Contagious session

Omar Jamil, CEO Latitude blogs for Aurora from New Delhi

Session 3 – Contagious session

Bit of a juggle up – David Droga, founder and creative chairman of Droga5, was unable to get his visa in time and so the session on Creative Participation has been postponed/cancelled and the Contagious session – scheduled for 5pm – has been pushed forward.

I’ve been a HUGE Contagious fan for a while now – having worked closely with the magazine while working in the UK.

Speaker is Will Sansom, writer and consultant, Contagious Communications.

First point: experience over innovation. Will speaking about the thousands of case study submissions that Contagious gets. What’s the basic insight? What’s the basic human need? What’s the big idea? Then think about the platform.

Best applications of tech is where the tech becomes invisible – endless market for simplicity. Applications of tech that are supposed to make things easier more often than not complicate things unnecessarily.

Will just showed a fantastic video on online shopping – how the process is often made ridiculously complicated. One reason why people are browsing and researching online and purchasing offline.

Good use of tech has no friction, frees up time. Gives two more great examples, Starhub online music store and Doggleganger (must find and check out!).

Personalised internet and advertising – the internet my way. Another brilliant use of tech: Band Sports Parental Control – a web app that you install on your browser and it controls your search results to only show positive results for sports teams you support and negative results for sports teams you don’t support! It’s great cause it’s viral and it engages people and it’ll get people to talk about them.

Seth Godin: Remarkable doesn’t mean remarkable to you, it means remarkable to me. Am I going to remark on it? If not, then you’re a loser. 

Remarkable means so good you’re going to share it. And that’s what you need to do. And this in turn will impact your media spend cause you now need to do less for the same results.

Next point: the power of emotional response. Cant underestimate power of emotional response. Will gives great example of Twitter being used – colleague Jess Greenwood at LAX, tweeted about horrid music to NZ Air. Got paged to the lounge and given a choice of music!

Third point: marketing as service design. 80% of branded apps downloaded less than 1,000 times. Most branded apps are not relevant and are self serving. People want more value, they want more meaning. So create something that will add rather than subtract. Sneakerpedia – created by SapientNitro for Footlocker – great example of marketing as service design. 

5% club – take 5% of your time, budget, resources to tinker with things, to play around. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter. Google used this as their business model. If 5% is focused on something human, with a real need – you’d be surprised how far it can go. 

Have to say, perhaps I’m biased given past associations with Contagious mag, but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this session – a LOT of the session was content driven, so videos and demonstrations of apps and campaigns. But all were geared around illustrating specific points and Will did a great job and explaining the connections.

Social data can be incredibly powerful – and if brands can tap into this then they’re onto a great thing. But needs to smart, subtle and generous.

Conclusion: it’s all about convergence, connecting the dots between the traditional and non-traditional in a meaningful way. Four pillars: interactivity of net, audio-video of TV, personalised location of mobile, and finally the real world (possibly the most important). Connect the dots between these four and you’ve grabbed people. Make sure it’s useful, relevant and entertaining. That’ll engage people. Be brave, make mistakes, innovate – the 5% mentality. And ultimately remember it’s for real people.