Memories light the corners of my mind
Misty,water colored memories
Of the way we were.
~ Barbra Streisand, The Way We Were

Barbara Streisland, image: barbarastreislandpictures.com

I attended the Damien Hirst show at the Tate Modern. Flies and fags, butterflies and bling, spin and spots, drugs and death… There. You don’t need to see it now.

I walked away somewhat hollow. I felt a pang of guilt and recognition. Guilt because Hirst was in many ways the adman’s artist. Art that came with a nudge, a wink and a knowing punchline. Art as quick hit, shiny bright, paper thin. Recognition because, yes, that was Britain in the ’90s. Spin doctors and Spice Girls, boy bands and man bags, heroin chic and Shabba Ranks, lads and Loaded, puffas and Prozac, Wonderbra and Wonderwall, alcopops and Posh & Becks. Fool Britannia…. There was no god, no beauty, no other. Just money and death and irony. Things could only get worse…

I’m not sure I blame Damien Hirst. I suspect he’s a very good artist. He was very effectively holding a mirror up to us and our values. Or lack of them. And I suspect each generation gets the art it deserves. Flies and fags was maybe all we were good for in the ’90s.

Don’t you also think that we get the advertising we deserve? As an Agency, as a Client, as a culture ? When we hark back to a golden hued, bygone age of celestial communication, are we not condemning our own failure to create greatness now? When the disappointed Client fires the disappointing Agency, isn’t he or she shirking personal responsibility? When we rail against cruel fate and happenstance, when we bemoan the recession, or reach for the blame gun, shouldn’t we be looking in the mirror first?

I believe in commercial karma. That, broadly speaking, in advertising as in life, we reap what we sow. That what goes around comes around. Not for some spiritual, counter cultural, gaia-type reason. But because, though it seems trite to say it, in the long run, smart, open minded Clients, working with intelligent, lateral Agencies, for honest, worthwhile brands, will make better, more effective work. And vice versa.

I guess I have witnessed exceptions to this. The craven creative, the malevolent marketing director, the bullying business director have on occasion won the day. But overall in my experience fakes are found out, charlatans are shopped. Good prevails.

Instant karma’s gonna get you
Gonna knock you right on the head
You better get yourself together
Pretty soon you’re gonna be dead
~ John Lennon, Instant Karma

John Lennon, image: backstageol.com

Of course in the past one had to wait for hubris to be followed by inevitable nemesis. Nowadays the social web has created a kind of instant karma. Because the courtroom of public opinion is so immediate and all seeing. It shines an unforgiving,instantaneous light on the ill conceived and poorly executed. It likewise rewards the virtuous with currency and value.

I had always believed that Corporate Social Responsibility was exactly that: a responsibility that a business owed to the communities it served. I wasn’t so enamoured of more fashionable phrases like social investment because I didn’t feel ethics needed commercial justification.  And I wasn’t convinced CSR had a role in marketing or brand.

Now I have been persuaded that ethics are more than a responsibility. They are fundamental to a brand’s sustainability in a transparent, socialised world. Because increasingly consumers are unwilling to buy good products from bad people. Because in a world of commercial karma only the good Clients, good admen and good brands can win.

In a couple of weeks time we’ll be speaking at the annual Planningness conference, which is coming to LA for the first time this year.

We were originally asked to talk about how we work as a planner / creative duo at BBH LA. But rather than share a single, narrow perspective, we thought it might be interesting to take a broader look at the planner / creative relationship today.

What do planners and creatives really value in one another? How can they best work together in a modern agency setup? Do similar or opposite styles attract? Does gender, nationality or experience make a difference? Has digital changed the relationship? Is it still a two-way dynamic or are planning and creative duties shared between more diverse teams?

We’re hoping to answer some of these questions by asking planners and creatives from a variety of agency backgrounds to fill out a short survey. If you work in either role at any level, we’d love to get your input. Results will be shared here on the Labs blog and in our Planningness talk on May 18th.

The aim is to gather some honest, practical learning about the planner / creative relationship, how it is changing and what we can do to improve it. Next up, the new business / finance relationship…

How communication is consumed: West vs East, from "Everything we know, is wrong"

BBH Asia Pacific Chairman, Charles Wigley, and Rob Campbell of W+K delivered their joint talk “Everything we know, is wrong” at The Asia Marketing Effectiveness Festival in Shanghai last week. Asked to be provocateurs, their talk (slideshare below) smartly tackles five flawed notions in one fell swoop: from ‘tv is dead’, ‘brand love’, ‘everyone wants to join in’, ‘pre-testing makes everything better’ and finally ‘London and New York know absolutely everything’. At Labs we particularly enjoyed the provocation of the last theme, which struck us as something not discussed nearly enough on these pages. If you’re someone with a client or simply a keen interest in Asia (so all of us, then..), then may we suggest – if you do nothing else – reading slides 64-81 of Chaz and Rob’s presentation below.

As Chaz himself puts it:

“We had what we knew would be a crowd pleaser in the East where we have both lived and worked for years, but may be less of one in the West. We’ll see. We firmly believe it anyway. Specifically we took on the notion that ‘West knows best‘. If you believe that culture significantly influences how people look at and interact with the world, then there is ample evidence that it causes Asian – more collectivist – consumers to interact differently towards brands and to read communications differently. Academia and our business are just at the start of understanding this one. But it’s going to be big. Read Richard Nisbett’s ‘The Geography of Thought’.”

Chaz and Rob in action at AME 2012

]]> http://bbh-labs.com/everything-we-know-is-wrong/feed 5 http://bbh-labs.com/the-barn-ny-internship-program-open-call-for-summer-2012 http://bbh-labs.com/the-barn-ny-internship-program-open-call-for-summer-2012#comments Tue, 01 May 2012 14:39:45 +0000 Saneel Radia http://bbh-labs.com/?p=11081

BBH NY's Barn Opens for Summer 2012

Author: Andy Ross, Account Manager, BBH NY

As the Winter 2012 Barn session came to a close with interns presenting digital platforms directly to UNICEF clients, something dawned upon us – we need to get the next round of the Barn rolling.

In short, the Barn is back. Please consider this your invite.

It goes like this: Two teams of three resourceful, slightly sleep-deprived interns compete against one another on a brief that belongs solely to them. They’ll also work on live projects within the walls of BBH and score some direct interaction with and mentorship from folks in nearly every department here, including BBH Labs.

The skills we’re looking for are varied, and none are mandatory – but guidelines might help. Do you know Final Cut Pro, PHP, C++?  Ever heard of Open Source? Are you hyper-organized? Do you have a penchant for human behavior studies or a highly developed sense of smell that you have leveraged into a successful truffle company? Bottom line: we want people who can get things done.

Our role here is to empower you, not to ask you for coffee. That’s why previous Barn teams have managed to win everything from Lions to Pencils during their 10-week internship.

So you have it, the Barn’s hiring criteria are as follows: We want people who are good and nice. Apply at BBHBarn.com and follow @bbhbarn.  Applications are due May 11th.  We start June 4th, 2012. We cry that it’s over August 10th.

Good luck.

We’re quite proud to say we’re in active dialogue with both the North American Street Newspaper Association (NASNA) and the International Network of Street Papers (INSP) working out how to help their members (150 or so papers across the globe) address some key issues they face in a modern media landscape. We’ve begun by working on a key pilot program: StreetWise in Chicago. We came to meet Jim LoBianco, who runs the paper (and broader organization), after he wrote this post during Homeless Hotspots. Upon speaking with Jim, it was clear he has a track record of innovation fighting homelessness, and that the organization is dealing with a number of issues familiar to papers around the world, including:

• Digitizing payments options for street vendors working in an environment in which fewer people are carrying change
• Offering digital services to accompany a print offering under pressure
• Ensuring vendors have a clear set of tools to earn income and offer something of commercial value
• Do all of the above without eroding vendors’ ability to engage with mainstream society (this is good for both parties, and is the key issue that blossomed into Homeless Hotspots originally)

If we can collectively address these issues for the largest North American street paper, we’re optimistic we can help other interested street papers evolve with the changing media and mobile landscape.

We’ll continue to keep everyone posted on progress. We appreciate the exceptional level of support you’ve shown for the participants and the shelter throughout this process. In fact, it may be worth heading over to the Front Steps Facebook page to say congrats to Hotspot Manager Jonathan who raised enough money from Homeless Hotspots to put him over the edge and move out of the shelter and into housing!

If you’re interested in helping us with any of these efforts, please reach out.

Every once in a while at Labs, we like, no, need to get our hands dirty. Oily, even. We like to make stuff that we can learn from – learn from the making of and learn from the interactions with. Robotify.me is one such experiment. And unlike most of our output, we’re going to share its whole gestation with you. Partly because we’re too excited not to, partly because we want you to shape the product.

Product? Yes. With robotify.me, we want to put a personal digital robot into the hands of every person who wants one.

Of all the companions you could make, why a robot? Why not a plant, an animal, even a pet rock? Because of the line robots walk (or fly), between the artificial and the human. They are not alive, but in the way the act we try to give them life. And this has bearing on the other half of the project.

Since our first aol email addresses, our first Second Life avatars, our geocities and myspace profiles, our first (and second) anonymous twitter accounts and our weavrs, we’ve been talking about the difference between a person, and an online persona. Is there one? We hope robotify will tell us, because the other trick is this: the characteristics and features of your robot will be determined entirely and exclusively by  your social network data. So if you post lots of pictures on instagram, your robot might grow a telephoto lens in its belly. If you click lots of odd links, you might develop tank tracks – negotiating rough digital terrain, you see.

That’s the simplest version. Gradually we want to progress to a version with a robot that changes and grows as you do – a living marker of your data journey. We’re even hoping that, over time, robots will be able to interact. Robosociety, if you will. But that’s the nature of the agile process we’re using – aside from the vision, there are lots of assumptions layered on top of each other, and we’d like a willing army of beta pioneers to help slice through these assumptions and get to the robotify.me that you want.

At the same time, we’d like to experiment with a slightly altered way of communicating – so for the 50s radio-style version of the Robotify story, just slip on some headphones and click play.

Hang on. You said something about beta users?

Yes, labs reader. That’s you. We’re making the beta right now – signup at http://signup.robotify.me. If there’s anything you want to see, anything you’ve always wanted to know about your social data, or anything else you think we should look at, let us know below…

Dr Techniko's extraordinary 'How To Train Your Robot' class

How To Train Your Robot – how DrTechniko teaches kids rudiments of programming logic (simple, genius): http://bit.ly/HRYWpQ (via@endofu)

‘Innovation Isn’t Easy, Esp Midstream’ - @nickbilton on why Kodak were incapable of making Instagram: http://nyti.ms/HOpRB1 (via @Malbonnington)

Is this the digital fin de siècle? Has the old thing run its course? A provocative must read: http://bit.ly/IMAWQG (via @jayanandrajog)

“Meaninful” startups - @cdixon on evolutionary vs transformative entrepreneurialism: http://bit.ly/HUnKQD

‘Instagram as an island economy’ - @genmon asks how do you value a closed system? http://bit.ly/HxcIz9 (HT @PatsMc)

‘We have confused productivity with acceleration’ – from interesting@lifehacker piece ‘Email Is Not Broken; We Are’: http://lifehac.kr/J9YYcY

The makers of ‘Welcome to Pine Point’ share what makes it work as a piece of interactive storytelling: http://bit.ly/JmuOjc and check out the story itself too: http://bit.ly/kE79iZ (HT @jamescmitchell)

Battle for the Internet: http://bit.ly/J0EGBQ - @guardian‘s 7 day investigation into the future of the open Internet

How would a computer scientist go about solving the issues facing journalism? Headlines on Nieman Journalism Lab blog here: http://bit.ly/I6ntDn (via @jeffjarvis)

***

And a bonus 11th link, kids send Go Pro 3D cameras into space (does Space Battleship Yamato beat Lego Man?): http://tcrn.ch/J3EVhi

Earlier this month we released a nifty little iPhone specific web app for the connected set. While we were off building it, (you see what we did there) we decided to produce some quirky promotional films to support the app’s launch.

We crafted short narratives that extended the comedic tone of the application, and helped explain the usefulness of While You Were Off through a series of possible situations may have kept you offline and away from the glorious Internet. Watch them all on our Youtube Channel.

Makers gunna make…
Anyone familiar with how we run Labs knows we make a concerted effort to learn by making. The thoughts published here and elsewhere, as well as the community’s feedback, often spark ideas that we bring to life internally for no reason other than a love of doing. For us, our curiosity was both in what we did and why we did it the way we did. Today, we’re announcing the latest output of that addiction.

While You Were Off is our venture into developing a mobile specific web application. We created it to learn more about the staged process of creating such an app in an MVP-minded way. It’s especially important because more and more often, applications are running free of the device and powered by cloud services. While You Were Off (#WYWO) embraces this idea as it serves you the content you missed while your phone was offline. It features two feeds: 1) a World Wide Web (WWW) feed that taps into a curated list of APIs that we feel best represent “internet culture” and 2) a personalized Your Wide Web (YWW) feed that runs the same algorithm to display the “most interesting” content from your specific social networks.

Determining the need…
A common feeling most of you are familiar with is the pseudo-anxiety one feels awakening your dormant mobile device after it’s been offline. It’s that “post Airplane Mode tingle” we’ve admitted to one another while traveling together. We all scramble to quickly catch up immediately on email, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. We felt a need for a mobile tool to quickly reconnect and get back up to speed with the internet with one click of the WYWO icon.

So we built it. And what better place to start than the beloved pink While You Were Out corporate memo pad? We even tried to pay homage to its charming name and anachronistic style.  The difference is this version of the pad is specifically built for iPhones.

A model to vet native app development…
Native application development can be a costly risk. Although we have no revenue or brand expectations, we see this as an opportunity to explore a model a client may find useful. We saw an opportunity to use modern web application development as a way of vetting an application’s value by putting it in the audience’s hands first. This method allows us to test in the wild.

We can optimize the experience based on consumer behavior and use that data to inform a future build, be it further web app development (including an Android version), or an eventual native app. We’ve focused on building this simple application in a way that lets us easily track performance and usage to bring about the natural parallel behaviors between web & native apps.

Pull out your iPhone and point it to http://wywo.me to give it a whirl. Once you play with it, we would love your feedback on what you like, how we can make it better, and how you are using it. Use the comments below to send us your thoughts. Thanks.

May 1st 2012, #wywo claims the Mobile Site of The Day @FWA

Author: Jim Carroll, Chairman, BBH London

I’m no motor racing enthusiast, but I was cracking up over the Senna documentary. The potent cocktail of youth, beauty, talent and tragedy. The story of a genius half expressed, a life half lived.

It’s a curiosity of middle age that one finds oneself weeping more frequently. Sometimes it’s prompted by the profound. But often it’s the incidental, the humdrum, the everyday. A fay costume drama, a moderately emotional screwball comedy, a random memory of Dylan, the springer spaniel, watching sparrows on the summer lawn.

I sat next to a guy on the plane a while ago. A formal, serious looking man with one of those bulky lawyer’s briefcases that mean money and business. He obviously travelled a lot. After take-off he set out his paraphernalia for in-flight comfort: his unguents, earplugs and blindfold. He refused food, switched on a monitor and proceeded to cry profusely all the way through Four Weddings and a Funeral.

I’m not sure about the psychology or physiology of Middle Aged Weeping. Could it be the remembrance of things past, the wisdom of age, the diminution of testosterone, the proximity of death, the fear of apocalypse? Or all of the above simultaneously tugging at the heart strings and demanding a tune?

I’d like to say I’ve gained some lasting benefit or resolution from my weeping, that I am more in touch with my emotions,more at one with myself. But, whilst I am certainly curious about it, I don’t feel any farther down the road to self knowledge. Tears are not enough.

With the exception of a few funerals, like Maxine Brown I have always cried alone. Context evaporates, time stalls, the world closes in. Melancholy is a matter of silent isolation.

Conversely I only laugh with others. To share the joke, to join the fun, to feel peels of laughter rippling through the crowd. The greatest highs are the ones we share. And solitary laughter is the surest sign of oncoming madness. As the guy on the 19 bus giggles out loud at the contents of his book, one edges along the seat a little farther, grips the handrail a little tighter. I suspect more people write LOL than do it.

Take a look at anyone’s Facebook photos and you’ll see a curiously hedonistic sense of self. The laughter, smiles, gatherings and getaways of friends and family. Darker thoughts and feelings are generally suppressed. It’s a redacted life.

I wonder what does this mean? Are we instinctively predisposed to share life’s highs and keep the lows to ourselves? Are some feelings inherently more private and others more public? Are there natural limits to the social?

I’m aware, of course, that some societies cry more freely than mine. Perhaps others laugh more privately too. And conventions are changing. We live in an age where the instinct to share has extended beyond the joyous and celebratory. Oprah’s openness, misery memoirs, celebrity confessions. Some have speculated that the  social era may lead us to happier personal lives, that in our free expression on the web, we’re engaged in some kind of mass therapy: we’re producing the best adjusted generation since before The Fall.

Nonetheless, I share the growing concern that our transparent world poses challenges in the area of privacy. Hitherto much of the debate has centred around personal data, unsolicited targeting, embarrassing photos. I suspect privacy may represent a more profound issue than this. Privacy is a matter of personal identity. And in order to prevent identity theft in the truest sense we need to protect the arcane, opaque, mysterious elements of our own lives. In her new book, Quiet, Susan Cain suggests that the ‘world that can’t stop talking’ underestimates introverts. I agree.

Van the Man once sang about the  ’Inarticulate Speech of the Heart’. I had grown up thinking that any belief needed a justification, that an emotion wasn’t properly felt unless it could be articulated, that one couldn’t recover from a trauma unless one could describe it. Now I treasure the unexplained, the unspoken, the unthought.