If Google was the digital innovation story of the 2000's with their 'Experiment, Experiment. Experiment' narrative/'Acquire, Acquire, Acquire' best practice model. Who or what was the digital innovation story of the 2010's? What was their branding narrative? and, after stripping away the narrative, how did their best practice model really worked?
In a decade of tech bubbles - e.g. Mobile Apps, Clouds, 3-D Printers, Crypto, EV, BNPL… - just who or what was the break through innovation narrative?
A decade ago - at the height of the mobile apps wave - I explored the Apple, Nokia, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Amazon, Salesforce, Blackberry, Samsung, Blockchain disruptive innovation narratives at length (See here)
Today I’ll focus on one: Blockchain
Why? Because is it speaks to the heart of the disruptive digital narrative and the past, present and future of brand building
Which is to say it is speaks directly to the arbitrage of trust and the monetisation of the digital economy
When I deconstructed Andreessen’s Blockchain monologue (published by the New York Times in early 2014) I described it as a ‘game of thrones played out in a house of cards’
I also suggested forecasting the value of Bitcoin was simply a matter of applying a contagion model to the social proof (i.e. the anonymity narrative encouraging organised and disorganised crime to be the early adopters/‘tribe of champions’)
In the end I summed it by saying: “Bitcoin may, or may not, be the currency of tomorrow but it is a clear measure of our ideas about progress today”
The nature of the exercise was very simple: It explored the question: What happens when the word Bitcoin becomes the word TRUST and the words Internet and Network become Community. The user, now a member. Distributed now simply shared. Programmers are Psychologists and products and solutions become behaviours and habits. When technology becomes meaning. The ledger our relationship.
Seven years on it’s perhaps time to revisit these underlying questions about the arbitrage of trust and the ongoing challenge of building the global repository for storing the single version of the truth.
Arguably we are entering the fourth wave of the networked economy.
We’ve had the Yahoo/Google Database of (Trusted) Links, the Amazon/eBay Database of (Trusted) Products and the Facebook/LinkedIn Database of (Trusted) Friends & Contacts
Today we are talking about the Database of (Trusted) Transactions… the Blockchain
and yes, the challenge of selling the Blockchain is no different to selling social media.
How do you turn the mundane? The updating and querying of a database into something exciting like sharing and connecting with friends?
How do you excite the programming community to build apps and solutions on your platform?
You begin by creating a new language. e.g. DeFi. Decentralized Finance
You talk disruption. You talk about disrupting old, traditional stale Banking with new and exciting and innovative decentralised finance
You talk Smart Contracts… simply because it repositions everything that has come before as Dumb Contracts (Plus it had worked before with mobile phones)
You reimagine arbitrage as Yield Farming and Liquidity Mining
You talk of snapping this next generation of APIs as Money Lego
You talk of trading contracts across decentralised exchanges
You reinvent the IPO as the ICO
and you repackage some old ideas that failed before (Think DRM=NFT)
You use language to reinvent the old as something bright shiny and new
More importantly you leverage language - dare I say stories? but more accurately triggers - to shift market behaviour in your favour
If we turn the clock back to 2010 when I deconstructed the innovation narratives of Apple, Google, Facebook, et al. we discovered - once you stripped away the rhetoric, the grand narrative - the market leaders were building their brands by gaming behaviour to arbitraging free
e.g. When we examined the DNA of Apple’s Innovation Engine we discovered “Today Apple has...
Developers building free software applications (Other people's time, effort and ideas)
Venture capitalists providing investment funds (Other people's money)
Media outlets providing lots of free promotion and/or content (Other People's Time, Brand and Customers)
Customers who are product champions (Other People's Time and Brand)
Market Brand Leaders building mobile apps (other people's time, effort, ideas, money, customers and brand)”
The same principle applied to Facebook’s You as a platform model
We also discovered that the primary channel for igniting this radical change in behaviour wasn’t paid digital advertising but VC funded PR circulated via mainstream media
(see SnapChat, Instagram, Pinterest, Angry Birds and the myth of the Viral App)
and so we discovered through collating two decades of data that there was evidence that measurable, quantifiable success was built through the art of story telling, of owning a piece of mind and not by playing the frenetic game of 24/7 traffic/conversion rate arbitrage
All the evidence pointed to a simple market proof
Change the story… and you change the game
Today Blockchain/Crypto ticks all the boxes
Today Blockchain/Crypto has...
Miners consuming large quantities of electricity to create bitcoin and other crypto tokens for free (Other people's time, money, resources, effort and ideas)
Developers building distributed applications & exchanges for free (other people's time, effort, ideas, money, customers and brand)
Venture capitalists providing investment funds (Other people's money)
Media outlets providing lots of free promotion and/or content (Other People's Time, Brand and Customers)
Investors who are product champions (Other People's Time, Money and Brand)
It’s changed the story… and now it is changing the game
and here is what I find confusing, because it is a measure of how far the advertising industry has fallen… how is it that Silicon Valley has once again out performed Madison Ave at its own game?
The answer is of course… they changed the story… and now everybody is busy playing their game
Which is to say the Agency of the Future has been with us for decades...