Immersion. Distillation. Creation. Implementation.

Mannequin podcast - episode 2 is up!

Episode 2 of the podcast I write and produce for FGI Toronto is now available. Check it out at www.mannequinpodcast.com or download it via iTunes.

The sky is falling. More at 11.

On Friday, Opinion Research Corp., a respected American polling company, released survey results that indicate 77% of Americans feel the media is making the economy worse by playing up negative financial news. I've been speaking with friends and associates about this possibility for some time, and it is interesting to have some validation for my thinking. This situation is a classic example of a feedback loop - one with very negative implications.

As described in Wikipedia, psychologists talk about a condition called "learned helplessness". Based on research originally conducted by Martin Seligman at Cornell University in the 1960's, it is a psychological condition in which a human being or animal has learned to act or behave helpless in a particular situation, even when it has the ability to change the unpleasant or even harmful circumstance. in fact, clinical depression and related mental illnesses result from a perceived absence of control over the outcome of a situation (Seligman, 1975).

Is learned helplessness partly responsible for the generally sour mood of the consumer? The pessimism can't be attributed solely to economic fundamentals any longer - many of the conditions that caused the seizing of credit markets and the subsequent fall of Lehman Brothers have been addressed.

I think that the media could as easily cause to a feedback loop with positive outcomes, if they would balance their sombre reporting of the negative with more positive economic messages (and there are positive things to speak about - the cost of oil, economic stimulus packages).

Unfortunately, these don't drive viewership/readership nearly as well ...

Podcasting.

One of my very first jobs (in 1982!) was as a control room operator and sometimes announcer at (Ted Baxter voice here) "a little 50,000 watt station in Cleveland". Well, in my case Halifax, but you get the idea. I was 18 years old, and had no business being in front of the open end of a microphone, but there I was. I had a riot and it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for a kid from Dartmouth, but decades later I can still think of one or two on-air "incidents" that make me twinge.

Fast forward twenty-six years later. I was approached by a non-profit organization of which I'm a member to resurrect their long defunct "podcast". I decided to undertake a little bit of due diligence, and soon was consumed by the opportunities available through podcasting. It's just like radio, but with no news directors or program directors to tell you what to do ...

So, if you've been at all wondering where I've been in the past couple of months, it's been buried in books on radio journalism and audio production. (Did you realize they don't use reel-to-reel tape and edit with razor blades any more?)

My first effort is available at www.mannequinpodcast.com - subsequent efforts will be much better, both from a content and production standpoint, I promise!

Malcolm Gladwell at the University of Toronto

Shaky pic from my Blackberry

I completely forgot to post about the recent appearance of Malcolm Gladwell (or here) at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. I tweeted live from the event - I've copied my tweets and pasted them below for reference.

I've been a fan of Gladwell's since I first noticed his writing in the New Yorker, and of course have read each of his books since The Tipping Point was first released in 2000 (!!!).

The purpose of the discussion between him and Dean Roger Martin (Dean Martin!) was to review some of the ideas behind his latest book Outliers: The Story of Success . It ended up to be a long reminisce between Gladwell and Martin - it turns out that Gladwell was a close childhood friend of Roger Martin's brother.

For posterity, here are my tweets from the event. (You can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/graemespicer).

I'm attending the Malcolm Gladwell presentation at U of T. I'll be tweeting live 3:57 PM Dec 1st from txt

Bedlam outside Convocation Hall (in the cold rain). Not too impressed with Rotman's organizational skills 4:14 PM Dec 1st from txt

The hall is sold out. My guess is 1000 seats. Gladwell is a pop star. We're inside now. 4:23 PM Dec 1st from txt

Everyone receives a copy of Outliers. Pretty cool. It's even (sort of) signed. Wish I'd known before I bought a copy retail last week. 4:26 PM Dec 1st from txt

Martin's intro: Gladwell when asked what he wanted to be when he grew up - a pastry chef. 5:06 PM Dec 1st from txt

Gladwell: there are many disadvantages that are actually advantages. Many, many entrepreuneurs are dyslexic. 5:15 PM Dec 1st from txt

Gladwell: compensation for weaknesses may be a better learning strategy than exploitation of strengths. 5:18 PM Dec 1st from txt

Gladwell: extreme intellegence may be a disadvantage. They don't as typically develop strong work ethics. They're lazy. 5:20 PM Dec 1st from txt

Gladwell: there is no test that will accurately predict future productivity. Better to try lots and see who sinks or swims. 5:24 PM Dec 1st from txt

Gladwell: IQ is not a predictor of success. One needs to be smart 'enough', but that it. 5:27 PM Dec 1st from txt

Gladwell is very funny and charming. Very at ease with Roger Martin and the audience. 5:28 PM Dec 1st from txt

Gladwell: in order to be consciencious, one must feel that the application of effort will genuinely lead to reward. 5:31 PM Dec 1st from txt

Gladwell: we are now at the boundaries of what we can do individually to help ourselves. We need to think more collectively. 5:40 PM Dec 1st from txt

Gladwell: how many people capable of achieving something actually achieve it? 5:41 PM Dec 1st from txt

Gladwell: Canada is leaving 40% of its hockey talent on the table. 5:46 PM Dec 1st from txt

Zzzzzzzzzz ... Martin's questions frequently seem longer that Gladwell's answers. 5:50 PM Dec 1st from txt

Gladwell: 10,000 Hour Rule - the importance of this rule is as much about commitment and discipline than about actual learning. 5:55 PM Dec 1st from txt

Martin: does mastery (10,000 hours) automatically kill creativity? 5:57 PM Dec 1st from txt

Gladwell: everytime we learned a new game as kids, we would deregulate it: change the rules to stay fresh. Tear it up, reconstruct. 5:58 PM Dec 1st from txt

Gladwell: Tiger Woods is constantly working on his swing - deconstructing and reconstructing it. 6:00 PM Dec 1st from txt

Gladwell: how many solutions exist to things that aren't problems? 6:03 PM Dec 1st from txt

Gladwell: Google isn't making us stoopid; its just killing the competitive advantage of those of us willing to go to the library. 6:05 PM Dec 1st from txt

Roanoke.

This was the view from my hotel room window. The big white thing is not a blind, it is the back of the bulkhead sign on the front of the hotel.

I was in Roanoke Virginia Wednesday and yesterday for a meeting. It was a refreshing reminder as to what the real America is like. The Roanoke Regional Airport gates are identified as 1 through 8. No need for A1, B152, etc. There is only one concourse and eight gates in the facility.

The buffet breakfast included with my $98 hotel room included sausage patties and some sort of maple flavoured pancake stick things. The lobby was full of guys wearing khaki pants and denim shirts with embroidered logos. They were all speaking into those funny Bluetooth earpieces. I think there was some sort of conference nearby for producers of industrial cleaning chemicals.

I scanned through the local radio stations on my drive to my meeting. A couple of country stations, another promising my salvation. I settled on Planet 101.5 - seemed to be mostly 80's rock. The first ad suggested pick-up truck accessories as the perfect Christmas gifts. Spray-on bed liners and trailer hitches, for example.

After my meeting I dropped into the local Barnes & Noble bookstore, looking for a book on creating presentations (Slide:ology, by Nancy Duarte. Excellent, by the way). There was an entire section dedicated to the available versions of the Holy Bible. A large section.

I think that sometimes buzzing back and forth between Toronto, New York and Chicago it is easy to forget that Plantation Road in Roanoke is more representative of America than Michigan Avenue in Chicago.

Confessions of an advertising insider.

Most of you know that I have a healthy skepticism for the state of the traditional advertising industry. This video says it all in 4 minutes. Love it! WARNING: Parental Guidance is suggested.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWXKHGolqrU

How big is a trillion?

When the TV drama "The Six Million Dollar Man" debuted in 1974, it seemed impossible that $6 million could be spent on R&D to make Major Steve Austin "better than he was before". My parents had just bought a house in a nice part of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia for $42,000. A call at pay phone cost a dime. Gas was 75¢ a gallon (about 20¢ a litre). Winning the Atlantic Lotto had a grand prize of $250,000.

A million of anything was an abstract number. It was a lot. Two million was twice a lot.

By the late 1980's, millions had become common, and better understood. A million dollars made you very well-off, but not rich. It was a decent sized account for an advertising agency.

A billion? That was the new abstract number. A thousand million. Budget surpluses and deficits of nations were measured in billions. But certainly not the profits and losses of most private companies. Walmart's sales in 1987? $15.9 billion (it will be well over $400 billion for 2008 - almost half a trillion dollars).

In the recent financial turmoil, for the first time in history we're talking in terms of trillions of dollars. Citigroup's bailout is around $300 billion. The US aid package already announced is $700 billion, and another round is on the way.

What is a trillion dollars? A thousand thousand million dollars. What does that look like, anyway?

If you spent $360,000 an hour ($1,000 a second), it would take you almost 32 years to spend a trillion dollars.

A $1 trillion stack of $100 bills would be 789 miles high.

A trillion dollars divided up amongst Canadians would amount to over $30,000 for every man, woman, child and baby.

To me, the only difference between a billion and a trillion? The letter "T".

The power of branding.

Across the street from my office at King and Spadina in downtown Toronto is a prime site for a painted billboard. Recently I noticed a couple of painters on a swing scaffold creating a new ad for the Apple iPod Nano ...

Wait a minute - they hadn't gotten around to painting the logo or any other brand identification yet, other than the iPods themselves. Yet could this ad have been for anyone else?

No. Apple has done in this decade what Nike was able to successfully do in the 90's. Their brand is so distinctive, so differentiated, that this ad could only be from Apple. And it's not only because we recognize the products.

This is why Apple is so strong right now. A powerful brand, consistently applied. I'm not certain in this new reality of user generated content that any brand will ever again be able to pull this off, because a brand manager sitting in a corporate office doesn't control the brand imagery anymore. It's now a collaboration with the brand's users, and detractors.

I wonder though, will anyone ever be able to use a silhouette in an ad again without us immediately thinking Apple?

The mea culpa post.

I haven't been posting regularly to my blog because:

1) I've been traveling extensively and therefore keeping a very irregular schedule.

2) I've been extremely busy between work and teaching at OCAD.

3) I've become completely absorbed in podcasting since taking over a project for a non-profit.

4) I've run out of topics to speak about.

5) The dog ate my keyboard.

There isn't really any excuse, although some mixture of 1, 2 and 3 above would be a start. It certainly isn't 4 or 5. Posting is like exercise. It's easy to fall out of the habit if you're not diligent.

I'm back on it. Promise.

A few random images from the NACS show in Chicago

The investment in the Coca-Cola booth must have been in the several hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The Blues Brothers schilling for Johnson & Johnson

No further description necessary.

Does anyone else find this a little disturbing?