OPINION: One of the best things about social media – whether you prefer Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram or some platform I haven’t heard of yet – is that it’s personalised.
Viewing entries by
Vaughn Davis
In a world where you can interact with virtual influencers and pets, there’s now a chance you might be wearing something designed with the help of artificial intelligence. TGF recently ‘collaborated’ with AI design platform Midjourney on the design of its TGF t-shirts and tote bags.
TGF senior art director Michelle Vohan and senior designer Alana Howitt worked with the Midjourney AI on the project. “It was a great lesson in briefing,” Michelle says. The AI uses the word prompts we supply to create a set of images which we then feed back on to see iterations and improvements. Some of the first ones were pretty weird!”
TGF creative director Vaughn Davis says it won’t be the last time the agency works with artificial intelligence. “Midjourney has only been public since July last year and even in that time its capabilities have grown enormously. It’s a really exciting time.”
TGF’s designs feature nine different goats, each generated by a string of different prompt words, fed to the Mindjourney AI via chat platform Discord.
Karangahape Road turned orange last Thursday night as local independent ad and design agency The Goat Farm celebrated its tenth and a bit birthday.
The bash was originally scheduled for February, but the bastard virus derailed that plan.
100 or so clients, staff and partners past and present joined TGF in its neighbouring studio / event space The Ever Room for a celebration of more than a decade’s work on clients including Vector, Graham Norton’s Wines and Spirits (Invivo), HRV and Kiwi Wealth.
Not surprisingly, the crowd was well watered thanks to the generosity of Invivo and Hallertau.
TGF founder and creative director Vaughn Davis says the event was as much a housewarming as a birthday party. “We moved to our new Karangahape Road space after outgrowing the old one last year. Covid put the kybosh on an opening party, so it made sense to combine the two. Has anyone seen my glass?”
If truth is the first casualty of war, then the Covid-19 pandemic shows every sign of being one. Three months since the first reported case, reliable information is becoming as rare as toilet paper, face masks and a busy Chinese restaurant.
The other parallel is more sobering. As far as we know, the virus’s mortality rate is about 3 percent. That’s about the same percentage of the world’s population that died in World War 2. There are differences, of course. It’s almost impossible that everyone on the planet will catch the disease and that no cure will be found. And while the WW2 losses were mostly among the young and fighting fit, the average age of death due to Covid-19 so far is 80.
So far, so grim.
But let’s look forward – maybe 9 months, maybe a couple of years – to when Covid-19 is under control and just another reason to wash your hands and believe in vaccines.
What could be the lasting effects of a pandemic on the way we do business and live our lives?
Looking back over the last century or so, the other thing global wars had in common (and we’ll count the Cold War and its sexy cousin the Space Race here) is that they all drove innovation. Technology and society advance far more rapidly in times of global crisis than they do in peacetime. When it’s do or die, we choose do.
If we’re lucky, the Covid-19 pandemic could have much the same effect. Tragically, many people will die. But, as we always have, we’ll innovate and adapt, and many of the changes we make will stick.
Travel
Ironically, the global air travel market was made possible by a global crisis. World War 2 accelerated innovation in aircraft size, speed and range and left us with the planes, pilots and long runways that cheap world travel needed. Covid-19 could well wind back the clock.
Targeted travel restrictions were among the first actions governments took to control the spread of infection. Businesses and sporting bodies have followed, imposing severe restrictions on international travel. The environmentally-driven #nofly movement was already gaining momentum pre-virus.
In a world with less business travel, organisations will lean more and more on video conferencing, email and just plain old phone calls to connect. Travel will bounce back post-virus, but by then we will have become familiar with new ways of working… so it’s unlikely business travel will return to anything like the same level.
How we connect
If there’s one thing a virus likes, it’s a room full of people from all over the world, shaking hands. Conferences large and small are being canned, including Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress and just this week Austin Texas’s tech/film/music megaconference South By South West. On the business front, a year of cancelled events will likely force companies to find new ways to communicate, learn and sell, and many of these will stick once the pandemic passes.
Gatherings for entertainment – concerts, movies, festivals and so on – are more likely to recover. Like Marie Kondo’s half empty sock drawer, they spark joy – and we’re always going to want that.
How we work
Technology companies – telcos in particular – have been predicting we’d be working from home for years. Until now, though, it just hasn’t happened. The number of Kiwis working from home reached about 10% a decade ago and hasn’t grown much since then, possibly due to the social appeal of spending time in a workplace outweighing the benefits of a 30-second commute and Skyping in your undies.
Today, the technology to support remote working is accessible to almost any business. Fibre connectivity and fast mobile internet mean workers can remain constantly connected from anywhere. Free or cheap cloud-based services like Google Drive or Dropbox remove the need to physically connect to an office server. And communications platforms like Skype, Zoom, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger make it as easy to send a cat video across the planet as it is to send one across the office.
That 10% working from home number? Expect it to go up and stay up.
How we commute
Not everyone can work from home. So how will the way we get to work and school change in the face of a pandemic? One unfortunate and likely effect will be people avoiding public transport. So we can expect a rise in private vehicle use, with lower fuel prices making this even more probable.
On the upside, for those who can make it work, commuting by cycling or walking is likely to increase. Hopefully this habit will stick.
How we shop
Online shopping – especially groceries and ready-to-eat meals – is already booming. My Food Bag is already New Zealand’s third biggest food retailer. Uber Eats drivers outnumber customers in many restaurants. In China, home food delivery businesses are reportedly flat out. If the pandemic leads to people avoiding trips outside the home, it’s likely this will accelerate.
As the home food delivery market grows, so will the logistics back end needed to support it. Greater scale, coupled with lower fuel costs, will help make delivery more affordable and accessible. Once home delivery becomes a habit, it’s likely to continue post-pandemic too.
Three months in, it's not clear whether Covid-19 will become this generation’s World War 2 or just another skirmish in the endless battle against disease. Either way, we will adapt, change and innovate, just as we always have in the face of global threats. While the challenges are ahead of us aren’t clear, I reckon we can find the confidence to face them by looking to history.
Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua: “I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past.”
I was excited to read yesterday that one of New Zealand's biggest brands (a bank) has announced it will be ending its relationship with the New Zealand branch of one of the world's biggest ad agencies.
Now before you accuse me of schadenfreude (I own a small and awesome ad agency, I don't take any particular joy in the likelihood that some people at the big agency had to tell their kids and partners last night that mummy or daddy might not have a job come Christmas. (I'm not going to cry any tears for their global CFO wondering how to plug the money hole though.)
What excites me about the move is that it signals a growing and positive trend in marketing. The age of the whale is ending: welcome to the age of the dolphin.
Whale agencies have served us well for 100 years or so. Solid, huge, global in reach and immensely powerful, they were a great fit for a time when advertising was about spending millions of dollars to put a message in front of millions of consumers.
But with that size came hunger. Whales live to eat. They need enormous amounts of krill and they need it every day. For that to work in the marketing ocean, whale agencies need whale clients; big, rich and able to fill the money bucket that high overheads and global ownership are constantly emptying.
Dolphins are different. Dolphins eat fish – they get their energy in larger, less frequent bursts than the filter-feeding whales. Eating takes up less time, creating the opportunity for play and allowing complex communities to develop.
Returning to the marketing ocean, in New Zealand dolphin agencies seem to be on the rise, and there are far fewer whales than there were a decade ago.
But how is this working out for the dolphins as businesses? Being a dolphin is fine, if all you want to do is swim about and avoid straying into the wrong Japanese cove. To eat and survive, though, you need clients to buy into the idea of dealing with a smaller fish / marine mammal than they're used to.
The good news is that’s exactly what is happening.
Spark (when Telecom) was an early leader, moving in the space of a few years from an almost-exclusive whale agency relationship to the more dolphin-friendly way it operates today. (The telco quietly cut its last ties with the whale it had used for decades last year.) Air New Zealand has followed the same path, while at the same time shifting from the “big gorgeous ad" model to the “try lots of shit" (actual name of strategy may vary) approach it's famous for today.
And now the first of the big banks.
Making the shift from a whale to a pod of dolphins takes more than a press release, of course. It means a lot more work for the client, and that's a good thing. When your whale agency has handled your account for longer than any of your marketers have worked for you (or in some cases, been alive) it can be easy to lean on the agency for marketing or even business strategy.
When you're dealing with dolphins, you need to own your own brand. You need to set your own objectives and drive your own marketing strategy. In short, marketers need to step up and be marketers. (And, of course, they need to Be Like Lego, as one genius commentator points out.)
Saying goodbye to a big, dependable whale is a brave decision. But it's the right one, and one that more and more big clients will make.
Welcome to the age of the dolphin.
One of the things I enjoy most in my role as creative director at The Goat Farm is directing radio ads. I guess I’ve done a few hundred over the years, ranging from “bang-em-out” station-produced retail spots to the more considered and carefully produced ads we’re lucky enough to be making these days.
In case you can’t picture just what directing a radio ad entails, imagine this: in the voice booth, behind glass, a voice artist (usually an actor or radio host) stands in front of a very expensive-looking microphone holding a script. She’s wearing headphones, and can hear our feedback from the control room, plus any music and sound effects we want to include.
On our side of the soundproof window, the main feature is the mixing desk and the engineer driving it. The desk takes a feed from the microphone, captures the read digitally and mixes it with the other components of the ad. All the audio components appear as coloured waveforms on the desktop, which can be clipped, moved, stretched and manipulated to make up the final ad. (Once upon a time, this would have involved actual clipping and gluing of tape.)
Also in the room will usually be a client, a suit from the agency, and me. Audio sessions can be long, so we’ll inevitably be sprawled on comfortable couches, snacking on lollies and drinking coffee.
Put that all together, mix for an hour or so, and a radio ad should come out the other end… here’s what I’ve learnt from the good ones (and the not so good):
One voice to listen to. While there are three are four people in the room, all with valid and often different opinions on the way the artist is reading the script, it makes her life much easier to only have one voice to listen to. So while I will always chat with the client, the engineer and the suit, it’s my direction the talent works to.
One thing at a time. Often, especially in the early takes, there might be a bunch of things we’d like changed in the read. As the director, I decide which one to do first. Then, when we’ve nailed that, we move on. So if we’re looking for a quicker, more serious read, with emphasis on the product name, we’d first work on the pace, then the tone, then the emphasis.
Ask for the what, not the how. Let’s say I want the final line to sound friendlier. One way to do that would be to read the line myself in a more friendly way, and ask the voice artist to do it that way. Or I could ask for it to be friendlier and let her draw on her experience and talent to come up with a solution. Guess which way works best?
Be open to change. A script on paper isn’t the same as an ad on the radio. So I try and be open to ad-libs, changes and additions from the voice artist. (Having the client in the room to approve things on the spot helps too.)
Know what it’s like on the other side. My first advertising job was as a radio station copywriter, and as part of that we’d be asked to voice some of our own ads. That experience gave me an understanding of what it’s like to read a script, and what it’s like to be directed.
Give everyone a say. Everyone in the session has given an hour or more of their time to be there, and everyone brings years of experience. So before I approve a take I’ll always ask everyone in the room what they think, and whether they’d change anything. That includes the talent – they’ve seen hundreds of scripts too, so their input is gold.
"Fake news" has been the big issue on social media in the last six months, and it doesn't seem likely to go away. After years of claiming it's not a news organisation, Facebook has been paying more attention recently to its role as a trusted news source for many of its 1.7 billion users.
Late last year the network launched a "fake news report" feature for US users and reported in January that the feature had also launched in Germany. Now it's here for (at least some) New Zealand users.
So how does it work?
Fundamentally, it's just an extension of the reporting tools already available on the site. Every story in the news feed has a small grey arrow top right, that brings up a menu including "Report post." Click this and you'll see another menu including a checkbox "I think it shouldn't be on Facebook."
Click on this and you'll see the menu in the picture above, now including "Fake News"
In the US and Germany, clicking this submits the story to a team of human fact checkers who assess whether or not the story is genuine. If they assess it, Mythbusters style, to be fake, it will still appear on Facebook, but lower in the news feed. According to Wired Magazine:
"Facebook will the append the questionable content with a notice that reads “Disputed by 3rd Party Fact-Checkers,” with an option to read more about why that specific post was flagged. If users try to share the post anyway, they’ll be met with an interstitial that again reminds them that third-party fact checkers dismissed it, and a further note that reads “Before you share this story, you might want to know that independent fact-checkers disputed its accuracy.”
It's not clear who the third party fact checkers are in New Zealand (say hi if it's you!) and the system will of course depend on their judgement and users knowing about it. You can do your part, of course, by sharing this story.
(Just make sure you check that it isn't fake...)
Update: Facebook's NZ PR people advise that the "Fake News" feature we're seeing here is not the same as the identically named feature available in the US... if you keep clicking through there are no options for submitting a story for fact checking. You can however report it to the news site that posted it – and that's something!
New Zealand’s big banks have a money problem, and if they don’t do something about it, it’s going to kill them.
It’s not the money their customers pay in fees and interest (although I’ll touch on that further down).
It’s not the money they ship off to their overseas owners, despite what Winston Peters and his talkback tribe would have you believe. It’s important for banks to be profitable. I buy that, and I’m not fussed who owns those profits. (If you are, buy shares.)
It’s not even the money they lose in $60 million chunks when New Zealand retailers go under, taking their obligations with them (cough, Pumpkin Patch).
It’s the money that’s piped in under the front door of each bank’s headquarters 24/7, day after day, year after year. A high-pressure torrent of billions of dollars, theirs by right for being the portals through which, for the last 150 years, all commerce must pass. That’s what’s going to kill our banks unless they do something about it.
It’s seductive and it’s dangerous. When your business model is to sit at the mouth of a river of gold and watch the lake fill itself, taking risks is hardly ever a good idea. Because there’s so much money coming in, it makes sense to pay people well. And who’d want to take a risk that could lose you a very well paid job?
Banks aren’t alone in this. The recording industry, newspaper classified advertising, telcos and many others have all had their own rivers of gold and one by one have lost them to technological or cultural disruption.
So far, the disruption in banking has been in dribs and drabs. A bit of crowdfunding. A trickle of peer to peer lending. Phone manufacturers acting as payment gateways. But when the real disruption hits; banking’s Uber, Air BNB, Spotify, Amazon Prime or whatever; the river’s going to run dry, and run dry in a heartbeat. When that happens, it will be too late for innovation, reinvention or pivoting.
The best time for New Zealand banks to reinvent themselves was yesterday.
If I were them, though, I’d start today, and start with these five things:
Hold your own funeral
Taxis will die. Mid-range hotels will die. What’s left of recorded music will die. Media will die. They might be rebuilt in some other form, but they will die.
Why should banking be immortal?
So imagine a future where banks – big companies with thousands of people, beautiful head offices, hundreds of branches and rivers of profit – simply don’t exist. What does that future look like? How do people exchange value? How are they paid? How do they buy houses? How do they travel overseas or get stuff online?
Imagine yourself at your bank’s funeral. (Hopefully there was a little money left for some decent booze.)
What happened? What did we miss? What was the last straw and could we have seen it coming?
It’s likely that the answers to all those questions are happening now, just not everywhere. As science fiction author William Gibson said, “the future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed.” So find those processes and technologies people are already using to sidestep banks and imagine a world where that’s ubiquitous. Ask whether your current offering has any advantages over them. Find ways to incorporate them into how you do business. Or plan for the managed death of those parts of your operation that just don’t have a future.
Don’t settle for spinnovation
I like gadgets. Love them! Enough to schlep over to TV3 every fortnight to talk about them on the Paul Henry Show when that was a thing. But it’s easy and wrong to confuse producing a gadget with real systemic innovation. Smart phone card readers, cashless moneyboxes and a reskinned local version of this or that phone payment technology are all cool. But do they challenge the fundamental way your bank does business? If someone overseas had invented the gadget you just launched, would you be calling a sweaty-palmed crisis meeting and wondering how you’d deal with it? If not, maybe what you’re doing – as awesome as it is – is more spinnovation than innovation. Good press (and ad agency award) fodder and a shiny new thing to point at when someone asks what you’re doing about disruption, but that’s about it. Spinnovate, by all means – but don’t let it slake your thirst for real change.
Fight Facebook, not fires
Fire drills are a part of everyday life when you work at a bank. Less frequent but just as important are crisis simulations… what if an earthquake took out the data centre? What if online banking failed for a week?
More likely and more cataclysmic, in my view, would be a global player such as Facebook deciding to enter the game. Selling ads to put in front of those 1.6 billion users works well for them now, but financial services could be an insanely profitable regional or global play (and yes, they’re dabbling in that already).
So a very smart thing for a bank to do this year would be to assign a team not to consider responses to an imagined Facebook bank, but to invent one. Pretend you are Facebook, right down to the hoodies, hackathons and free lunches. With all your resources, all your customers, all the trust billions of people place in you, how could you turn that into a financial services company? What would you sell? What boring and unprofitable things would you leave to the old-fashioned banks to provide?
Then, once you’ve invented it, consider how you’ll deal with it once Facebook makes it come true. Or, better still, do it before they do. (Laugh if you like, but Trade Me kept eBay out by being firstest with the moistest – at least in this corner of the world.)
Simplicate and add lightness
Military aircraft design fans will know this mantra from American engineer Ed Heinemann, which led to the remarkably small, light, simple and successful A-4 Skyhawk. While this is perhaps a contrary direction for a bank to take, it’s a position that’s wide open in the New Zealand market and would connect with a lot of consumers.
It’s all about limiting the menu, doing things simply and doing them well. It works for In ‘n’ Out Burger, and it would work for a bank.
One cheque account
One savings account
One term deposit
One credit card
One mortgage (available in fixed or floating flavours)
That’s five products… maybe seven or eight if you give some term options for the mortgages and deposits. If people want anything more complicated (and expensive) then maybe you’re not the bank for them.
Oh, and branding wise… just call them what they are.
Consider free
No really. What if you challenged a team of your best people to invent a banking business model where your customers paid nothing to bank? No account fees. No transaction fees. No credit card fees. No credit card interest. No mortgage interest.
How attractive would that be to customers?
What kind of business would you have to build?
Who else would you need to partner with? A telco? Government? A social network?
How would a business like this even make money? Could it have employees? Premises?
New Zealanders have always been able to watch television and listen to the radio for free. Spotify, Pandora and Lightbox deliver music and TV shows for free. Libraries, museums and art galleries are largely free. Wikipedia, YouTube, Google, Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat are free. Telco commodities like texts, that used to cost 20 cents a pop, are so cheap they might as well be free.
Why not banking?
Pay peanuts, get funky
Oh, and here’s a sixth idea for free: pay people less. Get some young people in: clever thinkers, artists, tinkerers, people as diverse as the customers you serve – people who absolutely do not want a 20-year career in banking. Pay them enough to be happy but not so much they can’t take your job and shove it. Then give them a place where they can experiment and break stuff, throw some thorny problems at them, lay on some free lunches and sodas and see what they come up with. Launch the good ones. Kill the duds. Repeat.
Note: this was originally published in 2009 but I was reminded of it when discussing the homogeneity of the advertising industry with The Spinoff yesterday...
I blame the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. And the advertising schools. And me. And every other creative director in town.
Each of us is responsible, a bit, for a change that on one hand has given our international awards tally a handy boost, but on the other has gone through our creative departments like a petrol powered weedeater, stripping an entire level of paid jobs out of the bottom end of the industry and replacing them with what an uncharitable person might describe as a generation of homogenous gong-hungry clones.
Temuera Morrison wasn’t behind this clone army, though. The NZQA was, armed with not just an oversized novelty cheque, but an entire oversized novelty chequebook (and possibly a very big pen). It’s not just an advertising issue. Ever wonder why every other office building on Queen Street is home to at least one hairdressing academy? It’s not because people are hairier these days. It’s because if you can fill a class with wannabe hairdressers and train them to a certain standard, out come the oversized novelty cheques.
And the size and number of the cheques, whether you’re running a hairdressing academy, an air hostess college or an advertising school, come down to how many students sign up for your course.
It’s supply and demand. Kids demand a course that sounds like more fun than tax accounting (which, OK, is any course at all), so the hairdressing academies and ad schools supply them.
Turn it round though, and look at it from the ad industry perspective, and the supply and demand start to appear a little out of whack. Between them, the ad schools turn out up to 60 eager, talented graduates a year. That’s a lot of grads. Count up every creative position in every decent agency in the country – not just the juniors – and you’d be lucky to hit 200.
So where do all those graduates go? They’re not all flipping burgers or wishing they’d done hairdressing. A good number of them are working long hours in creative departments, for less each week than some of us could spend on a feed at Prego. They’re winning awards, and they’re turning out the work.
But they’re also turning out the workers. Rather than serving as a poorly compensated step on the way to a proper job, the placement teams have become the replacement teams – doing the work junior teams once did, but for a fraction of the cost.
The impact on the number of paid jobs is just one problem though – and if you’re into market forces, you could say it’s just tough titties. What’s hurting us more – and this is where creative directors have to take a hit – is that going to an ad school has become almost the only way into the game.
It hasn’t always been this way. There used to be a time, the ex-art director who cleans our kitchen at work told me, when people who wanted to work in advertising would get a book together, knock on a lot of doors, land an interview or two, then maybe get a job. What they didn’t know when they turned up they’d learn as they went along.
Since there was no such thing as an advertising graduate back then, all sorts of people would turn up and try their luck. Policemen, firewood contractors and – God help us all – military pilots came knocking and some of them even got hired.
Sure, not all of them could tell you the nine times in the last three decades that ads featuring gerbils had won international awards, but they got by. They came up with ads based on their life experiences – which they could do because they’d actually had some. Insights weren’t just something that came from the planner’s crystal ball. They were what you got from spilling beer on a big guy’s shoes in a pub, riding the bus 200 times to a shit job, having kids and changing their nappies, falling in love, buying a house, crashing your car, having your cat die and painting a roof.
The result, on a good day, was advertising that connected with all sorts of people, because it was made by all sorts of people.
Of course, it makes perfect sense for some professions to be staffed by an annual crop of bright eyed graduates, all products of the same rigorous system, all trained to the same high standard. It seems to make sense for lawyers, and I’m pretty sure it makes sense for doctors – when the folks at the ad schools mail me a bomb tomorrow I want someone who knows what they’re doing stitching my hands back on.
But I’m not sure it makes so much sense for advertising.
If you’ve noticed that your favourite swanky Auckland restaurant has been a bit light on advertising lovelies this week (especially middle aged male creative directors), there’s a good reason for it. This week marks the annual celebration of advertising creativity at Cannes, in the South of France. Each year, thousands of ad folk (and thousands more trying to sell them stuff) get together to first judge, then award each other’s work, drink themselves silly and stay in some of the most expensive hotels you’ll find anywhere.
Cannes is a hoot, and the one time I was invited to judge, my bag was packed before I’d put down the phone.
It’s also a bit flawed. This year, the unofficial theme has been sexism, with first Kiwi James Hurman then wine and social media industry darling Gary Vaynerchuck called out by #changetheratio crusader Cindy Gallop. (Both have since apologised, as covered off in the links.)
It’s a worry. What used to worry me even more, though, was that the ads that won at Cannes were almost never anything like the ads most clients bought and ran to help promote their products and services. A big chunk of them existed more to win awards than to, you know, sell stuff. It’s not surprising. Advertising people don’t usually get promoted on whether their ads work. They get promoted on whether their ads win awards. (I think it’s what economists call a perverse incentive.)
A good example this year was an app out of multinational Grey’s Singapore office. It uses crowd-sourced image analysis to help find refugee boats in the Mediterranean. It’s a cool idea. It won A Gold Lion at Cannes. The only problem is it’s a fake and doesn’t actually work. (Soz, drowned refugee children!)
Stuff like this used to irk me. Over time, though, I’ve changed my position. I still think chasing awards for their own sake is at best a waste of agency time and at worst a betrayal of the clients who pay our wages. The award-winning work, though, serves a handy purpose. For me, it’s like high-end catwalk fashion. It doesn’t have to be commercially viable. It doesn’t matter if no one other than Lady Gaga will ever wear your dress made from meat, or your 15 inch heels or whatever. But when you push those boundaries, try new things, maybe tell some lies about how real your client or brief or media placement was, you break new ground. And next year in Glasson’s you see echoes of that catwalk craziness from Paris, or New York. And the world is a more interesting place for it.
Two great examples awarded at Cannes this year have been The Swedish Number – a super simple but powerful campaign that allows anyone in the world to call a Swede (seriously) and Y&R New Zealand’s McWhopper. Will they drive more tourism or sell more burgers? The jury is out. Do they challenge marketers to think differently and do better work? You bet.
I don’t know if I’ll enter or attend Cannes again (both start looking super expensive when it’s your own money). But I’ll read the blogs, follow the scandals and admire the work – and try not to worry too much about what’s real and what’s just inspiring.
I didn't watch the Joseph Parker fight last night, and it doesn't look like a lot of my friends did either (yay, social media filter bubble!). Plenty of people did, though. Many via $50 a pop Sky TV pay per view, and a smaller but newsworthy number via various unpaid online streams.
Promoter Dean Lonergan didn't think much of this, and according to media reports has threatened – Taken style – to find the offending streamers and kill them. Wait, I mean sue them.
I'm not going to tell Mr Lonergan how to run his business, and I'm certainly not going to be rude about it (hell, he hangs out with people who hit people for money). But here's another way to look at what happened. "Wow, not only are there people keen enough and / or dumb enough to pay $50 via dear old Sky TV to see my fight, it looks like there are thousands more who I could possibly sell some sort of cheap ticket to as well."
That's not a threat, that's an opportunity. Turn it into a social-friendly channel idea and you're heading for a knockout.
The other week marked the end of a year of speaker selection, content development and coaching for TEDxAuckland. (It also marked the beginning of another year of speaker selection, content development and coaching!). I've been lucky enough to work as content director for this event for five years now. It's one of the world's biggest, and every year we welcome up to 30 speakers and performers and up to 2500 attendees to spend a day or two experiencing some "ideas worth spreading."
I've learned a lot in those years but the most portable one – my idea worth spreading – is our formula for choosing a talk. It's an idea worth spreading because it doesn't just apply to TED... it's true for any situation where you're asking yourself, "will anyone listen?"
I believe to give a great talk (or write a great song, or make a great film) you need just three things.
1. An idea. Not five ideas, and certainly not zero (although plenty of TED talks turn out to have none). Evolution is an idea. Don't worry be happy is an idea.
2. A personal connection. You don't have to have come up with the idea yourself (although hearing Isaac Newton talk about gravity would be cool). But it does need to have changed you, or you changed it. Test: if you could hand your notes to someone else and they could give your talk, you don't really have a strong enough personal connection. This should be a talk only you can give.
3. The skill to tell it well. This is the part speaker coaches often focus on. To be honest, though, nail the first two and we can take care of this. After coaching almost 100 speakers I've learnt that the most important speaking technique is to have a great idea, then don't let your talk get in its way.
Videos from TEDxAuckland 2016 will be online in June and I'll update this post to include a link.