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I'm back from the Consumer Electronics Show, trying to process a work week's worth of meetings, demos, and conversations - so much that it felt like it filled at least a month. I did get some highlights shared already on Pinterest, with the help of some colleagues and friends. Far more is coming.
While there, I banged out a post for Ad Age on why there wasn't a single conversation piece, a water cooler moment - beyond, perhaps, Michael Bay flubbing his keynote appearance.
Why CES Lacked a Big Bang
The theory of events like the Consumer Electronics Show is that there has to be a big bang every year. What happens when there isn't one?
It's a timely question, because it was hard to come up with a single standout product launch at CES 2014. What's the big water cooler moment? While I was waiting for the Brand Matters keynote for advertisers ad marketers, the five most buzzed-about topics were: ultra HD (the latest evolution of improving video quality), Sony (a CES mainstay), Samsung (ditto), wearable tech (this one's important; more on that shortly), and Michael Bay (newly infamous for flubbing a keynote appearance on Monday). Are these top trends a sneak peek into the future?
No, they're not. And that's okay.
The biggest reason CES 2014 feels less exciting in terms of its innovation output is that it has become a victim of our heightened expectations. We may not want to wear Google Glass yet -- or have a FitBit track our health, play immersive 3D virtual games or have self-driving cars take us around town. That's fine; not all of these technologies will offer immediate benefits for everyone; some will barely have a use for anyone. But for all of these, we've collectively reached that view of the horizon where we can envision what might come in the near future. In the past several years, it feels like just about every great science fiction idea has been dusted off, prototyped, and popularized.
It brings to mind "the adjacent possible," the concept coined by Stuart Kauffman and popularized by Steven Johnson in his book "Where Good Ideas Come From." Johnson describes how different people in different places often come up with the same invention or innovation at roughly the same time, largely because they're all operating at the margins of what we think could be plausibly real. "The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future," Johnson wrote in The Wall Street Journal, "hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself." Right now, we're awash with possibilities, and there are so many edges where inventors can operate.
The margins themselves are more important than the individual products at this CES. With wearable headgear in particular, there will likely be a few successes for the mass market, and a number of other winners targeting special use cases such as skiers, surgeons or heavy gamers. Most others will fail. What's far more important is that there are now viable applications in fields such as hands-free mobile computing, voice controls, lifecasting and the merger of fashion with consumer electronics. With the top five trend list cited above, it's healthier that that people are more interested in the field of wearable tech than any one product. Any category matters more than its individual companies and products.
Even if a product broke out and became the most buzzed about hit, it wouldn't necessarily mean anyone will buy it. No matter how many curved and 4K displays get headlines, high-definition sets are already so impressive that TV software matters more than TV hardware when it comes to displays. Anecdotally, the TV hardware I've heard most people excited about is Google Chromecast -- a product sold for $35, not $3,500. Chromecast itself, while not introduced at CES, is just one of many technologies enabling people to easily connect their screens and devices, and that broader trend is something evident everywhere at this show.
Every attendee will have his or her favorite products they saw here. There was plenty to choose from. Android coming to cars, Intel's sensors built into clothing for babies and WowWee's gesture-controlled robots are a few of the standouts. Figuring out what this mean and what to do about them will then mean CES isn't a weeklong event but one that reverberates all year long.
Oh, just a typical line from CES, via my Flickr set from CES 2013
Are you going to the Consumer Electronics Show this year? I'll be back for my eighth straight year. Below are some highlights I can talk about, as I'm out Monday to Friday with a pretty full schedule. If you're there, we might be able to find each other through Twitter, Instagram, or Foursquare (all username dberkowitz), and you can always email me at dberkowitz (@) gmail (dot) com.
MediaLink always puts on a good show, and their Brand Matters lineup is fantastic. I'll be at their Monday night bash, as well as the Wednesday morning keynote featuring leaders from Publicis Groupe, Twitter, MillerCoors, Facebook, Ford, and Salesforce.
Tuesday morning, I'm speaking at Digital Hollywood on a session about mobile advertising. Fellow panelists include Google's George Meredith, Beachfront Media's Frank Sinton, WPP Group's Shawn Fenton, Possible's Andrew Solmssen, Time Warner Cable Media's Fred Bucher, and Skype's Al Kallel, with IBB Consulting's Jonathan Weitz moderating.
The past few years, some of my best finds have been at the emerging tech zone Eureka Park, which I'll likely visit on Tuesday.
My friends at Publicis Groupe (my agency MRY's parent company) have a robust series of events focused on marketers.
Also, I started a group Pinterest board to share CES updates. If you want to contribute to it, drop me a note.
As you might guess if you've been reading this blog for a bit, this isn't my first week as a chief marketing officer. Yet the start of the new year feels like a fine time to return to some unfinished business.
Last summer, a week into starting my new job as CMO of agency MRY, I penned a byline about lessons from a first-time CMO based on a single week's experience. Amidst other columns I was working on getting out then, other deadlines, and the Advice for a New CMO roundup, I didn't get around to publishing it. Here, for the first time, you can read the column in full. It's unedited from the initial draft, so the rawness is in place; perhaps I'll soon get to adding more thoughts about lessons learned since this was published.
By all means, your own experience would be most welcome in the comments, social channels, email, or any other forum you see fit.
First Week Lessons from a First-Time CMO
By David Berkowitz
Chief Marketing Officer, MRY
At the end of June, I joined agency MRY as its first chief marketing officer, a role I’m now holding for the first time. For those taking on new marketing leadership roles and embarking on other transitions, I kept track of the experience during that first tumultuous week on the job. Here’s what I learned so far:
Consider everyone a potential ally. Some of those I started to collaborate with in the first week included the heads of human resources, strategy, innovation, business development, and certain account teams. Granted, the very first person I met was the office barista – another person who can make a big difference in one’s day.
One of the biggest wins is reach a clear understanding with the chief financial officer. Marketing, known as a cost center rather than a revenue driver, isn’t always a CFO’s top priority. I have the good fortune of working with a CFO who already believes in marketing. What’s more important is for a CFO to appreciate the need to be nimble, and even engage in real-time marketing. In return, the marketing team must be willing to keep their books balanced. By finding common ground, my meeting with the CFO proved to be one of the best hours, and perhaps most important, of my first week.
Your relationship with your marketing team will make or break most days on the job. Get to know them well. Support them. Show that you will go to bat for them.
A team is composed of individuals. Treat them as such, even if it’s a group where everyone may wind up stepping in to chip in with other’s jobs.
Share everything you can with your team. Earn trust.
Have a vision, or better yet, a “Big Hairy Audacious Goal” or BHAG as Jim Collins says. I had a small, fuzzy, ambitious but attainable goals going into the job. Then I started getting approached with some challenges on the first day that I wasn’t expecting. Addressing those to the extent necessary will require a BHAG. The night after my third day there, I wrote an outline for a BHAG. The next morning, it turned into a minimalist 60-slide deck. Before lunch, I shared it with my team to see if it made sense and get them on board. It is now something I hope to work on the rest of my time in this job, and maybe in many jobs to come. And I never could have thought of it in advance. It came entirely from listening.
Listen to anyone and everyone.
Listen actively. Find something to learn from every conversation. Write it down. Revisit it until you internalize it.
One great way to internalize what you learn is to share it with your team and others. It goes back to the saying that my eighth grade math teacher, Pat Kelly (of blessed memory), made all of her students memorize on the first day of class: “The more senses you bring into the learning process, the more lasting will be the learning.” Repeating what you learn engages more of your senses.
Every day, play small ball. Look for those quick wins. Find a way to say yes to someone and make something happen.
Say yes even when you’re in over your head. Not even 90 minutes into starting there, an opportunity arose to present at a major client’s event in Australia a few weeks later. That meant working harder to get the agency’s story straight, getting immersed in the agency’s work, understanding the client in depth, creating a presentation hitting on the organization’s key themes, and scheduling a trip about as far away as one can travel, all while trying to keep things moving forward with the countless projects and needs arising in the home office. Then again, it was a great way to make a statement as part of an organization determined to go to the ends of the Earth for its clients. Find a way to start with yes.
Prioritize. The first priority? Sit down with anyone and everyone internally who can meet with you. Beyond that, the CMO will have to partner with many others externally to get the most visibility possible for the organization. Many such potential partners will benefit far more once you have a better understanding of how your own organization works. Even if some are hungry to work with you right away, they’ll appreciate you trying to be effective rather than too fast.
Make every minute count. You only get one first week. Use it to define yourself. Set yourself up for success in what will, one hopes, be years contributing there.
Be proud of what you’ve done so far, however subtle or grand. Remember, you were brought in for a reason, and it means at least someone else wants you to succeed.
Smile.
Below is my latest column that ran in Advertising Age's special 2013 opinion issue, with my own research on mentions of "startups" in Ad Age listed above. I've also been having a fun exchange about this with Kite's Tarah Feinberg, some of which you can catch on Google+ (yes, really, G+ still exists). Tarah noted, "We don't believe that 'brand and agency love for startups is going to fizzle'; we believe they're going to start dating for marriage, rather than just to get laid." I think he's on to something, and it dovetails with the article. The sleeping around is over; now it's time to focus on real relationships.
Here's the column; I'd love your thoughts.
Hey, marketers, are you excited to finally kick off some amazing startup partnerships in 2014? Want to get some hackathons going? Maybe you can crowdsource ideas and incubate them? Sorry, but that thinking is so 2013. Come 2014, brands are going to get more serious, and startups are going to have to work harder to get their attention.
People are debating whether startup funding from venture capitalists is in a bubble, but there's another kind of bubble that doesn't have much time left: the past few years of brands' interest in startups.
Advertising Age itself reflects this, with more mentions of the word "startup" in 2012 than in 2005 through 2009 combined. Expect those mentions to ebb in the years ahead.
Here are three reasons why a lot of the brand and agency love for startups is going to fizzle:
Clutter:
There's so much clutter in the startup marketplace right now that the most-frequent kind of startup pitch I'm getting these days is from those that help marketers keep track of startups.
Two of them were started by colleagues from my previous agency, and two of the most-developed -- Kite and DMR's Industry Index -- have executive teams with substantial agency résumés. I can only imagine how many current and former agency folks have such business plans in their desk drawers, just waiting for one of those "make the logo bigger" moments that convinces them to quit and try tackling this.
That said, marketers do need help managing the startup deluge. The number of startups out there with words like "crowd" or "social" or "app" in their names makes it practically impossible to remember the difference among them, and it's no easier for the startups with unusual names (Flayvr, for example, is for photo-sharing, rather than for recording your favorite kind of ice cream). The biggest problem with the clutter is that there are too few that matter for any particular brand at any particular time.
PR:
One of the biggest motivators for marketers looking to work with a startup is the public-relations value that they can get out of it. Typically the coverage has nothing to go on beyond the limited history of the startup and what the brand hopes to do. Rarely is there any follow up about what this achieved.
Journalists are going to start craving more meat. After the fifth brand-sponsored startup hackathon at South by Southwest or the 15th "we're the first brand to use this app" story, serious journalists will focus on what such partnerships accomplish. This is all the more true for stories about specific technologies. A brand using Vine, Snapchat or Google Glass is no longer newsworthy. Once in a while, a decent outlet will look at the five or 10 best examples of brands working with such technologies, but by the time that happens, a sizable number of brands will be competing for that attention.
Results:
If the announcement of some so-called partnership isn't newsworthy enough to generate a little PR, then what matters will be the actual results. Yet a lot of these programs are experimental, with a high risk of failure.
The programs are often designed to teach marketers how to be more agile and to teach startups what matters for brands. Both parties are expending resources with the overarching goal of evolving faster than their competitors, betting that focusing a little less on hitting quarterly targets will help them outlast everyone else in the long run.
It sounds rather poetic, but the harsh reality of the natural order is that most species go extinct. Most of the efforts don't make enough of a difference. Even good bets often don't pay off. A marketer working with a startup successful enough that it soon gets acquired can soon find a lot of their effort wasted when the acquirer buys the startup, strips it for parts and destroys its original purpose. It's relatively rare that a partnership between a marketer and a startup delivers results that the chief marketing officer cares about.
Startups still matter, of course. They contribute new ideas. They make great use of the talent contributing to them. They challenge their dominant competitors to keep earning their status. Marketers can learn plenty from them, and can learn even more from working with them, but they need to prioritize their resources and ensure any attempt at a partnership is designed to deliver value to the brand.
A handful of startups are designed to do that; the vast majority are not. Marketers have no choice but to minimize their startup involvement if other strategies are more promising. The upside of all the recent press attention is that enough marketers now know that working with startups is an option to pursue. Whether they should do it and under which circumstances will be up to them.
