BrandKnew January 2023

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Dear Friends:

The New Year is upon us and I earnestly look forward to this year being promising, fulfilling and healthy for all. Let it be a year full of new thinking, many possibilities. My best wishes to you and yours.

This edition promises and delivers. If brands( both B2C and B2B) have to have their way, storytelling has to be up, front and centre- we talk about the Principle of World Class Storytelling in this edition. AI(Artificial Intelligence) can be used to generate more creative ideas. Understand more about that in this issue. We take a look at the consumer affinity trends that could affect marketing in 2023. Visual identity and organic visibility go hand on hand. Decipher it here. Microsoft has taken the plunge and scripted a new era for design. Read about it here. Have you ever been told that you are too nice to work in advertising ? Well, now you know. The times are uncertain surely, though that does not mean cutting down on marketing spending. It calls for better marketing focus. Know more about it in this edition. It has been the flavour of the season for a while now but ambiguity still shrouds it. I am referring to the metaverse here. We take a look at the stakeholders who care about the metaverse. There is ample more to soak in and extract from. And I leave you to do just that.

Till the next, my very best.

Suresh Dinakaran linkd.in/1dsjYaW isdbranding isdglobaldubai

@Brandknewmag bit.ly/1h95tgO suresh@groupisd.com

@ISDGlobalDubai

Chief Strategy Director: Rishi Mohan Chief Country Man, India: Rohit Unni

Brand Trends and Research Architect: Meeta Pendse Revenue Growth Architect: Ritu Dey

Country Head, Australia: Norbert D’Souza Country Head, UK: Sagar Patil

Performance Marketing Architect: Suresh Babu

Technology & Web Enabler: Vyanky Charakpalli

Social Media Outreach: Pooja Chhabda

SEO Advocate: Santhosh Rakonda

Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran

Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher

What these latest consumer affinity trends tell us about marketing in 2023

Ever Been Told You’re Too Nice to Work in Advertising?

Why ChatGPT will profoundly transform every marketing career, starting now

The Principles of World-Class Brand Storytelling

How to use AI to generate creative ideas

Space advertising could be the next big thing

How brands should be addressing inflation in marketing

Why B2B must embrace diverse and inclusive storytelling

Uncertain times? Change your marketing focus, not your spend

Inside Microsoft’s quest to lead the new era of design

How much impact can visual identity have on your organic visibility?

Crypto Was Always Smoke and Mirrors

This new site uses AI to let you create the brand mashups of your dreams

Who cares about the metaverse?

The Future of Digital Cash Is Not on the Blockchain

Author Talks: The simple way to get more great ideas

How technology is helping to revolutionize real-time collaboration

Book, Line & Sinker

in 2023

By Antoinette Siu

Consumer affinity across social media can reveal some surprising insights about how people shop and engage if they watch certain videos.

Video analytics firm Tubular Labs recently expanded its artificial intelligence and consumer insights tools to analyze video categories and social audience behaviors across some 1 million topics and 11 billion videos across YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Twitch and TikTok.

Subject material ranged from food consumed at Super Bowl watch parties to instructions for hair extensions — and showed a potential correlation to consumers’ shopping habits across other sites.

These data points might guide marketers on alternative spending options for their budgets that go beyond their business. For example, Food Network’s audience on social media was nine times more likely to visit websites of insurance brands like State Farm and Geico, according to Tubular. Tubular’s recent analysis also showed people who watched beauty videos were 5.84 times more likely to buy Nintendo DS games on Amazon compared to the average viewer.

“With the fast growth of video content across top social platforms, digging into how video behavior relates to shopping affinity gives advertisers what they need to justify social platform ROI in the face of what could be an uncertain 2023,” said Chrissy Werner, vp of marketing at Tubular Labs.

In its latest report on navigating the social video landscape, Tubular covered its predictions on the future of search and marketing and the creator economy in the upcoming year. It also addressed the rise of augmented reality in virtual reality platforms, such as the metaverse or other immersive environments.

Next year, Tubular predicts that creators are poised to become bigger economic drivers. In the past year, influencer content was watched 13.2 times more than media and brand content combined, according to its research. Tubular also expects the influencer market to keep expanding, with 2023 projected influencer viewership hitting some 10 trillion views per month across all platforms. In January 2022, this was around 5 trillion views per month.

Creator marketing — which has been a trend this year — is causing many agencies to rethink their strategies on using content creators and social media influencers. Major holding agencies are also looking to creators when developing a commerce strategy.

“Shoppable livestreams or video content, paired with a credible influencer and raving comments from a community of viewers is an instant recipe for a believable, trusted sponsored social post,” said Amy Lanzi, coo of Publicis Commerce. “With this blueprint, we have built out … creator-led commerce solutions with partners like TikTok and Spotify that offer more personalization and closed loop measurement.”

Tubular also predicted that augmented reality will come into greater focus as marketers experiment with virtual worlds and platforms, an area in which Snap has hung its hat. The social media company is developing its own AR glasses called Spectacles to connect with virtual reality content.

In the past year, 15 million views were tracked across platforms mentioning AR or VR, according to Tubular. This was 38% higher than the previous year, suggesting that social audiences are getting more engaged in the topic. And as some of the technologies, such as 5G and robotics, become more integrated, companies can expect “faster and more nimble solutions” while consumers see improved experiences, said Ian Liddicoat, CTO of AI advertising company Adludio.

The popularity of videos is showing that social is becoming the new place for search — just ask TikTok. When people are looking for answers, they tend to seek out videos more rather than text, which marketers should keep in mind when identifying new audiences, Tubular data suggested. Based on Tubular analysis of popular keyword searches, for instance, those searching for recipes were 204 times more likely to look for Green Giant products on Amazon. Those consuming sports videos were more likely to gravitate toward brands like OREI and Riot Games.

“As the creator economy’s importance continues to grow, brands and agencies need to go beyond just listening to where audiences exist, but also how content influences consumer purchasing decisions,” Werner said.

What these latest consumer affinity trends tell us about marketing

Top brands come to SCAD seeking new ideas, inventions, and business strategies for a changing world. SCADpro delivers.

Tap into our talent bank. scad.edu/scadpro

Ever Been Told You’re Too Nice to Work in Advertising?

By Josh Day and Caitlin Keeley

When we first got into this business, we were both told, more than once, that we were “too nice to work in advertising.” We smiled politely but thought, WTF is that about?

For years we have witnessed our community endure the trope of toxic creative geniuses. People enable that behavior thinking it comes with the territory, but is that really true?

And at what cost?

Research indicates that a toxic work environment was the single biggest predictor of attrition—10 times more powerful than wages!—during the Great Resignation, better known as The Great Reassessment. Just last month, the U.S. Surgeon General issued a warning against toxic workplaces, linking them to consequences for both mental and physical health. He also noted a marked rise in respondents reporting trouble focusing at work.

Personally, we have always found we do our best work when we are relaxed, feel psychologically safe and have some laughs. Because we find it both pleasant and productive, we have always tried to foster this kind of environment for the people around us.

Dare we say we were nice before it was cool? :)

For us, niceness—empathy, mutual respect, humility—has

always been in style and we’ve been drawn to collaborate with people who feel the same.

Since we’re feeling chuffed about being ahead of (what we hope to be) a niceness trend, here’s a list of 10 things that nearly two decades of being “too nice” made possible:

ILYFN, a short documentary film that toured the festival circuit. Listening to our director Finn O’Hara’s ideas made for a captivating concept. (+DP Stuart Campbell!) When it came to editing, it was so impressively cut by Melanie Hider, we dropped our egos and said “no changes.” And it’s been viewed over 2 million times on YouTube alone.

Bathing people in pink paint for the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, which beat the MoMA (NY) for Best Museum Branding in an international show the year it launched (among other awards, but that’s our favorite).

Mark Zibert worked with us from the conceptual stage and together we made memorable work.

A limited-edition chair with Umbra. We graciously accepted an introduction to Matt Carr, now VP of design, and said, “Let’s make a chair together.” He said yes.

Leading Lexus, driving business. Working in stride with our exceptional strategy, media and account team. We even got ourselves on the nice list by redesigning Santa’s sleigh as a

Lexus concept car.

Fibre 1 commercials featuring Beck Bennett just before he got his spot on Saturday Night Live. Our director, Benji Weinstein, said he “knew a guy” and we said, “Ya, let’s see him!”

Podcasts for Country Harvest challenging the persistent gendered concept of “breadwinners.” With kindness, we gave people the space to be themselves and it was reflected in authentic, honest, provocative content.

Delivering gold coffee beans to every AmEx Business Gold Rewards Card holder so they could “get up and gold” with gold coffee. Truly, a collaborative team delivered.

Intersections—an interactive data-visualization art piece that showed at Nuit Blanche and attracted thousands of participants. Our innovation crew from that project still stays connected to hype each other up, talk about art, share future signals and trade skateboarding memes.

Music. The geniuses who make music for this business deserve respect. There are virtuosos in our midst. When we’re nice to them, the results can be pretty sweet. One time, with Didier Tovel from SNDWRx, we made a series of (NSFW) music videos to experiment with gamification and social media.

Inklusive—a custom-made ink created to address a DEI

data challenge. Fundamental to this process was listening, integrating the ideas of our collaborators (Matthew Progress artist, Jason Logan ink maker, Andras directors) to craft a human solution for a systemic issue.

In the book Humble Leadership, authors Edgar and Peter Schein outline some captivating points about the future of working together, including:

Organizations around the world are struggling with the increasing rate of change, the degree of global interconnectedness, multiculturalism, and the pace of technological advances … It is becoming obvious that keeping pace in this world will require teamwork and collaboration of all sorts … Leadership in this environment is categorically humbling because it is virtually impossible for an individual to accumulate enough knowledge to figure out all the answers.

Collaboration is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s a necessity. If we want to work effectively, efficiently, innovatively—we need to genuinely play nice. Especially since our industry is a thrilling blend of A.I., product design, real-virtual, content, events, everything. Let’s learn from recent themes like quiet quitting and actual mental-health awareness. It’s finally time to flip the script on this business’s nice-guysfinish-last narrative. Here’s to the nice folks and all the amazingly nice work we can do together.

Why ChatGPT will profoundly transform every marketing career, starting now

by Deroy Peraza

The ChatGPT struggle

I am a person who explores the edges. I experiment with every new technology so I can be a better consultant, teacher, and author. I recently plugged into something that gave me the same feeling as the electric moment I connected to the internet for the first time. It will change everything in social media and content creation.

About six years ago I attended a presentation at SXSW and saw an entire movie script written by AI. It was both beautiful and stunning. When would this technology creep into our every day social media experiences? Until now,

this sophisticated AI has only existed in the complex world of coders and developers. But with the introduction of a new, user-friendly interface, anybody has access to this breathtaking technology. One million people signed up for ChatGPT by OpenAI in the first week.

OpenAI is a research laboratory dedicated to creating artificial general intelligence (AGI) that can benefit humanity. Their mission is to ensure that AGI is developed safely and responsibly and that its benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible. They are one of the leading organizations in the field of AI research, and its work has

the potential to revolutionize many areas of society, from healthcare and education to transportation and energy.

This will also revolutionize the way content is created, distributed, and consumed. AI could help content creators create better and more engaging content, dramatically reduce the time needed to create content, and automate content creation. AI-generated content could help creators reach more people by helping them efficiently create content tailored to their target audience.

By the way, the last two paragraphs were created by ChatGPT.

One of the common arguments in marketing is that AI can never replace the human voice. False.

This technology levels the playing field and makes everybody an excellent content creator. In many cases, it is better than a “human voice” if that human is a lousy communicator. example of chatgpt writing

In 2023, marketing and the marketing profession will be transformed. AI has been unleashed in a massive and practical way.

ChatGPT can do much more than just blogging and copywriting. It can generate images, ideas, answer questions, correct your copy, devise business plans, write poetry, provide sentiment analysis. I forecast that by the end of the year, it will provide audio and video production capabilities.

To help us navigate the meaning of all this, I turned to a revered tech analyst, Shelly Palmer. In a special edition of The Marketing Companion, I had the opportunity to pick the brain of an industry legend.

In this spellbinding interview, Shelly explains Why ChatGPT “changes absolutely everything.”

How marketers can adopt a positive mindset and embrace the technology as an amplification of what we do best. How this is similar to technical disruption in the music industry when thousands of people lost their jobs.

Here is the episode for your listening please and I have also included a transcript of our conversation.

Click to listen to Episode 259

Transcript of the ChatGPT interview with Shelly Palmer (edited for brevity)

Shelly Palmer on ChatGPT

Shelly Palmer

Mark Schaefer

I’ve been waiting for some company to pull the trigger and unleash artificial intelligence in a way that could be broadly applied to our businesses, our lives and our creative processes. That that came last week when OpenAi introduced

a very user-friendly version of its GPT-3 technology called ChatGPT.

This quickly took the internet by storm. A million people signed up in the first five days and were instantly creating poetry, song lyrics, college-level essays, research papers, computer code, business plans, and more. When I tried this for the first time, it was like the moment that clicked onto the internet.

As I tested it, I had a feeling I was entering a vast new space of opportunity and perhaps peril. This is significant enough that I needed to create this special episode of the Marketing Companion, and enlist the help of my friend, Shelley Palmer to make sense of this development.

Unless you’re living in a cave, you probably know that Shelley is one of the most respected and innovative minds in the tech space. He’s an author. He’s also a very accomplished music composer and producer. He’s a revered tech analyst, keynote speaker and consultant. I recommend his newsletter all the time, and I also recommend his new venture Metacademy this is a resource everybody should try.

Shelly, I’m so honored to be talking to you today to help me unravel these new developments. Nice to be here. How are you? I’m great. I’m great.

Shelly Palmer

I think it’s me … or is this an AI version of me?

Mark Schaefer

In your livestream this week. You described your initial experience with ChatGPT as mind-blowing and profound. So I assume you agree with me that this is something we’re entering a new era?

Shelly Palmer

I think it’s become commercialized in a way that people are just warming up to it. Last year at CES, I wanted to I want to do a session about AI deep fakes and I specifically wanted to make a political commentary by leveraging Carl Sagan’s writings because Carl called out some of the things we’re into right now. decades in advance. Very smart guy with prescient views and brilliant insights, but sadly taken too young. So he never said in a speech the passage I was interested in. What I did was I sent samples of his writing to a friend of mine with a very, very good speech replication AI model. And I gave him the passage I wanted that he had written but never spoken. And if you go to CES 21 dot Shellypalmer.com you’ll see a YouTube link to the 10-minute keynote. It includes this photo montage of Carl Sagan as he speaks his words in his voice –that he never spoke, but wrote. Now that was a year ago.

ChatGPT shows up last week on my doorstep. And all I’m dealing with is hundreds of texts, hundreds of email messages every single day. “This is chilling.” “This is awesome.” “This is unbelievable.” All the things you said in the intro.

I’m very familiar with this tool. And I’m very familiar with the people who are working on the model. And when I experimented with this current form, but I saw something I never thought I would see. And Mark, this is the part that

I think changes absolutely everything. And I know that is a bold claim.

A changed human-machine partnership

I’ve been talking for years about how humans and machines will be partners that will become better where you and your AI co- worker will be a better than just you by yourself. There are certain things that humans are extremely good at and certain things that machines are extremely good at. If you put those two things together in a good way, you’ll get a superhuman.

chatgpt robotNow the analogy is generally like this: At the beginning of the Industrial Age, the steam shovel and steam engine amplified the capacity of our muscles 1000s of times, and the world around us is built substantially by those machines and skyscrapers. sure that somebody built pyramids, they probably didn’t have, you know, they have the steam shovels and steam engines, but you don’t build the Empire State Building with 1000s of people unless they have machines. You don’t build New York City as it sits here without those machines.

And I’ve always said metaphorically that AI amplifies our minds by 1000s of times. It is no more a replacement for us than a jackhammer is for the person who wields it.

But this is changed now. I go to ChatGPT and I say all right, write 200 words about what Facebook is warning that it could ban news in the US if Congress passes a bill that would require the platform to compensate publishers — in the style of Shelly Palmer.

I realized I’ve written over 19,000 blog posts in my life and while GBT doesn’t have access to all of the current internet, it’s read a ton of internet. Well, I got a ton of stuff in my style with my byline. So there’s a pretty decent chance it’s read some of it. and it turns out I was right. ChatGPT wrote like me:

As Facebook faces increasing pressure from lawmakers and regulators over its handling of misinformation and other controversial content, the company has warned that it could ban news altogether in the U.S. if Congress passes a bill that would require it to negotiate with and compensate publishers for their content.

The proposed Journalism Competition and Preservation Act would allow news publishers to collectively negotiate with online platforms such as Facebook and Google for compensation for their content, granting them an exemption from antitrust laws in the process.

Facebook argues that this bill would fundamentally change the relationship between the platform and publishers, potentially making it impossible for the company to continue offering news content on its platform. This warning serves as a reminder of the growing tensions between the tech industry and the news media, as they navigate the shifting landscape

of digital content and advertising.

“I

got scared”

This is what stopped me in my tracks. The proposed Journalism Competition and Preservation Act wasn’t mentioned in my query. The AI did the research that it needed to do — that I would have done — and paraphrased the question and stated the thesis for me. It’s a perfect five-paragraph essay. And it’s tight in a style like I would write it. So I instantly recognized it as something I would write … and Mark at that moment, I got scared. It was that simple. It was wow.

Mark Schaefer

It scares me a little too. And here’s why. I have my own instincts that I don’t necessarily trust. But I trust your instincts! And what you said in your rant: “I have been 80% replaced.”

I have a friend who’s a marketing consultant. And five years ago, I asked him, “How worried are you about AI replacing you?” He said, “it’s five years away.” And I wrote him an email today — “you were right.” It was five years away.

Shelly Palmer

The word replace is interesting because right now, AI is a tremendous enhancement and a time saver, and it just increases productivity in such a profoundly beautiful way, like Wikipedia when it’s right. It’s right. And when it’s wrong, it’s really wrong. So it’s not doing your work for you. But remember, this is the first day of this right?

Mark Schaefer

I was testing it, and I actually got into a one-on-one chat with it. And it said, “Thank you for being patient with me. I’m still learning.” And I said, “What do you mean, you’re still learning?” and it said, “Well, I’m learning from you. I’m learning from every interaction.” So I think that’s one of the things that people are overlooking. We don’t need millions of developers to correct these mistakes. It’s correcting itself as it learns.

Shelly Palmer

That’s an important point. It needs to be slightly honed in the following way. reaction to chatgptThere are different kinds of machine learning. There is supervised learning, which is precisely exactly what it sounds like there’s a big pile of data and you say I’m looking for a needle in a haystack is what the needle looks like OCD can find it. Okay, once you’ve learned what that is mostly how many more there are double just like it, how many look kinda like it. And supervised learning is an era of machine learning that we see often because very often you know what you’re looking for, but very often you got a monstrous amount of data. What I mean by Big Data is 25,000 columns by 20 50 million rows. Right? If I give you a 10 by 10 spreadsheet and say Mr. Here’s a 10 by 10 spreadsheet about your business, it within seconds, you’re gonna go Oh, I understand this is blank. This is because you know your business. And if I’m describing your business in 10 columns and 10 rows, you will really

have solid insights about what that is, whatever your business might be.

Once I get to 1000s of columns and millions of rows, you are human, you can’t interpret that so very often, we’re just looking for stuff and it’s more of an enhanced search than anything else. But there’s unsupervised learning where you say, hey, you know, there’s a big pile of data here. Go see if there’s anything interesting in there like you see any patterns and the computer goes in there looks all around and the AI model tries to figure out if they’re patterns of interest, whatever they may be, but all of these work when you are using machine learning or an artificial intelligence environment.

Baby training

The main way to train these models is what’s known as reinforcement learning and it works the same way that a newborn baby works metaphorically. A toddler picks up a rattle it shakes. It makes noise! Bangs it on the floor. The floor is hard. Bangs it on it’s head. Don’t want to do that again. Tries to eat it, all this trial and error stuff.

So deep learning and neural networks literally use that kind of reinforcement learning and so when we say the computer learns, it does learn. It can also forget because it has a limited storage capacity. They they can be taught to score things above other things. And this is the most important part, whether the programmers add too much bias to the model or whether it’s trained on bias information, it can be overtrained and trick and there are very profound examples of this.

Again, this is very early days. We’re learning how reinforcement learning and humans are learning and how reinforcement learning can be beneficial. It does learn one of the things you can do with ChatGPT, which I think is magnificent is if you have a like button after you’re done, you can put in what you would have written to make it better. That is training the model because now it knows what it wrote. And you can ask it to try again and try again. So ultimately, it gets really really better

Mark Schaefer

It’s obviously very good at taking a lot of data and fitting it into patterns, like a creator would. And so as I’m starting to think about the implications of this, if you’re a content creator, if you’re a copywriter, you’ve got to be pretty nervous right now.

And I’m even thinking about patterns in terms of my consulting practice. You know, one of the beautiful things about marketing is they are foundational elements that can be applied to lots of different problems. And that’s what AI is good at. So I wonder if you’ve had time to process this from a psychological perspective? It’s like, in one week, someone’s opened up Pandora’s box. It’s existential in some ways. How do I start to come to grips with this in terms of my career? Have you thought about this?

I’m not replaceable by ChatGPT

Shelly Palmer

You know, Mark, this is my lived experience. I’m one of the pioneers of electronic music. And I have an awful lot of patents. And I have an awful lot of hours in these experiences of career disruption.

Prior to 1982, if you wanted to do a session for a commercial or television music and you were putting a band together with a lot of musicians. Maybe even an orchestra in a studio. You have a rhythm section, string section, horn section; maybe they play together, or maybe they play separately. And you would also have singers.

By 1986, when digital music came on the scene, I could now play all the parts at a work station. The number of musicians that we were using went from 600 a year with maybe 90 singers down to about 300. In one year.

This is the most important part. A lot of people say, well, that’s not an example like AI. Well, it’s exactly like AI, because it’s just tools that are making work more efficient.

And so what I think is gonna happen here from our lived experience. This tool will dramatically enhance the capabilities of those who embrace it. It will hurt a lot of people who don’t … let’s say they will fall into lower-paying jobs!

ChatGPT will amplify creativity. If I want Frank Sinatra singing “New York, New York” hanging off the Empire State Building while battling King Kong and rescuing whoever, then AI draws it for you, or does the animation, or creates whatever you can dream.

This technology works. I think ChatGPT will empower people who have great ideas, terrible ideas, people with ideas but no skills other than their imagination. And I gotta tell you, unlocking the imagination of every person? I just think that’s awesome.

Mark Schaefer

That’s a great sentiment to wrap things up here. And I love what you’re saying. It’s such a great analogy for the early days of music that look; you’ve got to embrace it. I mean, you just can’t wait it out, and you can’t ignore it.

Spend one day being depressed because your job has changed. But the next day, come back ready to fight.

And creative skill and artistry will always matter. The most magnificent images coming out of AI are still manipulated by artists who really know what they’re doing. Most of my images still don’t have fingers or another key body part. The people with the greatest creative capacity aren’t going to go away. They will manipulate the technology, just like you did with music, in new and amazing ways.

You can choose to be scared of ChatGPT, or you can choose to be excited. I choose excited, and I hope you do, too.

Mark Schaefer is the executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions. He is the author of some of the world’s bestselling digital marketing books and is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant. The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world.

The Principles of WorldClass Brand Storytelling

By Carolyn Griffin

You’re hearing from more brands in more ways than ever before. At this point, all are multichannel, some are open source, and a few are more than a little experimental. They pop up overnight with shared DNAs, guest visionaries and new communities, but the ones that stay—and stay relevant— share one thing in common: They are world-class storytellers.

World-class storytellers don’t rely on the written word to do the work for them. They use every tool at their disposal to express what they have to say. These brands have wildly different approaches to visuals, sound, textures and experiences—but all understand the need for these elements to work together to advance their stories. And by harnessing these storytelling principles, you too can create a brand that is world-class.

1. Start your story by defining your hero—a cause or focus people can rally behind.

World-class storytellers are memorable because they advance a clear perspective. Having a main character, or hero, to focus on is part of what creates perspective. Beyond content, it is a human element that audiences can recognize and connect to.

Many brands are unreliable narrators that claim their hero is the customer, when in fact they focus on themselves. Smart brands find a way to center people or humanity within a general focus, cause or community related to the people they serve.

The stronger the hero is, the clearer and more connected the brand. One way to strengthen brand characters is to define an enemy, or the negative force their hero is up against. The

introduction of an enemy creates conflict, a reason to pay attention and keep coming back to brand and story.

Pfizer told a breakthrough story during the pandemic, with a renewed focus on science. Science became the hero of the brand and a champion audiences could trust in the face of serious disease. By shifting the storytelling focus from itself to the field of science, Pfizer became more powerful and relevant.

The New York Times holds up the truth as its hero and shows how it beats the odds in an increasingly dangerous media landscape. With every new campaign, they point to new threats to journalism and the effect on people’s understanding of the truth, to show the importance of quality media. In these communications, the Times stands for more than a publication—it is a protector of free press.

Nike defines its hero as the athlete in everyone. Its famous slogan, “Just Do It,” established in 1988, still resonates today, and clearly sets up an enemy—any obstacle that could get in the way of people “doing it”; the blockers that keep people from getting physical and achieving their goals.

2. Build your setting—a brand world that’s memorable, consistent and responsive.

Any good hero needs a setting to thrive. Great writers create settings for their stories that are instantly recognizable and immersive, places people can imagine and want to visit.

To be credible to the audience, the setting needs clear rules and memorable hallmarks. Think Harry Potter: an ecosystem

built on magic and wizards, with agreed-upon social codes, spaces and details that are not real in our world, but are believable to millions of fans globally.

For brands, the setting, or in this case brand world, needs to be memorable, with creative hallmarks that inspire people to stay a while and discover more. The brand world also needs to be believable, with consistent rules that make it recognizable and trustworthy wherever it happens to be. Most of all, it needs to be responsive, acknowledging and rewarding its audience just for showing up.

Openness is the connective theme across Mozilla’s brand world. Their mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all— which they have proven through a crowd-sourced visual identity, transparent experiences, and resources that are available to all.

Dunkin’ proves that brand worlds don’t need to be rigid to be strong. They produce funny, tantalizing and far-out collaborations held together by the same energizing creativity and sense of play.

Gucci is an exhausting brand to keep up with, spanning categories and collaborations, but wherever it appears, it sucks people in with its eclectic sensibility. The prints, posture and casting of company they keep all add up to a club not everyone can afford—but everyone can enjoy watching pass by.

3. Keep the plot simple by planning ahead to create connected events and behaviors across season and initiative.

The best storytellers know how to keep their audiences on the hook by developing an engaging plot. They understand the role of voice and style to keep people engaged, but do not let these elements compete with the purpose of the story. They gather the facts and events, arrange them in a logical way, and bring audiences along for the ride.

Brands that advance a strong plot are planners. They think beyond the moment to create connected events that drive their story forward with clarity and surprise. New chapters may be added as brands grow and evolve, but the best storytellers can tie everything together with a single red thread, so no one is lost along the way.

Adobe has always stood for creativity. As its product suite has grown, it has stayed connected, because each product is clearly defined by how it supports the creative community.

Rather than develop a new story around sustainability when launching an ESG advisory, KPMG connected this work to its larger role of empowering change in the world. With this clear focus, they have been able to show the impact of what an ESG advisory can do for clients and society.

Target exists to help all families discover the joy of everyday life. With a strong design ethos and emphasis on value, they make it easy to find the products people need with the savings and fun they want. Visit a Target on a Friday night, and you’ll see it teeming with shoppers, each experiencing the Target story across the aisles, checkout experience, and through the Target Circle rewards program, a loyalty experience built for shoppers, with a giveback component for the community— truly, a joy for everyone.

How to use AI to generate creative ideas

BY ETHAN MOLLICK

What is really exciting about this week’s advances in AI is that I think that generative AI is good enough, right now, to make you much more creative.

Despite of (or in fact, because of) all its constraints and weirdness, it is perfect for idea generation. There are a few reasons why I think this is true. First, idea generation benefits from differences: Diversity of backgrounds of people in the room, differences in core beliefs, and variations in social networks all help add new ideas and combinations to the mix. AI is not a substitute for this, but it is a way of adding extreme difference and even weirdness to your ideageneration sessions that can be useful to build on.

And that weirdness is a benefit in idea generation as well, in a way that it is not in other applications. Chat-based creative AI can be untrustworthy, presenting fake results as real with confidence, or even “hallucinating” a fake answer. This can be a problem if you are a doctor hoping to get trustworthy diagnostic information, but it isn’t if you are trying to generate ideas, where strangeness can be a benefit and bad ideas are filtered out. AI also adds a vast amount of (mostly accurate) knowledge, which can help generate unique combinations and recombinations of existing ideas.

Finally, chat-based creative AI is available right now. You don’t need to be a programmer or to spend any money. Just sign up at Open AI playground or, even better, ChatGPT, and start working. How can it help you generate ideas? We can turn to the science of idea generation to get some hints.

PLAY WITH CONSTRAINTS.

A way to generate good ideas is to change the boundaries of the problem by altering the constraints you face. This allows you to see a problem in a new way, which might lead to new solutions. Adding constraints can have the same effects.

Psychological experiments have shown that when people have limitations on the ideas they can pursue they are often, paradoxically, more creative. For example, in one study, participants were told to design a toy for children, given five weirdly shaped blocks selected from a larger set of pieces.

In some cases, the experimenters randomly gave people blocks, while in others they allowed participants to pick their own. Additionally, in some cases the subjects had to use all five blocks, or they were allowed to use any number of the blocks they were given. The least-constrained scenario allowed for someone to pick their own blocks and use whatever number they saw fit. Surprisingly, people in this group came up with the least-creative answers. Instead, the most constrained group of participants—those who were given five blocks randomly and had to use all five—were actually the most creative, both in process and outcomes.

Constraints help because they force you to change your thinking and break out of old frames. You can add constraints to your ideas in various ways, often by consciously changing your perspective. For example:

You can consider extreme users of a product or service,

which can force you to think of novel angles: How would an astronaut use a common product? What about a child? Someone on the run from a secret conspiracy?

A screenshot of the author’s interaction with an AI writing bot. The text reads: Author: describe in detail a toothbrush for astronauts. AI bot response: A toothbrush for astronauts would be designed to overcome the unique challenges of brushing teeth in a zero-gravity environment. The toothbrush would likely have a handle with a suction cup on the bottom, allowing it to be attached to a surface and held in place during use. The bristles of the toothbrush would be angled in such a way as to allow for easy access to all areas of the mouth, and the toothbrush could be designed to dispense toothpaste directly onto the bristles.

The handle of the toothbrush would be made from a durable, lightweight material such as plastic, and would be designed to be easy to grip and maneuver even in the absence of gravity. The suction cup on the bottom of the handle would be strong enough to hold the toothbrush in place during use, but could be easily released when it was time to switch to a different surface or move the toothbrush to a different location.

The bristles of the toothbrush would be made from a soft, gentle material that would be safe and effective for cleaning teeth and gums. The angle of the bristles would be carefully designed to allow for easy access to all areas of the mouth, including the back teeth and the spaces between teeth. The toothbrush could be designed with a built-in toothpaste dispenser, allowing astronauts to brush their teeth without having to worry about toothpaste floating away in the weightless environment.

Overall, a toothbrush for astronauts would be designed to be practical, efficient, and easy to use in a zero-gravity environment. By taking into account the unique challenges of brushing teeth in space, it would be possible to create a toothbrush that would help astronauts maintain good oral hygiene and keep their teeth and gums healthy even in the challenging conditions of space.’s prompt

You can place constraints on your solution to spark new approaches: What if it had to be done using an online service? How could the problem be solved by modifying an animal or plant? What if it had to be done for less than $10?

A screenshot of the author’s interaction with an AI writing bot. The text reads: Author’s prompt: describe in detail how a toothbrush made out of a living animal or plant works. AI Bot response: It is not possible to create a toothbrush made out of a living animal or plant, as toothbrushes are typically used for cleaning the teeth and gums, and living organisms cannot withstand the abrasive action of brushing. However, it is possible to create a toothbrush that incorporates living materials in its design.

One potential design for a toothbrush made out of a living organism could involve using a small, hardy plant such as moss or a succulent as the handle of the toothbrush. The bristles of the toothbrush could be made from a soft, flexible material such as nylon or another synthetic fiber. The plant handle of the toothbrush would be able to absorb water and

nutrients from the mouth, allowing it to stay alive and healthy even with regular use.

To use this type of toothbrush, one would first need to wet the bristles and apply toothpaste to them. The toothbrush could then be used in the same way as a conventional toothbrush, with the bristles moving back and forth across the teeth and gums to clean them. The plant handle of the toothbrush would provide a natural, biodegradable alternative to traditional toothbrush handles, and could help to reduce waste and improve the sustainability of personal care products. Overall, a toothbrush made out of a living organism would be a unique and environmentally-friendly option for cleaning the teeth and gums. While it would not be able to withstand the abrasive action of brushing, it could provide a natural and sustainable alternative to traditional toothbrush designs.

You can consider opposites, which force you to think about the space more generally: What would you do if you were trying to make the problem worse? What is the most complex way you could solve this particular issue?

A screenshot of the author’s interaction with an AI writing bot. The text reads: Author’s prompt: describe in detail the most complex way that a toothbrush could be created. AI Bot Response: The most complex way to create a toothbrush would involve using advanced manufacturing techniques and materials.

First, the handle of the toothbrush would be 3D printed using a high-strength and durable material such as titanium or carbon fiber. This would allow the handle to be customized to the user’s hand and grip, ensuring a comfortable and secure hold.

Next, the bristles of the toothbrush would be made using nanotechnology. The bristles would be incredibly fine, on the order of nanometers in diameter, and would be coated with microscopic crystals of enamel-like materials. This would allow the bristles to effectively clean the tiny crevices and grooves in the teeth, removing plaque and bacteria.

The bristles would be arranged in a highly precise pattern, using computer-controlled robotic technology, to ensure that they effectively clean the teeth without damaging the enamel. The toothbrush would also be equipped with sensors that could detect the user’s brushing technique and provide feedback in real-time, helping them to improve their oral hygiene.

In addition to its advanced design, the toothbrush would be connected to the internet, allowing it to receive updates and improvements over time. It would also be able to communicate with other connected devices, such as a smart toothpaste dispenser or a dental health app, to provide a more comprehensive and personalized oral care experience.

Overall, the most complex way to create a toothbrush would involve using advanced manufacturing techniques, materials, and technology to create a highly personalized and effective tool for oral care.

AI is awesome at all of these things. The answers are not

going to be perfect or accurate, but you don’t need them to be! They are ways of pushing you out of your own familiar patterns.

“INTERVIEW” THE AI.

One of the most important things you can do to change your perspective is to actually observe the world and see if you can learn anything new or surprising. This involves moving past searching the internet or reading books, and instead watching people go about an activity that you are interested in exploring.

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While nothing beats a real human, an AI interview can be a surprisingly enlightening first step. You just need to make it “act” the part. This can involve asking it to “imagine you are a ____, how would you answer” or to ask it to “describe how ___” might answer a question. It may involve a bit of experimentation, but the results can be interesting.

A screenshot of the author’s interaction with an AI writing bot. The text reads: Author’s prompt: Describe the frustrations that might bother a professor who is trying to grade many students accurately. AI Bot response: One potential frustration that a professor may face when grading many students is the difficulty in providing individualized feedback to each student. With a large number of students, it may be challenging for a professor to give each student the attention and feedback they need in order to improve. Additionally, grading a large number of assignments can be time-consuming and tedious, which can be frustrating for a professo who has other responsibilities and duties.

Another potential frustration is the challenge of maintaining objectivity and fairness when grading a large number of students. It is important for a professor to grade each student’s work based on the same standards and criteria, but this can be difficult to do consistently when dealing with a large number of assignments. A professor may also face frustration if some students do not put in the effort or do not meet the expectations for the course, which can make the grading process more difficult and time-consuming.

Finally, a professor may face frustration if students do not take their feedback or grades seriously, or if they do not use the feedback to improve their performance. This can be frustrating for a professor who has taken the time and effort to provide thorough and constructive feedback, only to see that it is not being used effectively by the students.

Overall, grading many students accurately can be a challenging and frustrating process for a professor, but it is an important part of their job.

Author’s prompt: How do they solve these problems today?

AI Bot Response: There are a variety of ways that professors can address the challenges and frustrations associated with grading a large number of students. One solution is to use technology, such as online grading platforms or automated grading systems, to streamline the grading process and make it more efficient. These tools can help a professor to manage their workload more effectively, and they can provide students with immediate feedback on their

performance.

Another solution is to set clear expectations and criteria for the course, and to communicate these to students in advance. This can help to ensure that students understand what is expected of them, and it can make the grading process more objective and fair. Additionally, a professor can use a variety of grading strategies, such as rubrics or grading scales, to provide clear and consistent feedback to students.

Finally, a professor can encourage students to take an active role in their own learning and development, and to use feedback to improve their performance. This can include providina opportunities for students to reflect on their own work, to engage in peer review, and tc seek feedback from the professor and other students. B fostering a supportive and

collaborative learning environment, a professor can help students to understand the value of feedback and to use it effectively to improve their performance.

Author’s prompt: What are the limitations of these solutions?

AI Bot response: There are a few potential limitations to the solutions that I described for addressing the challenges and frustrations associated with grading many students. One limitation is that technology can be expensive and may not be readily available to all professors. Additionally, not all professors may be comfortable with using technology in the classroom, and they may prefer more traditional methods of grading.

Another potential limitation is that settina clear expectations and criteria for the course, and using grading strategies such as rubrics, can be time-consuming and may require additional effort on the part of the professor. This can be particularly challenging for professors who are already dealing with a heavy workload and may not have the time or resources to devote to developing and implementing these strategies.

Finally, encouraging students to take an active role in their own learning and development can be challenging, especially if students are not used to this approach or if they are resistant to feedback. It can take time and effort for a professor to create a supportive and collaborative learning environment, and not all students may be willing to engage in this process. Overall, while these solutions can be effective in addressing the challenges and frustrations associated with grading many students, they are not without limitations.

Again, this is no substitute for actual interviews, but it is often a useful way to get you to think about problem areas you haven’t considered, and to prepare yourself to get better data from the real world.

YES, AND . . .

The classic improv technique for playing with ideas works with AI as well. Agree with its points while adding something new in order to focus in on areas you want to think about more.

Space advertising could be the next big thing

By Benay Ozdemir

Dive Brief:

Marketing chiefs will face serious challenges to growing brand value and loyalty next year amid an economic rough patch and changing digital habits, according to predictions from researcher Gartner.

The firm identified three major trends: shifting customer behaviors increasing uncertainty; cross-functional collaboration creating worse outcomes for marketers; and disruptive market dynamics weakening mainstay tactics for winning consumer favor.

CMOs may need to make less money go further and fight for their independence in light of these headwinds and as larger corporate mandates focus on preserving growth.

Dive Insight:

Marketers have had a rough go of it in 2022, and Gartner’s CMO predictions for next year don’t herald happier times. One of the biggest factors pressuring the role remains the economy. While some of the inflationary pinch has eased in recent months, fears a recession will hit next year endure. Marketing departments are often among the first targeted for cutbacks in a downturn.

Consumers, too, are tightening their belts. Gartner research from September showed that 30% of surveyed respondents are trading down for store-name brands. Retailers are investing more in promoting their private labels to capture this interest, amplifying the competition.

Meanwhile, almost one-fifth of people have ditched inperson shopping for e-commerce, per Gartner. This online migration is occurring at a time when effectively deploying and measuring digital campaigns is harder due to the deprecation of third-party cookies and important identifiers on iOS and Android.

Gartner expects the “majority of consumers and [business-

to-business] buyers” will withhold data that’s crucial to digital marketing moving forward. Categories like packaged goods have relied more on retail media to address the firstparty data gap, but it’s proven to be a channel rife with its own frustrations and gatekeeping.

Additionally, Gartner believes traditional methods of tracking and shoring up brand value, including brand reach, brand sentiment and perceived differentiation, are at risk. Reasons for this include disruptive new market entrants, higher consumer expectations and the fact that it’s easier than ever to learn about unfamiliar brands. Three-quarters of surveyed audiences have searched for information on a brand they didn’t previously know about while browsing online, according to Gartner. Just 15% said they were loyal to a given familiar brand.

“CMOs must redefine and quickly demonstrate the value of brand investments in a volatile environment,” said Ewan McIntyre, chief of research at Gartner’s marketing practice, in a statement attached to the research. “The strongest driver of brand commitment is a single meaningful brand experience, even with unfamiliar brands.”

At the organizational level, CMOs must navigate tricky internal politics. For years, marketers have been encouraged to break down silos and collaborate more with other departments. This trend has seen traction as areas like digital commerce expand to become enterprise-wide priorities. But the benefits of a cross-functional approach could be waning for CMOs.

Prior Gartner findings drawn from polls of senior marketers showed that those who described themselves as “independent” frequently outperformed those who viewed themselves as “collaborators.” A cross-functional focus at a company can siphon resources away from marketing departments that have struggled to return to pre-pandemic budgetary levels, Gartner found.

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How brands should be addressing inflation in marketing

By Krystal Scanlon

2022 will go down as the year of the Liz Truss lettuce, the Jennifer Coolidge “Jenaissance,” and the $8 “$5 meal.”

It’s no secret that seemingly everything has gotten more expensive in the last year, and some brands have taken it upon themselves to address consumers’ economic woes head-on. Earlier this year, Everlane had an “anti-inflation sale.” RV-rental company Outdoorsy made an ad about inflation not existing in nature. A Hardee’s campaign featured a faux newscast about inflation to hawk burgers. And now, with the holidays on the horizon, more brands are incorporating language around tightened budgets into their campaign messaging.

But when it comes to marketing around inflation, how beneficial is it to mention the elephant in the room— particularly when consumers are struggling while corporate profits are at an all-time high? And how can brands resonate with people otherwise?

Keep Be the change

Kaitlin Ceckowski, associate director at Mintel Consulting, told us that brands looking to address inflation are likely better off positioning themselves as a solution. One example she shared is Chase, which markets its apps as a budgeting tool.

“Obviously, it’s not radically changing consumers’ everyday lives, but they are brands that are in a position to help consumers navigate financial concerns,” she said, adding that “if you’re not a brand that’s going to be able to radically change consumers’ day-to-day financial situation, it’s probably not best that you try to be.”

One brand that seems to be framing itself as a potential solution is Airbnb in its latest campaign. CEO Brian Chesky says in a video about the company’s new tools that are geared toward hosts—the focus of the ad campaign—that “people are looking for ways to earn extra money,” as he was when starting the company in 2008.

Airbnb Global Head of Marketing Hiroki Asai told us that “in times when there’s a lot of financial uncertainty, a lot of people turn to hosting, and so it’s kind of the perfect time for us to ship a lot of these new [hosting] features.”

One risk to jumping into the inflation conversation, Ceckowski noted, is that it opens a brand up to comments and potential criticism from others.

It can also call attention to a brand’s larger role in today’s economic situation: While it may be considered pretty common to rent out a room on Airbnb, studies have shown that short-term rentals can drive up rent prices in New York and around the US.

Value over savings?

Around the holidays, Ceckowski said a good holiday strategy for many brands in today’s economic circumstances is centering emotion: “We don’t focus on buying; we don’t focus on decking out the home with gifts and decor,” she said. “Instead, we focus on our time together.”

Some brands may look to to offer additional discounts— particularly given the record-high Black Friday sales this year. In its 2022 Macro Marketing Report, marketing communications company RRD found that more than half of consumers “feel that brands have the responsibility to accommodate for recent inflation,” with 66% of respondents saying brands should offer discounts or promotions.

However, Imran Hirani, VP of media and advertiser analytics at Nielsen, also told us that offering such price cuts isn’t a smart strategy long-term, noting that promotions are less effective than investing in ad and media placements when it comes to profitability.

Looking ahead, Ceckowski also said it’s smart for brands to consider value and how to communicate through more authentic channels, like customer testimonials or microinfluencers.

“The messaging you actually want to be focusing on isn’t about price or promotion. It’s going to be about quality, durability, longevity,” she said. “You want your messaging to help consumers justify their purchases, rather than trying to convince them that this is the best deal they’re going to find.”

Hirani echoed that, saying brands should make their case “so that their brand is seen as not a higher price, but a better bet.”

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Why B2B must embrace diverse and inclusive storytelling

By Steve Wheen, Distillery

It’s now a given that brands need to be inclusive in their marketing to meet the needs of all their audiences. Steve Wheen, CEO and Founder of distillery, explains why B2B brands need to catch up.

A commitment to diversity and representation in content is not only the right thing to do. It’s also a key driver of business growth and sustainable profitability.

Brands are increasingly recognising the need to step up their marketing in order to meet consumer expectations in diversity and inclusion. This was made clear by Kantar in its 2021 Global Monitor, which found that 39% of global consumers believe that brands are not doing a good job of representing people ‘similar to me or my community’.

More brands are getting D&I right in their marketing. But it has been the B2C sector that’s leading the way in diverse representation and storytelling, particularly in advertising and online video content. Take for example, Renault’s 30 Years in the Making, which is a great example of inclusive queer storytelling, or Starbucks’ narrative from the trans community, Every Name’s a Story, which was a former winner of Channel 4’s Diversity in Advertising Awards in 2019.

B2B brands are missing out by lagging behind in diverse and inclusive marketing. Sharing perspectives from

different communities brings new and exciting stories to the table. These are stories that reflect the reality for today’s consumers and of the modern corporate world. And telling diverse stories drives acceptance in society – 80% of those exposed to LGBTQ+ people in advertising and media are supportive of equal rights, compared to 70% who are unexposed, according to a 2020 study from Procter & Gamble and GLAAD.

Having the right diversity in marketing is key to a brand conveying the right messaging in the right way. But it goes beyond this to leveraging the power of diverse storytelling. Some experiences – falling in love, playing football, planning a holiday, even buying new software – are universal and it’s that universality that B2C has already tapped into. Take, for example, Habitat’s Seb and Dad’s Habitat, which tells of the story of the shared shopping experience of a black father and son. Or the Christmas story that we can all relate to, featuring a gay couple, told by Etsy in Gift it like you mean it, new guy.

So why is the B2B sector struggling to embrace inclusion in its marketing and to leverage the power and potential of diverse storytelling? There are potentially many reasons, but one key one is simply the lack of diversity in some B2B sectors. For example, in the UK technology sector, only 15% of the workforce are from BAME backgrounds, according to Diversity in Tech, and gender diversity sits at 19% compared

to 49% for all other jobs.

There is also the issue of historic and unchallenged target audiences in B2B. In technology, the ‘target demographic’ often falls into the presumptively white male category. For tech – or any B2B sector – to grow and flourish it must become more accessible and diverse. B2B also suffers from the general lack of diversity in marketing. A recent study from recruitment company Zippia in the US found that 71.2% of marketing managers are white and 91% identify as heterosexual.

So for many B2B businesses, the starting point for diverse storytelling is to ensure that all the voices are properly represented within the business. You can’t hope to have diverse storytelling in marketing without creating an inclusive environment inside the business. And this runs throughout every function and level within the organisation, but it should be led from the top.

Businesses with diversity in their leadership teams outperform those with more homogeneity. In its 2019 study, McKinsey found that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on executive teams were 25% more likely to have aboveaverage profitability than companies in the fourth quartile.

In marketing, B2B businesses should move towards diverse teams across all functions right from the planning stage, through to creative, production and distribution and amplification. This is one of the reasons why we set up studio d at distillery. It’s a diverse network of creatives from all over the world and every facet of life focused on enriching the creative output for clients. Tapping into our studio d team helps our clients to leverage the skills and insights of a talent pool full of intersectionality and smarts.

But no business can hope to have entirely the right diversity within its teams for all areas of representation, so it’s

essential for the B2B sector to listen to other voices and to seek the opinions of those with relevant lived experience. Even if you think you have expert knowledge of a community, if you are not part of that community, your approach to storytelling may not be a true or relevant representation of that community and you may also be influenced by unconscious bias.

Despite B2B’s lack of speed in embracing inclusive storytelling, there are some companies that are getting it right and leading the way on diverse marketing. Google has won praise for its social videos. The More We Learn, the Closer We Get, featuring footballer Marcus Rashford, depicts what it’s like to be an outsider, focusing on the importance of understanding difference. Google has also created films on personal journeys in resilience, such as one featuring a woman in South Korea who finds strength and hope in sport after a life-changing injury.

Microsoft is using in-depth storytelling to showcase the initiatives it’s supporting, like Inner-City Computer Stars, a programme that provides young adults from low-income communities with the tools to develop the technical and leadership skills needed for a career in technology. This online content series shows that Microsoft is doing more than paying lip service to diversity, which is vital to customer engagement, particularly among younger people.

By embracing inclusive storytelling and representation in marketing, companies can reflect the world we live in and meet the needs of all their audiences. As Joseph Taiano, Global Head of Marketing at Accenture Song, puts it: “Because we’re also the storytellers, the creatives, and the owners of the company’s image and brand, we have the opportunity to contribute to and benefit from inclusion and diversity on a much larger scale.” Doing so is a win for society, for brand loyalty and for overall business engagement.

Uncertain times? Change your marketing focus, not your spend

BY TYLER HARTSOOK

The buzz coming out of the ANA “Masters of Marketing” conference is different from past years. It was not about the latest trends and cool new technology, but about meeting the demands of younger consumers and how to fight to keep marketing budgets in uncertain times.

Many advertisers and agencies will tell you not to cut marketing in uncertain times. Rather, now is time to spend and take advantage of the opportunities. Early reporting suggests industries are split on this with some such as travel, media and entertainment ramping up spending while others , such as the early pandemic boom industries of finance and home furnishings, are dramatically pulling back.

Evidence suggests leaning into the power of positivity might pay off. Over the last century, companies that increased marketing budgets during recessions often generated proportionally higher sales than those that cut. In fact, in every recession since the 1970s, companies that increased marketing spending in a downturn outperformed those that slashed.

While industry leaders looked at forecasts and reacted with fear, challenger brands saw opportunity. This does

not mean they reacted without thought. It means they felt properly prepared for the moment, which empowered them to pivot to an advantageous position.

Preparing for uncertain times – which is the only thing certain these days – requires a different marketing approach starting with these five actions:

Review technology investments

The last five years have seen a surge in marketing technology tools and platforms. Now is the time to review these tools, ensure they are working together, integrated well and performing optimally.

Reduce technology tools where necessary and invest in platforms that drive first-party data insights and actionable consumer engagement. That’s something Twinkies did In 2012. After parent company Hostess filed for bankruptcy, the snack brand streamlined its process and developed a new formula with double the shelf life of the old, enabling Hostess to sell more products for less cost.

Audit the customer journey

Due to the global pandemic, supply chain issues, inflation and the rise of e-commerce, consumers have significantly changed how they purchase and where. Audit the customer journey for your products or services and ensure a modern understanding of how consumers are purchasing today and how they plan to purchase in the future. Adjust your technology, targeting and investments accordingly. During the 2008 recession, Netflix found creative ways to stream its content through partnerships with brands like Xbox, which increased subscriptions and streams.

Invest in (the right) innovation

Innovation is the key to succeeding during times of transition. But only with the right bets.

Now is the time to get the lay of the category landscape, determine brand health, execute consumer insights segmentation research and evaluate where brands stand and can win. The gold standard for doubling down in a recession is Kellogg’s. While rival Post cut, Kellogg’s invested heavily in the late 1920s to promote a new cereal, Rice Krispies and created more jobs by thinking outside the box to a six-hour workday, while investing in its home community of Battle Creek, Mich.

Foster loyalty

In times of defense, larger groups of loyal consumers will drive strong, continued sales. Consider where technology, innovation, first-party data and owned platforms can provide new ways of driving loyalty. Then, invest in loyaltybased marketing and digital platforms to encourage longterm loyalty and turn loyal customers into advocates. Coming out of bankruptcy in 2005, Delta heavily invested in improving the customer experience by investing in its workforce. Better trained and happier employees meant more satisfied and loyal customers.

Acquire a new position

As competitors go into defensive mode, it may be the ideal opportunity to attack. Look for significant share opportunities among your closest competitors to increase your position.

Consider besting direct competitors through landing pages, paid search campaigns, content and influencer tactics alongside in-store POS and advertising via retail partners.

Despite the recession, from 2006-2008 Amazon stayed the course and continued creating new enterprises and launched Prime, Kindle and AWS, all of which still drive substantial revenue today.

When facing difficult times it is important to reexamine your focus, not your commitment. It is not the time to question how little to invest, but where to best invest to overcome these new obstacles. When consumer habits begin to shift it is important to shift with them. The brands that shift their focus on the human element of their business will see gains.

As we have learned historically, and most recently since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is no recessionproof plan or company. The one thing we do know is that abandoning brand marketing will almost guarantee diminishing market share.

Instead, brands should use this period to reevaluate current approaches, pivot and unleash the power of creativity to build a deeper connection with their audiences. Brands that are able to do that will emerge from recession stronger.

Tyler Hartsook is a senior brand strategist at independent agency SCS. His passion and extensive background in digital marketing, emerging technology, social media, public relations and sales give him a unique viewpoint of what customers really want and need and how to best engage with them at a variety of touchpoints to help find and turn passive fans into brand-loving advocates through creative concepts and campaigns.

Inside Microsoft’s quest to lead the new era of design

BY MARK WILSON

At first glance, you might think you walked into a suburban living room, or perhaps a hotel lounge. TVs, couches, and other comfortable seating fill the space, while a Rock Band kick pedal sits idly near the front door. But upon further study, the Microsoft Inclusive Tech Lab in Redmond, Washington— which opened in May 2022 as a space where Microsoft’s design team can develop new products, not simply for but with people with disabilities—is a meticulously crafted room, intended to welcome everyone, no matter their needs.

On the floor, crisscrossing tiles create a grid for easier cane navigation. In the corner, a fiber-optic octopus hangs from the ceiling, floating over a couch topped with richly textured pillows to ease neurodivergent people into the environment. Dimmable lights and sound-dampening paneling dot the ceiling and walls to mitigate overstimulation. And if you leave through the doors, down the hall you’ll find a bathroom equipped with adult-size changing tables, installed for some wheelchair users.

Six months ago, the room was nothing more than a campus lobby. A pool table sat in the middle of the room, and a few arcade cabinets were up against the wall. Now, that arcade is a small but dedicated space where the $1.9 trillion technology company (market cap) is developing new products and evangelizing the importance of designing a more accessible

world to both its own 221,000 employees (as of June 30, 2022) and other corporations.

And evangelize, Microsoft does. Before the company invited me to be the first journalist inside the lab last October, it had already hosted representatives from Amazon, HBO, Nike, and T-Mobile. It welcomed designer Tommy Hilfiger and the musician Stone Gossard from Pearl Jam. It received government officials from Australia, Germany, Japan, and Singapore. Altogether, approximately 2,000 people in and outside the disability community have made a pilgrimage to the renovated space in 2022.

“It’s come a long way from the pool table,” says Panos Panay, chief product officer at Microsoft, with a laugh.

While the staff laments that some employees still treat the lab as a pass-through to the cafeteria, Microsoft is taking this moment to firmly establish itself as the corporate leader in the rapidly expanding space of inclusive design.

Inclusive design is the process of fashioning products and platforms alongside people with disabilities. It’s a technique that feeds into the broader umbrella of accessible or universal design. Accessible design programs are a ballooning practice across corporate America. Forrester estimates that people with disabilities are currently spending nearly $2 trillion a year, and companies courting the market are spending $10

billion on accessible design over the course of 2022. Today, surveying 505 companies from around the globe, Forrester finds that 60% of executives have committed to creating accessible products (up from 25% just a few years ago), and 27% of surveyed design professionals said their teams were going to hire roles in accessible and inclusive design in the next year.

“The work used to be very motivated by legal factors and increasing accessibility lawsuits,” says Gina Bhawalkar, principal analyst at Forrester. “The primary data we’re seeing [now] is about getting new customers, and attracting and retaining talent that cares about inclusion.”

Microsoft currently employs “hundreds of people who work on inclusive design and accessibility,” according to the company, and it has set up advisory boards on products for people with limited vision and hearing. Over the past several years, Microsoft has launched such watershed initiatives as its inclusive employment program, and in 2022 it spearheaded a new neurodivergent jobs marketplace called Neurodiversity Career Connector. That’s atop close relationships Microsoft maintains with half a dozen nonprofits, including AbleGamers, Special Effect, and the Cerebral Palsy Foundation—along with its own Ability Summit, which has operated for the past 12 years.

Yet, there’s a lot that Microsoft is struggling to talk about outside of its own mythos, like the way to use its inclusive products and the costs and revenue of its inclusive projects. Microsoft, it seems, has thought of everything. Well, almost. Developing traditional products is hard enough, but reimagining them as accessible products for the estimated one out of 10 people in the world with disabilities is proving to be a far more difficult task, given the eminently wide range of human needs. That’s a challenge even within the design of the lab itself, which is still a work in progress. At one point during my daylong visit in October, the lab’s director, Solomon Romney, gestures to a busy, striped wall.

“We’ve found that [this] pattern can be overstimulating for certain guests,” he says. “We’ve also heard that all the lights reflecting off the glass can be a bit much. So we’re thinking about ways we can help with that. But these are the kinds of conversations we have and the lessons we learn.”

Inclusion. Accessibility. These are design buzzwords today, but corporate interest in accessibility can be traced back to 1990, with the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which mandated baseline accessibility technical standards on public and commercial facilities, affecting the design of everything from building entries and water fountains to parking spots and carpet pile. While on-screen, digital designs weren’t explicitly included in the original ADA, in 1996 the Department of Justice defined the ADA to cover digital-product access; and every several years, as warranted, the ADA is expanded, mandating equal access to every manner of digital environment.

“I recall Microsoft Windows and Office always investing in accessibility and having people with direct experience of

specific disabilities provide input and help design solutions,” says Tjeerd Hoek, a director of design on Windows in the ‘90s, who is now head of creative at Argodesign Amsterdam. “We also had to, because the government, Army, Navy, and Air Force were clients, and they required compliance to accessibility standards.”

To this day, ADA-related laws vary by region, and they tend to lack specific rules to designing websites, apps, and other digital products. Instead, the laws are driven by two vague but encompassing guidelines. “The law says you have to one, not discriminate, and two, effectively communicate,” says Lainey Feingold, the disabilities lawyer who pushed banks to install speech systems in ATMs in the ‘90s, and author of Structured Negotiation: A Winning Alternative to Lawsuits. “The only way [to satisfy both requirements] . . . is to make it accessible.”

Over the last decade in particular, Microsoft has increased its efforts to surpass any discernible ADA baseline. Following the Obama administration’s failed attempt to launch expanded web accessibility laws in 2010, companies including Facebook and Google have launched their own accessibility labs (Google just opened a new London lab this year).

“The labs are great, and they really are great if they’re done properly,” says says Lucy Greco, a web accessibility evangelist at UC Berkeley, who has been blind since birth.

“The model I prefer is the model that companies like Amazon are using, where they have people with disabilities as part of the workforce, and there’s no ands, ifs, or buts about it. That is something Microsoft has been doing well, [too].” Greco’s criticism of most corporate labs is that they tend to be a place for able-bodied people to try out accessible technologies, such as screen readers, for themselves.

Microsoft’s lab has pushed the notion of accessibility further than its peers and has made a concerted effort to hire designers with disabilities. Even the fact that the lab—which can be filled with secret, prerelease products—has windows looking to the outside, instead of secure, opaque walls, signals an atypical openness of Microsoft’s design practice. Both literally and metaphorically.

Much of the credit to this new strategy belongs to the team under Albert Shum, Microsoft’s former corporate VP of design, experience, and devices, who had tasked his deputies with rethinking design at Microsoft in the 2010s. During this time, former Microsoft designers Kat Holmes and the late August de los Reyes codified the theory and practice of inclusive design.

While designers have long been thoughtful students of their intended audience, ultimately, a person who actually lives their life with anything ranging from a stutter to a power wheelchair will understand their distinct needs better than the most dedicated anthropologist. While universal or accessible design imagined a world built to accommodate people with disabilities, inclusive design argues that one must literally bring their subject into the design process to create solutions together. Ideally, what began as an accommodation

will actually lead to better products for everyone. (The paradigmatic example? The OXO vegetable peeler.)

I’m sitting in the lab with Panay and Jenny Lay-Flurrie, Microsoft’s chief accessibility officer, awkwardly balancing on a stool with the variegated plastic patterning of a bendy straw, encircled by Microsoft designers and at least as many PR handlers. Panay is contemplative, self-effacing, and wearing all black, save for his olive green hiking boots. Lay-Flurrie toys with the fiber-optic octopus while casually listening in through her ASL interpreter.

Panay tells me that a decade ago his team was still concerned first and foremost with the reliability of their products—would they be durable enough to hold up on a day-to-day basis? The Microsoft team learned firsthand that if a product wasn’t built to last from its earliest steps in the design process, it most probably wouldn’t.

More recently, he says that their focus has shifted from starting with reliability (which is now table stakes) to two new priorities—sustainability and accessibility—each as impossible to add in the 11th hour of a product release as ruggedness.

In the 2010s, Microsoft began to bring people with varying disabilities into its own product labs to bake in accessibility from the get-go. Such strategy can be seen to this day within the Xbox interface (de los Reyes led the Xbox design team), which was constructed with large, easy-to-grok panels instead of tiny icons, cue-able with a click or voice command.

In 2016, Microsoft published an inclusive design tool kit, which, alongside Holmes’s book Mismatch, serve as corporate tomes of inclusive design. Microsoft itself used the methodology outlined in the tool kit—which includes everything from broad advice on how to connect with the disability community to finding research participants for specific exercises to audit a UX—to create its first inclusive piece of hardware, 2018’s Xbox Adaptive Controller.

Video game pads are wonders of modern engineering and design. Xbox controllers squeeze in 20 buttons for your fingers to reach (these controllers are so advanced that they have steered military drones and submarines), and they require fine motor control to operate. The Adaptive Controller whittled the design down to a flat board that can sit on your lap, with two giant buttons that are easier to strike. For everything else someone might want to do, the controller featured an unprecedented 19 ports on the back that allowed people to plug in any specialized button or sensor to control a game. Think, buttons you could strike with a foot or knee, or sensors that you could activate by puffing into a straw. The Xbox Adaptive Controller wasn’t just accessible for a single, or even a few, use cases, like an ergonomic cane might be; it was ostensibly designed for any possibility, through optional customization. Microsoft calls this approach “one size fits one.”

Microsoft embraced its more inclusive identity with a wave of saccharine marketing campaigns that began in 2018, and included a 2019 Super Bowl commercial produced by McCann. In the ad, children with disabilities detailed their joy gaming with Microsoft’s Adaptive Controller, while their

parents discussed nervousness and fear of their children fitting in. The ads were widely celebrated, but were questioned by some in the disability community for framing people with disabilities as superheroes, and accessibility as a doe-eyed, childlike phenomenon.

While the Adaptive Controller won design awards (even the product packaging was designed with specialized pull tabs to open with a single hand or a mouth), Microsoft’s Disability Answer Desk—the company’s customer troubleshooting center with American Sign Language support that’s fielded a staggering 1.5 million calls over the last decade— was gathering less enthusiastic feedback. The problem: Microsoft’s own customers hadn’t been briefed on how the controller worked quite as well as the press.

“People didn’t understand that the real beauty of that product was . . . pieces that connected to it,” explains Kris Hunter, a senior director at Microsoft for devices user experience research and accessibility. “[People] want the hero shot, of course, right? But I do think we learned that we had to show the beauty of the adaptability of it. . . . You could just connect anything into that.” This communication gap around the Adaptive Controller was an even larger problem for caregivers, who were often the ones tasked with setting up the device but might not have the technical background to do it with ease.

This sort of lapse is why critics such as Henry Claypool, a consultant for the American Association of People with Disabilities, who advises for companies including General Motors, argues that Microsoft is falling short of its own claims. “Microsoft is an example of where a company has struck out as a leader to try to bring and instill this practice in their work, so devices can be born accessible,” he says. A bit later in our conversation, he qualifies that: “It’s clearly a growing practice [at the company], but just how deep it goes into the organization . . . is still pretty unclear.”

The Adaptive Controller has taught the company the importance of more supportive software and the necessity to film tutorials. But also that it still had strong biases that its technologies were easy to grasp. “Everything we’re doing now has an integration point from hardware and software,” says Panos.

That evolution is clear in Microsoft’s sequel to the Xbox Adaptive Controller, its Adaptive Accessories. The collection of mice and modular buttons are built for flexible use on a computer, tablet, or phone. Instead of being sized for a lap, they are tiny and portable

A 3D printing partnership with Shapeways allows people to order a variety of customized tops (and open CAD files even allow enterprising people to design their own). But as Gabi Michel, director of accessible accessories at Microsoft, demonstrates to me, the power of the accessories is largely in its software layer—the programmable macros. The Windows backend allows people to program a single button to complete complex tasks ranging from “copy and paste” to hyper specific jobs that can have a dozen or more steps, automatically juggling a maze of mouse clicks and enabling voice commands, even between apps.

Dave Dame, Microsoft’s director of accessibility, wheels up in a telepresence robot as Michel demonstrates the tool, explaining, “Really, what people with disabilities have in common with [everyone else] is we love to stay in flow when we’re doing our work.”

Microsoft also doesn’t want to make people who need access to these tools dig through layers of menus, which is why Windows advertises its improved accessibility from the moment you hit Start. The menu lists accessibility settings right at the top of its apps, and from there, it’s a tap to turn on audio transcription or verbal controls that make a computer usable.

“Before it was, ’We know you need something now. Here’s the maze!’” says Panay, who believes the new Start menu does a lot to fix this issue. “Elevating something like that into Windows? It seems trivial. It’s not. It’s complex. It challenges the UI.”

Experiencing demo after demo through my (admittedly ablebodied) eyes, Microsoft’s inclusive design work appears to be both effective and thoughtful. Yet, to gauge Microsoft’s impact through inclusive design—whether or not they’re improving the daily lives of actual customers—is a task so big that it’s nearly impossible to audit.

“We’d have to do an assessment, and lay out the metrics of ‘doing better,’” says Aimi Hamraie, associate professor and director of the Critical Design Lab at Vanderbilt University and author of Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability. “There can be things made and marketed in accessibility and inclusion that don’t do stuff people actually want. It makes it really challenging, even in an academic sense, to measure, Are things improving or not?”

Part of the issue is that designing for one is an impossibly large mantra. Even if Microsoft is listening closely to specific members of the disability community, it—like all groups of people—is too diverse to agree fully on how all things should be designed. And reaching customers and experts alike in this field is an ongoing challenge to Microsoft. I was surprised that in a handful of conversations with researchers and consultants in the disability community, all but one were unaware of Microsoft’s new space.

“They’ve never invited me to that lab,” says Greco, before tossing on a dollop of sarcasm. “I’m just a person who runs an accessibility program at a big university who happens to have a disability; why would I have to know what Microsoft is doing?” (In response to such criticisms, a Microsoft spokesperson clarified that, “For anyone interested in touring the space or learning more, we have our email address at the top of Microsoft Inclusive Tech Lab.)

Some have called the Adaptive Controller, with its large buttons (originally designed for amputees) infantilizing and overly specialized. It’s a perspective that might seem paradoxical to able-bodied people (shouldn’t products be designed to just work?), but to some in the disability community, initiatives like the Adaptive Controller can feel like superficial solutionism.

People with disabilities are often described as natural hackers because they’ve learned to adapt objects for their own needs. But that term doesn’t resonate with everyone. To some, a walker with tennis balls stuck to the bottom is a gross failure of companies to properly design a walker that can glide smoothly on its own; whereas to others, those tennis balls are a point of pride, celebrating the ingenuity of people with disabilities to thrive in a world that’s so often ignored their needs.

“[DIY products] are a way we pass innovation and build community,” explains Hamraie. “We say, ‘we got this thing at the dollar store and [transformed] it into this other thing— and you can, too!’ But not everyone wants to do that.”

Indeed, not everyone does, which is why Greco approaches the topic more bluntly. “Somebody who generalizes and says people with disabilities are natural hackers? Bullshit,” she says. “People are hackers or people are not hackers. If they happen to have a disability and fall into the hacker space, they might be in a better place when they use inaccessible technologies.”

While Microsoft puts incredible effort into marketing its inclusive design programs, the company has always shied away from questions about the profitability of its accessible initiatives. When I ask Lay-Flurrie about the profitability of the lab and Microsoft’s accessible initiatives, her friendly countenance melts away, and her jaw juts out in advertised disgust.

“We don’t do this for ROI,” she says. “And I will just say, this question comes up, candidly, a little too much.”

But the question remains valid to researchers in the disability community, because profitability is a capitalist placeholder for that word Microsoft used to be so focused on: reliability. “Society needs to know, are these things being created financially solvent?” says Hamraie.

On one hand, both McKinsey and Forrester have both pointed to the trillions of dollars in consumer spending up for grabs in building products for the disability community. On the other, Microsoft is carefully implying that it’s losing money, or at least doesn’t care if these programs ever happen to turn a profit.

Yet, financial solvency is the only dependable way that accessible design can scale. That’s true for both inclusively designed products and the labs that produced them. Microsoft—which is working hard to lead the corporate conversation around accessibility—also owes it to the community to disclose the financial stability of the operation, both so that the disability community understands the costs of these programs long term, and so corporations modeling Microsoft can properly assess and plan inclusivity projects of their own.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is a champion of inclusivity, and published his own 2017 letter detailing his life with his son Zain Nadella, who lived with cerebral palsy since birth and passed away in March 2022. Yet, one only needs to glance

over to Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter to see how a shift in ownership can completely alter a company’s civil rights priorities, especially if certain programs aren’t profitable. Case in point: The Adaptive Controller itself was almost canceled due to budget balancing at Microsoft.

Microsoft is deep enough into its own accessibility initiatives that a Twitter-like human rights meltdown, which has emboldened racism and Nazism over the past few weeks, seems hard to imagine. But many companies emulating Microsoft’s inclusivity efforts don’t necessarily have institutional momentum on their side, nor do they have the $100 billion pile of cash that Microsoft does to ride out any economic tumult. It’s easy for companies to play the good guy when things are going well, and harder when they aren’t.

History also teaches us that if accessible products aren’t profitable, they don’t stick around for long. Hamraie points to thermostats developed in the 1970s with big buttons and displays, which were easier to read and use for people with vision issues and arthritis, but disappeared from the market. Meanwhile, they point to the ergonomic task chairs born in corporate environments in the 1980s, designed to ease one’s body to increase productivity, and the stretchy pants of athleisure that can squeeze onto more body types, as examples of accessible ideas that have stuck around because they were flexible. Accessibility has always had roots in industrial capitalism, and Microsoft is not immune to this reality.

“It’s why we have ergonomic chairs at the workplace but not our dinner tables,” says Hamraie. Yet, for any lingering skepticism about Microsoft’s inclusive design initiatives, those efforts have been contagious across

the business world. Lay-Flurrie says that she talks to peers at Apple and Google “every few days,” and the fruits of those conversations can be seen in a new joint research project that also includes Meta and Amazon to improve speech recognition for people with speaking impairments.

Ayelet Winer, senior technical product manager at T-Mobile, has toured design conferences for the past several years, studying the ins and outs of inclusive and accessible design to expand the wireless carrier’s accessibility programming. She calls Microsoft’s lab the “gold standard” in the industry and considers it a place where the sharp elbows of capitalism are padded so that companies can pursue shared ideals.

While Winer is currently planning her own inclusive design lab at T-Mobile, she admits that just three years ago, when she was tasked by her boss to build out T-Mobile’s accessibility efforts, she knew nothing on the topic. And when she saw Lay-Flurrie speaking on stage during that time, upon hearing that Microsoft had such an expansive inclusivity team, Winer called her manager in a panic.

“I’m like, ‘Oh my god, I will never be able to do that,’” she recalls. “Today, we have a much bigger [accessibility] team. We are building our own training. We have best practices. We have processes people are following. We have experienced a huge, huge growth. But it all started with me looking at Microsoft, terrified.”

Mark Wilson Is The Global Design Editor At Fast Company. He Has Written About Design, Technology, And Culture For Almost 15 Years. His Work Has Appeared At Gq, Esquire, Popmech, Popsci, American Photo And Lucky Peach.

How much impact can visual identity have on your organic visibility?

By Ann Smarty

What is visual identity?

A visual identity is a collection of graphic elements that represent and differentiate a brand.

It can be a logo, a tiny element of a logo, a color palette, a unique font – or any combination of all of these visual branding elements that make a brand recognizable.

Creating a recognizable visual identity used to be a prerogative of big brands with huge budgets. Thanks to digital channels (social media, video, etc.), a visual identity is something every brand can and should have because it helps your past customers recognize you and become your returning customers.

Creating a consistent and cohesive visual identity is key to cross-channel marketing. People traveling from channel to channel and seeing your brand everywhere will finally start

recognizing you and with recognition comes more trust and engagement.

How is visual identity reflected in organic search?

Historically, Google has loved brands because they are easy to understand and map together (hence the Knowledge Graph is based on entities, i.e. brands).

A few years ago, Google started featuring brands visually in SERPs too. So now brands can actually build recognizability through organic search results.

Let’s look at just one example.

Let’s search for a brand name first: Notice how many images show up in different search sections across SERPs, including:

• The knowledge panel

•

Twitter carousel

• Image thumbnails

• Image carousels

• Video thumbnails, etc.

• How to create a consistent visual identity

The key to building a visual identity online is being active and consistent.

It doesn’t mean living on social media sites. It means using social media strategically and regularly to publicize wellbranded visual messages that keep reminding your target audience of your brand.

According to Namify, it takes five to seven impressions for people to remember your brand.

This means serving your visual message to the same person at least 5 times before you start looking familiar. How can this be achieved?

Reuse the same image across several channels

Apps like Photoleap make it extremely easy to create effective visual assets that can be used across multiple social media channels. You can use it to apply advanced effects or minor touch-ups to existing images, or use the built-in text-to-image AI engine to describe whatever visual you want to see, and then edit from there.

Once you have your concept created, you can easily fit it to multiple social media channels, and even animate it, which extends your possibilities even further allowing you to use it as Reels, shorts, and even stories.

Curate your own (and your customers’) images

Monitoring your customers’ reviews and turning them into visual assets (images and videos) is a great way to control your brand sentiment under control and promote your brand’s visual identity through user-generated content.

There are many ways to approach that, and you don’t have to choose once. Try several of them before your create your own UGC-driven visual identity strategy:

Create a unique hashtag and encourage your customers to publicize their feedback using it (then re-share to updates and stories from your own account)

Use Highlights to keep those brand-driven stories permanent Embed 20-second videos on your landing pages to increase conversions

Set up a contest to reward weekly/monthly photo submissions from customers

Turn text reviews (from Google or Yelp) into visual quotes

Curate multiple images and turn them into a video presentation (to publish on Youtube and Facebook)

Monitor your competitors’ (or peers’) reviews to better understand what kind of feedback they generate and how they re-package and re-market it for better results. Visualize all you can

You need your brand-own assets to rank for a wide variety of brand-driven and generic queries to build recognizability, one search session at a time. This includes posting visual content on Twitter (which has its own carousel section in SERPs) and Facebook (that is usually granted visually rich snippets).

Make sure you stick to your brand-driven color palette for every asset you create (see the orange SERP example above), play with your logo elements, and add watermarks inside your videos.

Consider (but not limit yourself to) a few ideas below:

• Create original images for every article you publish (and then re-use those images on social media when sharing your link)

• Use image optimization tactics to ensure your images rank in organic search results. There are SEO plugins that make this step easier.

• Embed videos on your landing pages to generate videorich snippets in organic SERPs

• Create infographics to visualize how-to guides or make steps easier to follow. There are quite a few data visualization plugins to make this easier.

• Use illustrations: A brand illustration system is a collection of images with a cohesive mood and style that visualizes a brand’s promise

Use retargeting Retargeting is a great way to reach people who are already familiar with your visual identity, and so they will respond better to your ads. Google offers dynamic remarketing ads within its display network. Facebook is another great retargeting platform that makes it easy to reach your past site visitors and let them continue their buying journey from where they left it.

Conclusion

Building a recognizable visual identity takes time and effort but it is well worth it because a recognizable brand brings higher conversions and more sales. Keep your visual identity in mind when planning your content and visual marketing strategy and you’re halfway there! All you need now is time and consistency. Good luck!

Ann Smarty is the Brand and Community manager at InternetMarketingNinjas.com. Ann has been into Internet Marketing for 8 years, she is the former Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Journal and contributor to prominent search and social blogs including Small Biz Trends and Mashable.

Crypto Was Always Smoke and Mirrors

By Charlie Warzel

The world of cryptocurrency is rich with eccentric characters and anonymous Twitter personalities. So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that one of the early figures who called attention to the problems with Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, is a 30-year-old Michigan psychiatrist who investigates financial crimes as a hobby.

James Block, who runs a crypto newsletter called Dirty Bubble Media, has gotten overlooked in the swift and spectacular collapse of FTX. On November 2, a report from the crypto publication Coindesk highlighted the troubled balance sheet of Bankman-Fried’s crypto-trading firm, Alameda Research. Two days later, Block’s post titled “Is Alameda Research Insolvent?” went viral, and for good reason: Block had connected the dots from Coindesk’s earlier work to suggest that both FTX and Alameda had their money tied up in their own made-up tokens—an unsustainable circular flow of cash that would eventually sink FTX. Within a week, the company filed for bankruptcy.

Currently, Bankman-Fried is under investigation from federal prosecutors who are looking into whether he engaged in illegal market-manipulation tactics. He’s also supposedly going to testify before the House Financial Services committee in the coming weeks. Ignoring the advice of his lawyers, Bankman-Fried has given a series of interviews with independent journalists as well as national media outlets. Throughout, he has continued to deny wrongdoing, maintaining instead that he was ignorant of Alameda’s market positions. “I didn’t knowingly commingle

funds,” Bankman-Fried told The New York Times at a conference late last month.

Block, a vehement crypto skeptic, has spent the past 18 months doing forensic blockchain research. He uses opensource tools to follow flows of money between crypto companies, repeatedly demonstrating how shadow banks and nefarious scammers inflate the value of worthless assets in order to generate enormous wealth that exists only on paper. Earlier this week, I called him to talk about how he got sucked into the world of financial-crime investigation, why decentralized finance isn’t actually transparent (or, in many cases, even decentralized), and whether there’s any value at all in the crypto ecosystem.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Charlie Warzel: I’m very curious about what your day job is like. My fascination is with your crypto work, obviously. But a side fascination here is that you do this in your spare time.

James Block: I’ve always just been fascinated with the weird mechanics of financial stuff and fraud—the mechanics of it and the complexity of how something so simple ends up being so bizarrely intricate. I’d heard about bitcoin, obviously, but I never really knew anything about crypto until probably June of last year. And then I found out about Tether, this company that claimed to have $69 billion under management but wouldn’t show anybody the books. And so that was just like candy to me. I couldn’t resist becoming interested in something like that.

Warzel: The world of finance has always been intimidating and impenetrable to me, but the more I learn, the more I get what you’re describing: complex, but actually very simple. And it all hinges on the vocabulary. I was reading about hedge funds recently, and it’s like, Oh, that financial instrument, they just made it up!

Block: This is a great way to talk about FTX and Alameda Research, and how they got into trouble with their stupid tokens. They created this incredibly convoluted mechanism out of thin air. A token is just code they created that has no value, but then you can make it very visible and pump it up to make it valuable. But it’s nothing. It’s smoke and mirrors. There’s nothing really complicated there, but it looks complicated if you don’t understand what they’re doing.

Crypto hides behind all this complexity, and people hear words like blockchain and get confused. You hear about decentralized networks and mining, and it sounds complicated. But you get right down to it, and it’s just a ledger. It’s just like somebody writing down numbers in a book, and it’s page after page of numbers. That’s all it is.

Warzel: So what made you start poking into FTX? From your newsletter, it seems you were looking at the collapse of Celsius—a large crypto lender that promised investors large yields but ultimately filed for bankruptcy this past summer—and saw a lot of links with FTX. Is that what raised your hackles?

Block: I’ve always been crypto skeptical, but like everyone

else, I believed the stories that SBF was the smart one in the ecosystem who was making the money. I never thought he was a genius, but I didn’t think he was as insolvent as he was. Even after I wrote the article, I thought I’d be proven right about FTX maybe a few months later. I didn’t think it would be three or four days later. That was incredible. I was shocked to find out just how big the hole in FTX’s balance sheet seemed to be. I suspected for a long time that FTX and Alameda were almost certainly gambling with their customers’ money. It’s just common sense based on the fact that the companies were so closely related and on some of the things I had seen on the blockchain that I didn’t really know how to interpret.

Warzel: What were those things on the blockchain you weren’t initially able to interpret?

Block: It’s hard to attribute ownership of certain addresses on the blockchain. You can follow the money perfectly— every single transaction is legible, and you can track the money wherever it goes. But it’s hard to know who owns things sometimes. When it came down to Alameda, I had a few starting points, and I could see funds coming out of FTX and going into Alameda in a way that was odd. And you think that maybe there’s something weird here about how they’re treating customers’ money.

Honestly, though, this is true for most crypto. There’s rarely separation between a company’s ownership of assets and an individual’s holdings. So it never would have shocked me to know that SBF was commingling assets between these

firms. And I had evidence to think that that was the case. But I didn’t have enough to write about it, you know?

Warzel: I want to go back to your November 4 newsletter, which may have helped accelerate FTX’s unraveling. Coindesk’s story showed that Alameda’s largest asset was FTX’s token, FTT, which of course was created by FTX, SBF’s other company. And what you did was further that reporting by following the money. As you put it, SBF was “printing billions of dollars out of thin air against which he was able to borrow massive sums from unknown counterparties.” You produced a rather alarming chart showing that FTT tokens were actually just flowing in a circle. When you saw that, was it an “oh shit” surprise moment?

Block: Not really. I knew things were very bad as soon as I saw that the distribution of FTT was almost entirely in Alameda’s own wallets. And I knew it was bad because this is what Celsius was doing—it’s a big, stupid circle. And that’s actually true for most of these tokens. And a lot of this is what these market makers do—they “provide liquidity,” but in practice, it’s just wash trading. But here’s the hard part: You can’t prove it’s wash trading without the exchange’s internal records. So I’m stuck just showing that, well, all these people that are supposedly buying this thing just end up sending it right back to the exchange. So what’s actually going on?

Warzel: There’s this idea that crypto is supposed to be decentralized and deeply transparent, that it’s supposed to be so easy to see where all the money is going at all times. And some of your work speaks to that promise. But it also strikes me that these centralized entities like Alameda or FTX play in the crypto world, and yet their balance sheets are not transparent. FTX is not a decentralized entity.

Block: There’s always stuff going on the blockchain, but these companies also have agreements off of the blockchain, right? Everything they have inside these exchanges is not on the blockchain. It’s using regular old database technology, and it’s not traceable at all. So yeah, a lot of the most important economic activity in crypto has nothing to do with blockchain at all. Huge percentages of people who do this kind of retail crypto trading, they don’t even know how to take what they bought off the exchange and put it in their own wallet.

Warzel: Post-FTX, I’ve heard a lot of chatter from crypto true believers about what needs to happen to the ecosystem. But what’s always struck me as a foundational problem in this space is that decentralized finance seems to have no real utility behind it. So much of what is created is just financial instruments and speculative assets. Can you speak to that part a bit?

tremendous. The amount of time and money people put into just running these things is tremendous. And they produce nothing of value. There’s a reason these massive companies aren’t all using blockchain for their processes: It is incredibly inefficient. And realistically, who actually wants their financial information public and visible to everybody? The vast majority of people who got involved in this have no interest related to the technology or in the political or ideological aspects of crypto. They just see an opportunity to get rich. And a lot of those people end up absorbing and parroting some of the crypto ideals back to you, but they don’t really care to understand what’s going on. It’s just their excuse for what they’ve already done, which is gamble on something they thought was going to make them wealthy.

Warzel: Do you think most entities in the crypto space are insolvent and know it, and are just pretending right now, post-FTX?

Block: Absolutely. That’s because of what I said earlier about crypto. There’s no value created by any of these companies. It’s all just moving money from Person A to Person B. And look at the economic conditions. You have interest rates rising; people and companies are being squeezed economically and not willing to gamble. The fact is that there are fewer suckers aping into this system, and Ponzi schemes rely on new money to survive. I think most crypto companies are, like FTX, just borrowing from customer deposits to keep things afloat. And even the companies that aren’t doing that—I think Coinbase, for example, isn’t doing anything illicit, but their business model is based on this ecosystem where new money comes in. And that’s stopping.

Warzel: By that logic then, what is the future for crypto? Do you see this ecosystem existing in a few years?

Block: I mean, Beanie Babies still exist. Pogs still exist. Will bitcoin still exist? I think it’ll be like owning a ham radio, with hobbyists doing their niche thing together. I mean, who knows. But you know if they were to really regulate the industry, it couldn’t work the way it does. It would look unrecognizable.

Block: The AMC-meme-stock thing is a good example of how this can happen. People buy the stock of a semiworthless company because they have this idea about short squeezing, or whatever. They are not financial experts and have a loose or maybe even wrong understanding of how finance works, and want to try to move the market. Crypto takes this abstraction a step further, because there’s nothing linked to it at all. There’s no economic activity in this space. There’s nothing produced by these companies. In fact, it’s a negative-sum game because of the cost of running the blockchains alone—the computational cost is

One thing that is interesting is the psychology of all this. I’ve shared a lot of really damning things over the past year with people online—stuff that, if you were to hear about it, you would think any rational person would think, What am I doing with my money? I need to get it out as quickly as possible. And there were some people who reacted that way. But for every one person who listened, there were at least 10 who didn’t. And it’s just been fascinating to see. But this was almost more fun for me when I was on the losing side—when crypto was booming, and before it was obvious to everybody that this was all a scam. Back then, it was just a minority of us saying, “None of this makes any damn sense, guys.” That was fun. Now it’s kind of sad watching the consequences play out, especially because the people who get hurt the most are the people at the bottom of the food chain.

The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Galaxy Brain, about technology, media, and big ideas.He is a co-author of Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working From Home. Previously he was a writer at large for The New York Times’ Opinion section and a senior writer at BuzzFeed News.

BY ROB WALKER

Branded is a weekly column devoted to the intersection of marketing, business, design, and culture.

Imagine Microsoft collaborating with The Hundreds on a hoodie. Or Warby Parker executing a sneaker in collaboration with WD-40. Or a Little Caesars x Hello Kitty skateboard.

As popular as the brand-collab trend has become over the years, none of these mashups are likely to happen. But you can glimpse what they might look like, and even read marketing copy theoretically “announcing” them, thanks to a real collaboration—between branding expert Noah Brier and the artificial intelligence tools available from OpenAI.

This new site uses AI to let you create the brand mashups of your dreams

Brier, a writer and self-dubbed “general internet tinkerer” who has worked in and around marketing for years, has long been interested in the intersection of branding and technology. That’s what led him to create BrXnd.ai, which uses artificial intelligence to depict imaginary brand teamups, however improbable. And as of today, Brier is opening up the site to public participation: Anyone can now use the collab-engine he’s put together to generate a dizzying array of hypothetical dual-branded items.

As fun (and occasionally silly) as this may sound, the project evolved out of a more serious inquiry: We know AI will have impacts on brands’ intellectual property and marketing options, but what can it reveal about brands, brand aesthetics, brand familiarity?

At first, Brier was just curious what the AI tools would come up with. But some of the visuals were amazing, he says, and a friend joked that the fabricated promo copy was “exactly generic enough that a real VP of marketing would approve the collaboration,” no matter how absurd (such as, sneakers blending “Warby Parker’s classic style with WD-40’s durable construction, perfect for any adventure.”)

So he pursued the experiment further, extending an earlier brand/tech effort: Back in 2008, Brier’s Brand Tags project invited people to “tag” a brand with the first word that came to mind (example: WalMart = big, cheap, etc.), producing a visual “tag cloud” that offered a kind of shorthand, crowdsourced summary of a brand’s meaning. “If Brand Tags was a snapshot of the perception that people have of brands,” Brier says, “this project is just many orders of magnitude more.” After all, he points out, branding is about pattern building, and AI is about pattern recognition. Plus, some of what it generated was actually . . . kind of awesome. A Cap’n Crunch x Brunello Cucinelli jacket, for instance. “It’s such a ridiculous combination of brands,” Brier says, but it’s somehow totally on point. A Supreme x Polo Ralph Lauren sweater similarly “feels right.” Then there’s the imaginary sneakers combining Asics with outdoor camo brand RealTree. “I kind of want those,” he admits.

The more Brier experimented, the more it became clear that, joking aside, the AI really did a pretty remarkable job of rendering brands in recognizable ways—the technology doesn’t depict words and seldom echoes actual trademarks, but its choices for shapes and color schemes and other visual cues made many brands instantly recognizable.

That said, some mashups don’t quite work. The Adidas x Ben & Jerry’s jacket lacks visual nods to the ice cream maker (although the description notes that it’s “lined with Ben & Jerry’s iconic ice cream flavor, Chocolate Fudge Brownie.”)

A few are outright train wrecks—like Clorox x Mountain Dew ice cream. Others just clang off the rim—like Crocs x Tiffany shoes and Apple x Off-White sneakers, two flat-out fails that

basically look like Nikes, replete with a swoosh.

“Some brands clearly overpower others,” Brier says. For example, almost anything involving Hermès tends to come across “more Hermès than the other brand,” unless the collab is with another high-power brand like McDonald’s or the Grateful Dead. Nike is an even more extreme example: “If you ask it to make a sneaker, whatever brand you choose, it’s very hard to keep a swoosh off of it.”

This isn’t just a matter of having mass presence. In some cases, the AI is able to recreate the brand aesthetic of more niche brands like The Hundreds or Ghostly, in ways that ring remarkably true, suggesting that such brands achieve “salience without scale,” as Brier puts it. (Obviously, AI’s digital “training” gives it a bias toward recognizing and re-creating “more internet-y brands,” he notes.) And there are other results that have surprised him—like how well Hot Topic’s brand aesthetic consistently comes through.

Brier says his experiments so far are “more a jumping-off point than an end,” and that’s led him to open his collab engine to others. You can pick two brands from an extensive list, and choose an item the pair will “collaborate” on, from backpacks to mugs to cereal. Brier uses generative AI to create marketing and product copy that, in turn, builds the visual prompt. (When something is off, he makes adjustments to better train the AI.)

For now, BrXnd.ai is letting users make a total of 20 free collabs a day (once those are gone, users will have to shell out to create new mashups, — starting at three for $5). The limit is to keep the engine, and Brier himself, from getting overwhelmed. But he’s looking forward to seeing what people come up with—and figuring out how to learn from it.

He’s now working to use generative AI to measure the attributes of brand strength and recognition. “It’s one thing for you to tell me, ‘This is a good brand,’” Brier says. “It’s another thing for a computer to tell me that. That means that underneath, there’s data.” This, he argues, may prove to be AI’s real contribution to branding; in fact, he’s already organizing a “Brands x AI” conference in the spring.

So for now, while BrXnd.ai is undeniably fun, especially for those who geek out on brand meaning, Brier hopes it leads to something deeper to be extracted from it. “Brands have famously been very hard to quantify,” he says. “I mean quantifying the aesthetic strength of a brand—I don’t know where to begin. But now it’s like, Okay, I know where to begin.”

Rob Walker Writes Branded, A Weekly Column About Marketing And Branding. He Also Writes About Design, Business, And Other Subjects. His Newsletter Is The Art Of Noticing.

Who cares about the metaverse?

By Warc Staff

Around the world, levels of understanding and interest in what the metaverse is and could become differ wildly, according to a new report helping decision-makers navigate the barriers and opportunities of the new space.

Why it matters

Though the metaverse as a new phase of the internet remains in a state of confused infancy – somewhere between VR, gaming, social media, and what a simple hyperlink might look like in an embodied internet – the possibility that it will hit the mainstream within 10 years piles pressure on investment decision-makers. Bet or hold?

There are plenty of sceptics. However, should a ‘killer app’ emerge that proves its usefulness on a mass scale, this could start to change. As yet, there is neither a good app nor much content to enjoy once people are on a platform. We are in the very early stages, and new ideas are bound to come along.

The data

Legal firm Gowling WLG has prepared ‘The Immaterial World’, a report in partnership with research agency Censuswide, based on over 6,000 responses across six locations (UK, USA, France, Canada, UAE, and China).

Global figures

• 73% of consumers say they have an understanding of the metaverse.

• 63% would consider taking part in the metaverse.

• 51% have considered buying a digital asset.

• 19% would consider workplace team management or collaborations.

• 23% would consider attending a trade show/conference or marketing event in the metaverse.

• 40% are interested in knowing more about using the metaverse for financial gain.

Different uses

• 41% would consider playing games in the metaverse.

• 37% would consider shopping.

• 35% would consider ‘creative experiences’, whether art, concerts, or films.

Major disparities

Broadly, the data indicates that respondents in China and the UAE are much more enthusiastic about the metaverse than their European and North American counterparts.

• In China, 83% of people surveyed said they would consider taking part in metaverse experiences, more than double the UK rate (37%).

• Over half of Chinese respondents agree that entertainment and leisure brands are set to benefit from the metaverse, compared to just over a fifth (22%) in the US.

• Consumers surveyed in the UAE are over five times (43%) as likely to feel excited about the prospect of spending time in the metaverse than those in the UK at 8%.

• 52% of UAE respondents believe their career development could be enhanced by the metaverse.

• 91% of respondents in the UAE and 88% in China believe the metaverse will improve their businesses, versus lower levels in the USA (67%) and France (63%).

The UK is a pessimistic outlier

• True to the national stereotype, the UK’s responses portrayed a country largely unmoved by this brave new world

•

41% of UK respondents have no understanding whatsoever of the metaverse.

• 21% of UK respondents don’t expect the metaverse to become mainstream.

• Just 15% of the UK believes the metaverse will aid their career development.

• A strong majority have major concerns: about identity fraud, crypto fraud, privacy, safety, costs, and rights.

• A silver lining? Around half of UK consumers are yet to make up their minds.

The Future of Digital Cash Is Not on the Blockchain

By Gilad Edelman

WHEN YOU HEAR the phrase “digital cash,” what comes to mind? Perhaps a payment app, like Venmo, that you use in situations that used to call for paper bills, like paying back a friend for dinner. Or maybe you think of cryptocurrencies. After all, the original Bitcoin white paper is titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.”

But none of these digital payment options are really like cash. Unlike paper money, they require both an internet connection and a bank account to use. Above all, they lack what has long made cash the preferred medium of civil libertarians, dissidents, and criminals alike: privacy. The only kind of money that leaves no paper trail is paper.

A bill introduced in Congress on Monday seeks to re-create the virtues of cash, privacy and all, in digital form. The ECASH Act would direct the US government to experiment with issuing digital dollars that are stored on hardware, not in bank accounts, and can be used without an internet connection. The idea of new, surveillance-proof currency will

surely face skepticism within government. But with paper money on a slow path to extinction, the case for a real digital alternative will only grow stronger.

It’s easy enough to understand why apps like Venmo, which infamously makes your transactions public by default, are an imperfect substitute for cash. Anyone using an app to send money around should be aware that they’re leaving a permanent digital trail that could be accessed by the government or malicious actors. With crypto, on the other hand, the lack of privacy is a bit counterintuitive. Privacy was an essential part of Bitcoin’s original appeal. Early crypto enthusiasts believed that the blockchain would free them from Big Brother. Using a distributed ledger rather than a centralized one would remove the need for a banklike middleman that could block transactions. And tying accounts to cryptographic wallet addresses, rather than offline identity, would keep transactions anonymous. This led to a profusion of illegal activity taking advantage of cryptocurrencies.

But, as my colleague Andy Greenberg illustrates in his forthcoming book, the early faith in crypto anonymity was misplaced. The thing about blockchains is that while your transactions might be hidden behind a crypto wallet address, they are also permanently stored on a public database. It didn’t take law enforcement agencies too long to figure out how to connect those transactions and wallets to the realworld identities behind them.

“In the grand scheme of things, distributed ledger versus regular ledger is almost irrelevant on the question of cashlike privacy,” says Rohan Grey, a law professor at Willamette University. The more meaningful distinction, he explains, is between two different currency models: tokens and accounts. When you pay for something with cash, you’re handing over a physical token. Whoever holds the token has the money, and there is no third party to the transaction. When you send a payment using Venmo, or a bank, on the other hand, you’re just directing them to update your account by moving some numbers around in their books. The same thing is true

of cryptocurrencies; the only meaningful difference is that the network as a whole, rather than a financial institution, approves the transactions.

This means that, despite the various options for making online payments, true digital cash doesn’t exist. This is not merely a theoretical distinction. Paper cash has been on the decline for years, a trend accelerated during the pandemic, as more and more businesses decided to stop accepting paper money. This poses risks, most notably for the so-called unbanked—people who can’t afford to have a bank account and thus can’t access non-cash forms of payment.

Governments around the world, spooked by the rise of privately issued cryptocurrencies, have been exploring socalled central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs. Imagine a government version of PayPal or Venmo. This could solve the unbanked problem by creating a public banking option for low-income people, but it would not replace cash. As the economy shifts inexorably toward all-digital transactions, a future where our only options are payment apps, banks,

crypto, or CBDCs means a future in which every financial transaction is potentially subject to surveillance by the government or private companies.

The ECASH Act, introduced by representative Stephen Lynch, a Massachusetts Democrat and chair of the House Task Force on Financial Technology, seeks to avoid that fate. (It stands for the Electronic Currency and Secure Hardware Act— an impeccable legislative acronym.) The bill, which Grey consulted on, would direct the US Treasury Department to conduct a pilot program for a version of digital dollars that work just like cash.

“If we’re to have a public option for digital finance, it needs to include everyone,” says Raúl Carrillo, a researcher at Yale Law School, who like Grey consulted on the legislation. “A key part of that is being able to go offline.”

What would that look like? The Treasury would issue digital dollars, just as it has issued paper money since the 1860s. To function as cash, the money can’t live on the government’s books or on a distributed blockchain ledger. That means balances must be stored on hardware. That could look like a stand-alone device, or it could be a secure hardware environment on your cell phone, similar to a SIM card— essentially a chip that is physically segregated from the rest of the device, so that it doesn’t depend on the security of the entire operating system.

This idea has been around for a while. In the 1990s, companies like Mondex developed stored-value cards that could support offline payments. Governments, however, didn’t take to the idea of issuing digital currency, and those companies were bought up by the credit card industry. (As WIRED’s Steven Levy wrote, in 1994, “When I called a spokesperson for the Federal Reserve to ask about electronic cash, he laughed at me. It was as if I were inquiring about exchange rates with UFOs.”)

Today, the technology is sleeker, and its applications more apparent. Last week, I spoke with Razvan Dragomirescu, the chief technical officer of WhisperCash. Over Zoom, he showed me his company’s products. One looks like a credit card that has both a touchscreen keypad and a miniature, Kindle-style electronic ink display. Payments can be sent between cards either using Bluetooth or by entering the recipient’s ID number and the amount. In the latter case, the transaction generates a 10-digit cryptographic hash that encodes the parties to the transaction and the amount. To receive it, the recipient has to enter that code into their own card. WhisperCash’s other main product, a secure chip that sticks onto a SIM card, turns a phone—even a cheap “feature phone,” of the type common throughout the developing world—into a wallet for digital cash.

The key to making this work on a technical level is security— not so much from outside attackers but from the person holding the money. The main danger for any digital currency is the so-called double-spend problem, where someone spends the same money over and over again, wrecking the system. Anyone holding a digital cash device has a powerful incentive to try to hack past its defenses against double

spending.

The device “is the user’s enemy,” Dragomirescu says. “The user will try to double spend, will try to counterfeit money, will generally try to bypass any limitations.”

Dragomirescu acknowledges that WhisperCash, like every piece of hardware ever built, can’t offer perfect security. The realistic goal is to make it so expensive and time consuming to hack the chip that no one would bother. Any version of state-backed money will involve restrictions on how much can be stored on a device and how much can be moved in a transaction—similar to the way in which American banks are required to report cash withdrawals or deposits above $10,000. Even if a hacker managed to unlock a digital cash wallet for double spending, it would be hard to actually spend the money, because everyone else’s device would still be capped.

At this point, the barriers to digital cash are political, not technological. Government officials tend to like being able to monitor who spends what. In the US, lawmakers remain freaked out about criminals taking advantage of crypto, despite law enforcement’s growing success in catching them. In that environment, a digital currency that’s even more resistant to surveillance will be a tough sell.

The ECASH Act tries to anticipate these concerns. It specifies that digital cash must be “subject to existing anti-money laundering, counterterrorism, Know Your Customer, and financial transaction reporting requirements and regulations.”

Privacy is not the only selling point for hardware-based digital cash. Because it doesn’t have to connect to a network, it would work even in places with no internet access or in the event of a natural disaster (a prospect that grows ever likelier thanks to climate change). For that reason, the near-term future of the technology is most likely as an offline backup option for central bank-issued digital currency. So far, that’s WhisperCash’s market. “I think the first wave of customers will be countries where there’s concern about natural disaster risk or there’s large parts of the country that are not online,” says John Kiff, a former analyst at the International Monetary Fund and an adviser to WhisperCash. In that situation, people would need to be able to make transactions with no internet access, but these transactions would have still have to be periodically uploaded to the central bank.

The question of whether the public deserves true digital cash is ultimately philosophical. It depends on whether you believe that people should have the right to a degree of privacy in their personal finances—and that as life shifts ever more online, and our purchases generate detailed data that merchants and marketers eagerly sweep up, the government should take the initiative to carve out a zone of confidentiality that even it can’t pierce.

The supporters of the ECASH Act want to force Congress to take a stand on the issue. “Protecting the liberties that we have always enjoyed with physical cash in a digital form is going to be essential to preserve the liberties that we already have,” says Rohan Grey. “If people want to get rid of privacy, they should probably own that.”

& Stephanie

Spritzer and Stephanie Cartin were pioneers when they started their social media business in 2011. Not just because the medium was relatively new, but also because they were one of the few women-owned startups in the industry. That’s why, today, they use their social media savvy to build a support network that inspires female entrepreneurs of all ages. And with Mastercard’s Digital Doors program, these Citi Small Business clients can further amplify their digital presence. So businesses like Courtney & Stephanie’s can thrive in the digital world while they’re busy impacting the real world. Because their business is much more than the services they provide.

Author Talks: The simple way to get more great ideas

By Jeremy Utley

Stanford’s Jeremy Utley proposes approaching creativity with a “begun” mentality, where innovation is incorporated into daily practice instead of occurring only in sprints.

In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Raju Narisetti chats with Jeremy Utley, codirector of executive education at the Stanford d.school, about his new book, Ideaflow: Why Creative Businesses Win (Ebury Edge, October 2022), cowritten by Perry Klebahn. Although focus on innovation in the business world has reached a “fever pitch,” many people still haven’t developed a creative discipline, Utley says, but they can start with a 30-minute

calendar block and the willingness to share bad ideas. An edited version of the conversation follows.

Aren’t there too many books on creativity already?

There are a lot of books right now on creativity and innovation. When we started, there was a question of, “should we even bother?”

At Stanford, we had been leading the executive education programs for the past dozen years or so, and we’d seen that innovation, as a topic, had reached a fever pitch in its level of hype, and yet despite its emphasis and mentions in annual reports, our observation was that it remains one of the most underdeveloped or undernourished capabilities in any organization.

For us, the tension of if we should write another book, since there were already a lot of books out there, was counterbalanced—or overweighted—by a feeling that folks weren’t treating innovation like a capability. In a lot of organizations, innovation is an event. It’s episodic. It’s a moment in time. There’s a sprint, or a hackathon, or a workshop, and that’s innovation. That’s what a lot of people think of when they think of innovation. What we believe is that it’s not an event, it’s a practice, and if you aren’t practicing regularly, you aren’t an innovator—just like if you aren’t doing your scales, you aren’t a pianist, or if you aren’t doing laps in the pool, you aren’t a swimmer.

Unfortunately, we reached an era in this innovation economy where folks do a sprint or a workshop, and they go, “I’m an innovator.” They update their LinkedIn and put on a badge, and then they assume they’re all good, without any further development of their skills. What we’ve tried to do is shift the narrative from a “done” mentality to a “begun” mentality.

No one would ever go to one swim lesson and then say that the next step is the middle of the ocean or go to one piano lesson and then say the next step is Carnegie Hall—no, they would keep practicing. Yet, for whatever reason, when it comes to innovation, sometimes people take a workshop or attend a sprint and then think the next step is enterprisewide innovation.

Unfortunately, we reached an era in this innovation economy where folks do a sprint or a workshop and they go, ‘I’m an innovator.’ … What we’ve tried to do is shift the narrative from a ‘done’ mentality to a ‘begun’ mentality. What we felt was lacking [from existing books] was some of the routine behaviors and mindsets that drive a robust and healthy creative practice. For us, Ideaflow is meant to address some of these misconceptions, dispel some of the myths around innovation, and bring it to the level of daily practice in the context of business.

Creative practitioners in other fields like the arts or entertainment recognize the need for a creative discipline, but for a businessperson, if you were to ask them, “How do you build your creative muscles? How do you build your innovation capacity?” Most of the time you get a blank stare.

We felt like that was a fundamental problem that needed to be addressed. Our goal with Ideaflow is that when the folks

who read it consider this question of “how do I practice?” or “how do I stay sharp?,” they will have lots of answers that they can incorporate into their daily life.

We felt that it was time for innovation to get approached from a fundamental capability perspective where folks know how to routinely engage the practice so that they can really shine when it matters.

It’s not that we despise a sprint or look down on a workshop—not at all. We leverage sprints and workshops ourselves, but when you show up to this sprint, are you warm? Have you stretched? Have you trained? The goal is that when you show up to the sprint, you can really get into the work.

Right now, what we see is people showing up to the sprint with Cheetos stains on their blazers, so to speak. They’ve been sitting on the couch. They haven’t done any exercise. That’s not how we approach any other capability.

We felt that it was time for innovation to get approached from a fundamental capability perspective, where folks know how to routinely engage the practice so that they can really shine when it matters. What does it mean to ‘put the lightning rod down and start making lightning’?

There’s tons of fascinating research going primarily by Dr. Dean Keith Simonton, who recently won a Lifetime Achievement Award from Mensa. Simply stated, what Dr. Simonton found is that to get a good idea, you need a lot of ideas.

Linus Pauling actually said that—he’s the only individual in history to win two individual [unshared] Nobel Prizes. When Linus Pauling was asked, “How do you come up with a good idea like your breakthroughs that won you the Nobel Prize?” His response was, “To have a good idea, you need to have a lot of ideas.” And our observation is that folks dramatically underestimate the definition of “a lot.”

According to research conducted by our colleague at Stanford, Professor Bob Sutton, something like 2,000 ideas are required to get a commercially viable idea. When we ask business leaders in organizations, their answer is more like 20. Folks are not just one, but two orders of magnitude off when it comes to the question of, “How many ideas do you need to have a good idea?”

To get good material, you need a lot more volume than most people recognize. This is perfectly illustrative of our tendency to think [of innovation] in terms of an event rather than a practice. At an event, my job is to come up with one good idea. In a practice, I’m routinely generating ideas as a part of my life.

My favorite example of this is from Jony Ive in [Apple’s] memorial tribute to Steve Jobs. He said, “We ate lunch almost every day, and Steve would often say to me, ‘Hey, Jony, want to hear a dopey idea?’” He said they were really dopey, and some of them truly terrible, but every once in

a while, Steve said something that took the air out of the room and made them sit there in silence.

Something like 2,000 ideas are required to get a commercially viable idea. When we ask business leaders in organizations, their answer is more like 20.

To me, the reason that that’s so special is that when we think about Steve Jobs, we don’t think about truly terrible ideas. We don’t think about dopey ideas. We think about consumer delight, product category, and redefining products.

What we’ve observed is that if you want to get to delight, you have to be willing to have and share dopey ideas. Dopey is the price of delight, and very few people seem to appreciate the significance of that. Why is failing and rewarding failures key to successful Ideaflow?

It’s critical to reward failures and to allow for failure, at the very least, because the reality is that innovation is a risky endeavor. If you’re always succeeding, you’re almost certainly playing it too safe.

Astro Teller, who’s the captain of Moonshots at Google’s Moonshot Factory, called Google X, says the same thing: failure is the seed of breakthrough innovation. What he’s trying to get teams to do is to fail more quickly and kill ideas more quickly. If you don’t like that word, kill, think about it as pivoting.

Failure sucks but instructs. The question is: is your ego so shattered that you can’t learn from a failure, or are your expectations properly set so that you can learn quickly from it?

Moving quickly through ideas is a critical part of early-stage innovation. You have to be able to pivot, you have to be able to reorient, and that necessarily looks like failure. If people are afraid of failure or think that failure is a careerlimiting move, then you’re in trouble. If you want to reward innovation, you have to be prepared to reward failure.

If you reframe failure as learning, then that becomes more palatable. The learnings get harvested. The learnings can be repurposed. The learnings can be composted, as we say in our accelerator at Stanford.

Failure sucks but instructs. The question is: is your ego so shattered that you can’t learn from a failure, or are your expectations properly set so that you can learn quickly from it?

What does it mean to ‘make a habit of exposing yourself to unexpected inputs’?

When we think about creativity or innovation, we often think about output. However, innovators know that creativity is fed by input, and if you aren’t seeking new input, then there’s nothing new for the equation or algorithm to be processing. There are some simple things that leaders can do to stimulate fresh inputs. In the early days of Amazon, Jeff Bezos had two days per week when he refused to schedule any meetings just so he could be available for serendipitous discovery.

The calendar is often one of the greatest vehicles that we can leverage, or one of the greatest weapons a leader can wield to seek unexpected input. Most of the time, the calendar is the reason why someone can’t do something. For example, we were working with the senior leadership team of a large tech company, and we were helping them think about experimentation in the workplace. One of their technology leaders is a woman based in Ireland, and when we got to her, we asked her to tell us about her experiment.

None of the problems we face have only one right answer. If you put effort into one idea, you should put effort into alternatives—into variation— because the truth is that you learn a lot more relatively than you do in sequence.

She said, “I wasn’t able to run an experiment, unfortunately.” Our level of experiment is at an exceedingly low threshold— it takes 20 minutes and is very simple stuff—so I said, “Why couldn’t you run an experiment? You had two weeks.” She said, “It’s Wednesday. I’m on meeting number 32 for the week. When would you run an experiment?”

I realized in that moment that she legitimately didn’t have space to do anything new. I said, “Okay, you can’t do an experiment now. Look at next week. Do you have any time on your calendar?” She did not. “Look at the next week. Do you have any time on your calendar?”

She had half an hour, so I said to block that half an hour now and enter into the subject line of the calendar invite, “blank action.” What we realized in that moment is that you can create space for experimentation and exploration if you think about wielding your calendar differently. What I would ask leaders is, are you creating space for folks’ work to look different?

One simple thing that a manager can do is something that legendary Professor Bob McKim did at Stanford: if a student asked him what he thought of an idea, he would say, “Show me three.”

He was helping the student realize that none of the problems we face have only one right answer. If you put effort into one idea, you should put effort into alternatives—into variation—because the truth is that you learn a lot more relatively than you do in sequence.

How technology is helping to revolutionize real-time collaboration

BY FASTCO WORKS

If we can take away one positive from the pandemic, it was that it inspired companies to fast-track their use of technology. This digital transformation is fundamentally changing the way firms operate, from how they produce goods to how they fuel growth and spark innovation.

Perhaps the most important part of this, however, is how it is helping to supercharge collaboration—both inside companies and through partnerships and mergers with other firms. It’s helped suddenly remote employees work together in real time, and aided companies as they brought their corporate cultures together during the mergers-and-acquisitions (M&A) process.

At the recent Fast Company Innovation Festival, global technology company Altair hosted a panel discussion on how technology and data are helping companies make more informed—and humancentric—decisions around collaboration that drives innovation.

Here are three key takeaways from the event.

1. Technology is broadening collaboration.

The expanded use of technology has, in fact, allowed companies to broaden collaboration among stakeholders

while increasing productivity. In-person meetings and human connection are still important, but good videoconferencing, whiteboarding, and other tools can make collaboration more possible for a distributed workforce. “When you have people that are spread across geographies, you don’t necessarily need to take a day to fly six hours just to have a half-hour meeting and then fly back,” said Tejasvi Chugh, vice president of corporate strategy and M&A at IBM.

The increased use of technology has allowed Altair to more easily connect with people from other organizations during the due diligence process—and hear their innovative ideas early on in the acquisition process, said Stephanie Buckner, Altair’s chief operating officer. “It has allowed us to interact and move faster through those types of engagements, even well before meeting them in person. At Altair, we believe that innovation comes from everywhere, not just within our organization but truly from a global standpoint. So, technology has given us more reach.”

Stephanie Dolan, an M&A consulting principal at Deloitte Consulting, said virtual technologies have made it easier to bring more people into important discussions about potential acquisition targets. The result has been more voices at the

table during these important conversations. “It’s actually increasing the diversity in the room because you’re able to pull people from different parts of the organization,” she said. “I am seeing a lot more women and people of color join deal teams and also be part of the target-screening process. And that has created a heightened sense of innovation because of those new voices, which is really exciting.”

2. Don’t get bogged down in big data. Companies are increasingly relying on data to drive their businesses, from sophisticated algorithms that streamline manufacturing processes to workforce data that helps them make the most of their human capital. But amid a growing sea of data, companies face a big question: What data is really useful?

For Buckner, the answer at Altair isn’t to simply hoard data but rather to first identify the problem you’re trying to solve and then carefully select the data that will inform your decision. “You want to make sure you have the right data, not just big data,” she said.

IBM’s Chugh noted that 1,000 petabytes of data are generated every day around the world, and that number is expected to grow threefold over the next three years. However, less than 20% of that data is actually harnessed for decision-making. Over time, IBM has developed tools to make better data-driven decisions around M&A and postacquisition integrations. One initiative is the White Glove Tech Help Desk Service, which gives newly acquired employees access to a dedicated coworker for help getting familiar with

IBM systems. “You want to do everything possible so these employees feel like they want to be here,” Chugh said. “So, we’ve harnessed the power of data to make decisions about what’s important to those employees.”

3. Don’t forget the human connection. While using new technologies and optimizing data are crucial, companies can’t neglect the human factor. That’s especially true when two corporate cultures are being combined as the result of a merger or acquisition. Dolan said Deloitte pulls in plenty of data to assess a company’s culture and measure employee engagement. But the end result of that data collection is to create a pathway specifically designed to help these employees as their companies come together.

“We’re using that data to craft a journey for employees,” she said. “We use human-centered design to think about the moments in the employee journey that really matter, and to focus on the interventions or activities that would be most meaningful to employees. The goal is to give people what they need at just the right time.”

Buckner pointed out that Altair relies on individual feedback to help draw a bead on what makes a particular company tick. Altair seeks input from people throughout the company, not just within the corporate development team, to help paint a more complete picture of that company’s culture. “The fact is that cultural insights can come from a developer or a sales individual or from anywhere within the organization,” she said. “After all, they are the boots on the ground.”

& Book, Line Sinker

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