Mark Channon gave a well-attended Book Reading at SXSW 2012 entitled "How to Remember Anything: A Teach Yourself Guide," part of a promotional book tour. Channon definitely has the credentials, having won the rank of Grand Master of Memory in the 1995 World Memory Championships, and currently ranked #225 in the world.

To me it seemed clear that the crowd had gathered in hopes that they could somehow piece together the events of the previous evening. The man to my left was nervously looking down at the floor, perhaps to avoid eye-contact with someone who's name and title he had already forgotten. The woman to my right was typing-erasing-retyping some brilliant idea she saw so clearly the night before, but at the moment was unable to recall. 

Unfortunately for the audience, Channon said that all memory techniques essentially leverage two main principles: (1) Start in a relaxed/focused state, (2) Break information into key images to then be organized in your mind. Both techniques, however, are very difficult to do during the raucous SXSW nights. There is hardly anything relaxing about standing in lines, frequently switching conversations, shouting over loud music or walking great distances from event to event. And in terms of taking mental images--the best one can hope for is a camera-phone that still has some battery life at the end of the night.

A better approach, and a more helpful book, would have been about piecing together one's digital breadcrumbs throughout the evening: tweets, instagrams, check-ins, group chats; using digital evidence to rebuild memories of a well-spent SXSW night. If Channon was selling a book that could help someone remember why he was racing Pedi-Cabs, drop-kicking a mechanical bull, antagonizing a red-headed professional, and eventually waking up, fully-clothed, on a white leather sofa in an unknown apartment complex, he might have a best-seller on his hands. I'm sure Nathan Smith would buy that book.

Interestingly, Channon pointed out that "a radically improved memory can add real value in life and in business and can help build your career." But I would argue otherwise. Ironically, the best memories at SXSW are the ones that are soon forgotten.

Planing for attending sxsw interactive for the first time, one of the panels I was looking most forward to was also one of the most, shall we say, "interestingly'" titled: Adding Value as a Non-Technical No Talent Assclown. The last bit of that being an update on the old account executive moniker of "suit:" someone who adds little value to either the client or the agency - an empty vessel whose sole contribution might be looking the part and carrying the portfolio--or these days, sending the pdf. Sadly, what we heard in the panel was also old news, too. Advice with a digital sheen, perhaps, but certainly recognizable to anyone who's been around for even a few years. Listen more, talk less. Protect your creatives' and technologists' time by carefully managing access and interruptions. Don't fake it if you don't know something. Drop the ego. Pick battles carefully. Push back only when you are REALLY passionate about an issue. Focus the assignment down to the essentials.

You can read for yourself #sxnontech.

Sound, perhaps, but a shame as there was a real opportunity here to provide the type of advice and insights that would help those non-engineers of us (and there were many, many of us in Austin last week, too) start learning what we need to do to help lead our clients and businesses ahead in this constantly and rapidly evolving environment. Specifically, which panels should we attend? Which vendors should we spend time with? What and who was interesting in the trade show area? What should we have seen last year? What should we look out for next year? Should we be in Austin at all or should we be approaching this issue from a different direction? What are a few success stories where the technical and non-technical teams have partnered successfully? What were a few disasters? What kind of dialogue should we start when we get back to our agencies? Is learning how to write code and create animated .gifts (actual suggestions) really the best way to add value? It might be, but we need more of the why - across the board - and it's got to be more convincing than learning a few words of French before you go to Paris, so it looks like at least you're showing some effort.

Many panels spent time talking about working in dramatically new ways. Less linear, more prototyping and improving. Working with a less defined idea of what "done" looks like. Expecting, even encouraging, changes. More speed to market. Constantly listening, learning and building.

Sounds like a great model for how we can and should work as a team, too. For people who build such amazing things (and there are so many amazing things in this space, in Austin, and not just a few at Team One), I wish there were some better lessons on how us non-technical types can help us all get there.  

 

 

We do have some help on the way from our own camp. Robert Senior of Saatchi is leading an initiative toReboot the Suit, how the account/idea manager role must evolve.  A comprehensive presentation exists and I thought I heard a book was in the works. I wonder if it's too late to add a chapter on "Reboot the Assclown."

 

Plenty of Guacamole, but No Globalmole

As a first time sxsw attendee, I am certainly subject to a case of "maybe I was in the wrong place...," but the global nature of the attendees did not seem to be matched by the panel offerings. And I wasn't the only one of this opinion - one of the key members of the Interactive team at Saatchi Fallon Tokyo, said he experienced something similar and heard even more from a European contingent he was with the day before.

Since we cannot quite begin or end a Ritz-Carlton or JW Marriott conversation without at least one mentioned of China and India, I deliberately went looking for global topics when I was planning my itinerary and found just a handful that might seem relevant. Of those, one on a "Front Line Report on Japanese Interactive" #sxjpnart barely filled 1/5 of the ballroom even though the content was amazing. Another, on "China: Creators and Consumers of the Future" was sardined into a room for about 40 participants (out of the 12,000 - 15,000 reportedly in attendance). And conducted by a couple of non-native Chinese. An insightful presentation, but still...Last and perhaps most telling was that the Global track was combined with the Government track and banished to the AT&T Conference center - sxsw's version of Siberia. Well, at least that's a global reference.

The faces and voices of the attendees were inspiring, however. The feel was closer to New York, San Francisco or Vancouver. I hope they saw some things that inspired them and some things to carry back, but given how different the rules can be outside of the U.S., I think they learned alot more about us than we did about them. And when one thinks of how clients can increasingly (and increasingly easily) source ideas from all parts of the world, I think sxsw and Team One should expect something more...and different.

An idea, then, for a panel submission. As stewards of a number of powerful global brands, and perhaps with our partners at Saatchi, let's show the global attendees at sxsw 2013 that we know as many interesting things about them as they will come to know about us. And, how we turn that Into the launch of incredible ideas like no one else in the world.

 

If you work in or around the digital space you’ve most likely come across the idea of lean: lean development, lean startup, lean UX and other lean ways of working. It’s the latest adjective to attach to any process and instantly make is better, right? I had a chance to catch-up with one of the heads of the lean movement to find out how it may affect the advertising world. 

Eric Ries, entrepreneur and author of the Lean Startup, played a big role at this year’s interactive SXSW conference, and I was lucky enough to get a chance to catch up with him. Lean thinking has advanced and improved running technology startups and I was eager to find its potential within the advertising space.

Eric is probably the most well known evangelist of ‘lean’ based on the popularity of his book ‘the Lean Startup’. Prior to reading Eric’s book, I was a big supporter of another methodology, the ‘Apple Way’. Almost the polar opposite of what lean stands for. To break it down in its simplest form, the ‘Apple way’ is to bake your idea behind closed doors and surprise and delight your audience with a huge ‘ta-da’ moment, a perfect fit for the ad-agency.  Where lean involves your audience as soon as viably possible, taking their feedback and shifting your idea to better-fit people’s needs, obvious much harder when working with a client.

How did Eric win me over with his more transparent methodology? Simple, by raising the likelihood of an idea’s success. Well, maybe not so simple, but who doesn’t want a better chance of making something work, and by involving your audience sooner, and being agile in your development approach, Eric explains that you have a better chance of giving people what they want. I particularly liked the agile development nod, seeing first-hand the success that process can have in the advertising world. Eric went on to emphasize key steps when embarking on the journey to cultivate a new idea. One of the first steps being to ask the hard question of ‘should this be built’. This is an interesting question in the ad-world. More often than not, it’s quite hard to say no to a client. But in the end, the successful agency isn’t the one that finished the job, but rather succeeded along side there client. So if the client-ask is something that inevitable won’t lead to mutual success, asking this hard question first seems the easier route for both parties in the long run.

Another key point Eric spoke to was the necessity of failure, a hard pill to swallow. Failing faster and failing more often are all ideals of the lean method; looking at these failures and learning from them not after the project but during. I’ve always been a bit allergic to the idea of learning from your failures because I feel I learn so much more from success, but when working within the project and using these small failures to course correct a wrong path to a right path, based on audience feedback, seems invaluable. 

Eric calls these ‘course corrections’ pivots. A pivot being a change in strategy; without a change in vision. Getting your ideas in-front of your users as soon as possible to make sure the assumptions your making are correct. If they’re not correct, make a change; another hard concept to adapt to advertising. So much of what we do is to convince ourselves and our client that the execution is what’s best, but do we really know? We do our best to make sure, through departmental analysis, testing and historical knowledge, but without actually packaging the idea in a way that puts it in front of real people, can we really be sure these assumptions are correct? Adapting the pivot into the agency culture would need a lot of buy-in, mostly from the client. It’s almost a path of crowd sourced product development. One approach could be to approach the client pitch with more of a vision statement than an execution, then working with them and the intended audience to solidify the execution based on feedback. A lowered risk of failure seems inevitable and beneficial to the agency, the client and most importantly the audience. Like Eric says, we don’t want to waste people’s time.

Along the lines of wasting time, Eric touched upon ‘success theater’. Something some agencies have tuned into a professional art. Success theater manifests itself in a few (unintentional) ways: performance (or KPI) plans, case studies, Facebook likes, YouTube views, Tweets, etc. Success theater is human nature, Eric states, people want good news and failure is harder to admit than to identify. Being a big part of the agency project analysis world, I have a lot of first hand experience with this. Digging up the success metrics, looking at the social impact, and knowingly searching for success; not failure. We know our time is limited, I’m sure if we had the break from work to fully digest a project’s failures in order to learn for the next, we’d take it.. well maybe not but we’d like to say we would. This is probably the one concept I see that works well in the startup world but doesn’t make the agency bridge. I think success theater is an innate part of what agencies do, but not reserved to the spinning of bad projects. Success theater is essentially marketing. Projecting the success of a client’s product or service is arguably more impactful to fuel it’s success than any other method. Product endorsements, commercials, statements, billboards and websites are all a part of success theater. Along with pitches, sizzle reels, case studies and portfolios. Its what sells and gets agencies hired. Sorry Eric, but I’m still embracing success theater. 

The last key take-away I took from Eric was the idea of getting out of the business of deliverables. Again, this is another core to agencies. We deliver decks, comps, wires, sites, billboards, TV.. the list goes on. It’s what we do. Basically Eric’s asking us to get out of the advertising business. I asked, what’s the alternative. He went on to explain an ideal client-agency situation is one of mutual success. An agency should have a direct relationship to a client’s profitability. Interesting. Eric’s example relates to employee motivation. Want your employees to be more invested in their work, give them a part of the company. This, to me is by far the most impactful idea of lean to adapt to the agency world. 

Throw out the retainer, the estimate, the scope doc and the change order.  Let an agency prove its success through percentages of sales. When you come to the conclusion that product and marketing are of the same importance, good products fail equally as shit products succeed, this just makes sense.

Campaign tracking would be at a military level. Pivots and real-time adapting would become a necessity. User interviews, audience feedback, testing and prototyping would be a part of every agency employees job description. Lean would be at the center of the marketing world. Of course unless you’re the Steve Job’s.

Big thanks to Eric for being such a big part of SXSW. The ‘startup village’ was truly the cultural hub of the agency attendees. You can read more of Eric’s thoughts in his book “the Lean Startup” and follow him on twitter @ericries, or follow me on twitter @eddiestover.

 

The last day of panels at sxsw is brutal. There are slim pickings on the schedule, I've probably learned and absorbed more than my freshman year of college, and my morning panel is a ghost town. Worst of all, I already checked out of my hotel, leaving the Austin Convention Center the only viable place with AC.

In order to get a seat for the keynote presentation and the Anthony Bourdain panel later in the day (all in the same room), I decide to camp out and attend an earlier session about what we lose as a society the more we embrace technology. It sounds interesting enough.

When the session begins, George Friedman, CEO of the global intelligence firm Stratfor, walks out to the stage. He begins his talk by telling the audience that he's going to address his company's recent hacking incident - he had a separate presentation planned on "Surviving Technology," but he scrapped it to share his real life experience on the subject. At the time, I have no idea who he is. I'm sure if I'd watched or read the news more, I would have heard of the recent hacking incident by a group that claimed to steal credit card data from Stratfor's clients and over 5 million company emails.

As he's explaining everything that's been going on these past few months, I'm slightly interested and doing a causal search on my phone to read up on the topic. A few minutes in, a woman two rows behind and few seats over screams, "MIC CHECK!", which is immediately echoed by a man on the other side of the room. In army-like fashion, the two begin yelling anti-Stratfor statements about invasion of privacy and corruption, one after the other, in perfect rhythm and repitition. At first I thought it was all part of the show. Oh I get it, he's brought people in to "hack" his presentation and show how disruptive it is - cute. But then it doesn't stop. Mr. Friedman is still on stage with a polite smile on his face, letting these demonstrators get out all that anger and craziness. By this time, I've gone from slightly to very interested (and yes, a little terrified).

When the demonstrators are finally escorted out of the room a few minutes later, Mr. Friedman resumes his talk. He spends the hour talking about his company and how the hacking has not only affected his life but his employees' lives. The hackers ended up using the stolen credit cards to donate millions of dollars to charities (I love it... what a great idea). But Mr. Friedman reminds the audience that all of the donations will be reversed once the credit cards are reported stolen. All of the money these charities are relying on will no longer exist, and they will have to waste their own money and resources to sort out the mess (oops... what a terrible idea).

He also tells a sickening story of an employee who had written a private email to his son's physician, basically saying, "I don't think the meds are working." The email was not only posted, exposing this employee's personal pain, but mocked and laughed at by the group that posted it.

Mr. Friedman captivated the audience with human stories, and we ate up every word of it. He admitted that he is no longer able to sit in front of a computer and type an email to his friends and family without feeling as though someone is watching him. It's ironic considering that is one of the allegations against his company, but still, very sad. Whether or not Stratfor had been engaged in shady, unethical business practices, I don't know and don't care. I'm certainly not trying to make a point about who's right/wrong or take any position on invasion of privacy. It was simply an amazing speech by an amazing speaker. He was able to spin his image from bad guy to victim and shift the contempt onto the hacker group. He managed to turn an embarrassing company disaster into a plea for sympathy and compassion, and he got a standing ovation in the process.

***

For some early background on the Stratfor hacking:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/dec/27/security-stratfor-hackers-cr...

In my first blog post, I reviewed a set of apps I predicted would support and enhance my SXSW experience. Now it's time to review my hits and misses. #winning or #fail?

Foursquare: #winning Picked up some badges from the SXSW badge list, and the Porky badge! (Yes, I just admited to my excitment for rewarded consumption of mass quantities of BBQ.)

GroupMe: #winning Was one of the best tools for connecting with the T1SXSW team. Used for sharing panel attendance, notification of panels above capacity, messaging locations for netowrking events and general chatter. Allows for multiple message groups so we were able to break off for side conversations as needed. Used the default to SMS messaging feature a couple of times, when the connection was bad.

Instagram: #winning 

Facebook: Ended up using Twtiiter far more than Facebook. Found myself wanting to connect more with contacts outside my circle of Facebook friends at the event and contribute to collective hashtags to be a part of the content aggregation.

Twitter:  #winning 

Path:  Great for the more personal post stream.  Wasn't in heavy rotation until the last day, when my concern for over sharing in other networks kicked in.

Calendar: Found my SXSW Go App and GroupMe to be far more valuable than the calendar that I set up for the week.

Highlight: #fail The concentration of contacts with shared interests resulted in the constant notification that there were dozens of people near me that I should connect with. I didn't find any value in the notifications, found it distracting and it drained my iPhone battery. I closed this app out pretty early on and cannot say I'll open it back up at this point.

Evernote: #winning Notes and Audio via Evernote were my primary source of panel documentation.

Maps: #winning 

 

Comedian, The Onion contributor and Keynote speaker Baratunde Thurston, and Columnist/Activist Mona Eltahawy delivered two of the most profound speeches at SXSW 2012. And although they took very different approaches to relay their message--Thurston amused his audience with satirical Onion headlines while Eltahwy sobered and awed her audience with personal tales of trauma and heartache--their messages were in fact very similar. The message: Positivity, be it the art of comedy or the ideal of optimism, is an extremely potent force for social defiance and social change.

In his Keynote address, Thurston focused on the power of comedy to subvert spin and to get to the heart of the truth. Comedy is a platform that allows us to communicate the truth, albeit indirectly, and comedy can become a launching point for other comedic expression. Witness the Onion's satirical piece on a very sensitive topic, "Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billion Abortionplex," a concept that is obviously disgusting and ridiculous, but it launched an entire internet meme and revealed the depths of peoples passions when activists mistook the article as actual news. The satirist behind the article is trying to draw attention to the disproportionate outrage aimed at Planned Parenthood, an organization that contributes a relatively small portion of it's resources to this one aspect of women's health, and the article became a platform for others to riff off the topic and further propagate the satirist's original message: witness this user-generated Yelp entry for the fictional clinic.  In this way, comedians can help to bring focus to an issue and allow for conversation around touchy or taboo topics. Furthermore, comedy also has the ability to "smash idols." Thurston shared several international examples of how protesters and satirists in oppressive regimes use comedy to subvert authority, from China to Iran, and he astutely pointed out the proportional relationship between the freedom of a society and the tolerence it has for its satirists.

The second presentation from Mona Eltahawy was anything but humorous. In fact, her talk about Optimism was often sad, anger-inducing and poignant. Eltahawy went into great detail about her personal experiences of the Egyptian revolution, and those of her close family and friends, and loved ones lost. But she was able to artfully juxtapose those traumatic stories of injustice, violence and hatred against her own enduring optimism that her country and her revolution would ultimately succeed--perhaps not with this generation, but for the next generation or the one after that. Eltahawy talked about optimism with consequence; an optimism that emboldens someone to fight against an injustice, often at the risk of their own peril. It is that kind of optimism that enables defiance, and that defiance can inspire others. And when others are inspried, the optimism becomes contagious and minds can be changed. She has seen it first hand with the youth in Egypt, and that gives her confidence--and continued optimism--that the revolution will prevail. As Eltahawy elegantly expressed, oppressive forces "cannot imprison optimism." It is a true revolutionary act.

After I had some time to digest these presentations, I began to wonder about the relationship between optimism (or comedy), revolution and time. Both Thurston and Eltahawy seemed to take a long-term view on social change: Thurston referenced the gains of the civil rights movement during his grandparents, parents and his own lifetime, and Eltahawy indicated that she has many years left to see the Egyptian youth take control of the country and finally fulfill the values of the revolution (democracy, women's rights). But what of situations where time is finite? Can one still be optimistic and can that optimism still inspire? I think the answer is yes. Because any situation may appear to be finite when there are consequences on the line. But courage and steadfast optimism in the face of these consequences will keep ideas alive.

 * * * 

Mona Eltahawy, "Optimism: The Ultimate Revolutionary Act"
Listen to a recording of her presentation, here:
http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP100209

One of the more innovative and controversial ideas at SXSW 2012: Homeless Hotspots. Gives new meaning to mobile internet.

See video and story here.

 

American Express brilliantly demonstrated the impact of a flawlessly executed, large scale brand activation with the Jay-Z Sync Show (or #jayzsyncshow in SXSW-ese). More event details later. But first, the photos.