Contagious x by Fernando Comet

Social Change / xxx

Contagious is ten. Welcome...

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THE CONTAGIOUS DECADE

A Primer

WELCOME TO CONTAGIOUS X

Brands for the next decade

Application instructions for this special dose of the magazine. Side effects may include broad inspiration, brand bravery and a healthy dose of disdain for the status quo.

STRENGTH STUDY / Disruption By Emily Hare Landscape How can brands make disruption work while protecting themselves against challengers? Brand Spotlight Tesla Opinion Jonathan Mildenhall, CMO, Airbnb CUT OUT AND KEEP

A brief history of (Contagious) time / The ten commandments

A crunched-down illustration of the major tech, social and business developments on one side and Contagious’ non-denominational lessons to live by on the other. Hang it proudly.

STRENGTH STUDY / Purpose By Lucy Aitken Landscape What’s meaningful is magnetic, and great brands understand their calling Brand Spotlight Chipotle Opinion Paul Polman, CEO, Unilever

SMALL BUT PERFECTLY FORMED

Little brands, big thinkers

In each of our past 20 issues, Contagious has celebrated seven small companies hoping to change the world. We take a look at some of our favourites – and add a few more to the ranks.

Log off, lean in and pore over Katrina Dodd’s attempt at imposing neatly alphabetised order on the chaos of the Contagious zeitgeist.

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STRENGTH STUDY / Publishing By Chloe Markowicz Landscape Brands evolve from being publicists to publishers Brand Spotlight Red Bull Opinion Tyler Brûlé, editor in chief, Monocle STRENGTH STUDY / Data By Chris Barth Landscape The fine art of surfacing signal from noise Brand Spotlight IBM Opinion Vikram Somaya, general manager of WeatherFX, The Weather Company

STRENGTH STUDY / Design By Ed White Landscape From decoration to business imperative Brand Spotlight Apple Opinion Sue Siddall, partner, IDEO

WHAT WE GOT WRONG

Our role as a handy instruction manual for the future isn’t as easy as we make it look, ok? But we’re big enough to admit a few of our mistakes…

FEATURE / The technology boneyard Explosive digital development has its casualties. Will Sansom considers those that became cautionary tales. ANALYSIS / The case study cash-in Contagious corners the hypothetical market by backing our case study-featured brands. By Raakhi Chotai. INSIDER IDEAS

Sex, drugs & Twitter

Will Sansom charts how the collision of celebrity life and digital media is reshaping popular culture.

To err is Contagious?

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STRENGTH STUDY / Experimentation By Alex Jenkins Landscape Test, measure and learn in a rapidly-changing environment Brand Spotlight Google Opinion Sir Martin Sorrell, founder and chief executive officer, WPP STRENGTH STUDY / Services By Patrick Jeffrey Landscape Service design thinking has radically reimagined marketing in the digital age Brand Spotlight Uber Opinion Russell Davies and Louise Downe, director of strategy and service designer at Government Digital Service STRENGTH STUDY / Empowerment By Arwa Mahdawi Landscape The tool-makers shall inherit the earth Brand Spotlight Safaricom Opinion Ethan Zuckerman, director, MIT Center for Civic Media

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STRENGTH STUDY / Collaboration By Georgia Malden Landscape Better together? Partnerships characterise today’s high-achieving brand landscape Brand Spotlight LEGO Opinion Blake Mycoskie, founder and chief shoe-giver, TOMS

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STRENGTH STUDY / Culture By Dan Southern Landscape Company culture galvanises employees and delights customers Brand Spotlight Etsy Opinion Dave Gray, author and consultant

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FEATURE / Job title safari As the marketing industry evolves, so does the taxonomy of its strange and exotic creatures.

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INDEX The brands, companies and people showcased in this special issue of Contagious.

CONTAGIOUS X INSERT NEWS

Contagious brand ideas

From selfless selfies to innovative uses of Instagram WILDFIRE

Stories plucked from the pop culture ether AI employees, smart cities and invisibility cloaks

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Editorial / Ten Years Of Contagious

Ten Years of Contagous Paul Kemp-Robertson & Gee Thomson Contagious founders

Contagious was born on the back of a beer mat in a Chelsea pub in 2004. It was a time of ferment in the marketing industry. Mobile was beginning to get smart, social media was primed to explode and people’s relationships with brands were becoming a whole lot more interactive. New media and behaviours meant the audience had run ahead of the advertiser, so we figured that the communications industry needed a fresh guidance system to make sense of the immediate future. Hence Contagious. We wanted to create a platform to explore alternative advertising ideas, assess the impact of emerging technologies and champion a greater sense of purpose for brands. Having been part of the marketing industry for 15 years we both believed the age of broadcast and monologue could be displaced by an era in which brands provide people with tools, services and experiences, and use their creative and financial muscle to effect meaningful social change in the wider world. This feeling is encapsulated in our name. Contagiousness is in the stuff that people choose to care about and feel compelled to share. It’s a spirit and a mindset that reaches beyond siloed disciplines, fusing creativity and marketing, technology, design and behaviour. The key landmarks and turning points of the past ten years are sketched into our Contagious Timeline on page 32 . This magazine has witnessed the business world’s most tumultuous and exhilarating epoch. The dominant giants – Alibaba, Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook and Twitter – have mashed into the trends and movements that have unfolded since 2004: social media, apps, crowdsourcing, the sharing economy, data explosion, wearable technology and corporate transparency. But dramatic as this change has been, Contagious will always be about the immediate future – what we refer to as the ‘first light of dawn’. Not for us the crystal ball-gazing of those Delphic trend forecasters. We have always been focused on a very practical future for marketers, given root by advances that exist right now, today.

Infrastructure has always provided the catalytic stepping stones for change. The 20th century was defined by mass media and motors. For our generation, the internet and mobile have been the new enablers. The next bridge, machine intelligence, is of an entirely different magnitude and one that Contagious is looking forward to charting. Technology, in the shape of websites, search engines, navigational aids and smartphones, already augments our intelligence. Those who are better able to deploy such resources are already on a superior plane of interaction with the modern world than those rare souls still tied to pencil and paper. The second wave of machine intelligence will be even more seismic, impacting on sectors far beyond marketing communications and wider pop culture. Artificial Intelligence, in all its various forms – from data manipulation and decision-making, to virtual assistants, sentient robots and connected devices – has the potential to transform every aspect of society: from education, employment, health and leisure, to energy, transport, manufacturing, banking and the future of governance. For all the technological and creative wonder that Contagious loves to celebrate, there’s no denying that the world has a legacy of ills to contend with: the environment, wealth inequality, resource depletion, and conflict being an immediate few. It’s up to those with ideas, the next Brins and Musks, the thinkers, the innovators and the inventors, to make themselves heard – and sooner rather than later. Let’s hope that somewhere, somehow, those urgent advances, those ground-breaking ideas that will define the next ten years, are already finding form on some sweaty 3D printer in a bustling lab, on a battered laptop in a student bedsit or even on a gleaming Mac perched on the desk of a Contagious subscriber. When this new dawn comes, Contagious will be watching…

To celebrate the tenth anniversary of Contagious we are offering 25% off all new subscriptions

Additionally, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll give an extra two digital logins with every subscription, so that key members of your team can benefit from Contagious thinking too. Place your order at tinyurl.com/contagiousx Offer expires January 31st 2015.

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Social Change / A-Z

The Contagous Decade: a Primer

The past ten years have been a glorious mash-up: evolution and revolution in equal measure, a clumsy but exhilarating waltz into our unevenly distributed, platform-agnostic and relentlessly accelerating futures. Before we sally forth into a fitter, faster Unknown, a little orientation seems in order: log off, lean in and pore over our attempt to impose neatly alphabetised order on the chaos of the Contagious zeitgeist By Katrina Dodd

*This article does not exist.

Illustrations / Alex Walker, YCN

A is for Apple. The transformation of Apple from technology also-ran to the world’s most valuable brand has been a defining obsession across ten years of Contagious. In so many ways the antithesis of open ‘for everyone’ internet culture, the company and its superbly polished works have established a set of standards for user experience that have fundamentally altered our expectations of, and relationship with computers. Bestowing a sense of agency and mastery over our gadgets even while edging us further away from a true understanding of how stuff works, the Cupertino corporation has handed us the keys to an expertly enabled world of communication, community and commerce. A world that reflects our new normal: where A is also for Always on, for Apps and Algorithms and APIs. A world that can incubate the Arab Spring and Anonymous. A world with Amazon and Alibaba in the ascendancy. And then, of course, there is Android. While Apple’s iOS-running mobile devices rule the high end of the market, in less than a decade Android has become the people’s choice, the de facto operating system du monde. But even with 85% of smartphones shipped this year running Google’s software, the race to run the world is still a long way from being over. A is also for alliteration: brace yourselves for B…

B is for Broadband, benevolent bearer of bandwidth, the better to support the binge-viewing of Breaking Bad. As a basic component of our communication infrastructure, broadband penetration has delivered benefits above and beyond our basic old-school telecoms needs. Described as a fourth utility after water, heating and electricity, in 2009 the World Bank put it thus: ‘Broadband is not just an infrastructure. It is a general-purpose technology that can fundamentally restructure an economy.’ That was true even before 2008 became the year of bravado-and-bullshit-fuelled banking balls-ups, but possibly even more necessary in its aftermath. The letter B has also brought us BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), an alternative to clunking, employerissued tech; Bitcoin, an alternative to clunking, centralised currency; Beacons, a nascent alternative to clunking, irrelevant marketing; And BuzzFeed, an alternative to clunking, text-heavy news and entertainment (see ‘23 ways listicles will improve your life’, below*).

C is for Cats. Pictures of cats. Cat memes. Cat videos. Really, though, the rise of cats is simply the cute, furry face of the rise of Content in all its guises. The creation, curation, circulation and consumption of material and messages is booming as the tools of production and channels of distribution become ever more accessible. Simultaneously, however, attention is a resource in effective decline, no matter how diligent our multi-screen multitasking becomes. Coming up with content that can compete on merit against everything else out there is exactly as hard as it sounds, and the brands that are doing it well are few and far between. Ten years ago, the ‘C-word’ was Convergence; at the beginning of Contagious it was hypothetical, a talking point. Now we’re living it: untold functionality and utility is telescoped into devices that are seldom beyond arm’s reach, and the evolution of consumer electronics continues to be fascinating. Somehow, though, we don’t seem to have any fewer gadgets: the ‘Peak Stuff’ story of late 2011 may have been a false dawn. Peak cats? Nowhere near. Special mention to the Crowd: some kind of ‘Many Hands Make Light Work’ award seems appropriate, although more for contributions to art and science than to marketing. You shall all receive one millionth of one percent of one hand clapping. And the gong for storage is metaphorically awarded to the Cloud, even if, as the Daily Mail recently clarified, it is ‘not an actual cloud’.

D is for Disruption. Or should that be Disintermediation? Or maybe even Democratisation? The combination of Digital technology and hot and cold running Data is driving the re-imagination of entire business categories, with music and publishing the canaries in the coal mine for other established businesses trying to weather the revolution. Distribution is also up for grabs: if your product can be broken down into zeros and ones, there’s the internet. For everything else there’s Drones and Driverless cars. But top dog among the Ds is Design, the discipline and rigour that’s informing the ongoing overhaul of our world and the organisations and objects in it. Design has become more holistic, a strategic as well as an aesthetic factor and increasingly an open and inclusive process too.

E is for the era- defining Economy, dragged down as banking revealed itself to be not so much a system as a sinkhole, caving in under exponential entropy and its own preposterous lack of substance. It’s for Ecosystems, slick, self-serving, habit-forming, loyalty-locking walled gardens of blissfully consistent UX. It’s for Empowerment, especially in the rapidly emerging nations (more MINT, less BRIC) leapfrogging established tech infrastructure and cutting straight to the chase with mobile. E is for Experience, a new preoccupation throughout this industry and beyond. For Experimentation because we can, and, more prosaically, for Email, an era-defining communications epidemic that even the Emoji has yet to eclipse.

F is obviously for Facebook, not so much the social network of choice as an internet-age equivalent of the phone directory: most of us are in it, and if you’re not, it’s a bit of a statement. Undeniably useful (as sounding board, stalking apparatus, as authentication/universal login), Facebook has attained a degree of ubiquity that is now its best defence against rival platforms. Wherever it happens, though, our online flocking together is fuelling the uncanny acceleration we feel across so many aspects of our lives. The simmering culture of Fear, the Filter-bubbles and the Fan culture: everything from Fifty Shades’ flights of fan-fic fantasy to the mainstreaming of Festivals feels connected to our increased exposure to, well, everything.

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Social Change / A-Z

G is for Google, not only the front door to the internet, but also a company of global consequence with an ambitious tendency to reach for the stars (OK, the moon) and fingers in dozens of different digital pies. But G is also for also for Games of every conceivable stripe. Against a thoroughly dispiriting backdrop of Globalisation, the GFC, and the growing Gap between rich and poor, the huddled masses have been keeping their spirits up with regular doses of racy fantasy epic Game of Thrones, the most-pirated TV show ever (see also Torrenting). Gaming in all its guises has also become ever-more pervasive, an under-acknowledged fact thrown into relief with the release of Grand Theft Auto V, which earned $1bn in three days flat, faster than any other entertainment product, ever. We also have gaming to thank for the gift that is Gesturecontrol: what started with the Nintendo Wii quickly opened up a whole new world with Kinect, now sensitive enough to track players’ heartbeats through the pulsing of their skin. But as sophisticated as Gaming has become, we’re still suckers for animated GIFs.

H is for Hype Cycle, Gartner’s handy graphic tool for mapping the maturity, adoption and social application of specific technologies. So we know, for example, that Haptics (aka tactile feedback technology) are currently climbing the Slope of Enlightenment, while Head-mounted displays are sliding into the Trough of Disillusionment. Fun, isn’t it? What if we could measure the ebb and flow of contemporary life in the same way? Harry Styles: Peak of Inflated Expectations. Hipsters: Trough. In reality our non-tech hype is measured in Hashtags: at one end of the human-endeavour spectrum the Higgs boson discovery got the world talking about physics, topping the trending list on Twitter on July 4, 2012; at the other, Hacking has made the top ten with depressing regularity.

I is for Image Explosion. If you’re more Instagram than Internet of Things, this is for you. At the end of last year, Yahoo! estimated that 880 billion photos would be taken in 2014, 123 for every man, woman and child on the planet. Self-contained cameras are fewer and further between, but combine smartphones and social platforms with an exponential rise in storage capacity, and Lo! a new visual language is born, and anyone can speak it. Expertise is not the point: the ability to shoot and share something important, or interesting or pertinent is. The upshot is that pictures have not only helped to define and document the past few years, they’ve developed (retro-pun!) into a kind of social currency and visual shorthand that fuels and fosters communication on all levels.

J is for Justin, Jay-Z , Jobs, a series of names of varying significance. Justin Bieber gets a shout for becoming one of our first, and most unavoidable YouTube stars, inspiring a surge in sales of hair products for young men; Jay-Z gets a shout for sound-tracking the zeitgeist and for a preternatural understanding of branding that’s allowed him not only to embody authenticity, but to confer it on a roll-call of brands – Reebok, HP, Budweiser, Heineken, Jaguar, Samsung – without denting his own apparently bottomless appeal; and of course, there is – was – Jobs, Steve Jobs, visionary, game-changer and a whole other kind of icon.

K is for Knowledge, and the changing relationship we have with it. Access to information is a transformative thing. Samuel Johnson said: ‘Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information upon it.’ He was talking libraries, but the effect of the internet has upped the ante by another order of magnitude: a whole generation, when confronted with a gap in comprehension or savoir-faire, reflexively knows they can Just Fucking Google It. Or pick up a Kindle. For those who don’t automatically turn to the internet, a pitying digital native is usually on hand with an eye-roll and a smartphone to help them out. From Kimye to Kahneman, from K-pop to Kale, it is getting easier to know stuff. But it is getting harder to explain to your kids why school and homework still matters.

M is for Mobile. It’s so obvious we shouldn’t even have to say it. Every year as far back as we can remember has been The Year of Mobile, and yet it never quite seemed to be true. Can we stop now? It’s just how we do stuff. It’s becoming a Meme, but more in the original Richard Dawkins sense than the ‘I can haz cheezburger’ sense. Our collective consciousness is gradually optimising for mobile. It may take another Moonshot to get us beyond that...

L is for Learning. The acquisition of knowledge and skills is a long way from being irrelevant, in fact it’s booming as people around the world sign up in their millions for tutorials, classes and qualifications of every conceivable type. The increasing availability of MOOCs, or massively open online courses, is offering unlimited participation and open access to some of the most respected educators and academic institutions in the world. The power of learning has not been lost on brands and business, and the proliferation of Labs in recent years is no coincidence. Test and Learn, Lean in, think global act Local and love thy LGBTI neighbours: that’s how it gets better. (Also, read things that are longer than a Listicle.)

N is for Netflix, feeding our need for the next movie, the next episode and the next season with all-youcan-eat dedication to our appetite for more of that thing that we love. Thank you Netflix. It’s easy to forget that in return we’re feeding Netflix the data it thrives on, from which it can deduce how better to serve – hell, even to create – more of what we crave. There are other Ns to consider: the impact of the Network Effect; the rise of Nationalism; the self-conscious ordinariness of Normcore; the not-quite-there-yetness of NFC; And Thaler and Sunstein’s Nudge theory, subtly engineering choice architecture to alter behaviour, to wit: ‘Nudges are not mandates. Putting fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.’ Which brings us to O.

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Social Change / A-Z

P is for Privacy. A lot has happened over the past ten years, but as blithely as we adopt, early or otherwise, the shiny gadgets and devices of the new millennium, we are still easily creeped-out when confronted with the tales they tell on us. Banner ads for stuff that we’ve looked at – or already bought! – follow us around the internet. We’re routinely asked to sign away our data in language that obscures rather than clarifies the reasons why that should be necessary. Research by GfK found that 80 % of consumers surveyed wanted more regulation to protect their data privacy and less than 40% trust marketers with their personal data. That’s bad enough in the smartphone era, but the more connected our daily lives become (and Cisco predicts the Internet of Things will see 50 billion objects hooked up to the internet by 2020), the more necessary clear and reasonable communication becomes. Why is this not a ‘Purpose’ issue for more brands? Stay tuned.

O is for Obesity. The World Health Organisation defines obesity as ‘excessive fat accumulation that may impair health’, a condition signified by a Body Mass Index of more than 30. According to the American Medical Association, two thirds of the US population is overweight, with 36% of adults clinically obese. In the UK and China, a quarter of all adults are obese; in Russia the figure is 23%; Brazil 15%. The epidemic claims the lives of 2.8 million adults per year, making it the fifth most common cause of death globally. The Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation have predicted that more than half of the US could be obese by 2030, costing $66bn in treatment and at least $500bn in lost economic productivity. Gulp. Or should that be OMG? We have less depressing Os: On-demand (see also Netflix), Open Source, O.Ba.Ma. Occupy. Oversharing. Damn, we were doing so well… Wait: OK Go! ‘OK Glass...’ Gah.

Q is for QR codes. The optimistically named Quick Response Code has been both a blessing and a curse. Its success in Asia has failed to herald its embrace in Western markets where it continues to be the weakest link in many a marketing campaign. Let’s move on. Quantified Self. The proliferation of sensors, data and the devices and software to gather and process a relentless stream of information has gifted us the ability to be self-obsessed aware in mind-boggling detail. QS might seem, well, selfish, but really it’s the beginning of quantified everything. Yes, it is profound and amazing, just spare us the details, okay?

U is for User, as in User-friendly and User experience, but also in the wider sense as in You, the consumer, now enthroned at the centre of the business universe thanks to quotes like this from Jeff Bezos: ‘Above all else align with customers: win when they win, win only when they win.’ It’s worked for Uber, the ride-sharing underdog-turned-undisputed-champion of transit disruption. In startup culture, every new venture wants to be the Uber of something, but if we had to stand shoulder to shoulder with one U-related service provider it would be Kenya-based Ushahidi Inc. The non-profit has grown from crisis-mapping to providing open-source tools and software, focusing on innovation and problem-solving on a social scale. Genuinely Upworthy.

R is for… Reprise! (to the tune of We Didn’t Start the Fire) Rise of the extreme right, renewables, real-time Re-views, rolling news, reality TV Re-cession, Raspberry Pi, riots, robots, Rockefellers switch from oil to cleaner energy We didn’t start the fire…

S is for… (keep it going...) Selfies, sharing, screens, space, Snowden Storytelling, Stuxnet, Silicon Valley Second Life, streaming, Shenzhen, Soylent Same-sex marriage, sustainabili-ty We didn’t start the fire…

T is for TED, and for TED Talks, a theatrical, time-limited format for spreading ideas with impact – a bit like WikiHow, but slightly less practical. Twitter performs a similar idea-and-information dissemination function, but with greater economy and a lot more Trolling. Ideas don’t have to be good to spread, though: Tea Party, take a bow. They also don’t have to be obvious: who’d have thought Twitch.tv, the internet equivalent of sports TV for gamers, would become a thing (acquired for $970m by Amazon, beating Google to the deal)? Ideas don’t have to rely on Touchscreens: feature phones are transforming lives across the developing world. And they don’t have to be the brainchild of billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk, but it sure does help. For content, of course, we have Torrenting.

V is for video, because although software may indeed be eating the world, the world is too busy watching videos to really give a damn. Omnicom recently advised its clients to shift as much as 25% of their TV budgets to online video, and this year eMarketer predicted that spending on online video advertising will overtake TV ad spend as early as 2018. From six-second Vines to the latest ubiquitous viral, Video has eclipsed Voice-control, Virtual Reality, Vampires and the curiously disturbing rise of Vaping and Vice. It is a Very. Big. Deal.

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Social Change / xxx

Welcome to the home stretch… W is for Wearables, because frankly, what could possibly compete? Not the wane of Windows. Not even the wonder of wifi. Not the diligently updated wisdom of Jimmy Wales’ Wikipedia, because we take it for granted and laugh at it when it’s wrong, even though it is a marvel of endeavour and collaboration. And not Wikileaks because

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even if information wants to be free, we’re not totally convinced that it should always get its way. But everyone loves Wearables, right? Whether that’s true now is not really the point: whether it’s true in the next ten years is way more important. Apple’s famed capacity to create new markets means a lot is riding on the success of its Watch.

X is for... Cut us some slack: X is tricky, we’re tired, and all we could think of was The X Factor and the XPRIZE (which really is spelt like that, we checked). One is a pitiless singing contest that humiliates the desperate for easy LOLs; the other is ‘a highly leveraged, incentivised prize competition that pushes the limits of what’s possible to change the world for the better’. The best thing is, we don’t have to choose, we live in a world where these things can happily co-exist. So. Our final desperate stab at X is a rallying cry to bearers of the XX chromosome: women. If there is one thing that’s even less evenly distributed than the future, it’s equality of opportunity, rights and respect for women. Over the past ten years at Contagious we’ve witnessed a steady building of efforts to redress the balance in all kinds of ways, some branded (Coca-Cola 5 by 20), some not (Slutwalks). All chipping away at a big, but fixable problem.

Y is for YouTube From ‘Yes we can,’ to YOLO, nothing has captured or embodied the spirit of the Contagious decade quite like YouTube. Now all the world really is a stage, with no subject too big, no camera work too shaky, no moment too trivial to record and share. And this epic and yet curiously personal platform has created a new generation of players: avidly followed stars of the small glowing screen, racking up subscribers in the millions, viewcounts in the billions and the kind of revenue that make their parents feel okay about how much time they’re spending in their bedroom. Felix ‘PewDiePie’ Kjellberg is currently the master of this oddball universe: a passion for providing first-person commentary on his video-game exploits has parlayed into 30 million channel subscribers, a total viewcount in excess of 6 billion, and income north of $4m per annum. A player par excellence. YouTube is both the greatest and most terrifying show on Earth. Good thing we like to be scared…

...Because Z is for Zombies. AMC’s premiere season five of The Walking Dead broke cable records with 17.3 million viewers tuning in for a fix of gore, violence and life-orundeath struggle. If YouTube brings us face to face with the world at its most human, the flipside is our unsated appetite for tales of the Zombie apocalypse. The subject of TED talks and TV shows, novels and Guardian think-pieces, zombies are variously described as a response to the rise of atheism (novelist Stephen Marche), a metaphor for consumerism, and ‘always double, a symbol of failure and success, slavery and rebellion’ (Professor Sarah Juliet Lauro). In other words, an endlessly versatile metaphor for the overwhelming churn of unsettling cultural circumstances and possibilities that define our lives now – and an entirely appropriate response to an era of change like no other. We live in interesting times. Every day might feel like the end of the world as we know it, but mostly we feel fine. Ten more years!

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Welcome To Contagious X / Brands For The Next Decade

Brands for the next decade Application instructions for this special dose of the magazine. Side effects may include broad inspiration, brand bravery and a healthy amount of disdain for the status quo By Emily Hare and Nick Parish

We conceived Contagious X – a celebration of Contagious’ tenth anniversary – as both a statement of the decade’s influence and a roadmap to building brands for the 21st century. In this special edition of the magazine, we’ve set out to crystallise our thinking over that period and lay out a vision for the future. We’ve tried to bring the benefit of ten years of knowledge to bear on every bit of this issue. This is graphically portrayed in a timeline of the most significant changes of the past decade, and lexically communicated in a set of non-denominational Commandments, both of which make up our fold-out centre spread. We’ve got an A-Z,

from the Arab Spring to Zombies (page 6), and a review of how digital-first fame and the dawn of micro-celebrity has evolved post-Bieber (page 69). Changing fortunes As well as hark ing back to brands that we’ve feat ured on their way up, we’ve decided to look at some of the flops that we’ve championed in What We Got Wrong on page 86. If dead tech’s really your thing, have a read of Will Sansom’s Technology Boneyard on page 66, complete with comments from Benedict Evans, partner at San Francisco VC f irm Andreessen Horowitz.

For every Kodak, Blockbuster or Lehman Brothers, there’s a new company waiting in the wings. Small But Perfectly Formed (SBPF), our long-running feature that showcases impressive startups, has moved from community-powered businesses through app developments to carefully crafted niche products that have been crowdfunded on Kickstarter. In this issue, we turned to the founders of three of our most successful SBPF companies – Raspberry Pi, GoldieBlox and BRCK – and asked them to recommend some new blood: companies that they think are about to break through to the mainstream. Check out their selections on page 40. Business and creative success We’ve had to restrain ourselves from snorting in horror when presented with certain business cards, so we’ve taken the chance to pull together some of the most offensive job titles we’ve come across and then imagine how these increasingly outrageous superlatives might manifest themselves in the future. Take a Job Title Safari on page 138. We ref lect back on just how successful the brands we’ve featured as case studies have been over the past decade by creating a theoretical stock portfolio and tracking their performance in the market. Our Case Study Cash In on page 68, though sadly virtual, showed how the brands we’ve written about over the years have (generally) had impressive business success alongside smart, creative marketing. We suspect a link. Overall, our index outperformed the control portfolio by 17%. Now, where are those Bitcoins? (Having said that, if we had bought one Bitcoin for 80 cents when we first mentioned them on Contagious I/O in April 2011, and been lucky enough to sell at their peak in November 2013, we’d have turned our loose change into $1,124.)

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Welcome to Contagious X / Brands For The Next Decade

Purpose

Disruption

Culture

Design

Services

Publishing

Play to win Let’s not forget the main event. Contagious has always been valued for its case studies, but for this special edition we decided to mix things up and focus instead on what qualities brands need to exhibit to succeed in this day and age. To that end, we’ve selected ten key brand strengths to make up the meat of the magazine. We landed on these specific traits based on an analysis of all the brands, creative work, trends and ideas we’ve covered over the past few years. So, when the editorial team weighed it all up, what were the topics, themes and ideas that

Experimentation

we’ve seen brands using to their advantage? We decided on Disruption, Purpose, Publishing, Data, Design, Experimentation, Services, Empowerment, Collaboration and Culture. Each strength is divided into three parts: Landscape, Brand Spotlight and Opinion. The Landscape section discusses how the strength has developed over the past decade. The Spotlight then explores the brand that best exemplifies that strength. We’ve used this opportunity to showcase and dig into standout companies. Some we’ve featured previously but felt worth revisiting, such

Data

Empowerment

as LEGO, Chipotle, Safaricom and Red Bull. Others we delved into for the first time, like Tesla, Etsy, Uber and Apple. Of course, the best brands are multi-talented, but to keep things focused we decided to home in on the one aspect of their winning approach. Finally, each section gives the last word to an external expert. We’ve tapped into our smartest contacts, folks who are pushing the industry to evolve in new and previously unimaginable ways, and asked them to share their knowledge with you. Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP Group, discusses experimentation. Blake

Mycoskie, founder of TOMS, gives his take on collaboration. Acclaimed journalist, entrepreneur and publisher Tyler Brûlé shares his thoughts on content and publishing. Unilever CEO Paul Polman tells us why purpose is so vital to the FMCG business. And Jonathan Mildenhall, chief marketing officer at Airbnb, considers disruption. We’ve had a fun, but strenuous, time compiling this issue for you. We hope it’ll take an honoured place alongside the rest of your Contagious collection, and serve as an important reference and companion as you help your company build on its strengths in the new year.

Collaboration

Strength Study / Disruption Promotional Feature

Lollipop learning

Disruption

What’s not to love about Chupa Chups’ latest campaign? It’s got it all. Lollipops! Instagram! Defending market share! Of course, when you’re playing a choose-yourown-adventure game on one of the hottest social networks around, it’s not obvious that one of its business objectives is to defend market share. It’s the type of information that’ll only surface if you interview BBH Singapore’s engagement planner, which is exactly what we did when we featured the campaign on Contagious I/O.

‘We studied their emotions during different points in the day – we looked at what their tension points are, how they feel and what devices they use at different parts of the day.’ Understanding device usage at different times was key to the decision to execute on Instagram. ‘Chupa Chups was only active on Facebook, which really is not the best place for us to be if we’re trying to talk to teenagers,’ says Cummings. ‘Instagram is mobile-based, which is perfect when targeting teens on their commute home from school when they’ll be checking their phones all the time.’

By Emily Hare

Inspiration, organised We know that your teams will find inspiration from a wide range of sources. But inspiration that: • can be filtered by brand, product category, media type, age group, country and business objective • includes effectiveness results and exclusive interviews with the people who created the campaigns • can be searched, bookmarked and turned into a collaborative workspace with colleagues • features multiple full-screen images and videos for use in presentation decks Well, that kind of inspiration is pretty rare. We call it Contagious I/O. I ll us tio n /M

Find out more: talkturkey@contagious.com

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Input / Output Contagious I/O covers the Inputs and Outputs of some of the most innovative and creative marketing in the world: from the client brief, through to the results of each campaign. Its purpose is to find out how and why brands are creating new, game-changing marketing and with what success. So for Chupa Chups’ Get Lolli campaign, we dug into the brand’s challenge in the marketplace and discovered that it had no direct lollipop competitors. However, as engagement planner Lindsey Cummings explains, ‘When you walk in to a convenience store, anything around the counter is competition because it’s an impulse purchase. So Chupa Chups is competing with Skittles, with chocolates, with mints.’ Another Input of the campaign was the research into the target audience. ‘We did a lot of in-depth interviews with teenagers from across the world and then conducted consumer journey mapping,’ outlines Cummings.

A startup’s success relies on coming from left-field and disrupting an established industry, or creating an entirely new one. But how can big brands make disruptive tactics work and protect themselves against the threat of being rendered obsolete?

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isrupting an established and – let’s face it – often complacent industry is an artful practice generally pulled off by brave, creative and gutsy brands. And the rewards are great: just think how Apple created a new breed of music ecosystem and consigned stacks of CDs to history. Look at how Dollar Shave Club took a 6% volume share of the US razor cartridge market with its value subscription shaving proposition. Or consider the apparent ease with which Amazon became your go-to location to check prices and buy more or less anything. Michael Dubin, CEO of Dollar Shave Club, defines disruption in business as ‘an idea or a business model that produces a significant or resonant and widespread change in an established way of doing things’. The main factors that provide a fertile environment for the majority of these disruptions are recurring themes throughout Contagious X: rapid technological change, connected consumers, the rise of ecommerce and digital distribution. Taking a disruptive approach marks a refusal by businesses to be content with incremental enhancements and a desire to establish a business that is fit for the future.

Flash points Jean-Marie Dru, chairman of TBWA\Worldwide, encouraged the advertising industry to embrace this attitude with his book Disruption, published in 1996. Dru explains: ‘It started as a methodology for creating room for growth for our brands.’ Disruption is a strategy that TBWA continues to pursue, running disruption days for clients to help them come up with new ideas and safeguard against rivals. Dru continues: ‘It’s entering new categories, creating new business models, thinking differently.’ Though regarded as predominantly negative when he started to use the word in the early 90s, Dru now says: ‘All our clients, in all companies, are much more open to breakthrough, innovative or disruptive thinking. They don’t always do it, but they like to think about it at least.’ Author and Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen brought his theory of Disruptive Innovation to a more mainstream business audience in 1997, with the publication of The Innovator’s Dilemma. Christensen’s theory, developed to explain how personal computers disrupted the mainframe computer market, demonstrates how established companies can slip from dominant positions and how a new

Dollar Shave Club: CEO Michael Dubin’s viral video praising its razor blades was a memorable launch for the company in 2012, with views currently amounting to 17 million

product or service can gain a strong foothold in the marketplace. More recently, The New York Times Innovation Report, published in March 2014, warns of the dangers of ignoring these entrants who often seem innocuous at first. ‘Over time, disruptors improve their product, usually by adapting a new technology. The flash point comes when their products become “good enough” for most customers.’ This leaves businesses with a dual problem: how to put their own disruptive strategies in place, and how to protect themselves from new rivals. Successful startups When you imagine a disruptive company, it’s probably a startup that is not encumbered by legacy systems, and is armed with a killer insight into its marketplace and potential consumers. And it’s probably staffed by hipsters with a reception area that you’d be happy to call home. However, just as renowned author and management strategist Peter Drucker defined seven sources of innovation or opportunities in his book Innovation and Entrepreneurship, there are a variety of ways that companies can disrupt their competitors or burst into a marketplace. These range from the product or service itself right through to distribution, retail and creative opportunities, leading to successful executions that are generally better, cheaper and simpler than existing rivals. Signature assets Dollar Shave Club nailed price, attitude, distribution and, memorably, product when it launched in 2012 with a viral video featuring CEO Michael Dubin boasting: ‘Our blades are f**king great.’ Dubin says: ‘Guys are really frustrated by the price and experience of buying razors when they go to the store. By understanding that problem really well, we were able to provide a solution that was incredibly simple, easy to use and affordable. The way we brought that to life, through great user experience online, empowered our success. And, of course, we developed a signature social asset in the video that people forwarded around to each other so that people could tell that story.’ The original video’s view count is now close to 17 million and Dollar Shave Club passed the 1 million member mark in September 2014. Creating an entirely new product or service can potentially cause the greatest disruption in an industry, or even launch an entirely new category, but it’s also the hardest to conceive and convince consumers that this is something they need. Mobile payment system Square is one such business, offering a solution that allows people to make and receive card payments thanks to a device that plugs into a smartphone. From there, Square has expanded to offer a full point-of-sale system, competing with more developed in-store hardware solutions. Since it launched in 2009, it has received almost $600m in funding, although

it must now look to challenges from Apple and PayPal in order to protect its business. Compelling creativity Disruption comes in different shapes and sizes. How many brands do you know that would be happy removing their logo from their product, for example? Coca-Cola’s Share a Coke campaign originated in Australia in 2011 and has now printed more than 1,000 names on Coke bottles and cans in lieu of the brand’s distinctive logo. Initiated via Ogilvy & Mather in Sydney, Share a Coke has been the brand’s biggest local-to-global campaign in decades. It was recently credited with boosting sales in the US by 2%, reversing 11 years of decline in the country, according to The Wall Street Journal. After the debacle that was New Coke, disruptive creativity is a strategy that allows brands such as Coca-Cola to reap some of the rewards of disruption without altering their existing product or introducing something new. Self-sabotage Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, has instilled a disruptive approach throughout the organisation. In an interview with journalist Stephen Levy, he said: ‘As a company, one of our greatest cultural strengths is accepting the fact that if you’re going to invent, you’re going to disrupt.’ Amazon’s relentless willingness to rip it up and start again shows the mark of a truly disruptive company – one that is not afraid to potentially undermine its own products and services in its quest to build the business. It disrupted its book-selling roots by launching a digital reading device. It jeopardised content sales by embracing rentals, through its purchase of Lovefilm and the introduction of the Kindle Lending Library. And its one-off delivery charges were thrown into question with the launch of Prime’s subscription model. These all point towards a longer-term goal of a locked-in customer who sees Amazon as the go-to option for the best, easiest and cheapest purchases or content. Know your limits Often, startups have no option but to take a disruptive approach when they’re trying to gain a foothold, but is there a way that established companies can ensure they don’t fall into the trap of only making incremental changes? Cesar Brea, author and founder of marketing analytics firm Force Five Partners, believes: ‘To be successful at disruption-driven strategies, if you don’t have scarcity you have to manufacture it yourself.’ 3M does just this by setting itself the target of generating 25% of its revenue from products developed in the past five years, for example. On the flip side, Brea counsels that companies can avoid being disrupted themselves by gathering ‘continuous feedback from the market about whether or not you are actually solving your clients’ needs’. He says: ‘The trick is to be

ruthlessly objective about meeting those things and not looking for confirmatory evidence.’ Adding value Disruption today isn’t so much a strategy as a reality, and one that forces businesses to both protect themselves from competition and look around for new opportunities. Relentlessly paying attention to your customers and solving their pain points isn’t enough, however. You also have to focus on faint signals that may, in time, become a serious threat. This is a daunting task, but one that marketers are ideally placed to facilitate. To ensure that the company remains relevant, marketers can serve as a conduit to share customer feedback with the wider business, and ensure that information is distributed and issues are dealt with. Marketers can combine their knowledge of how people are using new technologies and platforms with an awareness of the company, placing themselves in a position that is integral to business growth. This understanding gives them the chance to add value through incremental changes based on customer feedback. It also means they can come up with something genuinely disruptive that people had no idea they wanted... but subsequently can’t live without.

As a company, one of our greatest cultural strengths is accepting the fact that if you’re going to invent, you’re going to disrupt Jeff Bezos, Amazon

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Brand Spotlight Tesla In creating electric vehicles that are desirable not only for their environmental credentials, but also their speed, safety and style, Tesla’s founder Elon Musk claims his place alongside Henry Ford in turning the automotive industry on its head

here aren’t many people who would attempt to launch a best-in-class electric car while simultaneously getting a commercial space venture off the ground. But a voracious appetite for establishing new, disruptive companies runs in PayPal co-founder Elon Musk’s blood. The 43-year-old co-founded Tesla in 2004 (along with Martin Eberhard, Marc Tarpenning, JB Straubel and Ian Wright), and serves as chief executive of a company determined to bring electric vehicles to the mainstream. Since then, Tesla has forced the rest of the automotive industry to sit up and take notice as it disrupts not only what people expect from an electric car – up until now some kind of glorified milk truck – but also shakes up established practices in manufacturing, retail, design, safety and marketing. As Tesla’s vice-president of communications and marketing, Simon Sproule, explains: ‘Tesla took a fresh look at the auto industry and said: “What are the parts of the auto industry that consumers really don’t like? What are the changes that we can make to improve the experience?”, and then set about doing them.’

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Packing a punch So how best to impress the doubters? First: with the car itself. Tesla’s Model S combines slick design and impeccable safety features with an impressive electric engine. At the same time it’s extremely economical. Last year the Model S was named Motor Trend ’s Car of the Year, the first time an electric vehicle has claimed the prestigious award, beating rivals including the Porsche Boxster, BMW 3 Series and Lexus GS. Tesla set out to prove, as Musk said at the Model S’s launch, that ‘an electric car can be truly better than any gasoline car,’ which he believes is a critical step towards the widespread adoption of electric vehicles and sustainable transport in general. The luxury Model S achieved a perfect 5.0 NHTSA safety rating, and the 85kwh version of the vehicle can accelerate from 0-60 in 5.4 seconds. It has a maximum speed of 125 mph and a range of more than 200 miles. And that’s on top of its environmental credentials and cheaper running costs.

The only way to cause other companies to change their behaviour is to impact their bottom line Simon Sproule, Tesla

Giga-plans Prior to the Model S, Tesla produced the Roadster sports car from 2006-2012. And it is adding new vehicles to its fleet in the coming years. The X, launching in 2015, is similar to an SUV. The cheaper model 3, due to hit the streets in 2017, will be about 20% smaller in size than the Model S and will cost in the region of $50,000-$65,000, according to Sproule. The dual-motor Model S (known as the D), announced in October, will be Tesla’s most powerful vehicle yet. The car includes autopilot hardware, tapping into data from radar and ultrasonic sensors to enable active breaking and self-parking. With access to the driver’s calendar, the car can even pick him or her up at a given time or location. Forthcoming software updates should mean that self-driving Teslas become a reality in the next few years. The cars are manufactured in the US, and the fact that so much of their construction is under Tesla’s control is part of the business’s strength,

Tesla’s Model S was named Motor Trend’s 2013 Car of the Year – a first for an electric vehicle

according to automotive industry analyst James Albertine, vice-president at Stifel Equity Research. Albertine notes that this approach contravenes the automotive industry’s modus operandi. ‘What Tesla has done, in contrast to traditional original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), is in-sourced or developed in-house roughly 75-80% of its entire vehicle production process. That’s basically the inverse of a traditional OEM. That is the most fundamentally disruptive element, because that is what’s going to drive profitability, ultimately.’ Tesla recently announced it is constructing The Gigafactory with Panasonic. Set to open in 2020 in Nevada, the factory should produce 500,000 Lithium Ion batteries a year. Sproule explains that this should help make the cars more affordable, as well as provide the business with an additional revenue stream. He says: ‘The cost will be 30% or more lower than the current battery packs that we’re producing.’ Employee ecosystems By placing its showrooms in high-footfall locations, such as shopping malls, Tesla took a disruptive approach to how people actually buy their cars, building on the easy access to information that digital provides. This is particularly clear when compared with America’s standard (read: excruciating) car-buying process of browsing and bartering on an out-of-town lot, before being pressured into driving off in a car that might be in the wrong colour or with a slightly larger engine than ideal. Tesla stores typically feature display versions of the Model S, a Design Studio where people can select paint, fittings and extras for their car, plus a touchscreen experience where customers can learn about the benefits of driving electric vehicles and Tesla’s technology and book test drives. The car can be configured and ordered online either in-store or from home, and then tracked through its production and delivery process. Tesla’s retail network also sells the Model S second-hand, which lowers the price point and gives a wider range of potential customers the chance to get their hands on the vehicle. Tesla has been able to establish its own retail network and online sales platform thanks to its lack of legacy franchise agreements. Hyping up the disruptive elements of this approach, with transparency around costs and the opportunity to deal directly with Tesla employees rather than a third party is, Albertine says, ‘engendering a very different sort of ecosystem that will play into the evolution of the auto dealer, the auto service model’. In the dominant logic of the automotive industry, where massive dealership networks are ultimately the manufacturer’s customers and determine which cars sell, this model stands apart. Electric experience Electric cars still have some way to go before they hit the mainstream. In the US, electric vehicles

made up just 0.67% of those sold in the year to May 2014, from a total of 8.1 million, according to the Energy Policy Information Center. However, that represents a 35% increase compared with the previous year. Demand for Teslas is high, and customers are prepared to wait two to three months to get their hands on the car. Tesla has built up desirability around the vehicles by creating positive experiences throughout the purchase and ownership process, ranging from door handles that emerge from the car as you approach, right through to a carefully constructed customer service strategy, including an eight-year and unlimited mileage warranty on the Model S battery. The cliché of a slick car salesman in a cheap suit couldn’t be further from what a Tesla buyer encounters. Sproule explains: ‘It’s a relationship-based marketing approach. It’s not just us shouting about the car and the brand. It’s about inviting people in, getting them to experience the car.’ He adds: ‘Most people have still not driven an electric car. So there’s a basic level of experience that you want people to have. When people drive an electric car, they’re like, “Wow, this is a really special experience.” So it makes a lot more sense for us to build our marketing around experiences.’ Open approach Tesla’s interactions with its customers in-store, through services, owner events, factory visits and over the phone and email, provide the company with the chance to listen, and respond to queries. Sproule says: ‘We get unfiltered feedback, and we get a lot of it. We’re directly connected to our customers and they’re telling us what they like and what they don’t like, and we’re planning long term.’ This feedback has played a key role in how Tesla vehicles have evolved. Tesla’s desire to be a positive force for change not just for its customers, but also in the automotive industry, has led to it taking an open approach, offering its API and patents to the world. Sproule explains the company’s motivation: ‘The stated aim of the company is to encourage electric vehicle development. If we hold back and keep our patents to ourselves, we are effectively restricting the evolution of the business.’ Faster horses While Tesla is starting to make sizeable waves in disrupting the automotive market, it still has far to go before it achieves its audacious aims. It first turned a profit in May 2013, but electric vehicle sales at major manufacturers still make up less than 1% of their total. Developing consumer demand is crucial in terms of both growing Tesla’s business and encouraging rivals to mount a challenge that will help the entire marketplace to grow. The way Sproule sees it: ‘The only way to cause other companies to change their behaviour is to impact their bottom line.’ He continues: ‘If other

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manufacturers see business going from their cars to our cars then they will figure out a way to try to stop that. And if consumers are saying “we want electric cars”, then every car company in the world will produce electric cars.’ Tesla’s dominance is growing, with a market cap of over $35bn, more than half of General Motors’ market value, despite GM having an annual revenue that is 50 times greater. In 2010, Tesla became the first car manufacturer since Ford to launch a public share float, when it raised $226m. Its share value has grown more than 1,000% in the past four years, topping $250 at the time of writing. Albertine has predicted that Tesla shares have the potential to hit $400 in the foreseeable future. ‘Short term, the next two to three years, I don’t think there’s anybody that can touch it,’ he

says. However, he believes that a clearer picture will develop over the next few years in terms of demand for electric cars, how well Tesla’s retail infrastructure and service strategy is established and the total construction costs of the Gigafactory. For Sproule, keeping one eye on the future and staying in touch with consumer demand is vital for Tesla’s continued success: ‘The kicker of any business is not just to give customers what they want today, but to give them something that they realise they want in the future.’ And the mark of a truly disruptive approach? When your next project could potentially derail your last. Founder Musk is working on the Hyperloop, a conceptual transportation system that will whisk people between LA and San Francisco in just 35 minutes, and has the potential to disrupt Tesla’s own business model.

Takeouts Be your own threat / Imagine your worst case challenger and work out how to meet that threat. Strive for excellence / Tesla’s vehicles excel in terms of design, safety and desirability, as well as in their environmental capabilities.

Opinion Do the ‘wrong thing’ Jonathan Mildenhall, chief marketing officer at Airbnb, argues that companies need to ensure they’re not so preoccupied with doing the right thing that it becomes the wrong thing

Focus on the customer / Incorporate customer feedback into your development plans and think about what they might want in the future. Push for more / Constantly look for ways you can increase not only your business capacity, but grow the entire marketplace. Disruption has historically surprised consumers. I don’t think anyone could have predicted what impact the iPhone would have – not just on the mobile phone market, but across industries ranging from cameras to gaming – when it was launched in 2007. Nowadays, consumers expect and demand that the brands they love surprise them and be one step ahead of what they need. ‘Why can’t my watch do more of what my fitness tracker does? And if it’s not going to, then I’m going to move away from my loved watch brand to something that does.’ Disruption is becoming normalised; it’s becoming expected. Doing the right thing I can’t think of an industry not touched by technology. Technology has turbo-charged disruption, lowering barriers to entry and making it possible to scale new ideas quickly because of the way in which our world is now so interconnected. So why are so many established businesses not waking up to the opportunities and the threats? Classic companies that fail often do so because they were doing the right thing. And if you do the right thing forever it becomes the wrong thing, because you fall out of sync with consumers. Kodak is a brand that did the right thing, but although it was doing the right thing for Kodak, the world around it had completely changed. Companies need to be constantly challenging themselves: ‘What is the wrong thing for us to do right now?’ Because answering that, in the long term, could be the right thing. I love how the mobile operator Three is disrupting the mobile industry in the UK through moves like abolishing sky-high roaming charges or not charging extra for new 4G services. Bake it into your business With six months now under my belt at Airbnb, I can honestly say that I have never before worked in such a dynamic and fast-paced environment. And one where seeking to disrupt the status quo truly runs through the DNA of the company. Take our brand evolution, unveiled during the summer, where we introduced a new marque for Airbnb, the ‘bélo’. Here we did the unthinkable according to marketing and trademark norms, by also launching Create Airbnb, a website where our community can adapt the symbol and make it their own. Disruption for Airbnb is not just about changing the way people travel, it is also about changing the way we do business.

Several multinational businesses look for disruption in their annual planning, and they’ll apply it in their business model, marketing strategies or even in creative executions. Conversations planning the next calendar period will quite often ask explicitly: ‘What are we disrupting and what are we going to get in return for that disruption?’ Established companies have models to encourage disruption, Coca-Cola has its 70/20/10 model, for example. Seventy percent of investment is proven, 20% of investment is innovative off this and 10% is new ideas that have never been done before. When you’re being reviewed at the end of the year in those kind of companies, the review starts with ‘and what did you do in the 10 %? ’ Because organisations know that the 10 % will find new markets, find new ways to market and find new ways to apply disruptive creativity. And it’s through the management of that budget that organisations learn to feel comfortable with disruption. If you can’t disrupt your product, your category or your business, you can always disrupt creatively. Take Old Spice. Everything about the category stayed the same, everything about the packaging stayed the same, the only place that the brand manager had to disrupt was through the creative, and it has been done brilliantly and the brand has done it consistently. As a result of that, it has earned a disproportionate share of market for that brand. If you’re not failing, you’re not going to innovate Tech-based organisations have an advantage in using disruptive business strategies compared with more traditional organisations, and that’s because failure is part of the process, and investors expect certain technology initiatives to fail. Management teams see failure to be a by-product of learning at the organisation. They believe that you’re not pushing the organisation far enough and fast enough if you’re not occasionally failing. In some of the more traditional sectors, I don’t think the management teams understand what to do with failure, and are certainly less confident declaring it to shareholders. Business is a scary but exciting place to be at the moment. Nothing is sacred, nothing protected. Disruption is not just about finding a new product or revenue stream; for some companies it will be about survival. And for that reason, it needs to flow through every aspect of the business.

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Contagious 1 / Editorial

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;The current climate is bewildering and disorienting. But for those who like a challenge, i represents a landmark opportuniy. Depie the tumult, advertising remains one of the mos effective ways of gaining an unfair advantage over the competiion...

The fites, mos flexible agencies are already riding the revolution. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s time to abandon the rules, invent a new language and focus on those non-invasive ideas that have created a two-way dialogue between brands and their believers.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Paul Kemp-Robertson, Contagious issue 1 / December 2004

A Brief History of (Contagious) Time: Bebo to Bitcoin to Bionics and Beyond

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• Facebook launches

• Google Maps goes live

• Steve Jobs announces the iPhone

• AOL buys Bebo for $850m

• Wikipedia is ten years old

• Vine launches • The power goes out at the Super Bowl, Oreo triumphs

• Sea levels will have risen by one foot since 1986

• Nearly 1 million minutes of video content cross global IP networks every second

• A $1,000 computer will have the same processing power as a human brain

• Copyright on Mickey Mouse expires

• People regularly upload their brain to a computer

• Teleportation enters testing phase

• The Human Genome Project completes its sequencing of chromosomes

• Google Chrome debuts

• Uber launches

• High-resolution bionic eyes on sale, customisable by size and colour to suit every face

• Military drone market worth $82bn

• Apple launches the App store

• Facebook buys WhatsApp for $19bn and Oculus Rift for $2bn

• Facebook dies out completely

• The IPCC concludes climate change is caused by humans

• Facebook buys Instagram for $1bn

• Excess heat from devices is recycled

• Buy-one-give-one company TOMS Shoes is founded

• Compare the Meerkat makes UK insurance interesting

• Old Spice introduces Isaiah Mustafa to the world

• Nike launches FuelBand

• YouTube launches: the first video is called ‘Me at the Zoo’

• BP Deepwater Horizon oil disaster

• First Bitcoin transaction

• Burger King’s Subservient Chicken campaign receives 20 million hits in its first week

• The Simpsons’ 400th episode airs

• T-Mobile announces the G1, the first Android phone

• Tencent announces $1bn in 2008 revenue

• Gmail launches on April Fool’s Day • 30 St Mary Axe (The Gherkin) is built in London • Super Size Me released • Last episode of Friends airs • Issue 1 of Contagious is published in London

• Titanium category introduced at Cannes Lions • EBay buys Skype for $2.6bn • Live 8 takes place throughout the world as part of the Make Poverty History campaign • Facebook.com domain name bought for $200,000 • Alibaba Group takes over China Yahoo!

• Twitter launches

• Google buys YouTube for bargain price of $1.65bn in shares • Al Jazeera English launches • OfficeMax’s Elf Yourself campaign runs for the first time

• Charlie Bit My Finger goes viral on YouTube • Street View debuts on Google Maps

• Spotify launches

• Mad Men starts

• Obama election shows A/B testing has made it to the political arena

• Amazon releases the Kindle

• Global online population hits 1 billion

• WGA writers strike for greater digital royalties

• MySpace peaks at 75.9 million monthly unique visitors in the US

• Michael Jackson dies • The Chrysler automobile company files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, closely followed by General Motors • James Cameron’s Avatar is released, marking a breakthrough in stereoscopic filmmaking

• Tesla raises $226m in the first car IPO in 50 years • WikiLeaks drops more than 90,000 internal reports about the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010 • Instagram launches • Habbo Hotel reaches an 8.7 million monthly average users peak

• Charlie Sheen goes off the rails • Two billion people watch the UK’s Royal Wedding • Osama bin Laden killed

• Google unveils Glass and announces Google Now • Facebook reaches 1 billion monthly users

• Microsoft takes over Skype

• Red Bull Stratos

• The Oprah Winfrey Show ends

• Gangnam Style becomes the first YouTube video to reach 1 billion views

• Occupy Wall Street movement begins in New York City

• Dumb Ways to Die

• A monkey in a winter coat roams an IKEA alone

• Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches goes viral. It is the most successful video ad of all time, with 165 million views • Google unveils Project Loon • World’s first lab-grown burger is eaten • Snapchat spurns $3bn bid from Facebook

• Alibaba flotation raises $25bn in IPO • Airbnb valued at $10bn • Tim Cook announces the Apple Watch • China overtakes the US as world’s largest economy. Adjusted for purchasing power, China’s GDP overtakes US GDP by 0.2%

• Electric car ownership reaches 1 million worldwide • Personal biometric scanners for online banking

• Spacecraft Juno finally arrives on Jupiter • Spacecraft Dragon V2 takes astronauts to International Space Station

• Smartphones have a sense of smell • Personal devices allow you to touch and feel virtual objects • Digital tastebud implants encourage healthy eating

• The number of devices connected to IP networks is nearly twice as high as the global population • Robot insect spies are in military use • Drug created to prevent obesity

• The total power of all computers equals the total brainpower of the human race • Glasses for the deaf convert words into text, and music into images

• Humans wear devices that record and file all their conversations • There are 50 billion connected objects

• Downloadable 3D printable fashion designs are commonplace

• First manned mission to Mars is launched

• Solar is the primary source of energy • Electric air transportation takes off • DNA mapping at birth allows diseases to be identified

• The first human-robot couples emerge as simulated personalities become more lifelike

Illustration / Jim Stoten. Future predictions are absolutely not our own. Sources include: BBC Future, Cisco, Elon Musk, Erik Eckholm, Futuretimeline.net, IBM, IHS Jane’s, NASA, NBC News, Princeton University, Ray Kurzweil, Thomson Reuters, Touro Law Review

Sometimes the world needs brands to act like NGOs.

The original Contagious mantra ©2005. Use marketing to generate compound interest: if someone invests time and energy into the content, services and experience your brand offers, is what you’re giving back of increased value?

Turn people into media. Cede control. Buy into the mass, but play in the niches too. Your audience is powerful and vocal – invite them to influence your brand’s direction and behaviour.

You don’t always have to reinvent the wheel. It’s easier to play to an existing behaviour than to change or create a new one. When seeking engagement, it pays to collaborate – so don’t be afraid to co-opt existing platforms and services.

The best advertising isn’t always advertising. Be consumer-centric: ease the friction, solve the pain points in the customer journey.

Ten steps to brand bravery

Dare to question your assumptions. Embrace dissent. Don’t ask why, ask why not? The best answer may be 180-degrees away.

Typography / André Beato, YCN

Test & Learn. Devote a percentage of your production or media budget to experimentation. Be optimistically curious: failure sucks, but instructs.

Don’t be flashy: technology should serve creativity, not the other way around.

Reputation is a future micro-economy. Data is a manifestation of the lives of living, breathing people. Treat it with respect.

Always.

To celebrate the tenth anniversary of Contagious we are offering 25% off all new subscriptions

Purpose An ever-growing number of brands are investing in a meaningful approach to their marketing communications. This strategy goes beyond traditional CSR and attempts to impact on the wider world, not just immediate stakeholders By Lucy Aitken

Illustration / Matt Chase

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he concept of brands taking on some of the biggest problems faced by the world used to be an unusual one. While many corporations’ CSR departments support NGOs and charities, the idea of connecting shareholder value to a broader system of values has advanced over the past decade and is now fully formed as opposed to embryonic. Indeed, Edelman’s Trust Barometer indicates a declining confidence in governments and a growing faith in business. ‘Businesses must now lead the debate for change,’ urges the 2014 report. This is partly due to technology helping to enable brands to be in places that were formerly off limits. Optus, a telco in Australia, now helps detect sharks in the sea with its Clever Buoy initiative through M&C Saatchi Australia. Samsung, created by Cheil Worldwide, is helping to fund research into cancer cures with Power Sleep, an app that crunches data, using the processing power of a smartphone while it charges. There has also been a shift in corporate culture towards greater transparency, collaboration and thinking beyond the balance sheet. What does your company stand for? What will its legacy be? What is its purpose? And despite there being a healthy amount of cynicism around connecting the words and worlds of ‘marketing’ and ‘meaning’, don’t underestimate its significance for people entering the industry. As Tim Lindsay, CEO of D&AD and chairman of The Gate Worldwide, wrote in The Guardian in August: ‘Younger people are more demanding of their employers and workplaces when it comes to having at least

some “purpose beyond profit” in their professional lives. There’s a natural and inbuilt momentum for change.’ Challenging the status quo A handful of brands have a clearly defined purpose. Over the past ten years, we’ve covered a range of impressive social enterprises – including TOMS shoes and Sir Richard’s condoms – that have purpose baked into their business model. Patagonia also deserves a special mention for questioning our rampant consumerism with its Common Threads Initiative. But the companies that have truly impressed us are those that have challenged their own status quo, scrutinised their supply chains and made some difficult decisions. Multinational companies like McDonald’s are heavyweight enough to bring their many suppliers on board and persuade them, through initiatives such as ‘Our Journey Together. For Good’, to make important changes that have long-term significance. Intel, meanwhile, has developed and launched conf lict-free microprocessors, responding to demand for more ethically produced consumer electronics, particularly smartphones. Amsterdam-based Fairphone, meanwhile, was overwhelmed with orders for its ethically produced smartphone and, to date, has sold 55,000 handsets. People want to feel good about the brands they have in their lives. Some 91% of global consumers are likely to switch brands to one associated with a good cause, given comparable price and quality, according to a 2013 Cone Communications/Echo Global CSR study. In other words, no one wants

to look in their wardrobe or their fridge and feel uncomfortable about how specific items got there. But as well as addressing their own issues and cleaning up their acts, brands need to make it easy for people to do their bit. French supermarket chain Intermarché, through Marcel Paris, created a whole new revenue stream when it offered misshapen fresh produce in an initiative called Inglorious Fruit and Vegetables. The produce, which would otherwise have been wasted, was sold for 30% cheaper than its more aesthetically pleasing equivalents. Across the Channel, the Sainsbury’s Value of Values campaign shows that you can enjoy reasonably priced bananas and be assured that they’re Fairtrade, or know that the fish you’re buying is sustainably sourced. Even though cynics might suggest otherwise, people care about this stuff. Purpose ǂ sustainability But a purpose doesn’t necessarily have to entail sustainabilit y. In July 2014, online accommodation booking service Hotels.com petitioned the US government to guarantee paid vacation days for all American citizens with its Vacation Equality Project. Amex’s Small Business Saturday, via Crispin Porter + Bogusky in Boulder, created a new shopping day in the run-up to the festive season, where Americans were invited to patronise local businesses. The concept started in 2010 as a one-off, but the following year, the US Senate declared Small Business Saturday an official day, cementing it as a permanent fixture in the calendar.

Power Sleep: Samsung’s app is helping fund cancer research by tapping into the processing power of mobile phones

Play to your strengths There’s also a lot to be said for identifying your strengths and playing to them. So instead of dusting off the chequebook after a natural disaster, what else could your business contribute that might make a difference? Look at what Toyota did with Meals Per Hour following Hurricane Sandy: it applied the principles of Kaizen – improving work practices through continuous incremental change – to great effect with the relief effort so that families who were relying on food parcels months after the hurricane were fed and received their parcel more promptly. Singaporean telco StarHub, with DDB Group Singapore, has introduced an initiative where mobile subscribers can donate their unused data, minutes and texts to local charities every month so that people with illness or disability who rely on care-givers can benefit from access to mobile phones. StarHub plans to give 500 beneficiaries 80 minutes of talk-time, 300 SMS and 1GB of data each month for a year. More brands should step up in this way: it costs StarHub very little to redistribute something that’s already been paid for. Meanwhile, Toyota’s Meals Per Hour effort made much more of a statement about the Toyota brand and working culture than any traditional brand campaign or corporate website ever could. Power brands So how are things going to develop in the next ten years? There will no doubt be growing numbers of evangelists and just as many cynics. Advertising can’t save the world and it’s naive to suggest it can. However, the business still attracts some of the best creative and strategic brains around, and purpose is on their to-do list. You need only take a look at the Young Lions winners from Cannes over the past few years to see that. There’s a definite first-mover advantage here: if you’re the first consumer electronics brand to push for conflict-free minerals in your product range, or the first fashion retailer to offer complete transparency in how your clothes are manufactured, there’s a clear reputational benefit over dragging your heels and having to be whipped into shape by government regulation. And the benefit to balance sheets is clear: The Stengel 50, a joint project between Millward Brown and former global marketing officer of P&G, Jim Stengel, ranked the world’s 50 fastest-growing brands between 2001 and 2011, releasing results in 2012. It clearly showed that brands which had a higher purpose outperformed the S&P 500 by 400%. ‘I wanted to prove that maximum profit and high ideals aren’t incompatible but, in fact, inseparable,’ said Stengel. Take AmEx Small Business Saturday as a case in point. A total of $5.5bn was spent as a result of the initiative in 2012. That’s the kind of power that brands can wield. What could yours do?

Inglorious Fruit and Vegetables: Intermarché created a new revenue stream and cut down on waste by selling misshapen fruit at a discount

If you’re the first fashion retailer to offer complete transparency in how your clothes are manufactured, there’s a clear reputational benefit

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Strength Study / Purpose

Brand Spotlight Chipotle

Back To The Start: animation showed the plight of a farmer struggling to balance business with ethics

Chipotle has always had a clear mission: promoting the benefits of sustainable farming, one burrito at a time. And for any naysayers who consider purpose and profit to be awkward bedfellows, Chipotle’s impressive and consistent growth proves otherwise Content, not commercials Unlike many brands that have struggled to identify and then communicate their purpose, Chipotle has always had a clear mission. However, for a long time, it struggled to find an agency that understood it, earning it a reputation as something of a problem client and a serial reviewer: by 2010, it had been through five agencies in six years. So when it hooked up with the corporate arm of talent agency Creative Artists Agency in Los Angeles – interestingly, not a ‘traditional’ agency – it didn’t set out to do ‘advertising’, but rather to find arresting ways to tell its story.

hat does sustainability mean to you? Images of wind turbines and winsome children? Sunny skies and rolling oceans? While many brands over the past ten years have made huge strides with their sustainability policies, there’s often a disconnect when it comes to communicating those efforts beyond the boardroom. That’s why Chipotle, the US burrito chain, stands out. For the past two decades it has been busy promoting the benefits of sustainable over industrial farming – all while serving up a mean burrito. What’s more, over the past few years, it has spawned some incredibly moving and memorable marketing. And all of it as far removed as possible from the clichés listed above. Bucking the trend Chipotle founder Steve Ells bucked a trend when he opened the doors of the first Chipotle restaurant in Denver, Colorado, in 1993. This fast-food eaterie had no plastic furniture, styrofoam packaging or microwaved food. Instead, there was an open-plan kitchen where customers could see their food being prepared right in front of them. While we’ve grown used to that level of transparency in food preparation –

almost to the point of coming to expect it – back then it was a radical concept. Right from its inception, Chipotle set out to change the way people think about and eat fast food. And it has been phenomenally successful while doing so. In 2013, year-on-year revenue increased 17.7% to $3.21bn; net income was $327.4m, an increase of 17.8%; and the chain opened 185 new restaurants (its current total is 1,650). For brands that continue to believe that purpose and profit are mutally exclusive, Chipotle’s consistent growth over the past two decades is persuasive evidence to the contrary. Chipotle has been one of the loudest voices in the good food movement. Ten years ago – when I was part of the team working on the very first issue of Contagious – Morgan Spurlock’s SuperSize Me was released, chronicling one man’s downward spiral into obesity as he stuck to a fast-food diet. Now barely a day goes by without the O-word being in the news, or a food safety or animal welfare story hitting the headlines. Consumer behaviour is changing: McDonald’s announced in October that global revenues fell by 5% in the third quarter, while Chipotle’s cap is $20bn. There’s much interest taken in where our food comes from, behaviour that was brilliantly par-

odied in the comedy sketch show Portlandia. A couple in a restaurant obsess so much about the provenance of the chicken they’re about to order that knowing its name, breed and even seeing a photo isn’t enough for these super-sensitive beings: oh no, they abandon their table to visit the farm in person. Putting integrity first Signage in Chipotle’s restaurants communicates the company’s Food With Integrity mission as ‘Our commitment to finding the very best ingredients raised with respect for the animals, the environment and the farmers’. Visit the company’s Food With Integrity website and you can see exactly what this means in terms of livestock and the wider world. Transparency plays a big part here: if Chipotle can’t purchase naturally raised chicken for some reason, it lets people know. This allows diners the choice of opting for an alternative menu option if they want to prioritise their ethics over their appetite. If a brand wants to align itself to a higher purpose, charting progress and highlighting obstacles are vital. People don’t expect perfection, but honest communication never goes amiss.

Building brand ethics The first work from CAA Marketing was a touching two-minute animation, Back To The Start, directed by Johnny Kelly via Nexus Productions in London. It documented the epiphany of a factory farmer who no longer wants his livestock to be pumped up to the eyeballs with hormones and packaged into boxes. Given that 300 family farmers in the US walk away from their land every week, this film helped to explain their struggle to balance business with ethics. The powerful short film, sound-tracked by country music legend Willie Nelson covering The Scientist by Coldplay, left audiences misty-eyed while at the same time delivering a hard-hitting message about industrialised animal production. Awards juries loved it. Among other accolades in 2012, it picked up two Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions: one for film, and the first-ever in branded content and entertainment. The latter also recognised CAA’s entire Cultivate Programme, a multifaceted platform including a loyalty programme rewarding knowledge, not spend, and a ‘food, ideas and music’ festival. A digital-first media strategy optimised Back To The Start: it made its debut on YouTube and then to 21 million Facebook fans, leveraging the combined social media fan bases of Chipotle, Willie Nelson and Coldplay. Through paidfor downloads of The Scientist on iTunes, it raised funds for FarmAid and for the Cultivate Foundation, which has contributed more than $2m to help fund initiatives that support sustainable

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Content is a more effective tool to pique curiosity than traditional advertising. The idea is to bring people into the conversation through something that is first and foremost entertainment, secondly says something about us, and thirdly that is designed to spark conversation Chris Arnold, Chipotle

agriculture, family farming, culinary education, and innovation that promotes better food. Back To The Start continues to attract views on YouTube and, to date, has been viewed more than 8.5 million times. ‘The reason why it seems to resonate with people is because there’s an elegance to the storytelling,’ Jesse Coulter, co-chief creative officer from CAA Marketing, told Contagious.

The Scarecrow: sequel to Back To The Start scooped the 2014 Cannes Lions PR Grand Prix

The Scarecrow A 2013 sequel, The Scarecrow, also wowed jurors at Cannes, and scooped the 2014 Grand Prix for PR and Cyber. This time, the animation starred a scarecrow working at Crow Foods Incorporated. American singer-songwriter Fiona Apple’s cover of Pure Imagination plays in the background while the sad scarecrow witnesses horrors like a chicken inflating after being injected, and a melancholy cow shivering inside a metal box. The scarecrow decides enough is enough and starts cooking with freshly grown ingredients. The film, like its predecessor, is both compelling and hopeful. It’s been viewed 13.4 million times. Coulter says: ‘From the outset we knew we wanted to continue in animation, as did Chipotle. We thought it was a great medium for the stories we’re trying to tell and for the worlds that we’re trying to create. It allows us to tackle complex issues in a way that makes them more approachable, rather than taking them on directly in live action. It became the opportunity to build a vision for a different part of the campaign.’

Scarecrow: the game Accompanying The Scarecrow was a free iOS game, a 3D platform-jumper that sought to bring to life the pro-sustainable farming theme of the film. Our eponymous hero aims to free confined animals, serve wholesome food and dodge robotic crows. Downloaded 450,000 times, the game included a buy-one-get-one-free offer at the burrito chain, designed to drive footfall and sales. Farmed and Dangerous Having successfully experimented with shortform branded content, in January 2014, Chipotle launched a four-part comedy series, Farmed and Dangerous, which appeared on US streaming service Hulu. The show centres on a nefarious company called Animoil that wants to increase cattle production by feeding cows petroleum pellets. An activist, Chip, petitions to stop the firm. However, despite its comic intentions and satirical nature – including exploding cows and over-the-top villains – Farmed and Dangerous angered some farmers. One agricultural blogger, Ryan Goodman, urged the chain to ‘go talk with the farmers and ranchers that you are attacking… start a dialogue and let the conversation come from both sides of the plate to learn where our food comes from.’ Another blogger, The Foodie Farmer, cited US Department of Agriculture statistics that claim 97% of US farms are familyrun, exploding Chipotle’s ‘myth’ that our food is produced by industrial agriculture.

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Values Integration Chipotle doesn’t talk about product integration, preferring the term ‘values integration’. Chris Arnold, the chain’s director of communications, says: ‘Content is a more effective tool to pique curiosity than traditional advertising. The idea is to bring people into the conversation through something that is first and foremost entertainment, secondly says something about us, and thirdly that is designed to spark conversation.’ Worthy and worth watching Other brands – even in Chipotle’s category – are making huge advances in sustainability.

McDonald’s, a one-time investor in Chipotle, has brought its suppliers on board with its sustainability objectives and, like Chipotle, publishes its progress, rewarding those suppliers who help it to achieve these objectives. However, unlike Chipotle, McDonald’s has chosen not to build its communications strategy around its sustainability efforts. For Chipotle, its purpose, business and marketing strategy are all centred on the same thing: for ALL food to be sustainably sourced, delicious and affordable. It’s tough to be worthy and worth watching: Chipotle proves that brands can be both.

Takeouts Make purpose a priority / Purpose, business and marketing should all form part of your brand’s holistic strategic direction. All brands could have a more meaningful agenda, so identify what your brand could do to make a difference in the world. Even if talking about it isn’t right for your brand, you should embed it in how you run your business. Collaborate / Identify partners who will help you achieve your purposeful objectives through collaborations and alliances. Locate NGOs in countries where you’re looking to grow your brand and learn from their experience and insight. Be transparent / Set goals and regularly report on your progress on as many channels as possible. If you haven’t fulfilled an objective, state why.

Opinion Ethics at the heart of business

Paul Polman has been CEO of Unilever since 2009. Under his leadership, Unilever has a clear objective: to double in size while reducing the company’s overall environmental footprint and increasing its positive social impact

Almost every aspect of the world we know is changing. Rapid population growth, the digital revolution, lack of global governance in an increasingly interdependent world and stress on the environment are just some of the factors causing business to operate in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment. We have created prosperity, but too many are still being left behind. As we should know from nature, a world not in balance will ultimately be rejected. The latest progress report on the Millennium Development Goals shows that 1.2 billion people are still living in extreme poverty; 2.5 billion people lack access to adequate sanitation facilities; one in five children fail to make it to the age of five; and global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. Gridlocked political process While the human and environmental logic for change is overwhelming, the political process is gridlocked. We have the financial resources available, but money is lost on perplexing subsidies, geopolitical conflicts and wars, or inefficient bureaucracy. That means the role of business is important: business creates jobs and livelihoods by producing solutions to complex problems, and can have an enormous impact at scale by capitalising on its partners and stakeholders. Indeed, business can be part of the answer, but it has a responsibility to do it right. To succeed it must come out of the grip of short-termism and self-service. Business needs to put itself, first and foremost, at the service of society, not just shareholders. At Unilever, we strongly believe that business should give and not take from the societies and environments on which it relies in the first place. Crisis of ethics What we have experienced over recent years is not so much a crisis of capitalism, but a crisis of ethics. Initiatives like the Blueprint for Better Business can help by providing the right guidelines for businesses to put purpose and sustainability at the heart of their operations and earn the trust of those they seek to serve in the first place. Trust in business was at an all-time low after the 2008 recession. The 2014 Edelman Trust Barometer suggests that business is recovering, having made demonstrable strides in transparency, supply chain and product quality. There is now an opportunity for business to demonstrate its longer-term commitment to change.

Farmed and Dangerous: four-part comedy series, which appeared on streaming service Hulu, angered some farmers

Long term thinking At Unilever, we are backing words with action. We have aligned management incentives and invested heavily in R&D and people to build our pipeline of innovations and our organisation for the long term.

In addition, we have moved away from quarterly profit reporting. Since we don’t operate on a 90-day cycle for advertising, marketing, or investment, why do so for reporting? In 2010, we launched the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan (USLP). Some doubted our ability – and my state of mind – when we set out our ambition to grow the business but in a completely novel way – totally decoupling our growth from environmental footprint and increasing our positive social impact. The USLP is driving innovation and growth, reducing costs, increasing engagement and making Unilever a preferred employer. It is helping us create brands with purpose, connecting meaningful solutions with the needs of everyday consumers. Domestos is helping to improve access to basic sanitation; PG Tips and Lipton are supporting sustainably sourced tea; Knorr works to source key ingredients in a sustainable and traceable way through a network of landmark farmers, and Dove’s Real Beauty mission promotes self-esteem. All these brands facilitate a movement for change. Small actions = big difference Nonetheless, I challenge you to ask yourself: do people really care about this enough to change their buying behaviour or even their consumption pattern? Consumers can be schizophrenic. On one hand, as citizens, we value responsible brands and products. On the other, as individuals, we make buying decisions that are often inconsistent with our role as citizens. That’s where Project Sunlight comes in. We launched this platform in 2013 as a means to engage directly with consumers on our sustainability. Through Project Sunlight, we want to motivate people to live sustainably by taking small actions that make a big difference. Using our size and scale to pro-actively transform markets is not only right but also exciting. However, we can’t do it alone. That is why we’re working with others in partnerships like the Tropical Forest Alliance, the UN Scaling Up Nutrition Initiative, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development Action 2020 programme and the New Vision for Agriculture. Through these types of transformative partnerships we can drive change at scale. And yet this is still not enough. We need the right long-term framework and we need more companies to join us on the journey. Fortunately, more are. The key will be greater transparency in all we do and enhanced tools of integrated reporting, including for environmental and social capital. It will also help to identify the free-riders, those unwilling to join and take responsibility. Finally, we need governments to create appropriate frameworks for sustainable economic growth. If we get this right, we can mobilise, scale and make a real difference.

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Small But Perfectly Formed / Little Brands, Big Thinkers

‘Here’s to the crazy ones.’ That’s how we kicked off Small But Perfectly Formed, the section of our magazine dedicated to the startups upending industries despite their diminutive size. Since 2009, we’ve hunted great stories and have now profiled 140 dynamic companies – SBPFs, as we affectionately refer to them. We’ve featured brands innovating in sickness (Help Remedies, issue 21) and in health (Sherpaa, issue 37). We’ve written about EVRYTHNG (issue 31) and the kitchen sink (Lyfe Kitchen, issue 33). We’ve even covered sex (Smile Makers, issue 32), drugs (PillPack, issue 40) and rock ’n’ roll (Ed Banger Records, issue 21). Through it all, one thing has remained constant: nimble Davids are capitalising on innovative business models, brave new ideas and advances in technology to fell bloated Goliaths. As we wrote in issue 21, these are the companies ‘not only defying convention, but defining it’. Here we take a look at some of our favourite success stories – and ask a few familiar faces to pass the torch to the latest class of SBPFs. As if it could be said enough: Here’s, once again, to the crazy ones.

Small But Perfectly Formed In each of the past 20 issues, Contagious has celebrated seven small companies hoping to change the world. Let’s take a look at some of our favourites – and add a few more to the ranks; hand-picked by three of the entrepreneurs we’ve featured in the past By Chris Barth

Shake Shack / When we profiled Danny Meyer’s burger joint in issue 22 at the beginning of 2010, it was a three-shack ‘micro-chain’ in New York City, with aspirations of expanding beyond the Big Apple. Though we noted the brand had ‘a view to dotting the east coast with up to 20 shacks by 2015’, we underestimated the hunger for a great Shackburger. Shake Shack has blasted past that goal and now boasts 56 locations, including shacks in London, Istanbul, Moscow and Dubai. This autumn, reports surfaced that the chain is headed for an IPO, with analysts projecting a valuation as high as $1bn. MakerBot / In mid-2011, when we first focused our spotlight on 3D-printing startup MakerBot, the company had raised $75,000 in funding and was ‘headquartered in a nondescript warehouse’. Since then, the brand has moved to swankier digs – a 31,000sq ft office in Brooklyn’s Metro Tech Center – while adding to its coffers. In 2013, manufacturer Stratasys acquired the formerly small and perfectly formed brand for $403m. Today, just as we wrote in our initial coverage, MakerBot continues to ‘lead the digital fabrication revolution’. Bluefin Labs / ‘The implications of the insights for clients should truly allow advertisers to embrace television in more engaging ways,’ we wrote in issue 28, describing Bluefin Labs’ semantic analysis of social media. Twitter must have been paying attention; the social media

company acquired Bluefin two years later in 2013 for just under $100m to beef up its data science capabilities around advertising. These days, Bluefin Labs’ founder Deb Roy is Twitter’s chief media scientist. BrewDog / Acquisitions aren’t the only sign of success. Scottish brewer BrewDog measures its progress in litres. In 2010, when we profiled the aggressively independent beer-maker, it brewed 1.58 million litres of ale and had just opened its first bar. Last year, BrewDog brewed more than three times that (5.35 million litres), and the brand now has 23 locations around the world, with three more planned. Along the way, the ‘beer with balls’ has continued to turn heads, crowdsourcing £6.7m ($10.8m) through two more rounds of its Equity For Punks campaign, opening a new, world-class brewery and starring in its own BrewDogs TV show.

Nimble Davids are capitalising on innovative business models, brave new ideas and advances in technology to fell bloated Goliaths

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Small But Perfectly Formed / Little Brands, Big Thinkers

Over

Ellexus

Helping massive companies solve software issues

Democratising graphic design via mobile apps Cape Town, South Africa

2012

Friends & family funding

A mobile creative suite

madewithover.com

Erik Hersman is the co-founder of Ushahidi and CEO of BRCK in Nairobi, the mobile wifi generator that took home the 2013 Most Contagious Technology and Audience Awards. We asked him to nominate an SBPF company and he suggested Over. Said Hersman: ‘Mobile creativity is about great design in the app itself so that you get convenience and simplicity packaged with real creative power, which is why I use Over.’

Background Aaron Marshall likes to experiment – fast. As founder of mobile creativity startup Over, he’s always trying to improve his company’s offering, enabling a new creative class via mobile-native apps that lower the barriers to entry in a historically expensive software category. ‘We run lots of experiments. We try lots of things. We thrash a lot – let’s try this, let’s try that, let’s try this,’ says Marshall. Before founding Over, Marshall moved from product to product. When his intra-business social network Potluck hit scaling issues, he created goal-setting platform Goalsmith. The web version took months to build, but the iPhone app was completed in three weeks. ‘No more web,’ Marshall decided. ‘I’m going to do this app thing.’ Goalsmith became Pingoals, where people created goals and shared them to visual-first platforms like Pinterest. Marshall realised that the core technology – which let people overlay text on images in creative ways – was more valuable than Pingoals itself. He moved to Cape Town and turned that technology into Over. The app launched in July 2012 priced $1.99 and made $5,000 within three days.

Disruption Marshall credits an intuitive and unique user interface – along with a dash of luck – for the app’s success. Before launching Over, he spent months researching UI designs, spending more than $2,000 in the App Store. The result is a distinctive app that is a breeze to use. ‘I think the UI had a lot to do with why we’ve been loved by Apple and by users,’ says Marshall. Apple selected Over as one of a handful of apps given away for free on the App Store’s fifth birthday. Marshall anticipated 100,000 downloads. Instead, Over racked up 4.6 million downloads in a week. Despite Over’s success, Marshall prides his team on its humility, which he believes will help the company survive long term. Having a sober view on the challenges facing the team, he says, helps Over avoid ‘the drunken delusions of grandeur of an entrepreneur’. Still, not all of his decisions seem sober: last year, for instance, Marshall turned down $1m in venture funding. But he has good justification: ‘We’re not going to take money until it’s growth capital,’ says Marshall. ‘Because if it’s not growth capital, it could kill us. And that would be sad, because we like where we’re going.’

What’s next Over’s goal of becoming the leader for mobile creatives is a tall order, to be sure. But Marshall is quick to point out that ‘anything small is not worth doing’. Since launching, the company has brought in $1.5m in revenues, and the team is focused on cementing Over’s position as the leader in mobile creativity software. ‘The creative tool space has really been dominated by Adobe for many years, and it seems like the opening is mobile. They have not done a great job there. There are just a whole lot of new creatives that are emerging globally,’ Marshall says. ‘So yeah, we see a market opportunity, but also from a personal perspective, it’s a passion market fit.’ Though the space keeps heating up and Over will no doubt face stiff competition in the coming months, Marshall is excited about the company’s direction – and its directive. ‘People who weren’t creative before are finding out that they’re creatives, and that is a very fun spot to be in. We want to go to a whole new level and give people more and more powerful tools so that they can be free to create and make wherever they are,’ he says. ‘We want creativity everywhere.’

Boston, MA

2010

Self-funded

Diagnosing and fixing enterprise IT

ellexus.com

Eben Upton is the founder of credit card-sized computer Raspberry Pi. In 2012, Raspberry Pi took home both the SBPF and Audience Awards at Most Contagious. We asked Upton to suggest an SBPF company, and he told us about Ellexus, saying: ‘I think Ellexus is awesome because it has spotted (and solved) a key problem holding back high-performance computing: how exactly do you keep all those thousands of machines and all that software working at peak performance?’ Background Venture capitalist and co-founder of Netscape Marc Andreessen once famously said that ‘software is eating the world’. That may very well be true, but anyone who has worked much with computers knows that sometimes software gets a stomach bug. For the layperson, glitchy software is a minor annoyance – turn your laptop on and off and most of the time the problem will sort itself out. For multibillion-dollar companies, though, software glitches can be a much more difficult, and expensive, problem to fix. After years working as an engineer in the semiconductor industry, Rosemary Francis decided to do something about large-scale software malfunctions. She put together a team in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and founded Ellexus. The company uses advanced software to diagnose and solve installation and configuration issues on Linux systems. Think of it as a system debugger for massive computer infrastructures.

Disruption Technology lies at the core of Ellexus’ disruptive presence, specifically a software product called Breeze. ‘We’ve developed a tracing technology that allows us to see which files programs are accessing while they run,’ says Francis. For example, the Ellexus team can fix ‘File Not Found’ errors by identifying exactly where a given program is looking and helping to connect the dots. ‘We collect all sorts of information about the programs while they’re running so that engineers can very easily compare one system with another and, for example, discover that when they’re starting the application one user is typing the letter “l” instead of the number “1” and things like that,’ says Francis. The company has found a niche working with semiconductor software vendors and the IT departments of semiconductor manufacturers – an industry familiar to Francis. But its tools also work in other areas. ‘We work with pharmaceutical and bioinformatics companies such as Cancer Research and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, because problems with Big Data and complex software mean that they, in fact, have very similar computer set-ups and very similar problems,’ says Francis.

What’s next Now, the company is turning its sights to new issues in software configuration, expanding its team and developing two new products. One will expand Breeze’s current software to work with Docker, an open application platform that, in Francis’ words, ‘is very hot news at the moment’. Ellexus is also developing a product that will address storage issues related to software installation. ‘Obviously if you’re trying to read and write lots and lots of data to a disk, then that’s going to take a lot of time. It really matters where that disk is stored – a lot of these companies have data stored across a network, and so one application can easily affect another application just by putting too much data in the wrong place,’ says Francis. Ellexus, which is self-funded, has been profitable for the past two years, pulling revenue in the ballpark of £250,000 ($400,000) in 2014. And its growth potential is enormous – Francis says the company’s second-smallest client is ARM, a semiconductor giant with a market cap just under $19bn. ‘Most of the companies we deal with are multibillion-dollar companies, so that makes life quite exciting,’ she says.

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Hopscotch

Visual programming on mobile for kids New York, NY

2012

$1.2m Seed funding

Spurring creativity through playful coding

gethopscotch.com

Debbie Sterling is the founder of Most Contagious 2013’s SBPF Award-winner GoldieBlox, a toy company that encourages girls to develop an interest in engineering. Sterling was excited to nominate Hopscotch to join the next class of SBPFs. ‘I love Hopscotch because it is creating a really simple and intuitive platform to get kids learning basic coding skills,’ she says. ‘Computer science education is critical to the success of our economy and Hopscotch makes it fun.’ Background Prior to founding Hopscotch, a mobile platform that teaches kids to code through visual programming, co-founders Jocelyn Leavitt and Samantha John noticed a disturbing lack of diversity among their engineering peers. ‘They were primarily white, male, nerdy, uppermiddle-class guys who had come to engineering through a love of video games when they were very young,’ says Leavitt. So the pair hatched a plan in late 2011: find a way to get girls into engineering early on by developing a tool that Leavitt and John wished had existed during their youth. The duo started working on the project in earnest in the summer of 2012, and released the Hopscotch iOS app in April 2013 as ‘the first-ever programming language invented to be programmed on a mobile device’. The platform features colourful blocks of code that users can drag and drop to create games, animations, apps and more. In fact, the language is ‘Turing complete’, which basically means if you can dream it, you can build it with Hopscotch. ‘Given enough time and storage space, you could rebuild the internet,’ says Leavitt.

Disruption Though Hopscotch began with girls as a target audience, Leavitt and John went to great lengths to ensure it would appeal to all kids. They tested different colour schemes, illustrations and more to find a balance. ‘We actually took it into schools and tested it. The girls said they thought it was designed for girls, and the boys said they thought it was unisex,’ says Leavitt. ‘Perfect.’ Hopscotch says similar numbers of boys and girls are invested in the language and its community, where kids can share the projects they create. Says Leavitt: ‘It’s exactly what we wanted. It doesn’t become about “Is this a girls’ toy or a boys’ toy?” This is a fun toy where you make stuff.’ The community, launched earlier this year, took off immediately. Users now share 15,000 different projects on a weekly basis, and more than 2 million projects have been created since the app’s launch. For Leavitt, it’s a joy to watch. ‘Hopscotch is this emergence system,’ she says. ‘We are the designers of the system, but because the users are also a part of creating the system, there’s a lot of new stuff that comes out that we didn’t expect.’

What’s next Hopscotch’s founders have been keeping their eye on another popular platform that allows for creative exploration, open-ended play and community experiences: Minecraft. Leavitt speaks of the two platforms as kindred spirits: ‘They offer the motivation and give people the tools to learn on their own and spur great attitudes about sharing knowledge.’ Hopscotch’s next challenge? Ensuring kids understand the full potential of a limitless programming language. The company’s website offers lesson plans and curriculum aids to help teachers and parents work the tool into their educational plans. And it doesn’t stop with kids. Hopscotch has had plenty of adults having fun with its drag-and-drop programming capabilities. ‘There are all sorts of possibilities, both within a giant networked community for kids to be able to make and share and learn how to build interesting software, and in general for anybody who is not an engineer,’ says Leavitt. Hopscotch raised $1.2m in seed funding from investors including Kapor Capital and Collaborative Fund. The app is currently free, but the company plans to introduce in-app purchases to monetise its success.

Publishing The rise of social media platforms over the past decade has brought about an intense pressure on brands to feed the content beast. This in turn is inspiring a wave of advertising that places an emphasis on storytelling, as brands evolve from being publicists to publishers By Chloe Markowicz

Illustration / Matt Chase

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ontent marketing has been around since agricultural equipment-maker John Deere launched The Furrow back in 1895, educating farmers about how they could become more profitable. Described as the agrarian version of Rolling Stone, the magazine has covered needto-know topics for farmers for more than a century. From selling to storytelling Advertising has always been about creating content to sell products, but over the past decade more brands have come to think of themselves as publishers. Making content that entertains or educates rather than extols the virtues of a product has become a bigger priority as marketers move from buying an audience’s attention to earning it. Indeed, 57% of marketers planned to boost budgets for content marketing in 2014, according to Advertising Age. As brands have shifted from being publicists to publishers, the ‘selling’ has become less overt. Characterised by an editorial focus on storytelling and sharing values instead of pushing product, brand publishing involves creating advertising that feels more like journalism or entertainment. Taking cues from Hollywood W hen BM W launched a series of highproduction-value online f ilms with Fallon,

Minneapolis, in 2001, it was a landmark moment. Directed by big shots like Ang Lee and Tony Scott, and starring Clive Owen, this was content that tried to be more Hollywood than Madison Avenue. But BMW couldn’t achieve mass viewership online prior to broadband internet and platforms like YouTube. There are probably more marketing professionals who have seen BMW Films presented at conferences than consumers who saw it in the wild. Once social media platforms launched, the barriers to creating content were lowered. Not only were these online platforms free, but there was also greater access to tools to create everything from audio to video to still images. These days, as David Alberts, chief creative officer of content sourcing firm MOFILM, explains: ‘Anyone can afford a broadcast-quality camera. We can edit on our computers. We have a distribution model online that is cost effective to get anyone to compose video.’ It’s easy to forget that media platforms and content are so much more abundant now. With audiences having greater choice of what to watch and read, brands have had to work even harder to capture their attention. This meant creating advertising that wasn’t interruptive or a nuisance but so entertaining that people wanted to seek it out and

then come back for more. That was Gatorade’s goal when it launched its online branded entertainment portal Mission G in 2009. It wanted its platform to feel not ‘like advertising but news: an event worthy of interest and attention in its own right’, Brent Anderson, global group creative director of TBWA\Chiat\Day, Los Angeles, told D&AD. It was for this platform that the agency created the successful Gatorade REPLAY video series, which focused on years-later rematches between small, local sports teams. Connecting through content Content can lead to sales spikes – Gatorade sales shot up 63% in the region where the first REPLAY series was staged. But it also has the longer-term effect of building richer engagement with its consumers. Speaking about REPLAY, Jill Kinney, then Gatorade director of branded content, told D&AD that ‘longer-form branded entertainment allows us to more thoroughly connect with and educate our audience’. Intel had already built a stellar reputation in brand publishing with its Creators Project, a partnership with Vice started in 2010, when it launched The Beauty Inside with Pereira & O’Dell. This social film series is another example of how content can help a brand reach out to a

Brand publishing: Intel aims to build an ongoing conversation with younger consumers (left); BMW films were a landmark moment in branded content (above)

target group. Speaking to Contagious about the project, Justin Cox, then Pereira & O’Dell strategy director, explained that there wasn’t an immediate sales goal: ‘What Intel wanted to do was build an ongoing conversation with younger consumers. And hopefully drive all the typical marketing buzzwords you hear and love – driving brand affinity, driving consideration – among this audience. Part of it was just putting the brand on the cultural map for this audience.’ Agency co-founder PJ Pereira added: ‘Instead of interrupting consumers with a “pitch” [the brand] attracts them to a lighter, but deeper message they actually enjoy.’ Value-driven marketing Focusing on values instead of product can help brands achieve long-lasting cut-through in their categories. ‘Product differentiation lasts six months until it can be copied,’ says MOFILM’s Alberts. ‘Your values are sustainable.’ He adds: ‘Anyone can claim something in 30 seconds, but if you then want to demonstrate your values, you need storytelling. Saying “I am great” is not good enough, you have to demonstrate it.’ Sainsbury’s Little Stories, Big Difference series of video vignettes used storytelling to convey the British supermarket’s corporate responsibility values. The films focused not on the products the supermarket stocks, but how its business operates, from sustainable sourcing to nutrition labelling. Audiences prefer story-led content marketing. Nearly two-thirds of online news visitors are more open to digital advertising that focuses on a story rather than selling a product, revealed research from the Internet Advertising Bureau. Custom content is 92% more effective than traditional advertising at increasing awareness and 168% more powerful at driving purchase preference, according to UM research. Laughing, gasping and goose pimples So, how do brands win at publishing? The obvious answer is by creating engaging content. It needs to be consistent with their overall positioning and point of view, which explains why the brands responsible for some of the best content also have the clearest sense of identity. Emotionally charged content is also more likely to be successful, as shown in a study by Karen Nelson-Field, senior research associate at the University of South Australia’s Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science. ‘Content creators should aim to increase the emotional appeal of their videos, with less emphasis and fewer restrictions on the creative devices they use,’ she wrote in Viral Marketing – The Science of Sharing. ‘Creators should worry less about whether the video content contains a baby, a dog or a celebrity, and instead invest in pre-testing to ensure the material makes the viewer laugh, gasp or get goose pimples.’ Content can be more emotionally resonant when it is based on strategic learnings about

@SummerBreakAT&T reality series used influencer marketing to achieve social media success

consumers. Intel’s The Beauty Inside, for instance, was successful because it was informed by research into young people’s journeys of self-exploration. The insight that millennials use technology to discover their personalities inspired the mechanic of inviting the public to play the part of the main character in the series. Distribution is the answer Simply having content that’s entertaining isn’t enough to attract views. As The New York Times Innovation Report, designed to get the Grey Lady out of the digital ditch, notes: outlets like ‘BuzzFeed, Huffington Post and USA Today are not succeeding simply because of lists, quizzes, celebrity photos and sports coverage. They are succeeding because of their sophisticated social, search and community-building tools and strategies, and often in spite of their content.’ This awareness of how distribution works and knowledge of how to get clicks is why brands are so keen to collaborate with the likes of BuzzFeed and Vice on creating content. Inf luencer marketing is also becoming an important strategy to ensure content gets seen. AT&T’s @SummerBreak, a 2013 reality series that unfolded on social media in real time, amassed 15 million views largely due to its clever influencer campaign. The initiative took over the existing @SummerBucketList Twitter handle, already popular among teens, turning it into @SummerBreak’s home. AT&T hired the young woman behind the account to work with its social team to craft an authentic voice for the handle and help with fan engagement. Billy Parks, who worked on the campaign as EVP of digital production and programming at the Chernin Group, told Contagious in early 2014: ‘I would never, ever, ever, run a content programme without a solid

inf luencer campaign to support it. When we thought about how we were going to get people to watch this show, obviously print and television commercials didn’t make sense. How do we reach these kids in a way that’s consistent with the way they consume content?’ Marketers need to ask themselves not how they can create great content, but how they can get people to consume it. Kraft has revealed that it has a four-times-better return on investment through content marketing than through targeted advertising, but that is only because it has put major dollars behind distribution. As Julie Fleischer, Kraft’s director of data, content and media, said in a Content Marketing World speech in September: ‘If you wouldn’t spend money behind it, then why do it? It’s shouting into the wind without making a sound.’ In the early days of YouTube there was a misconception that, because it was a public free platform, brands didn’t need to spend any budget on promoting their videos. ‘Brands thought that if we build it, they will come and that was surely wrong,’ Nelson-Field tells Contagious. ‘We found that distribution has the greatest effect on the variation of sharing. Distribution trumps emotion. There is definitely a hierarchy: paid is without a doubt king, and content is queen.’ The best brand publishers have not just created amazing content, but have figured out how to get people to consume it over the creations of bonafide media companies. Net-a-Porter’s Porter magazine, for example, is comfortably competing with Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Brand publishers extraordinaire like Red Bull and GoPro are in the position where their content can generate revenue. By seriously investing in content creation and – crucially – distribution, brands are proving that publishing is a potent way to connect with audiences, drive consideration and even earn money.

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Brand Spotlight Red Bull

From daredevil stunts to unusual events, Red Bull has always been synonymous with great content. But its branded content has become more than a mere marketing tool, marking its evolution into a true publishing company

ou don’t crack open a Red Bull because it tastes good. And yet Red Bull has managed to sell 40 billion cans of the stuff since the company was founded in 1987. ‘Taste is of no importance whatsoever,’ founder Dietrich Mateschitz told Bloomberg Businessweek. Quite a bold statement for a drinks manufacturer, but that’s because Mateschitz sees it as more than a drink: ‘It’s an efficiency product. I’m talking about improving endurance, concentration, reaction time, speed, vigilance and emotional status.’ More than a drink Red Bull is also a powerful lifestyle brand. ‘It is still an energy drink, [but] Red Bull now also represents a certain approach to life,’ kitesurfer Robby Naish, whom Red Bull has sponsored since 1994, told Inc. It is Red Bull’s brand, rather

than the burst of energy the drink unleashes, that has made it a billion-dollar business. And this brand has been built on content – exhilarating, heart-pumping content. The product’s energy-boosting nature makes its association with extreme sports a natural fit. As Mateschitz told Fast Company: ‘When launching a product called an energy drink and named Red Bull, a product that stimulates body and mind, it is a short step to the roots where Red Bull came from. We have been doing this for 20 years – now it’s called adventure sports, extreme sports and outdoor sports. Most of the national Austrian champions in those days were personal friends of mine and we spent all our leisure time mountain biking, windsurfing, snowboarding, etc.’ Red Bull went from just hanging out with athletes to sponsoring them, which it f irst

Flugtag contest: Red Bull has carved out a niche for itself by setting up unique challenges

did in 1989 with Formula 1 racing driver Gerhard Berger. All this sports action makes for some pretty thrilling material, which explains why Red Bull has been creating content since its inception. ‘One has to admit that this was easier with Red Bull Energy Drink than it is with ordinary food products, soft drinks, or detergents,’ added Mateschitz. His statement downplays Red Bull’s shrewd content creation strategy. The brand hasn’t just been documenting exciting events that complement its active personality, but creating them and then capturing them. This has been going on since the launch – just one year after the company was founded – of the Red Bull Dolomitenmann: an extreme relay race that combines mountain running, paragliding, kayaking and mountain biking.

Doing the impossible In bu i ld ing un ique proper t ies l i ke t he Dolomitenmann, or Flugtag, an absurd contest where teams are challenged to f ly homemade, human-powered machines off a six-metre deck, Red Bull has carved out a niche for itself. No one creates events like Red Bull. And that means only Red Bull gets to tell their stories. This is true outside of sports too. For instance, instead of simply sponsoring a concert tour or music festival, Red Bull’s Revolutions in Sound annual event takes over the London Eye, with each of the attraction’s revolving capsules hosting a different music gig, and each concert being streamed online. Red Bull does more than simply slap its logo onto an existing event. Since the beginning, it has had the key to creating killer content because it has made amazing things happen, not

just through its events but its stunts too. These daredevil acts are a smart way to make Red Bull stand out in the fiercely competitive drinks market. As Jeremy Edwards, founder of sponsorship agency Activative, says: ‘It is a route to create a competitive marketing awareness platform with rivals like Coke and Pepsi with whom it simply can’t compete in terms of scale and ad budget.’ The brand broke five Guinness World Records when it sent Felix Baumgartner to make a free-fall jump 24 miles above the earth, with 8 million people watching YouTube’s live stream in awe. It wasn’t just that millions were enthralled by this literally out-of-this-world content, it had a business impact too. Sales in the US rose 7% to $1.6bn six months after the Red Bull Stratos mission, according to research firm IRI. The 2012 stunt is yet another example of Red Bull’s talent

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Red Bull built an independent media business on its heritage of creating great content. This became popular because, even though it was created by an FMCG brand, the product was never the focus

for making the impossible happen. That’s what the brand has done ever since it teamed up with Baumgartner to break the record for the highest ever BASE jump in 1999, when he leaped from The Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, then the world’s tallest buildings.

Revolutions in Sound: annual event stages a separate music gig in each of the London Eye capsules

Owning the story ‘We have no real material assets, our asset is the brand,’ Mateschitz has said. He overlooks Red Bull’s second most valuable asset: its content. ‘Whenever we did any event, or signed an athlete or executed a project, everything has been put on film or photographed. Stories have been told,’ Red Bull Media House North America managing director Werner Brell told Fast Company. ‘It’s part of the DNA of the brand.’ When Red Bull founded its own independent media company, Red Bull Media House, what appeared to be a strange move for an FMCG company was in fact a natural progression. ‘Storytelling has been part of the Red Bull DNA since its foundation,’ a Red Bull Media House spokesperson tells Contagious. ‘Back in the 1990s the company decided to make the investment in producing its own content to bring those stories across with the detail and quality they deserved. That content was shared with consumers and media contacts around the world. In 2007, the next step of professionalisation was taken: content production, collection and distribution was formalised by launching Red Bull Media House as a new business with a target of sustaining its own revenue stream.’ Red Bull had already been filming and photographing all the exciting things it was doing, and working with broadcast, print and digital media to publish this content. By creating its own fully fledged media business, Red Bull took content creation, production and distribution into its own hands. As Brell explained to Fast Company: ‘In content, everything has to do with rights ownership. If you don’t own the rights, it’s a little more expensive to do things in media. The advantage we have is we own the life cycle from beginning to end... With the Media House now in place and creating our own media channels, we have greater leverage and opportunities to bring our events to life and to the audiences we want to reach.’

Beyond marketing Mateschitz has said that his goal for Media House is to establish a global media network covering print, TV, mobile, music and new media. And Media House’s output really is all encompassing. It produces all the content for the brand itself, which includes RedBull.com, a digital sports, action and lifestyle platform, as well as the men’s active lifestyle magazine, The Red Bulletin, which has a publishing run of more than 3.1 million copies a month. Media House also works with media partners, for instance teaming up with NBC Sports Group to create the Red Bull Signature Series, bringing action sports coverage to US TV. It has developed radio stations, even produced feature-length films like 2011 snowboarding documentary The Art of Flight, which hit the top of iTunes’s movie sales charts. These editorial projects helped strengthen Red Bull’s brand but the company has made no secret of its goal for Red Bull Media House to become profitable. Products like Terra Mater, a National Geographic-style magazine, don’t have any Red Bull branding at all. Red Bull’s Content Pool, managed by the Media House, provides free images for editorial media covering Red Bull events. But this year, Red Bull launched its Photography licensing portfolio, working with a team of photographers to make images from Red Bull photoshoots available to media buyers and syndication houses, creating a new revenue stream for the company. Red Bull built an independent media business on its heritage of creating great content. This became popular because, even though it was created by an FMCG brand, the product was never the focus. ‘This strategy avoids the limitations of being a product-centred business and embraces the social, cultural and corporate evolution of being a content and lifestyle business,’ says Activative’s Edwards. ‘It also keeps those core Red Bull drinkers further enwrapped in the Red Bull lifestyle and therefore keeps them loyal.’ Instead of engaging in ‘pure marketing for consumer goods’, Mateschitz told Fast Company, Red Bull’s media output became ‘a way to tell our consumers and friends what is new about our approximately 600 athletes worldwide, their achievements and next projects; another band launch or song hit from Red Bull Records; what

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Opinion Brands must learn to edit Tyler Brûlé, founder of Monocle and design and communication firm Winkreative, talks to Chloe Markowicz about how brands can become stronger publishers

What do brands need to do to get content right? Brands need to take a deep breath first. We’re five years into this journey of companies becoming publishers and I think that many companies are still finding their own way, for a variety of reasons. Some waded in not realising how expensive it is to operate their own newsroom or their own feature desks. And you have a lot of companies who think, ‘Oh, we’ll just hire a bunch of writers. They’ll come into our company four times a year. They’ll dip their toe into the brand and then they’ll venture out again.’ Then they’ll be disappointed because they haven’t managed to capture the essence of the brand. You need to be living it day in, day out. We’re still in this process where a lot of companies don’t have it 100% right.

Red Bull Stratos: US sales rose 7% to $1.6bn after Felix Baumgartner’s free-fall jump

is going on regarding nightlife, people, events, culture, Formula 1, etc.’ Consistency and commitment The brand’s deep entrenchment in the worlds of extreme sports and underground music has endowed its content with authenticity. People read The Red Bulletin because Red Bull has proven itself to be an expert in sports. The brand’s reputation as a publisher is founded on consistency. Since 1998, Red Bull has been holding its annual Music Academy, bringing together young musicians, producers and DJs for two weeks of workshops, recording sessions and performances. It’s this long-standing commitment that gives Red Bull a legitimacy to create content about music. Speaking about the Daily Note, a magazine published for the 2013 New York Red Bull Music Academy, Torsten Schmidt, a founder of the Academy, told PopMatters: ‘You don’t make the Daily Note based on a six-month culture-marketing brief that you will abandon when the next CMO

comes in, you make it based on a continuous and long-term dedication to an idea of what you want to explore. The level of talent that gets involved with the Academy can only get this involved when there is a certain amount of understanding that this exercise is not a short-term branding grab, but an actual investment in a cultural conversation.’ As an FMCG company that publishes content that is more than just advertising, Red Bull has reinvented the notion of branded entertainment. ‘The perception is that there is content and there’s advertising,’ Raymond Roker, The Red Bulletin’s associate publisher in the US, told AdWeek. ‘We’re challenging that perception. The audience understands their athlete has brand logo stickers all over the board and the helmet, and that’s okay. If the end result is a good piece of content, parsing where it comes from is missing the point.’ It is Red Bull’s commitment to entertaining its fans by delivering them great content, rather than simply selling them more energy drinks, that has helped make it a multi-billion-dollar brand.

Takeouts Earn the audience’s attention / Take cues from Hollywood and think about how best to entertain people rather than just push your product onto them. Connect to the customer / Consider how you can start a conversation and build more meaningful interactions with consumers. Your values will help you stand out / Don’t just boast about how wonderful your brand is, rely on your values to show people. Invest in distribution / Great content will get you nowhere if no one is going to see it.

clean the rooms, and you have the CEO tweeting constantly about how they’re opening new locations, that demystifies the brand. Because you’re constantly on, it doesn’t leave any room for the consumer’s imagination. We tend to forget about that. We’ve moved into this area where everything has to be completely transparent and nothing can be opaque anymore. But who says? I would argue that with good branding a lot is residing in the head of the consumer.

What are brands getting wrong when it comes to publishing? The big issue is editing. A lot of companies have not come to grips with how to edit yet, what should be said and what needs to be hidden in the long grass. With the advent of social media and all of these free digital channels, that’s a major consideration. Because these channels are free, people think, ‘Well let’s use them as much as we can.’ They’re information buffets. All you can eat. Except in this case it’s sort of the reverse: all you can vomit out. One of the big challenges for companies now, when you’re constantly on, when you have all these channels available to you and you think suddenly you’re in the content business, even though your business is making cars or producing soba noodles or whatever, is that there’s a certain demystification.

How is creating content specifically for free digital channels hurting brands? With free channels, you’re talking to people who may not have spending power. Companies like the fact that you have to spend 20 AUD ($17.50) to buy Monocle. It means that there’s a very good chance that consumers might buy a business-class ticket on your airline, or they might buy a pair of your trainers because they can deploy $20 a month to purchase something. As opposed to saying, ‘Yeah I can be on all these channels. They’re free for me, they’re free for the consumer.’ Those companies don’t really have a sense of what the potential purchase is there. I think we’re already entering a settled-down period with publishing. People have recognised you don’t have to be on all these free channels. If you’re a brand and a whole bunch of new malls have opened up, do you need to be in every single one? Media channels are no different. You have to pick your battles. Companies think if a media channel is free, they might as well use it. They’re not thinking about the environment or the people who might use it.

What do you mean by demystification? Once upon a time you had advertising that enticed you through great photography and a wonderful television campaign, and you would find your way to that bottle, or that hotel, or whatever it was. But there were also so many other layers behind it that weren’t quite clear. For a great brand, 50% of it is in your mind. But suddenly when you have all of these channels available to you to communicate all the time, and you have your front-office manager who has to deliver a blog, and you have the head of housekeeping talking about how she and her team

What advice would you give to brands looking to move into publishing? Invest in a good editor, that’s the most important thing. Don’t think that it can just be your CMO. Maybe your CMO is just used to working with traditional ad copy, or their background might be retail or CSR. There is an art to understanding what makes a good lead, what’s going to hook somebody and whether to craft your message in one page or in the standfirst. Don’t kid yourself that suddenly you can just vault anybody with a marketing background into an editor’s seat.

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Data The worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s best brands are turning ones and zeros into actionable insights to understand and connect with consumers in fresh new ways By Chris Barth

Illustration / Matt Chase

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ata used to be so simple. A corner storeowner might notice that fruit sells better in warm weather and move the apples to the front on hot summer days; or a car salesman might notice that more men buy convertibles and tailor his pitch accordingly. Data was dollars in a till, inventory counts and, perhaps, knowledge about a customer’s purchasing habits. Today, data is spreadsheets extending toward infinity and, increasingly, ‘unstructured’ information like text and sentiment. Gathering data about consumer behaviours has become easier and faster by orders of magnitude, and consequently the data that marketers have to deal with has exploded both in scale and complexity. Parsing, organising and analysing that data may very well be the marketing challenge of our time. Every day, we generate more than 2.5 million terabytes of data – an unfathomable amount of information – ranging from credit card purchases to mindless tweets. Data.gov, a US site dedicated

to hosting federal information, offers 158,000 different data sets for perusal, from a database of consumer complaints to geographical data about farmers’ markets. ‘Data is the new oil,’ Clive Humby, co-founder of dunnhumby, famously declared in 2006. Or, as data journalist David McCandless put it during a TEDGlobal talk in 2010, data is the new soil: ‘It feels like a fertile, creative medium. Over the years, online, we’ve laid down a huge amount of information and data, and we irrigate it with networks and connectivity.’ A Bain report from 2013 found that early adopters of Big Data analytics on the business side are leaving peers in their wake. Companies using advanced analytics are twice as likely to be in their industry’s top 25% in financial performance, five times as likely to make decisions ‘much faster’ than peers and three times as likely to execute those decisions as intended. Over the next decade, brands that integrate similar data use into their marketing should reap similar rewards.

Improved experience Amazon has, without a doubt, been one of the pioneers in data use, harnessing vast amounts of information about consumer behaviour to personalise product recommendations. Over the past decade, its data-derived ‘related purchases’ (identified through a process called item-to-item collaborative filtering) have proliferated to the rest of the web. The brand is so good at mining consumer data to understand purchasing patterns that it recently received a patent for ‘anticipatory package shipping’ that can predictively begin moving goods before they’ve even been bought. Hot on Amazon’s heels is Netf lix, another brand with personalisation and suggestion at the core of its business. The online streaming service logs millions of data points every day – ratings, search queries, geo-location information, social media shares, device type, time of day, plays, pauses, rewinds and much, much more. That data is then used for extensive personalisation, surfacing the movies and TV shows that an individual is most likely to watch and like. It also feeds back into Netflix’s overall operations, fuelling decisions about which original programming to produce, what actors to cast in those roles and even what image should be used as an original show’s cover. Knowing that Netflix subscribers loved director David Fincher, actor Kevin Spacey and the original British version of House of Cards, for example, the brand gave the go-ahead to produce two full seasons of the US adaptation without even seeing a pilot. ‘Because we have a direct relationship with consumers, we know what people like to watch and that helps us understand how big the interest is going to be for a given show. It gave us some confidence that we could find an audience for a show like House of Cards,’ Netf lix’s chief communications officer Jonathan Friedland told The New York Times. From information to emotion The Sound of Honda/Ayrton Senna 1989 campaign, this year’s Titanium Grand Prix winner at the Cannes Lions festival, hints at an industry that is starting to move beyond simple pattern recognition, realising the possibilities of data in new and imaginative ways. As part of the execution, Honda turned race data collected during Ayrton Senna’s record-setting F1 Lap at Japan’s Suzuka Circuit in 1989 – quite literally a collection of telemetry data scribbles on a piece of paper, reportedly buried at the bottom of a desk drawer and forgotten – into an evocative and emotional experience and film that announced Honda’s return to the racing circuit. ‘Data is dr y and boring,’ said McCann Worldwide CEO Prasoon Joshi, this year’s Titanium Jury president. ‘This idea converts it into emotional data. It connects in a human way, and talks about the legacy and the future of the company at the same time.’

Data use (clockwise from top): Sound of Honda/Aryton Senna 1989 execution; Foxtel’s Alert Shirt; Netflix’s House of Cards

Australian television service Foxtel has found another way to turn raw data into a more connected, emotional experience with its Alert Shirt. Fans of the Australian Football League can don a jersey with embedded electronics, which turns real-time data gathered during an Aussie rules football game into haptic cues. Hard tackles might cause the shirt’s heartbeat to speed up, or long runs might make the viewer feel like their lungs are heaving – all by simply translating a live data feed into physical stimuli. Brands have sat on stores of information for long enough. Now, they must figure out how to take the information they have and turn it into marketing that will connect with consumers emotionally, making magic from dry data.

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Brands must figure out how to take the information they have and turn it into marketing that will connect with consumers emotionally, making magic from dry data DMA Friends: Dallas Museum of Art changed its membership model to gain customer data, in a bid to improve service

Superior services Elsewhere, brands have identified connections in disparate data sets to create and tailor services that add value to consumers’ lives. In Malaysia, for example, IBM has recently unveiled Traffic Forecast, an app that uses a variety of data sources to predict conditions at a specific place and time on the road. The service complements real-time existing services from companies like Google in its Google Maps and 2013 acquisition Waze, and can predict traffic patterns as far as five days in advance. ‘Now that many traffic authorities possess real-time traffic data feeds and information warehouses containing extensive traffic data, the most sophisticated have begun moving to the next logical step: specifically, leveraging the vast stores of data and feeds for real-time, forward-looking analysis,’ wrote IBM researchers Wanli Min, Yasuo Amemiya and Laura Wynter in a 2007 paper about traffic forecasting. Seven years later, that capability is being realised and passed on to consumers through a simple smartphone app. The Dallas Museum of Art took drastic steps to acquire the necessary data to improve its service delivery. The museum completely restructured its membership model, dropping paid memberships in favour of a free-to-enrol programme called DMA Friends. In exchange for an email address or a phone number, visitors can roam the museum for free, earning points for actions like entering various galleries, bringing friends or making multiple visits. The points can then be redeemed for various perks on the premises, allowing the museum to collect data about visitor behaviour and preferences. The DMA, in turn, uses this data to inform educational programmes and other activities designed for museum visitors. Since announcing the switch, the DMA has more than tripled its membership, from 18,000 to over 60,000 in the first 15 months of the scheme. ‘Visitor participation is an essential ingredient of the museum experience,’ says the museum’s website.

From Disney’s MagicBands, which use RFID to track behaviour and better serve visitors at Disney Parks, to Google’s predictive Google Now app, we’re starting to see what brands can accomplish by collecting and analysing data and designing services using the insights they derive. As rich data becomes cheaper and easier to gather, brands must use it to inform services that will meet consumer expectations. What’s next? Today, marketers risk being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data being created and collected in our connected world. Increasingly, they are turning to technology to help manipulate and manage structured and unstructured data alike. Chinese web services company Baidu’s chief scientist Andrew Ng predicts a world where deep learning and cognitive computing help us comprehend and analyse this growing mountain of data. This will lead to what he calls a ‘virtuous

cycle of artificial intelligence’, where great products lead to users who create data, which in turn is interpreted and utilised to create better and better products. Companies like IBM and Baidu, which are working on bridging the gap between humans and databases on both the business and the consumer side, may well lead the data-use charge in the decade to come. A study conducted this year by the Association of National Advertisers and McKinsey showed just how aware brands are of the need to use data intelligently, with 96% of marketing leaders saying the most important trait for businesses facing disruption to stay ahead of the competition is the capacity to make data-informed decisions. But a quarter of those companies say they still aren’t using data strategically, and almost half believe they don’t have the right analytics in place. Those brands must work quickly to develop infrastructure and capabilities to integrate data into their processes and products, before they’re left in the dust.

Disney MagicBands: customer behaviour is tracked via RFID, with the aim of better serving visitors

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Strength Study / Data

Brand Spotlight IBM Watson

Using a machine can actually allow doctors and nurses more time to focus on patients rather than paperwork

Big Blue is tackling Big Data, investing more than $1bn to turn its Watson system from trivia diversion into a profitable division. If the bet is right, cognitive computing will change how we interact with data forever

Dr Mark Kris, MSKCC

division over the next several years. Said Rometty at the time of the Watson Group’s founding: ‘I believe this will take its place as one of the most important moments in IBM’s history.’

n February 2011, 14 years after Deep Blue defeated chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov, IBM put Watson, its latest computing phenom, to the test against masters of a different kind: Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, the top-earning players in the history of American trivia game show Jeopardy. As host Alex Trebek noted to the audience at the opening of the man-vs-machine contest’s three-night broadcast: ‘You are about to witness what may prove to be a historic competition.’ Rutter beat Watson to the buzzer on the first question, but the computer won the second and barely looked back. After two full rounds, Watson emerged triumphant, with its total winnings of $77,147 more than tripling Jennings’ second-place total. Below his final answer of the competition, Jennings paraphrased The Simpsons, writing: ‘I for one welcome our new computer overlords.’

Test run: Watson is put through its paces in a game of Jeopardy where it beat the show’s top-earning players

From game show to Group Nearly four years later, Watson has blossomed into a computer system capable of far more than game-show thrashings. Indeed, if IBM’s prediction is right, the data-crunching technology will fundamentally change industries around the globe. So what is Watson? Named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, the system represents a step forward in the field of cognitive computing – a computer that can parse natural language, query immense quantities of data and generate

hypotheses, all while continuously learning and adding to its knowledge base. Ask Watson a question, and it will analyse what you’re looking for, simultaneously run thousands of algorithms against its vast databases and develop a list of hypotheses, weighted by confidence interval, to lead you to an answer. Watson learns from experience and interaction, developing better judgement over time. In IBM’s words, it’s ‘a natural extension of what humans can do at their best’. The brand is betting Watson will be a disruptive money-maker in the decades to come. Interpreting big, complex data, after all, is big business. In January 2014, IBM announced the creation of the Watson Group, a standalone division devoted to monetising Watson’s data capabilities, located in New York City. As the group’s senior vice-president Michael Rhodin explained in a talk at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference: ‘I needed to take the research tech, build a small team, isolate it, put an entrepreneurial CEO in charge of it, and take it through the same steps that a startup would go through. I built a moat around them to keep the rest of IBM out.’ Although it may not be involved in Watson’s day-to-day operations, you can be sure that the rest of IBM is paying close attention to what’s going on inside the Watson Group’s glass castle. IBM CEO Virginia Rometty hopes the group will produce $10bn in revenue annually by 2024, and the company has pledged to invest $1bn into the

Doctor Watson Though the Watson Group is still in its infancy, its cognitive computing technology is already impacting a number of industries where complex data mining could pay huge dividends. First up, healthcare, an industry where, as Rhodin puts it: ‘The amount of information produced has overwhelmed the professional’s ability to absorb it.’ Since 2012, IBM has partnered with Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) and managed healthcare company WellPoint to turn Watson into a doctor’s best friend. Watson combines analysis of millions of pages of text with extensive training from MSKCC experts to serve up a list of hypotheses – from diagnoses to treatment regimens – with confidence rankings and evidence to support the ideas. ‘Watson’s ability to mine massive quantities of data means that it can also keep up – at record speeds – with the latest medical breakthroughs reported in scientific journals and meetings,’ wrote Dr Mark Kris, chief of Thoracic Oncology Service at MSKCC and one of Watson’s main shepherds, in a blog post. ‘Using a machine can actually allow doctors and nurses more time to focus on patients rather than paperwork.’ Cognitive computing reaches beyond the bedside, as well. A peer-reviewed paper debuted at the 2014 Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining conference by IBM and Baylor College of Medicine, titled ‘Automated hypothesis generation based on mining scientific literature’, outlined Watson’s success combing through more than 70,000 scientific papers written about a protein often linked to cancer, p53. Over the past 30 years, cancer researchers have identified 28 proteins that could potentially modify p53; Watson identified six in a few months. Intent on proving the success wasn’t a fluke, IBM wiped Watson’s library of papers published since 2003 and ran the research again. Watson found nine proteins, seven of which had been identified and validated in the past decade.

Illustrator Adam Hayes created a series of illustrations for IBM’s Tumblr, celebrating Watson’s move to Manhattan

Promising, for sure, and the advances won’t end there. Pharma giants Johnson & Johnson and Sanofi are also working with Watson to speed up their research processes. The Mayo Clinic, meanwhile, has announced plans to use Watson to quicken the process of matching cancer patients with clinical trials. Working with Watson Key to Watson’s success will be IBM’s ability to leverage its capabilities outside of IBM’s walls. Following Watson’s win on Jeopardy, Rhodin and his team confronted a couple of challenging questions that not even Watson could answer: what’s the market for cognitive computing, and how do you evolve research technology into a commercial asset? The answer? Finding Watson some friends. ‘We came out of that market validation period recognising that we did not know how to take

this to the consumer marketplace,’ says Rhodin. ‘In order to make this technology available to the broader marketplace, we needed to open it up as an ecosystem platform.’ After all, what good is a machine that eats up Big Data and spits out answers if you don’t have the data to feed it? ‘Watson’s relationship with data is the relationship between fuel and engines,’ says Jon Iwata, senior vice-president of marketing and communications at IBM, in a video explaining the system’s capabilities. ‘Watson needs data to do what it does.’ Over the course of 2014, the Watson Group launched a number of initiatives to get that fuel into the tank, attempting to court businesses to use Watson’s skills at the enterprise level. Watson Engagement Advisor, one such initiative, leverages Watson's ability to interpret complex natural language questions and serve up customised solutions to improve customer service. Various

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Strength Study / Data

Takeouts If you build It, they will come / IBM has invested huge sums in the systems that surround Watson, from the incubator-like Ecosystem to enterprise products aimed at big brands. If you have faith in your product, build bridges to it. Embrace the aphorism that you must spend money to make money. Know your strengths / Aware that others might be better at ‘product-ising’ Watson’s cognitive computing, IBM found profitable ways to partner with those brands and startups. Don’t be afraid to open your brand up to partners in areas outside your strengths.

estimates pin the cost of poor customer service in the US alone above $100bn annually. Australia and New Zealand Banking Group and media measurement company Nielsen have both experimented with using Watson to salvage some of that cash. ‘What we’re hoping to do with Watson is use its capabilities to get answers to questions about ad effectiveness easier and faster,’ Nielsen’s global head of advertiser solutions, Randall Beard, told AdAge. Companies are also using Watson for proactive customer assistance. Fluid, a startup with some funding from IBM, is developing an app called Expert Personal Shopper that ‘aims to help retailers foster a more consumer-led, non-linear, ubiquitous shopping experience that turns shoppers into buyers’ with Watson’s help. Brands like The North Face, Quidsi and Puma have all worked with the Fluid platform, using Watson’s knowledge to help guide customers to the perfect product. Watson’s future IBM is also intent on creating a product ecosystem around Watson. In February, the team launched a Mobile Developer Challenge, inviting entrepreneurs to design apps using Watson to ‘analyse, discover insights and learn from Big Data’. The three winning teams came up with a sales training tool, an educational development toy and a health management app, earning support from IBM in bringing their products to market. For Rhodin, they also served as proof of the Watson business concept. ‘It really validated the idea that we needed to open up the platform and make it available to the broader startup marketplace,’ he said.

In May, ten universities in North America introduced cognitive computing courses codesigned by the Watson Group and built on the back of a cloud-based Watson system. And IBM has pledged $100m in venture funding as part of the Watson Ecosystem, a community dedicated to developers working with Watson. A number of companies, including travel recommendation engine WayBlazer and ecommerce enabler Sellpoints, have already emerged from the Ecosystem programme. Through a combination of calibrated marketing efforts and accessible entry points, the Watson Group is starting to add to IBM’s bottom line – growth that CEO Rometty will no doubt be eagerly monitoring in the coming years. It’s not outlandish to imagine a world in which Watson lends a helping hand in dozens of industries. Rhodin quickly ticks off a number of gigantic fields where cognitive computing could disrupt the status quo: law, financial services, law enforcement, marketing and even education. In early October, the Watson Group unveiled a set of partnerships that will accelerate the platform’s global expansion. Thailand’s Bumrungrad International Hospital is building on the work done by MSKCC; Australia’s Deakin University will develop an online student engagement adviser; South Africa’s Metropolitan Health hopes to improve health advisory services; and Spain’s CaixaBank is working on teaching Watson Spanish so it can supercharge its customer service. ‘Watson is fuelling a new market and ecosystem,’ says Rhodin of the group’s lofty long-term goals. ‘The next great innovations will come from people who are able to make connections that others don’t see, and Watson is making possible.’

Big Data is evolving / While no one is arguing that data is going away, few brands acknowledge just how much it is still changing on a regular basis. Aim to create processes that allow you to ‘learn’ over time, like Watson, evolving how and why you utilise data generated or gathered by your organisation.

Opinion Forecasting the future of data

Vikram Somaya, general manager of WeatherFX at The Weather Company, says brands need superior analysts to make data use feel magical

The Weather Company (originally The Weather Channel) was founded more than 30 years ago as a television network focused on the weather. A few years ago, the company took a hard look at itself and realised its use of weather data had, to that point, been fairly inconsequential for its marketer client base. We hadn’t linked the data we focused on to our partners. I joined the company to change that, and a year and a half later we’ve brought that data to life and changed the company at its core. Within a short period of time, WeatherFX has become an integral part of The Weather Company’s purpose and mission. The platform has been able to produce some genuinely remarkable results for blue chip CPG, quick service restaurants, pharmaceutical and retail brands. Now, The Weather Company is also a digital and mobile media business, as well as a professional services organisation providing weather-focused applications to industries ranging from aviation to insurance. What enabled this shift? Realising we could tap into the world’s most data-rich, complex system: the weather. Updated access Marketers have always used data. The term is used in a particular context today: as a catch-all. That usage understates the importance of the shift in how strategists and creatives now better understand the impact of what they are able to do. The kinds of insights marketers are able to tap immediately versus what they used years ago is the difference between knowing something you need is in the dusty Encyclopedia Britannica in your grandfather’s study and being able to do a quick search on your mobile. This instantly accessible new data helps WeatherFX understand consumers, like why a particular dew point in Texas provokes the sale of bug spray (because that’s when insects tend to hatch), or why people eat more yoghurt when skies are clear in the winter, even if it’s warmer (temperature matters less than the way weather ‘feels’ for yoghurt consumption). Weather-based insights are a part of both the natural world and the world we have built for ourselves. But what’s most interesting is that it absolutely, empirically, irrefutably works as advertised.

Human guides To some degree, data is like magic. One doesn’t need to understand exactly how the magic works to enjoy the effect. On the downside, it’s easy to claim to be the mighty Oz and have people flock down the yellow brick road. There will be failures and misuses and poorly organised initiatives, sure. Despite that, we, as practitioners in the magical age of marketing, are playing with forces that seemed utterly beyond description even ten years ago. The very definition of data science has broadened in the marketing and advertising space, almost to the point of becoming unrecognisable. This explosion of information is simultaneously a challenge and an opportunity. To make the best use of data, brands will need media analysts just as much as true data analysts. Even given advances in cognitive computing, there still aren’t Hal-esque systems that take data offerings and spit out answers wrapped in bows without human input. Marketers need to become analysts of the human condition, using data to better understand our consumers. They need to put those insights into practice and then rinse and repeat in a constant cycle of increasingly granular and nuanced questions, all ringed with measurement methodologies to help understand its success. Find ‘more equal’ data Brands have always used data in some form to inform how they interact with consumers. However, rather than being part of various functions within the marketing supply chain, data is now of enough importance to require both strategic vision and executional governance. The effective use of data, whether it be people-based, technology-based, channel-based or weather-based, has been proven. However, to paraphrase Orwell, all data is equal but some data is more equal than others. The key for marketers is to find out which data is ‘more equal’ for their particular brands and consumers, and then find the most effective way to integrate that into their customer analysis, campaign creation and success measurement under the supervision of a new breed of human talent.

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Dead Technology / Devices And Platforms

The Technology Boneyard Looking back over ten years of explosive digital development, Will Sansom considers the devices and platforms that either fell from grace or failed to reach it. What lessons can be learnt, and how can startup founders and industry giants alike avoid similar fates?

The lesson / Don’t sacrifice long-term survival in the interest of stringing out short-term success.

The app / Foursquare ‘But I know people who still use Foursquare,’ I hear you cry. Of course you do, but then you work in marketing. The harsh truth is that for the majority of the civilian world, being mayor of somewhere that specialises in artisanal coffee and silly moustaches is not a valid form of social currency. Once the darling of Silicon Valley, Foursquare now finds itself struggling to provide sufficient return on the $160m-plus investment it has received over the years. Its solution was to split what it does into two parts: check-ins are now via sibling app Swarm, whereas Foursquare is attempting to offer a Yelp-esque crowdsourced recommendation service. But therein lies the problem – Yelp already exists and is extremely popular. And as for Swarm, early iterations repeatedly crashed and were difficult to use – at least too difficult to stop users simply checking in via Instagram with a pretty picture instead. In short, Foursquare ‘innovated’ its way out of a job. The lesson / If you don’t evolve or add value to your original value proposition, others will.

Illustrations / Melvin Galapon

It’s out of character for Contagious to pay heed to anything but the best and brightest, but sometimes there is a grim productivity to be found in considering the dim and dismal. I’ll spare you a generic quote about the power of learning from mistakes, but course-correcting based on others’ failures has helped ensure the survival of some of the technologically fittest companies operating today. It is in the spirit of championing such enlightenment and progression that Contagious has identified five of the highest-profile tech fails of the past decade with the aim of calling out the things that went wrong, how, why and what exactly we can learn from each digital demise. We’ve brought in industry expert Benedict Evans, partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and a renowned technology industry analyst, to offer his perspective.

The device / The BlackBerry We’ve chosen to refer to ‘The BlackBerry’ as a generic device because in many of our lives it played a similar role to that of an office stapler – namely one based on a singularity of purpose, ‘doing email’ – and therefore we rarely invested enough care or emotion to distinguish between different models. And it is this unapologetically limited functionality that ultimately led to its downfall; put

simply, there came a point when mobile connectivity had to be about more than ‘doing email’. Misled by a last gasp of corporate demand for simple handsets, however, parent company Research In Motion (RIM) was simply too slow. ‘BlackBerry, Nokia and Palm had platforms based on the hardware constraints of 2000, and were not able to exploit the new possibilities of hardware by 2007,’ Evans says. ‘They were not able to match the iPhone (and later Android) because they were designed for totally different trade-offs. They had to start again from scratch, from a position several years behind Apple. Changing your entire platform is almost always a life-threatening process for a tech company.’

The network / Google+ Google+ is not as popular as Facebook – we should get that out of the way first. It has nowhere near the number of total users, nor the number of monthly active users. So as a scaled social network (in the traditional sense of the term) you could be forgiven for thinking that it failed to launch. But let’s be clear, Google+ was never intended to compete on like-for-like terms with Facebook et al. Evans explains: ‘Google+ is two things – a single unified profile for your activity on Google, and a social network that uses that profile. The social network has failed to gain much traction, but the profile has worked very well. Google is now much better able to build up a sense of what you search for and why, allowing it to give every user better results (and advertising).’ Recent additions to the platform, including a friend polling feature and a separate app for video Hangouts, support the notion of Google+ as a service-driven space that facilitates the creation of separate and, ultimately, more meaningful individual networks. So an unfair inclusion in this list? Not necessarily. Had Google defined a clearer vision for the platform and articulated this better to the world’s connected public, it might just have the scale it craves and users would have the post-Facebook social connectivity they deserve. The lesson / Opening a new service means nothing if you can’t communicate its raison d’être and value to the people who are going to give it life.

The company / Nokia ‘We have more than one explosion – we have multiple points of scorching heat that are fuelling a blazing fire around us,’ explained former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop in his infamous ‘burning platform’ memo to employees in 2011. The sentiment was simple – change or die – although proceeding to nestle into the protective bosom of Microsoft was arguably a combination of both. The consequent obligation to use Windows Phone OS over the booming, open source Android alternative was undoubtedly one of the biggest nails in Nokia’s coffin – not least because Windows Phone wouldn’t even work on

non-touchscreen handsets, of which Nokia still had a commanding global market share. The Nokia name was killed off entirely after it eventually sold the handset division to the tech behemoth for $5.4bn in September 2013, although Windows Phones remain something of a technology pariah. ‘Right now, Microsoft is stuck in the same position as Apple 20 years ago,’ Evans explains. ‘It has a perfectly good product, but its ecosystem is too small to attract a meaningful base of developers. It comes a late third, if ever, in the roadmaps of the core apps. That means currently it is only really selling at very low prices as an alternative to Android – to people

who value the polished experience over apps.’ Microsoft’s current predicament is only too reminiscent of Nokia’s original refusal to let go of its already failing Symbian OS, proof that it always was, first and foremost, a hardware company. Its failure, however, was in its institutional refusal to admit its shortcomings in software, embrace the open-source revolution that had arrived and have faith in its ability to compete on what it was good at – building phones.

The category / Health tracking Lots of us know a hardened triathlete or marathon runner who swears by their heart-rate monitor, but the health tracking category has repeatedly promised to crack the mainstream only to be dismissed as a fad. Everyone from students to suits and millennials to mums was supposed to be self-quantifying by now and the world’s most digitally savvy sports apparel manufacturer even waded in with its own solution, only to remove it two years later. So what’s going wrong? In issue 37 of Contagious, our very own Dan Southern claimed that the broader wearable tech category needed to offer more than wrist-sized representations of data we can already access

through other devices – an opinion Evans shares: ‘The key is providing actionable information and ideas, not just a graph of how many steps you’ve run.’ Perhaps the failure of healthtracking technology to achieve mass adoption is in its inability to integrate meaningfully into our lives. This could be an interface issue or even a broader perception gap that needs to be addressed through advertising. Either way, until we’re shown how these expensive and slightly geeky-looking gadgets will actually change our lives, it’s unlikely we’ll give over the necessary wrist-based real estate.

The lesson / If conceding market share is inevitable, be smart enough to defend what you have by playing to your strengths.

The lesson / Adoption of a new technology relies on it fitting seamlessly into people’s lives, not the other way around.

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Contagious imagines winning big on the stock market with brands we’ve featured as case studies By Raakhi Chotai

Illustrations / Tim McDonagh, Handsome Frank

The Case Study Cash-in

Laggards Top dogs 2004

Nike nyse : nke 248% Issue 1 / December 2004

PlayStation nyse : sne 47% Issue 4 / September 2005 McDonald’s nyse : mcd 210% Issue 1 / December 2004 Nokia nyse : nok 53% Issue 5 / December 2005 3 otcmkts : huwhy 255% Issue 5 / December 2005

American Apparel nysemkt : app 88% Issue 8 / September 2006 StellaArtois ebr : abi 197% Issue 6 / January 2006

Let’s talk about something important. Put that coffee down. At Contagious, we’ve always argued that creativity generates profit. So we decided to analyse exactly how our lauded Contagious Case Study companies would perform in the stock market, to see if our editorial choices held weight. To test the hypothesis, we created two theoretical portfolios. In one (the control portfolio) we invested $2,000 per quarter in something that mirrored an accessible whole equity market (the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund – VTSMX ). In the other, we bought $1,000 worth of shares in every brand (or its parent company) that we’ve ever profiled in a case study*. With quarterly issues, for ten years with two brand case studies in each, that takes us to 80 companies stamped with the Contagious seal of approval. For example, our first issue featured case studies on Nike and McDonald’s. It was published in December 2004. So into the basket went $1,000 each worth of Nike and McDonald’s shares, priced historically for December 2004. Simple. And those two did pretty well. Today, that initial outlay would be worth 830% more. If money could talk it would tell you that creativity is king, beating the control by a respectable 17%. If you’d followed the Contagious gospel, you’d have made a cool $52,000 on top of your initial $80,000 investment not including dividends. That’s roughly $12,000 more than if you’d stuck your dollars in a fund. The more discerning among you might have chosen to avoid HTC, American Apparel and Nintendo, which have made spectacular losses in the past few years. Well, struggling sales, a harassment lawsuit and not being able to top the N64 will do that to a business. If we could turn back time, we’d have bet the farm on Domino’s (because who can resist a melted cheese-filled crust?) or sneaker sovereign Nike. Together, they increased by roughly 900% over the period. So remember: A-B-C. Always. Be. Creative. *When a company’s stock wasn’t available, we substituted our control stock, the VTSMX

Nintendo otcmkts : ntdoy 66% Issue 10 / March 2007 Mini etr : bmw 146% Issue 12 / September 2007 M&S lon : mks 30% Issue 12 / September 2007 Uniqlo tyo : 9983 248% Issue 16 / September 2008 EA nasdaq : ea 26% Issue 15 / June 2008 Converse nyse : nke 196% Issue 17 / December 2008 BestBuy nyse : bby 25% Issue 21 / December 2009 Hyundai krx : 005380 235% Issue 19 / June 2009

Barclaycard lon : barc 27% Issue 23 / June 2010 Domino’s nyse : dpz 481% Issue 23 / June 2010 HTC tpe : 2498 88% Issue 27 / June 2011 Delta nyse : dal 190% Issue 34 / March 2013

Safaricom lon : vod 31% Issue 34 / March 2013

2014

Control

Contagious

Invested

$80,000

Profit

$40,000

$52,000

Value inc dividends

$129,000

$143,000

% Gain

49%

66%

Why the collision of celebrity life and digital media is reshaping popular culture By Will Sansom

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Insider / Digital Celebrity

’m not bi-polar, I’m bi-winning.’ Delivered during an interview with the ABC network in the midst of his extremely public meltdown in 2011, Charlie Sheen’s iconic soundbite may have been cunningly disguised as a spitball of nonsensical self-assurance. But, in retrospect, it provides a neat and (ironically) sobering summary of celebrity in the past decade. Having plied his trade as the star of hit CBS sitcom Two and a Half Men since 2003, by 2011, Hollywood veteran Sheen was the highest-paid actor on television. However, unable to win his constant battles with substance abuse, he followed his third failed stint in rehab by publicly criticising the show’s extremely successful creator, Chuck Lorre. The four remaining episodes of that season were cancelled and Sheen was not only sacked but also banned from entering the Warner Bros production lot, just for good measure. It is what happened next that is remarkable. Rather than drifting into drug-addled obscurity, Sheen charged into social media-fuelled hyper-stardom – his implosion and increasing infamy careering hand-in-hand as he broke a Guinness World Record for the fastest time to reach 1 million followers on Twitter. At one stage, he was amassing 129,000 new observers a day. Despite being pulled off one of the world’s biggest entertainment stages, he found himself with a larger audience than ever. Bi-winning indeed. His millions of followers watched in real time as he stumbled down from his trip and eventually found (partial) redemption. Some were fans, some were voyeurs, some lovers and some haters; what united them was the unfettered glee at having a direct line to a public figure losing his shit on a rather large scale. Social media had once again pulled its neatest of tricks: combining the illusion of intimacy with the thrill of a globally collective experience. It just so happened to be around the self-destruction of a human being. Across the pages of this anniversary edition of Contagious, you will find much musing on the impact of digital media on companies. The purpose of this piece is to consider what changes these same platforms have wrought on the human brand – the celebrity. These are the people who, through some virtue of talent, tenacity or just lucky timing, occupy positions of unique importance and influence in modern society. More so than most brands or businesses, for better or worse. And as we’ll see, their transformation at the hands of the internet has been no less profound. Close encounters The great Sheening of 2011 perfectly illustrates the first significant impact on the concept of fame – namely that real-time platforms have provided the rich and famous with unmediated access to their adoring (or abhorring) public. Gone are the days when celebrities would hide behind armies of publicists and press officers; in just 140 characters they can now connect instantly with millions. And what’s more, a tweet from an A-Lister will slip into your feed alongside one from your best buddy about missing the train. There is an immediacy and illusion of proximity that is compelling not just for fans, but also for the celebrities themselves, who can reach out and engage whoever they want, whenever they want. It’s not just disgraced TV stars who have taken advantage of Twitter: Miley Cyrus and Sinead O’Conner – two musical icons from different decades – spatted over sexploitation; everyone from Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas to Kate Middleton announced their pregnancies on the platform; President Obama celebrated

winning another term in office by tweeting a photograph of himself hugging his wife, Michelle – quickly claiming the record for the most retweeted post ever (until Ellen De Generes went to the Oscars with her Samsung Galaxy Note 3 and took a selfie with the stars). Even pop singer Jessica Simpson constantly reminds us that there is no observation too small or unimportant for public consumption, with tweets like: ‘Dear elderly man at the gym: it’s hard 4 me 2 keep composure whilst punching at chipmunk speed when yr ball sack spills out of yr wind shorts.’ Quite. More recently, Queen Elizabeth II tweeted for the first time, perhaps appropriately from the Science Museum in London, where she was opening a new exhibition about the information age. It is yet to be confirmed whether or not One was amused... Publishers, not psychopaths The increasing predictability of celebrity mishaps on social media has led many sensible management teams to hand over control of their talent’s Twitter and Facebook to more responsible parties, giving rise to a lucrative line in micro-managing celebrity social media strategy. Should Pitbull’s shirt be pink or white, for example? One could be forgiven for thinking that these middlemen are defeating the object of social media – shattering the illusion of

intimacy by capitalising on the apathy or idiocy of the famous. Those agencies at the sharp end of celeb social strategy, however, claim to do far more than simply vet tweets and hit send at the appropriate time. When done right, it can help that celebrity resonate in the most culturally relevant way possible. Mark Adams is director of London and Manchester-based The Audience, an offshoot of the LA firm co-founded with Sean Parker. As well as overseeing the largest social publishing network in the world, they have provided consultancy for Charlize Theron, Pharrell Williams and Barack Obama. He explains: ‘I think we get to show stuff that no traditional media can really delve into. Sometimes we have really pushed this and we have to argue quite often with the PR people about whether or not that is a good idea. In our opinion, the biggest mistake that social media ever made was falling into the wrong hands. It fell into the pot with PR and marketing when it should have fallen into the pot with publishing. ‘PR and marketing is about making withdrawals from the cultural account and contributing nothing to popular culture, talking about product and being a psychopath who’s obsessed with themselves. Publishing, when done right, is about contributing to and curating popular culture, about understanding what makes its heart beat faster and that’s where we are coming from.’

Digital voyeurism Social media has undoubtedly imbued celebrity life with a new transparency, although the second – and most recently publicised – impact of digital technology has pushed this to its very limits. Earlier this year the internet erupted with the scandal of nude celebrity photos being leaked via 4chan – the simple digital bulletin board that doubles as a gateway to the seedy underbelly of the internet. A long list of celebrities, most of them young and female, were hacked, including Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence, pop star Rihanna and supermodel Cara Delevingne. Unable to identify the hacker behind the leak, the legal representation of the celebrities turned instead on the technology companies. First in the firing line was Apple, criticised for breaches of its iCloud storage platform. Next was Google, from which infamous celebrity lawyer Marty Singer is still seeking damages on behalf of his numerous exposed clients. In a letter addressed to (among others) CEO Larry Page, executive chairman Eric Schmidt and co-founder Sergey Brin, he claimed that Google was not doing enough to prevent the spread of the leaked images: ‘Because the victims are celebrities with valuable publicity rights you do nothing – nothing but collect millions of dollars in advertising revenue... as you seek to capitalise on this scandal rather than quash it.’

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The biggest mistake that social media ever made was falling into the wrong hands. It fell into the pot with PR and marketing when it should have fallen into the pot with publishing Mark Adams, The Audience

Aggressive legal posturing aside, Singer makes a valid point about the currency of celebrity profile – the value of which is determined by public demand. ‘Let’s not forget that these were very personal photographs that anyone in the world could have sent,’ confirms Adams. ‘What makes it different for celebrities is that they are people of public interest.’ Indeed, with our appetites already whetted by increased access to more private aspects of celebrity life via social media, the leaked photos felt like a compelling inevitability as well as a shocking breach of privacy. And with hackers only too ready to sate the public’s voyeuristic hunger, it is likely that the immediate solution for celebrities will lie (ironically) in a more deliberate separation of their digital from their physical lives.

NOW / NEXT / WHY 2015 Contagious’ annual trends briefing

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The new celebrity While established celebrities overcome these digital trials and tribulations, there is, of course, a new generation for whom the web and its various platforms present life-changing opportunities. It may be naïve to presume that any plucky teenager with a webcam and a scrap of talent can make a star of themselves; and yet – be it bands like the Arctic Monkeys, who relied on MySpace rather than a record deal to launch their career; or Justin Bieber, who originally started recording videos of himself singing R&B songs on YouTube – the entertainment industries continue to be disrupted by the democratisation of fame. Federico Bolza, vice-president of strategy at Sony Music Entertainment, explains how social media has affected the company’s discovery and acquisition of new talent: ‘I’m not sure that digital and social has changed how artists are found – that remains a human art rather than data-based science. ‘What has changed is the amount of contextual information that is available when we are thinking of signing an artist – everything

from the size of their following to where they are popular and how much of their music is being consumed, as well as things like their tone of voice, overall aesthetic and creative sensibilities. This is incredibly useful to help inform the decision to sign (or not sign). However the final deciding factor is still lodged somewhere in that infamous “gut instinct” – the day algorithms alone decide what gets signed is the day the music dies.’ Damian Kulash is lead singer of indie pop band OK Go, famous not only for the credibility and inventiveness of their brand collaborations, but also the mind-boggling videos in which they wrap their music. We interviewed him the day after the launch of the band’s latest video for single I Won’t Let You Down, which at time of writing had amassed 11.2 million views in nine days. He provides an artist’s perspective: ‘Getting an electric guitar was never that huge a barrier to entry. Making music wasn’t hard, but figuring out how to become part of wider culture was. Today, social media is amazing, not because it gives everyone an opportunity, but more because it removes the old gatekeepers who decided “this band or this type of art is going to be big”. So it’s not necessarily about complete democratisation but this process being shaken up. The interesting thing is that we’re yet to see who the new gatekeepers are – if they will exist at all.’ When pushed on whether new gatekeepers can even emerge in such a landscape, he expands: ‘I don’t see, at least in the near future, any countervailing force to this fragmentation, but I do think that people have a hard time dealing with chaos and look for aggregators, taste-makers or at least those who can help them understand the world around them. In some cases this might be existing powers-that-be reinventing themselves, it could be new people emerging, but I think it’s also the technology itself settling and finding those who work best with it.’

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The new normal The music industry may have the clearest cases of social media breaking down barriers for wannabe Beyoncés and making it easy for them to catapult themselves onto MTV or the Billboard Hot 100, but the effect on the world of video – and its budding stars – has been even more significant. Sure, there may not be as many obvious Bieber equivalents bagging lead roles in Hollywood blockbusters, but that’s precisely the point – they don’t need to – they are happy on YouTube. To understand why, let’s consider one vlogger in particular. Swedish video game reviewer Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg – better known by his YouTube alias PewDiePie – is currently the platform’s most popular uploader, as well as its biggest earner. The 25-yearold has 32 million subscribers to his channel and his videos have received 6.5 billion views in less than five years – helping him overtake Rihanna with the most viewed YouTube channel of all time. He makes an estimated $4m (£2.5m) a year in ad sales and with little or no overheads (he works alone), most of that is pure profit. Kjellberg is currently signed to YouTube’s largest multichannel network (MCN) Maker Studios, which was recently acquired by Disney for $ 550m (although this could rise to $950m if specific financial targets are hit). His contract expires in December, and at the time of writing, it was rumoured that he would not be renewing but instead venturing out with a couple of trusted colleagues to create his own MCN. Notoriously press shy – perhaps further proof of his unease in the traditional media sphere – Kjellberg did give a rare interview to ICON magazine in his native Sweden, where he hinted at his aspirations: ‘So far, all the networks have been managed in such an incredibly poor way, it’s embarrassing really. I’d like to help other YouTubers.’ Kjellberg’s desire to remain the master of his own destiny is not surprising; why, with his audience, would he want a media owner, sponsor or agent getting in the way? More intriguing is his intention to give back to the platform and its users who helped make him. This takes precedence over simply focusing on becoming a new media mogul by replicating the commercial structures of existing

MCNs or, indeed, the entertainment and media industries from which they borrow. Kjellberg clearly has neither the desire nor the need to play Hollywood ball: he’s helped invent an entirely new game. All in the niches Of course, if you bumped into Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg on the street, you’d most likely have no idea who he was. And therein lies the final striking factor in the evolution of the celebrity. Put simply, my mum has heard of Jay-Z; she may not know the lyrics of Can’t Knock the Hustle, but she’s aware that he’s a big deal, which probably suits them both. The internet and its most frequented entertainment platforms have created and nurtured such a plethora of niches that the celebrities who star in them remain unapologetically specific in their appeal. Take 15-year-old Amanda Steele, whose MakeupbyMandy24 tutorial channel has 1.8 million subscribers and 111 million views. She is idolised by 12- to 14-year-old fashionistas across the US and yet, would a 16-year-old girl who’s into post-metal music know who she was? Unlikely – she’s probably too busy watching the immaculately coiffed Shane Dawson’s Emo Hair Tips video, along with his 6.2 million other subscribers. And, of course, her brother will be contributing to the 150 million views collected by Brian Wyllie, AKA TSMTheOddOne, one of the leading figures on Amazon-owned video game broadcasting community Twitch... you get the picture. Kulash pulls it back to music: ‘When I was growing up, it was about how many people you could get to show up at a little punk rock show in your neighbourhood church, but now underground music isn’t geographic at all. It’s all about small communities you can find online and that’s really beautiful because it allows an almost baroque world of miniature subcultures that are intimately connected to one another. You actually now need only ten people to make a crowd.’ The impact of these proliferating niches on wider culture is yet to be seen, although it is clear that these emerging internet celebrities

are champions not just of YouTube channels, but of individualism, entrepreneurship and freedom of expression. They may still be busy reacting to and atomising established trends, genres and tribes, but as the power shifts, they will become increasingly responsible for shaping whole new socio-cultural movements – new ways of looking, listening, loving and living. This is something that only a handful of ‘traditional’ celebrities have ever managed to achieve and yet for the new generation, defined by technological and social empowerment, it will be second nature. Next episode It seems only appropriate to return to our original protagonist, Mr Sheen. In the cold light of day following his glorious debacle of 2011, he said this: ‘Fame is empowering. My mistake was that I thought I would instinctively know how to handle it. But there’s no manual, no training course.’ He said this as an established 46-year-old actor, son of a celebrity family and star of numerous Hollywood hits before that specific career ‘incident’. He was, of course, speaking partly of his own chemical and sexual vices. But cocaine and porn stars have been around for decades – social media has not. There is no question that in the hands of the well-versed, or the well-supervised, digital and social media are revolutionising how celebrities not only influence culture, but actually shape it. There may be no manual, but evolution – be it social, cultural, political or, indeed, technological – has never indulged us with such a luxury. There is one reassuring constant that is perfectly illustrated by former YouTube sensation, top Twitter celeb and supposed new media native, Justin Bieber, every time he lashes out at the paparazzi, gets caught street racing or cries when his pet monkey is confiscated by the German authorities. And this is that the individuals beneath the celebrity sheen remain flawed, fallible and, ultimately, human. So, as far as the future of celebrity is concerned, we can conclude with a similar sentiment to that echoed throughout these pages: technology evolves, enables and empowers, but it’s nowhere near as important as the people who wield it.

Design Once just the tactical shaping of products, over the past decade design thinking has paddled upstream to become a set of strategic principles for tackling the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s biggest problems

32969 Leo Burnett

By Ed White

Illustration / Matt Chase

H A P P Y 1 0TH A N N I V E R S A R Y F R O M L E O B U R N E T T

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Strength Study / Design

Transdisciplinary design The core principles of design thinking are shared openly, too, which has helped it seep into the world’s most successful brands, leading them to new ways of working and creating products. A key component of design thinking is cross-disciplinary teams, which deliver breakthrough solutions by bringing wide-ranging perspective to problems. ‘To create an emotional link with people is a tremendous task, it requires every part of a business to be aligned behind design,’ says Béhar. Nike’s Flyknit material, which revamps traditional knitting with digital technology, embodies that philosophy. ‘We have cross-functional teams that bring together innovation, design, marketing, communications, digital and strategy and they take a holistic approach to taking a product innovation from concept through to market,’ says Mike Yonker, VP of product innovation at Nike. ‘People have little interest in me-too products and experiences,’ explains Béhar, on why

hether in the sloping profile of the Porsche 911, the brutal asceticism of early, Dieter Rams-era Braun products, or the colourful rebelliousness of the first Nike Air Jordan, design – the process by which function translates into form – has always mattered to people. Well-designed things are meaningful, and they delight us in their aesthetic and ergonomic qualities, balancing rational and emotional needs. It matters for business too: it’s no coincidence that design is implicit in one quarter of marketing author, consultant and professor Philip Kotler’s four Ps (product). Behavioural economics has taught companies what we’ve instinctively known: that people favour simplicity, clarity and ease of use when choosing what products to buy, qualities that good design exemplifies. ‘Less’, said the master of minimalism Dieter Rams, ‘is more’. ‘Our job is to make daily life simpler and more efficient,’ says fuseproject founder Yves Béhar, the man behind iconic initiatives such as One Laptop Per Child, connected lock August and Clever Little Bag for Puma. ‘Great experiences will be shaped by our ability to edit down complexity in both the bits and the atoms.’ A recent New York Times blogpost heralded the ‘golden age of design’, and wryly pointed out how that phrase has been trumpeted four times in the past ten years. But over the past decade, design has grown in influence and stature beyond product. Design has moved from a craft – the tactical prettification of products – to a strategic philosophy. Design thinking now underpins the principles of some of the world’s most successful companies. Witness former Rhode Island School of Design president John Maeda’s appointment as design partner to top VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers last year as a nod to the influence the discipline now exerts in top entrepreneurial circles. ‘Design used to be an afterthought,’ Béhar tells Contagious. ‘In the 80s and 90s, brands were communicating with their customers almost exclusively via advertising. With the advent of the internet and social, where communications are direct and instantaneous between consumers and companies, design is what everyone can relate to.’

Design for a simple life: fuseproject founder Yves Béhar created connected lock August

Befitting design’s rise in stature has been an expansion of its definition into new areas and titles, reaching deep into every part of the enterprise: digital, service, interaction, experience and, latterly, business and organisational design. Complexity and uncertainty As those new areas and titles grew, the same fundamental changes in the business landscape that brought them on sparked complexity and uncertainty. ‘When businesses and markets were local, products “dumb”, and people only watched TV or read the papers, the competitive edge for business in the 20th century was – to grossly simplify – risk management, process efficiency and optimisation, or “exploitative”,’ says IDEO London partner Iain Roberts. ‘Jim Hackett, the CEO of Steelcase, talked about classic strategy as being like understanding the “knowable knowns” of a market,’ says Roberts. ‘You could understand institutional knowledge, plan your strategy in response to that and deploy change. Big, systems-level infrastructure, distribution, brand, technology were all advantages.’ But the 21st century is wildly different. Globalisation, technological development,

heightened expectations from people and hyper connectivity mean the pace of change is rapid and the unknowns, well, really are unknown. ‘I think businesses have begun to understand that a more creative approach to solving their problems has become necessary,’ says Roberts. Design for changing needs In this new world order, a set of business attributes for success is emerging: user-centricity, speed and adaptability. Established half a century ago, the principles of design thinking – deep ethnographic and qualitative research to uncover needs, synthesising creative solutions to meet those, prototyping and testing with users, and iterating based on feedback – embody that new mode. ‘Design is about learning, the process and approach is fundamentally explorative,’ argues Roberts. ‘It’s one that’s about value creation. It’s one that’s about creating new forms of the future and it’s one that’s built on the premise of agility and iteration.’ That exploratory approach has proved uniquely suited to solving problems far beyond their initial remit of making physical products.

innovation matters. ‘There are so many choices out there that unless what is proposed to us is of a higher idea, quality and emotional connection, I don’t see why anyone would buy it.’ Brand experience design Similarly, the strongest businesses of the past ten years have ensured that their brand and ethos spanned every touchpoint with people, from product to packaging, retail, customer service, advertising and digital service. These brands – Coca-Cola, Apple, McDonald’s and Google, among others – are stitched together by a consistent design language across everything they do. ‘We firmly believe that brand, user experience, organisation and business model are interdependent today,’ says Roberts. One of the most striking examples of the breakthrough power of design is Starbucks, which has engineered a multi-billion-dollar revolution in coffee drinking through what we now recognise as experience design.

Americans who were used to cheap, graband-go coffee shouldn’t have wanted Starbucks’ highly marked-up product. But the chain crafted a warm, friendly ‘third place’ where people wanted to spend time and money between work and home. Starbucks’ legendary customer service training, curated music, promotional material, advertising and branding are all designed to express the brand: welcoming, personal and helpful throughout. In true user-centred fashion, it has kept up with its customers’ habits, evolving spaces to be more local, distinct and sustainable, and, especially, its evolution of digital marketing. Starbucks introduced free in-store wifi and an online content network, including news and entertainment, as its customers gravitated to consuming media on laptops and tablets. As mobile grew, so Starbucks has created programmes catered to it, including tie-ups with payment platform Square, social gifting through Twitter and NFC-based campaigns in China. The future of design As products become, as tech VC Brad Feld has put it, ‘software wrapped in plastic’, consultancies like frog talk about the ‘Third Wave of Design’, posing a new set of challenges. Merging hardware and software, data and predictive analytics, designers are creating new, contextually driven and personalised digital services like Google Now that evolve and adapt to the needs of the user. (More on that in the Services Strength Study, p99.) In higher-order strategic terms, organisational design aims to embed agility, creativity, exploration and user centricity into businesses – Barclays bank, for example, now has a 200-strong design team leading product development, and countless companies are building out innovation labs to generate a steady flow of new ideas. Business design, meanwhile, is learning from the startup world. Design firms like IDEO, frog and fuseproject are taking equity stakes in exchange for accelerating growth, so called Venture Design. ‘It means our responsibilities are increased to ensure the company performs well over time. It’s a great way to align all the stakeholders around the same vision, and to make design central to achieve success,’ argues Béhar. Perhaps most telling for the evolution of the discipline overall, however, is the rise of the founder/designer at companies like Airbnb and Mailbox. ‘They’ve baked this process of learning into everything they do, how they build their brands, how they build products, how they build organisations, it’s baked in at an infrastructure level,’ says Roberts. Design’s place at the heart of modern business seems, then, assured. In Design Q&A, a short film interview from 1972, legendary designer Charles Eames was asked what he thought the boundaries of design were. ‘What,’ he presciently threw back, ‘are the boundaries of problems?’

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Brand Spotlight Apple Design as an organising principle has made Apple the world’s most successful brand

ften cited as the most valuable company on Earth, it seems quaint to remember Apple in 1997: on the edge of bankruptcy. A bloated product portfolio, forgettable advertising and a muddled retail strategy meant the company had been haemorrhaging cash for 18 months and was now on the brink. Filled with desperation, the board brought back founder Steve Jobs and, well, the rest is consumer electronics folklore: Jobs whittled the product line from 15 to four, consolidated distribution in one national chain, nearly halved operating costs and rehired advertising agency Chiat\Day, which had earlier created 1984, acclaimed as one of the greatest TV ads ever made. Facing an empty product pipeline, Jobs bought the company valuable time to regroup, penning a deal with arch rival Microsoft that injected $150m into the business and persuaded Bill Gates to keep providing support for Windows for Macintosh for five years. But what shifted Apple from rescue, through recovery and into a world-beating success was Jobs’ decision to move Apple from an engineering-led company to a design-led company. At its most basic, that strategy led to a restructuring of the internal pecking order for product design priorities. Traditionally, the company had been led by engineers, with designers called in at the end of the process. Jobs inverted that model, championing an uncompromising design-f irst approach by putting a young British designer called Jony

Ive in charge. Ive rewarded Jobs’ gamble by creating a new class of lifestyle electronics that were as covetable as they were practical: the candy coloured iMac, titanium body Macbook Pro, iPod, iPhone, iPad and, most recently, the Apple Watch. Design with purpose Jobs’ first task after rejoining Apple was instilling clarity and singular focus throughout the business around a set of core values. It was giving the company purpose, before the word had entered marketing’s lexicon. Facing a def lated team, Jobs’ rallying cry, which was captured in a video of an internal meeting in 1997, was to make the best possible products to delight people, and help them change the world. ‘The way to do that is not to talk about speeds and feeds... Our job is not about making boxes for people to get their job done. Our core value is we believe people with passion can change the world for the better. And the ones that are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones that actually do.’ The now iconic Think Different campaign, which was created in just eight weeks with a newly rehired Chiat\Day, was strikingly unusual for an electronics company. Eschewing rational product benefits, the campaign emotionally tethered the company’s ambition to iconic world-changing figures such as Muhammad Ali, Mahatma Gandhi, Neil Armstrong and Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service Steve Jobs, Apple

‘To me, marketing is about values,’ said Jobs at the same meeting. ‘This is a complicated, noisy world, and we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear what we want them to know about us.’ ‘The best example on the planet of a company that has an idea, has a soul, has always understood its centre, it’s Apple,’ says Chiat\Day founder and chairman Lee Clow, who worked with Jobs and Apple for three decades. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has said that Jobs’ greatest talent was marketing, and from Think Different to the modern day, Apple’s advertising has alternated between strongly emotive work and slick product demos. The result? Apple’s advertising has consistently moved technology from tool to aspirational lifestyle product, be that computers, music players, or smartphones and tablets. Apple’s brand premium has led to blockbuster sales and the highest profit margins in the sector. Everything is the brand While competitors have slowly caught up with Apple in terms of advertising, one of the brand’s key strengths over the years has been a singular design sensibility. By having a vertically integrated business, Apple has been able to control how the brand is experienced in hardware, software, packaging, retail, ecommerce and through to its advertising. Apple was among the first to recognise the value of controlling and designing an ecosystem across products, services and marketing. Jobs’ decision to control the retail experience by building Apple Stores has reinforced the premium brand and delivered average returns per square footage enjoyed only by jewellers. By creating

Past and present: world-changing historical figures featured in Apple’s early print ads, while cities around the world are home to futuristic Apple stores, such as this one in Shanghai

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Takeouts Start with people / Markets and organisations are increasingly complex, but one thing is immutable, and central to design thinking: user needs. Unearthing what people want and delivering against that in ways that delight is an enduring competitive advantage.

One object speaks volumes about the company that produced it and its values and priorities Jony Ive, Apple (quoted in The Telegraph)

its own seamless, simple content outlet through iTunes, and later the App Store, Apple made its iPods more valuable, and locked people into its ecosystem. Across all its businesses, the key for Apple has been a deep understanding of design being beyond superficial product aesthetics, extending more widely into user experience. ‘Everything a brand does adds up to the totality of a brand and how people see it, view it, trust it or don’t like it,’ says Clow, who first met Jobs as a 23-year-old starting out in the business. It has led to agency and brand working uniquely closely to shape every part of the Apple brand experience. ‘Nothing was insignificant,’ he adds, saying that the two would work for hours on the colour of the bathroom logos, would rewrite stock certificates and user manuals. ‘It had to be as cool as an ad... He wanted it to be a conversation about how to use the technology that he felt was going to make your life better.’ The simplicity dividend Jobs’ shrewd observation was that as technology grew more complicated, ease of use would confer competitiveness. One of his favourite expressions when presenting new Apple products to the public was ‘It Just Works’, a dig at the complexity of most technology.

Deeply influenced by the expressive functionalism of Bauhaus, and designers like Dieter Rams and the Eameses, the core ‘less is more’ design values were enshrined way back in the brand’s very first advertising, a brochure from 1977. ‘Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.’ ‘As technology becomes more complex, Apple’s core strength of knowing how to make very sophisticated technology comprehensible to mere mortals is in even greater demand,’ Jobs told The New York Times in an interview at the time of the iPod launch in 2003. More than a decade later, with a new Apple Watch, home automation and health monitoring to add to its constellation of products, that strength is more important than ever. Apple has faced down challenges from every consumer electronics firm, carving a premium niche for itself in the mainstream that has yet to be truly challenged. Its differentiator has been putting design at the heart of everything it does. ‘In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer,’ Jobs told Fortune magazine. ‘It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains, of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.’

Everything is the brand / Products, packaging, retail spaces, services, advertising, even business models and human resources… they’re all part of how people perceive your brand, and they’re all touched by design. It’s the unifying thread across the entire brand experience, and transdisciplinary teams are key to delivering that.

Opinion Where can design thinking take us? Sue Siddall, partner at IDEO, on using design thinking to tackle complex business challenges and inspire creative confidence

Adaptability beats strategy / Change is more rapid than ever, requiring companies to shift from big strategy to adaptability. Even Apple recognises that speed is the new IP. And the design process of prototyping quickly, getting things to market and iterating based on real feedback will be central to thriving companies in the next decade.

Around the time Contagious launched, I was a group account director at advertising agency M&C Saatchi, London, running large clients such as British Airways, Asprey, Nestlé and BT. It was fun, and not dissimilar to the TV show Mad Men, but more light-hearted. And you knew the client output – ads – whether 60-second TV ads or glossy magazine campaigns. We were dealing with a fait accompli in terms of what we had to sell. Our role was to turn that into a must-have dream… with the right logo size. We were, in short, the end of the process of bringing something to market. When I joined IDEO, my eyes were opened to a world where we were at the beginning of that process. Instead of creating dreams, we helped companies understand what they should make, based on observing real consumer needs. A world where the answer wasn’t an ad. Design thinking, I learnt, meant being comfortable with ambiguity but asking the right question; having an approach, tools and a talented group of designers inspired by human needs. This is an approach the US had been using for a while, but design thinking quickly picked up across the globe after the 2008 financial crisis when clients were looking for another way to grow. Diverse challenges We’ve applied design thinking to increasingly diverse challenges across every sector and touchpoint, including service, space, retail and digital. In the UK alone, recently, we’ve created a holistic physical and digital experience for Royal Academy of Arts visitors; redesigned the digital

reading experience for a big media company; and a created paradigm shift in the way scientists can publish their work. But I think the role for design thinking will be further upstream yet. Disciplines such as business and organisational design go to the heart of business operations, but also help tackle deeply difficult problems. We’re using design thinking to create a world-class, affordable and scalable education system (including classrooms, curriculum, business model and training) in Peru. With dementia, mental illness and chronic lifestyle diseases swamping our healthcare system and overwhelming us, health is one of the biggest, most complex opportunities. And we’re starting to see human-centred design applied there. Creative confidence Ultimately, the future of design thinking may be like our work with the Singaporean government, where our ambition is to foster creative confidence through the nation. Not just designing things, but by providing individuals, organisations, communities and countries with the tools to ask the interesting questions, to be comfortable with ambiguity, while having an approach that they know will get them to a new and better solution. Most importantly, it’s to be inspired by the one thing that drives design thinking and will never change – evolving human needs. Over the past decade, design thinking has taken me from the end of a process, right to the heart of why businesses exist in the first place. To their fundamental purpose for being, beyond making money: serving people. That’s where I believe design will create disproportional impact over the next ten years, and beyond.

To celebrate the tenth anniversary of Contagious we are offering 25% off all new subscriptions

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Predictions / What We Got Wrong

What we got wrong Being an early-warning system for brands and a handy instruction manual for the future isn’t as easy as Contagious makes it look, OK? But we’re big enough to admit a few of our mistakes...

Flops & Failures Nokia: ‘The world’s most valuable non-US brand,’ we said in issue 5, 2005. Either all non-US brands are in REAL trouble, or this may no longer be true. ‘Bouncing songs from Zune to Zune’ turned out not to be ‘the most seamless technological expression of the “listen to this!” factor’. Issue 9, 2006 ‘Join the Stickybits revolution,’ we cried in 2010. We later covered founder Billy Chasen’s second-stab company turntable.fm, months before he shut it down. Issue 30, 2012 We dedicated a Birth of a Brand feature to personal video recording device Flip Video in issue 19, 2009. Meanwhile, Apple was manufacturing iPhoneshaped nails for Flip’s coffin. ‘Sound cards in magazines are becoming more popular’ we observed in issue 3, 2005. Put your ear to this page to see if they still are. User-generated news and information network Current TV ‘inverted the television pyramid’ in 2008, and closed down in 2013. Issue 15, 2008

‘While appearing fairly lightweight, Twitter can also be used as a to-do list, a newsletter and as a people management tool.’

Cover Catastrophes Our editoral director’s son was so traumatised by Philips TV’s clown mask on the cover of issue 19 that he hid it behind the back of a bookcase for a year. Our tenth issue brought with it a heated editorial debate about what should star on the front cover – Steve Jobs’ revolutionary iPhone, or a cartoon dog from a Volvo campaign. The dog won, and the iPhone was mentioned briefly in our ‘Did you hear?’ section.

Issue 10, 2007

‘Despite becoming something of a media darling, Facebook still faces competition from Classmates.com.’ Issue 9, 2006

On augmented reality: ‘The opportunities are limitless.’ Some limits have since been spotted. Issue 19, 2009

Our unfortunately timed concierge culture trend was published at the start of 2008. Post-financial crisis, items such as the ultra-expensive Vertu phone seemed a bit brash. Issue 14, 2008

Social sites we’ve loved, left & lost Dodgeball / Location-based social networking platform dealt a body blow by an Adam Sandler film. Issue 9, 2006

Friendster / This pioneer of social networking was crushed by Facebook’s giant thumb. Issue 16, 2008

MySpace / ‘The stigma attached to online socialising is dissolving.’ Not thanks to MySpace anymore. Issue 11, 2007

Bebo / Its founders bought back the site for $1m in 2013 after selling to AOL for $850m in 2008. Now it ‘dreams up fun ideas for social apps’. Hmm. Issue 15, 2008

Second Life / The leap ‘from cult community to cultural phenomenon’ that we anticipated never quite happened. Issue 8, 2006

Ning / The ‘create-your-own social network’ social network didn’t turn out to be the next big thing. Issue 16, 2008

According to contributor Joseph Jaffe, mass marketing was ‘dead’ in 2005, issue 4. Current prognosis: reasonably spry.

Strength Study / Experimentation

Experimentation Over the past decade, Contagious has observed that brands fostering an experimental approach have been better equipped to understand new technologies and platforms and quicker to adapt to the fast-changing environment. They stay ahead, they donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t keep up By Alex Jenkins

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hen Contagious launched in 2004, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) also launched its Grand Challenge in which driverless vehicles competed to navigate 150 miles of unpopulated Mojave desert. The most successful vehicle failed to make it eight miles into the course and many believed the challenge beyond anyone’s capabilities. However, just six years later, Google announced that a fleet of its autonomous cars had covered more than 140,000 miles on populated American roads. Commenting on the speed with which mankind’s technology improved between those two events, MIT scientists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in their book Race Against the Machine observed: ‘This is the world we live in now. It’s one where computers improve so quickly that their capabilities pass from the realm of science fiction into the everyday world not over the course of a human lifetime, or even within the span of a professional’s career, but instead in just a few years.’ Like the geek at the back of Ferris Bueller’s class trying to quantify just how fast life is moving, computer scientist Ray Kurzweil has predicted that: ‘[The achievements of the 20th century] were equivalent to about 20 years of progress at the rate of 2000. We’ll make another “20 years” of progress in just 14 years (by 2014) and then do the same again in only seven years.’ As technology has rapidly improved, people have just as rapidly adopted and accepted it. Autonomous cars are already legal in four states of the US and are being tested in Singapore, Japan and Germany. They will also be legal on roads in the UK by 2015. Over the past decade, the impressive has become ubiquitous to the point of mundanity: gesture controls, voice recognition, touchscreen devices, the social web and entertainment streaming are now features of everyday life. The so-called hedonic treadmill ensures that many of us go from ‘Wow! That’s new and cool!’ to ‘Yeah, whatever’ in weeks. Operating behind the curve However, while consumer adoption has matched the swiftness of newly created tech and platforms, brands have typically struggled to keep pace. For decades, marketing departments built themselves around a few proven media types and processes, with little need to optimise for adaptability. In the past decade, that need has become an imperative as new platforms are launched and scale within months – for example Vine, which launched in January 2013 and within six months boasted 40 million users. Brands and agencies have found themselves chasing consumer attention as it quickly shifts en masse to nascent platforms. However, marketers often have no skills or expertise, no precedents for engagement and scant time to evaluate how appropriate these platforms may be for the com-

This approach as a business strategy gained momentum with the release of Eric Ries’ 2011 book The Lean Startup, in which the software engineer and entrepreneur outlined a philosophy of continuous innovation. Although originally created with tech companies in mind, the concepts have been successfully applied to business in general – notably the importance of a ‘buildmeasure-learn’ mentality, an emphasis on minimum viable products and a willingness to accept failure as a necessary part of the learning process. As Ries notes: ‘This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.’

It’s good to fail: Pixar and Disney’s Ed Catmull believes failure is a ‘necessary consequence of doing something new’

pany’s objectives. The challenge has been compounded by the sheer quantity of new networks, making it a struggle to decide which platforms and technologies to put resource behind. How do you know if you’re backing the next Facebook or throwing company money at the next Second Life? A decision to step back and wait to see what gains traction is a decision to concede any first-mover advantage or, worse still, arrive at the party as everyone else is leaving. Exploring experimentation One of the most successful ways to address the challenges of a fast-changing environment has been for organisations to adopt a culture of experimentation. While that can mean an element of ‘suck it and see’, true experimentation has its roots in the world of science and a more directed path of exploration. Scientists tend not to have a philosophy of ‘let’s sling a buncha chemicals in a test tube and see what happens’. They start with a hypothesis, explore it through experimentation and learn from the outcomes to aid decision-making.

Fail to learn, learn to fail The cult of ‘fail forward’ and (for the time-poor) ‘fail forward faster’ may have been destined for the soundbite trashcan if it didn’t have such high-level and vocal proponents. For example, Ed Catmull, president of both Pixar and Disney Animation Studios, frequently cites the value of failure in his 2014 book Creativity, Inc.: ‘Failure isn’t a necessary evil. In fact, it isn’t evil at all. It is a necessary consequence of doing something new,’ and ‘If you aren’t experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: you are being driven by the desire to avoid it. And for leaders, especially, this strategy – trying to avoid failure by out-thinking it – dooms you to fail.’ The perils of avoiding failure were echoed in a tweet from Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt in September this year: ‘When tech’s cheap and experimentation’s easy, over-worrying about risk is a great way to fall behind.’ In this sense, failure is a misnomer and really is a synonym for learning. If organisations can square themselves with the semantics, the logic of experimentation and failure becomes clear. When faced with a world for which we have no precedents, implementing processes for understanding and exploring that world will safeguard the future of our business – even though there will be inevitable missteps along the way. Riding the crest of innovation We’ve seen that acceptance manifested in the rise of brand and agency labs – parts of the business often ring-fenced to explore new platforms and technologies in a safe environment. In Contagious 27, the then director of strategy at Google Creative Labs and former co-founder of BBH Labs, Ben Malbon, used the analogy of a lab being like a speedboat to the supertanker that is the main company: ‘Scouting into the future, feeding back knowledge, opportunities, talent; literally, operating over the horizon... To survive, agencies must effectively become innovation companies, moving at least as fast as culture, quickly triaging new technologies, formats and opportunities both on behalf of their clients as well as their own business.’

This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn Eric Ries, The Lean Startup

While the role of a dedicated lab has been the subject of debate (if you’re the innovative department, then by extension the rest of the company isn’t?), the importance of an R&D mindset outside the traditionally product-focused R&D department has found widespread acceptance. Brands in traditional, non-tech sectors, such as Mondelēz, American Express, AB-Inbev and British Gas, have all committed to innovation labs in a bid to keep pace with the changing environment. Similarly, although not ubiquitous, company hack days are becoming increasingly commonplace and show the world of brands taking another lesson from the working practices of Silicon Valley. The world is our R&D dept The approach of a ring-fenced trial can also be extended to marketing, with brands opting for a small roll-out of a costly or potentially controversial campaign to a contained audience to gather data and decide whether or not to disseminate it further. The McDonald’s Our Food. Your Questions campaign by Tribal Worldwide, Toronto, falls squarely into this category. Allowing the Canadian population to have any questions answered in public resulted in people inevitably bringing controversial topics to the table, such as ‘Is pink slime used in any of your chicken products?’ or ‘If you’re trying to promote quality and so-called healthy food, why all the additives?’ With the potential to open the fast-food retailer up to a public kicking, the trial proved successful enough for McDonald’s to roll Your Questions out across the US and Australia. Future focus As an attitude of adaptability becomes accepted as a worthwhile business practice, the challenge will be to find the balance between experimentation and focus, knowing when to tinker and gather data, and when to channel resource behind the best bet. In his 1922 book Approximations, French literary critic Charles Du Bos wrote: ‘The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.’ Experimentation is the exploration of exactly what your business could become.

Our Food. Your Questions: McDonald’s experimented with a campaign to publicly answer consumers’ questions about the company and its food

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Brand Spotlight Google How two computer scientists built one of the world’s most successful companies through experimentation on products, processes and people

wo things strike you when browsing the Wikipedia ‘list of Google products’ page. The first is that company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin sure have put out a lot of things during their 16 years in business. Google products and services have become so entrenched in our day-to-day lives that we take them for granted. The Chrome browser, the Android operating system, YouTube, Blogger, Gmail, Maps, the Nexus range of phones and tablets, and, of course, Search. The second thing that strikes you is that Page and Brin sure have killed a lot of things in their 16 years in business. The list of discontinued Google products is an impressively large graveyard, with the company burying more of their product lines in the past decade than most companies probably managed to create. Ride Finder, Reader, Page Creator, Buzz, Wave, Orkut, Notebook, Latitude, Talk and iGoogle all shuffled off this virtual coil. In total, 91 products are listed as discontinued. However, that level of prolific failure is to be expected when your company has a trial-and-error approach baked into its products and its culture, as well as its resourcing and even its people management. And it’s precisely this foundation of experimentation that has helped make Google one of the most successful companies on the planet.

Project Loon: Google’s initiative brings wifi connectivity, via helium balloons, to remote areas and those affected by natural disasters

A culture of experimentation Following the stellar success of the original Google Search, Brin and Page wanted to ensure their company would provide staff with an environment where similar ventures could flourish.

One of the key routes to achieving this has been what Google has dubbed 20% time, allowing staff to spend 20% of their time working on whatever they choose as long as it may in some way benefit the company (an approach which owes a lot to 3M’s 15% time but is, y’know, 5% better). In the 2014 book How Google Works, executive chairman Eric Schmidt and senior vice-president of products Jonathan Rosenberg admit that the reality is more like 120% time, often involving staff working after hours but, ‘Regardless of when you take your 20% time… no one can stop you doing it’. It’s a level of trust and freedom many companies might aspire to but few implement. More fool them, given that Google’s 20% time has spawned success stories such as Gmail, Google Now and AdSense – the latter earning $3.4bn (c.22% of the company’s total revenue) in Q1 2014. Not bad for a spare-time project. The trio of Brin, Page and Schmidt felt that ring-fencing time on speculative 20% projects was important enough to address in their 2004 Founders’ IPO Letter, explaining that its value to potential shareholders lay in the fact that ‘most risky projects fizzle, often teaching us something. Others succeed and become attractive businesses.’ Supporting speculative projects is also manifested in so-called demo days, where engineering teams clear their diaries of all commitments for five days in order to spend that time entirely on prototyping ideas that are demonstrated at the end of the week. And, unlike many companies, Google likes to continue its experiments once products are out in the field. At the 2014 Google I/O

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developers’ conference, Page talked of how ‘... we need to be honest that we don’t know the impact of changes and we should be humble about that... We should launch things in a more humble way and see what the effect is and adapt as we go.’ Schmidt and Rosenberg underline this philosophy: ‘Iteration is the most important part of the strategy.’ Our people are lab rats ‘Whether it’s creating self-driving cars or translating the web into 64 languages, we love big bets. Our company culture encourages experimentation and the free flow of ideas,’ declared a post on the Google Careers blog in 2013. ‘This perspective is not limited to our engineering teams and technical roles, but extends to all Googlers who share a desire to challenge what’s possible.’ It’s not an idle claim. The application of the scientific method at Google extends into HR, where the company’s experimental approach is brought to bear on organisational issues, such as how you manage people when your head count goes from two to 52,000 employees in 16 years. The company’s People & Innovation Lab, or PiLab, conducts applied experiments to work out the most effective people management and productivity methods. A team consisting

of organisational psychologists, sociologists and decision scientists have conducted experiments into areas such as employee health (reducing calorie intake at on-site eating facilities by altering plate sizes and positioning of junk foods versus healthy treats in the ubiquitous snack areas), the type of rewards that make workers happiest and encouraging employees to save more for retirement. In a 2012 post on the Google Research blog, PiLab manager Jennifer Kurkoski explains: ‘Doing R&D in HR isn’t a particularly common practice, but when your employees build virtual tours of the Amazon... you need creative ways to think about productivity, performance and employee development... By fostering conversations on the issues confronting modern organisations, the PiLab... aims to generate new theories and to challenge existing ones.’ Challenging existing theories hasn’t been something from which PiLab has shied away. One recent research project, Project Oxygen, set out to answer the management-troubling question: ‘Are managers necessary?’ The answer came back in the positive, with data analytics used to quantify the eight good management behaviours that can improve performance. Number one was ‘be a good coach’. You can Google the rest.

It shouldn’t really come as a surprise that Google applies experimentation to its people management. When your entire product base is up for grabs, why not your team too? The rapidity with which the company – and indeed the tech sector – operates makes it highly likely that, whatever skills employees need today, they may need a few new ones in 18 months’ time. As Schmidt and Rosenberg explain: ‘The world is changing so fast across every industry and endeavour that it’s a given the role for which you’re hiring is going to change.’ Experimental budgeting Unlike many companies that extol the value of experimentation, Google puts its money where its mouth is, not just in employee time but in financial allocation too. The Founders’ IPO Letter set out exactly how Brin, Page and Schmidt channel the company’s funds: ‘Our business environment changes rapidly and needs long-term investment. We will not hesitate to place major bets on promising new opportunities... For example, we would fund projects that have a 10% chance of earning $1bn over the long term. Do not be surprised if we place smaller bets in areas that seem very speculative or even strange when compared to our current businesses.’

That attitude is formalised in the company’s 70/20/10 approach to resource allocation, with 70% of resources being put behind core products, 20% dedicated to emerging parts of the business and 10% on completely new projects. Shoot for the moon Perhaps what differentiates Google most from other companies is not merely its willingness to fail, but just how high it sets its sights. The founders frequently talk about taking ‘ big bets’. Page has publicly bemoaned the business world’s lack of ambition and how it defaults to thinking 10% bigger, whereas Google encourages what it calls moonshot thinking: ‘The grey area between audacious technology and pure science fiction. Instead of a mere 10% gain, a moonshot aims for a ten times improvement over what currently exists.’ That attitude has seen the company tackle projects few others would contemplate, such as manually photographing more than 5 million miles of roads in order to create Street View, making every book in the world searchable, or building its own driverless cars. The latter is a product of Google[x] – a facility with a remit to deliver major technological advances. Under the guidance of Brin and ‘captain

Moonshot thinking: Google ‘sci-fi’ developments, clockwise from top, Street View; experimenting with technological advances at Google[x]; Google Glass; Project Wing; driverless car prototype

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of moonshots’ Astro Teller, Google[x] has been responsible for Project Loon – an initiative to bring wifi connectivity to remote areas and those affected by natural disasters by helium balloons (featured on the cover of Contagious 36); contact lenses that can monitor glucose levels in tears for diabetics; Project Wing – a drone delivery service; and Google Glass. The futuristic nature of the work has earned Brin not unreasonable comparisons with billionaire Iron Man inventor Tony Stark. Despite the science fiction-like advancements being made, the founders remain focused on what is beyond the horizon. ‘We’re at maybe 1% of what is possible,’ Page commented at Google I/O. ‘Despite the faster change, we’re still moving slow relative to the opportunities we have.’ It’s easy to downplay the wilder end of Google’s experimentation – when you have a multibilliondollar annual income you can afford to fritter away a little staff time on niche projects. But looking a little deeper at where that money is derived from tells a different story: around 90% of the

company’s income is generated by advertising. Baking in a culture of experimentation ensures that Google is constantly looking for ways to defray the risk of relying on one revenue stream by exploring new opportunities before it needs to – before, as some companies have found, desperation sets in. A complete lack of atychiphobia Of course, the secrets of Google’s success aren’t really secret at all: hire the best people you can, put your users first, think big, develop a bias for action and nurture a culture with a complete lack of atychiphobia (no need to Google it – it means a fear of failure). For companies looking to emulate the success of Google, completely eradicating a fear of failure across the organisation will be the hardest to implement – hardest to justify lost money and wasted man hours; hardest to manage inter-team dynamics when one department succeeds and another fails; hardest to convince investors of the value of rewarding risk. And the best way to tackle this? Try a few experiments and see how things work out for you.

Takeouts Fail to learn / Accept that failure is an inevitable part of learning when exploring the new. You only truly fail when you don’t appraise and learn. Ring-fence selectively / Ensuring time, budget and resource are ring-fenced is a great way to foster a culture of experimentation. Don’t let less obviously experimental parts of your business ring-fence themselves away from a trial-anderror approach. Experimentation beats desperation / A culture built on curiosity and exploration of the new ensures that opportunities are constantly considered – far better than having to react when a competitor launches their latest future-facing venture.

Opinion It pays to be paranoid Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP, tells Alex Jenkins why short-term thinking and an unwillingness to change are obstructing experimentation in the industry

At a conference in October this year you said that, in a complex environment, there is a real need for experimentation. Can you outline why? There are two big shifts that are taking place – one is geographical and one is technological. The geographical one is not that difficult to figure out. If sanctions are lifted in Iran, that will be a market that opens, just like in Myanmar or Vietnam. But trying to figure out the technology shift is much tougher. When I look at WPP’s revenues, they’re more than 50% different than they were 14 years ago. Back then, digital was close to zero. It’s now 36% and in the next 14 years I’d say the shift will be even greater. Take Digital, Fast-growth Markets and Data, which are our three pillars along with Horizontality – getting people to work together. You have to get your existing, traditional businesses to move into those fast-growth markets and to adopt a digital frame of mind. You have to get your digital brands to look at the fast-growth markets as well as the mature markets. Then, finally, you have to be willing to dabble with different structures, to try different approaches, eg 51% control, 20% associate interests, to make investments and to morph new models – which is what we did with [NYC-based ad tech company] AppNexus. We’re a substantial company, the largest in our sector, but not large in a general sense. We don’t have unlimited resources and neither would I want to take the risk of paying some of the valuations that we see in the internet space. With AppNexus, a private company, we injected some revenue in return for equity and then topped up our stake to 15% with some cash. This is, I think, a less risky, more considered, approach than splashing out large sums of money. It’s educated risk. As someone with a business background, how do you reconcile expenditure on an experimental approach, which almost inherently guarantees a level of failure? Post-Lehman Brothers in particular, but even pre-Lehman, companies have become too conservative in a slow-growth world. They’re too focused on looking down at their shoes rather than at the horizon, not focused enough on top-line growth. We can’t survive by just cutting costs, particularly in professional services. So we have to find the geographical pockets, the digital pockets, the data pockets and then win business by working together. Those are the four strategic pillars that are the most effective.

Visionary development: contact lenses that can monitor glucose levels in tears for diabetics

So your advice for the head of a brand or agency, for whom the bottom line is going to loom large, is to take a longer-term view and explore those pockets? The long-term view is absolutely critical. I think there’s too much of a

short-term view. The rise of financial procurement has made people focus too much on costs, lack of pricing power, slower global growth. The average tenure of a CEO is five years, the CMO in America is two years, and the CFO in America is three years. These are short lifespans and not long enough to implement strong strategic change. Do you think that misaligns their incentives? If you’re only in a role three years, you’re only going to take a three-year view? I think that’s part of it. I think boards are naturally conservative. It’s all far too short term. The biggest problem is unwillingness to change. The attitude of ‘why should I change when that change may not affect me?’ is the attitude you have to get over. It’s getting people to think long term and not look at their navels but at the horizon. It’s very easy to say, but very tough to do. Having been at this for a long time, I think we’re probably more focused on the long term. So experimentation is really vital, particularly in a world that is moving at the speed that it is. How do you balance a culture of experimentation with a company’s ability to focus? You have to continuously think about how things are going to change and how they might change. I think you probably have to be more experimental even if it takes your eye off the focus ball. You have to multitask, exactly the same as with new technologies. You have to watch television on the screen, play with your iPad, play with your smartphone, tweet and there’s also the society bit as well. Do you think that the ad industry has sufficiently embraced experimentation? A few years ago, we were going to get destroyed by Google. A few years ago, we were going to get destroyed by the recession. We managed to survive both. It doesn’t mean that we will be able to survive in the future. It pays to be paranoid as Andy Grove [former CEO of Intel] pointed out many years ago. Now, I think it pays to be more and more paranoid, because of the speed of change. You have to be Einstein to figure out some of the technological changes that are going on. If you were a hotel owner, did you think you would be subject to what’s happened recently with Airbnb? If you were a taxi driver, did you think you would have to deal with Uber? When you have a legacy or a traditional business, you change the engines on the airplane while it’s flying, which is particularly difficult when you have new, disruptive business models that are evaluated in different ways and attracting talent and capital on different terms. This is not a problem for the ad industry in particular, it’s a problem for everyone.

Read what over 200 marketers think about programmatic

Strength Study / Service Design

Services How the application of service design thinking has radically redefined the role, and value, of marketing in the digital age By Patrick Jeffrey

CHANGO.COM/PULSE Illustration / Matt Chase

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dvertisers can no longer just rely on carefully curated TV spots or glossy print ads. Today, the way a brand behaves is key – not only in communications, but in every interaction it has with a customer. A report by software company RightNow found that 86% of people would pay more for a better brand experience. And a 2010 poll by Accenture revealed 64% of customers have switched companies due to poor service. Experiences, not messages, have become the number one priority for brands. Over the past decade, the industry has adapted to this shift by re-imagining the role of marketing. In their paper ‘Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing’, Stephen L. Vargo and Robert F. Lusch claimed that a ‘service dominant logic’ is replacing the ‘product dominant logic’ of the past. Rather than simply delivering tangible products to market, they argued, marketers must consider how to deliver intangible services to customers. ‘[Service-centred dominant logic] has the potential to replace the traditional goods-centred paradigm,’ they wrote in 2006. The result has been a rise in advertising that doesn’t really feel like advertising. Tools, services and utilities have become important new ways for brands to engage with consumers. By removing friction or improving an experience, these solutions set themselves apart from the polished, measured emissions of traditional advertising. Connecting the dots This new marketing paradigm has been heavily inf luenced by service design, a discipline that established itself around the turn of the millennium. Unlike traditional design practices, service designers create experiences around the needs of the customer. At every touchpoint, service designers pay close attention to reducing customer pain and speeding up processes so that there’s a consistent, intuitive journey. ‘Ten years ago we thought of the product as the hero, and other touchpoints – call centres, mobile, distribution and marketing – were seen as secondary,’ says Chris Risdon, a design director at San Francisco-based consultancy Adaptive Path. ‘But service design recognises that all of these can leave an equal impression with the customer.’ Done well, this approach can transform a business. A 2013 study by Harvard Business Review found that focusing on the entire journey is 30-40% more strongly correlated with customer satisfaction than one touchpoint. And it’s 20-30% more strongly correlated with business outcomes, like high revenue, repeat purchase and low customer churn. The Government Digital Service is a living, breathing example of this transformation. A team of service designers is hauling the British government into the digital age by delivering 25 exemplar services built around the needs of

Let’s create the experiences that customers want and then we can worry about marketing them afterwards Erik Rogstad, AKQA

users. And a new website, GOV.UK, aims to be a single domain for every customer need across all government departments. By making services digital by default, the government is on track to save £1.7bn ($2.8bn) each year. Services, not messages Over the past decade, marketers have started to recognise the influence of service design and the importance of the service-dominant logic outlined by Vargo and Lusch. In 2006, The Barbarian Group’s Benjamin Palmer and Anomaly’s Johnny Vulkan coined the term Branded Utility. This highlighted a new approach, where brands used tools and services to offer added value to customers and create interaction opportunities. ‘Branded utility is about services, not messages,’ we wrote in a special report in 2008. ‘It’s about brands embedding themselves in people’s daily lives.’ Putting this thinking into practice, baby care behemoth Johnson & Johnson created a digital service that offered advice and tips to new parents. Babycenter.com quickly became the biggest baby site on the web, and helped the brand reach 78% of its target audience in the US. ‘It contains all that anyone would ever want to know about each stage of parenting, from getting pregnant to raising a toddler,’ said one glowing review. For Johnson & Johnson, this created a

dialogue with its target market – a conversation that benefited both brand and consumer equally. Not all branded utilities were as effective though. From the mid-noughties onwards, as marketers figured out how to add value with services, a slew of digital tools clogged up the web, and our app stores. Research from Deloitte, published in 2011, found that 80% of branded apps had been downloaded fewer than 1,000 times. Hardly evidence of a new marketing paradigm. Marketing as service design The smarter businesses, of course, realised that introducing a service-dominant logic required much more than a nifty digital app. It involved changing processes, reallocating resources and communicating with customers in new ways. It needed brands to think about the holistic consumer journey, to carefully consider each touchpoint, and to re-imagine products as services. Nike, once a bread-and-butter apparel business, successfully re-envisioned its offering to include a relevant service. Nike+, which launched in 2006, is a digital fitness ecosystem that enables people to track their runs, connect with friends and achieve health goals. Today, it counts 18 million members. ‘When I buy this product, take it home and sign up for the services, I’ve created a link so much stronger than anything you could say in communication,’ said Stefan Olander, Nike’s

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Once you have established a direct relationship with a consumer, you don’t need to advertise to them Stefan Olander, Nike

vice-president of digital sport, at the Cannes Lions Festival in 2012. For Nike’s customers, the experience of getting out there, challenging your friends, pushing yourself and enjoying sport is far more powerful than any advertising messages. It doesn’t tell people to ‘Just Do It’, it enables them to do just that. ‘The experience itself becomes the manifestation of your brand, and your communication channel,’ says Fabio Sergio, vice-president of creative at design firm frog. ‘Nike+ is a social-media strategy, a marketing campaign, a service, a product and a brand, and it’s all wrapped up in one experience that people interact with across different channels and in different moments in their life.’ US-based airline Delta has also embraced this philosophy when designing digital services for its passengers. The Fly Delta app lets people book flights, check in, find their gate and even stream TV shows to their device while in the air. The in-built bag tracker also allows customers to keep tabs on the whereabouts of their luggage. Delta’s focus on the entire experience has elevated its app beyond a one-off branded utility. And it’s emblematic of Vargo and Lusch’s ‘new dominant logic’ – instead of talking about flight routes or added extras, these services offer a more indirect (and useful) approach to connecting with people. ‘Let’s create the experiences that customers want and then we can worry about marketing them afterwards,’ said Erik Rogstad, managing director of AKQA Washington DC (one of Delta’s agencies), in Contagious 34. ‘For Delta, the product is the brand, the experience is the brand.’

Living services As billions of products connect to the internet over the coming years, the boundaries between services and marketing will continue to blur. Cisco predicts that 50 billion objects will be web-connected by 2017 – from toothbrushes to televisions, cars to clocks. And, according to service design agency Fjord, this will create a ‘third wave of computing’ that’s as influential as the dawn of mobile: an era where customers won’t just expect a useful service, they’ll expect it to learn, evolve and adapt to their individual needs. In 2013, we covered Turkish bank Garanti’s mobile app (built by Fjord), which showcased glimpses of this future. iGaranti uses a smart algorithm to crunch data around personal spending habits and predict future expenditure. And context – time, location, etc – is used to personalise communications. Part banking app, part lifestyle companion, this is designed to remove worry from finance. ‘Just focus on living your life, because iGaranti will help you with all your banking concerns,’ said Ayse Demir Ozer, head of digital channels and business development at Garanti, in Contagious 37. Creating future-facing services like this requires brands to master many strengths – from harnessing data to get a better understanding of consumers, to collaborating effectively with other companies in a complex new digital ecosystem. But, most importantly, it requires a laser-sharp focus on the user-centric principles of service design. To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, ask not what your customers can do for you, ask what you can do for your customers.

Smart spending: the iGaranti mobile app uses an alogrithm to analyse spending habits and predict future expenditure

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Brand Spotlight Uber

experience,’ explains Fabio Sergio, vice-president of creative at design firm frog. ‘By focusing on how people feel throughout the process, they make sure it’s better, more streamlined and more pleasant than the same journey delivered by other organisations.’ This creates a truly holistic experience, where every step of the journey is tied together by technology – the smartphone and app effectively become connective tissue between touchpoints.

Uber’s ride-sharing service has revolutionised the taxi industry, but it’s not stopping there. Now the company is vying to become the central nervous system of tomorrow’s hyper-connected world

here’s an ‘Uber of ’ just about every industry. SpoonRocket is the ‘Uber of ’ food delivery. TaskRabbit is the ‘Uber of ’ errands. Bannerman is the ‘Uber of ’ security. And there’s even an ‘Uber of ’ medical marijuana (Eaze, in case you were wondering). So what exactly does that make Uber? It’s the poster-child for a digital, on-demand service brought to a traditional landscape. Today, it connects car owners with people looking for transportation. Tomorrow, it plans to be something much, much bigger. ‘Uber is building a digital mesh, a grid that goes over cities,’ said Shervin Pishevar, serial entrepreneur and Uber board member, in an interview with Inc. ‘Once you have that grid running, in everyone’s pockets, there is a lot of potential for what you can build as a platform.’ In the future, you’ll probably consider opening the Uber app when you need a convenient ride somewhere. But you could also use it to buy a coffee, deliver your groceries or even pick up your weekly marijuana prescription. Building an empire The idea for a ride-sharing service came in 2009, when CEO Travis Kalanick and his friend Garrett

Camp thought of ‘pushing a button to get a ride’. Fast-forward five years and that vision is now a reality in more than 200 cities on six continents. The brand’s mission – ‘transportation as reliable as running water, everywhere and for everyone’ – will take it to hundreds more cities in the next few years. And, after a successful funding drive in June 2014, Bloomberg estimates that Uber is now worth $17bn. Underpinning this growth is a service that solves almost every gripe we have with the taxi industry. Ever stood in the rain waiting for a cab to come your way? Or had to stop off at an ATM because you have no money to pay the driver? Uber solves this, and more. When a customer opens the app and ‘pushes the button’, the GPS map shows the taxi approaching. It tells you how long you will have to wait for your ride, what the driver’s name is, what car he or she is driving and how other passengers have rated the service. Once you reach your destination, Uber automatically debits your account and lets you rate the experience. It also lets passengers split the fare with a couple of taps. ‘Uber starts with the customer experience and then figures out how the service can deliver that

By focusing on how people feel, Uber makes sure it’s better, more streamlined and more pleasant than the same journey delivered by other organisations Fabio Sergio, frog design

Uber for an ice cream As usage has increased, so too have the options available to customers. Uber members in London, for example, can choose between an Uber X (lowcost travel), Exec, Lux and Taxi (which lets you order a Black Cab – a compromise made after London’s iconic taxis went on strike to protest against the brand’s growing inf luence in the city). And, during last year’s Independence Day celebrations in New York City, residents could request an Uber helicopter to take them to East Hampton. ‘Blair Waldorf, Don Draper and Jay Gatsby got nothing on you,’ said the company’s blog post announcing UberChopper. But diversification hasn’t only come in personal travel. The brand has experimented with new uses for the service that don’t involve delivering passengers from A to B, yet still take advantage of Uber’s tech. On 18 July this year, it launched a daylong UberIceCream service, where anyone in 144 cities could request to have an ice cream delivered to their home or office. And similar campaigns have run with roses on Valentine’s Day, kittens on National Cat Day and even Mariachi bands in San Francisco (just tap the button for a fiesta!). These are smart PR plays from Uber, designed to increase exposure and sign-ups in various cities around the world. But they’re also future experiments, helping the company to gauge how it can expand its service beyond personal travel. Speaking to Inc last year, Kalanick outlined this vision as ‘the cross between lifestyle, which is give me what I want and give it to me now, and the logistics required to get it to you’. In other words, a much broader remit than an on-demand taxi service. The company has already announced a few trials that could potentially become bigger than one-off PR stunts. In August, UberFresh launched in Santa Monica, and provides a fixed-price lunch menu for a flat fee of $12. The same month, Uber Corner Store launched in the Washington DC area, allowing users to shop from a list of more than 100 daily staples, including toothpaste, medicine and beauty supplies. And in New York City, residents can send packages quickly and safely via an UberRush courier bike. So suddenly Uber starts to feel like much more than a taxi firm – here it’s a catering business, a postal company and a grocery supplier. And each of these is underwritten by the brand’s same, smart service.

Uber’s app lets users pay for their journey and rate the experience

Crafty or Capitalist? As Uber rapidly grows, so do question marks over its business practices. For example, the brand’s surge pricing policy (a system where fares fluctuate depending on the supply and demand) has been criticised, with novelist Salman Rushdie describing it as a ‘cynical rip-off’. Media reports in August detailed that people attending San Francisco’s Outside Lands music festival were charged up to 7.75 times the usual rate. (One reveller was billed $391 for an 11-mile journey.) More recently, PayPal founder Peter Thiel called Uber ‘the most ethically challenged company in Silicon Valley’ after it ran a secretive campaign to recruit drivers from its main rival, Lyft (of which Thiel is an investor). Operation SLOG (Supplying Long-term Operations Growth) armed hundreds of private contractors with pre-pay mobile phones, credit cards and recruitment kits, which were used to hail a Lyft ride and then convert the drivers over to Uber. While Lyft has accused Uber of sabotage (for ordering and then cancelling 5,500 rides over a ten-month period), media opinion is divided on whether Uber broke any laws in the process. However, with collaboration being such an important pillar of the future service ecosystem, Uber must ensure that it doesn’t alienate any potential partners with ethically questionable tactics or business strategies.

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Takeouts Design around the user / Good service design always starts with the customer’s perspective and works back from there. Think holistically / Don’t just solve one pain-point, look at the entire customer journey and ensure that every touchpoint is frictionless and user-friendly.

Opinion Services start here How digital technologies are giving brands an unmissable opportunity to transform the way they deliver services. By Louise Downe, service designer, and Russell Davies, director of strategy, at Government Digital Service, UK

Experience is a shared asset / In a complex and connected economy, brands need to collaborate to ensure that the customer is put first. Curate, don’t create / It’s not always essential to design your own game-changing services. How can your brand offer more value by teaming up with companies like Uber?

Social services In August, Uber announced its boldest step yet – it opened its application programming interface (API) to other developers – and in so doing nailed its intentions of becoming a ‘central nervous system for cities’ firmly to its mast. An open API effectively lets other mobile applications interconnect with Uber’s app to create a f luid experience for the user. ‘While simple on the surface, the seamlessness of the Uber experience belies the enormous complexity that powers it,’ read the company’s statement. ‘But now that we have this fundamental capability in place in over 40 countries around the world, there are so many things we would love to see built on top of it.’ This means that Uber can use the power of its service to collaborate with companies and extend its inf luence into new sectors. Other apps can now pass a destination address to Uber, display pick-up times, provide fare estimates and access trip history. The programme launched with 11 initial partners, including United Airlines, Starbucks, Time Out, TripAdvisor and Hyatt Hotels & Resorts. So if you really want a caramel macchiato but can’t get out of the office, Uber can deliver it to your door. Or if you want a taxi to collect you from the airport, why not reserve one from within your airline’s dedicated app? By opening its API to any brand, Uber is vying to become the service that gels multiple

experiences together. ‘Once you have the infrastructure in place, you can become the social plumbing that other companies can continue to build on top of,’ says frog’s Sergio. ‘That’s a major change from the past, where you needed to build everything from the ground up. Now, it’s about combining APIs from various service providers to create a seamless experience.’ This strategy has drawn comparisons with Amazon’s expansion from ‘ bookstore’ to ‘everything store’. And various industry experts believe that Uber and Amazon may end up going head to head in the race to create a truly scalable on-demand delivery service. While this hasn’t been confirmed by Uber (and, indeed, Jeff Bezos is an investor), the audacity of the comparison shows just how far the brand has come in the past five years. So, what else does the future hold? Clearly, it’s impossible to know. And a big question mark hangs over the ethical practices of the business (see boxout, p105). But it does, at least, have a shot at becoming a defining brand of the next ten years. ‘Uber has the chance to be a once-in-a-decade if not a once-in-a-generation company’ wrote David Plouffe, former White House campaign manager and adviser to Barack Obama, after joining the company as SVP of policy and strategy in August. But, for Kalanick and Uber, fulfilling that opportunity will take more than just pushing a button.

You know what Service Design is, right? It’s workshops and people saying ‘stakeholders’ a lot; Post-It notes and increasing brand engagement metrics in call centres; and shortening queues in fancy hotels. Right? That’s not what we mean. We call it service design – lower case – because it’s not anything complicated, it’s not a set of tools, or a process, or an ideology, or a new word for UX or co-design. It’s the design of services, because services don’t just happen, they’re designed. They may be designed well or badly, deliberately or accidentally – but they are designed. Service design happens. And it happens everywhere, all the time. Services are things that help someone to do something. That’s what most large organisations do, most of the time. But too often, the practice of service design is conflated with the illusion of Service Design and is kept in the box labelled ‘Corporate Distractions’ alongside innovation and away-days and CSR – leaving services to emerge on their own. But service design is too important to be kept on the sidelines. And most large organisations are going to have to get it right because digital technologies are giving them a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transform the way they deliver their services. And if they don’t design them well, or at least design them deliberately, then they will fail. This is what we’re starting to learn at the Government Digital Service and in government departments and agencies across the UK. Digital has given us all the opportunity to rethink and redesign the services we offer. That means more than digitising paper processes. It means redesigning our services by going back to what a user needs and redesigning the way we make that happen. There’s an implicit link between what redesigning around user needs requires, and how we work to do it. It means that we need to change the way our organisations are structured. Just as you’d design a better machine to produce a better product, we need to design our departments to deliver better services. This is not sexy. It’s not innovative. But it’s important. It makes life better for your users. It makes work easier for your staff. It helps you cut costs and it opens up new possibilities for your organisation. Here are some things we’ve learned:

1. Start with user needs You can hire plenty of people to help you with ‘Business Transformation’. The problem is, that’s where they’ll start – with the business. They’ll redesign you, cut your costs and give you a new target operating model (and the chances are that will always remain a target). Unfortunately, somewhere in all that, your users tend to get lost. Starting with users, rather than with the business, means starting with service design. That will get you a better result for the business. 2. Go to where the problem is It’s too easy for large organisations to separate strategy and delivery. Clever people in the centre have clever thoughts about how things should be and chuck their ideas over the wall to beleaguered delivery people. That’s not how you get good services. Form follows function as much as function follows form. You can’t separate a problem from the solution. To design anything functional, you have to be in constant negotiation with the limits of your materials. It’s the same for services. Your strategy (or policy) people have to be part of a service design process. They must be part of the team working that out with users, through prototypes and iteration – in the place where the service is being designed, built and delivered. 3. This is for everyone Right now there are Service Designers and there are web designers. Service Designers tend to work in niches, web designers tend to work at scale. The digital businesses that seize the public imagination and grow to billion-dollar valuations overnight tend, mostly, to be exclusively digital. They start from scratch, building systems and processes they need to deliver their services separately. But government services – and the next generation of businesses that need to transform, from banks to retail to utilities – can’t just ignore the services they already have and the inherent complexity that comes with that. We have to move at the pace of digital but we need to iterate our entire service – including paper forms, call-centre scripts and assisted digital channels – in the same time-frame. Making something for everyone that works that way is a new skill, an emerging profession, something that exists at the intersection of Service Design and Digital. That’s designing services.

Do you know how to make a good video?

Empowerment How inspiring people and giving them the wherewithal to make a difference became a darn good way to grow a brand community By Arwa Mahdawi

Illustration / Matt Chase

studioyes.co.uk creative video content

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Empowerment, n. The fact or action of acquiring more control over one’s life or circumstances through increased civil rights, independence, self-esteem, etc. (Oxford English Dictionary) Fauxpowerment, n. The fact or action of shamelessly pretending your marketing message is in some way empowering when you’re really just flogging a terrible product or, even worse, actually creating new forms of insecurity or inequality, etc. (Contagious English Dictionary)

h God. We just committed a cardinal sin of essay-writing and began an article with an Oxford English Dictionary definition of the subject. But this isn’t school, and in this case it might be warranted. ‘Empowerment’ is one of the most used and badly abused words in marketing. Any discussion of how empowerment has become central to the success of modern brands involves understanding and eschewing the meaninglessness that has built up around the word over the past few years. Stewart Brand & vaginal rejuvenation One particularly egregious example of this sort of ‘fauxpowerment’ can be seen in the advertising for 18 Again, a ‘vaginal tightening and rejuvenating cream’ pitched to Indian housewives in 2012. An incredibly cringe-worthy TV commercial for the product drew widespread ire for its spurious claims that the cream was basically feminism in pharmaceutical form – rather than, you know, a way to make money from women’s insecurities about their age and attractiveness.

But for the purposes of outlining how brands have built themselves on the strength of empowerment, we’re going to go back a little further, to Stewart Brand’s ground-breaking Whole Earth Catalog, an informative array of self-sufficiency knowledge that was later described as a precursor to the early web. The work was subtitled Access to Tools, which is the phrase that best describes how brands can create genuine moments of empowerment: by creating tools for, and with, audiences. Empowerment is not a marketing slogan or a tagline or a campaign idea. It is not a buzzword or a trend or a fad. In the examples and case studies that follow, you’ll see that true empowerment, as practised by brands, means transforming the status quo, either by facilitating access to tools that people wouldn’t otherwise have or by building capabilities or breaking down societal barriers. Empowerment can encompass anything from providing unbanked populations with access to financial services via their mobile phones; overturning cultural stereotypes about gender; or giving people a platform to have their voices heard. Consumers are doin’ it for themselves One reason empowerment has become such an interesting area in business is because technology has enabled consumers to empower themselves, to build their own tools and share them with like-minded others. Over the past decade, collaborative consumption has grown exponentially as people bypass established structures to trade among themselves. People no longer need or rely on brands for information, access or entertainment in the way they once did, leading to a shift in the traditional value exchange between brands and consumers. Basically, if brands aren’t making themselves useful in some way, or acting as a positive force in people’s lives, then they’ll slowly find themselves obsolete. Hard and soft tools One of the most important differentiations when it comes to empowerment is the difference between hard and soft tools. This isn’t a massive gulf, but it’s an interesting framework to consider how we, as communicators, create opportunities. Over the years, we’ve lauded plenty of what we’d call hard tools: robust services that deliver a physical or digital product that disrupts the status quo. Raspberry Pi, for example, barnstormed a new movement of at-home makers, whether they’re controlling a small, programmable computer to make games, or a sous vide cooker hacked together from fishtank heater parts. BRCK, the skeleton key of network access being developed in East Africa, is another example of this sort of hard tool. Skype, as Ethan Zuckerman discusses in our opinion piece, is yet another, as is Safaricom’s M-PESA, Bitcoin and Twitter.

But the more natural context for empowerment among those coming from a marketing background are soft tools. They typically use strong insight at their heart to drive empowerment. Soft tools are familiar because they look just like ad campaigns, but they differ in one respect: they create a badge of belonging and instil agency in those who pass along the message or contribute an idea. Empowerment doesn’t just mean using technology to close social gaps by connecting people to infrastructure – it means closing social gaps caused by cultural stereotypes, and using technology to open previously closed systems. Everyone goes to Harvard One of the most exciting examples of gaps closing is in massively open online courses. Often, brands have an exciting role to play in this kind of empowerment. In 2013, Bank of America worked with non-profit Khan Academy to offer free financial literacy courses through the academy’s online education system. The programme reached out to customers and non-customers alike to educate all participants in a simple, effective way. AT&T has also embraced the trend. In 2014, it partnered with online education company Udacity to create the world’s first ‘NanoDegree’: an affordable resource for potential employees to learn the specific expertise needed for a job with the company. The online curriculum costs $200 a month and teaches students basic programming skills like data analysis and iOS application design. The programme is available to anyone, including current AT&T employees who need further education on critical software disciplines. The goal is for all graduates with a NanoDegree to be qualified for an entry-level software position at AT&T. Brazil’s largest language school, CNA, recently worked with FCB Brasil, São Paulo, to develop Speaking Exchange – a video chat tool that connects students learning English with native speakers in the Windsor Park Retirement Community in Chicago. The pilot has been so successful that CNA now plans to roll the technology out to more than 500 schools in Brazil, and has more than 1,600 nursing homes and senior centres in the US interested in pairing their seniors with students. Thus, a dual benefit is realised: kids learn English while older members of society can find a new outlet for their wisdom and knowledge. Closing the gender gap via images Brands showing strength in empowerment are also now beginning to use soft tools to help repair conflict and anxiety. Research by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media found that the more media a girl consumes, the fewer options she believes she has in life. This insight gave rise to the Lean In Collection, a library of images devoted to the powerful depiction of women, girls and the people who support them. It’s jointly curated by Getty Images and LeanIn.org, the

women’s empowerment non-profit founded by Sheryl Sandberg. At the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity in 2014, Getty’s Pam Grossman noted: ‘The Lean In Collection has images of girls, not in pink and fairy wings, but who do karate and who are learning about maths and science. Women are shown in positions of leadership, women who are proud to use their voice to be heard. We’re trying to build a visual microcosm of the kind of world that we want everyone to live in.’ From real beauty to real empowerment Female empowerment has become a major advertising theme in recent years, shifting the focus from women’s looks to women’s abilities. Unilever’s Dove work, led by Ogilvy, was the innovator in this space, regularly calling into question how women are portrayed or see themselves. But more brands are taking on certain stigmas and building empowering programming. P&G feminine care brand Always’ Like a Girl project from Leo Burnett brought documentarian Lauren Greenfield to shoot a social experiment and declare its mission to redefine the phrase ‘like a girl’ as an expression of strength. Pantene’s Philippines division delivered a gender-role-questioning viral, Labels Against Women, via BBDO Guerro, to the tune of 48 million views. And CoverGirl’s #GirlsCan spot, by Grey in New York, brings together some of today’s most influential women. Instead of simply celebrating their beauty, the P&G brand creates a candid and compelling rallying cry for female empowerment. While a hashtag is a far cry from a robust service, these campaigns and others, addressing bullying, LGBTI rights and more, have become soft tools that have begun to influence broader social movements. Importance of focused empowerment Simply giving money doesn’t constitute empowerment. Giving money is charity; giving tools is empowerment. In this regard it’s interesting to chart the evolution of Pepsi’s Refresh Project, which launched with much fanfare in 2010. At the time, the idea of a billion-dollar brand redirecting $20m in Super Bowl spending to fund community projects was considered, in many respects, revolutionary. Only four years later and it seems, well, slightly dated. The problem was that there was no focus to the project. Any company can give money, or set up a foundation, or donate things. Focused empowerment needs to tie back to the intrinsic capabilities of the business and have a long-term goal that is linked to company growth. A new generation of brands is telling us we have potential, from Dove saying ‘you are more beautiful than you think’ in its Real Beauty Sketches, to Apple selling its iPhone 5s by reminding us ‘you’re more powerful than you think’. The ones who help us bring that potential to life will win out in the end.

Campaigns of enpowerment (top to bottom): Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches; P&G’s Like a Girl for its Always brand; CNA’s Speaking Exchange

Strength Study / Empowerment

Brand Spotlight Safaricom It’s rare for a single brand to be responsible for a commercial revolution, and we won’t claim Safaricom is. But Kenya, the country at the heart of Safaricom’s success, is a shining light in the infrastructural jumps that M-PESA and other services have enabled

hile empowerment can take many forms, one of its constant tenets is that it inspires action rather than simply consumption, and turns helping people into a holistic part of helping the brand. On that level, Kenya’s largest telecommunications company, Safaricom, stands out as one that can truly describe what it does as ‘empowerment’. The company has devoted itself to building services that improve the lives of the 19 million Kenyans it counts as its customers. In fact, when Contagious spoke to Bob Collymore, Safaricom CEO in 2013, he claimed that M-PESA – Safaricom’s mobile money transaction service – wasn’t set up to make money but to ‘transform lives’. ‘Our success is not measured by the profits we make, but by the difference we make,’ Collymore told us. Safaricom has made transforming lives a key driver of profitability, marketing and growth.

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The mobile is a powerful piece of technology, so how can we use it to improve society? Bob Collymore, Safaricom

Starting with M-PESA, Safaricom has been able to connect people to infrastructure or services they wouldn’t otherwise be able to access. That might mean healthcare with its Daktari 1525 telemedicine initiative, its foray into energy with leased home solar power initiative M-KOPA, or even political awareness and safe driving education. It’s easy to naysay Collymore’s powerful rhetoric. ‘It’s not that I want to be here as a philanthropist,’ Collymore told us, ‘but the mobile is a powerful piece of technology, so how can we use it to improve society?’ But that societal improvement, led by M-PESA, has had exceptional results. Safaricom’s share price is up 450% since his fouryear tenure as CEO began, and M-PESA accounts for 98% of mobile money in Kenya, which itself has a third of the globe’s 61 million mobile money accounts. But there’s plenty of room to grow. In Kenya, 90% of transactions are currently cash. Mobilised money M-PESA was launched in 2007 in Kenya by Safaricom and is now used by 16.8 million active customers worldwide, who make more than $1.24bn worth of person-to-person transactions per month. The system is based on text message technology, meaning that M-PESA customers only need a feature phone to access it. The service has since been extended to Egypt, India, Lesotho, Mozambique, Tanzania, South Africa and Afghanistan. In 2014, it launched in Romania, enabling unbanked Romanians to use their mobiles to pay utility bills, make deposits and withdraw cash. Customers can use M-PESA to transfer sums as little as one new Romanian lei ($0.31) up to 30,000 lei ($9,275) per day. They can even use the mobile currency to pay for goods such as newspapers or coffee at participating stores. The service is addressing a key need in Romania. As Vodafone (part owner of and partner to Safaricom) director of mobile money Michael Joseph says: ‘The majority of people in Romania have at least one mobile device, but more than one third of the population do not have access to conventional banking.’ For the seven million Romanians who transact mainly in cash, M-PESA could be a lifeline.

Radiating outward For Safaricom, M-PESA’s development and popularity has led to a more fully expanded role for the brand in the market. ‘Safaricom is the catalyst that has transformed the country at grassroots level. Although it started as a telecommunications company, it is providing services to each and every sector,’ Gaurav Singh, general manager of WPPaffiliated Scangroup told Contagious. As the impressive list of ancillary services and users for M-PESA grows around the world, it’s especially worth looking at what the service has targeted as another infrastructural leap: medicine. In 2012, Safaricom teamed up with Call-a-Doc to launch mobile health tool called Daktari 1525. This gives Safaricom’s subscriber base the ability to receive expert advice on health issues 24/7 – just by dialling 1525 on their mobiles. This is an invaluable service in a country where one doctor attends to 10,000-plus patients but more than 70% of people have a mobile phone. Mobile health services are burgeoning across Africa, where mobile penetration has outstripped infrastructure development including paved roads and access to electricity and the internet. A report by The Global Observatory for eHealth, a special mobile health unit established by the World Health Organisation, estimates that up to 40 African countries are using mobile health services. Large countries with several phone operators – such as Ethiopia, Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya – are leading the way, but the momentum across the continent as a whole is already considerable and growing. Bigger business Last year, Safaricom launched a mobile banking service for its customers called M-Shwari. The service enables Safaricom customers to save money and apply for loans using their mobile phones instead of a traditional bank account. M-Shwari was launched in collaboration with the Commercial Bank of Africa, and in the first three months the service accumulated 1 million registered users and deposits of nearly 1bn Kenyan shillings ($11.6m). M-Shwari enables users to deposit as little as 1 shilling ($0.01) and borrow as much as

Transforming lives: Safaricom’s mobile money services M-PESA (above) and M-Shwari (left); campaign for health tool Daktari 1525 (above left)

Our success is not measured by the profits we make, but by the difference we make Bob Collymore, Safaricom

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Takeouts Think tools / Empowerment is different from CSR or Purpose in that it puts power into the hands of the people. What would be impossible for a user without your brand or one of its services? If just that tool were dropped, fully formed, into a hypothetical world, what would happen? Partner up / Identifying kindred spirits will not only help you have shoulders to cry on when things inevitably get hard, it’ll also allow a tool to have a broader relevance than your imagination. You’re smart, but limited. Augment your vision by finding allies. Stay gold / While it’s always important that project ambitions are grounded in reality, truly empowering services don’t let cynicism impact an idea’s ethos or values. Sticking to the dream of delivering a truly revolutionary experience or transformative service is central to creating something actually empowering.

100,000 shillings ($1,160). To be eligible for an M-Shwari loan, users must be a Safaricom customer, have used M-PESA for at least six months and have deposited money into their M-Shwari accounts. M-Shwari offers customers a 7.5% interest rate and requires them to pay back their loans in full after one month, rather than in monthly instalments. ‘You do not need to go to a branch and fill in application forms. Just one click on your phone and you will have a bank account at no cost,’ said Safaricom’s Collymore. ‘M-Shwari is a ground-breaking financial service innovation that will foster a culture of saving and allow Kenyans with no collateral to access micro-saving and loans products through the convenience of their mobile phones at very competitive terms.’ As Safaricom’s partnerships, including those with banks, grow, even more territories open up for the brand to bring empowering programmes to the market. ‘We want to make a big difference to the small, medium and micro-sized industries,’

Collymore said. ‘Why? Because 40% of the country’s GDP is generated by that sector. But what challenges do they have? A challenge around access to affordable financing, because that can be quite tough. We can say to them let us help you set up a website, let us help you manage your payroll, let us give you some accounting software. ‘We’ve often said M-PESA is not a banking product, it complements banking products. In itself it’s a payment product. It gets rid of a lot of corruption, particularly in terms of revenue collection, such as if you want to collect car-parking fees or licence fees.’ This summer, Kenyan regulators ruled any and all mobile subscribers in Kenya could use M-PESA, a blow to the premium that Airtel and other subscribers pay to access the service to transfer money. To compensate and continue to thrive, Safaricom must continue to innovate M-PESA and its universe of ancillary services to create more opportunities for empowerment and grow the economy in Kenya.

Opinion The third wave of tech empowerment How do you make the world a better place? Build the tools to do so and empower people to make positive changes, says Ethan Zuckerman, director of MIT’s Center for Civic Media

We’re at a moment 20 years into the commercial web, where people are asking questions about what they can influence and what they can fix. If you are a citizen and you want to have an impact on society, what’s the way that you think about making change? Looking for change through code is something that, at present, feels new and promising to a whole lot of people. What I think underlies this is the notion that systems are hackable. You should be able to look at a system, tinker with it and push the boundaries of it. This realisation has been at the base of a number of revolutions. The open-source software revolution, for instance. That great software doesn’t have to come from a company where everyone shows up from 9-5 and wears badges. It might come from a loosely organised global group of people working together towards some common goals. Disproportionate impact This is a serious change, the idea that by building tools from code you can have a disproportionate impact on what happens in society. That’s a very interesting and quite profound shift. It takes down industries and builds new ones. And that’s only possible because a new toolkit comes online. When you go ahead and develop Skype, suddenly Voice over IP becomes pervasive. You may not mean to kill the long-distance telephone industry, but you are going to, and didn’t have to pass a law to do so – you just had to win the market and win the norms. Where I think it gets really interesting is when we bring this into the African context with mobile payments. There’s a huge amount of change that comes with that first introduction of novel tech. The mobile phone provided technology to solve this edge case problem, ‘How do I make a phone call while I’m in the car?’. It became this core new capability within African society, answering questions like ‘How do we know where people are? How do we transact business? How do we deal with weaknesses in our infrastructure?’ Then there’s a second wave of innovation, African tech hacks on top of western tech, and then you get hybrid, which is leaning very heavily on the mobile phone network, but with a particular African use of it – it’s now turning money into code. Money becomes code, and then code becomes money on the other end of the system. All M-PESA does is formalise it and creates a much easier infrastructure for it. This is all based around the theory that in many systems, if things are really messed up, you are far better off trying to build a new functional

system than fixing what’s broken. When you feel like it’s very hard to make change through law, through norms or through markets because there are things that are breaking those systems, code becomes a particularly rich strategy. South-south problem solving What I’m hoping is that in wave three, we will celebrate Africa-focused innovation because it’s not going to change the developed world. The combination of local creativity and local problem-solving with international-level engineering, creates an interesting third wave that goes south-south. It’s basically developing-world innovation for the developing world, but potentially spreading from Africa to India and back. It’s a whole economy that is going to be quite opaque unless you spend meaningful amounts of time in the developing world and actually understand why this stuff is cool. When we think about brands, I think the most under-valued model is the ‘Build great stuff and ask people to do what’s right’ model. I’m fascinated by the idea of standing up and saying: ‘I love this, I want this to happen.’ The first thing is to ask: ‘What would you make if you just wanted the world to be better and you weren’t thinking about direct return?’ Because the nice thing about a brand is you can get all sorts of indirect return. You can basically say: ‘We’ve made something awesome, the world is a better place because we’ve made it and as long as you sort of connect it to our brand, we’re going to do okay, generating revenue in the long run.’ There’s no reason why you can’t go a step further, and say: ‘Hey, we are really lucky we’ve got reach, an audience and we’ve got a team. We’re going to build tools we think can make the world better, and we are going to use it as a way of constructing our brand as being a group of people who care about improving the world, not just selling shampoo.’ That’s potentially very, very powerful. The key is to start from the notion of what do people love, and how do you give someone something that they love. If you are a citizen and you want to have an impact on society, that’s the way that you think about making change. Ethan Zuckerman is also co-founder of blogging community Global Voices and author of Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection, out now from W. W. Norton.

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Strength Study / Collaboration

Collaboration We expect a lot from brands today – digital prowess and impeccable social skills – and it’s getting harder and harder to do it all alone. Increasingly, the most successful are soliciting a little help from their friends, working with partners of all shapes and sizes to build better businesses By Georgia Malden China is 10 years ahead of the West when it comes to social commerce. Understanding why and how this is – closely examining China’s trends, technology developments and user behavior – will empower Western companies to successfully anticipate customer needs in their own markets a decade from now. Razorfish invites you to an exclusive, highly curated four-day tour 2-6 March 2015. An insider’s look at platforms, technology and exposure to digital renegades who spur innovation and growth unlike any other market. Join CEO of Razorfish Global, Tom Adamski and the Razorfish leadership team in Beijing, Hangzhou and Shanghai to meet with game-changers such as Tencent, TaoBao and Sina Weibo, among others. Register your interest at www.china10.razorfish.com.

Illustration / Matt Chase

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f all possible futures, who would have thought we might be ordering pizza through our car’s dashboard? Thanks to a partnership between Ford and Domino’s in the US, drivers of the 1.5 million Ford SYNC AppLink-equipped vehicles are speeding into a pepperoni reality. Unlikely a decade ago, that collaboration is indicative of the kind of fresh brand partnerships that increasingly characterise today’s business landscape. Partnering is at an all-time high, with IBM’s biannual CEO study reporting in 2012 that more than two-thirds of chief executives planned to partner extensively, up from just half in 2008. In a fast-changing market, where your next competitors may come from anywhere, today’s most successful companies recognise that they need to look beyond their own boundaries to get ahead. External expertise In addition to a diverse set of brand partners, from Amazon to Spotify, last year Ford also opened up access to its AppLink platform to developers-at-large via its Ford Developer Program. Announcing the finalists of a hackathon the company ran in September as part of

CTIA Super Mobility Week in Las Vegas, global technologist at Ford, John Ellis, said about the strategy: ‘Embracing open innovation and engaging the software developer community is critical for the future of the connected car and ensuring that we continue to keep pace with advances in consumer electronics.’ The success of this kind of approach, the oneto-many collaboration, has been proven. P&G’s open innovation programme Connect + Develop, launched in the early 2000s when only about 15% of P&G’s innovations were meeting revenue and profit targets, has resulted in more than 2,000 agreements and helped to triple P&G’s innovation success rate. More than half of its innovation now comes from some kind of external collaboration. Other multinationals have since launched their own innovation initiatives, from GE’s hook-up with crowdsourcing product development platform Quirky to Nike’s new partnership programme Nike+ Fuel Lab. 1+1= 3 The sometimes-unexpected juxtaposition of thinking and capabilities that comes from collaborating introduces possibilities that neither party could achieve on its own. Take, for example, Sephora and Pantone’s Color IQ. Pantone has been focusing on consumer licensing to expand its business into a more lifestyle consumer audience. But this partnership goes beyond a limited-edition range based on Pantone colours and instead creates something of genuine utility for Sephora customers.

Colour co-ordinating: Pantone and Sephora teamed up to create Color IQ, a system to diagnose skin tone, so that customers can find an exact match foundation

Finding a foundation that matches your colouring can be insanely difficult. With Color IQ , users can diagnose their exact skin tone, map it to a Pantone colour (specially created for Sephora), and then find their optimal foundation. What’s more, it connects to their digital profile so they can shop online or on mobile, making repeat purchase easier and deepening loyalty with the brand. This is about aligning knowledge and assets in the creation of a new service that adds real value to people’s lives. Pooling data In this era of Big Data, some of the smartest partnerships involve brands combining their respective data sets to enhance the customer experience. MasterCard and roaming infrastructure company Syniverse, for example, teamed up this year on a service that links spend data to the geographical co-ordinates of cardholders’ mobile phones to verify whether users are in the same place as their card. The aim is to prevent credit-card fraud, as well as reduce the number of genuine transactions that are declined, which currently stands at 50-80%. The initiative, therefore, removes problems for cardholders, while saving MasterCard the cost of recovering any fraudulent transactions and helping to instil faith in the brand. Meanwhile, American Express has embarked on a range of partnerships to differentiate its brand and appeal to a younger audience, from its tie-up with TripAdvisor that links card members’ spend data with their social recommendations to its more recent integration with Uber that enables card members to use their reward points to pay for taxi rides. Commenting on the TripAdvisor deal in October 2013, Stacy Gratz, vice-president, international digital partnerships and social media strategy at American Express, said: ‘We want to be seen as more than just a payments company… we want to make sure we are creating experiences so people say, “Wow, I wouldn’t expect American Express to partner with this group.”’ All shapes and sizes Today’s successful brands are showing themselves to be flexible and able to work with partners of very different kinds. One of the most lauded startups of the past few years, online eyewear retailer Warby Parker, has pursued a steady stream of collaborations since it was founded in 2010. Partners have included musician Beck, supermodel Karlie Kloss, charitable architectural organisation Architecture for Humanity, record label Ghostly International and even Warner Bros on a set of Superman-inspired frames for the release of Man of Steel. For Warby Parker, collaborations are about finding different ways of telling its brand story and creating reasons for people to talk about it. In an interview with SmartPlanet last year, co-founder Neil Blumenthal said: ‘As for partnerships, the way

Slice of the action: Domino’s Pizza Mogul application allows customers to create their own pizza, share it on social networks, and earn a percentage of the takings

we evaluate what we want to do is through this decision filter: is it authentic to who we are and the brand? Is there a narrative to tell that makes sense? Do people want to talk about it at dinner? Is there virality baked in? And finally, does it have a positive impact and do good in the world?’ The approach is paying off: more than half of its traffic and sales comes from word of mouth. Partnerships are also fundamental to furthering the brand’s buy-one, give-one social mission. Warby Parker has sold more than 1 million pairs of glasses to date, and at the same time distributed an additional 1 million to people in need, with the help of partners including non-profit VisionSpring. Collaborating with consumers One of the biggest shifts of the past decade has been the rise in brands working more closely with their customers in the development of their business. This goes beyond crowdsourcing a big ad through a contest to inviting consumers to have a say in how you run parts of your business. This approach is increasingly becoming the hallmark of the most successful companies. According to IBM’s CMO Insights Study 2014, businesses that invite customers to play a part in shaping their strategic direction and the products and services they offer are 59% more likely to be outperformers. A prime example is Starbucks’ My Starbucks Idea platform, which celebrated its fifth birthday last year with the announcement that more than 150,000 ideas had been submitted and 277 brought to life. Ideas put into development as a result of community discussions include skinny drinks, drive-thrus and new f lavours such as Mocha Coconut Frappuccino. My Starbucks Idea also acts as a valuable real-time CRM platform, giving consumers a space to voice concerns and Starbucks a rich source of insight. What, crucially,

My Starbucks Idea demonstrates is that collaborating effectively, and authentically, requires brands to be prepared to act on people’s suggestions. Rewarding customers for their participation can go beyond intangible benefits to financial rewards. A case in point comes from Domino’s Pizza in Australia. The Pizza Mogul application takes the ‘create your own pizza’ concept and turns it into a way for people to make money from sales of their designs. Pizza enthusiasts can give their creation a name, share it to their social networks and earn a slice of each pie. Domino’s Pizza Australia founder Don Meij reported in August, six weeks after the initiative launched, that the top moguls were earning up to $5,000 per week. There’s a clear win-win here. Domino’s gets an army of people driving sales on its behalf. In return, it gives up a percentage of its takings. Toward mutable brands True collaboration can be something of a holy grail – with fears of competitive risk, revealing proprietary information and sharing gains with a third party. The real strength that we see emerging lies in not only being prepared to share credit, but to let go of the reins to create shared value. Witness Tesla’s announcement this summer that the electric vehicle brand was releasing its patents in a bid to move the whole industry forward. In today’s culture of open-source technology, peer-to-peer platforms and social media, there is an expectation on brands to be more open – not to exist in isolation but to co-operate with others, including consumers themselves. Those with the confidence to embrace this way of working recognise that a strong brand is not a monolithic and sealed entity, defined by one-way impenetrable communications. Instead, it is permeable and mutable, shaped by the input of others.

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Consumers have very strong associations with what the brand is and what it isn’t. It’s really important that we understand and respect this

f ilm’s creation. ‘They were very inf luential on story, script, every major casting decision, every director decision,’ producer Dan Lin told Bloomberg Businessweek. ‘It’s a hybrid movie made out of [computer graphics] and real bricks. They co-built the movie.’ Even the marketing was collaborative. In a first for UK TV, and a beautifully playful reinvention of standard advertising practices, PHD London worked with several other brands including BT and Confused.com to construct an entire ad break with each brand’s advert recreated in LEGO. The Awesome Alliance platform, meanwhile, developed by Konstellation, Copenhagen, invited families to complete missions based on the movie, then share their creations on social media. And then, of course, there was the ReBrick film competition, which gave budding LEGO film-makers their five seconds of fame within the film itself. Celebrating the fans LEGO has an advantage: its ardent following of highly engaged users who have long been sharing their creations. Peter Espersen is head of community co-creation and one of the brains behind ReBrick, its bookmarking site for teenage and adult fans. He estimates that there are between 15 and 20 million pieces of LEGO-inspired, user-generated content spread across the web, from Flickr and YouTube to a host of individual LEGO fan sites. ReBrick attempts to tie them all together, amplifying the great things people are making. It does this not just by enabling people to share and discuss their creations in a central hub, but also by generating spikes of interest via crowdsourcing initiatives such as The LEGO Movie competition. Although the ReBrick website was made by LEGO, everything on it is fan-driven – from content moderation to the name itself, chosen in collaboration with the community, which has become something of a crucible for the brand. ‘There’s a lot of sense-making happening between consumers themselves about what LEGO is. They have very strong associations with what the brand is and what it isn’t,’ says Espersen. ‘It’s really important that we understand and respect this.’

Brand Spotlight Lego

The creative possibilities of the humble brick are in finding the right pieces to put together. And LEGO is proving itself as adaptable as its core product when it comes to collaboration and co-creation

film dedicated to those fans: the screens behind him show five movies created by LEGO users, submitted via a competition on the brand’s social media platform ReBrick. It’s cool when you’re part of a team The LEGO Movie dominated headlines for the company this year, not least when LEGO announced in September that it had overtaken rival Mattel as the world’s largest toymaker by sales, driven in large part by the success of the film and its associated product line. But this unlikely blockbuster also spotlights the multiple ways LEGO collaborates to build its brand. The partnership with Warner Bros is itself the culmination of years of working together on

co-branded consumer products. The toymaker’s relationship with Hollywood goes back to 1999 when it signed a deal with George Lucas’s iconic Star Wars franchise. Since then, licensing has been fundamental to how the company works with external partners to constantly reinvent itself for children hungry for the next new thing. The film is a showcase of those partnerships, bringing together characters from DC Comics and Disney, among others, in the kind of glorious, imaginative mash-up that replicates the way kids play with LEGO. The film’s production process bore the same collaborative hallmark. While the film-makers praised LEGO for not controlling the storyline, the toy company was heavily involved in the

LEGO images used by permission,® 2014 The LEGO Group

ook at all these things that people built. You might see a mess… What I see are people inspired by each other and by you. People taking what you made and making something new out of it.’ So says Emmet, the hero of The LEGO Movie, as he tries to stop Lord Business from gluing the universe irreversibly together: it’s both the inspirational, climactic message of the film and the rallying cry for the imaginative potential of the plastic block. It’s also the spirit of how LEGO collaborates with its fans: giving them the space and the tools to constantly reimagine what can be done with the brand, both in terms of product development and marketing. And it’s fitting that as Emmet says these words, there’s an Easter egg in the

Peter Espersen, LEGO

Learning to play nicely LEGO hasn’t always recognised the importance of its fans. A key turning point was the release of the computer-controlled Mindstorms range in 1998. Within weeks it had been set upon by hackers, who – foreshadowing the later hacking of Xbox Kinect – opened up new possibilities by modifying the product in ways the company hadn’t foreseen. Initially, LEGO wanted to fend off the hackers, but then it realised the value of this consumer input, and invited them in. The next generation of the Mindstorms product was co-developed with an elite group of users, and when LEGO

Building blocks of animation: designers from the company worked with the filmmakers to create The LEGO Movie

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LEGO Ideas acts as a way to capture consumers’ ideas and tap into what could prove successful in the marketplace. The platform has so far spawned eight new models, including a replica of the Ghostbusters Ecto-1 as well as the Exo Suit Mindstorms NXT was launched in 2006, the firmware was released as open source. The lessons from Mindstorms about the benefits of involving adult fans have had repercussions across the business. For example, the idea for the LEGO Architecture series came not from within LEGO but from architect and fan Adam Reed Tucker, who left his practice to join forces with the company in 2007 to develop the project. The partnership has helped LEGO open up previously untapped markets such as museums and souvenir shops. Tucker is one of an elite group of just 12 LEGO certified professionals worldwide. These are not LEGO employees, but fans who have turned their passion into a profession and are officially recognised by LEGO as trusted business partners. Crowdsourcing NPD LEGO has also been f lexing its muscles with one-to-many collaboration via its crowdsourcing platform LEGO Ideas (previously LEGO CUUSOO). This helps solve what Espersen calls the ‘idea tyranny’, which sees the company inundated with thousands of unsolicited ideas it has no process to deal with. The site acts as a way both to capture those ideas, and to tap into what’s trending and could prove successful in the marketplace. Users submit their designs to the site to be voted on by the community. Those that receive 10,000 votes are then reviewed by LEGO to see whether they will go into production. People whose ideas are selected for production are rewarded with 1% of the total net sales of the product. So far, the platform has spawned eight new models, including a replica of the Ghostbusters Ecto-1 and the Exo Suit, a kind of homage to the original LEGO Classic Space theme, with a bit of Tony Stark thrown in. For this, LEGO involved the community not only in the design of the product, but also its marketing. Together with LEGO, a crack team of fans hand-picked by the Exo Suit’s creator, Peter Reid, workshopped the suit’s backstory, the artwork for the box and the launch campaign itself, including teaser images, blog posts and videos.

This kind of collaborative effort is a clear winwin. LEGO is exposed to new ideas and talent; users get to influence new product development and earn money off the back of their creations. But it isn’t easy. You need both the mindset and process in place to make it work, says Espersen. ‘When you do things like LEGO Ideas, it all seems nice and dandy from the outside, but it’s actually very disruptive inside the walls of the company. That’s something you need to manage very closely.’ Working with the competition One of its most disruptive moments came with the Minecraft collaboration in 2011. It was the third project to be commercialised via the platform, smashing the 10,000 votes target in just 48 hours and crashing the site three times in the process. The company fast-tracked the production schedule, bringing out the LEGO Minecraft Micro World set just six months later, and has since entered a more official partnership with the computer game. They make for uncomfortable bedfellows, given their potentially competitive nature. It’s a measure of LEGO’s willingness to let go that it has embraced the relationship, even involving Minecraft’s millions of fans in the co-development of the new line launched this November. ‘Credit to LEGO,’ said Mojang chief executive Carl Manneh in an interview with the Financial Times in July. ‘They could see us as competition and not work with us, but they’re basically just embracing it and putting a lot of effort into this project.’ Digital building blocks While LEGO remains rooted in the physical brick, partnerships like the one with Minecraft help it explore ways to use digital to enhance physical play. ‘What we’re finding is that if you are very good at writing books, you are not necessarily the best to turn that book into a great movie. You need somebody who makes movies… and in our case we need partners who can translate the physical LEGO experience into the digital experience,’ said CEO JØrgen Vig Knudstorp to the Financial Times.

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Opinion Open for business Blake Mycoskie, the founder and chief shoe-giver at the original One for One company TOMS, on building a collaborative marketplace, and the power of generosity to grow your brand while doing some good in the world

TOMS works with more than 100 ‘Giving Partners’ to deliver shoes, sight and now (through its latest brand extension into coffee), clean water to people in need. There have been alliances with high-profile individuals and organisations that have similar social goals, as well as partnerships with designers who bestow their cachet and credentials on their more pedestrian rubber-soled partner. Meanwhile, the launch of the TOMS Marketplace ecommerce platform has led to the brand using its leadership to curate a network of smaller social enterprises, bringing together partners and customers alike around a set of shared values. Here, Blake Mycoskie explains the value of collaboration to the brand, and what the future holds for partnerships. Another such partner is Google, with whom LEGO collaborated to bring bricks to the web using 3D graphics technology. The Build with Chrome platform was pioneered by the Google Chrome team in Australia, working with M&C Saatchi/Mark, Sydney, and North Kingdom, Skellefteå, but opened up more widely in January to coincide with the launch of The LEGO Movie. Now people anywhere can build their own LEGO creations, using digital bricks, and place them wherever they want in the world using Google Maps. It’s a charming tool, complete with lessons on becoming a Master Builder provided by Vitruvius from the film (though sadly not voiced by Morgan Freeman), and is indicative of the kind of flexibility that LEGO is demonstrating when it comes to working with partners. Humble beginnings… and endings But it hasn’t all been plain sailing. LEGO learned the hard way this summer about the power of internet mobilisation and the risk of a misplaced alliance when Greenpeace released a video spoofing The LEGO Movie in protest against the company’s partnership with Shell.

The film drew more than 6 million views and 1 million signatures urging the toy company to ‘stop playing’ with the oil conglomerate. Eventually it capitulated, announcing that it would not renew the contract at the end of its term. While some criticised LEGO for bowing to Greenpeace’s strong-arm tactics, there’s humility in the move too: an acknowledgement of public sentiment and recognition that the context in which the partnership was made is no longer relevant in today’s climate. Espersen, meanwhile, is humble about the steps that the company has made so far in its collaborations with consumers, acknowledging that there may have been a bigger impact on the brand than on the company itself. ‘I think we’re seen as very edgy and innovative, and a lot cooler than we used to be because we involve consumers. I think we are just trying to catch up to the good PR we’re getting.’ And when we praise him for LEGO’s collaborative nous he corrects us with a rebuttal worthy of Emmet himself: ‘I would like to say, when people say, “Oh my goodness, you do some great things,” no, actually our users do some great things, with the things we provide for them.’

Takeouts Give and get / Collaboration can deliver expertise, ideas and talent that you don’t have inside your company, opening up new business opportunities and revenue potential. But you need to give too, whether that’s by sharing knowledge, earnings or credit. Release control / Not everyone is prepared to dispense with patents and IP, but having the confidence to let go can take you in directions you might never have dreamt of on your own. Set clear boundaries / As in any good relationship, people need to know where they stand. Be transparent and clear about your rules of engagement and make sure you have the framework in place to manage the process.

We refer to TOMS not as a company, but as a movement. What we’re trying to create through our company is this ideology shift of using business to improve lives, and the idea that it isn’t a competitive marketplace but a collaborative one. The more people share in this idea of using business for good, the more the customer will come to demand it of all companies. And I think that’s when the game is won in a sense, when business as a whole is shifted globally not from just focusing on profit, but focusing on people and the planet as well. Collaborating is a really key part of that. It’s also about uplifting other brands. Sometimes the market leaders are seen as the behemoths. Take Microsoft or Google, or any other company that’s first to do something and rises to prominence – often, they’re seen as trying to keep the competition out. I hope people see TOMS as the exact opposite. Despite being the market leader and originator of One for One and an early company to embrace a social entrepreneurial purpose to business, I hope people think: ‘Wow, TOMS opened a marketplace to help promote other companies instead of just doing all these ideas itself.’ Sum over parts There are so many different collaborations we’ve done, I wouldn’t say one was more successful than another. It’s really more about the sum, not about the individual collaborations. You do something with Ralph Lauren or Tabitha Simmons from a fashion design standpoint that has

been amazing, but then you also do something with Charlize Theron or Charity Water that really highlights the giving and the good work that they’re doing. And then you do something with Element Skateboards, where you help create skateboards for kids and a skate park in Africa – they’re all so different. The real success is in the community and the movement around TOMS and other companies that are doing this type of business. The biggest lesson is making sure that both parties clearly identify what they hope to get out of the collaboration. Setting clear expectations is really important. But it’s also about looking at both organisations’ communities and fans, because it’s not just about connecting based on whatever product or thing we promote, but involving communities too, and seeing how we get them to be excited about this and celebrate on different platforms. Power of the new Collaborations help with that because they can galvanise fans online. It’s the newness – people want new things from brands. Collaboration allows you to do something with the brand that’s not traditional, that’s a little different or unexpected. On some level it’s collectible too, because you don’t usually do collaborations for very long, especially the limited editions. Where it’s headed is cross-industry. Previously, you saw a lot of fashion brands, high and low, collaborating. So you had Karl Lagerfeld for H&M or Stella McCartney for adidas. What you’re seeing now is cross-industry: so a brand like TOMS collaborating with a hotel company to create an experience to help the homeless. That’s more where the future of collaboration lies. It allows the brand to speak to a bigger audience, and it allows the audience to experience something different and new from the industry than they would normally experience. We’re talking to banks, hospitality companies, restaurants, food and beverage companies. Right now more than ever, we are open for business for collaborating. For us, the give is just a part of what we do. I don’t look at it as easy or hard. Where things go wrong is if it’s not authentic. If it’s authentic and it’s real, it works really well.

Strength Study / Culture

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Though it’s often unfairly lumped in with that most anodyne element of branding – values – today company culture is marketing. And for a lucky few it has become brand dynamite that galvanises employees and delights customers

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n This Is A Generic Brand Video, Kendra Eash, associate creative director at Edelman, assumes the role of scriptwriter and disparagingly dissects clichéd corporate brand videos. The opening lines of her poem set the tone: ‘We think first of vague words that are synonyms for progress, and pair them with footage of a highspeed train.’ If the YouTube channels of Fortune 500 companies and startups offered a goldmine of inspiration for Eash’s witty observations, then the ‘values’ paraded on corporate websites would be a paradise for a follow-up. All too often these worthy vows are, on closer inspection, truisms or promises so vague that they can be considered little more than corporate wallpaper. As Eash writes in a later verse, ‘Equality, innovation, honesty, and advancement are all words we chose from a list.’ Yet, in recent years, the technology-induced drive towards transparency has demanded that more light is shed on the inner workings of companies and that their brands speak truthfully to genuine corporate behaviour. Meanwhile, a new generation of workers has been building multibillion-dollar global companies from scratch. From organisational design to office layouts, they have set about redefining company culture in their own terms. Today, the elements that forge together to form work culture can hold tremendous marketing potential.

Pizza Turnaround: Domino’s released a warts and all film as part of an effort to be more open about its company culture

Transparency triumphs In the decade that Contagious has been championing the new, brave and bold in brand-funded innovation, corporate behaviour has come under increased scrutiny. Consumer power has grown in tandem with technology, making information about companies more accessible and people more likely to act on it, with tools to help them rapidly self-organise and exert their influence. Brands

live in the minds of consumers through customer reviews on Amazon, user-generated content and employee tweets, as much as through sparkly, top-dollar TV adverts. In fact, 86% of customers trust word-of-mouth recommendations compared with the 62% who trust ads on the telly, according to research from Nielsen. Corporations have spent the past decade sensing that the ‘control’ they exert over their brand has been on the wane, and they’ve been right. Should a company now fail to align what it says with the way it behaves, its inconsistencies are more likely to be found out and are also more damaging. Recently, a photo emerged online of a poster meant for staff of UK supermarket Sainsbury’s that was mistakenly displayed in a shop window for the public to see. It encouraged staff to play their part in getting shoppers to spend 50p more on each visit, at odds with the brand’s public campaign for shoppers to ‘Live Well For Less’. A quick-thinking response from deepdiscounter Lidl, via TBWA, London, compounded Sainsbury’s embarrassment by publicly telling its own staff to encourage shoppers to spend 50p less on each trip. Brands that can leverage their culture to address tension have a powerful weapon. When, in 2009, a video emerged online of two Domino’s employees tainting pizza and laughing about it, the furore that the clip created forced the company into a soul-searching product rethink – as documented by Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Boulder, in the subsequent Pizza Turnaround campaign. The warts and all film traced the journey of the executives and chefs, featuring footage from focus groups and candid interviews. It paved the way to year-on-year sales increases of 14.3% by May 2010. Since then, Domino’s has pioneered ever closer collaboration with customers to ensure the misalignment between company culture and branding never happens again. Companies can also experience major business benefits by candidly explaining how they do things, without the typical rush of advertising adrenaline. Saddleback Leather, a premium manufacturer of leather bags based in the US, doubled sales when CEO Dave Munson used YouTube to take on counterfeiters. His 12-minute monologue to camera, How to Knock off a Bag, cleverly worked in insights on his company’s people and culture, leading to a major sales spike in January 2014. Another film, Tim and Susan Have Matching Handguns, profiled two company employees and was screened at Sundance Film Festival. ‘If more people would just share what they’re about in the business, they would do well,’ explains Munson. Digital first, culture thirst By 2019, Generation X (those born between 1965 and 1978) will be in charge, having spent two decades ‘bumping up against a grey ceiling of

boomers in senior decision-making jobs,’ trumpeted a Time magazine report on the future of work in 2009. By then, around half the workforce will also be made up of millennials, according to accountancy firm PWC. While outgoing baby-boomers take with them vast experience, for the incoming generations, digital is simply the way the world operates rather than something that happened to them somewhere along the way, and the nine-to-five has radically altered as a consequence. Constant changes in tech standards demand innovation to stay ahead. That’s a big ask of organisations that inherently value experience over merit. However, digital-first organisations have conversely thrived in this scenario by cultivating environments that help them to radically and rapidly disrupt and re-engineer the world around them. As Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt explains in his recently published How Google Works, ‘When it comes to standard of decisionmaking, pay level is intrinsically irrelevant.’ These companies encourage challenging ideas, even dissent, from anywhere and strive to do away with layered, traditional hierarchies. Far from this being a chaotic or distracting force, a strong culture – which is constantly restated and reinforced – keeps things on track. Baking in this type of culture requires methods that break with 20th century convention, and on occasion the results have gone on to pique interest beyond the traditional business-lit audience, entering popular vernacular. Netflix, the content streaming service, has no limit on staff holidays; online footwear giant Zappos has done away with managers and pays applicants NOT to join the company; the employees of Valve, a games developer, determine each other’s pay. Once, these internal policies might have been kept under wraps. Today, they are actively thrust into the limelight by businesses keen to prove their worth to talent, investors and even customers. Unofficially, communities like those on Glassdoor, an employer review website, do their bit to expose how things really are behind the scenes. Finding ways to best present culture to the world has therefore become an interesting task for HR and marketing, particularly in the hunt for the best talent. Netflix’s Slideshare presentation Freedom and Responsibility may have unexpectedly become the most viewed HR document of all time, with more than 9.5 million views, but the creation of Zappos’ Insights division is a calculated move. Paying participants are taught by the retailer how to cultivate a happier, more engaged culture for their own companies, while also attracting talent for Zappos in the process. Wolff Olins, a London-based brand consultancy, has launched Wolff Olins Kitchen, where its consultants and strategists teach – and show off – their skills

Hierachy-free: online footwear company Zappos has done away with managers

(such as ‘How to Workshop’) to a wide pool of learners, including current and would-be clients. Meanwhile, Etsy, the ecommerce platform for independent makers, publishes an innovative annual ‘Values and Impact’ report. Similar to an annual financial report, this openly details employee engagement and happiness benchmarked against the national average.

Could marketing and HR be called on to work more closely in the future, in an unlikely alliance?

The call for culture Could marketing and HR be called on to work more closely in future, in an unlikely alliance? The evidence above suggests that collaboration between the two can be fruitful for companies with distinctive cultures to share. Additionally, one in three companies globally now complains of a lack of talent, according to Manpower, and seven out of ten workers in the US are disengaged in their work says Gallup. Meanwhile, research from Edelman reports that just 18% of consumers globally trust business leaders. Being able to expertly capture and articulate culture – rather than merely choose words from a list – means tackling these considerable internal and external pressures.

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Brand Spotlight Etsy At online marketplace Etsy, culture is the business model, aligning the goals of its investors with its community of craftspeople, while meeting the needs of artisan-loving buyers and motivating employees

iven that Etsy, an online marketplace for handmade or vintage items, was prestigiously recognised by the Great Place To Work Institute in 2013 as being, well, a great place to work, what you’re about to learn may come as a surprise. Less than half of the company’s employees feel positive about their ability to accomplish all that is required of them in their work life. Additionally, a significant number feel they have questions about job clarity and believe the feedback they receive from managers about performance needs to improve. How does Contagious know this? Well, we haven’t had to trawl through online forums or scan the Twitter accounts of employees to hunt for a whiff of a whinge. Nor has a clandestine meeting with a trusty source led to a scoop. Quite the opposite, in fact.

A Great Place to Work: Etsy, the online marketplace for handmade and vintage items, received the accolade in 2013

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What we create in the office is going to be expressed on our platforms to our sellers, through our buyers, through marketing channels, throughout the support system Katie Hunt-Morr, Etsy

Etsy is telling everyone about it, whether you’re an employee, a job candidate, the media, a member of its 1 million-strong seller community, an investor or a buyer who contributed to the $1bn-plus sales on the platform last year. Its 2013 Progress Report is published online and includes the results of an annual employee happiness survey for all to see. In fairness, the good things far outweigh the aforementioned areas for improvement: 86% of employees feel positive about their sense of connectedness and trust in the company and 91% feel positive about their alignment to Etsy’s values and goals. But going back to the gripes: how often do you see that kind of admission of vulnerability from a company? It’s just one example of Etsy’s remarkable approach to its culture, which it has cast in a pivotal role on a journey to ‘reimagine commerce’ with the world’s makers.

Growth in kind Since 2005, Etsy has been a market for handcrafted goods. The platform is a delightful jumble (though easily searchable) of artistry, clothing, jewellery, vintage items and more – in fact, there are reportedly more than 26 million listings. For each of those, Etsy makes 20 cents and then receives a 3.5% transaction charge when an item is sold. A commitment against resellers and mass manufacture has fostered loyalty among the community and ensured 30 million artisan-loving buyers keep coming. It’s also proved enticing to investors: nearly $100m has rolled in from the likes of Index Ventures and Union Square Ventures. Getting to where it is today hasn’t been easy, though. As Etsy grew, technical problems plagued the site. In 2011, co-founder Rob Kalin gave way as CEO to then CTO Chad Dickerson, as the board sought improvements in performance. Since

late 2013, a policy overhaul has allowed sellers to work with manufacturers and employ staff under certain constraints. This has allowed some of those sellers to scale their businesses to meet demand, using emerging tools like 3D printers. But it has displeased some puritans who believe ‘handmade’ should always mean precisely that and suspect Etsy might be losing sight of its customers. ‘In trying to grow the business it’s actually about representing the 1 million small businesses that are on our platform,’ counters Katie HuntMorr, senior manager, Values and Impact team. ‘We’ve made a lot of decisions that have foregone revenue for Etsy as a company because it would have been at the sacrifice of their interests.’ This is where the power of Etsy’s culture comes into play. It is fundamental to the value proposition of shared trust between Etsy, sellers and buyers. In that respect, culture really is the business model.

Etsy’s Values ‘We are a mindful, transparent, and humane business’ ‘We plan and build for the long term’ ‘We value craftsmanship in all we make’ ‘We believe fun should be part of everything we do’ ‘We keep it real, always’

Plotting progress Like most companies, Etsy has a set of values, but instead of languishing in the backwaters of its corporate website, they’re the fabric of day-to-day work. ‘Our mission and values are the foundation of our culture,’ says Hunt-Morr. ‘They’re talked about at every level of the company, in meetings and all our communication. It’s not a requirement; just a genuine expression of who we are.’ A core deliverable of Hunt-Morr’s Values and Impact team is the annual Progress Report, which is used to both understand culture and inform day-to-day operations. It measures progress made by the company in terms of employee happiness, community impact and ecological footprint. Etsy is also designated a Benefit Corporation, part of which means its social and environmental performance, accountability and transparency come under rigorous independent assessment each year,

and the report also shares those findings. The Values and Impact team consults daily with different divisions on how to improve on the findings and implement values-based decision-making. This has been particularly important in recruitment. ‘When you have the people who’ve been around for a couple of years outweighed by the number who’ve been here for a year or less, it’s important to have those things formalised in a way that is understandable and absorbable by everyone,’ says Hunt-Morr. Office as community hall To look at Etsy’s offices in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighbourhood, one could easily assume the company was simply another tech firm competing in the perk-fuelled race for talent. Through another lens, the space really resembles the workshops, garages and studios of the sellers it represents. In

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some ways it’s run like one too. Etsy School, for example, gives staff the opportunity to share their own skills and talents with each other. ‘As the company continues to grow, it’s more important than ever to foster dialogues between co-workers in different teams, on different floors, even in different cities,’ writes Michelle Traub from the PR team on the school’s official blog. The office also brings the outside in. Twice a week local caterers and restaurants supply a communal lunch using ingredients sourced from New York State, New Jersey and Connecticut. ‘Eatsy’, as it’s known, is another opportunity to bring people together as a community, while consuming responsibly and supporting smaller businesses. Code as Craft Living the values like this is Etsy’s lifeblood. As Hunt-Morr explains: ‘What we create in the office is going to be expressed on our platforms to our sellers, through our buyers, through marketing channels, throughout the support system.’ Little wonder, then, that the engineering team embraces a motto of ‘Code as Craft’, taking inspiration from the makers it supports to approach their own work with the same ethos. As such, the team produces a frequently updated blog and hosts semi-monthly events of the same name that explore the topic and their experiences in more detail.

Trusty tribulations When Dickerson took the decision to overhaul the policy on ‘handmade’ items in 2013, he knew it would be a decision that could displease many. Far from shying away, though, Etsy went on the front foot and stayed close to its community. In addition to explaining the decision to the media, Dickerson fronted Town Hall meetings with its maker community that were broadcast online. Some of the attendees went to the heart of the issue, expressing their unease at potentially competing with small scale manufacture. Was Etsy selling out? ‘There was lots of anxiety about growing with Etsy,’ admits Dickerson. The new policies would remove the constraints Etsy was placing on sellers who were struggling to expand, without letting mass producers in. ‘Authorship, responsibility and transparency’ has emerged as a valuebased definition of handmade. It potentially presents a grey area over what truly constitutes handmade and relies heavily on trust between the company, its staff, sellers and buyers. This makes Etsy’s values and culture more important than ever. ‘Transparency of decisionmaking is huge and that’s internal and external,’ adds Hunt-Morr. ‘We talk a lot about why certain decisions were made and it’s always down to values alignment. It’s an internal compass for us all.’

Takeouts Culture needs to be heard / As businesses grow, understanding what’s going on at the shop floor level becomes more difficult, especially for senior managers. The Etsy Progress Report ensures culture has visibility and that efforts to respond are focused on the right things. Culture needs to be lived / For values to be meaningful and engaging rather than corporate wallpaper, they need to be lived in ideas, actions and day-to-day decisions. Doing so impacts and enriches every touchpoint you have internally and externally. It makes you distinct. Make someone responsible / Making values part of the day-today is hard as businesses grow. The Values and Impact team at Etsy consults with different divisions every day to help make decisions more instinctive and continuously aligned.

Opinion The rock of your culture In a volatile world, culture is the solid base around which you can build change, argues author and consultant Dave Gray. But it’s also the hardest thing to transform

Any human group, from a family to a nation, a startup to a global company, has a culture. It’s simply ‘the way that things get done here’. The things they talk about. The language they use. The things that are okay or not okay. Today, when it comes to companies, social media and the web have made many of these things, including the things culture doesn’t adequately address – the failings – more visible to the public. Those things were always there, but now they’re visible. This is a critical point when you think about marketing. It’s increasingly difficult for external marketing not to map out the way that things really get done. Goldman Sachs is a company that had one internal theory and a different one that it presented to the world. Once both were compared to each other, it had a PR disaster. Theory of organisation I believe that culture is part of something I call the ‘theory of organisation’. Companies that have been most successful in a sustainable way over extended time periods have a theory of organisation that is a unique and sound strategic fit for whatever is going on in the marketplace. It’s ‘the way things get done’ there, in the wild. IKEA, Southwest Airlines, Nordstrom and McDonald’s all have very beautiful theories of organisation, which (and this is crucial) their customers clearly understand. Amazon and Zappos are like this, too. Their cultures are distinct and very different, but that’s one of the reasons the former acquired the latter in 2009. Amazon doesn’t want to incorporate Zappos’ culture into its core business. But it does, I believe, see Zappos’ humanist, customer-centric culture as a legitimate alternative. Amazon is betting on automation and ease of use. Zappos is betting on openness and human relationships. With acquisition, Amazon in effect gets to bet on both red and black at the same time. Most companies, however, don’t have a cohesive theory. They’re constantly looking at successful ones, trying to find a template that they can apply to themselves in order to change. These efforts are doomed. While culture is the most stable thing to build any change around within a company, it’s also the hardest to change.

Green fingers A frequently used metaphor for a business is that of a machine, but working with culture certainly isn’t something that you can design by blueprint. It’s more like gardening. You can’t force things to grow. You have to create the conditions in which they can take hold. Companies grow better and more productively if they understand their own nature and try to support the things that they are trying to grow into. Therefore true power lies in learning to examine and understand culture, your company’s specific ‘way that things get done’. This is especially hard, however, for senior executives, because the more senior you are, the more likely there are people around you protecting you from the truth. To understand culture you need to truly listen to your employees and customers. Collect as many views as possible and overlap them with one another to see where resources and constraints lie for different people. Where there is tension, or pain, that could be a symptom of something going on that can reveal where the company wants to, and can, grow. The precariousness of market dominance Companies’ ability to come to understand their own culture in this way has always been important. But today, there’s more focus on it because hyper-competition is intensifying. Ten years ago the stakes didn’t seem as high to senior executives because there was a feeling that deterioration and decline were not imminent. Culture might be the next CEO’s problem. But now firms can be disrupted rapidly. It’s hard not to notice a company like Nokia, for example, going from dominant to an also-ran in less than a decade. No one is immune to these kinds of market shifts, so there’s an increased awareness of the precariousness of market dominance. But any company that has been successful already has the seeds of something special inside it. See it as being a doctor. You need to be able to probe and ask if it hurts because these pain points are signals of what a company wants to grow into. Dave Gray is a consultant and the author of Gamestorming and The Connected Company

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Feature / Job Title Safari

Job Title Safari

Passing quickly by the elephant’s graveyard of job titles with the word ‘Storytelling’ in them, we leave behind rational thinking and enter the creepy and the kooky, the mysterious and spooky witchery woods. It’s in this supernatural habitat that we may be lucky enough to spot one of the Abracadabramerchants of marketing, able to escape the shackles of joyless job titles, Houdini-like, and be reborn as Digital Marketing Magicians, Joint Magic Makers or perhaps even a Wizard of Light Bulb Moments!

The changing industry landscape has spawned a whole host of new job titles By Chief Taxonomy Wrangler

Our planet is home to a huge variety of marketing wildlife, with each individual species from all sides of the agency and client kingdoms locked in its own, life-long fight for survival. As the industry evolves, so too do the jobs required within it, and the names we choose to describe them. Our knowledge of some of these jobs extends back centuries. Others we’ve discovered only recently. It’s no surprise that relatively modern industries such as digital communications and technology have nurtured some of the newer and more colourful examples of taxonomical flora and fauna. Come with me now as we set off on a safari travelling from the Serengeti of search engine optimisation to the antediluvian plains of brand planning.

Narrowly avoiding a parting shuriken of shareof-voice as we leave, we arrive at an altogether more noble habitat. It’s here we encounter the alphas, the royal masters of the industry with a nomenclature to match. Scanning from a distance we catch a glimpse of a Digital Overlord just behind what looks to be a Content Marketing Czar. Each surveys his or her territory from atop a lofty perch.

If we pan across from this group, in an encampment no lower down, we see the self-appointed Spiritual Leaders of the industry. Here we find a world of those not satisfied with the limitations of power implicit in earth-bound titles. From the Evangelists (of anything) and Data Priests, to the Marketing Gurus, Supply Chain Shamen and Direct Mail Demi Gods this enterprising herd has had the vision to reframe their roles from the merely temporal to the spiritual.

We catch a glimpse of a Digital Overlord just behind what looks to be a Content Marketing Czar. Each surveys their territory atop a lofty perch

Any similarity to actual job titles, now or in the past, is entirely non-coincidental. The creatures described above can be seen in the wild by explorers armed with the appropriate equipment (LinkedIn). No marketing creatures were harmed in the making of this article.

Illustrations / Adam Nickel, Synergy Art

The first group we encounter is the warrior caste. Brought up in a ruthlessly Spartan state of nature where business is a zero-sum game of market share theft, these proud soldiers of Fortune magazine exist on a constant barrage of marketing as military analogy. The Brand Warrior sees every marketing task as a ‘target’, audiences that must be ‘captured’ and competitors that must be ‘encircled’ or ‘outflanked’. The near cousin – the great-crested SEO Ninja is no less martial in his ass-kicking approach, although perhaps with more of a taste for nunchucks than Nielsen.

Some may scoff at the idea of any kind of wizard being taken seriously in today’s corporate jungle. A more forgiving view is that it reflects the belief that managing the best brands requires an alchemist-like approach combining the magic of subconscious brand preference together with the science of rational purchase decisions. Maybe. Just as ‘Advertising Directors’ from the early days evolved into ‘Marketing Directors’ and then ‘Brand Directors’, job titles reflect an insightful view of how the relationships between companies, employees and their customers change. In the future we can expect this to continue, with new job titles that reflect emerging areas of marketing communications such as Director of Gesture and Experience or the cross-pollination of roles such as CIO and HR Director to bring forth a VP of Experimental Learning Capability. Or perhaps the increasing focus on mindfulness within the workplace will lead to new roles linking spirituality with business performance in the form of Commercial Brand Chaplains or perhaps a Pope of Pricing & Promotions? As widely and wildly as our systems of classification roam, what’s important is defining these creatures by their behaviour: flyers, swimmers or walkers? Or, to cut to the primeval chase, how do they respond when their mothers ask what they really do for a living?

Berlin school of creative leadership

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