We Can Do This.

“We need to reinvent the way we market to consumers. We need a new model.
It does not exist. No one else has one yet. But we need to get going now.”

A. G. Lafley, Chairman and CEO, Proctor & Gamble, July 2006

I figure, why not. If a nobody from Kansas named Barak Obama can aspire to the White House, then the guy who created the longest running ad campaign in history* should be able to give Mr. Lafley what he’s been asking for for the past two years. The problem is, I’m just one guy with a Mac and this is gonna take as much money as it took for Obama to win the Presidency. So I’m going to need a lot of help to make this happen.

* “I am Stuck On Band-Aid Brand”

This is really hard and stuff.

I don’t get a lot of sleep. I got a group of 12 Eurotrash and Russian code Vampires sucking the life out of me in a DowntownLA loft with the windows blacked out and no clocks allowed.  I got, “More fucking content, shit.” being barked at me in 9 different dialects. Reinventing Advertising is a bitch. But we got through all of our Benchmark Tests. Marriages were strained. Lovers broke it off. My life sucks. But NeoAdNet 1.0 past muster for year two. Now the hard part. Building the business model to develop, evangelize and bring it to market with. As of today NeoAdNet is just reams of data and pages of code. What comes next is going to be like building a dry dock around a ship while it’s still at sea. A stormy sea. But we have to formalize the way NeoAdvertising is defined, produced and evaluated. This is the next step in Reinventing Advertising.  So fuck it. It’s up, up and awaaaayyy!

Whiplash!

Ka-Chow!!! That’s the sound that February made zipping past my head. Everything was warp speed. The decision to turn the last two weeks of MadisonAveNew.com into NeoAdNet simulators was done more or less overnight. Not the best way to get things done, but the way things get done as opposed to being talked to death.

So far the feedback has been interesting. And we know that Coke’s global ad agency McCann-Erickson has buzzed the site several times over the past week. The 4A’s asked to be kept in the loop and Angela told me I was crazy for doing it. All in all, it was a good month. This is what we’ve learned. Although click-to-finish is an indicator of content engagement, it is a barrier to reach. We need to continue to work on optimum length of content in the next series of tests. Brand integration continues to be a challenge. The fading logo has received high marks for memorability, but a single page format has new issues of placement to figure out.

In my most Germanic pomposity, I must report that at this point our findings are not yet conclusive. However, our work continues along interesting new avenues. March demands the breaking of new ground. We are still seeking to build a medium worthy of pilot sponsor consideration. March will see IAPIA focus down to a viable prototype among the several content interest areas under consideration. Now a “product” needs to emerge from all of the great groundwork of the “Committee.”

Engaging “Audience O.”

Our hunch paid off about Barack Obama. We had the right people in the right place when it was time for us to make the necessary moves to establish credibility. We made ourselves known to the Transition Team both by the book and “other”. We established awareness among the earliest members of the change.gov forums of our Trojan Horse, the White House Office Of Creative Affairs Initiative. Through association with that White House Proposal we sought to get “A Seat At The Table”, but at least identify the viability of our concept for our first NeoAdvertising Network Audience. We call them “Audience O”. This Audience can be accurately defined by their common interest in taking an active role in the Resurrection of the American Economy. Over 125,000 members of “Audience O” submitted over 44,000 ideas and cast over 1.4 million votes to rate each other’s ideas.

These are the Thinkers and the Doers. These are the people who now take credit for the election of Barak Obama to the Presidency of the United States. We found a large number of our prospective Audience O participating in the forums of change.gov. Many of them were actively engaged in offering and debating new ways for the Obama/Biden Administration to address their stated agenda. IAPIA members became actively involved in the forums. We posted the ideas we thought were our top 20 of the day, on the white house test site.

After tracking our webtraffic we were satisfied that there was enough traffic coming from our Spheres of Influence ( The notification of being selected as one of the Top 20 Ideas of the Day, posted as replies to our selected ideas, throughout change.gov) to warrent the creation of a NeoAdvertising Content Network to further attract and deeper engage this Audience. That is our objective as we enter the next phase of research into defining and deliniating best practices in the NeoAdvertising Network Platform as they relate to “AudienceO”

Yippee!

ThinkHard America is off and running with the first eight ideas from change.gov. Time to put on your thinking cap and help us out, out there.

So Now We Make It Real.

America’s Ideas are open source. Anyone can contribute. Anyone can make them better. Anyone can make them work. The Obama/Biden transition team provided us with the gathering mechanism for America’s Ideas. IAPIA brought them out of the clutter of thousands of voices screaming to be heard on change.gov. Now we are putting “America’s Ideas” on display for America. Each of these ideas represents a potential NeoAdvertising Adaptive Brand in the making. That will be the contribution of IAPIA to the growth process in this Garden of Innovation. Work will continue this week on ThinkHardAmerica.WordPress.com to bring it to life idea by idea. Our campaign on twitter will start next week. As soon as we can dream it up. We hope to have the first NeoAdvertising program for one of America’s Ideas by February 1. We will keep you posted on our process.

An Alternative To The White House.

Well the word is in. The decision is made. The overwhelming response from those of you who are following this adventure is, “Go for it!” So we are preparing to launch, ThinkHardAmerica.wordpress.com. This website will host the thousands of ideas we have lifted from the Obama Administration’s change.gov under the provisions of Creative Commons Attribution Statute 1.0. We will encourage visitors to add to and enhance the ideas they believe they can improve upon. Many of the features of our proposal to the Transition Team seem to have found ther way onto the Citizen’s Briefing Book, online forum at change.gov, so we know we are on the right track. Onward and upward.

Time To Kick It Up A Notch?

I think 30 days is long enough to give the prescribed approach of making a proposal to the White House as per the transition team’s submission process, a chance to work or not work. Right now, I’m calling not working.

We are now at NeoCon 2

Time to get serious about our Proposal to establish a White House Office of Creative Affairs as a means of beta testing NeoAdvertising Practices in a political environment. We are currently at this point. We have gathered and republished more than 600 of America’s Ideas on the items on the Obama/Biden Administration’s Agenda.

We have scoured the transition teams comment board at change.gov with our volunteers, tirelessly cutting and pasting “America’s Ideas” into an accessible format so they can inform and inspire additional innovation..

Two of our formal proposals have been presented over for public comment at the “Seat At The Table.” We have yet to hear a response.

This is no way to get advertising reinvented in our lifetime. So it’s time for a drink and a quick decision. Do we wait for the transition team’s answer? Or do we take, “America’s Think Tank” to the people and do it without official White House sanction? Tell us what you think. We can use all the ideas we can get. While we are waiting for your response, we’ll check with our peeps on whether it’s worth the effort.

The Die is Cast.

Today, Friday, December 19, 2008 we sent off our proposal to the Transition Team. The proposal for the White House Office of Creative Affairs is now officially in play. Time to assume our phones are tapped, our mail is being read, our downloads are being monitored. Oh, that was the guys who are still in office.  Anyway we are now in the clear.  We did it by the book. Time to do it our way. Fasten your seat belt Ladies and Gents, boys and girls. In the words of the immortal Morphius, ” We are soldiers. This is a war. Death can come for us at any time. In any place. There is only way to save our city. (Nation) Neo.” (Advertising).

I scrubbed my own floor today.

Actually it was the final Herculean effort on my part to restore order to our kitchen that had not been dealt with since before Thanksgiving. Oh dishes were washed and pots were scrubbed, but the physical plant was sorely neglected. That’s when I decided to take some Holiday time off from Reinventing Advertising and Reinvent myself. Detail Number 1. I cannot be the kind of guy that has tiny broccoli stalks growing out of the Sicilian Granite in his Hollywood Hills kitchen floor. That is certainly not going to fly with the President -Elect’s advance team when they drop by unannounced to say the Commander and Chief of Everything that Counts will be “Dropping by at 0634 hours to have a “Kitchen Chat” on the way back to Air Force One.” Time to tighten up the ship.

The manual labor associated with bringing my working and living worlds back to spec after months of adjusting and ingesting six downtown Long Beach offices worth of stuff into one Hollywood Hills Loft space 4 feet 6” high. Great for sitting at a beautiful glass desk and looking out at the Hills on one side and the pool on the other. Not for ingesting the half of the innards of a real company, recently split in two. Now was the time to take the situation of reorganization in hand with reinventing. I started at the Sicilian Granite level, intending to scrub, scour, clean and file my way to the top. It has taken me two days to scour the kitchen stem to stern. The experience taught me that there was far more to Reinventing Advertising then just defining practices and outlining processes. Your perspective is different when you are on your hands and knees. You are resigned to the task at hand. Judgment is simple. Is it clean? Is it really clean? Or is it a half assed job? That is what is missing from traditional advertising. A simple need to know if the advertising is doing the job or half-doing the job. One more insight to what puts the Neo in NeoAdvertising.

What Does Any Of This Mean To You?

A few people are following this rolling circus we call NeoAdvertising. I have gotten to talk to a number of you. It seems that what most of you are interested in is the idea of no more advertising as usual. You can gather from all of the twists and turns we have had to endure thus far that nothing “different” or “non-standard” is accomplished over night. There are also tremendous insights into the sheer number of seemingly minor tasks that go into bringing every single component of an idea from concept to reality. But one fact is still firm and should be embraced without question in your mind. An Idea is worthless without the ability to execute it in the real world. That is the lesson to be learned as we begin to architect, engineer and build C21. The reason business model ( idea) execution is so important to the advancement of the practice of NeoAdvertising is simple. NeoAdvertising Practices require “clients” to be practiced on. “Clients” are defined as guys with bucks to spend on NeoAdvertising. NeoAdvertising has to generate the revenue it will require to prove itself. The old something-out-of-nothing Hat Trick. The IAPIA is driving that bus. They have come up with the “Think Hard America : Every Idea Counts.” NeoAdvertising Initiative, which now has a launch date of January 1, 2009. The eight business models that make up the “Think Hard America : Every Idea Counts.” NeoAdvertising Initiative are currently in development. As soon as I know. You will know. And the outcome of knowing is the ability to do. It is the hope of all of us connected with the Reinventing Advertising Movement that those who follow us get something more than the ride. We want you to think hard. We want you to be able to make your ideas come to life. We will be here to cheer you on. As long as we can stay awake.