this is violence

Dear Brands,

It’s NBA playoff time! I know you love sports so I thought this I would share this story with you:

When I was in 8th grade I started playing on my school basketball team. I was 5’9 at the time, which I guess was tall for my league, and I enjoyed a season playing center and averaging about 20 rebounds and 20 points a game. That summer, my dad got it into both our heads that if I could make varsity my freshman year of highschool, I could play in college and then – who knows. My first year of high-school I missed the first two days of try-outs, but squeaked onto the freshman team on the last day. Now at 5′ 11, I spent the season as an undersized 3rd string center, scoring 3 points and grabbing a single rebound. Total. The next season I was cut from the junior varsity team and played city ball instead. By the time I was in college, still 5’11, I found that basketball had become a humiliating mixture consisting of me getting either blocked or dunked on.

It wasn’t that I was getting worse, it’s that the position I had been playing my whole life was changing, the guys were bigger and stronger and I wasn’t. I had to face reality and change my game: at 5’11 I was a point guard I had to learn to handle the ball, learn to pass and to set up others to score and learn to shoot from the outside. But the biggest change was learning to see the court and the game from a totally different angle both physically and philosophically. While I had been coached as a center, whose role is to impose themselves on the game based on size, the role of the point guard is that of a facilitator. But I did something else too: rather than abandon what I had been coached on, I tried to integrate it into this new role. I tried to understand how i could embrace this new role, and make it my own by adding this skill not often associated with point guard position. I took what I had a natural aptitude for and made that the thing that differentiated me: I was a point guard who could play off the block.

The point of my story is this: for brands, the web changes things, and you need to acknowledge this change and if you want to stay part of it, recognize that you’re going to have to change. You don’t have to throw out what you have, but you’re going to have to look at it from a different angle.

What got me on this is a recent, and well covered, rant by Michael Lynton about the apparent perils humanity faces should the web be left unchecked. I don’t I need to address Lyntons concerns directly, nor the profoundly disappointing SXSW keynote by Bruce Sterling, nor the sort of half-hearted attempts by Andrew Keen to raise hackles at the The Next Web conference. There is though a thread running through all these and I think it’s something brands need to think about, and that is this:

I’m sorry this all happened on your watch. I’m sorry that your predecessors had it easier than you and that your industry is getting turned this way and that by people who have no real interest in your industry or your success. But it’s happening, and yelling at it, or deriding it, or praying that someone will swoop in and fix it all back to the way it was isn’t going to save you, it’s going to leave you in the middle of the street wondering how you got left behind.

One thing we need to come to terms with is this: the internet wasn’t made for you, and it really wasn’t made for you to make money on. It was made to enable people to share information. It was made for scientists and researchers, not for movie makers or Fortune 500 brands. And before there was the web, there were the bulletin board systems, and Usenet, and listservs. All this stuff has always been about individual people sharing with other people. The reason I bring this up is that at some point we got it in our collective heads that the “dot.com” era was the norm, that the web was some sort of cheap media channel to place advertising and that what we’re seeing now is somehow new. It’s not, it’s simply a disrupted system returning back to it’s normal state. While the ad industry is making marketing sites and display ad campaigns or trying to figure out how to sponsor some blogger to shill your product; people are out here sharing, and making their own things, and launching ideas and generally paying less and less attention to you.

The good news is this: as much as the web empowers all these people, it empowers you too. You just need to stop acting like corporation, and start acting like a person again. First things first though: we gotta get off the campaign, it’s a concept that has nothing to do with the web, it has everything to do with you, nothing to do with your customer, and breaks down the exact relationship we’re trying to create. By maintaining this one and done campaign approach to the web your best case scenario is that you make a real a connection with your customer and then pull the rug out from underneath them when the campaign ends. Instead, make something that’s built to last, and built help your customer. Don’t worry about getting your message out, and they will seek you out. Andrew Keller posed a great question a few years ago: why didn’t Kodak’s agency come up with Flickr? How much more relevant would that have been than a banner ad campaign? Yes, it’s absolutely more expensive than any single campaign, but how many campaigns, and micro-sites and Facebook apps has Kodak done since then, and to what end? How would have it have changed their relationship with their customers to say “hey, you like photography and sharing pictures, we like photography and sharing pictures, why don’t we make a product thats all about this thing we all love?”

But there is another thing, while there are somethings you need to do to change up your game, you still have that one thing you’ve always had, your post-up move so to speak: you are an organization. You have the knowledge and the infrastructure to organize people around a task and you have the means to get it done. Thats huge. So yes, the game has changed, and yes, you’re going to have to change. You’re going to have to change your perspective and see things in a different way, but while the web is breaking down a lot of the ways we used to do things, it’s also probably the best way to relate to your customers on human level than anything we’ve had. We can change the relationship to be about something more than you making a product and them consuming it. If you take all the things you already know how to do well, and you change your perspective a little, the opportunity is to take the things that make your brand great and re-envision them through this new position.