As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights.

An underwater museum. Off the south coast of Lanzarote, 12 to 14 meters beneath the sea, lies artist Jason DeCaires Taylor’s latest museum, Museo Atlántico, which opened on January 10. Three years in the making, the installation is not only an artistic way of raising awareness about environmental issues, but will provide a home for marine organisms: Taylor designed each of more than 300 life-size pieces to be artificial reefs, which will attract a diversity of marine life from angel sharks to barracudas to sponges. (Watch Jason’s TED Talk)

A documentary on a baffling disease. Jennifer Brea was 28 when she came down with a 104.7-degree fever. The fever marked the beginning of a host of symptoms, from dizziness to temporarily losing the ability to write, and endless doctor’s appointments that always ended with reassurances that she was physically fine. Later diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis, commonly known as chronic fatigue syndrome, Brea filmed a documentary from her bed to shed light on this widespread but poorly understood illness. The resulting film, Unrest, premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival on January 20 — and was widely and warmly reviewed. (Watch Jennifer’s TED Talk)

The fight for accessible mental health care. Vikram Patel and colleagues have published two new papers in The Lancet that explore similar strategies for closing the global treatment gap for depression and harmful drinking. Both studies evaluated the use of brief psychological treatments delivered by lay counsellors in primary health-care settings. The researchers found that for both depression and harmful drinking, the lay counsellors’ treatment, combined with usual care, was more effective than usual care alone, a combination that may be more cost-effective. (Watch Vikram’s TED Talk)

Fiction as dance. After its premiere in 2015, choreographer Wayne McGregor’s Virginia Woolf–inspired ballet, Woolf Works, returns to the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden, where McGregor is resident choreographer with The Royal Ballet. The production is broken into three acts, each of which draws on a different novel: the first is inspired by Mrs. Dalloway, the second by Orlando, and the third by The Waves. The show will run through February 14, 2017. (Watch Wayne’s TED Talk)

Healthcare’s digital future. The Scripps Translational Science Institute, of which Eric Topol is founder and director, announced a partnership with Nature Research to launch an international journal, npj Digital Medicine. The open-access journal will publish original articles and review research that focus on the use of digital and mobile technologies in healthcare. Along with Steven Steinhubl, Topol will act as editor-in-chief of the journal. (Watch Eric’s TED Talk)

The continued rise of a data-driven world. Data advocate Mallory Soldner presented at the first United Nations World Data Forum, held January 15–18 in Cape Town, South Africa. Soldner participated in two panels. The first explored the use of big data for sustainable development. The second took a hard look at new types of data and emerging techniques for managing big data, exploring, among other questions, how these new frontiers could be used to fill existing data gaps. (Watch Mallory’s TED Talk)

The next generation of leaders. The African Leader University, brainchild of TED Fellow Fred Swaniker, announced the launch of a new undergraduate program in Kigali, Rwanda, a city already home to their School of Business. The first undergraduate students will convene in May 2017 with a second cohort planned for September. The University has also acquired land in Kigali’s Innovation City, where it will build a permanent campus. (Watch Fred’s TED Talk)

Have a news item to share? Write us at [email protected] and you may see it included in this weekly round-up.

The creative imagination is more important than ever now because right before our very eyes we are transitioning to what Peter Drucker called a “post-capitalist economy.”

Cognitive capitalism has begun to rapidly erode the industrial economy. Marketing still rooted in that industrial economy has no choice but to go in a different direction. Hence, talking about marketing ideas or products without discussing the overall shift in the economy would make conversations about disruptive marketing irrelevant. Tactics and techniques don’t live on islands, unto themselves. They are part of the larger world around us.

Those who approach this new world with both feet firmly rooted in the twentieth century will have a hard time understanding some of the tools and personality traits required to make the leap. Even if you work in an industrial-era company that includes manufacturing or producing tangible goods, you’ll find that all companies will become social by design in the next five years.

The best marketers and organizations will act and think very much like open-source software. Success will be determined by constantly testing and experimenting with new designs. Design is at the center of all human experience.

Steve Jobs built Apple, the world’s most valuable company by focusing not on technology or marketing but on design. While I am a huge fan of engineering degrees and engineers (I did go to Lehigh University, a school heavily rooted in engineering), I believe that empathy, design, and emotional intelligence—three key skills for disruptive marketing and design—are better learned from an immersion in the arts, humanities, and psychology than from pure business, engineering, and management disciplines. An art history major who has studied paintings of the impressionists or “outsider art” may have gained insights into the human elements of technology and the importance of its usability. Psychologists and sociologists are more likely than pure marketers to know how to motivate people and understand what users want. A musician, chef, or fine artist who is driven to create always leads and innovates in a world in which we can develop almost anything we imagine.

The most disruptive marketers believe in using all possibilities available to them, including nondigital tools, in a world with ever more abundant goods and greater access to ever more information. This sometimes runs in contradiction to older systems rooted in hierarchy, monopoly, and scarcity. However, those who look for networks, platforms, and hive mind thinking to be the new avenues of feedback engagement and growth will find success.

In a world where authenticity and transparency reign supreme, marketing rooted in scarcity will have a short shelf life. Business schools have taught many to think that the 4Ps (product, price, promotion, place) are guarantees of success. In 2012, the 4Ps were updated to pivot toward people, processes, programs, and performance, but even this is becoming antiquated thinking in a world where process is redefined almost hourly based on customer behavior. The descriptions of the skills many say a marketer should possess are usually off the mark now in a matter of months, not years, because of advances in technology and customer behavior that adapt to those changes more rapidly than do businesses.

David Zweig, author of Invisibles: Celebrating the Unsung Heroes of the Workplace, declares that what brand marketers have been taught in terms of framing, identity, and promotion is now highly irrelevant:

So, aside from the time invested/wasted in promoting yourself online, and thinking about how to promote yourself, that could likely be better spent actually working on whatever it is you do, creating stuff, rather than marketing yourself as someone who creates stuff, there’s now the real risk of alienating the people you are trying to impress. . . .

Because it’s become so pervasive, there’s a growing sense that when someone is branding or promoting themselves too much or in too overt a way, that they are dishonest. Because after all, branding, if not inherently dishonest, certainly is about only promoting the positive. . . . Even if the brand you create is accurate, and not purposefully intended as a promotional lie, the problem still is the fact that you are spending too much time worrying about how you appear to others.

If you have this promotional mindset, you’ll want to relearn what you’ve been taught, based on Zweig’s points. Having marketing skills and an MBA is no longer enough to be successful. Being a promotional zealot will make you appear dishonest, even if what you are saying is the truth. None of what you’ve been taught about marketing will give you enough leverage in a world filled with abundant ideas, solutions, products, data, and services.

Learn how to keep your brand relevant in the 21^st Century in my new book Disruptive Marketing.

Don’t let the future leave you behind. Join us in Hollywood, California for Brand Leadership in the Age of Disruption, our 5th annual competitive-learning event designed around brand strategy.

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Distinguished in a tuxedo and glasses, “celebration expert” Justin Bieber gives a brief lecture on the history of celebration in the T-Mobile Unlimited Moves Super Bowl Ad. The high-five originates from the time of loin-cloths and cavemen, per Bieber, though it quickly transformed into the spike. The spike set off a train of evolution as demonstrated by football players, with a quick segue into the shimmy, the shake, the shimmy-shimmy-shake and then, Terrell Owens, who spurred the unlimited moves. T-Mobile introduces the T-Mobile One, an unlimited data service, and Bieber offers up his own unlimited moves.

CREATIVE CREDITS:
Ad Agency: Publicis, Seattle

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By Alex Parkinson In October, 2016, The Conference Board hosted The Future of Digital Transformation and Innovation unConference in Brussels, Belgium. It was an interactive event using facilitated breakout sessions, informal discussion groups, live polling, and multiple social media channels designed to be an ongoing crowd sourcing dialog to help organizations better understand the concepts […]

By Alex Parkinson The deadline to enter the Excellence in New Communications Awards is midnight tomorrow – Friday, February 3! Don’t miss out on your chance to be honored in these prestigious awards, which are now in their 11th year. Submit your case study today at www.conferenceboard.org/sncrawards2017. About the Excellence in New Communications Awards The […]

These are astonishing days. Amid rapid-fire policy changes, America has grown even more divided; similar divisions are spreading across the world. Vitriolic rhetoric roars from all sides, and battle lines are hardening.

We aren’t listening to one another.

Is there space left for dialogue? For reason? For thoughtful persuasion?

We’re determined to find that space. This goes to the core of TED’s mission. We’re therefore launching a series of public events, TED Dialogues, that will focus on the burning questions of the moment; questions about security and fear, democracy and demagoguery, neo-nationalism and neo-globalism.

We’re not looking for more angry soundbites. We’re looking to pull the camera back a little and get a clearer understanding of what’s going on, where we are, how we got here—and how we must move forward. Our speakers will be invited to give short, powerful talks, followed by probing questions from both live and virtual audiences — including you. We will search for voices from many parts of the political landscape. And we will focus on the ideas that can best shed light, bring hope and inspire courageous action.

The events will be held at our theater in New York and streamed freely online. The first event will be Wednesday, February 15, at 1pm New York time, featuring the acclaimed historian and author Yuval Noah Harari. There will be further events on successive Wednesdays.

If you have specific speakers to recommend or topics to suggest, please submit them here. Please sign up for email notification of these events. Or join our Facebook community.

The need for ideas—and listening—has never mattered more.

If digital transformation is a top priority for your organization in 2017, you may be overlooking a critical factor to success: engagement. Because digital transformation within an organization requires systemic, enterprise-wide change, everyone at every level—from the mail room to the C-Suite—needs to feel motivated and empowered to make that change. Research by The Conference […]

If you can’t believe your eyes when you see the new Buick, then you’re in for a big surprise with “Not So Pee Wee Football” ad set air during Super Bowl 51 starring Cam Newton and Miranda Kerr.

We knew you’d want more, watch the behind scenes footage below…

CREATIVE CREDITS:
Ad Agency: Engage M-1

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What marketers need to know this week: How much Super Bowl ads cost, what Heinz is doing for its employees this Smunday, why Google deleted 1.7 billion ads in 2016, and more.

On GlobalXplorer, people around the world will team up to map satellite imagery of Peru. Image: GlobalXplorer

The power of the crowd has helped digitize the world’s books; it maintains the online encyclopedia many of us check by default. The crowd has fueled our understanding of the connections between neurons in the brain and contributed voice samples that will become a simple phone test for Parkinson’s.

Incredible things happen when people around the world team up to work on important tasks. Today, a new one for you: searching satellite imagery to help find and protect ancient sites that modern archaeologists don’t know about.

In today’s TED Talk, Sarah Parcak explains that hundreds of thousands of archaeological sites around the world are vulnerable to looting because archaeologists, and often governments, don’t know about them. The winner of the 2016 TED Prize, Parcak is a pioneer of satellite archaeology, which operates like a “space-based CAT scan.” Her team takes imagery captured by satellites and processes them using techniques that allow them to see patterns in the vegetation and soil that might signal manmade features, hidden from view. Parcak’s work has helped locate 17 potential pyramids and more than 3,000 potential settlements in Egypt, and led to major finds in the Roman and Viking world.

Searching satellite imagery once it’s processed is easy. But Parcak’s team is small. That’s where you come in. With the TED Prize, Parcak has built GlobalXplorer.org, a citizen science platform to crowdsource this work. Launched today, GlobalXplorer’s first campaign will take users to Peru, where they’ll help search 200,000 square kilometers of satellite imagery, from the highlands around Machu Picchu to the deserts around the Nazca Lines.  

“We’re the generation with all the tools and all the technology to stop looting, but we’re not working fast enough,” says Parcak in her talk.

Users will search 200,000 square kilometers of satellite imagery. Large sections like this will be broken into smaller tiles. Archaeological features like this stone structure on a hill will be visible. Image: ©DigitalGlobe 2017

GlobalXplorer is a collaboration between the TED Prize, National Geographic and DigitalGlobe, which provided the satellite imagery broken down into search tiles the size of a few city blocks. When users log on to the site, they’ll get a tutorial on how to search satellite imagery for signs of looting. Users will level up as they search and unlock photos, articles and videos from National Geographic’s archives that will give them rich context on the ancient cultures of Peru. When they train their eye, users will move on to comparing imagery from two different time periods, to look for signs of sites threatened by urban development. Finally, users will learn to search imagery processed with a technique called “Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI).” It makes healthy and unhealthy vegetation appear in different colors, and users can spot patterns in less-healthy vegetation that might be growing over ancient ruins.

To keep the location of potential sites safe, GlobalXplorer tiles do not contain any location data and are displayed to users in a random order, one at a time, without the ability to navigate or pan away. Peru’s Ministry of Culture is a close partner in the project and will put in place plans to study and safeguard potential sites. On-the-ground partner the Sustainable Preservation Initiative will help, and engage local communities in protecting sites.

“It’s not the Pyramids that stand the test of time — it’s human ingenuity,” says Parcak in her talk. “The greatest story ever told is the story of our shared human journey. But the only way we’re going to be able to write it is if we do it together.”