Wikreate

Two days before the big American holiday, and I’ve already had enough fireworks for the rest of the year.

Wikreate just went and had a colorful display for about two weeks as we went though our first request for proposal, or RFP, for the San Francisco Department of Environment (SFE).

For a startup agency, I learned, entering RFPs is a necessary nightmare. A great deal of work goes into getting agency credentials straight and case studies in order. Not to mention the final verdict that evaluates an agency’s viability against the big boys and girls.

I spied a former instructor from the Academy at the SFE RFP briefing around a month ago. (She flunked me in my Digital Techniques 2 class for coming in five minutes late for final presentation.) At the same meeting, I met reps from PR agencies from LA., and, true to the Filipino goal of taking over the world, I met a high school friend from San Agustin in the Philippines.

Yes, the mad scramble to decode “the Bible” as Elena called the RFP, and at some point to piece together what we thought was the best response to the proposal was—from a startup agency perspective—life-changing at worst. Our strengths and weaknesses, our armor and vulnerabilities became part of our job descriptions. Attendance was at its highest in the last 2 weeks, and for once, on the second to the last day, every seat was filled and the silence and the delirium-infused laughter alternated in every room. Every room became a theater of war as we all worked on our part of the proposal, even though I tried to distract myself by worrying about our other clients that were in much latter stages, and therefore, just needed some project maintenance instead of actual management.

Most importantly, we got the response to the RFP out, with minutes to spare. And at the end of the day, there was still a sparkle of hope that we would get though this—still an agency, a better one, and with one addition to our credentials: survivors.

One of the main pillars of Wikreate as “360° communications meets social networking” is the establishment of our commitment to our community. Our concept of social networking goes beyond having business relationships with professionals in advertising.

Our goal is also to strengthen corporate social responsibility and give back—or in the case of our newest pro bono project, help NGOs like the Ayala Foundation, USA (AFUSA) give back.

AFUSA and GILAS

Ayala Foundation’s shining star right now is GILAS (Gearing Up Internet Literacy Access for Students) which is designed to provide internet to the Phillippines’ 6300 public schools. As of May 8, 2008, GILAS has connected 1,750 public schools, giving hundreds of thousands of students a chance to go beyond the dusty trails that lead away from their home towns.

The Philippines is an archipelago of 7,107 islands at low tide. But topography is not the only barrier to solving the lack the web connection. A shortage of funds, and an abundance of mismanagement and bureaucracy in national and local government makes it difficult to deliver the most basic services to 90 million Filipinos. Computers and pipes and tubes is forced low on the list of priorities.

Ayala Corp and Ayala Foundation, Inc., are strong advocates of civic duty, ethical business practice, and grassroots development to improve the lives of the people. It is because of these high standards and care for others that we are proud to make their mission our own.

The importance of internet activity to Wikreate

The experience and success of Wikreate relies heavily on the internet. It allows us to conduct business with suppliers abroad, deliver creative solutions instantaneously, and keep in touch with friends and news sources. The wiki platform is a new, powerful tool that allows more, open, and fresh work between collaborators that is as rich as the bench of players is deep. Such is the Web2.0 mentality that, face it or not, will rule the offline world as well as the online.

For this GILAS project, the media is the message and the message is:

• Connecting the best and the brightest volunteers
• Shining light on the undiscovered
• Teaching the underprivileged, and,
• Giving hope to the near-forgotten islands of poverty.

Wikreate’s call to action

There are 3.5 million Filipinos in the US. Presently, half of these are living in California. The challenge is to reach these using little more than AFUSA’s database of 7,000 emails, a smattering of volunteer groups on Yahoo! groups, and the tools that will open up the hearts and minds of the new generation of Americans who have ties, or once had ties, to the Philippines.

Seven thousand contacts. Seven thousand, one hundred seven islands. At low tide.

Last week, I had the pleasure of hooking up with some advertising and new media creatives who celebrated the visit of Inseeyah Barma, Copywriter for Rapp Collins in Hamburg. Under the imposing cavases of Kelly Turnstall, we talked about Inseeyah, art, the upcoming Advertising Spring Show at the Academy, and the fascinating concept behind quilted, a web-design agency that is a functioning cooperative.

Working in a start-up like Wikreate, where the vitality of the agency is directly related to the creative engineering within, the concept that investors have to work and that workers are invested in the company’s success is a thrilling one.

This is a very interesting talk given within the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco called “Where Do People Have The Time” by Clay Shirky about the place of interactivity in modern media.

Amongst the most important things he says it’s the anecdote of a friend’s daughter looking for a computer mouse while in the midst of watching a movie in DVD… the little girl was trying to control the movie as she’s used to in a computer. Shirky says “Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.” And that’s something to think about…

Link via Making Light

While we were at the Super School LA Carlos and I participated in a competition of sorts, where they gave us free reign to do an ad for a known brand. Amongst the brands to choose from, we decided to go for the Mini Cooper. Mari Luz Manchado-Seil accompanied us while we walked LA’s streets and the Santa Monica pier and discussed the different possibilities of how we could develop our spec ad.

Carlos kept throwing our way different possibilities of copy, and we discussed them, talked them over, dismissed them, and came up with new ideas… you know the drill. We didn’t have a finished idea and our time was running out. Tick, tock, tick, tock.

That’s when one idea we had discussed earlier –of the exclusivity of being a Mini driver– came up again, but with a twist. We wouldn’t focus our ad to the owner of the Mini, but at the passenger. We talked about how the friends of the owner would want to go in the front of the car, to call shotgun.

So the ad we came up with was in a way a form that the Mini owner could distribute amongst his friends to decide who had the qualifications to ride shotgun in his car; to be as exclusive as the owner. We didn’t have much time to actually make the ad, it was finished between the back of the car that was taking us back to the Super School LA Headquarters, and the few minutes before the ad had to be delivered.

After we came back from LA, we decided to revise it taking into account what the people had told us. It also gave us time to find the Mini font and a better logo than the one we had used and include them in the new version of the ad.

I just got an email from the Cannes Lions Festival. Surprisingly it announces two very interesting seminars from two shops that are reshaping the advertising and communications arena today:

One is titled “All that really matters is the power of the story. If you are focusing on anything else, you are wasting your time and resources” by no less than Crispin Porter and Bogusky. You can find more information here.

The other is titled “Designing experiences” by the interactive powerhouse RG/A. You can find it here.

In the last years, the power and the mission of advertising as storytellers on behalf of the brand has been questioned in terms of effectiveness in today’s attention-scarce communications world, while the New School of “delivering experiences” has gained traction and attention by the advertisers and the media.

These heavyweights will be defending their positions at Cannes. I’m sure it will be fascinating. I hope to be there to witness and comment.

I think user-generated advertising (ugADs) has seen its heyday. It was a good run—two years? five? who knows? Now, marketers are looking into social networks to reach individuals and turn them into brand evangelists. Will the new internet channel go the same way as the ugAD trend? The response to the efforts of Converse, BMW films, and Doritos are few and far in between—and not at the low-to-no cost that some people think. So the question remains: will social marketing be a more effective, budget friendly way of getting buzz around a product or service than ugADs were?

Well, that depends. What’s in it for us?

And by “us,” I mean EVERYONE. Everyone connected to the internet, that is. These two trends have proliferated thanks to the viral properties of the internet (and has also given us the opportunity to be supermachobrother_79). And while it deserves mention that old-school social networks like the Avon Ladies, Tupperware Parties, and High School Car Washes have always been a part of the American mainstream brand marketing mix, cheaper and faster multimedia production and sharing facilities have inspired a renaissance in “making masses move my message.”

Some (Carlos) might say that user-generated advertising is on the way out. “At least,” I type, “on the level that it’s on now.”

There are two popular sentiments from viewers of ugADs: Exhibit A: Friends and family of the contest participant swear that their progeny’s future is in making commercials and movies, acting, and they support them all the way—win or lose. Exhibit B: Advertisers subtly clear their throats and say, “and that is a clear example of how NOT to do an ad.”

But from the brands’ perspective, is 1000 people making ads, videos, posts, with the objective of catching the judges’ eyes a success? Okay, 1000 plus 5000 friends and family. That’s 6000 people who may or may not be their demographic at all. Parents, boyfriends, cousins. Who knows who they are? One in 1000 knows. What do they all have in common? The internet.

Granted, one only has to look at the three best videos of most user-generated channels (Fast Twitch, currentv, atomfilms) to see that some people are naturals—brilliant, even! How then do we measure the success of the campaign? Is it in getting a HANDFUL of QUALITY ads “for free”? Is it in how many people JOINED the contest? Is it in how many VOTES were cast by the friends and family of the contestants?

If the principle behind the user-generated phenomenon—of which social networks is a part—is connecting consumers to brands via a community setting, then what is the follow-up to the initial “success” of getting a thousand entries? I joined a the Crash the Superbowl and the 30 Seconds of Fame contests and didn’t get any thanks from Doritos. Chipotle, on the other hand, gave us a free burrito each, a t-shirt each, a disqualification, and the threat of legal action after we subsequently posted our DQ’d entry on youtube.

Whatever. The point that I’m trying to make is that the success of viral advertising must go beyond the initial fanfare that goes with getting your name up on a discussion board or on an entry. There needs to be a message or relationship that follows through because that’s what fuels the campaign’s endurance as well as that of the community that forms around it. Then the community will tell you whether you’re running a successful campaign or not.

Should someone put out a newspaper called “The Insecure Times,” this AdAge article might just make the credo section.

The thing that I like about advertising is that in in financially bad periods, advertising can see a growth in some sectors, with some brands like Starbucks, even though spending in the market generally shrinks. As the American Pie gets smaller, brands want as much as they can get (and give the spenders more value to see return business despite the hard times).

But back to the article at hand. Just like brands and CPGoods, agencies and creatives have to learn to stop ”bending” the rules as is so popularly stated. Sometimes, the rules need to be broken, just like the glass panels on building fire hoses. In some cases (no pun intended), the glass is removed, because some people, when they decide it’s time to do something drastic, just end up hurting themselves.

This article is for those people.

Social networking that works has to have a strong motivator for the participants. Successful models of these can be seen in both online and offline relationships. To put it simply—in my mind—there has to be something that the mere existence of the network can offer to the members that either was absent before, or was difficult before.

I just bumped into a friend of mine whom I went to the Academy of Art with in 2004. We happened to cross each other’s paths twice in one week (he was having lunch outside of Grumpy’s 2 days ago; he works at HotOrNot.com, which is right around the corner from Wikreate).

He was trying to create a social network for teachers (operative word=”was”)—a classroom assistance module that would link teachers to each other with the promise of sharing tips and creativity among the educators of the US. I asked him what the downfall of the project was. He said that the problem was that teachers were already overloaded with schoolwork; checking papers, making lesson plans, teaching, managing students, talking to parents, bureaucracy etc.

Long story, short: his program was ADDING another process for teachers, instead of taking one or more burden/s off. The goal of his web-based program was for teachers to share wisdom/experience/knowledge/lesson plans. But what was the benefit? What would they get out of it? We could clearly see the problem with his formula. What was the solution?

(I don’t know what the solution is. I do know that it is a noble cause; to help this country’s educators and improve US schools.)

For me this is a crucial observation for social networking creators.

1) You make a process easier for people (e.g. give teachers downloadable lesson plan templates; create a homework-generating platform that also safeguards against cheating. Other, proven examples that convenience is key:

Flickr makes photosharing easy; skype makes long distance telecom cheap/free; myspace allows low-maintenance, obligation/guilt-free “relationships”). Or,

2) You create a reward system for trendsetters to contribute. This will create critical mass which, eventually becomes a resource/database for the late adopters. This eventually leads back to #1). How to do this? In the case of the teachers’ social network, my first set of ideas is provide grants, scholarships, teaching assistants, trips to Hawaii on a schoolweek, free dl’able lesson plans. In other words, make the interactions commercially viable.

Amongst the many things we did in LA, one of my favorites was attending a conference by Gary Baseman; he’s an illustrator, artist and toy designer that I really admire.

At first, there was a technical problem and Baseman couldn’t show his slide show! But he overcame that by talking about his background –I didn’t know he didn’t attend art school… amazing!–, about his creative process and of how he has left illustration behind to focus in his paintings, prints and collectible toys.

But then after the technical obstacles were overcome, he started showing samples of his work and gave us an insight of most of the artworks. One thing that really stood out to me was how every piece of art he does has a story behind it. Baseman uses recurring characters and symbols, and even though his artwork might seem simple at a first glance it has a complexity and meaning that may be lost if we only see the surface.

If you can ever go to one of his gallery shows I highly recommend it!

(or if you want to check him online, click here)