Energy Innovation

Innovate a new kind of energy, more efficient, more powerful and at the same time reduce our global carbon emissions to zero by 2050. I feel like this challenge has been on the table for a few years now but it's nice to finally get presented with the challenge. Solving the energy and carbon emissions problem simultaneously is certainly the single greatest challenge our generation will face. We have 20 years to invent the technology and 20 years to implement it. Let's get crackin'.

Branding is Dead

Branding is Dead.

Well at least the way it's been done for the past 15 years. Here's a little remix of Hoffman Lewis (an SF advertising firm) and Naomi Klein (author of No Logo who is well known for anti-globalism.)

Both have a problem with the same thing. Brand culture and brand strategists have spent the past 10 years creating a world of culture, imagination and personality around a world of collapsing innovation and product development.

As products and services lost momentum advertisers compensated by focusing on the company's brand image. For me, the pinnacle of this movement came in '08 when I was recognized with a Jay/Chiat planning award for help on a campaign that boasted bad marketing for a great product. Although the strategy was considered clever, the irony is that the product was the same old crap the company had been creating for the past 10 years. It was another example of spraying a tan onto another pasty dude at the pool. The spray on brand tan that company's have received over the past decade are wearing off and they are getting exposed for their in-authenticity. Companies must continue to think disruptively but they must also tout an innovative, respectable product.

There is good news though. What is emerging from the rubble is a combination of brand imagination and product innovation; a mixture that has the potential to evolve the way we do and communicate business.

This is a call to action to stop branding the empty cow; if you must, look to the hands of the engineers, the architects, the builders; and find brands that are worthy of communications. But in my mind the real opportunity rests in collaboration. If your clients have a lousy product, don't create a more imaginative world to disguise it; help them build something better.

How to Manufacture a Meme

First what is an internet Meme?

A meme (pronounced /ˈmiːm/, rhyming with "cream"^[1]) is a postulated unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. (The etymology of the term relates to the Greek word μιμητισμός (pronounced /mɪmetɪsmos/) for "something imitated".)^[2] Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate and respond to selective pressures.^[3]

So it's viral content that encourages participation. It tells a very brief but revealing story. I recently came across an example that used om nom nom (which was apparently lifted from Sesame Street's Cookie Monster) to explain what a meme is. But when I started thinking about it I found it interesting that meme's aren't manufactured, they just occur; so what I'm wondering how easy it is to go about creating one.

Hypothesis for creating a Meme:

1. Learn how to be both funny and insightful.
2. choose one of the following:
a. select a pop culture event that resonates with a large audience immediately following a highly publicized occurrence; ie. Kanye slams Taylor Swift on the MTV music awards, Christian Bale loses his cool and spews profanity at a set hand.
b. choose a niche on the long tail that harbors a group followers who are passionate about something obscure or interesting; ie. LOL cats, Om nom nom creatures

3. Create an overlay that calls out something insightful or recognizes the essence or true nature of whatever topic you have chosen.

4. Make it easy and enjoyable for others to get creative and manufacture their own overlays that allow them to express their creativity and take part on what might be called "the inside joke."

Humanitarian Design

It's something all of us entrepreneurs and innovators should be thinking about. Not only how to make a profit but how to help people and how to take care of the planet. It's where capitalism meets altruism. Well Emily Piloton and Project H are at the forefront of making great things with not only great form and function but designed especially with social responsibility in mind.

What if we refocus our business models to think about doing good instead of just looking at the bottom line? It's not a new concept, but rather a business model that has taken some time to prove viable. There is money to be made even when a company is doing great things for other people and the planet.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Emily Pilloton
www.colbertnation.com
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Modeling the Mind: the singularity series

We're on the path to artificial intelligence surpassing that of human intelligence within roughly 20 years but scientists are re-thinking the path to singularity. There are a lot of different pieces required to re-constructing the thought process and now researchers are trying to find a way to integrate them all.

Although it's pretty nerdy, I've always been fascinated with figuring out how to get a computer to think, solve problems and function like a human mind. These two paragraphs are from Re-Thinking Artificial Intelligence, an MIT article about how scientists are re-thinking and re-approaching an issue that once resolved will bring us one step closer to successfully completing a Turing test, and ultimately singularity.

"After modeling the thought process, the second area of focus is memory. Much work in AI has tried to impose an artificial consistency of systems and rules on the messy, complex nature of human thought and memory. “It’s now possible to accumulate the whole life experience of a person, and then reason using these data sets which are full of ambiguities and inconsistencies. That’s how we function — we don’t reason with precise truths,” he says. Computers need to learn “ways to reason that work with, rather than avoid, ambiguity and inconsistency."

"And the third focus of the new research has to do with what they describe as “body”: “Computer science and physical science diverged decades ago,” Gershenfeld says. Computers are programmed by writing a sequence of lines of code, but “the mind doesn’t work that way. In the mind, everything happens everywhere all the time.” A new approach to programming, called RALA (for reconfigurable asynchronous logic automata) attempts to “re-implement all of computer science on a base that looks like physics,” he says, representing computations “in a way that has physical units of time and space, so the description of the system aligns with the system it represents.” This could lead to making computers that “run with the fine-grained parallelism the brain uses,” he says."

RedScout's Spur - Imaginative Solution Providers

The aspiration for planners should be "did I create a new reality and will people look at the world in a different way?"

Advertisers need to discriminate because you can't appeal to everyone. Planning is moving from the voice of the consumer to someone who adds imagination, creativity and a solution to a brand or communication problem.

Redscout presents Spur — Episode 3: Are planners glorified researchers? from Redscout on Vimeo.

Faris' 6 Step Approach to Social Media

Be Nice or Leave

1. Listen - market research, engage cognition
2. Respond - conversations about you are directed to you, customer service, being ignored creates backlashes
3. Nurture - support/ add value to communities that already exist.
4. Create Social Objects - produce something to pull people together and give them something to do.
5. Be Transparent - Expect everything you say to spread immediately
6. Join the conversation - cater a conversation to the interests of other parties.

The vision for social media: Dissolve the boundaries between companies and media.