Fight llc, a digital strategy firm based in Portland Oregon, is proud to announce that Operation Switch, an energy efficiency project developed in collaboration with our client Portland General Electric, has been awarded the Public Affairs Council’s annual Grassroots Corporate Innovation Award.
Fight partnered with PGE in creating “Operation Switch” to achieve the company’s goal of moving customers beyond awareness of energy saving issues and into making real change. Key to this program was showing that even little changes, when done by a lot of people, can make a big difference in Oregon’s energy future.
The Award
First presented by The Public Affairs Council in 2000, the Grassroots Innovation Awards recognize the nation’s best grassroots programs and campaigns. Award categories include:
Corporate Innovation
Association Innovation
Social Media Innovation
The Operation Switch program won in the Corporate Innovation category. Last year’s winner in the Corporate category was split between Target and Walmart.
Operation Switch Operation Switch is an online experiment from Portland General Electric that asked participants to make one simple change in their energy use every couple of weeks, and provided tips and support in making that change. Using a foundation of social media and basic game mechanics, Operation Switch helped PGE customers save an estimated 487,000 kWh of energy in 2010 – enough to power 41 homes for a year.
Fight llc Fight is a digital strategy firm built from the ground up to respond to the unique challenges and opportunities the digital space provides to brands of all kinds. Unbound by the need to fit ideas into specific executional capabilities, our core focus is on developing strategic plans designed to meet our clients’ business goals; plans that are forward thinking, measurable, adaptable, and designed to articulate a client’s unique value clearly to their customers.
Portland General Electric
Portland General Electric, headquartered in Portland, Ore., is a fully integrated electric utility that serves approximately 822,000 residential, commercial and industrial customers in Oregon. Visit our website at PortlandGeneral.com.
Prototyping is a way of testing that allows you to see how people respond to something so that you can make it even better. Google’s AdWords is normally used just as a pure advertising channel but Timothy Ferriss, a writer and entrepreneur, decided that for his new book he was going to use AdWords as a way to test new titles for a book he was working on.
He took 6 prospective titles that everyone could live with: including ‘Broadband and White Sand’, ‘Millionaire Chameleon’ and ‘The 4-Hour Workweek’ and developed an Google Adwords campaign for each. He bid on keywords related to the book’s content including ‘401k’ and ‘language learning’: when those keywords formed part of someone’s search on Google the prospective title popped up as a headline and the advertisement text would be the subtitle. Ferriss was interested to see which of the sponsored links would be clicked on most, knowing that he needed his title to compete with over 200,000 books published in the US each year. At the end of the week, for less than $200 he knew that “The 4-Hour Workweek” had the best click-through rate by far and he went with that title.
A fantastic way of using the tools that are out there in creative ways, read the full story here.
The trend in bike helmet design has been pretty straight forward, make it lighter, make it stronger. Which ment add more vents and improve the impact absorption. This kind of thinking yields incremental improvements, so how do you make a leap forward?
Rethink what a helmets purpose is, and work from there.
The Hövding is an airbag for your head. Mounted in a bulky collar, which can be disguised as a stylish scarf, the bag explodes on when you crash and surrounds your delicate melon with an inflated hood.
The collar contains the bag itself, helium to inflate the airbag and sensors which tell the Hövding when to fire. The sensor unit consists of gyroscopes and accelerometers which constantly monitor movement and deploy to bag when you’re in danger. The Chieftain is charged by USB (firmware can also be updated via the same port) and you switch it on by zipping the collar shut around your neck.
This is good and all, but before there is any value behind Apps on the AppleTV people are going to have to start creating Apps that are not driven by touch.. or someone needs to figure out how to turn my tv into a touch tv.
IOS hacker p0sixninja, aka Joshua Hill, has jailbroken the new AppleTV. To do it, he used an unreleased version of the tool greenpois0n, an exploit designed to crack iOS version 4.1.
The v2 AppleTV runs on the same iOS that Apple uses for all its mobile devices, and shares the custom A4 chip used in the iPhone 4, the iPad and the latest iPod Touch. Greenpois0n, like other jailbreak exploits, hacks the operating system to give the user access to the file system, and from there the ability to install third-party applications.
Each morning I like to take a peek and see what is trending on Twitter, today all the talk is about the PSAT’s. Which is interesting because often when talking about the Twitter demographic we find that it skews older, or at least older then the people who are typically taking the PSAT.
So either the youth are using Twitter more and represent a rapidly growing demographic or those that do use Twitter partake in the trending topics games more then others.
Want a fun free app that is focused on blending photo-sharing and social networks on your iPhone? Enter Instagram
Snap a photo with your iPhone, choose a filter to transform the look and feel, send to Facebook, Twitter or Flickr – it’s all as easy as pie. It’s photo sharing, reinvented.
The big question for me, ‘Why didn’t a company like Nikon or Canon make this app?’
Oh and yes it has a ton of great filters and options.
Your business might not have figured out how to make money using mobile devices as a way to drive sales, but Amazon has. In fact they reported that they saw more then one billion ( one plus nine zeros ) dollars in sales from it.
Amazon has seen more than $1 billion in sales from mobile devices over the last year, the company said during its second-quarter earnings announcement.
So what about all of you? Are you making Amazon purchases from your smartphone?
It’s anotherexample of a major brand looking to crowdsource ways of making themselves better
In this case it’s focused on marketing (even though it says advertising, their definition of advertising is over-broad)
We like to use opportunities like this to flex our brains with, poke at our process, and generally have a good time
We had not heard of this program from anywhere other than TechCrunch (see The Target Audience, below)
There’s actually precious little information to go on for GE Ads. In the best scenario, this is because GE is treating this not as a one-off contest, but as a long-range funnel for innovative work from unexpected places. In a less-good scenario this is because someone at GE thought that the idea was fun and went ahead with it with little thought (which is not a bad idea in itself).
In any case, we felt we were game, so we spent 120 minutes on it. Here’s how it played out.
Who’s Your Client?
GE has a HUGE breadth of products. We considered focusing on specific products, or even just specific major product categories, but, since we didn’t have any collective expertise in any one area, digging in to any one of them and trying to really understand what GE was doing and where the opportunities were, was beyond the scope of the time limit that we had set for ourselves. Besides, the scope of the request, while open-ended, seemed to be about GE as a brand overall, and not particularly about a product category.
The Target Audience
Again, not having done any sort of discovery (beyond what 30 minutes of web searching will get you), we decided to focus on the average consumer as the target. Business-to-business relationships are tricky to quickly understand if you don’t have some experience with what the target audience wants. On the other hand, we all have experience being a consumer, so it seemed like an easy headspace to get into. Ultimately we narrowed the audience down to Advanced Digital Literates because:
We are them, so we have some idea of what’s going on there
This project so barely made our radar (only due to Ned’s keen attention to things like this), but was so squarely targeted at people like us that it seemed to point to an opportunity that we could take advantage of
It turns out that, not having any information to the contrary, we thought that the broad consumers were probably being served quite well, actually, with the campaigns that GE is currently running (see below for more on this). We’re sure that someone in GE could give us evidence that there is a serious failing somewhere – in which case we’d tackle that more head on – but, barring that, we had to go with what we knew
The Goal
Again, given that there is not much to go on in terms of this project, we took a fairly generic goal:
Increase brand affinity volume with broad reach
What We Know
At first we didn’t think we knew much about the umbrella brand that is GE with respect to marketing. But it didn’t take us long to realize that GE’s advertising had actually reached us (which was especially surprising to me, as I’m nearly unreachable with advertising – a fact that I’ve decided to take as amusingly ironic). The ad campaigns are broadly inspirational, speak to the positive idea of “imagination” and talk about how GE improves the world. We’d seen ads on TV, and their digital ads were pretty solid. In fact, a campaign that they ran a few years ago, where you could create new ideas on a shared whiteboard, seemed downright inspired (though, of course, we can’t speak to its success).
Insomuch as umbrella advertising doesn’t seek to sell anything directly, these all seemed to be on the right track. And reflecting on our own feelings we came away on the positive side of neutral on GE, which is pretty good for a brand that we don’t knowingly consume on a regular basis (unlike, say, Coke).
Our Key Insight
GE has the opportunity to own a real concept of “imagination” in the marketplace, beyond what they currently do.
Our Strategy
GE creates the groundwork for inspired ideas. GE should provide the digital infrastructure for digital natives to bring new wonderful things into the world. Inspiring innovation and providing the framework in which it can grow.
By doing this, GE reinforces, in a very concrete way, its ownership of “imagination”. It creates affinity for GE in the people who are actually using their imagination to make the world a more interesting place. It also provides an interesting opportunity for GE to expand its business into a new space that is consistent with the image it projects (see the tactics section, below).
Tactical Approach
Specifically, we would like to see GE collect, build, foster, and own tools to help people spark new ideas, nurture those ideas into deeper concepts, and bring those concepts into reality. GE should be the company you think of when you want to figure out something new to bring into the world.
We envision a web site called imagine.ge.com which would provide a range of tools that GE has actively helped develop. Most tools would be free. This would include tools such as:
Community Ideation Platforms (e.g. Salesforce’s Community offering, which powers Dell’s Ideastorm, or, ironically, Google’s Moderator, which is what GE is using for this project)
Community Idea Acceleration Platforms (I don’t know of any in the wild, but have built a couple: systems that allow people to see other people’s ideas and get involved to the degree that interests them)
Basically an entire ecosystem devoted to the imagination/innovation process from creating the initial spark to making the idea a reality. We see this infrastructure as the “ideas” equivalent to Amazon’s Web Services, which provide essential services for new web applications without the need for a company to build the infrastructure themselves.
We imagine GE expanding upon these layers and integrating them into a more complete workflow.
The kicker would be for GE to make this infrastructure the foundation of how ideas grow within GE. This provides added incentive to improve the tools and added credibility to both the tools and to GE as a company that practices what it preaches.
In our biggest version of this concept, GE creates a new business unit around creating “imagination” infrastructure of all kinds (potentially capturing the brand space that Disney evacuated after Walt died), they create a global incubation program, get involved in 3D printing (maybe through the RepRap or MakerBot projects), and buy Adobe both for its creative and technology development tools.
All of this provides additional emphasis on GE’s classic jingle “We bring good things to life”.
Last week we posted the first edition of “Get in the Ring” featuring Rob talking about why social media was actually a 301 course for marketers. This week it’s my turn to step into the ring. The topic I drew was “What’s the difference between traditional and digital marketing?” This turned out to be a lucky draw as it’s something I’ve been talking a lot about recently, but getting it into three minutes wasn’t easy. Neither apparently would be writing on the board in a legible way. But GITR is all about just going for it, so that’s what I did.
If you want to know more about GITR is all about and why we’re doing it, or even how you can get in on it, check out Rob’s original post. But enough stalling – here’s me, talking about things off the cuff.
“As Adam Smith observed, the two commodities absolutely necessary for short-term human survival – air and water – are virtually free. From a survivalist viewpoint then, everything beyond air, water, and berries and nuts can be considered a luxury good. Do you recall the luxury good of milk, in bottles, delivered to your stoop? And how it turned to a clabber so heavy and yellow and thick that it could not be forcefully shaken from the bottle? Was your looking into this clabber – as rococo as bread pudding, as weird as a preserved calf – not unlike looking into your own crystal ball? And what of Bisquick? Bisquick mix was an anonymous staple of my mother’s kitchen. Pancakes and biscuits were never made with anything else, and nothing else was ever made with it. I think that was the initial appeal of the idea of Velvet Crumb Cake….Anyway, where was I?” – by Dave Allen.
Only seven words in the opening paragraph above are mine. The rest I took from the books of three authors – Spent by Geoffrey Miller, The Interrogative Mood by Padgett Powell and Manhood For Amateurs by Michael Chabon. It could be a paragraph from my first novel if I had followed the logic of the author David Shields, whose new book Reality Hunger consists of 618 fragments, including, according to Michiko Kakutani writing in the New York Times, “hundreds of quotations taken from other writers like Philip Roth, Joan Didion and Saul Bellow – quotations that Shields has taken out of context and in some cases, he says, “also revised, at least a little – for the sake of compression, consistency or whim..”
Mr Shields asks – “Who owns the words? “Who owns the music and the rest of our culture?” We do he answers – all of us – though not all of us know it yet. Reality can not be copyrighted.”
“Reality can not be copyrighted.” Quite the statement..
According to Jaron Lanier who just released his new book, You Are Not A Gadget, we have arrived at this place in culture because of how online collectivism, social networking and popular software designs are changing the way people think and process information. It’s a world of “metaness” that regards the mashup as “more important than the sources who were mashed..” Meanwhile, in his new book, Lanier makes an impassioned plea for “Digital Humanism” with regard to the Internet’s effect on public discourse.
Lanier may have an uphill battle on his hands. Take the case of the teenage novelist, Helene Hegemann, whose first novel Axolotl Roadkill, was named as a finalist for a prestigious literary prize in Germany. All was fine until it was revealed by “The culture blog www.gefuehlskonserve.de that found Hegemann plagiarised – mainly from Strobo, a sex, drugs and clubbing novel by blogger Airen (b. 1981) published last year by SuKuLTuR, a small publishing house in Berlin. Not only did she borrow humorous collocations like “Techno-Plastizität” (Techno Plasticity) or “Vaselintitten” (Vaseline Tits), she lifted whole lines and scene setups.” [Forgive me, but a book titled Vaseline Tits may just be screaming to be plagiarized..]
Helene Hegemann says she’s sorry, she knows it was wrong “not to mention all the people whose writings helped me”. And yet she stands by her novel: after all, “there’s no such thing as originality anyway, there’s only authenticity”. What’s more, she’s only a “lodger” in her own mind: “I help myself to whatever inspires me.”
Both Hegemann and Shields argue that there is nothing new about their literary plagiarism [if we can even call it that..] Shields points out James Joyce‘s own quote – “I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man.” He goes on to argue that “appropriation has breathed life into music, art and theatre..it has been a foundation of culture.” This may be true, yet if everything in culture can be truly taken as ready and waiting to be appropriated, what then of the original creator? Obviously we have copyright laws that can be applied by the aggrieved but as Louis Menand, a Harvard professor and New Yorker staff writer points out..”with any creative movement, if the results are compelling and profound enough, even rigid conventions come around to making what seems like a sin into a virtue.”
And finally, my friend Roy Christopher in Context Removal Machine: SXSW 2010 writes of listening to Bruce Sterling give a talk in which he says “….that the musicians are leading the way for everyone — authors, engineers, academics, everyone, not just creatives. We are de-monetizing everything. If we had free, open-sourced food and shelter instead of music and software, none of this would be a problem, he said, adding “Who’s on top of the game now? No one! The game’s on top of us!”
Roy says of Sterling’s speech – “It was as sobering as it was inspiring.”
