The COMRADITY Journal

Data and Creativity.

The hard-working woman arrived at her local grocer with a week's pay in her purse, to buy a chicken for Sunday supper. It was the end of the week for the butcher too, and he was down to his last chicken. When he put the chicken on the scale, the woman thought for a moment and asked him for a larger chicken. So he sloshed the chicken around in water until it was full and put it back on the scale, proudly announcing that this chicken was much heavier. The woman thought again and asked for both chickens. 

WARC editor Colin Grimshaw writes about the tension between data and creativity in his post about the debate exposed by the entries into the 2015 ADMAP essay contest, "Does Big Data Inspire or Hinder Creative Thinking?"

Unfortunately creativity and data can be used to deceive. But not always. 

Data can reveal the value of a product or brand that even the manufacturer is unaware of. For example, after multiple agencies unsuccessfully competed to raise the "motivation score" for a new baby product campaign, I asked for a different cross tab of the research results to pull out the perceptions of the most discerning customer, new mothers, revealing an insight that increased the "motivation score" of the new advertising. 

Creativity moves people. It can move people in ways the creators didn't expect. In "Art & Copy", Nike's Liz Dolan shares the unanticipated letters from consumers who claimed the "Just Do It" campaign inspired them.  Not just to get more exercise but to overcome the procrastination inhibiting them from self-improvement on a much grander scale. 

Which comes first? The chicken or the egg? The data or the creativity? In both of the above cases the creativity came first. The data was generated by the response to the content. The data was "opt in" or voluntarily shared. And it was in context.

That's why my vote is for creativity to come first. The data is more meaningful and actionable. Frankly, based on my experience and observations, starting with data dumbs down creativity. From the early days of copy testing to today's "KPI's",  creativity has become weighed down and distracted by data. I argued this point in the essay, "A Creativity Renaissance," which made it to the short list, but didn't win the contest. (You have to be a WARC subscriber to see my published essay, sorry, but those were the rules when I entered.)

More important than the chicken and egg debate over data and creativity, the marketing industry needs to face the elephant in the room - the myth of scale.

The media marketplace is just like the grocer trying to sell one chicken over and over again to a customer who needs much more. The scale has become dumber and dumber over the last 30 years I've been in the business. When I started in the business, reach was the important metric to predict success. Awareness was important, but conversion from awareness to loyal customer was more important to sustainable growth.

But that was when you could reach 30% of the target with $5 to 10 Million. Today that's not possible at budgets 10 times that. So we buy impressions (no matter how many are the same viewer over and over again). And who spends the money on research to measure awareness, aided or unaided, let alone customer loyalty?

To improve marketing results and the impact of creativity in business, in general, let's start by recalibrating the scale based on what is mathematically possible in today's media landscape. And let's bring all the stakeholders together - including the audience - to explore what really matters.  No one company or silo has the silver bullet. We all need to come together to reset the defaults and re-define success. 

Fresh Perspective: Fixing Opportunities

For years we've heard: to get ahead in business be a problem solver. The assumption is that when we solve problems, they go away.

Maybe that was true at some point.  But what if we have evolved to a point in time when fixing problems is having the opposite effect. They aren't going away. In fact they are compounding.

They are indeed fixed - as in cemented in place. They become dependent upon hiring lots of problem solvers to tend to them. And then there's this pernicious co-dependency of a revenue stream only existing as long as the problem is sustained.

For example, recently I read a New York Times opinion piece which shocked me by the author's complete obliviousness to how entangled the problem of end-of-life wishes paperwork has become. The author is an emergency room doctor who was arguing that a living will and a DNR is not enough. If an ambulance team brings you to the emergency room, they have to continue life-saving protocols. She was advising us to get yet another form that must be signed by a Doctor in addition to ourselves.

The unspoken message was that our wishes weren't enough to protect her from potential litigation. This is an example, in my opinion, of making an already naturally complex situation, more unnecessarily complicated - adding more paper work to fill a loophole left by another document. The problem - a conflicted family who doesn't know what to do, leaving a Doctor with no clear directive and fearful of a lawsuit - doesn't go away.

To improve this situation as well as the many complex scenarios in life and business, we need to stop this obsession with fixing problems. We need to start digging for opportunities.

In a world of unnecessary complications, opportunities are hard to find, develop, and sustain. It takes enormous effort to go against the momentum of this problem obsession culture for opportunities to persevere.

Opportunities are ideas, vulnerable from the start, that need a team with the chemistry to hold together against enormous odds to develop them, defend them, and bring them to life. We need to fix opportunity with a better process.

An opportunity needs "parents" - a team with the chemistry to overcome all the challenges, before even hatching ideas. That team needs the time to dig deeper, below all the superficial problems to find the opportunities that are being missed. And that team needs professional help to capitalize on all the communication tools we have to open the eyes of others who have been trained to see nothing but problems.

The team must include all of the stakeholders in the ecosystem so the outcome doesn't add unnecessary complications. Instead they should strive for ideas with mutual benefit. Inherently, this will simplify the inherent complexities of today's systems.

Before you say that is way to ambitious - I say aim for an opportunity that can be explored as a project - one that will prove this team can work together to make a real difference. Ultimately it is the team's chemistry that makes it able to find, develop, defend, and bring to life an opportunity in this entangled world of problems.

 

 

Productivity may not be all it is cracked up to be.

On Wednesday, October 1st, about 60 folks made time to "get creative" at a "Working Innovation Session" in the COMRADITY Big Idea Room. The purpose was to generate ideas to "Motivate a Multigenerational Workforce".  

It was well attended by a diverse group from business, creative, and education worlds.  The Ideation leader, Bryan Mattimore, engaged everyone to participate and generate several ideas which we will report on in another post.

There were a lot of ideas.

Bryan has developed his methodology specifically to generate a lot of ideas in a short period of time. Because that's what business managers are asked to do - produce more in less time. But Bryan will tell you that the real secret to his methodology is that it inspires a few really golden nuggets.

What if productivity as a metric for performance - as a goal to aim for - isn't very productive?

Consider the "Productivity Paradox"

The concept is sometimes referred to as the Solow computer paradox in reference to Robert Solow's 1987 quip, "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics."^[2] The paradox has been defined as the “discrepancy between measures of investment in information technology and measures of output at the national level.”^[3]

Economists differ on their explanation of lack of productivity growth associated with Information Computer Technology.

In the ECONOMIST article, "Productivity:Technology isn't Working"  there are three theories summarized:

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (as well as plenty of techno-optimists in Silicon Valley), is that technological advances increase productivity only after a long lag.

That sounds plausible, but for now the productivity statistics do not bear it out. John Fernald, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and perhaps the foremost authority on American productivity figures, earlier this year published a study of productivity growth over the past decade. He found that its slowness had nothing to do with the housing boom and bust, the financial crisis or the recession. Instead, it was concentrated in ICT industries and those that use ICT intensively.

An insight occured to me when reading this third economist's explanation:

Robert Gordon of Northwestern University suggests that recent innovation is simply less impressive than it seems, and certainly not powerful enough to offset the effects of demographic change, inequality and sovereign indebtedness. Progress in ICT, he argues, is less transformative than any of the three major technologies of the second Industrial Revolution (electrification, cars and wireless communications).

When electricity, cars, and wireless communication were invented and popularized the inventors and buyers  weren't thinking about being more productive at work. They were thinking of the benefits of being able to see at night (when people were not working), escaping the farm for the city (to expand personal horizons), and broadcasting over the air news and entertainment (which has nothing to do with work). The fact that these technologies also improved productivity at work were consequences - not the compelling inspiration behind these inventions.

Maybe the bigger reason for the lack of productivity growth is that business is so busy being productive and measuring productivity that it has eliminated the time and space to imagine altering someone's life for the better. Or put another way, the best strategy to improve productivity may not be aiming for more productivity, but by defining a compelling purpose and making the time and space to explore it.

 

 

The Elephant in the Room

 

It was six men of Indostan 

To learning much inclined,

Who went to see the Elephant

(Though all of them were blind),

That each by observation 

Might satisfy his mind

The First approached the Elephant,

And happening to fall

Against his broad and sturdy side,

At once began to bawl: 

“God bless me! but the Elephant 
Is very like a wall!”

The Second, feeling of the tusk,

Cried, “Ho! what have we here

So very round and smooth and sharp?

To me ’tis mighty clear

This wonder of an Elephant 
Is very like a spear!”

The Third approached the animal, 

And happening to take 

The squirming trunk within his hands, 

Thus boldly up and spake:

“I see,” quoth he, “the Elephant 
Is very like a snake!”

The Fourth reached out an eager hand, 

And felt about the knee. 

“What most this wondrous beast is like 
Is mighty plain,” quoth he; 

“‘Tis clear enough the Elephant 
Is very like a tree!”

The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear,

Said: “E’en the blindest man 

Can tell what this resembles most; 

Deny the fact who can 

This marvel of an Elephant 
Is very like a fan!”

The Sixth no sooner had begun 

About the beast to grope, 

Than, seizing on the swinging tail 

That fell within his scope,

“I see,” quoth he, “the Elephant 
Is very like a rope!”

And so these men of Indostan

Disputed loud and long,

Each in his own opinion 

Exceeding stiff and strong, 

Though each was partly in the right, 

And all were in the wrong!

http://www.rhymes.org.uk/the-elephant-rhyme.htm

We're reading about the hurdles to creativity in business. Reportedly (links Mercanta Communication in Sweden), a "review of the rapidly growing body of research into creativity and innovation in the workplace" suggests that the most significant hurdle is not a lack of ideas. "The vast majority of companies operating today are not doing a good job of translating creative ideas into solutions that improve the firms’ performance," according to one of the reserachers, Jing Zhou of Rice University Business School.

As in the elephant rhyme, many ideas are partly right. But without clear vision, each idea's author lacks a holistic perspective. They are motivated to sell their perspective instead of a desire to find something in another's idea that can make theirs even better. 

A holistic perspective has clarity of vision and motivates collaboration. 

Understandably most businesses and creative professionals fear collaboration. It can be a huge time waster and doesn't necessarily result in the clarity needed for everyone to paddle in the same direction.

That's why process is valuable to both business and creative professionals. When collaborators have a roadmap, they are more likely to use their creative time more productively.

What are features of processes that work in today's increasingly complex marketplaces?

How could existing businesses apply this learning to the marketing planning process?

What would a collaborative innovation process look like for new business ideas?

 

Disrupt Ambiguity

Jill Lapore, the first Harvard academic to critique Clay Christensen's "Disruptive Innovation" theory, is generating a lot of buzz. Clay Christensen responds defensively that he is constantly improving the theory.

 

Essentially, Lapore applies her expertise as an historian to debunk a theory developed by a business analyst based on a moment in time. Which is how businesses are analyzed. (Which is a bigger issue for another post). Importantly, neither Lapore nor Christensen provide a business owner or manager with advice on how to capitalize on their analysis. 

 

In my opinion, the problem with "Disruptive Innovation" is its ambiguity.

 

Ambiguity confuses people. It isn't actionable. People act on one objective at a time. Is the goal to disrupt or innovate? These are two different modes of operation. One positive. The other negative.

 

Ambiguity divides people in debate instead of bringing them together to act.

 

Ambiguity doesn't help people to make good choices. When taken literally, the (perhaps unintended) consequence is the conclusion that a successful innovation strategy starts with the objective to destroy. Here's what that gets you: a vicious cycle of mutual destruction. Which looks a lot like a stagnant economy with high longterm unemployment.

 

Ambiguity is often used by so-called experts to keep everyone else in the dark so they must continue to hire the experts to tell them what to do.

 

So let's Disrupt Ambiguity.

 

Accept that we don't know it all. Consider that the best answers come from good questions.

 

Start with a purpose that is aspirational - i.e., better.

 

A purpose that benefits all stakeholders so the outcome is virtuous cycle with the momentum to perpetuate.

 

Finally, be clear about what it takes to be better and prepare to work hard. In a highly competitive world with diverse cultures, needs, and wants it isn't easy to develop and market a product.

Simple

Complexity has the momentum of a tidal wave, making it more and more difficult to keep it simple.

But that's what what need leaders to do. 

Today's articles offer inspiration.

Pictures speak louder without words in these examples from "Silent Comics Need No Words to Shine" via @CreativeBloq

As if an entrepreneur or start up should need this advise: "How and Why to do Your Own Business Financial Model" via Martini Zwilling, @StartupPro.

When you don't start with a business financial model, you end up with "The Monetization Challenge of Large Networks" via @wmougayar

Examples of HTML5 demonstrate its power to be simple via @CreativeBloq

Facts can be straightforward insights for new business opportunity as are these from PEW Research Center via @pewinternet.

Businesses with the discipline of one word branding enjoy success based on these examples via @PaulSloane. Probably because they are easier for cross displine manager to operate on their own consistently and to collaborate.  Everyone has the same objective.

Maintaining a lazer like vision for the future is difficult, when the chroniclers of the past were not there.  The need for the people who were there to write the case studies and the lessons learned is evidenced by Frog Design's Hermut Esslinger's perspective on Steve Jobs in his new book Keep it Simple via @VasilyKomarov

"The Cure for Self-Inflicted Complexity" is about breaking down the silos according to Roger Martin via @BizBldrsHelpDsk

These are the articles featured in today's "What We're Reading".  Click here to read the rest.

Ambiguity.

Webster-Mirriam defines Ambiguity as: "can be understood in two or more possible ways."

Today's "What We're Reading" discusses issues in an ambiguous way.  Instead of choosing a side of an issue and defending it, they tell the whole story.  And instead of telling us what to think, they make us think. 

"How to worry less about money, timeless advice on courage and the creative life . . " by Maria Popova in Brainpickings, Debbie Millman's San Jose State University graduation speech is featured.  Millman shares the ironic twist of freedom of choice. The freedom to make our own choices is often self-limitating. She encourages the students as well as those in mid-life who are wondering "what if" to follow this advice:

I recommend the following course of action for those who are just beginning their careers, or for those, like me, who may be reconfiguring midway through: heed the words of Robert Frost.  Start with a big, fat lump in your throat, start with a profound sense of ring, a deep homesickness, or a crazy love sickness, and run with it. . . Work as hard as you can, imagine immensities, don't compromise, and don't waste time. Start now.

Guy Gonzalez shares an article about WWII and Korean veterans visiting Washington DC from Mississippi and Puerto Rico who "stormed the barriers of political gridlock" to honor their comrades at war memorials barricaded due to government shutdown.

In Gamasutra, Samuel Ranta-Eskola writes about the transformation from siloed experts to cross-functional teamwork in game development. On a team, roles are not limited to "titles" or "expertise":  "With the movement towards cross-functional teams, where team responsibilities are bigger . . . there need to be a lot of people . . . skilled in more than one area . . ."  Ranta-Eskola points to the paradox that makes us think: "The funny thing is that any small indie developer consists of people like this by nature. . . However, when the organization grows this tends to get lost along the way. Why is that?"

MEDIUM shares a post by Tim Bray which is one of the most articulate explanations of why we should care about the risks to our privacy on the Internet. "The reason I’m writing this is to shoot holes in the 'If you haven’t done anything wrong, don’t worry' story. Because it’s deeply broken and we need to refute it efficiently if we’re going to make any progress."

Tim Kastelle posts about "The Conflict between Efficiency and Insight," with several examples of why there is conflict between the two: for example, he quotes Jeffrey Phillips: "it is easier to focus on efficiency at the expense of insight and innovation."  Both add value.  Makes you think about which should come first.

The Berkman Center shares a video of a discussion with Molly Crabapple on "Art in the Age of the Ubiquitous Image."  It is rather long because this is a truly ambiguous issue about what is art, technology as art, and the distribution (from sharing to exploiting) the art of others. This issue relates to Debbie Millman's (above) call to overcome your fear of economic sustainability and have the courage to be creative.

Greg Satell shares a Harvard Business School post by Hemant Taneja "Economies of Unscale" in which Taneja argues that growing a business has never been easier for the little guy.  He argues that the internet makes a niche business possible, with echoes of the pre-social web "Long Tail".  Right or wrong, the small business or entrepreneur will need to have more of Debbie Millman's courage to believe it.

All these stories make me think. I don't know how you "disrupt the ambiguity" in these stories and rise above petty debate.  But I am sure of one thing.  No one person can do it alone.  It takes a conversation of people with different perspectives who are not vested in maintaining the status quo.

These are the featured articles in today's "What We're Reading." Click here to read the rest.

Yes.

I haven't had time to post here for a long time because we are in the process of building the physical and virtual spaces for COMRADITY. 

I am reminded multiple times a day why our economy is broken.

Here is the word, I hear regularly: "No"

"No" wasn't an option when we were gearing up a military from nothing to defeat Hitler or to go to the Moon.

When the word "Yes" is operative, no problem is too big to solve - if you don't come up with the answer, someone else will. 

You don't hear "Yes" much anymore. 

You hear "innovate" which sounds exciting but tends to be derivative. 

Then you hear "disrupte" which is a reaction to the woosy-ness of innovation. The instinct is you have to tear down what is in order to get rid of the word "No".

But that's a negative too. 

So here's the message to the "Indie" movement.  COMRADITY is a space where we will ask the question: "What if Yes were the answer?".

INTEGRATING Communication in a DISINTEGRATED Media Landscape

Digital media has succeeded in making communication more and more disintegrated.  Whether on a personal level - as an independent marketing professional - or their clients - there are more essential media to communicate on, more often, and now in real time.

Conversations are awkward if not impossible in disintegrated media.  So the perceived value of integrated communications in marketing is more precious than every before.

It shouldn't be a surprise that the advertising agencies and media companies haven't figured out how to integrate traditional and new media and social media.  They couldn't figure out how to integrate Network TV, Radio, Newspaper, and local retail Promotion, then Direct Marketing, then Cable TV. 

There's one basic hurdle. How do all those stakeholders make money?

As they have struggled, performance and profits are eroding. Many experienced professionals have left and are operating as sole proprietors. They get the problem. That's why COMRADITY Creative Professional Community makes a lot of sense to so many.

These independent professionals have valuable assets - knowledge and experience that are isolated from each other and from perspective clients. As the media continue to disintegrate, each silo requires more expertise. And no one individual can provide an end to end solution. True professionals - with a passion for creative communication that works - want to invest in continually improving and finding peers to collaborate with.

COMRADITY is an opportunity for them to disrupt DISINTEGRATION.  We provide a space and resources for independent diverse experts, with individually valuable assets to collaborate and realize more value than the sum of the parts, for the mutual benefit of themselves and their clients. 

No one individual has that answer.  That is the number one criteria for resident studio membership at COMRADITY.  The answer is by building a community with the camaraderie to collaborate. 

W.T.F.

Why They Fail.

Our leadership, Politicians, and Media are failing because they are choosing sides instead of solving problems. 

Today's issues are nuanced, ambiguous and require compromise to solve.  Choosing sides won't do anything but perpetuate the problems, and make them worse.  Instead of two sides finding common interests, they are even more polarized, unwilling to trust the other side because of what the Media and Politicians say.

Fully expecting to be told fracking is a bad thing, I asked a friend at the EPA what their policy is. She tells me that the EPA does consider the nuances. Recognizing that energy independence is critical to turning around the economy and world peace, the EPA considers fracking to be the best energy alternative. Specifically, she said, every possible downside can be fixed.  In contrast, nuclear energy still hasn't figured out what to do with nuclear waste disposal.

I was amazed because that is not what you'd expect given what you hear in the media, would you?

But low and behold, when searching EPA Fracking Policy on Google, I find this headline for a review of an EPA decision on April 2012 in the Wall Street Journal: "The EPA's Fracking Miracle. Behold, the agency shows restraint on shale gas regulation"

Did anyone else pick up on that in the mainstream media? The point is that a leader in our government (not a politician by the way) has acknowledged the complexity of the situation and come up with a compromise.  And a business media outlet noticed. Who knew?

Until we embrace the complexities of an issue, everyone is in the NO mode.  And when they are in the NO mode, no one is imagining anything better.  Period. 

As long as everyone is shut in their own homes, communicating without eye contact through emails, texts, tweets, etc., isolated from everyone else, listening to Media and Politicians who choose to support either one side or the other, no one is inspired to imagine solutions to problems.