Digital Integration of Media, Advertising, Gaming, and Philanthropy

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Volume 2, Issue 27

Sharing with you our contribution to the Wharton Advertising 2020 Project

Today a new company, Thinaire, is placing low-cost links to digital content in physical objects such as shelf-talkers and magazines. People can just tap their mobile phone to the object and the content appears on their screen and can be shared in the usual ways — plus by tapping a friend’s phone whereupon the content leaps phone to phone. This is only one small part of the continuing evolution of all (including in-store) media into digital media. All print media, to the extent that they continue to involve printed copies, will utilize links like Thinaire’s to become woven seamlessly into the one digital mediasphere that is forming. Radio is migrating into digital, and cellphone+stereo earpods will be the next stage both by radio receivers in phones and by all-digital stations springing up, led by Pandora.

The advertising industry is gradually becoming aware that sponsorship of good content (including fun/social games) and of good causes has far greater power to win hearts and minds than interruptive pitch/offer messages no matter how clever. In his book Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at The World’s Greatest Companies, Jim Stengel, former global marketing officer of Procter & Gamble, says “If you’re willing to align your business with a fundamental human ideal, you too can achieve extraordinary growth.” In his study of 50,000 brands, Jim found that those who grew the fastest 2000-2010 — on average three times faster than the overall group — had one thing in common. They were explicitly linked in people’s minds with fundamental human values such as joy, connection to other people, adventurousness, pride, and the desire to improve society (see the excellent issue of strategy + business published by Booz & Company, Autumn 2012, page 81). To yours truly, who has been saying similar things to advertisers and agencies since 1976, this is the most important insight of business and marketing in the last 100 years now that Jim has brilliantly put a sharp point on it. The brands that are winning are the idealists who bind themselves to enduring human values. Advertising would do well to “get” this learning and apply it in a sweeping redefinition of what advertising is. In this scenario we assume the industry will “get it”.

The Upside Future Scenario for Advertising

Today Cause Marketing is still only a billion-dollar slice of the advertising pie but in the future, with the precise media/creative ROI measurement now available, things that work will quickly balloon to the level justified by their economic efficacy. As Bob DeSena says, you can’t optimize it until you measure it. And once you measure something, it is highly likely that soon after that, the measurements will start to show improvements. CMOs and bright agencies will devise mixtures of Cause, Game, and Social aspects to make advertising and even promotion far more intriguing, fun, and self-satisfying for media audiences.

New forms of web-based testing, brain and psychographic research will develop that will help us understand how people tick so much better than today, equipping creatives with powerful insights to help shape effective messages. Sophistication and creativity will merge into advertising that is not only rational, emotive, perceptual and intuitive but also appeals to whole human beings instead of to one small layer of their most mundane purchasing interests. Share of ROI Uplift will become a way that media and agencies are compensated, with trusted third-party research companies led by the ARF, ANA and 4As ensuring that the ROI report cards are scientific and objective. The media business will become more fun for all with fewer doomsday scenarios and a never-ending game of day-to-day surprises enabled by technology and human ingenuity. Resistance to advertising, which had always been futile, will now also become nearly extinct due to the enjoyability of the new formats.  

What should we do NOW to achieve it

Probably the best organization to make this scenario come true is the Ad Council. This estimable organization is in touch with the Philanthropy “industry” (an oxymoron since they are all by definition nonprofits) and is always discoursing with them about advertising as a force for social good. Upping their game, they would bring in companies who have the ability to read sales effects of advertising, and would engage the cable industry to use cable zones for A/B testing of equal allocations of media dollars to BAU (Business As Usual) vs. new formulations of crossmedia Cause marketing gamified and made into Social media. Besides the Ad Council, there are heroes amongst us who are recruiting celebrities to help power creative innovation to serve social needs — people such as Bill Rouhana, Ed Martin, James Colmenares, and Rabbi Irwin Katsof, to name only a few of the veritable Army of Light that is self-forming around us in response to historical necessity.

The true investment required would be media costs — which are low in cable zones — and creative costs, which would be the major part in this case. The advertisers willing to lead this charge would be those who agree with Jim Stengel’s analysis of what makes companies successful today: caring about social good — which Jim has analyzed in relation to financial data to prove his case conclusively. Stengel’s article has not been widely quoted yet but is actually the shot heard round the world for the future of the advertising business. When Jim’s findings have been doubly verified by extensive A/B testing across many product categories, the seismic shift toward tying one’s messages to the larger concerns of humanity will be fully underway.

Best to all,

Bill

Mr. P was given six months to live

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Volume 2, Issue 27

When he heard this, his mind immediately accelerated. In the space of a breath before saying anything to the doctor, he experienced:

  1. A seemingly irrelevant thought about his rival at work;
     
  2. Realization that he no longer cared a whit about that rivalry, in light of his new fate;
     
  3. Insight that the rivalry was always at least equally his own fault for placing too much ego-driven emphasis on petty things;
     
  4. Insight that he did not want to be petty, and yet had let himself be petty at least several times daily over such concerns as rivalries, feuds, fears, envies, saving face, and the panoply of vanities;
     
  5. Realization that it was this new perspective on Time that had geared up his inner concentration to a level he had never experienced before, which instantly made ego things easily dispensed with.

The good news was that he would be strong right up until the last few weeks. That meant he could accomplish whatever he had always wanted to do in the last months of his life, or, as he laughed wryly to himself, “Die tryin’.”

He was alone in his car driving back from the doctor. He marveled at how fast and clearly his mind seemed to be working. So many trivial things that seemed important before had dropped away without an argument. His mind was sharply focused on his highest priorities. Realizing this, he thanked the Upper Light for doing it this way to him. He had lived a fun life up to now and if it was his time to be taken, he felt strongly there would be an afterlife and life eternal. He flashed on how seeing the way he faced death would help his family and those who knew him to open their minds about death.

He saw that it would not be compassionate to spend his last days doing a bucket list, or anything selfish like that. What should he do — what did he want to do — with his last days?

What he wound up doing was having a lot of one-on-one conversations and fun parties. The conversations would be the last so they never devolved into trivia. He said what he had always wanted to say to that person. After the tears, his family listened without boredom, first out of respect and then out of love and finally because they were getting good ideas for themselves from what he was saying, despite his occasional ramblings, from which he always brought himself back.

He envisioned the ways his industry could evolve in positive directions in the years ahead and he gave unsolicited advice to many of the leaders in the field. If it all came out the way he saw it, there would be more counterspecialization across competing companies in a major sector, which would lead to a consolidation of complementary entities later on.

He took up painting again and did other things compassionate to himself. When his wife found him and saw that he had passed away, he was sitting up, his eyes open, and a smile on his face as if seeing something awesome.

Best to all,

Bill 

Set Yourself Up To Cultivate “Aha!” Moments

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Being a creative being you are constantly having “Aha!” moments. In the Acceleritis cloud, however, like everyone else you may rarely notice your own “Aha!” moments.

These insights often go by unnoticed simply because they are obvious to you and you have heard them before. However, your subconscious continues to present them to you because some aspect of the insight has still not been fully realized. There is another layer there your subconscious wants you to get.

Give yourself permission to have “Aha!” moments. Give proper inner recognition to “Aha!” moments. Expect these moments to try to sneak by. Jot down even one-word fragments your mind seems to have some reason to offer you. These may be words and/or they may be images, feelings, or a cluster of all of these in a jumble. What do they mean? What action is indicated?

One test of the relevancy of what seems to be an old idea is, if it is so obvious, have you fully acted on it? If not, what is stopping you?

The day starts with dream wisps fast fading. Assume there is an encoded message that some part of you is communicating to some other part of you. Jot down the content in the fewest words that will bring back the original dream. We call these trigger words because they trigger whole thought-streams and/or other memories encapsulated in the most condensed code-words that capture the essence of the meaning the content has for you.

The shower is another place where ideas seem to come to everyone. Perhaps it is the negative ionization created by the water stream evoking a physical brain process. Develop memory discipline to count the number of ideas you have had in the shower and string together the keywords for those ideas into one funny picture. Have paper or electronics or whatever you use to jot notes close by at all times including right outside the shower and next to the bed and in fact wherever you might happen to be.

Clearing the mind is conducive to getting new ideas. A change of scene helps, especially stepping outside into nature and away from the work you have been doing. A sense of goofing off, not working on anything, just taking a break, a mini-vacation, giving yourself permission to just veg out, deeply enjoying just breathing — this often leads to the highest quality ideas of the day.

As the mind tries to continue what it has been obsessed with, gently cut off any words in midstream. The fewer words the more likely the subtlest parts of the self will be able to get an “Aha!” idea in edgewise.

A large sheet of blank paper can evoke automatic writing and/or drawing, e.g. a freeform diagram with trigger-word ideas or entities or processes in balloons connected by arrows or lines to other balloons with trigger words in them.

Meditation with eyes closed either on a chair sitting up straight, or face down on the backs of your hands on the floor stretched out (Sphinx position), just breathing and waiting and listening can summon a Master voice that speaks only deep truth to you, sometimes when you least expect it.

If you give presentations, creative Flow can occur if you prepare and rehearse but then avoid referring to any notes — just have fun with it, and take the tack “I can’t wait to hear what I’ve got to say.”

Just have fun with every moment and everything else will work itself out.

Best to all,

Bill

Do Something Different this Advertising Week

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Volume 2, Issue 25

Can You Make a Quantum Leap in Your Own Creativity?

If you’re in Manhattan the first week of October, it’s likely you will be attending some of the great events that will be happening as part of Advertising Week. The one event that is totally different from all the others will be the first-ever ARF Creativity Playshop led by myself and Richard Zackon, the formidable facilitator of the Council for Research Excellence (CRE). From 8AM to noon on Wednesday, October 3, come join us to stimulate your mind in some new directions conducive to breakthrough thinking. This will be an intensive immersion with groundbreaking participatory experiments that have the power to change your ways of engaging challenges and opportunities at work and everywhere.

Before the event, participants will receive the Human Effectiveness Institute 60 Day Course consisting of a book, a DVD, and a guide; a Playbook designed by Richard Zackon and myself to capture realizations stimulated by the pre-event-through-post-event process; a questionnaire to set your own goals and to later measure the extent to which they were reached; and the Xyte self-profiling instrument, which is a sensitive new litmus paper test to discern your strengths in mental/emotive processing.

During the event, the many sides of creativity will be explored in a participatory manner. Creativity is a complex cluster of dimensions, like intelligence. We know now that intelligence is not a single variable but dozens of interacting skillsets — some cognitive, some emotional, some perceptual, and many intuitive. Creativity is a special case of intelligence involving thinking the unthinkable, transcending one’s own ingrained ideas and style. In order to effect real and positive change, we won’t just talk about these subjects, we will use exercises by which each participant can find their inner truths regarding these subjects, thus creating the environment in which you will be able to discover for yourself how you tick and the levers you can pull to improve upon your strengths and transmute “weaknesses” into strengths.

Not all of the conversation will be about creativity since underpinning creativity are deep layers of mental behavior that themselves constrain or potentiate creativity at the conscious level. So there will be bold theoretic investigations into P300 waves, Observer state, Flow state (the Zone) and other subjects you’ve seen dissected here before, presented in a more comprehensive and systematic manner than blogposts allow.

We will look at obstacles, obstructions to and distractions from creativity, and how to get around them.

The Playshop will be at ARF HQ on Park Avenue and will be part of the Masters Classes offered by ARF University. It’s not called a workshop because the whole point will be that Flow state does not happen if you are focused fearfully on some outcome, the Zone happens when you are enjoying what you are doing for its own sake. We will be there to have fun together, it will be a “play date” and we will all have permission to let it all hang out. Hope I can persuade many of you, my special friends, to be there and to add your own life’s unique realizations, insights and perspectives to the party.

Best to all,

Bill