John Winsor

Ten People Who Influenced Me in 2011

Reflecting back on 2011 what sticks out are some of the profoundly smart people in the ad industry I had a chance to connect with last year. Through multiple conversations with each person on the list my thinking shifted and I was inspired. The ad industry is in the midst of profound change. Lot’s of folks have taken the “protect the flanks” approach with looking at the change in the industry as the glass is half empty. This group of leaders and thinkers represents a different, more positive outlook.

The reality is that change always happens. You can choose to look at it as a threat or an opportunity.

Thanks to conversations with this group I’m more stoked than ever.

1. Rishad Tobaccowala – Just saying his name makes you smarter. Spending time with Rishad makes you realize that the future will be what it is. That it’s just advertising and nobody's going to die. Rishad’s steady, thoughtful point of view gives you confidence in pusuing your own path.
2. Doug Moore – Doug’s willingness to innovate in the way advertising is done is inspiring. His balance to produce great work while looking for ways to change the model is something that more people will do in 2012.
3. David Jones – If you want to imagine what the holding company of the future might look like talk to David. His willingness to honestly address the biggest issues in the industry is inspiring. I just finished his new book, Who Cares Wins. It’s an important read for anyone in advertising.
4. Mark-Hans Richer - MH's ability to take an iconic brand and challenge the way to interact with customers and fans is an example of where advertising is going.
5. John Partilla – Every conversation with John is so full of positivity that you feel stoked. He’s one of the really good guys.
6. Alex Bogusky – Although it’s been 2 years since I’ve had the opportunity to work with Alex day to day I admire his fearlessness now more than ever.
7. Ty Montague – As a fellow traveller over the horizon of advertising, it’s been a joy to hang with Ty. His upcoming book is a powerhouse and shifts the paradigm of what storytelling can do for brands.
8. Bob Lord – A conversation with Bob makes you realize that all of this talk about new digital tools and the combination digital and traditional advertising has been going on for a lot longer than the current crop of gurus might want to admit. That experience brings wisdom. In every conversation a bit of it falls your way.
9. Tim Malbon – Hanging out with Tim gets you stoked to roll up your sleeves and start making stuff. The world is wide open for those who want to start making, experimenting and building.
10. Alasdair Lloyd-Jones – Alasdair has this wonderful way of poking holes in your argument in such a positive way. When you finish a conversation with him and your ideas have evolved to a much better place it’s hard to realize that he’s had that effect. His a bit of a strategic jui jitsu master.

There were also many other brilliant minds that I had the good fortune of intersecting. Thanks to all for giving so much.

Here’s to creating more momentum in 2012 to the changes that are already underway in the industry. 

 

Why Are Superbowl Ads Cheaper This Year?

It seems like everything I read about the reduction in price of Superbowl Ads blames the economy. But, could it be there is something bigger going on here? As we move from an economy based on scarcity (Superbowl ads are the very definition of a scarce commodity) to one based on abundance there other ways to have a more powerful and long lasting relationship at a reduced cost emerge.

Time will tell. Superbowl ad pricing has probably hit it's historical highs and the age of paying more for less is over. (In 1986 advertisers paid $1mm for 92.6 million viewers versus in 2008 $3 mm for 94.08 million views.)

In the age of abundance, the paradigm is flipped. You should expect to pay less for more.

Welcome to Victors & Spoils

The news is out. Another adventure begins. I love the start of a new adventure. So much anticipation. So much excitement. It always comes down to the team. Standing at the beginning of this adventure, Victors & Spoils, is especially exciting with the amazing team that’s come together. My partners Evan Fry, Claudia Batten, Scott Beck, Chris Marks, Dana Vallely and you (That’s right, you. More on this later.) comprise a crew that I’ve always dreamed about having on a big adventure.

Victors & Spoils is the world’s first creative (ad) agency built on crowdsourcing principles. Our goal is to provide businesses with creative solutions to their marketing, advertising and product-design problems, by engaging the world’s most talented creatives.  

Brands need an alternative to current ad agencies and crowdsourcing platforms. One that offers the strategic direction, engagement and relationship management that agencies deliver today but one that also delivers engagement, connectivity, creativity, and ROI that crowdsourcing platforms have the potential to deliver.

It’s time for a new agency model. One built to address some of the biggest forces changing the face of business today. Radical transparency, the consumer’s demand to be more involved and a growing cost consciousness regarding clients’ budgets have all made crowdsourcing especially timely for today’s marketers. However, the crowdsourcing paradigm is a bit unruly for most clients. The number of possible solutions created and the effort to keep things on strategy for a brand can be overwhelming.

At the core of Victors & Spoils is our creative department. It’s not a typical creative department made up of art directors and copywriters but one in which everyone from art directors and copywriters to strategists and producers come together to solve a brand’s strategic problems. Our creative department is a global digital community where anyone who wants to participate can.  People will not only be rewarded by the solutions they develop both individually and as a group but also for participating in the community, itself, and helping others develop their skills and talent. In an effort to guide this participation, members of the creative department will earn a reputation ranking that will help determine a share of the revenue from each project.

As on any journey, things will change and develop new paths. I’ve been blown away already by how fast things are moving and the amazing excitement that clients have expressed. This is going to be a wild ride.

We look forward to figuring this new paradigm out with you.

All a Twitter

I've been fascinated the past couple of weeks by all of the buzz around Twitter. John Stewart had a pretty funny segment about Twitter, while Roland Hedley on Doonesbury has been having some fun with it. Celebrities seem to be getting into the swing of things, as well, with Shaq and Aston Kutcher leading the way.

I've been playing around with Twitter (you can find me at @jtwinsor) and am finding it pretty useful as a research tool. Once you have enough followers, it's great to launch questions out and get killer thoughts and ideas back. Tools like Tweetdeck, Twitter Search, Twitterfeed and Twitterfall make it an even more powerful tool. While it's not for everyone (fellow CPBer Alex Bogusky has signed off) and might not be for me, in the long run, it's fascinating to watch a group form around a new media channel. The social boundaries and rules are fluid.

It will be interesting to see how all of this sorts out.

The Death of Brands - It's Not About the Cow

Brands don't seem to be working all that well these days. There's something bigger going on. To try and figure it out, I've been thinking about branding at it's simplest, putting a brand on a cow.

Over the last couple of decades we've gotten really good at working with cows. We've worked on the design of the brand itself. We've worked on creating new colored cows, like purple. We've redesigned the cow, adding features. We've used advertising to get people's attention. We've found new places to show the cow to people. But, all of this doesn't seem to work as well anymore.

Maybe, it's not about the cow. Maybe, it's about the farm, instead. It's about the water. It's about the crops that are grown the fields that feed the cow. It's about how the stalls are taken care of. It's about the attitude of the framer realizing he's part of something bigger that he can't control.  Heck, maybe it's even about the kind of massages and the kind of music cows experience.

A better farm certainly creates a better cow.

Maybe we've been focusing on the wrong thing. Instead of trying to design a better brand, one that gets noticed, maybe we we should think about focusing on the community around a product and a brand. How can we help people solve their problems? How can we help the community solve its problems? What positive things can we add to the community?

A lot of people seem to be thinking along the same lines. Recently, I've heard the words system and platform thrown around. Those don't seem right to me.

What are you thinking? How do brands go from being all about the cow to being more about the farm?

When is Enough, Enough? (Updated)

Pretty funny... Here's an update - "Maybe O'Leary was just taking the piss this morning... Michael makes a lot of this stuff up as he goes along and while this has been discussed internally there are no immediate plans to introduce it," said a RyanAir spokesperson in response to the CEO announcing this morning they were thinking about having coin-operated lavatory doors onboard the aircraft.

 Ryanair, the Irish discount airline, just announced that they are considering charging customers for using the toilet while in-flight. They've proposed installing a coin slot onto the outside of the restroom, similar to the ones you find in public facilities. General consensus is that Ryanair is trying to make a “fast buck” at the expense of their customers. Wouldn’t it be easier and less degrading to their customers, by upping the fare slightly?

Help with Baked-In

As many of you know, Alex and I are working on a new book, Baked-In: The Power of Aligning Marketing and Product Innovation. We need your help. We're looking for examples of products where the marketing has been baked right into the product itself. Where everything carries the same narrative. From the product, to the  packaging to the environment, the distribution, the web and even the advertising. All of it saying the same thing.

There are some great examples out there, Apple and the iPod, Nike +, Threadless, Patagonia, etc.

Shoot me a note or leave a comment with other examples.

Thanks for the help.

The Art of Being Culturally Relevant

Zappos responds quickly to take advantage of the news and get people talking. How can you be culturally relevant in a way that's true to your brand?

For the Love of Chocolate

I've got a weakness. You've got it, it's chocolate. I just love the stuff. Another thing I dig are brands that create cultural tension. Fat Pig Chocolate certainly does that. And it's even Oinkganic! I'm predicting a big success here.

via Josh Spear

A New Approach to House Brands

When you think of house brands at most supermarkets you tend to think of low cost, low quality and only available at the store which owns the brand. Safeway is taking a decidedly different approach with O Organics and Eating Well.

But two of Safeway’s newer private-label lines, O Organics and Eating Right, are moving in a different direction. Both were built much more like name brands than like store brands — in fact, both were supported by national television and print advertising. And more recently, Safeway has initiated the Better Living Brands Alliance, with the highly unusual goal of selling these two store-brand lines in places other than the chain that created them — school cafeterias, foreign markets and, ultimately, other U.S. grocers. In the judgment of the trade publication Refrigerated and Frozen Foods Retailer, which recently named Safeway as its retailer of the year, the experiment is “breaking the mold on what we all thought we knew about private label.”

The strategy, which is the culmination of several years of effort on Safeway’s part, seems to defeat the whole purpose of the store brand. O Organics, which now includes about 350 products, like milk and frozen edamame, was rolled out in 2006, in response to increased consumer interest in more-healthful and less-processed food. Of course many players, large and small, have seen this trend as an opportunity. It has fueled the growth of the Whole Foods Market chain, and many mainstream grocery stores have added a section filled with organic, natural or otherwise virtuous-sounding products from a variety of niche brands.

But rather than becoming the alternative to established brands, Safeway wanted O Organics to be the established brand. The company brought in executives from consumer-product giants like Procter & Gamble and Nestlé, gave the line a look that stands on its own (although the color choices may look familiar to anyone who knows the Whole Foods house brand) and hired the ad agency DDB in Chicago to create print and television advertising to help build the image of a full line of healthful, organic products in a wide range of categories. The company says the line is on track to hit sales of $400 million in 2008. In 2007, Safeway followed a similar strategy with Eating Right, which is positioned as balancing taste and nutrition, with a package design that highlights the most impressive aspect (“low fat,” for example) of the 250 products in the line, including frozen dinners and cereal.

Pretty cool stuff.

via Consumed