Big Idea : CauseCast

Yesterday received this RSS feed from TrendCentral.com It's about social media meeting cause. A site named Causecast.org!!

Trendcentral says 85% of youth today think it's important to make the world a better place (The Cassandra Report, May 2008), and Causecast is looking to reach these socially conscious consumers by acting as a powerful online social medium that connects nonprofits, leaders, brands, and individuals to those who want to make a positive impact on the world.

Boasting a roster of well-recognized celebrity activists and leaders, and 30 nonprofit organizations, Causecast is a one-stop-shop for philanthropy, including a social network, news outlet, and entertainment source.

In an effort to increase popular interest in social causes, the site makes it easy for users to give back and do good on their own. Users can highlight their favorite causes by adding a widget to their own personal sites and profiles. Additionally, cause-related news from around the world is available at Causecast, as well as a weekly news show, with shorter segments available on the site's YouTube channel...

Need to create something like this closer home!!

iPology

I first came across this term - 'iPology' on Steve Chazin's web-site! Read the post on Marketingapple.com!

In Chazin's words - "All the Apple marketing gets dwarfed by Steve's apology for cutting the price and undercutting his early adopters - so much so that MarketWatch's Tom Bemis invents a term for it, sure to be taught in business schools everywhere - the iPology.

And all this does is ensure that Apple doesn't have to spend a dime on its traditional marketing when the popular press does it all for them, at much greater reach and value.

In fact, by my calculation the value of the free advertising Apple received (this blog included) is greater the cost of the $100 rebate times all the iPhone sold to date.

Folks, you are living through what has to be the Golden Age of marketing and Steve Jobs is its king."

In fact check out another iPology story on AdAge called - Steve Jobs, My Fruit Vendor and How to Keep Customers!

It's amazing what the power of a simple apology can be. Am puzzled why more marketers don't use it when things go wrong!

The World of Adike and More 2

This of course is a manufactured image...Little Neo was fascinated with this making of Adike2 LOL...

8. Every few years/ now months new types of brands enter our worlds which weren't there till some time back. Hi-Technology brands, Knowledge/information brands, Concept brands, Cause brands, the sub-set Green brands, Social media brands, DIY brands, Experience brands, the proliferation of Luxury brands...

And almost all of them play by rules that are fundamentally different from FMCG brand rules of the past.

9. Real, authentic(often contrived-authenticity) conversations are replacing the copy of our advertised messages...It really doesn't matter who starts this conversation. It could be the CEO, the guy-on-the-net, the copy-writer, the planner, the passionate marketer...It's about a collaborative project.

10. It's very difficult for the brand to hide anymore. So little scope for bull-shiting, no hype, consistency in all markets, brands gotta 'walk the talk' or refrain from taking the high ground.

11. Brands got to be all human...have a character and not a laundry list of all 'virtuosity'. Have flaws. Admit to them...Have a sense of humour and play.

12. And lastly, I feel we must somehow devise methods to measure the quality of consumer-brand relationships, not just contact points, eye-balls, awareness scores, foot-falls...
We never measure our personal relationships through eye-balls, foot-falls, awareness scores...Why should brand thinking be any different?
That's all I can collate for the moment...Maybe some-time later will do Adike 3!!

Big Idea : Finishing Schools for Rural Youth

Often I find advertising ideas to be quite small. Mostly, that's a limitation of our trade...But many-a-time a reflection of the size of our thoughts. Shackled as many industry minds are by a 30sec structure and generally inflated egos!

Therefore, I loved this 'finishing schools for rural youth to curb attrition' idea of Azim Premji!(read it in ET).

Wipro has set up finishing schools in Chhindwara in Madhya Pradesh on an experimental basis. Under this, students from interior parts are selected and given training in English and IT skills for 6 months.

These rural students are barely 10th/ 12th pass. Not typically eligible for any IT job. The 6 month training readies them for a proper job in the IT industry.

Wipro and Premji believe that apart from creating newer employment opportunities, the students from these rural finishing schools would be loyal, determined to prove themselves and a definite value-addition to the company.

Wipro, under another education programme imparts training to primary teachers and students. Till date, it has engaged in training 2.5mn children from the interior parts of 16 Indian states.

Both the efforts are great,laudable examples of the corporates giving back to society instead of merely creating islands of excellence...

Wish the communication industry too had the bandwidth, the vision and the money to do something similar...

Wiki Woman, if that's the way it must be, okay...

Read a small article in HT some days back about the new boss at Wikipedia - Florence Devouard...Everything about her company and her job is pretty new-age!!

1. She runs her office not from NY, London, Hongkong or Shanghai but from a village in central France.

2. Her company - the Wikimedia Foundation in it's present avatar came into being as recently as June 20, 2003! Yet in a crazily short span of 4 years, last month it was voted among the world's 5 most influential brands!! No ads. Pure sampling and co-creation brand!

3. Florence's corporate climb(if we can call it corporate or climb) is equally fascinating...
Her first contact with Wikipedia was in 2001, when it was still a fledgling org.!

She started editing entries on genetically modified organisms and was gradually drawn into the community of volunteer editors...

Pretty soon, she started focussing on internal organisation rather than writing/ editing articles. 3 years later, she was elected to the Wikimedia Foundation board.

And last summer it was agreed that she would step into the shoes of the founder Jimmy Wales, as Chairperson!

4. She is a woman with 3 kids, who works from home in a village and heads among the world's most influential brands. All in 6 short years!

This is a really different world. A world my father can't even dream about. A world my MBA never cautioned me about!! But a world that gets bloody exciting every single day:-)

A world shaped by technology, possibility, serendipity and collaboration...

Organisations like Wikimedia are...

More concepts than companies
More collaboration than hierarchy
More content-driven than products/ services driven
More open-source than closed looped
More virtual than physical
More about volunteers than about employees
More hyborg(hybrid organisations) than anything we have previously known

But if that's the way, it must be okay...

Image sourced from Pixelache

Simplexity and the Change Agent

I was in Cambodia for a planning conference over the last week. That should partly explain my absence from the blogosphere. The hotel(I suspect the city) was somewhat Internet unfriendly:-)
And once again I enjoyed my break from our media dominated/ saturated world. That makes it twice in the last two months.

The conference was held in the beautiful temple city of Siam Reap. In a country that has been ravaged by civil strife, it was great to see it bounce back with spirit and simplicity. The combination of a tourist friendly nation and the heritage of Angkor Vat temples was breathtaking...

I could have come back with just a touristy notion which often is superficial and 'feel great'. But for the cello recital of Dr. Beat Richner - a Swiss doctor who in the past 15 years has opened three children's hospitals in Cambodia, all run from private donations! The doctor holds a cello concert in Siam Reap every Saturday night to raise money for the hospital.

During and after the cello recital Dr. Richner made an impassioned plea for money
and blood for the Cambodian children. Opened our eyes to the WHO and most of the West's obsession with glamour-diseases like SARS and AIDS and the blind eye turned to non-glam diseases like diarrhoea, tuberculosis and simply anaemia.

Complex and horrific health facts came to the surface which had been camouflaged by the carefully crafted sanitisation of the senses. 70% of Cambodia doesn't have access to safe drinking water. Appalling rates of HIV infection among the kids and very little access to health facilities and corruption!

Our conference was around the idea of 'change'. But of course advertising has it's limitations in a commerce and capitalism dominated world. So the issues were about changing out mind-sets, our way of thinking so that our clients could sell in the end more soap, more cola, more chips to the 'haves' of the world!!(Okay, I am being unfair to my occupation. It has its limitations at the end of the day!)

However, as I drove back to the airport, the image of an angry Dr. Beat stuck in my head and consciousness. He is the real change agent and a citizen brand. And am glad that my company has commited money and time for his cause.

One of the drifts that I had spoken about earlier this year was about Simplexity. The ability to hide the underlying complexity of a product, an experience, a nation behind the veneer/ facade / shell of simplicity...And I felt that Simplexity in my gut at Siam Reap!

Citizen Brand : Pashupati Nath Singh

It's funny how some of the best weekly articles surface in the Sunday TOI - a newspaper brand which I love to hate. Some of the write-ups on insights, cultural shifts, trends are good Sunday-reading-for-planner-types!

Came across this nice write-up on Pashupati Nath singh - a story about one man's efforts to mould under-privileged children into self-reliant beings.

65 year old Singh, runs the Patuck High School, tucked away behind rows of road-side shops and a well-kept garden at Vakola(Mumbai). Singh's students are largely under-nourished, under-privileged slum children often with severe learning disabilities. The courses here go beyond bookish knowledge and very often are centred on giving them confidence.

Pashupati Nath Singh, is a former director of Voltas. His 'Leaders of Tomorrow Project', aimed at bright children from Mumbai's slums is immensely popular among the slum/ street children near the airport, Mahim, Malvani, Dadar and Bandra.

Apart from reaching out to 3000 students in 26 schools in the city, Singh also annually adopts 32 poor meritorious students from the ninth grade for his India Scholar Award, a scholarship that ensures that these students are groomed by Singh and his academic partners till they graduate.

If interested, you can dig into the complete write-up in Sunday TOI(Dec 17). Meraj - you stay closest to Singh's school. Maybe, you can dig up the details if you wish...

I think if we can convince some of our clients to dole our money or to adopt the school, it would be a really great 360 project! Somebody like Bournvita(?)

I plan to compile such inspiring( relatively unknown) citizen brands. With the huge disparity between the classes, urban-rural divide, pg 1 and pg 4-6 lives,the only way India can truly shine is by supporting such grass-root citizen activism...And all of us can do our little bit. Any volunteers? Lets talk...

I strongly feel Planners need to be sensitive - not just to the tracking figures of cola/car/ cosmetic brands but also to the societal changes all around us! Often our lens is too focussed, our vision too narrow, our thinking too self-obsessed...Blue sky thinking -->Real 360 brand thinking should be about enveloping the consumers/ people at the fringe, bettering their lives. Cause branding has to be a big part in the new marketing/ 360game...

Got Journalism of Courage. Need Brave Marketing!

A newspaper that's not on the radar of most media planners, marketing and advertising junta because it doesn't give the reach and the absolute numbers is Indian Express.

But I love the paper because it is true to its DNA - the Journalism of Courage!
Of course I read it only on the week-ends as it doesn't have the ads and is a bit short on business and marketing stories!

Just wanted to share this IE story on the Mumbai train blast victims. Guys IE has been carrying out individual stories on all the blast victims on its front page since the day of the blast!(long after the other papers have forgotten the blast and gone to cover other 'Dhoom' stories or the Branjolina stories...

Every single day since the Mumbai blast, IE has been cataloguing the torn apart lives of the families of the blast victims. With sensitivity and painstaking resaerch. Francis Lewis in the picture above is the 127th victim out of a total of 187 victims who have been written about...

For Indian Express, they are real people. Who need the respect and individual attention which mass media is capable of giving but often shies away from!

For IE, the victims are not just statistics, TRPs, breaking news masala, opinion poll fodder, headline ingredients, chat show inputs!

Well, there were a lot many papers and channels who made a lot of noise over Jessica Lal, Nitish Katara and Priyadarshini Mattoo. But one can see they were largely TRP driven. I feel, for them there is no difference between a 'Rahul Mahajan' and a 'Mumbai Blast' story...But IE clearly is different!

I wish more people read the IE...And I wish the marketing guys made it more reader friendly!

I have a few suggestions though...(although I am not in the know of who IE considers it's core TG)

1. Guys, please cut down on politics a little. It won't get you readership...
2. Cover more news - in an attention starved society, readers often prefer width over depth!
3. Market yourself well...few uninspiring hoardings won't get you new readers...It's a tough world and you have aggressive competitors...You need 'Brave Imaginative Marketing' as well...
Think like a David!:-)
4. Use 'guerrilla marketing' tactics to reach out to readers who believe in 'Journalism of Courage'.
Will offer my POV on Monday on the need for 'Guerrilla Tactics'!
5. I think new media is a great way to market IE. Blogs, videos on youtube, WOM, sms/ MMS...
6. And yes, I am willing to 'crowdcast' for the IE marketing team:-) I am sure many of us will be...

Any other examples of highly principled but underdog brands?

Mumbai Musings I

What you see in the picture is one of the many Shiv Sena/ BJP sponsored reading corners/ shelters/ chaupals in Mumbai. Where the common man comes and reads the morning newspaper. Community reading over chai! This one happens to be quite close to Kamla Mills under the flyover near my agency.

Right now in shambles, but imagine a Crossword or Landmark taking it over and designing the right reading experience with heightened aesthetics and branding...

That would be an example of Branding 2.0! Whay say?

Creativity for a Cause

This one's for a small group of people who have been associated with the iVolunteer project at David. That's Priya, Steve, Meraj and to a small extent myself!

Today, we went to Salaam Baalak Trust's office near JJ Hospital. Heena and Kavita (two of the 4 street children,the team above have been mentoring) wanted us to see their night shelter.(Meraj, we missed you!)

We managed to reach the shelter, a lil late...But we had a whole gang - Sangram-who tagged since he wanted to brief Priya and Steve on Radio One!!, Jigar and young Malhar.

Some observations...

1. I saw children and their genuine smiles. Honest smiles. We in the advertising business live with 'Close-Up' smiles of happy, good-looking families. But a genuine smile is so much more rare these days!

2. Mamaji sang from his heart. And Ashreen/Afreen( sorry I may have mixed up her name) sang beautifully. In fact she had penned her own song.Again the experience was so different from the choreographed music based shows on TV.

3. There was so much pride and honesty when Kavita was telling us about the shelter and their day-to-day mundane activities.

4. Met Sonia - who had chucked up her Hutch job 2 years back and is now associated with SBT part time! Good to meet people chasing meaning not just money!

Coming back to creativity...And this part is relevant to all, beyond just the David iVolunteer team. Can we use our creativity to help children and other under-privileged sections of society.

Some action shoes...

1. Spoke to Misha. There is an opportunity to sponsor single parents. The project is near Bandra East. I am doing it. It would entail a cost of Rs 6K annually. Saurabh has also agreed to contribute. Josy was interested as well!

2. Sangram had a nice idea. The kids are really good in music. Can we ask our client Radio One to partner us in doing something for them. Raise awareness, reach out to sponsors. Spot some talent. Maybe make a small change in some one's life!

3. We also handle CNN IBN. Can we use Citizen Journalism to help the street children, prevent child abuse, do something special for the girl child!

4. Can we ask our client BBC to get some funding?

5. Can Tang do something for the SBT?

6. Intelenet also has an annual budget for social causes. Maybe Kumar can ask Sandeep to do their bit towards SBT...

If we all brainstorm, am sure we can come up with many more ideas.

It would be far more fulfilling to use our collective creativity for a cause...

Would be on leave for the next 10 days...So, most likely IndiAdRant would be shut from tomorrow. Happy Diwali!

Inhuman Billboards

Today was not the first time that I had noticed them - the men squatting/standing on the sides of streets sporting hand held cloth/ vinyl banners. In the past they have launched newspaper brands and waged mobile wars in the city. Today, it was for a car brand.

Often they are smartly dressed under-paid teenagers with brightly coloured caps. Today, they were the Dharavi poor. Perhaps, it was a quick job with impossible deadline for the agency. For a petty sum of money, these bill-boards would stand still under the hot sun and high humidity.

Their unshaven face, hungry looks, and near bed-raggled clothes were in stark contrast to the bright artwork of the banner. The logo was big and clear. The brand is among India's most admired ones. That's what the JD Power study had shown. The message/ copy was readable from inside the air-conditioned car!

Something was very amiss. It was this 'inhuman bill-board'.
Like life in Mumbai, it had two faces. The shining and the dark.
One riding on the other. Blissfully unconcerned. Long live the brand!