whizdumb

Social experiment on Broadway

I recently went to see the Neil LaBute play Reasons to be Pretty at the Lyceum Theatre. 

As curtain time approached the usual announcements were made. "Welcome to the Lyceum," "Please take your seats, the show will begin shortly."

And "Please take a minute to turn on your mobile phones."

Instructions were read aloud and provided as an insert in our Playbill:

"At Reasons to Be Pretty we're temporarily breaking with tradition! Take your phones out. That's right, get your phones out and on. We'd like your help with a little social experiment. We want to know how attractive you think you are... and how you think your fellow theatre-goers measure up in comparison. To participate, text the word PRETTY to 42903. After you cast your vote, turn off your phones, put them away and enjoy Reasons to Be Pretty. We'll text you the results at the intermission."

I followed the instructions. Rated myself and some lady sitting a couple aisles away (6 and 5 respectively if you must know). At intermission everyone received a text with the results. On that evening the average self rating was 6.6. The average stranger rating was 5.1, a difference of 22%.

The theatre seats 922 people. Every night the results are remarkably consistent, but not terribly surprising (you've probably heard a lot of talk about the wisdom of crowds, about how on average people tend to rate themselves above average on smarts and looks).

What is different about this is how it added a bit of fun to the experience. It literally set the stage for the play to follow, which is all about judging looks of one another.

But it was also a smart marketing idea. Two weeks later I received a text telling me to visit a site for details about a buy one get one free Monday Night Date Night ticket offer. So ultimately everyone wins. I think that may be the first time I have actually welcomed a text offer to my mobile.

This kind of thing is a great example of how some have started to think about relationships: Provide an experience made better through participation.

Faris Yakob recently gave a presentation that touches on this. In it he has a quote from Henry Jenkins of MIT:

"Our focus should be not on emerging technologies but on emerging cultural practices."

So to me this example is really less about a well executed mobile tactic but more about how open people are to finding new meaning (i.e. what people sitting around me think about beauty) in timeless forms (i.e. sitting in a theater and watching real actors).

Mental speed bumps

I've been in New York now for about three weeks.  Walking a ton, of course.  Amidst the pedestrian and vehicular chaos I've thought a bit about street level friction.  Friction between a person and their environment; an environment riddled with obstacles (objects, cars, buildings, posts) and concepts (noise, advertising, signs).

A recent article peeking into the world of traffic management (seemingly a dull endeavor) brought this to life brilliantly, showing how friction can be a good thing. Here's an excerpt.

Mental Speed Bumps

Slower traffic can make for a friendlier city. But slowing traffic can be done in harsh ways: Speed bumps, traffic circles and the intentional bottlenecks known as chokers are auto-hostile tactics that do little for pedestrians. Gentler measures include tweaking the timing of traffic signals, or using what David Engwicht, an Australian traffic expert, calls “mental speed bumps”— street-side social activities that slow drivers without their knowing the foot is on the brake.

A community project called Ninth Avenue Renaissance, for example, proposes the use of on-street parking spaces on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan for barbecues and the like, adding a dose of intrigue to the street scene that will lead motorists to become curious, and slow down. “New York has these sorts of mental speed bumps,” said Mr. Kent, of the Project for Public Spaces, “but we’ve slowly degraded them by designing a more and more frictionless city for fast walkers and fast drivers.” But street-level friction, he said, is actually good.

I'm curious to hear what a connections planner's reaction is to this metaphor.  What if connections planning was always done with this ethic in mind? 

How would creative approaches in crowded environments be different if the brief was about mental speed bumps?   

Design and the Elastic Mind

If you haven't heard of or seen this exhibit, I'd call it a must if you find yourself in New York sometime between now and May 12 when it closes.  Loads of inspiration and mind fodder for anyone interested in the role of design in an information and technological society.

Among the many wonders on display are instant furniture, nano inventions, and a new piece by Jonathan Harris.

If you can't make it in person, the MoMA's exhibit website is a meaty proxy for it.

A clean vision

"We will be completely off paid media in three years."

- Eric Ryan, founder, Method

You've just got to love that this is coming from a household cleansers company. That is, a design company run by an ex-agency planner that happens to make cleansers for your home.

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.

New Denver agency blog

The small Denver agency pure Brand Communications has started an agency blog called pure thinking.  Ken Barber over at pure let me know about it.  He looks to be off to a good start with this post about an ad he spotted on a pack of meat handed over to him by a butcher. 

The emergence of 'shopper culture'

One of my favorite marketing metaphors ever is from Advertising Age, which termed the retail promotion / below the line space as "the fanny-pack of marketing: not pretty, and sort of embarrassing, but really functional."

Well the fanny-pack may be undergoing a bit of a makeover.  At least that's what you're left to conclude from a few developments of late:

- RGA is "aiming to bring dynamic interactive shopping to the retail environment," opening a retail unit to bring their interactive brains to bear on the signage world

- Quotes like this are popping up around retail circles:

"Increasingly success at retail is less about what the retailer has to sell and more about how they sell it.  This is the new experiential paradigm shift in shopping.  This shift toward the shopping experience marks the biggest change to occur in the retailing landscape over the past century."

     - Pam Danziger

- Retail, media and CPG heavyweights are aiming to monetize the shopping environment and are seeing it as the next marketing frontier.  The new PRISM initiative is all about the 'In-Store GRP'.  They will ultimately put in-store in the media plan.  But it raises the question, what is the 'art' that will complement the reach/frequency 'science'?

- And lastly, Integer, where I work, has created a blog called Shopper Culture around all things shopper culture.  It's meant to create a dialogue around all these things.   

Join us.  And bring your fanny-pack.

Volvo parking only

Driving from Orange County down to San Diego yesterday I had an hour or so to kill so I thought I'd stop by Legoland to see what it's all about.  I only made it as far as the $10 parking lot because when I got to the front gate I balked at the $57 admission price  (that's almost even with Disneyland's cheapest $63 pass!) 

I suppose if I had half the day to kill and my family with me I'd have gone but it didn't seem worth it for a total of $67 (with parking) and an hour of wandering around trying not to step on small children.

Anyway, I did see this exclusive parking thing for Volvo on the way out.  I'm not sure what to make of it except perhaps that people who drive Volvos deserve special treatment (and maybe the scorn of others?).   

I got my $10 parking money back.

This is how it should feel

Here are some nice examples of where Westin is taking its new Personal Renewal positioning.  For all the strategies out there that attempt to deliver a transporting experience this actually does a decent job. 

The wrapping stuff can really get out of hand if it's misused but in this case I think it actually works pretty well behind the 'This is How it Should Feel' line. 

Next up: User Generated Strategy?

When it comes to consumer generated content, most of it tends to have a pretty short shelf life.  A video, a tagline, etc.  But one submission headed for the Heinz Top This TV challenge has a bit more staying power.  Sculptor Robin Antar has made a ketchup bottle out of marble and is going to film the process for a commercial she'll submit to Heinz. (The thing is on display along with other marble pieces at the Marble Sculpting Symposium until Aug. 5 in the town of Marble, Colorado.)

Heinz has been big on the consumer generated content thing for awhile now. Say Something Ketchuppy was among the more interesting UGC campaigns as it tinkered with the almighty logo.

This new contest is pretty conventional but instead of broadcasting the winner and spending all that money on media they're simply posting the top 15 videos on YouTube and having the public vote on the winner.  Most of the submissions I viewed are pretty forgettable though this one stood out to me:

But I have to say if I was a creative I would be pretty nervous about this user generated content thing.  How long can a brand be buoyed by consumer content contests?  It's really starting to get old.  And how many modifications of the same 'submit your...' approach can smart creative departments crank out before they feel like expendable middlemen?  Daniel Pink wrote a compelling argument about about how in the conceptual economy jobs that require creative thinking will thrive while those that can be automated, a la computer programming, will be outsourced.  Perhaps this should serve as a small warning to the agencies over-reliant on the UGC trend:  Is it diminishing the 'conceptual' nature of our contribution and even our role in the Conceptual Age?

To me, the sweet spot could be some sort of a hybrid between 'here is our idea, love it or leave it' being one extreme and 'hey we give up, you tell us what this brand should say' on the other. 

But all of this dangles the question, what about the planner's contribution?  Our brand conscience?  What kind of rubber stamp strategic thinking goes into 'lets' leverage consumer's ability to operate a video camera and let them make an ad'? 

It certainly makes use of a salient trend but I can't help but think the people behind the cameras are becoming the next generation of professional sweepstakes entrants.  In the short term it adds up:  The brand is happy because it saved money on big production and media budgets.  The consumers like participating and seeing genuine content created by their peers.  But what does this do long term to the agency role? 

Of course the reason for these big questions is that this stuff used to be totally promotional and always complemented by a more strategic brand advertising campaign.  But now these contests are soliciting brand ideas that get big exposure and act as a proxy for mainline brand advertising (like Doritos' super bowl spot).  I can almost hear a client asking why, in this example, does Heinz need an agency at all?

The good news is that despite this trend the marketplace for strategic thinking is getting ever more crowded and good planning is in greater demand.   

Hmmm.  Why pay all those expensive agency fees?  I smell a contest brewing!