Blog
We have all been present in this scenario (or been guilty of this ourselves) . Someone throws up a presentation in a meeting with one hundred slides in tiny font, and an hour later everyone's eyes are glazing over and they are starting to snore.
In order to combat this occurrence, Guy Kawasaki has come up with the 10/20/30 Rule of Presenting, a Mental Model designed to ensure any sort of presentation trying to reach some sort of agreement stays on point. Let's break it down.
I have written previously about some of the amazing stats from YouTube revealed in their wrap up of 2013. Well they're not the only video streaming platform in town, and off the back of this Vimeo have released their own 2013 Annual Report.
Vimeo have been driving great growth as a more creative focused platform, targeting photographers, filmmakers and general creative types. They have also made great inroads at providing a video on demand platform, allowing content creators to sell their projects directly to consumers.
The report is laid out beautifully in a clever timeline layout that highlights both platform results, as well as the unique company culture that I'm sure is a big part of their success. It's also a great example of a solid responsive website.
Some interesting platform highlights:
As robotics continue to advance and become more accessible, and digital technologies only become more pervasive in our lives, some interesting conversations are being sparked about the blurring lines between humans and machines.
Warp artist Squarepusher is really creating an interesting dynamic around this with the release of his 'Music for Robots' EP, a collaboration with Kenjiro Matsuo and a team of Japanese roboticists.
Matsuo and team developed what they called 'Z-Machines', a music-performing set of droids that could do things well beyond the most advanced musicians. With examples like a guitarist with 78 fingers or a drummer with 22 arms, the resulting composition sets out to dispel the myth that music performed by robots could never be emotionally powerful.
Basically anything on the Internet today is open to interpretation. It doesn't matter what you put out there, people are going to pick it apart, look for ways to screw with it, remix it, or re-interpret it for their own means.
The whole notion of MEMES are built upon this idea - people taking something that exists, changing it to be an expression of their own creativity, and then releasing it (usually within a community of largely anonymous, like minded individuals like Reddit or Imgur).
I love this recent example remixing Facebook's 'Lookback', a sort of retrospective experience showing your history through the last 10 years with the platform. Imagine what this would look like re-imagined for the "man who knocks":
This post continues my series on Mental Models.
Without sounding like a broken record, digital has added a huge amount of complexity to marketing (although on the flip side, also a huge amount of opportunity) . The problem we face is the pace of change at the moment - attempting to stand up against the tide of innovation can feel hugely daunting.
There is a great quote from Jocelyn K. Glei from Maximise Your Potential that sums this up:
“The lightening-fast evolution of technology means that jobs can now become indispensable or outmoded in a matter of years, even months. Who knew what a “community manager” was ten years ago? What about an “iPad app designer” or a “JavaScript ninja"?
A substantial portion of the working population now earns its livelihood doing jobs that didn’t exist ten or twenty years ago. And even if the nature of your job hasn’t changed, chances are you’re using new and unanticipated technology and skills to perform that job. Think of the designer who blogs, the comedian who tweets, or the filmmaker who raises a budget on Kickstarter.
Ten years from now, we’ll probably all be doing some new type of work that we couldn’t possibly imagine today. That thought is both exhilarating and frightening. How do we prepare for a future filled with uncertainty?”
Why do companies fail? Or more importantly, why do good companies fail? And by good, I mean the kind that many other managers and academics praise, admire or generally try and emulate.
There can be a range of reasons why companies stumble - from tired bureaucracy, poor planning, inadequate skills or resources, to just plain bad luck. What is potentially more interesting are why well managed companies fail - ones that listen to their customers and to the market, invest aggressively in innovation and new technology, make astute resourcing decisions, but still lost their market dominance.
One of the most famous books to address this failure is the Innovators Dilemma by Clayton Christensen.
The Innovators Dilemma is an enormously influential business book, a kind of bible for some of the most influential managers of recent years. Steve Jobs famously listed it as one of the few business books he trusted. Jeff Bezos highlights it as a must have in his own reading list. The startup community also practice a lot of the concepts, evolving these to fit the growth of disruptive technologies and ideas.
"A path of sighs through the emotions of life.
A tribute to the art and her disarming beauty."
There have been some amazing headways in techniques to animate traditionally static imagery. None however have been quite as hauntingly emotive as 'Beauty', a short film by Rino Stefano Tagliafierro.
From his website:
"Over Beauty, there has always hung the cloud of destiny and all-devouring time.
Beauty has been invoked, re-figured and described since antiquity as a fleeting moment of happiness and the inexhaustible fullness of life, doomed from the start to a redemptive yet tragic end.
In this interpretation by Rino Stefano Tagliafierro, this beauty is brought back to the expressive force of gestures that he springs from the immobility of canvas, animating a sentiment lost to the fixedness masterpieces.
Its as though these images which the history of art has consigned to us as frozen movement can today come back to life thanks to the fire of digital invention.
A series of well selected images from the tradition of pictorial beauty are appropriated, (from the renaissance to the symbolism of the late 1800s, through Mannerism, Pastoralism, Romanticism and Neo-classicism) with the intention of retracing the sentiment beneath the veil of appearance.
An inspiration that returns to us the sense of one fallen, and the existential brevity that the author interprets as tragic dignity, with an unenchanted eye able to capture the profoundest sense of the image.
Beauty in this interpretation is the silent companion of Life , inexorably leading from the smile of the baby, through erotic ecstasies to the grimaces of pain that close a cycle destined to repeat ad infinitum.
They are, from the inception of a romantic sunrise in which big black birds fly to the final sunset beyond gothic ruins that complete the piece, a work of fleeting time.
Giuliano Corti
(English translation: Thomas McEvoy)."
The Feynam Technique is a Mental Model named after Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize Winning Physicist. It is designed as a technique to help you learn pretty much learn anything - so understand concepts you don't really get, remember stuff you have already learnt, or study more efficiently.
The Feynman Technique was actually a big inspiration for this blog - I try and apply this to a lot of the concepts and Mental Models that I write about.
The technique can be broken down into four easy steps, but first a quick video from Scott Young that sums it up very simply.
In advertising, the real game changing campaigns tend to create their own cultural movements (check out my post on Hoopla to get some insight into this thinking).
Unfortunately the majority of advertising only attempts to piggy back off existing culture through parody. While this isn't necessarily a bad thing, it does lead to a lot of crap campaigns.
Denham the Jeanmaker have shown a classic example of a parody ad that doesn't suck with 'Denham Psycho'. Developed by Flickering Wall, it features great craft combined with one of the best advertising insights I've seen in a while.
When American Psycho was first released, it remained a viscous satire of the yuppie culture that permeated the mainstream of the 80's and 90's. Twenty years later, there has definitely been a change in the zeitgeist; the yuppie has been surpassed by the most divisive of all postmodern subcultures - the Hipster.
When something becomes tired, stale or predictable, it's a sign that a pivot is on order. That's why the new Axe Peace campaign is so incredible - they have completely thrown out the near naked girls and messages around getting laid with a spray in favour of something much more emotive and poignant.
I wonder if Axe has taken a page out of the Old Spice book - if women are actually the ones buying body spray in the supermarket, creating a broader appeal outside of just teenage boys could have a bigger business impact.
Kudos to Axe for trying something bold.
