Chicago, IL
The Leo Burnett brand's "HumanKind" take on social media
One day at Leo Burnet, someone walked up to a small group of us chatting in the hallway...
"If you could present one thing to Social Media Week, what would it be?"
I knew the answer right away, but it didn't have a name yet. It was a presentation I'd been working on with Mindy Cultra from the agency's in-house research group. The first half aimed to reset how marketers think about the nature of social media, with plenty of threads leading back to the Leo Burnett's "HumanKind" positioning and parlance of the time. The second half supported our thinking with data from a first-of-its-kind cross-category custom survey, mapped into a framework the agency called Decision DNA.
As I designed the presentation, nine key points emerged. Listed in succession, they read like a manifesto. Ad agencies loved manifestos at the time. That's why this became "A HumanKind Manifesto for Social Media" as presented at Social Media Week, 2013.
