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.”

Jim Stengel

Before there was a GameChangers LLC, before one word of the book had been written, I read in that Ad Age article how Stengel had made what we know today as a GameChanger move: He banned all storyboards from first meetings with ad agencies on new campaigns. What a gift!  Storyboards in a kickoff meeting, presume way too much. They hijack the process, and take it down a one-way, one-lane street. They imply a client/vendor relationship that prematurely assigns status and roles to the players and is therefore toxic to a truly organic process.

I give Jim Stengel a lot of credit for indicating that there is a need for improvisation in business. His storyboard ban created a vacuum that, by design I’m sure, required improvisation to fill.

In animation, where films are largely worked out on storyboards, presenting scenes that have been depicted on storyboards is called ‘getting the story on its feet.’ Stengel recognized that getting anything on its feet that was going to have legs needed to fall a time or two first.

Today, Stengel teaches at the Anderson School of Business at UCLA, and from his website it seems that he’s still got a unique perspective on the practices and processes of marketing brands.   I hope he’s telling the future captains of industry about his P & G storyboard rule.  It’s a good one.

One of my favorite metaphors for the Networked World comes from a source I can’t attribute. I believe I came across it in Wired Magazine in the late 1990s. In the article, the writer cited a sci-fi story that describes a future in which game kiosks have been installed on busy street corners. The kiosks alert passersby when there’s some kind of rotten thing happening to the human organism — a famine, a war, a currency devaluation, a water shortage, etc. When the alert is issued, pedestrians take to the kiosks and play a massively multplayer game designed so that the playing generates whatever kind of energy or economies are needed to correct the imbalance in the world.

If anyone remembers the Wired article or the original sci-fi story cited by the article’s author, please let me know. I’d like to give proper credit. (Thus correcting an imbalance : )

I am reminded of this article/scenario a lot these days, because we are seeing it happen for real. As a generation of gamers enters the workforce, gaming is getting more serious. In the next five years, the levels of participation and consequences of game play will be one of the most profound changes we will see in the networked economy.

As games and gamers have matured and evolved, the culture of gaming has gotten more sophisticated, and the levels of engagement have become more meaningful. Flight simulators are an example of a serious game that have gotten much more realistic in the 3o+ years their existence. The guilds in Worlds of Warcraft can be like family to their members. Facebook’s cause-related apps, Procter & Gamble’s online innovation lab, and the massively multiplayer game Superstruct, which the Institute for the Future launches later this month, are examples of games with a serious purpose. Procter & Gamble wants to externalize more of its creative engineering and in the process expand the pool of productive ideas entering its network. Superstruct is designed to forecast and positively impact a future that will improve the lives of cerebral palsy victims around the world. Serious games, those. Backed by serious money and talent.

Of course the serious consequences of games are not going to be 100% beneficial. The dark destruction of Yin always accompanies the bright optimism of Yang. The line between playing a war simulation game and actually killing other human beings is perilously thin, if it even exists any more at all.

So what purpose should games serve? What objectives should the playing of games achieve? The sci-fi story cited above expressed an idea about it. Post-Apocalyptic MMORPG games like Fallout set players in gloomier futures. Microsoft has one take on the question, the Pentagon another, Electronic Arts another. Here’s how an improviser sees it: We play games to solve problems.

Modern improvisation began in the 1930s, with theater games devised by two schoolteachers, Viola Spolin and Neva Boyd, to help children from multi-cultural backgrounds on Chicago’s South Side — first generation Serbs and Croats and Poles and Germans and Jews and Blacks and Czechs — find ways to communicate and learn from one another instead of beating each other over the head with bowling pins. For Spolin and Boyd and their students, improvisation became a way to transcend fear, ego and ethnic differences so that productive collaborations could occur. Improvisation was the conduit to learning, and games were the basis of improvisation.

The improvisation required by the playing of games — the spontaneous interactions between players — lets players collaboratively discover innovative solutions to problems. It’s true in theater, true in business. True for children, and for grown-ups, too.

Improvisation as conceived by Viola Spolin and Neva Boyd holds that the playing of games equates with doing some good in the world. Games are a means of supporting one another, and connecting with our communities.

The founding teachers believed in no uncertain terms that our interactions should arise from a spirit of hopefulness instead of being necessitated by our fears, and that the choice is always ours to make.

Obama ‘08.

To improvise is to heighten and expand the discoveries in the moment. I call this process leapfrogging. An idea is only as good as our ability to add to it, delve into it, expand on it. Leapfrog it. This is especially true of brand strategies. To the improvisational brand, a strategy is a call for a continuous exploration of the themes and ideas the brand represents.

Everything is important. Everything matters. In the Networked World, our fates and fortunes are interconnected as never before. The multipliers are intense. It is ultra-important to be consistently aware and respectful of even the tiniest details, because today’s incidentals become tomorrow’s headlines. Ask Eliot Spitzer.

Surrender unto the loss of control. Give up; it’s ok to be confused. If you give yourself permission to wade into the unknown, you are engaging in a process of learning, knowing, creating. Industrial Age behaviors were about the fight for control. In the Networked World our success depends on our ability to create cosmos — consensus, clarity, definition, constellations of meaning! — from chaos. Accept your confusion. Work toward understanding.

Follow the process and the product will come. I was a speaker this week at the Horizons High Performance Computing Conference in Palm Springs. One of my fellow speakers was Tom Lange, Director of Modeling and Simulation for Procter & Gamble, who gave a very engaging presentation on the uses of high performance computing in his company’s manufacturing processes. Among his observations was this: “We don’t sell soap, we sell ‘clean.’” This is a very improvisational concept. Improvisation is a process for exploring themes, and it is the exploration of the theme that yields the performance, i.e. ‘product’.

Realize that the next best thing to perfection is being damn good at whatever you do. Amen.

What do Jif Peanut Butter and the commedia dell’artes of the Renaissance have in common? Both are improvised performances that are informed by suggestions from the audience.

A suggestion is the word(s) or idea(s) given by the audience to an improv group from which the group develops themes for a performance. Suggestions are important to improvisation because they make the audience an active collaborator in the show. Watching a group springboard from a suggestion into an exploration of themes inspired by that suggestion is one of the most engaging aspects of an improv performance. It engenders a natural rapport between audience and performers, and gives the crowd a rooting interest in the outcome of the show. After all, if something is our idea, we want it to be good.

The business improviser also acts on suggestions from the audience. The purpose is the same: to bring the audience into active collaboration on your performance and give it a rooting interest in your success.

In the commedia dell’artes, an early form of improvised theater, small troupes of performers traveled from town to town in Italy and central Europe, giving spontaneous shows on street corners. These troupes used satire as a way of appealing to the locals’ sense of humor. Before the show began the performers would gather as much information as they could about the town and its people. Who the bigshots were. The name of the constable. The concerns of the citizens. The performance would then arise organically from this ‘conversation with the audience’. Because the troupe had been given useful information and invariably had a repertoire of stock (usually masked) characters that figured into the life of every small town, they could perform scenes that hit home with the audience.

Entrepreneurs and business executives like Jim Stengel, the Chief Marketing Officer for Procter & Gamble, maker of Jif peanut butter and a hundred other familiar consumer brands, understand that brands in the Networked World are, in effect, improvisational performances for the marketplace, and spend much of their strategic focus ‘listening to the community describe itself’. These days marketers like Stengel call on their brands to reflect to an unprecedented degree what the community is saying. A multi-billion-dollar company like Procter & Gamble and a centuries-gone commedia dell’artes company from Italy have this same vital fact of life in common: The success of each depends on how adept they are at acting on suggestions from their audiences. In business, the community describing itself instigates what I call an Umbilical Loop of interactions between audience and performer by which brands are built and sustained in the marketplace.

Business-related suggestions are usually complex and come in a multitude of forms via many channels and, if the organization is wired at all, in massive volume. On the other hand, sometimes suggestions can be slap-you-in-the-face simple.

In 1998 Dr. Taryn Rose was an orthopedic surgeon practicing in San Francisco. Her patients included quite a few stylish, shoe-loving women who frequently complained to Dr. Rose about and needed treatment for foot pain – pain caused by those stylish shoes. Dr. Rose, too, wore fashionable shoes, and her feet would suffer during the long hours she spent building her practice. The complaint was so chronic that Rose took it as a suggestion from the audience. From the suggestion of ‘hurting feet’, the entrepreneurial physician arrived at a theme of ‘comfortable fashion’ and began designing shoes that appealed to her audience’s sense of style and her doctor’s sense of good health. Suffice it to say that Rose no longer practices medicine. Today, she is a well-documented business success story, the founder and CEO of Taryn Rose, Inc., which in 2007 will enjoy retail sales worldwide in excess of $20 million.