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.”

It does, however, get a lot more complex, and in a hurry.  Here’s why:

In selling scenes, the customer plays two roles:  Audience and Scene Partner.  You, as a seller, co-create your selling scene with your customer as your scene partner.   He or she will then, stepping into the role of your audience, pass judgment on your performance.  Thumbs up or thumbs down?  Worth the price of admission or not?  Good collaboration or rocky relationship?  Will you generate positive word of mouth or negative reviews?  Your earnings depend on how your performance is received.

There’s no script for these scenes–at least not one your customer is going to be memorizing and reciting verbatim anytime soon.  You’re going to be improvising.  And this is a fact:  The best salespeople are the best improvisers.

Here are some ways in which good salespeople collaborate with customers on scenes that get a thumbs-up from those same customers:

They keep their scenes lively. They keep the dialogue moving along at a productive tempo.  They yes-and promptly.  They heighten by upping the tempo, the emotional pitch, or both.  They add useful information.  They perform with the awareness that a ‘dead spot’ in the scene now will be judged harshly by the customer-as-audience later.

They make their customer the hero of the scene. An improvisational salesperson is a Sherpa to the customer with some kind of allegorical mountain to climb.  The sales Sherpa has useful knowledge.  Charts a practical course to the summit.   Reads the weather.  Calculates the odds.  Comes well-equipped.  The sales Sherpa gives the gift of support, and in doing so, makes the customer look good.  The role of the sales Sherpa is not the same as playing a second-banana, a sidekick, a best friend, a wing man, a femme fatale or a fall guy.  These are Hollywood movie roles.   The sales Sherpa is exactly what the name defines: a Sherpa.  It’s a Himalayan thing.

They listen. Wow, do improvisers listen.  They hear things the casual listener doesn’t.  They remember the nuances, and use the throw-aways.  They know that the most important conversation of the day may happen on an elevator ride between the first and sixth floors before a sales presentation begins.  They listen with more than their ears.  They observe with all the senses.   And then, maybe then…they speak.   They understand that being silent and being mute are two completely different things, and that sometimes one sees more with one’s eyes closed than with them open.

They respect environment. In selling scenes, you, the seller, are usually a visiting performer in someone else’s theater.  In many ways, the ‘theater’ of a customer’s company is like any other theater.  Theaters have traditions and history that must be respected.  They are influenced by politics and patronage and star players with competing agendas.  They are invariably facing some kind of financial threat.  They are only as good as their last hit, and they have ridiculously high hopes for the next project.  They can be half-looney with romantic intrigue.  The improvisational salesperson sees and respects the arena in which the customer operates.  When performing at the Apollo, touch the Tree of Hope.  When visiting Ireland, kiss the Blarney Stone.

They build relationships. Relationships are the basis of all improvisation.  The relationships between players, between players and environment, and between players and audience, are all intertwined.  The best way to move toward a sale, to generate positive outcomes regardless of the circumstances, is to build and nurture these relationships.   Relationships will see you through the kinds of adversity, and capitalize on the opportunities, that no scripted sales program can predict or anticipate.

In selling scenes, the networked customer is a more potent player than ever.  He or she often knows as much about your product as you do.  Relationships with customers are frequently more sensitive, more fluid and more demanding than they were in the Industrial Age.  Customers use social media to converse frequently amongst themselves in scenes to which you, the seller, are not invited.  You can no longer impose your narrative on the customer, you’ve got to earn an invitation to participate in the customer’s narrative.

So be a Sherpa.  Know the mountain, and your customer will see that the climb is impossible without you.

A friend of ours who works in sales gets honored often as a leading performer at his company, a large and established organization which is one of the 87 current members of the S&P 500 that have been members since its inception in 1957. The honoring happens at lavish banquets attended by the company’s top managers and featuring a pricey speaker.

Understand that our friend is a madman, who rides his three-wheeled Piaggio motorcycle with the governor of the state where he lives, has 28 tattoos— including one on his (hairy) chest of a man pushing a lawnmower, next to which he shaves a smooth swatch as if the tattooed lawnmower has mowed his chest; and as a hobby he spent a couple of years performing standup comedy as a Catholic priest (he’s Jewish).  None of the tattoos is visible outside our friend’s business suit. Nobody at his company knows he does stand-up under a stage name while wearing a Roman collar.   He plays the company game, but it is far from the only game he plays.

Our friend told us that the speaker at a recent banquet where he was honored as his division’s Salesperson of the Year gave a speech about ‘Finishing First.’ About how nothing else would do. About how a person has a choice between finishing first and being a loser. How in sales, there is no prize for second place, first place is the only place that matters. You either make the sale or you don’t.

Our friend approached the speaker after his speech and struck up a conversation that went like this.

FRIEND: Nice speech.
SPEAKER: Thank you.
FRIEND: What’d you get for it? Forty thousand dollars?  Am I close?
SPEAKER: Uh..that’s in the ballpark.
FRIEND: You know, our first choice for a speaker was Colin Powell, but he wanted two-hundred thousand dollars and we couldn’t afford it.  So it looks like finishing second worked out pretty well for you, didn’t it?

“When I saw the look on his face I felt bad for saying it,” says our friend. “But I couldn’t resist.  It was such an obviously lame premise.  There are all kinds of situations where finishing first has nothing to do with your success.”

So you’re waiting in line for the iPhone or the Twilight.  Cool.  It’s a happening.  A social event.  Remember, though, that meaningful transactions happen in the line, with other people, not at the end of it, with an apparatus or an apparition.

Enjoy the ride and you won’t ever have to worry about whether you’ll be the first to arrive.

Weinstein’s video demonstrates brilliantly how our perceptions shape our opinions.  That’s the obvious learning.

There are other, subtler ideas expressed in this video, too, which is why I really dig it.  It has lots of subtext:

The absence of knowledge makes perceptions more malleable. Because Weinstein is unknown to his subjects, slight adjustments in his appearance seem to cause wild fluctuations in perceptions (the edits themselves also shape perception, but I’ll comment only with subjects’ behavior here).  Anyone or any brand that seeks to limit knowledge?  This is why.  Manipulation of perceptions.  In a business environment where knowledge is so easily shared and transferred, limiting knowledge in order to manipulate perceptions is not good business.

Consistent character encourages learning. Weinstein’s character, a slightly bemused, inquisitive observer of human nature, seems consistent throughout.  As a storyteller, he uses this truth to get honest reactions from his subjects—that is, because he’s consistently in character, we can be pretty sure the subjects’ reactions are their own, and not something he has manipulated them into doing   Imagine if, instead, he’d played different characters in the interviews—aggressive, stupid, coy, flirty—we would not have been half as interested in or trusting of what his subjects had to say.  He and we would not have learned half as much.

Interrogation is not dialogue. The questions all go one way.  Weinstein does this to control the narrative and make a point.  Generally, however, dialogue is much more productive than interrogation.

This is what a lot of market research looks like. Like market research, Weinstein’s film is a series of snapshots.  It is an interrogation of the audience, not a dialogue.  Because of the way the interviews are conducted, the audience’s multi-faceted responses are nearly all flawed.  It doesn’t matter how much data you have if its facets are flawed and unrelated.  Many facets do not a diamond make. It is the interrelationship of the facets, their connection to one another, that illuminates the stone.

Admit your ignorance. Nearly everyone in the video is willing to guess about Weinstein’s identity, and in doing so they accept a ‘rule of the game’ that underscores their ignorance.  This is a fine storytelling device for Weinstein’s video, but it’s a toxic game in business.  For some managers, however, this is THE  game.  A conversation consists of them waiting for a ‘gotcha’ moment, when they can prove you wrong, ignorant, or both.  People pretending to know what they’re talking about are just as much to blame for this game as those who expose them.   Beware of games designed to show up anyone’s ignorance!  Admitting your ignorance is a first step toward learning.  Guessing, or faking knowledge, is not.  Ultimately, Weinstein’s video delivers the goods in the form of questions answered, but not before he demonstrates just how elusive the goods can be.

This is an appreciation.

John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison’s new book, The Power of Pull–How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion, describes the business environments most of us are living in these days:  fluid, complex, generative, with networks, not machines, as their framework.  The book itself reflects this.  Its structure mirrors the structure of a network.  Its concepts are expressed as a matrix.  This gives the Power of Pull depth and perspective that asks quite a bit of the reader.  I had to go through the book twice to even begin to grasp its concepts and their implications to business.

The reading expands as you’re reading, as if you could stop at almost any page in the book and use it as a lens to zoom in on some aspect of business in the 21st Century.  What will it be like?  How will it change us? How can we change it? Who will prosper? What will hold us back? What’s the relationship between chaos and control? Between core and edge? It’s a lot to ponder.  This is not some fluffy recipe for feeling good about the future.  This is an important assessment of the work to be done.

The Power of Pull labels this evolution ‘The Big Shift.’  Make no mistake, The Big Shift is a life-altering change of game.  It is the tornado to Oz.  It is the jump to hyperspace.  It is the event that turns everyday turtles into Ninjas.  Prepare to be transformed by what you read.

Here’s a small sampling of the many concepts expressed the book that can make the difference between survival and prosperity in the networked era of business.

Push vs. Pull. ‘Push’ business models are (the GameChangers term for it) ‘Industrial Age’ models.  They are machine-like, hierarchical, heavily scripted, and emphasize planning over preparation. As one manager told me recently, “We are supposed to plan for every contingency, but you can’t plan for every contingency.  It’s impossible.”  ‘Pull’ models, by contrast, are dynamic, nimble, and emphasize preparation over planning.  In the Pull model, plans are designed to evolve, and deviations from the norm are seen not as failures but as opportunities to learn and grow.

Stocks vs. Flows. Push models treat knowledge as a scarce commodity.  A stock.  A ‘Push’ manager says, “I know but I can’t tell you.”  Pull models treat knowledge as an abundant resource.  A flow.  A Pull manager says, “Here’s what I know that can help solve the problem.”

Fast Learning. Push models called for standardized institutional learning.  Everyone worked off the same playbook.  In the networked world, there’s no time to transfer knowledge from edge to core, have it interpreted, codified and re-distributed to the edge as institutional dogma.  By the time the core has reacted, the opportunity to put the knowledge to use has been lost.  Because they treat knowledge as abundant and not as a scarce commodity, Pull models are free to direct flows of knowledge not just to the core, but to wherever in the enterprise there is a problem to be solved.  This is a far more efficient way for a company to apply its knowledge than the old Push model.

Small Moves. As improvisers we learn that the little things can make the biggest difference to performance, because the little things that have the ability to expand into big things, and the audience loves this.  Big things, by contrast, can only get so big as to be unmanageable, or be broken down into manageable chunks.  The small moves have manageability built into them. Networks are designed to knit together small moves into significant phenomena.  When communication is significant, markets move.   And when markets move, money gets made.

Serendipity. (I neglected to include this in the original post, and it’s important.)  Serendipity is an unforeseen positive outcome.  Because networks contain infinite potential for serendipity, it is essential to take it into account in the Pull model, as Hagel III et al certainly do.  Improvisation can influence serendipity in two ways:  First, because unforeseen positive outcomes are what improvisers intend in every scene, it invites serendipity; second, it is a process for turning the unforeseen events into positive outcomes.   Push models automatically regard what is unforeseen as negative.  Pull models (and improvisers) greet what is unforeseen as an opportunity to make something positive happen.

What JSB, Hagel III and Davison describe in The Power of Pull is a kind of magnetism.  The cover of the book shows iron filings aligning along magnetic fields.  This is my one quibble, what I’d call a slight disconnect in their narrative:  If The Power of Pull is, in fact, meant to describe magnetism, then the concept of Push can’t be discounted or discredited quite so much as the authors seem to want.  Magnetism involves both Pull and Push, attraction and repulsion.  There is a relationship between the two.  Just because we are divorcing Push to marry Pull doesn’t mean we’ll never deal with Push again.  We had kids with Push.  We built some wealth together.  As the authors themselves point out in the book, without a core there can be no meaningful edge.  Push will never be entirely out of the picture.

There is a whole new language coming into existence to describe business in the networked world.  This language invokes new rules, like the 140 characters rule; and defines new ways of collaborating, like the crowdsourcing game.   The Power of Pull freshens the lexicon by describing how and why business is changing, must change, to prosper in the new realities made possible by networks.  If, as I believe, this is magnetism we’re talking about, the work of realizing the new realities will consist in equal parts of rejecting the negative, attracting the positive, and not messing with the in-betweens.   Push, Pull or Get Out of the Way!

While you’re lacing up your Google running shoes, or in the vernacular of this future, your ‘Googs,’ you get an alert on your mobile that there’s a major drought looming in Tibet, which is on track to record its lowest snowfall ever.

You program your Googs where to send the 1,000 foot-pounds of energy you’re going to generate during your 6K run.  Around the world, millions of others who belong to the Himalayan Foundation like you do get the same alert, and trigger the same program on their Googs– and additionally via the movement generated by wearers of the 12 other shoe brands, two brands of workout machines, a theater seating company named Squirmigy, four flooring companies, and a wheelchair manufacturer–all of which the Himalayan Foundation has networked on the Donorgy platform.

For the next hour, the energy generated by the movement of the users of all these brands will be auctioned by the Himalayan Foundation and sold as futures on global commodity networks.  At the end of the hour, the contracts will be delivered and all bets get paid off.  With the money raised in a little over one hour,  the Himalayan Foundation will be able to fund a fleet of  gigantic solar powered cargo-cleaning blimps (known as Humptys) to pick up a billion metric tonnes of water from a flood in the Phillipines and clean and haul it to the farmers and communities of Tibet, who can now keep Buddha smiling for another season.

Okay, we’re not there yet, but we will be someday.

MEANWHILE…here’s what we got.  We run for causes.  The mechanism by which funds get transferred to various causes is to the aforementioned scenario what a Stanley Steamer is to a Lexus.  We’ve got a ways to go, but we work with what we’ve got.

Kevin Wall

TOMORROW, SUNDAY, APRIL 18…Kevin Wall and his band of Live Earthlings will stage a Run for Water that will channel money to a number of organizations who dig wells and provide clean water for poor communities in Africa.  It is the ‘opening act’ for the big concert Wall and Live Earth are producing to open the 2010 World Cup in Johannesburg in June.  Proceeds from that concert will also flow to social networks supporting economic development in Africa.

The cynic in me says this is sponsored by Dow Chemical.  Those Bophal people.  The thing is, it takes big money to solve big problems.  The waste and misallocation of the planet’s resources is a big problem, and Kevin Wall has a special genius for getting large organizations to direct big money at big problems.  movement.  Yea absolutely, the guy can  be a pain in the ass to work with.  Between him and Al Gore, there was pretty much no oxygen in the room on the Live Earth concerts (the plants were happy, though : )  That said, Kevin has a great heart, he is a master business improviser who causes a lot of unforeseen positive outcomes in the projects he does, and he deserves the support of anyone–from Tony Dow to Dow Finsterwald to Dow Jones to Dow Chemical to Daniel Dao–who wants to work on better ways of treating the planet.

And I will guarantee that when roller skates and skateboards start generating energy futures, Kevin Wall will be the first in line for that deal.

Until then…what are we going to do tomorrow?!…

If you run, or can walk 6K, and are in one of the many locations around the world where this run is happening, it will definitely be a good thing for you to do tomorrow morning.   Program those Googs and throw some foot-pounds at the problem, why don’t ya!

]]> http://www.gamechangers.com/index.html/archives/1760/feed 0 http://www.gamechangers.com/index.html/archives/1664 http://www.gamechangers.com/index.html/archives/1664#comments Thu, 11 Mar 2010 01:51:26 +0000 admin http://www.gamechangers.com/index.html/?p=1664 Take a look at these two passages.  The first written recently by a couple of anime fan/bloggers, Kiki and Lala,  and the second written by the physicist/philosopher, Fritjof Capra, in his book The Tao of Physics, first published in 1975.  The human experience has many faces, is described from many perspectives, in many languages, but it is ultimately the same story.  There is no one in this world you can meet, no animal you eat, no plant you grow, no product you use, no adversity you encounter, no interaction of any kind you can have, of which it cannot be said, “We are in this together.”

In our crazy race to escape these kinds of vortexes, we can turn direction-blind.  We pick a course of action, or someone picks a course for us, and in our all-out effort to escape a certain fate, we go heads down as hard as we can for as long as we can in that direction, like barn-sour horses galloping toward a distant barn.  A strategy, as Umair Haque points out in his latest HBR post, can be just as bad as a locked-in direction, because it can confine or limit one’s options instead of liberating them.

What Haque advocates, and what we could not agree with more, is adopting a set of behaviors (he calls these behaviors ‘Wisdom’) that foster liberation of the ideas and the ethical actions that can deliver us from the Goldman-Sachs Singularity, and whatever else sucks.  These behaviors have no time frame, because they are timeless.  They cannot be quantified, because they are potentially limitless in number.

One of these behaviors (me, adding to Haque’s list) is to Envision.   And by that I don’t mean Ayn Rand’s old Burt Lancaster-as-One-Of-A-Kind-Genius concept of vision but what I call ‘Viola Vision’, which consists of ’seeing and sharing what we see.’  This kind of envisioning expands our horizons, and gives us infinitely more options for escaping what sucks.  So in your quest for solutions, don’t forget to:

Look over. It’s how you get perspective on a problem.

Look under. Play with the dynamic of concealment and revelation.  Respect roots.  Dig deep.

Look sideways. My friend, the animation director John Musker, talks about stories as ‘taking an unexpected left turn.’  A sideways move can shake up your narrative in a way that keeps you on your toes and your audience engaged.

Look down. Who needs a helping hand?  Some days, this the only question worth answering.

Lisberger and Me

“For most of mankind’s existence, our subconscious mind has been hidden.  Now it’s on full display in the network.  Everything you can dream of is there and accessible instantly.  And the question is, what are we going to do with it?”

“People need a new way in.”

“If one aspect of work, access to information, has gotten infinitely easier, the laws of physics tell us that another aspect, one that maybe we don’t recognize yet, has gotten infinitely harder.  We expect things to always get easier, but that’s not necessarily true.”

“On one side of the equation you have the swarm, the hive mind, whatever you want to call it.  And on the other, you have all these tools, and this demand for productivity.  If you don’t know what you’re doing, it will get revealed quicker.  So you have to really know what you’re doing.  The swarm has to be grounded in capability.”

“The network and the tools are amazing.  If people learn how to use the network and the tools, they’ll be amazing, too.”

“One result of networks is the democratization of quality.  When all content is pumped out and made accessible, it creates a kind of middling format.  It leads to a common denominator effect.  This is why elitism matters.  Not just anyone can tell a good story, or create a good design.”

“Intellectual bullying perpetuates the wrong argument.”

“With improvisation, you can do a scene where one person plays the landlord and the other person plays the tenant who’s behind on the rent.  Then those two people reverse roles, and from that process, you learn how to go about resolving the problem.  In business, that never happens.  No one switches sides or changes roles.  If you play for the Blue Team, that’s the team you stay on.  If you’re on the Yellow Team, you stay on that team, and you argue for that side.  And you just keep on having the same argument, and it’s terrible, because nothing changes, and nothing ever gets resolved.”

“What you’re doing with GameChangers is fracturing and realigning the sides of the argument so that problems can get solved.”

“The subconscious mind doesn’t recognize time.  It exists in a permanent state of ‘now.’  In this sense the subconscious mind is like a child, who doesn’t know anything but ‘right now.’  When the subconscious mind makes itself visible and instantly accessible in the network, and everything exists in a state of now, it breeds immaturity.  We begin operating at the level of awareness of an 11 year old.  Maturity is something you can only get to over time.  It’s linear in that sense.  The ethics and perspective that come with time and maturity are what’s missing in this environment.”

“Maturity comes from mastery in the physical realm.”

One of these systems was called a Mix Mill.  It was a processing machine about the size of a small refrigerator that ground grains like corn and soybeans into livestock feed.  Using a series of black dials on the front of a cool-looking and very loud mint green machine connected to a set of augers, a farmer could dial in mixtures of grains and nutrients, and control the blend and texture of the feed.  This saved the farmer all the time and labor of loading grain into a truck, hauling it to a centralized grain mill, grinding and mixing the grain there in one big batch, then loading it  into 100 lb bags and hauling it back to the farm.

Another product, a Grain Bin, was a big silvery cylinder with drying fans installed around its perimeter that allowed the farmer to store and dry grain until the market presented the best selling opportunity.  No longer did a farmer necessarily have to sell his grain at harvest time, when the market was glutted.  The Grain Bin gave farmers more flexibility by giving them a much larger window through which to move their product.

After breakfast this morning with Scott Walker, the founder of BrainCandy LLC, whose Runes of Gallidon explores production using a networked  model, I can see more clearly than ever that we are in an analogous scenario today.  The ’small farmers’ of our time are Independent Media Producers (IMPs) such as app developers, gamers, bloggers, filmmakers and storytellers of all stripes.

The Mix Mills and Grain Bins of new media–some of them even sporting agri-names like FinalCut, Feedburner, FeedRoom, FeedCompany, Mailbeans and Sprouter–are abundant, and give an IMP almost unlimited ways to intersect with market vectors.  (In fact, anyone thinking of launching a media app would be well advised to take a look at this first.  All 67 pages of it.  It should be mandatory.)

Like Mix Mills and Grain Bins did for farmers, these apps  give the IMP much more say in the supply chain.  A say in when the feed gets ground.  How long it gets stored.  What goes into it.

The apps also hold down the IMP’s expenses.  Costs of fuel, labor and transportation are all lowered.  What was once produced at the centralized grain mill (e.g. a large post production facility with heavy-duty Avid machines and 24-track consoles) can now be produced using laptops in someone’s home studio.

With all these ‘Mix Mills and Grain Bins’ and the unlimited spectrum of mashups and market entry points they make possible, we IMPs– we tillers of the cybersoil, farmers of the fractal, growers of the game–are left with only two questions that have no off-the-shelf answer:  What are we planting? and Why?