From The Head Of Zeus Jones

You might have caught this a few days ago, in a blog post at the NYT:

“David Dalrymple, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,thinks human memory will no longer be the key repository of knowledge, and focus will supersede erudition. Quote:

Before the Internet, most professional occupations required a large body of knowledge, accumulated over years or even decades of experience. But now, anyone with good critical thinking skills and the ability to focus on the important information can retrieve it on demand from the Internet, rather than her own memory. On the other hand, those with wandering minds, who might once have been able to focus by isolating themselves with their work, now often cannot work without the Internet, which simultaneously furnishes a panoply of unrelated information — whether about their friends’ doings, celebrity news, limericks, or millions of other sources of distraction. The bottom line is that how well an employee can focus might now be more important than how knowledgeable he is. Knowledge was once an internal property of a person, and focus on the task at hand could be imposed externally, but with the Internet, knowledge can be supplied externally, but focus must be forced internally.”

Originally I bookmarked this because I thought it was pretty insightful, but then later as I was trying to explain it to my wife, I realised it sounded like absolute bollocks coming out of my mouth. I don’t disagree that focus is an important skill, but to raise the ability focus and filter above other skills such as the ability to make non-linear connections or put things together in new ways feels a bit short-sighted to me.

Filtering and focusing are things that machines will inevitably be better at than humans so aren’t the important skills in the digital age things that make us more human, not more like machines? What do you think?

Technorati Tags: digital, human, machines, skills, thinking

The numbers are in and we’ve exceeded our goal! A sincere thanks to all of you who contributed.

A quick recap: Back in December we ran a fundraiser with our friends at Puny Entertainment to try to raise $7,000 to send the kids at Green Central school on a field trip.  Not knowing what kind of response we’d get, we built a website to tell the school’s story and offered three ways for people to contribute: donating money, shopping at the Box Tops for Education Marketplace, and collecting Box Tops for the school.

The results: We raised $6,170 in direct donations and Zeus Jones provided $2,500 in matching funds, adding up to a total of $8,670 for Green Central. It costs about $7,000 to fully fund a field trip for the whole school, and we’re thrilled to have raised more than enough to do that.

It’ll be another month or so before we can report on the Box Tops for Education portion of our fundraiser, but you can continue to support Green Central by doing your online shopping at the BTFE Marketplace.  And if you didn’t get a chance to donate during the Bus Drive and you’d still like to, give us a holler – we’re delivering a check at the end of the month so we’d be happy to add on your contribution.

Where the money is headed: We’re hoping to tag along as chaperones and photographers on the Bus Drive-funded field trips that Green Central students will take in 2010.  Stay tuned for updates and photos here on the blog.

Image via: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tbruce/

I think you’ll probably agree that a lot of our current marketing theory is based upon the almost invisible assumption that thought precedes action. This made sense in an era when marketing was limited to generating thoughts, but when we can build digital and physical experiences, thought is often a barrier to action. Things are often more complicated to explain than they are to do, and thinking about something too much is often paralysing.

In life, it’s far more common that action precedes thought. We learn by doing, and doing changes how we think about something. This implies that changed perceptions are often a result of changed behaviour not the other way around.

So as marketers, if we are trying to change perceptions then we should probably be thinking about the behaviour change required to do this. And if we are simply trying to change behaviour we shouldn’t put the need to change perceptions in the way as a barrier.

Happy new year!

Like Faris, I’m a big fan of recombinant culture. It’s the framework that underlies  many the things that most capture my imagination.

The example of this that I’ve been thinking about recently has to do with the remixing of the “Philosopher” with the “Man of Action.” Of course, the most visible symbol of this comes from looking at our past presidents. Clinton, was replaced by Bush, who has been replaced by a blending of both in Obama.

It seems to me that this is a framework that’s also useful in describing some of what’s happening in our industry. We can see this in the blurring of production-oriented companies and strategy-oriented companies. I’m obviously heavily biased but I think there’s a new-found respect for strategy, but only when paired with technical ability and not when delivered by traditional consultancies. On an individual level our icons aren’t the thinkers or the doers but instead they’re more interesting blends like Noah who makes the stuff he thinks about, and thinks about the stuff he makes.

I don’t think this is a coincidence, I think this is happening because this is precisely the combination that we need to deal with the times we live in.

As the problems facing brands become more and more complex, so do the solutions. Even the most meager social media presence can’t be comprehensively thought through or planned, nor can it simply be managed through doing alone. It seems to me that the right approach is to think as you act, to learn while you practice, to develop systems and frameworks through doing.

As the complexity of our work increases, the need for this approach becomes even greater. While it’s tempting to try to spend longer thinking about more complex problems, it’s often more productive to actually start doing them sooner. However, complex solutions require more stakeholders, so there’s an even greater need for developing frameworks and ways of thinking about what we do that can be taught and transferred.

There are, of course, fairly significant business-model barriers in bringing together these two different kinds of skills in a company. Production skills are often billed on an hourly basis, while strategy is typically priced based upon value. However, I think that the more difficult barriers are cultural. These two archetypes have historically been polar opposites and simply putting together people who embody one aspect with people who embody the other is a recipe for disaster.

In order to move a production company into a more strategic area, you’re probably going to have to alter your production staff too. Similarly if you’ve been a strategic company and you want to start doing, you might want to look at replacing your strategic resources first.

Technorati Tags: agencies, production, skills, strategy

A year ago, when we started working on General Mill’s Box Tops for Education, we started our research by going out and talking to some of the coordinators who run the Box Tops program for schools in this area.

One of the people we met during those initial interviews was Jerri Henderson, a special ed teacher at Richard Green Central Park School in Minneapolis. Jerri is also the Box Tops coordinator for the K-8 school, at which 97% of the students live in poverty. She told us how participation in Box Tops had allowed some classes to take field trips that they could otherwise not afford. Our conversation with Jerri really helped bring into focus the strong cause component to Box Tops, and inspired much of our work throughout the year.

Flash-forward to October, we started discussing what we should do for our Holiday project this year. Last year’s Gift Guide was a hit, and we considered doing an updated version for 2009. But then the subject of helping Green Central came up. We decided we should put our design and cause-marketing experience to work for the school.

The last few years, the school has made enough money from Box Tops to send one class on a field trip, but most of the Box Tops collected actually came from sources outside the school. So we did some math and figured out that if we could raise about $7000 dollars it would cover bus and admission fees for a field trip for every student. We figured we could get people to help in 3 ways:

1. Donate money directly, and provide matching funds for some portion of the total. We figured this would be the fastest and most direct way to get money to the school immediately.
2. Sign up for the Box Tops Marketplace, an online affiliate program that generates money for schools on online purchases. We worked on massive re-design of the Marketplace this year, and we’re proud of how it turned out. The new version allows even easier access to the 100+ retailers who participate in the program. If we could get people to sign up and select Green Central as their school, it could generate ongoing donations.
3. Clip Box Tops. Anyone who has young children is probably already familiar with the tiny pink designs worth 10 cents each. But our goal was to also motivate people who don’t participate already to go check their cupboards for them.

We then approached our friends at PUNY about helping us create a brief video to explain the situation and help us make a plea for help. We wrote a short script and had Zeus Jones employees do voice-overs. Then we handed it to PUNY along with some basic design elements and they did amazing work bringing it all to life. The resulting piece is, I think, blowaway cool.

Zeus Jones / Puny :: Holiday Bus Drive from Zeus Jones on Vimeo.

That’s how we arrived at the Holiday Bus Drive.

As I write this post, many generous contributions have put us very close to our goal, but we want to aim higher. Every dollar counts for this school, so please consider contributing in one of the ways listed on the site. We have a few “incentive gifts” for donations, but consider doing some Holiday shopping online through Marketplace too. It costs the user nothing other than one extra click, but could have a huge impact for the school.

We would love it if you would go to the site, watch the video and help us out if you can.