Leon Orsmond, the Disruptivator at Osmosis, is here to speak about viral strategies and straight off the bat, he's not the usual kind of speaker. He immediately asks everyone to close their laptops (voluntarily) because he appreciates direction attention and a real connection with his audience.
He's an ex creative director. He's now a guerilla marketer with a message, and on a mission to tell it the way he sees it. He's tired of LSMs, tired of advertising being a one-way monologue that insults your intelligence. He calls people 'people', not consumers.
Osmosis believes banner ads are simply ad agencies' solutions to making money on the internet. But they're hopeless, terrible and annoying.
He loves MXit. Loves mobile. Believes that 'millennials' aren't watching TV anymore and don't answer their phones for three days if they don't feel like it. Leon despises old-school, floundering media and firmly believes that the marketing and advertising industry in general is in a severe state of denial.
At this point, he hasn't even started his Powerpoint presentation yet. He mentions that it'll come on just now. No rush. He's asking users to interact with him, to answer his questions, to have some emotion about all this stuff we've been talking about for the last two days.
The bloggers are doing it. People are creating their own content. We're about to see content that no agency could conceive, says Leon. And the Powerpoint begins ...
Leon wants all mainstream media to Jump the Shark - reach a point where there is no turning back, and where the end of existence for that particular entity begins.
By the way, the presentation is black text on a yellow background. Now it's bright purple. This presentation is not made for drifting off or daydreaming. A huge word fills the screen: Futzing. This is endless passing of time surfing the net, checking Facebook, reading Twitter, receiving emails from friends and checking out links they've suggested. Leon loves futzing and wants us to do it more. Not sure that's possible for some of us, Leon :)
We live in a snack culture. We have a 3 or 4 second snack when checking an SMS. At the office, you could be watching a TV monitor with one eye, scanning your email with the other and listening to a colleague talking about their weekend. We're consuming, consuming, consuming.
We need to shoot the puppy. Make the difficult decision. Do the unthinkable. And Leon means it, as he walks through the delegates instead of just standing at the front. He really wants us to feel the essence of what he's trying to get across. It's time to disrupt the normal. We need to irrevocably change the course by rupturing with convention radically.
But how? Here are some examples:
