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It's clear we at a very interesting point in time.

Consumers could get impatient waiting for something to happen- the launch of the dream/ideal product that meets an unmet need.

Could they become so impatient that they band together and get it built and made themselves?

Could they circumvent the brand landscape and do it themselves?

The bad news, it's already happening and it's being driven by a media brand.

Techcrunch wants an internet tablet for $200 and since nobody is currently making one, they are going to make themselves. (Techcrunch is Dell Ideas not working for you?)

Do brands want to listen and step-up to the plate or going to sit on the sidelines and watch as consumers take the product creation business away from them?



Posted by Ed Cotton Colin Drummond and John Windsor of Crispin gave an interesting presentation at the AAAA's Account Planning Conference that showed some recent examples of the agencies work.

They had all kinds of rules to think about products, but I though the most powerful frame of all was CPB doesn't like advertising or think of itself as an ad agency, but as designer of products- even if some of those "things" happen to be ads- like "Safety" for Passat, but the manifestations can also be internet products like the pizza application for Domino's.

It's a smart way think about creativity.

The rationale being that ads are unbelievable and extra wrapping that takes you far away from the product.

Of course, they have also invested in real product design- a unit complete with its own clients, 3 industrial designers and a suite of 3D printers.

The team has helped them to create a new light bulb, a dog lovers kit for VW, a bicycle sharing brand and even a brand new model for VW- the I.T. an updated version of "The Thing".

This is shown below in this poor quality picture.


Posted by Ed Cotton "Jeff keeps saying planners should be like river guides, but I don't know where the river is."

John Thorpe- GSP


Posted by Ed Cotton Here are a few things are learned from Jeffery Rayport-HBS, this morning at the AAAAs Planning Conference in Miami.

1. Goofy males rule the web-the Star Wars kid has been viewed 600 million times

2. Brands don't yet understand how important the web is to consumers

3. Brands should use their most passionate fans - Gawker Stalker allowed passionate fans to geotag and post photos using phones..this created a 45% increase in traffic for Gawker

4. Within 38 months, the average Scion user spends the same amount as they spend on the car in accessories

5. Communities are based on; location, ideals, interests and condition

6. 60% of YouTube's videos are viewed on third-party sites

7. YouTube is taking up the same bandwidth today as the entire web did back in 2000

8. Daily Candy has a 96% open rate and generates $11 million in profit on revenues of $20 million

9. Apple has 1 million subscribers at $100/year for priority Genius access


Posted by Ed Cotton At the first unofficial day of the AAAA's Account Planning conference, teams of young enterprising planners participated in an interesting live briefing and presentation session for Planning for Good.

Over 30 young planners participated and crafted strategies for Kiva and Witness.

I was really impressed listening to the quality of the presentation in the Witness session I sat in; lots of smart thinking, passion and creative ideas.

It was really inspiring and I learned a great deal

A big thanks to John Kaiser and Karen Procter at the AAAA's, Marta La Rock, Maria McHugh, Anne Benvenuto, Jason Oke, Aki Spicer, Libby Anderson, Alexa Knight and Stephanie Redliner and to our great clients Su Patel of Witness and Jessica Flannery of Kiva.


Posted by Ed Cotton Iain Tait of Poke has an online video about why Radiohead are online geniuses.

The video demonstrates to me that we are now so absorbed in video culture and that the blog is dead, the written brief is dead and if you are a planner and you aren't making online videos, you will soon be out of job.



My Online Marketing Presentation About Radiohead from iaintait on Vimeo.

Posted by Ed Cotton Jean-Marie Shields, Head of Trends at Starbucks gave an excellent presentation at last week's PSFK conference in San Francisco.

It became clear that the brand is increasingly looking to Japan as a source of inspiration for the future direction of the Starbucks brand.

Tokyo's coffee houses and cafes are at the forefront of using recycled and natural materials for their interiors and being highly creative in the overall experience.

One example is the Otemachi Cafe which Metropolis Magazine reviewed a few years back.

"The café is almost entirely constructed from recycled materials. Wood and marble from the old Shin-Marunouchi Building were used to build the bar, old whisky barrels and scrap wood were transformed into chairs, and mobile-phones and plastic bags melted down to make the table tops. The space is eclectic, but never jumbled, and pervaded by an indoor garden..."

I think it's safe to predict that we will see Starbucks experiment with its store designed in the next year or so, perhaps rolling out some radical new pilot designs.

The brand is going to need to evolve to stay fresh and given that according to Jean-Marie Shields, the number 1 customer request on My Starbucks Idea, is for "Conversations", it would be good to have environment that's more conducive to that.



Posted by Ed Cotton The latest McKinsey Quarterly is a special China edition.

It has some great articles including a piece on the future of China's cities. The scale of here is quite incredible- McKinsey's Global Institute predicts that if country trends continue China's cities by 2025 will break down into the following sizes;

Mega- 10 million +

120

Big- 5-10 million

111

Midsize-0.5 mllion-1.5 million

311

Small-.5-1.1.5 million

228

Big Town- Less than 500k

156

The increase in the urban population will be 325 million, including 230 million migrants. Obviously, this will it not be without problems as land is taken to build these things, but the idea that one country will have over 100 cities with a population of over 10 million each is quite staggering.


Posted by Ed Cotton Spotted on Starbucks V2V online board.

"Nike is hoping to launch its own V2V "neighborhood" or platform in December and we want to learn from the starbucks folks, but also have a place where the Nike folks can brainstorm and post their advice/ learning about what the Nike version should look like..."

Will be interesting to see what form this volunteer initiative takes, but it sounds grassroots and smart.


Posted by Ed Cotton Critics have been pretty excited about the forthcoming PS3 game, Little Big Planet.

There's something very interesting about the game because it allows the users to play with and interact with levels and characters in a way that hasn't been seen before. Yes, there have been level and character creators in games, but they've always seemed like after thoughts and nice to haves, so gamers can feel involved.

Little Big Planet does something different- it makes these tools central to the experience and invites the user to play with them and create the game experience on the fly. The developers are basically giving users plasticine, a place to play and telling them to get on with it.

The openness here is a refreshing change from the authorship culture that we've been so used to- where the creators are gods and players are forced to play games in the way the authors intended. In such a world, there's little role for the user to play creator.

With LBP, as you can see from the interview with Alex Evans of developers Media Molecule, there's a tacit understanding that the 'crowd" might be better at creating levels than they are.



Obviously, it remains to be seen if gamers will embrace the idea of making games as much as they do playing them, but there's a clear lesson here for any content creators.

How can you act like a composer and allow anyone to recast and recreate your composition anyway they like.

Could we make ads that are more like games?




Posted by Ed Cotton