Lance Ulanoff is warning us about the dangers of YouTube and what he calls iVideoism:

iVideoism is the insatiable need to digest video of virtually any kind on the Web and elsewhere (except TV). Most sufferers will live on viral video sites like TagWorld, Google Video, and YouTube.

I thought for a moment he might be kidding but no, he appears to be in earnest.  Lance thinks access to video on the net might be a social problem. 

The inescapable truth is that the moving image will be everywhere, yet iVideots will soon lose any true connection with the live people moving all around them.

It’s puzzling.  This "alienation" argument is precisely the one social critics used in the 20th century to warn us about TV.   But they thought that TV would have this effect because it was dominated by a few channels, a few brands, and a lot of brainless advertising.  The trouble with TV in the 1950s, they supposed, was that it was contained uniformity that must induce conformity from which alientation must surely follow. 

Say what you will about YouTube, but the problem here is precisely not the stupefying powers of a mass medium.  No, the reason YouTube is interesting is that it offers a fountain of invention from many thousands of people, pursuing a vast number of, some of them, deeply strange and cryptic projects.  YouTube is a mad house of inventiveness.  Regard the sprawling mess that is our culture. 

That’s what you begin to wonder about social commentators.  They have a very few "critical" cannons to roll out when called upon to reflect upon our world.  It doesn’t matter whether the target is mass media or micro media, the answer is going to be the same.  This is bound to be bad for us, not least because it will alienate us one from the other. 

Isn’t this the most powerful argument for the emergent, unedited, unconstrained, unpoliced and unapproved nature of our culture.  If we left it to the commentators, every innovation would look like a problem. Every innovation, TV and its opposite, would be forbidden us.  Thank god we have intellectuals to protect us from ourselves.  Thank god we don’t ever listen to them.

Lance, buddy, stow the warnings and break out the bubbly.  Every member of the species would love to have the "problem" of too much choice.  In the contemporary phrase with which we often honor the propulsive force of our culture, all of them like to be sipping from this fire house.  This is what we look like.  This is who we are. 

References

Lance, Ulanoff.  2006.  Are you an iVideot?  Internet Video is sucking life out of our live world.  PCMagazine.  April 20, 2006. here.

Smart people in small shops believe the best ideas come from smart people in small shops.

Today, evidence that this could be true.  Wieden + Kennedy is a smallish shop situated in Portland.  Recently, they landed accounts from the Coca-Cola Company and P&G.  Small may or may not be beautiful.  It certainly is flourishing.

Certainly, W+K is not tiny, nor is it obscure.  (The work for Nike precedes them everywhere.)  But they are not a conglomerate.  That TCCC and P&G should be prepared to trust them with a large account is telling. 

What it’s telling me: that the boutique (or boutique-ish) agency may finally triumph.  This appeared to be happening a few years ago.  Very small agencies were winning business away from giant advertising firms.  (One of them was called Taxi, apparently on the grounds that they never wanted to get larger than.) 

But then along came the global brand, and suddenly everyone said, "No, we can only do business with firms that have representation everywhere."  Good bye, boutiques. 

Now, plainly, big agencies should be as creative as small ones.  There is no technical reason why not.  But in point of fact, bigness in agencies is sometimes as destructive of the innovative instinct as it is elsewhere in the corporate world.  (And if an ad agency is not innovative, really, what’s the point?  It should be grounds for immediate cessation…whereas a more conventional corporation without ideas is good for, well, they could last another 3 or 4 years, easily.)

Here’s what Dan Wieden had to say when pressed by the Wall Street Journal.  (And, frankly, it kind of made me want to weep with gratitude.)

WSJ: For years marketers ballyhooed about the virtues of having a global ad firm that had offices in hundreds of markets around the world. Is that sentiment changing? And if so why?

Mr. Wieden: Yes. Obviously I sense change. You can see it with who we are going to bed with these days. When all this consolidation went on there was many voices that said ’scale is king’ and it turns out — thank God — that the idea is king. At the end of the day, one individual with one good idea can trump an entire network of thousands who don’t have an idea.

Why should this illumination, that the idea is king, be so hard for the corporate world to fix upon?  There can’t be any question.  We’ve all sat in those committee meetings that take forever, turn the problem into mush, the problem solvers into morons, and, finally, give advantage to the time servers and the knuckle heads.  (This surely the scary part.  The knuckleheads feed on large committee meetings like ghouls staggering around in a Buffy graveyard.) 

Surely, we will someday grasp that the corporation is a holligan, a veritable regicide, who, unless watched constantly and scaled back with enthusiasm, will destroy the very thing, the precious resource, on which the body politic (aka competitive success) depends. 

Increasingly, it seems to me that innovation, the true spirit of creativity in the marketplace, belongs to those who are prepared work small and fast.  The longer it takes, the more people it requires, the less likely it is to happen.  Let’s call this "Wieden’s law." 

References

McCracken, Grant. 2005.  The Malamud effect: ideas and the corporation.  This Blog Sits At… here.

Vranica, Suzanne.  2005.  Small Firm, Big Ideas: Coke and P&G Sign On.  Wall Street Journal.  November 9, 2005, page B3E and here  (subscription required).

No one much talks about this aspect of marketing.  To listen to the experts and the bloggers, marketing comes from people who are as well rested and stress free as 17th century French aristocrats. 

But the reality is, as most of us know, well otherwise.  As I noted in yesterday’s blog, I worked all day on a presentation that I will make this morning.  Powerpoint dumped a quarter of the deck around 8:00.  That meant pressing through to 11:30.  I went to sleep with the thing unfinished. 

Something unpleasant happens to cognition under this kind of pressure.  We lose our intellectual elasticity.  It becomes harder and harder to make the larger point.  It becomes harder and harder to see the larger point. 

I think this tells us something about deck construction, that we are working on the particular details of each slide, and then periodically perform a "fly over" to see how things look and where we might go.  At some point, these higher conceptual abilities just give up and go home. 

Now the writing process is a forced march.  We are visited by the sickening possibility that we might have to stand up in front of a roomful of people and have to embarrass ourselves.  (After teaching my first class at HBS, I asked a colleague how I did.  "Fine," he said, "there was no spreading stain on the front of your trousers, and that’s the first thing we look for.")  And now that Powerpoint mysteriously erased a quarter of the presentation, we are living with this fear too.  As time runs out, the pressure increases, the elasticity diminishes, and …

The thing I hate most is that the swirling stops.  When we’re well rested, it’s as if the deck and the writing process is surrounded by lots of little idea parts and possibilities.  Best case, we draw on these as we go.  But when fear and exhaustion have done their work, the creative world becomes very quiet.  We move from powerpoint to powerpoint, but really it’s not happening. 

The trouble is I am, as we often are, working with diminished resources.  I spend Sunday, Monday and half of Tuesday working flat out on a new project for a new client.  I finished on schedule but I could tell I was feeling a little glasseyed.  I took a break, to "recharge."  But when really tired, we are very like the batteries that used to plague the laptop industry.  Batteries would suffer a "false floor" effect.  We could recharge them all we wanted, but they weren’t going get more than a 20% charge. 

So if we have been overdoing, rushing from one high pressured project to another, there is a cumulative cost.  The usual remedial effort doesn’t help.  We are now working with a permanent deficit.  Sleep helps.  And last night I got 7 hours.  I found myself dreaming about the deck. 

I got up this morning and the 20% charge was enough to help me see how to complete the thing.  I present in an hour.  I will let you know later in the day how things went. 

This is an experiment in real time blogging (or close thereto). 

Jeremy Moon is an entrepreneur from New Zealand and the owner of Icebreaker, a 10 year old company that makes garmets for outdoors with a turnover of $100 million at retail.  I am listening to Jeremy talk at the Design Management Institute meetings on the Cape.  Right now.  I am going to write as long as he speaks and post the moment he stops.

I have to say this is really uncomfortable.  I am obliged to work without mediation, no real chance to think about what I am saying, how best to say it, and how to identify its larger significance.

Icebreaker has an interesting "brand story" as Jeremy calls it.  The garments are, as he puts it, "born in the mountains, worn in the mountains, start in nature, return to nature."

The IceBreaker question is "what does it take to build a 100 year brand"

1. choose position: maximize distance (from competitors)

deep innovation, to create a new category which IB has had to itself the market to itself for 6  or 7 years

2. add meaning: branding

Jeremy has very kindly cited my book, Culture and Consumption I.  Jeremy says, "We make sense of our world by scribing meaning to things through connection."  (This is unanticipated and not the reason I am blogging this!) 

Brand is the meaning behind a badge.  Mapped the competitlors, developed brand story (logic and narrative), create a brand blueprint (tone and design rules), create prototypes (test, refine, repeat)  The brand is as layered as the clothing and designed to allow from new meanings shifted in and out. 

3. add physicality: product

[missed this]

4. Business model: built to live like this

Over-invest in the true drivers of your brand

minimize capital expenditure

long term partners

focus narrow and deep (more business with fewer people)

build ethics and sustainability into the model

choose where brand lives

5. Market: Focus on top of the triangle

[missed this]

This guy is errie in the way all entrepreneurs are.  Clearly, Icebreakers is a company in progress.  The paint on these ideas is still wet.  Clearly, these ideas have just found their way into the world, and from this into marketing, branding, design practice at IceBreakers, and from here into this presentation, and finally into this crowded room on the cape.

Jeremy remindes me of the way professional baseball players run the bases.  The assumption is that you are going to take the next base after this one.  You round the base at speed.  It’s only when you see what is happening and take instruction from the coach that the final decision is made.  It is an ultimate momentum model.  You know that J. has to have proceed this way to have got to 100 million in sales in 10 years.  He takes something and keeps going.  You trust in their intelligence, your adaptive powers, your ability to re-interate and fix what was imperfect.

How often do entrepreneur remind us of Martians: Formidable powers of selection, assimilation, application and revision.  A couple of posts ago, I was arguing that one of the advantages for the Razr from Motorola that it was created at speed, in a single sprint through the corporation.  You see the advantages of speed hereto.    But this momentum model only works if the players are indeed martian smart. 

Ok, he’s stopping talking and I must now post.