ESSAY: Continuous Innovation

Update: Received a wonderful comment from a user identifying themselves as the Chief Technologist for NASA at Langley, VA. Here's hoping I can help space exploration, if in some small way!

I guess I must be good at this essay thing. They had another writing contest here at work, and I decided to enter. I wasn't really looking to do anything special, just wanted to see for myself if it was a fluke: if it was possible that I could write that well again. I really figured I had no chance, because of course, they wouldn't let me win twice, right?

Well, they did.

This contest was supposed to be about "Innovation." Here's the full essay, along with the announcement email, from the same Global Strategy guy. Plus, some minor mentions from later in the year. Enjoy!

Continuous Innovation


You have two minutes to do something innnovative. 120 seconds. Go.


Can we all be honest with each other here? When you look at the results from your latest campaign and see a click-through rate of .05%, or an open rate of 1.14%, or an average time on site of 00:00:14 with a bounce rate of 85%, you're not excited. Even though these numbers may be well above standard for your client's industry, or average rates for the medium, you can't help but wonder about the majority. The ones that just didn't do what you wanted them to do.

So what happens? You get in the office the next day and flip through your Rolodex of optimization techniques, survey out a 30+ variable testing matrix that would confuse a rocket scientist, and set about to "move the needle." Brief, blow out, build and blast; you manage to make that K.P.I. look a little less S.O.L., and your client is happy to carry on doing the same thing with the same messages in a slightly better looking package. That needle's moved, but that majority? Still there.

So why doesn't this FEEL good? Why doesn't this inspire your work and infuse your day?

Why doesn't this feel Innovative?


90 seconds.


The fact is, a lot of the things we fill our day with are NOT innovative. And really, there's nothing wrong with that - great work relies completely on great execution. An excellent process or cutting-edge idea will be the inspirational equivalent of a blank sheet of paper if it isn't carried out with absolute attention to detail, timing, and budget. The world needs people that do this, and for at least some part of our lives, we all must be one of them.

The problem is we confuse Innovation with The Work. We can't block out 30 minutes on our calendar to just "Innovate." Innovation doesn't generate any discrete deliverable, follow any Visio flow chart process, or wrap itself up neatly into a revenue stream by the end of Q2. Innovation is like a rainbow: ephemeral, beautiful, and impossible to precisely predict.

But, you CAN create the right conditions for it.

Just like we all know that stormy-sunny mix that gives the best opportunity for a solar color gala, we all intrinsically know the circumstances that will foster innovation within our organizations. We know the value of those hallway conversations, the break room areas, the coffee machine (oh YES the coffee machine), the foosball table, the huge whiteboard, the iPod with noise-cancelling headphones. We know those things that don't have a direct return, the stuff that's expensed before the bottom line, the things that usually get axed when numbers need to add up.

We know what fosters innovation - we're just afraid of it.


60 seconds.


The core problem with innovation is that it is rooted in, and generated by the Unknown. We can fertilize and water the field all day long, but ultimately it is innovation that makes a seed become a plant. The fear is that you might throw all your might and resources into a singular project to foster innovative growth and... it doesn't happen. Or worse yet, you take your baby idea out of the incubator and try to introduce it to the real world and guess what? It fails.

You know what we call new ideas that succeed? Innovation.
You know what we call new ideas that don't? Failures.

Under this paradigm, it's easy to see why a project with unclear and uncertain returns would never get off the ground. It's understandable trying your hand at the tried-and-true before ever venturing off into the unknown. When the world is black and white, why would you ever want to put yourself in the red?

And that's your problem.

If you see every new venture, every weird idea, every novel concept as ultimately falling down the plinko machine into one of those two buckets, the risk is always 50-50. You're always that fixed distance away from perceived utter disaster, and you're always going to stay there.

Take a moment and think of the enormous gamut of problems you work with and attempt every day - from a way to remember to pick up the dry cleaning, to some method of resolving conflict with a co-worker, to influencing a new audience to buy your client's product.
The wrong thought is to rank these solutions the same way we would a coin flip - heads/tails, right/wrong, successful/not. We deal in a work that so tightly integrates with the human experience, that of communicating and carrying understanding of a client to groups of other humans. We play on emotion, on aspirations, on cognitive dissonance. So how can we call one idea absolutely innovative, or another absolutely a failure? How can we not appreciate the campaigns that "showed a small ROI" or "did sorta well" for what they are - learning opportunities.


30 seconds.


If asked about his greatness, Edison would tell you about the thousands of ways he discovered how NOT to make a lightbulb. Einstein would tell you about the 42 years of life BEFORE he won his Nobel Prize for Physics. Michael Jordan would tell you about the 26 times he was trusted to take the game-winning shot and MISSED. Greatness only germinates from the ashes of failure. Innovation will only spark after countless ideas are tried, tested, and most are found lacking. The world's Next Big Idea isn't sitting out on the sidewalk like a lost penny - it's hiding behind a veil of missteps, mistakes, and missed opportunities.

The clear fact is that in order to foster innovation in ourselves or in our organization, we need to create a mentality that ALLOWS for failure. We need to build into our campaign plans an aggressive process for correctly identifying results, then extracting every single bit of meaning or understanding from them - both "good" and "bad." This knowledge then needs to feed our future works. This knowledge must be immediately shared within our organization. This knowledge needs to be openly celebrated in front of our clients, to prove how we've positively built from failure and made our partners' money really worth something in the long run.

We need to innovate, or we will become irrelevant. Therefore, we need to fail, or we will never find success. And when we fail, we must intensely scrutinize the results in order to innovate.


Time's up. Did you innovate? Did you fail? How about both.

I am pleased to inform you that our writing contest winner is once again Eric Swayne. Yes, that's right. Eric Swayne. Again.



Well done Eric!



This contest focused on innovation. As direct marketers, innovation is a bit of a strange bedfellow. I mean, we typically focus on a linear approach of testing, learning and then optimizing. Innovation requires new, often lateral thinking, is often inefficient and as Eric rightly points out ...gasp...can actually require failing, maybe even repeatedly, before getting to the Promised Land. And yet now more than ever our ability to innovate as customer obsessed agents on behalf of our clients is the litmus test by which we are judged as true leaders in our space.



Traditional executions across traditional channels, nuanced by creative and offer are simply not working as well as they used to. Consumers demand more...more relevance, more experience, more inspiration, more opportunity to co-create across multiple touch points. Across channels heretofore not even considered media. To truly succeed for our clients we are going to need to be brave, pioneering and yes, perhaps even fail from time to time. Different than many the Rapp way, the way of data igniting creative experiences, of direct marketing sensibilities informing new applications across emerging channels, gives us an unfair advantage. It slides the odds of success to our favor. And I am happy to take any advantage I can get, fair or unfair, on behalf of our clients.



Take the time to read Eric's entry on risk taking, on having the courage of our convictions and on our mandate to innovate as a brand. It is inspiring. Please join me in congratulating Eric on what is quickly becoming the Swayne Writing Contest. (Actually, the entrants are presented to a panel of judges without name!) I encourage all of you to participate in the next iteration and help us crown a new champion. Not to mention win a bunch of money :-)

This next one came from the CEO of all RAPP itself. He CCed our Global President, and the President of North America:

This is really well done Eric. I’d like you, [name witheld] and [name witheld] to trim this down, add a couple of real Rapp examples of innovation and put this on the website blog. This is a very relevant topic.


Thanks Eric.

And here's the blog he was talking about: http://opinion.rapp.com/. I'm working with other amazing luminaries of the RAPP stratosphere to get this live, and I'll let you know here when it's up.

I'm still utterly amazed and honored to win this go-round. The money's nice (VERY nice), but the validation as a writer and strategic thinker is many, many times more valuable. It's mind-boggling and humbling to have a reputation throughout the world-wide stretch of RAPP. I hope I'm afforded many more chances to do this kind of free-form, blue-sky thinking.

ESSAY: The New ROI

So the great place I work at recently had a writing competition about "reaching the new complex consumer." I was inspired to enter, because it's a fascinating topic - and the winner got a nice load of cash! I may not win, but I'm pretty proud of this little piece, so I wanted to share it here.

Remember: I'm writing this as a marketer, to other marketers. Some of the tone may get a tad fanatical for you, but when you're in the Advertising/Marketing industry, that's what it takes to get the attention of The Jaded.

Enjoy!

The New ROI: Collective Networking Between Brands and Consumers


There is no more "them," and it's all our fault.

For good or ill, we started as Marketers with our "magic bullet" messages and drilled all the way down to the "guerilla" level for the express purpose of reaching and changing the behavior of Them: The Consumers. We've poked, prodded, offered, discounted, promoted and printed everything we could to affect The Target Audience. Each new medium has just been a wider net for us to reach more numbers to get more prospects and yield more ROI. We've used all 360 degrees around The Demographic to find a new angle, but now They have done the unthinkable:

THEY have learned to ignore us.

You have felt it. That inward shut-off when you see the overly-idyllic lifestyle photo, or your hand reaching for the dial at each mention of "Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!" You know the Marketer's bag of tricks and can provide textbook examples of each, probably with material just from your morning commute. You've reached the point where it's sub-conscious, and yet if you're a Marketer, you'll get to your desk and try to analyze the next email campaign for whether we can get more out of Them with the "buy-one-get-one" or the "half-off" offers.

And this is the point: You ARE one of Them.

Marketers can not live in a diatomic, "Us vs. Them" world anymore, because the world has fundamentally changed. Publication now inherently includes participation, and the same people using your product are now recommending your product, rating your product, ranking your product, or just ranting about your product. Every move a Marketer makes throws off ripples of conversation, and the successful organizations are the ones who can anticipate these fluid dynamics, strategically activating groups and memes that maximize their clients' potential.

Marketing isn't hypnosis anymore, it's anthropology.

Our new study is to understand the full experience of how consumers interact with products, and how consumers interact with each other. These interactions are the new "synapses" in our collective intelligence, and it is at these points of exchange that every brand finds its success or failure. As information flows through these points, nuance is gathered. Impressions are made. The Sneezers come out, and Tipping Points are neared. Everything that goes into forming an opinion, or deciding on a purchase, filters through this decentralized network.

Marketers can't be Brand Managers. They must be Brand Matchmakers.

In the status quo, brand management is about control. We control the ways and places our Brands interact with Consumers, and only let that interaction occur when it's in our Brand's best interest. "After all, if all a Consumer knows about our Brand is what we tell them, then that's all they can say about it, right?" Following this path, some Brands have taken the recursive path into effective silence, repeating only the boilerplate messages and ignoring the conversations around them. It's the Marketer's role to take this Brand into The Real World and introduce it to the Consumer, making every interaction genuinely positive for BOTH parties.

Marketers have to be done "telling." They must INVITE.

Every marketing campaign has to begin by identifying (or creating) a point of JOY between a Brand and a Consumer. Is it an amazing timesaver? A gift to the Environment? A security for the future? What interaction between one Brand and one Consumer will be so incredible that it can not be kept under Wraps? Your campaign is a personal invitation to participate in this moment; to experience the Brand at THIS point. It's no longer a question of gimmicks or tricks -- it's a moment of relationship.

Brands are parties, and the best ones have party favors.

Return On Investment is a fine metric when you're dealing with concrete assets. A bridge costs so much money and lasts so long, meaning a certain ROI. But can we reduce the social work we're doing to the level of asphalt? Marketing is about Return On INTERACTION; the mutual benefit gained by both the Consumer and the Brand from encountering each other. If the Consumer can take away an artifact, a benefit, a new mental benchmark (or even all three) from a positive interaction back to their social network, the Brand is the real winner.

Successful brands create a "Gold Rush Effect."

You would think the first person to find gold in the Klondike would keep their mouths shut about it. It's a finite resource of immense value, so shouldn't you keep it to yourself? Unfortunately, that person had to use what they found to get what they wanted -- gold exchanged for money or stuff. They HAD to interact with other people who wanted the same thing. It's in our nature as Consumers to share our experiences, and it's in our nature to want GREAT ones. Brands want their Consumers to walk away with the huge gold nugget, because they know that more will come looking for the same.

Welcome to the Consumerscape. Hope you brought business cards.

It's the equivalent of a political campaign, this concept of Brands "pressing the flesh" with Consumers. For some Brands, it's going to be hard to get out there and mingle with "real people." For others, they will have skilled Marketers to help them develop a form of charisma, a genuine personality that encourages Consumers to come closer. Some businesses will focus on earning a million dollars. Others will focus on winning a million friends. Which will be worth more?