Clark Kokich, Chairman of Razorfish, speaks with Brian Morrissey, Editor in Chief at Digiday, at the Digiday Agency Summit.

Clark just released an interesting combination of book and app, aptly titled: “Do or die.” (The promotional video of his work is posted below.)

As Clark Kokich describes it, advertising’s past was about communicating emotions to change the minds of prospective customers. The future of advertising is about doing something that helps people, that matters to customers. Agencies used to be about changing perception, in the future they need to change reality.

He explains that agencies are struggling right now because they know in 5-10 years there will be a model for the future of agencies. Unfortunately, we don’t yet what the model will be.  That’s why everybody is muddling along, trying to figure it out.

My favorite quote: “You can’t apply the past formulas to a new problem.” So true.

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?

I love to run.

When I started running marathons, I used to focus on one person I wanted to beat. I just ran them into the ground. Until I passed them and I had to find another competitor to beat.

That worked well for a few miles but around Mile 15, I lost my stride and focus. Putting all my effort into beating the competition, made me forget to focus on the little things: My posture, the stride, breathing, my mental state, my exhaustion level. All have to be fine-tuned while running or Mile 22 will became the torture mile.

That’s a very common mistake

Very common for brands, organizations and people. We focus so much on the competition that we lose sight of our mission, vision and performance.

It happened to Toyota when they were focused on beating GM.

We need to use competition to improve ourselves. The competition is there to help us be better, learn from them. What are they doing right in marketing and product development? How are they dealing with customer services challenges? What decisions are turning customers into ex-customers? Collect all of them and delight them with your product/service. Don’t be ruthless against your competition. But ruthless when it comes to your brand. Ruthlessly improving.

When I run now, I focus on myself and try to learn from other fellow runners at the same time. Once I learned enough, I’ll pass them.

I’m a big fan of Jonathan Harris. Ballons of Bhutan, Today and my favorite: We feel fine. His overarching theme is to capture and preserve memories and emotion from life’s most fleeting moments.

Recently, Jonathan Harris released Cowbird, a platform that hopes to unite storytellers in the process of deeply documenting not just their own lives, but the larger overarching sagas around them.

His goal is to offer a platform for the sort of longer, richer and multilayered stories you’re not going to find on your typical social platforms. The site states: “We’re trying to preserve and evolve the dying art of storytelling using technology as friend instead of foe.”

At the moment, the focus of the site is on The Occupy Movement, tapping individual experiences to depict a richer, more meaningful picture of our collective experience. A fascinating experiment.

And, why the name Cowbird? To represent the best attributes of its namesakes: “the slow, deeply rooted contemplative idea of a cow with the fast, efficient playful idea of a bird.”

In a Fast Company article he describes the idea behind the platform: “It wasn’t clear to me how there was going to be another level of compression after tweets, unless we reverted to monosyllabic grunts,” Harris says. “I thought we would hit some kind of wall, bounce back in the other direction, and people would start craving a little more depth.”

(…)

“We all have unique experiences and if we don’t pass them on, they evaporate when we die,” Harris says. “If there were a way to embody some of that wisdom so that other people could learn from it, that would allow us to grow on an individual level, but also a species level, from generation to generation.”

By encouraging people to document and catalog these experiences. Cowbird has the potential to become an organic anti-panopticon, capturing the stuff of life that can’t be sufficiently synopsized. Harris is confident that this is something people will want to do. “It’s asking something very different than firing off a tweet from your cell phone,” he says. “It ask a lot more of you as a storyteller, but I think it gives back a lot more too.”

A wonderful project.