Digigen & The TinMan

I loved working for T-Mobile and think we spent a year producing some great work, some brilliant strategies and very visible consumer activity. Starting at Liverpool Street and finishing at the 13,000+ person event at Trafalgar Square, this presentation shows how we did it.

It would be interesting to see what comments he makes about “branded content”…..

Hats off to British Airways, they sure know how to ruin someone’s week. Check out this journey from my friend, starting in India…going via Brussels, to eventually get to London. Anyone know of any bigger and better journeys?

Chris Thornton

Our journey home from India since friday morning..3.5hr taxi, 2 hour flight, 2 cancelled flights, 9 hour flight, 4 hours on tarmac, 1 hour flight, 14 hours in airport, 2 cancelled flights, 30min train, 3 hours in a hotel, 4 hour coach, 2 hour ferry, 2 hour coach and a black cab.Highlights; borrowing €300 of airport meal vouchers and seeing Dennis Taylor off to Belgium sports personality. Madness. Merry Christmas All!

Nice work.

Time’s Person of the Year in 2010 has been announced as Mark Zuckerberg. I have criticised this on Twitter which met with a prompt questioning from @joshspear. I thought I had a valid reason for questioning why Mark Zuckerberg deserves this ahead of other global game changers, so thought I would get down what I think the Time Person of the Year should represent. Bearing in mind this is my opinion and as I have no gauge of personality of the other “winners” I can only judge on my instinct.

For me the Time Person of the Year should have an equation which looks like the following:

Person of the Year = Personality x Contribution to Global Community x Cultural Impact x Influence

So, you could argue that Mark Zuckerberg has contributed to the global community in 2010, but I don’t necessarily believe that he owned the year in terms of contribution to the global community. Surely someone like Julian Assange has contributed more by opening up the underhand/overhand techniques of global surveillance, backhanders and general bad do-ing through Wikileak, getting governments to rethink how they classify data, what they do, how they act.

Arguably, Zuckerberg’s greatest contribution is the cultural impact of creating a technology that allows the sociological shift to multiple (often overstated) connections and communities. However, although Zuckerberg is probably the most successful (current) social network developer and founder, channels like MySpace, Friendster existed before Zuckerberg brought his Harvard network to the masses. Of course, Facebook is culturally important to us and the global community but will it still be viewed as a seismic shift that happened in 2010? For me this is just as important, wasn’t 2009 Facebook’s year? 2010, simply the next step? (If the stories about a Facebook Killer coming out of Google are true, will Mark Zuckerberg simply be another digital story that falls by the wayside, a bit like Detroit and the motor Industry)

Personality as @joshspear pointed out to me, is entirely subjective. Sadly I haven’t had the chance to meet anyone in the top tier of Time Person of the Year. However, the camera doesn’t lie and I think personality is something that Mark Zuckerberg certainly doesn’t seem to have in droves. My feeling being that its not his personality that has driven him to success, but the technology behind him that has enabled him to reach this accolade. Would the technology have had the same effect on anybody running it and Mark simply in a good place at a good time?

Influence. Influence is hard to categorise, subjective to the extreme. When Mark speaks the tech community listens, does the global community care what Mark thinks though? Does your layman in India, London, Malaysia, Tokyo care what Mark thinks? I would say not. If you look at past winners they are kings and queens, captains of global industries, somehow I think Mark gets lost in the crowd. This isn’t to say Mark isn’t influential of course he is, I just think influence needs to be categorised in the right way.

Of course, Mark’s achivements cannot be denied. 600m users of Facebook. A billionaire. A generous spirit, donating over 50% of his salary to the “Giving Pledge”. We would all like to be Mark Zuckerberg, to be at the forefront of digital industry but my feeling (and I’m happy to be chastised) is that Mark Zuckerberg would have been more worthy in 2009, maybe earlier. 2010, just doesn’t seem as much his year as others…but hey.. I’d like to meet him to make up my mind. anyone?

Perhaps The Social Network film was a pretty big help…maybe?

In the second of our looks at future agency models, I thought we would take a look at one which seems to be making a few waves; Victors and Spoils. A heady crescendo of creativity and crowdsourcing, Victors and Spoils aim is to be an agency..

that offers the strategic direction, engagement and relationship management that agencies deliver today, but one that also delivers the engagement, cultural relevance, results and return on investment that crowdsourcing {if managed and directed well} can deliver.

Although it fits with the wikipedia definition of CrowdSourcing, namely the “outsourcing of otherwise contracted work to a large group or community”, it doesn’t necessarily feel massively different to how most agencies use freelancers. In this case, the term “crowdsourcing” applied to the use of freelancers which helps to reduce agency costs, create interesting stories, and helps position this business as a future agency. It almost doesn’t feel like “crowdsourcing” when you do it within a business area like advertising, but I still think its a fantastic model.

In practice, however, what Victors and Spoils are incredibly good at is making this feel like a real community. I have signed up “to trial” the agency and see what happens, as they are looking for strategists and planners as well as artistic creatives. My experience has been superb so far in terms of the agency contact points I have had to date. They certainly seem to have the experience and knowledge to build this agency to future greatness. However, it will be interesting to see how long freelancers stay with them, what their turn over will be of reliable freelancers e.g. the ones you know can deliver the brief, and what happens when they simply don’t get a great response. Is there a fall back plan?

The other question I also have is, what is it that clients will find interesting about this model? I think its probably the fact that there isn’t necessarily an agency style, so all briefs are new briefs, but if you look at great creative work it often represents a unique style to the agency or creative.

There are of course other crowdsourcing agencies, but it feels to me that although agencies like blur do compete, Victors and Spoils has the better community forming around it and will potentially be the (ahem) victor.

Link Here to Victors and Spoils.

Link Here to blur