June 19. San Francisco. Atelier Laurent Studio.

It was a gathering of contrarians, a few hundred radicals hand-selected to come together to mash it up inside an inspiring art studio. These weren’t painters or sculptors. These were protagonists in the business world, protestors of the status quo – demonstrators, if you will, of a better way to build and run organizations. This was a gathering of change agents who drive new agendas all over the world – in big organizations and small, established ones and newbie’s. This event was called the MIX Mashup. Its stories can be found here.

As you’ve read many times before, I’m a believer in – and practitioner of – the power of transformation.  Done well it has the ability to rise above the noise, stand out amidst the clutter, and drive market growth while accelerating through opportunities that enable higher levels of sustainable value. A transformation agenda does this by providing the belief system and operating framework that aligns an organization around one agenda, integrates product, sales and marketing around one point of view, and speeds decisions and action around one overarching objective. Attending the MIX Mashup was as comfortable as a homecoming for me.

Author Gary Hamel, co-founder of MIX and co-host of the event, urged the audience to “be more aspirational”, to “be more angry”. He urged attendees to define thoughts and actions based on what you want versus what you’ve been.  He’s right, of course. Just look at what budget planning looks like at most organizations. It’s a derivative of last year’s plan and last year’s results.

What is in the way of a better, more meaningful future?

Without being too obtuse, the Nobel Prize winning author, William Faulkner, who wrote of life in the segregated southern part of America, captured it well. The south was mired in a case of what Faulkner called, “Was. Is.”, meaning the south was stuck because its past was always present. “Was. Is.” Is that why so many organizations are going nowhere fast? Is that why so many can’t align around a future-focused agenda? Is ‘the gravitational pull of the past’, to quote a lovely turn of phrase by Geoffrey Moore the drag on what can be? I firmly believe it is. “Was. Is.” should be more like, ‘Was isn’t relevant any more’.

How can you think and act differently?

Be like a challenger brand. Take nothing for granted. Challenge conventional wisdom. Challenge the status quo. Start with the end in mind. Figure out what you want then handle things that are in the way. Challenge the dominance of the Big Dogs and their grip on how things are. Challenge the primal forces that conspire to keep things comfortable and tidy and as it’s always been.

How do you inspire others to be help power transformation?

I have my phrases. Gary Hamel, Geoffrey Moore, and others have theirs. But the best rallying cry of all just might be a bumper sticker I saw one day. It certainly works in this context.

Today, the challenge of trying to control chaos is very much at play – only this time without the slapstick. Where? The landscapes of many industries continue to get more complex. Whether it’s media or technology, science or health care, we’re witnessing a relentless drive to be part of the action. What does this mean to you? The free world might not be at stake, but  the need to control your place in your industry domain is.

To visualize just how chaotic some industries have become take a look at these fascinating infographics from Luma Partners. These are not the pictures of calm.

Here’s a popular one for the digital advertising display space.

Here’s another for the mobile industry.

What do these industry pictures show us? They’re cluttered. Messy. Chaotic.

What’s an organization to do that’s in the middle of one of these spaces – besides the primal urge to mark and claim territory? Here are some proven moves:

• Put yourself in the shoes of the executive who’s trying to understand what’s going on
• Own the problems trying to be solved
• Stop selling your solutions and start helping to navigate a clear way through the maze
• Make sense of the industry madness
• Become a calming source of relevant knowledge
• Create Thought Leadership that conveys your provocative point-of-view about it all
• Leverage that content everywhere and often
• Develop an industry Value Roadmap that delineates the way to create & capture value
• Publish it, teach it, disseminate it
• Train your organization on how to use the content to have new conversations
• Do this well and you’ll earn the coveted position of trusted guide to what’s important

If you follow these steps and execute this kind of work, you’ll go a long ways toward positioning your organization as the industry leader – a leader that can help companies rise above the industry clatter and clutter. But, hurry. It’s only a matter of time before someone else successfully stands out from the crowd.

For more insights, news and suggestions visit my blog at www.21weeks.com/blog or follow me on Twitter @ThomasButta.

Thomas Butta

Important debate that deserves to be surfaced…especially for marketers. Can the ad business take on the technology business?

Photo: Jonathan Fickies / Bloomberg via Getty Images

Martin Sorrell, the chief executive of WPP and, arguably, the dominant voice in the advertising business, recently gave an interview in which he challenged the basic efficacy of social media as an advertising tool.

Mind you, this is against a backdrop of the entire advertising industry in a manic dither to stress its social media bona fides. What you want to be right now is a social media agency—because every other agency network or holding company has to buy you. Buddy Media, a social media advertising agency slash technology company, even took a round of VC investment. Advertising, heretofore, is not a business the VC community has ever looked at with anything more than contempt.

But Sorrell told the Royal Television Society that he had “some fundamental doubts about the ability to monetize social platforms.”

“We used to write letters to each other,” he continued, “and now we correspond through Facebook and Twitter and other forms of communication. If you interrupt that with a message, you may run into trouble.” Of course, he added with artful humility, he had once said that Facebook was overvalued at $15 billion whereas it is looking at a public offering near $100 billion.

Now, in some sense, Sorrell is merely making a contrarian argument—and hardly a far-fetched one. The Web itself, once expected to be the ne plus ultra of advertising, has returned much more equivocal results. Its cost keeps going down instead of up. And social media is more complex and less linear and more anarchic than the Web. There is no straight path for a message to get through.

But Sorrell is wily and, we can assume, his point was something more than just polemic.

Facebook, like Google before it, is about to usher in another great depression in the value of the ad market. Its billions of user views which it can sell for fractional pennies will create, for Facebook, a cash gusher. But for everyone else, it will cheapen the value of digital media. By once again letting the technology guys control the advertising play, the chance is great that they will take volume instead of spending the time and effort to develop a more particular and exclusive branding play.

Sir Martin, in other words, is trying to put a stake in the ground.

The digital world is surely the future of advertising, but, as surely, the digital guys are fucking it up. Worse, the big digital kahunas have come up with a way to make money for themselves, at the expense of everybody else. Worse yet, the forms of advertising they’ve created don’t even work very well—so the entire craft becomes devalued.

It’s war—of a sort.

Curiously, WPP is Google’s biggest client (and it will, no doubt, if it is not already, become Facebook’s biggest client), but, because of AdSense’s fundamental democratization of the medium, this means that WPP is still a small overall contributor. Large ad agencies hold large sway over television; they don’t over big digital platforms.

Uncle Martin is jawboning.

He is at last trying to take back the discussion. The technology guys, not least of all because they understand technology, have controlled the conversation, even when it’s about advertising, a subject they don’t much understand at all (or particularly care about). The advertising guys, trying to placate cowed clients worried about their uncool digital strategies, and unable to truly talk the technology talk, have gone along.

A business that supports itself with advertising, that, effectively, has only one revenue stream—advertising—is almost entirely run by people who, effectively, want to cut out the advertising pros.

It’s a war whose time has come.

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