Craig Davis launches his personal project - BrandKarma - a social media website out to make the world a better place one brand at a time
Publicis Mojo's Australian Chief Creative Officer Craig Davis is out to make the world better - one brand at a time.BrandKarma is the world's first brand-centric social media platform. BrandKarma was founded and personally funded by Davis who developed the idea over months of his after-hours time. He started with two questions in mind: What kind of a world do you want to live in? What kind of a world do you want to leave your kids? The site launched today.
It's
designed to bring together important information about how brands
behave, so that people can easily evaluate and rate them. The goal is
to make brand owners more accountable to all their stakeholders -
Customers, Employees, Suppliers, Investors and the Planet. Its mission is straightforward, "to help everyone make better brand choices and influence brand behavior for good." A beta version of the site was launched this week, with 300 of the world's most powerful brands available for commenting and rating.
Davis - the former Worldwide ECD at JWT and Regional ECD at Saatchi & Saatchi Asia - believes those questions are far too important to leave for governments, regulators, experts and business leaders to answer alone. He felt it was time to bring peoples' voices to the table.
"People understand that their purchase decisions have consequences, and they want to do the right thing - if only they knew where to start," he says.
BrandKarma makes it easy for people to inform themselves, and to share their opinions about brands. Davis' hope is that the community becomes a fierce and fair democracy where good brand behaviour is recognised and rewarded, and where bad behaviour is called out loud and clear. The platform also acknowledges that people increasingly turn to family, friends, colleagues and strangers to help make their choices, more than other sources like news or advertising. It's a bottom-up approach to issues that have mostly been fought - but not won - top-down until now.
"In many ways it's an insanely ambitious project." says Davis. But, as Albert Einstein once said, 'if at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it'."
BrandKarma is already attracting publicity around the world, today featured on Fast Company and Creativity. You can also read more about it on Davis' blog.
Take a look at the intro video, create an account - and start doo'ing good right now.
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Nice one Craig.
I have an obvious question; your site says there is to be no 'content which is false or misleading'.
Does this mean I cannot write 'brand X running shoes are rubbish' because they may not be?
I wondering whether fear of misleading content will cancel out good, robust observations about brands.
Anyway, good luck with it. I laughed when I saw Financial Services - that's really ballsy (and bloody timely). This refreshing category will ensure your site doesn't deteriorate into an online hangout for teenagers going on about iPods.
It's inspiring to see individuals create projects such as this without a brief from 'big business.com'. Love the Intro video.
Fantastic work Craig.
I'd feel more positive about this if it were possible to deselect the 'Spam Me' button when signing up.
That aside, the entire thing is nonsense.
As we can already see, those with an axe to grind will slag off a brand. Those without will stay silent.
I fail to see the difference between this and eOpinions, Amazon or any of the myriad sites which allow one to review a brand.
Except this is aimed at advertising folk. In which case who cares?
Does that mean when I rock up to Mojo for their creative presentations that they will just want to do stuff that is good for the social conscience rather than expensive advertising campaigns?
Client
Well done Craig. Very big idea. Good luck with it.
Genius idea.
Genius.
I agree, nothing new, people have been talking about brands online for years.
What a load of self-indulgent toss.
@8:35PM You can say "brand X running shoes are rubbish" because it's a personal opinion. You probably couldn't say "independent research proves that brand X running shoes are rubbish" unless you actually have that research.
Nice work. I'm signing up.
But I wonder how any Publicis clients would react if they found themselves being slammed on there. Hopefully they'd accept that Craig has the right to have personal opinions and beliefs outside of his career. But some people are way pettier than that.
Well done on Craig for coming up with the idea, developing it using his own money (not a cheap exercise) and now launching it to the world. Best of luck on the world stage.
Wait? Wait a minute.....Karma? Karma is the basis of this site?
I think thats funny.....or it will be....soon.
.....and on the 8th day God created BrandKarma and all was finally right with the world.
Now we know why the latest Nescafé campaign is so rubbish.
The really frightening thing about this is that some innocent journalist is going to quote it as 'on line research' and the self important hollow people who will populate it will drive opinion at the expense of reality.
The creator might even become a guru.
Sign up and you get swamped by emails. very bad karma.
................another scary thing is that comments go up and then disappear. Someone exercising influence perhaps?
Surely if they are OK to go up they are OK to stay up?
It's slightly unfortunate, from an objectivity point of view, that Craig's personally voiced "how to get started" demo includes him typing a comment that reads "Nike makes great sneakers."
Can anyone confirm if Nike are still a Publicis Mojo client?
Can anyone confirm they are Craigs actual hands? Both of them?
easy to talk about, hard to live up to.
Please spare us the obligatory accompanying 'the children are our future speech'. Last year's Caxton ramble was enough. You work in advertising. You flog Coke and booze and cars. Bank the money and enjoy it.
It must have taken a lot of skill and practice at making something out of nothing to get this one up.
I think it's a fucking marvelous idea. Sincerely.
One worth giving a go (but one that probably needs to find a way to work within Facebook and similar sites to get critical momentum).
You anonymous commentators are such a bunch of bitches - in every sense of the word.
Hey Tom, can I have the tissues back when you've finished please.
Er, should we expect an announcement that CD is leaving shortly to persue personal interests and spend more time with his family?
P S Tommy it smells funny..........you're not still oh Tom how could you. You promised me you would stop. If you come home from the office in that condition again you can just piss off
Go the same way as fuel / grocery watch.
@5:21pm. Hahahahahahahahahahahaha.
The last Publicis web project was HoneyShed.com which lost money due to the lack of demand, advertisers and traffic, lets monitor this website to see if it can last.
Huge similarities with BrandKarma and HoneyShed.
Maybe Craig should wait until it's successful.
Is Mojo losing Nike Brand Karma? http://www.campaignbrief.com/nz/2010/03/us-sydney-takes-nike-business.html
Sounds like a load of hot air to me. What punter would spare the time to think about this nonsense when he's trying to feed his family and work his butt off.
Unless the real side of multinational brands is displayed to all and sundry. Then we might have something interesting. But what brand is going to let it's seedy underbelly get exposed?
I think this whole thing is pointless.
Fuck I love this market. People engage arguments without even bundying onto the logic lock. And morals...WTF are morals? All you need are some well placed knives and a few dirty handshakes. Of course this sort of initiative isn't going to go down well here, too many people have forgotten what it's like to get excited about something new, and interesting, and good - unless they can get their name on it (see knives and dirty handshakes above). Work here or OS....hmmm, give me a nanosecond. Taxi!
I suspect we are already mind-bogglingly savvy at knowing what brands are good. I guess it's handy to have somewhere official-like to centralise product complaints. Hang on, aren't some people already doing that on the interwebs.
Another original idea.................................................
perhaps not: http://www.facebook.com/circosbrandkarma
hmmmmmmmmmm