i [love] marketing.

SxSW Panel Proposal: Creativity for the Complex World

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

In a nutshell:

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

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

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

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

This panel is going to answer the following questions:

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

You can see the revised & submitted proposal here.

 

Data as Marketing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

online, causality doesn't exist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

behavior + technology = situation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good brands aren't filters, they are resources.

About a year ago Umair Haque said that brands today don't make any economic sense (he also said that NYT should acquire Twitter, um.) Years earlier, Wired said something similar. Their argument was that there's so much information around today that we don't need brands anymore. The logic behind it went something like this:

1. Brand is information from a company promising consumers a set of costs and benefits from the consumption of goods or service. 2. In the past, this information was treated as a scarce resource that was communicated via short television, print, and radio ads. 3. Today, there's no info scarcity and people can get first-hand information from others online, and 4. Since we don't need to compress the info about the expected value of goods and services into a logo or an ad, we don't need brands anymore. People stop trusting brand promise to help them in their purchasing decisions, and because they have info from others, their product choices are less risky. And when risk goes down, people's willingness to experiment goes up, and there's no loyalty as a result. Out goes the brand.

This would make a perfect sense if there wasn't a problem (a big one). If we base our argument around plain old availability of information, then as soon as we proclaim that there's no information scarcity we end up dealing with the problem of information abundance.

And that, turns out, is not what brand challenge is about at all.

Why? First, if we say that you don't need brands because there's info abundance, very shortly afterward we will claim that we actually do need brands to help us filter through all the available info, so that's a problem. But, the bigger problem is that the challenge of digital media is not that they offer a mere plurality of information sources (more info from more places), but that they increase complexity of communication as a resource (a person needs to navigate and interact and find and rate).

If we really want to talk about the role of brands online, then instead of focusing on information abundance (which is, when you think about it, just an extension of traditional communication position that a person is passive and easily bombarded with information), we need to focus on ways that information is categorized, organized, and presented so it helps people make product decisions and make their choices less risky.

Now, this is a brand challenge.

There are a lot of many great tools and resources on the Internet that help people decide among products regardless of the brand promise. So, the only think that may not make sense in digital is brand promise, not the brand itself. Why?

When brands are online, they too often think they need to communicate their promise in a way that "breaks through the clutter" because there's so much info around; and they think they need to filter this info abundance for consumers by telling them that their brand is the best. So they build a website or a minisite or an app. Turns out, that sort strategy online is plain stupid - because it treats digital just as TV on steroids.

Smart brands figured out they can be, instead, a resource in consumer decision-making: either by accompanying product with a service, or with a customer support, or with a superior e-commerce, or with a community, or with an advice. Then consumers go to them not because of their brand promise, but because of a tangible benefit.

Digital really doesn't kill brands, it just redefines what (and how) we call the brand.

gross national happiness

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

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

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

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

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

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.)

postcards I may send

It's time to be a girl [again]. Another fav of mine thus far is this. I love this blog. Lots of potentially useful stuff when [someone] screws up ...

digital communication

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

Flash-ed Out

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

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

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

how services became brands

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

just watch the sky

This is beautiful. Besides being fun&awesome in itself, i think it's a great example of "web storytelling", based on conveying ideas through technology. Or through design, if you will. Meaning that the story and technology are inseparable. This would be awfully close to McLuhan's famous idea, if I were talking about the medium and the message. But I am not. I am talking about turning an idea into something tangible [think any great design, e.g. furniture or fashion]. Here, there's also a song to go with each page. Song & text & font & color & navigation are all aligned to tell a story. By way of comparison, see this as an example of "traditional" storytelling & "the medium is the message" & "let's overuse Flash" [i've already written about the latter here and here]. It is worth noting that Anomaly has recently done something similar for Converse, but this one maybe has a slightly better vibe. (I didn't like Converse linear navigation, it somehow didn't totally work for their story. Non-linear and/or community-based navigation, like Digg's, might have been better ... but i heart Anomaly so will keep my comment lite)

are we storytellers? or ... are we a technology company?

One of the chapters of my dissertation deals with digital agencies' "identity crisis". The title sentence comes from an email exchange among the executives of a large digital marketing firm i worked for. I think it accurately describes what a lot of digital agencies are going through [i already wrote on R/GA here]. After all, they are the ones who need to somehow marry traditional marketing practices with properties of digital technologies. Making this combo happen is challenging enough for Sillicon Valley and Madison Avenue (a recent AdWeek article  talks about it), and considerably more so when it's happening under the same roof. In a nutshell, I think that the core of this divide is the way of thinking that separates "storytelling" from "technology". That is, here is a story, and then, here is a technology that is going to be used to communicate it. The problem is that the technology IS the story. To make this statement less obscure, just think that digital media are all about interactivity - and as a result, communication there depends less on messaging and more on creation of tangible stuff, like applications and websites and minisites and widgets which attract people to interact with them. So really there is no story before this interaction. And there's no story that is told just in a message - a person really needs to participate. So the story is kinda in-between the two.  How one designs interactions then pretty much shapes the story. Think branding, for example. Traditionally, brand is regarded as an abstract communication entity that manages brand image, logo, and personality. It does so through the representation of perception of products (operative word being "representation"). But the actual brand strength resides in our real-life attachments to products and services. Who cares what we are going to say when we may not behave in that way? Decline in brand loyalty & in brand power makes this say/do thing pretty apparent. There is a yawning gap between the world of communication and the world of, well, reality. What are agencies about to do then? Focus on how people behave, and don't really bother much with what they say. Forget about communication. Don't do research for messages that will resonate with the target audience. Do research about the target's life and then design something that will become natural and invisible part of it. Something that really seamlessly fits in their life. Now, what does all of this have to do with the agencies? First, their work process is still pretty linear and segmented: it revolves around the "idea" part and then the "execution" part. And the two are connected in a linear manner. Good luck with that. Truth is, those two things are inseparable - the same way the story and the technology are (so yes, I would have credited Big Spaceship in Cannes back in June). Second, where are the account planners? And why is design at the end of the whole process? And why does each team work separately? And, finally, why are we all still in the business of creating messages?? In order to marry technology and marketing, first there needs to happen a shift in thinking about the relationship between the two. Or, as Guy Kawasaki put it, a "jump to the next curve". Then the agencies can start to do business differently. This might seem a bit of a "chicken and egg" situation since agencies are the ones to make the change ... the good news is, if they don't, consumers will. It's all about the interaction, after all ... 

where is the runner?, part 2

I love pushing for the idea that social relations happen not only between people but also between people and products, technologies, and information. This kinda changes everything. Communication is not anymore something that happens exclusively between humans. And it's not reduced to images & sounds that grab our attention. It becomes interaction with things. And with this, the need for the concepts of brand image and brand personality starts to approximate zero. Why need an image or a set of imagined (personal) attributes to mediate your relationship the world around you? Properties of things may just be fine enough to speak for themselves, and interaction with them can be designed for, and made useful and delightful. When I go running, I have particular sneakers on, along with the rest of the gear. Those sneakers define how fast and how far I can run, as much as my own body. If I buy another pair of sneakers, I may run even further. They shape me as a runner equally as my training routine. So who does the running then? Me, or my gear, or me-and-my-gear system? I really think that neither we nor the products we use can be separated from the activity that connects us in and creates this system. The role of brands is then to serve this activity and to make it better (or more fun, or different, or whatever). And brand personality is pretty useless there.

service = system

In my previous posts (here and here) I was talking about how a brand should disappear behind its applications / stuff that it does for people. Sure thing, this is not new, and was already very neatly summarized in the concept of branded utility by Johnny Vulkan and Benjamin Palmer a while ago. I have hard time explaining people that's not really what i am talking about, but words tend to fail me. Until i figured that i am talking not about brands-as-services but brands-as-systems. What's the difference? I guess that a service addresses only a certain [single] type of action and builds a certain relationship around it. Service then operates only on the dimension "bad" - "good" - "great". A system is many relationships collected together (so some of its parts can be good/bad). Actions/relations - shopping, chatting, searching, banking, reading news - never exist in isolation but are always part of a wider systems of action [call it people's life]. There, everything is connected with everything else. So back to branded utility: what it provides is mostly PART of the bigger system. I guess it was just easier for us to regard the general statement "doing something useful" for people than thinking about specific actions that do so [i would love to put here "moments of truth" but will stay clear of the temptation]. That's why i don't think Nike+ is ONLY a service (it surely is that, but it's not only that), it is a system that addressed every action of what the practice of running is [maps, speed, goals, motivation, music, inspiration, community, races, etc]. Sure thing, it is a closed system [designed for a specific type of runners and for a specific types of runs] and that's why it breaks down so often (see Brian Morrissay's article for example) and is not very appealing to long-distance runners.  Another example is Google -- sure it does provide a great [search] service -- but today Google is way more than search. It is a whole system [search, calendars, email, im, photos, maps, images, and now a browser, too].  All these elements are [almost] neatly connected so there is no friction in going from one point (service) to the next. And that's exactly what Google was thinking about: how to address the people's experience not by thinking about particular activities but the way they are all connected (online and offline). An update: a week after I wrote this post, I came across this sentence in Dan Saffer's book: "service design, like systems design, focuses on context - on the entire system of use ... service design, really, is designing this whole system of use. The system is the service."

where is the brand image?

I just can't let it go today. Obsessed. With. Digital. Branding. Continuing on the "act of [brand] disappearance" behind its digital offerings [applications, content/advice, community - for examples think Tylenol "Feel Better", Nike + (yes, i know), Home Depot's "How to", Disney's Family.com, or just about any native digital brand]. Here what you see is what you get, i.e. perception = experience. Brand image is dead. When brand perception is based on actual experience, there's no need for a brand image, right?? Direct interactions with the brand online shape the brand experience AND, in this case, perception is not something that is seen/heard, it is something that is done. Digital branding is then about creating things that people would be attracted to interact with. In order for this to happen, brand's digital offerings have to have some tangible impact on people's life (again, think examples above). They have to respond to a need, give a solution or advice, transform a practice, offer entertainment, and/or impact behavior through creating some (any!) improved way of doing things. Digital branding is about actively transforming people's behavior, instead of trying to influence it through projecting a desired brand image (yay yay coke happiness factory!!) So I guess this shift in thinking makes us consider websites as a stand-alone digital products. A digital product communicates only if it does something [for me]. Promotion = function. Yep, websites can be created for promotion but even then they have to have a function in themselves. This function is the basis of creating a relationship with users: websites need to do something for them. As such, they develop value for people that is INDEPENDENT even from the products/services they promote.If this thinking is right, the actual products/services are then mostly "by-products" of this relationship.

Google's Chrome & immersive-ness of the web, part 2

While I am still at it ... a few more thougths to share. I kinda like this cartoon b/c of the [browser] frame. It is super-illustrative for the space of web, namely the one that is porous and fluid (think Hulu experience, or Facebook, or NYT (yes, still), or maybe just any blog around). We don't really pay attention to the frame, but go straight to what we want to do there. So I find interesting talking about brand "image" online. Like, what image [when there's no frame]? (Forget about moving images, too - they still need a frame). It's about something else here, not about [brand] representation or a narrative (what kind of brand image does Hulu have? More importantly, does it even care to have one?). How awesome would it be if a brand dissappeared behind the applications [i.e. why more brands don't take cue from Chrome??] Everything that brands ever did was to impose their image in between our perception of a brand and our actual experience with the products/services of that brand (the two often being a very different things). That is, brand image literally and figuratively blocked our view. But as cartoon correctly says, if you ignore the image, you can go straight to what you want to do. Oh panic [for brands] because for once they have to develop something that DOES something (and not only SAYS something).  The better thing they develop online, the more likely we  will go there  (and come back).  So brands online develop digital products (websites, applications). Even if they have a crappy physical product, they can create an awesome digital product. The relationship starts right there.

Google's Chrome & immersive-ness of the web

I get to hear a lot about "social and "immersive nature" of web. While I think that claiming that web is social is stating the obvious, I was intrigued by its "immersiveness". Not because I am suspicious (I am not), but because I tend to think that talking about immersion somehow went in the wrong direction. Namely, flash took over and all of the sudden to be immersive was to be IN some created environment, mesmerized by its awesomness (think Coke Happiness Factory and, sadly, AA/RF new website - forget not to turn the volume on). While this most certainly works for video games, I am not super-convinced that this is what being immersed online means. E.g. how many hours a day we spend chatting, shopping, reading news, searching, shopping, twittering, and /or hanging out on facebook? Those surely are activities that we immerse ourselves into, and we do so because of all the awesome applications that make the experience so enjoyable. So, when we are immersed online, we jump from one activity to another without ever breaking their stream. We are not immersed in BEING somewhere, we are immersed in DOING something. Being somewhere = Euclidean space; doing something = fluid space. Rich, interactive applications ask "what can i do for you" [to help you] search better, read news better, connect with others better, shop better, chat better? If they can do something awesome, here we come. Online ads, take notice.