Paul, how you doing?

I’m from Brazil, I work in a big advertising player here and I have some important questions to ask ya!

Could we start to send each other emails?

Thanks in advance!

Thiago

Thanks for the invite to the house of naked, I actually love being naked so I’ll make myself right at home.

If brands are truly naked now, a new idea for me but one I’m buying into, then what does it mean? For me it means that brands need to be doing more than just talking or in this case messaging. Lets level here, when was the last time you got naked and decided to “just talk?” Ummm… NEVER! I’m at a big agency this summer, one that will remain nameless, and it seems that this is all they are interested in doing, talking. Really?

Our media landscape is beyond cluttered. The choices are endless. It’s not even a question of staying up on everything any longer, its a question of picking the things you want to stay up on and letting everything else fly by you. This being said, if a brand is trying to talk to you in the mess of voices and messages, more often than not the message isn’t heard. There are some exceptions, you might hear it if it is so specific to you that you can’t miss it, kind of the advertising version of the cocktail party effect. However, we cant as advertisers bank on the fact that we will make that strong of a connection every time, though we keep on trying.

So what is the answer? For me it is brand behavior. Lets get naked and have some fun, right? Forget talking, we can do that later. But you raised a great question “Is it our place to advice behavior.” Of course it is!

The reason businesses come to agencies is because they need to know how to speak to their consumers. We positioned ourselves, and in the truly great agencies, our philosophies on being the experts on the consumer. We do everything we can to understand the thoughts, emotions, attitudes and behaviors of the consumers we want to talk to. This being said, we garner an enlightened understanding of the consumer the client would kill for, or at least pay a ton of money for (hopefully). With this enlightenment, its our responsibility to advise the clients behavior. They paid us to learn about the consumer, if we see an opportunity for them to grow their business, it would be unethical for us not to. It is a companies job to set up and infrastructure and offer a product to a consumer, and its our job to better tailor that product/offering/service to them.

What if they tell us that “its your job to handle communications, we’ll take care of the rest.” You calmly take out your intro to psychology book and turn to the nonverbal communication section. We are communications people, fair enough, but everything a company does is sending communications. There are messages in the minutia. These are often times the messages the client never even hears. By advising the behavior of a client, we are doing nothing more than advising a different facet of their communications. It seems crazy to me that clients ignore suggestions, which are usually substantiated with qualitative and quantitative evidence, because we aren’t “business people.” It doesn’t take an MBA to understand how people are reacting to things.

I like to look at us, advertisers, as the connection that creates a two way conversations. Unfortunately many times, clients are not willing to listen to the whole conversation. Maybe now, thanks to the vulnerability and exposure that being naked can bring, they will start to listen to what we are telling them and do things right. After all, when you’re naked if you aren’t listening to your partner the experience usually isn’t pleasurable for either party.

Hi Joey ,

Thanks for your passion and comments.
Helps a lot. If you reflected on the overall theme of ‘living naked’ what kind of questions would you want answered if you were in the audience?.
Go for it.

Paul

Hi Thiago ,

We did some email correspondence now i would love if you take 5 minutes to also reflect and shoot some questions on your thoughts , comments , challenges or questions related to this ‘living naked’ topic.

If brands do truely now stand naked in front of the consumer , where as soon as someone knows something , everyone knows something why oh why does the marketing services industry largely still use the same cloth to make the same cloaks to cover themselves up?.

P

What I’d be interested in would be seeing a brand that took living naked to the extreme… I think one might even consider a Coop grocery store as doing so. Not only are they open with their customers on how they operate, they often are run by their customers.
Another example of customer participation is a restaurant that I heard about in Denver where you can work for your food. Ten minutes doing dishes equals one sandwich (or something like that). I remember reading that the owner believed everyone is entitled to a good meal and she was building community.

How can others brands take the risk? How can they open their doors and let customers into their kitchen without risk that they might turn up their noses? Often big brands that we ‘believe’ in disappoint us when we discover too much. So how do you get close, without getting too close?

And how could other brands become more consumer participatory?

Glad I could offer a little help.

If i were in the audience there are a few thing i would probably want to know.

1) if living naked truly is a philosophy like you say it is how does it extend in to your own personal everyday life? do you even try to bring it there or is it limited to businesses?

2) If brands truly are living naked, is there any way for a company to survive that doesn’t embrace that idea? I ask this because I see a lot of companies resisting change. Is there a place for these companies or is there a complete shift in the dynamic of the marketplace.

3) On this same token there are agencies that are completely resisting the change, “traditional shops”, that only make ads. Can they survive?

4) Now that brands are living naked, I’m assuming the consumer was already naked, is the consumer on equal or much closer to equal playing ground? To me the idea of living naked almost seems like a climate of Anti-monopoly. By this i mean that bigger idea behind living naked is shift in the power struggle. As the market place becomes saturated consumers have more options and businesses are forced to comply with the consumers wants and demands more and more. If this is the case and we are kind of in an equilibrium now, what is the next step?

5) Maybe I’m taking the Naked metaphor too literally… If a company is naked that means you get to see them as they were made, right? you know, you get to see their make up, their structure, their imperfections and their naughty bits. This being said is there room for “plastic surgery” on brands in the metaphor? Augmentations, enhancements, plasty, or reconstruction? Are we going to become more accepting of a company’s flaws or hyper critical?
In this naked culture are mishaps, mistakes or blunders more detrimental or harder to bounce back from?

Ok, I’ll stop clogging up the space on your thread, but i really hope you respond (at least some) to my questions. I’d love to hear your opinion, and its not really a discussion if you don’t. Oh yeah, and Katie Fitz rocks and you guys are really lucky to have her for the summer.

In response to point #5 above from Joey: Maybe we should take it as literally as possible. Coincidentally, The Economist ran an article in their tech quarterly last week on open source hardware. The rules are slightly different — hardware isn’t free to reproduce like software is, for example — but it’s still really cool.

One example they gave was how Neuros Technology developed the Neuros OSD, a home digital repository for all your DVDs, VHS tapes, and other video. From the article: “Neuros made the OSD’s technical specifications available, and a group of users then wrote software to add a new feature that many users had requested: the ability to stream video from the OSD to another device across the internet. To access this new feature, users simply had to download a software patch.”

Here’s to getting our hands dirty!

Hi Joey,
The discussion really revolves around brands walking the walk as opposed to just talking the talk today..
Its no longer about what you say , its about how you behave internally , externaly at every communications touchpoint. Great companies and brands not only have great cultures and leaders but also a deep authentic understanding of how to consistantly behave and communicate.