Incito MentisA blog by Syed Abdul Karim

Planned Spontaneity - a term coined by trendwatching.com in their report from December 2003. When I first came across it I truly believed that it was an idea based on a powerful human truth that had the potential to deliver a compelling brand experience. In fact it was only last month I was thinking along those lines for an airline new business pitch. Coincidentally when I saw KLM deliver surprise the way they did I was…pleasantly surprised.

So what is ‘Planned Spontaneity’ anyway? If we look back at our lives I think all of us would recall some happy moment that occurred rather unexpectedly. It was either one that was completely unplanned, a random act of spontaneity or the product of a dear ones labor of love to give us a surprise and carve out an unforgettable memory. In other words – ‘Planned Spontaneity’. Applied to branding and marketing a surprise is a great way to create an emotional and an engaging brand experience.

Why the KLM Surprise inspires me is the “real time” factor. With the kind of technology and tools available today the time between research and execution has sharply narrowed down to real time events. Not so long ago research would take months to execute and analyze. The translation of an insight to ideas would be a long tedious process. After many rounds of presentations the idea would be approved and sent for execution in the form of some mass media. In the real-time era things are happening at lightning speed and on the go! The KLM team was tracking Twitter feeds and Foursquare check-ins in real time to see who was travelling KLM and is around at the airport waiting to board. Using the tweets or a check-in as a starting point the team would quickly scan the users social profile and come up with a surprise gift idea which would then be bought and delivered instantly to the passenger at their likely gate of departure! Amazing stuff. Check out the video below.

This is another great example of how to use social media. I think the key lesson for marketers is to to track social media conversations in real time and create a system to deliver an instantaneous response. We saw this happen with Old Spice and we are seeing it here again! Have you come across other acts of ‘Planned Spontaneity’ using social media from other brands? Feel free to share you thoughts in the comments below.

The Internet has done it again! Ted Williams a 54 year old from Columbus, Ohio – a homeless, jobless nobody just 3 days ago has not only got a home and a job! He has been a guest star on the “Today” Show, “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” and is now probably on his way to becoming a celebrity. The Internet has just created a radio star and all this happened in a matter of days. This is the world we live in. The world of Justin Bieber, the world of the iPhone playing Korean applegirl, Kim Yeo Hee who also got discovered on YouTube sometime last year and has signed a record deal since then. This is the world of “The Lonely Island” a trio from Berkley, California that posted some comedy skits that went viral eventually landing them on Saturday Night Live and now they are a famous Hollywood trio. Ted Williams is the latest entrant among the internet famous. This is the video which made it all happen!

The guy is talented alright! But is he the most talented voice known to man or are the forces of ‘The Long Tail’ at play? What just happened! It seems the Long Tail has bubbled up yet another niche and turned it into a hit! Chris Anderson is going to be proud. This is a great example of technology discovering something in the Long Tail of talent and bringing it out to the world. A reporter from Columbia Dispatch takes a video of the “Homeless Man with the Golden Voice” and posts it on their website, which gets reposted on YouTube, gets over 13 million views in about 48 hours, Twitter goes crazy with it and here I am in Saudi Arabia reading and blogging about this guy from nowhere! Amazing. This could not have happened just 5 years ago!

I just finished reading Freakonomics. Quite a book. It was long overdue but when I got to it, it flew like a breeze.  Stephen Dubner did a wonderful job capturing the insightful research and anlaysis by Steven Levitt. What really inspired me was his writing style - very engaging and purposeful. I will probably take a break with another book or two before reading Super Freakonomics. But I must say this was hardly like the Economics textbook from way back in business school.

So what was some of the key learning. For one, things are not always what they seem. ‘Conventional Wisdom’ maybe conventional but it is certainly not wisdom. It may seem quite obvious that the risk of a child getting shot by accident in a household with a gun maybe far greater than a child drowning in a house with a swimming pool. But quite the opposite is true. In fact most people would find a swimming pool a great thing to have in a home. Statistically however it has been proven that more children die from drowning than from a gun shot accident.

The same is true for riding in a car and flying in a plane. Mosy people are afraid of flying than they are of riding in a car. Why is that? Data again proves that flying is safer than riding in a car. In a car we feel more in control, especially when we are in the driving seat but in an airplane we are in the hands of someone we usually don’t even see and the unknown sparks a far greater fear in us. We intrinsically fear uncertainty. The more unknown the variable the greater our fear. But the point is this, what we believe or know to be conventional wisdom is not necessarily true.

Looking underneath the surface usually reveals a completely unexpected picture. Like the case of the sudden drop in crime in the United States and more specifically in New York. Surprisingly this topic has been a subject of many books and quite amazingly now looking at some of the examples in retrospect, this case has been used nicely to fit the context of whatever that was being talked about.

I don’t want to be the judge on who is right and who is wrong but in the ‘Tipping Point’ the context was that when small things are taken care of, when graffiti on the streets is removed, when broken windows and damaged street property is kept in shape it eventually leads to a Tipping Point in crime when suddenly the larger crimes being to reduce leading to an overall decline in crime rate. This was the apparent strategy by Mayor Giuliani to bring crime rate down in New York. In Freakonomics the reason for this reduction is completely different. After exploring a number of possible angles and then negating them Steve Levitt concludes that it was the legalization of abortion in the 1970s that eventually led to the reduction in crime in the 1990s. His theory being that women who usually seek abortion are women who for whatever reason are not in a shape or condition to raise a child, from being too young or too poor to everything in between. Therefore when they were allowed abortion it reduced the number of unwanted babies, babies who would not have been cared for, raised, educated and groomed in the same way as a mother who wanted a child and as result are more likely to perform poorly at school, drop out and eventually turn to a life of crime. Quite a theory but very interesting nevertheless.

Now having read Malcolm Gladwell’s Broken Window Theory to crime reduction in New York and Steve Levitt’s Abortion Theory you can’t help but think that it is unlikely both theories are true. I will let you draw your own conclusions, feel free to tell me what they are in the comments below. But I learnt one important thing. It is amazing how powerful writing can be as a tool to convince people and change their opinion. At the time of reading both perspectives I was equally convinced by each. Upon further research for this blog post I learnt that perhaps both are questionable but they both made a damn good case of what they were saying and they surely had me convinced.

These were just some of the highlights from the book. There are a lot more interesting examples and observations in Freakonomics that I would like to talk about. Perhaps in a future blog I will cover those as well, which if I keep to my promise should be not too far away.

It’s been a  little over a year since I started this blog. Quite a journey I must say. I learnt quite a few things about myself and quite a bit about blogging. My first personal learning was the realization that I really enjoy writing. I wonder how I ever managed without blogging. The most important personal benefit is the idea that when you share you learn twice over (a twist on the original ‘when you teach you learn twice over’). The very act of putting pen to the paper (or more like key taps to the screen) has been a liberating and refreshing experience. It has forced me, or rather inspired me to read more. From RSS feeds, to tweets, to magazines, books and more! Besides all the positive personal experiences I also learnt some crucial lessons about blogging itself. Lessons which I hope to apply in the year to come. At the same time I believe anyone who has recently embarked on the “Adventures of Blogging” or is considering a start should find these tips useful.

Lesson #1: Frequency of Posts

First and foremost is frequency of posts. To start with I wanted to keep a realistic target for myself – one post every month. Aiming for quality over quantity and trying to manage everything else in life made it seem the sensible thing to do at the time. Moving forward, for a number of reasons, I believe frequency of posting is critical. Not only does the quality improve as one writes more, it creates more content which in effect drives more traffic. Now how frequent is frequent is debatable. It’s definitely not once a month. From some professional bloggers I have come to learn that an ideal target should be four small posts and one big post every week. Quite a challenge but something I hope to embrace at some level in the coming year.

Lesson #2: Naming a Post

After analyzing my source of traffic over the years I realized Google has been a key driver.  I thought it would be Twitter or Facebook that would play a more crucial role but no doubt it’s Google. Now this is another profound lesson for me. Why? My naming strategy for my posts has always been to make them interesting and out-of-the-box. I believe they should catch attention in a Twitter Feed or a Facebook News Feed. If I am talking about Creativity and Viral marketing the title of the post would be something like “Remember Passing the Pillow”. Now this strategy would work out fine to get your friends or followers attention in a news feed but from an SEO point of view when content is being actively searched for this kind of naming will bear no result. Unless someone is looking for information on the party game “Passing the Pillow” they will not come to my page and when they do you can imagine how much time they would be spending there. Therefore my goal is to easily reach readers who would find the content most relevant.

Lesson #3: Focusing on specific content for a Post

I guess this lesson is related to both the naming strategy and the frequency of posting. When you write once a month you really want to make your post count. You want to be profound, which is great I guess but does not quite work for a number of reasons. You end up writing about a lot of things, lose focus and end up with broad titles that get you nowhere in web search. Imagine writing a post on Advertising and one on a specific ad in the Super Bowl. Which one is going to get you more traffic. Ofcourse this does not mean that one compromises on quality and focuses on things that simply drive traffic. But with a series of focused and relevant posts on advertising the reader will not only get what they are looking for but also get a glimpse of the larger picture if they so desire.

So going forward in 2011 I hope to write more frequently, focus on specific topics and use sharper titles that get the right people to my blog! Thank you Google for making it so easy to be found! Cheers.

Long time ago in a land far, far away Shoaib Qureshy, the man who introduced me to the world of Strategic Planning asked “What is the core purpose of our business?” Why do clients come to us? Is it because they want a TV ad? A poster? Or a campaign? The answer was IDEAS! They come to us because they want creative solutions to their business problems. If we don’t come up with ideas that deliver results then we have failed. It’s not about mega-productions or great art direction. It’s about creativity that moves people.

Creativity and ideas are very subjective topics. They are similar to a word we use so much in our industry – insight. Everyone has a different interpretation of it. Everyone talks about it but very few get it right when it comes to putting it into practice. I think both an insight and an idea require skillful craftsmanship. I guess it works like that for every industry. Watchmaking for example is a fine art of craftsmanship. Take Vacheron Costantin’s Tour de l’Ile. Known to be one of the most complicated watches ever made and only seven of them were produced. Each watch is made up of 834-parts and took more than 10,000 man-hours to be completed. It costs about $1.5 million. Of course the price is not only for craftsmanship – it has an 18-carat silver gold dial with an alligator leather hand-sewn band and a pink gold buckle.

The point being that in every line of work skill and craftsmanship are key. Creativity in advertising and marketing is no different.

So what is the point of this post? Well being in the advertising business I may not be responsible for coming up with the biggest and best ideas in the world but I am certainly witness to some of the finest. As a brand strategist I find ideas of all kinds very exciting. In this series of posts I would like to talk about different types of ideas. Obviously there is no formula to ideas but there is certainly a structure that one can learn form. Based on my observation of creative work here is an attempt to break down ideas and look at some structures that have made it big.

This post builds up on an earlier one I did for the Interplay Blog. It talked about coming up with big ideas in general. You can read it here if you like. Now I am taking the discussion further.

One theme of big ideas I have noticed are event ideas. When hunting for big ideas it is interesting to explore the dynamic of an event. The power of an event is exponential. Events provide a great opportunity to build hype and anticipation. One can either lead-up to something big or simply unleash with a bang and then amplify the experience post-event, which in the world of today means coming up with compelling content that spreads like a virus.

So what are some big event ideas! Surprisingly there are not too many of them, but whatever is out there is superb! I think it is one structure that is rather underused and it is route with a lot of potential. Here I am going to share two such ideas. The first one is T-Mobile “Rain of Flowers” and it’s beautiful. For a brand that promises ‘Life is for sharing’ a rain of flowers is the perfect event idea that creates a moment which everyone would love to experience and share. Check it out!

T-Mobile Rain of Flowers (2 Min) from Rosen Regen on Vimeo.

The second big event idea is a staged robbery! That’s right. Audi for the launch of it’s A3 decided to create an interactive spy movie that kicks off with a real-life robbery and then gets the audience to become private investigators on the hunt to find the new Audi A3. It’s a brilliant example of using the event dynamic to engage a target audience and then turn it into a full blown social media campaign. Here is the Audi – Art of Heist Case Video!

These are just two examples. Have you heard of a Big Event Idea? If so, please share. I would love to hear of more big ideas centered around events.