i [love] marketing.

What You Need to Know About Digital Marketing

 

Here is the presentation I've given at the amazing IdejaX conference this past weekend in Croatia. I was in the excellent company of other presenters, the audience was great, and the whole thing was a lot of fun. Below are the speaker's notes, as they may come in handy... Enjoy.

Slide 6: Temple Grandin says that she is a primarily visual thinker, and claims that words are her second language. She attributes her success as a livestock facility designer to her ability to recall detail, which is characteristic of her visual memory. Grandin compares her memory to full-length movies in her head that can be replayed at will, allowing her to notice small details. She is also able to view her memories using slightly different contexts by changing the positions of the lighting and shadows. Her insights into the minds of cattle has thought her to value the changes in details to which animals are particularly sensitive, and to use her visualization skills to design thoughtful and humane animal-handling equipment. While I know nothing about the cows, I am able to holistically approach the client challenge, and visualize the possible solutions.

Slide 7: Visual approach works great in digital, because it makes us think about solutions to clients’ problems in terms of systems and networks. It requires coming up with a more integrated approach that focuses on connections and relationships between brand and customers, communities, digital and physical, etc. We are challenged to simultaneously think of a creative idea and its execution, and to develop & evolve creative and strategy in parallel. This of course changes the nature of our agency process to become more non-linear, integrated, and interactive, and redefines how departments work together.

Slide 8: The way we often talk about digital world, we talk about it in terms of abstract disruption. The problem with talking about digital in connection to disruption is that is too massive, ephemeral, and hard to relate to. We end up talking about digital changes as if they have nothing - or little - to do with us and our work. They are viewed as something to talk & wonder about - but not something that we right now need to execute by.  

Slide 9: To me, these conversations about “digital future” are incredibly boring and repetitive.

Slide 10: Digital world emerged some 15 years ago, at least. That was when the disruption happened. Now we are living in the world where digital and non-digital are indistinguishable. The same way no one says “electric iron” or “electric fridge”, today digital retail is interchangeable with retail, digital sport with sport, digital tourism with tourism, digital cooking with cooking, etc. Our world is digital world.

Slide 11: I like talking and thinking about are specific macro-trends that are disrupting businesses and culture in very specific, tangible, and measurable ways. Only by focusing on particular inflection points and breaks in business and marketing, we can really use the insights about what/how digital world really changed the way the industries (cultural industry included) operates. If we understand dynamic of these macro-trends, we will be able to use it in our brand and marketing strategy, thus effectively keeping our brands competitive. 

Slide 12: Sharing economy revolves around having access to used and/or pre-owned goods. It’s based on a mutual trust between participants in a transaction, rather than the abstract market mechanism (price). It is a flexible system, as it nimbly provides supply based on the volume of demand through renting, trading, sharing, swapping, and bartering. Economic dynamic based on access removes the burden of ownership (costs of maintenance, storage, service, etc). At the same time, the access reshapes the markets in which brands compete in: they are competing not only with other marketers producing new goods and services but also with the all existing goods and services. For example, think AirBnb: it extends the hospitality/tourism markets to include all available rooms in the area (and not only hotel rooms). AirBnB effectively disrupts tourism industry by offering a cheaper, more convenient, more accessible and more fun version of hospitality service offerings.

Slide 13: We leave digital traces everywhere, from the moment we open the browser. Our likes, affinities, preferences, purchase habits and communication patterns are out there for all to see (and use). Aggregates of our individual behavioral patterns tell stories about wider social & cultural trends (think sharing, cooking, driving, running, shopping, etc). Brands, in particular, are rich repositories of all this data (just think big ecommerce platforms like Target, IKEA, JCrew, BestBuy or social shopping destinations like Svpply, Fab, Pinterest, etc). They can use all this wealth of data to tell a story about their customers, a wonderful, human, relevant story that can also be used as a bonus marketing message. This “consumer-based” story is a social object that’s easy to share, identify with, relate to and compare ourselves with (and that’s more interesting than any invented ad message).

 Slide 14: Social information today is overlapping with price and it provides a powerful social context for consumer decision-making. We can now “calculate” the worth of a product or service based on whether it’s green, popular, worn by a celebrity, based on fair trade practices - i.e. based on everything that’s important to us. This sort of information has always been attached to products, but the thing is that we weren’t able to see it. Digital now makes all this information visible - and allows us consider all sorts of information aside of price - and It helps us make better, more informed, more social purchasing decisions.

Slide 15: When thinking about social influence, the best is to think of a forest fire metaphor. Whether or not the fire spreads doesn’t depend so much on the kind of the fire, but more on the density of trees in the forest, of how dry the forrest is, whether it rains or not, how close the trees are to each other, etc. The same is with social influence online: rather than investing money in a few celebrities, we are much better off if we spend that same money on the large number of “accidental influentials” (Duncan Watts’ term). Back to the forest metaphor: lighting a fire on a lot of trees makes it much more easier for the whole forest to burn, than lighting just one big tree. As Buzzfeed, The Awl, The Onion, Cheezburger Network, etc. have shown, people do like to share. The best strategy is then to aggregate a lot of people who like to share vs. a few celebrities who don’t particularly like to share, but would do it for money. Duncan calls this situation targeting “easily influenced people who influence other easily influenced people.” Those kind of individuals (professional sharers :) make content & memes spread much faster and wider than any pre-planned “viral” campaign.

Slide 16: This one is my favorite, because it requires doing a bit of a detective work. I stole the idea of looking for contradictions, inversions, coincidences and oddities from an innovation theorist (forgot the name). Contradictions mean simultaneous happening of two things at odds with each other, indicating a transformation of a certain trend. Oddities refer to out-of-ordinary occurrences that make us search beneath the surface or a trend or pattern. Inversions refer to unseen-before reversal in a trend’s dynamics. Coincidences are about concurrent appearance of distant and unrelated trends or patterns. Here are a few examples: 

Contradictions: Millenials are 40% of the car market, but they are buying cars & driving less than any previous generation. Digital gadgets replaced cars as genY identity markers.

Oddities: Rapid growth of Instagram shows that this app is not only about taking photos and applying nostalgic filters. It’s about scratching some kind of storytelling itch among genY.

Inversions: There’s more than 40% of households in major American cities with just one occupant. This makes us accept urban tribes as a prevalent social unit.

 Coincidences: Economic crisis happens simultaneously with an incredibly lively economic activity happening in peer-to-peer markets. Safe to say that the established economic logic is under a quiet but inevitable transformation.

 Slide 17: The five macro-trends that I selected have the biggest impact on marketing: they bend its practices and create major inflection points in its processes and tools. These five trends are, more importantly, the inevitable starting point in digital marketing thinking: be it a campaign, a marketing strategy, a launch of a new product, a digital brand positioning or coming up with a brand purpose. Every single digital marketing venture should start from these macro-trends, because they define our approach to business challenges, consumer problems, competitive opportunity and/or brand positioning. Most importantly, using these trends as a starting point defines what digital marketing is: it’s not about the tools and tactics for execution - it is about detecting, understanding and tracking what’s going on because of digital and about building a brand around it. It’s this starting point that makes digital marketing unique and incredibly different from “traditional” marketing, which was obsessed, in a solipsistic manner, with using the brand, the category, and the product as its starting points. Digital marketing is not about media planning, engagement planning, communication strategy, and/or social media: it’s about the approach sensitive to macro-trends made possible by digital technology, and about devising a strategy that utilizes brands to amplify, recognize, or own these trends.

Slide 19: Digital marketing focuses on things that are enabled by, facilitated, spread, grow, etc. because of digital technologies and behaviors. Ask which economic and cultural trends & currents are made possible by/permitted/emerged/amplified due to digital technologies, and then start building brand strategy around it. 

Slide 20: The job of digital marketing, among other things, is to figure out new monetization opportunities for brands in the context of dynamic, consumer-driven, collaborative consumption markets. Making a cheaper version of a product/service is an option as it opens up the market to a whole new set of people (this is described in detail by Clayton Christensen in his “Innovator’s Dilemma”). Another version of the same approach, according to Aaron Shapiro, CEO of HUGE, is to make a product/service more convenient, or easier to use, or more fun. New monetization opportunities for brands should be based on all of the above, and focused on adding value to a selected consumer behavior/habit and/or responding to some need. Sharing economy in particular opens up new monetization opportunities for brands, because it forces them to explore: a) how to extend the product lifecycle, b) what unused distribution opportunities exist our there, and c) how to solve some customer’s problem. In the example above VW found a way to create brand affinity and promote its vehicles by wrapping a collaborative consumption-based system around them. It’s a test drive for everyone - when they need it and when it really makes a difference in their lives.

 Slide 21: Google insights for search, social listening tools, and digital ethnography tools give us insights into consumers’ habits, motivations, and expectations. They also reveal anomalies, oddities and atypical patterns that are signals that something interesting’s going on - that we should tap into. 

Slide 22: There are a few points to be made here: a) the most successful advertising today is native to its medium, meaning that it organically fits with the site content, layout, and with audience expectations for the site in question. In this way, we are using the site to create a powerful social context for advertising consumption; b) media today are not only what’s directed at people, but what exists between people (as Ian Schafer pointed out). Brand content needs to be sensitive to this dynamics: we should always ask whether our creative is/can become a social object; c) consumers rely on each other and brands for finding and discovering the best content. Most of cultural products are chosen by a small group of people who have a better taste than anyone else. Brands have an enormous potential to become part of this taste-making dynamic, by directing consumer attention towards specific content/products/etc. Ask: how can my brand help evolve consumers’ tastes by exposing them to the best content/information/lifestyle?

 Slide 23: There is a ton of interesting things happening outside the marketing and branding world. Those things are often way more interesting than anything a brand does. At the same time, brands can help these small, brewing currents at the edge of the culture or business achieve a mass scale and global prominence. By detecting an emerging trend at the periphery of some industry (think retail industry, in the example above), brands get to capture & own the trend and to amplify it to the level of a wider cultural conversation. Case in point: GAP combined a few brewing trends - fashion blogging, product remixing & scrapbooking, and personal fashion styling - under the umbrella of its GAP styld.by campaign, which asked fashion bloggers to remix GAP products with items from their own closet in order to express their personal style. This campaign is a win for a few reasons: Tumblr provides a natural environment for a fashion blog; GAP products live in a social context; it lends the brand legitimacy and reputation of stylists used in the campaign; it’s an easily shareable social object.

 Slide 24: Transparency can help brands to create a powerful social context that shapes consumers’ brand and product perceptions. Disclosing information about company culture, green practices, and operations turns them into marketing (think Zappos blogs, Patagonia product tracker, or Icebreaker barcode). It also turns their marketing upside down: it diverts consumers’ attention from a beautiful print ad or an emotional TV spot toward ubiquitous, easily accessible information about how brands products/services fare against competing products; how do they perform within a specific social or taste graph, or how they compare on fair-trade scale.

Slide 25: To put these macro-trends in context of marketing vs digital marketing, we need to understand where the “big switch” is happening.

Slide 26: Advertising is not enough. It’s also not effective enough in changing people’s behaviors. We need to move from making funny copy and commercial ad pieces towards approaching brands as taste-makers, editors, curators, publishers, and providers of value. To achieve this, we need to start from the context of consumers lives, and see how a brand can seamlessly insert itself into their habits, expectations, and behaviors. We need to ask: can we make a product/service cheaper? can we make it more fun? can we make it more convenient? can we become more useful and more entertaining? what problem are we solving for our customer?

Slide 27: Commercial art pieces can be beautiful to look at, they can be talked about, and they can win awards. What we need, as an industry, is to start thinking about creating social objects that will turn our creative solutions into memes, conversation pieces, etc. that will sky-rocket them into the domain of cultural conversation. ROI on social objects is measured in greater brand affinity, a wider exposure, more impressions, and ultimately more conversions. Social objects is how our customers communicate and relate to each other. They are things that take part or create a relationship between people - an invitation, a social gesture, a gift, a reward. People exchange social objects as a way of relating to each other - and we want our creative to become an inherent and seamless part of social relationships.

Slide 28: Demographic targeting is a great starting point in every strategy. Today, however, it’s not nearly a sufficient one. Social media brought into picture interest graphs, taste graphs, and most recently, spend graphs. All of these tell us a deeper story about consumers preferences, tastes, and decision-making processes than any demographic targeting ever would be able to. They reveal connections between diverse demographic groups that we wouldn’t otherwise realize, and they reveal patterns of social influence and taste-making that we need to take into account in developing our strategy and engagement plans. More often than not, the fastest and most effective way to reach our target is through their networks of influence: people who influence their tastes, interests, and shopping choices. Instead of being satisfied with the neat demographic groups, we need to ask the following: what interest/taste personas are we targeting? where can we find them? what do they do there? what are they influenced by? what social/taste/interest networks do they belong to? what do they talk about? what language they use when talking about our product/brand or category? how do they interact with brands and with each other?

Slide 29: Too often, our marketing efforts start from a product/service that a brand offers. The best brands - digital or otherwise - think in terms of relationships. They define  their brand purpose by capturing a specific behavior and/or relationship they want to own. Google’s purpose is organizing world’s information (and not search); Pepsi’s purpose is empowering communities (and not selling sugared water); Nike’s purpose revolves around running and making it better; Instagram’s purpose is to allow anyone to feel an emotional connection to photography (strangely enough, Kodak has this same purpose but it got list amid company’s rigid internal culture); Burberry’s purpose is to connect high and low culture that’s the essence of Britishness (Burberry has been worn by everyone from Queen to Sid Vicious). To succeed, brands need to ask themselves which behavior and relationship they want to build their purpose around.

Slide 30: In our industry, we are too often encouraged to think simple: to come up with a single insight, a single killer creative idea, a single course of our strategic action. Instead, we should start from the complexity of trends and patterns of consumers’ behaviors, and explore ways to amplify it them. The best way to win in today’s complex consumer markets is to recognize an emerging consumer need, a brewing trend, or an untapped distribution opportunity for our brands. Then, we should amplify it and own it. If consumers today are all about sharing, as in the car-sharing example above, we need to figure out the way how we can amplify this emerging trend and make it work for our car brand.

Slide 31: At the end, there are a few basic questions to help us kick-start our digital marketing effort. They can help us focus our thinking, inform our approach, and offer guidance for creating a winning marketing campaign - or at least one that is suitable for the digital world.

McLuhan is right (again)

The other day I came across this image (regretably, can't remember where), and it striked me as a lovely way to summarize the problem of fitting digital media into marketing thinking. Yes, we still have that problem. We are collecting Likes and views, measuring awareness, and resizing content - all instead of accepting that the rules of the game are through and through new and trying to understand them. 

What is Digital Strategy and Why Agencies Need It?

A couple of Fridays ago, I thought a Digital Strategy Workshop together with Farrah and Ale. It was an all-around awesome experience: participants were smart and wonderfully engaged, my co-teachers were super-inspiring and insightful, and finally, we put together a really fun (and informative) presentation - a section of which I am including here. That's the part I presented, to kick the workshop off. 

Speakers' notes are below:

Slide 3: Every conversation about the topic, area, or practice starts with its definition. Well, one of the great strengths of digital planning is that we haven’t settled on a single definition. As it goes, if you ask 10 people what digital planning is, you will get at least 11 different answers. And that’s a good thing, because if Richard Buchanan is to be trusted, we know that we are alive. After all, all the great, revolutionary shifts in culture, science or society didn't have names at first - think postmodernism (hell, i still don't know how to define it), innovation, DNA research, etc. We always have to rely on what's already out there to define a new field, and more often than not, what's out there is not enough.

Slide 4:  At the same time, there is clearly a need for digital planning thinking and tools, otherwise there wouldn't be there workshop. From your own experience, you know that you are dealing with things that you didn't have to deal with before. Above all, you are dealing with the need to think about how to create value for both customers and clients. This means you need to think how to create a relationship between them that doesn't benefits clients only. A related question is how to make new forms of relationship between buyers and sellers work for us. To clarify this point, the very idea of who buyers and sellers are is different. Sellers are not only brands anymore as collaborative consumption and redistribution markets can attest. Just think AirBnb, Etsy, Getaround, Neighborgoods, etc. Group buying and flash sales are also an example. Speaking of group sales, we are dealing with interconnected individuals that share, review, comment, and are able to make or brake brand's reputation by introducing unprecedented transparency of information.

Slide 5: Case in point: Community and technology, in combination, reshape marketplaces by changing dynamics between supply and demand, buyers and sellers, consumers and products. They have the capacity to create new markets by focusing on the previously unaddressed segments - all of the above being examples.

Slide 6: Venturing into unaddressed segments has proven to be rewarding. We are not dealing with someone’s side project, but with the emerging industries.

Slide 7: Why is all of this important? All of the new value models change consumers' expectations and shape their habits. They expect from brands the same thing they have been tought to expect from online services and tools - immediacy, convenience, transparency, competitive offering. Above all, they expect to be in charge themselves.

Slide 8: Our job as digital strategists in this context is the following: create a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose. First, I stole this definition from Charles Eames, who was talking about design when he said the above. Design analogy is especially convenient here, because if we are to be successful, we are to shape and format the digital environment. Also, design is not about end product, but it is a systematic process of identifying problems, and then researching, creating, testing, and implementing solutions. This is the second thing that's important - a problem solving approach. We address our clients through this problem-solving prism - every assignment has to be reformulated as a particular problem that the brand is focusing on - either it is the sales problem, the audience problem, or the brand perception problem. Lastly, talking about arranging elements leads us to systems approach, a system that connects people and technology, products and content, brands and services. 

Slide 9: The best digital campaigns have been built around the innovative connections between buyers and sellers that are characteristic of the new models of exchange. Pepsi Refresh project connected the brand with the community. New Balance teamed up with the long-distance runner (and a certified weirdo) Anton Krupicka, Uniqlo created Lucky Counter which combines group dynamics with people's desire for discounts, Lufthansa came up with utility, Burberry connected their brand to everyone with a trench, etc etc.

Slide 10: Often, we think that the client brief is about advertising or promotion, while we should be thinking about the brand or about the new ways to reach audience in digital space. What is brand's real problem? How to connect with audience in the digital space in order to solve it?

Slide 11: And now, onto practical stuff. First, start from the consumer. Here, we see a traditional advertising model of brand/product/category and consumer. Traditional (or brand) planners start every assignment from a competitive landscape, from thinking about the brand (what does it stand for? what's at its core?), the product (what are its benefits? what are the barriers to adoption?). Then they often look into surveys and numbers about the audience, and conduct focus groups to confirm their thesis. It's the thesis-support thesis model, as Noah reminded me the other day. And this is not wrong. Where digital strategists start from, in contrast, is a consumer. They are putting it at the center, as a starting point for framing a hypothesis, then they then test against brand, product and category insights. The benefit is seeing something that we have previously missed - instead of getting answers on our questions, we are letting consumers tell us what they want.  We are seeing the world through their eyes. And in order to do that, we have to reach a true understanding of their habits, culture, social context and their motivations space.

Slide 12: How do we reach that understanding? Well, we inquire: how do we think about the category? how do they talk about the brand? how do they perceive the product? Observing, monitoring and listening to customers can often reveal a different set of needs that escape the traditional quantitative methods. Here, social listening tools become very useful - they offer insights into the barriers to category and barriers to wider adoption of the brand. They offer insights into the context of consumers' life and role of priducts and a brand within it - they help us define the problem and come up with possible solutions. Through considering how to reach out to these people, it becomes possible to come up with the ideal brand experience that is conveyed across diverse touchpoints. Visualizing and codifying human motivation gives us opportunity to beter understand and direct human behavior. Deep seated or hidden needs and cultural trends can all be identified from dialogue with customers. It uses personas as a vehicle for introducing a user perspective and adds input from a wide selection of user-centered methods.

Slide 13: And how do we go about that? People leave digital traces everywhere: they talk, share, connect comment, track and update everything (or almost everything they do), but the difference is that now we can see all of that. It's all laid out for us to explore. 

Slide 14: For example, personas are one useful way of mapping and visualizing our learnings - they are a great communication device to visualize who our audience is, and to clearly communicate it to creatives, experience designers, content strategists, and technologists. They bring everyne on the same page in regards to the audience we are talking to. Moreover, they help us clarify the goals and tasks of our different target groups. Best yet, tey lay out the touchpoints for a sound media strategy, content strategy, paid media buy - because we know where we can find these people.

Slide 15: Now that we get acquainted with out target, we can start making our digital brief. No matter what format our digital brief uses, it has to revolve around the following: a) the idea (this is our response/problem formulation for the client's challenge), b) the tasks (how are we going to go about solving this problem?), c) connections plan (tactics and system access points), and d) success metrics. Digital is not everything, but it somehow gets into almost everything - it's got to be part of our objectives, our brand, our audience. The main and defining characteristics of digital briefs is not what we are going to communicate. Instead, we are thinking what kind of system we are going to build, and how we are going to draw people into it. Another thing to remember is that digital brief is means to an end, rather than an end in itself - which is always the case when you are dealing with the traditional agency process. Planners take too much time to write the brief, then they hand it over to creatives, who are at that point pissed off because they aren't left with enough time to come up with an idea, etc.

Slide 16: Adopt a systems approach, with a brand behavior at its center. Brand story defines the brand experience and helps us decide how to convey it through different touchpoints. This is not an integrated campaign (while it may look like one), and there are two reasons for it. First, I have never seen a successful advertising campaign. Second, at the system's core is a brand behavior, rather than a message. We are not simply pushing out a message through all different touchpoints in the "matching luggage" (thanks Farrah) way - instead, we are carefully considering how each touchpoint conveys a part of the story, and how all of them combined convey consistently and seamlessly brand behavior. Each touchpoint is the starting point for the experience and not the end point for the messaging. Brand behavior informs also how touchpoints should be designed, and which touchpoints we should choose to focus on. It defines the tone of voice, look and feel, and content, and interactions for each.

Slide 17 and 18: Our next task is to visualize the brand experience flow - for example, here we are visualizing customer journey for product trail. It helps us define the importance of each media touchpoint. We are deconstructint the marketing process into discrete touchpoints and interactions. Each touchpoint creates a "brand movement." A typical consumer journey is multi-channel and time-based. The second example is for the challenge of brand affinity. Again, we have brand moments that are experienced according to the context of each touchpoint.

Slide 19: Finally, and we are going to cover this in the separate session of this workshop, our task as digital strategists is to make each point work for us. This means assigning monetary value, expectations and success benchmarks to each touchpoint. This is going to help us dynamically optimize the campaign as we go, and foreground the importance of the most effective touchpoints, all the while minimizing the exposure of the less successful ones. In other words, we are assigning metrics of success to each touchpoint, so we can monitor and optimize them as the campaign unfolds. 

Slide 20: And now, it's important to understand that these four things: starting from the consumer, writing a digital brief, visualizing the brand experience flow, and assigning metrics of success to each touchpoint are not theoretical exercises. The reality is messy, but it helps to have a few useful tools and useful guidelines. It’s the experience, the process of trial and error, and figuring things out as you go. 

View more presentations from Ana Andjelic.

 

 

Everything about digital strategy ...

I am co-teaching the first-ever, all-day digital strategy course on November 18 in New York City. Along with the two amazing ladies (and the super-accomplished professionals), I am going to cover everything that ranges from how to write a digital brief, what are success stories and why there were successful, how collaboration between digital strategists and creatives should look like, to how to sell digital strategy to clients. More information about the full day agenda is here: http://digitalstrategycourse.eventbrite.com/

You should come, it's going to be fun! And bring friends :)

Post-Resume World

This is the presentation I was carrying around on iPad to my job interviews in June, instead of my resume. I realized that, more than a list of places, clients, and projects that I have done in the past, nothing inspires a conversation like talking about the way I think about things, what I find interesting/important, and what I am passionate about.

Having a social object at the meeting makes the assessment of the work fit easier because two parties are involved in an equal-footing exchange (instead of one-sided conversation style that's a staple of interviews). It also allows a person to tell a story in a personal way that puts work & extracurricular accomplishments in the real-life, relevant context of someone's life (always more interesting than just listing stuff that someone has done). It shows, too, a person's presentation skills and ability to build an argument (which is potentially super-useful for client presentations & meetings). Finally, it's a tangible display of someone's simple know-how of how to put a beautiful-looking deck together. 

And it worked out for me, in the best possible way. 

p.s. For the obvious reasons, I took out the  four case studies that are part of the original deck; they served as examples of my past work & my thinking approach to specific client tasks + deliverables. But everything else is there!

p.p.s. The part of "data mining" is taken from Julian Cole and the part of it is mine. 

 

SxSW Panel Proposal: Creativity for the Complex World

Bud and I would love to talk about complexity at the next SxSW, so we started thinking, plotting, and writing, and this is what we came up with... It's basically a summary of everything that he and I have been obsessed about in the past months, and is an attempt to get more people to start thinking about complexity. Hope the panel happens!

In a nutshell:

Have you ever been to a kid’s birthday party? It’s chaotic, unpredictable, fast-moving, and fun. It’s either the best thing or the worst thing, but you can’t know in advance which of the two is going to be.

Today’s digital world is a little bit like kids’ parties. It just involves a lot more people. And anything that has to do with a lot of people doing a lot of things is complex. To create something in the complex space forces us to think differently about the approach to, processes, and products of creativity.

This new creativity starts with interconnections between data, people, and things. It deals with the web of a bunch of small moving pieces that create intricate feedback mechanisms and new behaviors. It mixes code with the story and it’s open and iterative. It’s methodology relies on complexity’s own tools for solving problems. It's not about coming up with the new creative formats, but in making new connections. It’s a medium, not the product.

Complexity can be scary when connected with creativity. But it’s also unbelievably inspiring. It offers the maximum creative flexibility and the maximum executional options. It makes us realize that simplicity is a false god and that the new rule of creativity is looking for intuitive solutions that don’t reduce complexity but that thrive in it.

This panel is going to answer the following questions:

1. What's the difference between a simple and a complex problem?
2. Why does that difference matter when making digital things?
3. What does a creative process look like that respects complexity?
4. How do you build, launch, manage, and learn from many small experiments rather than one big product/campaign/message?
5. How should complex relationships shape creative strategy and execution?

You can see the revised & submitted proposal here.

 

digital world provides solutions for its own complexity*

*Or, why the holistic approach works better in digital.  

It doesn't reduce the complex situation to a causal, simple explanation. Instead, it's looking for intuitive solutions that seamlessly fit into people's behaviors. All well-designed products, services, and games are intuitive. Again, they are not simple - they intuitive.

The popular belief is that the contrast to complexity is simplicity. It's not. It's making things intuitive.

It helps that holistic approach inspires thinking through associations, both in their literal and metaphorical meaning. Literally, associations-as-in-connections are everywhere and exist between everything (people, information, tools, ideas). Metaphorically, associative thinking inspires us to make unexpected connections between things; and to recognize the innovative opportunities in the process.

Since it forces us to look beyond the obvious, holistic approach encourages "what if," rather than "why" and "how." It's non-linear and allows for the unexpected - both of which are in stark opposition to reductionist agency thinking a.k.a. "find the best strategy for solving a problem, discover one key dimension of consumers' behavior, define one thing that this advertising message is about." Instead, it's pushing for imagination and creativity: both in concepting and in execution.

Embracing the complexity of the whole situation is in fact a necessity in digital space. What we are dealing with are unexpected, ever-evolving movements and unpredictable connections. They generate micro-tensions and antagonisms that are ripe with cultural potential that has a direct consequence for brands. We are grappling with a networked social influence, and detecting "accidental influentials" in a given situation is as critical for campaigns as it is unpredictable. Irrationality of human behavior doesn't help matters, either: people's sensitivity to the design of information environments and activities of others is a powerful engine for behavioral change and needs to be utilized more in digital marketing campaigns. Then, there is data about individual and collective patterns of activities, and their aggregates act as a shared communication object with powerful storytelling potential. These sorts of stories disrupt the traditional model of authorship over advertising narratives. And finally, collaborative consumption and redistribution markets are constantly showing us where consumers' behaviors and needs are going: they represent a compelling lab for finding new sources of value that brands can deliver outside of their usual production/consumption value chains.. 

There are all challenges that resist obvious solutions and cannot be reduced to a single-cause explanation. So what to do? If complexity of the environment prevents one way of responding to the client task and if it prevents predicting the success of a single creative solution, then the best is to put all this complexity right at the center of the strategic problem-solving process.

This is hard. The need for strategy comes from our, human, anxiety in the face of uncertainty. Strategies are "anticipation machines" designed to help us know what the future will be before it happens. Complexity prevents this - but at the same time the problem is not unsolvable. If we can't have foresight, we can have hindsight. And a lot of those. The hindsight comes from standing close to the edge, which in plain language means merging strategy with its execution.

The good news here is that yes, while complexity creates a lot of challenges, it at the same time gives us tools to solve them. All one needs to be is crafty. (Big ups to the most brilliant Julian Cole for sharing some of his ideas about all of this).

In practical terms, this means that methodology for dealing with complexity needs to revolve around complexity's own tools. And, believe it or not, these tools are everywhere. Forget about eMarketer, and Forrester, Sysomos, and all that stuff. They won't solve the problem of originality of your campaign or of a real behavioral challenge that you want to create with your target audience.

What will solve the problem is a little game called digging for clues. I often use Wordle to run customers' reviews of the product/service/brand through it. It lets me uncover the common themes and the possible sources of tension or cognitive dissonance that are useful as insights for a campaign. GoodReads and apps like WANT! uncover what people identify with, how they define themselves, what is important to them, and what captures their collective imagination - all of which provides context in which a campaign is going to be received and what can make it resonate well with its target. Sites like 43Goals on 43Things and Daytum give us insights in human motivation, in different roles people are playing, what are their strivings, how they make choices and what are their frustrations. This helps come up with the ideas for inspiring and facilitating behavioral change for our target. 

Our understanding of the wider context of our audience's lives allows us to recognize cultural micro-tension, sources of influence, data that we can use for marketing, or needs that allow us to create an exchange market around. 

It lets us capture the new territories for our brands and to come up with the "what if." A new way of looking at things, perhaps, but that's exactly the point.

Data as Marketing

There's an interesting white space to be explored that goes beyond just visualizing data. A ton of online retailers (and just about any e-commerce site) has enormous amount of data on people's affinities, likes, purchase patterns, sharing patterns, communication patterns (and all other possible patterns), all filtered by time and location. That's a lot of information.

Sure enough, retail brands use this info for personalization and better targeting. But they are missing out, big time, tho: if only they turned this "individual-focused" model upside down and used their data for all sorts of community dynamics, they would be able to influence & inspire people's behavior on a much larger scale. In other words, they'd be able to turn their vast data repositories into marketing. 

The simple truth behind using data as marketing is that people are sensitive to the design of information environments and that others are instrumental in individual motivation (yes there are plenty of wonderfully self-motivated people but we are ultimately social animals). Combine those two things and you get a powerful engine for behavioral change. And this is hardly new: personal fitness industry has become an expert in pulling personal + community info and turning it into a motivation & statistics engine. Transport the fitness industry's approach to retail and all of the sudden there's an opportunity for creation of a data-driven feedback loop revolving around products instead of one's body.

The outcome is a shared communication object - a story around products' use based on aggregated information about all possible individual patterns and discrepancies among them. These stories provides a powerful shopping context - and a bonus marketing message. Since brands are all about fitting into the context of people's lives, why not also make a story on how this is actually happening.

A bonus feature: some ideas on how to combine 43goals, daytum, dailymile and runkeeper all in one to create information context with a storytelling potential.

Sharing motivations. Renovating kitchen? Buying stuff for the party? Going through the first 3 months with a new baby? Motivations help. There's no need to create a personal profile; it's enough for an individual purchase bundle to be  displayed in the "recent purchases section" so others can react to it. (Yes this requires sharing, but this being FB age, we may need to get over it. Besides, think of the grotesque things that runners' share on DailyMile or Runkeeper after long-distance races). 

Rating purchases on emotional scale. Shopping is equally passion-driven activity as fitness, so let people share how they felt after different purchases: some of them are "blah" as they are a pure necessity (toilet paper), some leave us feeling good (i finally got that Drano), and some of them we are really really enthusiastic about (in my case, clothes, shoes, and books). So, why not share the feeling [the forbidden word in e-commerce site design]?

Personal infographics (weekly, monthly, yearly, lifetime).  Enrich the basic shopping account data on how many objects by category a person has purchased this week/month/year so they have insight on how their household shopping budget is distributed. Or, give a weekly/monthly breakdown of how many times a site was visited per person; how many savings in discounts and deals a person accumulated and what it means translated in a dollar figure (bet it will make a lot of people feel good about themselves). The interesting part is that brands can aggregate all this information and publicly display it for everyone (of course, you can also filter it just by your friends, via FB connect). It allows us to see where the happiest shoppers live (which zipcode, state, country), where the busiest ones are, and where the most eclectic ones; which product category has the most passer-bys, etc. 

"Screen time." Filter and display product categories/times/locations by the longest and shortest "screen times" on the site/section/page. Distill it down to the individual level and give a scoop in what times of the day warrant the longest screen times and which ones the shortest (a lot of insomniacs shop at 2am, you know who you are). 

Goals. People often shop with a specific goals in mind, like "clean out my closet" or "clean my bathroom" project and a brand can come in here to help people achieve them in the best and fastest possible way by display a number of people who want to do this at the same time as you do, and share experiences of those who have done it. Add here progress tracking and challenges, and a "complete a task" function becomes something with an individual context and meaning.

Face-Off Time. This one can be called "passive game," because people are not always dying to play. But, they do like to compare themselves to others and see how they fare. Simply displaying data about which neighborhood has bought the most green products or which one saved the most or which one donated to charity the most can spur a competitive spirit (not to mention instill a sense of achievement). Rewards can come in here too: reward everyone in the same zipcode with a surprising discount at the checkout because they hit the X dollar amount in green products or in savings or simply display the rewarded neighborhoods for everyone else to see.

Retro Future

 "Utopian images that accompany the emergence of the new always concurrently reach back to the ur-past" - Walter Benjamin

This morning, NYT ran an article about GrubWithUs. I've seen this service some time ago - it basically gathers strangers around the dinner table - but now it reminded me of this wonderful Benjamin's sentence above. Every new tool and service is simultaneously new and old: it has a sort of nostalgia that let us glimpse in the way things might have been. While some people find it sad, GrubWithUs reminded me of the old-world tradition of travelers eating together in the road taverns and sharing stories of their journeys over food. That's what modern travelers do: come together for a brief moment, exchange their stories over food, and continue their journeys. Romantic, nostalgic, and amazing. 

To stay with Benjamin a little longer, these sort of experiences/chance encounters are contained in his concept of a "flaneur" (wanderer) which he used in the 1920s to describe a modern urban experience defined by casual connections: "The flâneur has no specific relationship with any individual, yet he establishes a temporary, yet deeply empathetic and intimate relationship with all that he sees." Sounds crazy familiar, and not so rare: there are other services that exploit the potential of these casual, weak ties to the max. Skyara that  defines itself as 'a marketplace to offer fun things to do, meet new people, and share experiences' [just like a children's playground] or Dodgeball/Foursquare, or Hash where strangers gather to run together & solve clues on the route [a tribe].

I really, really like this Benjamin's idea of nostalgia. I see it happening over and over today, where old-fashioned routines, forgotten customs and rituals are revived in ways that we are too often tempted to view as "alienating." That's where the lovely paradox is: the behaviors that existed way before any modern communication technology are brought back to life precisely because of it. So the things that we deem the most innovative - and uniquely digital - may as well turn to be the most nostalgic of all.

searchable world

A while ago I came across the Where To Get It app that helps us identify + find stuff others are wearing. It's basically a searchable database of street fashion. Then, a few days ago, Amber posted the LeafSnap app that identifies trees by their leaves. Take a photo of any leaf, and the mystery of its name and origin is solved. I did a bit of search and found out that there's also a thing called IntoNow that identifies TV content that you are currently watching, right down to the episode (I guess TV Guide does the same thing, but this seems faster). And then, there's imaginatively named IdThis which strives to identify anything, as long as you submit a photo of it. 

A possible useful ID tools that I'd like to see: take a photo of your skin and get a recommendation on the SPF you need to wear. Or a skin care you need to get. And no, this is not based on the lame "diagnostic tests" that cosmetics companies offer, but on an actual searchable database of people's real skin types and their characteristics. Or take a photo of a stain and it's immediately matched with a database of all possible stains to offer an answer. 

Shazam was of course the first in this territory of transparent information, and when you think about it, it makes a complete sense to warp a number of processes (search, asking others, inquiring with the experts, looking up our own old stuff) into a single scan. Of course, it usurps the question of expertise (in the cases above: fashion, arborism, music, entertainment), but that's another story.

It just crossed my mind that someone will come up for a "Shazam for people" where you can just snap any random person on the street and learn ALL about them. Hey, just a thought.

Brand Complexity

The other week, I got a brilliantly challenging question from Stuart Smith. He saw my presentation on Creativity and Complexity and asked me how to reconcile semantic & emotional complexity of brands with the need for the consistency of their global deliverables.

That's a nice one. After all, what's the benefit of complexity? Well, the human experiences are rich and nuanced and often really ambiguous. There are no two people that experience a same thing in the exactly same way. So, if human experiences aren't simple, why should brands be? The best brands are indeed those that are able to keep this complexity intact, without falling into the trap of reducing it the only one narrow aspect (the statement, the medium, the audience).

Think Apple. The most famously elegant brand around is, in fact, pretty complex. Where does this complexity come in? Counterintuitive as it may sound, it's in design. The design of Apple's products is intuitive enough to appeal to everyone. Steve Jobs never defined the "target" for his products. He never exclaimed that he wants to "appeal to 18-24 year old men," for example. And intuitive is not the same as simple. In fact, it's pretty far from it. Intuitive things retain the complexity of experience without simplifying it to a single dimension.

Or, think Converse (I have some sort of emotional hangup with this one). Thoughout the years/decades of being around, Converse created a rich & multidimensional brand, based on layers upon layers of accumulated cultural meanings & signifiers. Instead of being part of some pre-designed brand experience, these cultural connotations come from memories that are simultaneously personal (mine) and that cross the boundaries of country and audience (everyone's). This sort of collective memory can only be created from associating products with experiences that are so deeply personal that they become universal.

Both of these cases remind me of boundary objects. They are things that "have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable, a means of translation. They are plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of several parties empoying them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identitiy across sites. They are weakly structured in common use and become strongly structured in individual use. The creation and management of boundary objects is a key process in developing coherence across intersecting communities."

So people have thought about this one before.

Good. Because, in my own experience, complexity is great for creatives. It gives them the maximum inspiration & creative flexibility and the maximum executional options. It also creates thinking/outputs that are emotionally robust and nuanced enough to provide a backbone for many years of creative work for the brand (and removes the on-off campaign mentality) - you can go back to the well many times without repeating yourself. Second, complexity breeds many executional options, and secures that they are adaptive and adaptible to the fuzzy digital environment. Third, complexity has really become the only way, when you think about it. The old school planning mantra, narrow everything down, make things obvious, make things clear, doesn't get today's brands' problems solved. It just ignores them. Not the risk I'd take.

And besides, clarity is the enemy of magic.

 

Unknown unknowns.

I am pretty late with this, but figured I should put it here anyway. It's the story behind my Creativity & Complexity deck. It starts with me saying that advertising creativity has always been a branding vehicle, and if we are talking about branding (my fav subject) we can't avoid thinking about creativity. And now, as everythone's trying to figure out what's going to work online and why and how and all of that, it's useful to backpedal for a sec and remember that evolution of creativity is the evolution of media. So here we are now, in 2011, stuck with digital media. What helps?

When talking about creativity, everyone thinks about creative talent, creative agencies, or creative deliverables. But my starting point was not the words of wisdom from Weiden or Goodby or any other famous ad creative.  Oddly enough, here's the quote that (I think) captures the best the snafu situation that we have today with creativity: "... because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know." (the live version of this statement is here, for those who are into it).

What makes the unlikeliest of all quotes so relevant here is that the infamous "unknown unknowns" are in fact the core property of complex adaptive systems. (Worth noting: CAS is the term that showed up in biology and that has since been widely used in organizational and technology studies). CAS are the systems that are built around, and thrive, on unknown unknowns. That's what makes them different from merely complicated systems: in the latter, there are a lot variables and the catch is that there's just too many of them. But luckily, they are all known. Think airline cockpit for example. Here, it's a shitshow, but if we simply follow a sequence, we are going to be just fine. The sequences don't change and they can be broken down into a series of simple problems - so the learning curve is probably, possible, and likely. Experience and expertise count big time here: the more times someone has done some complicated thing (like preparing for a pitch or making a media plan or managing client relationship), the better they are going to become in it.

But complex systems are no such walk in the park. They are like organizing a kid's birthday party: full of crazy towns, unexpected developments, left-field surprises (someone cries in the corner, someone doesn't want to play, someone got too sugar-high and is off the rails). This situation can't simply be broken down into its essential components and analyzed. And even if we could do that, complex situations are un-repeatable so the insight won't help us much. If anything, experience almost becomes a liability. Expertise here can be valuable, but far from being sufficient: the next bday party, for example, may ask for a completely different approach than the one right now. Current successes are no guarantee - and much less a predictor - of future sucesses. Thus, what makes complex systems hard to deal with is a deadly mesh of unknowns and unpredictability. The main take-away is that complicated environments are rife with risks; complex ones with uncertainty. Risks are calculable, uncertainty is not. So there.

Advertising industry - as it seems right now - has always dealt with complicated environments. And it's been incredibly good at this (think media buys, ad unit sizes, length of TV spots, and creative solutions that are meant to fit these formats). It's been good because it operates as a simplification machine. Think simple has become a mantra and a signpost: we were thought to come up with a single killer insight, a compelling idea, one single business solution. Then we take it and multiply it throughout different touchpoints without paying attention to the complexity of each (no matter what transmedia planning claims).

Our solution to complexity has been simplification and multipliction. We have been fending off complexity through offering coherence. Even if we don't want to admit it, we end up in the business of resizing: how does this solution fit on the billboard; ok now, how does this same solution fit on an iPhone?

This approach worked for a while, no doubt. It still largerly works. To see how and where it may fail, the best is to use quote from Apple's CEO. No, not Jobs - the other one. The one that most of people would rather forget. When comparing Coke and Pepsi, John Scully said something along the lines, "Coke always focused on the drink. Pepsi focused on the person using it." Now, the catch here is that contexts - and people - using products have become incredibly interactive, networked, info-rich, collaborative, and all of that. Think the activity of cooking for example: it used to be pretty known where we get out inspiration/advice/resources. Not so much these days: there's always a new app, source, filter, community that become part of our cooking experimentation. People and their activities have become complex behavioral networks. 

And our challenge is to align our thinking as an industry with the complexity of this environment.

The first step is not to try to simplify complexity. Instead, build things that can in this complexity thrive. Instead of awareness, acquisition, products, sales, media buys, prices, promotions, budget, and ownership, change deliverables (and language) into connections, generative relationships, interactions, new combinations, systems, renting, etc. The best online creativity is alive - it's a medium for a ton of other things, not the end result. Sticking to thinking about creativity in terms of the creative talent, creative agencies, or creative deliverables is bound to make us seek results that are efficient and repeatable (and, in fact, it is this repeatability that accounts for efficiency) - which in turn is bound to disable us, organizationally, from solving complex problems.

In the world of unknown unknowns, the idea is "to be less wrong than yesterday." This may mean focusing less on abstract goals (drive brand engagement/raise awareness) and more on concrete behaviors (how does this particular design solution lead to desired activity and business result). In this context, it will turn out that the best digital creative solutions are always about something else. Not everything is creativity. But creativity is everything.

Delicious 2010

This post can double as a farewell to delicious and a breakdown of what people in the industry were talking about in 2010. Plus some stuff I was into last year. I went through a million of my bookmarks that I saved over the course of the last 12 months, and here is the hand-picked result. Prominent topics (and this should come as no surprise) were: geo-location, mobile, gaming, social retail, virtual goods, and a few really really dumb initiatives. If you missed any of these articles, have a look.

My fav topic of digital creativity

Creativity in digital goes way beyond advertising

Words, pictures, and everything else.

Digital may be everyday, but it's not effortless

Brands & Branding

Value of brand names

Nike Write the Future social media strategy

Facebook brand pages pay off

Compression

Google hasn't built anything interesting in over a decade

Competing with heroes: Domino's case study

Coke drops campaign sites in favor of social media strategy

Starbuck's formula for social media success

A big picture look at google, microsoft, apple, and yahoo

Social objects

Brands' social media casestudies

Do brand loyalty, commitment, and engagement metrics work

What Apple needs to do now

Kickpatrick Talks about Zuckerberg's World

P&G Pushes Design in Brand-Building Strategy

Digital Storytelling

Use social media to tell interactive stories

10 real-time twitter games

Geo-location and its discontents

Foursquare, Gowalla, stop pretending it's fun

Marketing experiments emerge using Facebook places

Foursquare fatigue and how to fix it

5 ways Foursquare is changing the world

Check-in royalty, customer loyalty, and Foursquare evolving strategy

Facebook vs. Foursquare: It's game time

Beyond Foursquare: The next generation of customer loyalty

Foursquare marketing hits and misses case studies

Location: How check-ins speak louder than words

Foursquare, Gowalla, Whirrl and MyTown case studies

Gaming

Gaming for behavior change

Achievement, Game Mechanics, and Social Software

Can games theory explain culture?

Engagement via gaming

Learning from game design: 11 gambits for influencing user behavior

Just add point: what UX can and cannot learn from games

Of lucky cats, lameness, and game-like logics

Steal other things

Incentivizing social media participation: points, giveaways, and other reward schemes

Complexity & Strategy

Cognitive edge: articles by Dave Snowden

Margaret Wheatley writing

Adding controlled serendipity to the web

Influencing business strategy through design

Platforms or campaigns? Both. AKA Platform-centric campaign model

Generative relationships

Serendipity is unexpected relevance

The $300 million button

Who needs agencies? A social platform just says "no" to Madison Avenue

Groupon and the future of web business models

Maxima/list

The science of sharing: platforms inject data into the art of going viral

Apply the rules of improv to digital

The overreaching vision

11 tips on how to apply social interaction to design thinking

Do you know what your biggest risks are? Really?

The next level

Mobile & Social Retail

Amazon now allows you to send gift cards to friends on Facebook

Impact of mobile on retail

The future is the mobile web, not the mobile app

Facebook likes bring Walmart deals

The 25 largest brand Facebook pages with the most likes

Study shows Facebook's retail appeal

Barcode Hero scans products to personalize physical retail

"It" Startup Grouptabs

The Groupon clone industry is so big, it now has its own exchange

Agregate market's shopfans bring social retail storefronts to Facebook

Facebook's plan to take over the web

Online consumer generated reviews have big impact on offline purchases

The Internet of Things

Tweet street: 7 extraordinary Twitter uses in the home

Emerging trend: physical-digital interaction evolves

How a physically aware internet will change the world

Digital Visibility

Mint data

How personal metrics can change our lives

Google facts and figures

Wealth distribution in the US

Personal informatics tools

Stupid Ideas

Forbes crowdsourcing names we need to know in 2011

MySpace unveils new, artsy logo

Gap pulls a Tropicana, nixes new logo

Are you ready to blow your million dollar idea away?

Mobile Apps

Less than half of brand managers use mobile apps

13 branded apps that got it right

How important have apps become?

Advertising

Top effectiveness ads

How the internet has changed advertising

25 internet marketing facts

How to translate a big idea to the masses

Digg's empty search results promote Burger King's double cheesburgers

Where is online advertising most powerful?

The ivory tower conversations (a.k.a. the future of advertising and the future of agencies)

The agency of the future

Mayhem on Madison avenue

My talk on future of advertising models

The future of advertising agencies

Virtual Goods

Madison avenue and the land of make believe

Virtual goods boom in 2010

Loneliness, happiness, and other interesting things

Mark's scrapbook of oddities and treasures

Joys of solitude

Sometimes I am happy

Happiness aint all its cracked up to be

From prices to prizes: competitions

What's valuable? Top 10 lists

Things you didn't know about happiness

Where the smart people live

The riddle of experience vs memory by Daniel Kahneman

Behavioural economics reading list

The immitation economy

Optimism bias

Bonus: Hand-picked posts from I [love] marketing

Rules to Execute by

Do we need a new definition of creativity?

The problem of strategy

The problem of ego

Why Nike's Write the Future is rewriting the past

Marketing's industry cognitive blindness

Why brands should NEVER think like media companies

Don't build an old brand with the new tools

Enjoy!

I have increasingly started to think that there isn't such thing as a "creative best practice in a digital age" and that proclaiming something as such is merely advertising talk. First, the idea of the "best practice" inherently contains replicability. It contains a certainty that, all things being equal, the results are always going to be the same. For this to happen, the environment needs to be stable, predictable, and controllable. Then, there's also measurability: deciding in advance on criteria for measuring success, and applying the same criteria across the entire environment. Tricky. Oh yea, there is also comparability. How is best practice compared to other, not-so-best ones? To claim that A is more successful than B, A and B need to be the same in all aspects except a single one, which critically contributes to the success of A vs. B. 

Just because some effort turned out to be a success - or because we proclaimed it as such post-fact -it doesn't make it the best practice. Why? Because digital environment relies on principles that exclude the very idea. You can't have it both ways.

Rules to Execute By

Once I put together a list of the best examples of digital creativity, I started wondering what does it take for digital creativity to happen. If my list offers any evidence, it is not about creation of brand images, storytelling ideas, and media strategy for distributing them. It's about creating conditions that allow something unexpected, fun, informative, communal, or helpful to happen. Also, almost by default, a lot of successful digital solutions have marketing built into their product. Groupon has done it really, really well; so has Pepsi Refresh Project, GroupTabs, and Best Buy Shopkick. To build upon the definition of digital creativity as a plan for arranging elements, I offer here the possible routes for executing this plan. 

1. There are no shortcuts. It's not enough just to release some commercial art piece and count on it to stir up consumers emotions; the hardest part always happens afterwards. In order to get a brand to be talked about and interacted with, an idea is only beginning of the job. The rest of the job here means coming up with solutions that build upon emotions long-term: for every idea that plays upon consumers' emotions, there needs to be a set of follow-up tactics that give it legs. Sometimes that means 24/7 engagement (Twelpforce Best Buy), sometimes facilitating a community (Ford Fiesta Movement), sometimes making something useful (Lufthansa's MyFlightStatus) or informative (Frito Lay's Chip Tracker).  Same token, I wonder where New Balance is going to take its Anton Krupicka partnership, and how Old Spice is going to continue interacting with its now considerable fan base. 

2. Build Media Behavioral Plan. Having a very a narrow view of consumers actions based on them rating something, updating, RTing, checking-in, clicking on, etc. prevents from seeing impact that our solutions have on the larger behavior that we want to change/inspire. Too often we think about the most effective communication channels for reaching consumers instead of asking how to align diverse behavioral tactics in order to achieve a desired change.

3. Enter decision-making game. It's always useful to wonder how different creative solutions will help consumers choose between different products/services/brands. That's a good perspective that shifts the focus from the brand and its story to consumers and their point of view. To avoid the over-simplified model of consumers as beings with "limited info-processing capabilities" leading to the "cut through the clutter" requirement, the best is to think about creative solutions as resources. This means aggregating and curating stuff that already exists online (eBay Lookbook, Nike+ Foursquare), using group dynamic as a resource (Groupon, Pepsi & Food52 recipes on Stickybits, Barcode hero), visualizing info (OK Trends, Hunch Taste Graph), or amplifying the behavior (Don Q's Lady Data). 

4. Get rid of dead ends. This means always think what comes next: how some particular tactic or solution can be linked to the next one, and the one after that. Think the rules of improv, and apply them to digital (COACH Poppy Project and Jonah Peretti's Start The Adventure are good examples). The point is: address a campaign as an interconnected system, not as a story (DonQ's Facebook page, Don Q's Lady Data on BuzzFeed). Then, keep it alive.  

5. Digital is not about the tools. Rather than chasing the latest digital gimmick, it's always good to think about digital as a network of relationships that are made both of behaviors and technology. Then it's possible to explore how make some relationships visible (Netflix Rental Queues Visualization), how to create new relationship between people (HowAboutWe, Uniqlo Lucky Counter), how to create a new relationship between people and products (Tesco iPhone app) or between people and the brand (GroupTabs, Best Buy Shopkick), how to amplify/improve existing relationships (Pepsi Refresh Project) or how to simplify them (Rightcliq by Visa).

6. Think bricolage. Any combination of digital/physical (Nike Livestrong Chalkbot, Schnitzel & Things iPhone app), brand/community (Burberry Art of the Trench), communication/behavior (MTV VMA's Twitter Tracker), mobile/web (7-Eleven + Zynga partnership), game/activity (RunKeeper) is allowed. Especially the unexpected ones. The point is to stick together different things to develop something new. It would be easy to think of it as a simple recombination: what's great about bricolage is that it uses bits and pieces of radically different media and behavioral dynamics to create new formats.

*My title is an obvious play on Bud's "Words to Strategize By" post that I very much recommend. But here's a twist: instead of being interested in the ideas that may guide our thinking, I was more into coming up with the possible rules of thumb for their execution.

Examples of digital creativity

I am very excited to be presenting as part of the Miami Ad School program in October (thanks, Mehera!). As part of my presentation on digital creativity, I have gathered here some campaigns/digital efforts that I think can serve as good examples. Because I believe that digital creativity can best be described as a "plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose" (Eames), I settled on the following criteria: a) ideas that enable/facilitate/inspire community well, b) ideas that curate/aggregate stuff that already exists on the internet instead of creating something new, c) ideas that combine things that were previously unconnected (this can mean digital/physical or app/web connections), d) ideas that make stuff visible so as to reveal collective trends/tastes, e) ideas that help people do something in the easier, better, and more fun way, and f) ideas that encourage some sort of behavioral dynamics (games, interactions, points, etc.) I also included some good ideas that are not used by brands, but that are executed well, and that solve some problem and/or respond in a new way to some need. This is just a preliminary list, and I'd love to add more based on your suggestions. 

a) Ideas that enable/facilitate/inspire community

Pepsi Refresh Project 

Ford Fiesta Movement

Groupon

Anton Krupicka + New Balance 

b) Ideas that curate/aggregate stuff that already exists online

Don Q's Lady Data on BuzzFeed 

COACH Poppy Project (disregard the visuals; the idea of the sites' trail is cool)

eBay Lookbook 

Rightcliq by Visa 

Burberry Art of the Trench

c) Ideas that make new combinations

Nike+ Foursquare

Best Buy Shopkick

Pepsi & Food52 recipes on Stickybits

Schnitzel & Things iPhone app

Tesco iPhone app

Nike Livestrong Chalkbot

Barcode hero 

d) Ideas that make stuff visible

OK Trends - data from OK Cupid

MTV VMA's Twitter Tracker

Netflix Rental Queues Visualization

Frito Lay's Chip Tracker

Hunch Taste Graph

e) Ideas that help people do something in the easier, better, and more fun way

HowAboutWe 

Don Q's Lady Data 

Twelpforce Best Buy

Lufthansa's MyFlightStatus

f) Ideas that encourage behavioral dynamics

Jonah Peretti's Start The Adventure (why can't brands come up with something fun like this?)

Old Spice

Uniqlo Lucky Counter

RunKeeper

7-Eleven + Zynga partnership

GroupTabs

Image found here.

The game of catching-up.

Agencies have an uneasy relationship with the "new generation of consumers," to say the least. Sure, stats like the above have become a must-have in any client presentation, there are slides on the trends of their behavior, there are audience insights and landscape overviews. But still, these consumers ("millenials", "gen Y", "superconsumers") are treated more as some special species from the future than as the everyday marketing reality.

Ok, this may not be completely fair. Agencies have been getting better in marketing to these people online - that is true. At the same time, the question is: do they really, truly understand how today's young consumers behave online, why and how they use the web, and how to resonate with them? Because if they did, would they still been doing what they are doing? This is, to the great extent, still brand-dominated world. The campaigns are approached from the brand's point of view, and retrofitted into consumer behavior. This is only understandable, since it is the brands that are paying for campaigns. Got to make a living. Still, how long this can go on, until the new generation of consumers completely slips out?

First, the "kids" who grew up with the Internet are not kids anymore - they are way past college, with a completely new set of needs, and consequently products, services and brands that can respond to them. What they are not past is their media habits and behaviors. You don't crucially change the way how you use the web and behave online just because you grew up - you further it and build upon it. The expectations that have been formed earlier stay. Don't expect that someone who watched TV shows online all of the sudden signs up for Time Warner - they may just hook up their computer to a flat-screen that they can now afford. Someone who shopped on Etsy may upgrade to Net-a-Porter, but the deal is the same. And so on.

Second, and more important for this present moment is that whoever is in touch with this generation changed their own media habits, too. Parents (and grandparents) are now on Facebook to keep tabs on their kids (or just plainly to connect with their long-lost high-school friends or play Farmville); they watch YouTube; they go to Twitter (can't beat all those coupon deals); and maybe even occasionally take a peek on Foursquare. And this is where the real challenge is: what we thought of as typical "suburban" parents are hardly such anymore. If we thought that we knew trends and behaviors of a certain demographics, we actually can't claim that today. All bets are off.

The point is that the change that new generation may be leading spreads way too fast to all other demographic segments. It impacts how other generational demos are consuming media, shopping, reading news, communicating, and interacting with brands. Because they all live in the same home, the gap between early adopters and the mainstream rapidly narrows.

So while agency teams are still building personas (btw, do people still do that?) with a photo of some edgy teenager, they may as well replace it with a young professional, college graduate, or whomever else fits the bill. Soon, it's all going to be the same media habits, brand expectations, and consumption patterns. It may finally be time to stop talking about the millenials, and start thinking about the millenial behavior. 

Note: this post was inspired by a brief conversation with Edward Boches and by this MediaPost article.

The future is uncertain, live with it.

The title (and the text below) don't come from me, but from this guy.

"Build yourself a network fast, by blogs, tweets or whatever, outside of the the organization. Find the intractable problems that face the people who run the organization: what keeps them awake at nights. Use that network to get ideas, adapt them to your context, use principles. Build capability, let the structure emerge, don't impose it."

While all of this sounds awesome, I'd have yet to see it in practice. Has anyone ever done it??

the problem of strategy

Once upon a time, everybody knew the answer to the question of strategy. But, don't be fooled: this fact has nothing to do with strategists' definitions of their own discipline; it actually has everything to do with an environment where strategies were executed. That environment was really predictable, clear, and stable.

There, strategists - not avid doers by nature - assumed a comfortable position of mostly observing the field from their elevated spot. Tricky as they are, they took pride in their talent of seeing everything that is going on in their business, brand, and consumer landscape. They were confident in predicting the next business move, and the next one, and the one after that. The whole strategic wisdom resided in optimizing a given set of alternatives, specifying a particular course of action, and committing to it. They knew what resources they had, they knew what their goal way, and simply enough, that their job was to connect the two. Sweet & simple, yet so antiquated.

At that ancient time, it was easy to say, "strategy is how you create value," "strategy is how you make money," or "strategy is how you use your finite resources to achieve your goal" (oh, actually: for some people, it's still easy to say that).

Ok, now, let's rewind to the present. What we are dealing with is messy, unpredictable, and hard to measure. It's complex. It's no longer possible to observe and predict enough to map out courses of action that guarantee desired outcomes. If you commit to a certain alternative, you may end up being dead. Turns out, a solid strategy may as well be your biggest liability.

In this context, we can't say anymore that strategy is "how we create value" and here is why. Simply, we don't know in advance what's valuable - or what may turn out to be valuable - to people online. Our criteria and our definitions of value don't work there. What the sources of value for people there are - free access, sharing, creating, participating, interacting - may not necessarily be valuable to business itself. In fact, it may seriously undermine it. Yet, there's ton of sources of value online. Best businesses of the past few years focused on making visible the network of connections between people, between things, and among the two. They didn't know in advance if there's any businesses value in those connections: they mostly believed that, if they create conditions for all those ties to be exposed, that new sources of value will emerge. And they did. How fast we run, how much gas our car uses, where do we go, what do we buy, what do we like, who do we talk to - all turned out to be potentially lucrative. Truth is, making this info visible also created new behaviors, changed how people do things, make product decisions, and form brand preferences. All of this unforeseen and sometimes not very obvious, yet very relevant. What these new businesses knew is that their strategy is a process of not creating, but understanding value: where it resides, how it has been exercised, and how it's distributed through this space.

And this is precisely why we also can't say anymore that strategy is "how we make money." Web certainly doesn't lack an entrepreneurial streak: people create value for themselves, and for each other; start-ups create value for people and for themselves. Is what's valuable on the web always (if at all) aligned with brands' money-making goals? Not necessarily. More importantly, should it be? Where exactly in this system either people or startups need to worry about if an advertising agency or a brand makes money? Further yet, why would they want them to make any money at all? And then, there's this trick: does the business of making information and connections visible - no matter how valuable - equal to making money? Not always the case. Facebook, for the longest time, didn't know what's its main source of revenue (our privacy?), Twitter didn't know (early bird?), and Foursquare still doesn't know. What they know - and know it well - is to react to opportunities that arise quickly and unexpectedly. And because these companies deal mostly just with creating conditions that make possible for the unexpected value to show up, they don't restrict their money-making options to a limited number of alternatives. Nor should they.

Then, here's why we can't say anymore that strategy is "how you use your finite resources to achieve your goal." Hate to break the news, but the resources are finite only if you make them so. What's worrisome here is the possibility that someone working online would even consider relying only on their own, by default limited resources, instead of utilizing the bulk of existing ones, or even creating conditions for new resources to show up? (No, I am not talking about crowdsourcing here, but basically about everything that people are doing online; all their actions can be used/amplified/facilitated/turned into a resource). At the end of the day, we are dealing with a hybrid behavior of people and technology, and the more distributed our resources, the better off we are. But, there's also something else here: on the web - it being so tricky with value and moneymaking and all - we often really don't know in advance either what resources we are going to need to achieve some goal or how to allocate them. Those who think they do, are either already out of business, or delusional (or both). For the rest of us, the best we can do is to see which connections have the biggest generative potential, and pour more resources into those.

So if strategy based on value predictions, projections, and finite resources doesn't make much sense anymore, what are we left off with? We got to accept that value online comes from very different and unexpected sources, and that we should not restrict our understanding if it in advance; that value is not always going to equal money on the short-term, and that this thus may not be the best way to inform our actions; and that our resources are as vast as we make them, and that how we allocate them depends more on the environment than on our strategic plan. Having all of this in mind, the best we can do is to try to work on providing conditions to make things happen: things like new behaviors, new connections, new sources of value, and new resources. The money will follow. Or not. But one thing is certain: the world that strategists work in is under active construction and there's no blueprint. For the first time ever, we are part of the construction crew: we are not directing it. And we need to reinterpret a lot of things that we have been regarding as fixed, and also probably come up with a new language to describe what the hell we are doing.

digital product dev = branding

 Digital product development equals branding. 

If this view is not more popular, it's because digital marketing industry is dealing mostly with pre-Internet brands, trying to retrofit them for the internet. In this situation, they end up doing marketing instead of product development.

A few words about product development: it's based on solving problems, it's aligned with what people are already doing/talking about/behaving, and it's creating something that let's people do/talk/behave in a different, better way. It's awfully similar to the way web operates.

Why is this sort of thinking so hard to apply to brands? 

Sure, old brands are big, slow, complicated, and all of that. But what makes them truly different from digital brands is the fact that their product development and marketing are separate, and come in a "create a product"-"market the product" sequence. 

To make Coke relevant, P&G relevant, Walmart, or Nike relevant in digital is something that keeps many a CMO awake at night. In fact, it is R&D management that should be awake. Once digital becomes part of the product development process, then marketing those products is a breeze.

The problem here is that the burden of digital can't fall at the end of the value chain: to marketing, advertising, and promotion. When it does, then ... well, we have already seen what agencies can come up with. If they are stuck in "why aren't we more creative" limbo, it's because they are entrusted with an unfair task.

To really be relevant in digital requires taking a step back and realize that value chain is more of a Venn's diagram, where business plan intersects with user behavior, strategy, technology, user experience, and visual design. It's about keeping all those different views in play while making things. 

This is something that all start-ups and digital brands already know. They invest in their products, in making it relevant and continuously evolving: not because they want people to talk about those products, but because they want people to use them. Which means that they spend most of their time doing R&D. 

Digital is really not a marketing challenge.

online, causality doesn't exist.

By default, the web is a network. When we say web today, we don't mean only "stuff online," but the whole digital ecosystem of interactive interfaces, smart objects, phones, and whatever else can interact. Now, if connections between people and things are like a network, then the difference between a "behavior" and a "mechanism" becomes a little bit irrelevant (just think Foursquare, Twitter, Nike+, or just about any app these days).

If every behavior is a bit of technology and a bit of our action, then we are actually talking about a network that is a combo of both. And when we start talking about networks, then causality becomes slightly problematic. In other words, digital really doesn't give us a reason to believe that either behavior or technology is something separate that causes immediate and apparent changes in one another. It's all about small & gradual changes.

This would all be cool if the marketing models haven't been based on causality or, on questions like "how is this effort going to impact behavior of this particular target?" or "how many impressions do we need?" or "how much media buy is going to cause this particular sales lift?" Everything people in marketing do is to create causes that (they hope) will result in certain effects.

But what if things don't work in this way? In everything we do, and in all (or most) decisions we make we look up to either to others or to an immediate context. We often do things because others have done them, or because they are easy and convenient to do, or because "one thing led to another."

This is where visibility of aggregated individual behaviors comes in: knowing how many people have already done something inspires and coordinates our own behavior. In turn, the ability to see actions of others, immediately and in aggregate, sort of changes how we talk about mobilization, organization, collective action, and movements. It's all about adding scale to the small & gradual.

Blue State Digital knows this, and a very few smart brands also know it, too. They let people to directly communicate with each other, organize their own events, and then record and share stuff they have done with the online community. Instead of dealing with the question of causality - "how is this message going to change this behavior," they focus on the widespread sharing of information about all the local, individual actions that happen. This visibility of collective "traces" then inspires a larger collective behavior.

The fun part is that, in the past, it took us years or even decades to gather this sort of composite data. At that time, when we could not see each other (literally), operating according the principle of causality (this brand/cultural/political representation caused people to behave in a certain way: shop, identify with something, or vote) may have been an useful social/economic invention. But today, choices, preferences, and actions of others are collected and exposed at an almost immediate speed. Networks and patterns made of small and local stuff form. Make that visible, and the whole new world opens up.

Still, for now, the only few times when we have seen this sort of local-actions-turned-networks that change our perceptions and behaviors were media events like Winter Olympics (Twitter Tracker), Super Bowl (reading Twitter was more interesting than watching a game), or MTV Music Awards (not sure how relevant that one was). 

Why don't brands do this? To remain important in today's world, the best strategy may as well be to expose a bit of it.

fun times

Just reading about the ideas behind these start-ups made me feel more excited about digital than any online marketing campaign i have seen last year. It really interesting how all those people are recognizing opportunities in the every possible combination of people's behavior and technology while ad industry is still sticking to doing what they have been doing for the past 100 years. (see Bergdorf Goodman ad above, for example). The full slideshow is here, and you can read the accompanying article here.

there's something wrong with the brand promise

Brand promise links products and services to a consumer. Through brand promise, brands tell people that they will be forever young, or beautiful, or rich, or popular - if they consume their products.

Brand promise used to have a powerful function. It helped people make decisions in the complicated situation of having to choose between millions of similar products. It mostly did so through helping people calculate the benefits and costs of buying a particular product over any other. 

To help people calculate benefits and costs, brands used communication. They repeated the same messages over and over again in mass media until: a) they created positive associations between a brand and its products and, b) they persuaded people to believe in the brand promise.

The alleged mechanism was something like this: first, you see some product and you immediately think "oh, it's going to make me forever pretty," and, second and more important, you decide to believe that it will. This means that, based purely based on the brand promise, you expect a product to deliver.

Well, that's just plain crazy.

Regardless, the reason that marketing communication used to be so powerful was simply that people did not have any other decision-making tools available. Precisely because people could not easily calculate costs and benefits, they had little choice but to trust the brand. There was simply no way of knowing in advance if a product is going to suck: unless you buy it, take it home, and use it, you won't ever know. The situation of decision-making contained obvious risks, and brand promise served to minimize them.

Ok, so that's how things used to work.

Now, it turns out, even if persistent marketing communication created specific & well-defined brand associations, there's no guarantee that these association have anything to do with product sales. And if brand associations do not indicate people's awareness of brand promise, how can we know that this promise played any role in people's decision-making? Truth is, we can't. There are always reasons that people will choose some product that have nothing to do with its brand: timing, price, convenience, habit, etc. And then, just because someone repeatedly buys some product, we can't know that she does it because of brand promise. Or, as Lou Carbone said: “Just because I fly airlines doesn’t mean I love them. I hate airlines.”

Then, that whole "let's persuade people to believe our brand promise by using cultural identification" does not seem to work so well anymore. A little bit of behavioral economics here: a study called “Rethinking Brand Contamination” (discovered via Bill Petti) shows that immediate context of decision-making shape consumers' calculations way more than their brand perceptions. This situation has very real economic implications: when they have social and cognitive clues available, people are willing to pay a way higher average price for some product than when those clues are missing.

Ouch.

In digital, we obviously don't lack those clues. There's Twitter, Red Laser iPhone app, Price Grabber, reviews, blogs, and ton of applications to help us decide among products and services. Then there's interface design, and navigation, and the way info is presented, and community, and page organization, etc. etc. This means that brand promise, instead of being something "in the mind of a consumer" is actually something "in the clues through which a brand delivers."

Best digital branding is simply about creating contexts rich with social and cognitive clues that help people calculate benefits over costs of consuming a particular brand's products. Think all of those brand platforms and utilities that are around, from Pepsi Refresh to Nike+. Those brands know that ever slight manipulations in platforms' design can significantly change outcomes of people's decision making.

If people end up buying a ton more stuff in IKEA than they originally planned, that's because of design of its stores. And if people end up spending more money on FreshDirect than they wanted, that's because the "super-intuitive" navigation of its interface actually does not contain a single grocery item, only gourmet foods.

Digital media turn branding on its head. Brands can't just communicate brand promise to help people calculate online. After all, we all know that online advertising is not particularly effective. But they can do exactly the opposite:  they can use all the ways in which a brand delivers to communicate it. After all, that's what that whole idea of 'moments of truth' is about.

In digital, brands have the same role as always. It's just branding that's completely different.

p.s. That kid creeps me out.

behavior + technology = situation

“A revolution does not happen when society adopts new tools, it happens when society adopts new behaviors,” famously said Clay Shirky some time ago.

And indeed, his statement seems simple enough. The problem is, it really does a little more than to reveal all the questions that it fails to answer.

The most obvious one is: how does this adoption of new behaviors happen? And then, there's also this one: what's the relation between tools and behaviors?

Before I go any further, first there's a quote that I love: "What happens in the place of two ghosts - society and technology - is a collective thing, the trajectory between programs and anti-programs."

So, let's maybe try to change our approach. For a second, imagine a world without any and all form of causality between technology and behavior. Imagine that they do not "influence" each other. Imagine that they interact.

Now, you don't actually need to imagine that last thing. Because interactivity is all around us. And truth is, we are actually not the only ones who can interact. Or, as Russell Davies says, “As object informationalize, communication channels are getting built in. And cleverer phones will be the perfect things to interact with these clever objects. This is what advertising and marketing and media people really need to get afraid of. There is a whole model here that integrates the conversation into the stuff, creating a much more natural relationship between people and things.”

So, if that's out reality, why are we still talking about who influences whom or how our campaigns are going to influence behavior or how differently people are going to behave after they see this or that message?

I guess that's because we like to think that there is a clear-cut dichotomy of people/culture on one side vs. technology on the other. Truth is, there's no clear-cut division between them, there's only a network. How so? Very simple: in digital, people are defined by their behavioral patters or, by what they do online. This is only partially defined by their skills, and interests, and preferences. The rest of their capabilities belongs to their tools/technology. (There's another reason why I find this situation interesting, and that's because it tackles the question of motivation: do you do something because you really want, just because you can, or because something in your tools/behavior of others inspired you to do so?)

This is a sort of game changing situation. And indeed: what we are creating today in marketing are not just products and services, but situations for interaction. Here, everyone included (people, objects, tools) are gathered into "programs of action." Now, instead of causality, the relationship between technology and behavior is the one of prescribing behavior: what kind of behavior does your situation encourage? What behaviors does it restrict?

I read somewhere about the rationale behind Foursquare, which goes something like this: instead of pushing messages out, Foursquare is something that allows people to prescribe activities to other people, to encourage them to change their behavior (stop going to same places, try out things that they wouldn't normally do). Similarly as Foursquare encourages its users to have a more active social life, or as Twitter encourages sharing of information by displaying the number of followers that each user has, there are services that rely on the same principle of transparency to curb behavior. For example, Bundle’s “Everybody’s Money” shows millions of personal finance trends across U.S. and allows people to compare their spending habits with those of others. Or, Blippy automatically publishes daily personal purchases for others to see and interact with. Phillip Kaplan, who founded Blippy, says that situation where you can see what everyone else is buying creates an interesting social dynamics, as maybe you’ll start manipulating your spending habits on your cards to show just a certain side of yourself.

What does this have to do with marketing? At the end of the day, we are still in the business of changing people's behavior, as we have always been. The difference is that, in digital, communication is much less effective than situations for behavior that we can create.

What are social media really good for?

 

Once they created a Twitter account, and a Facebook page, a YouTube channel, or a Foursquare badge, brands often have very little idea about what to do there next.

This is a quite common problem. 

Why? Well, social media are still to the large extent regarded as the domain of brands' PR departments, rather than a marketing activity. The classic Procter&Gamble's two step way of promoting brands, "spend a large amount of money to maintain the 'share of voice'" and "tirelessly remind consumers of your products' 'unique value proposition'" just replicated itself online. Maybe unfairly, I tend to put brands' crowdsourcing efforts (CP+B's Brammo, MyStarbucksIdea, Kraft's Vegemite spread, in the same category of smart PR gimmicks. Is this really about "co-creating the future of the company with your customers" or about your brand promotion?

Ok, look at this now. According to Social Radar, top social brand for April 2009 was Twitter, and then Google, Obama, iPhone and Facebook. Abrams Research survey of 200 participants in the Social Media Week last year shown that Zappos, Obama, CNN, NYT, Dell and Jet Blue are top choices for social media leaders.

I would add here Whole Foods' and SchnitzelTruck's use of Twitter, and YouTube's streaming of Super Bowl as my favs. The biggest lost opportunity: Tide detergent (how many times do we need immediate advice on removing stains?). It is even more lost opportunity because Tide has a pretty elaborate website so it would be quite neat to tie Twitter into their existing efforts. Integrated program, anyone?

In any event, the ranking above is interesting. Because, most of the brands that made the list are services. Which means that they do something for their customers. Which then also means that they use social media in the same manner. And this makes them the best. (Adrian Ho started saying this long time ago and recently posted an excellent presentation about it.) Rick Webb also recently observed something smart and funny: "What is with the Internet that no one wants to provide professional services? It's like everyone working on the web wants to start a car manufacturer instead of selling and repairing cars. Well let me ask you this: how many people got rich starting a car company? And how many people got rich starting a dealership, a dealership chain or a repair garage? A lot fuckin’ more. Will it make you a billion dollars? No. Do you need a billion dollars? No."

Right.

And while I am at it, let's take the idea a step further and say, as Adrian (again) already did, that "the best marketing isn't always separate from operations; often, the best marketing is great operations. Turn what you are already doing for customers into marketing." Now, if it were real, the LV campaign above would be just perfect example of this sort of thinking (use your own unique craft + distinct skills + internal processes + company's culture + different aspects of doing business to market yourself). After all, THAT is your only true differentiator from everyone else.) "Behind the scenes" and "Making of" videos that people love so much are a midget version of this idea.

Ok. So now what?

The problem that we currently have with social media is just going to replicate itself on Foursquare. Brands using Foursquare for badges is the same thing as them using social media only for conversation. Case in point: "The benefits for companies include increased footfall and the recruitment of a network
of brand ambassadors who will pass on recommendations to their friends and Twitter followers" (via BrandRepublic). Where did we hear that one before? 

As more and more brands make deals with Foursquare, they will do things to increase their "share of voice" and will push for their "unique value proposition" through ever increasing number of badges. The more badges there are, the less people are going to care.

Why? Because, and in addition to many many other things, badges are prone to losing their motivating value: "when getting started, the points system can be motivating, but after users attain a high level of points, the incentive no longer works." (says psychological research)

Cool. Now, while free stuff is always and forever be popular (drinks for mayors, specials, coupons, etc.), people also will also want some tangible service/relevant reward that helps them in some way. Just as they already want on Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube.

As smartest of brands have already figured out,  they need to be more strategic (no, PR thinking is not enough). And, they also need to be more aligned with the core programs of the Foursquare platform. Which means that, if Foursquare itself aims to inspire people to lead more interesting social lives, then the first question is how does your brand further that goal?

For example, I liked what HBO has done at Foursquare, mostly because they were smart enough to bring in  partners like Racked and Eater. On the other hand, I had a feeling that Zagat could have done so much more (e.g. I keep thinking that FoodSpotting and Foursquare would be a nice service combo).

What does being more strategic on Foursquare mean? Well, it's possible to think of it as a smart frequent flier/loyalty program, where consumers' behavior is influenced in incremental steps. How? Keep in mind that few things motivate people more than approval from others. Then, provide relevant info (tips and recommendations) that help people do some activity better (go to the gym, ride a train, go out on a school night). Educate them (so many opportunities there). Integrate what you are doing on Foursquare with already existing stuff that you are doing on Twitter, FB, and website in a meaningful way (so no, I don't mean just broadcasting "hey i am here" info). Tie people's points or tips or whatever info into their other related activities (eating out and walking, going out and sleeping, running and weight loss, etc ... this would require collaboration between Foursquare and other info tracking apps, but I guess that's what being strategic is about). So, yes, think partnerships.

Brands today have behavior-changing systems at their disposal. Why waste them only on conversation?

That's like using a computer as a calculator. Or iPhone to talk.

web is an inexhaustible source of data aggregates.

Here is yet another way to triangulate publicly available data. This time, the tool asks what Twitter lists say about you.

What's funny is that this thing showed up almost simultaneously with the Twitter lists. People are obsessed with self-reflexivity. As soon as there's a new way to organize data, be sure the way to organize meta data will follow.

p.s. I love the "suits" moment.

New ownership?

A couple of days ago, I came across this site, Rent The Runway, done by Hard Candy Shell. The concept seems simple enough: pick a piece of clothing, order it + wear it, and then return it via mail. Something like Netflix model applied to (expensive) clothes.

I talked a bit over Twitter with my all-time fav creative director, Diana Hong about the idea (we said all good stuff). There are a few things that come to mind when you see something like this: maybe it can spur less consumption (after all people are not really buying, they are just renting); it democratizes luxury fashion by making it more available to everyone who pays a rental fee; it quickly surfaces popular stuff so it can be a great research tool for fashion brands; and it takes away the whole social/emotional vibe of buying (and owning) a piece of wonderful and expensive clothing. After all, the concept "retail therapy" has not been invented for nothing ...

But all these thoughts may be beside the point. What services like this (and Bag, Borrow, Steal and ZipCar before it) actually show is that people today are way more comfortable with sharing than any previous generation was. They are used to mixing, combining, and renting things when and if they need them.

It all may have started in digital, with music and movie downloads and content mashups on YouTube, and gradually evolved into a relationship with tangible goods. And this also means a different relationship to the whole notion of "ownership". Something to keep in mind if you are a brand ... and also if you are in marketing (reminded me of a pretty good post that I've seen a few months back, "Does Your Brand Rent or Own?" )

And ... as for this service encouraging less consumption: if music online is any indicator, people who download free stuff end up buying more music, not less, than those who don't ... Another lesson for brands?

An update: NYT's published today an article on Rent The Runway.

the future of strategic planning?

A few days ago, via NakedNY, I came across the PSFK-hosted event "The Future of Strategic Planning".

It's a series of events, in fact, described as a "discussion and video series about planning and beyond", with the main purpose of exploring "the intersection of brands, strategy, innovation, and the world of account planning." The hope is to "spark a lively discussion, and inspire those working in the field."

That is great. Except, I am not sure how useful it can possibly be. Mostly because if planners talk about planning there will be a lot of ideas that planners have: a) already heard of, and b) are likely to agree with, even if they haven't yet heard of them.

There's an inherent problem with a business discipline trying to define itself.

First, planners who are exposed mostly to other planners' ideas, read other planners' blogs, and tend to agree with what's written there, will inevitably consolidate what they already know. This means that they will be less open to doing things differently, and to be able to offer a fresh perspective on business challenges they encounter.

Second, even if a planner comes up with a different idea, they won't be able to easily push for it, because it simply doesn't fit in what everybody's already agreed on. And lack of disruptive ideas kills innovation - and the evolution of account planning discipline.

And finally, and most importantly, there is also this. Whether a planner did a good or bad job is ultimately (in their everyday work) not assessed by other planners. It's assessed by everyone else - the people that planners work for: creatives, UX, developers, account people, project managers, and ultimately, the client. It is those people that are the planners' real audience.

So maybe we should ask them what they think how account planning may look like today - to help them do their job better.

Otherwise, it's just an echo-chamber. And this is its perfect example: "Planning was conceived as the thinking behind creativity. But the conventional planner has become a caricature: thinking in an ivory tower and post-rationalizing the doing of others. But today – as the industry, agency, and world-at-large have evolved – the definition of planning, and its future, is unclear."

Seems to me that, with this approach, we remain in an ivory tower. This time, without even realizing it.

(I took this image from Joe Van Wetering's blog. His drawings are pretty amazing.)

this is why you should never ask people anything.

I believe that best ethnographic insights come not from questionnaires, but from observing people. A few weeks back, I saw this NYT article, "Calorie Postings Don't Change Habits, Study Finds", which explored if and how posting calories in fast food restaurants impacts people's choices of what to order.

The results showed that people made less healthy choices in spite of visible nutritional information (or, maybe because of it?). That is, before the labeling law took effect, fast food restaurant orders had a mean of 825 calories. After the info was posted everywhere, this mean climbed to 846.

Here's a more interesting part, however. The study found that about half the customers noticed the calorie counts, which were prominently posted on menu boards. About 28% of those who noticed them said the information influenced their ordering, and 9 out of 10 of those said that they had made healthier choices as a result.

But when the researchers checked receipts afterward, they found that people had, in fact, ordered slightly more calories than the typical customer had before the labeling law went into effect, in July 2008.

Really? I don't think that those people intentionally concealed the truth - I think that they simply scrambled to rationalize why they choose to disregard the nutritional information.

First, when faced with a choice: healthier and more expensive vs. less healthy and less expensive, people choose the latter. For study participants, buying food is a price-sensitive situation, and while they certainly notice any information added to the price, it does not affect the choice. It's simply not relevant.

Ok, so this explains why 50% of people reported they noticed calorie information. But why almost 28% of them said that they made healthier choices as a result?? Well, they either: a) truly believed that they made a healthier choice, all information notwithstanding or, b) because they simply adjusted their responses based on their assessment of the survey expectations. Simply, they offered what they deemed to be a desired response.

And this is why surveys suck more often than not.

Also worth noting: information does not change habits. At best, it creates a temporary cognitive dissonance. What changes a habit is creating another, conflicting, habit. That, or peer pressure.

(the image above is Windows 7 Whopper, sold in Japan).

gross national happiness

Apparently, there is a Facebook application that measures "happiness". What it does, in reality, is to analyze sentiment of status updates via tracking the ratio of positive vs. negative words in people's status updates. Here's a description of the project:

"Every day, millions of people share how they feel with the people who matter the most in their lives through status updates on Facebook. These updates are tiny windows into how people are doing. They're brief, to the point and descriptive of what's going on this week, today or right now. Grouped together, these updates are indicative of how we are collectively feeling. Measuring how well-off, happy or satisfied with life the citizens of a nation are is part of the Gross National Happiness movement."

The problem is that people don't very often say negative stuff there. It's such a downer, and no one wants to be friends with constantly negative people. I guess. Then, negative stuff tends to be private (more than positive ones). We keep them to ourselves and share only with the closest friends.

Then, there's also a question of how to interpret results. Is the graph above showing that people indeed are the happiest around Thanksgiving (family time, yay!) or that they are simply wishing each other "Happy Thanksiving!"? I assume the latter is the case.

But not a bad start. Data indeed can tell stories. And offer better insights into people's behavior, too. Someone should make this for Twitter.

If the wrong person always wins, how do you know who's the right one? And more importantly, do you care?

The other day I came across this very amusing article, "The Case Against Awards: Why the Wrong Person Always Wins", published in The New Republic. The basic idea of the article goes something like this: the awards system is by default flawed and, more importantly, so what? "So what" - exactly. 

Funny enough, those who are the most vocal about the unfairness and/or futility of the awards, the author observes, are those who - paradoxically, perhaps - care the most: "Those most convinced that, say, the Oscars do a horrible job of rating films are the very people who cling to their emotional investment in the outcome," he writes. And, a bit later: "Magazine writers tend to be both obsessed with who wins and convinced the process is a pathetic joke." I can't help but see a parallel to advertising industry. But again - so what? It's all for the show anyway.

The question here is not one of the awards at all - it's the one of sociology. The organization of human groups are rarely chaotic for a long time, if at all. There's always some form of order based on horizontal or vertical distribution of authority, power, and accountability. Games people play to reorganize the ties of power and authority are, for me, one of the most interesting domains of sociology and psychology.

Best part here, though, is that a game becomes increasingly more complex as the objective criteria of authority/power decrease. That is, as we move from matters of survival (where the winner is obvious - just think Darwin Awards) towards the matters of taste, the ranking becomes arbitrary. In short, there's no way to prove it.

Who judges these awards, at the end of the day, is really not important. Either way, we won't like the outcome.

(the image is from the Creative Faceoff.)

Digg does some smart stuff. And Huffington Post, too.

Releasing a lot of different versions of the same thing and seeing which one performs the best has by now became so notorious that even the most backwards-thinking clients have heard of it. Yet, while everyone kind of agrees that digital is a perfect environment for testing-and-learning, there are still very few real-world advertising examples to back up such claims. (Notable attempts by individuals aside.)

More correctly, in fact, is to say that there were a few examples until very recently. Some days back I read about the performance of Digg's experimental ad network that they started on their site at the beginning of the summer. Now, what I find more interesting than the  core premise of the model (allowing users to vote ads up and down) is how the advertisers responded - they started releasing different versions of the same ad, to see which one gets most diggs. For example, according to Brian's Adweek article, Toyota featured 8 different ads, each with two sets of copy. In other words, to increase the chances that an ad will be liked/clicked on, Toyota ran a test.

So, now - since there is no better measure of success than actually monitoring that success - why is not EVERYONE doing this same thing? I mean, why the audience voting has not become an inherent part of web-wide ad networks? Of course, there's a non-negligible question if the model can work outside the Digg environment, but the current returns (click-through rate that reaches 2 in some instances) are such that it seems at least worth trying to find out.

At least, that's what Huffington Post thinks. Apparently, they've started doing testing to some of its headlines (this actually reminded me of the same thing that Elle now regularly does with two versions of its covers, but wonder what they learn from the results since the feedback loop is so long and celebrities on the covers are not repeated for a long time). Anyway, visitors to HuffPo randomly see one out of 2 versions of a headline for the same story. Then, the editors give it 5 minutes, and based on this 5 minute face-off between the two titles, they select the winner. Real-time headline testing? Kind of great. 

And - if it works for content, why wouldn't it work for ads? Try it.

(the image found here.)

nice sping morning

Tim Brown (of IDEO) has a new book. I am curious.

What made me laugh in NY Times' review of his book is, however, the following unrelated quote (it's a response that designer Raymond Loewy gave to the president of the American Tobacco Company when asked when he's going to be finished.)

“Oh, I don’t know. Some nice spring morning I will feel like designing the Lucky package... I’ll call you then.”

This is my new favorite.

nerdiness has just reached a new level

Google outdid itself, to celebrate 60th birthday of a barcode. Nerds everywhere approve.

what do you expect for a dollar?

Last Monday someone shared on Twitter a link to Seth Godin's post "If Craigslist cost $1". I don't read his blog, but this idea got me interested. I shared it at work with Noah, and his take was that Metafilter already applies this model, by charging its members $5 for service - and thus creating "one of the most active and highest quality community websites out there." (Noah's quote).

So, right, prohibitive pricing is a proven and efficient mechanism to coordinate demand.

In digital, things may turn out to be a little bit more complex. Prohibitive pricing indeed may work perfectly well for communities like Metacritic, where what is charged is a membership. Craigslist, on the other hand, is a service - and not a community. When we pay for a service, we expect not only access to it, but also to get something in return (at least, it seems to me that things work out that way). I expect Netflix to let me stream movies I want; I expect ZipCar to be where designated; I expect Time Warner cable to work and its technicians to show up on time (often an unreasonable expectation). So, while it is correct that charging $1 will create a "tightly organized community", it may also make people change the way they use - and benefits they expect from - Craigslist as a service.

(Somewhat related: while I think that micropayments actually can make a lot of sense on the web, I don't think there's should be regarded as a blanket approach - precisely because people's habits, expectations, and motivation considerably differ from one thing to another. For example, a piece of content is not just that: while people easily pay .99 for a song, I am not sure they would be willing to pay the same amount of money for a newspaper article.)

style as an attention technology

I came across this recent review article in the Journal of Bioeconomics talking about Richard Lanham's not so recent book, "The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information." While I find the subject old and tired, and generally regard it as a phrase du jour of the new media enthusiasts, I was drawn to this article because of the "attention technology" combo. Technology? Well, that's one interesting idea. 

Basically, the point that the author makes is that style can be regarded as technology for directing - attracting and allocating - human attention. (In a similar vein, brands can be regarded as technology for allocating attention). Then I wonder, this has to be a system design question. But then, what are we really designing here?

What's the point of style? In the information age, the argument goes, it's style, not "stuff" that becomes the greatest contributor to economic value. And then, "a mundane economic explanation for this shift from stuff to fluff is the rise of wealth, which induces income effects. For a family living at subsistence, "stuff" like food, clothing, clean water, and shelter, is vital. Wealth makes room for style; we expect style to be a strongly superior good." (Funny, this reminds me of the "relationships not objects" ideas, part 1 and 2 ... and also the fact that it seems that most brands online still operate in the condition of utmost poverty (amid waste) - if we follow the logic above - by focusing on creating stuff, not style.)

Then, there's the addictive power of style, and the tendency (reflected in the assumptions of some economic models of addition) for the "investment of time and effort in critical appreciation to be rewarded with greater pleasure in the future." And, finally, there's the question of the spread of styles in society, and more generally how ideas capture public attention (is there anyone today who does not ask this question??). This author calls the process "cultural evolution", similar to Dawkins' memes (that evolve via modification, selection, and replication). Individual decisions and social interactions "set the conditions for the evolution of cultural traits, and cultural innovations - good "style" among them - and those which are good at grabbing favorable attention grow in popularity."

Okay, all of this is not particularly new. What I am more interested in is, if style can indeed be regarded as technology, and if technology is "society made durable" as sociologist Bruno Latour claims, then it implies to something way more stable than evolution of cultural memes. And something much more "networked" and distributed and co-evolving. Which may indeed be an approach to attention more interesting than the economic one. (In economic view, attention is a raw and limited resource. Here, attention is a system, a network, a connective tissue; and as such it's a matter of design). Style is not a property of objects; it's indeed a technology. Perhaps.

The image found here.

thanks, niko!

A few days I ago I wrote about making intelligent connections (between stuff), instead of creating more (wasteful) stuff. One of the comments was by Niko Herzog, who emailed me yesterday a pretty great article related to this topic. The article is called "Human/Object Relations", and it features a conversation between well-known Japanese designers Naoto Fukasawa and Kenya Hara (author of "Designing Design"). Here are the parts that I liked the most:

"I realized there was no need to create new forms; all I had to do was design the relationship between a human, an object, and what is around the two. That realization gave be a big relief.

People think that design is about making new things, creating new stimulations. But what about the good relationships that already exist? Why abandon all that and make things all over again?

If there is already a relationship with an object that is 95 percent good, then all that has to be done is to adjust the remaining 5 percent to suit the current needs. ... What I am trying to say is that the important thing is how much design you can do with the remaining 5 percent ... how you can make the best out of the design along with what's already there, instead of just throwing everything out and starting from scratch."

stitching things together

A few days ago I read somewhere that, while the energy-saving capacities of electronic appliances are increasing (with the result of more energy saved), the sheer number of these appliances are growing, making the end amount of spent energy the same. A zero-sum game.

This made me think about the old-school (but still surprisingly vibrant) definition of innovation where repeatedly making new things - products, technology, services, etc. - is regarded as innovative. This is "more is more" model (and it found its best and most notorious application in fashion. And in advertising :).

What a waste.

Then I remembered the best innovation of all: the evolution of the human brain. That thing did not continue to grow according to "more is more" principle, because if it did then we would have our bodies attached to our heads and not the other way around. Simply, if brain actually continued adding a new part for the each evolutionary step it went through, it would be so large that it would not be very adaptive to have it.

So what brain did instead was to add more and more connections between its different parts - or, it used its  already existing resources to build new stuff. As a matter of fact, the human brain has more synaptic connections than brain cells.

Pretty intelligent.

But for some obscure reason, it seems that the web - which is actually all about the connections, as its name says - is instead following the "more is more" suite with no apparent justification. More content, more info, more tools. The focus seemed to have been on creating more things, not on how to stitch them together.

But those most successful on the web are the ones making connections. The connections between: a) people (Facebook), b) people and people and information (Twitter), c) content (BabyCenter), d) information and activity (Nike+), e) information and service (Zipcar), f) content and service (Netflix), g) information and information (Google), h) whatever the core of your business is with whatever will help you improve it.

So let's think about the web for a second not as a "digital channel" but as a "connecting tool". In order to get  best out of anything on the web, that something can't be created as a stand alone thing - or, better yet, it can't be designed in such a way that it functions as one.

Digital marketing challenge, then, is to stitch different things together: to figure out how all different elements interrelate, and to rearrange them to design a better (and not necessarily always new) customer experience. We can think of digital marketing as a business of making connections.

Clients' problems can be addressed with things that already exist. The important question is: "what and who am I connecting my product with?", instead of "who am I communicating my product to?". The difference (a big one) is that we are figuring out how to fit product in people's life in a more efficient, less wasteful way: what is the activity we are connecting it to? information? behavior? service? people? content?

And, in fact, this approach is not only about reducing waste. It's about creating more intelligent stuff.

Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.*

*Jane Jacobs

I have found this Russell Davies' photo  (in relation to print business) on Adam Greenfield's blog, and it got me to thinking (which is always a good thing). I was not quite sure in which direction I wanted to take my thoughts, and still am not, so let's see where this post takes me.

I can start with knowledge - organizational, social, and technical. Which, said more plainly, refers to the latent and manifested knowledge that's intrinsic to any industrial practice. Media firms do business the way they know how to do it, which is to say, to repeat stuff that worked in the past. Advertising agencies do the same thing.

When a new media and technological format emerges, they appropriate it to the already existing network of knowledge. Which is why the change is such a slow process (predictions of end of the world notwithstanding). But which is also why it also happens, by gradual and incremental dis-assembling of tools, ideas, practices, and information suitable for one business environment, and equally gradual and incremental re-assembling of those same tools and practices with new elements: new tools and new ideas and new ways of doing things. What comes out of it is a bricolage that's sometimes a monster, and sometimes a beauty.

Every time I hear an extreme argument about "old" versus "new" and the doom for the old and the celebration of the new, I think how bad, unfounded, and weak those arguments are. They are a) selective (they use only examples that support the argument, and ignore others); they are b) simplistic (there must always be one single force behind the change - call it the internet, or call it consumer behavior, or call it fragmentation, or whatever else comes handy), and they are c) very easy to make because of the a) and b).

The world is, in reality, complex (a great and inexhaustible wisdom, eh). If it is complex, then forget about causality. Everything actually happens at the same time - and if we perceive something as a "big" change this is only because we didn't pay attention to many smaller, interconnected, and c0-happening things. Big change is always an outcome of a network of lot of incremental changes. And people - by default - focus on outcomes.

And every time I hear "old" vs. "new", I remember my favorite example of the famous inventor, Thomas Edison. What people much less frequently say in relation to this name is a "great businessman". Why? Well, Mr. Edison notoriously invented a light bulb. What is less notorious is that, while he did spent time in his lab figuring out purely technical challenges of a light bulb, what really makes him an inventor is that he created a whole wide network of conditions within which his light bulb made sense: he built relays (or hired people to do so), meters, cables in people's homes, electricians, laws, standards, regulations, etc. Only when this whole system (a network) was assembled together and put firmly in place, his invention - a light bulb - made sense. (In contrast, Nikola Tesla, a brilliant inventor, spent time mostly in his lab and in his lone hotel room; not a savvy businessman, that one. His inventions - or most of them - still sit in some safe to this day).

A "new" thing is in fact a network effect - of a network already in place, but more importantly, of an emerging network that this "new" thing brings to effect. Similar analysis to a light bulb can be applied to Twitter - yes, people were texting before, and yes, they were lifecasting whatever they were doing (which secured that Twitter was not such a "new" thing), but it also gave effect to an evolving system of niche broadcasting + interpersonal communication (which Twitter created by making it possible).

So now, the real question for me is not when/why innovations emerge, but when/why they succeed. Because this is when we notice them. Big change.

one of those things is not like the others

Twitter apparently has a notoriously low retention rate (according to Nielsen's report from last April). At least, it has it compared to other social networks, like Facebook and MySpace (the image above). 

I am suspicious.

First, there's a reasonable doubt that Twitter is a social network. It's closer to a combination of the niche broadcasting model + personal communication than to a social network. As a matter of fact, Twitter may be its own, previously unseen, thing. Why compare it to other social networks then? Maybe (very likely, in fact) Twitter is nothing like them.

It's kind of weird then to put it in the same category as Facebook and MySpace. It's even weirder to make conclusions about its potential for the long-term growth. Why? Well, mostly because Twitter did not, and probably will not, grow according to the same dynamics.

Social networks grow by adding new nodes, and by adding new connections between nodes. In short, they become bigger and more dense. This size + density combo has a specific network structure: a) random networks, b) heterogeneous random networks (small worlds), c) networks with consolidated group structure, d) networks with integrated group structure). This structure, in turn, determines who/when triggers cascades; cascades' size; dynamics of information spread; and its reach and limits. And all of this can help us assess some network's growth as the function of time.

Now, the fact that Twitter does not grow at the same rate like other social networks does not mean (only) that it's retention rate is low. Its atypical growth may in fact give us a reason to think that Twitter is different.

People who signed up for Twitter back when it was founded probably found it super-boring back then. It's not only that it's no fun to follow 3 people and be followed by five, it's just that Twitter - being the open system as it is (just think all those third party-created Twitter apps) - simply took time to assume its form This is to say that Twitter, as a system, is characterized by a really high latency (defined here as "a measure of time delay experienced in a system, the precise definition of which depends on the system and the time being measured"). People who used Twitter at a beginning gave it up for a while, and then came back. It just takes time for people to get to use it.

So perhaps exclusively focusing on the low retention rate does not make much sense. Or, at least, it does not give us the full picture. But a combination of a retention rate + latency might: I would like to see data on how many people, after being inactive for a period of time, come back - not on month to month basis, as Nielsen's study did, but in a longer time frame.

Anyway, this just crossed my mind.

people design

I was talking to Toby today about some project, and that conversation reminded me of something that I thought was pretty smart: Nike+ Active, which I noticed a few weeks back when the new iPod nano was launched.  What, in fact, attracted my attention was not the system itself (I have same old objections), but its main underlying business/experience premise: not everyone is a runner, but everyone can walk (well, almost everyone), so why not create something for this "everyone" and then - over time, and in incremental steps - turn them into runners?

There's more. Apparently, this kind of "incremental steps" thinking penetrates other industries, and among them, the least likely candidate of all: luxury fashion. I came across this article today, where Burberry's CEO talks about why they're launching a social network for trenchcoats (kidding. it's for people with trenchcoats ;), and her point is, verbatim: "These might not even be customers yet. Or they may be a customer for a bottle of fragrance or for eyewear." 

This kind of evolutionary thinking is, while not entirely new to marketing (customer lifecycle path has been around since forever, after all) is nevertheless groundbreaking in the sense that it doesn't target brand customers - it targets the brand's customers-to-be. Everyone's included.

It works something like this: start from a truly broad audience, monitor its behavior, make a product or a workout routine recommendation (how about you walk at a slightly faster pace today? next thing, you know, you're running. or, how about this nice scarf to go with those Burberry glasses of yours? what happens next, you are head-to-toe in Burberry, trenchcoat included), then make some more customized recommendations, and, in that way, create the brand's audience. There's something for everyone, after all.

Think of it as "people design". A brand literally designs a runner from an ordinary unsuspecting individual. Burberry brand designs a Burberry woman or man by training any human being (willing to spend thousands of dollars) in style, quality, fit, aesthetics, prestige, status, etc. Over time, this kind of education pays off.

Or, in the Systems language it works like this: the more people interact with a brand, the more brand learns about them, the more it has to offer, and in return, the more people evolve into that brand's customers. What it takes is: a) making the first step as accessible as possible and b) making progress as incremental as possible.

Everyone's talking only about designing products and services to fit people better, whereas at the same time happens the parallel process of designing people to use those products and services.

And this is very different from traditional marketing and its customer categories (even the name "categories" suggests something discreet, separate, and mutually exclusive). In comparison, here, everyone's going to have a great number of overlapping phases. What's common to a marathon runner and me is that we both perform the motions of running. it's a matter of degree in which we do that where we become different. A loyal Burberry customer is very likely to share a few of the great number of Burberry items that she/he posses with someone who has only those few items. Again, these are different points on a continuum of Burberry-ness, or on a continuum of running fitness.

When you think about it, most of customer categorizations from the past worked "before the fact" (i.e. before a person had an actual, real life experience with a product or a service). Targets were selected based on the assumptions founded on their history ("if it's a mom, then she must like ..."). There are thousands of moms, and all of them have their own patterns of doing things. At the end of the day, you never can predict who is going to become loyal to your brand, until, well, they already become loyal.

Every journey begins with a single step, and all that stuff.

Peter Merholz + Don Norman = Design Goodness

Video discovery of the day is the Don Norman interview by Peter Merholz. You can watch the video here, and if you don't have time, some cool Norman's quotes are called out below it.

Design never ceases to be relevant.

time paradox

I spend ridiculous amount of time on this site, but that girl is just too awesome to resist. Which reminded me of something that I read a while ago about a way more boring topic than fashion, which is what site metric is good for. Apparently, not for stuff that we are accustomed to. Almost all brands today ask for some kind of measurement, and since that's neatly wrapped in the idea of "engagement", the most natural thing was to regard metrics in term of quantity: more page views = bigger engagement; longer time spent on the site = bigger engagement; greater number of clicks = bigger engagement. For your site metrics, it seems, Bigger is Better.

Not necessarily. Just because you can measure something, doesn't mean that you want to measure it.

What if people spend more time because they are confused by site's navigation? What if they view more pages because they can't find what they are looking for? What if they click more because web designers made doing something on the site insanely complicated? Would ideal situation be that people immediately find what they are looking for, complete whatever task they want to complete in 3 clicks (or less), spend 10 happy seconds on the site and then get the hell out of there?

All of this may sound like any web agency's nightmare, but in fact, it probably does wonders for online brands. If you make things easy for people, they will come back and love you a little bit more. But how to prove it?

Well, how about a different set of metrics? For example, ones that actually reveal something about people's behavior and motivation (like, why do they come to the site on the first place and what can you learn from the way they behave once they are there). That is, metrics that reflect people's real-life goals, practical reasons, and specific behavioral patterns. This is then opposed to brands' goals to grab people and make them spend as much time on the site as possible, even if they are only clicking in frustration.

This is really hard.

Mostly because we need to have insights on which people's needs and behavior the particular product or service satisfies and fits in. Then create content, tools, and navigation to support that. Then decide which kind of things you want to pay attention to (newsletter sign-ups? number of comments? number of articles? number of products in the shopping cart? number of recommended products that people actually click on? number of times someone share something with someone?). When this is done, you can monitor these metrics to if you are reaching your business/brand/user goals.

This is sort of boring. But it doesn't have to be if you think of these measures as insights into people's behavior. The more info you have, it would be easier to optimize the site further. It would be also easier to offer content and tools that you know (and do not assume) that people will like. Iterations do not sound as catchy as "engagement", but they do work.

The more reasons a brand gives people to visit a site, the more they will come back. The more they will talk about your brand, the more they would like it, and more often they will recommend it. "More" is new "Bigger".

(And, I have to add that this is yet another case to let go of metaphors like engagement for a bit, and do something real for a change. Next time, instead of saying "engagement", display a list of things to show what you really mean. The same goes for other marketing metaphors ...)

smart experience

I've noticed this a while ago, and decided that it's pretty smart. What I am referring to here is the small piece of information in the bottom right corner: "How to Shop". In addition to store availability, it contains information on where to find a particular product, that is, it offers its exact location in the IKEA storage.

What IKEA probably figured here out is where a bottleneck in the real-world funnel of consumer shopping steps happen. That is, people's confusion in the oversized warehouse where everything is packed in boxes and all rows looks pretty much the same. While the location information is displayed on items on the store floor, IKEA did something even better here: before people even go to the store, they know where to find what they are are looking for.

Now, there is a legitimate question of why would IKEA want to do that? After all, it spent years and years perfecting the stores' floor plan so that people are carefully, step-by-step, guided through the shopping funnel, with the most likely result that they buy way more things that they originally intended.

Well, here's a catch. You can't enter the storage directly. You still got to go through the whole store in order to get there. And, having information where you are going to find something once you are done with this journey, only makes the journey more enjoyable. It takes away the painful wandering at the end. Which can only mean that there's is more attention to be paid to what's going on in the store, resulting - most likely - in purchase of a few more items that we haven't really planned to buy.

Small details makes for perfect design. And makes people like IKEA a little bit more.

why so many copycats?

The other day, I was IM-ing with Phil, and we started the game of exchanging the "sites that look alike". Before long, we realized that there is way too much of that stuff going on. What we thought was a trend secured for photographers' portfolios online, in fact got spilled out to other areas as well (most notably, agency sites). Here are some of examples of the variation of the theme above: this, this, this, and this. (Note: I am not going to get into who came up with it first; I am more interested in why there is so much replication?)

So now the question is: in the domain that is the Internet, which is lauded for its diversity, tending to niche tastes, and variety of content and distribution formats, how come that a lot of people are doing the same thing?

The simple answers are: a) don't change the format that works; b) it's cheaper to copy than to innovate; c) everyone else is doing it; d) it's fashionable; e) no one wants to be an oddball.

While all of the above are probably true, I am most interested in c). In the uncertain and unpredictable environment - or, at least, in the environment where likelihood of knowing what is going to succeed is hard to calculate - people usually rely on what others are doing. And since the Internet is a densely connected network, news/ideas travel faster and get more people exposed. So, if something seems to as a good idea, the likelihood that more people will think so are higher (and consequently, the chances that someone will try to replicate it increase).

So, is it possible that, instead of diversification, the Internet actually encourages replication? Or, does it just make the Power Law more apparent?

At the end of the day, the Internet is a network of people, tools, and content. It displays characteristics of any community: learning, influence, and imitation. And why we imitate? Because it's critical part of social learning. No one has time to figure out the world all over again; it's much quicker (and more adaptive) just look what worked for others in the past. (Otherwise, we would just be inventing hot water over and over again. Well, some of us still do that).

Then, without people having some things in common there would be no "community". In this particular case, what the sites above have in common is a message that their owners work in a digital industry; that they understand a thing or two of how people browse the page and what they pay attention to (big slideshow in the middle, 3-4 categories of links at the bottom, name in the upper left corner); that they will apply the same kind of knowledge to you - their clients. Which, in turn, just further replicates the same format ...

On the other hand, having this kind of sameness is perhaps a good thing. It allows us not to spend to much time figuring out what the brand/agency/individual is about. If we are so used to the format, the novelty of it has worn off, and we actually can direct our mental resources to other things. If Gitte Lindgaard is correct, we spend about 50ms deciding if we like a site or not. If that's really the case, then having to repeatedly deal with the same thing is almost a blessing.

I still think it's sorta boring.

i like this.

I found this somewhere on the internet this afternoon, and it was part of an environmental sustainability campaign, but i just think it's an example of a cool design. I guess I just like very simple things.

And oh yes, it is true. One day we may (will?) be gone.

from ownership to use*

* This dichotomy, or a 'transition' if you will, is part of the Adam Greenfield's list that I came across over at his blog. It reminded me of something I was thinking about a while ago, and that's Marx's theory (yea, I know, whatever). At the time, for whatever reason, I got reminded of Marx's analysis of use value and exchange value. For Marx, exchange value is the basis of capitalistic production, and indirectly the reason of all inequality in relations of production. Use value refers to the literal utility of a commodity. Exchange value is its price that can, but not necessarily does, reflect its use value. So now if I rewind to the digital world, and its economy, it turns out that this Marx model gets turned on its head. 

What people deem valuable online is stuff that has immediate practical value for them (is this worth my time & attention? does it help me do something? does it help me do something better than before?). There's no value before use. And, there's no value if it's not delivered right there and then when someone needs it (maybe this is why advertising does not work -- it promises some value ("buy product, be happy"), but delivers none at the spot). 

Then, what's deemed as valuable online is stuff used by the most people. The thing here is that different people value different things, and since there is ton of stuff on the web, what's most valued by most people can mean that: a) those things are indeed superior in delivering value in their category of goods/services (Google, Dopplr Netflix, etc.) and/or b) those things exhibit network effects, so the more people use them, they become more useful to everyone involved (Facebook, Twitter). Neither of these two scenarios has any exchange value. No wonder it's hard to make money on the web :)

Since utility seems to be one of the core values of the web economy (and not necessarily "sharing" and "collaboration" which are great concepts in itself but don't really explain the value of digital stuff unrelated to content - e.g. applications, tools, services, and social networks), I'm wondering why marketing people don't kick in and start making their campaigns accordingly. Ultimately, I think they would make much more money with their products/services in the offline world if they reverse the economic rationale of their campaigns in the online world. 

But I may be totally wrong.

p.s. The photo above has nothing to do with the post. Obviously.

the problem with the big idea

I am certainly not the first, and absolutely not the last person to ask this question. I was thinking about this a bit, mostly in relation to digital branding. Then I also thought about it in relation to digital marketing campaigns.

So, in relation to digital branding, I pretty much reached the conclusion that big idea is not that relevant, although I am sure ton of people will disagree. But I have in mind all those successful brands that care more about being useful and usable and providing delight in small, surprising details (and you know who those brands are!!). They kind of don't have any big idea - or a story - behind them, they just work really really well. Their idea is their execution. End of story :)

Then I started thinking about marketing campaigns and the situation became a bit trickier. After all, people plan a marketing campaigns because they want to draw people's attention to something specific: a new product, or a new positioning of that product, or to promote a line of products, or to get more people to use more products more often. So, if the main purpose is to change people's actions in relation to brand's products, then the best way - agencies thought - is to tell people some awesome story. That is, change of behavior was expected to happen through the change of perception. Totally legit.

Except that digital does not necessarily work that way. There, a change of behavior happens through, well, the change of behavior. Something like moving away the mediator. It's much simpler online: a person does something, gets a feedback, then maybe a trend of those feedbacks, and then after doing stuff that works repeatedly, changes his or her behavior. In this scenario, brand perception is the outcome of positive interactions, and not their cause.

Big ideas, on the other hand, love to command people's attention. They require their own domain on the web, and they rule it (and to avoid any romantic notions, by ruling it I mean mostly practical stuff: not being connected, or referring to, anything or anyone else online; being built from scratch for a gigantic budget; not really being optimized for measurement; etc). And yes, it goes without saying that they expect people to come to them.

In contrast to big ideas model, there's this. It has now almost become a mainstream to think that data and applications and fun stuff live outside the web page, and roam freely on the web (and outside of it, in the physical world -- just ask Russell Davies and Matt Jones). So now the challenge that a marketing campaign has is to build a lot of small fires that people will hopefully interact with. Building a lot of small fires may require a bit more creativity than coming up with one big idea (because, honestly, it is harder to work with what's already out there than to dream up some crazy stuff at the back of the napkin). But, there is also something else. Where the real challenge starts is how to connect all of that stuff together. After all, the task is to build a marketing campaign, and releasing all different things online with a logo on them won't really count as such (just ask the Cannes Lions jury ;).

Ok, now the question is how to integrate all those different and really separate efforts?  Can a big idea unfold over time through a lot of small ideas? Or, should we let go of the question of ideas altogether?

Then, there is a reality check: the client paying for a marketing campaign, used to seeing their brand live as one big idea, is - almost by reflex - going to ask: "Where is my brand here?!?" Well, we have a problem. The brand is all these different things. What you build is going to differentiate one brand from another, the same way that different 30-second spots promoted different moods, jingles, characters, and storylines to make some brand "alive" and different from other similar brands. Or, to put it simply: it's about moving away from telling a story (about the brand) to facilitating a conversation through providing utility.

Second, and more importantly, it's not the brand anymore that connects all these different things into a marketing campaign. Big idea cannot hold things together. But people can. And they are doing so through the flows and patterns of their everyday user behavior. This is easy to say. Not so easy to build for. Because the context of that behavior comes in (as currently much quoted Eliel Saarinen put it, “always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context ...") and that has much less to do with where people are going to see the tool you've built, and much more with their current 'state of mind', motivations, emotions, needs -- the stuff that's a real driver behavioral change. And now, we can't really know someone's state of mind (and old-school marketers didn't know it either, but hey, they didn't let that stop them). What we can know is how they behave online - their usage patterns.

This brings me back to the start (and I can just hope that I didn't build a circular argument here :). And the start was: use people's behavior in order to change it. Don't give people the IDEA of how they should be (look, feel, eat, behave), just let them do stuff that positively change their life. The desired behavior change is much more likely to occur in this second scenario. Something like a video game: people go through their days and they get different tools to do different stuff, and they get some feedback how they performed and how others performed, and that helps them correct their behavior a bit, etc. It had just now occurred to me that Phillipe Stark said something similar in relation to the role of designers, so I managed to dig out his quote: "In the future, there will be no more designers. The designers of the future will be personal coach, the gym trainer, the diet consultant." What he meant here is that the role of designers is to provide tools that improve people's lives.

Um, can the same thing be said about brands? (Just replace designers with brands in the above sentence, and it does not sound so crazy. It actually sounds pretty cool.)

ideas are everywhere.

ha.

found here.