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.
At the crux of never-old back-and-forth of “who is going to win, digital or traditional?” resides a misplaced belief that organizational change is easier than it seems. All it takes for us is to declare that boundaries between digital and traditional are, in fact, artificial and that they shouldn’t exist in the first place and that “brand experience” strives to break free of channels and roam wild in the world.
That’s simple to the point of being simplistic. It overlooks the fact that organizations are different because they interpret the world differently. Transformation depends more on those in the agency who welcome the newcomers than the newcomers themselves.
This is to say that we need to think about this transformation above and beyond people changing jobs in this industry. Organizations are accounts of the change that is happening around them. They are sense-making tools. Their ability to adapt – and absorb – changes around them take way more than a simple hire. How they adapt and absorb depends on the already existing organizational structure and dynamics, which in turn emerged from the need to most efficiently and adaptively interpret the world around them. When those interpretations start to fail more often than they succeed, organizational change happens. Or not. In any event, it’s the question of slow, laborious, and highly managed process that spans to all and every department and their interrelations – and not of the HR department alone, as we are too often led to believe.
A digital agency that was building websites, and then platforms, and then ecosystems, has an inherent and strong revulsion for anything that has to do with advertising. A newly hired “traditional” person mentions brand behavior, and the organization scoffs at it as unmeasurable. That person pushes for a brand story, and the organizational culture pushes back. The same goes for traditional agencies: unless a “digital” person has a strong and unflinching support of a CEO, she won’t last long. Even with this support, it’s a daily struggle. And that’s the fact.
Case in point: saying that “user experience and engagement are the new art and copy” is an attempt – if you grew up in a traditional agency – to interpret the world through the concepts that you are familiar with and that make sense to you. For people who are outside that interpretative framework, this makes absolutely no sense, simply because they have never interpreted the world through art and copy.
Trying to find the answer in “ideas” that “transcend” execution, media and technology neither helps our understanding nor brings an insight. If digital teaches us anything, it is that there are no ideas that are separate from their executions, and that the best ideas are about how to execute, how to design technology, and how to transform the media. They are not what, they are how. And who comes up with the how? Well, you guessed, it – it’s the organizations, traditional and digital. Media, creative, stories, tech, software and experiences are not all one and the same simply because they are generated by organizations that make sense of the world differently.
In this context, a solid organizational consultant may be a better bet than a newly minted title (Chief Digital Officer? Chief Innovation Officer?) that's supposed to signify how transformative an agency is.
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.
Creative X (and I will make a bold assessment here that's not his/her real name) claimed yesterday that the ad industry is becoming nameless. While I get his/her point that collaboration, new media formats, and an evolving industry relationships are changing what an industry name means today vs. in David Oglvy's time (oops, I used a name), the whole observation strikes me as naive.
Names matter. Otherwise, this person wouldn't put Bogusky in the title. From what I've seen, the industry is as name-driven as they were in the past, albeit the names are different: in place of the old boys Goodby, Weiden, or Lubars we now have Nick Law, Jeff Benjamin or Ben Palmer. The truth is, it won't evolve differently. Simply replacing one group of individuals with another, only gets us entangled in the tired old debates of idea vs. execution, "who owns what" and who should have won in Cannes.
What we are really asking here is not the question of names/namelessness but of the value attributed to them. And when we enter the territory of value, we start talking about appraisals, prizes, and prices associated with the individuals: or, about the tangible questions of talent, awards, and monetary compensations. The critical difference with the tired names debate is this question is not simply another industry navel-gazing exercise. In fact, it's not the ad industry that defines value attribution. It's everyone else around it: the clients, the media, and the consumers.
This industry has been grappling with the definitions of its own value for quite some time. It's also been dealing with the interpretations of how and where to find value in its changing environment. This is mostly because its value judgement found itself at odds with everything else around it. Just think about all the obsolete ways of evaluating consumer behavior; the unjustified value attributed to fitting storytelling into technology; and the equally obsolete value judgements about campaigns' budget allocation, timing, and success metrics. Where is value? We won't find out if our debates stick to Names, Whose Idea Was It, and An Honest Letter to The Industry type of things.
The real challenge is to come up with the new metric of what's valuable: what and how to praise, award, and pay. The new metric come from evaluative criteria that are not discrepant and irreconcilable with the value judgment of those the ad industry is working for and making money off, like they are now - as the amount of bad advertising shows. If there's anything to learn from startups and tech cos, that's how to be more aligned with the environment, and how to extract value because of it. The focus on customer experience, openness, dynamic budget allocation, and new marketing success criteria are some examples. They offer access to the alternative - and because of it, incredibly valuable - judgments made by consumers and by technology.
The main takeaway from the digital ecosystem is not that names don't matter (because that's simply not true) but about the new metrics for valuing things, processes - and yes, people. It's safe to say that in the future there will be people whose names are going to be more prized, paid, and recognized than others. That's not going to change. What is changing is how we get there.
There's an article on Nikola Tesla in the latest issue of GOOD magazine, where he's described as a dreamer, mad scientist, a person who clashed with his environment and one who didn't do things for money. Just the opposite from Edison, who - while of often inferior inventions to Tesla (see the paragraph below) - in a systemic way created a whole support network (infrastracture, laws, regulations, behaviors) for his inventions that helped them to prevail.
"Tesla hoped to wow Edison with his prototype for alternating current, but Edison merely put him to work around the clock refining the existing DC motors. The Wizard of Menlo Park did promise to pay Tesla $50,000 should the immigrant manage to build a practical AC motor. However, when Tesla accomplished just that, Edison not only refused to pay, but embarked on a smear campaign against Tesla’s system—thus begetting the infamous War of the Currents, in which Edison depicted Tesla as an unreliable dreamer and alternating current as dangerous. Ultimately, after Tesla’s Westinghouse Corporation–backed AC-powered “City of Light” wowed onlookers at the 1893 World’s Fair, his model became the dominant electrical paradigm. Since then, 80 percent of U.S. electrical devices have used variants of his alternating-current model."
And
"When Guglielmo Marconi earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1909 for the invention of radio—giving the Italian scientist the name the Father of Radio—Tesla was livid. He had been poised to send radio signals using his eponymous coils as early as 1895, though a fire at his studio set him back a few years, and he only filed a basic radio patent in 1897. For the next few years, he and Marconi worked independently of each other, but it was Marconi who sent and received the first successful transatlantic radio signals, using 17 of Tesla’s patented inventions, most notably the “Tesla oscillator.” The U.S. Patent Office, however, refused to enforce Tesla’s claim."
The dude was obviously not good with patents.
"It wasn’t until 1943, after Tesla’s death, that the Patent Office reversed its decision, and recognized him as radio’s true father. That outcome is perhaps fitting, as the story of his life unfolded more like something out of Nathanael West than Horatio Alger—his financial troubles at times rising in direct proportion to his ambitions."
Uh-oh.
"Tesla’s other innovations include the first version of modern hydroelectric power (a dramatic and successful harnessing of Niagara Falls), an early version of radar (too ahead of its time to be immediately implemented), the first examples of neon and fluorescent lighting, and the first instance of wireless remote control. Rarely is Tesla credited as the father of robotics, but it was his invention, a battery-powered “tele-automated” boat that responded to wireless radio signals, that gave birth to the discipline. He envisioned an era in which man could harness energy from the sun and a “‘world system’ of wireless communications to relay telephone messages across the ocean; to broadcast news, music, stock market reports, private messages, secure military communications, and even pictures to any part of the world.”
Top that, Edison.
What strikes me as interesting is that Edison with his famous definition of genious as "one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration" may represent an old-fashioned and today quite obsolete approach to innovation. It is true that, back at his time, it was more important to persistently focus on doing the legwork and making sure that his innovations become part of the everyday life. But, is that still true in the 21st century? Tesla embodied a dichotomy of simultaneously being a creator of game-changing technology and a visionary sensitive to "the spectacular poetry of human life." As such, he perhaps would have fit better in the messy and unpredictable world of today's innovatons. Because, what's considered innovative today goes well beyond just refining - and making better - what already exists. It revolves around coming up with a radically new frameworks and concepts for interpreting the world, and dealing with solutions that simply don't fit in anything we know.
There, the dreamers count. More so than the prespireres.
January 02, 2011
In 2010 ...
... I wrote 38 blog post that elicited 248 comments.
Read a mere 15 books. Peter Hoeg's "The Quiet Girl" was my favorite.
Went 2x to Serbia. 1x to Amsterdam and San Francisco.
Moved 1 time, to a different borough.
Read a lot of blog posts and articles. Saved 1,500 bookmarks on delicious, best of which I put here.
Made one visit to emergency room. Got 32 stitches on my right hand.
Was confused for 2 months on what I wanted to do next.
Made 2,361 Twitter updates. At least 10% of them ridiculed a campaign, an idea, or a person.
Ran one half-marathon, in Queens. It took me 2h to do it. The temperature was 96F and humidity 70%.
Spent 4 months cooped up in my appartment, writing.
My favorite movies this year were "Mother," "The Ghost Writer," "The Secret in Their Eyes," "127 Hours," "Toy Story 3", "Winter's Bone" and "The Social Network."
This post can double as a farewell to delicious and a breakdown of what people in the industry were talking about in 2010. Plus some stuff I was into last year. I went through a million of my bookmarks that I saved over the course of the last 12 months, and here is the hand-picked result. Prominent topics (and this should come as no surprise) were: geo-location, mobile, gaming, social retail, virtual goods, and a few really really dumb initiatives. If you missed any of these articles, have a look.
Last Monday, Diana and I have given this presentation at the Miami Ad School. It was pretty fun. To make things easier to understand, adding here the notes for each slide.
Slide 2: The arch of the story here is that ad agencies creative solutions are by default the product of the media of communication they use. The simple evolution of advertising creative supports this logic: when there was only print around, logos were important. With radio, slogans (jingles) took the center stage. With television, it became all about brand image communicated through the 30-second spot. Simply, creative has always been interchangeable with a specific media technology. Change this technology, and the rules of advertising creativity crumble. Why is this the case? Above all, it’s really hard to classify digital media as a communication channel. They are more of a behavioral platform. What is regarded as creative here? First, everything and anything that can modify, inspire, and introduce behaviors (think big behavioral platforms like Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, or smaller ones like thousands of Tumblr blogs, individual Facebook profiles, or just about any tool we interact with or interface that we come across online). Second, what’s regarded as creative is something that’s an inherent part of our activities. Messages are not part of our behavior, and not only because they are interrupting whatever we are doing at the time. They are external to it simply because they are not part of interactions that form that behavior. Do I need to click on an ad to complete some task, like booking a trip, online? No. Do I need to click on it in order to connect with my friends? No. Do I need to see it in order to explore maps, look at the photos, or read blogs to get inspired? No.
Slide 3: Now a quick trip down memory lane. First “forms” of advertising creative used to mark ownership (cattle branding) and to serve as assurance of quality (early product branding and logo design, like Campbell Soup, Coca-Cola, Quaker Oats) in comparison to no-name products.
Slide 4: Ok, let’s focus on mass media. Rumor is that mass media are on decline. People watch content on Internet. People fast-forward through commercials. Ads have become boring. There’s an interesting twist here, thought. It’s core is in the belief that while mass media (and traditional advertising) may be dying, but advertising creativity is here to stay. Simply, we just continued to apply the very SAME principles of advertising creativity to the new medium, and we are on our road to success. I will come back to this later, but for now, let’s see what these principles are.
Slide 5: What is advertising creativity in mass media based on? It can be boiled down to the following:
Slide 6: A creative solution is always a “thing” - a commercial art piece, an image, a great copy, a jingle, a slogan.
Slide 7: Leo Burnett also said that “big ideas come out of big pencils.” According to the mass media concept of creativity, creativity equals making something tangible: a great copy, an idea that makes a twist on the popular culture, or that captures the Zeitgeist, a piece-of-art logo and/or a print ad.
Slide 8: Bill Bernbach had a big faith in the individual talent of people working in advertising.
Slide 9: Mass media creativity also asks for and rewards the individual creative genius. If advertising award shows are to be trusted, there are people among us who are very talented in making pretty and funny stuff.
Slide 10: David Ogilvy believed in the killer agency - that its competitive edge resides in having the best-in-class creatives.
Slide 11: Finally, mass media creativity also asks for an advertising agency. Now, this being an unfair world, there are some agencies that are deemed to be more creative than others. That usually means that they are considerably better in making commercial art pieces for their clients that guarantee those clients meeting sales, brand, and audience goals.
Slide 12: Mass media creativity can be summarized in three simple steps.
Slide 13: Now, let’s fast-forward to the creativity in the digital world. If mass media fail to deliver brand messages - either because people time-shift through television commercials or because they spend more of their time online - then, the rationale goes, advertising creativity should reach them through digital media. Digital, it turns out, offers an unsurpassed opportunity for customer targeting: “we can deliver the right message to the right people at the right time.” That is, if people care to see that message at all - but that’s another story. In this approach, digital technology is treated as yet another channel for communication. The reasoning behind this approach is: we can still develop advertising creative, and now we have an additional venue where to display them. The only challenge here seems to be how to add this new channel to the already existing rooster of mass media channels traditionally used for advertising (i.e. how to create an “integrated” marketing strategy: “the question today is of how and why to integrate traditional go-to-market tactics with digital tactics in order to support the brand promise.”).
Slide 14: The truth? Think 4Chan, or Tumblr, or Twitter, or Foursquare. Or, as a matter of fact, think whatever any startup is building right now. In this setting, 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, the traditional creatives focus on coming up with witty, funny, pretty or smart piece can turn into a liability: this is not a templated world, and thinking limited to 30 seconds or 50x100 pixels or in any other given frame is bound to fall short. For an ad solution to be successful, it needs to fit with the network of stuff that people are already doing, talking about, and acting upon. With all this collective creativity connected in a network, what are the handful of creatives holding fort in agencies to do? When no one knows where a good idea is going to come from, why limit it in advance to a creative team?
Slide 15: Traditionally, development of advertising ideas has been the domain of creative; their implementation has been the domain of media. Complexity of digital technology tests this dichotomy. It exposes the challenge of strategy versus its execution, and the problem of making predictions in an uncertain environment. Instead of facing a simple task of coming up with a creative idea and then strategizing its implementation via media channels, marketing teams today have to come up with solutions that mirror complexity of the entire digital environment. In traditional advertising, everything is templated. There is a set format, and there is a certain way that an ad spot has to be done: it has to have audio, and it has to have visuals, and it needs to go on for thirty seconds. But, in digital there are no guidelines.
Slide 16: I gathered here some campaigns/digital efforts that I think can serve as good examples of what best creativity DOES - and that creative solutions should do - in digital media. My criteria were simple.
Slide 17: The best creative solutions inspire community - enable people to gather around the idea, contribute to it, mix it, and pass it along.
Slide 18: Pepsi Refresh mobilized meaningful contributions from the community both in terms of submitting ideas and of voting for them. It represents a collective & collaborative platform that makes visible issues that local communities deal with, and help solve them through crowdsourcing.
Slide 19: Another version of the community idea is for a brand to connect with the most passionate fans of an activity (running, cycling, endurance sports, or in this case, minimalist running) and work with them to make the brand better. Out of collaboration with Anton Krupicka, a minimalist ultra-runner, New Balance came up with its minimalist running shoe. Passions of exceptional people ignite passions in others.
Slide 20: Group dynamic & ad-hoc collectives can also be utilized for a purely commercial purposes. Group Tabs created a win-win situation, where if enough people check-in at some venue, all of them get a deal. The model creates incentives for consumers to come in groups, and for venues to offer deals to boost their traffic and popularity. Good for business, and good for customers.
Slide 21: The best digital creative solutions do not start from scratch - they build upon, re-invent, and remix things that already exist. After all, the history of art is the best proof of this evolutionary dynamics.
Slide 22: To promote its new POPPY handbags line, Coach came up with the Poppy Project, where plugging-in a code on a blog connects it with everyone else who have done the same thing. A simple plug-in creates a network of diverse content destinations. It also creates a highly interactive and engaging web “trail.”
Slide 23: These days, The Art of the Trench is almost as iconic as the Burberry Trench itself. It also proved the point that some brand stories can provide the endless collective inspiration. A combination of crowdsourcing, beautiful imagery, quality product, and individual creativity contributed to the popularity of this creative solution.
Slide 24: Visa RightCliq turned the best of the web - data visualization & community & taxonomy - and turned into a super-useful decision-making resource.
Slide 25: Best digital creativity combines things that no one thought of putting together before. For example...
Slide 26: A simple solution that utilizes the possibilities of digital media to the max, Stickybits finally made the interactivity between people and products mainstream. It also turned products into media.
Slide 27: Small things are usually the best. How many times have you been annoyed by having to type a nonsensical text into the little box? Well, nonsensical no more. Instead of random words, now you’ll be asked to type in ad slogans. There’s even a cognitive theory behind this idea: apparently, people tend to remember things better once they have written them down.
Slide 28: Zynga’s unlikely partnership with 7-Eleven created something new: use codes on products to accrue Farmville credits. Other retailers, like Target, have since jumped on the virtual currency bandwagon: Target recently started selling $15, $20, and $50 Facebook giftcards.
Slide 29: This is my personal favorite: never before have we been able to see actions, opinions, and emotions of others on such a scale than with digital media. An instant sense of community, a comparison tool, and a mobilization device, digital visibility helps us to literally and figuratively, see things differently. What are the benefits? From getting an immediate feeling of belonging to getting a map view of the trends as they are forming, we have never been more social.
Slide 30: Simple things, like exposing where a pack of chips originated, provides context for consumer goods and products. Behind every object, there’s a story. Why not tell it?
Slide 31: OK Cupid’s trends based on personal profiles reveals all our differences and similarities. And it’s quite hilarious, too. Update: Mint.com has last week also jumped on the digital visibility wagon, see here.
Slide 32: Now a classic, Netflix Queue Visualization map exposes what your neighbors like to watch. That sort of collective information has always been every anthropologist’s dream. Part ethnographic study, and part statistical analysis, exposing taste and sentiment-based data is as business useful as it is satisfactory to our curiosity.
Slide 33: There’s an enormous untapped area for marketing innovation, and it’s called people’s behaviors. Transforming some mundane and ordinary activity into something that’s more fun/easier/better is a sure guaranty of both brand loyalty and product sales.
Slide 34: This one is not yet used by brands, but it should be. “How About We” matches people based on their shared interest in doing some activity: going for a walk in a park, solving a crossword puzzle, or biking through the city. No more boring obligatory dinner dates: now you can get to know someone by actually doing something you are both into.
Slide 35: One day, a free wi-fi will become a norm in air travel. In the meantime, Lufhansa will take care of your social networks while you’re stuck on the plane.
Slide 36: Probably the best product/marketing idea of this year, Groupon offered deals with a social twist: it provides venues with a guaranteed mass audience, and because of it, it allows everyone searching for discounts an opportunity to save big. Now, the model is spreading to other areas, most notably travel.
Slide 37: While games have been an inherent part of human behavior since forever, only with digital media they were allowed to achieve the scale needed for marketing to pay a serious attention. The findings of behavioral economics, sociology of role playing, and incentive system studies started offering inspiration for and useful insights into ways to direct and shape human behavior.
Slide 38: Old Spice entered the hall of fame with the never-seen-before churn rate of videos that respond to users’ requests. While we often may think of digital interaction in different terms, this was interactivity at its best: it utilized the possibility of the medium to further a creative idea. It doesn’t get better than that.
Slide 39: Always a darling of marketing people, Uniqlo failed to disappoint yet again: it created an enormous WOM campaign by simply telling consumers that their tweets lower the price. Both brand buzz and discounts soared.
Slide 40: What is the best way to promote an already established (and loved) brand name than to launch a giant blimp? A simple sighting gets you a badge - and right there’s the motivation to look up at the sky. Of course, the whole thing has been made more fun/interactive by employing Google Maps, livecam, and through tracking & broadcasting the blimp’s movements via Twitter.
Slide 41: While all these solutions are getting a lot of attention (and customers), at the same time they represent a perspective critically opposite to ad industry’s view of creativity.
Slide 42: Case in point.
Slide 43: The missing link here is that there is the equation between marketing and creative. Creative solutions of 2010 and beyond have to have a business plan incorporated in them. In other words, they need to be able to make money (and to prove that they are making it) in the most direct and causal manner. Inspiring pictures and funny stories may indeed change customer perceptions and give a boost to brand equity, but when it comes to the moments of truth (buying a product/using a service), it is what customers do that matters.
Slide 44: This means that today’s advertising creativity has as much to do with observing, utilizing, amplifying, aggregating, and curating, as it does with storytelling.
Slide 45: This new definition marks a critical shift of creative solutions from messages and stories to actions and experiences. Best creative solutions of 2010 are all trying, with some success, to provide value. This is a very different approach to advertising creativity. Not a single example above demonstrates creativity in terms of “image,” “message,” “trust,” “expectation,” or “perception.” Instead, they peruse dynamics that’s best described in terms like “search,” “explore,” “discover,” “learn,” “discuss,” and “experience.” In the place of advertising creativity as something tangible, we now have creativity as the long network of tools and actions that, in one way or another, become part of our behaviors.
Slide 46: Borrowing from Charles Eames, I came up with this definition.
Slide 47: Think of advertising creative as a medium of behavior. No matter what solution you come up with, always ask: is it going to somehow change people’s behavior? is it going to become part of that behavior? is it going to be flexible enough to evolve with that behavior?
Slide 48: What does it take for digital creativity to happen? If the list above offers any evidence, the task is not about creation of brand images, storytelling ideas, and media strategy for distributing them. It is 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. To take the definition of digital creativity as a plan for arranging elements further, I offer here the possible routes for executing this plan.
Slide 49: Management consultant Warren Bennis said: “There are two ways to be creative. One can sing. One can dance. Or one ca create an environment in which singers and dancers flourish. At the end of the day, to create something needs both.”
Slide 50: Well, that’s a good question. Digital space is rife with unpredictability. With each new technology, the unexpected behaviors only multiply. There is so much going on simultaneously and things change so quickly that no one, absolutely no one, can know everything that is going on. Making predictions on what people are going to like and respond to, in this situation, is close to impossible.
Slide 51: Still, it may be good to remember a few things.
Slide 52: 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.
Slide 53: Having a very narrow view 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.
Slide 54: 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. How do you help people make decisions? This sometimes 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 some behavior (Don Q’s Lady Data).
Slide 55: 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, DonQ’s Lady Data on BuzzFeed). Then, keep it alive.
Slide 56: 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 to make some relationships visible (Netflix Rental Queues Visualization), how to create new relationships between people (HowAboutWe, RunKeeper, SKVNGER + BuyWithMe), how to create a new relationship between people and products (Tesco iPhone app, Uniqlo Lucky Counter), 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).
Slide 57: 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.
Slide 58: If you remember one thing here, it should be this: instead of facing a simple, clearly formulated task of creating an advertising campaign that “extends delivery of what the brand promised” to digital media, digital creatives are challenged to develop something new whose value they have yet to discover.
Slide 59: Or, in Mark Zuckerberg’s words: “We don’t know yet what it is. It’s like fashion. it’s never finished.” The same applies to our creative solutions. Never forget that web doesn’t have an expiration date.
October 17, 2010
I have increasingly started to think that there isn't such thing as a "creative best practice in a digital age" and that proclaiming something as such is merely advertising talk. First, the idea of the "best practice" inherently contains replicability. It contains a certainty that, all things being equal, the results are always going to be the same. For this to happen, the environment needs to be stable, predictable, and controllable. Then, there's also measurability: deciding in advance on criteria for measuring success, and applying the same criteria across the entire environment. Tricky. Oh yea, there is also comparability. How is best practice compared to other, not-so-best ones? To claim that A is more successful than B, A and B need to be the same in all aspects except a single one, which critically contributes to the success of A vs. B.
Just because some effort turned out to be a success - or because we proclaimed it as such post-fact -it doesn't make it the best practice. Why? Because digital environment relies on principles that exclude the very idea. You can't have it both ways.
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.
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.
Apparently, there's a new trend in the advertising industry. I sadly missed it, but some people claim that the top creatives are getting bored.
Now, I am not sure what exactly they are getting bored of, but I have a hunch. If I weren't belle de jour anymore, I'd probably also be annoyed and likely to blame everyone else for it: "oh, my job consists of too many meetings. This is no fun," "clients are 'know-it-all' assholes" and/or "people don't talk about my campaigns anymore." Absolutely heartbreaking, and I would be willing to shed a tear in that name, if I actually didn't know quite a few traditional ad creatives. Interesting breed. One told me a few months back that he'd love to go to Davos. Like, why? You make ads, my friend, and your only link to the world's economic imbalance is that you get 500K for it.
So when a dissatisfied traditional ad creative leaves their mother ship to create their own "incubator of breakthrough commercial ideas," I can't help but think that this 'new' trend in fact is masking something else. Because, when was the last time that a breakthrough commercial idea - the one that truly transcends the format of the medium - came from a traditional ad creative? Was it 2006? Was it 1993? A few days ago, I couldn't remember a single campaign of note. Instead, I could remember a lot of smart marketing ideas.
What it is masking is the fact that traditional advertising creativity has largely been marginalized. The "kick-ass" creative director and what he/she does is no longer culturally relevant as it used to be. Today's creativity is way more collective, iterative, and yes, humble. To deliver it, creatives got to move away from "I have an idea, and it's brilliant" MO: the artistry today is in creating environments where collective creativity can flourish.
Are the spin-off boutiques bearing the names of their founders such environments? Hardly. They, despite their fashionable mission statements, to the large extent replicate whatever David Droga or Gerry Graf have been doing all their careers and what they know how to do well.
It takes more than creating your own shop to catch up with creativity circa 2010. "For the unhappy creative mind still toiling in a big agency," Ad Age writes, "There are two choices: You can either, in Freudian terms, sublimate that ego or, in Lebronian lingo, you can take your talents elsewhere." Or - here's a crazy idea - you can realize that your creative talents need some serious updating. To be fair, there are notable exceptions: Edward Boches, an avid student by his own admission, did not decamp to create his own shop. Successfully, he is turning Mullen around from inside-out.
As for others: rather than being misunderstood geniuses unappreciated in their time, traditional creatives resemble more divas well past their prime. When they complain they are not having fun, I think: that's too bad. Because, the rest of us are having a ball.
Image credit: "This painting is not available in your country" Paul Mutant, 2010. Acrylic on canvas 12" x 10"
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.
Marketing people love lists. They love making them, and then they love criticizing them. While the purpose of these lists is often unclear and their selections by default arbitrary, they can be said to offer a way to sort through people and bubble up those that are - by some criteria - better, more interesting, or more worthy attention than others.
Lists remind me of mass media. If you want to draw an instantaneous attention to something, put it on TV. If you want to draw attention to something or someone online, make a list. And here's the problem: web is not mass media. Web hates lists: it is a network, and if are to believe the bulk of research on how influence spreads there, we should value more a portfolio of "regular" individuals versus those who are somehow exposed (or, should I say, have a "voice"). Web is a cacophony of voices - and it likes it that way.
In practical terms, that means that we would be better of with a number of lists, or better yet, with no lists at all. Alas, things don't work that way. If we brush off all ego-grudge aside, there's something to lists. Why? Because people also display herd behavior, are easily influenced by others, and are prone to do what everyone else does. It just makes their life easier and simpler: why think, when we can just imitate?
I myself am prone to the same faulty reasoning, as it has recently been fairly pointed out to me. For example, only 20% of people I follow on Twitter are women. Why? Well, let's see. If people imitate each other, and if same people are consistently promoted, than the likelihood that they as hubs are going to get bigger can only increase. Nothing succeeds as success, as the saying goes. This also leads to decreased diversity and to so-called echo-chamber. In network terms, the world can only become smaller.
And that's exactly where the problem is. Are we, as a marketing industry, becoming an increasingly shrinking world? If so, the future is not bright: we are in the vast - and expanding - distributed network of the web that does not operate on the principle of lists. So why do we, whose job is to understand this world? As anthropologists would say, the best way to understand a culture is to become part of it.
For the sheer fun (and fairness) purposes, I put together yes, a list, of people that amuse me, inform me, educate me, and entertain me on a daily basis online. I'd prefer not to have a list at all, since I love serendipity and chance of the web, but I gathered people who rarely, if ever, make any other marketing list. But since it's Friday, let's make marketing world a little bigger.
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.
The title (and the text below) don't come from me, but from this guy.
"Build yourself a network fast, by blogs, tweets or whatever, outside of the the organization. Find the intractable problems that face the people who run the organization: what keeps them awake at nights. Use that network to get ideas, adapt them to your context, use principles. Build capability, let the structure emerge, don't impose it."
While all of this sounds awesome, I'd have yet to see it in practice. Has anyone ever done it??
Once upon a time, everybody knew the answer to the question of strategy. But, don't be fooled: this fact has nothing to do with strategists' definitions of their own discipline; it actually has everything to do with an environment where strategies were executed. That environment was really predictable, clear, and stable.
There, strategists - not avid doers by nature - assumed a comfortable position of mostly observing the field from their elevated spot. Tricky as they are, they took pride in their talent of seeing everything that is going on in their business, brand, and consumer landscape. They were confident in predicting the next business move, and the next one, and the one after that. The whole strategic wisdom resided in optimizing a given set of alternatives, specifying a particular course of action, and committing to it. They knew what resources they had, they knew what their goal way, and simply enough, that their job was to connect the two. Sweet & simple, yet so antiquated.
At that ancient time, it was easy to say, "strategy is how you create value," "strategy is how you make money," or "strategy is how you use your finite resources to achieve your goal" (oh, actually: for some people, it's still easy to say that).
Ok, now, let's rewind to the present. What we are dealing with is messy, unpredictable, and hard to measure. It's complex. It's no longer possible to observe and predict enough to map out courses of action that guarantee desired outcomes. If you commit to a certain alternative, you may end up being dead. Turns out, a solid strategy may as well be your biggest liability.
In this context, we can't say anymore that strategy is "how we create value" and here is why. Simply, we don't know in advance what's valuable - or what may turn out to be valuable - to people online. Our criteria and our definitions of value don't work there. What the sources of value for people there are - free access, sharing, creating, participating, interacting - may not necessarily be valuable to business itself. In fact, it may seriously undermine it. Yet, there's ton of sources of value online. Best businesses of the past few years focused on making visible the network of connections between people, between things, and among the two. They didn't know in advance if there's any businesses value in those connections: they mostly believed that, if they create conditions for all those ties to be exposed, that new sources of value will emerge. And they did. How fast we run, how much gas our car uses, where do we go, what do we buy, what do we like, who do we talk to - all turned out to be potentially lucrative. Truth is, making this info visible also created new behaviors, changed how people do things, make product decisions, and form brand preferences. All of this unforeseen and sometimes not very obvious, yet very relevant. What these new businesses knew is that their strategy is a process of not creating, but understanding value: where it resides, how it has been exercised, and how it's distributed through this space.
And this is precisely why we also can't say anymore that strategy is "how we make money." Web certainly doesn't lack an entrepreneurial streak: people create value for themselves, and for each other; start-ups create value for people and for themselves. Is what's valuable on the web always (if at all) aligned with brands' money-making goals? Not necessarily. More importantly, should it be? Where exactly in this system either people or startups need to worry about if an advertising agency or a brand makes money? Further yet, why would they want them to make any money at all? And then, there's this trick: does the business of making information and connections visible - no matter how valuable - equal to making money? Not always the case. Facebook, for the longest time, didn't know what's its main source of revenue (our privacy?), Twitter didn't know (early bird?), and Foursquare still doesn't know. What they know - and know it well - is to react to opportunities that arise quickly and unexpectedly. And because these companies deal mostly just with creating conditions that make possible for the unexpected value to show up, they don't restrict their money-making options to a limited number of alternatives. Nor should they.
Then, here's why we can't say anymore that strategy is "how you use your finite resources to achieve your goal." Hate to break the news, but the resources are finite only if you make them so. What's worrisome here is the possibility that someone working online would even consider relying only on their own, by default limited resources, instead of utilizing the bulk of existing ones, or even creating conditions for new resources to show up? (No, I am not talking about crowdsourcing here, but basically about everything that people are doing online; all their actions can be used/amplified/facilitated/turned into a resource). At the end of the day, we are dealing with a hybrid behavior of people and technology, and the more distributed our resources, the better off we are. But, there's also something else here: on the web - it being so tricky with value and moneymaking and all - we often really don't know in advance either what resources we are going to need to achieve some goal or how to allocate them. Those who think they do, are either already out of business, or delusional (or both). For the rest of us, the best we can do is to see which connections have the biggest generative potential, and pour more resources into those.
So if strategy based on value predictions, projections, and finite resources doesn't make much sense anymore, what are we left off with? We got to accept that value online comes from very different and unexpected sources, and that we should not restrict our understanding if it in advance; that value is not always going to equal money on the short-term, and that this thus may not be the best way to inform our actions; and that our resources are as vast as we make them, and that how we allocate them depends more on the environment than on our strategic plan. Having all of this in mind, the best we can do is to try to work on providing conditions to make things happen: things like new behaviors, new connections, new sources of value, and new resources. The money will follow. Or not. But one thing is certain: the world that strategists work in is under active construction and there's no blueprint. For the first time ever, we are part of the construction crew: we are not directing it. And we need to reinterpret a lot of things that we have been regarding as fixed, and also probably come up with a new language to describe what the hell we are doing.
If so, here's an amazing opportunity. MDC Partners offers you a million dollars for 51% stake in your new ad agency. Sounds like a sweet deal. A sweet deal for MDC, that is.
There's at least one problem with this whole idea. First, I can't help but think that it came a decade too late; back then, ambitious and smart people were obsessed with founding agencies, and the hefty amount would be more than welcome in those dot-com bust days. (A side note: even back then, doubt that someone would be happy with a 51% cut, but anyway).Today, ambitious and smart people fund their own tech startups, and in what may come as a great surprise to MDC execs, none of those startups deal with advertising business.
Simply, "great talent" today has actually figured that money's not in advertising. It's in many, many other things that you can create, build, and execute online. If brands wants to use those things - that's great. But MDC's criteria that, in order to be considered for their contest, you need to do "brilliant work, you want to make brands famous, and you want to drive results for clients" sound, in the context of digital innovation, close to arrogant. Guess what, smartest kids in town are a little bit more ambitious than making some brand famous.
Second, if the idea is so awesome, why VCs or angels haven't already thought of it? VCs are notorious for NOT investing in agencies. Now, those guys are entrepreneurial, money-making oriented people, willing to invest in anything and everything with a potential to return their investment. So, if they are investing in plethora of start-ups, yet curiously leave agency business aside, there must be a reason for it. Hint: not enough money.
And third: there may be, after all, some people who, in MDCs own words, say "let's spend our lunch hours for the next three weeks putting something together." I am sure there are plenty of those who dream about having their own agency during their lunchtime (for the rest of us is still hard to simultaneously sleep and eat, but those are very talented individuals). The main problem is that those people are going to have their own agency almost always through client relationships, or to put it more crudely, by stealing a client away from their current employer. Worse things have happened.
The bottom line is that all those smart, entrepreneurial, and driven people whom MDC wants to entice with a lucrative 49% offer are already doing something else. That something else is curiously unrelated to marketing communication, and now may be the time for MDC to ask themselves why (maybe someone should offer them a million bucks to figure it out, too. Wouldn't bet, tho.)
Not only those people are doing something else, they manage to find money for it without help of a traditional industry middleman, be it in advertising agency or a publishing company. Just ask Bud Caddell. Instead of asking a publisher to back up his first book, Bud has secured the funding according to the true rules of the web, by asking people to contribute through KickStarter (Bud's book itself is a collaboration, too.)
But the biggest, and a very real problem is that brands have also figured this out. They are starting to give money to startups directly (think PepsiCo10) in exchange for collaboration in the relatively new marketing areas of mobile and social media. Some industry people have apparently figured some of this too, as they created Victors&Spoils. These things are new, interesting, and where the money and action are.
So, yeah, an awesome idea, MDC. I'd almost say "a million dollar one," but that brings me too close to home.
It's not rare that advertising and ego go together. Just look at the recently ended Cannes Ad Festival - amid all that mad twittering about how many times someone has seen Ben Stiller, how hungover a person is, or whether someone has lost their voice from all those drunken conversations at the Gutter Bar - it is a celebration of individual creativity, personal talent & genius, and creative accomplishments in advertising. Yes, in advertising. You are not helping people do something better, you help companies to sell more products. Congratulations.
Yet, it seems incredibly hard to keep this perspective in mind, and to sort of realize that advertising celebrity is, well, not a "real" celebrity - if that still means anything. Just an example: the fact that Jeff Goodby is finally on Twitter even has become a recent news item in an industry trade publication. You can follow him here, if you get over the fact that, as a primer of sheer advertising genius, his name there is Jeff Badby. I am, personally, blown away by the creative twist.
Or, if you want to know Alex Bogusky's globe-trotting whereabouts, just go to the new MDC site. There, in Alex's own words, you can, with a little help of time slider, follow around MD execs. That is, if you really want to know. (I wonder if a paid team of paparazzi is next, just in case we are curious what David Doft ate.) Alex adds that MDC highlights great individual talent, and apparently, high-tech stalking is the best way to convey it.
And exactly there resides the biggest problem of turning people who are successful in advertising into something of a rare and special species (of course, aside of the apparent obnoxiousness of that whole deal). And that problem is: if digital media offer any lesson, it is that creativity, talent, and an accomplishment are not an individual thing. Gone are the days of David Ogilvy and Bill Bernbach fame (actually, they are still alive and well in Cannes, not that anyone cares); new things are now are created incrementally, collaboratively, and interactively. The same way that small ideas fare better than big ones online, small contributions combined into something new and interesting that grows over time and through even more contributions, may as well replace a lone "creative genius" of the past.
So what do we have now? Aging "gurus" with their agency machines well oiled to generate "big ideas" vs. hundreds of startups with their small ideas + the digital environment that is exceptionally good in creating a shared value and in continuously introducing new forms of cultural capital. Who has, in the long run, better chances in succeeding?
Of course, if everything else fails, ad execs can always put themselves in an ad.
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.
The first is content - it is really expensive to create an elaborate rich media ad. Also, the bargain is the same as with TV ads: invest a lot of money into something that you are not sure that people are going to like. The web environment also doesn't truly support it: there is already way too much content floating around, and people choose to talk about and share stuff they are interested in (yes, sometimes that content is brand content, but more often it isn't). And, shared content is viewed content.
Instead of pushing for "brands should be publishers" idea, maybe we should instead push for "brands as connectors," where places like Buzzfeed monitor, amplify, and most importantly, sort content into categories like "soft drinks," "cosmetics," "food," "sports," "retail," etc. and brands get to pick and choose which content they would like to connect (and be associated with). Then, in real time, they distribute that content through ad networks, on Twitter mobile ads, or Twitpics, or however else they want. Renting is sometimes cheaper than owning, and also brands are renting something with a proven "shareable" value, because the content is something that people already like - and talk about.
The second, and more important one, is metrics. To me, it seems that it makes way more sense to use VEM (viral engagement metrics) instead of current PPC and SEM metrics. PPC and SEM metrics are rarely revealed, making it hard to really know what ROI of the ads were, and how they should be priced outside of cost of placement. Switching to VEM metrics however requires making rich media ads shareable, which is something that a horrifically little number of brands (if any) is doing right now. And if brands don't make their rich media content easy to share, how will people ever going to view it (outside of the page where it's displayed, which is a tough call anyway). The VEM idea may be a far fetched thing, but the one that makes sense nevertheless.
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.
Everyone is talking about the new Nike World Cup spot, and with a good reason: it's a beautifully told story that transcends media formats to deliver a truly emotional and inspirational experience. In 30 seconds, it appeared that Nike finally cracked the code by combining what's it best at with the power of digital distribution. And, Weiden + Kennedy showed us what it means for a brand to truly participate in culture.
Or, did it? Is this really still a way to build a strong digital brand? It's clear what Nike tried to do with its spot: to insert itself into the culture around the World Cup. And that's fine - without this connection, as the popular argument goes, Coke is just a soft drink, Google is just a search engine, and Nike's nothing more than a pair of sneakers. People need symbolic power of brands in their lives, because it turns their connection with products into something with cultural meaning. Brands help them navigate the world, understand their role within it, and broadcast the message about who they are. In this believable, albeit slightly needy scenario, all that brands have to do to reclaim their relevance is to sneak into popular conversations and become something that people use to tell their story better.
The
problem is, we are today dealing with a completely different sort of culture.
Yes, World Cup is a big and awesome event, but how it’s going to play out in
the lives of soccer fans next month is part of the emerging digital culture,
and not some symbolic inspirational culture that Nike – and other brands – are
so desperate to penetrate.
Digital
culture is based on tools, incentive systems and ideas that have absolutely
nothing to do with brand or cultural symbols. In other words, how people get
inspired and motivated, how they identify with something, and build their
identity online has refreshingly little to do with brand stories told through
30-second spots.
This year’s Cannes
Young Lions 48 Hours Ad Contest bubbled up Chatroulette for a Better World,
aimed to raise awareness of the clean water problem. Why does it matter? What
it offered is a simple execution, and more importantly, plenty of inspiration
without representation. Go to Huffington Post to see what’s new, you may as
well became a “Networker,” “Moderator,” or “Superuser.” Go to 7-Eleven and buy
something, and you can unlock some Farmville animal, courtesy of Zynga. Stumble
upon the new Mitchum deodorant site, and you may end up there for a while
watching videos of the “Hardest Working ______ in America.” Or, start following
the World Cup in a few weeks, and you will probably be equally interested in
what all other soccer fans are saying about it on Twitter as in the soccer
itself.
All of this suggests a
new sort of networked, reciprocal, gift-based, game-like digital culture today
-- and digital culture is quickly becoming popular culture. Apply badges,
likes, cues, contests, and make-believe social settings to the World Cup, and
all of the sudden you have a completely different beast you are dealing with.
Why didn’t Nike do something with it? It’s World Cup campaign may have played
out completely differently if it used all these things to inspire fans to
connect with each other, with the global soccer culture, and with the Nike
brand, for that matter.
"Write the
Future" tells a story about how the World Cup is the stage where players
can achieve immortality. It's meant to inspire not just for soccer fans but
also people in the industry that things, after all, may work out for the
better. The Internet, sadly, will never offer this sort of culture they are
hoping for to make their brands relevant there. Only a lot of missed
opportunities.
Why? Because it is
this other sort of culture, digital, that gives people ability to play with who
they are and to explore who they want to be. It doesn’t give people stories to consume or to talk about, it allows actively making them. Or, to stay true to
the theme, it lets people write the future.
Here's an idea for brands: crack that code, and you may as well be doing the same thing.
After I finished and defended my dissertation, I did not have a remote feeling of accomplishment. It was mostly a job finally done, after four solitary months of thinking, some more thinking, and writing. It was a project between me and my dissertation adviser. I didn't even feel a relief, and was wondering when the excitement and pride are going to kick in.
And then, they did. Big time. For many people (me included) graduation ceremonies may seem corny and silly. But when I put that cap and gown, and had my name called in front of everyone on the graduation day, it hit me: this is pretty AMAZING. I wore the same clothes as my professors; our caps were octagonal instead of square. I am now one of them.
All of the sudden, that single brief moment when I stood up and waved to a giant auditorium made everything worth it. For the first time in my life, I felt like I have something that no one, ever, will be able to take away from me. Ever. I accomplished something that not a lot of people can achieve.
This accomplishment may seem unnecessary. As my friend put it, getting a Ph.D. is like climbing: it's not useful, it doesn't help anyone, but once you do it, it's such a f*ing BAD ASS. Once you are at the top, you forget all the pain and sacrifice that got you there. The only thing that stays with you is the deep and overwhelming knowing that you, after all, have done it.
And you feel a little bit like a bad ass yourself.
Brand value deals with financial contribution of
brands to their companies. Here, brands are corporate assets. As it goes, brand value results from many factors, including
(but not limited to) both product sales and brand equity. It has often been
described as a cumulative result of sales volume, equity, audience size, and
the brand's market potential.
Financial value has, to some extent, always been
attached to intangible corporate assets, like patents, intellectual property,
and organizational knowledge. But the practice of brand valuation hasn't been
established until the 1980s to specifically understand brands and assess their
financial value. Before then, brands were considered merely as a marketing tool
primarily used by consumer packaged goods companies.
While the practice of brand valuation can be
considered in a variety of ways, it has been most often discussed in relation
to the situation of a company’s sale. For example, Raggio and Leone (2007)
regard brand valuation as a helpful tool for estimating acquisition price of a
company. In this context, brand value is regarded as something intrinsic to a
firm, and not something that belongs to the consumer market. Advertising executive
Jeremy Bullmore similarly observed: “It is universally accepted that brands are
a company’s most valued asset, yet there is not universally accepted method of
measuring that value. The only time you can be sure of the value of your brand
is just after you’ve sold it.”
The evolution of brand valuation has been tied to strategy of corporate growth
through mergers and acquisitions that started in the 1980s. Before brand
valuation took hold, the main source of companies’ business value have been
their tangible assets. But, the continuously increasing gap between companies’
“book values” and their stock market valuations has put on the map the value of
their intangible assets.
The practice of mergers and
acquisitions that was adopted in the eighties also contributed to a sharp
increase in premiums above the companies’ stock market value. Naomi Klein
(2000) describes this trend of companies paying premiums for brand names as
“brand value mania.” Case in point: in 1988, Phillip Morris purchased Kraft
Foods for staggering six times what the company had been worth “on paper.” This
dichotomy between a company’s “book value” and its brand value has best been
illustrated by John Stuart, Chairman of Quaker Oats: “if this business were
split up, I would give you the land and bricks and mortar, and I would take the
brands and trade marks, and I would fare better than you.”
Advertising executive Jim Mullen
similarly noted: “Of all the things that your company owns, brands are far and
away the most important and the toughest. Founders die. Factories burn down.
Machinery wears out. Inventories get depleted. Technology becomes obsolete. The
brand is the only sound foundation on which business leaders can build
enduring, profitable growth.”
Today, there is a widespread
belief that the concept of “brand value” has a tangible impact on quantifying
the contribution of brands to a company’s market value. Rita Clifton, Chair of
Interbrand UK, wrote in her book “Brands and Branding”: “Well-managed brands
have extraordinary economic value and are the most effective and efficient
creators of sustainable wealth.” Driven by this belief, some branding
consultancies have conducted studies to estimate the extent of this value
contribution. For example, a study by Interbrand, conducted in association with
JP Morgan, found out that, on average, brands account for more than one-third
of shareholder value. Their study concludes that brands create significant
value either as “consumer or corporate brands or as a combination of both.”
Regardless of their perceived
importance and widespread use, brand valuation retains its particular
challenges. First, there is still not a clear definition of brand value: “the
market is aware of intangibles, but their specific value remains unclear and is
not specifically quantified. Even today, the evaluation of profitability and
performance of business focuses on indicators such as return on investment,
assets or equity that exclude intangibles from the denominator. Measures of
price relatives (for example, price-to-book ratio) also exclude the value of
intangible assets as these are absent from accounting book values.” Then,
unlike other assets like stocks, bonds, commodities, and real estate, there is
no active market in brands that would provide comparable values. In this
situation, branding consultancies like Interband, Landor Associates,
Brand Institute, Millward Brown Optimor, and Future Brand, had developed a
number of proprietary brand evaluation models.
The main challenges of brand
valuations today remain their arbitrary measurements and a very few agreed upon
systems and processes for evaluating brand assets. For example, in October
2008, a London-based brand-valuation consultancy Brand Finance noted in their
“Brand Finance Global 500” report that, due to “the flailing economy”, brand
value for the top 100 brands has declined 4.2%, or $67 billion, in between
January and September 2008. At the same time, in their evaluation of this same
time period, Millward Brown Optimor claimed that “in a year of global economic
turmoil, the value of the top 100 brands increased by 2 percent to $2
trillion.”
In recent years, Interbrand’s
rankings in particular have been more openly criticized, mostly because its notorious
tardiness to include digital brands in their report. Most famously, due to the
sheer size of its market, Apple brand is still not among top 10 global brands
there, despite its steady sales and its status as an innovator in the areas of
media and design. “Brands are inspired by Apple more than anyone else. They
transformed the music business, and people are taking what they did seriously,”
notes Simon Williams, Chairman of branding consultancy Sterling Group. Google
is, in Interbrand’s report, ranked similarly low, as number seven. One
brand consultant recently told me: “Interbrand hasn’t really taken into account
how the web changes the brand management rules. For generational and cultural
reasons, probably.”
Methods
that Interbrand and other branding consultancies use today are based on a
deep-rooted belief that a link between consumers’ purchasing behavior and the
economic performance of brands is chiefly caused by brands’ communication that
mediates people’s perceptions of brands. As the same brand consultant puts it,
“We talk a lot about brands. We are proud of our brands. But, we consider
brands in much less dynamic and much more patrimonial way than our consumers
do. A brand is [still] often a synonym for advertising and image.”
Brand equity is an intriguing concept. Unlike “equity” in economics, finance, or in
real estate, where it refers to ownership interest, equity in marketing refers
to outcomes that “accrue to a product with its brand name compared with those
that would accrue if the same product did not have a brand name.” Kevin Keller
writes that a brand has “positive customer-based brand equity when consumers
react more favorably to a product and the way it is marketed when the brand is
identified than when it is not.
The idea of
brand equity is based on the premise that a brand promise adds “something”
intangible to the sum of brand’s tangible assets. The reasoning goes that, if
customers are aware of this promise when they are making choices among
products, it reduces risk associated with their choice, saves their time, and
provides reassurance in their decision. In exchange to this reassurance,
customers are expected to display a durable brand loyalty and reduced price
sensitivity. Standard indicators of brand equity have traditionally been the
size of loyal customer base, customers’ frequency of product purchase, and
lowered customer acquisition costs (as proportion of the total marketing
efforts).
Another
indicator of brand equity are consumer favorable responses to a brand,
reflected as a combination of “recognition, associations and judgements.” Brand
equity is here regarded as a consumer reaction to brand communication.
Marketing
practitioners often talk today about brand equity as a collection of individual
consumer reactions to a brand or, as a “collective representation.” Pauil
Feldwick claims that “Brands are built in people’s heads. What the most
skillful of marketing companies do, with great sensitivity and unceasing
vigilance, is provide some raw material from which brands are built.” Branding
consultancy Millward Brown Optimor similarly notes:“The only people who invent
brands are people. Brand reputations exist only in the minds of their observers
- and all observers are different. In theory, therefore, (and probably in
practice) the reputation of a brand within a million people’s heads will have a
million slightly different versions. But ... the strongest brands are those
that enjoy what’s been called a (favorable) consensus of subjectivity."
In this
view, brands’ products and services are not responsible for creation of brand
equity. Some people say that a “real,” durable, brand equity springs only from
a distinct set of brands’ purpose and beliefs: “Equity is more a factor of a
brand’s ability to express a clear and honest sense of why they exist and what
they believe about the world than simply the quality of what they do or make.
What do you stand for? The clearer that belief, the more attractive the brand
is to those with similar beliefs. If others believe what you believe, they will
put up with all kinds of better offers to do business with you”
Perhaps
unsurprisingly, brand equity has been, in practice, regularly estimated through
people’s perceptions of the brand. A mere presence of brand perceptions has
been considered a sufficient proof of existence of brand equity – or as Faris
puts it, “a brand is a form of socially constructed reality that has attained
an objective reality, which is why it can have a cash value that is dependent
on the totality of perceptions held about it.” If the intangibles such as brand
associations and perceptions are managed through brand communication in a
satisfactory way, the reasoning goes, then they will result in some tangible
economic effect on the brand.
The main
challenge here is that the mechanism of connecting the two has been mostly
asserted, rather than proven. Consider this example. A recent study titled “Rethinking
Brand Contamination” (Richardson Goseline, 2009) has shown that immediate
context - properties of the situation of exchange - shape consumers decisions
more than their brand perceptions.The study explored the impact of
counterfeited good on how people value the brand, and found that people can
more accurately distinguish between a branded designer bag and a fake if given
social clues, like if the individual carrying it wears expensive clothes or has
a look of a rich person. When knock-off goods were displayed without any
additional cues or context, observers were less likely to differentiate between
authentic and counterfeit luxury products. Additionally, shoppers were willing
to pay an average price of $786 for a real luxury bag, but that price declined
to $403, when they saw the items out of context displayed against a neutral
background. Another study, conducted by Nielsen’s Bases unit in 2009, found
that in-store marketing has significant advantages over television as a leading
medium for creating awareness of new products.These studies indicate that
consumers’ decision-making resides more on the local and distributed context of
their situation of purchase than on brand equity defined through consumers’ “favorable
brand responses.” It turns out that slight manipulations in the design of this
context can significantly change consumer purchasing behavior.
Then, a
change in consumers’ economic circumstances also question the idea of brand
equity. Traditionally, the main “proof” of brand equity has been consumers’
price insensitivity: their willingness to pay higher prices for branded
products than for the same, but generic ones.Recent research shows that, in
the situation when people cannot afford anymore high prices of a premium brand,
they regularly “trade down” to a generic brand. For example, when P&G
reported an 18 percent drop in its profits due to the decline in sales of its
premium-priced brands, it rolled out a cheaper version of its flagship
detergent product called Tide Basic in order to prevent its customers from
switching to a lower cost alternative.What Tide has been afraid of is that
people’s inability to pay premium for a brand would challenge their perception
of differences in quality between its products and products of other, more
generic, detergent brands. And with a reason: “After years of spending $17 on
bottles of Matrix shampoo and conditioner, 28-year-old Ms. Ball recently bought
$5 Pantene instead. ‘Buying the more expensive stuff just isn’t as exciting to
me - it’s not as important,’ she says, ‘I don’t know that you can even tell the
difference.’” Once people start asking what branded products are really worth,
brands’ ability to command a price premium evaporates - and their brand equity
goes to zero.
A way of
questioning the asserted connection between consumers’ favorable brand response
and brand equity is to correlate positive brand associations with product
sales.It turns out that, even if
a brand has a particular, well-defined, set of associations achieved through
persistent brand communication, this still does not guarantee that people will
buy its products. In other words, consumers can be aware of a brand, and
respond favorably to it, but find it personally irrelevant.
This is
tricky. Brand equity has been, for a long time, been correlated with product
sales. Interbrand, the largest brand consultancy today, claims: “The
understanding, interpretation, and measurement of brand equity indicators are
crucial for assessing the financial value of brands.After all, they are key
measures of consumers’ purchasing behavior upon which the success of brands
depend.”
But, if
brand associations do not translate into people’s purchasing behavior, then we
cannot know that brand equity has an economic effect on brands. Some brand
professionals have already noticed this challenge and they say that “there are
always reasons people will do business with you that have nothing to do with
you: timing, price, convenience, and habit are just a few. These things can
help influence an initial sale, and they can influence repeat business, but
they do not influence equity. Just because someone buys from you over and over
does not mean there is equity.” Lou Carbone, founder of consultancy Experience
Engineering, similarly says: “Just because I fly airlines doesn’t mean I love
them. I hate airlines.”
Regardless,
in the absence of alternatives, marketing professionals still largely
consider brand equity as a
critical indicator of the causal relationship between brand communication and
consumers decision-making in the situation of purchase. In other words, brands’
cultural relevance is still asserted to have a direct causal effect on their
economic performance.
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.
Digital media make visible the network of ties that connect us to things and to each other. So now, instead of brands as a mediating mechanism between consumers and products, we have a series of discreet, local, and situated interactions that mediate this relationship.
Because marketing professionals could not see these interactions in the past, they invented brand stories and representations in order to assert a certain cultural and economic relationship between people and things.
Since today consumers have information on all those previously hidden, distributed, and unexpected connections that critically shape their preferences and product choices, they do not have to rely on brand stories to help them decide among products and make their decisions less risky. But this information abundance in itself is not the factor that challenges brand stories. In fact, it is because digital media are a complex decision-making resource that allows us to make product choices without these stories.
In the context of this complexity, brands should be defined as media of behavior. Only by becoming visible + seamless parts of the network of interactions between people and things, can brands today claim to mediate their relationship.
p.s. I have revived my long-forgotten DailyMile account today. Now that my dissertation is done, I want to do more things that I am passionate about. A biking adventure to Montauk is one of them. Anyway: soon after I signed in on DailyMile, 7 people commented on my morning run - with advice which running watch I should get. This is great; I know nothing about running watches and the advice was very welcome. That's is the visibility that I am talking about above. It would be cool if a brand inserted itself into my workout routine - I am sure that I will need all sorts of running and biking advice/information/utility/entertainment as I go along. But there's also something else here: the network that formed between me, other runners, running products, running advice, and all other possible stuff mediates my activity of running: these are all the local, distributed, and situated interactions between people and things that I mentioned.
The same thing goes for all other activities. Our behaviors are networks. Brands can be media of that behavior; but they can't remain outside of it (and all traditional advertising, flash micro-sites, elaborate online campaigns, etc. belong to this category).
In a recent NYT review of her new book, "The Art of Choosing," Sheena Iyengar says that "Human beings are born to choose. But human beings are also born to create meaning. Choice and meaning are intertwined. We use choice to define our identities, and our choices are determined by the meanings we give them, from advertising-driven associations to personal relationships and philosophical commitments."
To this, behavioral psychologist Dan Ariely, responds: yes, we may use choice to define our identities. But we are also hopelessly irrational. We may think that our choices are determined by the meanings we give them, but in fact, this is an illusion.
Why? We have, as humans, a need to create meaning. To do so, we tend - the same as with sight and memory - to fill the stuff in in order to close the gaps that we can't see, remember, or make sense of. And what we can't see or remember or make sense of, we simply invent. We do the same thing when it comes to our choices: we make a decision first, and then tell stories about it after the fact.
This is interesting. On a daily basis, each one of us make incredible amount of decisions based on limited information. Because we are not quite aware how we do it (cognitive blindness), we often resort to some form of rationalization and/or to claiming that we trusted our gut. And this is precisely what gets us into trouble: it opens up an incredibly vast space for systemic, predictable mistakes. In other words, out of our craving for meaning, we submit to illusions.
Alright, but how do we really make decisions then? Ariely claims that we in fact turn to local context to infer what we like and don't like. When situations are complex, defaults have incredible force on behavior. In other words, when there is a lot to choose from, we submit to people who make interfaces: who gather, organize, and present information to us and who opt to make some of that information a default. (Have you ever wondered why Amazon managed to sustain a continuous growth in the past two years when all other business suffered, or why in Fresh Direct-s "natural" navigation there isn't a single item that belongs to low-priced grocery?) Beyond just mere defaults, it turns out that social and cognitive clues in our immediate decision-making context count more than, for example, brand associations. A study titled "Rethinking Brand Contamination" demonstrated that people value luxury brands based on whether an individual carrying it wears expensive clothes or has a look of a rich person. Without these additional cues or context, observers were less likely to differentiate between regular and luxury products. Additionally, they were willing to pay a way higher average price for a luxury bag when they saw if against a neutral background. Another study, conducted by Nielsen Bases unit, found that in-store marketing has significant advantage over television as a leading medium for creating awareness of new products. What does this tell us about the way we define brand equity?
Then, in situations when people don't have anchor
how to behave, which is the case when we create something new or design
new environments (think Apple iPhone and iPad and Twitter and Foursquare), the latitude of
defaults and design clues becomes enormous. When we make decisions, we make them in silos, and we don't compare them across categories. All it took Starbucks to establish its empire was to call its coffee a different name to separate themselves from other coffee shops (and to make us pay 3 times more for a cup of coffee than we normally would). Similarly, the genius of Apple was not to lose sight of elements of design of environments it created (including naming its product, iBooks being the latest example) - knowing that's an incredible force in people's decision making. While eBooks may have had been a failed concept in the past decade (and while consumers were ready to pay no more than $9.99 for an "e-book"), the books that we can now download on our iPads are called "i-books" (something associated with Apple) and they will cost more - as much as $14.99 - which we are ready to pay for.
While these insights might have had a limited business and marketing power at the time before digital media (brand advertising is what counted back then), today we encounter a digital interface in almost any decision that we make - from choosing two products in a store, to deciding how much money to donate to a political campaign, how much time to spend interacting with some brand or how much personal information to reveal while doing it.
This is to say that findings like above cannot anymore happily remain in the domain of "interesting
things to think about" but should be taken seriously. Defaults, social and cognitive clues, and designs all have a powerful impact on our
behavior. They steer us towards "self-herding", which refers to our tendency to, once we made first decision, stick to
it. Our first choice also influences all consequent ones, and the
reason we do so is that we don't remember our emotional states or why
we made a decision - we only remember our actions. The only think we
need to do then is to repeat them, and this is how habits (or, brand
loyalty) are formed. In other words, it our actions create - they do not reveal - our preferences.
Ok, now back to Sheena Iyengar and brands. Results of her famous jam experiment started a powerful trend of thinking that too much choice is not good for us. But neither is less choice. Interesting part is that the way we talk about brands in digital environment today fits here perfectly: James Surowietcki and Umair Haque claim that too much information about products kills brands; Erick Schmidt and others, claim that information abundance, in fact, makes brand more important than ever. Those who are in-between say that we should think of brands as filters for all this information, which is just another way of saying that the only reason that shoppers don't suffer a nervous breakdown in a cereal isle is that they, in fact, eerily recall all those awesome brand associations that make their hand reach one box of cereal over another.
Where does all of this leave us? Instead of thinking like the little Goldilocks who wants "just right" amount of information to simplify things, we should in fact embrace complexity full-force and turn to exploring the ways we gather, organize, and present the crazy amount of information that we encounter every day. In other words, when we talk about choice today, let's talk now about defaults, social clues, product categories, and a design of our decision-making contexts.
People indeed do have cognitive limitations that skew their choices in certain ways that we are not aware of - that's a fact - but now they also have this powerful digital tools that can act like our decision-making scaffolds and that can make us aware of all our mental illusions that we could not see before. And our ability to see all those factors that influence how we choose may reduce our need to invent explanations for our behaviors.
The same goes for marketing. The way things are still largely done in the industry is make decisions first, tell enticing stories about it after the fact (which only left us with a profound disagreement on what kind of advertising slogans and marketing campaigns work and what doesn't). It is not surprising then that, when we encountered way too many gaps in behavior of people and technology, our solution was to fill them out with what "makes sense" to us based on what we already know (all cognitive errors work in the same way.) This, in turn, opened a vast space for systematic, predictable mistakes ("let's create another brand video game, and to hell with it.") Our craving for meaning as an industry allowed us to submit to powerful illusions - such are brand image and brand promise and our definitions of brand equity and brand value. This sort of cognitive blindness opens up some uncomfortable questions. But so what.
Just reading about the ideas behind these start-ups made me feel more excited about digital than any online marketing campaign i have seen last year. It really interesting how all those people are recognizing opportunities in the every possible combination of people's behavior and technology while ad industry is still sticking to doing what they have been doing for the past 100 years. (see Bergdorf Goodman ad above, for example). The full slideshow is here, and you can read the accompanying article here.
I've just came across this little game over at Times Labs Blog. The game is fun enough, but what caught my attention was a description of our tendency to associate colors with objects: "Sometimes our color associations are “diagnostic” - heat being red, for
example - but they can also be semantic, a product of culture: we
associate red with danger because our society has tended to make
warning signs red." I started playing with colors, and for me "stylish" is purple. For most people, it's black.
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??
Brand promise links products and services to a consumer. Through brand promise, brands tell people that they will be forever young, or beautiful, or rich, or popular - if they consume their products.
Brand promise used to have a powerful function. It helped people make decisions in the complicated situation of having to choose between millions of similar products. It mostly did so through helping people calculate the benefits and costs of buying a particular product over any other.
To help people calculate benefits and costs, brands used communication. They repeated the same messages over and over again in mass media until: a) they created positive associations between a brand and its products and, b) they persuaded people to believe in the brand promise.
The alleged mechanism was something like this: first, you see some product and you immediately think "oh, it's going to make me forever pretty," and, second and more important, you decide to believe that it will. This means that, based purely based on the brand promise, you expect a product to deliver.
Well, that's just plain crazy.
Regardless, the reason that marketing communication used to be so powerful was simply that people did not have any other decision-making tools available. Precisely because people could not easily calculate costs and benefits, they had little choice but to trust the brand. There was simply no way of knowing in advance if a product is going to suck: unless you buy it, take it home, and use it, you won't ever know. The situation of decision-making contained obvious risks, and brand promise served to minimize them.
Ok, so that's how things used to work.
Now, it turns out, even if persistent marketing communication created specific & well-defined brand associations, there's no guarantee that these association have anything to do with product sales. And if brand associations do not indicate people's awareness of brand promise, how can we know that this promise played any role in people's decision-making? Truth is, we can't. There are always reasons that people will choose some product that have nothing to do with its brand: timing, price, convenience, habit, etc. And then, just because someone repeatedly buys some product, we can't know that she does it because of brand promise. Or, as Lou Carbone said: “Just because I fly airlines doesn’t mean
I love them. I hate airlines.”
Then, that whole "let's persuade people to believe our brand promise by using cultural identification" does not seem to work so well anymore. A little bit of behavioral economics here: a study called “Rethinking Brand Contamination” (discovered via Bill Petti) shows that immediate context of decision-making shape consumers' calculations way more than their brand perceptions. This situation has very real economic implications: when they have social and cognitive clues available, people are willing to pay a way higher average price for some product than when those clues are missing.
Ouch.
In digital, we obviously don't lack those clues. There's Twitter, Red Laser iPhone app, Price Grabber, reviews, blogs, and ton of applications to help us decide among products and services. Then there's interface design, and navigation, and the way info is presented, and community, and page organization, etc. etc. This means that brand promise, instead of being something "in the mind of a consumer" is actually something "in the clues through which a brand delivers."
Best digital branding is simply about creating contexts rich with social and cognitive clues that help people calculate benefits over costs of consuming a particular brand's products. Think all of those brand platforms and utilities that are around, from Pepsi Refresh to Nike+. Those brands know that ever slight manipulations in platforms' design can significantly change outcomes of people's decision making.
If people end up buying a ton more stuff in IKEA than they originally planned, that's because of design of its stores. And if people end up spending more money on FreshDirect than they wanted, that's because the "super-intuitive" navigation of its interface actually does not contain a single grocery item, only gourmet foods.
Digital media turn branding on its head. Brands can't just communicate brand promise to help people calculate online. After all, we all know that online advertising is not particularly effective. But they can do exactly the opposite: they can use all the ways in which a brand delivers to communicate it. After all, that's what that whole idea of 'moments of truth' is about.
In digital, brands have the same role as always. It's just branding that's completely different.
“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.
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.
This is something I have been thinking for a while, actually ever since people on Twitter started wondering how is it possible for a platform to be announced as a "Digital Campaign of the Decade." Then, yesterday, I came across this article called "Campaigns Die, But Platforms Live and Grow" over at the Organic's blog (of all places).
If we move beyond just marketing semantics, the difference between the platform and a campaign is the one between the idea and its implementation. Suitably, Nick Law of R/GA said something like this a while ago: "The issue with the branding companies is that they have always been separate from the execution. ... The nature of branding industry is that they create something that they hand off."
Now, in digital it's not so easy to just "hand things off," isn't it? This is because more often than not we face clients' requests without really knowing in advance that our digital solution will be or how it it going to unfold in reality. Instead of facing a simple campaign task that can be resolved by
a plain dilemma like "should we spend more time and effort on developing
strategy or focusing on implementation?" we are challenged with perplexing situations (yup) with uncertain outcomes. We are developing something new and sure as hell we don't have a manual on how to do it.
Fine, now let's tie this uncertainty in strategy vs. implementation combo. First, where does uncertainty come from? It comes from the fact that digital creates so many unexpected and non-obvious connections between people and technology and products. Just think Nike+ or
Foursquare or Twitter or Fiat Eco Drive or as more recent examples, Pepsi Refresh or Unilever's and Coke's taking their budgets from campaigns to "social media platforms". Or even go further, to mobile, and think Red Laser iPhone app where we can immediately get all possible reviews on products right in front of us (who cares about the brand promise in this situation?) This trend is just going to continue: with each new technology, the unexpected
behaviors and non-obvious info resources only multiply. Predicting who is going to get
connected there and how and what kind of info will they get is close to impossible.
Now, which format is better to deal with this whole digital uncertainty? A campaign or a platform?
Unlike a branding campaign, which usually aims only to extend delivery of the brand promise to digital space and end after a certain short period of time, a platform has as its core properties both unpredictable results and the fact that unfold as they go. Simply, it's the definition of a platform to grow over time and through use. And this is its winning card: instead of wrestling with uncertainty, they place it right at the middle of what they are doing.
So, to answer my question from the title - yes, campaign vs platform debate in digital is moot. Online, there should be no campaigns.
Everyone today seems to be talking about culture and brands, and about the importance for brands to understand, connect to, and use culture. But, haven't brands always by their very definition and role been the culture? Or, what is really new here?
A little journey through history. Million years ago, before mass media, branding had mostly a pure economic function of organization of products in the market. (When mass markets emerged, companies needed to somehow persuade people used only to local trade that their products are equal or better quality than the local ones). But then came mass media, and branding expanded to include concepts like brand image, brand personality, and brand associations. Those were then communicated through television, radio, print, etc. And they have transformed branding from a purely economic relationship between products into a social relationship between the brand and its customers.
With modern branding, the brand was made into a social symbol that communicates a set of values aimed at turning consumption into an activity with social meaning and consequences. In this context, as everyone knows today, branding communicates not the actual worth of products and services, but the social benefits that a consumer can expect to receive from economic exchange. By translating economic value into social benefits, the brand mediates between the social activities of consumption and the economic activities of production, distribution, and exchange.
Forever now, brands have been taking something happening into pop culture and aping it in advertising. Without being able to do so, brands would not exist. It seems to me that the question is not how the brand can be connected to culture, but how they are the culture. Again, nothing new.
(Before brands even existed Veblen and Simmel were talking about cultural significance of consumption. "Philosophy of Fashion" was written in the 19th century. So was "The Theory of the Leisure Class". For people who care about thinking about consumption as a cultural activity, they should check out anthropologist's Daniel Miller's books and also other stuff from the field of "material culture").
About a year ago Umair Haque said that brands today don't make any economic sense (he also said that NYT should acquire Twitter, um.) Years earlier, Wired said something similar. Their argument was that there's so much information around today that we don't need brands anymore. The logic behind it went something like this:
1. Brand is information from a company promising consumers a set of costs and benefits from the consumption of goods or service. 2. In the past, this information was treated as a scarce resource that was communicated via short television, print, and radio ads. 3. Today, there's no info scarcity and people can get first-hand information from others online, and 4. Since we don't need to compress the info about the expected value of goods and services into a logo or an ad, we don't need brands anymore. People stop trusting brand promise to help them in their purchasing decisions, and because they have info from others, their product choices are less risky. And when risk goes down, people's willingness to experiment goes up, and there's no loyalty as a result. Out goes the brand.
This would make a perfect sense if there wasn't a problem (a big one). If we base our argument around plain old availability of information, then as soon as we proclaim that there's no information scarcity we end up dealing with the problem of information abundance.
And that, turns out, is not what brand challenge is about at all.
Why? First, if we say that you don't need brands because there's info abundance, very shortly afterward we will claim that we actually do need brands to help us filter through all the available info, so that's a problem. But, the bigger problem is that the challenge of digital media is not that they offer a mere plurality of information sources (more info from more places), but that they increase complexity of communication as a resource (a person needs to navigate and interact and find and rate).
If we really want to talk about the role of brands online, then instead of focusing on information abundance (which is, when you think about it, just an extension of traditional communication position that a person is passive and easily bombarded with information), we need to focus on ways that information is categorized, organized, and presented so it helps people make product decisions and make their choices less risky.
Now, this is a brand challenge.
There are a lot of many great tools and resources on the Internet that help people decide among products regardless of the brand promise. So, the only think that may not make sense in digital is brand promise, not the brand itself. Why?
When brands are online, they too often think they need to communicate their promise in a way that "breaks through the clutter" because there's so much info around; and they think they need to filter this info abundance for consumers by telling them that their brand is the best. So they build a website or a minisite or an app. Turns out, that sort strategy online is plain stupid - because it treats digital just as TV on steroids.
Smart brands figured out they can be, instead, a resource in consumer decision-making: either by accompanying product with a service, or with a customer support, or with a superior e-commerce, or with a community, or with an advice. Then consumers go to them not because of their brand promise, but because of a tangible benefit.
Digital really doesn't kill brands, it just redefines what (and how) we call the brand.
*Bill Bernbach (Somewhere in California, Google silently laughs). I have always been slightly surprised by the ease with which marketing professionals assert causality between brand symbols and product sales: "it's pure art, and we have no idea what's the mechanism, but it works!"
Why do I say this? I recently came across the list of top 10 slogans and the list of top 100 advertising campaigns of the century. Do they have anything in common? No. Do we know why they worked? No. Yet, there's a list.
This is the problem called Everything is Obvious in Retrospect.
And it would not be so interesting as a problem (people make cognitive mistakes all the time, after all) if it weren't for its impact on the millions of dollars in brands' investment. Someone said "the great idea in advertising is in the
realm of myth.” This means that people still think, in great numbers, that a good ad or a slogan is a question of art and inspiration and accident. An inescapable conclusion follows: brand symbols are critical for a brand's commercial success, but their influence is a matter of chance more than anything else.
That's like going to a horse race and betting on a unicorn.
Yet, brands are still doing exactly that. Why? First, they don't know what else to do or how to do it. Second, and more importantly, they genuinely believe it works.
And why do they believe it? Because they can easily observe successful examples of what worked in the past, and conclude that they can do it as well. So, they say, "I want my brand to be a new Apple. Or, I want something like Foursquare. Or, I want Nike+"
Okay, now: why didn't you ask for a Foursquare before the Foursquare was invented?
In marketing, we know what is a success story only after it, well, succeeds. And if we can feel that we can explain why they worked, it is only because we look at them from a vantage point of the future. That is, we say that something was effective only after we have already seen its effects.
Why is this a problem? Because this is how we start planning our campaigns: from their effects. Better yet, we start from their imagined effects. We imagine something groundbreaking, some ubiquitous future cultural artifact, or another iPhone. In that, we are no different from our clients. Our ambitions are so immense, that we never stop for a second to think about a solution that can work, right now, and work really well. We are so obsessed with the future rewards, that we under-deliver.
And all of this would be okay if it was an individual cognitive mistake. When the whole industry is based on a faulty reasoning, this is a problem.
“Let us prove to the world,” said the aforementioned Bill Bernbach in the 1960s, “that good taste,
good art, good writing can be good selling.”
Fifty years later, the proof is still missing. It might be time to try something else.
Now, while it can be expected that someone working for Landor would say something like "everything we know about branding is just amplified in the digital world" (after all, they need to stay in business), it struck me how much of this (mostly inaccurate) assumption I have still encountered in the industry and in my own work. That is, marketing professionals maybe too often simply appropriate digital media to what they already know about branding ... instead of focusing on how digital media change it.
To make the shift between "let's apply branding to digital" towards "let's focus on digital and see what branding means there" we maybe first need to change our starting position. In particular, we need to move away from the question:
1. "How to use digital tools to build brands?" to asking "How digital tools challenge what we call the brand?"
2. "How technology applies to principles of branding?" to asking "How digital creates new ties between people and products?"
3. "How to use the Internet to build brand value? to asking "What is valuable on the Internet?"
4. "How brand promise should be brought to life online?" to asking "How immediate delivery in digital removes the need for brand promise in the first place?"
Just an idea. Maybe also good start in thinking about digital branding, too.
That's my brother on this photo (no, not the bird). He is a credit derivatives structurer-turned-adventurer. Right now, he is in La Paz and has also recently visited Patagonia and traveled around Bolivia as well. I have eerily little interest in his travels, and I this morning I started wondering why.
Of course, I love my brother and am interested in his life. It's just that talking about long stretches of traveling into awkward territories bores me. I also display minimal enthusiasm to be part of them. This is nothing short of crazy, since everyone loves to travel and everyone loves experiences.
Turns out, not really. I prefer being cooped up at home, reading the Internet or other forms of written word. That sounds horrible and also slightly sad. But that is what I really enjoy; I love learning about new things, and more than that, I enjoy finding out about unexpected connections between stuff that I already. Making new knowledge discoveries - that's something I could do all day.
So I guess both me and my brother are exploring new territories. It's just that mine are invisible.
Not sure if that's supposed to make me feel better, but it did.
My articles in AdAge attracted63 and 94 comments. 50% of them were vicious and personal.
Saw 130 movies this year. Went to movie theater 26 times. Favorite movies this year: "Anvil: The Story of Anvil", "Fantastic Mr. Fox", "12" by Nikita Mihalkov, "Up", and "New York, I Love You".
Yesterday, I've seen Adrian Ho's post "Blending Skills in New Ways" over at Zeus Jones' blog. It reminded me of stuff that I read in organizational theory a few years back. Mostly, it reminded me that recombination is not sufficient for innovation.
Instead, it is a productive friction between multiple perspectives that secures continued adaptation in the face of complexity. While Joseph Schumpeter did say that innovation is recombination, he also said that innovation is deeply disruptive of the things that we, as professionals, take for granted in our work. This means that the more
disagreements and disruptions we can create in our organizations, the
better off we are.
Why is this the case?
More often than not, we start client’s challenges these days without really knowing in advance what the solution will be. We also don’t know which solution will succeed. This is because we are not addressing a specific, neatly formulated problem - we are addressing the whole complex brand’s environment.
Innovation involves bringing together incompatible and diverse points of view, and this process is not harmonious. Every time there’s a successful recombination (think Twitter, for example: it’s a combination between people’s tendency to lifestream and a txt-like technology), it is only because the technology and strategy worked from the starting point of their differences. The Twitter team didn’t know what they will come up with, simply because they didn’t in advance formulate the problem as “let’s make Twitter.”
If they did, then the question of innovation would be the one of mere implementation - which is what people who are savvy in both strategy and technology do: they are capable of implementing their ideas. But, these days, we need a hell lot more than just implementation.
So, rather than altering your production staff or replacing your strategic resources, it’s better to let them keep their differences and make them interact as much as possible. In the resulting productive friction reside solutions for the complex problems.
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.
A perfect discovery for a silly Monday afternoon. Thanks to Daniel Granatta, I stumbled upon a this goldmine. My fav so far is Drama button. I need to remind myself to press it frequently and a lot.
(Also worth mentioning: Sad trombone via Mike Arauz and Nooooooo! via the Internet).
I finally got around to reading Vanity Fair's article "Addicted to Cute". The article makes quite a few interesting points about our (Western) obsession with "cute", all of which revolve around human's evolutionary wiring towards protecting everything that has big eyes, round face, and button-like nose. It also makes an argument about our need to regress to the safety of childhood when faced wit difficult social/economic times. And there's also a bit about how we use cute photos when we want to present ourselves in a non-threatening and likable way. The article claims to be inspired by a recent wave of movies like Fantastic Mr. Fox, Up, Wall-E, Ratatouille, WTWTA, etc. which are aimed to adults as much as they are for kids (if not more). That is, it seems like grown-up, complex emotions, are communicated via heartbreakingly cute animated characters.
This is interesting.
All of this it's surely not that new, since anime and manga have been
around Japanese culture for almost a 100 years now. But still, popularity of
cuteness in the Western World seems way more recent:
"For generations, kids couldn't wait until they reached adulthood, so they can smoke, drink, eat four-course meals, make money, drive cars, have sex. Now we would rather log on and tune out, preferably in the womb-like comfort of a Snuggie, which is the perfect thing to wear as we gaze the photos of kittens while gnawling on delicious cupcakes."
My quick and dirty take on this trend is that it's somehow related to digital technology or, to the fact that everything we do today is to some extent digital. But rather than thinking that cuteness is a way for humans to avoid "coldness" of the digital, it's actually quite the opposite. Digital teaches us instant gratification, immediacy, constant novelty, a million possibilities, split attention, and playing with stuff. Which are all child-like habits and behaviors and values.
So, if cool was the culture of the 60s, and cheesy was the culture of the 80s, cute might as well be the culture of digital. If we all behave like kids online, we need, well, some cute toys to play with there.
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