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.

tool-based knowledge specialization sucks, behavior-based specialization doesn't

At this past SxSW, I was part of the panel talking about Social Media Strategy. My thoughts are on the slides 25-33. Enjoy.

View more presentations from Ana Andjelic

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 :)

is stale economic logic behind digital marketing hampering its success?

This article got me thinking. The shortcomings of the neoclassical economic theory have been known for a long time now. It's also well known that many new currents emerged as a response to this failure. What's less explored - if at all - is what this means for marketing and advertising (and by this, I don't mean academic exploration, but the adoption of the new economic learnings in practice). Here and there, we use segments of behavioral economics, economic psychology, and economic sociology but overall seem to ignore the very reality that deemed traditional economic theory obsolete. Think monetization opportunities in redistribution markets and/or business models that can emerge from collaborative consumption. Our marketing frame is still not the one of a dynamic economic world. In all our rush for the re-invention of marketing, we seemed to have forgotten to change the economic logic behind it.

The image above is from Trashr, which connects supply and demand of discarded goods. Everyone who's lived in NYC for a while knows what gems can be found discarded on the street. Why not create a market around it? One man's trash is another man's treasure, after all. 

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.

 

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.

branded filters on instagram

Now that Instagram has reached a considerable early adopter base (more than 4 million users in 7 months since its launch), there's a good question of how/when brands can jump in. (Not that they have to). Truth to be told, some brands are already there, in a very obvious way - they're having their own streams, with their own photos. But what if, instead, they came up with filters for everyone's photos?

For example, the image above screams "Coca-Cola" to me. Currently, Instagram offers only "the most popular" filter. The Barbarian Group created Screenstagram, which combines popular & your friends' photos. Now, any brand can create something like this and display it wherever they want. It's just another way to navigate through the bunch of users' uploads. Now, why woud people care about branded filters? First, if brands like to claim that they want to "own" a category of human experience (running, cooking, fashion, grocieries, going out, extreme sports...), this is one simple way to do it. And even simpler than this, maybe they manage to filter some really good content that people just simply wouldn't come across otherwise. 

I found this screengrab here.

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.

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.

Do we need a new definition of creativity?

 There are a few things that ad people like more than to call out for someone's portfolio when in disagreement with that person. In a more modern version of the "show me your portfolio" theme, this means asking the question: "yes, but why listen to him? what has he actually done? I mean, what has he ever made?" 

Beyond its occasional cameo in the spats that are advertising world's joie de vivre, this question is meant to mark a long-living perceived divide between people who make stuff - a.k.a. the creatives - and people who merely observe and talk about stuff - a.k.a. the strategists. Because, the reasoning goes, creativity is about "producing." In other words, to be creative, a person actually needs to make something tangible.

Hate to bring it up, especially because I don't have a portfolio to display, but this question doesn't make any sense.

First, it asks for a static commercial art piece (or a "portfolio" of these). Last time I've checked, those were very popular on television. Creativity regarded as a great copy, as an idea that makes a twist on a popular culture or that "captures the zeitgeist," or as a piece-of-art logo and print ad may indeed belong to the same era as those media that defined it. 

Second, the question asks for an individual creative genius ("show me what you've done"). Because, if advertising award shows are to be trusted, there are people among us who are very very talented in making pretty and funny stuff. Sometimes they even earn the title of "Sir" for it, but if the Queen is busy and that falls short, at least they get to be called a "Guru." Which may be, in spiritual sense, even better.

And third, it asks for an agency ("why would I listen to this guy?"). Now, this being an unfair world, there are some agencies that are deemed to be more creative than others. What that usually means is that they are considerably better in making commercial art pieces for their clients that guarantee that those clients will make a pot of gold based on them. To prove this point, Crispin - in a streak of its usual genius - created a campaign that revolves around measuring girls' butts for Old Navy. Don't expect of advertising to get more creative than that.

Ok, let's fast-forward now to creativity of the digital world. Here, most creative stuff that people create are relationships, connections, and interactions (think 4Chan model, or Tumblr model, or Twitter, or what any startup is building right now, for example). They connect tools with behaviors, with geo-locations, and with objects. They create networks or systems, if you will. To be creative there, you need to be, well, strategic: you need to figure out who connects to whom, when and why, and to what result. Simply, you need to plan for a chain reaction. 

So what happens next in this scenario? These networks then give way to a collective creativity to become visible for all to use it, build upon it, change it, and add to it. In the same way as the concept of "lone inventor" turned out to be a myth and the concept of "big idea" turned out to be hoax, the notion of "big name" in advertising may turn out to be a fake. 

Simply, an "advertising genius" holds no chance against the bulk of digital people who make their creative talent visible - and available - the moment they turn their computer on. Worse yet, their focus on coming up with witty, funny, pretty or smart piece can turn out into a liability: this is not a templated world, and thinking bound to 30 seconds or 50x100 pixels or in any other given frame is bound to fall short. For the ad solution to be successful, it needs to fit with the network created by stuff that people are already doing, talking about, and acting upon. Again, without a template to hold onto, one needs to be strategic. 

Finally, with all this collective creativity connected in a network, what to do with a handful of creatives holding the fort in ad agencies? As Edward Boches told me on Twitter the other day, "the most interesting stuff has been done with individuals: Lemonade, Uniform Project, Vaynerchuck - all better than brand farts." Why do we pay attention to them? Well, because they are doing something new, interesting, fun, and meaningful. And because no one knows where a good idea is going to come from, why limit it in advance to a creative team? 

The bottomline is that digital creativity may as well end up having to do as much with observing as it does with making.  Or, as Warren Bennis put it, "there are two ways to be creative. One can sing. One can dance. Or one can create an environment in which singers and dancers flourish." At the end of the day, to create something needs both.

All of this is fun stuff, and it's best to let people who face these challenges every day answer it. This is why I created an all-girl + a super-woman SxSW panel where one creative and three strategists talk about this stuff. Why all girl panel? Well, not to be all bra-burning about it, but hanging out only with guys can get so boring sometimes.

How big is "The Chance"?

Nike followed its "Write the Future" with the new online contest called "The Chance." Using soccer superstars featured in their (almost) universally loved spot "Write the Future", Nike hopes to inspire young soccer-wannabes to create their fan pages on Facebook, promote themselves there, and build a following in order to be selected for the Nike Academy Football Trials.

While this sounds like something coming straight from Simon Cowell's manual and thus may be thought to succeed just by sheer association, I still have my doubts. The idea for engagement is, in itself, not bad at all - it has a potential to generate a considerable buzz for Nike, and it has equal potential to solicit participation. 

Here comes a question, though: the requirement for participation is to be at least 18 years of age. At that point, most soccer-talented youngsters have already either achieved some prominence going beyond their high school soccer league, or are signed up by a team. So, why do they need to Nike soccer academy? Sure, some of them may come from the gravely disadvantaged regions, and this is their chance to raise to global prominence. I'd like to think that those disadvantaged regions offer regular high-speed Internet access required for participation in the contest.  

Where does this leave us, then? Will all those people who play soccer as a hobby, soccer fans, and amateurs. Can Nike academy turn them into next Ronney or Ronaldo at the age of 18 and more? Perhaps, but I wouldn't bet on it.

There's another thing, too. If research is to be believed, the Internet activity around the World Cup has reached the new high. Which means that people are actively looking up online for ways to express their fashion for soccer, connect with other fans, get information and commentary, and just participate in the discussions surrounding the World Cup. They are interested, motivated, and active target for all brands, and especially for the sports brands. Why not do something to help THEM instead have more fun, cheer their teams better, feel greater participation, and engage in a bigger debate? Granted, brands are doing some of this, albeit rather shyly.

At the same time, a simple Twitter update about the attire coaches choose to wear for the games has a potential to solicit a lively debate, like it did last night. Comments like "USA coach looks like a gym teacher," "British coach looks like he is on a museum board," or "German coach is an ad guy," poured from everywhere, adding up to each other. If I knew how to make things on the Internet, I would make a site where people can fill in who all coaches remind them of. At the end, there's a winner based on the most frequent association. Small and silly, but apparently something that spurs people's imagination and passionate responses.

This only reminds me that rarely brands encounter a target group of scale, passion, and participation than the World Cup gathered this month. I can't help but think that, this time around, Nike's missing its chance.

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.

why brands should NEVER think like media companies.

I love when people claim that brands should learn to think like media companies online. You know, because media companies' cost-and-revenues structure fares so well in digital. 

The argument "you should turn your brand in the media company" is, in a nutshell, based on the overused quote that "we are not in the business of keeping media companies alive, we are in the business of connecting with consumers," by Trevor Edwards.

On the surface, it may seem that the best way to avoid dealing with media companies is indeed to become one. Something like, let's not rent anymore now that we can own.

But, operative word here is "on the surface."

By behaving like a media company online, brands unfortunately replicate the way that media cos' costs and revenues are (mis)aligned in digital media. Or as Michael Wolff recently put it, online "costs are out of whack even with the most optimistic revenue expectations."

And indeed. Just look at the YouTube viewership of the Chanel videos that the article I linked about uses as "success stories." Chanel produced several videos (including a silent movie and a short movie made by Karl Lagerfeld, which, one can only suspect, cost way more than an ordinary YouTube video) that drew 3,901; 13,626, and 37,884 views. This is a bit more than 50K altogether.

Even a failing magazine can guarantee any fashion brand a larger audience than that.

This reality does not stop the author from concluding that, "in this new reality, forward-thinking fashion brands like Chanel are learning to think like media companies, creating and publishing original editorial content to earn attention and attract fans who will carry their message across the internet." Well, darling, it seems to me that "the fans" are not too hot for the Chanel content online after all.

Basically, the problem here is one of replicating an old media model in the new media space. Just because brands CAN produce content themselves, this does not mean that they should. There are a few reasons:

First, why original content? There is so much content on the web, especially about fashion, and especially about Chanel. Can you do something with it? Instead of creating "all-original editorial" as seen on Chanel News online destination that the author lauds as "forward-thinking," why not employ Gawker's or Mashable's model where you have a large variety of contributors? Besides reducing costs of content production, this also means that a fashion brand is co-creating their "news" with its industry, which seems to me as a super-suitable model for the fashion biz, now that all the fashion bloggers are around and everything.

Second, why spend money on building a full-blown original destination? Listen to this: "The idea is to give all these social networks a location where they can have genuine information about Chanel," said the president of Chanel fashion. Um, do people in "all these social networks" want another location to go to? They can already get all the "genuine information" right where there are (live-streaming of Luis Vuitton's show on Facebook being just one example). Sometimes it is just cheaper to rent.

Third, and this may come as a surprise, but people online want from their brands way more than "inspiring content to talk about and spread across the internet, driving recognition, desire and conversion." Aside of the fact that people online love mostly to talk about themselves (and not about some brand), they also want their brands to be of some service, or be helpful, or offer expertise, or craft, or information that consumers really can't get anywhere else (and no, a silent movie does not belong to this category). If the high-end fashion consumers really strive for exclusivity and status, then fashion brands should start experimenting with enhancing fashion products with complementary service, which the web is just perfect for.

Back to the Trevor Edwards quote. If brands are really in the business of "connecting with consumers", then they (along with the people who advise them) should understand that in digital there is a variety of ways to make this connection happen. Creating your own content is only one of them, and in that, often the most expensive option. Why would you ever want to advise it to your client??

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.

Google doesn't advertise? Think twice.

In the past month, I have seen two very good examples of online marketing. Today, Adrian Ho shared the third one. All done by Google.

First, there is "Send a Christmas Card", for free - courtesy of Google. It works like this: there's a selection of Google-themed Christmas cards, you pick one, enter your email address, your friends email and mailing address, and you are good to go. Google sends a postcard to your friend (and collects A LOT of emails in the process).

I have just checked the page now, and the initiative apparently worked - all Christmas cards are out. (Ah, the people are so predictable ...). What in fact happened is that Google combined people's perception that the brand doesn't advertise with giving stuff away for free, which is what people love the most. Good job, Google!

Then, there is "Give Chrome for the Holidays." The promo tagline is: "Google Chrome is Now Really Easy to Share. So if you are looking for gift ideas, why not wrap up Google Chrome with one of our shiny artist themes and give the gift of super-fast browsing. Google Chrome is so simple to use, even your grandma will love it." Well, I don't know about the grandma, but I am sure that geeks and their friends everywhere have already bit the bait. This is a lesson 101 of how to spread the word (and make people adopt your product faster) by being "helpful." Again, Google doesn't advertise. It just really invests in its customers. Good.

And then, Adrian took a photo of Google's gift - "We're the favorite place" from Google maps. This one is real simple and easy and very very promotional. It's a nice touch that just makes us love Google a bit more. After all, who doesn't want to be a favorite place?

What's interesting here is that, if any other brand have done the same thing, it would be sneered upon as a marketing gimmick. But - by carefully playing by the rules of online marketing (don't shower people with ad messages, create a lot of interlinked services to lock-in customers, expand the category by spreading to adjacent markets, and yes, don't be evil), Google managed to position themselves as the brand which does not advertise - but the one that invests in customers.

And, as we know, all good investments pay off.

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.

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 ...)

there's something wrong with marketing metaphors

I have been thinking about metaphors (in marketing) a bit, and what they are good for. Some of the most popular representatives are: "influentials", "social influence", "tap into community", "break through the clutter", "building buzz", "bottom-up", "social currency", "viral video", and "consumer control". (Disclaimer: I acknowledge that Noah likes this topic, but I suspect that we in fact are interested in two completely different phenomena related to the concept of a "metaphor", so not linking to his stuff here.)

I am mainly thinking about free and deliberate use of the above terms as metaphors to address the complexity of social behavior in digital media. Metaphors are, in reality, great rhetorical devices but often extremely poor explanatory tools. For example, whenever someone uses "break through the clutter", they assume that: a) there is an agreement on its meaning: i.e. that everyone else uses that term in the same way, b) that there is a clearly identified situation that this term refers to, and c) that just by using the term, they explain this situation.

Neither of which is correct or, for that matter, helpful. Why? Well, it contributes to the status quo in the industry: despite of the fact that they employ the metaphors, marketing people continue doing what they know how to do best - bicker with each other, watch Mad Men, build minisites, rip off their clients, create flash banners, and go to award shows. The new media environment and its actual consequences for clients' businesses remain on some PowerPoint slide, locked in a metaphor of choice that is very easy to understand but equally hard to explain.

To rely on metaphors in fact just prolongs the illusion of having the challenging situation under control (something like: if we name it, we understand it). But naming a problem does not solve it. It just makes people talk more and more about it, and invent their own variations on the theme. Second, metaphors work retroactively. They can only apply to things that already happen. But they can't actually predict if that same thing is going to ever happen again. So, in a way, they are on the verge of useless.

Digital media have been around for a while now, and people are still creating minisites that may "go viral", but that will definitely "break through the clutter". They seek to target "influentials", and "tap into the power of community". It all works perfectly together.

Except, that it actually does not. What's missing is the evidence that a connection between "viral" and "video" actually exists. It's a perfect crime, as Baudrillard would say.

How would a marketing world without metaphors look like? Instead of being intimidating, the world of not knowing how to name something - and how to connect something new to something familiar - should in fact be liberating. Why? Because it actually takes off the pressure of predicting the future based on the past (and the business of future-telling this is by no means an easy feat).

The role of metaphors in society was (and still is) to transfer knowledge from previous generations in order to illustrate new situations, and, to use a model or idea from one domain of human experience and apply it to another. It can be incredibly inspiring if it offers fruitful insights and innovative ways of approaching a situation. But it can also be incredibly stifling when a metaphor actually masks the novelty of a situation.

Seems to me that we are currently struggling with the latter.

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.)

this is not you digital brand personality ...

... this is just an ad. And yea, Apple does ads, and a lot of them. I've heard enough times "brand personality" in combination with thinking about some actual person, and then with a question mark when it comes to translating the idea in the digital space. For me, this is the worst case of anthropomorphism, something like those visions of "the future" of home appliances from the 70's where fridge says "good morning, dear, it's sunny outside." What you really want from your fridge is to be super-functional, and useful, and to be nicely designed, and just to be easy & pleasant to use in those short moments before it fades back in the background of your attention.

So I guess this is my thinking against taking the idea of brand personality too literally. Because if you do so, then there's nothing else but to buy banners (and a lot of them), or build a minisite featuring someone saying something (hey, it worked for ShaveEverywhere, but that was million years ago, and also online video was "the next big thing" back then). 

But, when you don't take it literally, but just as a tool for thinking that should help you in selecting features&functionalities to include on the site, which look and feel to choose, which content, and how to promote it. So basically, talking about brand personality is talking about your audience: what will resonate with them & still reflect your brand. 

And in digital, you have all possible existent and yet-to-be-discovered tools to use for building your brand. Good example is that when you go to Apple.com you can expect to see Google maps (and then you do see them), because at the core of this brand are the best practices from the web (and everywhere else). On the other hand, when you go to Citibank.com site and try to find a branch, you get to the map which is of course in a pop-up window (preventing all other site info integration/brand promotion. For comparison, see Apple's solution, which never misses the opportunity to promote its brand/products). Then - and should it be a surprise - the map is a moderately interactive Microsoft MapPoint that you can't zoom enough to useful or get directions and all. It came straight from 2002. This is of course terribly suitable, because Microsoft is about as stale in terms of real innovation as the banking sector.

These details tell us a lot about the brand, and about the category of banking online in general. What it communicates is: "I don't really know how you use web, and I don't really care. I am making banking difficult everywhere else, so why would I make finding a branch easy for you?". And then you think, oh this sucks, and Citibank sucks, and there's where the loyalty goes away.

Citibank's "personality" is expressed in that tiny little detail much more than it is in that "thank you" (whatever) message on their ATMs (once you actually manage to locate them). The map is something that I would actually frequently need, and frequently use, and regard it as helpful and relevant for your banking and hence your relationship with Citibank. So next time you think about "brand personality", think tangible details = think tools and features, think navigation, think design, and what are those going to make people think about the brand, and more importantly, are those details going to make people WANT TO INTERACT with your brand ...?

Global Swarming*

* Term by Andy Clark, from his book "Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence". Andy Clark is great, and I strongly recommend his books (esp. "Being There") to whomever is interested in distributed cognition, biology, and information, all combined.

So, he uses the idea of "global swarming" to draw an analogy between information traces that we leave online and the information traces that snails leave in their mucus as they move (that shiny thingy left behind). Apparently, while it looks just gross to most of us, this slimy matter if full of information that is useful to other snails. Now, I read this a while ago so the only thing I remember is that he connected this with Amazon's recommendation system (yep, a while ago). But anyway. The real culprit for this post is in fact Johanna, or to be more specific, an email exchange that we had. It made me remember the snails and information trails and how we can now see the connections between our trails. 

It turned out that we know a few people in common, most of whom I have never met but know from the Internetz. Johanna included. I knew that Michael linked to her blog recently, and that I came across her blog maybe through Faris' blog, or who knows how. (At the end of the day, it does not really matter). 

More important is that what made our paths finally cross is what both of her and me regarded as a series of coincidences. Now, some people say that coincidences are actually stuff made visible, and that we are all connected anyway. Regardless of your view is on the subject, this was super interesting because both of us could actually trace the line that made our paths cross. The interesting part is, it would probably take many many more months, and many many more coincidences for this to happen in the world without digital media. Which is I guess why people were obsessing about the importance of "informal social networks" and "social networks in organizations" for so long in the past.

Now it is all done in "3 steps or less" (actually, in 6 :). This is interesting in itself, but I made me think about something else. Which is, if now we can know stuff that other people make and do and how they think, do we need really a centralized measure that is a resume (and what I am talking about here hopefully will bear no relation to the recent POKE's solicitation of prospective interns' videos. Changing the communication channel really does not make the format that different). My point is, similarly like Download The Use of Knowledge in Society of price as the main coordinating market mechanism in the world where everyone has only local information but no one has all available information, that there is the world of "accumulated accomplishments" (resume) that used to be (and still is) the main coordinating mechanism of the job market. Which was indeed very useful at the times where people had only local information.

Now, there's a suitable metaphor, "this all looks great on paper", and it is exactly what I am talking about. From the conversation with Johanna, and Amber and Leila before her, I learned more about them and about the company they both work for, Naked, that I would have learned on this company's website; they may have learned more about me than if they just came across my resume. If someone really wants to be competitive in the digital marketing job market, they need to be on the web doing something, making something, or saying something. Building a street cred. (btw, this is not new. Apple founder, Microsoft founder, Twitter founder, etc. left their formal education to make stuff). This situation tells a lot not only about the set of skills needed for working on/with the web, but ultimately (and now read between the lines) about the marketing & branding in the digital.

p.s. the image above is part of the 100m long photo exhibit called "We are all going to die - 100 meters of existence". It's pretty great, you can see it here. 

brands + social media **[disclaimer]: the most boring post ever

I didn't have time to write this note about this while it was happening, but I haven't forgotten :) While I am completely over-bored with the same stuff about how brands should behave on the web, i came across an interesting example first hand. And I am writing it here ONLY because i think it is important that brands' micro-neglect stuff like this become visible.

Time Warner Cable guy, Jeff Simmermon, is on Twitter, and all those unfortunate people allocated to do "digital communication" in conglomerates like TWC, he is paid to stare at the screen and wait for someone to say on Twitter "Time Warner" (usually in combination with "SUCKS") so they can start following them. Then they repeatedly poke disillusioned customers with the same question "is there something i can help you with?". At first I thought that it was a good brand move (micro-interactions are real important, after all) and that behind it is a genuine concern. The guy even showed some traces of humor.

But then, here on my blog, the old thing got confirmed: it's not enough for brands to just be there in the social media, they've got to behave like their customers. Social media is not just another channel of communication for brands. It is an entirely new set of relations, and it often requires building the brand from scratch there. So, as Faris repeatedly points out, be nice or leave.

There is a larger point here, however. Your communication is not your brand, your service is your brand. Until your service is great, your brand is going to suck. If you are nice in social media, you may mend that relationship a bit, but only to the extent that customers  may be willing to put up with your crappy service because you are nice (think Frank at Comcast). But the sad truth is, no matter how nice you are, there's no real loyalty there. Only awesome service builds real brand loyalty.

Anyway, back to the story. Namely, the dude responded to my suggestion that his company better offer some good service instead of just using Twitter with the following: "Thanks for the tip -- we should have something ready for your approval shortly after lunchtime :)"

Lovely & totally endearing.

the enigma of the gift*

*Book title. This is my story: contrary to my usual behavior, last Friday I went to Beacons Closet in Park Slope. That is something like a consignment store, except that they "evaluate" the stuff you want to give & either pay you 35% of that "value" immediately or let you have a store credit. Since the interest i have in wearing someone else's clothes approximates zero (even when that someone else does not want them, or actually especially then), I opted for "fast-cash" option. The bag i submitted for evaluation had stuff that i regularly paid $100+ for and then never wore. yea, real smart. So anyway, i thought that i am doing a favor both to these poor, unloved, clothes and to myself -- after all, they will find a new home and i will get money to buy something else that i will not wear. My hopes for the brighter future for everyone involved in this transaction disappeared when i was offered $16.75. I was not sure if the offer was awesome or offensive. Or both. 

So I thanked the lady, took my bag, and went straight to Goodwill Store in my neighborhood where I disembarked the bag's contents FOR FREE. Yea, I admit it was kinda impulsive decision, and by all counts terribly irrational or just real stupes, but somehow i don't regret it. Which made me think about the types of exchange that could have been classified as "economic" only if any kind of calculation was involved. Which, surely enough, led me to thinking about behavior online. There, people who are mostly, if not completely, immune (um, "repulsed" actually may be the word i am looking for) by ever more creative brand efforts to be "engaged", are actively, immediately, and generously participating when solicited by their fellow online citizens. The evidence includes this, this, and this, and is growing... While it is not hard to imagine why many people choose to do good, there's also something else here.

For one, it is associated with the feeling of the fairness in exchange. I preferred to feel good over felling duped & ripped off + getting a symbolic monetary compensation for feeling that way. So my behavior at the end was not economically irrational at all: actually it made a complete sense. I did calculate, and I calculated that $16.75 it's really not that worth it. Then of course the critical question is what would be the cut-off point for me that would make it worth it ($25? $50?) At any event, my calculation obviously took place within an order of worth that's not the traditional economic one.

Second, there's a whole economy of gift giving that has an exchange structure in its own. This is of course super-old, but it's always been somehow pushed to domains of either "special occasions" and/or primitive societies and was rarely, if ever, related to modern capitalist society. (b/c here, it is thought exchange happens in an anonymous marketplace & in an impersonal manner). So now, while the rise of social exchange on the web does not necessarily mean that market-based exchange is going to decline, it def indicates that both of them operate at the same time. And while this is terribly obvious today, it's funny that actually only few have figured it out. I think it's because people focus either entirely on "sharing" stuff or on "money" stuff. It's actually the friction between these two orders of worth that make possible to create something, well, worthy.

Anyway. Nan Lin says that there are two primitive rewards for human beings in social structure: economic standing and social standing. [standing being defined as a relational measure expressed as someone's capacity to mobilize resources]. And when there's a market that combines the two, marketing should do the same.

p.s. i found out about the site above via Michael Surtees).

this is also [unfortunately] regarded as creative

For comparison with Whopper Sacrifice-type of creativity, see this Coke Zero promo advergame thing. It' inventively named "Coke Zero Dance Hero" (awww, copywriters were involved, too). Aside of being really painful to watch (all those Flash billable hours ...), I am super-curious how many people actually found this site; of those who found it, how many cared to load the game (hey, you can also download it, b/c you know, people love downloading & cramming their desktop with one-time shit like this); and of those, how many cared to play it for an extended period of time? or shared it w their friends? And how is this game relevant for anything, except if you want to be weirded out by a creepy tongue? This is ALSO regarded as a creative effort...um.

If today there are more campaigns like Coke Zero then like Whopper Sacrifice, this is because people still like to define creativity in marketing as "making funny stuff". Yea, art director + copywriter + of course a Flash dude because web is all about "telling stories in Flash" and creating "immersive environments". Um, actually it's not.

new definition of creativity?

I really like this idea. More as an excellent example of digital marketing (and the new creativity) than as a particular promotional effort. It demonstrates that, to be creative in a digital agency means to understand how online relationships work, and not to make the website beautiful or the copy appealing. There's really nothing pretty in this thing (literally and figuratively), but yet i find it crazy-creative. Figuring out how people behave, and what's the context & dynamics of that behavior, and then offering something that builds on it, responds to an unmet need (?), or simply offers some related & aligned action should be new definition of [digital] creativity. The BK's target probably has easily 600-700 friends, a considerable number of which they haven't have the slightest clue who those people are. If anything, whoever uses FB and Twitter looks for ways to limit information overload and to somehow filter the amount of content and its sources. People usually don't have a reason to eliminate those they had already befriended: and besides, it's weird to do that (altho i do it regularly :) but then again, i have also tried for weeks to limit the number of my FB friends to 150, just as a social experiment. didn't work). Anyway, the campaign rationale is seemingly straightforward: why not give people the reason to (legitimately) get rid of the excess of friends? Simple as that. After all, creativity is about seeing the familiar situation in a novel way.

Heidegger & digital technology

A while ago I accidentally came across Faris' post "The Invisible Web", which is fine enough, and in which he refers to Heidegger's concept of "invisible technology". Now, I am not sure if I should even volunteer this information, but did I read Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology" a few summers ago (at a beach ;) No, it's actually a major pain in the butt to understand what the guy meant. In fact, I strongly suspect that those water stains on the pages above are actually me crying and cursing the day I picked up the book. and yes, i sometimes write on books. I am lame. So anyway, Faris is half-right in that "the web is becoming invisible" and that "tools become integral aspects of how we live in and experience the world, extensions of ourselves". [and truth to be told, his is the most popular reading of Heidegger = the one that is most frequently mentioned in the everyday culture]. But there's more to it & and find that "more" super-interesting. Which is a somewhat paradoxical position of digital tools in relation to people. Yea, it can certainly be said that they may go invisible [for us] when helping us conduct mundane & less mundane tasks but what makes it all fun is that we first need to engage - to interact - with them [to figure out how something works?, to explore something, to find it interesting, appealing, useful, delightful, etc]. And from there, we never stop interacting. To stop interacting in digital equals death. Just think banners. Anyway. Our attention is not only directed at what we accomplish (with tools), but also in the engagement (with the tools themselves) that takes over parts of interaction. With digital technologies, we are part of their functioning. That's in fact what makes them unique (it's not very clear where do they start, and where do we end? think Twitter, FB, iPhone apps - they would not make any sense w/o our engagement = our continuous activity & provision of information, connections, content, and relationships). Better yet, all the fun is in engagement (hence the constant new versions of all stuff digital). Engagement is inevitable in order for something to happen or to be done & experienced (if you refuse to click, you would be left staring at your home page. or even at your desktop). The relation between digital tools and people is the one that BOTH does something AND provides experience in itself (otherwise, why would we seek ever new apps or better versions of software?). Digital technology is thus positioned somewhere between "presence-at-hand" (Heidegger's term for tools in use. this is where they become invisible) and "readiness-to-hand" (Heidegger's term for tools seeking attention for themselves). So digital tools occupy this somewhat paradoxical position as they merge the above two modes of functioning. Digital tools = "engaging technologies" as they simultaneously provoke user involvement in their functioning AND user attention. I guess the bottomline is that sure, digital technologies can be regarded as extensions of ourselves, but these extensions require our constant involvement in their functioning - and as such, they are hardly invisible. 

compfight redesign + some thoughts on how to become a virus

I think that this new compfight site is great. [for those unfamiliar with compfight, it's a tool that enables you to search the universe of flickr images. the thing that makes it even better (for me) than google search is not only the quality of images but also the search itself that is better than google for terms that lean towards conceptual, like "happiness" because it searches through human-made tags and text and not through context/links]. Anyway, they've launched the new site a couple of weeks ago, and now it's possible to bookmark your searches, which means that now it's possible to create del.icio.us-style your searches and share them w others . Which is not only truly awesome in itself, and also because this whole compfight thing gave me an idea of "how to become a [benevolent] virus". Compfight defines itself as "a flickr search tool" and claims that, although it is not affiliated to Flickr, "makes good use of the Flickr." Flickr already does have it's own search tool, but this one is better. So when you want to develop a service, or a brand, you may just go to some website and do something better than it does [like, you can go on someone's blog and leave comments there that are better than the content of that blog, so people start to come there for your comments]. Infiltration is a virus-like tactic (and it may save a lot of money for building your own website. if comfight wanted to create a database of images it would fail miserably. and why would they do it? there's already a ton of user-generated content on the web - to make money = to organize it. This is what never fails to amaze me with brand promotion campaigns that solicit users' content submissions and then put some impossible legal conditions and get something like 12 entries. Like, why? There's already ton of content out there. Use it, it's free). But allowing search+bookmarking+sharing of a ton of stuff that already exists is a good idea. Maybe brands should try something like that with Facebook instead of repeatedly creating dumb-and-dumber applications. So anyway back to virus idea: instead of really beating yourself up to create some content that you hope will  go "viral", become a virus. And then you go contagious on people by using their content. At least, you know where you're going.

the devil in details

Sad as it may sound, I actually do own the bed above. Minus the slatted bed base, that is (until the last night). Which got me to thinking not only about the usefulness of the information above, but about the power of details in general. More specifically, about details that lead to (proven) accountability. Things like reminding people that their purchase is not complete until they have all the bed parts shows not only superior customer research (how did they know that people fail to realize this?), but also something else: a realization that each step of the process (of purchase or otherwise) can be observed, managed, and - ultimately - monetized. That is, made accountable. This is specifically relevant for websites which made each step on consumers' journey visible and observable. In this world, the size of a button, the location of the image, a position of the search box or a number of links displayed does matter. And it matters because it represents a "break-it or make-it" point - a moment of truth about a brand. People click or don't. They want to interact or not. They stay or they leave. To say this in the simplest possible way: decisions about the micro-details like above define if you make money or you don't.  Now think advertising or, better yet, some of its most *exciting* formats:  flash banners, advergames, webisodes, minisites, video game ads, and ubiquitous "viral video". The way those are accountable (whatever) is through elusive concept of impressions and engagement. People spend some time, and a moment later, agencies claim to clients that their campaigns made money. Targeting or no targeting, between watching an ad and the actual product purchase is this giant black box, where all the real decisions happen. Matrics is today a big numbers game (number of clicks, impressions) that can maybe describe reality of consumer behavior, but certainly can't explain it. What big numbers - as well as any big picture - conceal are the details of where the clients money is. The question then is: why so few agencies care about this?

the election is over. what now?

I've read today NYT article (thanks, Brian) about Politico.com, which in the months leading to elections has become one of the go-to online news destinations. The article asks what happens to it after November 4th? The same question can be asked about any news source (plus Stephen Colbert and John Stewart shows) and any news brand. What to do now? How to keep energized voters interested (especially the young ones)? How to inspire them to come back to the sites when there is no pressing election issues going on? Those who succeed will probably need to reinvent their online presence. Traditional news brands are competing with blogs; at the same time they  are challenged to rise above them in terms of credibility (loosely used here), but to keep the blog dynamics. A though task & the one that requires a thorough makeover. Keep authority without being stodgy & rigid. Offer facts  & information, but be fluid & dynamic. Blogs are awesome in the latter, and (some) news brands are better in the former. But aside of redesigning their sites, they are faced with much more fundamental issues: who owns online political debate today? And, perhaps more importantly, can this debate even be owned? Online news consumers are faced with fragmented news, information, and opinion sources. They often need to visit a number of destinations in order to get a full spectrum of information they seek. There resides the opportunity for traditional news brands: while blogs are great in offering opinions and angle, the news brands (and not all of them, for sure) are actually still perceived as reliable sources of hard-core information (think "I saw it on CNN" t-shirts). So why not go in direction of curated aggregation? More often then not, this is a question of execution - provide enough blog links, comments links, and trackbacks. In short, bring the debate in. Instead of too often abused strategy of littering social networks and blogs with meaningless widgets and annoying "hello, you are my friend now, so better get used to it" approach, be the host of the party. (yep, RSS is a challenge, but when political issues are concerned people more often then care about others' opinions as much as about the article itself). Owning a debate does not necessarily mean having the last word; rather, it means having the first (being first in Google search results, featured on Buzzfeed, most cited on Twitter). Speaking of firsts, featuring "First 100 Days of Obama's Presidency" seems like a good start.

introducing healthy competition. is Nike+ bound to become a runner up?

My friend Ben Bloom has recently taken on running (seriously), and he pointed me out this site. I accused him of being a running "amateur", but soon enough I realized that I have laughed too soon (as I often tend to do). I think this is a great site. It has all awesome & necessary elements: advice, trainings, community, finding a training partner, tracking your own progress. This inevitably made me think of Nike+. I have already written at length about everything that is wrong with this site, so here is just a recap: a) Nike+ system supports only a specific type of running experience, and a person has to have that specific running experience in order to find the system personally useful ( Adam Greenfield's awesome post "on the ground running" talks about the closeness Nike+ system much better than I do);  b) This would not be an issue if Nike didn't claim that they provide super-customization (marketing talk alert!) for all runners - exactly the lack of which got a lot of serious runners not to use the site + to complain about Nike Human Race. The truth is that the more people run, the more help they need - that help being better shoes, well organized runs, and support and advice of community of runners. Which brings me back to the site above. It is all about runners' (serious or casual) actual experience. And ignoring those experiences reveals a too-well-known marketing perspective that is focused way too much on the brand and its products, and not enough on people's experience with the actual activity [in this case, running]. The brand cares less about *people-as-runners* and people's *running experience*, and more about *people-as-consumers* and *running-as-a brand-experience*. Experience seems to be the weirdly missing link in many brands' marketing thinking. It definitely is nice if a brand, like Nike, wants to help people, but then it should organize uncontroversial runs + open up their system so it is well, less about the brand, and more about runners. The problem that I have is that a lot of people in the marketing community use Nike Human Race as an "excellent" example of advertising-as-service. But if that service does not serve runners, then it is not a service anymore but a pure brand promotion. It should be questioned, not celebrated. This is the larger problem of brand images - they cover up reality way too much. This is why I think sites like DailyMile are awesome: they don't claim anything, they don't want to sell you anything, they just want to help you run better. This is a great way to build a long-lasting and loyal relationship - with a brand or otherwise.

this is not a joke.

This is awesome. I suppose this means that President Obama's win offers a longed-for accountability to online advertising. The "huge ROI" is to be attributed to in-game Obama ads. Mind all on-ground volunteers, incredible campaign outreach, and actually useful online tools, like tax-cut tracker. Obama won b/c of the in-game ads. Speaking of desperate, whoever is interested in learning more about achieving Obama-like success for their brand, can attend Digital Media Measurement and Pricing Summit - prospective attendees, please register at this nothing less than amazing, pure state-of-art summit's website. Your online ad ROI has just been found.

if obama wins the election, it won't be because he took out banner ads in video games?*

* A sentence from an IM conversation this morning. I really like Google's "In Quotes" thing. It reminded me of advertising vs. "facts" or, if you like this better, advertising vs. ROI situation (yep, apparently, it is a "vs" deal). It all starts with the really old question of wasted advertising. Are your ads effective? More importantly, perhaps, what does it even mean to be effective? (to drive sales? um, ok). If this is really the case, “typically what consumers do is they remember they saw the ad for a discounted fare to Vegas, but they can’t remember who it was from,” [so they type it into Google] (a statement by Michael Hayes). All (online advertising) roads seem to lead to Google. (But forget not Microsoft "engagement mapping" initiative - it works only when your cookies are on. a tricky situation - no cookies, no tracking which ads consumers had seen). What I am actually wondering is if does it really matter than if someone creates a super-fun display ad, with a ton of flash (+ little aliens), or a video game? In short, how much does it really matter if consumer is exposed to brand message throughout a *fun* display experience? Would it make her go to the store and buy a product? Even if she soundly memorizes what the brand was, how that little fun piece of engagement has anything to do with the sale of a product? Can an advertiser really claim that higher "engagement score" mean higher purchase intent? I guess I am wondering if there can ever be a hard-core facts list, like the one above, that correlates the engagement score with a purchase intent & product sales, which would give an idea of a ROI?

i should be liking it, but i am not

This is one of those ideas that if you have them, you should ask yourself why no one else have done this before. Quite a legitimate question in this case. Sounds like an awesome idea, but in fact has nothing to do with what branding is. The brand that these peeps create can be the most interesting thing in the world but it will never ever say anything about its products. Because it hasn't got any. The concept is that people create A brand, and then this brand is auctioned for whichever amount by a company that thinks the [demo]created brand is appropriate for their products. This by default means that people's experience with those yet-non-existent products is not going to be calculated in the brand. This is way too self-referential for my taste. Brand in the abstract world, people and products in reality. I am sadly aware that this is how most brands work, but using the web for the efforts like this looks like a jump in the wrong direction. On the other hand, things like "Name This"or Edopter, that never fail to work and are examples of a *meaningful* crowdsourcing. Shouldn't web be used to solicit interactions between people and [branded] products & services? [great brands are not causes of interactions but their outcomes] You know, like Google, and Netflix, and Amazon, and even Pizza Hut and Nike Plus. Not to create some simulacrum-brand and then call it democratic just because it's created by many and not by a single company. For me, real democracy happens at the point of execution, when we choose or not choose to use brand's products.

digital communication

I liked this site for a few minutes that I found it entertaining. But I am continue to like it too because it's a great example of social participation/user contribution. I didn't think I would ever utter that sentence, as my firm stand is that thinking that the web is social is a verbosity. But today there are so many conscious &  strategic efforts to solicit user participation, especially on the part of brands, and most of them really don't make sense when one seriously thinks about it. Like Democreated brand. Awesome on surface, much less so in substance. But things like the above, small & intrinsic efforts, they do make sense. They capture Zeitgeist. They say stuff both about Google as a brand, and about what's popular in our culture right now. They are not forced efforts of social participation. And they are fun. Much more fun then my journey through the flashland.

Flash-ed Out

I had no idea what is this promotional site is for (altho I found out later that's for Cadbury Schweppes Spring Valley). I just know that I was flashed out while trying to figured it out. After a truly immersive experience that lasted for what seemed like eternity in internet minutes, I ended up on the page above. My inner "neglected sensible". Looks ugly (don't draw any conclusions ...).  What this prompted me is to think of all those flash sites that I usually laugh at (I wrote some about this in my Google Chrome post). And there are quite a few of them, and counting. Even UNIQLO, whose work I usually love, created a flash minisite, together with some ear-piercing Japanese tune. Some other recent examples are this and this (altho the list can go on). I don't get it. Using flash to create video or some other video-like narrative is no different than a 30-second spot (except it usually does not last 30 seconds). I have to sit through its story (and i have stuff to do...) Sure thing, the story might be emotional or fun or whatever the story wants to be, but why would I come back again to hear it twice? (and sure as hell I am not putting that little monster above to my facebook page) There's nothing there for me - it doesn't do anything for me [except making me sit through it]. There are much better ways to put Flash to use ... for the most obvious examples, think Google Chrome, Viewzi and Hulu.

micro-reality vs. mega-image

Since this is the topic of my dissertation (loosely defined), I suspect I will be going back to this idea. I figured it can go in installments ... like a soap opera (minus the unpredictable but highly credible plot twists). This thing above is a YouTube comment (no, i don't read them out of interest. strictly for research purposes) posted among maybe 1000 comments on the Coke Happiness Factory commercial. And I found it super-illustrative for what I am talking about on this blog, which is the gap between the world of products & the world of brand communication. If the tools of communication changed, why doesn't that communication change as well? Traditionally, brand = abstract economic entity that manages processes of product qualification (this product is better than that one because is made by Apple). Also, brand = abstract communication entity that manages brand image, logo, and personality (i hate Coke but i love their commercials!). It's not hard to imagine how the digital change both the ways people qualify products & talk about and with the brands. But the ways brands are managed haven't changed all that much. If you think about the brand as a setting for interactions between people and products and - b/c of digital media - these interactions are pretty visible and tangible, then really there's no need for brand-as-an-abstraction. Or, more simply, no need to imagine those interactions when we can actually see them/observe them/measure them. Something like traditional branding in reverse: the brand (strength & loyalty) becomes an outcome & not the cause of these interactions.

authentic WHAT?

Au-then-tic = worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact; not false; being fully trustworthy. Among the current marketing craze about "authenticity", I would really like to know why is this word used as a noun, and not as adjective? If used as a noun, it is kinda self-referential, like "this is authentic", "authentic brand" or, "authentic communication". This last one is particularly troubling to me, since I thought it should be given that communication is authentic = honest, and that no one should really take pride in that (like, marketing agencies figured out only NOW that they may want to consider communicating honestly ... and only when really cornered). So in this context, I suppose that what "authentic" should really refer to is the question of "what" [is communicated in ad messages needs to correspond to real-life consumers' experience with products/services that are advertised], and not "how" [to communicate ad messages]. In short, it's a question of doing, not of communicating. And if this is true, then the word should be used as adjective, as in [doing something] authentically ... Anyway, even without this analysis, got to admit that "authenticity" sounds like crap to me. (it's filed in the same folder as "engagement", "authentic engagement", and "the original maverick" )

the cause or an outcome?

Is the brand the cause or an outcome of the experience? I would like to think that it is the latter [experience understood broadly as any interaction with the brand]. But it seems that a lot of people still think is the former. And that brand image, logo, and personality influence our experience through strategies of brand communication. I think Virgin is a good example for this "dichotomy". It does have a really strong & evolved set of brand values/attributes. At the same time, the real-life experience is equally strong, and this is what really drives its power as a brand. This means that values are executed through experience not through communication. Something like how digital brands are, the experience = the brand. This does not however mean having some branded lounge or some other lame form of turning communication into something tangible. It's more about communicating by doing [something that makes sense]. Maybe this is why there is an increasing discrepancy in market cap, brand loyalty, & "real" brand power between digital and "non-digital" brands. Wonder if this is going to change how brand power is assessed. If brand is not a cause anymore of product sales/service use (i.e. if it doesn't translate in them), what's the point in having great brand recognition? Like, everyone knows about you but no one really wants to hang out with you. That doesn't sound good to me.

the idea of brand personality & why it sucks (again)

Not sure why I put this image here. I just thought it was cool, I guess. Joker may actually help revive the brand. I recently read James Surowiecki's article "Decline of Brands" from 4 years ago, and was thinking about the idea of "reverse" brand halo. No such thing exists, of course, but if it did, it would refer to the mechanism that reverses the influence that brands are thought to have on consumption of their products/services. That is, direct experience with products/services now creates halo effect that influences brand perception. Also, the experience with certain products influences experience with other products from the same brand (think Google email, search, calendar, and Chrome). This "reverse" halo is kinda what is going on now in the branding world. And it of course questions the concept of brand power. If the brand image (logo & personality) was considered to be the strongest company's asset, and that asset consistently fails to fulfill its revenue-generating potential, then where does brand power reside? Today's strongest brands are those with superior products and services. It is no mistake that those brands are mostly digital ones (plus Apple, Zipcar, Virgin, and a handful of others). Those brands just always focused (and still do) on superior interactive experiences. Which means that they have focused on what brands should do in the first place: on turning interactions into attachments. The attachments are built through repeated positive interactions with products/service. Positive interaction is the one that does something for me. The more interactions, the better. And right there resides the long-term brand loyalty. So I am really not sure what to do with the concept brand personality. It used to be a mechanism for "integration" of different products under the same umbrella, and about consistency of interactions of the brand, and about managing consumers' expectations from the brand. But all of this sounds so wrong now. Products/services can be [and are] responsible for all of the above. Like, really -- why is it so hard to imagine that I am truly & emotionally attached to my running shoes, to my Mac, to my Marc Jacobs dress, and that I have a very real & ongoing relationship with these products. Why do I need to imagine their respective brand personalities? More importantly, do I find these products delightful to use just because of it? And what to do in the situation when there's no pre-defined brand personality [that is, nothing external to the actual experience], like in the case of Netflix, or Google? I just think that we should drop the idea of brand personality and try something new. Something like designing great experiences with products & services. You know, stuff that creates attachments.

logos in the world of their own

It's really awesome to know that power of logos to generate sales is not that strong anymore. Marketing people used to think (and to the great extent still do) that the logo is the brand's most valuable asset. It has a value in its own right. It does not only signify something of value, it is a value in itself. Put a logo on whatever, and its value increases. Whoa. Let me use my favorite example, Nike :) The brand first became popular because it made superior running shoes. Not so much anymore, according to the people who know about running. So Nike can change its logo for women in Europe [i have no idea what's the deal with that, because slogan can't change brand values, and honestly i don't see any huge difference between "just do it" and "here i am", besides the latter using more obscure athletes in their campaigns] but the basic truth at the point of purchase is gonna stay the same: runners choose Asics. So it's like, there is a separate world of logos, and there is a world of products. There is a world of brand "power" and there is the world of actual sales. Too bad they connect less and less. [disclaimer: i am not crazy enough to think that logos dont matter anymore; this is just exercise in thinking about their diminishing power]. I actually think that the logo would be just fine if it starts to actually be connected with real experiences with the products rather than with the concept brand personality that tends to mediate this experience [this move mostly requires reconceptualization of the ways we measure of brand power & brand value]. The good start is to move from measuring what people say about your brand to monitoring how they actually behave.

how services became brands

 
I already mentioned earlier that digital brands are famously devoid of brand personality [understood in a conventional sense as a set of attributes & a brand logo that communicates them]. But somehow, the moments like the above seem to be personal enough for us to maintain a relationship with the brand - and furthermore, to strengthen it. So, apparently, personalization is not the thing that creates affective relations between a brand and its customers - rather, it's direct, designed, interaction that achieves that effect. The most famous digital brands are also mainly regarded as services or systems [google, ebay, amazon, netfix, twitter, facebook] that connect people, products, and people and products. Truth to be told, though, on the internet it is practically impossible to separate what's considered product design from the service design [websites and applications are designed for immediate, 1:1 interaction, but they also help us interact with other people & information in time]. Where's the brand then? Well, this designed system of interactions is the brand. Sure enough, conventional [offline] brands also can create systems (Nike+ being the most famous example, but today in fact, there's hardly a brand that does not care about "multiple customer touchpoints" & "moments of truth":). But what those brands do is to consistently deliver their "brand image" every time a customer interacts with the company. They don't particularly care about the customer experience itself, they more care about coherence of brand(ed) experience they deliver. Simply put, they start from company's point of view vs. customer experience point of view. On the other hand, digital brands care first & foremost about how the customer experience with the company can be positive and as a consequence strengthen the brand. So the small details as above are designed to create those positive experiences. They have power to delight & to positively surprise. The outcome is that our brand perception is really based not on the logo, but on the actual experience with the brand. No personality needed.

a bit of thinking about customer research & banking

A friend of mine told me a story about a company who was pitching for some big bank, and lost it. Apparently, they got the customer research part wrong. That is, they overdid it. They also seemingly asked the wrong questions. I am all for the planner's classic role as a voice of the consumer. But can we have too much of that voice? In this particular case, a company pushed consumer perspective more than brand or business category perspective. In fact, they totally ignored business goals & category insights. How did they managed to do that? Well, it seems that a thorough user research revealed that people don't know and don't care about the difference between Roth IRA and traditional IRA (fictional example -- i just made this up), so account planners in question just went straight ahead and told that to the bank. Made their recommendations, too. Aside of the fact that this can make the pitch team look arrogant, or ignorant [or both] in front of the client (who still knows a thing or two about their own business), it also revealed something else. That something is the manner in which some acct planners do customer research. It is fairly expected that people won't know and won't care about the above mentioned difference if they are asked in that way. But if they are asked, do you plan retirement now, or later, or never, the answers would be different. If they are asked if they plan to move to Florida, or go to Europe, or cruise around the world when they retire, the answers would be even more specific. If they are asked how they think about money in terms of risk and how they calculate the future, the insights can really help both those people and the client. But this requires a way broader research approach (and also, dare I add, some knowledge/interest in sociology, ethnography, and design research). In this broader approach, customers needed to be treated holistically, as people, not as bank users. Then, it is the context of someone's particular life that matters. (Or, as Dan Saffer puts it, "by fixating on tasks, [one] won't look for solutions to the problem as a whole"). Third, in life, everything is connected to everything else. So even if you asked about their daughter's wedding, you may end up getting a good insight about what level of risk that person is willing to take in life, and this may offer a good idea for designing a suitable retirement plan. Just don't ask specific banking questions. Why? If you do, you will never be able to make something better than what already exists -- and more importantly, you won't be able to seamlessly fit into people's life & transform their [future planning + risk calculating = banking] experience. Which is what great branding does. And what designers  have been doing forever. Like IDEO, for example: "when IDEO tackles an assignment, they properly believe it’s lazy to ask people what they think about a product or idea. Instead, they choose to observe people using the product (or engaging in an activity) ... [then they ask] how can we change this interaction so that the user gets more our of it?" (via blog of a very smart guy Leland Maschmeyer). And yes, as steve Steve Jobs says "a lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them". Or, in this case, they won't be able to tell the difference between Evergreen Mountainview Health and the trip to the Carribean.

brands & personalities & brand personalities

When you hear repeated mentions of brands as people, and of people as brands, you start thinking about the concept of brand personality created by Stephen King of J Walter Thompson in the 70's (yea, that's long time ago and JWT still had its original name). Sure thing, I know the why & who & how of this concept, but I still have to ask: why so complicated? To clarify ... People interact with offline products/systems directly. They also interact directly with online brands (which are famous for their lack of personality). But for some reason, marketing people still use the concept of brand personality to explain this interaction. B/c it's thought not to be social, so we need to socialize it. And we do the socializing through this really complicated set of steps (there's a brand, it's characterized by a set of attributes, these attributes are communicated through messages and/or different touchpoints) to finally get to the beginning, which is people's direct interaction with a product/service. So I guess these products/services are terribly socially incompetent to form any kind of bond through our interaction w them. They just sit there until brand comes and breathes in life in them through its personality. I am well aware that there are ton of products that are so generic that are indistinguishable. But thinking that a strong brand personality has to be the only way to contextualize the relation between us & a generic object is wrong. Ties between people and products can be contextualized in many different ways (build a system, create a content, design, innovate). But this kind of thinking  requires a serious shift in brand communication though. Communication does not happen solely between humans. It also happens between humans and objects (as Dan Saffer nicely demonstrates). Maybe it's time to think about designing for this interaction instead of anthropomorphizing it. The latter just creates an image that separates us from the world around us. An update: A month after I wrote this post, i accidentally discovered another similar opinion on personal branding [via tiny gigantic].

What is (the) definition of digital marketing? part 1

I strongly suspect that if people in the industry knew HOW to define digital marketing a lot of their lives would be easier. That is, it would be awesome if some affirmative claim existed instead of statements what what it is not, and inventing "wizard of oz"-type of concepts like "engagement" and "authenticity" that regularly conceal more than they reveal. The trouble really started a few years back, when marketers started taking web as a serious advertising & branding vehicle. Trouble is, it turned out that is not enough for digital agencies to define their area of expertise as "digital marketing" as opposed to "traditional marketing", which relies mostly on media buys in television, print, radio, and outdoors. In reality, "digital marketing" usually means just a little bit more than adapting the attention-based, get-the-most-eyeballs framework of traditional marketing to the digital medium, and developing content formats suitable for it. So as people's social behavior has changed, digital agencies unsurprisingly found themselves in the same crisis as their traditional counterparts. As a consequence, they are increasingly forced to come up with a new set of concepts and methods that define what "digital marketing" is. Also to invent the new language to talk about the evolving digital reality. But as of now, the situation seems to me to be something like this: 
"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" asked Alice.
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don't much care where--" said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.
"--so long as I get SOMEWHERE," Alice added as an explanation.
"Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."
"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."