With the gluttony of Thanksgiving in the rear view mirror, it’s time to turn our attention to the gluttony of another holiday season ahead!
Gluttony is inherent in the human condition, no matter where, when, or how we indulge. We are gluttons for happiness, gluttons for profit, gluttons for progress, gluttons for information. Many of us are also gluttons for punishment.
The holidays provide us with some degree of comfort and familiarity that foster our collective gluttony. We know SOMEONE is going to send us fruit cakes and flavored popcorn. We know that Lite FM will play non-stop Christmas music for the next three weeks. We know that the Hess Truck's back and better than ever! We know that Omicron will perpetuate the need for caution against a raging COVID virus that may just be the biggest glutton of all. We know that millions of people will spend billions of dollars on sending holiday cards to people they haven't seen or talked to in years. We know that meaningless resolutions will dominate our newsfeeds and we know that business planning for a new year ahead will result in some of the same tired talking points we've seen from years past.
Thomas Aquinas declared that gluttony had "six daughters:" Excessive and unseemly joy are the first two, followed by "talkativeness, uncleanness, loutishness, and an uncomprehending dullness of mind." While I know nothing of the first two, the last four are quite worthy topic for this week's Four P's.
Something Professional: The Talkativeness of Transformation
So many businesses talk about "transformation" that it's become the single biggest cliché in and around digital media and marketing. I'm tired of even hearing the word. Innovation and disruption are, ironically, becoming equally stale terms used to cover industry stagnation. "Digital transformation" has become so commonplace that it has exceeded “test-and-learn” “take chances,” and “learn to embrace failure" in the jargon olympics. The vocabulary of radical change has been co-opted for often uninspiring purposes.
Whether you're a start-up, an established brand, a service provider, even an agency, there is too much shallow innovation. Just about every presentation, every plan, every roadmap for digital transformation I've seen in the past five years lacks substance at heart; most just consisted of strings of fashionable phrases. This is an example of “safe and steady” that characterizes so many organizations – merely tinkering around the edges and offering superficial changes.
There's a lot of blame to go around for the delta between talking about transformation and actually achieving it. Fear of obsolescence, fear of failure, and laziness are the root causes. In many companies, far too many well-educated, talented people who spend a good deal of their time on pointless tasks and in pointless roles. Whether it’s on checkbox bureaucracy or on superficial corporate “targets,” their creative potential isn’t properly utilized. Unfortunately, well-educated, computer literate, and information-rich individuals are all too often squandered on small ideas. Whether it’s incentivizing people to click on online ads or tweaking the color scheme of creative assets, many organizations employ their workforces on small ideas.
It's time for deep innovation, which requires a focus on big solutions and might mean starting from scratch or heading off into an entirely different direction.
While we can’t forecast what the future will look like precisely, we can consider what we know about tech platforms, platforms, and languages right now. And one thing we do know, is that machine learning follows logical patterns determined by algorithms. It works by analyzing existing data with a speed and precision that no human mind could manage. While this is extraordinarily useful in many scenarios, from medical science to finance, it’s mainly for data-driven improvement, not innovation in itself.
Real innovation, which looks beyond what we do and know now, requires human ingenuity. We have the ability to think in ways that make seemingly illogical leaps between topics and themes, which no technology is able to replicate. It is this ability to link seemingly unconnected things together and blend them in unexpected ways that drives our innovative ability. Too many businesses today actually function more like algorithms than human-led organizations. An incremental, data-driven approach is favored, rather than one that fully utilizes human creativity. This means that many businesses seek to make their existing operations as efficient as possible – finessing them, rather than doing any real innovation. Put differently, most companies focus more on the how than on the why.
To successfully embed a culture of innovation that drives transformation, it means encouraging an encompassing and nurturing culture. This nurturing environment requires that workers feel safe. Much like in our private lives, we must feel a certain degree of trust before we open up fully to others in a work environment. To actually innovate, companies need to aim for real, impactful change, which will then instill a broader sense of purpose in their workforce.
Something Practical: Cleaning Up the Branded NFTs
You may have missed it over the long holiday weekend, but Macy's released a series of 9,500 parade-themed NFTs on Thanksgiving morning, even teased on air during parade coverage on NBC. To see branded NFTs get a huge national spotlight was great, but it was far from a clean experience for anyone involved.
The NFTs, featuring some of the parade’s iconic balloons over the past 100 years, were free to mint, with 10% of their resale profits on the secondary market are set to be donated to the Make-A-Wish Foundation through smart contract terms. Macy's also auctioned off 10 “Ultra Rare” NFTs, with all earnings also going to Make-A-Wish. However, the actual experience on Sweet left a lot to be desired. Broken links, a terrible mobile experience, and the Macy's branding gets overshadowed by the Sweet platform, itself. Not ideal for brands. There are obviously better platforms for customized wallets/marketplaces.
Will Coss, the parade’s executive producer, said in a press release. “To celebrate that history, we created art in a new form through NFTs that would bring the magic of the parade to a new generation and simultaneously while raising funds for our partner Make-A-Wish.”
We are obviously still very early in this game, and I give Macy's credit for jumping in. But while the charity angle is certainly admirable, Macy's didn't think much beyond this drop. Neither has Budweiser, who launched its first NFT drop on Monday. Despite selling out in an hour, fans who had been engaging in the brand’s Discord server for a month were extremely frustrated by the drop mechanics, poor communication and lack of utility.
The long-term plan and value for these NFT assets also seems opaque at best, and these activations do nothing to advance web3 strategy or execution, nor deliver an enhanced consumer experience. We're still relying on Web 2.0 platforms for marketing and communication, and far too many have a "get rich quick mentality."
The good news is that this is here to say, as so many are joining the NFT craze as the market sees explosive growth this year. But as more and more people experience their first NFT purchase, there needs to be a gradual, familiar process that gets them comfortable... then increasingly leverages decentralized tools over time. The simplest I’ve seen so far can be paid with credit card via a fully-branded Shopify storefront, wallet and marketplace. Some are impatiently looking for a revolution, but this will be a slower evolution.
I don't have all of the answers, clearly, in terms of how NFTs can unlock and how to implement them in our marketing plans. I'm not sure having the answers would even be a good thing. But I do know that when planning, engagement and community-building must be the initial priority. Holder value needs to trump hype. Otherwise some of your most loyal consumers will be left holding an asset that isn't worth what they paid for it, and that will degrade the relationship between brand and consumer long-term. If you're ready to REALLY explore the utility framework, here's a great, long read from CoinYuppie that could help clean up the future of branded NFTs.
Something Personal: That Bites
Loutishness is often associated with drunkenness (another type of gluttony), but Webster's Dictionary defines a lout as an "awkward, brutish person." And you don't need to be drunk to be a troublemaker.
Severe, uncontrollable pain turns me into a lout. And it’s not pretty.
About this time last week, sitting on the couch with the laptop to finish up some work for the day while eating the last of the leftover Halloween candy, I felt sharp rush of pain in my mouth. A large chunk of one of my upper molars had just sheared off and left the nerve exposed. There's a reason dentists don't like candy, and I get it now. What ensued was one of the more painful, uncomfortable nights of my life.
As a result of years of heavy teeth grinding in my sleep, I have broken so many teeth and fillings that I've spent thousands of dollars on fillings and crowns. Having lost more than 50% of this particular molar, the only thing left to do is replace it with unbreakable implants. Not porcelain or ceramic, but hard metal. My dentist has marveled at my "superhuman jaw strength" (which he has even measured with a pressure gauge to determine that my PSI output is in the 100th percentile of human beings). The average strength of a human bite is about 160 pounds per square inch (PSI), whereas mine is about 300 PSI. This still pales in comparison to the hyena (1,100psi), the bull shark (1,350 PSI), and crocodile (5,000 PSI), but you do NOT want to be caught in my grip.
What I likely do NOT over-index for is pain tolerance. With a sheared molar and exposed nerve, every breath I inhaled that rushed cool air past the exposed nerve... every sip of water that washed over the broken tooth sent a rush of pain that nearly cause me to pass out. Pain makes me impatient, irrational, even angry. And what made things even worse was that there was nothing I could do about it. No one was returning my calls to the dental emergency hotline and no OTC pain relief could take the edge off. Not knowing how quickly it would be before this could even be addressed was literally insult to injury. Here and now, I would like to apologize for my increasingly rude voicemails I left at the dental office throughout that night. Fortunately very people experienced my loutish behavior
Now with a temporary cap on the open space, I await the minting of my first permanent gold tooth implant. 14k gold. Allegedly unbreakable. But it's only a matter of time before I break a few more and will need even more gold. So here's hoping that my new dental insurance is all it's cracked up to be.
Something Political: Cracking Down On Fragility
The town adjacent to ours made national headlines last week when another school board meeting went off the rails. This one was not COVID/mask-related, but the result of a teacher talking about the history of injustice and systemic racism in the United States. An 11th grade English class teacher in the Great Neck School District reportedly included a slide in a lesson saying: “White people benefit from this system, intentionally or unintentionally, which makes us all (technically) racist, myself included.” The slide also mentions that the word “racist” was used “as an adjective to describe certain language, beliefs, and policies as opposed to racist as a noun to label a person.”
To which I say: Yes. "White fragility" posits that white people harbor significant fragility when discussing race, and some manifestations include defensiveness or anger, emotional withdrawal, guilt and tears. Which brings us to the last of Acquinas' results of gluttony: Dullness of minds. Specifically, the inability to understand distinctions.
I posted this comment on a local Facebook group page: ("It’s past time to STEP UP teaching our kids about issues of race. Time to TALK with our kids about how of our institutions are broken. Time to CHANGE the next generation of citizens), which resulted in a handful of uninformed responses and attacks.
One such response said," Teaching kids they are racist is wrong! PERIOD. I raised my kids to respect others from time they were babies and telling them they are racist because of their skin color is wrong. Teaching kids history, good and bad......is one thing, telling them racism is the response for all the ills in the world is wrong."
Of course, I never said anything about teaching kids that they are racist. On the contrary, teaching children about institutional racism does not assume that everyone is a racist... just like teaching kids about peanut allergies doesn’t assume that everyone has a nut allergy.
The things we teach must extend beyond our own personal visibility, even accountability. You with me?