Lessons from TED2011 (& SyFy)
By Mickey Cloud, Digital Strategist, @mickeycloud
“Embrace fear. Embrace transparency.”
“The freedom of mobility… is going to be compromised if we can’t figure out how to move people and goods around in a very constrained world.”
(photo credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED)
The above quotes were central themes of two of the more entertaining and inspiring TED Talks given last week at TED2011 during the “Worlds Imagined” session, delivered by director/entertainer/documentarian Morgan Spurlock about the process of making a documentary about product placement and by Ford CEO Bill Ford, Jr. about “global gridlock,” the issue that concerns him most when looking towards the future, respectively.
I wasn’t in California to hear Mssrs. Spurlock and Ford in person, but thanks to the good folks at SyFy, I was able to still see them live in a simulcast in a posh SoHo loft that offered an all-too-appropriate venue to expand one’s mind, to look for connections between two seemingly unrelated ideas, to quite literally, “imagine greaterTM, SyFy.”
When hearing these talks consecutively, it got me thinking about the role of the agency in not only solving our clients’ business problems today – but also creating value and, for lack of a better term, “good” in the long-term.
In short, can we help solve a client’s need today – while also putting them (and the world) in a better position for tomorrow? Is that possible? Is it worth thinking about – even when it’s not “in scope”?
I believe the cultural movement model that we employ at StrawberryFrog allows us to think about these questions more often than not. We’re working with clients to help connect a brand’s purpose in the world with an idea on the rise that starts in culture – ultimately, trying to find ideas that motivate people to want to belong to and join in on our (brands’ and consumers’) shared crusades.
But even in the more day-to-day tasks as a strategist/planner, I’m faced with a more focused objective – be it creating a new brand positioning, revamping a website, or mobilizing/activating a movement idea. Even with our higher-level tasks, these objectives are often to help solve an immediate need – not something as distant as the issues raised by Ford when he talks about understanding and solving for a world that will have 4 billion cars in it by 2050. So does it make sense to take that step back, to look at how this very project I’m working on helps build for a better tomorrow (at least for my client and at most for society)?
Spurlock touched on this standard agency “lowest hanging fruit” thought-process by showing clips from his documentary, “The Greatest Movie Ever Sold,” about trying to get brands to finance a film about product placement. Spurlock visited agencies big and small, asking them to help pitch the idea to their clients. Agency after agency turned him away, telling him there was no way their clients would go for something so transparent, so uncontrollable, or quite simply, so far out of their comfort zone. Spurlock seemed genuinely disappointed that so many people in the media and advertising industry wouldn’t hop on an opportunity to present something bold to their clients, something that he hoped would pull back the “marketing” curtains and make a real impact. He ended up mostly working with brands directly – eliminating agencies altogether – to get the film financed and produced.
Maybe we (the ad industry) have been burned one too many times by clients who say they want “blue sky” ideas and end up executing something much smaller in scale. Maybe it’s more difficult to ask, “why?” than to ask, “when do you need that by?”
But it shouldn’t stop us from constantly re-examining our work, from taking a moment to have an honest conversation with ourselves and our clients, and asking, “Are we pushing ourselves as far as we can?”
