Way Out Where

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book The Black Swan, talks of large, unpredictable events, and how these events are ones that have the most consequence on the world around us. Events of consequence are almost impossible to identify in advance, seemingly obvious only in retrospect. If events that have the most impact are almost impossible to identify in advance, they become impossible to plan for. Check Wikipedia for a better introduction to the subject.

It’s interesting in terms of communication, because so often the success or otherwise of a campaign is due to means beyond our control, particularly in pure digital, where unexpected coverage from other media can boost success. Our most-visited site a few years ago was one for Crime Stoppers, which benefitted rather heavily from a front page story in The Sun. It was a great site, but the event that made its success was its unexpected, unpredictable appearance on the front cover of a paper with a circulation of 3m+. That site was one of the ones reviewed and voted for when Reading Room was voted Digital Marketing Agency of the Year for 2007 (Impact Awards). It’s not that I think we don’t deserve it, but it’s interesting how success in this case (and I’m sure many others) was, to an extent, outside of our control.

The book goes on to talk about how to profit best from these Black Swans, and, if you’ll excuse the gross over-generalisation, for the most part this is down to preparation. Be ready for when you are witness to a Black Swan, and you can better take advantage of it. And I think social media provides us with a toolkit to do just this.

Let’s look at an example. Let’s think of something remarkably unlikely to happen. Say, a plane landing on the Hudson river, New York. Fairly outlandish idea. At least it was until the 15th January this year, when a US Airways Airbus A380 did exactly that (apparently due to another large aquatic bird, the Canadian Goose).

Janice Krums, on holiday from Florida, happened to be on a ferry in the area that went out to rescue the survivors of the crash. He was there well ahead of the mainstream media, and he happened to have an iPhone and a Twitter account, with TwitPic, which allowed him to share photos via Twitter. This was his photo

It was almost certainly the first picture of the scene. I think it’s a fantastic photo. 30 minutes after posting this picture, Mr Krums was being interviewed by MSNBC. The photo of TwitPic has almost 360,000 views. He’s now followed by 3,940 people on Twitter (I have read that pre-photo, he was followed by 200). People are, at least for now, interested in what he has to say. The Black Swan event has led to his popularity increasing, and his influence growing.

But of course, this is only possible because he had the right toolkit to get his photograph and thoughts to the rest of the world. There was more than one person on that ferry. Janice Krums was just the only one with access to the right tools.

So if we want to try and take advantage of our proximity to Black Swans, what do we need? When Alex Iskold wrote about the Attention Economy, a key part of this was the relevancy of the information you were broadcasting. People are interested in you and your thoughts/pictures/ideas whilst they are relevant, and when they no longer are, don’t expect them to stick around.

In this example, relevancy is about speed. You as an individual with your camera phone are relevant only until the mainstream media gets to the event, so to stay relevant, you need to be able to act quickly. And of course, this is what digital lets us do - write, photograph, publish and broadcast quickly.

My initial ideas are below, but I welcome thoughts for things I’ve no doubt forgotten.

1) A device to capture the event. A camera phone is clearly best for this, as it’s something you’ll likely always have on your person. Most phones now have a camera of reasonable quality, and many also provide video capacity too. Small, easy-to-use video cameras (such as The Flip) would be suitable too, although that don’t also provide internet access, which brings us to …

2) A device to get the event online. No point having a great photo that no-one else will see until you get home. The great joy of modern mobile phones is of course they’re always connected to the internet. For iPhones, Blackberrys and other smartphones, internet connectivity is part of the package. A small netbook with 3G card would suffice, but really the mobile phone gives you both the speed and ease of having a single device that can both capture and communicate the event.

3) Somewhere to broadcast to. There are so many sites out there that are possibilities here, from YouTube to Flickr to Facebook, but I actually think that Twitter is perfect. Twitter is built around short, regular communications, and it is the fact that they are regular that makes it perfect. If people regularly update Twitter, then people are more likely to regularly check Twitter. Twitter also has the largest sets of alarms and notifications to update you when someone you’re following sends a new tweet. In short, it’s great because people check it a lot. They’re more likely to find your event whilst it’s still relevant.

Of course, offering users a choice of where they can consume your content is only a good thing, and most mobile devices offer uploads to a variety of social media sites, and uploading to Facebook and Flickr is only going to increase the visibility of what you’re talking about.

Linking mobile devices with internet publishing creates an army of citizen journalists to report on these events. But it does more than that - the ability to react quickly around unexpected events is almost certainly one of benefit to the individual. And the digital world has given us a set of tools to help us do just this.

It’s interesting to think whether or not brands can benefit from this - either from being the “individual” with the tools, allowing them to communicate rare events to their consumers at greater speed, or from being the monitors of these events. Does monitoring social media for publication of Black Swan events aid the brand? Can they identify new trends or ideas quicker than competitors in this way?

An interesting piece from Dan Sabbagh at the Times on new technologies to allow you to run targeted advertising on television. Quite apart from the mild digs towards digital advertising, in particular Google paid search, I think there is a core problem with what he is saying, and that is soon people won’t need to watch advertising any more.

The main problem with his arguement is that technologies such as Sky+ will eventually render advertising obsolete. People watch advertising because the adverts are placed between the programmes that they want to watch. They watch because they have to, not because they want to; despite myths perpetuated to allow advertisers to feel culturally relevant, people do not watch ads for fun. They are not the end destination.

So as more people get Sky+, more people will realise that they don’t need to watch the advertising at all. Sky+ isn’t particularly cheap, so I imagine certain demographics will be the first to be untouchable by TV advertising. Those with money to pay for it, and with an early-adoptor attitude to make the initial leap that says “I don’t NEED to watch these ads”, will be the first to go. And then slowly it’ll spread, until eventually, I expect that they’ll be just a small core demographic left that can’t afford the technology or don’t want to understand it. Of course, even this will go eventually, but in the meantime I guess we’ll be seeing a lot more of Daz’s Doorstep Challenge.

I’ve just ordered a shed load of stuff from Moo.com (this is what happens when I upgrade my Flickr account and have more space for photos!) and it just reminded me what an unbelievably great site it is.

They’ve actually created an application which is fun to use. Possibly the only thing in the world where the ordering process leaves you feeling better than when you started.

They’ve made ordering and getting the product fun.

They’ve made ordering and getting the product part of the product itself.

Genius.

Last night we checked out Shunt - a new club, calling itself a “lounge and theatre company”.

Going in is slightly surreal - a small door inside London Bridge station opens out into a vast cavern (there is something of the Plaform 9 3/4 about it) and you follow luminous lights up to the main stage and bar area.

Getting served at the bar was a serious pain after a while but its an interesting and fun use of the space.

A few more photos on my flickr page

The New York Times has removed almost all of its content from subscription-only. People tell me that the Wall Street Journal will soon do the same. In Chris Anderson’s recent article for Wired magazine, he names advertising as one of the 8 business models that will allow end users free content. All hail the ad-funded business model.

I have a nagging problem with this though - online advertising doesn’t work. And if it doesn’t work, people will eventually refuse to pay for it. If no-one’s willing to pay for it, then no model exists.

Its generally accepted that current click-through rates on banner advertising is 0.2%. Yep, for every 1,000 impressions, you get 2 people clicking through to the site. Lets say you’re paying £20/CPM - this gives you a return of £10 per person. Just to visit your site.

Some people have said that the downturn in banner effectiveness is a recent thing, and this is what I’d always assumed. Perhaps clients just hadn’t noticed yet. Perhaps with better creative execution, click-throughs might go up again. However, this article from 2000 suggests that in mid 2000, click-rates were already at 0.3-0.5%. That’s almost 8 years ago. Technology and the creative execution of online ads have changed a lot in 8 years. And we’ve not seen any great up-turn in clicks.

The latest potential “savior” for banners seemed to be targeting - media owners such as Facebook were going to be able to offer you incredibly powerful, micro-targeted advertising. And again, at first it sounded convincing. However, this study on who clicks on banner ads (amusingly enough undertaken by a group of media agencies) revealed that 6% of web users are responsible for over 50% of all clicks on banner ads. From ReadWriteWeb:

Those people who click heavily have a number of other characteristics of note. “Heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000,” the study said, and they “are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites – a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers.”

So, as long as you want to target these users, then it would seem that banner advertising is perfect for your needs. Otherwise, perhaps not so good.

People have also talked about banners building brand awareness, of which I couldn’t find a single study to prove or disprove either way. It would be interesting to see the results of such a study, although I have to say my gut feel is that banners wouldn’t and don’t build brand awareness. Besides which, in order to build awareness, the user still needs to see the banner in question. Which the phenomenon of “banner blindness” seems to suggest happens less and less. Again, this is not a new thing - it was defined in 1998, and updated studies suggest that it is on the increase.

If you add everything up, it seems absolutely crazy to me that this is now one of the largest businesses supporting the internet. Internet advertising spend is growing year on year - companies are continuing to pile money into this. Surely at some point they have to realise that the return they’re getting simply isn’t worth the money.

What this means for advertising is that you’re going to have to be much cleverer with what you do online, and you’re going to have to work harder at integrating different channels, to work together to deliver successful campaigns. No biggie here really. We all know this. And this is the fun work anyway.

What this means for the internet at large is more interesting - we’re using a fundamentally fucked model to build businesses off the back off. If clients realise that online advertising doesn’t work, then what is going to happen to the millions of sites that now rely on advertising to survive? Can they all switch to one of the other free models that Anderson suggests? Or might we see a rather large internet cull?

There isn’t anything much to say about this, other than watch the video, then watch all their other videos. Simply brilliant

9/11 Conspiracy Theories ‘Ridiculous,’ Al Qaeda Says

Yesterday evening I got back from the iMedia Summit at Sopwell House. It was an interesting event - the most interesting speech by far was by a non-advertising person - Hamish McRae, giving an inspired 45 minute talk about the state of the world economy, and - just perhaps - how it might impact us as communicators.

The reason I think this was the most interesting was because it was from a non-industry person. Conferences have a habit of becoming a bit of a navel-gazing marathon - either too self-congratulatory, or too self-damning - either way, there’s a lot of “self” involved. It was really refreshing to hear from someone outside of the industry with information that was fascinatingly interesting and very, very useful.

Hearing Johnny Vulkan from Anomaly was also interesting - what he and the other partners at Anomaly have done is create an entirely new business model for agencies. Anomaly is described by Ignacio Oreamuno as

Anomaly is not driven to make ads, it is driven to solve business problems.

(full write up here)

What is so interesting is that this has forced them to work out new remuneration models for their business. Sometimes they work on a standard agency fee, but more and more they’re getting paid by taking royalties in the sales of the products they help create, even launching their own products under their own IP.

Can you imagine the extra drive and passion you’d feel if you were directly tied into a product’s success? How much more of a partnership you’d feel with your clients. I think this is probably the agency business model of the future, where agencies tie themselves into to the absolute success of their clients’ projects, taking their fee as profits based on these successes.

Brief moment of self-congratulatory ego-boosting: I was asked to give one of the opening 5 minute speeches. Inspired by a recent Cory Doctorow post on Boing Boing, I briefly, and I think rather nervously, discussed the idea of the Conversation as King, and what this meant for agencies and brands (I’ll get round to writing the whole thing up and posting it at some point). What was pleasing was that “conversation” was a recurring theme of the 3 days, with many other people discussing similar themes. In general, that was probably one of the best things about the conference - to hear from and talk to a lot of people with similar theories, and to feel that perhaps we’re all moving in the same direction.

Having said that, as Russell Davies said in the funniest talk of the conference by far, “If you haven’t changed already, you’re not going to now”. So maybe it was just a bunch of navel-gazing after all ;-)

Spurred onwards by a ridiculous discussion at work (the gist of which was that you had to use Flash to build interactivity on a website), I decided to build a very quick proof of concept for a javascript slideshow.

In fairness, when I say “build”, what I mean is “plug together a few things where other people have already done the hard work and do a little bit of coding round the edges”.

However, the whole reason for this was to prove how quick and easy it is to build interactivity into sites without using Flash. So I figured using free, open-source code already provided by others was fair game :-)

So, using the completely free-to-use Smooth Gallery alongside the completely free-to-use phpFlickr, I present a javascript slideshow that goes to the Reading Room Flickr pool and finds all the photos currently uploaded and tagged with the word “competition”.

Not a timeline in sight. 

Andy has finished updating our band website with a new photo and, more importantly, the new demo tracks from our time in the studio.

Very exciting. Please check it out.