i [love] marketing.

Data as Marketing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brand Complexity

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

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

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

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

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

So people have thought about this one before.

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

And besides, clarity is the enemy of magic.

 

branded filters on instagram

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

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

I found this screengrab here.

The Real Agency Talent Challenge

 

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.

Unknown unknowns.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What's in the name?

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.

Delicious 2010

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

My fav topic of digital creativity

Creativity in digital goes way beyond advertising

Words, pictures, and everything else.

Digital may be everyday, but it's not effortless

Brands & Branding

Value of brand names

Nike Write the Future social media strategy

Facebook brand pages pay off

Compression

Google hasn't built anything interesting in over a decade

Competing with heroes: Domino's case study

Coke drops campaign sites in favor of social media strategy

Starbuck's formula for social media success

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

Social objects

Brands' social media casestudies

Do brand loyalty, commitment, and engagement metrics work

What Apple needs to do now

Kickpatrick Talks about Zuckerberg's World

P&G Pushes Design in Brand-Building Strategy

Digital Storytelling

Use social media to tell interactive stories

10 real-time twitter games

Geo-location and its discontents

Foursquare, Gowalla, stop pretending it's fun

Marketing experiments emerge using Facebook places

Foursquare fatigue and how to fix it

5 ways Foursquare is changing the world

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

Facebook vs. Foursquare: It's game time

Beyond Foursquare: The next generation of customer loyalty

Foursquare marketing hits and misses case studies

Location: How check-ins speak louder than words

Foursquare, Gowalla, Whirrl and MyTown case studies

Gaming

Gaming for behavior change

Achievement, Game Mechanics, and Social Software

Can games theory explain culture?

Engagement via gaming

Learning from game design: 11 gambits for influencing user behavior

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

Of lucky cats, lameness, and game-like logics

Steal other things

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

Complexity & Strategy

Cognitive edge: articles by Dave Snowden

Margaret Wheatley writing

Adding controlled serendipity to the web

Influencing business strategy through design

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

Generative relationships

Serendipity is unexpected relevance

The $300 million button

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

Groupon and the future of web business models

Maxima/list

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

Apply the rules of improv to digital

The overreaching vision

11 tips on how to apply social interaction to design thinking

Do you know what your biggest risks are? Really?

The next level

Mobile & Social Retail

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

Impact of mobile on retail

The future is the mobile web, not the mobile app

Facebook likes bring Walmart deals

The 25 largest brand Facebook pages with the most likes

Study shows Facebook's retail appeal

Barcode Hero scans products to personalize physical retail

"It" Startup Grouptabs

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

Agregate market's shopfans bring social retail storefronts to Facebook

Facebook's plan to take over the web

Online consumer generated reviews have big impact on offline purchases

The Internet of Things

Tweet street: 7 extraordinary Twitter uses in the home

Emerging trend: physical-digital interaction evolves

How a physically aware internet will change the world

Digital Visibility

Mint data

How personal metrics can change our lives

Google facts and figures

Wealth distribution in the US

Personal informatics tools

Stupid Ideas

Forbes crowdsourcing names we need to know in 2011

MySpace unveils new, artsy logo

Gap pulls a Tropicana, nixes new logo

Are you ready to blow your million dollar idea away?

Mobile Apps

Less than half of brand managers use mobile apps

13 branded apps that got it right

How important have apps become?

Advertising

Top effectiveness ads

How the internet has changed advertising

25 internet marketing facts

How to translate a big idea to the masses

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

Where is online advertising most powerful?

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

The agency of the future

Mayhem on Madison avenue

My talk on future of advertising models

The future of advertising agencies

Virtual Goods

Madison avenue and the land of make believe

Virtual goods boom in 2010

Loneliness, happiness, and other interesting things

Mark's scrapbook of oddities and treasures

Joys of solitude

Sometimes I am happy

Happiness aint all its cracked up to be

From prices to prizes: competitions

What's valuable? Top 10 lists

Things you didn't know about happiness

Where the smart people live

The riddle of experience vs memory by Daniel Kahneman

Behavioural economics reading list

The immitation economy

Optimism bias

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

Rules to Execute by

Do we need a new definition of creativity?

The problem of strategy

The problem of ego

Why Nike's Write the Future is rewriting the past

Marketing's industry cognitive blindness

Why brands should NEVER think like media companies

Don't build an old brand with the new tools

Enjoy!

Rules to Execute By

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Examples of digital creativity

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

a) Ideas that enable/facilitate/inspire community

Pepsi Refresh Project 

Ford Fiesta Movement

Groupon

Anton Krupicka + New Balance 

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

Don Q's Lady Data on BuzzFeed 

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

eBay Lookbook 

Rightcliq by Visa 

Burberry Art of the Trench

c) Ideas that make new combinations

Nike+ Foursquare

Best Buy Shopkick

Pepsi & Food52 recipes on Stickybits

Schnitzel & Things iPhone app

Tesco iPhone app

Nike Livestrong Chalkbot

Barcode hero 

d) Ideas that make stuff visible

OK Trends - data from OK Cupid

MTV VMA's Twitter Tracker

Netflix Rental Queues Visualization

Frito Lay's Chip Tracker

Hunch Taste Graph

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

HowAboutWe 

Don Q's Lady Data 

Twelpforce Best Buy

Lufthansa's MyFlightStatus

f) Ideas that encourage behavioral dynamics

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

Old Spice

Uniqlo Lucky Counter

RunKeeper

7-Eleven + Zynga partnership

GroupTabs

Image found here.

Bright shiny things.

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"

The game of catching-up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do we need a new definition of creativity?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the problem of strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

are you ready to blow your million dollar idea away?

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.

the problem of ego

 

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.

How big is "The Chance"?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The problem with rich media ads

In fact, there are two problems. 

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. 

At least it would be good if someone tried it.

Why Nike’s “Write the Future” is Rewriting the Past

 

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.

ok, but what about brand value?

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.” 

Well, now, that's the problem.

how digital media change brands. in a nutshell.

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).

the marketing industry's cognitive blindness

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.

why brands should NEVER think like media companies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are social media really good for?

 

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

This is a quite common problem. 

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

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

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

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

Right.

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

Ok. So now what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

in digital, is campaign vs. platform moot?

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.

I warn you against believing that advertising is a science*

*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.

(photo courtesy of Vintage Ad Browser)

Google doesn't advertise? Think twice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

i don't care about why people do things, i care about how they do them.

On my way back from Thanksgiving, I read some chapters from Malcom Gladwell's new book, "What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures". In this case, the "book" is actually a collection of his NewYorker articles + a preview. Something like a "greatest Christmas songs" mix ...  I have no idea why I actually picked that book up, since I am not really a fervent reader of Gladwell's (mostly because I think that his very good observations are way too often disguised as a true insight). Anyway. It was a fun read.

In the book, there's a chapter on hair color and advertising and getting the consumer psychology right. Gladwell writes about the relationship people have to the products they buy, and about advertisers realizing that "unless they understood the psychological patterns of that relationship - unless they can dignify the transactions of everyday life by granting them meaning - they could not hope to reach the modern consumer." Hence the focus groups: "Focus groups are aimed at discovering people’s motivations in buying products. Up until 1940s, advertising research had been concerned with counting heads - with recording who is buying what. Motivational researchers are concerned with why: why people buy what they do? what motivates them when they shop?"

This reminded me of how much the things in advertising have changed.

In digital, we surely think about the relationship people have to the products they buy. But we try to figure it out more through observing people's behavioral patterns then through thinking about often obscure consumer motives. In a sense, our job is easier - online, almost every action and behavior is visible. Which frees us up to replace tricky psychological "understanding" with a simple observation. Often, do we really need to know what people think, if we can see what they do?

And this is why we are focusing the question of "how." Thinking about why people shop/run/use services/enjoy content can be a tricky game, but designing conditions so people shop more easily, more often, and in a more fun and functional and social way, is indeed going to make them shop more, run more, consume more content, and to want to do all of it more often. 

And so it is.

people under influence.

 

I find it interesting how the question of influence is always addressed from the influencers' point of view. It's always, how big is someone's social network? how many people they reach? who is the most connected?

Very rarely, we talk about following.

This is, of course, not entirely surprising. In our culture, influence is equaled with originality, creativity, uniqueness, creation, and all of that. In contrast, following is about imitation, receptiveness, replicating, adopting, etc. Naturally then, everyone wants to be (or to think about themselves as) an influencer. No one really wants to say, "I am a follower."

Yet, we all are.

Some of the people I enjoy following on Twitter the most are those who are easily influenced themselves - they are curious, they like exploration, and they always discover unexpected things. Everything seems to influence them - new ideas, new stuff, new content. They don't really create any of that, they are just really receptive, really imitative, and really susceptible to influence. Truth is, if they weren't so easily influenced, they would be able to share so much stuff with others.This is of course not incredibly new. My friend Duncan has been talking about "easily influenced people influencing other easily influenced people" for a while now. But what reminded me of all of this is actually a recent Fast Company article "Is Imitation the Hidden Key to Creativity?", and its (much better written) original source, "The Curious Threshold for Creativity". They talk about a social study that explored how ideas spread and discovered that about "30% of people should create while the rest imitate." This may sound weird taken out of context, but it points out to a bigger idea of the article: "organizations and societies that spend too much time on ideas see their overall fitness decline." Which then reminded me of the exploration/exploitation balance thing from some time ago...

More interesting, tho, is a conclusion that creative ideas can spread if they are actually adopted by others. This means, in order to encourage adoption of an idea, you don't need a handful of influencers, you just need a really lot of followers.

p.s. And sometimes, a mere exposure to something actually works really well. Which makes all those "let's create a cool ad campaign", "make something interesting", and "do big ideas matter?" discussions a little bit, well, irrelevant. Too much creativity and not enough imitation "makes ideas die, because there are so many of them and few ever catch fire." Imitators, as it turns out, play an important role in society: they act as a kind of memory, storing the successful creative stuff for the future. I'd really like to hear someone to say, let's reach the followers.

uncertain times call for glorious past.

At some point last week, I came across on Facebook a quote from a New Yorker article on Mad Men that Noah put there.  This reminded me of a post that I have written here more than a year ago about the wonders of Mad Men popularity. The main thing that puzzled me back then was not why people watch Mad Men, but more interestingly, why now? Would this show be popular in the nineties? Or even, 7-8 years ago? Is there anything in the current time + the state of media & advertising that provided a set of circumstances for its topics to be popular right now?

Perhaps. At first, I thought that Mad Men popularity may be accidental. (It never actually is). I mean, the show that takes place in the 60's, depicts professional+private relationships on the time long gone (and not particularly missed), and is set is set in a traditional advertising agency world, is so popular right now when that same world has almost been transformed beyond recognition?

Well, maybe precisely because of this transformation. The narrative pretty clearly reflects the "glorious past", "legendary times", and (currently considered) "mythical events" (think yapping gender inequality).

Every group (professional, generational), culture, and nation has these legendary times and events. That's not new. More interesting is when and why they start to dig them out. Usually, it's at the times of overwhelming uncertainty.

This uncertainty can precede some giant turmoil, a dramatic break with the past, or the final stages of one kind of order and its replacement with something else. For example, 1930s Germany rediscovered its mythical past at times of incredible economic crisis and wounded national pride just before WWII and the crash of the Weimar Republic; Churchill frequently recalled memories of Lord Nelson before difficult and bloody war battles; and the current New York has been trying really hard to remind us of the old New York amid all the new condos via, for example, last year's movies "The Wackness" and "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist." Hard times indeed call for the glorious past. 

But so do the uncertain ones. Uncertainty does not need to signify some impeding change; it can also be the result of continuous, volatile, and unpredictable changes. In this case, uncertainty actually becomes an enduring condition - a state of affairs in itself and by itself. When people loose footing - when they face things they can't easily explain with what they know, when they are forced to think about doing things differently, and when they can't really rely anymore on the established rules, they need to cling to something.

Usually, this something is "good old times". And if history offers any lesson, epic memories come forth when they need to help us cope with change.

p.s. I suspect that a show set in a digital agency would be way less popular. But I may be wrong.

Evidence. Missing.

This morning, I read this excellent NYT article, "Making Health Care Better", by David Leonhardt. Although the article deals with something (almost) completely different, it reminded me of the increasingly mentioned need for measurement and empirical evidence of selected brand solutions in the marketing industry.

A far-fetched analogy? Perhaps. But it does tackle the "intuition" vs. "empiricism" approaches to the way we solve client's problems - in marketing. More often than not, in the absence of empirical criteria (or because of our unwillingness to look for it), we rely on our intuitive reasoning instead of on the observation.

And more often than not, we judge the work of others based on our taste, intuition, and relationships we have with those who made that work. 

And that's the problem. According to the article, "Intuition is not simply belief; it springs from this knowledge. A doctor making an intuitive diagnosis is doing so on the basis of thousands of hours spent treating patients. The problem, however, is that the mind is not particularly good at sorting through this knowledge and weighing different parts appropriately. We give too much weight to information that confirms our suspicions or that is highly memorable."

How can we then decide that a campaign was "better" than another one? We rarely look at a campaign data - partly because the actual metrics data is proprietary and not available to anyone beyond walls of an agency and of their clients. What we do is rely on our experience.

But ... "When a person says, ‘In my experience,’ what’s actually happening is you’re being dominated by one or two recent cases that you can recall or by some distant case that was either particularly good or particularly bad." Famous behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman claims that "Intuitive diagnosis is reliable when people have a lot of relevant feedback. The feedback needs to come quickly and to be clear."

General, and generally available, feedback mechanisms and benchmarks for success don't really exist. While it may not have been possible before to know exactly if a TV/print/outdoors/radio campaign influenced particular brand affinity and purchase decisions, digital lets us do things differently.

This means that we don't have to judge works of others purely on elusive criteria of "creativity", but on actual data on how this creativity fared with people (what did they do? and what did they do next?). It's not that we don't talk about this stuff - we may even be talking too much. The problem is that we don't do enough about it:

"The explosion of medical research over the last century has produced a dizzying number of treatments for different ailments. To enter mainstream use, any such treatment typically needs to clear a high bar. It will be subject to randomized trials, statistical-significance tests, the peer-review process of academic journals and the scrutiny of government regulators. Yet once a treatment enters the mainstream — once we know whether it works in certain situations — science is largely left behind. The next questions — when to use it and on which patients — become matters of judgment, not measurement. The decision is, once again, left to a doctor’s informed intuition."

And then, there's aversion to criticism. (Unfortunately, not everyone reacts like Alex Bogusky to a critique. I thought his humility is a great example: "I was just so excited to have a review in LA Times that the fact that it was harsh didn't really hurt my feelings much. To survive 20+ years in the advertising industry, my feelings dried up and  blew away long ago. I do miss them. But without feelings in the way it was easy to appreciate how lucky I was to even get reviewed.") The rest of us, however, often choose to ignore - or worse yet, devalue - anything that suggest an alternative:

"The journal Health Affairs will soon publish a survey of the chairmen of more than 700 hospitals. Its main message is that many hospitals are not even aware of what they do well and what they don’t. The physicians who conducted the survey, Ashish Jha and Arnold Epstein, gave the chairmen a list of issues — including financial performance, organizational strategy and the quality of health care — and asked them to name their board’s two top priorities. Roughly half did not name the quality of care. Yet the chairmen said they believed that the care at their hospitals was above average. Even at those hospitals that Medicare data suggest are among the worst in the country, 58 percent of the chairmen said they thought their hospital was above average. Not a single one said the hospital was below average."

Turns out, the main problem is not admitting that we can do our job better.  The problem is pretending that we can't.

New ownership?

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

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

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

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

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

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

the future of strategic planning?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

why do people agree with each other so much?

This is something I occasionally think about. A few days ago, I read a NewYorker article "The Things People Say" about web-facilitated polarization of political opinions. On a more general level, I found it interesting how people tend to guard their opinions once they are formed, rather than to expose them to a challenge.

Then, the other day, Michael Surtees observed something interesting: he noted that, in New York, there are a lot of "followers" in the digital industry. That is, people who actually start something and/or have a fresh perspective or an idea, are outnumbered by those who quickly (and uncritically) adopt and repeat the ideas of others.

The NewYorker article claims that this has always been the case, and that the Internet has just made it visible. And it made it very much so: just think all those "great post", "smart analysis", "agreed!" blog comments that offer validation of the opinion rather than to expose it to a discussion.

Does this mean that people working in digital marketing are very agreeable in general? Or, that they are easily influenced? Maybe they are just lazy? Or overly political? Or, they simply don't have an opinion of their own?

Or, they just really, truly, agree with everything that their colleagues write. If so, that's a problem.

Why?

An industry that claims to be based on disruption needs to nurture the culture of disruption. For disruptive ideas to happen, people need to, well, disagree.

A few pirates around would really help.

Why Digital Agencies Aren’t Ready to Lead

Any conversation about digital marketing these days includes at least one mention that traditional agencies just “don’t get it”. While this may be correct, what’s equally true is that digital agencies are not ready to take the lead.

Look at the typical digital agency. It excels in exploring new horizons. It supports a flat and loose organizational structure in which a developer has access to the CEO. And it makes sure everyone’s opinion is heard. It’s one big crazy family.

Digital agencies are having a ton of fun experimenting with ideas, technologies and strategies to find new alternatives superior to obsolete ways of doing marketing. That’s what they do best.

The problem is, this is the only thing they are doing.

When they are asked to actually follow through on their ideas, they often come up short. It is because they don’t know the business of marketing (or want to know it, for that matter), and they rarely have the organizational structure or past practices to guide them.

This comes at a cost. Digital agencies impress clients with their passion, drive, and technology knowhow. Clients then say: “You gave as a lot to think about.” which often came to mean that the account is awarded to someone else. Where digital shops fail is giving confidence to the client that all this momentum will be indeed executed in a well-led marketing campaign.

All of this is not new. It is already described in organizational theorist James March’s exploration vs. exploitation dichotomy. The best companies have the optimal balance between the two; those less successful are doing too much of either.

There certainly are places around that represent an uneasy mix of exploration vs. exploitation: Digitas, Razorfish, and AKQA. They are sort of stuck in between recently acquired marketing knowledge and their digital savvy, trying to combine them to sometimes embarrassing results (think Razorfish's Laundry Fairy, for example).

If digital agencies excel at exploration, traditional agencies thrive on exploitation. A traditional agency is risk-averse, accountable, and systematic. It knows its business inside out. It knows its clients’ businesses and executes campaigns reliably. Its people hang out with the’ CMOs. A typical traditional agency has decades of experience.

This, too, comes at a cost. A traditional agency, organized around exploitation, ends up doing the same thing over and over again. For every marketing challenge, their solution is “better creativity”. This is not surprising: if an agency spends all its time making sure that everything goes efficiently, that leaves it with little time to experiment. And then, even if it wanted to do things differently, it would be met with its own organizational inertia.

How is the exploration/exploitation gap closed? Like most things in marketing, it comes back to the client. As much as people like to talk about the agency of the future, it will never happen until the client gets there first.

Shorter client-agency alliances, smaller budgets and faster review cycles create a more competitive environment that forces everyone involved to be more alert. When relationships are unstable, shifting, and temporary, it’s the balance that count. That means not only having innovative ideas, but also executing them swiftly and flawlessly.

Until digital agencies show they can strike this balance, they are also the ones who don’t get it.

the other group of people in marketing. no, not consumers.

The other day I saw this article, "Human Behavior: a Key to Future Tech Developments" and didn't think much of it (not because I don't think the idea is super-important, but because very smart people have already written a lot about it in a much more interesting way.)

So anyway, this quote stayed with me: " "Microsoft and many other companies realize that since it is, after all, people who use technology, it's critical for the company to understand how people adapt to technology." But I didn't think of it in relation to customers but in relation to the "other group of people" in marketing who use it: the agencies.

I'd really like to go to a traditional ad agency and observe this. Because, in order to develop a good "fit" with its environment, any organization is challenged to "match its knowledge with the problems in the environment it operates" (Brook Manville). How they tag, code, organize, and communicate this knowledge depends on technology. It influences how an agency is organized. And, it also shapes how an agency perceives, relates to, and interprets its environment. So, if they are increasingly using digital media, that should change a bit ways they think about marketing. Or, it will change over time. Which is a good thing.

(photo found here).

the evolving role of marketing ...

This made me smile. On Friday, I was digging through my external drive with archived papers from my Ph.D. classes. Completely randomly, I came across a project that I pitched to consulting firm Booz, Allen&Hamilton - actually, to Randy Rothenberg, who was really nice to me and connected me with others at BoozAllen.

So, anyway, the project's called "The Evolving Role of Marketing in Media Companies", and the time is January 2005.  It's sort of awesome how this question is still very relevant today. 

Some highlights from the doc:

Media companies today don't take the full advantage of their internal resources and market opportunity. This is because they lack organizational structure, incentive, and functional areas to extract the maximum value from their resources to meet customers' needs. As media market changed, internal organizational structure and dynamics of media companies did not. For a company to effectively alter its offerings, a real internal change must occur - and because marketing is well positioned to strategically link external consumer information and company's internal assets, it has a key role in this process.

Two main organizational challenges in today’s media industry are how to achieve the organizational flexibility capable of adapting to a an environment with a high degree of uncertainty and what are the new strategies for value creation necessary given the evolved relationships between media companies and their markets. Specifically, the main organizational challenges are: a) How can media companies internally restructure such that their organization empowers a business model which meets the need of the fast-changing and complex media market plays? b) What kind of functional and organizational consolidation will cross-platform deals foster? c) what incentive structure need to be in place to encourage these behaviors, i.e. how to motivate and foster interdivisional collaboration that will enhance companies' potential for innovation and responsiveness for changing demands of the market?

There is a strong need for a coordinating unit that is strategically well positioned within a firm and to the market to leverage the company's internal assets allowing for adaptive and continued responsiveness to unpredictable environmental changes. Marketing departments can achieve such strategic position and that they will have an increasingly important coordinating role within media companies. The new role of marketing in media companies will potentially ensure both leveraging firm's assets and its competitive position in marketing services and/or with traditional marketing services providers.

All of this sounds terribly, terribly familiar. Just replace "media companies" with _______.

:)

hollywood was here first.

Occasionally, people in marketing industry talk about how to adapt their agencies to changes in the media environment. Every time I see something like that, it reminds me of the same question that media companies were asking themselves 4-5 years ago (no answer), and also reminds me of Hollywood.

Hollywood, as a matter of fact, did organizationally adapt to a relatively sudden change in its own environment (television, and then all other stuff that followed). So maybe there's a lesson there. 

Before any other content industry, Hollywood was faced with the need to quickly and adaptively respond to fast-changing + unpredictable environment that was increasingly hostile to its business model of Fordist movie production (to make an analogy, think minisite/banners/video ads).

So, in order to survive this all this terrible hostility, Hollywood had to reorganize itself ... and move away from classical, vertically-integrated studio model towards a networked cluster. Hm.

There's an old article that talks about this: "Hollywood has mutated from an industry of classic huge vertically integrated corporations into the world's best example of network economy ... Hollywood's network economy isn't unique, it's just more evolved than most - and as a result offers a picture of how and where companies in all kinds of industries will do their work in the years to come. Eventually, every knowledge-intensive industry will end up in the same flattened, atomized state. Hollywood has just gotten there first."

Okay, so now what do those networked clusters mean? Well, industrial clusters like Hollywood or Sillicon Valley are places where a lot of firms are grouped in immediate proximity. So it's easy to know everyone, and social and economic ties go together. 

What's cool about clusters as organizational forms is that they are combo of firms and markets. As markets, they have power to create and allocate resources efficiently. After all, they are governed by the laws of supply and demand, and are highly efficient at allocating resources to the "material well being of all". In short, a little competition can be good for you.

Now, in addition to being a cluster, Hollywood operates on a project basis. Something like this: now that everyone's clustered together, let's see who's the best to respond to some challenge?

Someone defined projects as "temporary systems of diversely skilled people working together on a complex task over a limited period of time." A person reads a script, goes to a producer who wants to make a movie, and calls this director, and then these actors, etc. etc.

So then someone in Hollywood figured out that they would be more competitive and more adaptable and able to explore environment better if they operated on temporarily and flexibly assembled project teams. This means that the talent is not always the same, because if they were then it would be really boring to watch same people over and over again. Also, things that always-same talent can come up with would also be limited (how many different things can same people come up with?). Most importantly, though, it could happen that limited talent is not up to the current task.

Thus, by continuously reshuffling people vs. not keeping all its talent "in house" Hollywood makes sure that it always has A-team on its disposal. And it also makes sure that it's flexible for whatever comes next. And, sometimes, it produces innovative stuff.

Now, for a second, think about agencies as clusters. Clusters have spatial proximity of diverse talent, but without hierarchical and formal ties that keeps it in place. Talent is only loosely coordinated (people belong to certain functions, units, etc.) but otherwise works as a market. When people are closely together, it enhances communication and collaboration. But it also creates little bit of competition. So bringing market inside of a firm may be a healthy thing. And who knows, it may help create something new, too.

if you put good people in bad systems, you get bad results.*

*Steven Casey. Some time ago, I came across Tim Malbon's article, "Pulling Off The Optimal Platform Job". At the time, two things caught my eye there, so I am finally writing about it.

First, the idea of "Chief Culture Officer" struck me as terribly silly. I completely understand the need for the "board-level support for the kind of cultural immersion needed." But, in the same way Chief Innovation Officer doesn't make any sense (how crazy was that??), Culture Officer can't do much if, well, there's no shared culture where (his) ideas can resonate.

And the very moment that kind of culture exists throughout the organization, well, there's no need for anyone in particular to represent it (because everyone does). And if there's no such culture, one man will not bring it in, on a board level or not. Sounds like an oxymoron to me.

Here's a great illustration that I've just came across on Bill Petti's blog: "A study of the top fifty game-changing innovations over a hundred-year period showed that nearly 80% of those innovations were sparked by someone whose primary expertise was outside the field in which the innovation breakthrough took place." And: "Only 1 in 5 game-changing innovations came from the minds of people that are specialized in that particular field."

There's a ton to learn here about culture of innovation and about organization for innovation. (If innovation happens everywhere, what organizational structures support best distributed collaboration? No, the answer is not Chief Innovation or Culture Officer - that's a shortcut.) But, unlike Bill, I don't think that innovation is so much about "polymaths". Maybe more important than having multitalented people is having a lot of connections between them, so that info and ideas can be exchanged quickly and can flow freely. And this is no one man's feat.

Okay, and now to the part of Tim's article that I liked. It is absolutely "overly simplistic" to claim that ad agencies should be like software companies. I have always found that analogy too weak and way too literal. It's like saying: this horse is running fast, let's be like this horse! 

The question is, of course, one of values: testing, iteration, short feedback loops, monitoring, collaboration. These values are inherent in digital technology. Software companies, by sheer proxy, are those dealing with this technology the most. So, the easy conclusion is, let's be like this production shop! Whew.

What happens if you are too much focusing on being like a production shop, is that you may miss out opportunity to be something else, something better, and something more suitable for your business. That's a problem with organizational imitation vs. organizational innovation. Next time, I'd like someone to try to say how are digital technology's values changing their agency and the way they are doing marketing, instead of pointing at the fast running horse.

You are f*ing with the magic!

I thought this sentence was hilarious.

It's from the NewYorker article about Google, "Searching for Trouble", that I read a couple of weeks ago, but never gotten around to writing something about it. The author is Ken Auletta, and there is something touching that this writer, who built his fame around following shenanigans of the old media moguls (his book from that period, "The Highwaymen", is notorious) now has to deal with the challenges of understanding of the whole new media world. All within a single career.

Anyway. The above sentence ends the paragraph where the author talks about the stark contrast between the old and new ad models:

"Most American media - television, radio, newspapers, magazines - depend for their existence on a long-entrenched advertising model. That model, at which Karmazin excelled, depended on salesmanship, emotion, and mystery. ... "I was selling twenty-five billion dollars' worth of advertising." Karmazin recalled. "Did I want someone to know what worked and what didn't? Karmazin looked at his Google hosts and proclaimed, only half in jest, "You're fucking with the magic!" 

Now, while certainly funny, his outcry is not as outdated as we'd like to think. Even among digital marketing agencies and its creative directors, there's still a lot of belief in creating "magic". This magic, true, may not be measurable, but is thought to be attractive both to advertisers and audiences alike precisely because the aura of its mystery.

In Karmazin's words, this would be: "I have no idea if it's going to work. You pay your money, you take your chances." Utterly appealing.

On a recent industry event, I heard one digital CD say that "you got to make things that people are going to search for." So, I guess the game is the same, it just in a different medium. Except, the logic "if you build it, they will come" (or search for it, in this instance) doesn't really make much sense in digital. You can build as much as you want. They'll ignore it. To make something searchable - and findable - you got to optimize it, test it a bit, and then distribute it in such a dispersed way that it increases chances that people will stumble upon it. Nothing magical there, in fact.

There's also another sort of magic that's still alive and well and right in the middle of agency-client relationship. Karmazin put it like this: "I want a salesperson in the process, taking that buyer for drinks, getting an order you shouldn't have gotten. You don't want to have people know what works. When you know what works or not, you tend to change less money than when you have this aura and you are selling this mystique."

And here I thought that our job is to help clients solve their problems in an accountable and transparent manner. To tell them the inconvenient truth and to show them the tough love. But at the same time, to really, truly, help them by bringing tangible and measurable results. It should also be noted that best digital agencies employ a bunch of nerds and geeks who are incredibly passionate about solving problems but whose social skills are, dubious, to say the least. Or, rather - they are filled with people who don't exactly see the point of  creating any "aura" around themselves or their work. And, besides, going for a drink with a 20+ year older client on a weekend night only for the sake of selling them "mystique" sounds like a horrible way to spend time.

But more worrisome than how people spend their weekends, is forging a personal relationship where a purely business one makes more sense (just think Richard Fuld, started to love his bank too much, made some bad decisions). A lot of clients stay with an agency not because it's the best choice, but because they have a "relationship".  Lame advertising campaigns happen because people got to like each other over drinks; or because the agency convinced the client that their solution is the best. Proof for it stays at the bottom of the drink.

Google here did not mark only the end of one advertising model and introduction of a new one; it actually mostly made visible a whole new set of relationships. A set of relationships that becomes apparent when everything else is made transparent.

Magic is an incredibly pretty thing to believe in. Only, it's not real.

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

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

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

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

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

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

(the image found here.)

TV is soo not dead.

I had this conversation a couple of times in the past, enough for me to think that maybe I should write it up here. Namely, it's about the role of TV in success of social media initiatives ("viral" campaigns included). It's kind of a fact by now that search traffic spikes after a brand's advertisements were shown on TV (even Google talks about it). The number of fans on brands' Facebook pages as well as Twitter pages also multiplies in terms of hundreds upon those brands ads hit TV. So much for building a brand "organically" via "connecting" with consumers through social media.

In a way (and absolutely ironically) this effect turns TV more in a direct response medium than in what it's traditionally considered: a broad-based awareness and branding medium. Get that.

This kind of thinking reminded me of a 2007 paper called "Viral Marketing for the Real World" by Duncan Watts, Jonah Peretti, and Michael Frumin, which talks about ways to augment impact of "viral campaigns".

Rather than figuring out which sort of content is going to go viral (puppies, pranks, etc, which made some people naively wonder what should brands learn from the most popular web videos?), and how to "seed" it so it widely spreads (which "influencers" should we target?), the model that authors propose combines the power of traditional media with the ability of digital to quickly and easily spread messages. The catch is - in order to reach a wide spread - social media campaigns need a little help from, well, mass media. (They aren't call mass for nothing, after all).

The authors specifically call out BK's Subservient Chicken, which is often used as a blueprint example of a legendary and wildly successful "viral" campaign. Ok, so maybe it's time to debunk its myth. Just a little bit.

Apparently, Watts and Peretti claim, the Subservient Chicken campaign "reached millions of viewers, but was also supported by a nationwide marketing effort that yielded a very large seed."And,"although many people heard about the website through word of mouth, many others saw television ads paid for with a multimillion dollar advertising budget." The best part is this, however: "Perhaps because it makes a better story, journalistic accounts of the campaign usually fail to mention the paid advertising and present the campaign as a purely viral phenomenon." Conclusion: "Nevertheless, the Subservient Chicken clearly benefited from paid advertising that dramatically expanded the reach of the campaign." Fair enough.

A question now: why are TV & social media efforts not better coordinated, and more often?

(image found here)

a little cultural inquiry

I came across this excellent analysis of online commenting, which, according to the article "has become a medium in its own right". The question then becomes, "when the general consensus is that most comments suck, why do we continue to add the functionality to websites?"

Comments on my blog are all awesome, and I love to get feedback on stuff I write. However, it is easy for me to love comments here, because they are all very smart, interesting, and polite and respectful even in disagreement. In fact, I welcome people who disagree with me (or offer a new way of looking at things) because they push me to think more. When comments are inspired by the topic/article, and not by its author, there's  a context for a healthy exchange of ideas, and "enhance whatever they are attached to and offer insightful and constructive debate".

More often than not, this is not the case.

It's more likely "to find comment in the form of excessive superlatives or the monosyllabic jeering and swearing from anonymous cowards, wading through which only saps our energy to persist in looking for something worth while to read."

And it's not only about the wasted energy. Accumulated comments, like those on AdWeek or AdAge, are a collective reflection of the marketing industry and its predominant culture. It's like an anthropological case study.

So, what are the findings? I am going to quote here Alan Wolk, who already wrote about this, and summarized it the best. Apparently, all industry comments belong to three main categories: a) "you are not famous enough for me to pay attention to", a.k.a. "where is your portfolio", b) "all this smart stuff makes my brain hurt", and c) "enough about you, here's a link to my brilliant blog post".

If these comment modes are reflection of the "state of the industry", then it may help us grasp why the industry is not adapting a bit faster - and better - to consumer behavior in the complex media environment. Simply, a lot of people working in it are often more interested in trashing each other, pushing their own agendas, and being intolerant to difference, than in thinking and discussing new ideas.

In contrast, there's a digital marketing world. It's an uncertain and unpredictable place. More importantly, it's also a place where most people are actually curious about the changes in the media, society, and the world around them. (Operative word here being "around them").

Just have a look at Faris' or Noah's or Paul's or Gareth's blogs. People there want to talk about ideas, not about each other. Together, they offer a reflection of a totally different culture. It's a culture of appreciation, respect, creativity, information, experimentation, newness, and challenges.

To brave an uncertain digital environment, people working in it figured they need a little help from their friends. And that's adaptive.

If traditional and digital advertising don't get agree so often, it's not because they revolve around different media. It's because of the people.

people design

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

not quite correct, mr. goodby

 
I am not sure why I am even writing about this. Probably because it caught my eye the other day without even knowing what's exactly about. And now I have to follow through. Truth is, these kind of debates bore me to death. Bob Garfield's "The Chaos Scenario" book certainly feels like talking about the future while looking at the rear mirror, and Jeff Goodby himself does not seem terribly far from it, too.

Simply put, Goodby seems to think that all we need is better advertising. Yes, times are challenging, and our response is to try harder to do what we are already doing. If we were just a bit more creative, or had a tad better copy, or be slightly more funny, then "advertising could morph itself into something people actually want to experience and seek out".

Good luck with that.

The question here is not one of advertising at all. And framing complexity and uncertainty of the current media environment as an advertising question, can only limit the range of possible solutions. If Goodby asked: how do I inspire people to buy more of my clients' products in the current complex media environment (or, better yet, how to become more relevant in consumers' lives), then he may have come to a range of possible solutions, some of which may have been quite interesting, and all of which could have been actually expected to increase sales and/or promote the client's brand.

But no, let's talk AGAIN about advertising.

Goodby wants a more efficient old system. And he is hardly the only one. This kind of path-dependency in thinking is known both in studies of decision-making and in real life. Thinking that agencies' can't change because "there's simply too much money and corporate energy devoted to this cause for those budgets, and hopes, to disappear overnight." Hm, something's not going to fail because there is too much invested in it? Bigger systems collapsed for less: financial system and Soviet Union come to my mind :).

People tend to cling to what they know and with what they are comfortable; they are averse to loss and tend to repeat things that worked for them in the past. This form of irrationality is called Sunk Cost and it's super-interesting.

Worse yet, they think that if they continue doing what they were already doing, just in a better, faster, more efficient way, the current obstacles will be solved. Wrong. Internet may never make money. That is, it will never make that kind of money that advertising people think would make them want to do business on the Internet. Waiting for the Internet to start making money (even if the ways that Goodby hopefully suggest, "a combination of micropayment entry fees and advertising that people like") does not seem like a good strategy. Simply, it's applying one set of expectations to the system in which those expectations don't make any sense.

Social, technical, and economic organization of the web does not - and will not ever - support the media value chain in which someone makes money off advertising at the end as it was the case in the past. No matter how much "better" that advertising becomes. This situation does not mean that we are dealing with chaos (that's just silly). We are simply dealing with a complex system that sustains multiple coexisting orders of worth. Sometimes, what worked in the past will not work in the future. And sometimes it will.

The fact is that no one can predict which of these two possibilities will be the case. This is not a riddle; it's just a situation that requires a crucial understanding that now, it not the challenge that can be classified under "advertising".

What is certain is the following: keeping the debate always within the same boundaries will not ever provide a new solution. Asking the same question will not give a new answer.

This whole Goodby analysis reminds me of Henry Ford's "faster horses". He would have never invented a car if the only business he was in was breeding faster horses. Or, in the Sunk Cost terms, sometimes one just needs to cut losses and start thinking anew.

Does Google Need a Second Act?

It all started earlier this week, when I came across this article on TechCrunch. The article asked what happened to the free version of Google apps. I thought that something like that was to be expected, as Google was probably waiting from the start for a sufficient number of people start using its services. That is, it waited for scale to happen, and to ripe the benefits of network effect (usefulness of a service increases as more people are using it. A cell phone or a fax machine or an email is pretty useless if you are the only person in the world who has it.) So, anyway, that was my initial thought: now that some of the google services are so widely used that they are close to irreplaceable (at least in people's minds) they would not mind paying for it. Which Google counts on. 

That would be the end of the story if I didn't send that article to Noah, who - as it turned out - was himself thinking about Google's market strategy. Then Jeff Jarvis post surfaced the next day, and all of the sudden the question of what Google is exactly doing became [somewhat] interesting to me. While I tend to agree with Nick Carr and with Noah that, roughly put, Google's business is to get people to use internet more (in Noah's words, a "category growth"), because by association and necessity, they will end up using Google's services, I recognized this kind of approach in systems thinking and "design thinking". 

And this is where the question becomes how is this new. People in marketing figured out about "compliments" (as Carr puts it) way before Google showed up. Smart marketers know that they need to put a product/service in the wider context of people's lives. The job is to figure out connections = what fits well with other stuff? So in simple terms, it means educating and motivating people about running if you are selling running shoes; teaching people to cook if you are selling kitchenware; inspiring and tutoring women if you are selling makeup; you help people live healthier if you sell vitamins. In all these instances, product is pushed vicariously, through trying to transform people's behavior. Nothing new there. Marketers were trying to expand market for whatever they are selling for decades now. 

So, now back to Google. The real question is whether "expanding the category" is a long-term business growth strategy for Google? Or, does Google need a second act? For a while now, as Brian put it, Google's been throwing billions and billions since "it hit on a tremendous product (search) at a time when the Internet was exploding. It lucked out that Bill Gross pioneered a readymade business model for it. It just needed to tweak it." The question is now, can it continue its growth/domination just on making more people use the Internet more? 

While I think that's a completely legit business path to take, Google's been lauded as a revolutionary (most famously in Jarvis' book that's fervor more than few people found uncomfortable). What Google does right now is - it turns out - far from revolutionary. Is it smart? Definitely. Does it help Google make money? For sure. But to be a real innovator in your market, you got to come up with something, well, new.

from ownership to use*

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

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

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

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

But I may be totally wrong.

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

the problem with the big idea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KFC is crazy?

Or maybe not so much. I came across this today, and while my first thought was, "whoa, megalomania", then I started thinking, just for fun, if Google Maps Satellite View can be yet another advertising channel. Something like geo-advertising. So not that the search for "Arizona desert" will generate some giant audience, but if KFC can do it here, than brands can do it everywhere, so you may want to look at Fiji islands and all of the sudden there is a giant image of Ronald McDonald. Or, if you want to go targeted, a bottle of Fiji water. (what a creepy idea)

Ok, so just now I went to google maps and maybe this geo-advertising thingy is not such a completely dumb thought because honestly there's ton of empty roofs that make outdoors seem so passe. And anyway more people look at google maps than they look at outdoors on Houston street (unless it's some naked Calvin Klein situation). I can see contextual advertising lurking just behind the corner. Literally and figuratively :)

filtering out.

This is Rick Webb's status update that made me laugh so hard at the time that I remembered it and dug it out now as quite appropriate as an illustration of the stuff that I've been thinking about for some time. Which is the problem of filtering information once the adoption of a social networking platform reaches such a number of people that there is all of the sudden more noise than signal(s). Or, the costs of using the platform become higher than its benefits. Or, network effects turn into negative externalities.

We've seen it happening with Facebook, and we've seen it happening with Twitter. When *everyone* started using these platforms, the issue moved from "being there" to how the hell do i "filter stuff out". It's like these platforms stopped being services in themselves and instead became a resource upon which a new, cooler, more useful, and more fun service has to be built.

Here comes the question what do you do with all that data, information, and connections that exist on these social platforms? Some people experiment with services like Qapture, which wants to filter Twitterers by popularity. Needless to say, the list is full of usual suspects in all three categories. I know what those people are saying even without going over to Qapture. So this made me think that popularity is really not a good filtering mechanism. It's nice to be in the loop, but I can do that just by relying on the local knowledge of people in my immediate proximity (in network terms), but that's something that Hayek discovered like 100 years ago. I just need to link to the nearest hub (a person with large number of connections), and puff, I learn about everything everyone is talking about. Something like turning the TV on.

So now, why would I want to do that on the web? There's actually data that is visible and that can allow me a much smarter and more interesting filtering mechanism: the one that introduces a high level of randomness in my network. Or, in other words, that feeds stuff that I like but would never know that I like until I came across them.

Filtering mechanism like that would be a great discovery tool (the one that allows for accidental discoveries), and it would also at the same time weed out all the information that I find uninteresting, irrelevant, or simply a noise. So the problem, how I see it, is not to fight this noise by amplifying the already strongest signals; it's by amplifying the relevant ones.

But how do I know what I will find relevant before I see it? Um. That's part of my thinking about serendipity so will write about it there :) In a bit.

the newness of new technology

Every time I hear an argument that claims that something is  ... "new", "revolutionary", "first", "unprecedented", my first thought is that it probably isn't. 

Being inclined to think that we live in the time that is like no other before it is a recognizable human tendency that probably marked all earlier epoques of history as well (it's just that we don't know, or think about it). We like to think that there's no time like present = we exhibit "present0centrism". 

Then, there is a major fallacy in logic that assumes that human history is a linear endeavor, where things go from a less developed state to a more developed state. That is, that there is always some form of progress. From this fallacy then stems another one, and that one is that progress happens suddenly, as a revolution, and that one set of relations is replaced quickly and swiftly with another, completely different set of relations. No wonder then that we think that present is always "new".

I found a great example of this kind of logically flawed thinking in the [unfortunately] widely accepted idea that the audience has a "newly active role" in its own consumption of entertainment. Well, maybe. Aside of the fact that statements like this present a pretty boring simplifications of people's behavior, they are also pretty wrong. (And while I understand that it's easy to say something like this cliche because it "makes sense" and clients and the industry will quickly agree, I also think that saying things that we can immediately understand on a superficial level without really thinking about them really hampers more creative and ultimately more interesting thinking. I guess I am just bored of things that are "common sense" because they represent nothing but an agreement of something by a large number of people).

So anyway. First, audience has never really not been active, it's just that this activity was invisible. There was no technology for this activism to achieve a. visibility and b. scale. 

Second, and to me more interestingly, the era of audience allegedly "not being active" spans to a mere 60 years of the mass media. That's a terribly short time. And, honestly, before that time, audience never-ever shut up. It was laud, interactive, and it had an enormous say in any show. The early cinema was like that; in fact the first 15-20 years after film was invented it was always part of vaudeville acts - one among many of them. Audience shouted and expressed its liking or disliking of whatever was happening on the stage -- in short, the audience itself was part of the show. But then, while looking for something else yesterday, I came across an article from NewYorker from a while ago that I saved because I found the analysis interesting. The article is about the format of the concert performance, and just have a look at this:

(about audience in the Paris Opera in the 18th century): "While most were in their places by the end of the first act, the continuous movement and low din of conversation never really stopped. ... In other words, the opera served mainly as a playground for the aristocracy. The nobles refrained from paying overt attention to what the musicians are doing. Indeed, silent listening in the modern sense was deemed declasse. ... Public concerts well into 19th century took the form of miscellaneous - eclectic affairs at which all kinds of music were played before audiences that seldom sat still or quieted down. ... Piano recitals were completely nuts. They resembled "The Ed Sullivan Show" more than the hushed recital of today. In one favorite routine, Liszt brought onstage a large urn into which his listeners had dropped slips of paper, each one inscribed with a suggestion for a tune on which he might improvise. The audience sometimes participated without any prompting from the stage. Once, when Liszt was beginning a performance of the "Kreutzer" Sonata, listeners begun calling out "Robert le Diable!" - meaning that they wished to hear instead Liszt's fantasy on themes from the Meyerbeer opera."

Sounds terribly familiar.