Bring People Together and Give them Something To Do

There is a line from Henry Jenkins' response to my transmedia planning post that I use in nearly all of my presentations.

[Mark uses it too, which makes sense.]

You can see it as a slide in Be Nice or Leave.

It goes like this:

The key is to produce something that both pulls people together and gives them something to do.

I think this is probably the key to unlocking the awesome, and the biggest win for any kind of brand related action.

We are social creatures - I'm sure you all agree - but we need reasons to be social.

I suspect this is why we have sports and religions - we need to have reasons to congregate, and something to do when we all get there.

The true function of such things is almost certainly phatic and cultural and that.

This T-Mobile spot [which goes live today] from Saatchi London could have used the line as the proposition in their brief - and it seems to have turned out beautifully.