scott goodson's writings

CANNES LION 2009 JUDGING

Alexander Peralta is in the house - ie our fearless StrawberryFrog Brazil leader has started his judging in the sun baked riviera while we New Yorkers are drenched in what is the wettest summer on record.

Buying Hummer is a smart move for China.

A Chinese company buying the Hummer brand is a brilliant move. China does manufacturing well. But brand building? Not as fast. So acquiring a famous name in the car business is one way to launch a thousand new kinds of products to the world market, the domestic market - and the US. Repositioning Hummer with a new not so crazy fleet of cars that get better mileage will impress America as well as their domestic market. I'm sure every Chinese aspiring car owner would be happy to drive a Chinese brand of car, especially one that comes with the cache of durability forged in battle. Brands outlive products. Brands well crafted with authenticity and mythology have magic inherent inside of them. They also have the awareness. This was a good deal for the Chinese. Stay tuned, if they can change the portfolio and reposition the brand in a more dynamic way, its legacy would entice consumers to take a new look at the line up.

Below is an article about the deal in today's NY Times. Worth a read.

What Would Mao Drive? A Little Red ... Hummer

Even in a world mostly done being amazed by the ironies of globalization, last week managed to produce something fresh and previously unfathomable: General Motors, newly bankrupt and struggling to raise cash, agreed to sell its Hummer division to a company from China.

Yes, that Hummer, maker of the famously gas-guzzling behemoths whose menacing width and armor trace their provenance to the American military, is now set to become the property of Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Company, in a land officially still called the People’s Republic of China.

It might seem incongruous, this plaything for the unabashed American road warrior shifting to a country where the bicycle once ruled and collectivism was an organizing principle. (What next? Harley-Davidson snapped up by the Vietnamese?) But that’s just until you contemplate the realities of modern China, and the nouveau riche in the growing suburbs, setting down lawn furniture inside gated complexes of villas, shopping at big-box stores and driving luxury cars. China seems intent on nurturing the very sorts of landscapes and consumer attitudes that produced the Hummer.

More than a merely economic event — the latest sign of China’s rise and American struggles — the deal is a cultural moment. It seems no accident that a Chinese company is taking possession of Hummer. China has come to embrace many of the attributes and modes of consumption that Americans may reflexively consider their own, complete with the sprawl and tangle of highways familiar to any resident of Los Angeles or Atlanta.

As China has cast off its ideological past and aggressively modernized its cities, it might reasonably have been expected to look to Europe or Japan for models of urban planning. Like Japan — home to one of the most sophisticated rail networks on earth — China is densely populated and dependent on imported oil. As is true in Europe, China’s major cities are surrounded by productive agricultural lands, making tightly clustered growth seem prudent.

Instead, in a choice familiar to Americans, China has put the automobile at the center of contemporary life. China has torn down older buildings in every major city to make way for more vehicles. It has erected an impressive network of highways crisscrossing the vast country. Air quality and energy efficiency have been outweighed by reverence for the car.

This has not happened randomly. In recent times, China’s leaders have unleashed enormous quantities of state finance to seed auto ventures in every province, spurring industries that have grown along with the ubiquity of the car. Petrochemicals, steel, glass-making and rubber have all expanded to feed auto-making. Tourism and retail shopping have increased as more Chinese take possession of steering wheels.

Along the way, many Chinese aspirations have come to focus on car ownership. In a country where so many people look back with bitterness on the regimented days of Maoism, and where public transportation still involves packing into belching buses and gruesomely crowded trains, the car has become a vessel for Chinese dreams.

“Why do you want a car?” I asked a young professional couple shopping at a car lot outside Beijing in 2002. The question elicited an irritated glare from the woman, as if I were condescending. “Same reason you want a car,” she said. “We want what you want.”

She did not mean merely the ability to go where she pleased, but also the geography the car enables — the villas with their backyards and modern conveniences; the superstores selling microwave-ready food; the new golf courses.

Asked about the atrocious smog blanketing Beijing and the traffic jams that made driving there a threat to mental health, she shrugged. Anyway, the car takes a growing slice of wealthy urbanites into the countryside for the pure pleasure of it — this, too, once unthinkable in a nation that remembers how city dwellers were forcibly dispatched to the hinterlands to slop pigs during the Cultural Revolution.

As driving has evolved from a mere way to get around to a mode of life, sales of passenger cars in China have grown by 20 percent to 30 percent per year since 2005. In January, for the first time ever, China’s monthly vehicle sales exceeded those in the United States.

Still, it would be wrong, if tempting, to view China as some sort of time capsule of 1950s American suburbia, that age before the vernacular came to include “climate change” and “non-renewable resource.” China is moving to impose fuel efficiency standards tougher than those in the United States while developing hybrid cars. Most car owners favor cheaper, smaller models.

But much as everywhere else, the auto has become a status symbol in China, and in ways that collide with the country’s history as a paragon of anti-imperialism: Cadillacs, that icon of American capitalist success, are now made on Chinese soil along with Audis and Buicks. In the new Chinese social divide, the middle class hews to economical vehicles with tiny engines, while the wealthy fuss with automatic climate control in their luxury sedans.

So it actually seems fitting that Hummer will be a Chinese brand. A vehicle that makes sense only as a pastime, with its miserable gas mileage, the Hummer has become an object increasingly shunned in the United States as a sign of wasteful decadence (not to mention something that most Americans can no longer afford). China, primed to consume and long since shorn of its collectively imposed thrift, will take a crack at extracting profit by selling the hulking beasts.

How Twitter will change the way we live?!

In today's issue of Time, there is an article entitled: "How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live," By Steven Johnson.

"The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your "followers," and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It's not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, "If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal."

The article strives to make a point that Twitter has moved from being a tendency or trend to becoming a new national habit among Americans. And that this habit is something new and better and different than what people had before Twitter was born.

I am a little skeptical about the long-term viability of this habit however as technology crazed people like you and me like the 'new' new, and are always looking for interesting new ways to connect and spread ideas.

It might very well grow deep roots and be the media of choice of my children. But based on the fickleness of tech users I think this might well turn out to be another fashion.

What Social Media Revolution?

Gareth Kay, the strategy head over at Boston-based Modernista, wrote a lucid and impressive piece in AgencySpy that is worth a read if you are fretting about social media.

The discussion around social media reminds me of the discussions around digital that surfaced back in early 2000 as agencies grappled with the impact and spread of the internet. Gareth's point about the focus on Social Media ideas is bang on. This is the way we at StrawberryFrog, have been working with social media before it became "social media". For example our campaign for Scion - called ScionSpeak is an example of this. It enabled Scion owners and fans to create badges about their lifestyles and use them on social media to express their own individual lifestyles.

Here is Gareth's well-written article:

"I absolutely believe that communication needs to be a two-way conversation not a narcissistic monologue, and that people aren't passive consumers waiting to be penetrated by marketing messages. Social media has helped prove the power of human conversation, and our innate social nature for anyone who had forgotten or doubted it.

But all this talk of social media got me thinking that perhaps, yet again, we are looking at this from the wrong end of the telescope, focusing on the delivery mechanism not the underlying issue.

Rather than focusing on social media shouldn't we be focusing on social ideas? This may sound a little trite, but I think it's important. Rather than (again) using communications as a sticking plaster to cover real fundamental issues a business faces, it forces us to confront what it is that we need to do at a more fundamental level."

More>>

The Sixth Extinction?

The New Yorker has also published a rather scary piece on the mass extinction of frogs. Being a proud frog, I must say that I was thunderstruck by this article and feel the need to try to do something about it. Any suggestions?

The article in the New Yorker describes how graduate student Karen Lips observed the mysterious disappearance of large numbers of local golden frogs, in the nineteen-nineties, at several locations in Panama and Costa Rica. Whatever was killing Lips’s frogs moved east, like a wave, across Panama.

More here >>>

De-globalization

There's a great piece in the New Yorker Think Tank about the possibility of a new idea on the rise in global culture: deglobalization. It's an interesting thought. Perhaps more relevant for Western companies who have already reached around the world and are now retrenching. But perhaps not so relevant a thought for companies coming out of the merging world markets such as Brazil or India. Have a read:

From the New Yorker:

Last month, the PIMCO bond and economy guru Bill Gross wrote, “The future of the global economy will likely be dominated by de-leveraging, de-globalization, and re-regulation.” De-leveraging and re-regulation are easy to grasp. American households, for example, are shifting rapidly from borrowing to saving; this change in the United States during the last nine months has been particularly dramatic, and not exactly helpful to our consumer-dependent economy. Banks have already de-leveraged and shifted large chunks of their bad debt to taxpayers. Re-regulation is in the newspaper headlines every day—one of its goals, presumably, will be to prevent Wall Street’s wizards from re-leveraging. But de-globalization? What might that actually mean? The economic crisis has not abolished Moore’s law (which observes that computing power, and thus the power of electronic devices, has doubled about every two years since the invention of the computer chip, in 1958.) Whatever their states of mind, more and more people are plugging into the grid, and will continue to do so; even in hard times, the cost of electronic integration will not pose a serious obstacle. At the same time, cell phone and computer users are also expanding the depth and reach of their online activity. So that form of globalization will certainly accelerate.

More here>>>

Surge in creativity

The NY Times today reports a surge in creativity in the US as a result of the economic times we are living through.

Liz Fallon, 30, a visual artist in Portland, Me., started selling her paintings and drawings to private collectors about 10 years ago, when she was still in college. She has not sold an original work in almost a year. But in the Portland area, Ms. Fallon said, there seems to be a kind of artistic renaissance under way as various groups, like photography cooperatives and drawing collectives, form to connect creative professionals with one another.

“As for myself, freed from the constraints of creating for a specific buyer,” Ms. Fallon wrote, “I’ve experienced my own surge in creativity and have been producing a great deal more than I used to. While it would be nice to still be getting paid for my work, the need to be more resourceful is having a beneficial effect on the arts community around me.”

Cadine Navarro, an artist in New York says: “I feel that artists are well equipped to deal creatively with such situations and with a bit of persistence and optimism, can turn this recession into a point of strength.”

Read the full piece here >>>

Better agency model for the emerging market

What do I see as the new agency model of the emerging new market? The model that delivers strategic and creative excellence, innovation and a lot of agility - and is able to scale a brand quickly?

The better agency model must do three things:

It must have a new ideas culture, a new value culture…and a new talent culture. The agency model of the future is built around the value of ideas. You might say there’s nothing new about this point. Our industry talks a lot about ideas.

But at the same time, we have allowed the emphasis, the value, and the fundamental business model of our industry today, to shift away from ideas and to focus predominantly on execution.

A lot of lip service is paid to the value of ideas, but agencies are often primarily regarded as executioners and, in that regard, purely as suppliers. In the future, suppliers will be valued less and less and squeezed more and more. It is idea generators who will be most valued – because “ideaspeople” create the greatest value, across every industry sector, not just our own.

So the new agency model has to move the value of our industry away from execution and back to ideas. Firstly, by demonstrating and standing up for the value of ideas. And secondly, by outsourcing execution.

Now, by outsourcing execution, I don’t mean for a moment giving up responsibility for execution. It is very important that we steward the process – and we do this flawlessly for some of the biggest advertisers in the world - but less important that we feel we must execute everything, and be able to provide a full range of execution services “in-house”.

The pressure on agencies, often self-inflicted to be able to claim ‘We do absolutely everything’, is entirely counter-productive to fostering a culture that focuses on and celebrates the value of ideas.

Interestingly, outsourcing execution not only re-emphasizes the value of ideas; it also re-emphasizes the value of specialist executioners. Idea creators and idea implementers are both key.

At the implementation end, the opportunity to be the Fedex of the execution marketplace is an exceptionally valuable one in its own right – when it absolutely, positively has to be produced overnight, or in some other very tight timeframe

And there are some interesting developments in this area.

At StrawberryFrog, protecting a true “IdeasCulture” has always been our aim. We haven’t embraced this change for change’s sake, but in order to ensure “new creativity” and “originality” as well as innovation and a hell of a lot of agility. We have always been about the value of great ideas, and outsourcing execution to media buying companies or major digital production organizations was a key part of our founding philosophy ten years ago. We have developed strong partnerships with PR firms and specialists in various areas of expertise and technology and in different geographies.

At StrawberryFrog we have extraordinary talent in-house, but we also outsource into a unique network of talent literally all over the world, while we steward huge brands nationwide and across all continents. Pulling these partners into the StrawberryFrog team gives us tremendous reach and power, innovation and dynamism, as well as some very unconventional disciplines that you wouldn't find in your traditional agency such as mobility crm capabilities and social media listening.

Not every client is ready for this – yet. It takes a creative CMO to understand what the true value of this model really means vs the traditional legacy agency model.

Our model was not inspired by the old agency model, but by architectural partnerships and feature movie productions, i.e. the best available talent from wherever it’s assembled for the duration of a project. This is the StrawberryFrog model as it was developed ten years ago, and perfected over the years - and, through the experience of stewarding complex campaigns for major clients in the US and in other regions.

CMOs are looking for more, better, faster

Things are getting busy. Very busy. So much so that I simply haven't had much time to write on this blog. After the economic collapse in the back end of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009, the phones started to ring again in early spring. First there were one or two inquiries a week. Now it's a new call a day. I have been in touch with a select group of other modern agencies, and it's much the same with them. We are getting a lot of calls, most of them from large clients that previously worked exclusively with the very big legacy holding company agencies or networks. But they are searching for something new and they are a great deal more informed and curious about new ways of doin things than clients in the past.

This is a phenomenal sign for places like the FrogPond.

We've noticed that clients are looking for smarter, better, more effective and more efficient partners. Partners that are part of the solution, not the problem.

If current contact growth rates hold up, we could be witnessing the first significant shift in business away from the traditional agencies who have controlled and dominated the ad industry for decades, towards new, more innovative firms with the competence and pedigree to strategically steward a brand and scale it with creative excellence in all media. Far-fetched? Perhaps. But if you understand the pressures clients are under to achieve both effectiveness and speed, then you can see why they are searching for new options, and how challenger agencies are able to leapfrog the systems that have been around for 40-50-60 years.

After living through the recent psychological impact of the failure of some of the biggest firms in the world, businesspeople simply no longer believe that their accounts are best parked at the traditional corporate agency. Nor do they believe the myth that just because it's a huge building with thousands of people in cubicles, that putting your account there is a safe choice. On the contrary, clients are starting to feel that putting their accounts in a traditional agency is perhaps the riskiest move to make. When we started StrawberryFrog ten years ago, it was virtually unheard of for huge major clients to award multi-million dollar accounts to new challenger firms. This is no longer the case. We have proven over ten years that you can do what huge clients need and want, but do it differently than the dinosaurs. Many of the calls we've received the past month have been from America's blue chip companies wishing to meet us and understand how we can service their businesses and brands differently from the legacy agencies.

For agencies like ours this is a welcome sign. "Yeah, yeah yeah", you say. "We'll believe it when we see it." Sure thing. But even in the face of that semi-corny line, these calls do signal the importance of brilliant ideas, the resurgence of strategic and creative excellence, and not the focus on money or the crushing weight of bureaucracies. Today, intelligence, experience, innovative and being agile as hell counts. It's good to be a firm in the outside lane at a time when that's the best place to be - without, I dare say losing any creative quality.

The pressures of the economy mixed with the media revolution underway are pushing clients to take hard looks at their traditional agencies, and this is blowing the cobwebs out of the advertising attic, and creating new opportunities for modern agencies that have proven track records of re-energizing huge brands or launching new brands from scratch and scaling them into successful businesses.

Viva la revoluion!

Quaker Cultural Movement Case: StrawberryFrog Brasil