How success is born...artificially

There is a consensus that by 2012 all countries in EU should decrease the number of fatal car accidents on the roads by 50%.

Slovak Republic was one of the lasts to implement new regulations in order to achieve this. We decreased the city speed limit to 50kmh as last but one country in EU, the fines went up significantly, etc.

The new law is valid as of February 1st and couple of days ago the police announced first month results: 60% decrease in accidents y-o-y! Some people say: yes, that is it, finally law and order on the streets! Minority says: ok, ok, that is the initial fear, it will turn a little worser after some time. But almost no one realize (and you can hardly find this in media), that this significant decrease is mostly due to change in statistics: accidents under 3000 euro are not considered as accident anymore and you are not obliged to call the police. The two sides have to arrange it between each other and go with report of accident to the insurance company directly.

So this is it: 60% percent down, significant success! Better don´t ask, how we got there...btw do you know that there are elections in 2 years?

Sticky ideas

According to bestseller of Chip and Dan Heath any succesful idea/campaing/activity should reflect 6 basic rules of SUCCES:

• S hort - not to bother with too much details. Life is fast today.
• U nexpected - surprise or shock. Purple cow.
• C oncrete - in what we try to achieve.
• C redible - support by relevant source, quotation, numbers, survey.
• E motion - you know, 80% are emotions, brain only 20%.
• S tory - aka storytelling, which makes it easier to digest and spread.

If interested in more details check their blog or buy the book.

Does viral appeal to companies?

Most advertising companies do believe in viral.

So do lot of their clients.

Until it comes to the budget.

After presenting the idea and needed investment, there are usualy three ways of answers comming from clients:
A - So expensive? Let´s leave it out...
B - Too expensive! We would go into it but with much lower budget.
C - Good idea. Let´s lower the budget by 10% and go for it.

Of course, the best answer for the ad company is C, however the question is: how to deal with the situation if the answer are only A or B?

If it is a major client worth to risk for, an ad agency might cover (some part) the production cost. Crazy? No, some virals shown on the link below wouldn´t have been executed without this approach.

As already Onassis used to say: if you believe in yourself and aim to get a dream job dare to work for free at the beginning. If you are really good, they will hire you.

List of successful Slovak and Czech viral campaigns.

Rule of success

Friends, colleagues often come to me to tell me about great new business idea they have.

I do believe, that great idea is only 33.3% of success. There are a lot of interesting new business suggestions in business magazines or internet, but is it enough?

I also do believe, that successful implementation is another 33.3% of success. Without having the right team, enough quality funding bringing idea into reality is difficult. But this is still not enough.

And finally I do believe, that endurance to survive the growth or initial troubles in first 1 or 2 years is the last 33.3% of success. Stats are clear 60-70% of businesses fail in first 2 years.

33.3% - 33.3% - 33.3% is success. Idea itself is not enough.