Way Out Where

… but I couldn’t help myself. Create your own over here

Integration of digital has always been a hot topic, from how you structure your agency teams to what role digital should play in advertising. In Campaign last month, they even ran an article on DDB Latina’s new creative “trios”, including a digital specialist alongside traditional art directors and copywriters. My favourite part is a small comment at the end by Steve Vranakis:

“… it’s the principle behind it that counts, not the trio …”

And of course he’s right. It’s the principle behind what you’re trying to do that is important, not necessarily how you get there. And I think 2010 is going to be the year of understanding the principles of digital.

Russell Davies wrote in UK Wired last month about the transparency that technology has given us, and how this has changed our lives. He was talking with reference to Government and Government data, but apply it to brands and business and it still holds true: what the internet has really given us is transparency. And what this results in is what Alan Wolk refers to as The Real Digital Revolution.

Advertising can no longer clever language and use flashy imagery to mask a poorly designed product or service. That’s because at its core, Web 2.0/Social Media/Conversational Media (your choice) are word-of-mouth recommendations that have been transcribed and made searchable. The result is that all of a products faults are instantly visible to anyone with an internet connection and the ability to use Google

And this is what the internet is, and this is how it changes communications. It forces people to be transparent. And you can’t just choose to try a little on the side and see if you like it. You can spend as much money as you like on advertising your brilliant customer service, but Google will tell me pretty much instantly if this is true or not. It’s Google as Planet-Sized Bullshit Detector.

I think transparency is the real principle of digital. And I think switched on people have understood this for a while, and this year I think we’ll see more people understanding this and better, more effective work being produced as a result of it.

Now, if you’re still interested, a few other themes I think you’ll be seeing this year:

There may be a wider understanding of the power of digital to affect business rather than just communications. Digital agencies will need to have a greater understanding of business strategy and ICT strategy. Agencies that can understand business strategy, technology AND provide cutting edge creative will be able to work for clients across more than just marketing, which will give them a distinct advantage. Perhaps Sapient’s (relatively) recent acquisition of Nitro lends a little credence to this theory.

Despite lots of other very clever people saying the opposite, I’m going to stick my neck out and say that 2010 will continue to be a year of iPhone dominance and not the year of the Google Phone. Based around the idea that the main reason to get a smart phone is the applications you can then put on it, and there is nothing slicker than Apple’s App Store. Note I didn’t say cheaper or even bigger. Just as iTunes is to me the home for purchasing digital music, the App Store will be the place to purchase apps, and therefore interest in the iPhone will continue to grow. In order to break it’s dominance, you need to build a better surrounding infrastructure as well as a better product.

Lots more devices will have internet connections - fridges, seat backs in planes, coffee tables, whatever. The proliferation of these devices will bring a much sharper focus onto interface design. Unlike browser-based design, there are no heuristic shortcuts available, no common way of interacting with the interface. Effectively, as yet, there are no defined rules. This makes it an exciting space and you’ll see some fantastic innovation alongside a lot of horrible failure as people establish these rules.

Finally, of course, don’t expect all that much to change. We are at heart a species that fears change, and this will mean you should probably expect to see a lot of what you saw last year, and probably the year before that too.

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, has weighed in on the issue of crowdsourcing, a current hot topic doing the agency rounds ever since Victor & Spoils launched and Pepperami decided they were going to dump their ad agency and crowdsource a creative solution.

What Jimmy says is, I think, quite brilliant:

“In the consumer space, people aren’t going to do it for strategic business reasons, they’re going to do it because it’s fun.”

As clever as Victor & Spoils like to think they are, their approach does rather feel like auditioning freelancers and giving the gig to the best one. It doesn’t really have a collaborative feel to it in the same way as, say, editing a Wikipedia page does. The same with the Pepperami experiment. These people call it crowdsourcing because it’s a buzzword that the marketing press are currently into and they know they’ll get coverage. But their projects naturally exclude the majority of consumers, being as they are openly targeted at design and creative professionals. Who, whatever you might think, are not the majority.

Crowdsourcing should allow anyone to get involved. MyStarbucksIdea was a great example of crowdsourcing: open to all, and produced genuinely useful ideas submitted by genuine Starbucks consumers. Same for Walkers Crisps, which again allowed anyone to take part. And for that very same reason, Victor & Spoils isn’t really crowdsourcing at all. It is a great way of getting freelance creative teams to submit their ideas for free and then only pay for the very best of them. But that is surely something that freelance creative teams won’t be happy about for very long.

Crowdsourcing is a great idea, and I think there is incredible potential, particularly around how a brand engages with their consumers; it’s taking new ideas and using them in new ways. What Pepperami did was use this idea of “crowdsourcing” to help produce an old-school campaign. You’re still going to get a 30 second ad spot, it’s just written by a freelance creative. Honestly - how is this different to using a variety of freelancers?

But using the idea of crowdsourcing to connect directly with your consumers, to involve them in a deeper level with your brand, and have them actually help to create output they’ll then later consume themselves, well, that’s sorta cool, right?

Since we got back off of holiday about 2 weeks ago, I’ve found that every morning I’ve been about 2 minutes late for the train. It had begun to get quite annoying, as it had got to the point that I was missing trains, or having to race like mad up the stairs to the platform. Not being much of a morning person, my routine was always timed to give me the longest possible time in bed without having to rush (rushing makes my mornings significantly worse). I had always been pretty good at timing it perfectly, but since getting back off holiday, I always seemed to be a couple of minutes out. I would miss the train by 20 seconds, or find myself diving through the train doors at the last minute.

At first I put it down to the jetlag, and then to the fact that I just hadn’t quite got back into the swing of things; holiday blues. Today, I finally worked out what it actually was.

My watch was 2 minutes slow.

When we landed back at Heathrow, I set my watch time back to GMT. When we got back to the flat, I reset the radio and oven clocks (as both were turned off whilst we were away) from my watch. The whole house was 2 minutes slow, and today I just happened to be listening to the headlines at 8am when I looked at my watch, showing 7.58am.

Given that - despite occassional claims to the contrary - I’m not a complete idiot, what interested me most is why I hadn’t noticed before. It was so easy to just assume that time was an absolute. What my watch said was the time WAS the time, no questions asked. And this is true of so many things. We assume they just ARE.

I think one of the tricks to having good ideas is to be able to move out of viewing the world as absolutes; to not be tricked and blinded by the obvious.After all, how often have you heard someone utter the phrase “it was just staring me right in the face …”

So first of all, I read this article, and thought “wow, you’re an idiot”. It’s a few days later now, and I still don’t understand why flat structures and direct access to the CEO means digital agencies can’t lead, and are somehow inferior to traditional agencies.

I thought we all decided that there wasn’t much of a difference any more anyway.

But then I read The Ad Contrarian, who seemed real angry about a bunch of stuff, but principally how much toss digital agencies seem to speak, and then I got to thinking that, in all fairness, if someone came to me and said “Building a conversation strategy will allow us to visually see our complete marketing ecosystem” I’d end up being pretty angry about it too, although possibly less witty with my responses.

And then I saw this great YouTube video that reminded me of a few consultants I’ve met over

And then I realised why Ad Contrarian was so angry, because so many people pertaining to be “digital experts” talk such an amazing amount of absolute rubbish that quite literally anyone could say. And expect kudos for saying it.
This isn’t good for the digital industry, because crap like that gives food to the people who want to claim it’s not mature, it’s not business focussed, it’s not capable of delivering proper results. I don’t want to talk about visually seeing anything, but what I would like to comment on is one of the comments made by Tom Wanek at the bottom of another Ad Contrarian article:

I’m alarmed at the number of small business owners who struggle with foundational marketing principles. For example, the idea of speaking to the customer’s felt need is a foreign concept to most. Social media won’t help if your message is irrelevant. Now here’s another point to consider: With so much of social media being irrelevant noise, it’s becoming much more difficult to cut through the clutter, making it more critical than ever that marketers learn to communicate clearly and with power

Tom, social media (digital, the internet, whatever) isn’t meant to broadcast irrelevant messages. It’s meant to help you find what message is relevant. That’s what people mean when they talk about the power of conversation - it allows you to have individual, customised, one-to-one relationships with your consumers. Which means a two-way relationship, and not just thinking in terms of broadcasting messages to your consumer. Two-way conversations mean you listen as well as speak.

Digital continues to have a huge impact upon business. In many ways it completely changes the nature of how businesses communicate, and this is principally because it forces business communication to be more human. Humans communicate through conversation, through two-way dialogue and through ideas of honesty and trust. Sorry to sound all naive and hippy-like there, but it’s true, and it’s what business needs to learn. All these “social media fail” stories? They’re businesses breaking bonds of trust and honesty, and being outed in a very public arena for being shitsticks.

This is the power of digital. Not “First, by socializing all media, the engagement experience is cyclical and ongoing. Second, by identifying conversation groups (social graphs) and tapping directly into them and then connecting them together, the long tail of niche market segments become your mass or ‘mainstream’ media play.”

That’s just bullshit bingo, and the more we speak like that, the harder it is to convince the doubters that we have anything interesting or relevant to say. So please, can we stop?

Thanks

Our clients ask us quite a lot about Social Media, and what their strategy should be to deal with it. My standard answer seems to illicit quite a lot of confusion - “be yourself”. I’m not sure why, perhaps because “being yourself” is something that is quite foreign to many large companies. But also, I think it’s because people still regard digital as something new, different and scary. When of course it isn’t. The internet is just a technology that allows communication on a scale and speed that has never been seen before. But it’s still people communicating.

It’s like record companies complaining about music piracy and how the internet will kill music. It’s not going to kill music. It’s not even going to kill record labels (which is not the same thing as music incidently), given that  a recent study in Denmark showed that those who are most likely to pirate music are also most likely to purchase it online. And in fact, today a new study was published in the British media (please excuse the link to The Daily Mail) backing the same statement. And anyway, sharing music with each other is nothing new. In fact, being able to share music you love is sort of fundamental, right? It’s just people communicating.

My favourite band in the world is The Pixies. I first heard Doolittle on my friend’s battered tape player back in 1992 on, you guessed it, a taped copy of the original album. Taped. Copied. Pirated.

I now own every single album The Pixies made. I own B-side collections, best-off compilations, rare releases of the Purple Tapes demos, a live DVD and even a DVD of them playing Newport Folk Festival. I’ve purchased all of these off the back of one pirated cassette tape that I played over and again until the tape wore out. I even own Bam Thowk for fuck’s sake.

The point is, of course, that pirating music isn’t actually anything new. In fact, it is all to do with the fundamental human desire to share things you like with people you like. And the internet makes it easier to share things than ever before. This is a good thing. If we share your product with someone else, they’re more likely to buy it in the future. This is what you as a corporation want right?

And of course this is how it’s always worked. My friend plays me music they like. I like it. I listen to it. Eventually I might buy it. Funnily enough there is no evidence to suggest that listening to a pirated copy of music actually then stops me buying the real thing. There’s no corrolation there.

So the internet is just people being people. And this is what I mean when I tell clients to be themselves. Find the people who are passionate about your organisation and get them talking to other people. Do it yourselves. I mean, if you’re not passionate about your own organisation, surely there’s a problem there.

I meet people who love the company they work for, genuinely talented passionate people who can talk for hours about what they do and where they do it, because they’re interested in it. Yet, they’re asking me for a “social media strategy” as if I have the secret recipe for instant internet success. Sorry, but there isn’t one. Just do what you’re doing already. Passionate people are interesting. Interesting people write interesting stories. Interesting stories spread.

Amelia Torode has a great post from her work with the IPA Social initiative. Her point is simple: “technology changes, people don’t”, and I like it because it expands on the idea of exactly why it is that people use social media. One of her main points is around Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and how social media can help to fulfil them. And as she points out, Maslow defined his hierarchy around 1934. There is nothing new here.

Or as Paul Graham said at iMedia earlier in the year - “social media is just people chatting”.

(picture in this post from birgerking’s flickr feed, reproduced under a creative commons licence)

In a “bid to find tweets that are ahead”, The Golden Twits awards have been launched by The Drum magazine to try and find the best tweeters in the Galaxy, and they’ve very kindly asked me to be one of the judges on the panel.

As with anything you’re asked to judge, it’s a strangely humbling experience, full of “hmmm, am I really qualified to judge this?” and “wow, they got that guy to be a judge too”. Anyway, it’s all very exciting, and obviously you should all enter. The official press release is below:

A new award scheme is to be launched for users of Twitter – the micro-blogging site many decry as a useless, waste of time.

Despite such sentiment the site has become a social media phenomenon – from a standing start in 2007, it is expected to top 18m users by the end of this year.

And the fact that it can now support an award scheme is testimony to the fact that it is entering the media mainstream.

Within seconds of the awards being announced on Twitter, the event attracted dozens of entries into categories that includes Best Celebrity, Corporate and Bizarre Tweets.Mindful of problems acceptance speeches at events such as the Oscars, organisers will insist that any winners must keep their acceptance speeches to 140 characters – a rule which applies to Tweeting itself.Judges for the event include leading new media figures such as:

• Ashley Stockwell - Virgin Media
• Syd Nadim – Clock
• Peter Abraham – Econsultancy
• Trevor Chambers - Start Creative
• Rowan Heasley - Naked Penguin Boy
• Mat Morrison - Porter Novelli
• Adam Sefton - Reading Room

The entry deadline for The Golden Twits is October 22 and the ceremony will be held at Fabric, London in November.

The organisation behind the Golden Twits is media and marketing magazine The Drum. In a 140 character statement its publisher Gordon Young said, “The awards will recognise the fact that, despite the character limit, Twitter is being used by people in increasingly sophisticated ways.”

… that in my last post I refered to myself as a planner. Well, it’s in my job title I guess. I’m not sure how important it is to have a job title though. I guess it must make some people more comfortable to know which box I’m in.

Either or, I hope you still let me play with the crayons from time to time.

First up, the fact that comments on a YouTube video are often funnier than the video itself. Take this piece of succinct genius from the comments on the latest Diet Coke ad (which truly is awful)

Revengeonseattle (48 minutes ago)

The people who made this ad made the world worse. 

Now, I’m not sure what problem this person has with Seattle, or indeed how their revenge has been taken on the place, but what is for sure is that s/he has one excellent point.Terrible ad, and the world is now actually worse because of it. The sheer grandioseness of the statement made me laugh anyway. And then I found myself in a bit of a black mood because, well, no-one likes watching stuff that is actually making the world worse.

Until I read that the next England game is available live online, and you can pay to stream it direct to your desktop. Which sorta made me smile in a ooo-I-wonder-if-this-is-the-future sort of a way. And then I read Rio Ferdinand’s comments on it:

“I read that online advertising has taken over from TV, so that tells you something about where it’s going in terms of the digital world,” he told BBC Sport.

“So I’m sure it’ll be the way forward and in the future it’ll probably be the reality. I think it’s a good way to gauge how many people are interested.”

And the fact that Rio has been researching the world of online advertising really made me smile. His next UK Gangsta flick will hopefully be launched exclusively through his MySpace page.

Which took me, in a strange and roundabout-via-twitter way, to The Ideas Brothers and their “A novel written by a planner” post, which made me laugh so much I want to say “That was funny Ideas Brothers. Here, have a LOL”.

‘The Wedding Murder Code’ is so titled because according to research, books with ‘Wedding’, ‘Murder’ or ‘Code’ in the title are more likely to be bestsellers.

Anyway, it nicely sums up a certain view of the function planning plays, and probably explains why it’s copywriters who write novels, and planners who write the quasi-science I-wish-I-was-Malcolm-Gladwell books with neon covers.

And, ending in a nice circular way, one of the comments to the post reads

Anonymous | May 21st 2009 at 9.57pm

why is it that all planners are fucking morons?

Anonymous, I really don’t know, but it’s certainly funnier to create a whole fake book about it than just call us names, however moronic we may be. Still, your comment made me laugh as well. So well done. Here, you can have a LOL too.

See, when I was 12, our school discos consisted of standing awkwardly against the far wall, listening to some scratched 12″ of Bananarama and drinking a cup of warm, flat cider that Craig had stolen from his parents.

Not so these guys, who get to watch the genius of The Scribbles and their 12-year-old Ukelele-playing lead singer

Just seems a shame he’s too young to enjoy the groupies …