DDB Does Austin

Embracing the Crowd with a Hacker Mentality

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 09:25:00 -0700

This article was first published by DMNews.com on March 18, 2013.

I was fortunate enough to attend this year’s SXSW Interactive Festival as a moderator on a panel about crowd-funding and entrepreneurship. Considering every one of the more than 25,000 people at the festival had their eyes fixed on their phones, there’s plenty of content and conversations surrounding the show available in the social sphere at #sxsw, so I won’t try and out “Grumpy Cat” the crowds. But here are a few observations:

“The Crowd”

The uniform last week in Austin was plaid shirts, big glasses, tattoos, and beards among the digerati. However, there was also a lot of talk among these elites about “The Crowd.” There were at least a dozen different talks on the power of accessing this crowd, which could refer to either one’s own social network or a larger community, to hack a system. In my case, the system was financing. Platforms like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Kiva, and Neighbor.ly connect entrepreneurial ideas to capital by disrupting the more traditional means of banks, community-based economic development, and venture capital firms.

These crowd-funding platforms have democratized access to capital. While crowd-funding business ventures are currently limited by regulatory and fraud concerns, there’s strong support for it at many levels. Many made the case for the transformational power crowd-funding has to unleash a huge swath of entrepreneurial activity among business owners and start ups everywhere. It’s about making the process to raise money virtually frictionless for entrepreneurs by pointing towards a way to monetize our social networks. Our understanding of what it means to be an “investor,” an “owner”—even the market itself—will surely change as this emergent behavior expands. Just a few days ago an avid group of fans helped bankroll two million dollars for their dream project, a Veronica Mars movie—$10,000 got you a walk-on part—and saved the studio hundreds of thousands of dollars in financing and marketing costs. It’s a win-win situation.

Industries and institutions are ripe for this kind of democratizing disruption. The questions now are: How can we shed light on new opportunities for brands that act generously and openly with valuable customer advocates, and what can we glean about emergent trends and tastes from crowd-funded projects?

Everyone is selling something

SXSW is a festival by design, not a conference. As a result there is lots of schmoozing and socializing. Startups are selling their ideas to potential users, agencies, and clients, and agencies are selling their coolness and insider insights to their clients. The “pitch” is just part of the culture at South By. Social media and digital media on the whole create an always-on and ready-to-respond environment for brands that is hectic and unrelenting. The speed of change, demand for response, and an abundance of options make selling a strategic priority.

So, how can we simultaneously strengthen our relationships with clients and customers while opening doors for opportunities that add value (technology, media, and production partners)—even if they also compete for attention and resources?

Makers, hackers & storytellers

There is a distinct melting pot feeling at SXSW: Makers with their pride in craftsmanship; hackers with their disruptive tendencies; and storytellers who can capture and sell the optimism. This trio can make quite a marketing stew of innovative solutions and valuable relationships.

Kraft made a big investment at SXSW with program sponsorship and various activation points throughout the festival, and Oreo was also a standout example of the marketer embracing the maker and hacker mindsets within a branded story. Oreo has made a big investment in social media in an attempt to connect to a new generation of Oreo customers. Some of activation ideas were fun (green screen Austin), while others were more traditional advertising activations, such as T-shirts on pedicab drivers—but overall it was clear Oreo is willing to hack its own brand in order to reinvent itself within the burgeoning SXSW community.

The ability to create a product people want to use, and a willingness to innovate within an emotionally resonant context, can both change behaviors and impact the trajectory of entire industries. Doing it well takes care, courage, and creativity. Do you have what it takes?

Seth Friedman is managing partner at Tribal Worldwide.

The end of the line, but only for SXSW 2013. Thank you, and good...

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 20:00:19 -0700

The end of the line, but only for SXSW 2013.

Thank you, and good night - counting down to SXSW 2014 and the next instalment from DDBdoesAustin.com!

The end is nigh.

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 19:56:58 -0700

The end is nigh.

Depeche Mode meet their audience - looking forward to the Delta...

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 17:20:52 -0700

Depeche Mode meet their audience - looking forward to the Delta Machine album being released!

DJ Bunny Ears’ panel (his mum calls him Eric Johnson) was a...

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 17:20:49 -0700

DJ Bunny Ears’ panel (his mum calls him Eric Johnson) was a great kick in the pants for all of us about the opportunity to use music in our work. Covering work including Converse Rubber Tracks, Hyundai Re:Generation and Mountain Dew’s Green Label Sound, this was a much needed reminder about just how much heavy lifting that music can do for our work, how much it gets the short end of the stick (“you mean we’ve got no time and no budget? AWESOME!”) and the incredible opportunities that exist to go beyond licensing and to create something great that benefits both bands and brands.

Get on your boots.

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 17:20:45 -0700

Get on your boots.

What brands can learn from bands: just how valuable your fans really are

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 17:20:42 -0700

While music is more popular than ever before, it’s ironic that a large part of SXSW Music is devoted to figuring out just how the industry can survive in the era of peer-to-peer sharing (interestingly Napster’s co-founders Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning were here for the world premiere of the documentary feature film Downloaded).

A great panel here showed that the music industry is actually under-developed and that there’s another potential $450 million to $2.6 billion that could currently be made (I know that that’s quite a wide range, but if I were in the music industry I’d be pretty excited about another $450 million cents in sales at the moment). Where is this opportunity coming from? Largely from the fans – those people who want to engage even more with the bands they love and are using platforms such as PledgeMusic not to donate their money to the industry, but instead to gain a deeper experience with their favourite artists.

Substitute “brands” for “bands” and I think that’s a pretty interesting idea that we can all use.

I love rock ‘n’ roll: SXSW x Shepard Fairey x Art...

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 17:20:21 -0700

I love rock ‘n’ roll: SXSW x Shepard Fairey x Art & Soul.

Dave Grohl at this year’s SXSW Music keynote address - a...

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 10:17:06 -0700

Dave Grohl at this year’s SXSW Music keynote address - a great talk about how important it is to find your own voice, as it’s the one thing that everyone’s been blessed with.

A bit of #lovehome

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 09:59:00 -0700

HGTV has a #lovehome wall mural outside the Austin Convention Center, allowing peeps walking by to grab some paint and add their artistic flair to the wall. Lookin’ good!

Overdid it a bit...

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 09:37:46 -0700

Overdid it a bit. Didn’t remember the portions. Stoked though. — at Torchy’s Tacos.

Another Day of #SXSW Music

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 09:34:27 -0700

Get ready!

#LordHuron. Super Lovely

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 09:30:00 -0700

Was able to duck away from work and see #LordHuron. Super lovely. #sxsw2013 @DDBDoesAustin — at ACL Live.

Yoga anyone?

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 09:07:03 -0700

Not an uncommon sight at #sxsw

Cirque du Soleil #sxswadobe

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 08:59:01 -0700

#Amazing show at the Austin City Limits venue:

Freebies

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 07:57:36 -0700

Lots of freebies as we walk around this week:

SXSW: Don't focus on the technology, or the masses

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 07:51:02 -0700

SXSW has become a key venue for the introduction of new technology, with Foursquare launching and Twitter gaining a large amount of its early momentum here. However, as much as this event has become a showcase for new tech (Monday’s Woodstock-sized Google Glass developer demo, anyone?) it’s far more important to focus on the human element – including what the tech asks of people and what it can do for them. With this in mind, here are my four key outtakes from the last two days here in Austin.

Look after your niche (and it will help look after you)

A highlight for both me and, judging by his smile, the guy who sat next to me (who turned out to be an early investor) was the interview with Air B’n’B co-founder Brian Chesky. While the company’s idea initially seemed fairly out there – “strangers will let you come and stay in their house. And you meet them on the internet” – today it seems pretty normal, something vouched for by the thousands who either rented out their homes during SXSW or used it to find a place to stay. During this interview Air ‘BnB ‘had a clear message: products have traditionally had to be useful straight out of the box, however increasingly they require a network to be built around them in order to function. Instead of focusing on the masses to create this network, the brands that now use this model need to focus firmly upon their niche – especially those first 100 customers who love them enough to get involved early – and then use technology (and some word-of-mouth) to help them scale to their first 1,000,000 users.

Transparency/Authenticity

Yes, we’ve heard this before (whether or not this is informing everyone’s work is another thing), however if I had a dollar for every time that I’d heard these words at SXSW 2013 then I could already afford to pay for next year’s trip. The core reason that presenters have spoken about this need is the expansion of the sharing economy, which is driven by individuals, each of whom has their own brand and reputation available online for everyone to see. If you believe that this age of the personal brand and transparency is not relevant to you then think about whether or not you Googled/Facebooked/LinkedIn a person the last time that you were recruiting (or someone recruited you).

There is no better, it’s the experience that fits you best

A quick confession – I share a desk at DDB towers with our experience designer, so I’ve more than drunk the Kool Aid on this one. Bias aside, another major theme that has emerged this year is the importance of digital design and in particular design that focuses beyond the immediate and concentrates upon creating unique experiences (particularly for products and services that want to enjoy more than a one night stand with their audience). However before you can address this it’s vital to know what trade you’re actually in – with Air B’n’B proclaiming itself not to be in the travel industry, but rather the business of making memories for people. If only someone had told the music industry that they’re not in the business of making and shipping little plastic circles…

Foremost before first

While “always on” means that brands can’t close shop for the day, interestingly it doesn’t mean that they have to be first when it comes to news.

James Quinlan Director of social media
DDB Australia

SXSW: The techies not the tech are lessons from Austin

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 07:07:02 -0700

Despite the annual influx of SXSW hashtags reporting innovation and bringing news of new digital startups hitting our twitterboxes each March… It’s hard to fathom quite what you’ll get from South By SouthWest, a 5 day interactive festival held in a town that’s motto is “Keep Austin Weird”.

Ultimately, as advertising agencies, we look to SXSW to learn from the latest technology and platforms so that we can find opportunities for our client’s brands to catch the zeitgeist and impact behaviour.

But whilst advertising has always been about winning the moment and this is as close as you’ll get to today’s cutting edge moment, it doesn’t take too many presentations from Silicon Valley’s finest to see that advertising can learn a lot more from their spirit then the whereabouts of the next bandwagon.

A talk about 3D printing, Google Glass or a keynote address from a billionaire genius or former US Vice President can quickly convince you that you now know the future. But what’s more intriguing is actually the simplicity of their success. At SXSW you hear multimillionaire founders and start up celebrities cite their success as simply - creatively solving human problems.

The American Tech scene is quite simply the most lucrative commercial centre on the planet, its invention, reinvention and innovation is changing the way the world reads, communicates, buys, banks and operates and it does this on the simple premise of solving real people’s problems.

It may take a few genius programmers, some luck and a lot of capital funding but, the success stories from YouTube to Behance tell you that winning here is about who can help improve people’s lives the most.

So, yes ad agencies can learn how to crack the next social network for their clients here at SXSW but what is more intriguing is actually learning how we can, as an industry move from positioning brands to understanding how we can help our clients maximise value for their audiences. That requires a subtle but poignant shift from seeking return first to delivering value for people first.

Daniel Lipman is a senior business director for DDB Sydney.

Collaboration Angel

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 23:26:55 -0700

Collaboration?

The New Vibrant Ecosystem of Brands + Music

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 23:18:00 -0700

DDB Chicago (Moderated by Eric Johnson)

Wednesday, March 13 12:30PM – 1:30PM
Austin Convention Center Room 17A, 500 E Cesar Chavez St
#musicbranding #sxsw # #ddb @DDB_Worldwide
http://schedule.sxsw.com/2013/events/event_MP1456

Explore how music and brands play together in an ecosystem that is mutually beneficial to all parties involved. With brands, music is really just beginning to get utilized in a more meaningful way. Look at the unique and unfolding opportunities of music in collaboration and partnerships with brands, ad agencies and marketers. Brands, record labels, ad agencies, music/band management, marketing companies, artists and music supervisors talk about the ins and outs of working together.