Grown Up Thinking

The Mr Youth Creative team was in good company Friday night. As guests at the One Show Interactive Awards at New York’s Terminal 5, we were both surrounded and inspired by an eclectic and talented crew of colleagues. Each year, the One Club recognizes the agency teams behind the most innovative and buzz-worthy advertising of the last 12 months.

Here’s our personal compilation of the “wow”-worthy winners that made us applaud hardest:
 
Kindling a community of composers…

“Sounds of Hamburg” | Client: Philharmoniker Hamburg
Agency: Jung von Matt, Hamburg
Award: Gold Pencil, Websites and Microsites: Services

Because at the end of the day “it’s just advertising”…

“Pink Ponies” | Client: john st.
Agency: john st. advertising, Toronto
Award: Gold Pencil, Online Films and Video: Self-Promotion – Single

An awareness-builder of a different kind…

“The Girl Store” | Client: Nanhi Kali (K.C. Mahindra Education Trust)
Agency: StrawberryFrog, New York
Award: Bronze Pencil, Websites and Microsites: E-Commerce

Comedic gold for the cause…

“Devin & Glenn” | Client: Overturn Prop 8
Agency: Furlined, Santa Monica
Award: Silver Pencil, Online Films and Video: Public Service/Non-Profit – Single

Crowdsourcing creativity to honor the Man in Black…

“The Johnny Cash Project” | Client: American Recordings/Lost Highway
Agency: @radical.media, New York
Award: Gold Pencil, Websites and Microsites: Social Networks/Community

Some other favorites:

“Fastball” | Client: Google | Agency: BBH, New York

“UNIQLO Lucky Counter” | Client: UNIQLO | Agency: Dentsu, Tokyo

“Pay With A Tweet” | Client: Innovative Thunder | Agency: R/GA, New York

“I Am Not An Artist” | Client: Elisava | Agency: Soon in Tokyo

“Nike+ GPS” | Client: Nike | Agency: R/GA, New York

“The Fun Theory Winner – The Speed Camera Lottery” | Client: VW Sweden | Agency: DDB, Stockholm
 
A hearty high-five to all of this year’s winners. Keep our seats warm.

Key takeaways from this SXSWi panel:

Alexa Andrzejewski, Cofounder and CEO of Foodspotting: People don’t interact for the sake of people. With Instagram and Foodspotting, people interact over a photo, an object. Apps don’t engage people, people engage people.

Jake Mintz, Cofounder of Bump Technologies: It’s hard to get the information/content noise down to a level where it’s valuable.

Boris Bogatin, CEO of NearVerse: Someday, there will be (50 people with) 50 devices in a room, each with their own profile, and mobile will automatically organize and connect everyone in the room. (As for right now?) At the end of the day, apps don’t make sense for the physical world. No one app is going to fit all your needs.

Chidi Afulezi, Director of Product Management at Turner Broadcasting: We don’t need apps for news, we need platforms. Can any one app handle the onslaught of citizen journalism during an event like the Japan earthquake/tsunami?

Keys to audience engagement: 1 – Creating compelling content: that is engagement. 2 - Build a colony of experiences around a flagship. 3 - Create two-way dialogue. 4 - Mobile web. Applications are the sexy thing right now, but we need to work on getting mobile web up to par.

I just sat in on a panel discussion hosted by Marci Ikeler, Director of Digital Strategy at Publicis. The focus was  on co-creating content in the social space and our need to adapt to real-time culture. As advertisers we strive to create ideas that will spread quickly among our audience. Ikeler says the key here is to adapt in real time and invite people to co-create in a way that’s comfortable to them without asking too much.

Marci says, “Whether you invite people into a community for co-creation or not, people are doing it on their own.” In the meme-tastic 4chan community, members can “bump” pieces of content as a way to self-select information they’re interested in. This is how members say they want to see more on this topic, and as Ikeler noted, “The best response you can get from your audience is that they want more.”

Will clients embrace a site like 4chan that can’t truly be regulated? She says they will because more and more things are being done in a crowdsourced way, advertisers will have to embrace that there will be content out there that’s off-brand.

So how do get consumers interested in produced or branded content when they could just go make it themselves? As one panel guest reminded us, “We as advertisers are the echo, not the boom.”

Ikeler talked through a few different strategies for effectively engaging your audience. “If you’re not creating ideas that develop naturally in a social environment it’s not going to work, you can’t just post any content in the social space and assume it will grow [...] Some videos aren’t as attuned to social spread and dialogue as more successful ones.”

Marci’s solution is micro-content: fast, small and sticky. Rather than coming up with a long-form, polished video, the most successfully social brands are posting micro-content more frequently. It can be risky to put that much content out there, but it allows advertisers to test which types of content and messaging will resonate best with their audience.

If 3,029,062 people “Like” Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook, could 18,976,457 people “Like” New York City? Rumor has it Mayor Michael Bloomberg just had a powwow with the world’s most popular dweeb to discuss pushing the Big Apple into the social realm (which is really the least Zuckerberg could do to redeem himself for that painful SNL cameo.)

The NY Daily News reports that while Big Mike has been somewhat vague about the details of the meeting, he believes “there’s a lot of potential” in NYC having its own Facebook page. Bloomberg’s even gone so far as to hire a Millennial to man the helm as Chief Digital Officer – 27-year-old Rachel Sterne (<< follow her!) There has been some criticism that Sterne doesn’t have enough experience for the position or its reported $115,000 salary, but I beg to differ.

What does her resume look like? Our new CDO is founder and CEO of citizen journalism site GroundReport, and was named one of America’s most promising social entrepreneurs by Businessweek, at age 25. Rachel’s also an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School, despite the absence of her own graduate degree. AdWeek even claims she’s “a bit of a darling in New York’s digital scene“. So, what else do you want? Social and digital is a relatively new space for city government to play, and I believe it takes a fresh and eager mind to understand, embrace, and stay on top of it all.

Equipping the Big Apple with a social media presence will do more than give New Yorkers a greater sense of city pride, it could be an efficient way for NYC to both communicate and collaborate with those of us who live here. I’m curious to learn more about Zuckerberg’s plan for how New York can use Facebook, and what our new CDO will bring to the table. What’s your social media strategy for your city?

I’m a huge fan of what Threadless stands for. They were in on the crowdsourcing game from the very start and ensured that the tees they produced had an audience ready to buy them. Fast forward, and other breakthrough fashion brands are ready to follow their lead.

Inc. Magazine recently published an article showing how Modcloth, an online clothing retailer, has tasked consumers with choosing the fashions they’d love to see on the site. This, quite frankly, makes everyone happy. Customers get the gear they want, and ModCloth benefits from taking the guesswork out of buying and creating an even more loyal fanbase.

Mass retailers could take a cue from this and build deeper community by inviting consumers to participate in the buying process through voting, commenting, sharing and demanding a specific product. While sites like Polyvore do a great job of allowing consumers to create and share a look, a deeper level of demand and exclusivity could be achieved. Why not let fashionistas reserve an item before it hits shelves (or screens) and receive a group discount for doing so?

By creating a group savings structure similiar to Groupon.com,  retailers could project inventory needs, thus eliminating a surplus and obligatory price slashing at the end of the season. Those who agreed to buy the product upfront win too, thanks to a savings perk.

The force and immediacy of social media could only amplify demand further through the sharing and voting elements. It would allow both brands and retailers to see if an item was trending high before it was produced or ordered. Who knows? Maybe there actually IS an audience for Duct Taped Prom dresses.

Many companies have long been trying to come up with a way to give people back relevant answers that truly solve the question being posed. Of course there are the search engines, some like (ask.com) even starting out trying to answer search queries posed as actual questions. Other services like Cha Cha have explored ways to use actual people to answer questions, in Cha Cha’s case, a network of paid reps.

The idea of getting an answer to any question  in a matter of minutes or even seconds has always been an dream and as Google has shown, there is certainly money to be had for efficiently answering people’s queries. Now, a startup may actually have found away to make this dream a reality. After recently discovering Aardvark, I may already qualify as an addict. I’ve asked 10 questions over the past few days, ranging from new restaurants in the East Village to the season’s best TV shows to where to find the best UX talent, and in almost all cases gotten extremely helpful answers back.

What’s best is Aardvark is completely crowdsourced and not just by random people. Aardvark uses Facebook Connect to tap into your network and their respective networks to find the best people to answer each question based on their interests, subjects they have added and questions they previously answered. Right in the heart of where social networking, search and crowdsourcing all meet, Aaardvark just might have hit the next gold mine.

Everywhere you look, media properties are looking to bring individuals into the coverage of what will certainly be a historic moment in US history. Just as Obama himself has represented the rapid changes from a one-way communication to an open two-way dialogue through his creative use of Facebook, YouTube, blogs and a variety of social technology, the inauguration itself will serve as a showcase for how new technology has changed the way we create and consume media.

From Twittering with Current while watching the live event to CNN’s partnership with Facebook that will allow views to watch and comment together by updating their Facebook statuses, savvy networks have caught on to the new consumers’ desire to experience events together and be heard. January the 20th and CNN’s ireporters coverage go beyond the main event itself and seek to capture and broadcast personal accounts from individuals leading up to and during this historic moment by making it easy to submit their reactions and observations easily via e-mail, phone, video and twitter. Perhaps most impressive will be CNN’s The Moment, where they are asking everyone attending the event to take a picture the moment Obama gets sworn in and e-mail it to themoment@cnn.com. CNN will then take all those pictures and post a 3D image of the entire scene, with all the pictures combines via Microsoft’s Photosynch technology, within hours.

While such a transformational momemt in history certainly accelerates this desire to share and come together, what we are witnessing is a mere preview of what the mindset of Consumer 2.0 will demand from all media and information they consumer. Millenials have grown up with e-mail, IM, texting and social technologies. They will continue to expect instant gratification, dialogue and a digital soapbox to speak from.

While this unprecendented election and now innaugaration has showcased many of these new technologies, you can’t help but wonder how long it could be till the Super Bowl, gameshows, sitcoms and even commercials latch on to the new mindset and find ways to crowdsource content and create deeper communities around their properties. While 2009 looks to be a slow year for the economy, it certainly will not be in the evolution of media and communications.

So, much has been said about Joe Six-Pack and the newly famous Joe the Plumber but convenient store chain 7-11 actually conceived of an ingenious promotion to use Joe to predict the election. In this case, a cup of joe. The idea is quite simple, 7-11 created red coffee cups with McCain’s name on them and blue cups with Obama’s. They then track the cups that their customers are selecting on a nationwide map on their 7-Election.com web site, which even allows consumers to view results by state. Even more remarkable, the results of this poll were within 1% of actual results in 2000 and identical to final results of the 2004 election. Guess Joe really does play a big role in this year’s election.

A 21st century (healthy, robust, and OFF LINE) romance has become an increasingly difficult feat of balance and skill accomplished only by the most adept. Now, I’m an old-fashioned lass. Doesn’t  take much more than a few adventurous meals and whispered punchlines stolen from The Big Lebowski to get my heart a’flutter, but even I turned to the teeming cesspool of online dating when I first moved to New York. I (without guidance) found almost immediate success, and have hence quelled my misgivings about meeting a mate in cyberspace, but finding (and keeping) love in the new millennium has now gone just a few steps further.

From crowdsourcing your lovers’ spats to tasking the inhabitants of a metropolis to help you find your dream companion, apparently relying on luck in the meatspace just isn’t enough to navigate the tricky waters of love. What’s more, young Japanese women are turning to the web to quell their loneliness via a new dating simulation/ social network called WebKare (or WebBoyfriend) to communicate with one of four anime digital crushes to win his heart through gameplay. 

Now, I’m all for gushy moments of overzealous, cheesy romance, but tracking your process of proposing to an unwitting fiancee is, as the great Walter Sobchek would say, over the line. Right, dude?