The summit opened with a quick introduction from Dave Morgan of Simulmedia. Since the theme of the conference is storytelling beyond advertising, he briefly discussed the importance of thinking beyond the computer. He touched on Bill Joy’s Six Webs. He envisioned:
- Far web – the typical TV viewer experience
- Near web – desktop computing
- Here web – mobile devices with personal information one carried all the time
- Weird web – voice recognition systems
- B2B web – business computers dealing exclusively with each other
- D2D web – intelligent buildings and cities
Joy sees these as the foundation for how the internet will continue to change. He predicted the “here” web would be most prominent due to its portability. Morgan points out that despite the fact that Facebook represents 25 percent of all page views on the internet, if its audience size were compared directly to a TV network, it would be equivalent to being PBS. He showed numbers to illustrate that Facebook’s “viewership” paled in comparison to that of CBS. So there’s a long way to go to get to the “here” web, but conferences like this help to bring to light the importance of designing content for the evolution we are in the midst of.
Following Morgan was a presentation by Claudia Batten, the COO of Victors & Spoils, an ad agency that uses crowdsourced production. Your brand is whatever consumers say it is, so you might as well engage them in helping you to establish what the brand is and stands for. Her agency worked with WD-40 to generate ideas for innovating the brand. Here’s what they got: 336 ideas submitted, 26 investigated, 10 validated, 5 awarded, 1new ownable platform. This outside perspective gave the brand some freshing thinking, and provide for endless stimuli for internal ideation. Similarly, Starbucks idea submission campaign had 70,000 ideas submitted in its first year with over 100,000 total submitted. A team of 40 people reviewed the ideas, and they implemented about 100 of them.
Her advice was to engage these fans and audiences who want to contribute to your brand, but you must be prepared for it. To do so, you must be prepared for the worst, not everything goes perfectly; you must be a collaborator, and not an intruder in these discussions and brainstorming; you must be transparent and willing to share your problems/challenges; you must spread the word and promote it, targeting key influencers and advocates. If you’re able to do this, you’ll get solutions to some of your biggest challenges, as well as a way to connect with consumers and tell your brand story.
