Buzzcloud is fascinated by all things Triple Crown right now, particularly with the Belmont Stakes race coming up on June 9th. How exciting!  There hasn’t been a Triple Crown winner since Affirmed took the title in 1978, and with I’ll Have Another as this year’s Triple Crown hopeful, the buzz is more heightened than it has been for a long time.

I am also delighted to welcome a new client to the TMG family. Since 1894, Daily Racing Form has been telling the story of thoroughbred racing.  In fact, the expression “Triple Crown” was coined by legendary DRF columnist Charlie Hatton in the early 20th Century.  There is no question that Daily Racing Form, in print and DRF.com online, continues to be a leader and key change agent in what makes the horseracing experience so exciting, rewarding and enjoyable. (Check out their site for all the latest, including state-of-the art tools and analysis that will help give you greater odds at winning, and with more frequency.)

I love the image above of female jockey Chantal Sutherland captured by Bo Derek for Vanity Fair magazine, not only for her strength, confidence and beauty, but the fact that Chantal is the real deal.  According to reports, she has almost 1,000 career victories, $45 million in winnings, and is the first women ever to ride for the $10 million Dubai World Cup—the richest pot in horse racing. It is also a great example of perception vs reality, wouldn’t you agree?

Press note:  if you are a reporter working on Triple Crown stories, and would like to interview an expert in the horseracing industry, please feel free to email me.

Reach out to others when you’re stuck. “There’s nothing heroic about failing alone.” -Susan Cradle, CCO Leo Burnett #transformLA

PALM TREES, PRODUCT AND PUNDITS AMONG BIG AGENCY NEWS

It’s takes vision to be successful in a world that’s in a state of constant transformation.   Talking about transformation is the easy part – just look at the #transformLA hashtag on Twitter that tracked this week’s Transformation event from the 4A’s.

Having the humility, imagination and nerve to embrace transformation is an altogether different thing.

Prompted by one major CEO’s vision of a simpler future, two advertising super-powers are demonstrating the willingness to do things a whole new way.

If you missed it, The Wall Street Journal ran an article this week about the GM global account.

Here’s an excerpt:

GM To Consolidate Chevrolet Advertising With OMC And IPG 

Omnicom’s Goodby Silverstein & Partners and Interpublic’s McCann Erickson are forming Commonwealth, a joint venture that will handle the account, these people said. The new agency, which is expected to be announced Tuesday, will be based in Detroit and have offices in about a dozen markets around the world, they added.

Last year, GM’s Chief Executive Officer Dan Akerson told The Wall Street Journal that the company was working to shore up its advertising and marketing operations. “The company has far too many advertising agencies which drives up costs and complexity. Multiple agencies lead to inconsistency and a dilution of our message,” he said.

CREATING NEW SANDBOXES

I love that GM is embracing a less complex model. This is a company that has had about 70 agencies handling its business around the world. As someone who’s personally had to collaborate with over a dozen other agencies at times for a global financial client, the process is not only unwieldy for those involved, but the client often can’t be effective at managing the collaboration process and thus the issue that Dan Akerson so astutely understands and describes.  So, GM, kudos for paving the way to better, smarter collaboration.

Nick Brien, Chairman & CEO McCann Worldwide

I reached out to Nick Brien, Chairman & CEO of McCann to help put this amazing win into perspective.  Clearly, there were many brilliant decision makers involved in making an important decision like this – afterall, GM spent $4.7 billion on advertising last year – so it has huge implications any way you slice it.   In a matter of months, an agency stood out with a fresh solution, one that presented clarity in a world of overwhelming variables and possibilities! Lucky for me and the readers of this blog, Nick was happy to give us some key insights:

 

BuzzCloud:  Nick, it’s been widely known that GM put its account in review late last year. Here we are about six months later with a huge success for you, McCann and your GS&P colleagues, and a new joint venture Commonwealth.  What does this mean for McCann?

 

Nick: It demonstrates that McCann is committed to delivering its clients real innovation in building global brand equity through alliances and partnerships that capitalize on creative talent and category experience.

 

Since taking the helm at McCann in April, 2010, you are known for being relentlessly focused on collaborating in ways that transform the agency communications model.  How will this new collaboration impact GM’s business?

 

GM has many of the best car brands in the global auto industry and the challenge is to optimize marketing impact whilst reducing costs. Commonwealth will streamline Chevrolet’s marketing activities across all markets whilst providing one global voice and consistent brand vision.

 

As we know, a brand no matter how big or small now sits on a global stage thanks to low cost barrier channels that social media platforms provide.  Is all this connectedness bringing us closer or farther apart? And if I can add, has it made marketers smarter because the stakes are higher?

 

The new channels offer brands tremendous opportunity for creating deeper, better targeted and more creative engagement with consumers. The nature of brand building today demands a smarter blend of strategic innovation and content creativity. McCann has been the ‘Truth Well Told’ agency for 100 years and today’s digital channels and technology platforms simply extend the opportunities available to us.

Well done, Nick. Whomever had the initial thought that led to not “overthinking” it but resulted in coming up with a clever, powerful, creative, innovative solution that gained momentum and support on multiple levels is to be commended. This kind of bold leadership and innovation is what the Brand World needs.

Transformation is heady stuff.  It requires taking risk and thinking differently, and it gets really messy along the way.   You’ve got to be willing to surrender to the “Power of Thinking Without Thinking” that Malcom Gladwell introduced in his amazing book “Blink.”

For a brand like GM, global marketing is anything but simple, sitting smack in the middle of this new “experiential,” digital economy.  The solution masterminded by the chiefs at Omnicom and McCann was to solve the client’s real problem:  How do we streamline our process but keep as many smart voices in the mix as possible.  This is the goal of every iconic brand like as Coke, Ford, Chevy, MasterCard, Nike, McDonald’s, Apple:  to be relevant, connected and efficient and successful in every market.

A cynic will ask: Can this possibly work?

I, for one, am rooting for this to. I’ll tell you that I’ve witnessed it in the real world.  My 1^st grader attends a school where children are taught to become responsible citizens.  They are given the space to collaborate, engage and, believe it or not, disagree.  Two simple principles inform their actions:  they are responsible for their own learning and they are responsible for their own actions.

You would be amazed at how cooperative, efficient and creative that classroom is.  I often wonder whether they’ll be able to transfer those skills to their adult lives.   It’s nice to see that there are already pockets of the world, like GM and McCann, that embrace the principles my son is being taught:  you can come up with a creative approach to a problem, work through the complexity, collaborate, innovate, and solve it…or in this case, win!

McCann has been dubbed an “agency to watch” in 2012. Let me know your thoughts on how today’s digital channels and new technology are helping brands like GM extend their voices globally, and how agencies like McCann are guiding them strategically — perhaps heroically– through that creative and visionary process.

SHARE. SHARE. SHARE! The coveted marketing verb of the moment.

One of the first lessons in life is learning how to play in the sandbox.  Share, cooperate and collaborate and all the best toys will end up in your corner; start insisting that everything goes the way you want, and you’re likely to end up sitting alone with a broken shovel.

The same life lesson that we had to learn in early childhood is being driven home in the new world of telling a brand story.  Creating great content in a vacuum isn’t going to get it done any more.

Nowhere was this more evident recently than at the Design Bloggers Conference in Los Angeles last week.  I had the incredible fortune of not only attending but speaking at this sold-out event where bloggers, brands, innovators and marketers collaborated about this crazy thing called Social Media Content Marketing.

DesignSherpa, a division of NCI, brought together more than 300 of the top people creating content in the design market.  And, most strikingly to me, DesignSherpa did it entirely through word-of-mouth.

DesignSherpa got the word out about its industry conference for the interior design world entirely by leveraging its own distribution channels, almost all in social media, such as its blog, Twitter and Facebook networks.  These snackable media bits fueled an escalating social dialogue that drew interest, attracted the best in the industry, and ultimately, sold the place out.

Things really got interesting on Twitter the Friday before the conference kick-off. Using the hashtag #DBC2012 Twitter, bloggers and tweeters took to the social web to express their excitement, and ignited a conversation that is still continuing long after the 2-day event concluded.

A day before the event began, just 154 tweets had created more than 660,000 impressions, reaching an audience of 194,000 people.

That is measurable impact that drives superior ROI, no matter how you calculate it.

As the Second Annual event unfolded Adam Japko, president of NCI Home & Digital Sherpa Divisions, passed out the celebratory bubbly –at 10am!– (not your typical conference for sure) and shared with the crowd that there were big gains over last year’s numbers and reach.

Regional Relevance & Global Reach:

4 Countries

36 States (up from 29 last year)

37% From California (45% last year)

Twitter reach over 340,000

Other fascinating nuggets Adam shared were:

 About 67% have been blogging for 2 years, and over 25% spend 40+ hours per week creating their posts

And yes, according to a new survey of 700 marketers by a fellow presenter from Wildfire, you can measure the business impact of social media too. Read more about what they shared at the conference, here.

I was impressed by the simple lessons of DesignSherpa’s marketing of their event and the relevance for all of us in media and marketing.

Their approach acknowledged that the walls between personalized content, branded content, original and curated are coming down rapidly.  Audiences and users act in personal ways on mass platforms, giving marketers the room to tweak and hone their brands and messages to be more integrated into our lives.

Bloggers – the serious, talented ones — and content curators are often passionate individuals who will continue to play a major role in how we engage with the digital world, but more importantly, how that spills over into our physical one too.

As any marketer is aware, newer social sharing platforms such Instagram and Pinterest are already proving their “web cred” and that content curation – or more to the point, anyone’s ability to share and share well, will reign supreme. The rules of engagement are being re-written everyday.

TIMELINES ARE THE NEW GOLDMINES

On the media side, digital newsrooms have their best and brightest trained to tweet, live log, shoot video to accompany their story…all before or as a story is published. What I am seeing is that timelines are the new goldmines where journalists, sources, and PR pros convene to rally around trending stories.

Traditional newsrooms, too, particularly broadcast news shows, cry out for any “visual moments” that help take their reporting from the snoozy “talking head” format to the next level of transmedia storytelling, as we have gone from a world of hearing and reading about news and currents events, to “seeing” them, “commenting” on them, and “sharing” them across peer-to-peer networks.

Transmedia storytelling is not only the “now” but the future. And consistent branding across multiple platforms is the only way to differentiate and drive specific actions. Everyone from your best friend to your favorite brand is a mini-media company today. The challenge whether for anyone who attended the Design Bloggers Conference in February or the new product launch you may be orchestrating for tomorrow, is how to separate the junk or the endless noise from your story.

How do you tell your story in a way that gets you invited to play in the world’s largest sandbox and with the cool kids who can ignite your brand? How do you inspire, inform and influence your key stakeholders?

After the talk I was approached by many in the audience who wanted to extend the conversation and it was truly refreshing to see such a high level of quality engagement. The best part, for me, about speaking to a group of bloggers — thanks to Twitter — is that you get instant feedback while you are speaking. In this case, when I got back to my laptop and fired up my Twitter account, my timeline was full of so much positive feedback, most importantly, about what was resonating with the audience. Design bloggers, contrary to what my friend celebrity journalist Flo Anthony may think about bloggers in general, are not buck wild. But they are wildly positive and focused…and they are smart. Smart about content, engagement, experience, and community. The result was a collaborative energy in the room that was a joy, personally and inspiring, professionally.

“Face it, reality TV is what got soaps cancelled. Who needs a soap opera when you can get real life train wrecks on TV all day and night?”

I recently had a chance to chat with one of the biggest names in celebrity journalism: Flo Anthony.  If you don’t know, Flo is everywhere covering celebrities and reporting on their lives whether it’s on entertainment television shows such as “ET,” in newspapers for gossip columns in New York’s Daily News, or The New York Post, or over the airwaves for her syndicated radio show on all things celebrity.

It struck me during our conversation that she had a lot of keen insights into the world of celebrity journalism in the digital age, and particularly when anyone can call themselves a “celebrity blogger.”  Flo is actually one of those rare people today who has long-standing relationships with celebrities of all kinds, and solid sources to back up her reporting.  Here’s what she has to say about Celebrities, PR, Social Media and Reality TV:

TM:  You are one of the most widely known and respected celebrity journalists. I see you everywhere, and you always have the inside, credible, scoop on all things celebrity — whether it was the death of Michael Jackson in ’09 to the recent passing of another icon, Whitney Houston. What has changed in the last 5 years in the world of celebrity journalism?

Flo:  Thanks for the compliment. Bloggers have changed everything. Now, anyone with a computer can report on a story, make up a story, post photos and the world goes along with it before checking anything out. You don’t need an education, writing skills, just sit down at a computer and go for it. No one establishes real contacts anymore. Everybody is just buck wild. It’s crazy to me. TMZ also took the world of gossip to a whole other level. But, I love it because at least they are actually talking to celebrities and as an attorney, Harvey has great police sources.

Who are some of your favorite celebs to cover and why?

Well, Michael Jackson was always my favorite, but now he’s left us. Right now I like Beyonce’. I think she is the ultimate celebrity. She has it all, talent, beauty, incredible style and great family, and she’s always smiling. I also like covering Rihanna. I like her funkiness, and I like Puffy, yes, I still call him Puffy. He has it going on, a swagger that is so cool. I also like Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, Halle Berry, Samuel L. Jackson, Tyler Perry, Jennifer Lopez, Gabrielle Union, Will Smith, Madonna, and believe it or not, my favorite celebrity couple is Kyra Sedgewick and Kevin Bacon. I see them around town and they are just so cool and down to earth. I also like Eddie Murphy a lot and John Stamos. They are class acts. I tend to like celebs that are approachable and aren’t afraid of cameras.

How has social media impacted your profession?

Well, that’s a loaded question. In one hand, it helps it a lot because you can just punch in keys and get information that you need. One the other hand, it is impossible to keep a story exclusive for more than 5 minutes, so I don’t feel as valuable in 2012 as I was in 1993.

If you could give one bit of advice to celebrity publicists, what would it be?

Once in awhile, just tell the truth.

What are some of your pet peeves when publicists contact you?

I don’t get the kind of complaints from publicists like back in the day when I worked on Page Six. I’m pretty celebrity friendly in my coverage these days, so, I don’t really have any pet peeves regarding publicists. I even do a little bit of publicity for select clients myself.

With the soaring popularity of reality TV shows — whether we like it or not — they are now part of the pop culture mainstream.  What’s your take on this? Are these shows here to stay?

Well, I will go on record and say I hate the Kardashians, but I’m not mad at them that they have been able to make millions. If audiences are that dumb, why not take advantage of it? I do think reality shows are here to stay. Face it, reality TV is what got soaps cancelled. Who needs a soap opera when you can get real life train wrecks on TV all day and night? However, I wish that certain shows wouldn’t depict African-American women in such a bad light. It’s so sad that we as African-Americans have evolved into having a class act like Michelle Obama in the White House and then we have to look at women brawling on TV.

Here’s a clip of Flo who is credited with breaking important information regarding the recent death of Whitney Houston:

As we know, we see you all over the news providing expert celebrity commentary, but where else can people catch you?

My daily radio shows “Gossip On The Go With Flo” and “Big Apple Buzz” are syndicated by Superadio. My weekly column “Go With The Flo” appears in several African-American newspapers including the New York Amsterdam News, and I publish Black Noir Magazine. www.florenceanthonysblacknoir.com.

Oh, how I love a good pro! And Flo is one of the best.