Obviously, issues that impact them all like “spectrum” generated a fair amount of conversation, but a surprising new topic emerged on the scene, “trust”.

Dan Hesse, Sprint’s CEO and the man who recently took a pay cut, went on the record saying.

“Even cable and oil industries rate higher with consumers than we do, its very troubling.”

Hesse then explained to the industry crowd why trust was important.

“Trust is important. There has never been a device as personal as a smartphone.”

Hesse wasn’t alone on the trust issue, AT&T’s Ralph de la Vega blamed advertising for causing some of the mistrust.

“That’s why this industry has a bad rap. We take the truth and we stretch it. We each try to put our best foot forward and in doing so it’s confused the customer.”

Wireless is a business deep in the throws of transformation as it has to consider and find new sources of revenue.

It’s clearly eagerly looking at the vast opportunity that lies mobile payments, in mobile advertising and from sophisticated data protection and home security services. All these new business have one thing in common, a need for trusted brands.

It will be interesting to see how the carriers migrate into this new world of value add and how they can improve their trust ranking, the biggest challenge is being able to do this while continuing to sell confusing data and voice plans and spending billions of dollars on advertising in order to do so.

The digital component is “Pepsi Pulse” which uses data from Social Flow to populate a new dashboard for pop culture and entertainment news. This platform integrates a range of content including celebrity Tweets and Tweets containing relevant hashtags.

Another component of the campaign is a partnership with Twitter that involves a number of pop-up concerts.

The idea of the digital campaign is to take the brand full steam into the social space by creating a conversation with its audience around the pop culture topics and celebrities they’re passionate about. This is true to Pepsi’s history and DNA that comes from its past campaigns with high profile musicians.

The digital component of the campaign is being led by Shiv Singh, Pepsi’s Global Head of Digital, who we are delighted to have as a speaker at Influx’s Back to Storytelling Basics Conference in NYC on May 23^rd.

The Influx conference explores the concept of storytelling from a variety of angles- from the perspective of filmmakers, musicians and cartoonists, through to the brand storytellers themselves, from established brands like Pepsi and newcomers Warby Parker.

It’s easier to follow a competitor when you are that close, but that requires discipline from a company that’s growing so fast. Next time, when a competitor emerges from the streets of Sao Paulo, Brazil, Facebook might not be so fortunate.

Failure to spot competitors has been one of the major reasons for the downfall of some of the world’s biggest brands. They get blinded by arrogance and it becomes harder and harder to see the biggest competitive threats that don’t conform to your pre-conceived notions. If you make cameras, you can only see other camera makers as your competitors, not a phone and the same could be said for Nintendo’s recent challenges in the world of gaming, they also failed to see the rise of mobile. 

The way around this problem is to have eyes in the back of your head, which means you need to see competitors from all sides, not just straight ahead. The best way to do this is to start by understanding the consumers that might not traditionally be your customers; they aren’t your core, they are the ones on the peripheries. You need to understand how they are behaving and what they want. This takes discipline because there’s always only so much budget to go around, it’s always easiest to focus only on the people that seem to matter to you right now.

To challenge conventional laziness and lack of resources, corporate leadership needs to embrace the idea that there’s value to a broader level of consumer understanding. Instead of positioning the exercise as a negative, it needs to be flipped to a positive. The positioning up the organization has to be about getting to the opportunities before competitors do, so this isn’t about finding competitors, because if it is, you’re already too late.

This opportunity seeking is not for the feint of heart, you’ve got to disrupt your traditional research practices and slay your conventions to get there. You’ve got to experiment and do things that are outside of your comfort zone. In addition, it requires a bravery to get to grips with your brand’s weaknesses and to acknowledge and identify your Achilles heel, because this is where you will find opportunity.

Once you discover and find that opportunity, your job has just begun because you have to convince others that this emergent behavior is worthy of your colleagues’ time and your company’s investment. You’ve got to make them excited about the potential, you’ve got to take them into this new world and tell them a story and you’ve got to demonstrate what it’s going to take for your brand to be successful in this new space.

The brands that survive in the world of hyper-competition will be the ones that get to opportunities fastest and have teams capable of convincing stubborn internal cultures that they need to embrace change and forks in the road.

These will be the ones that have the courage to embrace new forms of research that can uncover real opportunities and can find creative and imaginative ways to brings these opportunities to life in order to convince the corporation to take action.

We invite you to join us as we explore these topics with an exciting group of industry experts:

The art of storytelling: finding the initial spark of emotional connection and determining what’s a compelling story to tell
Frederick Kaufman — Harper’s/CUNY Graduate School of Journalism
Jennifer Steinman — Documentary Filmmaker
Harry Bliss — Cartoonist, The New Yorker
Throughout the day, singer, songwriter, bluesman Patrick Sweany will share his songs and his perspective on songwriting and storytelling.

Empowering the new consumer tool set: developing a plan for telling the story and monitoring how it’s being received
Kristi Burrows & Ed Cotton — Influx
John Feland — Founder, Argus Insights
Noah Brier — Co-Founder, Percolate
Redefining the customer experience: creating the opportunity for consumers to connect to the story
Grant McCracken — Anthropologist, Lecturer and Author of Culturematic
Paula Payton — SaleMaker/Oxford Retail Research
Ryan Hughes — CMO, Isis
Neil Blumenthal — Co-Founder, Warby Parker
Evolving the brand ecosystem: extending the brand and story into nontraditional spaces
Shiv Singh — Global Head of Digital, PepsiCo
Michela O’Connor Abrams — President, Dwell Media
Paull Young — Director of Digital Engagement, charity: water
Betty Liu — News Anchor, Bloomberg Television, New York

It took a group of students at University of Texas to come up with the idea of EnemyGraph and while it’s success might be shocking to those involved, 10k users in 36 hours, it could easily have been predicted.

While commentators have shunned the negative forces that they claim to be pulling a country apart, it’s only human nature to rally around and converse about things that we don’t like- while some early stage manifestations are obvious, like pushing against unpopular cultural icons like Beiber, it would be interesting to see if the force of negative energy can turn into a positive force for good.

EnemyGraph is one manifestation of a social media world that’s in constant flux and broadening beyond Facebook’s singular vision.

Here’s a great one.

“We aren’t doing anything to make them look up!”

Neil deGrasse-Tysson- Director of the Hayden Planetarium

Neil’s comment refers to kids who are now spending their days looking down at tablet or phone screens.

Via Swiss Miss

This is a great example of how you can engage an audience with content and conversation.

It’s back from 2010, the show’s Twitter leads imagined something that wasn’t even the show, one of the characters- attending The Beatles concerts at Shea Stadium.

The film below shows how the conversation went back and forth as the show’s lead Tweeters encouraged their audience. Obviously, when you put the iconic Beatles together with a critically acclaimed show and an audience who is following its every move you have a great opportunity to engage.

Just in the past month, we’ve seen Facebook revolutionize its experience for brands with the introduction of Timeline and Apple introduce a new retina display iPad, that’s causing all kinds of chaos for content producers and advertisers.

It seems that simply making the transition and acknowledging the new world is not enough, you’ve got to be ready to have you finger of the pulse and be able to respond to the changing requirements that technology is forcing upon you. No one wants to be left behind and no brand wants to appear dated and behind the times with when they communicate digitally.

Beyond the basics of constantly updated experience from familiar brands and channels, there’s also the ongoing fragmentation of media channels that requires constant checking and understanding. This now appears to have added complexity because we are at the start of fragmentation of social media channels, as we can see with the arrival of Path, Pinterest and the growth of sites like Instagram and dozens of other small emerging entities.

Any agency that believes the tough part was the cultural change and the integration is misguided, the real challenge is keeping up with the technological change and being anticipate it, build for it and stay ahead of it. This means you need team members who constantly read the pulse of change, but more importantly don’t just know what’s going on, they understand how to make everyone else aware and do something about it.

The new trend for many brands is to hire iconic cultural figureheads as creative directors, hoping that they can sprinkle their magic zeitgeist dust on the brand.

Brands realize he power of celebrity endorsement, but the creative director role is a very different one; instead of just being a shill for the brand, they usually have to put their creative talent(s) to work .

However, it’s a dangerous game to play and there are no guarantees for success. Polaroid hired Lady Gaga and asked her to design product, but she’s certainly no industrial designer, HP had more success with Gwen Stefani, but that relationship, fizzled out, kind of like the brand.

The latest in the long-line of creative director appointments is John-Paul Gaultier, who now works for Diet Coke Europe.

I get the importance of cultural relevancy, but these appointments are expensive and force the brand to focus it’s attention on the efforts of one individual who certainly isn’t likely to represent the tastes, interests or desires of the majority of their consumers.

Do you think these appointments are consumer tested with the same level of rigor as the brand’s advertising?

The other problem is the cultural relevance of these individuals; get them too early and no one has heard of them, get them too late and they’re irrelevant and get them at their peak and they are probably too busy to add any real value.

There’s nothing wrong with the idea of cultural figureheads helping brands connect better to culture.

However, culture these days is so diverse and constantly changing, in this new world, maybe it would be smarter for brands to place smaller bets over a shorter time period with a diverse group/federation/team of individual talents, than to gamble everything on one person with a grandiose title, the ego to match and a long-term contract.

However, as is the case with many posts, the gems are often hidden in the comments, where there seems to be an interesting line of thinking emerging that challenges the ability of ad agencies to solve client product problems.

“The area of what you do when there is a ‘Product’ problem is the most interesting right now. Product difference is more important than ever before in our ZMOT, like button, Amazon review, TripAdvisor world. This is the area which ad agencies are least equipped to deal with – we’re generally pretty good at helping with Brand or Comms problems.

“If we in ad agencies don’t have a strategy for how we can advise clients in designing outstanding products then we will be marginalising ourselves even further from what is the most important step in brand-building.”

Advertising was at its zenith in the mid-1980s, when technology wasn’t the force it is today and agencies were being tasked with using their skills to help consumer products, which were often at parity with their competition, to differentiate themselves through building stronger emotional connections; as we all know great creative advertising can do just that.

Fast forward to 2012 and while many of the same problems of parity exist for classic packaged goods brands, the brands with energy and momentum right now are those that technological products and services- think of apps, search engines, social networks, handsets, operating systems, e-commerce sites. All things where the product and the product experience do make a real difference.

In this world of technological opportunity, agencies need to get involved in product development. This isn’t about creating a new beer, or launching a clothing line, but instead, helping non-technology based brands to embrace technology and to help those with technology, to make their experiences better.

Account Planning was born in the last great moment of consumer change, the 1960s, by people who felt the industry had become removed from the realities of its customers. Account Planning was created to build a bridge and bring insight from the consumer to the creative process.

The world has moved on, but the core principles of Account Planning that exist in agencies, should be flexible and adaptable enough to help those agencies develop and enhance technology. It’s a skill that’s basically all about understanding people and trying to anticipate their wants and needs.

The insights gathered during the process are boiled to their core and the output is always a simple idea that’s very concentrated and powerful which becomes the building block for advertising.

If agencies are doing all the hard work to understand consumers and throwing away 90% of it, we now have a use for it, because to help our clients develop products for the technological age, we need to think expansively about possibilities.

This isn’t about finding the one thing that consumers want, but understanding the broad opportunities and how they can best be configured to meet needs.

It would be naïve to simply suggest that we just need to simply reapply what’s been done before, to something new, that’s not the case.

To help agencies create digital products for clients- planners need to been able to go broad fast and understand all the aspects of people’s interactions with a category and put this in the context of the technological tools and access points available. It’s an exercise in looking at possibilities and identifying those that are unmet or under-served.

To get there, Planners need to rely on a mix of new and traditional tools. This should include deep dives with data, working with those in the UX discipline to better understand interaction and being fully on-board with the latest information on what’s technologically feasible.

Agencies certainly have the opportunity to help build, create and optimize products and they have the people skills and discipline to do it, the critical thing to recognize and realize is that these skills need to be used in slightly different ways and to be updated to be relevant, but there’s nothing that says it’s impossible to achieve.