Is Imagination More Important Than Knowledge

Thanks Susan, that's great. After you. Guys, we have a few minutes to talk about a shitload of stuff. Who's already fatigued on brands? Heads up? Yeah, I am. So, here's the deal. Whatever that description is, I'm going to talk about some of that. But what I really want to talk about is this. Computers are absolutely useless, they only give us answers. Amen. Because I should know that. I work for a company like this. Send out more CDs than people on the planet. But here are a couple of things that you should know. Is that we merged with Yahoo and IAWO brought these two companies together. I designed a logo drunkenly on a plane. So that's what we should call ourselves. We did not go with that. We call ourselves Oath. But at Oath there's only two things I give a shit about. It's culture and code. It's the only thing you guys have talked about today since I landed this morning. At the heart of that is creativity. And that's why I love the Netherlands. There are three things that I observe every time I come here. Wow, holy shit, you guys are tall. And as a short-arse Australian Chinese guy, throw me in the minority sector, sure. You guys also export more beer than I do. Than anyone else on the planet. So you're tall, good-looking and drunk. And I love that about you lot. But here's what I do think is amazing about creativity, which you are open about. It's this. If you think about the most dis... I would say abused word in our industry, it's this. Every time I meet with a brand, they say, hey man, we want to disrupt. I'm like, awesome, how are we going to do it? They're like, let's use technology and let's think about our business. I'm like, oh my god, your business model is a thing that needs to be disrupted using technology. But the truth is what I've heard more of is experience. That's 2018 in a nutshell. What's coming is clearly transformation. If you haven't heard the context of everything you're hearing about today, it's all about transformation. Why? Because we're changing. We're at the fourth cusp, or the cusp of the fourth industrial revolution. The first was this shit floating around. Steam made this building available. And then of course along came the big switch of electricity. And then of course the grubby thing in your hands, computing, and what's been coming at you for 20 years, this is an invisible sense of intelligence. So we are at the cusp of the change of intelligence. It's coming. And given that's the case, there's going to be 34 billion devices by 2025 connected to this incredible industry of ours. So every single brand on planet Earth has to have a 360 degree radius of humans. Otherwise, they're going to be in the forgotten community. And be open to that community. Be open to conversation. Be open, open, open, but don't be rude about the data that you collect. Because it's really hard, man, to get people to your brand and then get your brand to people. That shit is hard. So is it all rainbows and butterflies? Uh-uh. Shit got real uncool. It got real practical. And it's all about services. Every single brand on planet Earth, I believe, is a service brand. Because look, the first thing you need to know is that it's all about personalization, isn't it? You got to know who I am, man. Shee, you just landed at 65 degrees here in the Netherlands. Awesome, great, whoop-dee-doo. What I want it to be is customized, bringing me an experience that feels like you know me enough to think about. You know me? But then I'm going to add my personalization layer to it. You've probably heard every single brand on planet Earth talk about that this year. But then truthfully, how do you make sure it's humanized? And all these grubby platforms that we try and experience our brand, we need to make sure that we are talking like a human. So is tech actually making people human? Well, let me give you my story. 20 years ago, I moved to New York City. At that point in time, I bought that television, Sony Trinitron. I subscribed to Time Warner Cable. I had 99 channels of TV. I pushed that TV into the hallway and said, I want free TV. The first week I moved there. Why? I'm from a country that had five channels. I moved to a country that had 99 channels of shit that's going to rot my brain. So I decided, done with this. I'm going all digital. 20 years ago. No radio, no newspaper, no TV, nothing, nothing, nothing. And what's amazing about that is that beautiful environment where I understood, it was a bit slow by the way, but I knew who I was connecting with. I knew how I was connecting with them. I knew why I was connecting with them. That all changed and went to massive anxiety. I don't know about you guys. About four years ago, it started for me. I fire up my phone. All I see is misery and sports, both of which I don't participate in. And if I'm feeling like that, maybe you feel like that. If you feel like that, maybe the brand you represent feels like that. And that is society as we know it. Trust is the hardest thing to get, man. And if you think about trust, trust is just one of those environments where if you can get it, it's golden. But who are we getting? Are you looking after these humans? This is psychographic targeting according to Harvard. God bless. Or you could go Maslow's rule of hierarchy, which is another way to think about needs. But what I know is that technology is changing your behavior. But what it's not changing, and by the way, there are some behaviors that cannot change. You scumbags. But what I do know is that although technology is changing our behavior, it's understanding human needs is half the job of fulfilling it, period, full stop. So get that right and we can look for beauty. I've been looking in beauty this year alone because of the digital chaos. I'm looking for physical connections. Like this. This is a teddy bear you can buy for a child. It's called the guardian. A child holds this and their biometrics gets read and can determine whether it's sick enough to go to hospital. Or you've got this coming out of the Nordics. This is flick. You press one button and it does multiple actions that you program. So it doesn't use your cell phone. Or this. You can work out with another person like you, apparently. Or this. This is connected Tupperware. This is a very aggressive sizzle reel for connected Tupperware. But basically, when you go and do all your grocery shopping, when you open up a bag of spinach and three days later that thing has turned to hell. So what this thing will do is ping you and let you know when to optimize all your groceries. So we can make sure that technology is helping us facilitate ease and convenience in our worlds. Now, I'm Chinese. So when I travel, and I travel a lot, I wear a face mask. And when I wear a face mask, you don't know whether I'm smiling at you or I'm angry at you. So people are inventing these things, man. So you can still connect with humans and actually make sure the pollutants aren't happening in your body. It still doesn't stop you looking like an idiot, by the way, but there's that. Smart packaging. If you are in the packaging world today or have a physical product that you deliver, the smart packaging environment is worth $250 million today. It's estimated to be $25 billion in the next 10 years. It's going to happen in ink. This is an example of RFID chippable tattoo that lasts two weeks. So what you normally need a computer and a screen to do can all happen by using a tattoo. A good example of where it's headed also is nail art. This is L'Oreal's Sensor Art. You put this on your nails. It not only doesn't make you look blingy, you can also read the UV outside and tell you what SPF sunscreen you should be wearing. So practical technology that's helping the humans. Wearables. Yes. We love this category. There are about 593 wearables and the number one category is fitness. We're still trying to figure out if this thing's going to have a home, aren't we? Anybody in here have a wearable one? Quick show of hands. What do you got? Garbage. You're a runner? Are you a runner, young lady? How long have you had that for? This one? Yeah. A few months. A few months. You've got about three, four months before that is irrelevant to you perhaps. Brother behind you. What do you got there, man? You're both runners? You ran here today or some shit? Anybody got a wearable on at home? They don't have it here. So normally hands go up when I ask that question. Why? Nobody gives a shit if you walk 10,000 steps and socialize that crap. Secondly, it does the same thing your phone does and it kind of just doesn't do this any purpose. But they're beautiful, aren't they? Look how gorgeous these things are, except for garments. They're normally the ones that people do use. But these things are incredible. Some of them look like they're bent towards women. Some look like they're from the future. Some look like they're from the past. These are incredible supercomputers on our wrist and we're trying to figure out what they can possibly do for us that is different than your phone. Let me show you some that I think are quite amazing. This. A Braille watch. Finally, a piece of technology that helps the sight impaired. How about this thing? This is a piece of technology, guys, that creates an ultrasonic sound wave from your wrist to your ear. It's just to the tip of your finger. So when you make calls or listen to messages, you hold your finger to your eardrum. You look like an idiot, but it's also probably going to give you finger cancer. But whatever, dude. That is at least a wearable that is useful and doing something different. This is a wearable that I wish I had at happy hour. This is Pavlov. This wearable will shock you if you do something you said you're not going to do, man. You reach for that third Heineken tonight, this thing will just shock the shit out of you. If a player is tackled, then you get to feel the physical effect of that. But if a player is nervous before a kick, then you get fluttering, you get that kind of sensory experience. Okay, so you do not need to go to Disney World anymore to experience 5D. You can be sitting in a dark room like this and feeling the visceral experience of what it's like to be a footballer. This is haptic plated wearables. This is the stuff that's trying to create brands as experience and not brought to you by tech. This is a media company doing this. But probably the creepiest thing I've seen in a long time is this. Check it out. This, brothers and sisters, is a 3D dress called the gaze. This will morph and change based on your biometric determining whether you want to attract or distract the person standing in front of you. And the dress grows accordingly. I don't think it makes that rattlesnake sound, but boy, I could use that shit on the subway in New York, heads up. What about sound? Sound. Sound is of visceral importance to us today. People probably up here have talked about the power of sound with podcasts, etc, etc. Why? Because of this shit. Who has one of these at home? Alexa or... It got a whistle. Yay! Anybody have Google Home in the house? Anybody have Alexa? Anybody have both? No, you almost put your hand up, young lady. I was going to pick on you if you did. Do you have any of those technology, Alexa? Do you do any services on Alexa? Have you programmed to do something other than play the news in the morning and tell you what the time is? Turn on and off the line. So you're consuming services, which is great, because the vast majority of people do not. But let me tell you why I bring up sound. Sound is incredible. By the way, I thought I'd be up here talking about gestures and stuff, but we're apparently talking back in the 70s when this used to be called radio. Now we're talking to objects again, which is amazing. But brand sound is incredibly important. Why do I say that? Because of this. If I speak to brands and say, hey, where are you spending your marketing dollars? They say, hey, man, we love digital, we get this shit, but hey, we spend the vast majority of our budget on television. I'm like, awesome. What's the music in your TV ads? Well, it's top ten music, although licensed commercial free. Okay. They've forgotten about their brand sound. If there's no screen, there's no visual identity, what about the sound identity? Whose brand is this? Intel. Verizon. No, but nice plug. This is Intel. In three seconds, if you weren't under the age of 25 and you're a bit older, you'd probably identify that as Intel. So if you've got a brand that's identified by sound, that is remarkable because it's creating a whole other visual layer of brand identity for you, which I think is incredibly important. Although sound, I think, is headed to this sort of place. I don't know if any of you have tried Mars. Mars is a language translation. You guys clearly don't need that because most people I speak to in Holland, you guys can speak English better than I can. Remarkable. But this is something that allows you to, you know, you could wear a headset, I wear a headset, as you speak, it directly translates for you. Pretty cool use of technology, right? So that's kind of where sound's going. It's going to create better human connections and not just talking to innate objects. What about visual? You've heard me say that I haven't had a TV in 25 years. Cool. But if I was going to buy a TV, it should be now. Look how gorgeous televisions are. Look at that thing. The frame by Samsung. This is a beautiful piece of technology called the wall. This is a beautiful TV that if you bump a bunch of these together, you don't see the grid. So visualization is now incredibly important. It's also beautiful to see the back of TVs because, you know, this happens otherwise. So hopefully we can beautify that shit at some point. But here's the thing about screens. The screens that you're seeing are not designed, these sort of screens are not designed to give you immersive entertainment in your living room. We've already got that. This is designed to bring you little bits of information in the context of how you want to see them. In this example brought to you by LG, it's saying that these screens can actually create an ecosystem of information transfer that's tiny bits of information delivered in the context of how it should be delivered. In this instance, little Johnny's cast turns into a visual identity screen. You're able to read what's going on with the repairing of his arms, for example. So this is the sort of thing that screens that you look at, these immersive screens are designed for. It's really designed for a different type of augmentation. Cool? Awesome. How about virtual reality? You guys have heard a lot of this today, I'm sure. Virtual reality was the hot topic of 2016, 2017. Who in this room has tried on VR? Sister, this is it. Thank you for the crocodile arms, by the way. You guys are like, whatever. Who here owns a pair of VR goggles? Anybody? Sister, the one I was going to pick on about the Alexa bullshit. What do you own? What are they? Samsung. Gear? The Oculus gear thing? Did you buy those or were they given to you? Your boyfriend bought them. When was the last time you put them on your face? And how long were they on your face for? Half an hour. You are not normal. So here's what happens in planet Earth. I ask people if they try on VR, hands go up. Who owns them? Not many hands. Or some cheap ass gets them because they were brought to you by a free phone or something. But here's what's amazing. And then they say, oh, I've put them on face for two minutes. Six months ago. But what I love about VR is it's going to be organic. It needs to take time. Because this category is incredible. It's been around for 20 years. We just need it to continue along. So, man, you don't give two shits around you. It's pretty impressive. But what I do know is I love companies that are trying to bridge this stuff beautifully. Look at what Nintendo are doing. This is a thing called Labo, man. They create an on-ramp before you fall off the cliff. Don't just create VR experiences and go, ugh. Create a VR experience that helps people come on the ramp and come off the ramp. This is an example that allows kids to build the product before they immerse themselves. I love this ambition. ambition. Look what Samsung did. They allow you to dress like Iron Man before you play like Iron Man. God bless. And if you don't think that VR and AR are a thing, you have to go to Asia. Look what the Chinese are doing. They're developing these incredible little products that bring the physical and digital world closer together because kids don't delineate that. But they're not using cell phones to do it. They're using these dedicated devices like this thing. Pretty cool, right? So that's sort of a sense of where AR might be heading. But if you want to know where VR is going, it's going to here. Every fantasy catered to, apparently. Although I like this. This is the Jaguar F-Type Simulator. It's just sitting on a six-axis hydraulic platform here. Roll you around, lift up, down. That's our upper wing. Once you wear this helmet, that's really going to simulate exactly what it's going to be like on the track. There we go. Make sure you brace yourself. Good luck. Okay, Glenn, I'm about to start the roll. Welcome to Jaguar F-Type Simulator. Jaguar F-Type Simulator. Are you ready to experience the power of Jaguar F-Type? Jaguar F-Type Simulator. Jaguar F-Type Simulator. And you'll know what happens next. You should. You should. You should. You should. You should. You should. You have to realize that your brand experience, physical, can be way better than the digital experiences you get them there with. But they have to feel like the same componentry. A lot of people say, hey, man, I think this is the sort of person we're trying to target if you think about us in tech. This is not necessarily who I think we're targeting, man. We just need to calm it down. The so what for me is really, really simple. Look, guys, if you think about it, we started out in cinema advertising. Then we went to television. I need to update this slide. Nobody likes Kevin anymore. Whatever, dude. So that's television. And then we went to smartphone marketing. And now you are told that you might have to market on different shapes and sizes. So good luck. But here's the reality. If you went to marketing school on any place on planet Earth, they taught you the four Ps. And I think these are rubbish. These were invented in 1948. I think that the new world of marketing is more a reflection of our culture of business than it is the way that consumers consume. It's this, man. It's all about platforms, partnerships, performance, and pedigree. And it's also the business of science, sound, and motion. To do what? Create emotion. Why? 75% of purchase decisions are made emotionally. We sell to the heart to justify to the head. Our industry at a conference called brand was founded upon big ads, little content. Hasn't the world changed so quickly? Because now it's all content, little ads. Why? Because of this crap. Ad blockers. Who has an ad blocker on their machine here? Brilliant. Who has an ad blocker on their mobile? Oh, my God. And you're in the business of marketing. Good luck. Good luck. Good luck. Thanks for watching. humble opinion. It's a very old slide I put back in this morning and this is more relevant today than ever before. I retired from Twitter quite a long time ago. I came up in 2014 with a phrase, I said that befriend and unfollow will be a trend. I fundamentally believe that today. Why? Here's why. Today, you have had the ability to either buy or participate in the open social web and we think that being popular is being relevant. Awesome. But that is absolutely not where planet earth is headed with people. We're going to a closed internet community of peer-to-peer. Let me prove it to you. Who in here is on Instagram? Because I've heard that name a thousand times this morning. Yay. Whose Instagram is set to private? Yay. About 70% of you. Now, if I go and present to high school kids and ask them about WhatsApp, WeChat, Insta, Snap, boom, 100% of the hands go up. If I ask them who's set to private, 100% of the hands stay up. All the public stuff is just to appease their people. Parents. Intimacy happens in these closed interconnected networks of humans and you need to be different to actually communicate there as a brand. Why? Brands are trying to catch up to be a conversational brand. I have very few friends, by the way, so when I send out a text and I see those bubbles, anxiety attack for me. But what I do love about this is that brands also need to understand that this is a great place where you can create intimacy through commerce. Let me show you. WhatsApp. Actually, no. WeChat in China. Dior, this fashion brand, did this limited edition bag of clothes. It's only available in WeChat. Sold out in 48 hours. Price? $4,200. So if you think about it, it's a messaging app, man. You can do commerce in incredible ways in places that feel intimate, not public persona. This is intimate connection and it's really impelling to think about that. So how can you be the calm in the chaos? You've probably heard this. You've got to have a point of view. You can no longer just sit in the middle. You sit in the middle, you get forgotten about, man. And things like design matter. Anybody know what this is? Toothpick. Anybody know who invented the toothpick? Japanese. Anybody ever notice a little barbell at the top of your toothpick? Anybody know what it's for? I'm going to give you something very valuable now. If you break that off, that becomes a rest for your toothpick, just like you have a rest for your chopstick and a rest for your bowl. That's all I can offer you today, guys. Just kidding. Design matters. Conscious design matters. If you're iconic, you can get away with this. Pretty cool? Don't even have to put your logo up there, man. Just part of it. It becomes a... Road sign. How amazing. This thing. Lego. If you can't read this, it says steam engine, diesel, electric, hyperloop. Lego. What a cool brand. Always consistent. Always relevant. Look at this. Lacoste. They replaced the crocodile logo with endangered species series that was limited to the number of animals left. So, you know, there's 20 of one t-shirt. There's a thousand of another. All sold out in 24 hours. You can only buy that t-shirt on the black market. Isn't that an incredible thing? Which is apparently where you can buy the animals. Because humans are idiots. But you have to get real, don't we? Getting real means you need to do something different. I love this. This is the pride index. Destination pride. You go to this website, you type in the city you're going to and it'll tell you how it is with gender equality, how it feels about embracing you. I love that. It turns the pride flag into something useful. Budweiser wanted to become relevant to rock and roll. They did this program where they said, well, instead of us telling you that we're significant, let's look at the old archive of images and find out what we're doing. That's what we're doing. That's what we're doing. That's what we're doing. That's what we're doing. That's what we're doing. That's what we're doing. That's what we're doing. That's what we're doing. That's what we're doing. That's what we're doing. That's what we're doing. That's what we're doing. That's what we're doing. Marmite gene test. Please show whether you were born a lover or a hater. What does it say? You're a hater. Bad. Yeah. I, um, I need to tell you something. I, uh, I'm a Marmite lover. I thought you said I hated it and you said I love it. What kind of mother does something like that? Baby, I... Oh, my goodness, I am so stupid. I... I prefer Jan. I'm going to hate this baby! I'm going to die! I told you! Oh, sweetheart. Give me this. We're taking care of it all. We just want you to be happy with who you are. Have you ever done it, Kiera? In this house? And the story goes on and on and on. But being self-effacing and adding humour to that thing is absolutely amazing because if you do become real, you can do this. KFC ran out of chicken in the change of delivery situation in the UK and instead of waiting for that PR storm to come over them, they embraced it by going, oh, man, we just fucked it. And that also gives this brand permission to have a whole lot of fun that it never had before. Look at this. That's the beautiful photography that National... I was going to say National Geographic. That would be not right. That KFC did. But now, look at that thing, man. I did a double take. Photography is stunning on this spicy chicken work. Ha, ha, ha. Right. So apparently the most appropriate video after lunch, excuse me. But here's what's amazing, man. The most important ingredient in anything you do, if you want your content to be contagious and to be shared, clearly has to be surprises because we love it. We love to share stuff as humans. We want to feel like we're an authority, but understand the world is completely overwhelming. You're hit with 1,900 media messages, and then it's underwhelming because you can't find what you're looking for. In fact, one of the largest contributors to stress today is what? Media overload. So here's the bad news. The shit you're producing on behalf of the brand you represent is stressing people out and killing them, dude. Just kidding. The only thing we care about is attention. That's the economy, right? How much we spend our grubby time in front of this thing because we all suffer from tech neck. The average iOS person unlocks their phone like 80 times a day. But it's all about the app economy. It's not about mobile web. It turns out the vast majority of what we do is on apps, but we download fewer, spend more time and money than the ones we give a shit about. And that's amazing. So if we're going to, move away from awareness-based advertising, the old model, and move into a word-of-mouth, peer-to-peer, interconnected human network, we have to do things that are different. Because if people fall in love with you, particularly on the mobile experience, they're going to become a power user. All these brands that people talk about have disrupted the space all started out on this grubby device of which we open about 250 times a day and play around with. It's incredible. So in this business of sight, sound, and motion to create emotion, what are we going to do to instill trust in a place that feels super anxious? Well, you need to tell great stories. And it's not about this. Get rid of the telling or the yelling in our industry and just focus on great stories. And maybe we can build Tell Me Remarkable like this. Oh! Oh! I follow the night Constant the light One day I'll fly away Leave all this to yesterday What more can your love do for me? When will love be through with me? Why live life from dream to dream? Dread the day When dreaming One day I'll fly away Leave all this to yesterday Why live life When dreaming When dreaming When dreaming When dreaming That's the Christmas story as told by John Lewis, one of the largest retailers in the UK. They try and move as much product as humanly possible off the shelves at Christmas time. But what have they done? They've marketed to the heart to justify to the head. They're not showcasing any product. That's the power of good story. And if you're open to the power of the internet, you can also end up with crazy shit like this. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So it doesn't matter whether you tell a beautiful story for four minutes and ebb and flow or you allow yourself to be spoofed and embrace that excitement or user generated content turns up like this crazy thing that's batshit crazy. The brand sentiment at the time that's most important for that brand took off. But the most important thing that I can provide you today is this incredible quote by Catherine Hepburn. If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun. And isn't that the reason we became creatives? Thanks very much. Thank you very much indeed, guys. Take care. Thank you. So I want to urge you to accost Chingi for every drop of knowledge that lives in this digital prophet's brain. Could we have gotten any more content, any more amazing ideas in one sitting than that presentation? Amazing. Amazing. So I want to let you in on something very special that's not on the schedule that we're going to share with you right now. As you may know, we host the Binder Video Awards, recognizing the most creative uses of video that really engage deeply between brands and customers. And the winner was announced just a few weeks ago. And we wanted to share with you a few highlights of their amazing videos. So the agency responsible for this is Lemon Scented Tea for Veloretti Bikes right here in Amsterdam. So please enjoy the videos and then relax. We're heading out to our coffee break right after. So it's your chance to connect one more time with this incredible community. But just take a couple of minutes to watch this awesome video. Who needs 20 minutes for 20?