In 1926, Henry Ford instituted a controversial shift change at his growing automotive empire: the weekend. To the ire of many other manufacturers, Ford closed shop on Saturdays, giving his workers the new-fangled ritual of two days off a week. His move was the high point of a short-lived historic experiment. Remember the weekend, when men and women valiantly tried to keep work and home separate, equal and unadulterated?

Now, of course, we work anywhere, and most of the time. Work is in our pocket, spilling into homes, weekends, vacations and bedrooms. Nearly 40 percent of mobile workers with PDAs now wake up at night at times to check them, at least occasionally, according to a quarterly survey of mobile enterprise workers by iPass.

Does this blurring of boundaries signify an easy return to a pre-industrial past, when we lived over the store or on the farm? Are we sliding seamlessly back into integrated lives? No. For most of human history, work and home were blended due to the restriction of experience. Geographic distance and the rhythms of sun and season limited the circumference of our work and home lives. Trade, like war, ceased at sunset. Entire lives centered on the same corner of earth.

Today we multitask in nanoseconds on a global scale, moving restlessly in thought and body across the planet. Forty percent of offices lie vacant on any given day, according to Deloitte. Bankers shift their hours to the midnight darkness of each monetary mess. We rarely speak of anything being “too far away” anymore. “Long weeks within a single community are unusual; a full day within a single neighborhood is becoming rare,” writes sociologist Kenneth Gergen in The Saturated Self. The @Work State of Mind arises from an expansion of experience.

What is the impact of these extraordinary changes? Surely, we are light-footed and nimble-minded. And yet always-on work forces us to constantly negotiate what we are doing, individually and collectively. Who changes the diaper when both spouses return from work exhausted? How do you sync a team spread across six time zones and three alternative work arrangements? Throughout the day, the average worker switches tasks on average every three minutes; half the time, they are interrupting themselves, according to studies by Gloria Mark, a professor of Informatics at the University of California Irvine. Perhaps this is why the @Work study reveals that among today’s decision-makers, a sense of accomplishment correlates with an ability to separate work and personal life. Without at least a few borderlines, we cannot find terra firma in an unshackled world.

A constant negotiation of attention is our foremost challenge. At heart, paying attention well is a matter of judicious boundary making. Focus, or “orienting” in science parlance, is akin to a spotlight of the mind, allowing us to filter what’s secondary and go deep into thought. Awareness opens our sensory floodgates, making us sensitive to our wider surroundings. Finally, executive attention fuels our abilities to plan, prioritize and weigh conflicting data. Attention isn’t singular, scientists are now discovering. It’s a multifaceted skill set that is a secret to thriving in an always-on era. How we attend shapes how we rest, play, create, manage, communicate and love.

Hopping from task to task, juggling interruptions, layering time is our default work style, although research conclusively shows that we cannot multitask very well. Beyond simple tasks such as folding laundry and watching television, we are often slow, prone to error and intellectually half-asleep when we multitask. And those who do it the most tend to do it most poorly, according to a 2009 study by Stanford University scientist Clifford Nass. The habit trains them to be “suckers for irrelevancy,” says Nass. Skimming, surfing, task switching are crucial “literacies” of this new age. But they must be balanced by time for deep focus, analysis, reflection and—dare I say it? —calm. @Work needn’t be a monotone state of mind.

Remember the weekend? It varied the pace of life, placing a boundary around something worthwhile. Put in place to protect people from the burden of never-ending work, over time the weekend, nevertheless, came to exemplify the rigidity of the boundary-centric Industrial Age. Now liberated from the confines of space and time, will we be remembered by future generations as the people who forgot the art of the limit?

Maggie Jackson is an award-winning columnist and author of Distracted

For example many organisations rely on central planning for rolling out digital initiatives in many different markets. The risk is in missing some of the key differences in those markets.

According to Orange Exposure 2011, a study that researched European habits in mobile Internet services and content, Spaniards increased their use of smartphones in one year from 29 percent in 2010 to 71 percent in 2011. At the same time, adoption of tablets went from 28 percent to 51 percent. Impressive numbers, but still tremendous room for growth compared to penetration in France and the UK.

More significant, however, is how Spaniards use these technologies. More so than their French and British neighbours, Spaniards are heavier users of smartphones for entertainment. It’s a way to kill time when no other screens are available for viewing. Tablets, on the other hand, are used more to save time and for more efficient navigation.

Spaniards consume more entertainment content on-demand and streaming through smartphones and tablets than through traditional media. Still, tablet users are far more likely to have used their device to complete a purchase than those relying on smartphones (60 percent vs. 35 percent). Spanish users also rely more heavily on their browser, as opposed to dedicated apps, to access the Internet than those in many western economies. In Spain, apps remain in an incipient phase.

The pace of development and adoption of mobile technology is different in each country.  Focusing on a single strategy for both content development and online communication is, therefore, not a valid approach. It’s important for marketers to understand the pace of technology development and adoption in specific markets and cultures so that they can be sure they’re delivering meaningful content through relevant channels.

Bottom line: If your audience is more comfortable buying online using a tablet, your plans for a phone-centred secure shopping app may be ill-advised.

by Ana Garcia-Hierro
General Manager, gyro Madrid

Follow Ana on Twitter @Ana5Names

Cross posted at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

If we exclude certain extremist movements that are taking advantage of this situation, who, then, are the last emotionalguides of our society? Who or what can create want, satisfy pleasure and decree the keys to the success of individuals and their degree of fulfilment? Who, if not brands and artistes (who have themselves become brands!)?

This statement is an acknowledgment of fact and certainly not a value judgment. It emphasises the role of brands in our society, looking beyond their ability to satisfy needs, which is clear. Each brand has its own universe, which will contribute to fulfilling the consumer’s expectations and existential needs.

The product itself adds to the brand universe, giving it physical form. In the choices made by consumers, the emotional value of the brand takes precedence over the functional value of the product.

And where is the CMO in all that? He will play a new role as a creator of emotions, producing his work through all possible channels of distribution. He will stage the brand through events, shows, films, games and ideological debate. All these productions will pursue the same aim, seeking to attract, group, move and convince consumers.

In making his choices, the producer CMO will seek to expand the brand audience across every channel used. Audience ratings thereby become the new barometer of success. The higher they are, the greater the increase in sales. The power of the audience ratings will influence the quality of product referencing in distribution and could even reverse the balance of power between brands and retail. In this new world, point of sales becomes a theatre that needs the productions created by the CMO in order to bring people in. The world is changing fast. Make way for the show and the audience ratings!

Ladies and gentlemen, waste no time in telling your CEOs that you have become a creator of emotions. They think you’re still a CMO!

by Didier Stora
General Manager – gyro Paris

Cross posted at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

A boatload of researchers and academics share this perspective and as marketers we owe it to ourselves to become conscious of the potential this particular attitude holds for global marketing communications. A relatively small set of root concepts represents shared experience, emotional significance and hold potentially profound persuasive power for us all. These “deep” metaphors are embedded or embodied in us as human beings. Universally across languages and cultures, these metaphors are used to simplify complex concepts tied to imagery, to experiences and to emotions.

According to researcher Zoltán Kövecses, “universal primary experiences produce universal primary metaphors.” Presuming they are used in a relevant way, metaphors engage us because they spark imagination and extend meaning far beyond words.

Hardly a new idea, metaphors in communications from speeches to campaigns have been argued to have great influence on how we think and act, and they can substantially affect how we reason about complex issues and gather information to make decisions (P.H. Thibodeau and L. Boroditsky, 2011). For example, in 1946 when Winston Churchill sought to paint a clear picture of what was happening in Eastern Europe and to warn the Western world about the spreading threat of communism, he said:

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the continent.”

With these very simple and powerful words, Churchill created a shared image that transformed American feelings and changed the course of history.

If metaphors can unite us, can reach us at an emotional level and can influence our decision-making, why don’t we see more of them in global advertising? The answer is they are being used successfully by many global marketers, although we may not all consciously realize they’re there. In his recent blogpost, Pete Healy of gyro discusses the art of creating messages that can resonate with audience members across languages and cultures. And his blog raises the question, “Are we to the point where this can be done with standardized content, or must it be localized?”In response, I’d pose that relevant “deep” metaphors have the power to do both.

Gerald and Lindsay Zaltman explain in their book Marketing Metaphoria that there are seven “deep metaphors” that provide a bridge to unconscious imagery and emotions that unite us as humans. These seven—balance, transformation, journey, container, connection, resource and control­—can be experienced at the same basic level by people worldwide and can offer unifying insight to inform global marketing strategy.

For example, take the metaphor of transformation, which Zaltman says “may be the most pervasive deep metaphor among consumers.” In the book How Customers Think, Zaltman writes, “Transformation involves moving from one state of being to another, with each state having both desirable and undesirable qualities.” An example of a transformative metaphor used globally but adapted by culture/region is the Effie award-winning Kraft Philadelphia Cream Cheese campaign. For the years that this campaign ran, the brand held the position of “indulgent heavenly experience” on a global basis. In execution, the campaign metaphorically struck a balance between the transformative experience of blissful indulgence and of divine goodness. At the same time, because heaven is viewed differently in different cultures, executions were appropriately localized. For example, the kinds of angelic beings employed were modified by cultural norm, i.e., angels used to represent heaven in ads running in Christian but not in Muslim cultures (Kates and Goh, 2003).

Metaphors serve as a practical and powerful bridge linking imagery and emotion in ways that can be both universally and locally relevant. What we must keep in mind as marketers is that the audience is not going to simply absorb and accept what we say at face value. They will, if we successfully engage them, interpret, interact and apply their own judgment to what we say. The audience drives the conversation and owns the understanding. In today’s dynamic and global world of marketing communications, metaphors can be powerful vehicles of persuasion, but communications have become a two-way conversation where the audience controls the script.

by Judy Rudolph Begehr
Senior Vice President – Account Planning

Cross posted at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

From AMC’s huge rating figures for the stylish TV series Mad Men, the resurgence of classic Americana styling among the young and fashionable, to the ever increasing number of “authentic” Americana brands being created or resurrected like Narragansett beer in New England.

Is this just baby boomer nostalgia? Or is it a significant yearning for what the WSJ calls America’s  ‘Midcentury Moment’, those post war  “golden years of the 1940’s, ‘50s and early ‘60s?” The boom years when Americans forged the world’s new super power, as those in Europe diminished.

Production lines hummed and capitalism flourished.  Millions of Americans literally bought into the American dream, enjoying new levels of comfort and security. Diligent workers toiled on production lines or equally mechanized corporate machines.

This was the time of BIG things in the US. Big government, big population growth, big ambitions and big civic construction projects sprang up.

In truth, it was a time when the world’s biggest economy was then a young, dynamic, fast growing market.

During this time US companies became dominant corporations on a world stage, strongly influencing how business was conducted all over the world.

Fast forward to 2011, America now competes in a fierce global market against young and dynamic economies. New companies emerge as world leaders such as India’s Tata, and new brands take top spot like China’s Snow Beer which is now the biggest selling beer in the world.

In addition to this, the US is suffering from a seriously stalled economy, job losses, and corporate giants losing their way. To top it off, in many parts of the world Brand America is now viewed with alarming degrees of vehemence.

Perhaps this is why so many Americans find themselves looking back to the Golden Years with aspiration. To a time when America was accelerating and seemed unstoppable, economically, socially, politically and culturally: Brand America was strong and healthy.

As a brand strategist I have spent a good amount of my career helping companies to reach their potential as brands, employers and stakeholders in society. As such I am a witness to the terrible frustration felt by smart executives who are constricted by the most potent and enduring by-product of the Golden Years of America: “corporate culture.”

Around the world, the phrase “corporate America” is used to denote a numb, faceless style of big business. Its characteristics will be familiar; global, hierarchical, process orientated, slow, uninventive, impersonal. “People are numbers” and the focus is firmly on profit at the expense of personality.

Understandably consumers, customers, employees and talented graduates feel this style of business is deeply out of step with our dynamic, interconnected and digitally cosmopolitan world.

The realization of this and stagnant growth, has prompted many executive teams to seek change and transformation. We are enlisted to begin the process of uncovering what is intriguing and relevant about the company and through redefining what their organizations and brands stand for, we unlock momentum and growth.

Interestingly, during this process we so often hear “we want to be like Apple or Google,” the success stories of today. But in truth, these firms were never created as corporations in the mid-century mold. Their founders were courageous and created something original, rather than mimic older corporate styles.

So, here it is. The Golden Years of the last century gave birth to so much. It gave America its confidence, its political and economic might. But it also fueled a style of business which seriously inhibits many companies today, and has rendered many American corporations unresponsive and irrelevant.

So as America nostalgically looks back to the Golden Years, and yearns for economic momentum once more, we need to recognize the need for new recipes of business appropriate for today’s fast, inventive, digitally interconnected global market place. And secondly the urgent need to unlock what worked so well in middle of the 20^th Century when American ingenuity, enterprise and risk tolerance created the world’s strongest, go-go, youthful marketplace.

by Adam Swann

Vice President, Planning

Cross-posted at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

Experience builds over time and it’s not until you encounter a newbie fresh off a flight dressed in a shorts and a vest top, holding a coffee with their left hand whilst hailing a cab with an arm offensively held in the air that you suddenly realise how much you’ve learnt!

You start in Dubai by slowing your walking pace. You discover the wealth of languages and dialects spoken in the region by locals and expats. You’re able to signal with your hand that you’d like the crazy driver behind to slow down or “have patience.” You understand the vision, the complex legal system and you can cope with the bewildering weather. Ultimately your sense of business etiquette develops and it’s a cliché but the region starts to get under your skin.

Trying to explain subtleties in relation to making a marketing campaign work locally can be a challenge. It’s hard for people that aren’t in the region to understand why direct mail doesn’t work (no-one has a mailbox), or why ideas need to be originated with local cultures in mind rather than localised. Seemingly innocuous content once transcreated can be seen locally as highly offensive or culturally inappropriate at worst, but in most cases just irrelevant. We’ve made a couple of mistakes along the way, like our big idea that involved branding sandal soles to leave footprints in the sand (Muslims consider the soles of the foot to be unclean), but luckily the people we have encountered are incredibly patient and have really helped us develop a deeper knowledge.

I understand the challenge from an external perspective too, I can see why a client based in New York or Stockholm wants to add a bit of “Arabian flavour” to the look and feel of their campaign. Maybe in their minds we’re pictured surrounded by sand dunes and souks, camels grazing outside and the smell of shisha and spices wafting through the air and they want to capture this atmosphere. However for us expats and locals in the region sitting at our Ikea desks in our glass offices, sipping our Starbucks lattes, watching the metro shooting past our windows and wondering whether to go to Nobu for dinner or late night shopping at Bloomingdale’s, adding a camel or lantern is just not always that relevant.

And believe me, I’ve been asked to add camels.

A lot.

by Lucy Miller

Managing Director – Dubai

Cross-posted at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

Last summer, we assembled a group at HyperIsland, the world-famous digital training center in Karlskrone, Sweden, for what we call Ignition Camp, an intense professional development program for our youngest colleagues showing the greatest promise. We were exposing these students to our techniques and tools for ideation and collaboration. They were asked to select a challenge against which they could practice these tools. They chose “work-life balance.”

I wasn’t among our youngest colleagues. So, when I came to the session as a mentor, I was gruff and dismissive. “Quit whining! People have been complaining to me for 30 years about the long and daunting hours of the ad agency business. Do you want a job, or do you want a career? This is no business for clock-watchers. It’s a fact of life in the agency business. There’s nothing new about this work-life balance issue,” I said.

Then one of them said, “Oh, yes, there is,” and she reached in her jeans pocket and set her iPhone on the table. “This has changed. It’s attached to me. I cannot disconnect from it.”

“Point made,” I replied. “Point very well made.”

It was for me a moment of epiphany; of sudden revelation and insight. It was not as if I had been oblivious to the spread of networked communications and hand-held devices, or even how important it was to deliver new forms of communication to reach people with these media. But as one who had spent his entire career focused on perfecting business-to-business marketing communications—that is, on marketing to people at work—it struck me like a lightning bolt.

Work has changed—and people at work have changed profoundly.

Oh, I had understood for many years that it was technically easier than ever to identify them, locate them, reach them, engage them and transact with them; even to spur them to exchange messages among themselves. I understood clearly how technology had changed, but I must confess I  neglected just how much it had changed them: the people to whom we were marketing.

by Rick Segal

President Worldwide and Chief Practice Officer

Cross-posted at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

You can follow Rick Segal @MrBtoB

The first time I heard it I was bemused and then annoyed and but really it’s not that dissimilar to being a Chairman or a Foreman – it’s just the most generic way of asking if I’m top dog.

Running a business in the Middle East as a woman (and a Western one, too), is actually a lot easier than you’d think. At a professional level, my female business partner and I have never encountered any negativity. We’ve never knowingly lost any pitches or business just because we’re of the fairer sex. On the contrary, it sets us apart. We’re often described as brave or pioneering but we’re no braver than our male counterparts.

The most commonly asked question I get from my peers, colleagues, friends and clients who work in the West is “How do you do it as a woman in the Middle East?”

A question that loosely translates as, “Are you boss man?”

by Fiona Menzies

Managing Director (Dubai)

Cross-posted at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

In the lead up to the 8th IDM B2B Marketing Conference the premise for my blog series is this: the staunch divide between B2C and B2B no longer exists.

Over the coming weeks, I will attempt to look into how this has happened and more importantly, what it means. How can we use some of the latest business theories, anecdotes and musings to effectively tackle a new brief and critically, add real value to our clients’ brands.

As a sweeping generalisation, it used to be that marketers and agencies made the communications decisions. Ultimately, we would rely on people being ‘switched on’ at varying times. So we’d patiently wait for people to respond to the direct response ad, direct mail and so on.

Now, we’re always ‘on’ – whether we are an avid social networker, smartphone user, proud owner of a tablet device – or whether we are not. That means that our professional and private lives have blurred, merged and in many ways become one. The psychology of having our personal life interrupted by our work is intriguing. Is it an invasion of our privacy and leisure time, or do we secretly relish in what it does to enforce our status – highlighting our success and demonstrating that we are always in demand. More on that later.

Add into the mix that business is now cool – Robert Preston, Martha Lane-Fox and  Richard Reed, not to mention the Bransons and Gates, are our equivalent of stadium filling popstars (who also appreciate being  associated with ‘serious’ fiscal  success). A key proof point is that the business publishing sector is actually one of the fastest growing in the world.

So there are 3 big things to think about:

1. Tech has allowed us to be always on, we’re no longer 9 to fivers
2. The ‘always on’ idea removes the ‘I’m at work thinking’. Work is no longer a place, it is a state of mind
3. Business is cool, in fact, business is uber cool and people want to be a part of it, more than ever.

So as business decision makers, over the last decade we’ve evolved and that means that the way we’re talked to must evolve. And this should probably be happening faster than it currently is.

The 2011 IDM B2B Marketing Conference takes place on 18 May

By
Richard Perry
COO
gyro

But, so often in the world of technology, we see one company launch a ‘revolutionary’ new device and the following years see every other producer scrambling to catch up. The tablet has been such an overwhelming success because it taps in to the human desire for functionality. It is far more intuitive for people to use a touchscreen to navigate the internet than the traditional mouse and keyboard and really this is just the tip of the iceberg. The next step for consumer technology will be the use of biometrics.

Biometrics is a fast-growing industry and we can see its application already in places such as airports. Now when I fly I no longer use my passport to the same extent, instead I will have a retina scan to determine who I  am. I become my own passport and it is this level of personalisation that will take consumer technology to the next stage of development. Smart alerts will make devices more intuitive, so for example, your personal device will know where you are going for dinner and automatically send you traffic updates for the area, direct you to local parking and let you know what else is going on nearby.

The future will see the mobile device becoming more of an extension of you; it will pre-empt what you need based on your personal preferences and bring relevant applications to you, rather than you going to them. And really the world is your oyster, the device of the future will be completely in tune with the individual, eye movements, body temperature and even thought capture will control your device.

I think we’re going to see massive leaps in the maintenance of mobile devices as well. The latest development to be announced was a chip that uses the body movement to generate power, and there is no reason why this technology can’t be used to charge your mobile device.

The future of computer technology is hugely exciting and the possibilities are endless. It’s easy think of all the fanciful ways that we could be using devices in the future, and many of these are no longer that fanciful – just take a look at Google’s April Fool, Google Motion, and the speed with which it became reality at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies. (via Mashable)

If I knew what the answer was I would be developing it and making a fortune, but I will be keeping a keen eye on the industry to see what comes next, and who gets there first.

By
Richard Hammond
gyro