meerkat can be a memorable shared experience.  There are a set of other experiences - delivered only via mobile - that can quite easily be created by a brand and that I believe are more powerful. I get a little kick out of driving through Spain using the phone sat nav, or watching my nephews laugh uncontrollably at a talking hamster, or knowing the time of the next train on the platform at Kensal Green (no indicators).  These experiences make me feel good. I wasn’t watching them.  I wasn’t being told anything. I was in them.  In my own physical world.

The most powerful demonstration of mobiles potential is at this crossroads of the digital and the physical worlds.  This is the place that you can create delightful experiences.  A brand can aspire to do no more than that.

Presentation slides and video of Peter’s talk at APG’s Battle of Big Thinking 2009.

We need your help.

Aside from reading this (60 seconds) we also need just 10 seconds of your time.

If we can persuade enough people to give us 10 seconds and one click, we’ll help achieve something extremely worthwhile.

Read on . . .

In between some fairly insanely busy day jobs, a few BBHers from our New York office have been busy on a project called ‘Pencils of Promise’ (PoP), a startup non-profit organization dedicated to building sustainable education in the developing world. PoP is one of one hundred organizations participating in a $1MM competition (sponsored by Chase) called the Chase Community Giving Program. The competition is being run through Facebook as a voting contest, and the organization that receives the most votes will receive a $1MM grant. The five runners up will each receive $100,000. Voting ends Jan 22nd.

PoP is (as of today, Sunday morning ET) in 9th position, but only 1000 votes off the top 5 and 20,000 votes off top spot. Most of the organizations participating are leveraging massive databases and established relationships with celebrities to spread the word. Fair play. PoP doesn’t have that, so BBH Labs is attempting to activate our extended network of friends, bloggers and tweeters to spread the word today and activate some votes.

Pencils of Promise is also well-placed to make an immediate impact in light of last weeks horrific events in Haiti. With a commitment to sustainability and on-the-ground impact, the organization has committed, should they win the grand prize, at least $100,000 to youth focused projects in Haiti; they will personally oversee and develop these. That seems pretty awesome to us; once the immediate emergency aid is up and running it’s clear that the young people of Haiti are going to be central to the recovery. In it’s modest way, this should help.

Please help PoP and do two things . . . ideally right now:

1. Vote for PoP on Facebook: http://bit.ly/4DYKIV

2. We don’t usually ask for RTs at Labs but we think this is an exception, so please retweet the tweet that sent you here, or cut and paste this into Twitter:

We need your help with ‘Pencils of Promise’: ten seconds, one click is all it takes: http://j.mp/8naMZJ (please RT)

One click, ten seconds.

Thanks

Brad Haugen (BBH NY; @hoogs), Michelle Keith (ex-BBH NY; @michelleakeith), Ben Malbon (BBH Labs; @malbonnington)

@pencilsofpromis

For a 99 second intro on YouTube: youtube.com/pencilsofpromise

——

ABOUT THE ORGANIZATION

Pencils of Promise is a registered 501 (c)(3) nonprofit that builds sustainable schools, partnerships and solutions to enable basic education for under-served children in the developing world. Pencils of Promise is a passionate community of individual volunteers dedicated to empowering each person regardless of status or position to make a positive impact on the world.

Founded in October 2008, PoP uses for-profit business principles and non-profit ideals to work to empower Western youth to use their skills, abilities and networks to participate in the nonprofit process in a meaningful way. With more than 75 million children in the world without access to a preschool education, PoP helps bridge the gap of inadequate educational resources for the world’s most impoverished children.

In 2009, the organization’s first year of operation, Pencils of Promise raised over $150,000 in donations through fundraising events and donor support, built three schools in Laos, and established a presence in more than 20 cities and college campuses throughout the country. In 2010, Pencils of Promise has goals to attract 5,000 new supporters across the globe, to build seven more schools in committed villages in Laos, Haiti and Nicaragua, and to continue to identify additional areas of impact around the world.

More information about Pencils of Promise is available at pencilsofpromise.org.

What a year. Here within the BBH Labs team we’ve had our ups and our downs. But we’ve been facing only forwards. We thought today might be the one day of the year we allow ourselves a sneaky peek backwards. In particular in regard to our little blog.

This blog’s grown from nothing, through embryonic to, well, at least something approaching pre-pubescence. Whilst we’ve not shared as much as we had hoped in these pages, since launching on April Fool’s Day 2009 we’ve managed around 70 posts.

Looking back through the content it’s reassuring (at least to us) that we’ve managed a fair degree of consistency in terms of the topics we’ve  posted on, with some key themes emerging as core areas of Labs’ interest. We didn’t plan this when we started, it just happened. (We outline these themes - with links to example posts - underneath this list of our Favourite 10 from 2009.)

What made most of the posts even remotely interesting to start with was the commenting and opinion shared on the blog in response to them. We’d like to thank all those who took time not just to read but to improve our thoughts. We massively value your contribution, and we always look forward to reading your input, however challenging or provocative.

More than anything, even more than the 900+ comments on these posts, what we’ve taken out of this first eight months of Labs blogging are some great new friends, partners & teachers. Long after the frothy excitement around this app or that platform recedes, and even after the buzz around great work might fade into Awards annuals, it’s this side of the blog that we will value most highly.

Happy New Year. See you in 2010. Mel, Pats, Ben

* * * *

So, we thought we’d fish out ten posts that we either particularly enjoyed putting together, or that triggered a debate from which we learned a lot (often, it was both). Here they are, with links (via titles) to the originals & original comments.

1. The Battle Between Art & The Algorithm

The onset of increasingly ‘perfect’ information would suggest that the content we are served is ever more relevant, the choices we make are ever easier, and our levels of satisfaction should never have been higher (think the ultra relevance of Netflix, Fresh Direct, SatNav, Amazon recommends, Facebook suggests, Google search). We argue here, however, that this rise in relevance amounts to nothing less than the ‘end of surprise’, and that comes with a cost (think The Truman Show meets Minority Report). We focus on the opportunity: a role for genuinely inventive, interactive and surprising content and experiences in an era where the rough edges are too often being smoothed away.

2. The Big Idea: Chronicle of a Death Foretold

We presented what amounted to a deliberately provocative defense of big ideas, at a time when many commentators (all much more esteemed than us) were suggesting they were dead, that we needed to break free from their ‘tyranny’ and that the future lay in many small ideas instead. We concluded with five reasons we’d be wise to re-consider the power and potential of big ideas in serving the needs of brands. The quality of the debate and commentary around the post was fantastic; we’re clearly only scratching the surface here.

3. Marketing Mashup

A rallying cry to break down the walls, take a step outside and embrace the new forms of creativity that lie waiting for us at the intersections with fields, disciplines & cultures different to our own. We suggest three ways this might be achieved: Cross-pollination, Mutation and Divergence. As Darwin noted: ‘In the long history of humankind those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.’

4. Why isn’t there more great work in the interactive space?

A quickfire, exploratory tour of debate around why we’re not all bowled over with the quality of work we’re seeing in interactive. We argue for bringing geeky technical know-how closer to what we currently call creativity. In fact, much of the argument, and particularly the ace commentary that followed in the comments section, dealt with an emerging discussion around what creativity is today. This has obvious implications for businesses have have as their output ‘creativity’ and that are structured to produce specific variants of this with relatively fixed approaches.

5. 10 Reasons Why There’s Not More Great Work in the Interactive Space

The follow-up to Number 4 that distills the debate and comment provoked by the first. Covering everything from speed, endurance, pride, passion, & risk. We identified factors that seemed to be within our control (attitude, collaboration, generosity) and those that seemed less easily fixed (especially skills gaps in key emerging areas). This was one of our most commented-upon posts of 2009.

6. The Storyteller’s Story

At a time when many had been suggesting the end of the road for storytelling, a strident defense of the relevance and power of storytelling. We argue that there is a real and significant opportunity for brands to excite and inspire again through storytelling. That it is possible to reinvent a lost art, rather than dismiss it. That storytelling can be a powerful tool to drive new creativity in the interactive space. That the storyteller’s story does not, after all, end here . . .

7. Twitter - the Beginning of the End, or the End of the Beginning?

Back in April, as the cacophony of noise around Twitter grew to deafening proportions, early adopters such as Steve Rubel (& many others - @malbonster for example) were starting to predict a downward spiral for the company as geeks sought shiny new toys elsewhere. In this post we argue - or guessed, I suppose is more accurate - that this wouldn’t be the case, and that this was just the beginning. Time will tell, but right now Twitter seems to be morphing into something more significant than any of us might have imagined this time last year.

8. If you want a conversation, say something interesting

There have been plenty of conversations this year about conversations. Here, we made the argument that conversations require nurturing if they are to be sustained, and we suggest a driving role for campaigns in helping to achieve this. Campaigns start conversations. They can refresh and sustain them. And they can amplify them. If we think of conversations as the fire and campaigns as the fuel for those conversations, it’s pretty clear we need both. There’s no fire without a spark. There’s not much heat without fuel.

9. Less, But Better - an interview with design legend Dieter Rams

Long-term admirers of Rams’ philosophy on design and his general radical outlook on life, we interviewed him to see how we might make our own innovation efforts more radical (& successful). As the key influence on head designer Jonathan Ive, at Apple, and without question a linking thread to the Bauhausian minimalism and functionalism of the 1920s and 1930s, we were honored to be allowed to ask Dieter a few questions. He gave splendidly ‘in character’ answers, particularly on the theme of crowdsourcing. There is much we value in this post, but the primary finding for us - question everything, *especially* the most obvious - remains with us and in fact seems ever more relevant.

10. The Coming Age of Augmentation

A particular favourite of mine, this post is one I’ve returned to more than any other. We touch upon the concept of the ‘Technological Singularity’, the idea that once we create an an artificial intelligence greater than our own, it follows that any resulting ‘Superbrain’ will be capable of augmenting itself extremely quickly to become even more intelligent and so on, leading to an explosive growth in intelligence that is (literally) beyond our imagination. And we begin (and really only begin) to explore a broader point around the pace of technological change, and what we - and the brands with whom we work - can do to embrace it. This was another of those posts that received some phenomenally insightful and inspiring comments. (Note: this piece also came with a bonus post that contained all the background reading we’d found most useful in putting this together.)

Hmmm. We kind of cheated as two of the posts around the theme of ‘better interactive work’ were essentially two halves of a single post, so here’s a bonus fave. A recent one.

11. Google Chrome - Behind The Scenes

BBH’s recent work for the launch of the Chrome browser in Europe was the focus for this piece. We shared the full-length films (now on YouTube) but also shared the short film we produced around how we made them. It’s work of which everyone at BBH is proud, and that BBH Labs played a leading role in producing. Take a look if you haven’t seen it.

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KEY EMERGING THEMES ON THE LABS BLOG . . . SO FAR . . .

- The development of interactive as it collided with the emerging social web (for example: 10 Reasons Why There’s Not More Great Work in the Interactive Space)

- The increasing attention given to new models of creative collaboration (& crowdsourcing)

- The proliferation of data visualization and new ways of using it (Art & The Algorithm, From Art to Apps)

- Emerging agency models (Agency Nil, Agency Nil #2, R/GA, Boulder Digital Works)

- The celebration of awesome creativity (esp where it innovates or hacks channels or platforms - LEGO, Sour, Concave Scream, Mary Poppins, Nike, Google)

- Interviews with people we respect (Dieter Rams, Aaron Koblin, Manual Lima, Jeremy Ettinghausen)

- Musings on the shape of the future (The Coming Age of Augmentation, Will the Web Make Us More Honest?, Adaptive Brand Marketing)

- New apps, software, APIs, cool stuff (Goggles, Foursquare, The Phonebook, QR codes)

- Sustainability & community (iSaw, Blog Action Day, Glove Love)

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Taped Together entry for December 17

2009 undoubtedly has been the year when the ‘crowd’ really came into its own.  As the year drew to a close, it seemed like it might be a fun (okay, also possibly foolish) idea to attempt to create the world’s first crowd-curated holiday playlist.

Whilst I’d tinkered with this in fairly samizdat fashion at the end of November, the idea properly came to life when Maria Popova (@brainpicker) - the undisputed queen of online cultural curation and author of, amongst other things, Brain Pickings - got in touch. She suggested we create an audio tumblr together and see if we could find 31 people to curate one, great, vaguely seasonal track for every day in December.

So far, 24 days and around a 1000 plays later, it’s a fairly diverse collection of music and commentary: by turns happy, nostalgic, darkly funny, triumphant, moving, warm, sad and - if you ask us - all of it pretty downright wonderful.

We hope people have had as much fun as we have getting involved and watching it unfold.  Maria and I will say thank you properly to everyone when the project completes at the end of the month, but in the meantime please keep checking out the site, listen to the smorgasbord of tracks we’ve had in so far and read what the curators have had to say about the music they’ve chosen.

For more about Taped Together, check it out here.

The full and final playlist will be made available as a download to anyone who’d like one, please check out the site for details at the end of this month.

Happy Christmas and Happy Holidays Everyone.

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: