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Coffee Mornings' first Planning For Good assignment

Did you ever think you could help a non-profit by drinking coffee with some friends?

This Friday's coffee is going to be a little different.  I've volunteered us help out a global group of planners trying to do good stuff for people who need it.  It's called Planning For Good and described as:

Account planners and their friends using their brains to help solve problems for causes and non-profits.

To date Planning For Good has, through its Facebook Group, tackled its first project: helping the New Orleans non-profit group Idea Village create a vibrant, entrepreneurial community through talent and collaboration and innovation.  See the first PFG presentation that resulted from that effort here.

Ed Cotton, the organizer of PFG recently sent this out to the group:

We are keen to get as many great ideas for non profits as possible and with time constraints we know it's often hard to participate.  So we want to make it easier. Here's how.

1, We want to create PFG city groups

2. Each city will have a leader who organizes coffee mornings - 30/40 minute brainstorms over a brief that happen once a month

3. The ideas generated are then sent in

It's a good way to meet people and do good at the same time.

So naturally I volunteered our coffee morning this Friday for just such an assignment.  And the brief came in today so we're going to tackle it Friday!

The assignment is about helping UNICEF in a late 2008 five-day push. 

So here's what I'm asking of you:

- Read the PFG brief for UNICEF 
- Come to Coffee this Friday with your strategy and creative hat on and start jabbering.  Hell, even if you haven't read the brief, come on by!
- You'll have done some good and had some good conversation doing it.

I'll coordinate any submissions / ideas that we create and will get it out to the PFG group.  It's a really quick deadline as all ideas need to be submitted four days later, 11/7.

Thanks in advance for your participation.

P.S. If you're feeling really frisky about it and want to get started before coffee, bring some of your ideas on the PFG Submission Form.

Talk to your daughter before Unilever does

A couple weeks ago at Iconosphere I met a handful of interesting planners.  One was Rye Clifton who works at The Martin Agency.  Coincidentally, when checking out Junior Planner I Am, I stumbled on a link to an orphaned blog Rye used to maintain, and I gave him a hard time for not keeping it going. 

I especially think he should after he passed on this mashup he made.  It brings Dove and its corporate brother Axe together in ironic harmony.

My two cents are (as I mentioned in a comment the PureThinking post and which I will lazily paste here) is that I fear we're all at risk of a little naivete around the overall Real Beauty campaign. At the end of the day it was a brilliant, brave marketing strategy and idea. I think if you view it as marketing it doesn't seem duplicitous at all that they would take different approaches for different brands. It wasn't a Unilever campaign, but a Dove campaign. The problem - not a bad problem to have - is that the public has attached a Dove halo to Unilever rather than an Axe halo. The Axe work resonated at a brand not a societal level so we could keep it in a box called brand marketing. The double edge of Dove's success is that it's made Unilever seem like a corporation that truly cares more than it does.

Coffee Morning 10/19 recap

First things first.  The pictures I took at Coffee with my new phone didn't come out well.  Actually what I mean is they came out fine but people just looked bad.  You're all nice people but indoors early in the morning with a camera phone, it's a crap shoot. 

So instead I did a Google image search for 'i need a picture' and took the first image that came up.  (Woah, I just tried it again and it came up second). 

There it is.  WTF?  It's a consumer submitted video for TreeHugger.com and Seventh Generation's Convenient Truth Video Contest.  So if you fancy getting lectured to about consumer consumption by a pipe cleaner, check it out.  Wow, talk about irony.  Is this karmic retribution for Coffee Mornings' consumer marketing jabber?  Who knows.

Back to coffee last Friday.  We were joined by Ameet, Jennifer, Monique, Dave, Anoud, Erin, Melissa, Ken (of the Pure Thinking blog.  He wrote his own coffee recap here), and newbies Joe and Tommy. 

Joe just moved to town and is looking to land in a corporate communications or marketing role of some sort (Joe, leave a comment with any other details or contact info if you like). 

Monique is a planner at McClain Finlon, and she let everyone know that they're hiring.  So if you're a planner looking for a home check 'em out.  I believe Sarah Miller is the head of planning over there.  I've never met her I know she's trying to make it to coffee one of these days. 

Tommy has worked for some time at Comedy Works helping them to operate and expand their business and he had some really interesting perspective on comedy as an art and as a product.  For example, a good comic should have you laughing 4-5 times per minute.  I never really thought about that.  But it is a product and it's got, well I guess, metrics.   He also talked about the ratio of practice material versus tried and true material.  In a 15 minute set there may be 2-3 minutes of experimental stuff.  If you err on the high side that's 20% experimental.  Putting stuff out there to see if it sticks. You can see where I'm going with this...

What if brands allocated 20% of their ideas / product innovations / media spend to purely experimental stuff?  Things that might polarize.  New ground.  It's not unlike a regular innovation pipeline, but just put out there with the rest of it all, not researched in test markets and groups.  Just as there's nothing quite like a live audience in a comedy club, there's little to truly replace really going for it with a product launch in the real world.

Anyway, Tommy was also kind of segmenting comics among comics versus performers.  Dane Cook, for example, he considered a performer.  I'd probably put Robin Williams and maybe Bill Hicks in that category after watching a clip that Craig posted. On second thought, I think Hicks may be in a category all his own!

Incidentally, he's also a comic (performer?) himself.  Tommy, you've got to let us know the next time you're on stage.  I promise not to throw rotten tomatoes.

Ameet was sharing some thoughts from a presentation he recently attended on innovation by Tony Ulwick (Download the ppt here).  It makes the case for devising solutions that meet unmet consumer needs.

A few other topics came up but that's all I've got time for now.  Anyone have anything to add?

Reminder: Coffee tomorrow Friday 10/19

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A Few Good Creative Men

Iv'e got a few posts kicking around the noggin that haven't made it out yet.  Soon.  In the meantime here's something fun to watch.  Saw it on Paul's site and in a few other places.

Holy Mary, mother of beautiful nonsense

The New Yorker gets bold and brilliant

The New Yorker's covers are often gems.  Usually they touch on the essence of the city in ways even a non-resident can relate to.  But sometimes they strike a broader chord and this is one of those cases. 
By intersecting two debacles: the Senator Larry Craig
bathroom scandal, and Iranian President Ahmadinejad's statement that there are no gays in Iran (wrong!), they attained simple brilliance.  Well done.

Weatherproof Caveman Ad

The mini-controversy over the dumb Weatherproof Caveman ad has been dissected nicely by Seth at murketing.  I saw it in the NYT Magazine recently and, along with my pal Erin, was totally perplexed.  As Seth tells it, the whole thing was just drafting on the coattails of the Cavemen / Geico's success and had no formal agreement or permission from Geico or the Martin Agency.  It's based in the fact that one of the cavemen in the sitcom is a weatherman, the resident minority like Al Roker. 

It's a pretty thin thread to go on but hell, it's got us talking.

Coffee Morning 10/5 recap

Last Friday we were joined by David from Corona Research, Melissa who is a planner for hire while she cooks up other interesting plans, and two marketers on the market, Rebecca and Anoud.  If you'd like to get in touch with any of these folks I'd be happy to make the connection. 

We talked about a lot of stuff.  Of course, about the new Dove spot Onslaught.  The new TV Guide.  And David shared his love of the Facebook Cities I've Visited and Borat applications. 

Anoud brought up the subject of Dubai the brand. 

From floating cities to skiing indoors, the country has taken bold steps to make a name for itself and attract attention from the West, and in some circles it's being called the New York of the Middle East.  She mentioned one proposal for a bubble city floating in the air.  I poked around and found it mentioned in the Washington Post:

"A few months ago one of the newspapers did a spoof about a project called Bubble City," said Sohrab Motiwalla, a longtime Dubai resident who tracks development trends. "It was going to be a huge city encased in a glass bubble, suspended above Dubai by helium balloons. The problem was that it took people here a few weeks to figure out it was a joke."

Amazing how long it took people to figure out the joke was on them.  The country is so used to spectacle a bubble city was not outside the realm of believability. 

Then we trailed into a reverie of travel stories, tips, and lists.  Melissa told us about her Balinese honeymoon.  Anoud shared her transformative Galapagos trip.  And on and on.  I won't go into more detail except to say that we basically covered every continent and by the time coffee was over there was a palatable wanderlust in the room.

Next coffee: 10/19

Reminder: Coffee tomorrow Friday 10/5

Join us at 8:00 am, Common Grounds @ 17th x Wazee, downtown Denver.

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