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  • Homeless Hotspots: what we’re doing now

    30th April 12

    Posted by Saneel Radia

    Posted in Uncategorized


    As promised in our follow-up post to Homeless Hotspots, we wanted to keep everyone updated on how those learnings- and open conversations- are being applied to try to help fight homelessness at scale.

    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.

    1 Comment

  • Robotify.me – what Labs are making next, and why.

    26th April 12

    Posted by Jeremy Ettinghausen

    Posted in makings

    Author: James Mitchell, Strategist, BBH & BBH Labs

    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…

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  • Our top ten links of the past 7 days: 20 April 2012

    20th April 12

    Posted by Mel Exon

    Posted in BBH Labs

    If you’re a regular reader of the blog, you’ll know that we send out a email to BBH staff with 10 links we’ve liked over the past 7 days. We look for things that are provocative, challenging, useful, or just plain interesting. When we feel really good about the list, we post it to the blog. Here’s this week’s list. Feel free to let us know what we’re missing. The list is strongly influenced by what we tweet and what we put on our Google + page. Here goes:

    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

    Spectacular long read, nonfiction from 2011 – in Byliner: http://bit.ly/J7YQHm

    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

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  • That’s Entertainment: #wywo online films

    19th April 12

    Posted by timnolan

    Posted in BBH Labs, culture, online video


    (click above image to view them all now)

    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.

    2 Comments

  • While You Were Off: an iPhone web app for the connected set

    5th April 12

    Posted by timnolan

    Posted in BBH Labs, coding, mobile

    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

    3 Comments

  • Laughing Together, Weeping Alone

    2nd April 12

    Posted by Jeremy Ettinghausen

    Posted in Insight

    Author: Jim Carroll, Chairman, BBH London


    I was at home watching a film when it happened again. A drying of the throat, a tightening of the vocal cords, the involuntary dab at the side of the eye to discover a bead of moisture forming. Yes, I was crying again.

    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.


    I cry alone
    When no one else can hear me
    When friends come by to cheer me
    I smile and say I feel OK.
    Maxine Brown, I Cry Alone

    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.

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  • A day in the life of BBH

    29th March 12

    Posted by Mel Exon

    Posted in BBH

    Every now and again, we get the chance to stop and draw breath, to reflect a little. Today is BBH’s 30th birthday and, to mark the moment, Nigel Bogle wrote to everyone who works here. It’s a personal perspective on the story of BBH, sure, but in reading it, it struck us this might be something of value beyond these four walls. A celebration of – and provocation to – our industry, not just this agency.

    We hope you enjoy it.
    http://www.vimeo.com/39397525
    Hi Everyone,

    Today BBH is 30 years old. Happy birthday to one and all.

    As this day approached I found myself reflecting on what the last 30 years has taught us about running an advertising agency. We have learned a lot, obviously. Thirty years is a long time. A lot about the importance of attracting and developing  the best people, creating the right environment, having clear beliefs and values. But for me, above all else we have learned one simple thing:

    It’s all about the work. Or, as John puts it: ‘All roads lead to the work.’

    I know this is a blindingly obvious thing to say. An advertising agency’s reason to be is to produce work. But the fact remains that when we singlemindedly put the quality of our work above anything else, then everything else falls into place. And when we say it’s all about the work, we are talking about the relentless pursuit of creative excellence. Game changing creativity that has the power to change the fortunes of brands and businesses. Ideas that break out of the confines of their category and enter popular culture.

    That is not easy to do. It not only requires talent, it requires trust. It is harder in some categories than in others. It requires an environment that inspires trust in the clients who entrust their brand communication to us. That is a responsibility every one of us shares, not just those directly involved in the creation of our product. It is why I have said many times that all of us are involved in the work. The way a client is greeted on entering the building, the efficiency with which we handle their financial affairs, even the quality of a cup of coffee, these things all help to create the environment where we can be the best we can be and our clients will trust us to take the calculated risks we need to take.

    Over the last 30 years we have been more consistent than many of our competitors both here in London and across our network. But on closer inspection you will see that we have had our ups and downs. The quality of our creative work has not always been top drawer by the high standards we judge ourselves against. And, reflecting upon the reasons for that, more often that not it has been because we got distracted. By obsessing about new ways of working, shipping in armies of consultants, (one of my bigger mistakes) too much introspection, coping with growth, dotcom madness, whatever. All well intentioned, but in their pursuit we took our eye off the ball that matters most and our product quality dropped. And then our confidence drops too and that is not good because the thing that you put in the fuel tank of an agency is confidence. And as the doubt creeps in you can start to question your belief.

    BBH was built upon a set of beliefs, many of which others did not believe in. 20 plus years of no creative pitching, a policy  the Financial Times called “suicidal.” The belief that we could build a strong global network that competed with the big boys, with a tiny number of offices. A holding company chief said “not in my lifetime” when I told him years ago that was our vision. He’s still alive.

    We have chosen to zag while the world zigs. We have nailed our colours to our first belief, “The Power of Creativity and the Primacy of the Idea”. It is not easy being BBH. We have chosen a demanding path. A path that relies on confidence and self belief. And  we have learned from those ups and downs that nothing reconfirms belief and builds confidence better than doing great work. Hence the lesson we have learned above all others. It’s all about the work.

    Consider BBH London’s work for The Guardian. (And I could reference many other fine examples of BBH work over the years). A brilliant piece of communication, rooted in a fundamental truth about the brand, created by a team of talented people working with a visionary client. It has spread like wildfire and the concept of open journalism is being talked about from here to Australia. It has become news in its own right and entered popular culture. It is game changing.

    But with all that come other good things. People want to know who created the film. People want to share it. Most people love it. Some hate it. That’s okay. Many of our clients admire it. It increases the interest people have in working at BBH anywhere in the world. It puts a spring in our step. It makes us proud. It makes us confident. It reaffirms our belief in ourselves. It makes the phone ring with calls from prospects wanting to meet us. And, perhaps most importantly, it inspires us to try even harder in all we do to reach for that level of excellence. So many other things fall into place when all we do is focus on the work.

    Thirty years. One simple lesson. Running an advertising agency is a very simple business that on occasions we can make complicated. As long as we remember all roads lead to the work then the next 30 years can be even better than the first 30.

    There is one other very important lesson that John, John and I learned before we started BBH. You cannot create a great agency or do great work without great people, working well together. We have been privileged over the last thirty years to have brilliant people join us all over the world and in many cases build their careers with us. Everything we have achieved as a business is down to all of them and all of you. Thank you to every single one of you for making BBH the very special company it is today.

    All the best.

    Nigel

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  • ’tis the season to be truthy

    27th March 12

    Posted by Jeremy Ettinghausen

    Posted in Uncategorized

    Author: James Mitchell, Strategist, BBH & BBH Labs

    “I don’t trust books. They’re all fact, and no heart.” – Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report

    In 2006, Stephen Colbert promised (parodically) to “not tell the news to you, but feel the news, at you.” He coined the term truthiness, a quality applied to something that has a sense of truth, that is true enough to serve its purpose, without actually being factually accurate. It was just a swipe at lazy newscasting, but Colbert had it right – in modern culture the truths we tell ourselves are the ones that best make us feel something. Advertising has long known that, and has told actual truths about its products, wrapped in representational ‘life truths’ that spin off of it. These are narratives, and all parties in the situation know it. So far, so good.

    In my second BBH interview in 2010, Planning Director Ed Booty asked me, “do you think people have had enough of the real?” The concensus we got to was that people could never have enough of the real, but that media forces have worked to inflate people’s expectations of what the real can deliver. Remember: this was at time when Endemol’s solution to the stagnation of ‘reality show’ Big Brother was to put ever more abrasive and conflicting characters into the mix, and people had begun to call it out as a circus. Since then, the response from entertainment has been a whole string of programmes with a new definition of truth: The Hills, Jersey Shore, Geordie Shore, The Only Way Is Essex. Watching them is like reading The National Enquirer; within their own ecosystem they are true, and they offer the most value when you read them as true. Deep down, you know them to be false, but the spectacle tacitly asks you to suspend that to get some value from them. They are truthy. The old masters of this form, the wrestling (“sports entertainment”) industry have a term for this – kayfabe. Successfully engaging with kayfabe can be a lot of fun.

    img credit: wwe.com
    Note: Not an actual undertaker
    The combination of the extremes of fiction and the rawness of reality have left us wanting the impossible – a fantastical truth. At the same time, ever since Cluetrain we’ve come to realise that our collective ability to dismantle a narrative is potent, and hungry. A tough gig for anyone who wants to tell their truth in the most engaging way possible. Remember when James Frey got ripped into A Million Little Pieces by Oprah? It turns out that parts of his story were just that, a story, and it was unforgivable.

    Even when the cause is ‘just’, the scent of manipulation is hard to deoderise. In the past month, we’ve seen KONY 2012 explode and be exploded – partly from speculation about the company’s finances, partly from questions about the appropriateness of the solutions they offered to the problem, but in equal part from the sheer slickness of the manipulation. It was too glossy for the message it was trying to put across, too much like an episode of MTV’s Made, rather than a call to action. The response to this criticism might be “that’s the format our target audience responds to, so that’s what we have to use,” but the savagery of the counterattack suggests that young people still respond to message as much as medium.

    Then there’s Apple. When public radio show This American Life chose to broadcast an excerpt of monologist Mike Daisey’s show The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs in January, they got their highest-ever ratings in the show’s 17-year history. That’s because Mike’s monologue is the story of his experiences in Chinese tech factories, including Foxconn, one of Apple’s biggest suppliers. Because it describes the working practices that go into making the tech we use even as we consume blogs like this one. The narrative arc and the expertly crafted pathos could only come from a practiced storyteller – and therein came the problem, because Daisey used  a storyteller’s toolbox – deletion, distortion and assumption – to the point where the story just wasn’t true any more. It was a cobbling together of things that happened to Daisey, things that used to happen but don’t any more, things he’d heard about from others but had no proof of, and simple fabrication. And Daisey has been eviscerated by much of his audience. This American Life has never felt so mortally wounded – to the point where Ira Glass and his team produced an entire episode called simply Retraction, and pulled the original from the podcast feeds.

    Where does that leave the practice of marketing? Advertising deals in truthiness because it uses things that didn’t happen to get audiences to think of what could happen, and to feel the ‘truth’ of a brand’s world. And this was Mike Daisey’s defence on This American Life: “this isn’t about me lying to you or anyone else. This is about me doing everything I could to get the media to pay attention… Did I go too far in that effort? Maybe. That’s for others to judge.” The truth didn’t quite cut it, so he used made up facts in order to get to what he thought was a higher truth – the story of labour practice in other countries. And to be fair, it worked well enough to enchant the audiences on his tour, the normally journalistically rigorous This American Life, and everyone that listened to it – including the New York Times.

    But what these events teach us is the care we must use when we wield the power of story. That when you have an audience that wants life to be larger than life, they should know where and when the enlargements and the brightening of the colours is occurring. There have been calls for cosmetic adverts to have an “airbrushing watermark”. We don’t need to go that far for story: rather, we just have to watch where we’re putting the truthiness. We have to map the zones in the media space where absolute truth is expected – yes, spaces like facebook and twitter – and treat people with what they deserve there.

    But the biggest lesson of all lies further upstream. As marketers for brands, we’re usually telling stories about ourselves. So if we want to tell any story we can – all we have to do is make those facts be true by causing them to happen. If you’re Starbucks, don’t just talk about how friendly you are – get your employees to write customers’ names on their takeaway lattes. If you’re Johnnie Walker, don’t just talk about progress – put a real investment into the Keep Walking Project, and make progress happen.

    The people have spoken, and they’re not satisfied with truthiness. They don’t just want brands to tell them stories. They want brands to take part in the rewriting of reality, so that the stories they tell each other can be that much more amazing.

    9 Comments

  • Homeless Hotspots: Where We Go From Here

    26th March 12

    Posted by Saneel Radia

    Posted in sxsw

    When we started planning for SXSW, we could not have anticipated that our idea for a four-day philanthropic project to update the street newspaper model would spark such a widespread debate.  The volume of the response to this program has reinforced our ongoing commitment to this issue, and the feedback has helped us explore the ways in which we can draw attention to it, support it, and effect change.

    Homeless Hotspots has connected us with representatives of some of the nation’s leading advocacy groups and street newspaper organizations with whom we are beginning to have conversations about the challenges facing the current street newspaper model and ideas for overcoming these challenges with technology and innovation.  In many ways, we owe these connections and the future of this program to those at front lines of this issue, like Mitchell Gibbs at Front Steps in Austin, Mark Horvath of invisiblepeople.tv, and writer Becky Blanton who spoke at TED about her time being homeless.

    Where we go from here is directly tied to how we wrestle with some complicated issues that any street newspaper attempting to deploy change will have to answer for themselves – issues we’ve come to sharply appreciate amidst all the debate. Our aim is to partner closely with these groups to utilize the lessons and best practices learned from this experience. Based on conversations to date, our shared goal is a sustainable model that continues to bring homeless people entrepreneurial opportunities that challenge stereotypes, derive purpose and create meaningful interactions with society.

    While street newspapers are facing the same challenges as many other traditional media outlets, there are a number of more complicated issues that need to be addressed.  We’ve outlined the salient ones below.

    1. Quantifying an acceptable level of provocation in the name of the cause. One of the big discussion points from Homeless Hotspots was the line “I’m a hotspot” on the t-shirts, a line we too debated internally before and during the program.  The goal of the t-shirt was to create a marketing material that was provocative enough to get message-bombarded festival attendees to actually stop and speak with a homeless person – to spark a human connection and a conversation with a person who is often treated as invisible.  Thus, the humanity of the project lived in the actual conversation between the Hotspot Manager and their customer. But what about the potentially negative reaction to that message by some that didn’t stop (or who simply weighed in from afar via the web)? It was many in this group that created a wave of negative sentiment online. While the participants in the program saw the shirts as an ideal social lubricant on the streets, the message took on new meaning when it spread online.

    Any entrepreneurial sales venture for the homeless must be carefully designed.  The newspaper organization basically works like a franchisor responsible for distributing materials to franchisees, but it must also work like a social service. This balance varies widely from organization to organization and is a complicated role for social enterprise. You want to help homeless participants (i.e., the franchisees), but you don’t want to do so at the expense of the cause itself.

    2. Understanding the potential for partnership with a profit-driven company or brand. Because BBH is in the business of marketing and advertising, it was assumed early on that Homeless Hotspots was endorsed by a marketer. We fully funded the initiative and purchased the pocket-sized MiFi devices from Verizon just as any customer would, yet the reaction to the false reports of brand endorsement is an important one to explore.  Many found the idea that a brand would employ homeless individuals to be offensive, while others said they’d support a brand initiative if it provided an employment opportunity. Of course, when people realized the partner was actually a local homeless shelter and that proceeds went directly to the individual Hotspot Manager, the sentiment was widely positive.

    Before SXSW, we talked about how the long-term viability of a program like Homeless Hotspots would require bringing on a partner that could help financially support it. The costs of the technology and data usage for a program of this nature are significant, making the model difficult to scale beyond a short festival.  A brand partner would have the resources to underwrite the costs of an ongoing effort, incentivized by the promotion of its technology; meanwhile, a social enterprise would have stronger public endorsement, but would be challenged to fund such a venture. The potential problem we saw was that when a social enterprise brings on a corporate partner, perceptions change. Emotionally, the social enterprise simply becomes enterprise for some. For others, the opposite is true.  Street newspapers and homeless entrepreneurial efforts looking to share costs will have to decide where they fall on that spectrum and choose any partners wisely.

    3. Determining the importance of content creation by participants. Where Homeless Hotspots differed most from an actual street paper is that the participants were not selling content they created (although it’s commonly misunderstood just how few of the homeless individuals that sell the papers actually create the content). Serving original content to a user upon log-in to a MiFi device is surprisingly complicated if you don’t manufacture the device yourself (thus we directed users to homelesshotspots.org for further information upon activating a connection).

    There is an opportunity to create a more content-rich model for street newspapers and homeless entrepreneurs moving forward, especially as it relates to drawing attention to the causes of homelessness and prevailing stereotypes.  For example, Hotspot Manager Jonathan is a talented musician, and there could be an opportunity to use the personal and web connectivity to draw attention to his talent, such as directing customers to a site promoting his music.  The Hotspot Managers were also full of local expertise that could add more value to their conversations and connections (John Bird sees this as the future of street newspapers, which he invented when he founded The Big Issue). The absence of such content leaves a void.

    The question remains whether or not consumers of the product value that content though. Looking at our own data (difficult to extrapolate from due to the extraordinarily large number of media impressions Homeless Hotspots received, which led to a disproportionate number of donations from non-users), it’s unclear how much the utility of the service vs. philanthropic impulse drove purchase. This is hard to come to terms with if you are a commercial enterprise. How can a business be a degree removed from its product? That sounds potentially negative, but we’ve left with mixed opinions on the matter. After all, the Hotspot Managers were still able to raise almost $4,000, even though the first 2 days of sales were extremely depressed by rain. If purchases were only about actual connectivity, the rain would have made Homeless Hotspots a financial failure for the participants.

    What’s important is that the model moving forward must balance entrepreneurial opportunity, with supporting meaningful content and fostering personal interactions.  Our data implies it was hearing an individual’s story (many times not even first-hand) that led to someone donating. This particular phenomenon in Underheard in NY already got us to rethink non-profits last year, and it’s especially important for social enterprise. Non-profits fighting homelessness don’t just want to help homeless populations, they want to stop homelessness altogether.  But in many cases, customers of street newspapers seem solely focused on helping the individual in front of them. In a world where a homeless person sells a product without content, the one-on-one social interactions are their only opportunities for expression. Luckily, those conversations help overcome stereotypes (the 13 Homeless Hotspots participants had hundreds of conversations in just four days), but only if someone is provoked to stop and listen. Which brings us right back to issue #1.

    We’ll keep everyone updated once we’ve identified which partner(s) we’ll be working with in future developments. We’re genuinely excited by the amount of interest from street papers around the world to collaborate on addressing the digitization of media. In the meantime, we can only hope the conversation around homelessness doesn’t step back into the darkness as the media circus winds down. You can certainly do your part by supporting organizations like our partner Front Steps. Even small donations can go a long way in helping them overcome their daily challenges long after conference attendees have left.

    UPDATE (April 30, 2012): We are working with StreetWise, the largest street paper in the US deal with numerous modernization issues, including many of those outlined above. For more details, you can read the follow-up post.

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  • Dreams from the land of Geektopia

    23rd March 12

    Posted by Jeremy Ettinghausen

    Posted in sxsw

    or

    How I went to Austin expecting to learn about browsers and came back wanting to change the world.

    Author: Agathe Guerrier, Strategy Director, BBH & BBH Labs


    I went to SXSW for the first time this year, with the firm intention to learn about UX, data visualization trends, and new, exciting browser features. As I landed in Austin, I couldn’t wait to find out more about the native vs. web-based apps debate.

    In reality, although clearly there WAS a lot of talk of browsers and coding languages and apps, I  found myself confronted with a much more fundamental subject: that of meaning and purpose. More than acquire new knowledge, I was filled with new enthusiasm (and a little bit of concern) about the task that lies at hand – basically, redefining the rules of our economic, political and societal framework. Rethinking the world. Yup. Something that we need (the creative and tech community) need to take part in for two reasons: because the last 10 years have demonstrated the need for a new paradigm, and because the growing importance of technology in our world, means it now intersects significantly with world views, beliefs, and ethics.

    Take the “Skynet vs. Mad Max: Battle for the Future” dual session (by our very own Mel and Jeremy). It drew a parallel between the small, apparently benign technology choices we make today as consumers, and the future of the human species. Who imagined that buying an iPhone represented a leap towards a world where individual identity would be reduced to one login, one identity, one self, the scary simplicity of this system ultimately leading to totalitarianism? It’s removed, but not far-fetched.

    Tim O’Reilly, in his fantastic “Create More Value than you Capture” discussion with Andrew Mcafee, made a powerful case for embedding social good and genuine value(s) in all businesses. He pointed to a brilliantly obvious truth: it’s enthusiasm and passion that fuel creativity, not greed. For the sake of the social equilibrium that it depends upon, the objective of a business can not simply be profit, it has to create value for society at large, as well as for itself.

    Ben Silbermann (CEO and co-founder of Pinterest) took part in a Q&A session with Christopher Dixon and kept surprising us with disarmingly candid answers to “hard-nosed” questions. When asked what product feature he was most excited about developing, he answered it was his team, because “your team should be the most interesting product you’re building”. A few minutes later, brushing away a question about whether he was concerned by the various attempts to copy or rip off Pinterest, he explained that their effort went into improving the product and making it the best it could be, not preventing others to imitate it. In his eyes, success comes from putting all your efforts into making your product and experience brilliant, and if others copy you, it probably means you’ve got it right.

    And finally, against a backdrop of high risk, economic worries and general breakdown, I was surprised at how optimistically confused Bruce Sterling’s Ultimate talk left us all.  He forecasted a move away from the chaotic “internet” and towards vertical stacks or platforms like Google, Amazon, or Facebook (more organized, less messy – an echo to the Skynet vs. Mad Max talk and its crowd-sourced prediction of Skynet’s victory)… but also the ulterior demise of stacks.

    He didn’t say what they would be replaced with, but this legendary cynic seemed pretty optimistic about the ability of the interactive community to make sense of the “augmented, ubiquitous, post-stack future”.

    In building this uncertain “new world”, we might find inspiration in community-based, generous value creation models like Kickstarter, Airbnb, or Task Rabbit (which were unanimously praised as the most inspirational things to have happened in the last 5 years).

    But there is still a lot of work at hand, especially for our industry, in translating the inspiration from Geektopia  into actionable ethics for the world of brands…

    In the spirit of starting small, here are three things I’m going to start or do more of:

    1. 1. Get rid of any obsession with single-mindedness, and make sure to respect people’s intelligence by recognizing that “There is not one You”, as Christopher Poole pointed out
    2. 2. Broaden the definition  of “Business objective” to entail the creation of value and values for consumers and society at large, not just profit for the company
    3. 3. Behave more generously everyday, by building great teams and empowering them to create and make even greater things

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