I’m currently taking two online courses via Coursera. One seems to have generated a lot of traction – Dan Ariely’s A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior has registered more than 135,000 students. In fact, Coursera has, in less than a year, enrolled more than 3 million ‘students’ in more than 10 million courses, proving than MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses) have the potential to be a truly disruptive technology for the education system. Coincidentally, the other course I’m taking is entitled, Surviving Disruptive Technologies and that’s what I want to focus on this week.

Over the last year we’ve seen the rise of the 3D printer. Bre Pettis, the founder of MakerBot, the leading consumer 3D printer maker, gave a keynote address at SxSW this year. 3D printing has raised discussions around such diverse subjects as guns,food and clothes, but it’s perhaps a more conventional use of 3D printing that has led one beloved brand to get in front of what it sees as a potential future. According toSociable, LEGO will be unveiling their own 3D printer by the end of the year. In an article titled, Is Lego about to embrace the Dark Side by releasing an official 3D printer? (complete with image of LEGO Star Wars figure), the Danish company ”says that along with the printer they will also release a selection of their 2013 range of Lego sets as downloadable files.  All official sets produced from 2014 will be available for download from the Lego Web Store. Once downloaded, the plans will let users print all the required bricks for their new sets.”

Ok, it was an April’s Fools Day joke by the gang at Sociable. Full disclosure: I fell for it. Tweeted a link to the story and started writing this essay under the assumption it was legit. Seems a bit silly, but if you’re taking that Disruptive Technologies class, it doesn’t seem so far fetched. In the class we are focusing on three brands – Kodak, Blockbuster and Borders who all got crushed by Disruptive Technologies. Now, I’d argue they all got crushed by the same disruptive technology, the Internet, just different applications of it. But let’s go back and think about LEGO for a minute. If in 3-5 years thousands of people have 3D printers in their house and can easily produce LEGO blocks at home maybe taking a ‘If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” strategy isn’t a bad idea. Didn’t we all look at Kodak, Blockbuster and Borders and ask why they didn’t create Instagram, Netflix and Amazon respectively before those latter companies put the former out of business? And don’t we all think that universities all around the country are trying to figure out what they are going to do about Coursera?

Now the question is: What disruptive technology is your client (or brand) facing? Are you in denial about what it will do to your industry, market or brand? Do you have a plan to own it before it owns you?

At some point you recognize the tipping point. You know, when in just about every business conversation you have, someone eventually says the “magic word.” For a long time there it was “viral,” wasn’t it? You just knew at some point somebody would throw that out there. It was usually followed by enthusiastic head nodding by the others involved in the conversation. Now storytelling has become that magic word. Everyone loves to talk about the power of storytelling. It’s fascinating because neither the word, nor the concept, are particularly new to marketing communications. We’ve seen ourselves as storytellers for a very long time, and in fact we’ve been storytellers for a very long time. So, why now do we seem to be talking about storytelling with extra gusto?

There are probably several reasons for this. Perhaps it is in part a reaction to the metrics-driven approach that the marketing industry has been caught in for the last decade or so. Let’s face it, none of us — client-side or agency-side — got into this business because we loved taking statistics courses back in school. Maybe stories are our way of telling the bean counters to back off. Or could it be that the answer is more culturally-driven than that? Maybe this golden age of television we are in (Mad Men, Downton Abbey, Game of Thrones, Homeland, Breaking Bad…) has reminded us how compelling good storytelling can be. A third cause could be that the democratization of storytelling tools has made it easier for anyone, and everyone, to be storytellers. Virtually anyone can be an author, poet or filmmaker today, and share their stories with the world. As a reaction to that, maybe we feel the need to re-establish our role as cultural storytellers by flexing our narrative muscles.

And yet, if you were to watch an evening or two of primetime television, you wouldn’t see much storytelling happening during the commercial breaks. Why is that? At a time when people are less likely to watch commercials than ever, shouldn’t we be trying to make more compelling content? Why is it that T-Mobile spends millions of dollars on ads that feature the same character, yet those ads have absolutely no connection to each other? Why does Progressive feature Flo in every ad, yet we’ve seen no real narrative advancement? With YouTube available to everyone, it’s not as if having a narrative thread would make it impossible for people coming in late to catch up.

How many of you remember the Taster’s Choice (Gold Blend for UK readers) ads? Yeah, these ones. They first ran twenty years ago and I vividly remember them. They captured the imagination of the countries they ran in with their “will they / won’t they?” storyline that lasted for six or seven years and nearly a dozen spots. And they sold product as well.

Today, storytelling seems to be for online only, and then for extended length films rather than episodic storytelling. Sure, we all love Chipotle’s “Back to the Start” piece or Johnnie Walker’s amazing, do-it-all-in-one-take ”The Man Who Walked Around The World” but those seem to be the exceptions.

With all the tools available to marketers, and all the channels through which people are consuming content, I think there is a greater opportunity available to us. But what do I know? I’m certainly no novelist. I don’t own an agency that specializes in innovative storytelling techniques. I don’t run a website that uses novels as a jumping off point for cultural discovery. That’s why I’ve reached out to Jim Othmer, Jeff Gomez and Richard Nash, who, respectively, are all those things. This Thursday, January 31st at 3pm, Othmer, Gomez and Nash will be my guests for IGNITE NYC, Y&R New York’s very own live talk show. Jim, a Global Creative Director at Y&R has written a number of books; Jeff is the CEO of Starlight Runner, a transmedia storytelling agency, and Richard works at Small Demons, a brilliant little website that no description would do justice, so go check it out.

But this show goes up to 11! We’ll also be joined by Y&R planner Matt Colangelo, who has recently put together a report on storytelling, aptly named, The Story Behind Storytelling. He also studied the role that early modernist authors (such as James Joyce and Ezra Pound) had in innovating traditional storytelling techniques while at Oxford. So,yeah, he’s got game.

You can participate by joining the conversation on Twitter, using #YRNYignite.

This piece originally appeared on the Advertising Week Social Club website.

I want to tell you about a brand I love. Not a product – though I do like those as well – but a brand. Betabrand. I love them because they get it. They understand their customer, they understand culture and they understand how those two things connect.

Betabrand is a clothing company, but sometimes it feels more like they are a content company that also makes clothes. But not your usual clothes. They make clothes with names like the Vagisoft Harka, the DARPA hoodie, Sons of Britches and Japants. Pretty much everything they make looks, feels, sounds or tastes like nothing you are familiar with. Tastes? Ok, so you wouldn’t want to eat their reversible disco hoodie, but if somebody is going to make clothes that taste as good as they look, it will be Betabrand.

In a world where collaboration is an increasingly critical element, and crowdsourcing is a viable option, Betabrand really walk the walk. They have something called the Think Tank, their “community idea factory.” They get ideas for all kinds of items, but as a small company that keeps production in the States, they simply can’t produce things on a whim. So ideas go into the Think Tank and if enough people like the idea, they’ll make a small batch run of it.

In another truly inspired move, they’ve created the Disco Open-Source Project. What started as a hoodie that utilized material replicating the look of a disco ball has evolved into an entire line, including pants, skirts, vests, even a tuxedo jacket. Betabrand’s audience seemingly couldn’t get enough of the disco look, so they created the Open-Source Project. The details:

Every day, Betabrand receives requests for specialty Disco apparel, everything from sombreros to luge suits. Unfortunately, our production facilities are simply too small to make all the fantastic items that fans demand.

That’s why we’re now letting would-be inventors descend into our top-secret disconium mine and haul away as much of this magically shiny substance as they can carry.

We call it the Disco Open-Source (DOS) Project. For a very limited time, you can purchase two-yard swatches of pure, shimmering disconium and transform them into something spectacular — like that Disco Dog Coat, Parachute, or Lingerie you’ve been dreaming of.

Not only will we feature your creations on our site, we might even make some of them permanent members of the DiscoLab!

Brilliant. And notice the language they use. “top-secret disconium mine.” Well, where did you think disco ball fabric comes from? This whimsical tone is evident in much of their copy. Here’s the intro copy for their Bawaiian Wedding Shirt:

Ever heard of the island of Bawaii?

No? That’s not surprising. This poor little chunk of rock in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is, quite possibly, the most woebegone nation on Earth. What else can you say about an island whose chief export is molten lava? An island known to other Polynesian cultures as “Isle of Infinite Sorrows” and also “Place Where the Poisonous, Bloodthirsty Monkeys Dwell.”

Their email newsletters are equally wacky. As are their user-generated content plays. The ‘Model Citizen’ promotion asks customers to snap a photo of themselves wearing Betabrand clothing. The results are often hilarious. And look how they’ve cleverly integrated their logo into the offer.

I love Betabrand because they continue to double-down on the crazy.  A giant Zeppelinthat will act as their HQ? Absolutely.

The Executive Hoodie.

Sock insurance? You bet. A mobile app that inserts Sasquatch into your pics? Why not? Sure these are tongue in cheek, but in a world where most brands take themselves so seriously, what a refreshing stance to take.  We hear the word ‘authenticity’ thrown around so much, and usually it translates to Facebook status updates from brands like this: “Hey, what’s on tap for this weekend, going to the movies?” That’s why there is a Condescending Corporate Brand Page on Facebook.

I could give you several more examples, but you get the point. Betabrand does all this without the aid of an advertising agency. It’s just a small group of people in San Francisco, having fun. They could teach a lot of us in the advertising industry a lesson or two.

This post originally appeared on the Advertising Week Social Club blog. If you aren’t familiar with those guys, check ‘em out.

Since the Digital Explosion launched Marketing 2.0, great debates have arisen over which agency should be responsible for what type of execution.

Is it the straightforward ad agency? The news/media-focused public relations agency? Maybe even the “new digital” social media-based agency?

All wrong.

Why?

Because we’ve moved beyond what these shops can legitimately claim to be experts at based on their current makeup, thinking and abilities. Today, there is only one type of agency that matters:

The agency capable of making CULTURALLY RELEVANT CONTENT.

30-second TV spots that people buzz through while using TiVo are not culturally relevant content. Neither are your 15-second YouTube pre-rolls – the ones that I don’t see because I’m focused on the countdown clock until I can skip them entirely; or your press releases or, more than likely, your recent Facebook status updates or your last 15 tweets.

Yes:

These are all forms of content – but chances are they have been ignored, missed or otherwise switched off by the people you are trying to reach.

Why?

Because your message was living within its own hermetically-sealed ecosystem. A world where your brand or product lives in isolation, devoid of any cultural markers that would let a person know they exist in the real world.

Because you’ve decided that people are sitting at home, thinking in silos, waiting specifically and only for a solution to a problem that your brand can solve.

A recent Ad Age/Bluefin Labs report shows that for consumers, commercials are just really, really short shows. They talk about them with the same amount of interest as the network programming. If that’s the case, then shouldn’t marketers be using a wide variety of channels (broadcast yes, but also mobile, online, live event, etc.) to create content that people want to talk about and engage with? Content that is culturally relevant and that acknowledges both the consumer and the world at large?

Of course they should.

But it’s not something that they (or their agencies) are used to doing – and it’s not necessarily easy to do.

Brands and agencies tend to think in terms of discreet campaigns, and often brands have to deal with restrictions enforced by legal departments. That often means that agencies are required to create pre-programmed content – that is approved by legal – before it can be pushed to social networks.

The result?

You know how, before you go to a backyard BBQ at your friend’s house, you take out an index card and write out four or five conversation topics that you can use?

Neither do I – because no one does that.

If you’ve “scheduled” content in advance, what happens when news breaks, or the conversation changes? If everyone is talking about the latest meme to fly around and you’re still pushing your amazing new razzleberry-flavored frozen yogurt, you’re going to be ignored. Content marketing fails when companies try to bend it to their will (and needs) rather than participating in the conversation that consumers want to have.

Being culturally relevant means having a point of view, a unique voice and being quick enough to be where the action is before everybody else gets there.

This takes a type of thinking that most traditional client-agency relationships aren’t currently set up to handle. But the time is coming when brands that don’t take this approach will be pushed aside by consumers who will be more interested in engaging with brands who act more like consumers themselves.

This piece originally appeared in Digiday.

I agree with Jack Marshall that it’s an uphill battle of Sisyphusian proportions for an agency to get in the product development business. If this notion, as commenter Matt Straz, CEO of Namely, suggests, is marked by “a record unblemished by success,” then perhaps agencies need to look in the other direction with concern. After all, their core business as brand stewards is at risk.

It’s far more likely that brands will find success dipping their toes into the world of marketing. Market forces have made it easier, and cultural forces have made it desirable, for brands to engage consumers in different ways, either directly or in ways that can easily circumvent the traditional agency role. The signs have been there for a little while now.

When Moby’s 1999 album, “Play,” became the first to have all its songs licensed for use in films, TV and commercials, it signaled the start of a new era. Now, I don’t think of the Black Eyed Peas as a band so much as a marketing agency that makes music for brands to license. Sure, agencies still play a role, but as a brand that needs to make culturally relevant content, why not just do a deal with Will.i.am and Co. and let them be the creatives on the project? You see this trend already as brands look to the likes of Lady Gaga, Jay-Z and Gwen Stefani to be their creative directors. At the same time, brands that we traditionally think of as distribution channels or platforms like Google and Facebook have their own internal creative teams that are equipped to help brands leverage their sites.

As more and more brands produce content and think of themselves as media companies, they’ll continue to hire people who know how to create content and how to effectively distribute it across and through channels on which consumers are spending time. How much agency involvement does a brand like Nike need to hire Casey Neistat to make a video and post it to Facebook and YouTube, for example? Probably not much, and this video has 6.8 million views and counting. Savvy brands also understand how to create products that are inherently social objects that require less heavy lifting from agencies to promote and that instead rely on the consumer to drive buzz through social channels.

Certainly these developments are just another reason that agencies are struggling to find their way right now and are willing to try things like product development. There’s no easy or right answer here, but my guess is that companies like Goodpenny and Deeplocal, hybrids that create content for brands but are right on the edge of products, are the agency evolutionary equivalent of the first mammal that dragged itself out of the water on fins that were more like flippers.

A big thank you to Digiday for originally publishing this post.

Earlier this week on Digiday, Jack Marshall wrote eloquently on the need for agencies to start “stocking their strategic arsenals in the hope they’ll still be relevant to clients five or 10 years down the line…”  While I certainly wouldn’t argue with Marshall on the need for agencies to provide strategic counsel, I’m not sure that’s what will set them apart, nor keep them in the good graces of their clients.

I believe this to be the case for two reasons, the first of which Marshall states in his article.  While “research suggests 76 percent of agencies now provide strategic services, up from 59 percent in 2009. Only 16 percent of marketer clients surveyed, however, say they make use of them.”  I’m not certain why that is, but my hunch would be that most agencies needlessly over-complicate their strategic counsel in the hopes of making themselves look like all-knowing wizards. Or perhaps, on the other side of the spectrum, clients aren’t making use of the strategic counsel provided because it’s not very good. Regardless of the reason, if only 16 percent are making use of it, few agencies will survive with that being their bread and butter.

The second reason is that the greater opportunity is in execution — just not in the types of executions they are normally used to doing.  Gone are the days of disruptive advertising, ignored press releases or wasteful apps that provide no user benefits.  Agencies have to learn the new new rules of engagement and guide clients towards providing consumers with culturally relevant content that they want to consume, engage with, participate in or otherwise interact with.  While this may include Facebook and Twitter, platforms we now almost take for granted, it also includes a host of new opportunities that few agencies, and fewer brands, are ready to take on.

From gamification to transmedia storytelling, second screen opportunities to Internet memes, consumers are looking for brands to provide new and innovative content that syncs with their lives and provides both entertainment and emotional connection.  These are new territories and in many cases the paint is still wet, but that’s where the people are and that’s what they are doing.

Yes, there will be a need, an urgent one, to create content strategies that integrate these new opportunities; but crucially there will be an even greater need to execute against those strategies as brands will not have the human resources – either in manpower or talent – to creatively leverage these opportunities.

Look for a new breed of agency, one that understands that a “culture first” approach is what wins the day, to emerge to take on these new challenges and win over clients.