1/6.6 billion

My agency, Intellinautic, operates on the premise that live experiences offer a compelling opportunity for event sponsor-partners to engage audiences in a meaningful, genuine conversation.

Intellinautic operates as a value-added aggregator of live event media products. For agencies, we serve by facilitating the activation of your brands within an event property and providing local support, research, and performance reporting. For marketers, our focus is on outcomes.

Beyond measuring impressions delivered, I believe that sponsorship programs should be held accountable for delivering behavioral influence.  I  sure can’t figure out how to truly deliver, let alone measure, ROI unless everyone’s working through the event design and the sponsorship activation in concert. Integration is the magic.

For properties that provide extended immersion, I offer four rules for effective design.  These apply to the development of assets and the design of the campaign to leverage them in order to activate the sponsorship.  These work regardless of whether the sponsorship activation extends current collateral or is the launch of a new,  property specific promotion.

Effective campaign deployment must abide by the following rules, which guide all Intellinautic event strategy and sponsor activation efforts:

Miles Four Rules For High Performing Experiential Programs

1. Look at all decisions from the audience point of view. First and foremost – will this sponsored element/interaction augment the experience of the attending fans? If not, don’t do it.
2. How does this sponsored interaction deliver results to the sponsor’s goals? How can we measure the impact on behavior? An event must provide data on outcomes and not just impressions or increased brand affinity, unless the marketer is in a category where affinity for their brand is related to behavior, I guess.
3. Is the sponsored interaction aligned with the spirit of the event? Is it interruptive or does it integrate into the flow and energy of the event context? Make sure it’s right. There’s a fine line between a cool environmental design and just a digital panel with a sponsor logo and mismatched creative.  An even finer line between an annoying SMS and an exciting one!
4. Cross-promotion is key. Humans store memories in chains. Associate, associate, associate. Pull together the right co-sponsor and watch magic.

As people seek customized entertainment outside the living room, I believe that every serial event property, and arts and humanities exhibit for that matter, offer sponsors a special opportunity to invest in a long-term relationship with the audience.

Now, with the business case built, let’s leave it here. In the center of an imaginary room. And walk away from it, out of the Land of Intellinautic’s Value Proposition, and through the door to the other side, where we’ve emerged into my world of weirdness…

Welcome.
I believe that live events do really great things for the economy. Especially the Happiness Economy. There is a science to play, you know.  There’s even different kinds of play: structured, rule-based, and goal-oriented play at one end of the spectrum and unstructured, non-competitive, free play at the other.

The point is, there’s a special event for every kind of playfulness and I’m glad that the bridge to adulthood did not include any warnings against festivals and vacations full of unstructured, imaginiative play.

I feel obliged to promote moderation in all things, while emphasizing that having _no_ fun is _bad_ for you. Fun = good for you.

Therefore,

Intellinautic Mission Statement

For the purpose of creating happiness in the global economy,  the mission of Intellinautic is to deliver high performing live event properties with high performance sponsorship programs.

Everyone’s invited to come along and join the fun.

John Steinbeck said that all of the books that came before East of Eden were just practice. Published in 1952, the saga describes his own family history against a pastoral California backdrop. Northern Cali, back when there were more fruits and nuts on the trees than walking around. 1900’s. The story spans a lifetime that happened about 100 years ago. Our protagonist, Adam Trask, was born in the 60’s. 1860’s and by Chapter 29 (the inspiration for this post) we’ve turned the century and are heading straight for the age of oil. My friend Matt, a guy who reads so much he claims to be getting a degree in it, thinks an indulgent Steinbeck too often gets bogged down describing the details of the scene. Matt takes his stories with a smoke and prefers them “character driven.” I’m truncating his thoughts, but admit that East of Eden is ridiculously full of imagery. But so delicately presented, you can taste the color of the countryside. (A point noticed by my sister, Kaysie, who’s sensory-brain is, too, so cross-wired she once described a taste as a waterfall of quarters.)

I was so effing hooked from the first word. In part, because my current faux-rural Oklahoma setting has strangled any crystal clear memory of my former urban life and I’m drinking what Steinbeck is describing as if it’s good, old wine served with Glenn Miller and childhood. Although I spent my first 18 years in Oklahoma, I quickly left for a decade spent on as much cement as possible. Here, now in the absence of the urban offerings, I’ve been left in the country awestruck at the nature I totally dismissed as a youth, walking out of this two-bit town as early as my first step. If you ever spend two years, as I have recently, in the middle of my monastic prairie, you’ll discover that there’s alot going on in the outside. There’s dirt. And grass. And clouds. And birds. And I’m no Steinbeck, but that stuff is all really pretty. And it pulsates with a rhythm that takes a long time watching to discern at all.

Chapter 29, a few notes provided in brackets for your pleasure:

…But the sap was beginning to run freely in the willows. The bark would slip easily from a twig. Adam got his knife back to teach the boys to make willow whistles, a thing Lee had taught them three years before. [Lee, hired caretaker of the motherless twins. Adam, the dad.] To make it worse, Adam had forgotten how to make the cut. He couldn’t get a peep out of his whistles.

Tragic truth, I could not remember what a willow tree looked like when I read this. When I finally got around to Wikipedia to lookup a picture,

which I clearly recognized as a willow tree, I was so pissed that I had made it to chapter 29 without it in my mind. And then I wondered how many urbanites, (over 1/2 of Americans now live in cities!), have ever seen a tall tree making shade in the place where it’s seeds just landed. Man, there sure has been lots of change in a short span of time, just 100 years. I suggest we all go find ourselves a willow tree to lean up against for awhile when it gets warm again.

Just as I was catching my breath wondering what the hell a willow whistle is, Steinbeck drives us head-on into the mother of revolution that has carried us into our beloved age of 14-lane highways:

At noon one day Will Hamilton [One of Cali's first car dealers] came roaring and bumping up the road in a new Ford. The engine raced in its low gear [a result of inexperienced pilot error], and the high top swayed like a storm-driven ship. The brass radiator and the Prestonlite tank on the running board were blinding with brass polish.

Will pulled up the brake lever, turned the switch straight down, and sat back in the leather seat. The car backfired several times without ignition because it was overheated… He hated Fords with a deadly hatred, but they were daily building his fortune.

As they were us all, Will. The dawn of hydrocarbon. Oil. Black gold. Texas tea. Energy. More than we could imagine. But wait, there’s more! New innovations in how we harness human resources provides for the production of an internal combustion engine like clockwork. At regular intervals new plants popping out little internal combustion engines. Little people in a building machine, making things. Well, making 1/5000th of a thing at a time. Imperfections in the product eliminated by carving out variability. Oh, manufacturing.

“Now the boy went on so rapidly that the words ran together into a great song of the new era. “Operates through the explosion of gases in a enclosed space. Power of explosion is exerted on piston and through connecting rod and crankshaft through transmission thence to rear wheels. Got that?” They nodded blankly, afraid to stop the flow. “They’s two kinds, two cycle and four cycle. This-here is four cycle. Got that?”

Steinbeck leads us to where, 100 years later, we watch ourselves lose our own virginity. We have both the market to consume and produce energy on a mass scale. How will we ever manage all of this wealth in the ground? I mean – we’re rich! We have energy and demand! Only in America!

“They’ll change the face of the countryside. They get their clatter into everything,” the postmaster went on. “We even feel it here. Man used to come for his mail once a week. Now he comes every day, sometimes twice a day. He just can’t wait for his damn catalogue. Running around. Always running around.” He was so violent in his dislike that Adam knew he hadn’t bought a Ford yet. It was a kind of jealousy coming out. “I wouldn’t have one around,” the postmaster said, and this meant that his wife was at him to buy one. It was the women who put the pressure on. Social status was involved.”

This is where I can’t help but laugh out loud. Almost hysterically. I love that Steinbeck is writing this in 1952. Civilization has finally learned how to produce in mass, how to get energy from oil, and how to make oil into plastic. I think he must have known that something was slipping out of whack. Fewer people were raising their own food by then. A few updates to Economic theory called for more math-think and less people-think, people’s unpredictable behaviors muddy up the tidy money machine theory. With a new “neoclassical” model to describe markets, it became oh-so-much easier to manage all the wealth in the ground. And so confident we became in oil’s luscious promise to yield future wealth, that borrowing against it became normal. Standard. No more gold standard required and the banks can lend 100 dollars on every 10 you deposit. Awesome. Unlimited purchasing power from unlimited supply. Goooooooo OIL!

So, here is Steinbeck, roughly 50 years ago, publishing about something that happened about 50 years prior. And this gets me to thinking about this Michael Ruppert movie, Collapse. “Peak oil,” generally refers to the point at which we’ve used up more oil and than we have left – like globally. Now, I don’t care how much oil there is left exactly – but I know that population is increasing and at some point global oil production will decline to the point that we’re going to have a problem.

So, I don’t know if we’ll run out of oil before global warming melts all the polar ice caps (which if it happens in time, we will be able to drill for oil up there, literally the last place on earth), but I can’t imagine a world without plastic. I really need plastic. And electricity. Alot.

In the meantime, I am DEFINITELY learning how to grow a garden. And I’m dusting off those plans for a family compound. (Plus solar panels and electric fence.)

My love for mass media was born early in my life, but my first memory of appreciating it came while browsing a 1960’s issue of National Geographic when I was in the 8th grade. The ads seemed to have captured the era, I thought, as powerfully as the photojournalism. Studying the print creative was to me like picking through the contents of a timecapsule. My own private little VH1 “I Love the 60’s.”

A few years later and to the credit of my high school humanities teacher Linda Batty (seriously), I was introduced to the work of Andy Warhol. The study of Warhol inspired in me an abundance of curiosity about popular culture. And a loss of innocence, too, as I realized the true breadth and depth of advertising’s role in defining our culture.

Like Warhol, my love of the many domains of advertising comes from my awe of it’s absurdly powerful impact on our lives everyday. Further, I’m convinced that our study of this dynamic relationship between marketing communications and modern culture is the only study that matters when trying to understand how to both shape the media platforms of tomorrow and leverage the ones we have today.

Before we embark on that journey, let’s start with an advertising primer for the uninitiated. The digest version of advertising’s birth:

In June 1836, French newspaper La Presse is the first to include paid advertising in its pages, allowing it to lower its price, extend its readership and increase its profitability and the formula was soon copied by all titles.

Presto, advertising is born.

As mankind inevitably also discovered, the size of the audience determines the ad rate, and so in advertising’s wake, the mass media industry was spawned with the neoclassic ambition to reach the largest possible audience.

Ad agencies come along soon after and increase the efficiency in which media is bought and sold. Instead of calling every newspaper in the market area, you can call an agent to place all the media buys for you. Not only handy for the advertiser, but a great profit for the service too, a standard 15%.

Even through the introduction of radio and television, the 15% model remains the standard. Marketers hire the ad agency to produce the creative communication content who then buys the right space so that the target audience will see or hear it. Admittedly, this model is still highly efficient in delivering a message to print, radio, and television audiences. However, to say only that “times have changed,” since 1836 is a pretty ridiculous understatement.

For starters, people are wiser. Embedded into our 2009 culture is a disdain for interruption and the commercials that interrupt. To quote a July 23,2009 WARC news story:
“Some 53% of industry professionals argued that ‘ads that make me stop and think’ could be classed as being ‘very effective,’ compared with just 29% of the general public who shared this view.”*

It’s interesting to me that only 53% of the industry professionals, (corporate marketers and ad agency folks) share a common view! To represent the minority opinion for the sake of argument, I could safely assert that an Arby’s commercial at 5:00 drive time might not make me stop and think but might trigger a stronger than normal response if I drive by an Arby’s before I have dinner. I could, then, also argue that from the anthropological view, as long as commuters who get off work at 5:00 are open to eat at fast food chains, radio will safely see us into the future. However, it is not the majority of advertisers who benefit from an appeal directly to our primal and often immediate need to eat and radio will, therefore, continue to evolve along with the rest of culture if it is to remain relevant.

Since the days of the newspaper, advertising media has grown to include wall paintings, billboards, flyers, radio, cinema, televisions, shopping carts, magazines, and those clever screens along the concourse at airports just to name a few. The methodology employed to create and sell this media inventory has always been the same:

If you own an audience, count how big it is and then sell slices of their attention to an advertiser.

So that brings us to the media evolutions of the last decade and, so here it comes, the phrase that everyone uses:

Social Media.

I cringe every time I hear this phrase used by my friends in advertising and media. I don’t mention it when it happens because I’m not a jackass semantics snob, but the reason I hate it is because it totally discounts the power of this phenomenal advancement in the evolution of mankind by reducing it to a mere audience. On the Internet, through social networks, individuals organically self-select into tribes huddled online around a shared interest and then magic happens: a community forms.

I wish marketers and advertisers would let the deeply rooted semantics of that word, community, sink in before they trod on such sacred ground while, along the way, turning the medium into a stupid billboard. A community is so much more than just an audience. In fact, consider this message to help marketers understand the new landscape, provided by Paul Isakson, arguably among the most brilliant minds in advertising today,:

And while I’m singing the praises of Paul Isakson, I’m going to totally steal the copy from his deck titled, “The Future Of Marketing.” I share his thoughts, but I admit when something has been said as elegantly as it can be said, which he’s done:

*The future of marketing is not about doing and saying things to people.
*The future of marketing is about doing things with and for people.

Therefore, he continues:
*The future of marketing is collaborative.
*The future of marketing is generous.
*The future of marketing is experimental.
*The future of marketing is helpful.
*The future of marketing is playful.
*The future of marketing is personal.
*The future of marketing is honest.
*The future of marketing is participatory.

Isakson boldly proclaims that “the product is the marketing.” And to be successful in the days ahead, he advises marketers to “make better products,” and “commit to something bigger than you.”

Like Isakson, I believe that future marketing communication successes will be based on genuine conversations between producers and consumers. Aware that mass media outlets and ad agencies have been sleeping together for a few decades shy of two centuries, marketers must demand that their media and creative partners are truly helping to foster the conversation. Marketers must be brave enough to choose only to solve real problems. Marketers must commit to being good and honest and also demand that their communications agencies help them listen to the communities that they serve, both online and off. Ladies and gentlemen, the future of all media is as social as it was when the first bloke used papyrus as paper, the only difference is that the voice now belongs to the people and it is now the brands who must listen.

As modern media change the way that people connect, giving each individual a voice, I think Andy Warhol would agree: never before has “popular culture” been more relevant.

Sometimes, I wonder what the world would be like if we decided that all really important person-to-person written communication were produced using Eliot Noyes beautiful 1960 machine:

A note about the Selectric’s designer:
Eliot Fette Noyes (August 12, 1910 – July 18, 1977) was an American-born, Harvard-trained architect and industrial designer, who worked on projects for IBM, most famously the IBM Selectric typewriter and the IBM Aerospace Research Center in Los Angeles, California. Noyes was also a pioneer in development of comprehensive corporate-wide design programs that integrated design strategy and business strategy. Examples of his work are IBM, Mobil Oil, Cummins Engine and Westinghouse. [1]

I hope this works. It’s cool. Fandom.

A few days ago my friend Melissa invited me to ride her Vespa to watch a designy movie at an art museum. I jumped at the opportunity and decided that my best outfit would need to include my red Original Penguin shirt that I just picked up from the cleaners. I really do love the shirt. Well, the design is so iconic.

I felt so pleased with myself that I even snapped this picture:

After which I tweeted (which updates Facebook too)…

Then…

Just a few days later, I got this e-mail.
Hmmm.  What does it mean?  I was excited at first. I thought it was cool that I could tweet something about the Original Penguin on Thursday and then by Monday – the brand found a fan.

I decided to write a post about how the Penguin social media strategy is working.  I admit that my passion for a clothing brands is not universal.  Some people don’t care about clothing brands at all, but I love beautiful things.

But, mostly, I think that Penguin is cool.  I watched its rebirth and connected to the reintroduction of the Penguin all-american charm with a dash of sophistication.  I truly am a fan even if I don’t have one of those dens with forest green walls and shelves of antique books and carafes of finely aged Brandy and Cognac.  Although, if I did, it would definitely be set to a soundtrack by the Sex Pistols.*

So, I began my research on how twitter fit into the brand conversation strategy.  They have 145 followers.  following 35 people.  Wait.  Did that say they follow 35 people? One of my favorite brands, the Original Penguin, follows 35 people and I’m one of them!? HOLY SHIT!

Like usual, the research became all about me and I thought – who the eff else do they follow?  Are they like me?  Are we in the same social tribe? Or is it, “twibe,” now? Oh, god, I hope they’re not just other companies trying to figure out how to be social by following other companies who are doing the same thing but they never really say anything except to each other and give out coupons.  Oh, maybe they follow designers? That would be cool.

Admittedly, Original Penguin does follow other companies concerned with the retail distribution of their product.  I can’t really hate on that.  Although, I’m stoked to report that based on the selective tastes of one of my favorite brands – I’m even cooler than I thought! (Most of you won’t be able to believe that’s even possible, I’m sure.)

It’s the company I keep!  I looked down the list of pretty profile pics and came across this dude, vossro, who caught my eye first.  Can I just say, uh, YES PLEASE!

First of all he buys fresh homemade cosmetics and drinks exclusively organic coffees and teas. He also works for, yes, Louis Vuitton. He is also, surprise, gay. Overall, I would say that the Penguin has great taste!

So, I moved on to the next pretty profile face:
jmaggiore.

His most recent update sounds like my dream weekend, except for the shitty day at the casino, but I’ll bet he still had fun.

He also sounds like me. Well, inasmuch as he sent a message to his friend in Florida at 8:55am telling her he wants to come visit. After lunch he says to the world, “need to get away.” And then, on Monday afternoon he makes his report. Boating, even. So Penguin.

So, our Penguin dude in IL sounds like this: On Saturday he goes to the barley corn for a late bday celebration, on Tuesday he struggles – “Bar or Casino?” By 9am on Wednesday he’s, “excited to go out tonight.” On Thursday he’s hoping for nicer weather for the afternoon golf game. On Friday he needs to get away, to go boating and gambling and then works out. I LOVE THIS GUY!! What can I say? I want to hang out with him. I want to throw 7s and laugh and drink scotch and smoke cigars. Wearing Penguin. Who wouldn’t!? This guy knows how to live.

Of course, I followed these folks – plus Krit Pongcheewin in Tewksbury, MA – USA whose bio reads, “If u have passion in knowledge then join me, if you love medical then follow me, if u’re a Ph D then definitely subscribe to me, etc.”

Yeah! Why not? I love knowledge. I love medical. No Ph.D, but maybe just reading his tweets will inspire me to try that. Krit is clearly a student who really REALLY wants a new Mac. “Heavy,” american restaurants make him sleepy. He was sick with a body temp of over 100 for 2 hours! He eats alot of salad. He talks about the sales on Aeropostale.

He also writes:

80 followers! Me personally this is a ratio of 5:70 which most normal Twitter user can’t surpass! Yay me! Just marvelous.

I love this because it says that Krit deals with his world in numbers and that he is especially fond of the computation of his influence compared to his volume of twitter influencers. A funny little metric that it would take a medical Ph.D. in Boston to come up with.

I followed four people total from the 35 selected members of the Penguin twitter panel. I’m left to wonder if my selection was because some cute chick running the social media program liked what I said or if I was picked out algorithmically by some really great software that we should all be investing in.

In either case, to Penguin – I say, SCORE! I’m a real live fan and I’m glad you wanted to hear my voice as I describe all the ridiculous things I do and you can make cool iconic pieces of personality for me to wear in the seasons to come.

For the rest of you who’ve lasted this long, hoping for some payoff to this blog entry, have no fear! Here’s the strategic advice that we can take from my experience with the Original Penguin:

“Social Media” engagement isn’t rocket science. It’s just listening to the people who are cool…

And the cool kids are the ones who believe you are too.

Google Wave. It’s a Product. It’s a Platform. It’s a Protocol!

Google announced Google Wave a few weeks ago at i|o. Watch below – MUCH more to come on this interesting development in the world of communication. If it works, we can say goodbye to e-mail forever.

Or click through to
wave.google.com
or
waveprotocol.org