Recent

Recent success by leading brands such as Old Spice have proven that media innovation can drive sales and help reinvent any product. According to Nielsen data provided by Old Spice, overall sales for Old Spice body-wash products are up 11 percent in the last 12 months; up 27 percent in the last six months; up 55 percent in the last three months; and in the last month, with just two new TV spots and a series of online response videos, up a whopping 107 percent.

A survey published by www.eMarketer.com leading brands are beginning to embrace media innovation. In May, 52 percent of brand marketers had no plan for social media management or outreach. Miraculously in June 72 percent of business leaders said that they now had a “social media” strategy. Even more encouraging marketers are now expected to raise their media innovation budgets to close to 18 percent in the next five years.

This is a great sign for technologies who have been waiting to tap into media budgets. The most successful brand marketers are escaping the silos created for “Social Media” and realizing that in order to own the conversations that matter most – their entire strategy must change. ROI is being generated by understanding and speaking directly to specific audiences, empowering them to own your brand narrative, and quickly harnessing data to make changes and bring greater value to distribution.

Blogging has never been my thing. It feels like a big overwhelming task. What to say to an undefined recipient and how to say it. How to keep your message targeted enough when you are more of what Daniel Pink refers to as being a hedgehog – or knowing one big thing that many little things contribute toward, rather than specializing in one little thing.

I normally feel like there is to much content in the world. Who needs another blog to scan through or another perspective to consider. We are over-saturated. Nothing is more frustrating to a big picture thinker than needing to sort through more. Nothing is less attractive to a big picture thinker than thinking that they are contributing to the clutter.

People have enough to consider – most just need help considering it. That’s the role of what Pink refers to as a R directed thinker. We are here more to empathize than to create. I think that empathy is what dictates our New Brave World. The key any creative has is in understanding how their narratives will help people know the things that they already know. We are not knowledge workers. We are communicators and our skills should be more intuitive than scientific.

Blogs make empathy difficult. But I am going to try to do it anyway and in a way that converses with the entrepreneurs and creatives and technologist who shape today’s economy and who will ultimately break the world out of it’s depression.  Our New Brave World is waiting for a new kind of narrative to become real… and we may be lucky enough to be the generation that makes it happen.