By Alex Parkinson, Associate Director, Society for New Communications Research of The Conference Board The Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) of The Conference Board (SNCR)—a 501(c)(3) research and education institution dedicated to the advanced study of how new and emerging communications tools and technologies (such as digital, social media, and mobile) are affecting business, […]

I recently had a great conversation with David Dufresne, CEO of Bandzoogle, an amazing company that probably a lot of you already use to build your websites. Bandzoogle is based in Quebec and have made a major impact on the independent music scene giving tools to musicians to help build their career.

In our conversation we discussed ways you can ensure visitors to your website are converting into fans and spending their time and money where you want them to, website dos and don’ts, apps and responsive websites as well as knowing your audience and who consumes your content. With David’s background as a venture capitalist he shares his unique perspective on this new music industry.

This episode was edited by Andy Warren of  www.applesandchocolate.com

Take a listen below!

Aaron Bethune.

Music Specialist. Creative Collaborator. Author. Musicpreneur.

Take a listen to the interview here.

Check out maybe the first ever official commercial for Clash Royale they posted in Korea – this one was for a university challenge! Still hilarious.

Creative Credits:
— n/a —

By Katie Paine, Founder and CEO, Paine Publishing, and Advisory Board Member, Society for New Communications Research of The Conference Board “I can show a direct connection from this press release to company revenues,” said no communications professional ever. That’s right, I repeat… “Said no-one ever!” If you’re wondering “why not?” one reason is that […]

In this infographic, learn about research conducted by the ANA, in partnership with GfK, to find out how B-to-B marketers can become drivers of growth in their organizations.

North Korean borderlands. Hotel rooms outfitted with binoculars to peer across the river at the forbidden land, spotty phone connections and a bridge partially destroyed by Korean War-era bombs, and smugglers of diamonds, watches and expensive face creams: This is the Chinese-North Korean border, a world of shifting identities and coded language. In the New Republic, Suki Kim traces its shadowy outlines as she makes her way to Dadong, a notoriously dangerous border city. In Dadong, she spends time with a group of smugglers, attempting to pierce the impenetrable logic of their world as she seeks a deeper understanding of North Korea that has always eluded her, “Whatever I sought to understand about North Korea was always beyond my grasp; the country’s inherent unknowability was a condition of its survival.” (Watch Suki’s TED Talk)

How your brain controls what you weigh. Losing weight is hard, and only a slim fraction of dieters are able to do so successfully. In the New York Times, Sandra Aamodt reveals the inherent flaw in dieting: the brain. The brain, she writes, has a host of tools that it uses to keep you within a certain weight range called your set point.  The brain’s natural responses not only make it difficult to lose weight and maintain it, but also make it more likely that you’ll end up gaining weight in the long run. But don’t give up! Sandra offers suggestions on what to do instead–within the limit of your brain’s natural responses, of course. (Watch Sandra’s TED Talk)

The second digital revolution. While the Internet has inarguably been revolutionary, it still faces significant challenges, like reliably verifying identity and conducting transactions online. But blockchain–the technology that powers bitcoin–promises to change all that, argue Don Tapscott and son Alex Tapscott in their new book Blockchain Revolution. The blockchain establishes what they call a “Trust Protocol” and the ability to record “virtually everything of value and importance to humankind,” without having to worry about security. It is, they suggest, the second generation of the digital revolution. (Watch Don’s TED Talk)

Don’t drag yourself to the polls, celebrate! US election seasons used to have parades, festivals and open-air debates — a joyful participation in civic life. Now, they’re mostly soundbites from a TV screen or 140-character inflammations. But it doesn’t have to be this way, says Eric Liu. With help from the Knight Foundation, Civic University, Liu’s nonprofit for powerful citizenship, is launching the Joy of Voting project. In four pilot cities across the country, it will partner with local organizations to get the community excited about voting this November. As Liu writes: “From parades and street theater, to civic engagement apps and university rivalries, this project will combine the old and the new to reinvigorate a culture of voting.” (Watch Eric’s TED Talk)

A hurdle to becoming who you are. Equality needs more than just social acceptance; it needs legal protections. In The Guardian, model and activist Geena Rocero writes that even though she and many other members of the transgender community were socially accepted in the Philippines, not being able to change her name and gender marker on important legal documents was a substantial hindrance — one that motivated her move to America. After moving to San Francisco and later to New York City to pursue a modeling career, she grappled with whether or not to reveal her transgender identity professionally. But after she came out ( at TED2014), she was inspired to tell the stories of others going through similar struggles. “There are still a lot of trans people’s stories that need to be told – the ones who never had the resources and support to emigrate to the United States.” (Watch her TED Talk)

The ultimate check and balance. In his first-ever longform article, Edward Snowden asserts the political and democratic necessity of whistleblowing  in The Intercept. Sitting with the knowledge of enormous, illegal wrongdoing, he says, is an excruciating moral compromise too many are forced to make. Citing heroic examples, such as the Pentagon Papers and Wikileaks, Snowden explains the uncomfortable differences between accepted and illegal whistleblowing. “What explains the distinction between the permissible and the impermissible disclosure? The answer is control. A leak is acceptable if it’s not seen as a threat, a challenge to the prerogatives of the institution.” Despite the enormous risks, he argues, whistleblowers like him act on this core driving principle: “We, the people, are ultimately the strongest and most reliable check on the power of government.” (Watch his TED Talk)

Give up more often. “Never give up” is a cornerstone of persistence and grit. But according to Tim Harford in The Financial Times, knowing when to give up is just as valuable. Using Daniel Kahneman’s (watch his TED Talk) and Amos Tversky’s “loss aversion” principle, Harford shows how our natural psychological dislike of losses over gains causes us to overlook the advantages of moving on and, ultimately, trying a better approach to the same problem. (Watch Tim’s TED Talk)

The unintended consequences of campus reform. At the end of 2015, students protesters across the United States approached campus administrators with demands for campus reform addressing racial concerns on campus. In the Wall Street Journal, using key tenets of psychology and scientific studies, Jonathan Haidt and Lee Jussim show how the proposed reforms may actually backfire, arguing that “they are likely to damage race relations and to make campus life more uncomfortable for everyone, particularly black students.” Instead, they call on universities to try a different approach than the one that has failed over the past several decades, a new approach based on available knowledge of what does and doesn’t work in order to create a campus where everyone feels welcome. (Watch Jonathan’s TED Talk)

When I first started my online radio show, “Magnificent Time,” my first goal was to share my message of empowerment with a broader audience. What I didn’t realize at the time is that the power of a podcast goes well beyond broadcasting. That’s why I was thrilled to welcome to…

Infectious communication is the result of creating such compelling experiences and content that your customers enthusiastically become your best advocates.

It involves any method through which your message is conveyed by willing and (usually) unpaid intermediaries. It can cover everything from word of mouth to shared media such as TedTalks, for example. Success is when things go ‘viral’ and develop a life of their own beyond your control, scary though that may be.

More and more organizations see the benefits of infectious communication. Brands such as Burberry, LEGO and Apple are moving most of their marketing activity to social media platforms. Unfortunately many others are simply applying old rules to new media. You see it on websites that are clunky to use and therefore deliver poor user experiences. You see it with demeaning pleas for customers to ‘Like us’ on Facebook, or worse still, the purchase of followers and fans from sweat shops in India. Why do some organizations simply not get the power of infectious communication and how to achieve it?

Marketing Should Be A Verb, Not A Noun

The answer to the above question is that in many organizations marketing has become a noun, a set of processes and a function. Instead it should be a verb, a set of behaviors and everything that an organization does. When John Lewis, Arthur Guinness and Conrad Hilton started their brands they saw marketing holistically. They believed that it was how they treated their customers and ran their companies. But, perhaps, because of the introduction of the scientific view of management largely founded by Frederick Taylor and continued by Alfred Sloan in his time at General Motors, fueled by the rigor of P&G’s approach to brand marketing in the 1960s and 1970s, and reinforced by the plethora of MBA programs since then, marketing has become a function supported by its own set of rigid principles not dissimilar in their rigor to finance. But this is changing.

The advent of social media has opened up so many communication channels that are beyond the remit of traditional ‘above the line’ marketers. The ways in which consumers form impressions of brands are so much richer than advertising alone that marketing activity has become an experience in and of itself in many organizations. Adam Greenwood, a teen ‘vlogger’, discovered that there was no toilet paper available when he used the toilet on the Virgin Train from Euston to Glasgow so he did what any good millennial would do – he tweeted Virgin HQ about it. Virgin picked up the tweet and within a few minutes a Virgin employee was knocking on the door with a roll 
of toilet paper to rescue Adam from his predicament. That tweet and its  follow-up story have been ‘liked’ and shared by over 6,000 people.

Is this story about customer service? Is it about complaint resolution? Or is it about marketing? The answer to all of these is ‘yes’. The fact is that ‘above the line’ is now ‘below the radar’ for many consumers.

Research by Thales S Teixeira for a Harvard Business Review article revealed that the percentage of ads considered fully viewed and getting high attention has decreased dramatically, from 97 per cent in the early 1990s to less than 20 per cent in 2015. In 2013, the average American was exposed to about 52,000 TV commercials. So it is no surprise that, in these days of remote controls, TiVo and digital video recorders, consumers vote with their fingers and skip the ads – unless they are entertained. The most powerful way to entertain people is to engage them emotionally through brand storytelling. At Christmas 2014, the British supermarket brand Sainsbury in partnership with the Royal British Legion released a moving video that celebrated relationships forged in the First World War. Despite it being 3 minutes 40 seconds long, nearly 17 million people have viewed it on YouTube.

Tell A Story That People Care About

John Lewis Partnership released its own Christmas ad, also celebrating relationships, in this case featuring a penguin. It has been viewed nearly 23 million times.

Neither of these ads promoted a brand or a product. They told a story that was emotionally engaging about a higher purpose – being with people whom you care about at Christmas.

So we have two interesting but opposing trends: one is the decline in consumer attention to traditional advertising and therefore the increasing cost of buying awareness; the other is the increasing trend for consumers to willingly view marketing material and even share it if it strikes a chord. How much would John Lewis have had to pay to air their ad on prime-time television to attract 23 million viewers, we wonder?

Some brands go even further. LEGO’s purpose is ‘to inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow’ and it does this through its range of plastic building blocks but also increasingly through its social platforms and media activity. In February 2014 it released The LEGO Movie to critical and consumer acclaim. By September 2014 the movie had enjoyed sales of $468 million and LEGO was reporting a shortage of product. The trailer has also been viewed over 27 million times on YouTube. If you are one of the apparently few people that haven’t yet seen it you can do so here.

Think about that for a moment. LEGO has earned nearly $500 million in income by enticing consumers to sit through a 98-minute advertisement for the brand. A very high proportion of those viewers were ‘highly qualified prospects’ in the jargon of marketers – kids, to you and me. LEGO achieved this by creating marketing that is so infectious that their target consumers are willing and enthusiastic participants.

Bigger Is Not Better

One of the things about infectious communication is that it is a great leveler. You don’t need to be a large corporate or spend mega-bucks to get your message across. In fact, the less you can spend the more likely it is that you will hit on something that really works because it forces you to be innovative.

For example, Air Canada staged an experiential event in a bar in London called ‘The Maple Leaf’ – which is popular with Canadians – in order to highlight its London to Canada service. A pilot and flight attendants visited the crowded bar and gave away free tickets so that expat Canadians could be with their families at Christmas. Here’s the result.

First Direct, the online bank owned by HSBC, went out to 580,000 of their customers and asked them what they liked most about the brand. Their answer was that being able to engage with a real person rather than an interactive voice response was really important for them. So First Direct said, ‘Great, would any of you like to be in our ad?’ Hundreds of customers said, ‘Yes!’ and so First Direct’s advertising agency created a number of advertisements featuring customers speaking about their First Direct experience. One, named ‘Call Center’, featured a customer speaking about her experience of calling First Direct and being able to speak to a person to get help any time of the day or night. The ad was shot in a bare room with the customer speaking to a single hand-held camera. She is nervous and stumbles over her words, but her enthusiasm for First Direct is clear. The simple treatment, engaging tone and authenticity are estimated to have produced 5 million in incremental revenues for First Direct – the ad cost next to nothing to make.

This was probably one of the first examples of crowdsourcing, and First Direct has continued to engage with its customers since then. It now has a section of its website called ‘Lab’, which tests new product and service ideas and invites customers to try them and give their feedback. First Direct has won numerous awards, including Best Banking Brand by Which?, and it remains the most recommended bank in the UK – achieving an NPS rating of 62 per cent in an industry that scores an average NPS of 0 per cent, according to Satmetrix Systems UK research. First Direct’s score is remarkable for any brand, let alone a bank.

Traditional marketing can be costly, slow and unengaging. Robert Stephens, founder of the Geek Squad, says, ‘Marketing is a tax that you pay for being unremarkable.’ There is a great deal of truth in Stephens’s comment; it often seems that the more boring the brand, the larger the marketing budget.

The average marketing campaign can take months to plan and execute, with all the risk that by the time it is aired circumstances have changed. For example, AT&T, Accenture, Gatorade and Gillette all dropped Tiger Woods from very expensive sponsorship and advertising campaigns in 2009, when he was involved in a car accident following issues with his wife and disclosures of infidelity.

The benefits of infectious communication, by contrast, include cost-efficiency and speed. Infectious communication allows you to be ‘in the moment’ and communicate something that is topical and relevant. But you have to be clever and you have to be fast. In 2014, Nissan produced an ad just seven minutes after Clarence House announced that William and Kate, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, were expecting their second child. Featuring the Nissan X-Trail, the company tweeted a picture of the interior of the vehicle with a crown on each seat. The message accompanying the image was ‘It could be triplets and there would still be enough room for the Queen.’

Plan To Win

You also have to be prepared and organized to take advantage of opportunities. In 2013, during the third quarter of Super Bowl XLVII, a power outage at the Superdome caused the lights to go out for more than half an hour. Within minutes, Oreo cookies tweeted an ad that read ‘Power out? No problem’ with a picture of an Oreo and the caption, ‘You can still dunk in the dark.’ The message was shared 20,000 times on Facebook and Twitter and gathered 525 million earned media impressions (five times the number of people who actually watched the Super Bowl (and its ads) on TV). Despite the fact that it was a spontaneous, unscheduled tweet on social media, Adweek voted it one of the Top 5 ads of Super Bowl night. Oreo achieved this because they had a 15-person social media team ready to respond to whatever happened at the Super Bowl within 10 minutes or less – and they were aware of a survey that showed 36 per cent of the Super Bowl audience would be consulting a second screen while watching the game.

The effects of infectious communication are long lasting. If you Google Oreo Super Bowl even now, you will find a plethora of references and links to it. But the important thing is to ensure that your social media message is consistent with what your brand stands for.

Excerpted in part from: On Purpose: Delivering A Branded Customer Experience People Love by Shaun Smith & Andy Milligan, in partnership with Kogan Page publishing.

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Sweden national team captain Zlatan Ibrahimovic stars in the Volvo web film ahead of the 2016 UEFA Euro Cup, “Prologue” created by the creative shop Forsman & Bodenfors. Celebrating the independent mind and those who think differently, Volvo has centered in on the uncompromising Swedish striker who will captain his country at this years big tournament in France.

The Made by Sweden ‘Prologue’ ad promotes Volvo’s V90 car while focusing on a solitary Zlatan as he discusses his turbulent upbringing and the mentality which drove him to be one of Sweden’s greatest ever players.

“The campaign is a celebration of the independent mind, of the power that lies in the ability to think differently. There are many similarities between Zlatan’s and Volvo’s journeys. We haven’t got to where we are now by doing the same as everyone else,” said Anders Gustafsson, senior vice president of Volvo for Europe, Middle East and Africa.

Creative Credits:
Advertising Agency: Forsman & Bodenfors

A great TED tidbit we missed the first time around: In TIME Magazine last month, Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell (TED04) wrote a tribute to Freakonomics author Steven Levitt (TED04, TEDGlobal), who was honored as one of the TIME 100. It starts like this:

Not long after Freakonomics came out, Steven Levitt and I had a public debate at a salon in downtown Manhattan. The subject was crime. In my book The Tipping Point, I had argued that the cluster of innovative policing strategies known as “broken windows” played a big role in the dramatic drop in New York City’s crime rate. Levitt and his co-author Stephen Dubner argued, to the contrary, that “broken windows” was an illusion and that other factors, like the demographic changes brought about by the legalization of abortion, played a much bigger role. It was a straightforward back-and-forth. Levitt got up and made his case. I got up and made mine. But halfway through, I glanced over at Levitt and had a realization that I’m not sure I’ve ever had before with an intellectual opponent—that if I made my case persuasively and cogently enough, he would change his mind. He was, in other words, listening. More >>

The above-mentioned event was, course, a TED salon. Held at the TED loft in Tribeca, it featured the friendly, timely debate between Gladwell and Levitt, the week Freakonomics was published. Very pleased to see the salon had as much impact on them as it did on us!