Posts Tagged ‘agencies’
Big lumpy clumpy balls of crap
Leading on from the previous post about the coolness of chaos…
Have you ever had to deal with a big lumpy piece of complex old software that was written years ago, then updated countless times, new bits added on, a new guy adding another bit, bolt-ons, sticking plasters and fixes… until it’s a big slow cumbersome piece of crap nobody can change or work with?
That’s pretty much industry as it stands – and other big systems for that matter (e.g. government, education). Since the industrial revolution, we’ve built up this massive ball of crap. Now nobody can do a damn thing with it.
The most obvious example that’s hurting right now is the whole free thing. We can listen to music for free. We can watch TV shows for free. We can read books for free. This of course screws record companies, publishers, broadcasters… oh yeah, and then there’s the whole fact that we don’t pay a blind bit of notice to advertising. The big massive balls of crap are stuffed because they’re prisoners within their own structures – too slow, too fat, too inflexible. They’re waiting to die, with their fingers in their ears, screaming ‘lah lah lah!’ as nimble network-based businesses spring up under the radar, taking over the world at lightning pace.
At the end of the day, all a business traditionally does is ensure people get paid. That’s it, when you think about it. Traditionally the big boys get paid much more than the little boys, but it’s just a bunch of individuals getting paid.
Now, think about the overhead in a big-lump-of-crap business. Big shiny offices, management structures, HR departments, blah blah blah. Think about MARKETING BUDGETS… zillions and squillions… to make sure you sell LOADS to make sure you can pay the overheads and pay the individuals (staff, bosses, shareholders etc). So we pay more to make more to sell more to pay more.
And it ain’t just the hippies who know sustainability is an issue. We need to stop producing so much crap. Reuse, reduce, recycle and all that jazz. Yet still we need to make people want more so they buy more so we sell more to pay individuals.
What if we scrapped all the crap?
What if there were no management structures?
What if there were no multi-million advertising / marketing budgets?
What if there were more or less no overheads?
Answer? We wouldn’t need to sell as much, so we wouldn’t MAKE as much. Sweet! It isn’t rocket science.
And could we do business without these business-as-usual / this-is-business stuff that costs so much? Hell yeah. It’s already happening. It’s soooo easy to change from ground level, as a bunch of individuals, with no management, a pinch of leadership and a sprinkling of magic dust – in comparison to attempting change from the ‘top’. It’s no surprise that people feel pretty darn good when they’re an individual within a collective, creating profit through good growth, without all the psychologically, environmentally (and every other ‘ally’) damaging self-fulfilling prophecies inherent in business as we know it.
I mean, we all know we went a bit crazy over the past few years (decades). We all got a bit carried away. It’s like full on raving in the 80s/90s (or whatever equivalent!). Bloody hell what a blast. Dance your face off – time of your life. But after a few years everybody starts to feel like crap, go nuts and realise it’s no fun any more and life’s better when you feel good. The individuals-formerly-known-as-consumers are just started to ease off the uppers. They’ve been turning your brain cells to mush and it’s much nicer to be wide awake.
So what now? Sit back and wait until the chaos period is over and this network-based commerce phase kicks in and emerges as the new status quo?
Err… that would be pretty boring.
Instead you could join a tribe. Or you could start one. Soon it’ll pay way more than your job (if that’s what you care about)… and really when you get into the swing of the new way you won’t give a toss.
Take it a leap beyond ‘markets are conversations’ into the realms of DOING, not planning. ACTION IS THE NEW FORECASTING.
Scrmblr
I haven’t blogged in any great depth about Scrmblr (’scrambler’), so thought it was about time.
Scrmblr is a global network of content producers (Scrmblrs) who create anti-ads (Scrmbls).
Marketing used to be about advertising, but advertising is often expensive, fake and dumb. What remains important is the act of telling stories about the things we trade – stories that sell and stories that spread.
Scrmblr gives power to the people – the talented people of the world, enabling creators of great content to reap fair rewards, while enabling organisations who couldn’t dream of affording video ads the opportunity to air Scrmbls (much better!). Cheaper, better, faster.
Scrmblr removes the unfair, prohibitive supply-chain mess that sits between talented people who make stuff and people who buy great stuff.
Fair trade.
The Scrmblr website has just been launched here. 20% of profits will be donated to microcredit projects, in a drive to do something good. The first scrmbl created was for UK charity ShelterBox, by Tel Aviv scrmblr Danny Aronson.
Scrmblr already has a presence in UK, ISA, Israel and Canada… and is on the lookout for more talent (filmmakers, producers, animators, designers, creatives etc).
Are you a Fraggle or a Doozer?
Unlike Fraggles, Doozers love to work all day long; and they hate playing games. With the help of various Doozer machines and vehicles, they build elaborate constructions all over Fraggle Rock, like towers, buildings, roads and bridges.
Their building materials, Doozer Sticks, are made of radish dust. Doozer Sticks are the Fraggles’ favorite snack, and they love to eat the buildings that Doozers build. The Doozers don’t mind their buildings being eaten; if the Fraggles didn’t eat the constructions, the Doozers would run out of building space.
Doozers and Fraggles usually show very little respect towards each other. It’s very rare for Fraggles and Doozers to make friends.
The Doozers all work together in a society that values cooperation in order to further the common good (which is very much contrary to the Fraggles, who place a high value on individualism and independence).
The Doozers pride themselves on the good work that they do, but no Doozer is allowed to take personal credit for their work – that would mean that they thought their work was better than everyone else’s, and would be destructive to the communal spirit. Competition is seen as a vice that occasionally afflicts Doozers. Again, this is very unlike the Fraggles, who love to have races and competitions, and who take pride in their individual jobs and passions.
Are you a Fraggle or a Doozer?
Do you keep creating stuff that gets eaten by those big Fraggles?
Should you stop building stuff out of Radish Sticks, so it doesn’t get eaten? How will you avoid running out of space?
Do you keep eating stuff those little Doozers build?
Do you think of yourself as a cool media Fraggle… but keep having to take a deep breath and quash fleeting realisations that you’re actually a Doozer and what you do is fundamentally pointless unless you change something???
Equilibrium and fractal business models
A fundamental law of physics (in one formulation) states that left to itself any closed system will always change towards a state of equilibrium from which no further change is possible. One example is swinging a pendulum… if you hold it up to one side it’ll be in a state of extreme disequilibrium, then as you let go and it swings back and forth, gradually losing energy, it’ll come to a standstill.
Other examples include many media agencies and advertising agencies. You know why.
Someone said to me today, ‘but we need to prove the ROI – how much is it [implementing a vision that gives power to the people, to cut a long story short] going to cost and what will the return will be? How do we show that listening to the customer has better ROI than direct marketing?’
Errr…. I’m not even going to answer that.
Our obsession with plotting loads of numbers in loads of rows in so-called forecasts, that ‘demonstrate ROI’ may be a comfort blanket for some, but are forecasts ever accurate or meaningful? If we look back at them later (which we seldom do thoroughly, because they’re so irrelevant and unfriendly) we’ll be astonished (or not) at how far off the mark we were.
Way too many business models set themselves up for equilibrium. A scalable business model should be fractal in nature… infinitely scalable, independent of any company’s resources. You should be able to zoom all the way in… or all the way out… and see a repeatability, recursiveness and simplicity. We should focus on setting ourselves up to leverage the unforeseen opportunities, rather than attempting to predict the unpredictable and produce reams of comfort crap on autopilot.
The rotary motion of a harmonograph produces a series of complex drawings influenced by relative frequency, amplitude and direction.
Brands should communicate with a harmonic balance between relative frequency (WHEN… don’t interrupt), amplitude (WHAT…loudness…don’t shout / broadcast) and direction (WHERE… targeting, permission).
Companies should seek to produce beautiful pictures… not chaos (disharmony / dissonance). Business models that can be boiled down to a simple, beautiful picture tend to have inherent scalability.
Things don’t resonate coz they’re dense, innit.
According to general advertising industry relativity, black hole budgets are entirely compressed into a region with zero meaningful volume and near-zero relevance, which means their density and gravitational pull towards the 30 second TV ad and print campaign are infinite; and so is the curvature of space-time and agency-time that they cause.
These infinite values cause most physical equations – common sense, general relativity and good manners (i.e. not interrupting), to stop working at the centre of a broadcast industry black hole. So physicists, Resonance Jedis and every single one of us call the zero-volume, near-zero-relevance, infinitely dense region at the centre of the broadcast industry black hole a singularity.
A gravitational media agency singularity is a location where the quantities which are used to measure effectiveness (eyeballs, click-throughs etc) and the gravitational field become infinite in a way that does not depend on real life or the co-ordinate system. These quantities (with lots of zeros on the end which must mean brands should pay us loads for stacking them up) are the scalar invariant curvatures of agency metrics and ad-space-time, some of which are a measure of (the) density (of matter).
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