I attended an event for the UO Alumni group here in NYC last night that was theoretically about “Journalism and Media in the Digital Age.” Jodi Kahn from iVillage and Carlos Lamadrid from Woman’s Day, and Tim Gleason, the Dean of the Journalism School at the UO were the panelists.
This is not a review of that event.
There was one strand of the conversation though that really struck me – and that I think is one of the biggest problems all big media companies face as they’ve been muddling through the last 15 years of ‘digital.’ There was a real sense of ‘all or nothing’. Either paid or free. Either protected or open. Either web or mobile. This is not to say that the panelists are not exploring ‘hybrid’ approaches, or taking their brands into other channels, but they are thinking about things in those ways: hybrids, channels, etc. There is, it seems to me, a singularity of vision that comes from this way of thinking about things. And it wasn’t the kind of ‘singularity of vision’ that equals ‘clarity of purpose.’
You could tell because their favorite answer to most of the questions was, “No one knows.” I believe this was honest. It also suggested they should try harder, do some more experimenting, play with more ideas. Not just try to port over old models into new structures, because as Dean Gleason kept saying, those models are broken.
The need for a closed environment, a safe place, in which to try new things – a vacuum in which to run experiments – seems to be the dream of all big corporations and marketing departments. But that’s hard to create, and limited in its usefulness. I propose instead that you prototype in public – don’t insist on an answer that is provably good or true; look for the path to the answer.
Make some things and try to sell them. Learn about them by the way the prototype works and doesn’t. Learn about how people will react to your message by whether they sample or purchase your prototype. Learn about how to make the prototype better by how people actually use it.
Now, here’s the tricky bit. You do need to have a direction in mind. That direction should be rooted in who you (A) are today, and (B) want to be tomorrow. It should be immersed in the way people live their lives and have a point of view about how to augment or disrupt people’s habits and assumptions. That takes living in the world where your brand lives, but as a conscious, conscientious observer. It takes respecting the other people who live there, the people who have a bit of green in their wallets that you’d like to put in yours. And it takes making something worthwhile.
Some examples, hot off the presses.
DailyCandy sent their email out today…
The profile was of Wintercheck Factory‘s new line of sunglasses. I poked around the site this morning and am very impressed by the openness of the business model. They are keeping track of and teasing their prototypes on the site. And in some cases, they show you how to do it yourself. This is, by any big brand’s measure, foolhardy – why give away the store? But Wintercheck is simply showing us the thought and effort that goes into making their products. Yes, we could make our own, but we don’t really want to. We want the thing, and it’s even better if there’s a story behind it.
Here’s how they made their Julian Scarf:
This got me thinking about something else I’d seen recently that I really loved – the new Ok Go video.
So I went back to their channel, and sure enough – the guys at Ok Go don’t just want you to see their brilliant, single-shot videos, they want you to see some of the ‘behind-the-scenes’ action. Check this out:
Prototyping helps you work out the kinks. It can be a lengthy process, but it’s alway a fruitful one. You see how the thing actually works – not just how it’s supposed to work – and you get to have a real sense of the thing, not just the messages and positioning around it. When you do it in public you inspire other people – you demonstrate the benefits of creative effort, you lift the veil, you reveal your methods, and you earn their trust and admiration. This is way more valuable to any brand than a transient transaction. People come back to see what great new idea you have, and they want to have proof that they were there.