Some things that matter to me

Filed under: advertising

What a rock album can remind us about biz innovation

U2-doc-from-the-sky-down

I watched Davis Guggenheim's new U2 documentary, From the Sky Down, last night on Showtime. Guggenheim brings the band back to Berlin's Hansa Studio where they recorded "Achtung Baby" twenty years ago. They re-imagine and perform some of the songs, talk about the making of the album, and play and react to early demo recordings. In between, Guggenheim weaves in archival footage and animation to help establish and drive the narrative. The production value is strong, and it's an entertaining look inside the band and the making of a tremendous rock record.

But more than being an entertaining rock documentary, it's also a profile in smart business and brand leadership. Going into the 90s, the band's popularity was on the downslide. They had in many ways lost their way. Instead of trying to recreate what they had done before and just trying to make it a little better, they decided on radical change and musical experimentation. Then they worked their assess off. And they kept pushing until the new sound and clothes fit. In essence they laid out a roadmap for creative innovation.

The most transformative and exciting brands today aren't afraid of radical change and experimentation. They hit it head on every single day. It's a core part of the company DNA for brands like Facebook, Google, Netflix, Rovio, and Starbucks, to name a few. They hack their way into long term plans. They tinker and experiment. They get products to market fast, listen, react, adjust, and experiment some more.

For a lot of people this is not a new business leadership insight. But the marketing world is still largely behind. Marketers wants innovation. But they also want campaigns. There's nothing wrong with a smart and strategic marketing campaign. They work. But if we want to get to meaningful innovation we need to look at what we do differently and need to redefine the marketing fundamentals. Consistent and prolific creative experimentation has to become key deliverable. You just don't get to the big new sound without it.

A producer's definition of crowdsourcing

Ateam

I’ve spent most of my career working as a producer, breaking ideas down to their core, figuring out what they are, and how they should work.

Over the past year, I’ve read and heard a lot of talk about crowdsourcing, and it’s mostly questions about what it means for the soul and future of our industry. What I haven’t heard a lot about is what it actually means. Blame it on a good buzz word, but everyone seems to be caught up in the effect rather than the what. As a producer it’s hard for me to skip the what.

When you break crowdsourcing down to its essence, it takes on a relatively familiar shape. It’s Web 2.0 + freelance, or more specifically, aggregated, online freelance. The only thing that’s new about this idea are the websites and tools that filter and bring the communities together, though a site like TopCoder has been around since 2001.

Crowdsourcing sites make it easier for small businesses, brands, and agencies, to access and activate freelance communities, at lower cost, and that’s a very cool and powerful thing, but even great tools don’t remove the baggage that comes with having to lead and manage a freelance and virtual workforce.

The best things we’ve done since I’ve been at CP+B, particularly in the digital space, have been a result of co-located and cross-disciplinary teams working together. But even the successes have come with challenges, and it can be hard getting people to work together well even when they sit next to each other in the same building. When you add physical distance, different time zones, tight timelines, and a lack of shared work culture and goals, it gets a whole lot more difficult to do effective, press worthy work. It’s not impossible, but it takes more time, and in the marketing world, that’s not something we have a lot of.

Crowdsourcing has a future. There’s no doubt about that. It’s a smart way to open up the ideation and design process, as well as empower consumers to take a more active role in your marketing efforts. But as good as the Web collaboration tools are today, the toughest creative problems, more often than not, get solved faster and more efficiently by teams sitting and working together.

For that reason, we’ll continue to experiment with and incorporate the latest and greatest collaboration and social media tools into our work, but as far as our business model goes, the premium, for the foreseeable future, will be placed on creating an evolving work environment and process that enables better teamwork. Original A-team style.

That’s how we get results. And that’s what our clients are paying for.
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