Marketing Mashup
2nd June 09
Posted in creativity, culture
“I love fools’ experiments. I am always making them”
Charles Darwin, 1809-1882
Universal logo for mashups, concept by Zohar Manor-Abel, criticalflare.com
Brokeback to the Future. Must Like Jaws. Google Maps with just about anything. Danger Mouse’s the Grey Album. We just can’t escape mashups. When the very last music track, piece of software, data or film has been spliced with something else to create another new hybrid output, perhaps then, and only then, will the world rest easy.
Or maybe it shouldn’t. We could look at consumer-orientated mashup culture as just the start of something with even broader application. Taken to an extreme, I’m talking about mashing up entire industries. The marriage or mutation of skill sets inside an industry like marketing & communications, with those on the outside. The sole purpose of the experiment to devise radically new, hybrid forms of creativity.
Industries as diverse as architecture, astrophysics, poetry and genetic engineering are already showing us how it’s done, collaborating and cross-fertilising with each other to evolve. A BBC podcast not so long ago explored this whole area with almost Darwinian alacrity, a guest on the show summing up his take as follows:
“How do we produce original knowledge? …We no longer need specialist knowledge, but trans-disciplinary creative solutions.”
Andy Miah, editor of ‘Human Futures: Art in an Age of Uncertainty’
The implications for creative businesses seem particularly significant. Despite the pride the communications industry has taken historically in its ability to seek inspiration from far & wide, it’s undeniable that large chunks of it currently maintain a pretty insular, closed off existence.
Consider this then 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.
There are of course good reasons why this may not be as easy as it sounds. During a recession most businesses focus inward: attempting to extract maximum value from their significantly reduced resources. Unwritten rules state that the time for exploring new paths is best confined to periods of economic growth when the cost of failure can be more easily written off. Yet – and I say this knowing none of us needs to hear the words ‘unprecedented’, ‘change’ and ‘profound’ restated together in a sentence any time soon – we can’t let the economic environment disguise or excuse the fact that, without exploring new avenues, the communications industry risks coming out of this recession a lot less fit for natural selection than it went in.
In the fifteenth century we have evidence of the evolutionary path I am advocating here in action. Described as the ‘Medici Effect‘ by the author Frans Johansson in his 2004 book of the same name, the Medici family’s deliberate removal of the traditional walls separating different fields and cultures is credited with helping to catalyse the Renaissance. The human psychology behind this is both fascinating and useful, the book itself also well worth the read. However, for our purposes here, I’ve deliberately reduced Johansson’s cogent and nuanced argument into two sentences…as follows: Whilst there are exceptions, most people on the planet develop hard-wired patterns of thought and behaviour (‘associative barriers’) that can hugely inhibit our natural ability to create & innovate. When we’re forced into contact with people who have very different starting points & skill sets to our own, quite simply those barriers to innovation are broken down.
So how might we replicate the Medici’s approach? Here are three initial steps to get us started:
1. Cross-pollinate
“No matter where you work, most of the smart people are somewhere else”
Bill Joy, co-founder, Sun Microsystems
On the surface at least, this seems the simplest, most cost-efficient solution: the idea of collaborating with people within an industry, but outside your own company. Yet partnering someone whose business may overlap with yours is often the toughest and least intuitively comfortable thing to do. As Bill Joy’s statement suggests, the reason we must overcome any residual reluctance to this is the fact that, by definition, it’s increasingly impossible to house everything and everyone you need underneath one roof nowadays, an issue that’s only grown in recent years with the proliferation of technology, mass collaboration and media. This demands we seek out liked-minded companies or individuals and work out a value exchange together. Most recently Rory Sutherland’s inaugural speech as IPA President led with the thought that we are “better together”, announcing the creation of “a cross-disciplinary group to discuss how the different disciplines can work together better as complementary organisations – with a view to growing the value we create overall and the money we earn.”
2. Mutate
“Mutation: it is the key to our evolution. It has enabled us to evolve from a single-celled organism into the dominant species on the planet. This process is slow, and normally taking thousands and thousands of years. But every few hundred millennia, evolution leaps forward.”
Professor Charles Francis Xavier in X-men (20th Century Fox, 2000)
You don’t have to be an X-Men fan to be familiar with the concept of mutation. Here the opportunity is to mutate creativity with technology. A step on from collaborating or cross-pollinating, it represents a fundamental change in the physical make-up of a team. To alter the very DNA of team structure and process by pairing creative technologists directly with other idea generators. In short, we reinvent the traditional creative team. This mutation is already underway in many corners, but we could speed it up and see it to completion faster across the industry as a whole.
This doesn’t mean simply hiring people with a deep understanding of the creative implications, opportunities and limitations brought about by technology, but placing them at the absolute heart of a creative business. I can’t put this better than Randall Rothenberg who, having expressed concern about the hesitancy with which creative technologists are being adopted by agencies, recently declared:
“This evolution of the creative partnership [integrating technologists] is as transformational a moment as was the invention of the copywriter-art director partnership exactly 60 years ago”
3. Diverge
The final approach here is perhaps the most extreme: putting a team of people together with radically divergent starting points. Why not bring in professionals from different industries to change how marketing departments and agencies work from the inside out? What approach would a group of scientists, architects, graffiti artists, industrial designers or hackers adopt to address a marketing challenge? Grafting their methods & influence into a team will get us to fresher outputs.
As context, it strikes me part of the problem facing marketing is the homogenisation of inputs. It’s often hard to tell the difference in input between team members, particularly when you throw into the mix a client organisation with their own strategists, design directors etc. By all means, let’s collapse departments that no longer require separation, foster hybrid thinkers, but then let’s encourage as much divergent thinking as possible.
This means building some new and different skills into the heart of a team, yes, but it could also mean taking the more extreme approach I describe above.
It’s a major challenge to find examples of our industry doing this well or with any breadth at the moment. When Campaign magazine looked into this in early April this year they reported “the silence was deafening.” There are some, limited examples of management consultants and psychologists being brought into agencies. Wieden & Kennedy London also have WK Side, a 3 month placement scheme for recruits from outside the industry.
Inter-industry mashup is easier to find elsewhere. At the extremes, geneticists experiment by working with artists & designers, poets work alongside astrophysicists. In each case, overcoming scepticism and creating brand new, hybrid outputs that simply would not have been possible if it had not been for the fresh perspectives afforded by the collision of very different points of view.
To end, what could happen if as an industry we don’t do this? Two things spring immediately to mind. One, we deepen the risk of our outputs becoming ever more self-referential & stale. Two, teams increasingly become the victims of Group Think, blithely believing we must be right, because we all agree.
Instead, let’s take every possible step to mashup & mutate our teams and approaches. We would love to know what other people think about this – as always, please comment here and let us know. For now, I leave the final word to Charles Darwin:
“In the long history of humankind…those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”
Nice post. I just finished reading ‘The Ten Faces of Innovation’ by Ideo’s Tom Kelley, and he speaks of how mixing people up and staying away from putting people in silos really helps them come up with their innovative ideas.
I didn’t know about WK Side – that’s very interesting. I wish more agencies did that. From my experience, not having specific work ex related to a role is usually an obstacle to getting it. It’s very frustrating. I hope the number of enlightened agencies starts increasing. It’s a key factor in ensuring that the work produced is not stale and therefore key to their survival.
yep
recombinant creativity mate
ideas are and always have been new combinations
http://farisyakob.typepad.com/blog/2008/11/interesting-a-history-of-recombinant-culture.html
which is why we need renaissance polymath thinking
http://farisyakob.typepad.com/blog/2009/04/springfest-or-renaissance-planners.html
FX
o and i’m a huge fan of xmen and mutation as well – nature’s best route to novelty is, of course, recombinance – and who are we to argue
http://farisyakob.typepad.com/blog/2008/06/and-the-winners-are.html
Thanks for your comments and links Faris. Mel would thank you herself but the excitement of linking through to your work has caused her to go into labour and she’s in hospital as I write having her second child. Ben
Great post.
I was thinking exactly the same thing as Anjali about the ’10 faces’ book, this idea is pretty much at the core of the ‘cross-pollinator’ face.
Incidentally Mel, W+K’s activity in this area has moved on a fair bit, you might want to take a look at http://platform.wk.com/ which was announced this week.
Mike.
I’m a big fan of your option #3, which I call asymmetrical partnerships. It seems though that the only people really willing to adopt this sort of style are people like Faris, who are already wildly creative and bringing a diverse level of thinking.
The trick is getting the ‘traditionalists’ to let go a little and give it a try.
Ditto
Some good comments so far, and very good builds on the main starting point, which is just what we’re after. Thank you. Please keep them coming. Particularly after any experiences of these three different suggestions in practice. We’d like to make this more tangible. Prototypes over PowerPoint. Ben
I absolutely agree — seen from a high level, there is clear benefit to “recombination” (to borrow Faris’s fancy word).
But I’d love to hear your thoughts on how this can/should practically take place in the marketing industry? As you point out, there are currently a dearth of good examples.
At Naked, we like to profess that we hire people from many different backgrounds. And we do. But the majority of us (me included) are still strategic planners with loads of marketing industry experience. As often as not, people from outside the industry just don’t have the appropriate skill set to deliver a nuanced marketing strategy (or whatever the client has hired us to do). We still have to deliver for our clients at the end of the day.
I’d like to propose that perhaps it’s less about our particular backgrounds and more about
1) The business structure in which we work
and
2) The process by which we interact with our colleagues, clients, and other agencies.
We are all interesting people, and we all bring a unique perspective to our jobs. (At least, I hope we do!) So maybe it’s just about making sure the triggers are built into how we work, making sure that we unlock that interestingness and bring it into our work?
What do you think?
p.s. Congratulations on the birth of your second kid, Mel!
[...] http://bbh-labs.com/marketing-mashup [...]
Mel,
Excellent post. I couldn’t agree more with the pressing necessity for cross-pollinated thinking – not just in marketing, but also in the broader context of culture. Because, after all, the marketing industry is merely the business of getting cultural ideas – products, services, movements, ideologies – to the people who will use them. And, as much as we like to credit our creative output with the industry’s success, in reality it’s is very much contingent upon the richness of the very ideas it purveys.
When I started Brain Pickings a couple of years ago, it was inspired by the belief that in order to improve and strengthen those ideas – be they brands, or artistic endeavors, or scientific research – we, as creators, have to first understand all the little pieces that surround them. Pieces across a multitude of disciplines – science, art, technology, philosophy, politics, psychology, anthropology, whateverology – that somehow converge into a larger context, which in turn helps our original ideas congeal, making them richer, deeper, more impactful.
College president Liz Coleman touched on this in her brilliant TED talk in February, where she stood in bold defense of indiscriminate curiosity and the cross-pollination of ideas. She argued that liberal arts education has mutated into a narrow race for expertise in some concrete field, where students discard all their other, diverse, “liberal” interests in favor of pursuing that one specificity. This, of course, is the antithesis of the Medici Effect, which gave the original conception of liberal arts education – a quest for harnessing human curiosity in its full, most inspired breadth.
Fittingly, some of today’s most culturally successful companies are harnessing this cross-pollination model – hiring both “specialists” from diverse backgrounds and “generalist” with that priceless kind of indiscriminate curiosity. Take Google, for example – we’ve all read about their unorthodox recruiting efforts, hiring anyone from English majors right out of college to neuroscience researchers. As a personal anecdote, one of my closest friends from college – a Psych and French double major – is now one of Google’s top marketing managers, in charge of monetizing their most profitable social media properties.
The moral, of course, is that this approach helps mediate the “Digg effect” of culture – the over-division of content into niches, where the most vocal contributors (the “experts”) regurgitate the same information so that it floats to the top, burying fresh insight from that niche and completely ignoring insight from other niches, building a self-contained reality that only perpetuates itself. The most nimble of cultural agents – companies, publishers, conferences (TED, I’m looking at you) – take steps to prevent this by building this sort of indiscrimnate curiosity into the very DNA of the company, so that it manifests itself in anything from hiring practices to product portfolios.
[...] Smart People / Smart Ideas #170 @melex from @bbhlabs riffs on Marketing Mashups http://bbh-labs.com/marketing-mashup [...]
Update: IPA brought agency people and academics together for a ‘speed dating’ session on areas of mutual interest and potential projects. Exactly what we like to hear. Great stuff. Read all about it in John Willshire’s (@willsh) article in NMA: http://bit.ly/7sMRa
Get involved – email nigel@ipa.co.uk
Makes perfect sense, particularly at a moment of such disruptive change in our mediated experience.
A friend of mine (Giles Phelps) led me to this post and it’s fascinating – embracing as it does (at least to me) the very issues facing the majority of agencies in London.
To me the heart of problem lies with the conservative approach most agencies adopt with almost everything they do. It’s an intrinsic fear of change coupled with a reluctance to ‘rock the boat’ that sees most agencies making hires, delivering strategies, etc, based on a replication of the past. Rather than thinking about what needs to happen and in so doing admitting to clients, each other, that they don’t have all the answers, but that they can unearth them by collaborating more, thinking differently, hiring the consumers that buy their clients products for instance.
We’re a middle class industry, populated with middle class, degree educated, white, urban professionals. Undoubtedly that makes for a limited viewpoint. It clearly doesn’t mean that it’s the right viewpoint though.
Great post – thanks Giles for sharing it with me.
Fascinating post Mel.
I personally think the problem relies on the form. Working in Latin America I’ve seen how the lack of structure and process within most agencies drives an instinctive push for random collaboration. Many times this even goes beyond the building and extend to people from a myriad of areas far from marketing. The end result is what then becomes part of local culture.
Here in the US, my experience has been quite different. An interesting too. I’ve experience how structure limits mash up culture. Agencies spend quite some time building areas of expertise but that, regardless how much they try to avoid it, end up working in silos.
Having cultural agents within an agency (both Specialist and Generalist) in random areas as Maria Popova mentioned on her post, is a must if the goal is to build a culture of indiscriminate curiosity within any company.
[...] 1. Talent needs disparate sources. If talent cannot be taught — if it can be discovered anywhere — then we should broaden our horizons of where we look for talent. Better talent isn’t necessarily the one who have a traditional background, but rather who have been influences by disparate sources. Faris has written about a need for “renaissance” planners and BBH has put out a call to “mash up & mutate our teams and approaches.” [...]
Perhaps what we’re seeing now are the business webs Don Tapscott wrote about in Digital Capital? Where value is created by any means necessary and no longer dictated by organisational relations and boundaries. In an article, Social Life of Routers Stanley Milgram’s original ‘six degrees of separation’ experiment is being used to massively improve the performance of internet routers.
More recently, scientists say their version of Google’s PageRank could be a simple way of working out which extinctions would lead to ecosystem collapse…….Dr Stefano Allesina realised he could apply PageRank to the problem when he stumbled across an article in a journal of applied mathematics describing the Google algorithm.
So the Medici effect is happening around us, its just unevenly spread!
It really helps when you are a noob to affiliate marketing to take an online marketing course to keep from getting quickly overwhelmed.
Reading this is like seeing the light!
I think online partnership is the way forward for a business like mine.
[...] and rebuilding them, is happening well outside the area code of adland. Work with start ups, look at the spaces between industries, beg, borrow or steal a ticket to an event no-one else you know is heading to, examine [...]