Sunshine from American Buffalo on Vimeo.

In honor of ‘Mad Men’ starting its 5th season, do yourself a favor and watch this endearing portrait of a modern day ‘Mad Man’. An American advertising producer in Shanghai tries to sell fast food to the Chinese.

I grew up in a small town in Germany. Everybody knew each other, everybody knew everyone’s business. Many people had dreams to leave that little box they called home. They dreamt of living in amazing places like New York or Acapulco. They wanted to experiment with different professions, life styles and learn by traveling the world. 99% of these dreamers were not good in executing any of these ideas. They were extremely good at bashing the ones that tried: “Why would he leave our town to study art? You can’t make money with that.” or “No wonder he ran out of money in San Francisco. What was he thinking?” When people that walked the walked returned, they were embraced with an implied “You learned your lesson: Stay home and stick to what you’re good at. Don’t bother trying again.”

The advertising industry is like a small town where 99% talk the talk and 1% walk the walk.

And the 99% talkers can’t wait to start bashing the 1% walkers when they fail. The last example is the #shamrocking meme by McDonald’s, that followed the #McDStories bashtag revolt. Before that, Honda paid bloggers to write positively about the Honda Civic. the “Homeless Spots” by BBH, J-Lo’s Fiat campaign, etc.

I’m not defending the specifics of these campaigns. What I’m defending is that the client and their agencies tried. They came up with ideas, they executed them and we were waiting behind the bushes to bash them.

Attend any media/advertising conferences and you’ll be inundated by talks about innovation, fast failures and quick innovation. While talk is cheap, it gets cheaper in the hallways while the advertising community bashes any campaign/initiative that didn’t turn out to be the next Old Spice or Apple’s ‘1984′ commercial.

Every time people create something, they stick their head out. They risk something. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail. Bringing out the big hammer to put them back in line doesn’t help anyone. It just ensures that less people and brands will take risks.

“The essential part of creativity is not being afraid to fail.” – Edwin H. Land

Have we created an environment where people are afraid to even try?

Ever brand and agency is suddenly a data-driven business. This monicker helps to establish the value of our collective investments in digital measurement, analysis, and optimization technology. This is pretty brilliant, except for one big problem:

A “data-driven” business will fail in the end.

This might only be semantics but instead of talking about “data-driven” we should be talking about the need for a heightened awareness of the numerous sources of data and information we have available in the digital world, enough to take advantage of these sources to create insights and make recommendations. Indeed, you’re a fool not to consider better use of available data in the decision-making process as an amazing improvement.

I’m just very skeptical that a company can be data-driven. Data, when improperly used, can lead not only to poor decisions but to poor decisions made with high confidence that, in turn, could lead to actions that could be erroneous and expensive.

We need to develop “data-informed” businesses.

We need to collectively create increasingly data-informed and data-aware businesses and business people who integrate the wide knowledge we can generate about the digital customer into the traditional decisioning process. The end goal is a more agile, responsive, and intelligent business that is better able to compete in a rapidly changing business environment.

The best organizations understand the relationship between people, process, and technology – and are able to leverage that knowledge to inform their overarching business strategy – a very healthy blend of data and business knowledge, each applied judiciously based on the challenge at hand. Smart business leaders leverage insights made by a trust analytics group/organization – not bots pulling levers based on KPIs.

Success with analytics and optimization requires a balance, and business leaders who will be successful in the future will need to develop a top-down strategy to govern how their business will leverage both digitally-generated insights and the collective insights of their organization.

Let’s not forget: We are both rational and emotional. We are humans, not some robots – we will always carry emotion and rational thoughts in us. All the time.

A ‘data-informed’ business understands the Yin and Yang of the human experience, showing respect for the hard work, commitment, and passion all stakeholders have as part of the enterprise. It encourages actively working with the organization to move the company in the right direction.

The financial crisis has been with us since 2008, followed by a tepid recovery. You would expect businesses to focus on delivering excellent customer service experiences and overdeliver on every level.

Surprisingly, even though customers value excellence, and even though companies are committed to delivering it, we’re still subjecting each other to excruciating mediocrity.

Why is that?

Great service is not delivered on pure attitude or willingness to please. Great service is part of the business design. Businesses make strategic tradeoffs to deliver a reliable, superior experience:

JetBlue: Low prices, no transfer to other airlines, no business class, no lounges, no special service. In exchange, customers get low prices, one bag for free and convenient locations out of the mega-airports.

iPad: The iPad has no USB, it’s hard to create any content on it, multi-tasking is almost impossible but it’s a great device to consume media, get sucked into the app world or use it as a presentation tool.

My favorite coffeeshop: The coffee is mediocre, the seating is limited and uncomfortable, the Wifi spotty. Still, their kid’s area is superb, a lot of other parents show up on the weekend, they remember my order and have it ready within a minute and everybody is very friendly.

Successful businesses make these choices by design. They know they can’t be good at everything but need to be superb at something, while, at the same time, be bad at other things. For that to work, companies need to deeply understand their customers and design a business that delivers on the most important values of their customers.

I can live with mediocre coffee as long as my kid plays happily for an hour and I can catch up on my Instapaper during that time.

I can live without special service offerings from JetBlue as long as they get me to m destination without any frills and paying for the first bag.

We don’t want to buy from brands that can do everything fairly well. We want to buy from companies that do something exceptionally well and other things exceptionally bad.