Presentation from the IMDS 2016

1. Interactive Minds Digital Summit
Disrupt or Die: How business needs to stay relevant to a shifting
audience
20th July 2016

2. who am i
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3. WHO AM I?
My professional life is spent understanding and harnessing the changes
that digital has wrought on brands and businesses, transformations
and disruptions that operate at velocities exceeding Moore's Law.
Important to continually question technologies, push business
boundaries and create innovating digital strategies.
I am driven by the challenge of innovating new products and services
and removing friction from existing ones.

4. what is disruption
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5. WHAT IS DISRUPTION
Transformation and disruption are two of the most
used business buzzwords of the past five years. And for
good reason: only 12 per cent of companies in the
original listing of the Fortune 500 some 60 years ago
are still on that list.

6. WHAT HAPPENED TO THESE GUYS?
“40 per cent of businesses in this room, unfortunately, will not exist in a meaningful way in
10 years. Either we disrupt or we get disrupted.”

7. how to disrupt: the pivot
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8. DEFINING THE PIVOT
Companies having the courage and vision to transform and
disrupt themselves to their own benefit.
Some, such as Apple, Adobe and IBM, were successful
companies already. And some cleverly changed their business
model while still in the start-up phase to become household
names: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Paypal and Android.

9. DEFINING THE PIVOT
The favoured Silicon Valley phrase to
describe these successes is “the pivot”. It was
only coined in 2011 by Eric Ries in his popular
book, The Lean Startup.
It gained further notoriety via Silicon Valley
heavyweight Marc Andreessen a year later
when he commented: “The pivot. It used to
be called the f . . k-up.”
Even so, it’s good for Australian CEOs and
CMOs, to acknowledge when the current
business strategy has run its course, and that
they have to reset the company in a new way.

10. EXAMPLES OF THE PIVOT
For marketers, the obvious pivot tactic is to change the
product. When the bosses at start-up Odeo realised
that its podcast subscription and search network was
doomed with the rise of iTunes, they gave staff two
weeks to come up with a new product. Twitter was
conceived, and the rest is pivot history.

11. EXAMPLES OF THE PIVOT
Burbn realised that the majority of usage on its app
was for photography, it rebuilt itself, and Instagram
was born. And when Game Neverending saw that the
most popular part of its online role-playing game was
the photo sharing, it minimised its offering to what is
Flickr today.

12. EXAMPLES OF THE PIVOT
Others, such as Adobe, completely overhauled their revenue and
pricing model. Only 10 years ago Adobe would send out its latest
imaging and design software upgrades on CD-ROMs and charge a
licence fee upward of $600 for use on just one computer. Fast-
forward to today, and many Adobe products are free, while the
equivalent imaging software upgrades are downloaded from the
cloud on a subscription model at a smidgin of the price, but by a far
wider user base.

13. EXAMPLES OF THE PIVOT
For many the challenge beyond how to pivot is when to pivot. Joe
Schoendorf, the former CMO of Apple and HP, and now a major tech
start-up investor, has a great answer to that:
“Every year I get my best people to hack my business.”

14. defining experiences not
technology
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15. DISRUPTION IS ABOUT EXPERIENCES. NOT TECH.
When we think about disruptive businesses, we focus on the way they
change and shift the processes and systems that we’re used to. It’s all
about how businesses disrupt, and often the technology that allows it.
But you’ll find most of the Taxi companies who have tried to respond
to Uber have done so by releasing their own app, falsely believing that
the reason people choose the service is because they can use it via
their phone.

16. DISRUPTION IS ABOUT EXPERIENCES. NOT TECH.
You’ll find that these apps fail. Every time. They fail
because they completely miss the point. They fail
because Taxi companies see themselves as being
disrupted by an app. The truth is, they’re being
disrupted by an experience.

17. UNINTERRUPTED
James is one of the most
popular athletes on the planet,
and he’s capitalizing on it off the
court. He brings in more than
$40 million in endorsement
deals a year, and he started his
own media company back in
2008, Spring Hill Productions,
with childhood friend and
business partner Maverick Carter

18. SLACK
Slack started working on the app at
the end of 2012. ("Never mind the
part where we first tried to make a
web-based massively multiplayer
game and failed," Butterfield quips—
another story for another article.)
And by March 2013, he and his team
had enough to work with that they
were using the product themselves.
Still, they knew that they
represented just one team dynamic
of a nearly infinite set; by May of that
year, they were ready for more users

19. CANVA
Canva touts a user-base of 5 million
customers across 179 countries.
Perkins seems to be imbued with
an optimism and determination
she claims was entirely necessary
for her perseverance through
rejection and failure, a confidence
so many experts claim is missing,
particularly for young women in
the tech industry, and which might
go some way to explain the lack of
diversity in tech hires and
entrepreneurs.

20. how to do this
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21. THE ESSENCE OF DIGITAL STRATEGY IS CHOOSING WHAT NOT TO DO.
Thus Digital Brand Strategy to inform disruption must understand how
people are behaving on digital platforms and in the world, building
relationships with brands and each other and buying products.
It’s impossible to separate the content, or the idea, from media on
digital platforms, so digital brand strategies need to be concerned
with who and what and where and when and why - a complete system
approach based on experiences.

22. STRATEGIC APPROACH TO DISRUPTION
Define the Customer Journey
Develop an MVP
Know the Problem with Previous Experience
Test and Fail Fast
What is the Value Exchange

23. ACKNOWLEDGE THE PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE
If you’re working on something that you see as being
disruptive, you have to make sure that you’re disrupting
the previous experience, and doing it well. It’s not always
about being shinier — it’s about how it makes your users
feel.

24. Thank you
Contact:
Andrew Kolb
Publicis Pusher
Level 2, 164 Grey Street
South Brisbane
QLD 4101
Australia
andrew.kolb@publicispusher.com.au
M +614 413 464 438