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Will Technology Creation enter its own Age of Abundance?
The proliferation of computer software and the internet has brought many powerful tools to the masses.
From desktop publishing to cheap and powerful design tools, from affordable HD cameras to global publishing platforms such as blogs and YouTube, and self-publishing and self-marketing platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, technology has given power to the amateur and the semi-professional — the power to create media and content that can been seen by millions of people, quickly, cheaply, whenever and wherever.
This is the Age of Abundance. People love it. Now, anyone can create fan sites, parodies, anti-adverts and dissenting PR for their favorite/most-hated brands that are seen by millions. It creates challenges and opportunities for the worlds of marketing and advertising.
John Winsor, for example, created Victor & Spoils to build on crowd-sourcing principles. Victor & Spoils aims to tap into a broader client talent base than can be maintained within a single company and, notably, to co-create with consumers as well as with other creators. It is using this abundance to create a more diverse base of creativity.
At the same time, this technology shift has created a new opportunity to add value in a networked age. Call this ‘Ideas that do‘ or ‘marketing with meaning‘, advertising as a service, brand utility or one of any number of other terms, it involves leveraging networks in order to target specific users or customers. A large part will be technology creation, not just web platforms and iPad applications but networked FMCG products and internet-enabled real world devices.
In the past the advertising industry was able to create long-lasting cultural impact through Big Ideas and broadcast media but now the major effects on our culture, especially the ever-increasing network culture, are caused by innovations in technology and software platforms. To offer these same effects in the future we must look to Technology Creation.
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“Sometimes you have to destroy something you love”
That’s one of the many stirring quotables from a blog post published last week at John Winsor’s blog.
John is the CEO of Victors and Spoils, the new model (ad) agency that’s applying crowdsourcing models to creativity.
The piece is really quite inspiring, drawing a distinction between the great people and creativity you find in advertising, and the business of that business “which really sucks”.
In the post, John discusses the impact of abundance on the advertising industry. It’s a big theme that we saw Clay Shirky applying to the broad sweep of human history and nature at SXSW this year. In this context, both John Winsor and his guest and recent investor Jon Bond chew over the way the ad industry mistakes abundance for over-supply and commoditisation of their business models. This reminds me of another nugget from the Shirky keynote, which was actually the most re-tweeted line from it:
“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”
Both men lament the fact that structures, complexity and fear are blinding agencies to opportunities, but I have to say that neither is holding out a quick panacea – or any kind of panacea – to the legacy players. I don’t think they believe that it’s possible to change things gently and piece-by-piece without really radical renewal, by which I mean epic-scale, biblical, creative destruction. It’s not about tinkering about at the edges any longer. This paragraph nails it:
I love ad people and the ideas part of the business. It’s the “business” of the business that really sucks and brings down the rest of it. Sometimes you have to destroy something you love in order to rebuild it again, and that is what the new models, like Victors & Spoils, will do. There will be pain. But there is no alternative to the slow, painful death that has been eating away at the soul of the business for the past 15 years.
That’s my highlighting – but it can’t make for very happy reading if you run a big holding company, unless of course you don’t believe the hype and think things will sort themselves out just like they always have. I think that’s ignoring the bigger picture. I know it’s hard to imagine chaps, but what’s happening is somewhat bigger than the ad industry.
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Propagation Planning
Over the last year or so, one of the kinds of planning that I’ve been hearing more and more of is propagation planning. Propagation planning is planning that reaches a tier of people beyond those your agency directly connects with through its work, by providing a core group of people with material they find useful enough to spread on their own.
In the words of Griffin Farley, Strategy Director at BBH New York, “planning not for the people you reach, but the people that they reach, by giving them assets to propagate.”
Propagation planning has assumed increased importance lately because it puts influencers in the limelight, as opposed to assuming they are just another cog in the generic PR wheel, which encompasses multiple traditional offline PR elements as well as digital ones.
Word-of-mouth initiated by influencers is key to the success of any campaign or project, and propagation planning makes the spread of word-of-mouth a more researched exercise. I’d like to clarify two things here: one, that by word-of-mouth I don’t mean merely blogger outreach, which a lot of social media agencies do, and two, that by ‘influencers’ I don’t necessarily mean people who are big in the social media world – I mean people who are passionate, knowledgeable and who occupy positions of influence within niche communities. These communities will need to be selected according to the nature of your campaign (tech people, parents, artists, writers, movie fanatics and so on), and the strategy shouldn’t take a ‘one size fits all’ approach.
At Made by Many, we’ve made propagation planning a larger part of our work over the recent past. As I searched for relevant information about this discipline, I realised that there just wasn’t enough, and that what existed was dispersed across a number of places. Taking matters into my own hands, I decided to set up a wiki to document all these pieces of content, and Griffin kindly agreed to be a key part of it.
You can find the wiki here. Don’t forget to check out the sidebar with its different categories (including useful files and Slideshare presentations from Griffin). Comments, suggestions on information that should be included, and discussions about propagation planning itself are welcome here. I’ve kicked the first one off: how is propagation planning different from engagement planning and connections planning?
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The Kingdom of Awesome
We were milling about at @LenKendall’s @the3six5 meetup at The Ginger Man here at SXSW last night when Greg Christman, aka @reelspit, came over to say hello. Greg had recently taken part in a creative workshop we held at BBH NY to generate ideas and test thinking for the next phase of Metrotwin, a site we created and run for British Airways. What a dude.
The place was packed with South By’s itinerant freak scene of start-up makers, innovators, journos, digital and new model advertising folk. I was hanging out with Utku from Mint Digital and, in jest, we discussed how awesome it would be if this group could be a country or city-state. This prompted Greg to whoop loudly that we should call it the Kingdom of Awesome and design our own awesomeness flag, and run the whole place using Foursquare. As an aside, I’ve heard a few people recently suggest that the word “awesome” is over. My friends, you misunderstand the meaning of awesome if that’s what you think – but that’s another blog post.
The idea of a Kingdom, Republic or Nation of Awesomeness – depending on your political persuasion – is funny (especially after quantities of booze on a warm evening), but it reminded me of a tweet I’d seen earlier in the day from Jeff Jarvis:

I don’t want to get carried with all this but I think The Kingdom of Awesome is real – real in an allegorical, Utopia sense: a metaphorical ‘State’ of hive-mind.
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A call to arms. Make way for ‘the builders’.
Rishad Tobaccowala’s blog post at Reinventing, and his speech at the American Association of Ad Agencies Transformation conference, are both incredibly exciting.
With both, he calls for renewal and appeals to the ad industry to save itself by hiring in top tier talent to build a new world, specifically:
“This is the time to build. The talent we most need are builders, sculptors, painters. Folks who create and not just manage.”
And what should we be building?




