ERROL FLANAGAN

Genius graphic design

A brilliant collection of playful and inspiring inventiveness - mostly with a client attached. A timeless and enduring truth that comes through for me here is that inspiring people is the main thing to achieve to makes something stand out.

Culture stuff - the great Gibson Les Paul

I was listening to community radio here in Sydney 2SER 107.3FM, running programmes on Les Paul, inventor of two phenomenal things that changed music forever - the Gibson Les Paul solid body electric guitar and also multitrack recording. All fascinating and good to hear early recordings of twiddly Bert Weedon-esque 50's twanginess by Les Paul, the talented multitracking guitarist. 

The Les Paul goldtop is a big icon in the guitar world - that and the starburst finishes are timeless standards - from Paul Kossoff in Free, to Jimmy Page and later to Thin Lizzy and Pete Townsend and many others. For me though, the quintessential Les Paul experience turns up on the genius debut album by Boston. 

'More Than A Feeling' is the complete crowd pleaser - but 'Hitch A Ride' has the brilliant soundtrack of great things to come feel. Download 06 Hitch A Ride - Fabulous how a technological revolution in instruments of human expression in one decade, can move people generations later in ways the inventor could probably never have imagined.

A big conservation landmark from a baby elephant at Taronga Zoo

 

I'm delighted to say that this video is the sixth most viewed on Australia's YouTube today. 

It features Thong Dee, an Asian Elephant, and her new baby elephant that was born a few days ago at Taronga Zoo, in Sydney. Please pass it on, spread the good word and help some important conservation work get done. 

This is a first of its kind in Australia - the birth is a massive milestone in the Taronga Zoo Conservation Society's plans for conservation. There are only around 34,000 of these animals left in the wild. 

Taronga Zoo wants people to get involved and help them in their conservation efforts in any way they can. I've had the immense privilege of working with some of the people at the Zoo. They're wonderfully inspiring folk who care about doing the right thing by their conservation goals. The atmosphere there must be incredible. 

It can't be underestinated how a big moment this is in an enormous lot of effort by many very committed and passionate people over a long period of time. It's a magical thing too, being a time and a signpost to great possibilities. 

If you want to help Taronga and its conservation efforts, go to the Taronga Zoo website and find out more, or if you can, go and visit the Zoo, take in the atmosphere yourself, and talk to someone there about what you can do. Thanks for passing it on if you do.

Play, embracing failure, decoration and great learning at the Tinkering School

I saw this on TED. It speaks for itself. Fantastic parallels for just about any grown-up pursuit. Highly inspiring.

Free film about our home planet - Recycle, reuse, and reinvigorate our appetite for doing the right thing by the planet

This is a talk about free film called 'Home' released last week on World Environment Day. 

There are some stunning images and some poignant commentary in this talk by it's creator, Yann Arthus Bertrand. It's completely copyright free. 

Plus see a fascinating study of people across the world at 6 billion others, another project by Bertrand as part of the goodplanet.org site, a non-profit environmental organisation he founded.

A wonderfully generous gesture.

Starbucks goes RED

Good to see more corporate giving in these times of economic stress. Well done Starbucks. I'm not sure what the deal is exactly with the contributions to good causes, but at least they've signed up. Signposting good intentions is a positive thing that may inspire others to get involved, so that's a definite win.

Also good to see this once trailblazing brand, flying a flag of philanthropy. Cynics might accuse them of going for a soft CSR sympathy dollar bandwagon but, I'm more optimistic there's a Warren Buffett-esque acting on a socially aware desire to have change for the good, happening here. The battle of good America v. crap America is hotting up perhaps - the popular hope has got to be that good America gets stronger, early Obama signs suggest it might, and that from here on, we all get to help in whatever way we can, to make crap America history.

Cool animation for cool Converse work

This is a direct link to the work above Psyop did for the Converse campaign by Anomaly NYC on Psyop's site. Great energy, edginess and authenticity. Also good to see are the interviews with Pharrell Williams and Santogold on YouTube.

Converse and (PRODUCT) RED doing good brightly

I saw these Converse shoes in a Hype shop window in Bondi Junction, in Sydney the other night. The brand is owned by Nike and it was one of the founder brands of Bono's (PRODUCT) RED initiative launched a few years ago in the US and UK.

The original brands in at the start of (PRODUCT) RED were Gap, American Express, Motorola, Armani and Converse. Gap did some t-shirts - INSPI(RED), was one design I saw pictures of David Beckham and Elle MacPherson wearing in a couple of different issues of mX the free Sydney commuter paper - American Express did a red card for use in UK and USA, Motorola did a red RAZR phone, Armani did some red sunglasses and Converse started their PRODUCT (RED) product line with some mud decorated Chuck Taylors. Apple have joined too offering (PRODUCT) RED bits of the iPod family, but Converse has, it seems, been the only brand to fairly consistently support the effort in Australia with a number of outings to market with new products.

A brand that innovates and gets to market fast and fairly easily might appear to be an ideal partner for a cause brand looking to have a lot of consistent market presence over a long time, with the message being kept relatively fresh. Though Apple may have had their (PRODUCT) RED Nano out for some time, it feels like Converse have been more active in their raising of the charity's profile.

What really caught my attention was the bright and optimistic nature of Converse's brand behaviour in this particular cause minded effort. Given the brand's stereotypical emo associations, the latest red effort could have been a whole lot heavier. It definitely isn't gloomy. It's very positive, rallying almost. It made me think about social efforts that are made, or could be made, by the commercial world again too, so thanks Converse and (PRODUCT) RED for bringing that very worthy but necessary point back into my head.

Apple store in Sydney

I saw this today in Sydney's George Street. I had a fleeting thought that it would be interesting if there was nothing actually behind the big blue poster awning covering the supposed new shop construction, and that one morning it suddenly wasn't there - a sort of pop-up pretend-to-construct-a-store.

It also struck me that such a vast piece of surface could have been put to some more interesting marketing use other than just being a great big coming soon poster.

People could have interacted with it in some way - perhaps a giant scratch card surface like the one in the post below about the Royal Festival Hall's 'Hidden Love Song' programme. Or a projection site of some kind, or a simple spilling on to the pavement or interacting with the buildings around it in some way.

Like the £106 million architectural wonder, the Eden Project cleverly did in Cornwall, UK, people might have been encouraged to come and watch the build progress. Eden Project sold tickets to come and see 'the big build' from a platform high above the disused China Clay pit as the vast biome structures took shape.

Perhaps it's a testament to Apple that something special is expected to be their business as usual. Once an expectation of innovation is set, there's no turning back to doing the normal kind of things other less innovative brands would do unnoticed.

Less functional and more emotional works for P&G

This is a link to an article from a 'Cool News of The Day' daily email newsletter I subscribe to from reveries.com

It is pretty clear about describing how P&G are succeeding in marketing to households by inspiring rather than telling.

Amongst many interesting comments from Jim Stengel, P&G's CMO, are these;

“Businesses and brands that are breaking records are those that inspire trust and affection and loyalty by being authentic, by not being arrogant, and by being empathetic to those they serve.” He says the key for P&G was moving away from its traditional focus on “functional benefits” and concentrating instead on being “inspirational.”

The article refers to a fuller interview with Jim Stengel in Fortune Magazine.

I think there's lots to learn here. It's notable that such a big influence on the current conventional wisdom in marketing has found that authenticity and trust play a powerful role in the present and future of fmcg marketing.

This is significant news for all fmcg marketers, and a big encouragement to all who have faith in leadership, innovation and inspiration as drivers to success in marketing fmcg or any brands.

What it also does, is signpost a real change in things - this could be a tipping point in the way many choose to market in fmcg and beyond from now on - we may see a growing wave of adoption of newer, more inspiration led ways. Consumers often play back to us how boring and cliched most advertising is, we know we are in the attraction, engagement and 'generate talkability' game, we know too that 'interactive friction' (as leading exponents in cultural phenomenon creation Crispin, Porter and Bogusky put it), is a great route to deep cultural contact and greater share of consumer everything (voice, mind, word of mouth, word of mouse), but perhaps it takes the likes of a P&G to proactively shift their step, for the world to see this as a significant threshold event.

Unilever, with Dove and Lynx are successful players in the cultural phenonemon creation business, with less emphasis on functionality for either of these brands for a some time now (can you remember when Lynx had a pseudo-science bit? or Dove? no neither can I). It will be interesting to see which brands see this shift and respond, and I wonder which ones will stay stuck in the conventions of product-centric marketing. The risk of being swept into the less interesting for consumers margins as being outmoded and out of touch with a world that looks to brands to be things to be inspired by, believe in and trust, is getting arguably larger.

How we react to this for the brands we work for is a big issue. It's an exciting issue too. How do we link test for inspiration? How do we promote and quantify authenticity and imagination? What metrics do we put in place to measure, "the extent to which I will interact with this and resonate brand love to everyone I know in my social network"?

More on this I'm sure to come soon. It seems that a desire to give inspiration and build trust makes for greater brand loyalty, and what has previously been considered to be a lower priority, emotional nice to have for long term brand equity, has proven to be, for P&G at least, a must do winning strategy.

Howies doing great corporate social responsibility and innovative marketing at the same time

I've a lot of time for the Howies brand. They do interesting and sound things, which is a good thing to have around in a 'buy-me' world saturated with self-interested sales messages. It's also good to have in a society that increasingly looks to brands to signpost, and hold our hopes for, a better world - a world with better corporate social responsibility.

Howies is an active life clothing brand from Wales (skate and bikes with lots of mud, concrete and the great outdoors), that is arguably fast becoming an icon of world class corporate social responsibility. They have grown from tiny to highly influential amongst a growing and committed group of consumers, to become an exemplar of innovative behaviour and ideas.

It feels like momentum on green issues is about to go through an inertia barrier. In Australia, Earth Hour is getting lots of media attention and intentions to do good by a big idea from the media industry itself. In Monterey, California this talk by John Doerr (filmed in March 07 and posted in May 07) on TED.com, is powerfully cogent and emotional. He talks about how companies are making money from greentech, and it is one of the most moving talks I have seen on this issue.

Meanwhile on the more populist end of the scale, videos like this one I got sent the other day are getting passed around on facebook funwalls, simplistically putting the case for doing something about global warming.

Howies may already be a world class case study of 'innovation and creativity, meets sustainable and substantial revenue generation, from networked communities with a conscience'. They have recently opened their first shop in London's Carnaby Street and they are making corporate social responsibility work for their business.

This brand is about as integrity as integrity gets. A visit to their site is a breath of corporate social responsibility freshness that is modern, entirely optimistic and extremely authentic. I think if there was an epitome of 'Slow branding', like the slow food movement, this brand would be pretty much the standard. Howies has over a number of years been a patient and great grower of a brand. An ideas company that says it's a clothing company.

From a marketer's point of view, they are interesting too. The founders, Clare and David, are both from the creative industries in London, Clare was a writer at brand experience company, Imagination, and David was a creative at the ad agency, Wieden+Kennedy, and the people that work for them are classic Pro-ams, as Charles Leadbeater would describe them (amateur enthusiasts who are serious about a pursuit like the enthusiastic consumer groups that made 'clunkers' the forerunners to mountain bikes of California).

An activity they did recently involving a blackboard paint covered van is a typically engaging and inspiring Howies piece of brand behaviour that combines corporate social responsibility with marketing ingenuity. They asked for ten cheap ideas to promote the brand and this was one. A skate tour in a white van, painted grey with blackboard paint (cost 120 pounds), with a question on the front about Nuclear Power. One side of the bus was the 'Is it green?' side, and on the other, 'Is it dumb?' and they toured the bus around skate parks where people wrote their views on the bus .

From a marketing point of view again, this is high brand engagement, non-traditional, brilliant blog fodder, no media budget, highly imaginative, hopeful and fresh - completely 'let's do something interesting and positive' thinking. It was a good idea, from an idea led challenger brand, a cause brand, not consumer insight driven, but high ideal driven. Not done before, not part of a campaign with a strapline, no key visual, no functional rtb emphasis, but a definite signature tone of the Howies brand throughout, a rapid low-cost prototype activity that wonderfully exemplifies a 'try stuff often, and always be true to ourselves' culture that has faith in the idea that good business comes from positive and ambitious thinking and doing.

In more product oriented behaviour they are equally as innovative. Good examples being a collaboration with Honda to use metal from old Honda cars to make rivets in Howies jeans. Also Howies sells certain items of clothing where they keep separate bits of the clothing items in stock, so that consumers can replace the bits that wear out as and when they need to, without having to buy a whole new garment. If your jacket has a hole in its elbow, you send it back and get the arm replaced.

In his moving talk, John Doerr talks about his fifteen year old daughter turning to him and blaming his generation for the mess we are in on global warming. Howies embodies a sense of hope that consumers of the solution seeking generation, like John's daughter, might relate to> I think corporations interested in making money whilst doing the right things might learn a lot from this small brand with a big, and very timely, point of view.

If there is a core trait that enables it to trailblaze a fresh way of doing things, I think its their appetite for doing something special and being very open to ambitious and big thinking collaborations with like minded partners. Other brands that have created cultural phenomena and step changes in their competitive sets have also been compulsive big thinking collaborators. Nike+ is a good example of collaboration raising the game.

Like the blackboard paint van with Tom Seymour, and the rivets with Honda UK, other brands that do CSR and social comment well are often at their best when they are in coalitions of high principles and like-mindedness. I think the power of good collaboration is underated by most brands - the constructing a partnerships of rapid prototyping, to coin Michael Schrage, is highly risky, difficult to measure and so it gets the too hard to do tag in more traditional marketer and agency company cultures.

Successful collaborators like Howies though, show that having an appetite for chancing frequent connections with people, who are in sync with your point of view, in the spirit of doing something special, can be inspiring, good for society, and good for business. They embrace the open-endedness of things because it is their very nature to pioneer and explore, which is perhaps why the brand works well in the CSR context as a great brand people can believe in for the long haul, and when times get tough or uncertain.

Branded content

The fascination with branded content is intriguing.

If it means that the mediocre can be filtered out by the consumer, or the curator/editor doing the filtering or compiling of content on behalf of a subscribing consumer set, then fantastic. And if it means that the pressure is on to engage, in what's been termed the age of engagement, then again, all good.

Great creativity will love the new imperative to create branded content. The skill will be to orchestrate and measure its effect so that marketers will support doing it. It's clearly going to have elements of a long tail argument at times, and at least it will be a very complicated ecosystem argument that econometrics may have real problems quantifying, but the lack of precision just makes the onus on intuition, agility and creativity bigger. There should be a lot of prototyping and risk taking, like Droga5's Honeyshed.

I think intuition, agility and creativity are key things to have because a brand that has a highly tuned intuition to what it's about, what matters to the people it cares for, and the culture it is in, is likely to respond more on target and more inspiringly, more rapidly and with greater efficiency than its competitors.

If a business or brand truly understands that content is king then, being agile enough to act on finely tuned and nuanced intuition and information is a great first mover and innovator's advantage, and having the best and most imaginative minds to hand to concept and create new things that inspire, is the final piece in the capabilities of a game shifting organisation.

Nike + is a phenomenon because user generated content has been catalysed into life by a service created through an imaginative application of technology. Innocent Juices's 'Fruitstock' music festival in the UK is also a service set up as a thank you to devoted consumers that becomes a great big piece of branded content through the experience people have there and what people hear about it.

Ultimately I think the fascination with the 'branded content' phrase is unhelpful. I'd suggest those agencies who are trying to figure out what it means are those well behind those already doing it, those organisations who are completely happy with the idea that everything communicates.

I'm a big fan of Crispin, Porter and Bogusky because they have that view and they have done great game shifting things in marketing brands that have been tagged breakthrough and non-traditional. They've been great at the traditional stuff too. Fundamentally though, they have shown a determination to engage. Media choice has been largely irrelevant, but the driving pursuit of cultural phenomenon creation has seemed to be an aim, by whatever media means necessary.

Everything a brand creates or does is branded content, and the new clamouring for depth and engagement at every moment of encounter is a good thing and a wake up call to those who have been satisfied with not engaging and inspiring people outside the usual opportunities. Traditional media channels clearly aren't dead, but arguably, traditional mindedness certainly is.