John Winsor

What Happens Now?

As an entrepreneur that’s sold a few companies, I’ve had the experience of what it’s like pre and post transaction three times now. It’s something that entrepreneurs talk about and certainly worry even more about. It’s your baby. You’ve put your blood, sweet and tears into something. You have a team of fellow rebels that have taken a leap of faith, usually starting with lots of passion and a lot to learn and experience.

The conventional rumor is that gaining a new strategic partner can be a bit like Jekyll and Hyde – During the courting phase it’s all wonderful but when the deal’s done things change radically.

A month into our partnership with Havas, I’m more inspired than I ever thought I could be. Everyone I’ve met and worked with have been truly amazing. Not just positive but realistic, transparent, passionate, and accepting. From the beginning of V&S our vision has been to change the way advertising works for the benefit of clients and agency folks alike using collaborative technology. Working with the leadership of David Jones and the Havas team, I’m more confident that our vision will be radically accelerated on a global scale.

Finding a partner like Havas is what every entrepreneur dreams of.

Hello, David

While today it might seem commonplace to think that the 3 C’s, collaboration, co-creation and crowdsourcing play a major role in the future of advertising it was a bit of an outlier idea only a few years ago. Nonetheless, it’s something that’s been fueling my quest my whole career. I’ve always looked for opportunities to create more cultural momentum around the ideas. Changing an industry’s culture around an idea is more of a marathon than a sprint.

When I started my first company Sports and Fitness Publishing back in 1986, I was intrigued with how early adopter consumers, or in the case of our magazines, core athletes, could help influence the marketing and product development of the leading brands in a category. There’s a long history in outdoor sports, like climbing, where the lead users and the top brands worked together to push a sport forward. While it wasn’t called co-creation back then, that’s what it was.

After selling Sports and Fitness Publishing to Conde Nast, I was obsessed with applying co-creation to a wider audience, which became the basis of Radar Communications in 2000, as well as the central theme of my second book, Beyond the Brand: Why Engaging the Right Customers is Essential to Winning in Business.

“In this new era, beyond the brand, it is the creative citizens – the people and the brands – that will survive and thrive by co-creating from the bottom-up.” and  “Brands that can make the transition to provide honest, original, cultural materials will win.”

It was certainly early days for collaboration and co-creation, more of a theory than anything else. While Radar was a great success, the opportunity to work with Alex Bogusky came in 2007 (to put collaboration and co-creation at the center of Crispin, Porter + Bogusky’s brand strategy). The Radar team became the planning department, a bigger stage to influence culture with the ideas of collaboration and co-creation. As Alex and I wrote Baked-In, we started talking about a sub-category of co-creation: crowdsourcing. We put that theory into practice as we crowdsourced for a client. The results were astounding.

After leaving CP+B I wanted to take the exploration into co-creation and crowdsourcing even deeper with the founding of Victors & Spoils. My good friends from Tango, Scott Beck and Chris Marks, believed in and helped fund Claudia, Evan and I as we explored the new world of abundance in digital and social technologies, accelerating the cultural momentum of the 3 C’s.

In the last couple of years, I’ve had the chance to talk with some of the best thinkers about the future of advertising. Along the way I had the good fortune to meet David Jones.  While many in the advertising industry talk the talk about innovation, very few walk the walk. David takes it one step further and runs the run. I was impressed not only by his vision for Havas and One Young World, but also by his bold philosophy outlined in Who Cares Wins. Every conversation we had flowed from a similar world-view that collaboration, co-creation and crowdsourcing are the future of not only advertising, but business itself; and that a deep dedication to becoming a social business can make the world a better place. We both believe that the new competitive advantage is a collaborative advantage.

From those conversations grew a vision to work together to create even more global cultural momentum for collaboration, co-creation and crowdsourcing. I believe that Victors & Spoils and Havas together can change the way advertising is done for both clients and creatives for the better.

Our connection with Havas will give us the ability to accelerate our vision and global reach, enabling us to continue building our community and our digital collaborative tools.

As the Chief Innovation Officer of Havas, I’m honored to be a part of David’s team to help spread this vision even more broadly.

Who Needs An Advertising Agency, Anyway?

 

When we started to work with Harley-Davidson we had this crazy idea. If you could source ideas from advertising professionals around the world using digital management (via Victors & Spoils' digital collaboration system which we call Agency Machine) then why couldn't a brand source ideas from their own most rabid fans?

With all of the attention that is on social media, and the significant investment by brands in fan acquisition, why not put fans to work? By doing so you could figure out a couple of things. First, who your most important fans are. And second, by allowing fans access into the brand in a substantial way, we’d create radical engagement. Fans would no longer be customers but co-creators of the brand.

These questions lead us on a journey to create Fan Machine.

Fan Machine is software that allows a folks who have "liked" a brand on Facebook to submit ideas directly to the brand. By giving fans an easy way to contribute ideas and vote on submissions from other fans, Fan Machine facilitates real co-creation with the brands they love, while giving them a chance at prizes and a seat at the creative table. And brands can wrangle the conversation by posting specific "briefs" for their fans to work on. These briefs might relate to an upcoming advertising campaign, new product or seasonal promotion.

We launched Fan Machine last November with Harley-Davidson as our first client. Harley-Davidson has some great passionate fans that really went to town. 584 people threw down ideas for the first brief and 16,000 people voted, to create campaign ideas for the model year 12 1/2. Harold Chase, from Tukwila, Washington, submitted the idea that became the advertising campaign, “E Pluribus Unum.” The V&S team shaped Harold’s idea then used Twitter to cast fans and followers, all bike owners, for the spot, above.

In a world where ideas can come from anywhere - and amateurs are getting better everyday at creating everything from videos to posters -  what is the role of an agency? While it might seem like there’s not much of a future for them, our experience is that agencies play an even more vital role. With an abundance of ideas, it’s easy for a brand to get crushed by the sheer volume of possibility. Agencies are evolving to focus on three areas, 1. The development of a great brief that gives anyone the ability to deliver good work; 2. The creative and strategic direction of ideas; and 3. Brand stewardship.

Under the leadership of Mark-Hans Richer, Scott Beck, Dino Bernacchi, Mark Peine and the rest of the Harley-Davidson team, we at V&S have the ability to focus our creative energies at the front edge of advertising. Their visionary approach, that great ideas can come from everywhere and can be curated into great work, will be a model for many other brands to follow.

I had an epiphany a couple of days ago when leaving the Denver airport. In the last 6 months the airport parking management has replaced pay booth attendants with self-serve technology that allows drivers to speed up their exit from the parking garage by not having to deal with anyone. The result has been not only faster service for the customers but also has given the airport management the ability to cut their expenses through a reduction in staffing.

Then, reading Thomas Friedman’s latest op-ed piece in the NY Times really drove the point home. The latest economic turmoil has highlighted the fact that other businesses are doing the same thing. We are in the midst of an economic paradigm shift where technology is replacing jobs making companies more efficient but producing long-term unemployment issues. It’s happened before. First, with the agricultural revolution then with the industrial revolution and now with the collaboration revolution.

What’s this mean to the advertising business? We’ve certainly seen the effects of the collaboration revolution in other creative businesses including music and photography. Digital technology has allowed more people to participate in the creation of creative output driving down prices in a radical way.

I’ve been on the road for the last month talking to a dozen CMOs of Fortune 500 companies. There’s a lot of frustration out there. The biggest is the cost of creating advertising both in terms of time and money.

I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not the people. There are fantastic people both on the client side and the agency side. It’s in fact a broken system.

Businesses act based on the way they are compensated. And, the majority of agencies are compensated by selling their people’s time. Compensation is based on the number of FTE’s or full-time employees working on a piece of business. In the age of collaboration the FTE model is broken. The fact is that many agencies make more money when they put more people, or say they do, onto a piece of business. Likewise, it’s more profitable to take more time to do something. If a project should take a month there's no disincentive for most agencies to drag it out longer.

One of our clients called a couple of weeks ago saying, “You’ll be excited because we can move the deadline back one month on a project.” Our reaction was, “No thanks.” You see, we believe in fixed cost pricing. Just like the Denver parking lot we’ve used technology to become a lot more efficient. Each project, from concepting to production is a fixed price. We feel that this aligns our interests with our clients. In order to make money we need to be more efficient through the use of technology. We make money when we deliver great work faster, using fewer resources. That’s what clients want.

If advertising industry is to thrive in the age of collaboration we must address the root of the problem, the way we are compensated for our work. If we don’t many companies won’t survive the current economic transformation that’s underway.

Let’s come together, all of the great people from great clients and great agencies and fix this. Sure our businesses will be transformed and probably be a lot smaller. But, if we don’t collectively grab the bull by the horns and proactively transform our businesses then they will be transformed without our input.

 

One of the things I love in the sports of surfing and climbing is the idea of progression. An athlete does something new, approaches an unclimbed rock in a new way or surfs a wave that seemed impossible, and all of a sudden everyone can see the possibility. The culture as a whole can imagine climbing the new climb or surfing the wave. All of a sudden dozens of people can do what was unthinkable only a few months before. New stars are made in an instant and old icons are put out to pasture.

This weekend I was fascinated by Adam Sternbergh’s article, Around the World in One Day, in The New York Times Magazine about Ridley and Tony Scott’s crowdsourced documentary, Life in a Day:

The film aims to tell the story of a planet, but it’s the vulnerability of these individual moments, contributed as part of a larger project, that lingers. If the knock against the Internet in general, and YouTube in particular, is that it stokes our collective narcissism, this film, in its best moments, proves the opposite: not a global craving for exposure but a surprising universal willingness to allow ourselves to be exposed.

The worlds of collaboration, co-creation and crowdsourcing are progressing fast. They’ve gone from a wild west of too many confusing voices and lot’s of amateur, low-production, solutions to highly curated creations, like Life in a Day, that can rival the best of traditional productions.

The progression is happening at various speeds in different corners of the creative world. Music and photography have been leading the charge in this change for a while now while film and advertising are just starting their radical transformation.

In advertising, it feels like the progression has hit a tipping point. Hold on. The speed of change will only accelerate.

After starting a few companies over the past 25 years I’ve found that start-ups are defined more by what they are for than what they’re against. But discovering what you’re for usually takes a bit of time. That’s what I love about start-ups. It’s a clean slate. You start with a vision, which includes being different than something else, then you race like hell to learn as much as you can. Then you pivot. Only then can you discover what you’re for.

Victors & Spoils is 20 months old now. And we like where we are. We’ve had the very good fortune of being at the right place at the right time as the world becomes more open. Recently, we added new clients to our roster, including Nike Foundation, Mercedes-Benz and Unilever. And, we're putting the finishing touches on the production of new work for Harley-Davidson and Smartwool. We are honored that they want to be part of the future with us. Our creative department has grown to over 6000 and our technology is being tested every day. We’ve learned a lot and have continued to pivot.

We’ve also learned a bit more about what we are for. And above all we are for technology that powers creativity. Without our technology we couldn't do what we are doing. The technology we are building has allowed us to create more fluid and open communications, reputation ranking and a more abundant way of solving our client's marketing objectives. Our technology is enabling us to achieve everything else we are for: from open systems, to transparency, to more flexible career options for our crowd and great work our clients.

Above all, great work using Collaboration, Co-Creation and Crowdsourcing wouldn't exist without the right technology.

 

Being in Cannes last week I had the honor of hanging out with Jon Wilkins, co-founder of Naked Communications. He hit the nail on the head when he wrote this in Fast Company about his session at Cannes:

The one thing we learned researching our session during Cannes on community crowdsourcing and co-creation is that the best 'creative ideas' in the world have their own energy, their own means of distribution, and their own collaborators that propel them into a strata that conventional paid communications can never reach.

 From Cannes, I flew right to Phoenix to give a talk at the PDMA Co-Creation Conference and was super inspired to see Co-creation emerge as it’s own field with so much momentum.

Both at Cannes and at the Co-Creation conference I was asked how the 3C’s of Collaboration, Co-Creation and Crowdsourcing fit together. It's We think of it as a ladder of collaboration. The first step on the ladder is Social Media Engagement but it goes much higher eventually creating a whole company around a collaborative system. Think of Threadless or Local Motors.

Collaboration is not only the future of advertising but of business and perhaps society as a whole. 

Where are you on the ladder?

 

 

Nobody likes conflict. I don’t. I’ve been especially sensitive to it my whole life. I’ve never been very good at taking criticism. I’ve been known to not fully listen to my friends and colleagues. I was horrible at listening to my parents. And, I have tortured my amazing wife with my insecurities around any kind of criticism or even positive suggestion (sorry, Bridget). Honestly, I was scared. Scared to be vulnerable. Scared to be wrong. Scared to fail. It’s certainly a journey.

Well, a lot’s changed in the past year since we’ve started Victors & Spoils. I’ve had the opportunity to work with some amazing partners at V&S. I’ve been honored to team up with so many inspiring clients who want to change the way things work. I’ve learned and built ideas with some of the smartest collaborators in the industry who are not only unafraid of change but want to get in and lead it. I’ve had the good fortune of jumping into this crazy torrent of change that is besieging our industry and am learning so much so fast. I’m having a blast.

I’ve even learned to love the haters.

While I was traveling yesterday, I received this email from my blog that made me reflect on just how much things have changed for me and on my journey to overcome my own insecurities.

Dear John,

Congratulations on selling a desperate ... company some snake oil.  Always great to book new biz.

If your approach works (which it won't) you send me some raw squirrel meat and I'll eat every bite.

Regards and laughing like a maniac,

Steve Fisher
Owner
Goldfish Public Relations
818-688-1502
<http://www.goldfishpr.com/>

Thanks, Steve. I do understand these are scary times. A lot of things we’ve taken for granted have been pulled out from underneath us. It’s created a lot of insecurity and anger for a lot of people.

Emails like this remind me to let go. Let go of my insecurities. Let go of my ego. Let go of myself. And, jump into the cultural revolution we are in the midst of.

Thank you, everyone. Thank you for your support, your criticism and your input.

Love love, love hate.

Guest Post by Mat Ranauro

(Note: I asked Mat, our Director of Technology here at V&S, post this. He's started a new blog, Boom Days. So, be sure to go check it out. He'll be talking a lot about what's happening on the tech/community front. Lot's of cool stuff has been happening and we've been learning a ton every day. Mat's got a lot to share.)

I used to be in a band, this is not to imply I was or am remotely cool, I can assure you that's not the case. But being in a band allowed me to travel around the country with my friends, play new cities every night, meet new people and generally not have much to worry about. We encountered a lot of folks and observed just as many, we knew our “in a band” lives did not reflect the lives of most; People had responsibilities – a job – to sustain themselves and their families, 3 of 4 in the band did not.

A conversation stood out while we were in San Diego. We were staying close to the beach at a friend of the promoters house and a small party spun-up. Of course, we drank a few (million) beers and shot the shit. Someone brought up the topic “are you following your passion?”

Surprisingly, no one at the table said they were passionate about playing music, although every one of the people sitting at the table were in a band. How could that be? 

The group then went around the table, the chat getting more heated, while frustration began to brew when the consensus was obvious: people realized they had no passion for what they were doing everyday. The question landed at me. It was an easy thing for me to answer, I loved my job. It was truly satisfying and I have always been aware of my fortune to have found something I had passion for which also paid my bills.

The entire group turned on me. 

That conversation happened over 5 years ago but the backlash I received has stuck. Those eleven people were confused and pissed by my reply. Like they couldn’t believe what I was saying could possibly be true. But why not? When it happened I didn’t give the response much thought, I brushed it off and diffused the mob forming around me.

Their anger stemmed from hating their jobs and not finding any satisfaction whatsoever in the work they were doing. They couldn’t stand it. And something became apparent to me – this collective group is extremely intelligent and passionate for everything they’re NOT doing. 

Passionate people are everywhere, however the likelihood of those people using those passions to fuel what pays their bills is extremely unlikely. Being driven by something you believe in creates a completely different output: a genuine perspective.

The platform and community which is growing at Victors & Spoils, for me, is a direct response to those eleven intelligent and passionate people. It then multiplies by the thousands of people who now have a place to tap into their passions and contribute their thinking. 

We’re learning as we go. We’re in stealth mode, showing what path we’re on but carrying out a mission that will begin to reveal itself gradually. I wanted to shed a bit of light on the “why” behind the “what” we’ve got brewing: connecting more people to what they care about while giving them a place to contribute, learn and grow.

A distinction in the types of groups within our community is a critical point to be made. We believe the voice of an evangelic audience must inform the goals and vision of a brand while the craftsmanship and expertise of creative contributors defines the produced output. 

Our engine is taking shape: an open forum for anyone to contribute, a place to learn and grow as a creative problem solver and a proven group of top experts to craft the collective intelligence of the entire community into something that is less advertising and more informed, genuine communication between a brand and it’s audience.

Fees, Lies and Advertising

I had an epiphany a couple of days ago when leaving the Denver airport. In the last 6 months the airport parking management has replaced pay booth attendants with self-serve technology that allows drivers to speed up their exit from the parking garage by not having to deal with anyone. The result has been not only faster service for the customers but also has given the airport management the ability to cut their expenses through a reduction in staffing.

Then, reading Thomas Friedman’s latest op-ed piece in the NY Times really drove the point home. The latest economic turmoil has highlighted the fact that other businesses are doing the same thing. We are in the midst of an economic paradigm shift where technology is replacing jobs making companies more efficient but producing long-term unemployment issues. It’s happened before. First, with the agricultural revolution then with the industrial revolution and now with the collaboration revolution.

What’s this mean to the advertising business? We’ve certainly seen the effects of the collaboration revolution in other creative businesses including music and photography. Digital technology has allowed more people to participate in the creation of creative output driving down prices in a radical way.

I’ve been on the road for the last month talking to a dozen CMOs of Fortune 500 companies. There’s a lot of frustration out there. The biggest is the cost of creating advertising both in terms of time and money.

I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not the people. There are fantastic people both on the client side and the agency side. It’s in fact a broken system.

Businesses act based on the way they are compensated. And, the majority of agencies are compensated by selling their people’s time. Compensation is based on the number of FTE’s or full-time employees working on a piece of business. In the age of collaboration the FTE model is broken. The fact is that many agencies make more money when they put more people, or say they do, onto a piece of business. Likewise, it’s more profitable to take more time to do something. If a project should take a month there's no disincentive for most agencies to drag it out longer.

One of our clients called a couple of weeks ago saying, “You’ll be excited because we can move the deadline back one month on a project.” Our reaction was, “No thanks.” You see, we believe in fixed cost pricing. Just like the Denver parking lot we’ve used technology to become a lot more efficient. Each project, from concepting to production is a fixed price. We feel that this aligns our interests with our clients. In order to make money we need to be more efficient through the use of technology. We make money when we deliver great work faster, using fewer resources. That’s what clients want.

If advertising industry is to thrive in the age of collaboration we must address the root of the problem, the way we are compensated for our work. If we don’t many companies won’t survive the current economic transformation that’s underway.

Let’s come together, all of the great people from great clients and great agencies and fix this. Sure our businesses will be transformed and probably be a lot smaller. But, if we don’t collectively grab the bull by the horns and proactively transform our businesses then they will be transformed without our input.

 

Progression

One of the things I love in the sports of surfing and climbing is the idea of progression. An athlete does something new, approaches an unclimbed rock in a new way or surfs a wave that seemed impossible, and all of a sudden everyone can see the possibility. The culture as a whole can imagine climbing the new climb or surfing the wave. All of a sudden dozens of people can do what was unthinkable only a few months before. New stars are made in an instant and old icons are put out to pasture.

This weekend I was fascinated by Adam Sternbergh’s article, Around the World in One Day, in The New York Times Magazine about Ridley and Tony Scott’s crowdsourced documentary, Life in a Day:

The film aims to tell the story of a planet, but it’s the vulnerability of these individual moments, contributed as part of a larger project, that lingers. If the knock against the Internet in general, and YouTube in particular, is that it stokes our collective narcissism, this film, in its best moments, proves the opposite: not a global craving for exposure but a surprising universal willingness to allow ourselves to be exposed.

The worlds of collaboration, co-creation and crowdsourcing are progressing fast. They’ve gone from a wild west of too many confusing voices and lot’s of amateur, low-production, solutions to highly curated creations, like Life in a Day, that can rival the best of traditional productions.

The progression is happening at various speeds in different corners of the creative world. Music and photography have been leading the charge in this change for a while now while film and advertising are just starting their radical transformation.

In advertising, it feels like the progression has hit a tipping point. Hold on. The speed of change will only accelerate.

It’s About What You’re For Not What You’re Against

After starting a few companies over the past 25 years I’ve found that start-ups are defined more by what they are for than what they’re against. But discovering what you’re for usually takes a bit of time. That’s what I love about start-ups. It’s a clean slate. You start with a vision, which includes being different than something else, then you race like hell to learn as much as you can. Then you pivot. Only then can you discover what you’re for.

Victors & Spoils is 20 months old now. And we like where we are. We’ve had the very good fortune of being at the right place at the right time as the world becomes more open. Recently, we added new clients to our roster, including Nike Foundation, Mercedes-Benz and Unilever. And, we're putting the finishing touches on the production of new work for Harley-Davidson and Smartwool. We are honored that they want to be part of the future with us. Our creative department has grown to over 6000 and our technology is being tested every day. We’ve learned a lot and have continued to pivot.

We’ve also learned a bit more about what we are for. And above all we are for technology that powers creativity. Without our technology we couldn't do what we are doing. The technology we are building has allowed us to create more fluid and open communications, reputation ranking and a more abundant way of solving our client's marketing objectives. Our technology is enabling us to achieve everything else we are for: from open systems, to transparency, to more flexible career options for our crowd and great work our clients.

Above all, great work using Collaboration, Co-Creation and Crowdsourcing wouldn't exist without the right technology.

 

How Do the 3C’s, Collaboration, Co-Creation and Crowdsourcing Fit Together?

Being in Cannes last week I had the honor of hanging out with Jon Wilkins, co-founder of Naked Communications. He hit the nail on the head when he wrote this in Fast Company about his session at Cannes:

The one thing we learned researching our session during Cannes on community crowdsourcing and co-creation is that the best 'creative ideas' in the world have their own energy, their own means of distribution, and their own collaborators that propel them into a strata that conventional paid communications can never reach.

 From Cannes, I flew right to Phoenix to give a talk at the PDMA Co-Creation Conference and was super inspired to see Co-creation emerge as it’s own field with so much momentum.

Both at Cannes and at the Co-Creation conference I was asked how the 3C’s of Collaboration, Co-Creation and Crowdsourcing fit together. It's We think of it as a ladder of collaboration. The first step on the ladder is Social Media Engagement but it goes much higher eventually creating a whole company around a collaborative system. Think of Threadless or Local Motors.

Collaboration is not only the future of advertising but of business and perhaps society as a whole. 

Where are you on the ladder?

 

 

Love Love, Love Hate

Nobody likes conflict. I don’t. I’ve been especially sensitive to it my whole life. I’ve never been very good at taking criticism. I’ve been known to not fully listen to my friends and colleagues. I was horrible at listening to my parents. And, I have tortured my amazing wife with my insecurities around any kind of criticism or even positive suggestion (sorry, Bridget). Honestly, I was scared. Scared to be vulnerable. Scared to be wrong. Scared to fail. It’s certainly a journey.

Well, a lot’s changed in the past year since we’ve started Victors & Spoils. I’ve had the opportunity to work with some amazing partners at V&S. I’ve been honored to team up with so many inspiring clients who want to change the way things work. I’ve learned and built ideas with some of the smartest collaborators in the industry who are not only unafraid of change but want to get in and lead it. I’ve had the good fortune of jumping into this crazy torrent of change that is besieging our industry and am learning so much so fast. I’m having a blast.

I’ve even learned to love the haters.

While I was traveling yesterday, I received this email from my blog that made me reflect on just how much things have changed for me and on my journey to overcome my own insecurities.

Dear John,

Congratulations on selling a desperate ... company some snake oil.  Always great to book new biz.

If your approach works (which it won't) you send me some raw squirrel meat and I'll eat every bite.

Regards and laughing like a maniac,

Steve Fisher
Owner
Goldfish Public Relations
818-688-1502
<http://www.goldfishpr.com/>

Thanks, Steve. I do understand these are scary times. A lot of things we’ve taken for granted have been pulled out from underneath us. It’s created a lot of insecurity and anger for a lot of people.

Emails like this remind me to let go. Let go of my insecurities. Let go of my ego. Let go of myself. And, jump into the cultural revolution we are in the midst of.

Thank you, everyone. Thank you for your support, your criticism and your input.

Love love, love hate.

Connecting Communities Beyond Advertising

Guest Post by Mat Ranauro

(Note: I asked Mat, our Director of Technology here at V&S, post this. He's started a new blog, Boom Days. So, be sure to go check it out. He'll be talking a lot about what's happening on the tech/community front. Lot's of cool stuff has been happening and we've been learning a ton every day. Mat's got a lot to share.)

I used to be in a band, this is not to imply I was or am remotely cool, I can assure you that's not the case. But being in a band allowed me to travel around the country with my friends, play new cities every night, meet new people and generally not have much to worry about. We encountered a lot of folks and observed just as many, we knew our “in a band” lives did not reflect the lives of most; People had responsibilities – a job – to sustain themselves and their families, 3 of 4 in the band did not.

A conversation stood out while we were in San Diego. We were staying close to the beach at a friend of the promoters house and a small party spun-up. Of course, we drank a few (million) beers and shot the shit. Someone brought up the topic “are you following your passion?”

Surprisingly, no one at the table said they were passionate about playing music, although every one of the people sitting at the table were in a band. How could that be? 

The group then went around the table, the chat getting more heated, while frustration began to brew when the consensus was obvious: people realized they had no passion for what they were doing everyday. The question landed at me. It was an easy thing for me to answer, I loved my job. It was truly satisfying and I have always been aware of my fortune to have found something I had passion for which also paid my bills.

The entire group turned on me. 

That conversation happened over 5 years ago but the backlash I received has stuck. Those eleven people were confused and pissed by my reply. Like they couldn’t believe what I was saying could possibly be true. But why not? When it happened I didn’t give the response much thought, I brushed it off and diffused the mob forming around me.

Their anger stemmed from hating their jobs and not finding any satisfaction whatsoever in the work they were doing. They couldn’t stand it. And something became apparent to me – this collective group is extremely intelligent and passionate for everything they’re NOT doing. 

Passionate people are everywhere, however the likelihood of those people using those passions to fuel what pays their bills is extremely unlikely. Being driven by something you believe in creates a completely different output: a genuine perspective.

The platform and community which is growing at Victors & Spoils, for me, is a direct response to those eleven intelligent and passionate people. It then multiplies by the thousands of people who now have a place to tap into their passions and contribute their thinking. 

We’re learning as we go. We’re in stealth mode, showing what path we’re on but carrying out a mission that will begin to reveal itself gradually. I wanted to shed a bit of light on the “why” behind the “what” we’ve got brewing: connecting more people to what they care about while giving them a place to contribute, learn and grow.

A distinction in the types of groups within our community is a critical point to be made. We believe the voice of an evangelic audience must inform the goals and vision of a brand while the craftsmanship and expertise of creative contributors defines the produced output. 

Our engine is taking shape: an open forum for anyone to contribute, a place to learn and grow as a creative problem solver and a proven group of top experts to craft the collective intelligence of the entire community into something that is less advertising and more informed, genuine communication between a brand and it’s audience.

That'll Never Happen: In a World Where Knowledge Has Been Democratized, How Do Planners Thrive?

Here's my talk from the Jay Chait Award Ceremony. Enjoy.