advertising, conferencing, creating, innovating, planning

Running away to the Circus: Dispatches from The Festival of Commercial Creativity – Chow on Chrome and Vervroegen on Creative Constraints

the second session of the first day of this week's Festival of Commercial Creativity, Circus, saw Marvin Chow, the Marketing Director for Google across Asia Pacific and Erik Vervroegen of Goodby Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco take us through two very different kinds of creative process…

first up, Marvin Chow, who talked about the marketing of Chrome, and about what happens when creativity meets technology…

declaration of interest – Google are a client of PHD Australia, where I spend a lot of my time

Chow started by making a few points about Google:

one, Google is an engineering company. engineering is part of the culture. Google people like to solve big problems, he cited that driver-less car came from an engineer asking how Google can stop people dying on the roads
Ideas can come from anywhere, for example the search-able maps that helped coordinate the Queensland floods response was conceived and developed by a Sydney engineer who wanted to help
the role of marketing at Google is to bring technology to people. often this is about filling the existing Google pipeline with content, for example the Life In A Day project, an idea that came from Tim Partridge in London. The Life in a day video … which was created from a bank of 80,000 clips has now been seen by 13m people on YouTube and will have a cinema release later in the year
finally it's about bringing a culture of engineering to marketing. engineers are interested in the responses of real people to the real world. there's no substitute to what real people do in real situations. Google test 6,000 marketing ideas a year. they fail regularly, they fail fast, they fail well – test and iterate people, test an iterate…

given that context, what follows is "the story of how one product can change the world" … the story of Chrome.

we know, I suspect, one side of the Chrome story, but the other side is just how challenging it's been for Google to gain market share and gain penetration in a market with a significant, dominant and entrenched player.

the first question was why bother? why invent another browser? when Google asked people about browsers, they found that people found browsers indistinguishable from search…

the suggestion is that people see browsing = searching… Chow made the point that "browsers are a lot like Tyres – we know they are important but we don't care or think about them every day"

the last time a browser launched [excluding Firefox presumably] was in 1995. Google's ambition was to bring speed, stability and security to browsing. but how to evolve the browser proposition? … it's been a long time since 1995 and people do lots more than browsing with their browsers, it's no longer a passive experience; browsers are TVs now (35 hours a video a minute currently being uploaded), they are phones and communication devices (100bn emails and texts are sent daily). this was the new context for the browser and for Google – and how Chrome should drive the web experience forward.

the marketing of Chrome actually began with a comic book, which was distributed in december 2008 to innovators influencers in the web space.

Chrome's comic book, distributed in 2008, was drawn by Scott McCloud and can be viewed, courtesy of Creative Commons, in full here

post the comic book Google looked to deliver more scale, and so developed ideas around platform of 'why switch?' … exploring Chrome's value proposition and product benefits. they experimented and tested different benefits, for example this effort around 'simple'…

made by a small team in japan, this was broadcast in the US and became Google's first broadcast ad. but here's the trick, Google didn't just test 'simple' – they tested a whole range of value propositions and product benefits. and tested them not in focus groups but in the real world. how did they measure success? which ones led to the most Chrome downloads … real people in the real world remember…

'fast' (rather than 'simple') worked best, and so fast became worldwide creative brief, which eventually led to this…

"The idea of showing Chrome and speed in a different way excited us" noted Chow … the next iteration of comms was Chrome Fast Ball, which invited browsers to browse the web as fast as you think in a race across the Internet…

the coolest thing – and very Googley – is that these ideas are being crowdsourced from everywhere … ideas like this one which has since adopted another classic Google behaviour – users being able to generate their own versions of the ad.

two and a half years on from launch and 100m people around the world use chrome. Google seem to be happy, although as the below chart from Wikipedia shows, there's quite a long way to go for Chrome yet.

one of the most innovative areas of crowd-sourced comms for Chrome is Chromexperiments.com … I'm not going to lie, I don't actually know what these are – the website says that "Chrome Experiments is a showcase for creative web experiments, the vast majority of which are built with the latest open technologies, including HTML5, Canvas, SVG, and WebGL. All of them were made and submitted by talented artists and programmers from around the world" … I'm not sure that I'm any the wiser :o(

one example of which is Arcade Fire's The Wilderness Downtown – saw this a good while back but didn't connect at the time that this was a Google idea.

Chow's two key messages … that ideas can come from anywhere, and that it's crucial to experiment and iterate. he stressed the importance of understanding the problem that you're trying to solve, and whilst I'm not entirely that sure his solution – hire an engineer to fix it – is feasible for everyone, the last of his comments is true for all of us … that "you have to resist the voice inside you that says only you knows the answer" let go of the problem and let the answer come to you…

you can view Marvin's prezi here.

up next in session two was Erik Vervroegen, who as the recipient of seventy Cannes Lions, is a very creative person indeed. his thesis was that life in agencies is hard :o( … but don't feel too sorry for the ad agency kids just yet, because it turns out that the result of constrained conditions often produces the best work … the more problems you have the more creative you have to be…

problem one: no money (but free media to use and a super-tight production budget)…

…which was a problem faced by Amnesty International. the answer for whom was to make this…

of this spot for the Nissan QashQai, where Vervrogen's agency came up with creating an entire fake sport…

McDonald's had no money and no time to combat a recycling message so recycled ads to create new posters…

it's so beautifully obvious in retrospect, but it takes someone to imagine such an elegant solution in the first place. take these examples for Amora Hot Ketchup, the shoestring budget necessitated a shoestring production, which the creative embraces and uses to its advantage…

some of Vervroegen's most creative work is for AIDS prevention charity AIDES who's brief was "nobody knows us and we can't advertise but we want to be the biggest provider of Aids prevention in Europe' … the solution: target the advertising industry with the magic word 'awards'

if you want proof as to whether or not the strategy has worked I urge you to Google image search AIDES, but here are some of the highlights…

stunning, brilliant work for a client with no money but a lot of balls.

problem two: the impossible brief

Vervroegen quoted the following actual brief from an actual real life client (I'm paraphrasing) "we would like exactly the same ad as last time only this time we want it to work" … you couldn't make it up. another example was the bread client who said that they wanted to show an entire breakfast table and demonstrate that their bread was the softest. the solution:

Nissan QashQai asked Vervroegen to come up with an ad that showed the car in the urban environment and which showcased every angle of the car. every angle. every. angle. they actually said "think of it as a 45 sec 360 degree pack shot" … cue this beautifully elegant solution in which a 45 sec 360 pack shot has never looked so good…

Amnesty International want to show the power of a petition. specifically in the background they wanted to show the harshness of torture and execution … without violence. this poses a bit of a problem, as it's hard to show torture and execution without violence…

problem three: Burnt out creatives

…who feel sorry for themselves and are producing tired work. the solution, observes Vervroegen, is to continue to push the idea. and push and push as far as it will go… for example a brief to show how Mir washing powder 'keeps black strong' let to the obvious place of clothes with budging muscles, which was able to be pushed to these fellas…

another example of pushing a bad idea until it becomes a good one was for a brief for Playstation to show rebirth, the idea for which was this tired (his words not mine) approach…

which was pushed to it's limit and resulted in this…

…an effort which secured one of Vervroegen's seventy Cannes Lion in the print category. the last example, again for Playstation was around a brief to show the excitement of the Playstation gaming experience and equate it to sexual arousal. here's the obvious sketch…

and here's the pushed execution…

that was it for session two. I'll aim to get session three written up tomorrow…

advertising, conferencing, debating, planning, predicting, thinking

Running away to the Circus: Dispatches from The Festival of Commercial Creativity – Day One, Session One

yesterday saw the first day of Sydney's first Circus – a festival of commercial creativity for the advertising, media and communications industries. and a rather cracking event it was too. a series of speakers took us through what creativity was to them, how it was under threat, how it is thriving and how a changing world places ever incresing demands on those to work to use creativity to commercial ends.

despite starting rather dubiously – we were invited not to tweet, and to only ask questions if we thought that they'd be relevant for everyone (not the most encouraging of starts for a festival aiming to – in part – explore an evolving communications landscape) – it turned out to be a rather inspirational day…

this was how the first session of day one went down…

first up was Jeffrey Cole who eleven years ago founded the Centre for Digital Future at USC. his talk was on surveying the digital future – and in particular the impact of the Internet on our behaviours.

he introduced himself as a TV guy, and observed that we 'blew' TV – in that we knew it was going to be a mass medium, but didn't track audiences to see how it was changing their lives. important questions like where did the time to watch TV come from? what did it displace? …went unanswered.

emerging media are way more powerful than TV. in 1988 for the first time kids were watching less TV in the US, the result of the rise of computers and the web. where Cole believes that we lost the opportunity on TV, we can make up for it with online, and eleven years ago set up a research programme to track a panel over time as the internet changes their life…

key findings from the research are around teenage behaviour and in internet, but crucially, Cole seeks to make a key distinction between those behaviours and attitudes that teens do and have because they are young and have time, and those behaviours and attitudes which are permanent. what will drop off as life gets in the way? versus what do they do that is 'transformational' with regard to the society that they will grow up to form.

he observed that college students setting up home for first the time are particularly instructive. no landline and no newspapers for them. but also no cable (90% penetration in US so this is a significant trend). Cole believes that whilst we're not looking at the end of cable, we are looking at the end of the cable pricing structure as it stands.

things that teenagers abandon…

teenagers say they're not affcted by advertising. which isn't true. like all of us they are they just don't like to admit it
they believe that unknown peers are 'just like me' and can be trusted – similarly this comes to change over time as they learn the world isn't always what it seems
teenagers don't use email and claim to only need IM, texts and facebook (they go further and say that voice calling is 'an intrusion' – similarly this is an attitude that fades into adulthood
they want to know all the details of their peers' lifes in what they describe as 'ambient awareness' (a phrase strikingly similar to the continuous partial presence that Faris described in May 2007); Cole observed that Twitter works because of this … ambient awareness is a general understanding of someone's situation, and a reflection that teens want not fifteen minutes but fifteen megabytes of fame
we're not initially good at distinguishing truth from fiction. Cole argues that this is because we didn't have to question the mass media we grew up with (the Chinese for example are better at critical media assesment) …we are better at understanding amateur vs proffesional, which Cole suggested was due to beter understanding the limitations and boundaries of ugc
he talked about Murdoch and MySpace, and reflected that at the time of the NewsCorp purchase he commented that "it's a great investment but he'll never hang onto the teenage users" … an angry NewsCorp rebutted by saying "look how much money we're making" but Cole by that time already had the hindsight to see Friendster and Geocities go. to teenagers, he said, "social networks are like nightclubs", despite this, Facebook is going nowhere (yet), a fact underlined by his observation that at their last Zeitgeist, Google seemed nervous (they have no place nor role in Facebook's world)
finally, teenagers have no sense of the nature of and need for privacy. for good reason the law says you can't sign contract till 18. whilst this attitude means that kids upload potentially very compromising things to the internet, this is not a lifelong attitude, and with maturity comes a sense of what is public and what is private

which brings us to the things teenagers keep, and with them significant implications for society, brands and advertising…

teenagers have, and keep into adulthood a total control over their media. Cole cited the 17yo who first unlocked his iPhone; he didn't want to unlock it for anything in particular, he unlocked it so that he knew that he could
a huge implication for the media industry is that permanent changes in attitude mean we're seeing the beginning of the end of platforms … Newspapers, in Cole's opinion, are history. environmental reasons is one reason for teens, but furtermore the concept of owning media is in it's last days as we move to the cloud. on newspapers, teenagers not using print is a permanent shift. they are very much into news, but the internet delivers this. Cole's prediction is a stark one – because every time a print reader dies they are not being replaced, print has about 5 years in the states, and around 8-9 years in Australia (perhaps)
teenagers don't grow out of not wearing watches (the mobile is their watch and alarm clock and much else besides) – this is not a problem for Rolex, but will have consequences for more mainstream inexpensive watches
TV is not on a set top box and is not scheduled. YouTube is TV, and TV is any content you watch on your schedule
Game playing is serious business that ecourages task-oriented behaviour and is similarly a behaviour and attitude that is here to stay
"Mobile isn't everything – it's becoming every thing" – it's rapidly becoming the primary and predominant place where teenagers get media
on the iPad, Cole observes that it is NOT the fourth screen, rather it replaces the second screen (the pc), and that we're witnessing the beginning of the end of the PC as standard home device for many people
finally and most significantly, there is an emerging and permanent shift in the perception of real versus perceived empowerment. we are passive readers no more, we contribute and correct. we self-diagnose our illnesses. we negotiate on deals based on pre-research and start our negotiations based on wholesale prices … the "internet is best at shining light into dark places", giving everyone power over governments, over repression … this most important trend will emerge and very much in Cole's opinion stay with us.

Q&A

will Facebook eventually be displaced? yes, but it will continue to grow for around four more years. it will be supplanted by another more fragmented social media landscape. Facebook won't be abandoned completely, but will become more passive – an ongoing reminder of the biggest social networking site there ever was or ever will be.

2% of people drop off the internet each year… they leave because they change jobs or their PCs break. with few exceptions their back within 14 months.

advertising will remain the model for content. Cole wants to see content survive, and so wants to see digital advertising survive.

I asked about permanent vs transitory media. there was suggestion that whilst the legacy media (BBC, NBC, NYT) were permanent, emerging media (notably social networks) aren't – they are transitory platforms that people adopt for a while before moving on. will Hulu – for example – be permanent or transitory? Cole's opinion is that all platforms will need to learn and adapt. Google will adapt. as will Hulu. legacy media brands – and indeed all media brands – will be defined by their ability to evolve.

next up Agnello Dias – creative director at Taproot, who talked to the festival about the remarkable story of advertising and comms work for The Times Of India, a story that began with a brief…

a brief to celebrate India's 60th year of independence. an argument broke out in the agency about whether India was on the verge or greatness or the cusp of the abyss. the client talked about the country being at a crossroads. was India to go forward or back? Dias scribbled a paragraph describing 'India vs India' as a creative brief, but as time ran out the client ran the brief as an ad. the brief. a dat later Dias was informed that the brief wouldn't be an ad after all … it was to be the front page editorial.

the front page became audiovisual content which became a YouTube viral.

which became a debate. a debate so emphatic that The Times Of India decided to call the debaters bluff…

the response to the video was a national platform that created a parralel decision making group, bypassing party politics and supported by politicians. facilitating democracy in a nation a billion people strong.

what has any of this to do with brand and selling newspapers? nothing. to the client it's not about that. it's about building credibility – something that has huge benefit for a paper… after all who is the prime minister going to call?

the latest phase was editorial that ran on the anniversary of Mumbai terrorist attacks. The Times Of India ran a headline saying love Pakistan – a controversial position that stimulated a great deal of opposition, even people in Dias' office didn't want to work on the campaign. but the objective was to start a debate that would lead to peace, rather than perpetuate an argument for war…

the jury, according to Dias, is out on whether or not they should have done it. they will see what results. whatever happens, it's a phenomenal story … a story of a media brand acting not as reporters or observers but as instigators of change. as provocateurs of debate. as writers of the future.

next up the enigmatic Jess Greenwood of Contagious fame who talked about projects not campaigns – and a shift away from the creation of advertising to the creation of projects with no specific timespan. less say and more do, behaviour rather than talk.

Greenwood also talked about how everything is advertsing and – in a phrase of which I was particularly fond – that we need to be "less 360 in our thinking and more 365" … nice. as an example she cited how after tweeting to complain about the music in the Air New Zealand lounge in LAX, her tweet was picked up by the airline in New Zealand who called the lounge front desk in LA who invited Greenwood to choose her own music. this all took less than 60 seconds. remarkable stuff.

so how do we change, well one we put insights before advertising. no more the Mad Men model of ideas leading executions, of working out how to execute ideas generated on gut feel. two, its about engagement over reach (allelulia) – citing one advertiser who said they would rather have 100 engaged people than 1,000,000 passive ones.

the Contagious mantra is that branded communications in the early 21st Century should be Useful and or Relevant and or Entertaining. a mantra she expounded across three main themes…

ONE – Inside Out Marketing

we need to stop mindlessly pushing marketing and product into the world and instead be the change we want to see. as example is Operation Nice, which seeks to encourage people to embrace an emering sense of independence by saying that 'if you want something doing…'

her next example was Dulux who want to own colour. rather than telling people that they want to own colour they behaved like they owned colour via an urban regeneration project. they asked people which areas deseved colour, then launched Let's Colour. they went to areas around the world and added colour, areas like Tower Hamlets. the brand managers and local communities did the painting, and produced some rather remarkable content…

their sucker punch is that Dulux 'own' colour, but communicate such in a very real and credible – or inside-out – way. Greenwood talked about a smart approach by Dulux to how this thinking is deployed on a global via local level; the global mandate was to find out what colour means to your country, and make it happen through actions and behaviours at a local level.

Greenwood talked about mass media as an "iterative process", citing the example of how VW and a tiny Darth Vader 'jacked' the superbowl. the ad was deliberately released prior to the broadcast to build buzz prior to seeing it on the Superbowl screen. it is TV (advertising) but TV not just designed for TV – it's wholeheartedly designed for theiInternet.

another example from Levi's and their Go Forth organising idea (note not campign). Levi's are using this idea to generate behaviour and action as opposed to making and broadcasting hyperbole. Levi's – amongst other things – built a community centre and funded the library in Braddock. they are building infrastructure. they've opened workshops to give substance to their claim that 'Levi's makes things by hand and makes things the right way'. this makes levi's meaningful.

Greenwood talked about four pillars of convergence in media and communications:

AV experience on screen (whatever and wherever that screen may be)
Interctivity of internet (facilitation two-way engagement, converstion, debate and cooperation and cocreation)
Location-based functionality and customisation of mobile phone
Real world experience

when developing insights and ideas we need to ask ourselves if said insight or idea can work in and across these four areas. if it can, then it could work… for example T-Mobile create advertising as programming. if you're doing mass media it has to be this engaging…

"it's designed not just for broadcasting but for sharing. they are creating mass media for the Internet, for niche media".

TWO – be Prolific not Precious

'Social media makes stories' – this, in Greenwood's opinion, is the evolution of user generated content … smart brands monitor and track the stories as they emerge around them – cue Gatorade Mission controlness.

another example is reformed drug addict Ted Williams, the story of whom was picked up by a journalist who learned he had a great voice for radio. he made a film about ted's life. which went from zero to 13m views in two days. this in turn ws picked up by Kraft who used the Ted in their ad. all of which is phenomenal enough, until you consider the timescale…

Monday – upload the video
Tuesday – watch the views pile up
Wednesday – Ted appears on TV with ad agency
Friday – Ted's voiced ad is on air

using social media to tell stories garnered 450m media impressions for Kraft. and there are a plethora of examples where that came from… Qantas flew the girl with the twitter handle @theashes to Australia for the Ashes. all because said girl / handle got messages from people wanting the cricket score … a bit of support via #gettheashestotheashes and Qantas and Virgin were fighting it out to make it happen.

Hippo snacks example of using tweets as distribution management system and saw a 76% increase in sales.

and finally on proliferation, the South African low cost airline project (not campaign) around the World Cup in aid of being the 'unofficial national carrier' of the World Cup… the best thing about this campaign was something they hadn't planned for. the airline offered free flights to anyone called Sepp Blatter, so when a dog came forward to say that that was his name the airline flew the dog around the world.

THREE - Play and Gaming

the rise of play dynamics in marketing. Gamification. adding game dynamics into marketing but also product design. Greenwood used the example of Ford who have a virtual plant on the dashboard that grows if you drive in an environmentally friendly manner.

NBC do market research not via a focus group or survey but via fanit, an initiative that I discussed in a post in May of last year.

Skittles pitched David Phoenix versus Skittles fans.

Mini gaming in Stockholm example. Steal the car.

one interesting point from Greenwood, if you're going to develop or have a game or app, make sure that you have an end to it, a climax or endpoint to which people can aim.

and finally in gameification a wonderful project called iButterfly, which uses an app that captures virtual butterflies to get vouchers to people. smart, contemporary, embedded with utility and above all fun. as Contagious as it gets.

three final suggestions from Greenwood…

ensure that your communications are Useful and/or Relevant and/or Entertaining
make sure your idea is created, developed and deployed for real people not marketing people
Be brave and make mistakes

and that was session one, post is way big enough so I'll write up the other sessions in following posts…

conversing, planning, researching

Word (of Mouth) Up: what Soup’s TalkTrack Study has to tell us about the simple and compelling truth about conversations and brands

the power of word of mouth, cartoon from xkcd

the lovely Sharyn and Michele from word of mouth marketing agency Soup came in to Kent Street Towers yesterday to share the results from their TalkTrack research into word of mouth in Australia. the study, which was conducted in partnership with Mindshare, ING, Foxtel and LG, consisted of a diary and quant with almost 3,000 Australians aged 16-69, who between them over the month-long course of the study had 30,000 branded conversations. the report makes for fascinating reading…

turns out that the average Australian has 67.8 branded conversations per week, which equates to 1.2 billion conversations (or impacts if you like) across the Australia population every week. this however is on average, 'influencers' – those people who are more passionate, knowledgeable and who tend to have more networks of connections – have 140 brand-centric conversations per week.

Telstra is the most talked about brand, but not necessarily positively – that title goes to Apple, which enjoys 1.7% of all positive brand-centric conversations. in fact Australians are generally overwhelmingly positive about brands… 61% of all branded conversations are positive, whilst only 9% are negative.

but it's when you look at where conversations are had and what instigates them that it gets really interesting. of all the conversations in the study, the vast majority were conducted face to face… 82% of the conversations we have about brands we have with real people in the real world. this compared to only 7% online, which had fewer conversations than even over the phone (at 10%).

Brand conversations overwhelmingly happen face to face; Source: Soup's TalkTrack study – for more information contact Sharyn Smith via here

there's a big flashing 'proceed with caution' here – because whilst we're all of us going about measuring with gusto branded conversations, turns out that in most cases (as most trackers are online-based) we're doing it with a sample of 7% of all conversations. skews and distortions are therefore almost inevitable.

the other big news is that the research provides hard evidence as to what actually sparks conversations. overwhelmingly it is customer or personal experiences with a brand or it's products and services that get's us talking. compare this to media or marketing efforts – which people attribute to 49% of the brand-centric conversations they have.

Experiences with brands, products and services cause more conversations than media or advertising; Source: Soup's TalkTrack study – for more information contact Sharyn Smith via here

it's here that online plays an interesting role… it just outperforms TV in terms of it's ability to spark conversations. Nielsen report that FY up to June '10, 28% of media money was invested in TV, versus 15% online – so online more than punching above it's weight in it's ability to get us talking.

proof, if it were ever needed, that – unless a brand has a very good reason otherwise – the best role for advertising is to amplify innovative products and services from a brand. the best ad in the world, all things being equal, won't start as many conversations than an investment in relevant and engaging products and services.

I've talked about planning for transactions on these pages before. I firmly believe that advertisers should invest in marketing to their existing customers via the creation of collateral – products and services – that add value to their lives. the role of bought media is then best aligned to what it does best: amplify what a brand is doing with and for it's existing customers to a broader audience…

and now, thanks to the research described above, we have another crucial bit of evidence to prove how this model of approaching comms planning works: it sparks conversations which create intention to buy or try (33%) or consider (25%) a product.

kudos to Soup for commissioning this research. research that proves that it's not he who shouts loudest that builds the biggest and best brands and businesses, but rather he who gives the most people the most compelling reason to talk about that brand or business. and in the evolution of media and communications, this simple but compelling truth should be a game-changer for any brand and business brave enough to do it. whether we do, is entirely down to us.

innovating, planning, reaching

The inverse relationship between innovation and scale: and the tragedy of smart stuff that simply passes us by

this is good. really good. OK so no one is going to disagree with the fact that it's a cracking bit of insight-translated-into-execution. but here's the thing… does it reach enough people, and is that important? and am I a bad planner for even asking that question?

I've written recently about the tyranny of reach and the grip that it holds on Australian marketers. I observed that reach is, as Admiral Ackbar would say, a trap… as long as it remains our default method of measurement, our modus enumeri if you like, we will eternally be lamenting our collective inability to stretch fewer resources over more places in more ways.

so I don't for a second give credence to 'reach-based' advertising, but I do suspect that in the main there's probably two kinds of media campaign in the world. mainstream media campaigns that have scale, and innovative media campaigns that remain niche. there are of course exceptions to this – those examples of innovative media thinking that break through and deliver scale, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule; by in large – from a media perspective – my bet is that there's an inverse relationship between scale and innovation… a bit like this…

avoiding the innovation vs. scale envelope into which most media campaigns fall

the challenge for any media effort is to get into the top right quarter, you want to innovate so that you cut-thru / are engaged with / generate earned media / bring down the overall cost-per-impact of your effort. given these conditions, there are generally therefore only two ways to get top right… either you attach scale to your innovative efforts or you inject innovation into existing scale.

a comment was made to me earlier in the week that one of the great benefits of using Facebook is the scale it can bring to an idea. in this context you can rationalise how one of the main reasons Facebook's ad revenues are set to undergo such significant growth is because advertisers increasingly see it as a 'safe' way to bring scale to a schedule. Facebook is a very good 'scaler'.

the alternative is to take an idea that already has scale and inject
innovation into it – I guess you could argue that efforts to, for
example, bring interactivity to TV sponsorship fit this model.

methods to get you right and top – scalers and innovators

in a perfect world of course you shouldn't have to either attach scale or inject innovation into a plan; both should be inherent – we should be in the business of creating innovative communications ideas that travel. but these are rare beasts… and I suspect that whilst no doubt too many conventional solutions fail to innovate, the greater tragedy are the countless innovative media efforts that go to market without sufficient thought into how scale can be generated. their failure to reach us is ultimately our loss.

content creating, engaging, innovating, planning

Ideas not Impacts: what JibJab and MadMen can teach us about a world where multiple smaller ideas are better

Personalize funny videos and birthday eCards at JibJab!

so a little while back, Lauren sent me the attached clip showing us both and the rest of the Twitterpod here at PHD Australia as we'd be cast in MadMen. it's pretty funny and pretty cool and anything that puts me in the same frame as Don Draper is to be welcomed.

but it got me thinking about how much this little video can tell us about the emerging media paradigm that's challenging brands, agencies and the media industry… I think it can tell us a lot about idea-driven planning and the importance of doing multiple smaller things not fewer bigger things. let me explain.

if you've worked in media as long as I you were probably taught that the role of media planners is to link three things together. link the brand to the right media in order to reach enough of the right people, enough of whom will then do or think what the brand requires of them to make the media investment worthwhile. a bit like this.

how I was taught: the right brand in the right media reaching enough of the right people

it's a model driven by impacts – the more impacts the better, which is all well and good. but the above video JibJab video doesn't work like that at all. the brand (MadMen) is there, but media is replaced with a platform – in this case the JibJab video utility / site – and the audience is replaced with the few individuals who get exposed to the video via the link that the originator sends… so the model looks more like this.

how it think it is now: brands using platforms to plug ideas into networks of individuals

this is a model driven by ideas not impacts… rather than having an audience who receive a message, we instead have a few individuals who engage with it. and whilst on the face of it the overall impact is a lot less, this isn't necessarily the case – a few quick numbers…

in the first model let's say you deliver one million impacts. at a click thru rate of 0.1% a you'll get about 1,000 people to click thru to the place or space a brand wants them to go (I appreciate that this misses the brand effect of the other 999,000 people who see the banner ad but run with it) … the JibJab MadMen requires only 250 to make a video and send it to the three other friends who are in it reach the same number of people.

the emerging model also offers significant benefits. the first is in targeting. from a brand perspective, this model is a lot more likely to reach people who are into the product (in this case MadMen). the second is the level of engagement with the content – and in this instance people are part of the content, which I'd suggest makes it pretty engaging. the third is that it's inherently viral, the products of the model are things that people will want to share and propagate throughout their networks of friends and peers.

the challenge is that you simply don't reach enough people, but you can always amplify… there's no reason why you couldn't use the one-to-many model to showcase certain videos, perhaps even as a promotion or competition mechanic.

there's a big implication too. there's no way that this model replaces the scale and reach of the broadcast model, but that can't be ours to mourn… if scale is what you're after then there's only two ways to get it. either you have the best ideas (in the long tail of an ideas ecology the impact of the few biggest ideas will greatly exceed the individual impact of any of the majority of others), or you create more ideas.

in that context, screw fewer bigger better … the best performing brands will be those that can scale the output of the quantity of their ideas. a marketing effort spread across multiple smaller ideas will be better, and a great deal less risky, than the same effort invested in fewer bigger ideas. not sure what Don would have to say about that…

creating, making, marketing, planning, publishing, sampling

More than a Calling Card: how Daemon Group is creating collateral fit for the Age of Evidence

the cover of Daemon Group's calling card; THINK 02 Issue 2

you meet a lot of people in this business, most of whom leave you with a warm feeling, a couple of action points that you promise to yourself you'll do, and a business card. no so the Daemon Group, the day after a meeting with whom, I received a magazine designed, written and produced by the agency.

it's a collection of thoughts and analysis of everything from design concepts to social issues, taking in behaviour and international reportage on the way… and it's a pretty great read.

the stats on social, just one of several articles on the changing communications landscape

the idea of a more personal calling card isn't necessarily new; moo have been providing the best of ways to personalise and add character to your 'keep in touch' collateral… nor is the idea of the company magazine…

but what stand's Daemon Group's effort apart is the sheer commitment to quality… the quality of the not only thinking, writing, and production, but also the quality of contact… the magazine was delivered fresh to my desk the morning after my meeting with Richard, the group's chief executive. the commitment to following up the meeting with me was matched only by the commitment to the collateral delivered.

the two big implications for brands and the planning of marketing communications are clear. one, invest in quality collateral… don't say you're passionate about what you do, have collateral that proves it. don't gesticulate on the quality of your thinking, have collateral that demonstrates it… buying media space that tells people how good / fast / impressive / [insert USP here] you are, is for a time now long gone by…

we live in the age of evidence.

claims, counter claims, and statements no longer cut it. in the age of evidence it's what you do that counts, what you produce that get's noticed. in the age of evidence reputations are built on what you craft and deliver to make your case to the world.

the second implication for brands is to have good, considered connections planning. the too-often used phrase that means, simply, to have a plan for how you create and manage connections with people. Daemon Group's magazine means nothing to me whilst it's sat on their Chief Executive's coffee table. how much of what a brand actually does remains locked up? hidden behind policy doors and content management gates. brands that love their collateral set it free, fueling connections with people…

because that's what the best communications planning, at it's core, is… what evidence can we create that proves the truth about what our brand is and represents; and how can we ensure that the right people encounter that evidence in relevant and meaningful ways?

I'm grateful that in a complicated world, which sometimes seems to move faster than I can keep up, a magazine landed on my desk to remind me how elegantly simple it all really is. the challenge isn't to keep up with a changing communications landscape; the challenge is to remember that you can.

oh, and there's an article on Mr Potato Head too – who doesn't love that…

broadcasting, buying, planning, realtiming

Going Live: Observations from the forefront of RealTime planning, via The Olympics, the Superbowl and Harold Macmillan

Seth Westcott, who performed in RealTime ad placements for Visa

courtesy of WARC, via Andy, comes a great article on the RealTime activation. whilst there was a fair degree of coverage of the efforts at the time, new commentary seems to show the extent to which the companies involved have deemed the initiatives a success.

commenting on broadcasting a TV spot minutes after one of their athletes – snowboarder Seth Westcott – won his second gold medal, Michael Lynch, Visa's head of global sponsorships, said "Our research has proven out that [these ads] are one of the best connections between Visa and the Olympics we have … We know the opportunity in the moment when we're sharing with Seth his accomplishments is special, and it's worked extremely well for us."

Drew Brees, Dove Men+Care's Most Valuable Player

a similar approach was adopted by Unilever's Dove Men+Care, who's ad featuring New Orleans Saints' Drew Brees landed on US screens hours after his team won the Super Bowl. being named MVP didn't do any harm either; "It just ended up perfectly" observed Rob Master, director of media for Unilever's North American operations.

whilst underpinned by technology, and the willingness (and / or necessity) of media companies to accommodate such media buys, the above ad placements mark three interesting observations for those of us negotiating the future of media and communications.

one, that there's an interesting and clear direction of travel emerging, and it's called convergence into RealTime. so far so whatever – this we know and I've written some thoughts on that before. but the second observation – the infiltration of RealTime into the broadcast stream – shows just how far the trend is now pushing…

it's not unrealistic to assume that continued fragmentation of channels and viewing will only increase the opportunities to place more customised and relevant content in front of people in RealTime. and there's a fascinating insight into how this could be deployed in the below video, showing how Slate’s Seth Stevenson bought an ad in a low-rating spot. via Google.

it only takes a small leap to imagine how Google data could be combined with this technology to deploy a significant proportion of a schedule in RealTime, based on whatever factors a planner deems appropriate… run ads when only it's raining, or whenever a sports team wins, or when interest rate decreases are announced. to name but three – the possibilities become kind of endless…

but the final observation takes a lesson from Politics. when Harold Macmillan was asked what represented the greatest challenge for a statesman, he replied: "Events, my dear boy, events" …both the Visa and Dove examples above resonated above and beyond delivering pure awareness because, and only because, of events.

I can't help but suspect that the future of media implementation may have events very much at it's heart. from mass events like the Olympics or the Superbowl, to macro events like interest rate changes, thru to the micro events of re-targeting someone who visited a website. politics' greatest challenge may be media implementation's greatest
opportunity.

planning, printing

Of Editors and Marketers: media planning lessons from the New News ecology

a legacy of the past? Sydney Morning Herald's Ad from earlier this year (shot at Harbourside Open Air Cinema Feb 2010)

so I was fortunate enough this week to enjoy breakfast with the editor of an online news portal, and during our discussions it occurred to me that online news editors have more than a little in common with contemporary marketers.

the audience-centricity of online news editing was clear, from how stories are aggregated and published thru to the future platforms being considered and developed for content deployment. the predominance of this centricity in the reader was clear when the editor talked about 'owning the reader at every point in the day'…

all this is in stark contrast to the heritage of the print newspaper, the monopoly of whom lasted for so long that it institutionalised a product-centricity which is, in some part, I believe firmly responsible for the current challenges facing the print publishing industry. the newspaper industry 'didn't have to try for so long', was one observation made over the course of the discussion.

it occurred to me that marketers and media planners have three big things to learn from how news editors go about doing what they do…

the first is around content vs platform, and which is most important in gaining share of attention with people you want to reach. on one hand its crucial to create appropriate and stimulating content for an audience. this one from LG for example, which Oldham sent me this morning.

but platform is and will increasingly become the most important element. I was never going to see this ad on TV… I'm a light viewer at best, and now pretty much see every ad on YouTube or Facebook as and when they're recommended by friends. the fact is that if you're aim is to gain audience share of attention you have to be platform-centric… deploying content on those, rather than on the content's, terms.

the second learning is the old chestnut of doing not saying. news organisations are increasingly defined not by what they say (see the Sydney Morning Herald effort above) but by what they do. actions increasingly resonate louder then words, as any flick thru Contagious demonstrates. this doesn't negate the need for the broadcast model – it just makes you re-evaluate its role on a schedule.

but the final lesson – and perhaps the most important – is around audience migrations. you have an online space (Facebook page, YouTube Channel, Microsite (really?), website, etc) around which you want to aggregate an audience. so you produce content an use search to direct them where you want to go right? well yes, but…

…our editor was explaining that Facebook is increasingly more important than search in audience-flow to their site. and that this traffic is dwarfed by the volume that comes direct from email links and browser bookmarks.

the lesson? the most valuable way to aggregate an audience is to give it reason to stay connected. book-marking, liking, registering for more, linking are all more important – in volume terms – than clicking thru search. efforts to build long-term audiences that you encourage to keep coming back for more become significantly more valuable than one-off 'come see this' efforts. one more nail in the coffin then for the idea of 'the campaign'.

big thanks to Rob for organising the session, brilliant stuff…

advertising, planning, praising, thinking

Why we do what we do and what comms can do about it: how the IPA is learning the lessons of Behavioural Economics to shape a better future for us all

James barry's The Progress of Human Knowledge and Culture, which – appropriately – surrounded us at the RSA yesterday

“Behavioural Economics provides a floodgate of inspiration to our industry. Our challenge is to ‘chunk’ it down, and apply it in ways which make a meaningful difference to client agency dialogue and communications planning and execution. It’s just the sort of breath of fresh air we need to stimulate our intellectual juices and rise above conversations about time sheets and schedule. It gets us back to the core of what we do and why we do it.”

Rory Sutherland, IPA President

and so yesterday I gathered at the RSA with other industry folk as the IPA, led by Rory, began its journey into the world of Behavioural Economics. and a brilliant session it was. it was such a stimulating morning that I'm at a bit of a loss on how to capture it all – so I'll have a go at listing the gems that I took out of each of the talks before adding some thoughts of my own at the end.

First up was Doctor Matt Grist who is director of the RSA's Social Brain project

Grist introduced us to the notion that Behavioural Economics are a "patchwork of theories that predict irrational behaviour", (versus rational behaviour as predicted by neo-classical theory) – essentially its Economics + Psychology

Behavioural Economics in action has been popularised by books like Nudge. 'nudges' work by guiding behaviour thru changes in choice architecture… ie its not awareness and consideration that primarily dictate our choices but the context in which those choices are made, here's a good example…

historical consensus has been that there are two systems in the brain; automatic and reflective. automatic is when we take our regular tube journey or are reading a book. reflective is when we have to concentrate on taking a new / different route to work or have to write an essay. but Grist proposed a third element and a new model:

Grist's model of the brain's three behavioural systems

this opened up the interesting question of how much of our behaviour we actually have control over? Grist observed that we ought to think of these brain systems as "libertarian paternalistic" ie they are supposed not to erode autonomy and responsibility – this is achieved thru training; top-down, sideways and bottom up. I then got awfully lost and at one point I fear I scratched my head and squinted.

anyhoo the next stage, for Grist, is understanding to what extent thinking in terms of the threefold system above empowers people to be more autonomous and responsible?

next up was Nick Chater, Professor of Cognitive and Decision Sciences at University College London

his three themes were how we perceive magnitudes, decisions and valuations all without the context of internal scales. it turns out that we have very limited capability to put a value on anything… everything is relative. when perceiving magnitudes we only have about five 'buckets' in which to separate out degrees on any particular perspective on the world. the system is limited at a very basic cognitive level.

when it comes to decision making, we're similarly it turns out "all over the place" – all we have is binary judgments. take for example £300. if I was to say I'm going to put £300 in your wallet, right now, your response would probably be "whoo hoo" or something similar. if however I was to say I'm going to right now take £300 off of your mortgage, your response would probably be "so what?!" or something similar.

…the point is that exactly the same amount of money engendered totally different responses because of the context in which it was placed. everything is relative, but relative in a very limited (binary) sense. the same contextualisation applies when we get used to a variable having a certain amount – so for example in banks money generally goes in in much bigger chunks than it comes out… the consequence: losing £300 is a lot more worse than gaining £300 is better.

the same applies for time discounting… analysis of Google data demonstrates our pre-occupation with the immediate future and our ambivalence to the distant future.

finally, when it comes to perceiving valuations, we can't. we know the price of everything and the value of nothing. experiments with pain (like Dr Peter Venkman at the start of GhostBusters) show how the value of pain (ie how much we're prepared to pay to avoid it) changes depending on how much we have to spend. demand is extra-ordinarily malleable. how much is the value of a cup of coffee? don't know, how much does it cost? £2. I guess its value is £2 then…

then it was up to IPA President Rory Sutherland to tell us why we should care about any of this

he's written a full piece on this in this weeks Campaign, which is a great read, but here are a few of his gems from yesterday…

most successful businesses of recent times have started by figuring out how to make value, and only then worked out how to make money off of the back of that value. as an industry though where we make money and where we add value are different things – we've "hitched our fortunes to media spend", and here's the danger; if – as supply increases – media becomes cheaper, it will have less value to clients (see above) and those clients will skimp on the expense of getting the most out of that media (or other exposure).

people have a preference to solve problems with infrastructure solutions rather than persuasion solutions. but persuasion solutions can be a lot more effective. and we, the communications industry, should be experts in the applied-psychology business. "ad-folk are better at ideation off of a theory" …understanding and applying behavioural economics is fundamental to the success of most businesses and social problems. he gave a wonderful example, I don't know if its true…

Rolls Royce were having problems selling cars in their regular showrooms. so instead they sold them at Yacht fairs, where the items on sale go for a few million rather than a few hundred thousand. "I think I won't buy that £8m yacht" says mister man. then he sees a lovely Rolls Royce and thinks, "I've just saved £8m, what's £350k for a lovely car?!" …behavioural economics works.

the last speaker was Nick Southgate, who explored how we could apply all of this

first up brand preference. people don't express a preference when they don't need to. structure is more important than preference, indeed structure creates preference… competitive positioning is very important to brands; it what creates the structure – and therefore determines preferences – within a category.

second, brand positioning. in example after example, introduction of a third choice massively changes the preferences of the first two. one implication – the launch of 'me too' products actually make the existing market leader look better.

thirdly from a creative perspective, testimonials don't work. behavioural economics might help explain why… the plan to make us buy something because someone expresses their preference for it is flawed by the – incorrect – assumption that behaviour follows attitude. but we forget our attitude whilst automatically going on with a behaviour… you get to the top of the stairs (automatically) and on the way forget why you were going upstairs. chimpanzees do the same thing – they will remember that they're looking for a stick to get termites only whilst the termite hill is in view. behavioural economics is something that would seem to apply to all great apes…

and then on to the panel discussion which I won't summarise but instead pick a few themes that emerged…

targeting

it had occurred to me throughout the session, and was suggested by an audience member, that understanding BE presented opportunities for better targeting. does understanding what BE tells us make attitudinal targeting redundant? if we don't make decisions based on attitude, then why are we segmenting people based on what they think? and if so, what should we be identifying and segmenting people based on? anyone?

NB Mark Lund (formerly of DKLW and now Chief Executive of the COI) who was on the panel noted that the COI would be publishing research at the end of November that "will affect segmentation" and that will demonstrate the requirement for another degree of (agency) segmentation.

agency and industry structures

Lund suggested that he believed that agencies will have to get flatter and wider; with expertise spread across a wider number of areas. he referred to the adage that to a man with a hammer, every solution looks like a nail… if agencies are to provide more holistic solutions, they're going to require more than hammers.

Kate Waters, Planning Partner at Partners Andrew Aldridge, observed that "we don't have the right relationships to make our ideas happen" – beyond the buying of conventional media spaces, experiential, DR we have little implementational skill. if BE says we need to be creating structures that influence behaviour, then we're severely limited in the structures we can change. our industry engine is one built around awareness generation and perception change. we may need to seriously reconsider our long-term agency and industry structures.

ethics

a wonderful debate on this one, does the ability to sub-consciously affect what people do give us too much power? and is there are conflict between planning the Change for Life campaign in the morning and a campaign for Snickers in the afternoon?

"there is no conflict" said Lund – paraphrasing Darth Vader, "clients would much prefer people eat less but for six decades … its about quality as well as quantity of consumption". but this misses the wider point highlighted repeatedly by Waters; much of this isn't new. we've been in the business of affecting what people think and do for a century – all BE does is bring us an appropriate, and consistent, language for what it is that we do.

I'll leave the last word on ethics to Rory – "I'd rather be perceived as evil than be perceived as ineffective"

…

and so that was that. awesome morning and lots of questions raised which now need to be answered. workshops are going to be held in November, details of which are here. I urge you to get involved. I'll leave you with more of the lovely Rory, talking recently at TED. enjoy.

advertising, planning, social media-ising, social networking

Emperor’s New Clothes, Meerkats and who clients should trust: dispatches from the edge of the social media debate

IPA publish and broadcast thoughts on social media. "that's not very social" said some socially-minded planning types. "no its not is it?!" replied the IPA, "let's change that" …so it was that last night the IPA Social Media group hosted the most social of evenings to debate and discuss the ongoing evolution of all things socially media…

the always lovely Mark Earls kicked us off with five principles that outline the big picture:

connecting people allows them to behave less independently
connectivity makes things more volatile
connectivity disrupts existing and established power relationships
its not about what technology does but what it enables
technology allows people to spend more time with other people

well worth a read of Mark's full text here

Neil Perkins then took us through ten principles – thought starters and jumping-off points for discussion and debate on all things social media. they and their authors are thus…

People not consumers – Mark Earls
Social agenda not business agenda – Le’Nise Brothers
Continuous conversation not campaigning – John V Willshire
Long term impacts not quick fixes – Faris Yakob
Marketing with people not to people – Katy Lindemann
Being authentic not persuasive – Neil Perkin
Perpetual beta – Jamie Coomber
Technology changes, people don’t – Amelia Torode
Change will never be this slow again – Graeme Wood
Measurement – Asi Sharabi

Neil finished his section with a quote by John Dodds that really got me thinking… “Are we actually talking about social media or has the advent of the internet simply revealed that the advertising emperor had no clothes and should have obeyed the the principles all along?”

I Tweeted at the time to "be wary of John Dodds [you quote you understand not John per se – sure there's no need to be wary of him] …Advertising is not the enemy, the too-narrow concept of the ad is. Fireworks are part of the solution"

the point I was making was that its easy and dangerous to treat social media as though its going to usurp the crass, unrefined and unsophisticated concept that is advertising. which is just plain wrong. a point made more than eloquently when Amelia Torode presented a case study of VCCP's Meerkat for Compare the Market…

Amelia was very keen to make the point that the Meerkat campaign wasn't a 'social media' campaign but a 'social' campaign. but I think this misses the point… Meerket isn't a social media or even a social campaign. Meerkat is an advertising campaign, an advertising campaign that has made the most brilliant use of social media to extend the scope, levels of engagement and fame of the ad.

great advertising is John's Fireworks that get ooohs and ahhhs from people. this is how one-to-many broadcasting advertising works. its brilliant, but let's not pretend that its social-led.

we then had a break out session on which type of agency is best placed to plan social media…

there are echos of the "who owns communications planning?" debate here. the easy answer is that comms planning is owned by everyone and no one. the harder answer is that you have to understand the role of communications in conjunction with the capabilities of a given client.

great social media planning needs generalists who can understand the role that social media plays in a wider strategy and balance the weight of effort across different behaviours accordingly. but it also needs brilliant specialists who can bring the latest technologies and activities to bear on those strategies.

social media calls for new specialist agencies, but at the same time it calls upon all of us – no matter what our discipline – to understand the role it can play and how it might affect and change how we do what we do.

who should clients trust with their social media strategies? they should trust the people most closely aligned to the role for communications…

are you looking to use social media to tackle head-on negative brand perceptions? …trust your PR agency
social media to actively create sales opportunities? trust your media / direct agencies
or to improve customer service? …that'd be the call centre

—–

all in all an awesome night, but its only the start… join in the debate via the facebook group, on twitter, or via Social on the IPA website. and finally a big thanks to everyone who helped organise the evening…

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negotiating the future of media and communications

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