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- Related experimentation?
We live in the world of experimentation.
Marketing is the world of experimentation.
It has to be,
and it's the world of creative expression.
And you are filled and surrounded
and inspired by that all the time.
Well, fire--and trying to solve issues through creative--
creative, innovative ways.
Well, Firefox, take Firefox.
So a gentleman in our company several years ago,
his computer melted down because of an Internet Explorer virus.
So he goes online with another computer,
and he--and he finds out that there's this--
this guy out of Stanford
that is about to launch a open source web browser,
open source meaning that anyone in the world
can improve the code as it relates to this web browser.
So he comes into my office, and he says,
"Hey, you know what, I just worked on the Dean campaign--"
and by the way, best-- In my view,
some of the best ideas that I steal from,
and Picasso, you know, says, "Great artists copy--"
or, "Good artists copy, great artists steal."
We steal from politics all the time.
Whether or not we like politics,
there's lots of great creativity and innovation
that occurs in politics that we can learn from,
and so he was on the Dean campaign,
and the Dean campaign revolutionized, if you recall,
the way to fundraise by using the internet at that time.
We know what Obama did with Facebook in the next iteration.
In this case, we said, "Hey, what if we said to the world--
because I know I'm an open source guy
and so is Rob Davis, the guy that came up with this idea.
We're open source guys, and he says,
"What if we said to the whole open source community,
'Are you fed up with your web browser?
"'We have no money, but we've got this open source product.
"'We have no money for advertising.
"'We have no money at all.
"'But if you give us $25, we'll take out a--
"'We'll pool all that money,
"'and we'll take a half page ad in "The New York Times"
"'to launch this thing internationally.
We thought we might have enough money to get a quarter-page ad
or a half-page ad.
We got 10,000 names giving $25 plus to this campaign,
and we had enough money for a double page ad.
And that's what's great about these types of grassroots ideas.
If the idea is powerful, then it becomes an earned media
massive success.
We were on the cover of "Wired" magazine.
We were on the cover of "USA Today."
The list goes on and on and on
in the hundreds of millions of impressions
that were created just from this idea,
and, of course, we were in 82 different countries,
and then Thomas Friedman ended up writing about
the world is flat
and mentioning Firefox as an example.
Organizational development meeting the power of--
of the internet.
This is back in 2000.
We're very proud of this particular idea.
This is experimenting with the internet at the time.
Ann Bancroft wanted to cross Antarctica,
the polar explorer.
She came to us, and she said, you know,
"We know that you have adventure background
"and you love human development.
"I want to make history.
I want to cross Antarctica."
So we sat down with this wonderful man, Charlie Hartwell,
who wanted to be the CEO of it,
and we ended up creating the mission, right?
To inspire--and the mission was
to inspire and promote the achievement of dreams.
The--the vision to expand the walls of the classroom,
because Ann and then Liv Arnesen were former teachers.
They were inspired by Shackleton as young children,
and they wanted to make, once again, history.
The target audience, the personas, the profiles,
the brand champions, whatever you want to--
we call them different things--
were certainly women and young girls.
Well, at the end of the-- and we--and, of course,
the other piece I'm gonna talk about is coalitions.
We got the Girl Scouts.
We got CNN to be our wire service for two stories a week.
This sounds really easy, by the way.
Ann Bancroft, of course, she crossed Antarctica.
It took us two years to plan this thing
and to basically beg the media to follow it,
and then they followed it,
and, of course, it was a huge success.
But at the end of the day, 3 million kids followed along,
and, um...
a billion impressions were generated,
and I remember going to Volvo Cars of North America.
This is how we first met Volvo Cars of North America,
and they got it.
They got it because of the idea of connecting with women
at an aspirational level.
This is an interesting one,
and I-I purposely chose some of these smaller companies
because they--they're like you.
You don't have a lot of money to advertise.
So you have to use very, very powerful and relevant means
for generating funding
or connecting with your audience.
So here's a company called CodeWeavers.
CodeWeavers is such a small company.
They're here; they only have a few employees.
One of the guys at the company is a bass player in my band,
and he's just a friend, and we're like,
"Okay, let's brainstorm some ideas."
So a couple guys at my-- at my firm sat down,
and this was two years ago now.
George Bush was president.
He was a lame duck president, and gas prices were beyond--
were higher than you can imagine,
and so these guys say, "How are we going to sell
"and create awareness and generate sales
"for a product we have no money to really sell?"
And--and--and--and basically the product, once again,
is a technology where you take Windows--
you can run Windows software on Macintosh computers.
So the idea here is, "Well, let's do something relevant.
"If George Bush, during his presidency
"in the next two to three months one of five things happen,
we'll give our software away for free, okay?"
Not a huge--not a huge piece, 'cause software,
you can just kind of print it
and, boom, you can create these seats.
So what happened was,
is gas prices went down below $3.
If you remember, gas prices went up,
then they went down below $3,
and because we're so on top of it,
we didn't realize that that trigger had happened.
"The Star Tribune" had been following this.
"The Star Tribune" calls us and says,
"Do you know you issued this lame duck president challenge,
and gas prices went below $3 today?"
And we're like, "Oh, my goodness,
"we got to get our acts together.
"So can you just give us, like, a day
to get our act together here?"
And sure enough, the next day, he breaks the--
this reporter breaks the story.
In one 24-hour period, we had 600,000 downloads, okay?
600,000 downloads.
That's because we're targeting the open source community.
We understand the persona and the profile and the brand,
the brand resonance and the product resonance
with the open source community.
The open source community, by the way,
is the toughest community around.
If you're not authentic,
if you're not the real thing,
you will--you'll be destroyed.
But the good news is, these guys are geeks.
So when they--when our server-- when their server crashed,
obviously, with 600,000 downloads,
which we still think is great as marketers at some level,
we immediately put together a YouTube video with one take
in their--at their offices
and just showed this video of these guys saying,
"These crazy marketing guys told us to do this,"
and made humor of it.
And then we sold T-shirts that said,
"I crashed CodeWeavers server."
The Volvo for Life Awards.
Many corporations are wondering how do I engage with people,
and they'll sponsor athletes.
They'll sponsor all kinds of folks,
or they'll--or they'll give money to a particular cause.
In general, my viewpoint is, let's create our own program.
So we created this thing called the Volvo for Life Awards.
The idea here is to humanize the brand attributes,
the brand attributes being safety, quality of life,
and the environment,
and so what we did--
This is about between 2003 and 2008,
we would put out--give the-- create this opportunity
for people to nominate heroes,
ordinary people doing extraordinary things
in their community to--
The would nominate these heroes,
and then we would have this big, big--
well, we got thousands and thousands of nominations,
and then we had the celebrity panel.
Celebrity panels can be local; they can be national.
In this case, they were national,
Paul Newman, Caroline Kennedy, Hank Aaron,
the list goes on and on.
But every time we would promote
and generate publicity for these heroes,
Volvo would get a mention.
And so every single year, we'd get publicity placements,
every single state in the country,
and then it would bubble up into a national story,
and their usually interesting,
were one to three stories that were incredibly powerful.
So basically, this cause related program is a story generator
that generates earned media.
And then we realized, after a few years,
you know what, we should give this to the--
we should give this to the public,
and so we started creating an "American Idol" approach
four some odd years ago,
and we were generating hundreds and hundreds
of thousands of downloads,
and what we did is, we would rent out Times Square Studios--
It doesn't have to be Times Square Studios.
It can be here.
We've done these types of things here,
and we created an emotional pressure cooker.
We create documentaries and videos of these people,
and we then pay it forward to these champions
to help them raise money,
to help them create awareness of what they're doing,
and then we also, of course, create mentoring
so that they're connecting
with the Richard Bransons of the world.