Social Change / xxx Contagious is ten. Welcome... 14 28 31 47 THE CONTAGIOUS DECADE SMALL BUT PERFECTLY FORMED 06 A Primer 40 Little brands, big thinkers Log off, lean in and pore over Katrina Dodd’s attempt In each of our past 20 issues, Contagious has at imposing neatly alphabetised order on the chaos of celebrated seven small companies hoping to change the Contagious zeitgeist. the world. We take a look at some of our favourites – and add a few more to the ranks. WELCOME TO CONTAGIOUS X 14 Brands for the next decade STRENGTH STUDY / Publishing Application instructions for this special dose of the 47 By Chloe Markowicz magazine. Side effects may include broad inspiration, Landscape Brands evolve from being publicists brand bravery and a healthy dose of disdain for the to publishers status quo. Brand Spotlight Red Bull Opinion Tyler Brûlé, editor in chief, Monocle STRENGTH STUDY / Disruption 19 By Emily Hare STRENGTH STUDY / Data Landscape How can brands make disruption work 57 By Chris Barth while protecting themselves against challengers? Landscape The fine art of surfacing signal from noise Brand Spotlight Tesla Brand Spotlight IBM Opinion Jonathan Mildenhall, CMO, Airbnb Opinion Vikram Somaya, general manager of WeatherFX, The Weather Company 28 CUT OUT AND KEEP A brief history of (Contagious) time / FEATURE / The technology boneyard The ten commandments 66 Explosive digital development has its casualties. Will A crunched-down illustration of the major tech, social Sansom considers those that became cautionary tales. and business developments on one side and Contagious’ non-denominational lessons to live by on the other. ANALYSIS / The case study cash-in Hang it proudly. 68 Contagious corners the hypothetical market by backing our case study-featured brands. By Raakhi Chotai. 31 STRENGTH STUDY / Purpose By Lucy Aitken 69 INSIDER IDEAS Landscape What’s meaningful is magnetic, Sex, drugs & Twitter and great brands understand their calling Will Sansom charts how the collision of celebrity life Brand Spotlight Chipotle and digital media is reshaping popular culture. Opinion Paul Polman, CEO, Unilever 2 / 3 69 77 86 INSERT STRENGTH STUDY / Design STRENGTH STUDY / Collaboration 77 By Ed White 119 By Georgia Malden Landscape From decoration to business imperative Landscape Better together? Partnerships characterise Brand Spotlight Apple today’s high-achieving brand landscape Opinion Sue Siddall, partner, IDEO Brand Spotlight LEGO Opinion Blake Mycoskie, founder and chief shoe-giver, TOMS WHAT WE GOT WRONG 86 To err is Contagious? STRENGTH STUDY / Culture Our role as a handy instruction manual for the future isn’t 129 By Dan Southern as easy as we make it look, ok? But we’re big enough to Landscape Company culture galvanises employees admit a few of our mistakes… and delights customers Brand Spotlight Etsy 89 STRENGTH STUDY / Experimentation Opinion Dave Gray, author and consultant By Alex Jenkins Landscape Test, measure and learn in FEATURE / Job title safari a rapidly-changing environment 138 As the marketing industry evolves, so does the taxonomy Brand Spotlight Google of its strange and exotic creatures. Opinion Sir Martin Sorrell, founder and chief executive officer, WPP INDEX 140 The brands, companies and people showcased STRENGTH STUDY / Services in this special issue of Contagious. 99 By Patrick Jeffrey Landscape Service design thinking has radically reimagined marketing in the digital age Brand Spotlight Uber CONTAGIOUS X Opinion Russell Davies and Louise Downe, director of strategy and service designer at INSERT Government Digital Service NEWS 109 STRENGTH STUDY / Empowerment Contagious brand ideas By Arwa Mahdawi From selfless selfies to innovative uses of Instagram Landscape The tool-makers shall inherit the earth Brand Spotlight Safaricom WILDFIRE Opinion Ethan Zuckerman, director, Stories plucked from the pop culture ether MIT Center for Civic Media AI employees, smart cities and invisibility cloaks Editorial / Ten Years Of Contagious 4 / 5 Te n Years of Contagous Paul Kemp-Robertson & Gee Thomson Contagious founders Contagious was born on the back of a beer mat in a Chelsea pub in Infrastructure has always provided the catalytic stepping stones 2004. It was a time of ferment in the marketing industry. Mobile was for change. The 20th century was defined by mass media and beginning to get smart, social media was primed to explode and people’s motors. For our generation, the internet and mobile have been relationships with brands were becoming a whole lot more interactive. the new enablers. The next bridge, machine intelligence, is of New media and behaviours meant the audience had run ahead of the an entirely different magnitude and one that Contagious is looking advertiser, so we figured that the communications industry needed a forward to charting. fresh guidance system to make sense of the immediate future. Technology, in the shape of websites, search engines, navigational Hence Contagious. We wanted to create a platform to explore alterna- aids and smartphones, already augments our intelligence. Those who are tive advertising ideas, assess the impact of emerging technologies and better able to deploy such resources are already on a superior plane of champion a greater sense of purpose for brands. Having been part of the interaction with the modern world than those rare souls still tied to pencil marketing industry for 15 years we both believed the age of broadcast and paper. The second wave of machine intelligence will be even more and monologue could be displaced by an era in which brands provide seismic, impacting on sectors far beyond marketing communications people with tools, services and experiences, and use their creative and and wider pop culture. financial muscle to effect meaningful social change in the wider world. Artificial Intelligence, in all its various forms – from data manipulation This feeling is encapsulated in our name. Contagiousness is in the and decision-making, to virtual assistants, sentient robots and connected stuff that people choose to care about and feel compelled to share. It’s devices – has the potential to transform every aspect of society: from a spirit and a mindset that reaches beyond siloed disciplines, fusing education, employment, health and leisure, to energy, transport, man- creativity and marketing, technology, design and behaviour. ufacturing, banking and the future of governance. The key landmarks and turning points of the past ten years are sketched For all the technological and creative wonder that Contagious loves into our Contagious Timeline on page 32 . This magazine has witnessed to celebrate, there’s no denying that the world has a legacy of ills to the business world’s most tumultuous and exhilarating epoch. The dom- contend with: the environment, wealth inequality, resource depletion, inant giants – Alibaba, Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook and Twitter and conflict being an immediate few. – have mashed into the trends and movements that have unfolded since It’s up to those with ideas, the next Brins and Musks, the thinkers, the 2004: social media, apps, crowdsourcing, the sharing economy, data innovators and the inventors, to make themselves heard – and sooner explosion, wearable technology and corporate transparency. rather than later. Let’s hope that somewhere, somehow, those urgent But dramatic as this change has been, Contagious will always be advances, those ground-breaking ideas that will define the next ten about the immediate future – what we refer to as the ‘first light of dawn’. years, are already finding form on some sweaty 3D printer in a bustling Not for us the crystal ball-gazing of those Delphic trend forecasters. lab, on a battered laptop in a student bedsit or even on a gleaming Mac We have always been focused on a very practical future for marketers, perched on the desk of a Contagious subscriber. given root by advances that exist right now, today. When this new dawn comes, Contagious will be watching… To celebrate the tenth anniversary of Contagious we are offering 25% off all new subscriptions Additionally, we’ll give an extra two digital logins with every subscription, so that key members of your team can benefit from Contagious thinking too. Place your order at www.tinyurl.com/contagiousx Offer expires January 31st 2015. Social Change / A-Z The Contagous Decade: a Primer The past ten years have been a glorious mash-up: evolution and revolution in equal measure, a clumsy but exhilarating waltz into our unevenly distributed, platform-agnostic and relentlessly accelerating futures. Before we sally forth into a fitter, faster Unknown, a little orientation seems in order: log off, lean in and pore over our attempt to impose neatly alphabetised order on the chaos of the Contagious zeitgeist By Katrina Dodd B is for Broadband, benevolent bearer of bandwidth, the better to support the binge-viewing of Breaking Bad. As a basic com- ponent of our communication infrastructure, broadband penetra- tion has delivered benefits above and beyond our basic old-school telecoms needs. Described as a fourth utility after water, heating and electricity, in 2009 the World Bank put it thus: ‘Broadband is not just an infrastructure. It is a A is for Apple. The transformation of Apple from technology also-ran general-purpose technology that to the world’s most valuable brand has been a defining obsession can fundamentally restructure across ten years of Contagious. In so many ways the antithesis of open an economy.’ That was true even ‘for everyone’ internet culture, the company and its superbly polished before 2008 became the year of works have established a set of standards for user experience that have bravado-and-bullshit-fuelled bank- fundamentally altered our expectations of, and relationship with comput- ing balls-ups, but possibly even ers. Bestowing a sense of agency and mastery over our gadgets even more necessary in its aftermath. while edging us further away from a true understanding of how stuff The letter B has also brought us works, the Cupertino corporation has handed us the keys to an expertly BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), an enabled world of communication, community and commerce.