My top 10 posts of ‘09

As 2009 draws to a close I thought I’d recap with a list of  the top 10 posts (according to you guys) that gained the most traffic on my blog. It seems the posts you guys tended to navigate towards were those that were about how brands should behave in the new media environment when trying to engage youth in conversationas well as learnings from the world’s best youth brands.

Here are the 10 posts (in terms of site traffic) in  2009 for those that haven’t read them.

1. Nike: We don’t do advertising , we do cool stuff (by far and away the most popular post of the year)

2. Levi’s ‘Go Forth’ – Inspiring Generation Optimism

3. Youth want TRIBAL IDEAS – tips on creating a movement

4. Youth are Cyborgs

5. 10 Principles for engaging Teens

6. 10 Observations on how the best youth brands behave

7. Why Red Bull is the world’s best youth brand

8. Youth marketing is about Culture Creation

9. Experimentation is the new Engagement

10. Brand Ecosystems and Participative Branding Comms Model

My top 5 youth ideas for 2009

Well I’m about to log off tomorrow for 2009, back Jan 6th. It may be a little quiet around here for a while. I’ve got some cool ideas that I’ve been working on the past months that will be breaking in early 2010, so I lookforward to putting them out there and seeing what people think.

 It’s been a great year, I hope you’ve found my insights into youth marketing, planning,  social media and Gen C interesting. In my time off I’m going to be thinking about how I get my book on Youth Tribes going, as it’s such a morphing space, but I’m excited about getting into all the different youth subcultures in Australia and understanding their differences and universal commonalities.

For a bit of fun, here are my  5 favourite youth ideas/content deliveries of 2009:

1. Red Bull Project X – Shaun White Secret Halfpipe (clear winner) – Creating a secreet halfpipe for Shaun White to practice new tricks in…in a word AMAZING. RB are the kings of creating mythology around their brand and deliver the storytelling ina simple yet inspiring way. They know that they are far more than an energy drink brand, they are a youth entertainment media brand. No one ‘creates culture’ like RB.

2. Burger King Whopper Sacrifice – brilliant idea which fucked with the establised codes of culture by getting people to ’scarifice’ friends to show their love of the Whopper. It’s so brutally simple and engaging. Just when everyone though FB was about adding mates, Crispin turned things on it’s head and made the world go into sacrifice mode.

3. Levi’s ‘Go Forth’ - superb job of creating a new manifesto for Levi’s and making the  ’Original’ brand position mean something for American youth. This brand idea did a great job of tapping into Generation O (Optimism) which is sweeping across America right now and capturing a relevant mood of global youth.

4. Sprite ‘Reality Remixed’ – Green Eyed World - truly social idea with great follow factor, following the breakout year of a pop hopeful,  Katie –  which in the world of music marketing is absolutely rare…fantastic consumer engagement via the youtube series and Facebook connect interaction, awesome use of technology to make the idea truly social

5. DC Shoes ‘Gymkhana’ videos  – the series of Ken BLock ‘gymkhana’ videos are a youtube phenom, makes the brand feel so authentic and cool when you see KB burning around trailer parks doing tricks in his WRX. DC shoes are smart, they entertain their true believers and the rest flock towards them

Some other cool things that have been quite innovative in engaging youth:

- Fiesta Movement – innovative way to launch a car, try sparking a movement by giving 100 cars away to kids to drive around for a few months…created deep engagement with ‘agents’ and the car was the backdrop to the storytelling. They’re shifting into getting fans to ‘create the 2011′ advertising which worries me, but lets see what happens.

- Halo 3 ODST:  - love a great little ARG which sent Canadian gamers on a trasure hunt across Toronto for VIP access to the launch party…they engaged the true believers and the game sold out like hot cakes.

- V Australia 4320LA (Well done Sudeep and Nick K) – smartest use of ‘Twitter’ for a campaign, although the return leg of 4320Sydney wasn’t as engaging.

- Coke Expedition 206 - sheer scale and audacity of the idea of taking 3 20 somethings around the world for a year to spread ‘Happiness’ in 206 countries is cool…whether there is follow factor is yet to be seen

- Gatorade ‘Replay’ – clever doco created by Gatorade in the US..getting two high school football teams from the 90’s who are super fierce rivals to replay a drawn match. Captivating content and an authentic role for product which is rare in branded content these days, without it feeling forced.

Have a great Christmas/Hannukah and Happy New Year  and am hoping one of my ideas make it onto this type of list of innovative youth marketing ideas/programs.

The Sun Sound – preventing skin cancer Down Under

The best ideas are always the most simple ones. Well done to the guys at Three Drunk Monkeys here in Australia who have really cracked a simple but revolutionary idea. Australia has the highest rates of skin cancer in the world and the issue is particularly prevalent amongst Aussie youth, where getting a tan is seen as culturall acceptable. As a solution to a brief from the Cancer Council to get more people thinking about protecting their skin, Three Drunk Monkeys created ‘The Sun Sound’.

Listen here http://www.cancercouncil.com.au/sunsound/

It’s basically a 5 second sound which will be trialled at beaches across NSW as a reminded for young people in particular to apply sunscreen and be careful in the sun. Local councils are also looking at implementing it across schools and sporting playgrounds. It’s a simple but potentially culturally groundbreaking idea. The Sun Sound was created by Bondi local and singer Ben Lee. It’s great when you see a simple idea with the potential to really make a difference. Well done Cancer Council and 3DM.

Principles of Transmedia Storytelling

Watched an interesting lecture by the ‘father’ of transmedia storytelling, Henry Jenkins, author of Convergence Culture, who recently returned to MIT (he’s now at USC) to speak to students about the 7 principles of transmedia storytelling. You can find the full 50 minute lecture at his blog  here, but I’ve summarised some of the key points I took out of it.

Essentially ‘transmedia storytelling’ is cross platform entertainment where each media touchpoint makes its own unique contribution to the story and the audience/community is encouraged to engage with the story and remix it to help influence the outcome of the story. In terms of brand communications, there has been quite a few famous ‘transmedia’ ideas, most notably the ARG’s (Alternate Reality Games) used to launch moves like The Dark Knight, or McDonald’s ‘The Lost Ring’ ARG associated with the Beijing Olympics. There’s also been Audie’s ‘Art of the Heist’ and numerous others. I’ve always been fascinated by ARG’s just because they generally ask people to play an active role in the outcome of the story, and what’s ‘on screen’ is only part of the story.

In a nutshell here are the 7 principles of transmedia storytelling which Henry spoke about:

1.       DRILLABILITY

With transmedia narratives it’s about ‘depth of engagement’  – you have to create a story arc that allows people to deep dive into it’s complexities and uncover nuances. This makes it far more engaging for the true fan as they have a reason to keep coming back.

 2.       MUTLIPLICITY over CONTINUITY

Most traditional advertising communications speak about ‘continuity’, but in fact the success of transmedia storytelling comes down to ‘multiplicity’, where people are encouraged to have different perspectives on characters. A great example of this is Batman, in terms of all the comics, anime and cartoons, there are always slightly different perspectives on the character which make the franchise ever more appealing and contextual to youth.

 3.       IMMERSION/EXTRACTIBILITY

For me, the most interesting part of great transmedia ideas are when elements are taken out of the story and put into the real world which enable deep immersion by the consumer. Brands that are driving digital scavenger hunts like for HALO 3 ODST are doing well at building extractability within their ideas so the consumer id engaged beyond their computer screen or mobile.

4.       WORLD BUILDING

The story created is just the beginning, what really matters is what happens in ‘their world’ – how people interact and taken on what fans have gathered. Think Pokemon, which has over 200 characters to collect or the complex relationships between all the X-Men characters . In essence people want to map the stories of these characters and take joy when brands take them on a journey.

5.       SERIALITY

Sounds really obvious, but seriality is a critical component of a transmedia narrative. A series of instalments drive both anticipation and speculation of what will happen next with the idea, resulting in deeper engagement for the individual.

6.       SUBJECTIVITY

Transmedia ideas typically work best when people can uncover a ‘backstory’ or secondary characters within the mix who have or will influence the outcome of the story. So in the case of ARG’s, people want to know the lead in and reasoning behind what’s happening. It comes down to people’s fascination with mythology and a world where people are constantly interested in hearing different points of view and comparing them.

7.       PERFORMANCE

This principal should really be called REMIX, as it’s all about fans bring the content into their own world and putting a spin on it, it’s about crowdsourcing and reconstructing the narrative. The Hunt for Gollum story is a perfect example of fans creating this narrative as a prequel/backstory to the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

As a youth marketer, there’s alot we can learn here, first and foremost is that brands today need to think about how their brands story unfold over multiple touchpoints as well as how the colletive remixes that story along the way. Nothing should ever be set in stone, what we do as marketers is START SOMETHING..hopefully a conversational in culture that can then unfold and be remixed in culture.

Halo 3: ODST does cool ARG

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a cool ARG (Alternate Reality Game). This one to promote Halo 3: ODST hits the mark. It was done by these guys in Canada.  It was very underground and covert and just goes to show you don’t need millions of participants to create deep engagement.

They developed a transmedia narrative which fused online and offline challenges to get fans to crack the clues for VIP access to the HALO 3 launch party. It was based on a guerrilla style scavenger hunt with viral videos, hidden clues, encrypted messages, GPS coordinates, custom Google maps, real world locations, interactions and SMS. If you cracked the clues, you

Great example of brands (especially video game and movie launches) need to fuse the real and digital world with their launch ideas and tap into young people’s need for discovery and interaction with other fans. The idea connected the Halo 3 tribe better than any TVC would ever do.

Planning is about CULTURE MORPHING

I’ve been thinking about the role planners are now playing in agencies around the world, and my belief is that first and foremost, our job is to try and MORPH CULTURE in order to solve business problems.

We all know that culture (through people) is always changing and at its very heart, subcultures want to change and evolve. Planners now have to not only think about where the brand has come from and where they want to take it, but more importantly, how the brand can create conversations and connect the tribe by morphing culture. This means we’re trying to create tribal ideas, ideas that foster cult like communities, where there is an innate awareness as to whether you’ in or out of that community. People mobilise around ideas or movements which change or ‘morph’ the status quo, they always have, they always will.

Culture Morphing is about creating a ‘new reality’ for people, shifting their views about how they interact with each other and the world. If a brand can play this role and change people’s view on reality by morphing culture, you become an integral and memorable social object to them. And, they’ll more likely than not love you for it.

Sprite’s ‘Green Eyed World- reality remixed by Facebook community

I’m really liking this idea by Sprite called ‘Green Eyed World’.  It’s obvious part of this brief was to create an authentic role in grassroots music for youth. Instead of making a TVC, they created a social music series built in real time, following an emerging artist, Katie Vogel for a year on youtube, with her fans being able to interact with her via Facebook connect. The idea was called ‘reality remixed’ and it’s got loads of follow factor. It has produced 4 seasons with 13 episodes, I’ve watched 3 of them and they’re not too bad.

The content itself isn’t that amazing, but what’s really interesting about this idea is how they cleverly linked in all the social media platforms and created a REAL TIME interaction method for the community to really get up close and personal with Katie V and her journey. The integration of Facebook connect along the journey has been brilliant and you can help her decide what to do, the whole way. The community helps create the outcome of the story, it’s truly an interactive brand narrative.  This is what creates the ‘follow factor’. It’s done very well, with 2.5m views on youtube.  My only criticism is that Sprite as a brand doesn’t really add that much value to the user experience, it’s in the background, which is maybe enough, but I would have pushed for more integration into the brand narrative.

What communication agencies & brands can learn from ‘The Wire’

Last week I  was chatting with one of my fellow planners, Cat Collins about things that have had inspired us creatively. She got talking about how the HBO series ‘The Wire’ was an amazing piece of storytelling and that brands could learn alot from this masterful series. So I asked her to do a guest post. Here tis. Thanks Cat, love your work

I believe that The Wire is the greatest work of creativity to have emerged in recent years, maybe even in my lifetime. So surely, there must be some lessons we can learn for our own creative endeavours. Here are 5 observations that I think we would benefit from applying to our work with brands and communications. Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet.

1.       Don’t be scared of scale.

The Wire is epic. It tells the story of the disintegration of an entire city from every angle – education, drugs, the law, politics, the media, industry, families. A lot has been written on the demise of the big idea as communications becomes more nimble and agile. The Wire shows that a big idea, told through multiple, interwoven stories is a very powerful thing indeed.

2.      Don’t underestimate your viewer.

The Wire makes no attempt to make the show watchable. The dialogue is fast and the Baltimore dialect takes a while to understand. The storylines are complex and you have to be paying attention to know what the hell is going on. I’m pretty sure that the Millward Brown scores for comprehension would be abysmal. But it is the effort that you make to step into the world of the Wire which makes it so compelling and makes the reward for watching that much greater.

3.       Tap into big human truths.

I don’t have much in common with a drug dealer on a West Baltimore corner but the issues the show tackles ensure I relate to every character. Love, loss, moral codes, ambition, family, loss of purpose in life – all big issues which strike a chord with anyone on the planet.

4.      Embrace unconventional heroes.

Omar, the gay, black, stick up boy who whistles while he hunts. Stringer Bell the brutal henchman with a mind for commerce. Snoop, the diminutive girl whose bloodthirsty appetite for violence is extraordinary. All too often in communications we fall back on stereotypes and miss the opportunity to surprise.

5.       Be true to your vision.

When David Simon pitched the Wire to HBO he presented a coherent vision of how all 5 seasons would pan out. He knew the characters stories and had a vision for how theses would be played out on screen. Comparing the pitch to the finished work, it’s extraordinary to see how much of his vision he managed to pull off. Next time you pitch a creative idea and then watch it get pecked to death by 1000 ducks, remember why it is worth fighting to keep the integrity of an idea intact.

‘WannaMe’ – the better digital version of my real self.

WannaME culture/Facebragging- uploading the best version of yourself to Facebook

We all know that social media has turbo charged our connections to each other and the conversations we have, this is particularly prevalent when you think of Gen C. The last few weeks I’ve been talking to quite a few 16-21yr olds here in Sydney about their ‘digital life’ and what’s become more and more obvious, is this concept of ‘WannaME’.

WannaMe (a rip off of an Aussie slang word, Wannabe), is when young people build digital personas on Facebook and other social networking sites which show the absolute best parts of their lives. Call it Facebragging, showing off, call it what you will. It’s all about how they meticulously craft their online personas to share with the world, i order to ensure they pass judgement from other members of their tribe.It’s about creating the best version of yourself – as we all know perception equals reality.

Belonging to a tribe is and always will be a primal need for youth, but now we’re seeing youth needing to constantly upload pics, show that they’ve been invited to the right parties/concerts, be seen wearing the right clothes, hanging with the right crowd. It’s all a part of their desperate need to fit in and this competitive pressure to be in the know is overwhelming alot of young people I spoke to. It’s like the 1980’s ‘cool kids’ phenomena all over again, where you were either in or out based on how you dressed. Now it’s just dimensionalised in real time.

When you talk to these teens, you realise that the pics they’re uploading from music festivals, parties, make up about 10% of their life, but on facebook, it looks like they are uber social, connected and little party animals. One guy I spoke to even said he pulls out old pics from last summer and posts them if he doesnt have anything good to contribute to the conversations happening. So they are re-using old versions of their social life to ‘keep up with the Jones’ if you will.

The WannaME culture that has been charged by social technology has definitely also made youth more extroverted. What was unacceptable to share with friends is now completely acceptable, and Aussie kids are trying to one up each other on facebook. Boys are uploading pics of them doing risque sporting tricks eg: jumping off a bridge illegally, whereas girls are being more and more provocative with how much flesh they show. Psychologists talk about the need to highlight the  ’social risk’ in communications when you’re trying to change a certain ingrained behaviour eg: drinking driving, smoking, drug taking etc. Now it seems that this social risk is being celebrated online.

WannaME culture is permeating through pretty much all youth subcultures, it’s not just the rich urban indie kids, it’s across the board. More than ever young people are carefully crafting their digital personas and brands need to understand this mindset in order to engage with them. Thoughts?

Generation Spiritual – 18yr olds love yoga

So last night I decided to try out Power Yoga in Neutral Bay to help get some flexibility back into my creeking limbs. I rock up at 6.30 to a 32 degree heated room ready to get in touch with my inner yogi. Yes, their were the usual hippy dudes and Byron Bay-esque chicks who all looked like they had been on a hunger strike for a week or two, but what blew me away was that out of the 60 or so people, about a third of them were aged 18-21 – guys and girls. I spoke to a few of them after the class and they all said that yoga was in at the moment and that it was cool to ‘get in touch with your inner self’ (their words not mine). Granted this was a Sydney north shore yoga club and I don’t imagine kids from Parra busting out downward dog in a yoga club, but it was interesting nonetheless. There’s definitely a shift away from the mucho Aussie sports to guys wanting to combine physical fitness with spiritual fitness at the moment. Or, the yoga practice is a new ‘pick up’ spot where young guys and girls go to meet and sweat it out together. Hmm, not quite sure on this one. Namaste !!