When we spent time in San Francisco in 2000 as part of an Antipodean startup, there was a bizarre moment in the process of obtaining precious venture capital that it became obvious the cheques being written would not be less than tens of millions - it was too tiresome for the VC's to break up their fund in $1-5m chunks spread across a portfolio of smaller startups. Way too much paperwork.
Apart from not wanting to see the majority of the company disappear under $25m of VC equity, we also struggled to imagine what to spend the extra $20m beyond the requirement for $5m to get to profitability the old-fashioned way (customers, profits, you know...).
Anyway, to cut a long story short, the answer was 'Superbowl adverts'! If you haven't heard about them, it's a one-off television commercial that must cost millions to make, whilst the media time alone is in the millions as well. Theory being that several million overweight American consumers have consumed so much beer and fried chicken by half-time in the annual football final, that they cannot move from the couch.
To keep you up to the moment in your latte discussions over strategy, we've co-opted Forbes Magazine's kind offer of a built in video player with the 2010 adverts. They were released to the web in the 4th quarter of the game, acknowledging that 'advert watching' has now become part of the event itself.
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Then again, you might remember the most famous superbowl advert of all time?
We picked up a fascinating blog post on the wires this week - and whilst it's a fun idea for a cafe, it's an evening more interesting thought starter for the subject of corporate strategy.
Either way, it's guaranteed to strike an interesting emotional reaction in most people.
The idea is simple - here's PSFK's description of the concept:
"Cabel Sasser brings word of a mysterious cafe that he recently experienced in Kashiwa in Japan. Located inside the Urban Design Center Kashiwa-no-ha, the Ogori cafe looks innocuous enough, but holds a surprise in store for its patrons.
In a nutshell, you get what the person before you ordered, and the next person gets what you ordered. Thus, if you’re in on the game, you can choose to be either a generous benefactor, and treat those that come after you – or try your luck at being cheap.
Either way, it’s an interesting experiment that explores surprise, kindness and encourages interactions.
As I sat down to enjoy my surprise Appletizer, loving this insane idea and wondering what would happen if you tried it in America, a Japanese woman approached the cafe. Since she could actually speak Japanese, she could read the large sign at the front and, fortunately or unfortunately, got advanced warning of what she was in for.
Before making a final decision on what to order, she quietly snuck up to me to try to ask me what I had ordered, knowing that it would be her unwavering refreshment destiny. The staff put a quick stop to her trickery, and I didn’t answer.
Of course, regardless of what she ordered, she got the orange juice I ordered a few minutes earlier. But here’s one of the moments that make this experiment cool: she actually chose orange juice, just like I did. So she got what she wanted. Ogori cafe synchronicity!
Before we left, there was one last thing hat had to be done. Mike went up to the cafe, slapped down a couple thousand yen (~$25), and ordered a little bit of everything: some ice cream, some snacks, some candy, some drinks, a Japanese horn-of-mysterious-plenty intentionally set up as a shocking surprise for the next lucky customer. (After his order, Mike received single iced coffee.)
As we walked away from the cafe, with just the right amount of delay, we heard an extremely excited “arigato goazimasu!! thank you so much!!” yelled in our direction, from an ecstatic mom and her equally excited young son. They truly appreciated the surprise. It was so worth it."
So - apply this crazy Japanese 'we're all linked together' thinking to your business planning cycle.
It's most likely you're currently eating what the last person who prepared a strategy for your group ordered. You're probably now engaged in ordering the plan that responds to the GFC/ iPad/ exchange rate crisis/ __________ (insert your option here), which if the process of corporate job promotion (if it works, you're heading up the chain!) and general job churn applies, someone else will get to eat.
Should we be more cogniscent of that when we make a plan? Do you make your order/strategy a little more conservative, knowing clearly that everyone is the next person in the queue at some stage? Do you make it more flexible? More generous? More frugal - are all orders suddenly the minimum amount (ie effort/risk) people can spend? Does it change the way you feel about that plan? Are we grateful to those who precede us who ordered generously?
Just the sort of things we like to mull over at R+R. The misanthropes we poll on this subject conclude that human beings will quickly descend to the lowest common denominator, unable to control their fear of being short-changed - thus investing the absolute minimum.
Why the future of the internet has very little to do with your desktop computer.
With the imminent arrival of the Apple tablet/iPad/ iSlate dinner-plate sized portable computing device, it's been a popular thing to reflect on where this interweb thing came from and where it might be going to.
We all know it started 20 years ago with a bunch of scientists at CERN wanting to share documents across different computers with a common format (see Tim Berners-Lee's Weaving the Web for all that stuff). It went into message boards, web pages, web sites, forums, audio, video, advertising, ecommerce, search and the need for a Titanic scale web presence to be taken seriously. With porn, junk, plane tickets, advertising and books proving to be where the money was mainly at.
I'm reminded of a great quote from the late 1990s (allegedly attributed to media futurist Marshall McLuhan) that the problem we humans would face in 2010 would be not getting ON to the internet, but ever getting OFF it! Bullseye - this is definitely where we are now.
Dialing up and enduring 2400 baud modem's shrieking handshakes was like rolling the dice at Vegas - gambling whether it would come up this time? That's a distant memory for most, and not even a known concept for many. Apple offer it as highly ironic ringtone on the iPhone.
In the USA the spread of Wi-Fi is impressive, given free wi-fi was only invented in 2003 - now people are seriously talking about a national grid network across major cities. Admittedly, they were talking about that when we were in San Francisco 10 years ago, but the country has had a torrid time since those heady dot-com days.
This is the trend that concerns me most for our place in the world - New Zealand is getting a bad reputation as being luddites when it comes to free wi-fi access. On his recent trip to the North Island, our alumni Nigel Dalton found only 1 free hotspot in 2000kms of driving (here's to you Crouton Cafe in Kinloch!).
Trend #2: Web access will not focus on the personal computer
Microsoft's lack of a presence in the mobile computing market is about to become an obvious goof-up of Titanic proportions - despite Billy-come-lately Gates getting a twitter account this month. He could have bought Twitter with a week's income a couple of years ago.
The personal computer's dominance is over for web browsing and consumption. Look beyond the Apple 'slate' computer hype to the BBC's progress delivering its programs (via iPlayer) on consumer platforms like Playstation for examples of what devices will matter in the next few years.
We've experienced the challenge of getting business people to accept that just when the internet became relatively understandable ("it's behind that e logo on my desktop"), it's going somewhere else. Hell, I remember fax machines being the technology that would bring down the Post Office.
Too many corporate digital strategies are currently focused on producing what we call a King Kong website. Waste of money now. You need some things that are small, to the point, and work fast over wi-fi or 3G to avoid making Telecom rich(er).
Trend #3: The web will be (multi) media-centric
What's interesting to us about this prediction is that the multi-media you will interact with may not be entirely delivered in real-time. 3G mobile video still sucks, and 4G is a while away unless you live in the digital first world. Think a clever mixture of YouTube and your iPhone. Wi-fi will help.
But needless to say, the web is now further along the continuum from ascii characters on a message board towards 1995's Johnny Mnemonic than you might imagine. Don't be distracted by the rise of your tween's SMS messaging ability, progress from there is simply being throttled by monopoly/duopoly control of the medium.
Trend #4: Social media will be its largest component
Yesterday Twitter produced 1.3m A4 pages of content. And if you're working in a sector that (like social media online) has grown by 82% in the last year, let us know - we'd like to invest! Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and blogs - if you're still saying "I don't get all the fuss" or "most of it is rubbish", then what you're really saying is "how much would a Jim's Mowing franchise be?"
Anyway, don't take my word for it - read the Mashable post.
Why the future of the internet looks pretty secure.
Clay Shirky wrote a great book titled 'Here Comes Everybody' in 2008, a primer for understanding how the web and its tools (social media, publishing etc) has changed the way people organise - making a lot of traditional barriers to groups of people organising themselves disappear along the way. It's followed up with a supplementary blog, which keeps the book alive with case studies and discussions.
These 2 videos from YouTube are Clay talking on another favourite subject - how the world is being impacted by the web.
He was asked by a TV producer while talking about how Wikipedia works, "how will people find the time (to do all this internet stuff)?" The maths that follows is boggling:
Wikipedia, in all 100+ languages, since its inception in January 2001 represents about 100 million hours of human thought and effort - which has produced over 14m articles and references.
Television, in the USA alone, is calculated to absorb 200 billion hours of human effort and thought (what Clay calls the 'surplus') every year. That is the equivalent of 2,000 wikipedias each year.
In a single weekend, Americans invest about 100 million hours watching just the TV adverts.
A 1% shift of Americans watching TV adverts to some form of participation on the internet is over 50m hours of 'consumers' eyeball and brain engagement time a year.
Much of what he raises we have been talking about for a while within R+R's walls - in particular the erosion of advertising in traditional media like newspapers etc, but his thinking about 'one way consumption' vs a new generation of people who prefer to 'consume - produce - share' is very insightful. Their desire to share and be interactive might surprise you.
I love his critique of 'media that doesn't include you'. Brilliant! The new strategy for you and us is, as he says, looking for the mouse. Enjoy.
David has two passions – helping clients achieve greatness in their business, and cycling. He often finds it possible to combine the two. David has worked in senior advertising and marketing roles in New Zealand, Australia, England and the US. R+R is the second successful business he has built; when he sold his shareholding in the first in 2000, it was New Zealand's second-largest privately owned agency. His early advertising career was interrupted when he spent two years cycling professionally in Europe. Today, when David isn't working, he is cycling, buying bits for cycles or talking about cycling. Or motorcycling...but let’s not start on that.
