Innovator IQ: New Medici Innovator Series (Open Q&A)
Year’s end, and we’re moving forward on our manuscript for forward thinkers in media and lifestyle innovation. Not limited to media, digital or social – we’re capturing those thinkers who game change society.
Social Mission Control
The real deal in big brands associating with social systems: PepsiCo’s global head of digital Bonin Bough on “how leadership in social is the new ownership,” as ownership goes away in a Facebook transparent world.
Bonin is clearly helping this global brand become “digitally fit.” Literally, digital experts vanish when whole companies become d-fit.
Love the NASA or Situation Room concept of having a veritable ‘Today Show’ live set or Gatorade Mission Control for all employees to experience daily as they walk into work. Talk about proactive social engagement.
Hack the… [Insert Industry Here]
What’s hackable these days? Answer: Everything. Every traditional vertical, agency and business line is on the “hacking block” with innovative entrepreneurs and executives trying to reinvent business by disrupting it.
Intrapreneurials are actively competing with their entrepreneurial brethren to breathe live into inefficient companies.
With Facebook making the “hackathon” a regular event, they’re challenging the concept of doing something faster with little devotion to the past. Basically, it’s the corporate-sized version of “pivoting” – or refreshing the process in favor of faster-better-more efficient methods. It’s not downsizing to reduce costs, but super-sizing business or brand thinking to reduce natural inefficiencies Read more >>
The “High-Flying” Brand Extensions of Angry Birds
If you haven’t played Angry Birds as yet, you’re probably not reading this post – it’s been downloaded 350 million times and is considered by many to be one of the fastest growing, individual brands – with faster growth than Amazon and YouTube in two years according to Rovio’s Brand Advertising and Analytics SVP, Wibe Wagemans, via StrategyEye.
From iPhone to social gaming, movie tie-ins, its own upcoming movie, merchandise at every mall and a console game in the works, it’s created an incredibly robust yet lo-fi ecosystem. One has to wonder the next piece of premium IP and launch strategy to create such a viral following. Definite a nice perch to swing from; and an IP that has remained concentrated instead of spread thin (note: Rovio created 51 games that didn’t “hatch” before creating Angry Birds.)
I recently ran into red hoodie-wearing “Mighty Eagle” (aka Rovio’s CEO), Peter Vesterbacka, at SXSW. After closing the “Rio” deal with 20th Century Fox, Peter was visibly flying around the conference, exultant in the growth of his company and its high-flying brand extensions. Kudos to Fox under Peter Levinsohn in digital and Jake Zim in marketing for advancing a spin-off tie-in that definitely “added wings” to their film’s performance.
Below, a casual (and already dated) infographic on Angry Birds. The “Facebook” of casual games or a model in “how-to really extend next-gen IP…”
Digital Hollywood: Capturing and Transforming Millions of Users in Communities
Looking to “capture, captivate and convert” millions of users across social communities, gaming, conversation and content? For your brand, your start-up or your content – we’ll be talking about the building blocks of targeting and transforming audiences into critical masses. We’ll talk also about how CRM has changed with this catchy “social” thing…
The panel via Victor Harwood’s Digital Hollywood is Thursday, October 20th, 12:50-2pm.
Social Media, Brands and Target Markets: Capturing and Transforming Millions of Users in Communities, Content, Conversation and Commerce
Charles Black, President and Chief Strategy Officer, Technorati Media
Laura O’Shaunnessey, General Manager, Social Code, a Washington Post Company
Thomas Gerace, Founder & CEO, Skyword
Dan Schechter, Global co-head, Media, Entertainment & Technology, L.E.K. Consulting
Kevin Pomplun, CEO, SkyGrid
Pauline Malcolm-John, EVP of Strategic Partnerships, WeeWorld.com
Mike Raffensperger, Vice President of Strategy and Creative Development, Magnet Media
Adrian Sexton, Co-Founder & CEO, New Medici LLC, Moderator
Topics we’ll cover: building brands in social, targeting (niche) markets, rolling up niche markets (where are the new audiences and their WOM watering holes?), capturing influencers and tastemakers, social CRM (what is it?), social media for social businesses (SalesForce.com just bought Social.com – wonder why?) and what kinds of content rafts float these new communities? Soup-to-nuts conversion of social communities.
New Medici Innovator Series: Mohamed El-Fatatry
I met Mohamed El-Fatatry, an Egyptian-born Muslim living in Finland at a Finnish Consulate dinner in Los Angeles. Talk about “fish sphinx out of water,” yet Mohamed commanded the room with his eloquence and forward thinking.
He founded Muxlim.com, a prescient new multicultural company that was soon mirrored by the likes of Ogilvy and other multi-adcongloms. New Medici helped Muxlim leverage its social media feature set and network of sites into a leading diversity advisory to brands.
Mohamed doesn’t think small – as a mid-20s startup entrepreneur his CV reads like a global political leader, veteran diplomat or travelwise Ram Charan. In his own words, he is the “World’s Top Evangelist for the $2 Trillion Global Muslim Consumer Market. Visionary Entrepreneur and Motivational Speaker with a Background in Media, Technology and Business. One of the World’s “500 Most Influential Muslims” & “Leaders of Tomorrow”.
1. What is an “innovator” in your words? A “game changer”?
A change agent, a minority of active individuals who take bold action to create disruptive change. A good metaphor is a bottle of medicine that has 98-99% inactive ingredients, but only 1% of it creates all the healing effect.
2. How do you get inspired on a daily basis? What media do you consume? Environment? Tools?
I get inspired by looking at problems that affect me in day-to-day life. Then I look at the problem from a macro-level, and try to figure out if there is something that can be done top-down to trigger positive change.
Vanity Fair: Tech Has Disrupted the “Establishment List”
Vanity Fair does an excellent job in redefining the new vanguard of media in their annual “New Establishment” List.
With much smaller hype than their patrician traditional media peers, the list of late has become a Silicon Valley hitlist. What will be interesting is seeing which Hollywood media elites (think the annual Sun Valley media retreats) can earn back their relevance on the list.
With cross media investment groups somewhat the rage, think The Raine Group, which we will analyze, and others where talent agencies are bridging tech with content, it’s time to see who can scale media best.
Not an easy bargain when you listen to the backchannel on the Hulu sale – minus the great UX (user experience) that Hulu provides – but rather that big tech is interested as it’s so hard to procure studio library relationships that innovate at scale.
So, for those tech visionaries who can communicate, i.e., distribute, in content, let’s see who your “bridge” team is in 2012. The list below with some commentary after the companies:
1. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook – could own the #1 spot for several years to come; now needs to bring content and brands in with further immersion; think fan stratification fwiw, and create tiers of users who influence online.
2. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google – like the new – is it new? – management as they’re taking big risks that feed into Android, YouTube, Google+. Especially excited for games – finding a new medium between console and social…
3. Jeff Bezos, Amazon – I buy 70% (okay 80%) of all my retail at Amazon. Would they, should they compete with Apple Stores in retail as they expand the Kindle. Love to see them also become a bigger media machine with Hulu acquisition.
The rest of the top 50 after the jump…
Infographic: Anatomy of a Fan (Who Needs to be Rewarded)
Via FastCoDesign.com – a great online complement to Fast Company magazine – a breakdown of how to qualify and quantify fans. The real context that still eludes “brands seeking social” from our New Medici POV is that there is no real “fan stratification or appreciation,” i.e., the fans that give you, the brand, the biggest word of mouth exposure receive no rewards, and the brands have no way of even recognizing them using FB Insights.
We get the network effect, but want to reward top influencers…
Example: Will Smith’s 22 million strong fan page posts get 110k likes and 14k comments on average. If I were Will or his PR/management team, I would want to know the top 25-1000 fans who are interacting and sharing. I would want them to become a core group that I can focus test with (with permissions), I can reward for joining my brand militia, and I can throw some traffic at should they have individual fan pages, blogs, etc. Sure, I cherish the growing quantity, but I want the contextual quality.
If you’re going to use the FB Marketplace or buy direct with the sales teams and spend $XX(XX)k, I want to know more than the demo insights and fan CPAs; I want to be able to communicate with the “biggest” fans directly, transparently and with collaborative integrity.
I would like these alpha fans to speak for my brand above the masses. Forget personal branding, I want a fan recognition and rewards’ program. Time for some Fanticipation!
More infographics after the jump…
Moneyball: First Look at a Sports Game-Changer
Billy Beane changed baseball management with the Oakland Athletics, and there’s a movie to boot following the bestselling book by Michael Lewis. The adaption stars Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill with a script by Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian. Pretty good pedigrees with a little comic foil.
Not sure if this will be The Blind Side meets baseball, but it has critical success and audience sleeper potential (“sleeper”s a good Hollywood word for non-tentpole movies that perform over a long period, like Blind Side, fyi). Love the Jonah Hill line about the undervalued players being like “an island of misfit toys.” Everyday extraordinary.
Socially Networked: The Plugged-In Producer
I’ll be moderating an interesting panel this Saturday am at the Producer’s Guild “Produced By Conference 2011″ on the Disney Lot at 9:45-11am.
Socially Networked: The Plugged-In Producer
Social media outlets are now an essential component of a project’s overall production plan. Even if you’re a low-budget indie that doesn’t have millions for traditional P&A, you can now build a strong target audience through savvy use of social media sites and tools. Whether your project is a traditional feature or television program, or expressly created for digital media, this session gives you the answers: What do producers need to know and do when navigating social media for production, marketing and distribution? What are the best social practices for film, television and online? Most importantly, what methods give producers more control, and what approaches should you avoid? Jump into the debate and tweet questions: #sociallynetworked
MODERATOR: Adrian Sexton, CEO, New Medici (former EVP, Digital at Participant Media; Head of Digital at Lionsgate)
SPEAKERS:
- Brent Weinstein, Head of Digital Media, United Talent Agency
- Bedonna Smith, Producer, Stand Up To Cancer, Digital Media Producer, 83rd Academy Awards, Co-Developer, BMW Film Series ‘The Hire’
- Nick Turner, Senior Vice President Digital Media, Relativity Media, LLC/ROGUE, Limitless, The Fighter, Catfish
- Elias Plishner, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Digital Marketing, Sony Pictures Entertainment, The Social Network, 2012, Battle: Los Angeles
Jack Dorsey’s Circular Focus in Square
Following Vanity Fair’s Sean Parker sketch, Jack Dorsey of Twitter and now Square makes the editorial cut under David Kirkpatrick’s steel pen. The focus on both is primarily their focus and their market timing.
While Parker carries a precise gut instinct for the right opportunities, Dorsey employs a predictive ability towards where community needs lie.
Intriguing about both is their singular or circular focus. Having worked with Jeff Skoll, dined with Larry Page and met Zuckerberg at a Google Zeitgeist conference – I notice the clean lines of their expression mimic the intensity of their entrepreneurial passions.
Theirs is a cleanness of personality; an ability to concentrate on one thing above all others, which is ironically anti-social given their social projects.
Also ironic, Parker had to convince Zuckerberg to think big on Facebook, and Dorsey’s direction has been for purity of the product design of Twitter and now Square, a plug-in to smartphones and tablets for credit card transactions.
Peter Thiel—the billionaire hedge-fund manager and co-founder of PayPal, who became Thefacebook’s first investor—says that around that time “Sean consistently argued that Facebook was going to be really big. If Mark ever had any second thoughts, Sean was the one who cut that off.”
Via the Dorsey VF piece, “Twitter Was Act One,” there’s definitely a management learning curve, which has put Jack Dorsey into a better stead.
More control over his products is also what connects these digital characters. Call it a focused ownership and particular attention to detail, like another chief innovator: Steve Jobs. Read more >>
Twitter 101: Advertising Explained
For those of you who have been using Facebook’s self-serve or marketplace advertising, and wondering when Twitter would make its advertising more open – watch the 40 minute video below via DowJones/AllThingsD. Very casual but hands-on walkthru and we like their “CPE” model, Cost Per Engagement.
Andreessen Interviewing Ovitz
Via All Things D, a strong interview on CAA as a disruptor in the 75-year-old entertainment talent game with a $100k line of credit, utilizing only $21k.
What’s interesting on both a disruptor and company building level is that Ovitz and his early partners were able “with a standing start” to launch CAA. Ovitz shares how they went for their bank line, and the head of the bank was good friends with William Morris’ CFO, where Ovitz et al were currently agents. Realizing they were about to all get fired, they pulled an all-nighter to lock up their partnership, and then went in the next morning and resigned.
Similar in some nature to how Ari Emanuel and his departing ICM coterie created Endeavor in 1995, Ovitz shares the hardships of the early days. Like an internet startup, CAA was independent looking to leverage deals. Read more >>
Social Filtering Beyond Friends
Social filtering sounds a bit like whittling down your friends (or wannabe friends) with their throwaway wall posts, but it’s going to be a very big business not only for Facebook but other companies like Gravity, founded by MySpace’s Amit Kapur. In a recent Techcrunch article, Kapur talked about the info overload situation.
Today, we live in a world where we’re constantly overwhelmed by information. There are over 90M tweets per day, 34 hours of YouTube video uploaded every minute, and every Facebook user has an average of 130 friends who are becoming more and more active all the time. We also experience this with content farms flooding search results and with the thousands of articles available everyday on traditional websites like the New York Times and ESPN: of which only a handful appeal to each of our individual interests.
What’s interesting here is the idea of personalizing larger form content or utilities to users – we’re talking bigger social integration than you typically get with the NY Times, HuffPo’s social news or iTunes’ Genius Bar and the newly created Ping.
Of course, will the consumer respond or even pay for this personalization? Our predilection is that the early-alpha adopters will certainly pay with their feedback and “pro benefit” upgrades of a more personalized web (that’s a lot of potential onamotapoeia), but the masses will just enter it via osmosis.
Quick Take on Google Instant
From the iHollywood Forum event – jump to 0:48 in for my take on Google Instant:
iHollywood Session: Social Media 101
From my September 15, 2010 presentation at the Intercontinental in Century City. Some of the basics – the audio (my speaking) will be put up as a video:
Social Network Effects: “If You Build It, Will They Come Back?”
Via an SAI pull-out, Sean Parker of the Founders Fund (and former Facebook prexy) puts together a strong argument [video after the jump] at last year’s Web 2.0 conference on how network effects – i.e., empowering users to share content/data/relationships – matters more than the corporate governing or collecting of user data and activity, better known as CRM.
There’s CRM which is “customer relationship management,” but as Parker argues, today it’s more about “customer social engagement” (new acronym alert … CSE), empowering network effects that leads to more growth across market share and eventual monetization.
Borrowing loosely from Field of Dream‘s much reworked quote: “If you build it, they will come…”, it’s much more relevant these days to think of “building to get users to come back again and again (and again) with more intent” and with those returns, bring more consumers/relationships to bare against digital properties.
Look at how early Facebook or Twitter adopters dragged their ‘kicking and screaming’ friends, colleagues and relatives into the social family. Read more >>
Alex Bogusky: After Elvis Has Left the Ad Building
It’s undoubtedly hard to leave any industry unscathed after you are annointed as messianic. For Crispin’s Alex Bogusky, his departure was akin to an ascension, but the reasons for pulling the corporate ripcord were less than clear.
Via Fast Company: [W]hen news broke that after a mere five months into Bogusky’s new gig, The One was abruptly quitting MDC, the odds of Crispin staying on top got a bit slimmer. “The problem with the Jesus model is it’s hard to institutionalize,” a former executive of an MDC agency told me. “Alex has created a cult of Alex. It’s all about what does Alex think of this? and the how much time do I get with Alex model. Now Jesus is off skiing.”
From the standpoint of losing talent as it graduates from a client-service world to a how-can-I-engage-directly, Alex “The One” Bogusky – the love child of Mad Men‘s Don Draper – has staged his exit with a few independent pursuits. Read more >>
The High-Paid Life or Decade of CEOs
Annual compensation for CEOs is nearly always a thorny question. Not so ironically, every CEO wants to land on Forbes’ “Billionaire List,” but mention of annual salaries for public companies brings a corporate chorus of no comments or quick stage lefts – helicopter waiting depending on the benefits package.
Via WSJ (including the graphic): Larry Ellison, founder and chief executive of software maker Oracle Corp., topped the list of best-paid executives of public companies during the past decade, receiving $1.84 billion in compensation, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of CEO pay. Coming in No. 2 on the compensation list was Barry Diller, who received roughly $1.14 billion from IAC/InterActive and Expedia.com, the online travel site IAC spun off in 2005, where he remains chairman. Following Mr. Diller [was] Apple Inc.’s Steve Jobs with $749 million.
Over the past decade, Ellison has held strong in the face of Diller and Jobs, who’s comp is mostly in his stock and does not include Pixar/Disney transaction gains. Steve Jobs still remains the largest individual shareholder of Disney, which sums up what a superb brand strategist he is: Apple, then Pixar leading into Disney.
Entrepreneurial Flow Chart
Via Barbieri’s Facebook feed – great take on the entrepreneurial flow chart:
