Everything is embarrassing
Often we hear from companies that want to take [shiny new thing], be that AR/VR, voice interfaces, influencer partnerships, whatever, and do something that hasn’t been done before. This is before the organization itself has built up any sort of understanding of how and what to use [shiny new thing] for. The best way to ruin any client relationship is to let someone well intentioned but overly ambitious pay you to indulge them. I could talk about the client that came in one day asking for a hologram, but then that would just prove that I don’t follow my own advice, and where would that get us?
A simple way to manage this is to think about it in concentric circles. The first and smallest circle is the company itself. Has this organization done anything like this before? Do they know what to look out for, what questions to ask, what a given platform or piece of technology is good for? Does the CEO understand what this will or won’t do, or has her niece just returned from Coachella and shown her a Snapchat face filter and she’s thought “Go on then”?
The second circle is the category. Once an organization has some familiarity with [shiny new thing], how could we apply it in order to stand out in the category? Have competitors also experimented with this? What can we learn from their successes or failures?
The last circle is the technology or platform itself — doing something that has legitimately never been done before. Doing this in public is loaded with opportunity and risk, but in having taken the previous two steps, you’ve built up a fluency in a given technology or platform where everyone speaks the same language, understands the risks and has decided to go for it. Said differently, Newton’s quote about standing on the shoulders of giants still applies, but sometimes one of those giants is Steve from IT who needs to add some permissions to get the thing working.
Anyway this was on my mind this morning as I bored an audience at the Youth Marketing Summit in Brooklyn. Thanks to Tribe for having me down and fellow speaker Lauren who was far more useful than I was. Looking forward to next time!
