The slide

Context: A few days ago I had the chance to participate in a panel discussion on "Creativity in Digital marketing", as part of the Game Changers Conf 2017organised by 24 media and Tsomokos SA in Athens Greece. Here are the thoughts I shared during this interesting panel.

I’m born and raised in Greece. There are two important things to have in mind for most Greeks that impact their behaviour towards travelling. The first one is the Climate and specifically the Greek summer. Like most of the countries of Europe’s South, we all tend to book our annual leaves during summer, which  as you can imagine, we spend them in some Greek island. The second thing is called Greek Family. Unlike many other European countries, the institution of family is very strong (btw This maybe one of the reasons, greeks stood and keep standing in their feet during the recession). The latter point is the reason we spend most of our other holidays, especially X-mas with family or close ones. As such, and if you add the fact that we believe we live in the greatest place on earth, Greeks don’t travel much. And when they happen to travel abroad it would be mostly Europe (Paris, London, Rome, etc) which not significantly different to Greece.

I was, and still am, a living proof of this theory. Besides the fact that I consider myself a frequent traveller for the past 5 years, most of my destinations were in Europe for business or pleasure.

Last xmas was the first time i went somewhere out of the western world. I never had the desire to do so, it was just some good friends that convinced me to go the extra mile and travel a place almost 14hours far by airplane: Colombia.

It proved as one of my life’s most enlightening experiences for one reason: it changed, it widened to be more specific, the view of what we call “World”. Not in the aspect of exploration, but more in the sense of redefining who i am, and where i stand in this world. We grow up as individuals perceiving ourselves in the world’s center. This very fact is the root of many things like prejudice, bigotry, racism, and more.

Quoting Mark Twain:

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” 

Travel as far as you can, not just to see new places, but to be a better version of who you are.

This #theslide is dedicated to another crazy project we started at isobar & iProspect in Greece after building a sunglasses business from scratch.

This time the idea came from the insight that a company of 80, spends annually almost 50.000€ in coffee.

The most rational decision is do what most organisations do. Outsource this job to a certain coffee chain (Starbucks, Costa Coffee or Everest in Greece) to set up shop inhouse and offer less expensive and more convenient service to employees with no hustle.

But we saw an opportunity there. We wanted to see how the FnB industry works from the inside. We figured out that more than 40% of our clients somehow use FnB as a distribution channel, so it does makes sense to better understand how this channel works. Actually a few months earlier we ve been in the process of setting up a virtual burgers & Snacks store for Philadephia Mondelez. Take a look at the video case:

Our operations team, which is not your usual Ops department, started exploring the industry, through meeting with suppliers, visiting expos, negotiating with vendors and business planning. 3 months later we knew almost everything one needs to know to start a coffee shop. But, really, it wasn't about the coffee shop. We understood how any FnB business works. In the future we will be so much more confident understanding the challenges some of our clients face. And this is the most important thing that came out of this project.

Our coffee shop is unlike any other of its kind. It's made for the people, by the people and is funded by them. We couldn't offer free coffee, but we didn't want to make a Peny for profit, Just break even.

So how does this work? As people buy more coffee, the price gets down. Every 3 months we review the coffee shop's PnL, adjusting the rates to make sure we make no profit.

With this in mind, the "Side Project" coffee shop was born. With products of the highest quality (our coffee is 85% robusta 😜) the side project has now more than 50 SKUs and the business has been running for the past 3.5 months.

The brand identity was obviously developed by us and we are all so proud about it.

Since the business started running, we got even more creative. We used the side Project to motivate people to start their day earlier. Every day from 09.00 to 09.30 there's free coffee for everyone. That didn't have the results we expected. We should have thought of it: we are in the ad industry.

We are now trying something new. Working with Nestle ice cream brands (now Froneri) for the past few years, we decided to add Nestle ice cream in our menu. A while after, we decided to start an experiment to figure out if a consumer insight about ice cream consumption is actually true.

Ice cream consumption is one the most viral things happening in the physical world. When you see someone eating an ice cream you suddenly get a viral indulgence, and you want one for yourself. This is something we learned on a discussion a few years back from Petros Zissou, a former client now Global innovation Manager at Nestle in California.

Beginning last week we started an internal promo, where if you are the first one buying an ice cream for this day, you get it for free. We want to see if the ice cream consumption will actually rise, seeing at least one individual daily eating an ice cream.

We've no idea what's the next thing we are trying as part of this project. We do have some things in mind for the future that are a bit more complicated. The most important one is getting the coffee shop public in the neighbourhood through online delivery.

The idea behind it that the more the revenue from external orders the lower the prices for the people until it gets completely free. We would then expand our knowledge on how the booming industry of online delivery works, and also how a local business can thrive through the use of location based advertising, and (why not?) leaflets. It a harder one to try since it will get more of our collective energy to make it work, but hey, we do have amazing people on board.

This is all part of a wider effort to transform ourselves from a ad agency, to a valuable business partner for our clients, understanding the challenges they face, being in their shoes, and looking at the big picture with every given opportunity. As part of this process we are changing the way we work, our structure, the people we are getting on board, as well as the very core of our service offering to become a valuable partner for the digital economy.

Credits:

This is not my idea. This is the outcome the collective creativity and work of the people of isobar and iProspect in Greece. But there are certain people that had an important role in this project.

Costas Mantziaris. isobar & iProspect CEO and my partner in crime for the past 12 years, with whom together we've been day dreaming since the first day we met.

John Panagiotou who within isobar iProspect redefines every day what the role of COO actually stands for.

Popi Kesanli who built this business from nada.

Marianthi Raftopoulou & Elisa Pardalidi who brilliantly elevated this project by coming up & designing its brand identity.

Maritina Laskaridou for designing these slides which are part of a presentation we delivered with Costas at this year’s annual isobar Global Summit.

John Violantzis our beloved barista who's industry knowledge helped us realise this project.

The 50th (Hurrayyy) slide is part of one of the most exciting keynotes we were asked to deliver with my partner Costas for #Atcomnext conference in Athens. We chose to discuss the future of AI, and the dangers and opportunities that rise with it. Since we are not AI experts we chose to summarise an article of Tim Urban from waitbutwhy.com (Part 1, Part 2) called the AI Revolution. 

The reason we chose to discuss AI, is that we are freaking scared of on what might happen in the next 30 years, if we fuck up as a species. I won’t tell you the whole story, just put some time on reading this article. It took me 3 days.

PS. For those of you who are serious about reading this article, Tim Urban is one of the greatest examples on what we call popular science. He gets down to the bottom of a subject absorbing any relevant knowledge and then puts a summary in words and images, in a way that even my mom can get what he says. This is why, when Elon Musk wanted to explain to the rest of humanity that the future of cars is electric he asked him to spend a few days with him at Tesla HQ and write about it. here’s the article.   

The 46th #theslide is dedicated to our vision with my partner Costas on where we see things going in our business.

Ever since we started mindworks and then isobar & iProspect, there has been an ongoing discussion between us, about all the things we need to change in our business to stay relevant with the market’ needs.

The past 12 years, have been an ongoing search for the new, the different. And it is this quest that has driven change in our operating model, our service offering, our people and our culture.

All these little decisions, have gradually transformed us from a Search Marketing agency to a full service communication agency and a leading Performance marketing shop that is isobar and iProspect today.

Which brings us to now. What’s next? Well, our vision for the years to come is:

“To close the distance from our clients’ real business and transform ourselves from an ad agency to a valuable business partner”.

Let’s be honest, the truth is that agencies (and any kind of specialist) have a completely distorted view of a client’s reality. This starts from the belief that advertising (or fill in your area of expertise here) is THE most important thing for the client’s business objectives. And this is clearly not the case.

To get out of this bubble, we decided to create a new product from scratch and actually go through the entire business cycle. Not because product development will be a new revenue source, although it may prove to be one, but because this whole process will, and actually already has, make us a bit wiser.

So, we created a new sunglasses brand. And by that I don’t mean we just designed a logo or a brand identity. We actually created a brand from scratch.

We did almost everything on our own. We partnered with ID Sourcing, an experienced partner in sourcing stuff in huge quantities and with them, we created a business out of nothing. From market research, to business planning, to product design and sampling, to production, to logistics, to placement, to pricing, to selling. The whole f*cking 4Ps and beyond.

And let me tell you, it was one of the most enlightening experiences we ever had as an agency. Looking at the big picture was such a reality check.

In this 10 month go-to-market project, can you guess how much time did we actually spend for “advertising”? Only two (2) f*cking weeks.🤘🏼 Yeap! You’ve read correctly! We spent months on setting up the business, designing the actual product, waiting for the samples, changing things we didn’t like, waiting for the samples, changing things we didn’t like, waiting for the samples…

A few more words about the business.

We decided to enter the sunglasses business for a reason: it’s an industry with ridiculously high profit margins, with two conglomerates controlling a big part of the global marketshare.

This is why we took up the challenge of creating sunglasses of unparalleled quality, at a reasonable price.

This is why we created WE ARE EYES. To make high quality sunglasses accessible to everyone.

In order to succeed, we had to cut off any intermediate between us and the consumer. We decided to sell directly to the consumer by being an e-commerce only brand and, at least for the time being, we kindly refuse any offers from potential resellers.

Along with our partner, ID-Sourcing, we have decided to use Greece as a test market before ultimately releasing our products all over the world. And we may have started small with only 18 SKUs, but hey… this is only the beginning of an exciting journey.

A very special thanks goes to Kleanthis Nikolaidis the Chief Executive of ID Sourcing for trusting isobar and making this partnership real. And of course the isobar team, Katerina Yiannouli, Marianthi Raftopoulou, Stelios Nikolakakis and John Makridis for working hard all this time to make this happen. (@Costas Mantziaris you are more like an idea than a team member).