Fact: Twenty percent of the price of a new car is for the software.

My car didn't stop itself from hitting this tree, either.

Monday I take my seven-year-old car in to have the front end repaired. I hit a cement block in a local garage because my car didn’t let me know that it was there.  It tore off the bumper and part of the grill. As you can see from the image on the left, hitting things head on is a recurring problem.

If I had an Internet ready car, it would have warned me.  It would also have checked me in on Foursquare so that people would know where I was. It might have taken an Instagram image of the dangerous cement block so that others would be aware of it.

Looks like we can’t escape. The reason I’m still driving a seven-year old car is that it’s an Audi S4 Avant six speed. You can’t buy them in America anymore.  You can’t even get an A4 wagon without settling for an automatic. If you like driving, you don’t have many options these days.

But if you don’t like driving, life on the road will soon be grand. Your car will know traffic conditions before you go anywhere. Since it will have access to your calendar, it will let you know if you need to leave earlier than planned to make that meeting or if you can continue tweeting from the office instead of from the road. You’ll be able to tweet from the road because your dashboard will be an over-sized digital touch screen from which you can update your status, check your Gmail, and access your friends’ playlists on Spotify.

For me the best part will be the satellite connection that informs every McDonald’s I drive by that I’m in the vicinity, so it can send me real-time offers based on how many people are in my car. The heat sensors in the seats will let the cloud know if there are passengers occupying the back seat or just luggage.  And if they include digital scales as part of the system McDonald’s will even know if the car’s occupants are candidates for a Super Size meal or just a burger and fries.

Better yet, if the car can drive itself – inevitable within 10 years, I’m told – I can simply push the steering wheel out of the way and fire up the grill and deep fryer and make my own lunch.  Then I can even share what I’m eating for lunch on Twitter. From my car. While I’m not driving.

Have you ordered your Internet ready car?

Recommended song for this post: Baby you can drive my car.

Mike Markkula, right, Apple's first investor and father figure to Jobs. Fired by Jobs in 1997 his parting advice called for re-invention.

Like everyone else in America who still reads I am deeply engrossed in Walter Isaacson’s biography on Steve Jobs.

It’s a remarkably honest and thorough account. It introduces us to Steve’s early influences. It explains the genesis of his design obsession. It reveals his many flaws.

While the entire book chronicles the story of Steve’s life from childhood to the end, every chapter is a story in its own right. You probably have your favorite. The lost battle with John Sculley. The launch of Macintosh. The board trying to kill the best ever Super Bowl spot. (They failed because Chiat Day secretly refused to sell off the media.) Jobs’ questionably hesitant but triumphant return. The complex rivalry between Jobs and his sometimes nemesis, sometimes friend, one time savior Bill Gates. Or on another front, the confrontations with Michael Eisner that prompted Disney to back off its ill-advised attempt to re-write Toy Story.

Readers can cull endless lessons from these stories: how to simplify, how to believe in an idea, how to adhere to standards, how to trust your intuition, how not to back down. In some cases – personal hygiene, treatment of friends and family – we can also learn what not to do.

But one of my favorite lessons doesn’t come from Steve. It’s attributed to Mike Markkula. Upon his official return to Apple in 1997, Jobs fired Markkula from the board and then asked Mike to join him on one of his long walks. Jobs told the former chairman that his goal was to build a company that would endure. He asked Markkula’s advice. Markkula shared this.

“Lasting companies know how to re-invent themselves. Hewlett-Packard had done that repeatedly; it started as an instrument company, then a computer company. Apple has been sideline by Microsoft in the PC business. (by then Apple’s market share had plummeted from 16 percent to four percent). You’ve got to reinvent the company to do some other thing, like consumer products or devices. You’ve got to be like a butterfly and have a metamorphosis.”*

The language and the metaphor may not sound brilliant. But you sure can’t argue with the advice. According to Isaacson, Jobs didn’t say much that day in 1997, but clearly he agreed.

Lasting companies know how to re-invent themselves. I think the same might even be said for individuals.

Got a favorite story from the book of Jobs? Please share. And as always, thanks for stopping by.

Photo “borrowed” from Christopher Dernbach’s blog Mac History.

*Excerpt from Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, page 320.

My friend Erik Proulx is in the midst of his second Lemonade film, this one telling the story of what we all hope might be Detroit’s resurrection. As with his first film, the original Lemonade, it’s not government policy or unemployment checks, or even the bailout of the automobile industry – don’t get me wrong I was in favor of a better stimulus package than the one we actually got – that restores an economy, it’s personal and collective optimism, achievement and creativity.

And so it will be with Detroit. The often ill-fated attempts at urban renewal and the erection of shiny glass buildings are never what make a city great – it’s the people who live there. Erik’s film focuses on such people and as an exploration into the spirit and passion of Detroit residents intent on bringing the city back it paints a picture of hope and possibility.

Erik released the extended trailer of Lemonade Detroit right as I happen to be reading Edward Glaeser’sTriumph of the City. Erik’s premise is that with enough will power and motivation (the latter often comes from having got kicked pretty good) people have the ability to turn lemons into Lemonade. Glaeser’s hypothesis is that cities magnify those qualities. They attract innovators and entrepreneurs, place them in proximity to one another and encourage interaction, collisions and social mobility.

In the late 1800’s right before Detroit became the center of the automotive universe, the city looked a lot like Silicon Valley in the very early days of the computer industry.  Dozens of small, innovative firms and an army of entrepreneurs – Henry Ford, Ransom Olds, David Buick – fueled each other’s ideas, created a community of competition and attracted investors.

A culture of learning and experimentation, and communication among and between industry pioneers, led to the growth of both a city and an industry. Detroit was a center of knowledge. If you were in the car business you needed to be there.

But unlike Silicon Valley, where constant learning, education, and ideas continue to attract thinkers, Detroit’s industrial model led to the opposite: a culture and a massive scale production process which, according to Glaeser, turned out to be “antithetical to the urban virtues of competition and connection.”

Instead, because the assembly line made it possible to be highly productive without knowing that much, it killed the need for learning and attracted the kind of worker for whom learning didn’t matter. According to Glaeser’s thesis, as soon as that happened Detroit was destined to die. “When a city creates a powerful enough knowledge-destroying idea, it sets itself up for self-destruction,” the author writes.

In the end the same industry that made Detroit great ended up destroying it. The vertical integration of the automobile companies crowded out new ideas, spinoffs and alternative industries.

Erik’s film suggests that if urban re-invention is possible it will emanate from a diverse mix with of human capital. Entrepreneurs, artists, educators and other creative people are the ones who’ll make it happen. They’ll make new connections, riff off of each other, and maybe turn Detroit into the kind of city that Glaeser writes about: one that attracts smart people and enables them to work collaboratively to build something lasting.

Kudos to Erik for celebrating the human spirit and making us all more hopeful.

So Made by Many and Good for Nothing started the 50/50 project – the idea being to get friends and partners — advertising and digital agencies mostly — to launch 50 projects in 50 days to raise at least $1 million, perhaps much more, for relief. Today is the official launch day for many of those projects. October 16.World Food Day.

Our project at Mullen is called The Good Belly Project. We realize that we can’t actually transport food to East Africa. We can’t secure a fleet of helicopters. We can’t establish an on ground presence.

So here’s what we did. We launched a social-media powered fundraising partnership with 17 of Boston’s top restaurants and their customers using Instagram. Every time a customer takes a photograph of their restaurant meal and shares it, the participating restaurant will donate $1.00 to the Good Belly Project, which transfers 100 percent of the proceeds to UNICEF’s East Africa’s relief efforts.

Yes there’s a kind of absurd irony in posting photographs of gourmet meals in order to help people who are starving. But at the same time there’s a logic to it. It’s the ideal time and place to remind people who have plenty to eat how fortunate they are.  It taps into an existing behavior – food porn is pretty prevalent on photo sharing networks like Instagram. And it gives the participating restaurants something in return for their contribution. A bit of visibility and cred for supporting the cause.

I hope you’ll join us over the next few weeks. You can frequent the restaurants that have offered to help.  You can post food porn images. And you can, perhaps, realize how fortunate you are to have food in your belly and maybe write a big fat check to help those less fortunate. Feel free to make that donation here, at the Good Belly Project.

Good Belly Restaurants (links and addresses):

• Abigail’s American
• Bambara American
• Bergamot American
• Bon Me Truck Food Truck
• Figs Beacon Hill Pizza
• Figs Charlestown Pizza
• Fillbelly’s Food Truck
• Hillstone American
• Isabelle’s CurlycakesBakery
• Island Creek Oyster BarSeafood
• Kingfish Hall Seafood
• KO Prime Steakhouse
• Market by Jean GeorgesAmerican
• Naked Pizza Pizza
• Rialto Restaurant + BarItalian
• Sibling Rivalry American
• Stephi’s On TremontAmerican

I can’t help it. I look at everything through the filter of either creativity, innovation or advertising. So while watching Martin Scorcese’s new documentary about George Harrison, I found this to be one of my favorite anecdotes. Paul McCartney recalls what it was like to prepare for a recording session.

Now, keep in mind that in the 70’s most advertising agency creative teams would insist on two weeks to copy and layout. Didn’t matter whether it was a full campaign, or a single ad. The Beatles, meanwhile, could generate a song a day. On demand no less.

The second part of the story, of course, is about collaboration. John and Paul would show up a week later with their seven or eight songs, all of which were news to their band mates, and within a matter of minutes George and Ringo would be adding riffs and the backbeat, making the idea, the song, the music better.

I imagine that anyone who has ever played in a band knows that this is how it works, or should.  But I couldn’t help but be inspired by these recollections from Paul as he talked about his non-writing (at the time) partners. “They’d go ‘uh huh.’ And George would be like, ‘I can see what you’re doing. I’m one of you.’”

That is how collaboration is supposed to work. It’s the epitome of celebrating the idea instead of the person who came up with it. It’s a great great lesson for all of us working as part of a creative team in the new on demand world.  If you’re not the one who makes the idea, be the one who makes the idea better.

Decades later, The Beatles still inspire. Think I’ll go and dig out some old LPs. Oh, and if you have not seen Martin Scorcese’s new two-part documentary George Harrison: Living in a Material World, you must. It’s on HBO right now.

This may be a lousy rule, but we'll discuss it at MIMA Summit 2011

I’m on my way to Minneapolis at the invitation of my friend Tim Brunelle, CEO of the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association, for MIMA Summit 2011. From everything I can gather he has an awesome session planned. Google’s analytics guru Avinash Kaushik and Wired’s Chris Anderson both keynote; the list of speakers is impressive; and the sessions are all designed to inspire action.

I’m doing a session with the prolific and omnipresent David Armano. It’s called Group Therapy for Would Be Innovators. We both decided to eschew Powerpoint, panels and pontification. Instead we hope to conduct a large group discussion that covers the following

• What does inno­va­tion even mean inside an agency?
• Can agen­cies actu­ally create value beyond service?
• Should they think in terms of cre­at­ing their own products?
• Does the ser­vice model get in the way?
• How can cul­ture, space, and team struc­tures help
• Is the role of CIO even necessary?
• How much should you invest in innovation?

For some reason innovation appears to be the new industry buzzword. As a result it gets overused, applied to everything, and sometimes pursued with no clear purpose.  My thoughts on the subject are simple.

We need to innovate for three reasons.

To keep up with changing consumer behavior.

In just a few years our consumers have turned into content creators and distribution channels. Our old media connected information to them. New media connected them to information. But social media connects people to each other. That means agencies have to invent new ways to engage. We have to master transmedia story telling. We need to get better at gaming dynamics. It takes new kinds of work, teams, briefs and processes to be effective and that is a form of cultural and organization innovation.

To create new products and IP

Who says an agency can’t invent the next Groupon or Instagram or Kickstarter. Our companies are filled with talented, creative, idea generating people. But most of us can only think like service companies.  It’s why people like Matt Britton, who created Crowdtap, had to take his idea outside of his agency. Granted some of us are trying to do this with internal labs or various kinds of internal spinoffs, but it takes a software mindset rather than an agency mindset. You need to be faster, more agile and comfortable with prototyping.

To assure long term growth

We spend an inordinate amount of time maximizing how we deliver current services to current clients. Pitches drain our time and energy when we try to sell current services to new clients. It’s often a challenge to develop new services, products or IP for clients who came to us for a different reason. So maybe we ought to carve off at least a percentage of time, money and resources to invent new services or products for either our own firms or client companies who are willing to experiment with us. If one thing is certain it’s this: in transformative times incumbents rarely survive.

None of this is easy. We have to get buy-in, plant seeds, change people, discover new partners.  But it beats sitting around watching other people do it first and admiring their accomplishments.

I’m hoping the MIMA sessions yield some great discussion and inspire some new ideas. Wouldn’t it be great if next year we were listening to someone in this year’s audience present their latest innovation.

The brilliant Robert Reich on us and them. He talks about why we can’t (or won’t) solve unemployment or address poverty among families with children. Reason? Us and them. They are not one of us. They are not in our community of concern. They are not people with whom we share interdependency. Too bad he’s not running the country.

You may never have heard of Jean-Philippe Vergne, Professor, R. Ivey School of Business, University of Western Ontario. But he will give you an entirely new perspective on the value of inviting your users, customers, community into the creation of your brand and company. He argues that pirates and hackers actually make things better. Those in control not so much.

And finally, this  young dude, Adam Braun. It’s not so much that he took up a cause, though he did. Or that he built 40 schools around the world, though he did. Rather it’s the idea that he has re-defined not-for-profit, labeling it “for-purpose,” and applying for profit principles and practices to Pencils of Promise.

There were many other great speakers and endless conversations about possibilities.  You can find more of them on the Zeitgeist YouTube page.  If you want to be totally blown away, watch some of the young minds talk about what they’re up to. You’ll either think you wasted your youth entirely, or that you better get on your kids’ asses real soon. If you’re a news junkie, check out Koppel and Ariana going at it(gently but still) in this panel conducted by New Yorker editor Nicholas Thompson.

Thanks to Google for sharing all of this content with those of us who attended and the many more who didn’t. Watch. Learn.  Be inspired.

It's actually your brain that gets blown open at Zeitgeist 11. Art work by the Brick Artist, Nathan Sawaya

Imagine being hooked up to an IV bag.  Only instead of saline it’s filled with a high concentration of inspiration.  And instead of the bag being set on a slow drip, it’s turned all the way to the right, to “fire hose.”  That was Google Zeitgeist 11. Themed Each of us, all of us, it was brilliantly choreographed by the fine folks at Google who assembled an amazing cast of characters, all of whom managed to thread the theme through their presentations.

Robert Reich crystallized all of America’s problems and solutions into the simple need for creating communities that build empathy and interdependence. (Is this the potential of social media?) Will write a post on that later.

Ariana Huffington and Ted Koppel presented opposing views (sort of) on the state of journalism. Koppel arguing that the news media only gives people what they want rather than what they need. Ariana’s position is that truth (objectivity doesn’t really exist in journalism) is better achieved by crowdsourcing, curating and greater participation rather than through the filtering that Koppel calls for. Especially when foreign governments and one reporter’s sources can game the system.

Jean Phillippe-Vergne brilliantly compared similarities among The Dutch East India Company, the BBC, AT&T, and National Institute of Health to show how new categories initially operating as state sanctioned monopolies become much better when the “pirates” influence and change them. Think back to the days when the British government had the BBC presenting (almost exclusively) religion and classical music. Supposedly it was good for you. Every one of those categories and organizations initially thought it was best served by aligning with government protection. But was it?

There were stories of success from moguls like Ted Branson and Eike Batista; examples of innovation from technology enthusiasts like Dr. Jay Parkinson (brilliant idea to be a digital doctor); and amazing demonstrations of passion and purpose from the likes of Dave Eggers (826 Valencia) and Robert Hammond and Joshua David who co-founded Friends of the High Line.

Over two days, presentation after presentation by young artists, filmmakers, and entrepreneurs filled attendees’ heads with all kinds of possibilities.

Through many of the presentations I detected a similar formula working again and again, both for its creators and for those of us in the business of marketing them. Here they are:

Listen to your dreams

Every presenter who had a success story to share, from Dave Eggers to Nathan Sawaya, had a nagging urge to do something that would make a difference. Granted Zeitgeist 11 featured only those who succeeded, but many did so against huge odds and despite skepticism.

Avoid the naysayers

This ran through almost every great story. So many people, from young entrepreneurs (Scooter Braun) to successful artists (Miral Kotb) had to free themselves from people who told them they were insane or that their idea would never work. You can’t have that negative energy around you and accomplish anything of significance.

Include the community

You would expect this at a session whose theme is Each of us, all of us.  But in case after case – crowdsourcing designs for The High Line, for example – ideas got better when multiple constituents were involved and communities gathered behind a purpose.

Tell a story

We still need marketing. Whether you launch an idea on Kickstarter, sell your vision to one other person, or put up a website, the story you start and re-write as you go becomes a powerful magnet, attracting attention and inviting others to share it.

Iterate

No one among the presenters knew exactly how they’d accomplish their goals when they got started. They just knew that they had a goal. They figured out how to navigate there way there as they went. Early failures simply turned into lessons that that helped build the strength needed to persevere.

GTS

Google that shit. At least that made Adam Braun’s list. To me it’s simply a reminder that we have a multi-billion dollar infrastructure that connects and enables almost anyone with an idea. Answers, resources, community are all there for our using and sharing. Master the tools and platforms and you have new ways of creating a business. Just look at what Dr. Jay Parkinson did.

When you come home from something like Zeitgeist 11 one of two things happens. You instantly get caught up in the reality and demands of your day job and your new found jolt of energy dissipates . Or you actually rethink what’s possible and actually do something. In which case the energy builds.  I’m definitely going for the latter.

Skype in the Classroom from Made By Many on Vimeo.

I’m a pretty big fan of Made by Many. As the London based company of renegades likes to say, they “make new things out of the Internet.” That alone is reason to like them.

Note that MxM is not an ad agency. Nor are they a digital shop in the vein of an R/GA or Big Spaceship. They’re somewhere in between a software company, an IDEO-like design shop and a marketing firm.

If you believe as I do that a big part of our (the advertising industry) future will also be about making new things, there’s much you can learn from this small, but growing company: everything from their space (totally open with people sitting at benches to foster collaboration); to the kinds of people they hire (developers); to their willingness to share so much of what they know (read their blog); to their commitment to learning (they once took 30-plus employees – 95 percent of the company — to SxSW for a week).

They also embrace a very different approach to making what they make than a typical agency would practice. Instead of employing a linear process that sees a project migrate from research to strategy to creative to approval to production to media buy, they apply lean start-up techniques — testing, learning and iterating their way to a solution that they know will work by the time it’s ready for prime time.

Consider their relatively recent Skype in the Classroom project, which just won a mention at the Core 77 design awards. (Open IDEO won.)  We all know what a typical ad agency would do if challenged by Skype to get more teachers to use its video conferencing service. They’d create an ad campaign espousing the virtues of the service and run it in trades targeted at educators.

But if you’re a software company (or a design thinker) it never dawns on you to create an ad campaign.  Instead you focus on building something worthy of being advertised. Which is exactly what Made by Many did.  Sure they started with the premise that more teachers need to learn about Skype and how or why to use it. But they quickly discovered, through lots of interviews with teachers, that familiarity wasn’t the problem at all. Teachers already knew and loved the service. They simply needed more people to Skype with. So what did Made by Many make?  A directory that invited teachers to post the subjects, topics or projects around which they wanted to connect with other teachers or experts.

Skype in the classroom brings together a community of people and information to save teachers time and help them make the most of Skype and the international teaching community.

Teachers could post what they were working on or looking for. Then from anywhere and everywhere around the world other teachers with similar projects or useful expertise could identify opportunities for sharing and collaborating.  Taking advantage of the network effect – the more users use it the more people are attracted and excited to join – the project quickly grew to over 14,000 teachers and nearly 700 projects.

It’s innovation, crowdsourcing and the power of social media all rolled into one very cool idea that spread quickly with little more than word of mouth and some well deserved press coverage.

To me, projects like this are what we should all want to create. When you think about the potential of Skype in the Classroom – connecting teachers and students in the U.S. with their counterparts in the Middle East for example, or teaching kids about each other’s respective cultures – it has huge implications for learning and even international relations.

We might also want to learn how to make conceive and execute ideas like this. Many of us get our inspiration from the same places over and over again – other ad agencies, recent campaigns, award shows. But expand the list of places you go for inspiration and take the time to learn some of the new ways of creating, and who knows, maybe you’ll be competing against IDEO for design awards. And impressing the hell out of your clients in the process.

We’re living in a time when the diminishing impact of traditional advertising and the consumer/citizen’s ability to control and influence media and content requires all of us to get better at creating utility, experiences and baked-in brand qualities, not to mention social value, if we’re to serve and guide clients in their behavior, actions and branding efforts.

IDEO should be one of our benchmarks. Ironically, they’re as interested in the tools and tactics needed to generate awareness for their creations and inventions as we are for the methods behind their accomplishments.  So we have something in common.

Clark Scheffy, a lead designer, shared some of his and IDEO’s key beliefs.  Worth noting that in IDEO’s capabilities presentation there are few facts, no boring stats, and no “selling,” just a philosophy that is hard to argue with.

Design can have a huge impact on the world around us

The idea that design can create new products, change behavior, solve problems, and build solutions is key to IDEO’s belief system and to their entire approach to problem solving. It’s not about research; it’s about creativity and inventing stuff – products, methods, experiences – that effect real change. From programs like Keep the Change, to vaccines that don’t require needles or medical professionals to administer them.

Magic happens through diversity of experience and perspective

You can sense this just from meeting the people at IDEO.  Designers, UX professionals, former consultants eager to be more creative, former ad agency types, printers, musicians, strategists, chefs. You notice diversity in accents, skin color, age, gender. IDEO’s approach to collaboration and team problem solving (asking for help is more important than having an idea) is part of the culture.

Inspiration can be found in many places and in many ways, but you have to get out there.

In advertising we depend too much on query and focus groups. IDEO gets out there. They check into hospitals and strap cameras to their foreheads to improve health care. They live in a van with three other people on the edge of the beach to better connect with surfers when designing board shorts. Their designers balance checkbooks with ordinary people when working on banking products. It’s less about size of sample and more about proximity to those whom a product or brand strives to serve.

You get to great by experimenting

Their mantra, “Think to build. Build to think,” says it all.  They’re famous for their prototyping, but the idea of finding the answers in the building, embracing an iterative rather than linear process, brings to mind Lean Startup-type thinking rather than the typical ad agency assembly line approach.

Knowledge across categories and industries yields better ideas

How many times have you had a client ask for experience in their category?  Do you have car experience?  Packaged goods?  We may know that it matters more to them than to the ability to generate ideas that work. But IDEO takes the offensive and markets aggressively the value of that range of experience. Perhaps we should package that feature a little bit more effectively.

Success comes from vision and action

Plenty of firms do research, discover insights, hand over some data and move on.  IDEO refuses to take on projects that don’t have an actionable outcome. It makes me think that agencies should take (or consider) the inverse approach, requesting more of a role in the invention and creation of what it is that gets advertised or communicated in the first place.

We’re most successful when we work with not for a client

No doubt many of us are working this way. But within the advertising industry there remains a bit of the “creative magic” that only a few people are able to conceive. When that’s the case we work in silos and in isolation from our clients.  The “creative team” goes away and does their thing off in a corner. Great when you’re making a TV spot, but if you’re creating a digital experience, or developing an eco-system or inventing a new service, it’s definitely better to work jointly with our partners.

My favorite quote from Clark came in side conversation during a tour of the office.  “There’s no such thing as a boring brand or assignment.  Just un-exciting people.  We strive to work with exciting people.”

That may be the best take-away of all.

Image snagged from Ideo’s site.