Year: 2011

Taking it personally

By Mark Di Somma

There are days when the commercial creative process really does feel like blinding optimism in the face of unrelenting stupidity. And that’s the problem – it’s so easy to adopt an ‘us and them’ mentality, to slip into ‘right and wrong’, ‘enlightened and ignorant ‘… The working environment for marketers and branders is such a strange mix when you think about it. The need to give so much of yourself and yet not take the inevitable backlashes, compromises, negative feedback, rejections, legal insertions, snipping and blandishments to heart. In a discipline where getting people to feel something for what you sell is everything, the temptation to become detached can be great indeed. Sustaining a great brand though relies on believing in people, both inside your walls and beyond. Once care leaves the room, everything that makes a brand compelling soon follows: passion; commitment; excitement … Branding is personal and commercial. Hard as that can be sometimes, in the B2C world particularly, it has to be that way.

What will LinkedIn link into?

By Mark Di Somma

LinkedIn finally goes public today. This is going to be fascinating – not just to see what this IPO for a name social media company gets, but also to see what investors themselves are buying into. Are they riding a media wave, as is suggested here, or do investors see real and continuing value in B2B networking? My suspicion is the former, and that’s not good. Long after the hype and the bullish sentiment of launch, it’s the latter that is going to platform LinkedIn’s growth. After all, being a social media company is LinkedIn’s channel, not their strategy. And we all know what happens when investors plumb for a channel at the expense of a viable way forward. Nothing I’m seeing in the press suggests a worked out plan to meet Wall Street’s expectations in that regard. In fact, quite the opposite. LinkedIn does not expect to be profitable in 2011 and its financial performance to date hasn’t exactly been inspiring. I raised this point last week about the Skype purchase and I’ll raise …

Portion control

By Mark Di Somma

Often we don’t leave a favourite brand because of anything dramatic. In fact, quite the opposite: the experiences we have quietly fade to the point where there’s less reasons to stay than to go. One day the food isn’t quite as good as it was, the movies on the flight haven’t been changed in a while, the person we spoke with just now was that little bit less warm, the changes in the insurance policy are more inflexible and the biscuits in the pack are smaller and taste different. Brands make these changes with the best of intentions for the business. They do it to save money, to introduce a shortcut, to be more efficient. It’s just a little change right, a little reduction – think of it as portion control. No-one will notice. And most people don’t. Unfortunately, the people who do notice are the people who have been loyal to the brand. They know where this is heading. Not today perhaps. Not tomorrow. But at some point, this is going to be yet …

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 …