Okay, so where am I?

I’m still hunkered down, North Korean-style*, working with the team to produce our Clio submission. We want to make the April 21st deadline and save the $25 late fee. We shall see.

I can tell you that I was inspired by this article about North Korea’s Loyalty campaign where, “North Koreans are being mobilized en masse to boost production and demonstrate their loyalty to leader Kim Jong Un in a 70-day campaign aimed at wiping out ‘indolence and slackness.'”

Talk about innovation!

*- Note to Kim Jong Un: This is a quasi-compliment; please do not hack me!

Anyway…while looking for commercial inspiration, I ran across the perfect late seventies ad for my latest AD OF THE WEEK/MONTH/WHATEVER postings while simultaneously continuing my assault on sexist advertising throughout the decades. “Enjoy” the flashback.


Enjoli: The 8-Hour Perfume for the 24-Hour Woman
(Circa 1978-80)

Just like the exhausted woman in this classic perfume ad, Enjoli does it all, working overtime just to please her man perhaps. Or maybe it’s telling men to buy it so he can be pleased at the bank and in the bedroom.

Seriously though…the ad was powerful and it stuck with you. I didn’t have to hear the jingle on youtube to remember the words to this commercial. They have been embedded in my mind for three plus decades. Maybe I was addicted to television in 1980 (probably true.) Yet, I digress.

Listen to the jingle:

It’s actually kind of remarkable the way Enjoli tries to “have it all,” like the fantasy 70s feminist the ad is addressing. I mean, what does the liberated woman of the seventies get for trading in her Good Housekeeping-styled stay-at-home motherhood, smoking cigarettes, herding kids, cleaning the house, cooking seven days a week, and suppressing her dreams?

The answer is simple: More work!

In fact, the Enjoli liberated woman of the seventies is now a 24-hours-a-day working and pleasing machine, capable of doing nearly everything! In fact, if you offer to cook for the kids tonight, she make you shiver…

My takeaway? I’m beginning to think that advertising from 1950 to 1980 would have been non-existent without sexist ads. 

The post Enjoli: A 30-Second Capsule of Sexist Advertising appeared first on Media Guy Struggles.

I can’t believe it’s been over nine months since I was trying to finish my 2015 submission for the Clio Awards. The big agencies have entire staffs cutting up footage and storyboarding narratives into two minute vignettes designed to win at beautiful, sleek statuette termed, “The Oscars of the Advertising World.”

Me? I was doing it alone.

I am not unproud to say that I failed to win an award last year.

I didn’t even make the short list.

Yeah, poor me.

Failure is the catalyst to success. Didn’t Winston Churchill say, “Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.”? He must have. There are memes all over the Internet with this quote on it, so he must have said it. It must be true as well, because Churchill failed so many times, yet he has a cigar type named after him. And, we all know that lighting up a cigar is the ultimate symbol of success.

This year, there are five of us (plus the ad agency I worked with) putting our best feet forward to craft a story that drove our 2015-16 campaign. I’m excited and hopeful.

Judging for many of the categories is weighted 80% on creativity and 20% on results. Yes, there is something to be said for innovation. What’s the secret for cracking the code to innovation? Last year I spoke with Neal Thornberry, Ph.D., faculty director for innovation initiatives at the Naval Postgraduate School. He says there are seven steps that guarantee success. Further, he says that upper management is the culprit for shooting down great ideas.

“Senior leaders often miss the value-creating potential of a new concept because they either don’t take the time to really listen and delve  into it, or the innovating employee presents it in the wrong way,” says Thornberry, who recently published “Innovation Judo,” based on his years of experience teaching innovation at Babson College and advising an array of corporate clients, from the Ford Co. and IBM to Cisco Systems. “Innovation should be presented as opportunities, not ideas. Opportunities have gravitas while ideas do not!”

His innovation template outlines a recipe that seems to work:

•  Intention: Once the “why” is answered, leaders have the beginnings of a legitimate roadmap to
innovation’s fruition. This is no small task and requires some soul searching.

“I once worked with an executive committee, and I got six different ideas for what ‘innovation’ meant,” he says. “One wanted new products, another focused on creative cost-cutting, and the president wanted a more innovative culture. The group needed to agree on their intent before anything else.”

•  Infrastructure: This is where you designate who is responsible for what. It’s tough, because the average employee will not risk new responsibility and potential risk without incentive. Some companies create units specifically focused on innovation, while others try to change the company culture in order to foster innovation throughout.  “Creating a culture takes too long,” Thornberry says. “Don’t wait for that.”

•  Investigation: What do you know about the problem? IDEO may be the world’s premier organization for investigating innovative solutions. Suffice to say that the organization doesn’t skimp on collecting and analyzing data. At this point, data collection is crucial, whereas brainstorming often proves to be a waste of time if the participants come in with the same ideas, knowledge and opinions that they had last week with no new learning in their pockets.

•  Ideation: The fourth step is also the most fun and, unfortunately, is the part many companies leap to. This is dangerous because you may uncover many exciting and good ideas, but if the right context and focus aren’t provided up front, and team members cannot get on the same page, then a company is wasting its time. That is why intent must be the first step for any company seeking to increase innovation. Innovation should be viewed as a set of tools or processes, and not a destination.

•  Identification: Here’s where the rubber meets the road on innovation. Whereas the previous step was creative, now logic and subtraction must be applied to focus on a result. Again, ideas are great, but they must be grounded in reality. An entrepreneurial attitude is required here, one that enables the winnowing of ideas, leaving only those with real value-creating potential. “Innovation without the entrepreneurial mindset is fun but folly,” Thornberry notes.

•  Infection: Does anyone care about what you’ve come up with? Will excitement spread during this infection phase? Now is the time to find out. Pilot testing, experimentation and speaking directly with potential customers begin to give you an idea of how innovative and valuable an idea is. This phase is part selling, part research and part science. If people can’t feel, touch or experience your new idea in part or whole, they probably won’t get it. This is where the innovator has a chance to reshape their idea into an opportunity, mitigate risk, assess resistance and build allies for their endeavor.

•  Implementation/Integration: While many talk about this final phase, they often fail to address the integration part. Implementation refers to tactics that are employed in order to put an idea into practice. This is actually a perilous phase because, in order for implementation to be successful, the idea must first be successfully integrated with other activities in the business and aligned with strategy. An innovation, despite its support from the top, can still fail if a department cannot work with it.

My Clio Awards are aging. Both are 20+ years old. Happy birthday, buddies.

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Well if it were just ten years ago, I would be waiting in line to buy my Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens movie ticket that comes out three months from now. The Internet made it so I could skip

Hollywood lines for the 1977 opening of the original Star Wars.

the lines and buy my tickets at a Los Angeles ArcLight Cinemas theater, in my car, on the traffic-snarled 101 freeway. Even then it wasn’t easy as I searched fifteen different shows trying to find an assigned seat not in the first two rows. Mission was accomplished during my 52 minute commute.

Ticket sales were so brisk that it literally broke the internet (or parts of it). The Star Wars trailer is to the Internet what the Death Star is to Alderaan, crashing Fandango and Movietickets.com shortly after tickets were released. A couple of days ago, Imax reported $6.5 million in U.S. and Canadian advance ticket sales. This absolutely crushes box office numbers set by other highly anticipated hit films. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, The Dark Knight Rises, and The Avengers all raked in about $1 million each in similar sales.

Call me a nerd or a dork or whatever. Opening day for the seventh installment of Star Wars is an epic event (barely surpassing my South Korean movie opening [ha!]).

I’ll be there opening day. And why wouldn’t I? I mean listen to Han Solo (around the 1:11 mark) and the chills start in your ankles and climb up to your neck:

“It’s true.

All of it.

The dark side.

The Jedi.

They’re real.”

All this Star Wars talk and Internet breakage got me wondering about innovation. Innovation for the your life. Innovation for the workplace. Innovation from your staff. Getting your people to contribute more to your organization while simultaneously establishing stronger talent retention must cost a pretty penny, right? Not really, says corporate coach Maxine Attong.

Want to know more? Buy the book!

“You don’t necessarily need to add expensive new ingredients to the stew, you just have to know how to use your ingredients better,” she says. “A talented chef – or in this case, corporate or organizational leader – knows how to let an ingredient speak for itself, perhaps with just a touch of seasoning, or guidance.”

What is the guidance – competition or incentives such as bonuses? Not exactly.

“Most employees want to have more input,” says Attong, a certified facilitator and author of Lead Your Team to Win: Achieve Optimal Performance By Providing A Safe Space For Employees. “However, personal issues, fear of being laughed at or anxiety of not getting credit can stymie contributions from a leader’s staff.”

If a leader can engender a real sense of trust, the organization will benefit both from the individual and the team’s ingenuity. A reliable way of establishing a trusting climate is to make team members feel safe, says Attong, who offers five steps for doing so.

• Share responsibility; practice “I” statements: With openness, encourage interaction by having team members and leaders enforce the rules and monitor the use of common space. When members break the rules, the team discusses the problems and decides on the sanctions and steps necessary to assist the member in following the rules next time. Speakers are discouraged from using the word “you.” Instead, they use “I.” This simple yet effective practice encourages personal culpability and discourages blame.
• Consistency: Teams need to consistently follow the agreed-upon rules as they set the boundaries and the tone for relationships. Following the rules makes the behavior in the space predictable, which limits uncertainty and increases feelings of safety. Consistent application of the rules helps the team to increase trust as behavior becomes prescriptive and members know more or less what will happen in the room and how they will be treated.
• Judgment: The members must feel that they are not being judged. If someone says that an idea is bad, the speaker will shut down and feel embarrassed. In the future that speaker will hesitate to give ideas, since he feels his ideas may not be good enough for the team. Less confident team members may refrain from presenting ideas if they are uncertain of the quality of the ideas. However, many ideas that may seem strange or unorthodox at first can wind up being some of the best.
• Good intentions: Not all team members are effective communicators so it may be difficult for some people to frame and cogently express their thoughts.

“I assume all team members have good intentions and want a positive outcome,” Attong says. “Even though what I am hearing may be contrary to that assumption, I hold on to the thought so that I am able to fully understand what the member is saying before I react.”

When listening this way, the leader delays having a reaction and has time to assess the situation before responding. When the leader has emotionally detached from the situation, he can then ask questions to clarify the situation.

• Norming: By this point, team members seem to embrace each other and there is a spirit of togetherness. Do not be fooled by this. This doesn’t mean that your team has normed—that each team member makes decisions that advance the goals of the team. It means that the safe space concept has allowed them to see each other in a more neutral light and accept each other’s strengths and weaknesses. While the space may act as an accelerator or catalyst for the team to norm, it is not magic. It does not mean that whatever problems existed within the team before have miraculously disappeared. The leader still needs to pay attention and check the team temperature. Regular team meetings and team building sessions should still be conducted.

Want your own Star Wars? Buy the book!


Other things I discovered this week…

The death and life of the great British pub


Across the country, pubs are being shuttered at an alarming rate – scooped up by developers and ransacked for profit – changing the face of neighborhoods and turning our beloved locals into estate agents, betting shops, and luxury flats. This is the story of how one pub fought back.

What It’s Like to Vacation in North Korea? Look no further:

THE MANAGERS HAVE BEEN ZAPPED


The New Republic goes inside a radical experiment at Zappos, in Las Vegas, to end the office workplace as we know it.


AD OF THE WEEK/MONTH/WHATEVER


Do You Know What Your Marketing Is Doing? | Adobe Marketing Cloud

What better way to celebrate the success of The Martian than an with the ultimate brand fail set around a space launch commercial?

The brand represented in the “Do You Know What Your Marketing Is Doing?” spot by Adobe Marketing Cloud and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners is AstroBoost, an energy drink you’ve never heard of. The spot brilliantly showcases that advertising doesn’t have to be rocket science. Take a peak:

The post Innovation on the 101 Freeway appeared first on Media Guy Struggles.

We’ll get to the story as soon as I get outside my office and act like an anthropologist…

I bet you already know that the biggest breakthroughs in the history of business – and the history of the world – are never the result of conventional thinking. The Media Guy ran into Maria Ferrante-Schepis, a veteran in the insurance and financial services industry who now consults Fortune 100 companies and she further confirmed that philosophy.

“To echo Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt back in 1960, ‘In every case, the reason growth (in business) is threatened, slowed or stopped is not because the market is saturated. It is because there has been a failure of management.’ Many of the world’s biggest companies are simply riding on inertia,” says Ferrante-Schepis, author of “Flirting with the Uninterested,” coauthored by G. Michael Maddock, which explores innovation opportunity through the lens of the insurance industry 

‘You Can’t Read the Label While Inside the Jar.’

“There’s a great saying in the South: ‘You can’t read the label when you are sitting inside the jar,’ ” says Maddock, CEO of Maddock Douglas. “It’s hard to see a need and invent a way to fill that need when you’ve been inside one business or industry for a long time.”


She adds that recognizing those needs requires stepping outside of the jar and viewing things from the outside. “You can’t innovate from inside the jar, and if you aren’t innovating, you’re just waiting for the expiration date on your business,” she says. 


Ferrante-Schepis and Maddock bust five myths relating to corporate innovation:

• The preference of four out of five dentists doesn’t necessarily matter: Many years ago, when the Maddock Douglas firm consulted with P&G to develop new oral health care products, Crest was recommended by most dentists. However, it turns out the market had shifted; consumers became more interested in bright smiles than healthy gums. Many industries make the mistake of getting their insights from their own experts rather than asking the consumer. 
• Giving all your love to those who already love you: In the interest of preserving customer morale, too many companies focus on those who already love their service. But that’s not what companies need to work on; they need to focus on what’s not working in order to improve. The haters very often offer well-targeted insights that can tremendously improve products, customer service, and/or operations.
• “We tried that idea. It didn’t work.” What idea, exactly? People who are in the jar interpret new ideas based on how they last saw them. You may think you’ve tried or tested an idea, but if you applied it in a conventional way, the way it’s always been used, you haven’t really tried it. Consider the term “auction” — in-the-jar thinkers envision Sotheby’s and not the more practical and innovative eBay.
• Trying to impress with insider jargon: Communication is a huge part of innovation. Policies in the health-insurance industry, for example, include language that may make sense to insiders, but say nothing to the average middle-class customer, which is prohibitive. Be very careful about the language you use. In this case, “voice of the customer” should be taken literally. Customers recognize, respond to and build from their own words more than from yours.
• Staying at your desk and in the office: Doubling down on what already has not worked for you is not innovative. Get outside your office and act like an anthropologist. Spend time with your customers and bring an expert interpreter and a couple members of your team. Compare notes; you’ll be shocked at how differently you all see the situation. 

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