The integrity of our economy and democracy only exists if citizens and investors have perfect information. That day will come when all of us -- corporations, politicians, consumers, and private citizens -- are transparent about our costs and impact.
Over the past few weeks, between conversations with people and agencies at the intersection of digital strategy and sustainability, the LoudSauce team team has been preparing for the WeMedia PitchIt Finals in Miami, and talking with potential partners and supporters of LoudSauce, a new social way to buy ad space for your favorite causes.
WeMedia is gonna be the best opportunity we've had so far to share our vision for LoudSauce, and receive feedback and coaching from experts in the areas of venture funding, social entrepreneurship and media.
We'll have some workshops with the judges and the other finalists, which should be collaborative and helpful for everyone, and then on Thursday morning we'll each have 10 minutes to pitch our venture to what I hope will be a room full of media innovators, producers, funders and fans.
Crowdsourced Creative Partners
Over the last few weeks of preparation, a few key new learnings have emerged. First, I had a conversation with James Sheratt, the CEO of the crowdsourced creative service Adhack. Since I have always seen LoudSauce as a compliment and not a competitor to crowdsourced creative sites, I had researched sites like 99designs, Crowdspring, and Zooppa. We even experimented with 99designs to create the LoudSauce logo (which I got a lot of flack for from my designer friends).
After talking with James, he made a clear distinction between the contest driven services like 99designs, where everyone works and only one person gets paid, and Adhack which partners buyers and creatives for each job, paying designers along the way variable to their input along the path to a particular piece of creative. I think the Adhack model is more sustainable and will attract better talent, recent partnerships with major agencies like Crispin, Porter & Bogusky and DDB are a good sign. I'll continue to talk with James about how LoudSauce and Adhack could partner on one of our campaigns in the coming months.
Gathering the Best Existing "Good" Ads
Secondly, I have discovered the amazing quantity of social TV and print ads already online at the Ads of the World archive. While it needs to have better filtering for ratings and issues, the public interest collection is the strongest I've found to date, and hopefully we can partner to offer Ads of the World users an opportunities to "Go Loud" once the LoudSauce service is up and running. I will be talking with someone from the AdCouncil later this week to see if they would be interested in leveraging the LoudSauce community to help extend the life of their ads, which they already get placed for free across the United States.
The Google TV Revolution Begins
Lastly, and perhaps most exciting, I spent some time digging into the new Google TV Ads service, which is already starting to revolutionize Television advertising. Not only does the service make targeted TV Advertising drastically more affordable for small businesses and nonprofits, but they also partnered with Spotmixer to make it easy and affordable ($150) to make a reasonably professional 30 second ad that can be submitted.
It seems like some small and medium sized businesses have already taken advantage of the service, but (as usual) non profits and social groups have yet to jump on board. One exception is the Hanley Center, which has an amazing success story about what their Google TV Ad has done to the success of their business. Hopefully LoudSauce can help social organizations start using the service.
At LoudSauce, we believe that many non profits and social causes will be similarly surprised by the amazing support and credibility they will receive through traditional offline advertising. For all of the criticism that digital folks (myself included) have thrown at the old ad model, it still is a great way to reach a big audience to create awareness. For all the power of our social networks, the reality is that most people in the United States still have never heard of innovative projects like Kiva and Green for All.
Imagine if Green for All could edit a 30 second or 1 minute version of their great "New Sound" video, and we could put it on TV during March Madness through Google TV Ads. Understandably, Green 4 All's current funders would not appreciate "wasting" money for TV advertising, but what if we chip in to help make it happen?
According to Google, in order to make a reasonable impact, we would need to run an ad for 4 weeks, and spend about $750 per week. That's about $3,000, or only 150 people giving $20 each. What do you think? Would you help make it happen?
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This morning begins the month of March, the third month of 2010 and the fourth week of being in the Bay Area. As usual, after a great first week of "choosing the morning," the second week was at about 50% follow through, and then the third (last week) I didn't even do any stretching, sit ups or push ups. There's always part of me that judges myself, and feels bad about it, like there's something wrong. The reality is that each night and morning are another new fresh opportunity.
So after a good weekend that included our first gathering of friends in our new home (with the couch moved into our main room), an amazing mixed party of happy people and great music and dancing with thePeople, and the first good quality Sunday Session, last night around 10:30 I decided to wake up at 6:30 this morning, and begin this week as I wanted to begin it.
Now, around 7:15, with a cup of tea and no internet connection, I'm thinking clearly about the weeks ahead. With a combination of ongoing conversations and interviews exploring digital opportunities for sustainability leadership, the week to complete our LoudSauce finalist pitch for next week's WeMedia conference, and the everpresent cost and benefit of daily social activities, I look forward to a week of productive creativity and focused conversation.
With thoughts of my sister's family in Chile, those in Haiti and New Orleans, and the rest of whose time is coming soon, I begin the work of communicating why LoudSauce is an important new social venture that transform advertising into a medium for good.
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As people and brands begin their long term journey towards becoming truly sustainable, what are appropriate and effective ways to use digital to share data and engage stakeholders? Overall, even award winning brands are still over-spending efforts on static sustainability reports that are relatively useless to the digital generation. Below are some opportunities for agencies and brands willing to lead.
Last June, I attended the 2009 Sustainable Brands conference on behalf of a client. The experience talking with brands, sustainability consultancies and agencies confirmed two things:
These lessons got me interested why agencies weren't more aggressively exploring these opportunities. So after completing a major project with Nokia and Rihanna in November, I chose to leave my job as an Account Director at R/GA in London, spend the month of January in India, and move to the Bay Area to further explore opportunities to apply lessons of digital marketing to sustainability.
Social media's influence on sustainable brands is already well documented by sources such as the Gort Cloud, and I won't spend time here discussing that in depth. Instead, I will focus attention here on opportunities for digital agencies and brands to drastically improve the way they create digital experiences for their customers, shareholders and employees.
From Sustainability Reporting to Data Storytelling
Due to the nature of sustainability, most major brands have rightfully focused their energy on evaluating the social and environmental impact of their products and services. Particularly for manufacturers and distributors of physical goods, the vast majority of the improvements they can make are in the physical life cycles of their products. Therefore, the question from a digital perspective is: How can digital media engage stakeholders to share progress more dynamically, and also accelerate the momentum of those improvements for the company and its stakeholders?
As part of the 2009 Ceres/ACCA Sustainability Reporting Awards, which highlight best practices in reporting on sustainability issues by North American organizations, the General Electric pdf report won top prize for how it communicated the strategic alignment between their sustainability and overall business strategies. And Seventh Generation received a special award for making their report a flash based e-book with links and videos.
However, comparing these prize winning reports to even basic digital user experience expectations in 2010, the reality is that sustainability reporting is still extremely poor on interactivity and utility. In a joint research project by the Global Reporting Initiative and Radley Yeldar evaluating trends in online sustainability reporting, they were similarly unimpressed:
"Few companies are taking advantage of the more innovative uses of technology. No company in our survey used XBRL to tag data; none used Web 2.0 technologies to create engagement and dialogue with users of their primary report; and even where other online functionalities are being used, these tend to focus on 'design' rather than functionality."
There is a major opportunity for brands and leading digital agencies to make a step change that goes from simply reporting to long term dynamic storytelling. Instead of static pdfs and e-books with lots of photos and text designed to impress advocacy groups and shareholders, imagine amazing data visualizations of historical, current, and future projected social and environmental impact based on tangible, implicit data. Some early explorations of life cycle storytelling at the product level are Patagonia's Footprint Chronicles, and so many creative opportunities are yet to be explored. Also see TED International speaker and friend Manuel Lima's post on the subject of data visualization and sustainability.
The Need for a Strong Sustainability API
Beyond being product and brand specific, useful sustainability data eventually also needs to be intelligently shared through APIs that enable stakeholders to visualize, compare, and innovate on the data. In order to gain wisdom across products, companies and sectors, brands will need to become comfortable opening up their data, some of it proprietary, for customers and even competitors to build on and mash up effectively.
One of the most forward looking projects has been the GreenXchange project with Nike, Creative Commons and other partners, which opened up some of Nike's patents for innnovators to build on. I am curious to see what results are created out of the open innovation, but the long term strategy is spot on.
Similarly, some smart technologists have been working on open standards on environmental impact data to enable the kind of innovation we've seen in web 2.0 in the green economy. Walmart's efforts to create a Sustainability Index have major potential, and it would be great to see the UK retailers like Marks & Spencer build on their already strong leadership to formalize standard data sharing through an API.
According to Programmable Web's API Directory, for example, there are some noteworthy independent APIs such as the Carbon data measurement standards AMEE, Open Eco, and Carma. Of the three, the UK based AMEE, which stands for Avoiding Mass Extinctions Engine, seems the most aware of its potential role in driving innovative mashups for sustainable choices.
While independent organizations may be in a better position to gather and process data, sustainable brands and the agencies that serve then have an opportunity to be pro-active about leading or participating in these platforms, and will improve their brand reputation strongly by doing so.
In the second part of this series on Digital Opportunities for Sustainability Leadership, I will evaluate some of the best digital sustainability experiences that brands and agencies have produced to help people and communities to improve their life and buying choices, and live more sustainable lives.
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We just found out that our social venture LoudSauce, a social way to buy ad space for your favorite causes, was selected as a finalist for Ashoka's WeMedia Changemakers Pitchit competition, which means I will be pitching on March 9-11th in Miami for a chance at $25,000 to start the social enterprise.
A little less than a year ago, during another yearly beginning of reflection, I engaged in an excercise to find a new name for the social venture I had been discussing over the past few years. In 48 hours, a group of professionals and amateurs alike suggested names for a "crowdfunded media buying service for social enterprises," and the name that emerged as the winner based on NameThis.com's algorithms, was LoudSauce (suggested by non other than a previous Nokia client and hip hop karaoke master Dan Goodall.
The excitement of the interest from friends and supporters was contagious, and we ended up applying to a few venture competitions including TechStars and Ycombinator, and found a developer in the Bay Area who was interested in joining as a co-founder. We were happily surprised to be invited by Paul Graham and the friendly Ycombinator team for a final round interview in April, which perfectly coincided with a trip back to the US from London for my 10 year Duke reunion.
After one of the most efficient 10 minutes of communication I've ever experienced, they handed us a check to cover our travel expenses, and later that night we eagerly awaited their decision. While the discussion during the interview had focused on the model - we showed an early prototype and were asked what kinds of causes would attract the most funding - the email from Paul gave us the main reason they chose not to invest.
He said they liked us and they liked our idea, but they felt that LoudSauce would be "open to criticism on the grounds that you were encouraging people to spend money on advertising instead of giving it directly to charities." He wrote that advertising is criticized heavily anyway, and that as a for profit, we could be accused of channeling dollars away from solving problems and into advertising for our own profit.
While we understood his point, we were frustrated because we hadn't discussed that during the conversation. The appropriate causes that will benefit from LoudSauce are not causes like disaster relief in Haiti, which are well publicized and well served (at least initially) by current funding channels. The right causes for LoudSauce will be those that groups of friends or networks think are under-exposed for certain target audiences (like the Atheist bus campaign in London). We're essentially developing the tool to automate what groups like MoveOn and Repower American have been using with their users already, so that the rest of us active citizens can fund ad campaigns that we think are worth focusing attention and investment towards.
For too long, many conscious people have understandably criticized advertising as largely trying to get us to buy more plastic stuff that we don't need. In many cities, some graffiti and murals seem to do a better job at providing a positive vision for communities than billboards and television. However, now it's time to leverage some of the talented designers and culture jammers of our generation, and put our money where are vision is.
Over the coming few weeks, I'll be working on my 10 minute pitch for the WeMedia PitchIt session in Miami. If you have ideas about how you think it can be the strongest, please do let me know. Thanks so much for your attention and your support.
Note: I've also posted this on the LoudSauce blog.
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Thank you to all of those who participated in the 48 hour Namethis.com session to name a new crowdfunding social marketing venture.
With 172 names suggested and 1,192 votes cast over the 48 hour session, it was an amazing experience that put vastly more energy towards launching this venture than I could have ever put in alone.
When I first received word about the three winners, I was a little shocked (Loud Sauce and seedjar seemed completely random). But after writing some draft proposals using the name LoudSauce, and hearing back from some of you in my larger community, I am starting to seriously consider it.
Not only is it a great first story to begin a venture rooted in trust in the participation of the crowd (and a name submitted by one of my current Nokia clients), but it may be a name that designers may find interesting potential in exploring a brand identity (more on that in later emails). Let me know if you feel strongly that it works or doesn't work.
Lastly, please join me online for feedback and discussion, as I will continue posting refined versions of the vision and plan for the venture: for starters at the Global Social Benefit Incubator and the Changemakers.net Power of Us Competition.
I hope you will continue to spread the word and share your thoughts via email or the comments below. Enjoy this amazing week for the world honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the new leadership in the United States.
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