Some of those brands include: Coca Cola, Unilever, Starbucks, Beam Suntory, Ben & Jerry’s, Verizon, Diageo, Ford, North Face, Honda, Dockers, Levis, Patagonia and many more.

Coca Cola’s official statement includes: “There is no place for racism in the world and there is no place for racism on social media. The Coca-Cola Company will pause paid advertising on all social media platforms globally for at least 30 days. We will take this time to reassess our advertising policies to determine whether revisions are needed. We also expect greater accountability and transparency from our social media partners.”

What I’m Most Interested In?

Of course there are multiple angles to what’s going on, and there’s lots to read and learn about in the process. Debating online censorship and the responsibility of these powerful advertising platforms is long overdue.

However, what I’m most interested in is what impact will this have on the sales of these Brands? Digital Advertising was one of those things that arrived and everyone jumped on board. The hype around the benefits of digital advertising is massive and there are entire industries that strongly support that message.

Well, we’re about to find out what the real impact of digital advertising is? In this case, what the impact of no digital advertising is? For some of these brands, their advertising boycott is only in the US, and for others it’s Global. Assuming they all stop for at least a month, there are going to be some really interesting numbers that emerge. There are also going to be some interesting stories of how these brands re-emerge?

I’m expecting the result will be that digital advertising is key to the revenue of these brands, but this is a rare opportunity to attempt to measure exactly how key it is?

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

The post What I want to learn from the Big Social Media Advertising ‘Pause’ appeared first on Calidascope.

Even if he is using enhancements, they’re all (professional cyclists) using them, so even if he is, it still makes him the best of the bunch

It’s a conversation I often have in my head in today’s digital environment where businesses, large and small, are fighting for space in an overcrowded world of messaging to try and win customers over their competitors. The world of messaging has changed dramatically. Go back 10-15 years and the predominant platforms to speak to consumers were TV, Newspapers, Magazines, and Billboards. Over the past decade or so, the likes of Google and Facebook (and others) have been levelling the playing fields, creating a playground where even the smallest voice (budget) has a shot at outperforming the biggest. Today the unusual suspects often pop up in our streams, and the world has changed, possibly forever?

Fast Movers Had A Digital Advantage

During the transition, those that leapt first (the fast movers) into digital advertising discovered they had a firm advantage over the slow movers. They were usually the big voices (big business with big budgets) who were now dominating the old and new media.

As we know that’s all changing. Online advertising has become easier (it’s still not simple) and cheaper, as everyone jumped, and is still jumping, into the game. Our feeds are now made up of large brands, and my next door neighbour (selling organic carrots and potatoes).

Great Copy and Eye-Catching Images Still Win The Game

Even though its all changing, writing great copy (the words you use) and eye-catching images haven’t caught up, or haven’t made the same leap. While it can take no longer than 30 minutes to set up a digital advert that will run for weeks and months, writing great copy and sourcing the perfect images can take hours.

And yet, that’s where it’s all won and lost. Going back to my Lance Armstrong example… you can take as many enhancements as you want, if you’re not fit, strong, skilled, with the right body, experienced, well resourced, and surrounded by a great team, you are never ever going to win a Tour de France.

You Need More Than Brute Force Paid Digital Advertising

If your business has invested in digital advertising, you’re only part of the way there. You have to put your messaging up against those who are doing it well and getting the clicks, likes, comments, engagement and conversions. Don’t be fooled into thinking money alone is enough. Whomever you have working on your digital communication:

• invest in their writing and image sourcing skills.
• meet regularly to discuss what they’re doing and what they plan to do?
• benchmark yourself against those that are doing it well.
• ensure they’re reading regularly to familiarise themselves with the latest trends (the internet is an incredible resource for learning from others).
• do the necessary work to check that your messaging is alined to your business goals, and can result in getting customers to engage with you, be that in conversation, signups, or purchases.

In todays world of digital communication doing better business is not as cheap as a minimum payment to Google or Facebook of R300 (plus VAT) per month. It takes focus, discipline and lots of time to make sure you stand out from an extremely crowded market place. The opportunity to stay ahead is incredibly large, simply because there aren’t many companies doing it really well.

Are you Looking to Improve your Digital Communication?

Calidascope works with small, medium and sometimes large businesses, no matter the size of their budget, to find ways to disrupt their communication playground. We’ve had some incredible successes and worked on some amazing projects. From consulting, to designing strategies, and executing on those strategies. If you’d like to explore how we can help your business, send an email to Catri Dixon – catri@calidascope.com

Photo by paolo candelo on Unsplash

The post In a Digital World there’s no Substitute for Great Writing and Beautiful Images appeared first on Calidascope.

When we first started Calidascope our goal was to do our best to find interesting clients, doing interesting things, who wanted to shake up the status quo and get the attention of their market (not matter the size of their budget). Over the last 6 years we’ve had incredible fun on these projects.

FOR EXAMPLE – THE LEGO MOVIE AND LANSER’S ON MAIN

We designed and delivered Lego Mini-figures to Fresh, Gareth Cliff, Banong Matheba, Lee-Roy Right and Caspar Lee for the launch of the Lego Movie on DVD.

We’ve worked with Lanser’s on Main (in Bryanston). We used TripAdvisor as the bench mark when Lanser’s first opened their doors. If you’ve not been, it’s guaranteed to be an experience you’ll remember. In 18 months Lanser’s on Main has gone from 48th on TripAdvisor, all the way to Number 1. Definitely Bryanston’s favourite Bistro

KWANU – WESTVILLE’s FIRST DEDICATED CLICK AND COLLECT SUPERMARKET

And most recently, we’ve been involved in the launch of Kwanu. A dedicated click and collect online supermarket located in Westville, Durban.

Kwanu is doing some interesting things in the world of online grocery shopping:

Located in Westville, as a Click and Collect service, they’re not focussing on national. In the words of Neville Dunn (ex MD of Masscash), “We’re not trying to solve for the National Market. We’re focussing on one community at a time. We think grocery online in South Africa will be most successful when it has a local focus and integration.”

They’re not a ‘buying business’, using local retailers. Says Andrew Mardon (ex National Buyer for Masscash), “Kwanu is focussed on delivering ‘everyday best prices’. We’ve built relationships with key suppliers, ensuring we can offer our customers the best possible prices everyday.”

By offering a click and collect service along with a focussed range, they’re solving the two biggest issues with shopping online for groceries… never substituting products for out of stock and South Africa’s unique challenges with delivery.

Kwanu’s results and customer feedback speak volumes.

Fast and friendly service! The quickest grocery run I have ever done. – Kerri Wolfaardt

WOW !!! Kwanu is just the most incredible way to shop and has the most user friendly website – they have thought of everything to make shopping easier and then to top it all they definitely have the best pricing in town!! Last night I had a total life transforming moment – sitting at my computer in my PJ’S – normally you see everyone you have ever known when you shoot into the shops in your old tracksuit !!! – Abigail de Robillard

Just had my first Kwanu experience. Will Def be back. Friendly guys and so easy. Thanks. – Leigh Bolam

At Kwanu Promotional pricing is great!! But what you have to look at is the pricing of the products that are not on promotion as they still make up a significant part of your shopping basket! Here is where Kwanu wins. Would love for Kwanu to be put up against Checkers, Spar, PnP, on a basket of products across the range. My guess is that Kwanu is significantly cheaper! – Grant Surmon

More than just Grocery Shopping

Kwanu is onto something. Grocery shopping is largely made up of the same basket of items, week in and week out. There isn’t any reason to have to walk the aisles of a store to do 90% of your shopping. Repeat purchases should be fast, easy and convenient. That’s what Kwanu is doing, and they’re doing it really well. We’re proud to be part of the adventure.

LOOKING TO DISRUPT YOUR MARKET?

If your business is looking to disrupt your market, Calidascope has an experienced team to help you execute your idea into the world. Contact Catri Dixon to set up some time to talk.

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My own personal awareness was awakened through music. Specifically, ‘The Last Resort‘ by The Eagles, and then ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ by Joni Mitchell released in 1970. Bob Dylan did a version in 1973, Amy Grant in 1994, and then the one I grew to love by Counting Crows in 2002.

And while the words of both of those songs are very hard hitting, they’re largely socially palatable (perhaps during their time it was different?). I’m certain there were some that may have not agreed with the lyrics, but there wasn’t anything to cause you to stop and pay attention if the song had been playing while you were doing your weekly grocery shopping.

Enter Lil Dicky

Enter Lil Dicky and ‘Earth’. Released on April 19, 2019, three days prior to Earth Day (all proceeds from the song will apparently be donated to different environmental charities in collaboration with the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation).

The music video is embedded below, and if you haven’t heard / watched the full version, you’re in for a treat.

He collaborated with 30 different well known human beings, including Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Shawn Mendes, Halsey, Katy Perry, Ed Sheeran, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brendon Urie, Charlie Puth, Miley Cyrus, Meghan Trainor, Joel Embiid, Tory Lanez, John Legend, Psy, Bad Bunny, Kris Wu, Backstreet Boys, and Kevin Hart.

It’s everything an Earth Song has never ever been before. Highly entertaining. Engaging. Arresting. Non-Child-Friendly language. Amusing. Clever. Cute. Cheesy. Inaccurate. In fact, it’s the Earth Song you’d expect a guy called Lil Dicky to write. And yet, somewhere in there is a truck load of genius.

Who’s it aimed at?

When I first heard the song I shared it within my own network, asking for opinion on what age group people thought it was targeted at? I can’t imagine anyone over 25 listening to it a second time, and surely any half alert parent isn’t going to be happy with their younger children watching or listening? (my network felt the same).

And boom. There’s Lil Dicky’s genius or blind luck. The sweet spot. Teenagers love it. My 16 year old knows every line by heart, and my 19 year old has watched the video more times than she can count. I hear the song at least twice each day in my home. Heck, I even caught myself singing along the other day.

Well done and good luck to Lil Dicky. I hope he gets the credit he deserves, and more than that, I hope the planet benefits from a catchy tune, some clever lyrics, brilliant collaboration, and a generation that’s tuned in to a message the entire world needs to hear.

The post Earth Songs Properly Disrupted by Lil Dicky appeared first on Calidascope.

Quotes and studies abound supporting the notion that creativity is an important component in a business context. Take this one from Business News Daily….

A study by Adobe and Forrester Consulting found that 82 percent of companies believe there is a strong connection between creativity and business results. In fact, companies that actively foster creative thinking outperform their rivals in revenue growth, market share and competitive leadership, according to the report.

There’s also an IBM study from 2010 ( I know, light years ago, right?) that leads with…

Global CEO Study: Creativity Selected as Most Crucial Factor for Future Success

The list is endless, and I’m not questioning the research or critiquing the papers I’ve quoted above.

I’m just not convinced that I’ve met more than a handful of companies (outside of obvious creative companies) who authentically encourage the creative development of human beings within their organisation. They do pay lip service to the idea, and they may even, from time to time, invite creative humans in from the outside, but as for practically demonstrating that increasing creativity is valuable pursuit, not so much.

I’ve seen the inside of quite a number of companies, and I’ve spoken to my fair share of people working inside of those companies. I’ve attended their conferences, sat in on their training, and I’ve listened to their leaders speak about the things that are important. What I don’t see or hear much of is creativity. What I mostly see or hear are things like ‘back to basics’, and ‘the three things’ and ‘discipline’ and the ‘[company name] Way’. These all strongly point to getting into line, and doing things the one way we’re pretty sure it will work. However, these things also speak to ‘don’t think’, ‘don’t imagine’, ‘don’t try anything that’s not within the narrow boundaries we’ve set for you to work within’.

The Poster Child

Of course the poster child at the moment for my view is Vodacom. That they still haven’t found a settlement with Please Call Me inventor, Nkosana Makate, speaks straight into the ‘creativity in our people isn’t valued’ paradigm. You can imagine the message they’re sending to their current employees. How many Vodacom employees do you imagine are rushing to tell their boss about the incredible idea they came up with today, knowing that they’ll be fairly rewarded for their effort? (but all that for another post)

10 Quick Yes/No Questions on Creativity

If you’ve got 2 minutes, I’d love to know how you feel / what you think about creativity within your world and you organisation? I don’t need to know who you are, or what company you work in. Below are 10 simple and mostly yes/no questions to answer. It’d be great if you’d answer them. Results will be posted back on this blog in a few weeks time.

The post Just How Important Is Creativity To Business? appeared first on Calidascope.

My fear and avoidance of boredom comes from the multitude of apparently well meaning adults I was surrounded by, while growing up. I don’t think I’m alone in this? I imagine if you paused a little while and reflected on the advice dished out to you as a child, you’ll clearly remember at least this phrase being repeated over and over, at every opportunity boredom may have had to present itself….

An idle mind is the devil’s playground

It must have started early on, because if I’d heard it for the first time as a teenager, I would have rushed in to embrace boredom and stayed for a while. What teenager doesn’t want to dance with the devil a little, and if bored was all you had to be, then you know you were going to go there. By teenagerhood you were already brainwashed. Boredom was something that must be avoided at all costs.

This thinking survives today. A quick search of Google Images quickly confirms this view of ‘boredom’ via these and other similar memes …

Boredom is the Beginning of the Beginning

But what if it isn’t so? What if boredom isn’t the beginning of the end, but the beginning of the beginning? What if boredom is a gateway to incredible worlds inside of your imagination? What if boredom, as a gift for embracing nothingness for a while, gives up creativity?

My thanks to Kathleen Davis for placing this thought into my brain while reading her article in Fast Company exploring the impact of Smartphones in our lives. Somewhere in the middle of her writing, she makes a point about the link between boredom and creativity and the fact that Smartphones (to our detriment) have filled up all the empty space we used to have.

Perhaps the most detrimental effect is that we longer know how to be bored. Boredom is a gift to creative ideas; it’s time when your mind can wander and make new connections. But the easy distraction that smartphones offer kills the empty moments that make life what it is.

Journey to Find Boredom

And so I began a journey to find, embrace and explore boredom. It’s early on in the journey, but as I’ve thought about it, all that boredom is, at it’s simplest, is a space in time where you find yourself with nothing to do. No distractions, no activity, no hope of getting anything done. I smile at this because I know many spiritual people who pay good money to visit Monasteries built into mountains in countries like Bhutan, to spend weeks and months in silence, with no distractions, no activity, no hope of getting anything done. When nothingness is called ‘Meditation’, it’s a spiritual pursuit, but as soon as you call it ‘boredom’ it’s an invitation to the devil.

However, this is not a discussion on semantics, it’s an important conversation we must be having. We know that creativity is the application of knowledge. It’s taking thoughts and transforming them into a different state, a physical state if you like. Into something that takes up space in the physical world we inhabit. Be it as a business idea, or a painting, or a dance, or a new sport, or a fresh campaign.

In order to do this we must create a space for our minds to explore, discover, investigate, play, etc. Our minds need to take a multitude of different thoughts and ideas and put them together to see what might happen if you could successfully do so? And for our minds to begin that pursuit they must be emptied of the noise that fills them in our day to day existence of repetitive and structured behaviour.

Boredom is that kick start. Boredom is the act of emptying our minds. It’s why it’s so painful for us to be bored. Boredom scares us, not because it’s an invitation for the devil, boredom scares us because it’s the beginning of creation, and in creation everything is up for grabs. There’s a well known and quoted quote from Marianne Williamson that I’m certain she must have written having recently come out of a very empty space in her world…

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

The Alternatives to Creation are too Ghastly to Imagine

You didn’t think that great creativity was going to be easy did you? That you’d be walking down the road and a spark of genius that makes Einstein look positively pedestrian, would suddenly pop into your brain. Creation takes work. Hard work. Long hours. To take thoughts and transform them into something tangible and meaningful in the real world is not for the faint hearted. But we must do it. The alternatives are too ghastly to imagine. A world in which creation dies is a world in which we slip into a repetitive existence of 9-5 (or 8-4), Monday to Friday, doing the same tasks every day, over and over again. We wear the same ‘uniform’, conform to the wishes of untouchable and unknowable bosses and masters. We’ll sit in traffic for hours wondering why nobody spends any time finding a solution for our mundane and almost meaningless lives? We’ll train our children in institutions so that they too will one day live a life like we do, where everything seems the same, day in and day out. They too will live for weekends and 15 working days of leave each year, as together we go on leave with our colleagues and cram together onto beaches in similar places, or share dirt roads in the same Parks and climb mountains together, before returning to do it all over again.

If being bored is the beginning then bored I will be. I will embrace it, learn to love it and live there

By the way, all is not lost. On that same Google Images page I referred to above, with memes of warning, I discovered glimpses of what I have written above. People, who out of their boredom have discovered the beginning of the beginning

Photo by Julian Myles on Unsplash

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Chief executives believe that — more than rigor, management discipline, integrity or even vision — successfully navigating an increasing complex world will require creativity

From an article in FastCompany back in 2010, here’s the picture of most important qualities from the 2010 IBM study….

By 2012 ‘creativity’ had slipped down to 3rd place on the IBM CEO Global Study

The 2015 IBM Global CEO Study seems to have shifted what it’s looking for from CEO’s. But looking at the quotes that are used in one of the papers to come out of it, from a variety of CEO’s, it seems obvious that creativity must be pretty high up the list of priorities, because I’m not sure how else they’ll get through successfully without a very big dose of it?

SHOULD YOU PAY A PREMIUM FOR CREATIVITY?

As I pointed out in my post last week, creativity has been on the decline since at least 1984 in some countries. That means that people entering the workplace from around the end of the 90’s are less creative than their older counterparts. With no sign of a reversal in the ‘creative quotient’ it seems to me that there should be a premium paid for anyone with above average creativity in the workplace?

The world is a complex and unpredictable place to do business in, and rightly, CEO’s globally know that creativity is a critical skill and attribute to have inside of their organisations. There is an enormous need to pay attention to increasing the levels of creativity, from our children in school all the way through to the most senior levels of organisations, companies and government.

The post Is Creativity The Most Important Leadership Skill? appeared first on Calidascope.

A few years ago Lauren Summerton launched a company focussing on small to medium sized companies, with a particular focus on start-ups. She called it ‘About Finance‘. A perfect name for a business who’s focus was to oversee the financial bits and pieces of her clients leaving them to get on with the activities they started their business to do. Running your finances well is critical for the success of any business, but very few people start a business so they can spend large amounts of time managing those finances.

A little bit down the road, a university friend of hers, Carmen Dell, joined her as a partner in About Finance. Carmen married a UK based human person, and it became obvious for them to continue to leverage the great working dynamic they had developed and set up an operation in London.

By this time they were being pulled in by their clients to do more than just finance. There was strategy, and advisory services that clients were asking for, and Lauren and Carmen felt that perhaps it was time to look at their own strategy to see if they needed to alter some of who they were, and what they were doing? During this time, a third partner came on board, in the shape of Chloe Blumberg.

Lauren Summerton, Chloe Blumberg, Carmen Dell

Of course, we think it was a sign of their incredible skill, experience and gut feel that they asked Calidascope to see if we could help them create a new look and feel, in line with what they had become and where they wanted to go, that would excite them.

As we do, there’s no moving forward on any project until we’ve taken the time to get into the heads and hearts of our clients. We spent hours and hours with their team to extract the magic that makes them who they are. We then got our design team involved, and with much backwards and forwardsing, a new name, look and feel was born.

Well done to Lauren, Carmen and Chloe on the launch today of Decimal Point…

As they describe it on their website:

In the world of facts and figures, a decimal point creates order amongst numbers. It may be a small character on a keyboard, but it plays a critical and powerful role in making sense of those numbers. That’s what we do, and it’s the role we strive to fulfil each and every day for our clients.

If you’re a growing business looking for dynamic and skilled outsourced partners to bring order to your finances, drop them a line. You don’t even have to be based in Cape Town or London. I know they have clients that span the entire country.

• Website
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The post There’s Far More To This Decimal Point Than You Think appeared first on Calidascope.

But they won’t necessarily push us, or challenge us, or take us into a future that is going to be an improvement on the present.

Zappos – An Unsafe Book

Two years ago I had the opportunity to spend two days inside of Zappos. On day two, along with my two daughters, we attended a quarterly All-Hands meeting, where for the first time I heard the term Holacracy. According to Wikipedia…

Holacracy is a social technology or system of organisational governance in which authority and decision-making are distributed throughout a holarchy of self-organising teams rather than being vested in a management hierarchy. Holacracy has been adopted in for-profit and non-profit organisations in Australia, France, Germany, New Zealand, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States

It was a new framework that Zappos was in the process of exploring and implementing. To be honest, I haven’t really been able to get my head around it properly, except for the fact that it seems to be a fairly large departure from how we traditionally organise ourselves in companies. From a Fortune article worth reading, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh has this to say about why the move toward Holacracy…

“The one thing I’m absolutely sure of,” Hsieh says, “is that the future is about self-management.”

This move, as I understand it, is another deliberate change to ensure that Zappos both survives and thrives into the future. As part of the shift towards this new way of organising, Zappos offered employees a very generous 3 months of salary if they felt it was too large a shift for them. In total, during 2015, 29% of their workforce walked away. It takes monster courage to put an offer like that on the table.

This isn’t the first time that Hsieh and Zappos have executed out-the-box ideas in order to do better business. Over the few years I’ve watched them they have consistently made brave choices to make Zappos the leading online shoe retailer in the US and great place to work (click here for a collection of FastCompany articles on Zappos and Tony Hsieh)

I have no idea if this will work for Zappos? I’m certain there are many people watching carefully. I imagine there’s a large number hoping they will fail, because there’s a lot at stake if it succeeds. What I do know, is that in my world, Zappos and Tony Hsieh are an un-safe book worth reading (following),because they  see things differently, and have no respect for the status quo. You ignore them at your own peril. They change things and push business forward. And while some may see them as crazy, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do 🙂

The post An Unsafe Book You Should Be Reading? appeared first on Calidascope.

My own experience is that it’s unpredictable, unknowable, surprising, messy, non-linear, and doesn’t ever happen within whatever process is set up for it to happen within. Of course this is a problem to most business people. Business has been throughly schooled in the idea that everything can and must be managed and measured. Therefore everything must be able to fit neatly into a process or some sort of predictable flow. I’ve sat in pitches with companies who want their people to be more creative, who almost always don’t like it when I tell them that while I’m pretty certain we can help them develop a more creative culture and person within their business, there’s a chance that it might not happen. And if it does happen, we’re not able to show them a predictable process for how it will happen. It’s about then that we don’t get invited back for the next round 🙂

It’s the reason why, in my opinion, so many authors, consultants and experts build charts and flow diagrams and processes for how creativity, disruption and innovation takes place. They have neat lists of 10 and 20 things that will result in the desired outcome. Business buys this. I’m not sure they get what they pay for, but they do get the familiarity and security of a neat manageable and measurable process.

I’m about to start listening to a book called ‘Wired To Create‘ by Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire. I decided to buy it after reading a review on it in the New York Times recently.

Instead, “Wired to Create” rises above these shortcomings by emphasising the complexities and contradictions that distinguish creative people. “Insightful problem solving can’t be boiled down to any single way of thinking,” the authors say. Creative people have messy processes, and often messy minds, full of contradictions.

While wondering fairly aimlessly around the internet the other day I came across some images that describe the creative, disruptive and innovative process as I know it to be….

The post You can’t know how to be Creative, Disruptive or Innovative appeared first on Calidascope.