Business

For Wired UK’s “Work Smarter” issue (just released), I had the pleasure to speak with John Winsor, co-founder and CEO of Victors & Spoils (V&S), the world’s first creative (ad) agency built on crowdsourcing principles. You can find a shortened article in the Wired UK magazine. Here’s the interview in full length.

Q: V&S launched a few months ago. How is it going so far? How many clients do you have, and can you share some of the work that you are doing?

It's going really well. We're working with a … Read more

We need to rethink the traditional combination of CEO, COO, CTO, CMO and CFO. Back when companies were about routinization and optimization for efficiency and profit in stable industries perhaps this combination made sense, but in today's complex world it is woefully inadequate. As Dan Pink writes in his new book Drive, most organizations today are less based on procedural algorithms and must run on ad hoc heuristics. The tidy C-suite club of old just doesn't cut it in today's messy, disruptive, complex world.

There has been actually been quite a lot of action on this front:… Read more

Google is preparing an online store in which it will sell third-party business software to Google Apps customers, according to a report.

The Wall Street Journal says that Google's store could arrive as early as March with the works of third-party developers available as enhancements to Google's office productivity software suite. It appears the store would allow Gmail and Google Docs users to purchase add-ons for niche features too specialized for the mainstream Google Apps product.

Google already has a directory of sorts for these types of applications. The Google Solutions Marketplace contains lists and reviews of third-party … Read more

The launch of the iPad yesterday put an exclamation mark on an increasingly obvious point: Apple is the company that has captured the cultural zeitgeist. The massive hype leading up to the event--apparently achieved in a groundswell with very little effort on Apple's part--shows that it really is the "It" company right now.

Not so long ago, Google claimed that position. The amount of press ink (literal or virtual) that Google has been able to create every single day for the last decade is just astonishing--it is not uncommon to see two or three articles on the … Read more

As widely discussed by privacy advocates and blogs, Facebook recently changed some of its privacy settings. Users are no longer able to limit the viewing of their profile photos, home towns, and friends lists to only approved friends. Those are all public now by default. Moreover, Facebook’s new default settings “recommend” that dynamic content such as status messages and photos be made public. While the blogosphere still closely scrutinizes these changes and is aghast at Mark Zuckerberg’s "privacy is over" claims made at the Crunchies awards (he didn’t actually say it verbatim but his statements … Read more

Effective marketing is all about being remarkable. The new Mini Cooper campaign in Amsterdam is a good reminder of the golden rule: you create brand value when both your product and your campaign are being talked about.

1. Lean into the frame (hijack existing attention capital, in this case the street public);

2. Be disruptive (not necessarily provocative or intrusive). In other words: challenge people's routine by introducing an element of surprise;

3. Highlight your core brand attributes (in this case, and overall in the "age of micro," this actually and literally means making them "smaller … Read more

Google's introduction of the Nexus One, a phone to truly call its own, is a necessary move for the company. Only by taking ownership of the whole user experience will Google really be able to prove the value of its Android platform.

Nexus means a series of things connected together, an appropriate name for a phone where Google is taking more control of both the hardware and software, and therefore much more of the user experience.

We are at interesting inflection point with smartphones, a point where we have two competing development models playing out and a future in which probably only one will survive: Highly integrated, or highly modular.

Until recently, most smartphones have been modular affairs--with a few exceptions (BlackBerrys and to a lesser extent Palm Treos): hardware from one company, operating system and software from another company, wireless network from yet another. This has led to disjointed user experiences that have limited the appeal of the phones to more mass-market audiences. The success of the iPhone with mass consumers showed that it was vital to integrate all these elements together seamlessly (and that integration goes beyond the phone itself to content on the PC and in the cloud).

In the early stages of a category such as smartphones, the usage experience is often rough and incomplete. Early adopters will look past this, but until a more refined experience arrives that delivers the right recipe of capabilities, ease of use, and price, then the majority of people will stay away. I refer to this as an experience gap--a mismatch between what people want to do with a product, and what the products on the market can actually deliver.… Read more

For the first time in 23 years, Pepsi has decided to not run any advertisements during the Super Bowl. Instead, the nation’s second-biggest soft drink maker is plowing marketing dollars into its "Pepsi Refresh Project," an online community that lets Pepsi fans list their public service projects, which could range from helping to feed people to teaching children to read. Visitors to the site can vote to determine which projects receive money. The program will pay at least $20 million for projects people create to "refresh" communities. Last year, Pepsi spent $33 million advertising products such as Pepsi, Gatorade, and Cheetos during the Super Bowl, according to TNS Media Intelligence, $15 million of it was on Pepsi alone. Ad time last year for the NFL championship game cost about $3 million for 30 seconds, on average. Pepsi spokeswoman Nicole Bradley said Super Bowl ads don't work with the company's goals next year: "In 2010, each of our beverage brands has a strategy and marketing platform that will be less about a singular event and more about a movement." Pepsi's remarkable decision epitomizes the new paradigms of marketing: Online instead of TV; many-too-many instead of one-too-many; engagement instead of advertising; sharing instead of broadcasting; movements instead of events; communities instead of campaigns.… Read more

I attended the Trendforum in Munich last week, a two-day conference that gathered European innovation, marketing, and R&D executives to explore emerging technologies, social trends, and innovative business models. The program was eclectic and the content mostly of high quality. I was particularly intrigued by the opening session that intersected macro-economic forecasting with geeky trend evangelism as well as a humanistic pledge for meaning-driven business (in fact, the other sessions didn’t even come close, including special guest Ray Kurzweil, whose remote keynote, given by way of 3D-holographic projection, remained utterly flat).

As the first speaker, Markku Wilenius, … Read more