Fortune's Change the World List

 

Fortune’s first “Change the World” list, is a list of 51 companies that have made a sizable impact on major global social or environmental problems as part of their competitive strategy. This list is not meant to be a ranking of the overall “goodness” of companies or of their “social responsibility.” The goal here is simply to shine a spotlight on instances where companies are doing good as part of their profit-making strategy, and to shed new light on the power of capitalism to improve the human condition.

1. Vodafone
2. Google"Alphabet"
3. Toyota
4. Walmart
5. Enal
6. GSK
7. Jain Irrigation Systems
8. Cisco
9. Novartis
10. Facebook

To see the full list go here

 

Small Ways You Can Change the World Now

TED is the grand daddy of world change. In fact TED is the inspiration of the name of this blog from many years ago. They have compiled a playlist of 10 of their videos focused on small ways to change the world. The little things that you (yes, you) can do now (yes, now) to make a difference. It's a great way to inspire us all to do great things. I often ask people, if you had to give a TED talk right now, what would it be about? 

WHAT IS YOUR TED TALK GOING TO BE?

Here are three of my favorites from the list. 



AppleWatch & The Internet of Strings

If you haven't noticed today is the day that the AppleWatch finally arrives. I'm having mixed feelings about whether I want one or not, I think that watches are almost useless ever since I've had a mobile phone in my pocket, but if my history predicts my future than I'm sure I will have one soon.

I have always loved gadgets. They captivated me as a boy, high up in my attic bedroom in early 80's Boston. I used to hook up strings around my room all leading back to my bed. One to turn off the light switch and another to turn it back on, one for the stereo power, another for the tape play button. I used to sit in my bed, pulling wires, adding things up on my calculator watch, reading Choose Your Own Adventure Books, listening to the mix tapes I recorded off of the radio and dreaming about the future...

In 1986 this future came into vision so clearly - My dad stepped up to the plate and bought a brand new remote controlled TV just for the Red Sox World Series and as you can imagine my head exploded, "Wireless Remote Controlled Television", Holy Shit! This changed everything. I had one less string to worry about and more importantly, I no longer had to be the human powered "get up and change the channel" remote for my dad.  (actual TV below)

Three years later I won a Cellular Phone on KISS 108FM. The phone was huge, the size of a mini briefcase and the monthly costs were over $100. It took 10 hours to charge for 30 mins of talk time. Not much has changed here :), but I was 17 and didn't have any money to pay my bill - so that lasted for about two months... (actual phone below)

Pretty soon I was surrounded by all of this:

Fast Forward 20 Years...

Simple, Easy, All Encompassing...

Not sure I want to add another device to my simplified system, but I might just enjoy not having to pull the iPhone  "string" out of my pocket over 200 times a day, that alone might be the kicker....

Robots and the Future of Marketing

My 6 year old son's dream is to go to MIT and make robots that help the world. He wants to make a refrigerator that transforms into a robot chef that will cook, serve and clean for you and then pop back into a refrigerator at night. He also wants to make a robot that will pop-up from the sidewalk when a homeless person is walking by and give them a basket full of food. His brain is always thinking about robots that help our world and make our lives easier, if you watched Oscar Winner, Big Hero 6 than you know that nerds, science and robotics are the future, duh ;).

Right now our vision of robots is skewed based on books and science fiction films, most of us think that robots look human like, they walk, talk, and dance and generally are competing with humans in appearance and function.  The reality is that robots look much more like the arms you see in a factory making cars, or the semi-annoying voice you hear when you call the cable company when you want to trouble-shoot your WIFI, or source code of computer program.

There are over 1,000,000 robots in the world with half of them in Japan and just 15% in the US. Out of these, about 50% of those are making cars while the rest are assembling products, doing surgeries, bomb-detecting, cleaning up toxic waste, serving us online ads, content and doing the stuff that many humans don't really want to do or can't do as efficiently. 

So what does that mean for us as marketers and brands? How can we embrace this robotic future?

Experiential
We see this robotic trend emerging at trade shows, events, in-store and pop-up stores with the whole goal to pull us in and get our attention. Brands are integrating robots into their marketing experiences to stand out and connect themselves to the future, in fact there a many companies out there that will rent you robots for this purpose.

Content Creation
Publishers and brands are using robots to create custom content for their sites and social channels, they scrape sports scores, weather and other topics to automate content delivery for their readers. Brands have also used robots to respond to fans in social media during the Super-Bowl. Some people describe this as marketing automation but remember robots don't have to look human or even have a physical presence.

Advertising
Nowhere is robotics so prevalent in marketing than online advertising. There are robots right now watching you read this article and soon you will go somewhere else and a robot ad will appear next to you. There are robots crawling the internet looking for patterns and selling those patterns to the highest bidders through Google ad-words and other ad buying systems. They all speak the language of algorithms and its your job to understand the basics of this language in order to be successful.

 

 


 

Will Cinemagraphs Take Over the World?

Try to stop looking at the following cinemagraphs -aka- super produced gifs for brands:

Armani-Coffee-615.gif

There is a big trend brewing out there that is taking the power of gifs to the next natural place. It's called Cinemagraphs and sounds all fancy, but you may have just noticed that they are beautiful and mesmerizing. The trend for brands to jump in is making its way to Facebook and Instagram by trying to hack autoplay and make you stop and become hypnotized by the beauty and simplicity.