Pioneers of Digital: Success Stories from Leaders in Advertising, Marketing, Search and Social Media

345 Pages·2012·2.35 MB·English

by  Paul Springer

Note on the Ebook Edition
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tables and figures in landscape mode.
This ebook published in 2012 by
Kogan Page Limited
120 Pentonville Road
London N1 9JN
UK
www.koganpage.com
© Paul Springer and Mel Carson, 2012
E-ISBN 9780749466053
Full imprint details
Dedicated to Andrea Springer, Ashley Seffernick,
Maggie Carson and Dave Stobbs
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction
01 Thomas Gensemer MyBO and Obama’s 2008
Presidential Campaign
02 June Cohen Hotwired and TED.com
03 Denzyl Feigelson iTunes Advisor and Artists Without A
Label
04 Vanessa Fox Google and Nine By Blue
05 Gurbaksh Chahal ClickAgents and BlueLithium
06 Jaron Lanier Virtual reality and Microsoft Research
07 Angel Chen OgilvyOne China
08 John Winsor Victors & Spoils
09 Danny Sullivan Search Engine Land
10 Alex Bogusky, Bob Cianfrone Burger King’s
Subservient Chicken
11 Avinash Kaushik Digital marketing evangelist, Google
12 Carolyn Everson MTV Networks and Facebook
13 Malcolm Poynton Dove Campaign for Real Beauty
14 Qi Lu Yahoo!, Microsoft and Bing
15 Ajaz Ahmed AKQA
16 Martha Lane Fox Lastminute.com and the UK
government’s digital champion
17 Kyle MacDonald One Red Paperclip
18 Jess Greenwood Contagious Magazine and R/GA
19 Zhang Minhui Sohu.com.cn
20 Stephen Fry
21 Pioneering places
China
India
Middle East
22 Lessons from pioneers
Not being original
Pioneering commercial models
Repositioning creativity
Skills convergence
All platforms and no content
Running in real time (not being ahead of the game)
Create something useful and never assume
Enjoy what you do!
Ten steps to becoming a digital pioneer, from the people who got
there
Jargon buster
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Writing a book like this is a huge collaborative process, so we owe a
huge debt of thanks to many people across five continents.
There are a crowd that have drip-fed us leads and material throughout.
They include: Zhang Yiping and Le Jianfeng (both Beijing Normal
University, Zhuhai), Tang Lei (iMag Interactive Shanghai), the team at
CKGSB Beijing, Antony Robinson (World of Advertising Research
Council), Olivier Rabenschlag (TBWA\Chiat Day LA), Mark Middlemas
(UM), Mark Egan (Havas Digital), Phil Mahoney (PhD), Santosh Padhi
(Taproot India), Kaswara Al-khatib (Full Stop, Saudi Arabia), Mohammad
HA Abudawood (P&G Middle East), Dr Abdullah Dahlan (CBA Holdings,
KSA), Tim Stephens, Robert Urquhart, Matt Smith (The Viral Factory),
Peter Hadfield (Universal), Nick Lawson (MediaCom), Jon Buckley, Vic
Davies, Stephen Partridge, Richard Jones, Justin Luker, Tang Hi Yi,
Shadi Elemar and Mohammad Kazeroun (all Buckinghamshire New
University), Tamara Ramach, Dominic Lyle and the team at Edcom, the
European Institute for Commercial Communications Education.
There’s also a crowd that made the interviews possible, most notably:
Ajaz Ahmed, Bob Cianfrone, Liisa Juola, Alex Bogusky, Hannah
Hickman, Katy McKegney, Thomas Gensemer, Jane Austin, Nigel Vaz,
Malcolm Poynton, Rafael Rojas, Gurbaksh Chahal, Jeremy Barbour,
Denzyl Feigelson, Jon Winsor, Ashliegh Buck, Angel Chen, Kyle
MacDonald, Martha Lane Fox, Vanessa Fox, Danny Sullivan, Andrew
Sampson (SamFry.com), Stephen Fry, June Cohen, Qi Lu, Jaron Lanier,
Jess Greenwood, Avinash Kaushik and Carolyn Everson, Ronda
Carnegie (TED), Andrew Ellis (WeAreLikeMinds), Andy Beal (Marketing
Pilgrim), Judy McGrath, Matt McGowan (Incisive Media), Sheryl
Sandberg (Facebook), Guy Phillipson (IAB UK), Jim Sterne (Target
Marketing), John Battelle (Federated Media), Jonathan Beeston (Efficient
Frontier), Lee Odden (TopRank Online Marketing), Matt Cutts (Google),
Rand Fishkin (SEOMoz), Richard Eyre (Eyre Supply), Shari Thurow
(Omni Marketing Interactive), Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook), Karen
Adams (Kraft), Steve Clayton, Shelby Healy, Nickie Smith, Stefan Weitz,
Mari Kim Novak, Marc Bresseel, Sandra LeDuc and Kaila Lightner (all at
Microsoft).
For the pioneers material online – filmed interviews and much more
fun, content and chat – we have our team of Kelsey Powell, Laura
Robinson, Sander Saar, Becky and Dave Naylor (Bronco), Kean
Richmond (Bronco), Bryan Schaeffer (SINTR) and Jess Slaney and
Andrew Goddard (CherryUK.com).
We owe a debt of gratitude to our cottage-industry editing and trans‐
cribing teams: Andrea Springer, Ashley and Aubrey Seffernick, Colleen
and Josh LaBelle, Trinitie Kedrowski, Chason Hendryx, Anne Evans and
James Carson. And, of course, our patient employers, Buckinghamshire
New University and Microsoft in the UK and the United States, who have
been supportive throughout this rather large project. We would
particularly like to express our thanks to Matt Smith, Jon Finch and Helen
Kogan at Kogan Page for keeping the process smooth – true pros.
Introduction
The internet as we know it today would be nothing without key people.
An Englishman, Tim Berners-Lee, shaped the free network we now
call the world wide web. Microsoft’s Bill Gates sought to put a PC on
every desk and in every home. Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page set
out to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible
and useful. Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook, now strives to
give people the power to share and make the world more open and
connected. And of course, the late Steve Jobs did much to put the digital
revolution into people’s hands (and ears) and show how technology could
enrich lives through simple but brilliant design.
True pioneers of digital, these innovators have pushed the boundaries
of what’s possible through the internet and created compelling,
entertaining and useful experiences that have touched millions around
the world.
But they’re not the only ones. Far from it.
When we sat down to discuss writing this book, we wanted to tell the
stories of pioneers of digital that you might not necessarily have heard of.
We wanted to write about people who had explored new areas of the
internet, people who had developed groundbreaking technologies and
businesses, people who had discovered new ways to reach new
audiences, people who made the web look like it does today. These are
the people who had inspiring insight and have great stories to tell.
Having communications backgrounds and an avid interest in digital
media, we narrowed our focus to discovering pioneers in the fields of
advertising, marketing, search and social media, to showcase individuals
who had excelled in embodying an entrepreneurial spirit by creating
captivating connections with consumers in a multitude of different ways.
Our voyage of discovery led us around the world, from the UK and
Europe to the United States, India, the Far East and Middle East. We had
conversations with pioneers of digital who helped us understand where
they had ‘the big idea’, what drove them, how they accounted for their
success and what they think we can learn from their experience.
The result is 20 stories that span multiple disciplines, platforms,
campaigns and industries across the digital space. Each of our pioneer’s
stories begins by explaining their digital discipline, and then their journey
unravels in their words. With analysis of why their work has succeeded,
each ends with sound bytes that echo the main takeaways from their
cases. From big brand advertising to search engine optimization, from
political campaigning to virtual reality, from social activism to digital
creativity, from online video to celebrity social media – it’s all in these
pages.
Pioneers of Digital also includes some of digital history’s more unusual
stories. For instance, how did a political campaign have 80,000 unread e-
mails? Why does the father of virtual reality now question the
technological ideology he helped create? What do you do when your
website’s a global success but your client wants it taking down? Who
went on to generate a billion video views online after being turned down
by the BBC? From dilemmas to innovation, the stories behind digital’s
most consumed and followed content are told by the people who helped
create it.
As this project progressed, themes started to emerge: cross-cultural
themes, attitudinal themes, inter-disciplinary themes and astonishing
themes. Would it surprise you that most of our pioneers had little idea,
back in the 1990s, that two decades later the web would have become
quite so huge and all-encompassing in our daily lives? Could one of the
secrets to success truly be to simply love what you do? Is it really best to
avoid originality and focus on agility ‘in the moment’?
We’ve identified the pioneering territories of the world that are taking
up the digital challenge. How have China and India – the world’s biggest
countries – developed digital communications? How has the Middle East,
with the largest proportion of youth buying into digital, been shaped for
their brave new world?
In the final chapter we’ve reflected on the main issues, views and, in
some cases, counter-logic from the cases that defines these pioneers’
views from commonly held assumptions about digital.
Many people have asked us how we chose our pioneers. They are
people who, to industry insiders, are synonymous with digital innovators,
early adopters, real-time adapters and entrepreneurs. In the main these
are the people whose contribution to the digital ecosystem we could do
little without. We wanted to cover stories and themes that explain the
bigger picture of digital communications today, through the words of the