Quantcast has an e-learning portal with comparable content and slides from the training available at http://rtaacademy.com/. The e-learning portal also offers a free certification. A glossary and links to industry trades is available for download on the right side of this page. The Wall Street Journal article on the Mediasmith study referenced during the training is available here.

Sound Brand Architecture Requires Killing The Weak

A few months back, when Marriott International was given government approval to acquire Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide, there was no question that this was the biggest deal in the history of the modern hotel business.

Aside from the $13bn price tag, the acquisition turned Marriott into the largest hotel group in the world overnight with more than 1 million rooms worldwide. One in every 15 hotel rooms is now Marriott-operated.

When a clearly delighted Arne Sorenson announced the deal in September, the CEO of Marriott International was quick to highlight the scale and range of the new group that he would lead. “We have got an ability to offer just that much more choice. A choice in locations, a choice in the kind of hotel, a choice in the amount a customer needs to spend,” he told The Associated Press on launch day.

Sorenson was not making an idle boast. The deal means that Marriott operates 30 hotel brands around the world. And these aren’t niche hotel brands you have never heard of. The portfolio includes Sheraton, Westin, The Ritz Carlton, W Hotels and Marriott to name but five.

Not so long ago, owning and operating a large portfolio of brands made sense. The bigger the better. But with globalization and the ever-increasing cost of building and protecting brand equity, the fascination with adding more brands has been reversed in recent years. These days it’s the challenge of learning how to kill a brand and keep a customer, as the famous Harvard Business Review article puts it, that occupies most senior managers.

Compare the brand portfolio of any major organization today with how it looked a decade ago and, almost without exception, you will see a leaner and less diversified list of brands than was once the case. Everyone from P&G and Coca-Cola to Ford has moved away from multiple brands and sub-brands towards a simpler, more parsimonious brand architecture in which the number of brands is as tight as strategically possible.

The theory of brand killing could not be more simple. If you want more profit, more focus and stronger brands, you get rid of the weaker ones that compete with your other, stronger offers. Rather than simply kill a few weak and pointless brands on the periphery of the portfolio, the optimum way to approach brand consolidation is to assume you obviously need one brand and then try to make a very good case for having need of a second.

Such is the strategic power of a single branded house that many organizations would be significantly better off sacrificing the versatility and range of multiple brands for the dead-eyed focus and operational efficiencies of a single branded offer.

That logic is all well and good for guys like me who are legends in their own lecture hall. But try making the case to Marriott that it clearly needs the corporate brand but doesn’t need any of the other brands in the portfolio. We’re talking hundreds of millions in financial brand equity, customer affection, brand heritage and loyalty programs. The idea of killing a couple of the portfolio of brands that Marriott now owns is a daunting prospect despite the fact that there are clear overlaps in the newly merged portfolio.

The person facing this unenviable challenge is chief brand officer Tina Edmundson. She will have to work out how many brands Marriott actually needs and then how to silently kill the unwanted options and ensure customers are efficiently passed to one of Marriott’s surviving offers.

So far, Marriott, perhaps understandably, has moved slowly and not entirely impressively. Its new corporate website, for example, divides up the hotel portfolio into different categories, including classic luxury (Ritz Carlton or St Regis), distinctive luxury (W Hotels), classic premium (Marriott or Sheraton) and distinctive premium (Westin or Le Meridien). I’m not sure what purpose these arbitrary groupings play but like most category thinking it will mostly serve to get in the way of seeing how customers select hotels.

Categories do not actually exist and they usually blind us to the real structure of customer thinking and competitors – competitors that invariably attack us from outside the category we spent 18 months inventing and outside the rival brands we mistakenly assumed we were up against. One of the main reasons Marriott and Starwood committed to the deal is the stellar growth of Airbnb – a brand that is happily taking a lion’s share of the hotel market without ever considering itself to be a hotel.

It’s early days and you can be sure that Edmundson is, as we speak, scouring perceptual maps and segmentation charts to ascertain which brands she will kill and which she will keep. It’s certainly one of the biggest jobs in branding right now and also one of the most daunting. Irrespective of where she plans to stay in the months ahead, Tina Edmundson should not plan on getting much sleep.

This thought piece is featured courtesy of Marketing Week, the United Kingdom’s leading marketing publication.

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authenticity-governs-brands-in-a-post-trust-world

If you read any self-help books on how to be productive, efficient and excel in the last 50 years there are always three main themes within such books. They go like this:

  • Plan where you want to go. Because if you don’t have a plan you can’t excel against your competition which these books assume has no plans of their own.
  • Create repetitive habits that help you get to these plateaus. You do this by creating key performance indicators. Of course, these indicators are whatever you imagine with no real benchmarks.
  • See through these planned habits to excel at the highest levels via repetition and practice. The old “10,000-hour rule,” because more practice leads to more perfection.

While I’ll save why I find these rules outdated for another article in the future, what I want to call your attention to is the one thing many of these books never do is tell you, “Never tell anyone else how to do any of this.” Because in a printed format, distributed for anyone to read, that is impossible when these recommendations are of the public record.

While many probably note what to do when they read a book or an article in terms of actionable tactics, what is never told is to “share this with everyone you know and share it now.” That is inherent. It is a biological trait that has existed long before social media. You will share because humans are collaborative and social by design. We feel if sharing helps, we will do it, not out of self-interest, but for the benefit of the group. Social media now allows companies to scale sharing. If we look and diagnose prehistoric civilizations, they shared information because they had to to survive. You shared how you built fire because you needed others to build fire so they wouldn’t freeze to death. You didn’t want them to freeze to death because groups can get more done than any individual being. Everything was centered around the civilization or the group. The evolution of society was important through openness and sharing of information.

But in our world starting somewhere during post-World War II based on new systems of engagement, people and companies went rogue. It was better to not tell anyone what you were doing or how you did it. Much of this had to do with intellectual property laws, but much of it also dealt with brand facades and economics. If the public could see under the microscope what was really going on at many of these companies, they would be horrified and possibly never support them again.

In addition, scarcity became the big way to drive value. And when things are scarce, walls are built and information is neither leaked out or allowed in. The value one derived for much of this time was transactional. “If you want this information, well, you have to pay me for it.”

Now this behavior has been pivoting for the last two decades back to one grouped around society once again. Mainly due to openness demanded of a more “open source” communicative culture based on social networks and digital media. People want to know why companies make the decisions that they do, they want to know what they are doing in terms of innovation, they want to know where they donate their money to in terms of philanthropy. Also customers don’t simply buy what brands offer, they want to act as consultants. If you doubt this, look at any comment section on Facebook for a brand post.

It makes sense, we are coming full circle once again where society is just as important as the self.

What this means for brands is if you want to go beyond simply advertising in a newsfeed or on television to build that societal configuration with others you cannot do this by simply offering coupons or incentives. While people will always be self-motivated that won’t win the hearts of non-loyal customers who want to know what culture they are buying into by supporting you. They can’t understand what your culture is if you aren’t transparent. If you aren’t open. If you aren’t trustworthy and admit mistakes, failures, wins and innovations that benefit all and not simply some.

So how do brands do this? Follow these three rules:

1. If you demand customers to be open with you, you better be just as open with those customers. Customers give you their data in so many ways now. The least you can do is be open with how you’re using it, how you plan to use it and what you plan to do as a company within regulatory limitations. Relationships that are open and honest are highly sustainable, yet business relationships we treat as transactional. It’s no wonder there is so much brand divorce™.

2. Be so honest that when you make mistakes, admit it and when you do great things, be humble. Nobody likes humblebrags. I see it all the time by so many brands on Twitter or in their terrible television ads. “We’re so great, everyone loves us, our competitors stink.” You are asking for a karmic payback.

3. Beyond what can be told publicly from regulatory standpoints, be so open that what you tell your staff shouldn’t require “internal only” disclaimers. If you really want to operate like an open source company and build trust, then build trust by being open and honest and transparent with your working staff. And note to them that what you share they should share with customers. When you have internal vs. external politics, nobody wins and ultimately the managed systems internally leak out to the external world and shows how inauthentic you really are.

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

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Amazon has opened a brick-and-mortar retail store, the Amazon Books Store — offering a web-enhanced shopping experience to customers and a Prime membership acquisition tool for the company.  Check out this Brand Experience Brief to see inside the store and learn about the retail customer experience it offers.

related Brand Experience Briefs:

  • b8ta — a new store for discovering new tech products
  • Birchbox  — a retail location from the online cosmetics sampling subscription service
  • Warby Parker — another e-commerce brand venturing into physical retail

transcript: 

What would a website be like if it became an actual store?  It would be what the new Amazon Books Store is like — exactly like the website.  This Brand Experience Brief takes you inside this website store.

An Amazon Books Store just opened in San Diego’s UTC mall — it’s one of three brick and mortar stores from the company, others are planned for Boston and Chicago, and hundreds of stores are possible according to some reports.  The store is 3500 sq. ft., about a 10th of the size of a Barnes & Noble.  In some ways, it resembles a regular bookstore with an exterior brick wall and inside shelves of books categorized by type and areas to peruse them.

But for the most part, the store is unlike any other. First, all the books are facing out.  A staffer explained that this is to mimic the website experience, where you see the full covers of every book, compared to normal bookstores where you only see the spines of non-featured titles.    Also, prices aren’t displayed — you have to scan a book to find out the price — and prices actually differ, depending on if you are an Amazon Prime member, in which case you pay the price on the Amazon website, and if not, you pay the list price.  And you can’t pay by cash or check — only credit card and the Amazon app– just like on the website or mobile app.

The selection of books is highly curated.  There are only about 3,500 books and almost all of them have received a rating of 4 stars or above on the Amazon website.  This means you’re not going to find more obscure titles, but in my quick scan of the business section, I found most of the books I would expect — and of course, if you don’t find what you’re looking for, you can just order it online through your mobile phone or one of the store’s devices.

The book selection also leverages the website features and functionality by presenting edited collections like this one of highly rated books and this one of bestsellers in the city and this one of books most frequently found on people’s wish lists.  It references the website’s recommendation engine with “If you like X, you’ll love Y” displays.  Also each book has a sign that shows the number of stars it received on the site, a sample review, and a UPC code which you can scan with the Amazon app on your mobile phone to access more information about the book.

A hardware section takes up about a 1/4 of the store, where you can try and buy Kindles, Fires, Echos, Dots, and accessories. The store employees are enthusiastic about the store and eagerly explain all the unique features of it to customers and to each other since they’re all new.

My conclusion is the store serves two purposes.  For the customer, it makes shopping and buying even more convenient than the website.  You can leave the store with a book in your hand instead of waiting for it to be delivered.  And if you’re the kind of person that prefers in-person vs. digital shopping, it provides a nice experience.  For Amazon, it is a Prime membership acquisition tool.  Through the use of special pricing for Prime members and the many prompts about the benefits of Prime throughout the store, it’s clear Amazon wants you to sign up.   And it’s likely that these two purposes will continue to be the driving factor for the company to open up more book stores as well as grocery and convenience stores, as it plans to do.  For now, that seems like a win for customers and for Amazon.

The post brand experience brief: amazon books store appeared first on Denise Lee Yohn.

Host Dalia Mogahed at TEDWomen 2016 - It's About Time, October 26-28, 2016, Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts, San Francisco, California. Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED

Dalia Mogahed hosts a powerful, challenging Session 5 of TEDWomen 2016: It’s About Time. (Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED)

“TED is about challenging convention and deepening our understanding of the world around us by considering, even for just a few moments, a radically different way to look at things,” says Dalia Mogahed, host of Session 5 of TEDWomen 2016 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

In the conference’s penultimate session, thought leaders, activists and scientists challenge us to reimagine how we learn, work and build. Through explorations of some topics we’d rather not discuss — and discussions of innovative ways to solve old problems — each of the session’s seven speakers leave us with a sense of hope for a better way to engage in our global community.

Jeanne Gang at TEDWomen 2016 - It's About Time, October 26-28, 2016, Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts, San Francisco, California. Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED

“The act of making is a social activity,” says architect Jeanne Gang. She spoke at TEDWomen 2016 in San Francisco, California. (Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED)

Architecture 101: think about humans before construction. “People think architects design buildings — and cities — but what we really design are relationships,” says Jeanne Gang, a renowned architect and MacArthur fellow. When relationships are at the core of structural design, the lighting and the distribution of space can help instill trust, communication and harmony in communities. Gang describes design choices for projects she led to reinvigorate a student population, bring together a racially segregated city and foster community in a high-rise apartment in the heart of Chicago. She’s adamant about the role of architecture in solving social problems, like climate change, and the responsibility of designers to create timeless and impactful spaces. “The act of making,” she says “is a social activity.”

Michele L. Sullivan at TEDWomen 2016 - It's About Time, October 26-28, 2016, Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts, San Francisco, California. Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED

“None of us are just what you can see — we’re all dealing with things you can’t see,” says Michele L. Sullivan. She spoke at TEDWomen 2016 in San Francisco. (Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED)

Asking for help is a strength, not a weakness. Caterpillar Foundation president Michele L. Sullivan started learning difficult, eye-opening lessons on her very first day of kindergarten, when her classmates asked her: “Why do you look different?” Her confidence shattered, Sullivan hated being in public for years after, feeling every stare and pointed finger. “As a child, you can’t understand another child’s curiosity — or adult’s ignorance,” she says. Sullivan excelled in the classroom, and she made school a priority, eventually going on to earn an MBA. There were difficulties along the way. At her first job interview, Sullivan says, the biggest challenge of the day wasn’t the interview — it was finding a way to get into the building, which wasn’t handicap accessible. (She got the job anyway.) In her life, she chooses to focus on her experiences with gracious strangers who help her with small acts of kindness each day. “The only shoes you truly can walk in are your own,” she says. “But with compassion, courage and understanding, we can walk together, side by side.”

Kathy Hull at TEDWomen 2016 - It's About Time, October 26-28, 2016, Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts, San Francisco, California. Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED

Pediatric psychologist Kathy Hull shared moving stories of pediatric palliative care patients at TEDWomen 2016 in San Francisco. (Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED)

A peaceful place to say goodbye. Death is common and inevitable — but for the youngest among us, untimely death is tragedy like no other. Terminally ill children deserve to enjoy the time they have left, says pediatric psychologist Kathy Hull, rather than waste it surrounded by the morose beeps and harsh fluorescent lights of a hospital’s pallid walls. To honor and celebrate these young lives cut short, Hull founded a palliative care home for children where they can be gently and warmly guided toward peaceful rest. “Ultimately, life is too short, whether you live 85 years or just 8,” she says. “How long any of us lives is out of our control. What we can control is what we do with our days, the spaces we create, the joy and meaning we make. We cannot change the outcome, but we can change the journey.”

Suzanne Barakat at TEDWomen 2016 - It's About Time, October 26-28, 2016, Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts, San Francisco, California. Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED

Suzanne Barakat spoke — powerfully, personally, movingly — about standing up for those who face hate and discrimination, onstage at TEDWomen 2016. Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED

The cost of silence. On February 10, 2015, Suzanne Barakat‘s brother Deah, her sister-in-law Yusor and her sister Razan were murdered by their neighbor — who then claimed he killed them because of a parking dispute. The perpetrator’s story went unquestioned by the media and local police, until Barakat spoke out to call the crime what it really was: a hate crime. The help of their neighbor Neal, a journalist, allowed the Barakat family to regain control of the narrative around their family members’ deaths and raise awareness of the mainstreaming of anti-Muslim hatred. “We can all agree that bigotry is unacceptable, but when we see it we’re silent, because it makes us uncomfortable,” she says, but that silence comes with devastating consequences. She asks us all to consider what resources and expertise we can use to speak up and actively express our allyship with those who face hate and discrimination. “When we raise our collective voices, that is when we stop the hate,” she says.

Ian McCallum at TEDWomen 2016 - It's About Time, October 26-28, 2016, Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts, San Francisco, California. Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED

Ian McCallum shares a poetic take on our relationship with nature at TEDWomen 2016. Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED

Unlocking the poet in all of us. When astronauts from the Apollo 8 mission traveled to the moon in December 1968, they reflected on the perspective created by the distance between themselves and the planet they had just departed, documenting their journey in an iconic photograph of the Earth rising above the moon’s horizon. But in the almost 50 years since the date of that original photograph, many of the forests, wetlands, peat beds and arctic sea-ice has vanished from the Earth’s landscape, a statistic that Ian McCallum identifies as an alarming consequence of our “ecological amnesia.” “Simply put,” he says, “we have forgotten where we come from,” as many of the Earth’s natural habitats and wild animals continue to disappear in the wake of human population growth and development. McCallum argues that scientists, and indeed all people, must adopt the power of poetry in order to change the way we interact with our environments, harnessing those “voices that speak of anger, outrage, beauty and care in the same breath.” Indeed, we must all strive to be keystone individuals, creatures that play an essential role in maintaining the integrity of ecosystems and who promise of a consciousness capable of redefining our sense of history, our sense of nature and our sense of stewardship.

Deepika Kurup at TEDWomen 2016 - It's About Time, October 26-28, 2016, Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts, San Francisco, California. Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED

Deepika Kurup describes her new method of water treatment at TEDWomen 2016. Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED

Clean water for all. Deepika Kurup determined to solve the global water crisis at the age of 13, after she witnessed children outside of her grandparents’ home in India drinking water she felt was too dirty to even touch. Her research began in her family’s kitchen without any high-tech equipment and then expanded … into the garage. In 2015 she won the National Geographic Explorer Award in the Google Science Fair. Kurup’s water purification system combines cement and photocatalysts, materials that speed up chemical reactions, to harness both UV and visible light to kill bacteria and make water safe to drink. Best of all, the young scientist’s design is fast, safe, sustainable and cost-effective.

Peggy Orenstein at TEDWomen 2016 - It's About Time, October 26-28, 2016, Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts, San Francisco, California. Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED

Peggy Orenstein shares stunning, sobering facts about the way young girls are being taught to understand their sexuality at TEDWomen 2016. Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED

We need to talk to girls about pleasure. In America, the conversation with young girls about sex ends at consent. Journalist and author Peggy Orenstein challenges us to extend this conversation and talk to young people about women’s capacity and entitlement for sexual pleasure. For three years, Orenstein talked to girls ages 15-20 about their attitudes towards and experiences of sex. She found that girls measured their own pleasure by their partner’s pleasure and expressed shame around their genitals, which underscores the popularity of pubic hair removal and growing prevalence of labiaplasty surgery. Girls are taught of the risks and dangers of sex without learning the pleasure and joy of sex. Borrowing from Sara McClelland, Orenstein uses the phrase “intimate justice” to explain this situation — the idea that sex has political and personal implications. She encourages us to recontextualize sex by normalizing the discussion of sex. “We have raised a generation of girls to have a voice,” she says. “Now it’s time to demand ‘intimate justice’ in their personal lives as well.”

Ian McCallum speaks at TEDWomen 2016: It's About Time, October 26-28, 2016, in San Francisco. Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED

Ian McCallum speaks onstage at TEDWomen 2016. Behind him is an image of the historic photo “Earthrise,” a view of our home planet from space. As astronaut Jim Lovell said: “Everything that you’ve ever known, your loved ones, your business, the problems of the Earth itself … is all behind your thumb.” Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED

In December 1968, the crew of the Apollo 8 space mission captured a historic photo: “Earthrise,” an image of our home planet as seen from lunar orbit. Astronaut Jim Lovell was on that mission, and here’s what he said: “Everything that you’ve ever known, your loved ones, your business, the problems of the Earth itself … is all behind your thumb.” It was a poetic reflection on the frailty of life contained within that planet, and it echoed the observations of poets past and present that nature exists as an interconnected web of experiences between people and their environments.

Ian McCallum, a poet and psychiatrist, counts himself as just one of many voices who highlight this relationship, suggesting that so much of what makes up the natural world is also shared by living mammals like us.

His message is, in part, one of warning, of human development that’s created devastating effects on elephants, rhinoceroses, forests, and other keystone species vital to the Earth’s ecosystem. In the nearly 50 years since James Lovell and the other members of Apollo 8 gazed at our planet from the shelter of space, Earth has seen its ecological balance become more and more precarious through the actions of poachers and other human agents.

Ironically, while humans create so much environmental change, we are ourselves not a keystone species, McCallum says, not essential to any larger ecosystem. “Were we to disappear tomorrow,” he says, “nothing would miss us.”

But despite the best efforts of scientists to call us humans to account, people still exhibit apathy toward “the ecological warning calls of science.” In the absence of such reactions, he says, “the only voice left that can awaken us belongs to the poets.” Poetry is as much “a language of protest” as it is “a language of hope,” and it pushes us to be bold in how we address problems and ideas. It challenges us to be “keystone individuals” even if we aren’t a keystone species: to be “someone who can make a difference to the lives of others, to the animals, and to the Earth; someone who is willing to be disturbed” and willing “to stand firm in the knowledge that there are some things that are simply not for sale.”

It is, at its core, a process of self-examination, as poetry reminds us to consider what McCallum stresses we seem to have forgotten:

“that wilderness is not a place,
but a pattern of soul
where every tree, every bird and beast
is a soul maker[.]”                               — Wilderness, Ian McCallum, 1998

Big Data has become a term that we hear a lot these days. We are all trying to tap into available data and find ways to turn it into useful information. That’s where Data Scientists and Data Journalists come in. They are the ones that interpret the information and then turn that information into insightful information that we can all understand.

liv-buli-data-journalistThere are some great tools out there available to the general public. With some great companies helping make sense of it all, a few of which are focused on the music industry. They help turn relevant data into gold mines of information that can help advance your career and build your brand.

I have been a big fan of Next Big Sound and personally reaped the benefits of their product, as have my clients. In combination with other tools, it has given us creative marketing ideas, a new perspective on how and where to release music, the types of venues to focus on, concepts for custom merch designs that appeal to a specific demographic, and even the type of outside the box partnerships we have developed.

Liv Buli has been successfully turning the raw data into insightful articles that make even the least tech savvy person find an interest in big data. As she puts it, she uses data to decipher the business of music.

Liv has traveled all over the world talking about what she does – from Brisbane, to Chile, to NYU classrooms. She has been invited to speak and participate in panels at SXSW, CMJ, Music Biz, Future of Music Policy Summit, SF Music Tech, BigSound, ByLarm and more. Lately, she has been giving thought as to how to visualize data in simple, elegant ways to build better stories. As she says “…the best data journalism strikes a balance between finding (data science), showing (data visualization), and telling (journalism) a story.”

I enjoyed this conversation and as always learned something from it. I hope you do too!

Aaron Bethune
Music Specialist. Author. Manager. Creative Collaborator. Speaker.

www.playitloudmusic.com

Check out the interview here.

Do you have a TED Talk you’ve always wanted to try out in front of an audience? We’re thrilled to announce that applications are open for our TEDNYC Idea Search 2017 in New York City.

Anyone with an idea worth spreading is invited to apply; 10 finalists will share their risky, quirky, fascinating ideas in under 6 minutes, in late January, onstage at the TED theater in Manhattan. The TEDNYC Idea Search is a chance for us to find fresh voices to ring out on the TED stage.

Some of these talks will be posted on the online TED platform; other speakers will be invited to expand on their talks on the TED2017 main stage in Vancouver in the spring of 2017. Joshua Prager, Hannah Brencher, Richard Turere and Hyeonseo Lee — all these speakers are fantastic finds from previous TED talent searches.

The deadline to apply is November 28 at 6pm Eastern time. To apply, you’ll need to fill out this form and make a 1-minute video describing your talk idea. One note: We can’t cover travel to New York City for finalists from out of town; we encourage applicants from the tri-state area surrounding New York.

Apply to speak at the TEDNYC Idea Search 2017 >>

tednyc_idea_search_2017

 

Sing along with Clay Matthews and remember, even when he’s not around Muscle Milk always has your back. The Mekanism created ad features Matthews not only singing “Lean On Me” but we see him giving athletes a helping hand by assisting a marathon runner, rock climber and several other individuals, he proceeds to drink his own bottle of Muscle Milk and push his new friends through a brick wall on a football sled.

CREATIVE CREDITS:
Ad Agency: Mekanism
Music: “Lean On Me” by Bill Withers

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Tania Luna auditions for the TED stage. (Spoiler: She got there.) Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Tania Luna auditions for the TED stage. (Spoiler: She got there.) Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Here are 8 insider tips to creating a great audition video for the TEDNYC Idea Search 2017. (Remember, the deadline to apply is Monday, Nov. 28, at 6pm Eastern.)

1. Distill your idea. In a 1-minute video, you have about 150 words to describe your proposed TED Talk. So you can’t — and you don’t have to — give every single detail of your idea. Instead, focus on the basics of what you will want to say. As a tip, try writing your script around a big question that your talk will answer, such as: “How can teachers learn to connect with Generation Z?” Think about what you’d want the audience to take away from your talk — the main insight — and be sure to communicate that in your video.

2. Watch our TED Talk about … well … giving a TED Talk. Our curator, Chris Anderson, distills 4 points you’ll want to think about as you write your script.

3. Think about how your idea will be relevant right now. Some of our finalists will win spots onstage at TED2017, our major conference of the year, happening in April 2017. So think on this question: why does your idea have special meaning right now, as 2017 kicks off? The theme of TED2017 is “The Future You,” and we’ll be thinking about the big picture of how our world is evolving, as well as how we humans are changing.

4. Use incisive, clear language — not jargon. Consider that the audience, for the most part, will not be as familiar with your idea, or your industry, as you are. So try to describe your concepts in a way that most people would understand, without compromising the quality of your thoughts and ideas.

5. When you practice your script, record your practice. And then watch your practice recordings — you’ll likely see some ways you can get to the point faster. Listen for places where you lose your own interest, and cut cut cut.

6. Consider asking someone else to film you. This way, you can focus on delivering your talk, not on your tech. If you’re filming yourself on your laptop or phone, remember to look directly at the camera, not at your own face on the screen.

7. Keep your video simple. You don’t need to edit or produce your video in any way — no need for onscreen graphics or fancy cuts. We’re looking for your raw talent here.

8. Be your own fabulous self. Don’t feel you need to play-act the “TED speaker” — here at TED HQ, we’re as sick of this stereotype as you are. We’re looking for people who are authentic, who have something to say and their own honest way to say it. Use your real accent, your real gestures, your everyday words — be you!

Looking for a couple of examples of great audition videos?

Watch Zak Ebrahim’s short audition video, which turned into a blockbuster TED Talk and a TED Book, and helped share his message of peace to millions of people.

Watch Sally Kohn’s short audition video, which turned into a TED Talk … after which she was invited back to give another TED Talk.

And finally, 2 pro tips:

1. Try to turn in your video and application a few hours before the deadline. Here at TED HQ, we’re going to be watching hundreds of videos the day after the deadline closes … but you can get our attention by submitting earlier in the day.

2. If the audition format just doesn’t work for you, but you still want to speak, use our form to apply to speak at a TED event, or look for a nearby TEDx event and apply to speak there! The TED Idea Search is only one of many, many ways we are looking for great ideas.

Here’s how to enter the TEDNYC Idea Search: Complete the entry form and make a 1-minute video. Your 1-minute video can be very simple: Just explain your idea in a few sentences, and give us a flavor of how you’d present it. We’ll select a dozen finalists to present a short version of their talk in our New York City theater in late January.

We can’t wait to hear your idea!