The Reward of Teaching and discovering Serendipity

In my last post, I sited going back to Michigan State to teach a course on digital media. It is now one week after the fact and I am thrilled I got the opportunity to share my insights. It is humbling to think that a generation has passed since I embarked on my career ambitions from those hallowed grounds 25 years ago. It was extremely rewarding to “give back” and participate in educating tomorrow’s would be heroes. My presentation went over very well. The course I constructed created a firestorm of energy and creativity. A connection was made with the students. They were grateful for learning a subject matter in a digital context verses their current analog process. That discovery is another blog post to come.

When I created the Spatial Shift blog, it was part of my new years resolution to begin a new chapter in my life. I was inspired by a blog post by Christine Kane who prompted me to create a new years resolution around one word. The word chosen was “serendipity” . The goal being to filter everything for the year around that word. I really didn’t fully understand the word, but threw it around a lot in my conversations. Serendipity seemed to fit the mindset that I was about to embark on. I knew I needed to open up in new ways and to become more receptive to whatever came along. I also knew that I had to create the energy necessary to foster serendipity.

So, I am back from teaching and reflecting on what I learned. I got involved with the MSU opportunity because I reached out on something completely different and was offered a tenure that I had never considered before. I said yes. Serendipity to a “T”. While at Michigan State, I also ran into two other professors who happened to be working on several projects that are likely to overlap with some of my current efforts. Yet, another form of serendipity yet to come.

Sparked by my educational adventure, I thought I would dig down a little deeper for the true context of “Serendipity”. I found some very interesting things. One being a young adult female in Mexico who also discovered Serendipity and decided to spend a year writing a book about it – while a teenager. The book is called Discovering Serendipity and she has made it free on the web. Another find was the following quote and accompanying video:

Serendipity is when you find things you weren’t looking for because finding what you are looking for is so damn difficult. —Erin McKean, speech at TED

Serendipity has its roots in science, social science, anthropology and literature. The core underpinnings point to the significance of “discovery” as the core meaning of the word. In the paper “Three Priniciples of Serendipity: Insight, Chance and Discovery in Qualitative Research”, by Gary Fine and James Deegan – the authors define Serendipity as: “the interactive outcome of unique and contingent mixes of insight coupled with chance”.

The biggest lesson I learned this last week is the one that was taught to me 25 years ago by a wise old Michigan State professor – “You need to learn how to learn, because you will be learning the rest of your life”. Add to that Serendipity and I think you have the makings of a Spatial Shift.

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Looking Back to Go Forward

Next week I get to play a new role in my career. I will teach for the first time as a visiting professional at my Alma mater Michigan State in their Advertising program. In prepping for what will be my 25th anniversary since participating as a student, I have had the chance to really dig into macro level data and step back to a 30,000 feet level. When telescoping out, you really get to see an amazing view of change, the most significant of which is the speed by which creative destruction is occurring.

The Spatial Shift view is becoming more and more relevant. The analytics piece of the equation is now bubbling to the surface as Omniture hosted its first analytic summit around the significance of metrics. This article by Jason Burby sums up the arrival of analytics as a prominent piece of the marketing puzzle. I have been fortunate to meet with a lot of companies and executives over the last 90 days. The conversations I am having around the topic of analytics is usually front and center and ironically an admitted weakness. In fact, it is usually the “differentiator” when looking at true strategic advantages of the company. Those that have a grip on their analytics, are forging ahead. Those that don’t are scratching their heads against the swift currents that are impacting their business today.

The EU approval of the Google Doubleclick deal continues the sea shift for the advertising business in more ways than people know. The ability to see data flow, click flow and build ever optimizing algorithmic solutions against those insights is going to continue to drive business away from the traditional media companies towards the technology driven media companies of tomorrow. By academic standards – a “paradigm shift” that appears to be accelerating.

Click fraud and click quality are now becoming a new force of measurements as recessionary pressures cause every company to scrutinize its inefficiencies. A whole new wave of data driven “supercrunching” companies are emerging on the fringes and quietly creating a counter-balance to the Google juggernaut. With fraud and or click quality widely quoted to be between 17 – 30% (pending the source), there is a lot of room to squeeze better efficiencies out of the digital space.

On the creative/design side of the house, I met with Greg Wilson, founder of RedBallTiger this week. Red Ball Tiger is a creative analytics company. The mission of Red Ball Tiger is to create a new ROI currency for the art of storytelling – “Return on Involvement”. Greg is creating a new business model based on rewarding time spent viewing creative content (be it commercials, infomericals, branded entertainment, etc) on a second by second basis. The premise being – if you watch 1:50 of a 2:00 commercial, shouldn’t you be rewarded greater than someone watching :05 of a :30 effort? A new way to think about pay per view – from the creative side of the house. Will be interesting to see who is willing to break from historical models to play in this new risk/reward proposition.

This point of view will only become more relevant as broadcast goes completely digital on February 17, 2009. On this date, the idea of viewing something with the ability to track it, optimize it and activate it all becomes a reality. It will be interesting to see what the Advertising graduating class of 2008, 09 and 10 at Michigan State will have to say about what these observations.

A new generation of fresh minds meets an adaptive mind who is having to “unlearn as fast as I can, in order to relearn” the new way of living in a digital world on warp speed.

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