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GameChangers Glossary, H to N

Tuesday, August 24th, 2010

Adapted from GameChangers–Improvisation for Business in the Networked World, by Mike Bonifer:

Heighten–To build emotional involvement and energy in a scene

Improv–See ‘Improvisation‘

Improvisation–spontaneous communication designed to generate positive outcomes from unforeseen circumstances; interpersonal and group communication that is instinctive and informed by experience, knowledge, serendipity and respect for environment; improv, as performed in theaters, such as with improv comedy; a conversation with the community; the pedagogy, philosophy and process defined by Viola Spolin in her 1963 book, Improvisation for the Theater; a games-based methodology for generating communication, learning and transformation

Initiation–The first meaningful words or lines spoken during a scene; in this case, ‘meaningful’ refers to anything that directly involves the group’s progress toward achieving the scene’s objective(s).

Interrogation–A performance-related issue, often arising in interviews or employee reviews, that arises when one player only asks questions and never acts on the information revealed by the answers;

Invention–A performance-related issue that occurs when players work with speculative or subjective information instead of the reality of the scene.

Invocation–An exercise that lets players examine a subject from the third-person (“It is”), second-person (“You are”) and first-person (“I am”) perspectives in order to identify themes for a performance.

Issue–Any performance-related problem which can be remedied by better execution of GameChangers business communication techniques.

Judging–A performance-related problem that occurs when a player subjectively assesses a scene while the scene is taking place.

Justifying–A performance-related problem that occurs when a player self-consciously explains his or her (or their team’s) actions in a scene, especially when the behavior does not align with the GameChangers principles.

Liminal–relating to the threshold of perception that players break through by participating in a game; relates to perceptions of one’s own abilities and to what one’s perceptions of what is generally possible; transcending the status quo

Meta Communication/Meaning–A symbolic or allegorical representation of ideas and concerns that exist on a societal, cultural or archetypal scale; the symbolic representation of a macro trend, widely held belief, or aspect of the human condition; (See ‘Cosmetic Communication/Meaning‘ and ‘Emotional Communication/Meaning‘)

Monologue–A speech given by a single player in a scene; a speech shared amongst multiple players in the course of a scene or presentation.

Narrative–A flow of thematically-connected events that can be related after the fact as a story; organizational memory and vision of the future that inform scenes performed in the present; a purposeful alignment of ideas and events, such as for a brand.

Negativity–Traits, ideologies and behaviors that halt a scene’s progress through skepticism and a disagreeable inclination to oppose, deny and/or resist the ideas or involvement of other players; pessimism; the antithesis of the attitude required for productive collaborations.

Network–The communications matrix of an organization, brand or individual; those who are connected by a communications matrix or belong to an organization; defined by John Seely Brown, John Hagel et al as consisting of ‘core’ and ‘edge’

Networked World–The highly communicative, internet-supported global stage on which business gets conducted

Objective–The desired outcome of a scene; the stated purpose of playing a game; the business goal of a scene; one of the four elements that comprise a Game

Opening–An ‘overture’ prior to a scene or series of scenes in which a player or a group develops the themes for an upcoming performance; usually triggered by Suggestions From the Audience

Organization–The manifestation of a business or brand to its audience; the operational structure of a business or brand; a company or group with a shared mission and business objectives (see ‘Network‘)

TO BE CONTINUED…

Tags: Definitions, Dictionary, Fundamentals, Glossary, Meaning, Terms, Words
Posted in Branding, Communication, Dialogue, Emotion, Environment, Fundamentals, Initiations, Issues, Narrative, Objectives, story, Themes, Uncategorized | No Comments »

GameChangers Glossary, A to G

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

Adapted from GameChangers–Improvisation for Business in the Networked World, by Mike Bonifer:

Addition–Entering a scene in progress for the purpose of contributing immediately to the team’s performance; contributing to a scene; giving a gift

Agreement, The Agreement Principle–A principle of improvisation, characterized by players’ openness towards each other and an organization or communications network’s openness at its edge; the group consensus around a game or theme that informs a scene

Audience–Those within and outside of an organization whose reactions and opinions will determine the success of a scene or performance

Audience, External–People outside an organization or network, including customers (and potential customers), competitors, bloggers, users, fans, viewers, etc. whose reactions ultimately determine the value of a performance or narrative

Audience, Internal–People inside an organization or network, whose judgment acts as a kind of filter on scenes and narratives before they reach the External Audience

Blocking–A performance-related problem that occurs when players impede the progress of a scene by refusing the gifts offered them by their teammates

Callback–The act of recalling information that was stated by a player earlier in a scene or in a previous scene.

Cast–Players who share the same business objective; also called a Group or Team; can also refer to the employees of an entire division or organization (Disney, for example, refers to all employees as ‘cast members’)

Casting–The process of selecting players who will comprise a business team

Character–Traits that make a player unique as an individual and consistently valuable to his or her team

Close, Del–Credited as one of the originators of longform improvisation, and one of its most influential teachers, Close (1934-1999) created ‘Harold,’ probably the most-performed structure for group improv theater performances; his proteges include Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd, John Belushi, Amy Poehler and Tina Fey; legend has it that he willed his skull to the Goodman Theater in Chicago to be used in future productions of Hamlet, in which he was to be billed as playing the role of Yorick

Coach–A person who casts a team; an objective observer and critic of a team’s performance; one who establishes game-based strategies and standards of preparation and performance in directing a team toward its objectives; manager; director

Cosmetic Communication/Meaning–The surface level of communication within a scene, primarily through spoken dialogue; data; information. (See ‘Emotional Communication/Meaning‘ and ‘Meta Communication/Meaning‘)

Crazy Town–A performance-related problem that occurs when players indulge in fantasies, magical thinking, or egoistic behavior, until the scene becomes un-moored from any actionable reality.

Denying–A form of blocking in which a player repeatedly contradicts or ignores other players, confusing the audience and fellow players; refusing to recognize another player’s reality

Edit–The action of making an entrance for the purpose of shifting the scene’s focus, or to begin a new scene; edits usually occur in concert with other players exiting the scene

Emotional Communication/Meaning–The most dynamic and meaningful level of communication in a scene. conveying its players’ passions and desires, where reactions (both positive and negative), and reinforcements/alienation are strongest

Energy–The pitch at which a player or group performs (and modulates) its performance; an umbrella term for the level of activity and intensity the audience observes in the group, and that players in the group experience in one another

Entrance–A player’s first appearance in a scene

Environment–The setting in which members of team collaborate to achieve their objective; any place where players interact; more expansively, any place where an audience experiences a brand; the overall business climate in which an organization operates, shaped by factors such as regulatory agencies, competitors, geopolitical factors and the desires, attitudes and beliefs of customers

Exit–A player’s departure from a scene

Fantasizing–A performance-related issue that occurs when players build outlandish, or wildly fictitious scenarios that do not acknowledge or act on the real world environment or the businessa; magical thinking; (see ‘Crazy Town‘ and ‘Invention‘)

Flatlining–A performance-related problem that occurs when players show no energy or life, impeding or halting a scene’s progress

Game–Rules, roles, environment and objective(s) defined; an exploration of a theme; a strategy used to achieve a business-related objective; games fall into two broad categories – productive and unproductive

GameChanger–A player who has mastered the art and practical techniques of business improvisation; a manager/coach or player with the ability to identify and support productive games and quickly change or edit unproductive ones

Gift–A move that supports the scene and the players in it; ‘giving gifts’ is one of the most powerful and effective moves a player can make

Grandstanding–A performance-related issue that occurs when a player wastes time and effort trying to contribute something ‘heroic’ to a scene; holding back for effect instead of engaging in the moment; habitually swinging for the fences or reaching for the ‘Wow Factor’; going for a home run when a single would better serve the scene

Group Mind– The tangible web of connectivity between players that achieved through a shared focus on a game and the exploration of a theme; the collective unconscious; not the same as ‘Group Think‘

Group Think–Rubber-stamping; going along to get along; consensus for its own sake; agreement that does not involve a game or theme; behavior that is not intended to achieve the objective, but rather to reinforce status; uncritical or unquestioning support for a political agenda, ideology or hierarchy

TO BE CONTINUED….

Tags: Definitions, Dictionary, Explanation, Fundamentals, Glossary, Terms, Words
Posted in Additions and Edits, Agreement Principle, Branding, Casting, Character, Coaching, Communication, Dialogue, Emotion, Entrances, Environment, Fundamentals, Games, Gifts, Group Mind, Issues, Narrative, Objectives, Scenes, Themes | No Comments »

Fools With Rules

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

This one’s for the golfers…

I used to joke with our neighbor back in Indiana, Euline Kieffner, that the reason she and I loved golf so much was that there was nothing more alluring to folks who’d grown up on farms like we had than a mown field with no manure in it. Until four or five years ago, I was enchanted by the game of golf, and literally could not get enough of it. I played and practiced it religiously, at one point working my way all the way down to a four-handicap, which is pretty damn good. I could play.

Golf is a great game that can teach a person a lot about patience, persistence, imagination, focus, character, and the difference between trying to force positive outcomes and letting positive outcomes emanate from an open mind. As my business focus has changed, so has my relationship with the game. Today, I play rarely, maybe two or three times a year, and only on social occasions. The romance is gone. Occasionally, my Taylor-Mades and I stare wistfully at one another across a crowded garage, and remember how it used to be between us.

What fascinates me most about the sport of golf today, sad to say, is the wreckage to its most visible brand experience–the PGA Tour. We’re talking multi-vehicle pile-up. Its shiningest star has lost most of his luster and its TV ratings have tanked in tandem with the Tiger brand. The Tour’s newcomers have apparently had no life experiences to differentiate them from one another–all they know is golf. Its core demographic is aging. Its most interesting personalities have retired.

Last Sunday, while I did a little work in the office, more out of habit than anything, I had the PGA Championship—the last of the four ‘majors’ of the season—on the TV in the background. It held no inherent interest for me. And then, all of a sudden, it did. Several of the game’s young lions—Rory McElroy from Scotland(?), a long-hitting lefthander with high follow-through named Bubba, a cool German named Kaymer I’d never heard of before, and Dustin Johnson, who hits it insanely long, were all fighting for the lead, along with a caddyshacker named Wen-Chong from China, who learned to play on that country’s first golf course, which was built only 20 years ago. All of a sudden, it was a story worth following.

Over the last five or six holes the tournament’s drama became palpable. None of the young guys were holding back, no one was playing not to lose, they were all winding up, letting it rip, and playing for the win, and it was riveting. The tournament came down to a tie between two players, Bubba and the German, Kaymer, with Johnson playing the final hole of the tournament with a chance to win it. He missed his par putt to win. We were looking at a three-player, three-hole playoff for the championship.

And then, all of a sudden, we weren’t. A PGA Tournament official pulled Johnson aside as he walked off the 18^th green and told him that he had violated a rule by grounding his club in a hazard along the 18^th fairway, one of the 1000+ sand bunkers that lined the course.

I’m not going to get into the specifics here, except to say that technically the officials were correct—Johnson had, in fact, let his club touch the sand prior to making his second shot. Narratively, however, the PGA people blew it like I’ve never seen a call blown in a lifetime of watching sports. There was no possible way for Johnson to know that the spot where his ball sat—a spot that had been trampled by tens of thousands of people during the tournament, and was tightly framed by hundreds in the gallery as he made his swing—was a hazard. Besides that, if there had once been a border to the sand bunker, that border had been erased by the week’s crowds to the point where it no longer existed. Given this, there was no way for the PGA officials to know for sure from looking at a replay whether the ball was ‘in’ a bunker or not.

This wasn’t some snap judgment in the heat of the moment by a referee or ump. This was a deliberation. A review. A consideration. And then, a horrible decision that took all the life out of the story. Johnson was penalized two strokes, and eliminated from the playoff.

The tragedy of this decision goes way beyond any personal setback to Mr. Johnson. The PGA brand desperately needed this story, needed the drama to keep building with the playoff between three of its new stars. They had it. It was happening. The audience was engaged. There was real enthusiasm from the broadcasters. It was turning into the most interesting finish to a tournament in years. All the PGA officials had to do was stay out of its way. Instead, they committed the golfer’s most grievous mistake: they over-thought the shot. And then they shanked it.

This was not the behavior of people concerned about what’s best for the game of golf, about supporting their brand’s narrative, or about nurturing the next generation of golfers. This was vainglorious meddling by middle-aged men desperate for attention and fearing nothing as much as their own impotence.

Oh yeah, Kaymer won the playoff, but who cared? Nobody outside of Kaymer’s girlfriend is talking about it. All the fan conversation is about the idiotic ruling.

We see this a lot in business. A compelling narrative begins to unfold, or an idea seems to be gathering momentum, and then, from out of nowhere, an expressionless manager with a rule book derails it. It sucks for everyone involved except the person with the rule book.

If the rules don’t support your brand’s narrative, don’t change the narrative, change the rules. If your managers, like those PGA officials, aren’t nuanced enough to understand what it takes to support your narrative, change managers. This is what the PGA needs to do, pronto, to get its ailing game back on track.

Tags: 2010 PGA Championship, brand, Dustin Johnson, Game, Golf, Managers, Narrative, PGA Officials, Rules, Storytelling, Tiger Woods
Posted in Branding, Character, Focus, Games, Issues, Narrative, story | No Comments »

Created in America

Monday, August 9th, 2010

In noting President Obama’s rallying cry for a program to support small businesses in America, the White House published the following in the President’s Facebook news feed:

A minority in the Senate is standing in the way of giving our small-businesspeople an up-or-down vote on the jobs bill. That’s a shame. We need to decide whether we’re willing to rise above the election-time games and come together—not just to pass a jobs bill that is going to help small businesses hire and grow but al…so to rebuild our economy around three simple words: “Made in America.”

While we wholeheartedly support a jobs bill that will help small businesses like ours, ‘Made in America’ is an Industrial Age idea that has very little resonance in the Networked World. Nothing substantial can be built around anything as meaningless as that statement. Here’s why… MickeyMouse&Abro1

The problem is that making stuff is not what America does any more, not exclusively to ‘Brand America’ anyway. Stuff gets made all over the world. What’s the most ‘American’ brand you can think of. Disney? Coca Cola? Nike? ‘Made All Over the World’ is the truth of these brands, and the same is true for any other brand vibrating on a network frequency. The Budweiser Clydesdales are Belgians now. Deal with it. In light of these new truths, ‘Made In America’ becomes just another piece of empty political rhetoric, designed to dampen disagreement rather than to foster any large-scale agreement around a new economic narrative.

What we need is an idea that will generate new narratives, and new ideas about how to stimulate the economy.

One of our favorite American companies, ABRO Industries, based smack dab in the heartland of America, South Bend, Indiana, with 25 employees and projected 2010 sales exceeding $150M, does over $40M of sales a year in Nigeria alone with products it manufactures in South America. Most of ABRO’s products are made outside America, and yet most of the wealth it generates comes back to this country. How? It originates the business cycle and the brand. It creates networks to market its products around the world.

“Made in” is no longer an differentiator for American business. ‘Created in’ still is.

What makes American business unique, what we can count on every time, is Creativity. The true American brew isn’t Budweiser, it’s the idiosyncratic brew of cultures and personal histories that make the American narrative unique in the world.

What matters about Disney is not where it’s made. After all, its primary product, happiness, can be conjured up anywhere in the world. What’s unique and irreplaceable about the Disney brand is that it was created in America, born out of the imagination of a Scotch-Irish Socialist-Farming Depression-Era Cartoon-Making Hollywood-Bound Space-Racing Commie-Fearing Polo-Playing Chain-Smoking Family-Loving Chili-Eating Anti-Semitic Dandy From Kansas City Who Dreamed He Was a Mouse.

Making stuff means replicating it, and that means commoditizing. Anybody can do that. Originating stuff–growing Walt Disneys and Apples and Pixars and Lady Gagas and ABROS–that’s what America still does best.

Tags: ABRO Industries, America, Coca-Cola, Created in America, Creativity, Disney, Jobs, Made in America, Nike, President Obama
Posted in Agreement Principle, Branding, Communication, Creativity, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Narrative, Networked World, Sales, Themes | No Comments »

Old Spice Gamechange

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

When he was working at Twelve Horses Interactive (now part of One to One Interactive) in Reno in 2007-08, Dean McBeth (@evilspinmeister) participated in some of the very first GameChangers workshops.

Dean has since joined the Wieden+Kennedy Agency in Portland, where he’s a Sr. Community Manager and digital strategist for the Old Spice brand, and one of the principal architects of the currently-raging ‘Old Spice Guy‘ social media campaign. When Dean and I chat, as we did, by phone, this morning, the subject of improvisation in business is never far away. It’s always gratifying to hear how the learning Dean took away from GameChangers has blossomed into marketplace performance for him and his clients, never more so than with the Old Spice online campaign.

I ask him about the genesis of the campaign.

“We already had a ‘pop media darling’ (in Old Spice Guy, played by actor Isaiah Mustafa), and we wanted to amplify the existing asset of the television commercials. Our global interactive Creative Director, Ian Tait, said, ‘Why don’t we have Old Spice Guy reply to comments on YouTube?’ That was the idea that got us going,” McBeth says “In terms of digital media, we didn’t want to limit ourselves to YouTube. The question became, ‘How do we expand to every major community on the web?’”

Dean and his counterpart in W+K’s New York office, Josh Millrod, designed a strategy that involved charting all recent online comments about Old Spice, identifying anyone who mentioned Old Spice in a positive way, and ranking these people in terms of their influence. The most influential people on the list were combined with ‘regular folks’ who, by comparison, may not have had a ton of Twitter followers or Facebook friends, but whose comments the W+K creative team found humorous or inspiring in some way.

This Influencer List, which eventually totaled “between 30 and 40 people,” according to McBeth, was combined with traditional PR channels, to create a core audience for the first wave of Old Spice Guy videos.

Then, in one shooting day, the W+K team shot personalized videos for everyone on the Influencer List, with each video written and directed as a response to the Influencers’ previous comments about Old Spice. ”We wanted to be talking to people who already had an affinity for the product,” says McBeth. “The messages were geared to how they’d commented. We wanted to give them the biggest yes-and we possibly could.”

The W+K team was disciplined about addressing Old Spice Guy videos only to influencers who were already ‘having the conversation’ and avoiding those who weren’t. “We knew that nothing could kill the campaign faster than sending a personalized video to someone like a Howard Stern who maybe hadn’t said anything previously about Old Spice. We could’ve crashed in a hurry,” says McBeth.

At the same time, the W+K team kept an eye on influencers like Stern and Ashton Kutcher, who command big online audiences, and when these high profile players commented on the first wave of Old Spice Guy videos, they became candidates for response videos of their own that were produced in a second wave, also shot in a day. Kutcher eventually got a video addressed to him, and it’s how Alyssa Milano got to be a player in the Old Spice game.

McBeth calls the videos “strategic smart bombs,” and describes them as “gifts” to their recipients. Interactions with an already-existing narrative about the Old Spice brand.

Shooting 30 to 40 videos in a single day is about 30 to 40 times the typical output for a top-tier agency like Wieden+Kennedy. The Old Spice team had to be incredibly nimble. Scripts had to be written, approved by the client and performed as first drafts. A table full of props on the shooting set gave Mustafa and the creative team opportunities to keep the actor’s performances playful and personal.

Wieden+Kennedy’s client for the Old Spice brand, Procter & Gamble, “couldn’t be more pleased,” according to McBeth. “They see it as a new paradigm for brand marketing. We should be seeing numbers soon that will show tremendous results for both awareness and sales.” With the success of the Old Spice Guy campaign, Wieden+Kennedy’s other clients are, naturally, clamoring for viral brand mojo of their own. One thing is certain, the ability to improvise will be key.

McBeth did not learn until after the campaign had been produced that Millrod, his co-creator in W+K’s New York office, has a hobby. Improvisational jazz trumpet. If there had been any question before, this new bit of information finalized the answer for McBeth:

“Improvisation is the single most important factor in the success of the Old Spice Guy campaign.”

Tags: Branding, Dean McBeth, Josh Milrod, New York, Old Spice Guy, Portland, Procter & Gamble, Social Media, Video, Wieden+Kennedy, YouTube
Posted in Branding, Creativity, Listening, Narrative, Networked World, Sales | 3 Comments »

Imp

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

Because it is so tightly tethered to comedy, we almost never use the word ‘improv’ in relation to GameChangers (unless we’re referring to actual comedy improv).

We do, however, use the word ‘imp.’ I have always associated the idea of impishness–of being playfully mischievous–with improvisation and even sometimes refer to improvisers as ‘my fellow imps.’ While waiting on a Skype call this morning with Hildy Gottlieb of Creating the Future, I decided to look up the roots of the word ‘imp.’

Turns out that ‘imp’ comes from an entirely different strain of language than ‘improvise,’ which is derived the Latin root ‘improvisere,’ meaning ‘not foreseen.’ ‘Imp’ has Old English roots, a little Latin attribution. Yet there’s a lot of overlap, like a family from Naples and one from Nottingham having a lot in common.

Here’s how the TheFreeDictionary.com, an aggregator of print dictionary listings, defines it:

imp

(

mp)

1. A mischievous child.

2. A small demon.

3. Obsolete A graft.

tr.v. imped, imp·ing, imps

1. To graft (new feathers) onto the wing of a trained falcon or hawk to repair damage or increase flying capacity.

2. To furnish with wings.

[Middle English impe, scion, sprig, offspring, from Old English impa, young shoot, from impian, to graft, ultimately from Medieval Latin impotus, graft, from Greek emphutos, grafted, from emphuein, to implant : en-, in; see en-² + phuein, to make grow; see bheu- in Indo-European roots.]

imp [ɪmp]

1. (Myth & Legend / European Myth & Legend) a small demon or devil; mischievous sprite

2. a mischievous child

(Individual Sports & Recreations / Falconry) (tr) Falconry to insert (new feathers) into the stumps of broken feathers in order to repair the wing of a hawk or falcon

[Old English impa bud, graft, hence offspring, child, from impian to graft, ultimately from Greek emphutos implanted, from emphuein to implant, from phuein to plant]

ThesaurusLegend: Synonyms Related Words Antonyms

Noun	1.	imp – (folklore) fairies that are somewhat mischievous elf, gremlin, pixie, pixy, hob, brownie folklore – the unwritten lore (stories and proverbs and riddles and songs) of a culture faerie, faery, fairy, fay, sprite – a small being, human in form, playful and having magical powers leprechaun – a mischievous elf in Irish folklore sandman – an elf in fairy stories who sprinkles sand in children’s eyes to make them sleepy
	2.	imp – one who is playfully mischievous scamp, monkey, rapscallion, rascal, scalawag, scallywag child, kid, minor, nipper, tiddler, youngster, tike, shaver, small fry, nestling, fry, tyke – a young person of either sex; “she writes books for children”; “they’re just kids”; “`tiddler’ is a British term for youngster” brat, holy terror, little terror, terror – a very troublesome child

imp

noun

1. demon, devil, sprite He sees the devil as a little imp with horns.

2. rascal, rogue, brat, urchin, minx, scamp, pickle (Brit. informal), gamin I didn’t say that, you little imp!

Collins Thesaurus of the English Language – Complete and Unabridged 2nd Edition. 2002 © HarperCollins Publishers 1995, 2002

imp

n imp [imp]

1 a small devil or wicked spirit.

2 a mischievous child Her son is a little imp.

adj impish

——————————————————————————————

GameChangers summary: Both ‘imp’ and ‘improvisation’ express themes of playfulness, the getting of wings, a childlike view of the world, and a mischievous spirit that results in some kind of transformation. Like improvisation, the imping that describes a plant graft builds on an existing reality. Impishness isn’t a seed. It is a branch grafted onto the existing reality of the tree. It isn’t a new wing, it is adding feathers to a bird that already has wings.

Growth, flight, magic. What fantastic themes these are. Imp on!

Tags: Child, Cosmetic, etymology, Free Online Dictionary, Graft, Growth, IMP, impishness, improv, Improvisation, Language, Mischievous, Play
Posted in Branding, Communication, Education, Themes | No Comments »

Saluting Leroy Stick

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

Leroy Stick authors the brilliant BPGlobalPR Twitter account. If you’re not following it, you should, because it’s another good window on how social media acts on environment, and it’s one of the most engaging narratives you’ll find in any medium, tragic and hilarious and ultra-tuned to the zeitgeist, all at once. It is a running commentary on what happens when a brand believes it can impose its own reality on a world that knows better.

Two days ago, Mr. Stick explained the genesis of BPGlobalPR. Thanks to @andysternberg of Live Earth for pointing it my way. Here’s an excerpt:

You know the best way to get the public to respect your brand? Have a respectable brand. Offer a great, innovative product and make responsible, ethical business decisions. Lead the pack! Evolve! Don’t send hundreds of temp workers to the gulf to put on a show for the President. Hire those workers to actually work! Don’t dump toxic dispersant into the ocean just so the surface looks better. Collect the oil and get it out of the water! Don’t tell your employees that they can’t wear respirators while they work because it makes for a bad picture. Take a picture of those employees working safely to fix the problem. Lastly, don’t keep the press and the people trying to help you away from the disaster, open it up so people can see it and help fix it. This isn’t just your disaster, this is a human tragedy. Allow us to mourn so that we can stop being angry.

Tags: BP, BPGlobalPR, Branding, Environment, Gulf Oil Disaster, Leroy Stick, New Orleans, Twitter
Posted in Branding, Communication, Environment, Narrative | 1 Comment »

Sponsors Step Up!

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

There’s still time to join DHL-Africa, Special Olympics, Alive & Kicking, Africa Ten and GameChangers as sponsors of The Ball’s epic journey to the 2010 FIFA World Cup! Follow the journey at http://theball.tv

If your brand has an ounce of artistry to it, an iota of creative mojo, you will see, as DHL-Africa and Special Olympics have seen, as Tali Krakowsky wrote for Creativity Online, that the game IS the campaign, and because this is the game upon which the world’s attention will be centered for the next 90 days, this is where savvy brands will be. What are you waiting for, the NEXT World Cup? Your ESPN luxury suite passes? Those come later. The game is NOW.

Packages available:

30-DAY LEAD-IN TO FIFA WORLD CUP* KICKOFF
Tanzania 30th Apr — 9th May
Malawi: 9th May — 18th May
Zambia: 18th May — 25th May
Namibia: 25th May — 2nd June
Botswana: 2nd June — 6th June
Arrival: South Africa: 6th June

FIFA WORLD CUP PRESENCE
6th June—–12th July: TV and other media; personal appearances; presentations; five-on-five mixed celeb/Special Olympian Games with 2 New Sponsor players

“SPIRIT OF FOOTALL” DOCUMENTARY
(In partnership with Africa Ten Enterprises, producers of the feature World Cup documentary, “Africa Ten”) ‘Name above Ttle’ sponsorship is available. Post-production and distribution partnerships also available. 300+ hours of HD footage of three football-loving blokes on an adventure that gets to the heart of why they call it The Beautiful Game.

ENDORSEMENTS AND REPRESENTATION
Post FIFA World Cup sponsorship of Spirit of Football and the central characters on The Ball’s Journey to the World Cup: Christian Wach, Phil Wake and Andrew Aris.

OPTION ON 2014 FIFA WORLD CUP SPONSORSHIP
2010′s sponsors have right of first refusal in their category for The Ball’s Journey from the birthplace of modern football, Battersea Park in London, through North America, to Rio de Janiero, site of the 2014 FIFA World Cup.

Make your brand part of this great story when the eyes of the world turn to South Africa in June!

Contact: Phil Wake (phil@spiritoffootball.com) or Anna Weltner (anna_weltner@yahoo.com) to see how you can support the quest.

*The Spirit of Football is not affiliated in any way with FIFA. We’re using the name so you know which World Cup we’re talking about!

Tags: Alive and Kicking, Andrew Arris, Branding, Brands, Christian Wach, Creativity Online, DHL-Africa, Games, Phil Wake, Play, Special Olympics, Spirit of Football, Sponsorships, Tali Krakowsky, The Ball
Posted in Branding, Games | 1 Comment »

Chocolate + Love = Campaign

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

Rasul Sha’ir, and his brand strategy group, Cnvrgnc, are rolling it up bigtime in D.C. with a number of projects in the works that deal in narrative as the key to community. Sha’ir and his partner in Cnvrgnc, Jamal Williams, begin their process by looking at the stories a community tells itself, and how those stories can be improved and shared. Whether it’s an online group connected by a common interest, users of a social media platform, a city in the physical world, or some hybrid of the three, communities are held together by the stories they share.

ChocolateRose1 In a couple of recent blog posts, one about a campaign in Greece for a Kraft Foods-owned chocolate brand called Lacta, the other observations about storytelling made by creative exec Lee Clow and Alex Bogusky of Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Rasul, looks at the role customers (a.k.a. ‘citizens of the community’) play in creating narratives. Rasul makes this important observation: brands are in the business of producing their narratives in collaboration with their customers. The campaign for Lacta, “Love in Action,” enabled by OgilvyOne Worldwide, was based on this observation. The theme of love connects chocolate and the people who share it. By giving customers the ‘stage’ on which to profess their love–for chocolate and one anoher–the campaign transcended anything Ogilvy or Lacta could have possible produced on their own, in-house. By sharing the narrative with their customers, Lacta generated positive unforeseen outcomes for its brand.

Give customers the tools and the rules and they will build it. And if they build it, you don’t have to get them to go anywhere, because they’ll already be home.

Tags: Chocolate, Cnvrgnc, Customer, Jamal Williams, Kraft, Lacta, Narrative, OgilvyOne Worldwide, Rasul Sha'ir
Posted in Branding, Creativity, Emotion, Narrative, Themes | No Comments »

Paddles, Balls and Painted Dogs

Friday, April 16th, 2010

This one goes out to all the storytellers…

Ping Pong wasn’t perceived as a real sport until it became table tennis. And now that it has its first sex symbol in Biba Golic, it has, let’s say, aroused a certain demographic that paid scant attention to it before. PingPongTableTennis1

The wild dogs of Africa could not be brought back from the brink of extinction until Greg Rasmussen renamed them ‘painted dogs’ (per Nick Kristoff in the NY Times).

And the art of storytelling won’t gain mainstream cred with MBA-educated managers and their brands until professional storytelling gets re-branded and re-positioned. This came to me while I was reading about how legendary story consultant Steve Denning changed his working vernacular so he could talk to his clients without them thinking they already knew it all.

Let’s begin by looking at the current status of storytelling in business. Many managers will tell you that storytelling is too airy to feed the bottom line, or as Denning says, they think they’ve got their story covered. And they do. They have it covered. As in they have a story and they’re sticking to it. Bringing up the subject of storytelling can be a license to snark. “Story? Yeah, we got a story. We sell our product as often as possible for more than it costs to make and deliver it. We make our number. We go get a a drink. We live happily ever after until the next quarter. The end.”

As we know, these perceptions cripple a brand. When a story stops moving forward, it dies. And when a brand’s story dies, the brand is sure to follow. Here are three moves professional storytellers can make to break through the crippling perceptions.

1) Shift the focus from ‘story’ to ‘narrative.’ Narrative is our table tennis. It is our painted dog. Story is finite. It has three parts, beginning, middle, end. Narrative, by comparison, has infinite potential. It is flow. It is to organizations and brands what the Ohio River once was to the Shawnee Tribe. The source of sustenance. Stories are like the fish that come from the river and feed the family. Narrative is the river.

2) Share the narrative. In the networked world, brands can no longer script and control their stories the way they used to when there were only twelve or fifteen media channels for a manager to worry about. And they can no longer operate on the false assumption that the story that works today is the same one that’s going to work tomorrow. Today, brands have to find ways to participate in their customers’ stories. They have to learn to share the brand narrative with customers. That is a tectonic shift whose implications have just begun to surface in C-suite discussions and executive reading lists.

Sharing the narrative has many benefits. (We’ve been listing them here for two years, check the archives for backstory.) One of the big benefits is that narratives that result from collaboration with the customer energize a brand like nothing a brand can do on its own. And thanks to the proliferation of media platforms, sharing the narrative has the potential to generate ‘positive unforeseen outcomes’ on a massive scale.

3) Move from scripted to improvised narratives. Shared narratives cannot be scripted, they have to be improvised into existence. There are too many players in the game to script for all of them, and make no mistake, each and every player plays a role. All it takes is one customer with a bitch and a big network to knock down your market cap like Bluto took out Popeye before he ate his spinach. Improvisation is to narrative what spinach is to Popeye. Scripted (and re-scripted and re-re-scripted) scenarios quickly fall out of sync with the customer audience. Improvisation, by contrast, is about staying in the narrative flow. If you’re not in it, you’re out of it. Eat your spinach!

Stories are the best way we have of simplifying complexity, of finding common ground. They provide context that no technology or platform can. In a complex system, context owns. Because business gets conducted in an environment that’s exponentially more complex today than it was yesterday, story is more important than ever. But like everyone else does, we have to go about our work differently. We’re not just storytellers, we are experts in the science of narrative. We are Shawnee. We are hot blondes armed with paddles and balls. We are painters of dogs. PaintedDog1

Tags: Audience, Branding, John Hagel, John Seely Brown, Michael Margolis, Narrative, Narratoligists, Narratology, Networked World, quantum, script, Scripting, Steve Denning, story, Storytelling, The Power of Pull, value creation
Posted in Branding, Focus, Games, Narrative | 2 Comments »

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