It’s dangerous to perceive the world through only one set of eyes. The problem is we can only perceive the world through one set of eyes.
— @simonsinek (via colmscommonplace)
eatbigfish: Christopher Lukezic. AirBnB. “3 Bits of Advice for Brands Looking to Conquer the World”
Apple CEO Tim Cook was facing a Congressional panel today with tough questions about the way the company has organized itself in an effort to lower its tax burden. But at the end of the questioning, John McCain had something else on his mind. That, friends, is what we call a softball.
The quintessential question of our time.
Which Emotion is the Hardest to Fake?
Unlike the commonly deployed social smile, distressed expressions–anger, fear, sadness, and occasionally surprise–prove much more difficult to display on command.
These expressions cause tension throughout the face as one part of the brain tries to control an expression caused by another part of the brain. These expressions also rely on antagonistic muscle groups, pulling parts of the face in opposing directions.
For example, sadness often involves both an expression of sadness and the desire to control that expression. “The tug of war over your face creates the quivering lip,” says Dr. Mark Frank, professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Buffalo.
“We’ve all done our fair share of faking it” is the best lede I’ve read all day.
Read more at Popular Science
(Image: Dreamstime)
The great innovation tension in business is appropriately managing expectations.
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Michael Schrage “Don’t Let Predictability Become the Enemy of Innovation”
If you’re an Apple or a Samsung or an Amazon, is your brand better off building expectations around “no surprises” innovations that happily soak your customers in the warm bath of familiarity? Or do you gain greater brand equity by creatively disrupting the very expectations they’re predisposed to bring to your products and services?
Television is not a device anymore. It’s content.
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Mary-José Monpetit, MIT Media Lab.
“If we talk about using the content to create a community then we are using television content to create a community.”
Ms. Monpetit noted that there is a disconnect in the experience viewers have on a television and the experience they have online. While there is a connection forming between television watching and the online world there is still no way of making it a seamless experience.
So instead of creating a traditional interactive television experience, one of her students at MIT created an app to track Super PACs during the last US Presidential election.
“This was social television because it was creating a community of people who want to know what is going on in our lives,” she said referencing the app.
Snip
Television, no matter where you watch, is inherently social.
There’s a real opportunity for smart brands to publish content that’s useful, interesting, engaging, and helpful to their audience.
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It’s not a new idea — in fact I always talk about the fact that it’s an idea that’s been around for a very long time.
But what’s changed is all the tools that are available for content creation, distribution, measurement and all the channels that are available to brands. I think it’s a very powerful idea. I don’t think it’s one of these trend-of-the-season ideas. I think it’s a dramatic industry shift that we’re going to be tracking for years to come, through various iterations.
That was something I did with Jerry Wind, head of the Future of Advertising Program at Wharton. It was really based on the Wharton 2020 Project, which was asking a lot of advertisers about what they think about the future of advertising, and it was such a consistent theme — that it’s going to be less and less about what we think of advertising today, and more content that is voluntarily consumed by people because they view it as in some way useful or interesting.
This sort of content-as-ads is clearly the future of digital advertising, but not just because it works on the web in your dashboard/newsfeed/stream. It’s also the future because its the thing that works in mobile.
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Noah Brier “Thoughts on Tumblr/Yahoo” @heyitsnoah @percolate
Overall this is a big win for social and further proof that marketing is continuing to move towards real-time content creation at the intersection of brand voice and cultural relevance While everyone is focused (and concerned) that we’re going to start seeing Yahoo! ads on Tumblr, I actually think the opposite is much more likely. As more and more brands come onto Tumblr as organic content creators and pay to promote their content, Yahoo! will find a way for this original brand content to live in the context of the broader platform, giving marketers expanded reach and engagement.
Collyn Ahart: Cultural insight and brand strategy - what it means →
Basically it means I try to connect brands with culture. Little-c culture. It’s not really about Art and Music and Food and Architecture… but why people do the things they do, how they do them, what’s going on in their heads while they do so. It’s the behaviour, stuff and un-spoken rules…
The way I look at it, a brand only exists in the consumer’s mind. That other product isn’t a brand yet because consumers don’t really know about it. It’s still a product.
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Martin Bihl from Adweek,”Who’s the Boss?” via @heyitsnoah “Unique Perception”.
The brand is where the client and agency meet. The client comes at the brand from the perspective of the product, and the agency comes at it from the perspective of the consumer. And while overlap is good—smart clients should think about consumers, and smart agencies should understand their products—the strength of the brand will lie in the intelligent resolution of their differing perspectives.
Perhaps the most important thing about this idea is that it gives shape to the discourse between agencies and clients over strategy, planning, equity, direction and that mother of all flash points, creative. Each knows what their role is. Each knows what they bring to the table. And each knows who they really work for.
They work for the brand.
