Etiqueta: Industrial Revolution

Questions No One Knows the Answers to (Full Version) – Chris Anderson


TEDEducation

In the first of a new TED-Ed series designed to catalyze curiosity, TED Curator Chris Anderson shares his boyhood obsession with quirky questions that seem to have no answers.

“Questions No One Knows the Answers to” was animated by Andrew Park (http://www.cognitivemedia.co.uk)

View the full lessons:
http://ed.ted.com/lessons/questions-no-one-knows-the-answers-to
http://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-many-universes-are-there
http://ed.ted.com/lessons/why-can-t-we-see-evidence-of-alien-life

Mad Men: How the Web Would Change Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce

The audiences as defined by the Mad Men of the 1950s and 1960s were borrowed from radio, print or television. The strategy for nearly every campaign Don Draper has whipped up was a variation of the theme: design an ad and place it adjacent to what people are reading or watching. In this sense, the audience, as defined by the Mad Men of the 1950s and 1960s, was in reality not the brand’s audience but borrowed from media. As one of the original Mad Men, Howard Gossage put it, “when advertising talks about its audience, it doesn’t mean its audience, it means somebody else gathered there to watch or read something else.”


social.ogilvy.com


Mad Men kicked off its fifth season this week, and while the alcohol and smoke have (largely) cleared the air of the modern agency, many of the same departments, principals, and even clients have survived the last half-century. Placing an internet connection in the hands of Mad Men’s Don Draper is not only a fun thought experiment but also a useful way to articulate some of the major shifts in the industry, as well as follow the trajectory into the future.

Brand advertising in the 1950s and 1960s evolved in part to reproduce the feeling of familiarity consumers once had with product makers. The changes brought on by the industrial revolution triggered a shift in the way people bought products. The local bazaars, markets, and shopkeepers gave way to, first, chartered organizations and then corporations. Mass media helped to deliver a brand personality and relationship with consumers through radio and television before the new product hit the shelves. This model was built on brands as fictionalized narratives, the Marlboro Man and Aunt Jemima. The stuff of Mad Men.

The audiences as defined by the Mad Men of the 1950s and 1960s were borrowed from radio, print or television. The strategy for nearly every campaign Don Draper has whipped up was a variation of the theme: design an ad and place it adjacent to what people are reading or watching. In this sense, the audience, as defined by the Mad Men of the 1950s and 1960s, was in reality not the brand’s audience but borrowed from media. As one of the original Mad Men, Howard Gossage put it, “when advertising talks about its audience, it doesn’t mean its audience, it means somebody else gathered there to watch or read something else.”

This is an important shift because the audiences on Mad Men – the folks in the focus groups – have disappeared and in their place are humans with incredible editorial control over the brand and messages they encounter. NYU’s Jay Rosen has described this transformation as “the people formerly known as the audience.”

The integration of paid (borrowed audiences) to an earned media (adjacent content), and the brand as a content creator would usher in a wave of change through the halls of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce.

Mad Men + Social Web: Three Ways the Agency Would Quickly Change Leer más “Mad Men: How the Web Would Change Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce”

The Fluidity and Demands of Social Business Work

Part of the adaptation resistance we feel in businesses trying to become more social is that they’re taking an old model – the 5 day week fit into a daytime 40 hours – and desperately trying to fit it around the inconsistent and differing patterns that define a connected, networked and vastly more nimble global network. Strapping hours on your Twitter bio will not forever meet the needs of customers, employees, partners, supply chain, and the people who deliver on the work we’ve ultimately promised.

Here’s where I have some questions for you.

What do you think defines a professional commitment in today’s era? As a worker of any kind, what should you expect to commit? Is it different than it has been? If so, what will make that commitment worthwhile?
How can companies adapt an industrial-era mindset into a modern one while surmounting the challenges of sheer scale and cost of having a larger, more distributed and flexible workforce? Or are there savings in there instead of costs?
What does that mean for the education and induction that we’re giving to the next generation of workers, whether skilled or knowledge based or both?


http://www.brasstackthinking.com

The Fluidity And Demands of Social Business Work - Brass Tack ThinkingFew of us work a 5-day, 40-hour week anymore.

So if that’s true, and we’ve largely accepted that, why are we still trying to force social business evolution into the bounds of those days and hours?

Fluidity is a continually emerging reality in business. I struggle mightily with this personally, because I don’t believe that even the most entrepreneurial of us are winning medals when we get out there and flaunt our exhaustive, 80-hour workweek and lack of weekends as some kind of masochistic badge of honor. In fact, it tells me that we simply aren’t being smart with how we work, not telling us that we should just keep working and working and working until we break.

Stack that, however, against the ever-present reality that the online world does not tick according to the industrial era clock. We had metered, 8-hour days for a reason. Assembly lines needed to meet quotas and factories needed to meet the demands of their customers but without endangering their workforces.

Yet, the web is a fluid thing that rarely collectively sleeps… Leer más “The Fluidity and Demands of Social Business Work”