Its official, I too am infected by the status disease, affluenza, social status anxiety or whatever you want to call it. The pressure to find a cure has taken me down the path of books on the subject of my ailment and hours spent in session with my therapist in an attempt to control this hostile villainous disease from attacking my intrinsic values. I’ve also spent many hours sifting through the photographic data of my youth to jog my memory into remembering what my intrinsic values and pleasures in life actually are. I’ve been flirting with meditation and yoga which has only caused my wallet to deflate and not much toward inflating my feelings of wellbeing.

Meaner than a midlife crisis which used to easily be cured, there are new methods of treatment necessary to combat this virus.

It has me asking, can I not just put a price on my need for the status of emotional Well Being? Marketers are so incredibly smart that the road to commoditizing this new status symbol is well on its way. Should I be convinced that spending money on peace keeper cosmetics and ELLO mobile (the promise: you pay your bills and we give our money to charities) will do me lots of emotional good. It also has a very nice 70’s ring to it.

If there is one fact I have taken for granted in my life and a logical one at that, it is the statement that all the money in the world cannot buy you happiness. There is certainly something very warm and fuzzy about this assumption which many of us will hold dear. Whoever said it had well in mind to keep us from vile sides of the pursuit of wealth, consumeritus, the purgatory where the wantee’s and havee’s congregate.

I rather do despair at the idea that alongside my personal quest to find the deeper meaning in life I will inevitably be a marketing target and be vulnerable to the lure of a prêt a porter range of values and charities invented by ‘free range social marketers. Imagine that ‘using product xyz will help you feel you are playing your part, help us to create a new society where we will all be happy, fulfilled and conscious members of our friendly planet earth’.

But beyond this I am actually helping the world to be a better place and there are bound to be charities which particularly appeal to what I think are my personal intrinsic values.

In fact, it is a brilliant (mis)interpretation of what psychologists believe, actually will help you find your way to a happy, self-fulfilling life, free from status anxiety and depression. Not particularly easy to achieve as it is basically an exercise of self-motivation which essentially must come from within you.

However social marketing is still brilliant because I don’t think many of my intrinsic values differ quite that much from millions of other consumers so I and many others are basically easy targets.

Unfortunately in my opinion it doesn’t mean we are truly on the road to becoming the increasingly conscious society, it just means that marketers have found a way to influence me into thinking there are indeed less strenuous ways to obtain emotional happiness.

For social entrepreneurs (I love this label for its unprofessed ambiguity, for yet have I to encounter the anti-social entrepreneur, a concept which I would find very frightening indeed however exceedingly more realistic and funny as it reminds me of those hilarious Eristoff Vodka commercials. As Oliver James put it in his last book ‘Affluenza’, social entrepreneurs play a key role in unleashing the unselfish capitalist manifesto.

10 years down the line and consumers, having seemingly happily spent millions and billions of currency on charity endorsed products, they will still wake up feeling as depressed as they were ten years earlier.

I4C held the first of its meetings in Milan on the 8th of November 2007. I am very pleased to say 15 of our members joined us for the traditional Italian aperitivo kindly arranged by Pasquale Monteleone from PR firm Hill & Knowlton. It may be no coincidence that nearly 40% of our members are Italian,  Design and Italy are synonymous in many ways, the natural aptitude for style and passion and respect for their artistic heritage is something which lives on in deeply rooted tradition.

Although its a first for us I think the turn up wasn’t bad at all considering we have less than 200 global members at the moment. It was important to me that I could show members that I4C is dedicated to make its members part of a community which has a clear mission and that we aren’t just another impersonal online network. I4C is growing by the day and it is important to me that members are actively motivated to share and network amongst themselves. However it is my experience that this can only evolve into something real if there is a strong outside driving force and business value.
I4C will dedicate itself to create this value, in the form of business opportunities and the ability to connect and openly communicate with innovators and creative peers.  The meetings will continue to exist along side the website. If you would like to organise a I4C meeting in your city, I would be pleased to help you communicate this to our members.

If you would like to become a member of Innovation for Creativity please contact me for a personal invitation.

I was really pleased to see that my colleague Jerome Bertrand (no relation) from the Dutch company Geo-Games produced a short demo video to show how they have been developing a way to offer geo-browsing support and booking transaction sites right from the start - to the finish. It’s not a bad project for now although I still tend to think that the consumer interface needs a bit of work. Please see the demo at : <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWd77jBrlO4

I have spent some time researching the attitudes of SME on applying internet in a business growth strategy. SME’s actually do not use much of the Internet for advertising or to establish new distribution channels.

However, SME’s do recognize the importance of the internet in their business strategy to benefit from growth opportunities it presents. In fact SME’s consider the Internet as a vital contributor for business performance but do not apply resources to this area if; from one side, they don’t have or need a growth strategy or from the other, the value of the internet is not vividly apparent to them.

If a SME business owner has a value perception of the internet, adoption of an internet strategy is never far off even though there is no actual planned business growth strategy.

It could be that these firms see outside pressure from competition using the internet, another could be that the company owner just has a very good knowledge of the IT opportunities.

However with most SME who don’t have a planned growth strategy, the value perception of the internet is generally very low, there is usually no internal IT knowledge and perhaps they can’t see any competitive pressure.

If you will allow yourself to take a step back and look at technology adoption rates from the perspective of a SME business owner we may conclude that a change in attitude to business growth is needed and not necessarily a change in the perception of the internet as a business driver.

Show me the money

Why we ask ourselves are advertisers sceptical about online advertising and yet they will place an expensive ad in the paper without giving it a moments thought?

In my view its because the value is not transparent to all of us. I do not question the fact that my ad in the Sunday Times will be viewed by millions of readers. I read the Sunday Times, I can see my ad, my neighbour will too because I know he reads the Times front to back on Sunday afternoon. Somehow advertisers perceive the value of online advertising differently than offline advertising.

Let me be the devil’s advocate a moment by stating:. If you can’t visually illustrate ad performance, don’t bother selling it!

This may sound preposterous to an experienced online marketer. Think of all the wealth of tracking tools, analysis and performance stats I can provide to my advertiser, the possibilities to track ROI have never been finer!

All true, good arguments, but I’ll buy your ad because I know it pays off. You are telling me it will pay off and your statistics tell me this but I still have a problem visualizing the ad you are trying to sell me, I don’t even know these websites you want to place my ad on. On top of that he is thinking your pitch sounds pretty complicated. “I’m sorry we just aren’t quite ready for this right now and besides we don’t really have the budget.”

Turn around Adrank

So if we need to put the money where our mouth is, we should perhaps come up with a significantly simplified way to help advertisers visualize the ROI of online advertising.

What if we illustrate the return of ads by offering advertising conversion scores directly on the ads themselves and outside of any kind of Google AdRank. Current advertisers benefit by knowing if adjusting their creative format, copy or adblock will increase conversions for them but I’ve already made the decision to use Adwords by then. Potential advertisers should also be able to see how online ads generate leads before their very eyes and it makes the whole AdRank system much more transparent at the same time. No need to get out the case studies and analytic demo kit, get out of the hard sell business and back stuck into the relationship business.

Dear All,

I would like to invite you to our new private online network: Innovation for Creativity.

This is a private and professional online community, which means it is meant for contributors and members who already have strong connections with one another. The network is open to advertisers, creatives and marketers as well as technology providers who want to achieve a good understanding on how innovation is applied to media and advertising.

The community is an open discussion and presentation board to members who are involved in creation and development of marketing concepts and new business models by applying innovation.

Please go to http://innovation4creativity.ning.com to apply for an invitation.
If you are a regular reader of my blog please do not hesitate to request an invitation to the community. I would like to welcome you to our private network Innovation for Creativity.

From time to time will share a post with the community from my blog.