As we’re reminded pretty much every second of the day, we live in a digital world. So much so that I feel pretty ridiculous even writing that. And yet there are still some people out there who are trying to either hang onto or revive pieces of our analog past.

Take the photography industry for example. Digital cameras have been around since the ‘80s and have reached a point where they have almost completely replaced the film camera. But there are film purists out there (including some professional photographers) who refuse to make the transition to digital, even if it vastly reduces their costs.

While there is a minority still willing to pay for film as production of it declines and the cost of developing goes up, does that mean it’s a smart move to start a company that relies solely on selling analog product?

Shortly after Polaroid discontinued the production of their film, The Impossible Project was launched in an attempt to keep the evaporating instant-film market alive. Staffed with former Polaroid employees, the company caters to a very niche market of photographers who are willing to pay $30 for 8 shots of film and hundreds of dollars for vintage Polaroid camera equipment.

So far, the project has lasted nearly three years. But does that mean they’re successful or merely hanging on by a thread? Can they survive in a world where consumers can buy digital cameras that cost only slightly more than a pack of instant film?

They aren’t alone in selling analog photo equipment. Hipsters and photo enthusiasts may have noticed the relatively new chain of Lomography stores for people who like playing around with cheap, purposely-flawed film cameras. But those stores also offer products for people who use digital cameras, just as Polaroid has tailored its offerings to almost exclusively digital products. I say almost because they have recently re-introduced one instant-film camera model for their analog niche.

So what does this all mean for what’s left of the film industry? Can it even be said that such an industry still exists? Are film cameras destined to be mantelpiece decorations? Or will there always be small number of film photographers able to keep this small but dedicated market afloat?

Maybe only time will tell for analog enthusiasts like myself. That being said, I didn’t type this on an Underwood.

Auto Shows have been prime venues for auto manufacturers to showcase their new technologies, hottest designs, and brand evolution for decades. Given that the Canadian International Auto Show opened this weekend in Toronto, the Big Orange Slide is going to spend this week delving into why Auto Shows are important for automotive marketers, and where the opportunities lie going forward.

Whether you work on automotive brands, for an auto manufacturer, or just go to see pretty new cars tell us – what will the Auto Show of the future look like?

Creativity is about making something new or turning chaos into order (as my friend @jted would say), whereas innovation is a process of renewed application for something that already exists. Innovation and creativity are, however, similar in the fear and uncertainty that belong to the ideation process. To quote the opening lines from the documentary Art & Copy:

“The frightening and most difficult thing about being what someone calls a ‘creative person’ is that you have absolutely no idea where any of your thoughts come from, and you have no idea where they’re going to come from tomorrow.”

Frankly, there are no magic beans for innovating products or systems. But there are a few ways to begin imagining how they could be taken into a different direction. Here are some to consider.

Swap

I cannot count how many times I’ve stared at a pattern on the floor, and had another one emerge – a smiling face, an animal of some kind. Once I know that it’s there, I can’t see the forest for the tree my brain has detected. And the reason I see it, is because I’m looking at the pattern from a different angle to everyone else.

Whether it’s a physical object, a concept or a tactic, reversing how you look at a problem will often lead you to something that has yet to be considered. Here, I cite the example of our recent Snack Pack Smile Facebook campaign. Originally, Snack Pack was going to donate a dollar on a user’s behalf to Food Banks Canada. This is a viable, expected way to send donations. However, we as a team imagined what it would be like to donate their dollar on behalf of someone from their friends list, and encourage them to do the same – “pay it forward,” as it were. This twist increased the virulence of our social share. The result: we hit our target of $20,000 to feed families in need before the end of the campaign.

Invent

In my humble childhood home, Allen’s apple juice was a staple. Though we couldn’t afford a can opener, we did have other tools – a shoe, for example, and a butter knife. I’d engineer the can open by placing the butter knife on the top of the can, and giving it a whack with the shoe. Prying the knife down created a perfect spout – even better than the one a can opener would create.

The key is to dismiss the expected applications of things. In 1945, Percy Spencer (an American engineer) was working on an active radar set when he noticed that the equipment was causing a chocolate bar in his pocket to melt. Though he was intending to use microwaves to improve communication, he ended up creating one of the most convenient – and most hated – kitchen appliances in modern society.

Simplify

Sometimes, innovation happens when you imagine how the component parts of something might be improved to optimize usefulness. When Earle Dickson (then a cotton buyer at the Johnson & Johnson company) noticed that his wife was prone to kitchen accidents, he imagined how he could make an adhesive bandage that would be sterile, and would stay in place. He perfected his BAND-AID® in 1920, and was awarded for his inventiveness by being named vice-president of the company. Dickson saw the component parts of a bandage: the adhesive piece and the cotton swab, and imagined how he could revise them for improved efficiency.

Play

Play isn’t just a verb, it’s an outlook. By choosing to have fun with your designs, copy, code or ingredients, you inherently change your approach.  Make word jumbles out of your copy. Turn your designs upside-down. Imagine seeing it as a 10-year old. When we make productivity a game we use a different part of our brain. Imagination, not obligation, takes over and we give ourselves permission to think a little more recklessly. The fork at our table is a hand, robot, post-apocalyptic pick-up truck. Fun paves the way to something new.

Consume

In “Blink,” Malcolm Gladwell (one of my favorite authors) explains the massive role our subconscious plays in our decision-making. If our conscious mind had to make every decision we made, even the simplest of tasks would take hours to accomplish. While we are busy focusing on a task at hand, our subconscious is busy building a peripheral catalogue of everything around us. The next time we make a decision, our subconscious draws from our database of observations.

You can affect and alter how you make decisions by feeding your subconscious information. Books, movies, conversations, TV shows, video games, life experiences – all of these things will feed and shape your mind’s ability to think in different and deeper ways. Never give up the opportunity to experience something you haven’t before. It will pay dividends in almost everything you do, but especially when it comes to creativity and innovation.

Conclusion

There are many techniques and ways one can be innovative. These points are only a few of the myriad ways you can begin to try to approach problems differently. Of course, there’s always the possibility that you could innovate the tools of arriving at innovation.

“Dogfooding” is short hand for “eating your own dog food,” a term that is used by software companies to illustrate that they use as well as make their own software.

Microsoft and Google are probably the two most accessible examples of what this can mean for R&D. Microsoft became known for using their own Office product, a staple piece in almost every business and government workplace. Similarly, Google developers not only work on their core offering, but are also allotted a full 20% of their working hours to create pet projects, a brilliant idea that has lead to the creation of both Google News and Google’s social media platform Orkut.

It’s a proven model, so it should be no surprise that the developers at Grip also dine on our own kibble. When building the nomination site for the Oranges (Grip’s internal award program), the developers were able to integrate a different kind of authentication process and troubleshoot a solution for a nagging server issue. Most recently, Grip’s president, Harvey Carroll, moderated a battle of the business plans, allowing for voting via SMS and a mobile microsite with live voting results. At the end of this process, Harvey was able to use his phone to instantly name the winning team – as well as send a text alert to two random voters, informing them that they had also won prizes.

These are only a couple examples, but they lead to bigger conclusions. Here are a few other thoughts on how eating one’s own dog food can help improve overall product.

It forces developers and designers to be empathetic with their end user. It always scares me a little to hear designers question the validity of the user experience on their own projects. If the originator of the design can’t figure out how to perform a menial task how can we expect the end user to do so? It’s not enough to whip through an application to patch holes, you have to be a part of its active life.

You get user feedback for free and much quicker than you would in the wild. Consider how much faster it is to talk through an issue with a team member than a focus group. Going back to the Google example, you can see how that company uses its own resource pool to see if new features will work before spending money on promotion. They are a focus group – but of experts.

Finally, security of the project is increased. When you feed your dog food to a population with experience as vast as you do in an agency environment, unforeseen secondary uses rise to the surface. The combination of technical and non-technical people using your product reveals a gamut of interactions that may accidentally uncover a security flaw, before someone with less-than-ideal intentions gets to it.

But, perhaps, you do.

I’m a creature of habit in the mornings. If I can fall out of bed, aim a blow dryer at my skull and crawl into a subway car, I’ve won half the war on coherence.

If, however, I’m looking to throw the “V for Victory” over 8:30 a.m in -20°C, I’ll grab a Grande mild with milk. A Tall is too small. A Venti turns me into a foaming, glassy caricature. I know my limits, and what happens when I gleefully reject them.

So when I say that a Trenta-sized coffee would lead to madness, destruction and terror, I know of which I speak.

The “Trenta” is Starbucks’ new Man vs. Food-sized cup that has a full 7 ounces on the Venti. Granted, it’s only debuting in 14 states. And granted, it is only available for iced coffees, teas and lemonades. But I can’t help but be curious about the focus group research that leads a company to trump the size of an already gargantuan offering. At 31 ounces, the Trenta is larger than the average volume of a human stomach. I imagine line graphs indicating year-over-year increases in human thirst. Psychological profiles around beverage size and competitive consumption. Concept sketches of customers falling into swimming pools of Tazo.

It seems to me that size has become as valuable a marketing driver as innovation. Though we’ve grown accustomed to 99 cent tubs 0′ Slurpee at 7-Eleven, it somehow still surprises me when I see companies like Starbucks step in line. Championing consumption is one thing. Celebrating it is the realm of Texan steakhouses and theatre concession stands.

What do you think – is 31 ounces a viable product innovation? Or does it compromise Starbucks’ (somewhat) refined coffee house image?

The Official Ralph Lauren 4D Experience – London from Ralph Lauren on Vimeo.

Every category, product or service, has its conventions. Things that are done over and over again either because they work, because we can’t think of anything new, or because not doing them would risk a tantrum from the otherwise slumbering executive floor. For fashion retailers and brands like Ralph Lauren, one of those conventions is the fashion show.

Earlier this month, RL managed to reinvent the conventional fashion show in honour of the tenth anniversary of their e-commerce site.

The effort (and this entailed considerable effort) was deemed “the world’s first 4-dimensional show” by the folks at RL. While this description is somewhat disputable according to many comments I’ve read around the blogosphere, in this blogger’s humble opinion it was nonetheless a spectacular re-imagining.

A 10-minute light show was projected onto the façade of Ralph Lauren’s stores on Madison Avenue in New York and on Bond Street in London. The façade of the two stores came to life with projected images of models and polo players towering over the crowd, amid ambient sound and a mist of Ralph Lauren fragrance.

Even more powerful, for me at least, was the behind-the-scenes story of how it was pulled off. A team of about 150 people worked for months: First, intricate architectural renderings of the New Bond Street and Madison Avenue stores were created using 3D scanners and human modelers. Then ¾ scale replicas of the stores were built on a Hollywood-style sound stage so that real models could be shot in front of the façade. The film was then pulled into a 3D software environment where a team of animators (some of whom worked on Harry Potter) designed and melded visual effects. Finally, projectors – of even higher resolution than IMAX – were positioned so that the finished 3D film could be lined up perfectly with each of the real life, flagship stores on Bond Street and Madison Ave.

In terms of reach? Hundreds experienced it live in each of the respective cities, while millions got to witness and share the spectacle across the web. PR, as you can imagine, has been considerable as well.

How well does Ralph Lauren’s 4D Fashion Show score for reinvention of this well trodden category convention? I’m thinking at least a seven, but that may owe to the fact that it marries my past life as a theatre tech with my current career as an advertising creative.

I’d love to hear what you think.

People often ask me the differences between design and advertising. Seeing as I’m a designer in an agency context, the delineation isn’t as obvious as it may seem. But when I attended a recent DesignThinkers lecture by David Turner (of brand design agency Turner Duckworth) I got the one-liner I was looking for: “Design delivers what advertising promises.”

Design is the physical or experiential side of a brand. Advertising is what speeds those things into the world. The two hold hands, working in complement to achieve that elusive combination of reach and allure.

In his talk, Turner presented his principles of iconic design with supporting case studies. Abercrombie and Fitch, the go-to uniform for expensively underdressed millenials, has meticulously designed their mysterious and exclusive teen flavour. Billboard and print advertising use provocative, black and white images of toned male midriffs shot by Bruce Weber to promise an adult experience dressed in teen clothing. The mall experience delivers on this promise with darkly-lit stores and shuttered windows – a complete contrast to the bright, busy and colourful windows of the Gap, Old Navy and Forever 21. At every brand touchpoint, AF sets itself apart by offering up a simmering brew of sexuality and disaffected teenage style.

AF is an example of branding in isolation, but what role does design play in elevating co-branding campaigns? Turner Duckworth faced this very problem when Coke, an iconic brand, co-branded with the Winter Olympics. Their solution: develop collectable cans that leverage the swoosh of the iconic logo as a ski hill, a snowboarders’ pike and an ice skater’s swirl. The cans, beautifully designed, used the logo to make a clever connection to winter Olympic sports. Wieden + Kennedy closed the loop with TV ads that animated skiers, snowboarders and skaters to carbonated bubbles mixed to sound like fresh carved snow and ice. Linking the product redesign with delightful animated ads successfully created a second-nature link between two unrelated experiences.

Earlier this year at The Rotman School of Business, artist and writer Douglas Coupland and Roots founders Don Green and Michael Budman presented their thoughts about their recent creative collaboration. In a telling moment, an MBA student and budding entrepreneur asked the Roots boys where she should spend her small marketing budget. Green greeted her question with a passionate declaration that the best money they ever spent was on their logo and branding elements. He explained how (now defunct) design firm Cooper Hines had stressed the importance of investing in every consumer touch point to ensure a luxurious consumer experience across everything from receipts to shoe boxes to shopping bags. The strategy worked: Roots went from selling 7 pairs of their Negative Heel Boots on day 1, to opening 75 new stores in the next two years. Roots’ experience is entirely their own, and remains fresh and iconic 37 years later.

Sometimes we at ad agencies get caught up in delivering the “big idea” for a campaign, when the more powerful insights come from how the brand fits into our consumers’ lifestyles and identities. When thinking about experiences, sometimes simplicity and tactile design is the most powerful place to connect with your consumer.

An iCal reminder popped up on my computer on August 16, reminding me that Design Thinkers 2010 was going to take place in November. Yes, I did have my iCal remind me almost four months before the conference was scheduled to occur.

This is why.

We all work in an industry obsessed with sharing ideas, learning how to think, learning how not to think, accepting that maybe how not to think is actually how we should think – all in the interests of making an impression on our peers and the world at large. To my mind, two speakers at Design Thinkers were compelling representations of where design is going. The first, Don Lindsay, a man determined to change the face (quite literally) of technology. The other, Scott Thomas, changing the face of the world as we know it.

One spoke of selling a product and the other spoke of selling a change.

Lindsay represented the product angle of things. His pedigree includes time at Apple (working side-by-side with Steve Jobs for 6+ years), then Microsoft, and he is currently at Research in Motion, working on the launch of the Blackberry 6 and Blackberry Torch. With an entire career dedicated to researching what consumers want, he had this to offer: “It’s not about designing a moment. It’s about designing all moments.”

On the other end of the spectrum we have Scott Thomas, the designer behind the amazing design done for Barack Obama’s political campaign in 2007. The attention generated by that campaign gave America its first black president and the highest number of votes (over 65,000,000) in presidential history. It may not be that design won Obama the presidency, but it surely changed the way we viewed the American political system. Scott Thomas and his team didn’t help to design a moment; they helped to re-design a country.

Both men have made their names in the industry and will continue to do so. I urge you to go out and find out about them for yourselves. Read Scott Thomas’ new book, find out who they are, how they’ve affected the world that you live in, and more importantly, what they have done and how they’ve done it. Because it very well might affect what you do tomorrow.

Two days ago, ex-CP+B wunderkind Alex Bogusky unveiled a new website to announce his new self-appointed role as a consumer advocate. In the words of the site:

“The fact is we all consume to live. The food we put in our bodies, the clothes we put on our backs, the devices we use to do our jobs, and the energy that goes into everything we touch. Together we consume A LOT. Yet our expectations are too low. We think we have to accept the bad that comes with the good. The pollution that comes with the energy. The unsafe working conditions that come with low prices. The toxic materials that come with convenient packaging.

“We can do better. Wanting stuff isn’t going to change. So maybe it’s time to want more – more from ourselves and more from the people who make our stuff.”

What do you think? Does this project mark a turning point in the roles and responsibilities of advertisers? Or does it lose credibility by being led by a former ad exec?