The Quotes of 2007

2007 in Quotes Influx Strategic Consulting January 1st, 2008

Introduction
07 was a year where we at Influx saw interesting things happen including:
The rise of dominant social networks
Unpredictable economic events-Black Swans
More surprises from technology
Questions over China
Uncertainty in the content business
User-generated content evolving
The environmental issue taking the main stage
Brands fighting for attention
Brand experiences evolving

Introduction
Here’s a selection of quotes that made us think and in a small way sum up 07 for us.
Hopefully you will find some inspiration here as you search for ideas to keep your brands relevant in 08.
You can learn more about us at:
http://www.influxinsights.com
http://www.bssp.com

Contents
Advertising
Architecture
Brands
Brand Experience
China
Collaboration
Demographics
DIY
Economy
Environment
Food
Life:Work Balance
Media/Technology
Music
New Brand You
Predicting the Future

Advertising

“ Our world in 12 months’ time will be dramatically altered. The agent of destruction – and rebirth – is technology, of course, and its pace is swift. Even as I write, the futurologists are surely forecasting their own demise: the future is no longer the next five years, it’s next month, next week, and by the time you’ve predicted it, it’s been and gone.” — Claire Beale on advertising- Independent Online Edition Media

“ It’s mostly not really about things being viral at all, it’s just about dark media buying.” Iain Tait

“ Definitions are difficult now. The boundaries between what is the internet and what is TV are becoming more blurred. As a result, media decisions are becoming more complex and puzzling. It is not that simple to separate the two any more.” Sir Martin Sorrell

“ We thought it was a great idea when we presented it. [Simpsons creator] Matt Groening said it was a great idea, and it’s a great idea [now that it’s] being done. I guess that’s why we’re frustrated.” Leo Burnett team quoted in Adweek over Simpsons Movie debacle

Architecture

“ It’s as if a list of all known human pastimes have been collected on PowerPoint slides and then casually voted on by a show of hands.” Mike Davies on Dubai

Brands

“ It seems that the best pieces of marketing at the moment are coming from bands not brands.” Naresh Ramchandani

“ Everything from your haircut to your clothes to the type of instrument you play to the melody of a song to the rhythm - they’re all tricks to get people to pay attention to the story, If you just stood up in a crowd and said your story - ‘I came home, and this girl I was dating wasn’t there, and I was wondering where she was’ - it’s not interesting, but give it a melody, give it a beat, build it all the way up to a haircut. Now people pay attention.” Jack White-The White Stripes

“ Lauren took possession of The Dream. He used it to define his company, and without blinking, he argued through his storytelling that his version of The Dream was perfect. Even when so many people found themselves left on the cutting-room floor.” The Lauren Legacy: A Pony Tale

“ One of the cool things about the edgeconomy is that you can’t fake the funk. There’s an always-on, real-time connection between consumers, prosumers, firms, markets, networks, communities, etc - and if you choose to ignore what they’re saying/doing/learning/feeling - as EA’s done for the better part of ten years - you don’t just earn strategy decay, you lose credibility and trust in the long run.” Bubblegeneration

“ HP analyzed a number of other consumer product categories and found that in each case a company could make money selling low-price products and premium products, but that no one selling in the middle survived very long.” IHT

Brand Experiences

“ We try to pattern the feeling to a 5-star hotel, Apple’s retail chief, It’s not about selling. It’s about creating a place where you belong.” Ron Johnson-Apple

Skeptics have said social-networking sites have an element of fad to them and can lose ground as users lose interest. Nike, however, is expanding its Nike+ site offerings this summer to include “virtual” marathons and group challenges. “It’s not a fad,” Edwards said. “This is the way that people will connect with running products in the future.” Edwards vowed not to let the site fade, as the company did with joga.com, a collaboration between Nike and Google around last year’s World Cup. “We learned very quickly you just couldn’t go dark with these experiences,” Edwards said. Oregonlive

“ I was shocked,” said the owner of Payless Dollar Plus at 5616 W. Madison, a store found with tainted tubes. He asked that his name not be used. “I don’t like to sell stuff to harm anybody.” Chicago Sun Times

“ More than 80 percent of (US) ascorbic acid, better known as vitamin C and also used as a preservative, comes from China..” New York Times

Collaboration

“ People need equal opportunity, a meritocracy needs to be able to emerge, roles should shape themselves to the individual’s abilities and social relations, and there has to be complete transparency about the process and the progress. In a sense, management comes after the fact in the scaled world, helping out where needed, but letting much of the organization emerge from the complex relationships among the co-workers.” The Year of Scale Harvard Business Online’s Conversation Starter David Weinberger

Demographics

“ Lily Wauters is “delighted” with her hip replacement. It means she can get on with the gardening. She is 101.” FT.com

“ Millard Kaufman, a début novelist whose book “Bowl of Cherries” comes out this month, has been described by his publisher, McSweeney’s, as quite possibly “the best extant epic-comedic writer of his generation.”..Kaufman, who turned ninety in March.” New Yorker

“ In an era where everything seems so uncertain and traditional ideas of employment and the long term benefits of the corporation to the individual worker seem dubious, there is almost nothing to be lost in setting out for oneself. Taking what is in your individual head and making it into a physical reality is really in your best interest. You might make money, and you might, in your own small way, change the world. And that is pretty punk.” — Lipstick Dipschitz: The Mainstreaming of D.I.Y.

“ Nick Haley took just 30 minutes to pluck the Brazilian band CSS from obscurity and hurl it into the national spotlight.In September, Haley paired the band’s dance-pop song “Music is My Hot, Hot Sex” with his 30-second amateur video, displaying the capabilities of Apple’s new iPod Touch.”The video ends with the lyrics, “My music is where I’d like you to touch.” —SF Gate-Apple’s iPod ads are the new music-star makers

Economy

“ Here in California the P.F. Chang location list is like a tour of subprime-hit housing.” Paul Kedrosky

“ Computers failed to anticipate what the firm called “25 percent standard deviation moves” or events so rare Goldman had seen them only twice before in the firm’s history.” Washington Post

Environment n

“ How do our kids compete in a flatter world? How do they thrive in a warmer world? How do they survive in a more dangerous world? Those are, in a nutshell, the big questions facing America at the dawn of the 21st century. But these problems are so large in scale that they can only be effectively addressed by an America with 50 green states — not an America divided between red and blue states.” Tom Freedman

“ Global warming doesn’t affect our visceral emotions.” Daniel Gilbert

“ Though we may be reaching the breaking point in terms of menus identifying and lionizing their ingredient sources (sometimes a great steak is just a great steak. I don’t need to know the cow’s name) making farmers into heroes and promoting sustainable agriculture and humane animal-raising methods are never a bad thing. And when we see chains like Burgerville in the Pacific Northwest stressing and naming local sources for food, that represents progress.” Ed Levine

Life:Work Balance

“ In America self-help groups have sprung up to deal with workaholism, but people are too busy to attend.” The Times

Media/Technology

“ No longer content to be a passive audience; they insist on being participants, on creating their own material and finding others who will want to read, listen and watch.” Rupert Murdoch

“ The rumored 3G version iPhone will probably arrive in 2008 and all mobile video problems will be solved.” George Ruiz- ICM

“ Facebook is part of the web. Think of the web, of the Internet itself, as water. Proprietary platforms based on the web are ice cubes. They can, for a time, suspend themselves above the web at large. But over time, they only ever melt into the water. And maybe they make it better when they do.” Anil Dash

“ I’ve only begun to get my head around the possibilities of the Facebook platform — and I think that Facebook has only begun to open it up. This points to a new architecture to the web, an architecture built around people instead of content, the public instead of the companies. It’ll be exciting to watch and I’m glad I’m finally on the inside to watch it.” Jeff Jarvis

“ In 10 years, if not sooner, well below 1% of web page viewing and creation will be done by human beings.” — Connecting ‘07: Paul Saffo, Dunne + Raby, Janine Benyus

“ Maybe the first time you know you are pregnant is when a targeted piece of advertising comes through on your computer screen offering you some baby clothes because somehow the smart toilet, or some other aspect of your environment, leaked that information..” BBC

“ Spare cycles are the most powerful fuel on the planet. It’s what Web 2.0 is made up of. User generated content? Spare cycles. Open source? Spare cycles. MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Second Life? Spare cycles. They’re the Soylent Green of the web.” Chris Anderson

“ Similarly, there’s something up with the ways we do our development practices. The web principles are release often and fail fast. We don’t do that. We plan for two or three years, putting something together and then dumping it out there. With the web guys, it’s just a whole different method of operating. Flickr patches every half hour.” Ray Koster-On the difference between gaming and the internet

“ It’s an impatient ballet of subversions and expectations centered in gender, power, commerce, violence, and language, all coated with dripping wet sound.” M.I.A. - Kala - Review - Stylus Magazine

“ It’s just interesting to make people pause for even a few seconds and think about what music is worth now. I thought it was an interesting thing to ask people to do and compare it to whatever else in their lives they value or don’t value.” Jonny Greenwood

New Brand You

“ Actually, we don’t call it being online famous; we call it ‘famo,’” says Wilkinson, who conceived the “Internet Famous” course along with friends and semi-famo digital artists James Powderly and Evan Roth. The trio came up with the idea after realizing that their online strategies for distributing and promoting their own art would one day become essential tools for emerging 21st century artists trying to break through the static.” — Googling for Your Grade-Parsons New Course on Internet Fame for Artists - TIME

Predicting the Future

“ In corporate futurism they are really winging it - it must be increasingly difficult to come in and tell the board what you think is going to happen in 10 years because you’ve got to be bullshitting if you claiming to know. That wasn’t true to the same extent even a decade ago.” William Gibson

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The Quotes of 2007

by Edward Cotton on Jan 01, 2008

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The Quotes of 2007 — Presentation Transcript