There are expressions that most people hesitate to use. They’re simply too worn out or too associated with greasy stuff. One is perhaps carpe diem … another is think outside the box. The good news is that you don’t have to use the latter anymore. It’s simply not true anymore.

It used to be all about thinking outside the box is. I guess it meant thinking different and beyond ordinary references. It was good per definition. Everybody was thinking outside the box – especially in marketing.

Then of course came the book. “Boxen” by Prof Dahlén. And suddenly it was all inside the box. The idea was that creativity required rules or borders in order to be useful.  That you have to know what defines a category or set of thoughts to be able to go beyond them. (Please correct me in the comments MD!) I’ve read the book and I can recommend it if you haven’t read it, it’s really practical and straightforward. And I once closed a big deal using a scanned page from it (page 35 first edition).

Never the less, inside the box is so over. Today it’s all about the box. Not outside, not inside. It’s the box. If you can come up with a relevant box you’ll have a winner in the contemporary marketing field.

So what is the box? Well, the box is a well-defined platform from which any interest group can act. It’s something you can fill and it’s something you can pick from.  It’s a stage, a tool.

In the primaries everybody had “Change” in their election program and pay off. The thing that made Obama’s “Change” stick out was the fact that it was a box – something to fill and gain from. It was not carved in stone, it’s was an offer.

Yesterday the creatives on the advertising agencies were the interpreters of brands and companies. Today everybody’s gonna have their own take on things. So in a user generated world, the copywriter and art directors loose power. Instead the role of planners becomes more important.

It’s not the print ad that will stir it up, it’s the insight behind the print ad. And if you can box that insight, the future belongs to you.

True or bs?

Once upon a time in marketing, we used to both fear and love the challenge that was often called ”advertising noise”.

Nothing has changed, really. Getting your message across is still the hardest thing in business. We still fear (and love) that turmoil of messages we’re competing with.

The big shift is about – yep you’ve guessed it – the channels, and the possibilities for messages to travel from one person to another. The ultra social web is the new advertising noise.

What makes you dizzy nowadays is the fact that, were advertising noise is shouting to a more or less passive audience, the social web is talking with active, actual human beings.

Don’t get me wrong. The role of advertising hasn’t played out it’s part. It has just changed. The big noise battle is not being fought in your daily newspaper or at the bus stop.

We used to think brands were noisy – It’s of course nothing compared to the noise from consumers. A clean straight good old fashioned print ad … can’t think of anything less noisy. It’s just something sitting there waiting to be looked at.

Maybe it’s really happening: advertising is becoming a new kind of art.

True or bs? 

Anton commented on the 365-post asking what kind of resources that are demanded in this reality. Well, resources are required and I guess that the role of both advertisers and communication buyers will continue to change – more sweat and tears and less big plans.

In fact I would say that tactics is the new strategy. The longer into the future you plan ahead the less relevant you’ll be. Being locked by the standard one year plan makes you a bird on a wire.

Today you must get dirty to get ahead, dirty meaning being on the floor. You want to be able to get stuff out of your hands fast, not being stuck in plan documents and complex processes. Generalizing, I would say that it’s better to work from a retainer having a fixed fee for monitoring media and the surrounding world for windows of communication opportunity.

And equally important – monitoring the client. If you can’t identify a new thread every time you talk to your client, you probably don’t deserve to have one. And as the wise man said – client relations is all about frequency. The “quality time”-talk is as stupid as when fathers say it describing their relation to their infants. They want you there. All the time.

The client also has to adapt by creating internal self esteem enough to act more freely. Rolling with the punches is not something that everyone is comfortable with. Usually it takes years of experience and knowledge of field and category to get confidence to act without a strict plan. Basically it’s the same thing as a business meeting. The more senior a consultant get, the less stuff she brings to the meeting. You start out with computer, agenda, note pad, suit, business card and breath-mints. After ten years you only bring a Mont blanc.

True or bs?

Talking about 365 … let’s see how Innocent will do it

With a clean and sharp corporate story, with just a hint of humanity, a company can become very successful. If that company operates in a world characterized by mass media, where Internet still hasn’t conquered the minds of the population, that is.

Stupid? I know.

Still you’ll get 44 million hits if you google corporate story, a lot of them referring to companies that help other companies create the corporate story.

The concept of the corporate story is a true survivor in marketing. Why? Becasue it’s an easy way for a company to handle something complex. But what this story give you is just fake safety.

In the real world, where a brand can devaluate in just a few hours, the corporate story is dead.

 People don’t give a damn about a story. People care about the truth.

Boring?

Not a bit. You can get down with your company’s corporate truth and transform it into brilliant marketing, that will outlive every corporate story out there.

Building your company around truth is all about letting your target group inside, showing that you don’t have anything to hide.  The extreme version of this is to let the customers do all of the product development, like the guys behind Threadless http://www.threadless.com/.

Another way is to start a corporate blog, an important tool behind the success story Innocent Drinks, http://innocentdrinks.typepad.com/. This example is very interesting right now, since Coca Cola just bought at minority share of the company and the customers are raging all over the Internet. Will Innocent manage to handle this, will they be truthful enough? We’ll have the answer within this week.

True or bs?

New or coming stuff. I guess that’s what you write about in a blog called Nextopia. I’ll sure give it a try, and accordingly I’ll call every post “X is the new Y”. True or bs, you be the judge.

365 is the new 360

Micael Dahlén is a smart and funny guy. And the whole concept of Nextopia is really something I buy. Yet when it comes to marketing, the next thing isn’t the only thing. Ironically the concept of yesterday’s news is literary something that a person in marketing needs to learn how to capitalize on more. Today more than ever.

When I say yesterday’s news, I mean yesterday’s news – the stuff that was in the paper the day before today. For a marketing campaign to be relevant it needs to adapt to changes and happenings in the surrounding world. Only by knowing what’s the most recent topic you can act on it in a way that fits your business objectives. For every article, blog-post or pod cast there’s an unwritten responds. For every happening there’s an unwritten comment or activity yet to be activated.

In marketing there used to be a lot of talk about 360. Today it’s all about 365. Being able to act and steer your communication in real time, every day, is what makes you successful.

And this is not the little pr-guy inside talking. This goes for everybody in marketing. At Eurobest in Stockholm I listened to some seminars, and the best quote came from a senior marketing person from South America. On the impossible question “what is integrated communication?” She said: “Integrated communication is integrated in society”. At first it sounded kind of corny, but I soon took it to my heart. Don’t focus on making your units look the same, focus on how they’re relevant in society today (today meaning the day it’s published)

Still you hear people in marketing talking about “launching a campaign” or “releasing a campaign” … maybe they don’t understand that today you drive campaigns. It’s a full time job directing your campaign in real time.

“From 360 to 365″ is of course a brilliant, contemporary and true marketing saying. I wish I could take full credit for it but it was coined by one of my students when I was teaching at Berghs School of communication in Stockholm.

Why don’t you put it in your ppt. Next to that Nextopia stuff. 

True or bs? Please comment!

I am really happy to have persuaded a mastermind to be the guestblogger next week. Everytime I talk to him, he blows my mind with his smart observations, twisted perspectives and sharp concepts: Tom Beckman, partner with Prime PR, winner of multiple awards and the mind behind a lot of ground-breaking stuff! I can’t wait to be dazzled by his takes on nextopia!

Next week will be fantastic!

I just got to comment on this. As you know, I’ve written before about the fact that the EconoME makes us believe that we’re worse off than we actually are in the recession. Previous examples of us being in a pretty good position, as companies fight even harder for our favors in bad times, included the Spanish bank that offered new savings account customers a new car or scooter.

And now, the Swedish finance department, in connection to the new budget proposition, discusses whether the central bank could lower the interest rate to -3 percent! That,s right, a minus percentage.

That’s the world of any for you – take out a loan for 1 million and receive 30 thousand as a “thank you” at the end of the year!

I love the new millennium…

In a comment on yesterday’s post (check it out!), Fredrik pointed toward the next level of limited editions in the world of any:

“Anyone can buy a car”, says 19-year-old Thomas Mrzyglocki, explaining why he spent 20,000 dollars to buy the extreme limited edition package of Josh Freese’s new album “Since 1972″. The 20,000 dollar limited edition included, among other things, a recording session with Freese of songs written exclusively for Thomas, a round of miniature golf – and a foot massage.

Native of rock bands Nine Inch Nails and Guns n’ Roses, two bands that I’ve featured previously as icons of the Expectations society, it’s not surprising that Josh Freese is highly aware of the fact that in the world of any, anyone can get hold of the album anytime. He set the price for a download of the album at 7 dollars (somewhere in between the “before” and “after” prices people paid voluntarily for Radiohead’s “In Raibows”), but realizing that once the album is released, it’s worth almost nothing, he decided to go for the one thing that may stay valuable in the world of any – limited editions. However, in the new millennium, limited editions have to be really, really, special. Even smelly.

Check out the promo:

I received a tip about a new illustrated classic. This time in Hungarian. I’ve been told that Nextopia has received a fair amount of attention there, but unfortunately, I don’t speak the language. Does anyone know what is said in the comic below?

I’ve written before that in the world of any, anyone can be Michael Jackson or Lindsay Lohan. Not metaphorically, literally. You can be as famous as Jacko or LiLo in 15 microseconds, you can look like them with not much more effort than it took to fix a broken tooth in the yestermillennium, you can sing as well as them (Enrique Iglesias’ equipment can be bought dirt cheap on eBay).

And anyone can be a mom.

I’ve been asked the question quite a number of times: we marry later in the new millennium, we settle down later (I would say we never settle down now) – will that mean that we will reproduce less, that it will be too late for many to get kids? My answer is, no.

The underlying premise for the assumption that it will be too late for all hard-playing people to get kids later in life is that nature sets barriers. What people tend to forget is that we are nature. We have changed so much in the new millennium, and so has nature with us. Most people realize that nature has changed in a global-warming-sense, but it has also changed in other, very positive aspects:

1. We live much longer and are much more healthy. That means a) that we will be able to get pregnant later in life than in the yestermillennium and b) that we will be able to raise and be with our kids much later in life than before. Having kids at 60, which was unimaginable on the other side of the millennium, is a fact many people in the world can attest to today (right now, it’s news material, soon it will probably be too common to be deemed newsworthy). And it does not mean that you will not live long enough to see your kids graduate from university, with the increased life expectancy in the new millennium, you may even live long enough to see them receive a gold watch.

2. The world of any has shrunk time and geopgraphical barriers to nothing. You don’t have to be physically pregnant to get kids. Just ask Brangelina. Your kids can be born anywhere in the world, anytime.

3. The world of any have removed nature’s gender barriers. In the world of any, moms can be of any gender. Just ask Thomas and Nancy Beattie. They have two biological kids. Thomas gave birth to both.

Just ask Thomas – YOU can be a mom: