May the farce be with you: The highly anticipated, 2018 Stand-Up Strategist Top 23 Rankings has just been made public, and I am pleased to be a co-founder of this new platform.
Stand-Up Strategist (SUS) is the first rating platform to recognize and celebrate the important role of humor in corporate leadership, strategy and culture. The inaugural, 2018 SUS Top 23 List selects, ranks and applauds the most outstanding April Fools’ Day campaigns from companies around the world. The annual selection culminates in a high-profile awards ceremony event.
Top winners for 2018 include Swiss-based Logitech Business-Speak for BS Detection, US-based Life Storage with Howie the AI Bot, and Australia-based ME Bank’s debut of disposable credit cards. All 23 finalists are ranked on 5 key factors: entertainment value, opportunistic absurdity, quality of execution, strategic relevance and the likely positive impact on internal culture. An explanation of ranking criteria, as well as the full list of finalists and rankings, can be found at www.standupstrategist.com
Core inspiration for SUS was a quote by Albert Einstein: “If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it”. Accordingly, the humorous probing of the absurd through conceiving and executing April Fool’s Day campaigns, enables companies to unleash the creative potential of their staff, connect emotionally with customers, and lay the seed for new, future-shaping, strategic directions.
