Month: May 2011

Now playing

By Mark Di Somma

Slowly it seems everyone is coming round to the idea that content owners and developers and a new generation of distributors need to start working together. What interests me is how those content developers increasingly see social media as a valid outlet. YouTube has announced that it’s going to start renting more than 3,000 mainstream movies for as little as 99 cents each. That marks a real opportunity for quality shift for YouTube, from home videos to slick studio-quality product. But it also shows another move towards smarter monetisation of the social media model for both parties. The term ‘market share’ takes on new meaning in this context, in that it combines the marketable product of the studios with the massive sharing networks of the big social media outlets. One thing that YouTube, the film studios and Facebook share that I think offers real opportunities for these various emerging alliances to work: they absolutely understand the need to keep people involved and interested. Their presence and growth is predicated on that – even if they …

How to win

By Mark Di Somma

I’m always interested to see how successful people think and to learn how they go about building competitive marques. In 2009 – 2010, in the course of working alongside Alex and the crew at Milk on Will to Win, a history of the Pryde Group and its brands, I spoke with Neil Pryde many times. On a number of occasions, he talked about how he approaches running a global business. I thought I’d take a moment this morning and share with you the philosophies Neil shares in the book: 1. Strike the right balance between measured risks and natural optimism. 2. If you look back at your career and you’ve made more good choices than bad, you’re ahead. 3. Love what you do – but not too much. Too many businesses are wrecked by emotional decisions. 4. Be paranoid. Recognise that nothing is static. React quickly. 5. Never forget that sport is the business, and the business is a sport – always, play to win. 6. Always be prepared to walk away. If you’re going …

The power of interesting

By Mark Di Somma

I think we’ve all seen the movie about the ad agency that starts telling the truth only to find that business booms. Funny then how fiction turns to fact with news that in 2010, Domino’s US same-store sales rose 9.9% in a market where 1%-to-3% growth is closer to what’s generally expected. And the way they did it, according to Time, was by publicly trashing their old product, and encouraging consumers to check out the improvements they had made. That, it seems, got people back into the shop, intrigued by the admission and keen to taste what had changed. On the face of it, as I’ve said, this looks like a case for more truth in advertising, and of course to some extent it is. But I’m not certain that’s why the campaign actually succeeded – and I certainly don’t think it’s an approach that Domino’s could use again to such marked effect. What this story shows me, and what Susan Bonds’ speech reinforced last week, is that a generation notorious for its inattention will …

What do you do?

By Mark Di Somma

What do you do? – I write. Doesn’t just about everyone? – What do you mean by that? If you can form a letter in any language, you can write. What do you really do? … Here’s where this goes. Writers don’t write. Writers give people reasons to read. That’s what distinguishes them from people who can put things in writing. Speakers don’t talk. They give people reasons to listen. That’s what distinguishes them from everyone with the gift of speech. And photographers don’t photograph. They frame a moment in the world. That’s what makes their work different from someone with a mobile phone. The differences have never been more important in a world where so many people have access to technology that allows them to design, publish, print, record, point, click, template … What do you do, when anyone looks like they can do what you do? So often we want to base those differences on techniques. We do it better. Or history. We’ve done it longer. Or experience. We know more. Or frequency. …

Plenty of ideas coming out of AG Ideas 2011

By Mark Di Somma

I was lucky enough to be invited to watch the AG Ideas 2011 plenary yesterday morning via the simulcast into Wellington’s Te Papa museum. My highlights: Definitely the video of the kids workshop, with two stand-out examples of great design ideas by young minds that, as Ken Cato pointed out, do their creating with no preconceptions. The first design suggestion: a hot dog with legs, so that, in the words of its young inventor, overweight people, who love hot dogs, would have to chase them and thus burn calories. And then, the second suggestion, via this exchange: Ken Cato: What have you designed? Child: It’s a surfboard with flames. Ken Cato: How would that work? The flames in the water … Child (slightly impatiently): It’s a new design. Of course, the brief notes that follow cannot do justice to the presentations of the four featured speakers, but I thought I’d pick up on some of the thinking that particularly struck me, because it intersected with, and informed, the things that fascinate me – and, at …

What they see is what they brand.

By Mark Di Somma

Oh the irony. For years, many of us tried to get the people we worked with to broaden their understanding of what a brand was. It’s not just a logo, a product, a TV commercial – that conversation. We were fighting to make the definition of brand bigger. Now I’m wondering whether we have to start going back the other way. Suddenly, there are no people, countries, groups anymore. Instead, everywhere I look, everything’s a brand. Donald Trump is a brand, Charlie Sheen is a brand, so are Kate and Will, the President’s a brand, Greenpeace and just about any professional sports team or association you care to name. America’s a brand, so are the Tea Party, Survivor, Wikileaks, the Beckhams and Lady Gaga. That suggests to me that the media is in the process of redefining a “brand” as anything that gets or has our attention. In the new parlance, brand now is much more about profile. So I think Paula Lynn is right when she comments on this story in MediaPost that, “The …

It’s complicated

By Mark Di Somma

I really like this thought from Lars Bjork, CEO of QlikTech, in an interview in the NY Times: Love order, hate bureaucracy, he says … “Order is where you put a process into place because you want to scale the business to a different level. Bureaucracy is where nobody understands why you do it.” I’m constantly intrigued at how systems take on a life of their own. Everybody witnesses it. Everyone agrees it happens. What starts out, innocently enough, as a way of checking something soon grows its own mandate. It invades other areas. Then it gets a righteous title or attaches itself to a critical area (compliance, operations, efficiency, policy, framework etc), spawns a budget, a project team and a management structure, and suddenly it’s part of the war on chaos. It stalks the organisation gathering strength and credibility with every meeting. Before long it’s part of the sign-off, and once legal and HR take it under their wing, it’s part of the furniture. The sign-off gets longer, harder, more involved. ‘How’ overtakes ‘what’ …

Never stop answering

By Mark Di Somma

Let’s return to two posts from April – because one actually answers the other. Last Friday, I discussed the paradox that while assumptions equalise our world, not all assumptions in that world are equal, and that the dilemma for any brand is to sift the assumptions it must make from those that it must break with. Efficiency vs distinction. My sense is that the way to do that is through what I’ve dubbed the Feynman principle – a nod to Sanjoy Mahajan’s post about Richard Feynman  mentioned earlier in the month. This principle – you should always question what you do know – focuses on methodically re-litigating assumptions in order to uncover anything that had been missed and thus to extract new value and new possibilities. But how do you stop this becoming an endless loop of making assumptions then questioning those assumptions? By introducing answers – but answers that are themselves subject to continuing reappraisal. In other words, the response to the Feynman principle of ‘never stop questioning’ has to be ‘never stop answering’. …