lead/marke | ralf schwartz

lead/marke NET: Helge Tenno > Future Media - No More Middle Men

(lead/marke NET proudly features Helge's inspiring posts on a regular basis.)

A presentation on the future opportunities in media, turning threats into insights into opportunities.

The presentation future media – no more middle men, is an accumulation of a range of relevant thoughts from this blog, put into system.

It’s built as a master slide set (to pick and sort from), but I tried to add some structure to it by identifying six major “forces” affecting media, and then a short final chapter summarizing a suggested future mindset.

I’ve also chosen to ad a lot of the explanatory text – not just the headlines – into the slides this time, hopefully this will create more context for the people reading the thing online.

Find individual slides available for download under a CC license on my flickr account everything new is dangerous.

Find the presentation below, or on my slideshare account slideshare.net/helgetenno.

Helge works as a Planner for SDG, helping brands and organizations discover WHY they are valuable in consumers lives, and HOW they can create deliberate value on the arenas and inside the interfaces where they connect with them. (twitter: @congbo)

Congratulations, tumblr! Great Success!

"Has it been three years already?! February was a month of big milestones for us, possibly the most exciting of which was that you guys viewed Tumblr more than a BILLION times. That’s 36 million times a day, 25,000 times a minute, and more than 400 times a second! To say thank you, we have some beautiful, free, and awesome features we’ll be pushing this week. And follow us on Twitter for some special news. Thank you!!"

Via Jacob Bijani, tumblr's creative director.

A little bit more about tumblr: "Tumblr Hits Major Milestones, Plans to Start Generating Revenue" at mashable. Or just have a look at my tumblr page: "this message is too wide to fit your screen".

For me tumblr is playful publishing without the hassle of blogging. It's art, design, fashion, people, celebrities, wisdom, fun, comics, videos, and mangas, all last decades, and the early warning on trends and topics of public and popular concern.

It is the best part of participation, sharing, communication (mostly without words), free speech, transparency, and tolerance. It is the future of blogging.

Take away:

tumblr is the best proof that most brands do not really matter. Brands in general are almost irrelevant in tumblr, or in the minds of these independent and impatient individualists there. Most brands do not compute, they do not communicate, and they do not amaze.

Brands will have to think about that situation. If they want to be part of the youth's lifes, they must become part of the youth's world, needs, and wants. Youth today has other ideals than the classic brand.

Business Innovation: "The disruptive power of the mobile knows no end"

"The march of the mobile goes on and on but it is now taking off in a new direction with goodness knows what consequences.

Until recently, the mobile phone's distinguishing feature was its ability to gobble up competing products in a way that no other consumer product ever has. I used to keep a tally of all the products that could have been sold separately but which have been cannibalised by the mobile: cameras, calculators, books, video cameras, music players, satellite navigation and so on.

When the list reached 60, I gave up, because the arrival of the iPhone and iPod Touch made the list of extra products grow exponentially." (Victor Keegan)

Read Victor's great Guardian article "Mobiles move from cannibal to creator".

Forget everything you thought and heard about mobile phones and apps and stuff. This article gives you a realistic idea where phones - becoming smarter and smarter - are truly heading.

Understand the consequences for your product and add answers and solutions to your yearly strategy meetings (you are dead already), your continuously rolling micro-strategy-process (you may survive successfully) developing Informal Markets to stay ahead of consumers' new independence, individuality, and impatience.

lead/marke NET: Tom Fishburne > The Ivory Tower

(lead/marke NET proudly features Tom's inspiring blog posts on a regular basis.)

Last week I traveled to snowy Toronto with a sales director. Over two days, we saw more than 30 Canadian stores and talked with dozens of consumers, retail buyers, store managers, and shelf stockers. It reminded me that I need to get out of the office a lot more often.

It’s easy to think of marketing as what happens in the head office: the PowerPoint presentations, the slick ad boards, the debates in meetings. But brand meaning is created by consumers, not by marketers. Consumers interact with brands in the midst of their busy, chaotic lives, not in the artificial, carefully scripted way we imagine in brand onions and positioning statements.

It doesn’t matter how our brand resonates in a 30-slide PowerPoint deck with crisp graphics. It matters how it resonates in a crowded shelf of a dimly lit pharmacy to a time-pressed mother of four.

I remember something I learned as an intern on Cheerios from Ann Simonds who headed up our cereal business at the time. She told our New York based creative director, “I don’t care how you think Cheerios plays in Soho. I care how it plays in Peoria”. And she got the creative team on a plane.

It’s easy in business to get trapped in the ivory tower, detached from the actual consumers who buy our products. But you’ll learn a lot more away from your desk than at it. No matter how much Nielsen data you have.

Tom, when not cartooning (eg. for Marketing Week), is method's international managing director. Based in London, he frequently speaks at campuses, companies, and conferences about marketing, cartooning, and how to spread business ideas. (twitter: @tomfishburne)

Brand Engagement / Communication Agility: "The Social Media Cheat Sheet"

Click the image for a slightly bigger version. Via thenextweb.com.

Brand Engagement: Growing Your Community Organically

Fine, small case study showing the power of tiny steps towards a bigger goal: "Wacom Tablets: Community Included".

"Simply by listening, getting to know their community members, and enouraging them to spread their wings, Wacom and eROI have built a strong brand-consumer connection. Due to the success of the community they can now move forward, with a large group of loyal brand evangelists. What more could they want?"

Changing the Game: "Rethink the C-Suite"

Frogdesign's Adam Richardson calling to "Rethink the C-suite":

"The tidy C-suite club of old just doesn't cut it in today's messy, disruptive, complex world."

Rethinking the organization's top level is a logical consequence of the new independence, individuality, and impatience of consumers all around the globe. Because:

Slide taken from leadmarke.de

Game-changing thinking needs rule breaking, new thinking, new players!

Adam describes his new C-suite candidates:
- Chief Innovation Officer
- Chief Customer Officer
- Chief Meaning Officer
- Chief Culture Officer
- Chief Experience Officer
- Chief Sustainability Officer
- Chief Convergence Officer
- Chief Divergence Officer

Have a look at "It's Time to Rethink the C-Suite".

Engagement: "Consumers have moved on"

"The world has moved on. I think consumers have moved on, and we need to get past [TV spots] to figure out what the next way of talking to consumers will be."
(Unilever's vp personal care Kathy O'Brien)

Good to - finally - hear that. It makes even more sense, if you read this: "Google: ads with click-to-call options got 5-30 percent increases in response rates". Try this on your tv screen!
Think about the implications for your advertising and communication future!

Change the Game: Overcome Creative Block

Especially when you try to break the rules of your business, ie. search for new horizons, venture into unknown lands, you will need clarity, context, and wisdom on your side. You do not need a creative block! You will need to forget about your daily business, and be able to transcend your given markets.

In difficult situations I often recommend a 'waldspaziergang', German for 'a walk in the forest'. Fresh air, new olfactory and visual stimuli, no phone, no mail, no other distractions. And a wonderful analogy to 'see the wood for the trees' again!

Scott Hansen - confronted with a creative block - asked 25 of "today’s most exciting artists and creators" on how to overcome a creative block. Please find their answers after the click. Maybe some of them work for you, too.

Courtesy Scott Hansen - via Paul Isakson.