Full Frontal PR Report
Mark Simmons

This is what having a Punk Marketing attitude means.

It means saying something in a meeting that jars the groupthink away from the safe, tried and trusted.

It means introducing some managed chaos into the workplace to unshackle people’s thinking and put some creativity back.

It means taking a day out of the office to do something completely different but stimulating—an art gallery, a movie, a hike—and let your mind make creative connections to go at problems in a new way. And turning off your BlackBerry. But then turning it on again because you feel like…

It means making creativity a part of everyone’s jobs, not just the domain of a department in an ad agency, and judging employee performance partly based on how well they’ve used creativity to solve problems.

It means putting yourself in others’ shoes to see in a more objective way if what you’re doing makes sense to the outside world or whether you’re just talking crap to yourself.

It means realizing people don’t care about your business—and certainly not your marketing—unless you give them a good reason. Better be a damn good one.

It means setting yourself impossibly high goals and thinking of crazy ways to get there before scaling back your ambitions to more achievable ones, as this will free your mind to bigger possibilities.

And it means never having to say you’re sorry. And sorry seems to be the hardest word. It’s a sad, sad situation, and it’s getting more and more absurd.

So, here’s a vision of the future according to Punk…

The year is 2017.

Influencing consumers to buy products through TV commercials that interrupt their entertainment is a thing of the past. As TiVo and its competitors reach critical mass, the marketers pulled the rest of their dollars from TV advertising with the exception of a presence in a few major televised events, such as the Super Bowl and major awards shows, for which they spend a small fortune. The cost of 30 seconds of time during the Super Bowl is approaching $8m in 2017.

On the other hand infomercials have become the norm, appreciated by consumers for their high production values and liberal use of celebrities. Cindy Crawford and Chuck Norris still look too great to be real. And because they seem so forthright and without fault, they’ll be selling something you might actually want!

Following new rulings on disclosure, shows like The Apprentice that showcase brands have been classified by the FCC as infomercials and appear on specialty networks sandwiched between knives and tummy tuckers. Can’t get enough of those Norris gizmos.

Samsung, Motorola, Nokia, Dokomo, and Apple battle it out to be the superpower of strange-looking and difficult to choose mobile devices, each offering an array of functionality and content in sleek and Razr-like packages, so small they fit in your ear or a tooth or inside your skin.

The cellular “service” (a word loosely used) providers have become monsters, many merging with other, often smaller providers—film and game studios are becoming one now—to ensure that they have a hold on anything unique to offer to their subscribers, most of whom have opted out of service contracts as they realized it was they, the consumers, who had real say.

Almost half of the population has created a bit of content on his or her computer. It could be a blog, podcast, home reality show or movie or cartoon strip (one we like is www.disisdad.com) distributed to friends or enemies or Romans, and it’s bound to be sponsored by a brand keenly interested in his or her likeminded network of friends and contacts. The brands, though reaching a small number of people, feel good about their association with these shared-interest groups and are getting individual attention like they never dreamed before.

Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGS) are the most popular leisure activity by far with almost everybody having at least one virtual alter ego that lives the life they wish they had in reality. Within online alternate worlds players consume entertainment and brands without having to go to the trouble of traveling to the store or movie theater (all of which are now videogaming salons).

MMOGS have incorporated social networking sites in the realization that there is little difference between the characters videogame players create for themselves and the profiles MySpace users create, with both reflecting a disenchantment with the real world (which bizarrely is still MTV’s most popular show).

There is a super-league of Icon Brands like Apple, Nike and BMW that touch consumers’ lives in multiple ways, not just as hardware (computers, shoes and cars) but also in the form of their own stores and the content they create.

The Apple Store, Nike Town, and BMW Ultima (launched in 2012) are showcases for the best in design and contemporary culture, each with its own coffee shop and area for their users to create content. The Icon Brands themselves will continue in the tradition of their entertainment experiments (e.g. BMW films) and be providers of content in music and film.

Creativity has earned its rightful place in business as the one element that stops products from becoming commodities. And the most successful corporations have learned (through hiring PUNK authors Mark and Richard) how to rethink the organization so that creativity is employed right from the start and not left to the end, and to the lumbering ad agencies, when it’s too late to make a difference.

All marketing will be PUNK one day, with the exception of a few “traditionalists,” who are left fighting for the chance to create a Budweiser commercial for the next Bowl. To them we wish courage. And please have the person who replaces them call us.

Mark Simmons is the co-author of Punk Marketing: Get Off Your Ass and Join the Revolution.