Taking apart taking part
Posted: April 26, 2011 Filed under: marketing Comments Off
Over at AdLiterate, Richard Huntingdon has been doing an infinitely better job, it seems, of my favorite hobby – disecting pointless brand ‘immersion campaigns’.
We now have a very wide selection of examples of supremely stupid advertising-agency-created ideas encouraging the clearly disinterested reader to put down what they were doing and get involved in a supreme act of pointlessness instead.
Perhaps there are now enough examples of this sort of nonsense that a rudementary classification system can emerge.
a. Make our advert for us
This is probably the laziest thinking and delivers the most cringeworthy outcomes. Of course, it’s not really brand engagement at all, since no-one in their right mind could possibly put in this much effort just to celebrate the brand. Instead ad agencies offer actual money to anyone who can make a better advert than they can. But the result is almost always horrendous, like a desperately patronizing school project gone wrong, which the brand in question quietly has to run once on TV and then sweep into the shit-heap of YouTube. Since the reward is not guaranteed, such misadventures often go through a particularly embarrassing stage with the brand in question asking friendly production companies to get involved. So really this is just hit-and-miss outsourcing done in a very public and embarassing way.
b. Please be my friend
The desperate brand begs and bribes customers into playing along in even the most minor of ways. One of the most embarassing efforts recently was the huge (media wise) McCain chips campaign which required users to become the brand’s friend on Facebook to stand a chance of winning a trip to New York. Now, I don’t have 11,000 friends but then I suspect that if I did have that many friends as a result of offering them a holiday-based reward, they probably wouldn’t be very good friends.
c. Answers on a postcard
Before we had the internet, magazines used to run competitions to win things. Typically, you had to complete some kind of tie-breaker, normally where you would complete a sentence like ‘I really love Walkers Crisps because….’. Customers would then have to try and come up with something really corny to make their entry stand out and – in theory at least – the best would win. Now, of course, you don’t need a postcard. And the sales promotion johnnies have elevated this idea of a special answer to front and centre. In order to try and get the ‘real human voice’, customers are ironically asked to engage in the most bizarre and tripy sort of fabrication like these bread-related confessions. I can’t look at a site like this without wanting to post up ‘I have the Lindbergh baby in my airing cupboard’, although unfortunately I can’t because the answers they display are, in fact, all made up.
d. Act like a twat and we’ll put you on the (small) telly
Shows like Big Brother demonstrate that a small number of people don’t mind public humiliation as long as it’s extremely public. The advertising johnnies have translated this into ‘upload a picture of yourself looking like a twat, and then you can download the picture of yourself looking like twat, and there’s a small chance it’ll be seen by one of the other miniscule number of twats who’s willing to do this’. Unfortunately, this formulation loses even the minimal charm of reality TV and all of its appeal for the aforementioned twats, leaving the poor advertiser with their product being modelled by a bunch of losers. Now, even those worst advertising agency in the world knows that you want to show attractive people consuming your products. Not these people: http://www.milkybar.co.uk/PhotoAlbum.aspx. Incidentally, if ever see a non-loser on one of these boards, they work for the PR company.
Of course, most of this is just harmless. Wasting FMCG budgets is hardly a humanitarian disaster. I think the reason it feels so unpleasant and tasteless, rather than just irrelevant and silly, is that it seems obvious that the people that think up these horrible campaigns would never, themselves, contemplate taking part. The repulsion comes from the inherent (if shit) attempt to exploit an audience who we can only conclude the agency staff hold in very low regard. Customers may not always be right, but if we’re working in the name of participation, can we not try at least to show a little respect?
Decision time
Posted: February 3, 2011 Filed under: design, usability Comments Off
It takes a very cold heart indeed to not love a user-experience concept which can be illustrated using a mathematical formula. Look at Fitts’s law:
This set of symbols help us understand that the ability to point at something on a screen (or in real life) is dependent on the size of the thing in question and its distance from where you’re currently point (D is the distance, W the width of the thing and T the time it will take to do it).
How do such formulae exist? They show us that we’re dealing with a fundamentally limited but predictable set of capabilities of a fundamentally mechanical end-user. They have real life results, visible in any good mobile phone interface design, no amount of jiggery pokery will change them.
Well it was in this spirit that I stumbled across Hick’s law.
The law is a formula to help show how humans make a choice from a set of available options. Most famously, I suspect, this has been spun off to show that navigation systems should have about 7 options in them.
The idea here is that humans have certain coping strategies for making decisions. If a long list is presented, for example, they will try to create patterns to help them (roughly) bisect the list (pick half and reject half). It has also been shown that decision speed is related to IQ.
So – whilst we cling to the nice idea that any navigation system will be OK so long as we’ve got no more than 7 items in it, in fact there are several other dynamics at play
* Stimulus / response capability. It will take a lot longer to click on the right link if we break the intuitive link with layout (e.g. “bottom | top| left” is very hard to scan)
* Elements of mixed sorts shown together require the user to read all the labels and think about them together, placing enormous overhead. (“Carbon neutral products / Contact us / Back / About“)
* Users can ignore well known patterns, significantly reducing the thought process.
But the key thing to take away here – which may be very counter-intuitive for you advertising johnnies – is that it is positively in your interests if you can quickly help your users to ignore options which are not relevant to them. Support your user in ignoring messages 
Mapping the human enome
Posted: January 12, 2011 Filed under: engagement, environment, experience, learning, strategy 2 Comments »
The human genome project started in 1990 and continues today (I guess with ever decreasing marginal return) towards the exhaustive mapping of the core physical cells which make us. Definitions vary on when the project will be ‘complete’ but as Ray Kurzweil points out, we are accelerating towards whichever version of completeness you chose, as the technology to sequence the genome improves. This is a finite task.
This is of course very impressive.
But it will tell us absolutely nothing about why I used to hate my 13+ geography teacher, why Lindsay Lohan chose to throw away a promising acting career, what drove Tony Hancock to take his own life or how to sell a new type of toilet paper to anyone.
What we would need for that is an equivalent map of motivation?
I’m talking about a kind of super-matrix of Maslow needs, helping us to start to understand how the decisions we take are actually part of a broader model of interconnected behaviours and reasons we behave and think in certain ways – whether those motivations are primal, like the physiological elements of the hierarchy of needs, or more sophisticated like much discussed concept of ‘self actualisation’.
Such a model would certainly be useful in looking at tactics we use to address behaviours and behavioural problems, whether serious issues in development or less-serious issues (23 year olds are simply not buying enough cranberry juice), so why hasn’t it been done, or does it simply exist and I’ve been unable to find it? (Wikipedia lists the emotions here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emotions, there is something interesting in this: http://www.scribd.com/doc/3850260/Map-of-the-Emotions).
What sort of cook book would we be writing here? Will we – like chemists – come up with a long list of basic emotions from which all others will be cooked, or will we – like physicists – find a key emotion or two which sits as the basis of the entire system, and from which everything can be made?
I think we’re looking here at a system we can reduce to few components, maybe even one, the fear of death. From this fear we can start to derive many of the decisions that fill our daily lives. Death drives us to build a physical and mental security and to want to be part of wider, social groups. Death makes us want to reproduce, to extend our legacy beyond our actual lifetimes.
How about belief systems in major external factors, like religion and patriotism. Surely such otherwise peculiar behaviours start to make sense when we can see how they relate to a complex map of beliefs based on more fundemental conditioning we have undergone.
So I propose a first draft of a tree of decision making which is as follows (and many many apologies for doing it in smart art). 
The one thing that strikes me absolutely immediately is that so many of the immediate motivations relate so directly to areas provided for my religion. In Connected, Nicholas Christakis argues that belief in a higher-power can support the desire to be part of a network, it also – often – supports the need to think beyond one’s death and many many aspect of family life and social cohesion. Put more broadly, the need to understand moral codes, seems to link directly to the model I have outlined.
The areas shown here seem to be amongst the most primal. Where we can relate the behaviour we are trying to foster to these motivations, we will be far more likely to drive adherence. Magazine editors have long known that money, sex and chocolate sell. Apple have unleashed the powerful allure of group status and immediate clique membership.
Perhaps I’ll not get to the bookshelf of densely packed information shown at the top (in the Wellcome Collection’s physical readout of the human genome) but I’m going to keep exploring this concept, trying to find motivations which just don’t fit. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the idea.
Copy and taste
Posted: October 11, 2010 Filed under: marketing | Tags: windows phone 7 Comments Off
Well I’ve been lucky enough to borrow a pre-launch Windows Phone 7 for a few serious chunks of time over the last couple of weeks – enough to properly start living with the device, getting all synced up with Exchange, Facebook, Gmail etc; putting a few hits of the 80s on there; and copying across a few movies and pictures.
And I’m very positive about it indeed. The design effort that the team at Microsoft have put in is obviously enormous and very effective, managing to mix suprise with simplicity and to create a very pleasing interfaces which remains intuitive and usable.
Under the hood, performance is hugely improved and the drive for common hardware specification will make a huge difference for developers. It’s simply a great thing – like its PC companion.
But what has almost been more interesting to watch than the slow dawning realization online that Microsoft has made a device well worth consideration, is the often bizarre tack taken by the usual army of uniformed critics.Of course there is the predictable ‘Microsoft is shit, Apple is brilliant’ (and vice-versa) which polutes virtually every technology comments page. But in recent weeks, this has given way to outraged posts bemoaning the lack of copy and paste. How on earth will we be able to use this phone without this one feature whinge geeks everywhere with perhaps only one thing in common: none of them have tried the device.
This particular bandwagon is really rolling. it’s even got to the stage that – at today’s launch- the product team promised the feature would be added by January next year.
But why has this become so important? Or I suppose I should say, ‘why, oh why oh why?’
Let’s bear in mind that this feature was missing from the first three generations of iPhone without leaving users desperately copying essays onto the back of napkins or breaking down in the street. I’ve got it now on my iPod touch, and on my Android phone for that matter and how often do I use it? As infrequently as possible. And I’d imagine the same is true for post people. Why? Because it’s just too fiddly and I use my phone for working in tiny little chunks not big ones, and besides – when addresses or numbers come up, I can normally click right on them to carry out the appropriate action.
But people criticise the lack of copy and paste because its the only thing they know about the phone and it would obviously be a crime not to have an opinion about this product, especially when it’s made by Microsoft.
As Bill Buxton said at Mix this year when asked about the iPad (pre-release), it’s probably best to try it before making up your mind.
Lost in telecommunication
Posted: December 13, 2009 Filed under: apple, design Comments Off
News just in from the department of the extremely obvious – iPhone users can be a little obsessional and, even, delusional.
It seems a consultancy has invested a serious amount of time to diagnose what they call the ‘iPhone syndrome’. Strand Consulting tells us that the iPhone isn’t that great a phone but that users will sometimes overlook its faults or even come to defend its shortcomings as features. They liken the behaviour of both users and mobile phone networks to the delusional relationship which can sometimes develop between kidnappers and their victims.
Well I’ve certainly witnessed the behaviour. All one need to do typically is wait a couple of hours for the iPhone battery to die (normally a critical failure for a mobile phone’s performance) and the addict will claim that it’s not the iPhone’s fault – they shouldn’t have left the 3G switched on, they’ve been using the screen too much, or perhaps they’ve made too many calls. Indeed this is such an obvious design flaw that there are now several products, advice and articles (‘turn off bluetooth, vibrate and the music equaliser’) out there to try and remedy it. Or, you’ll receive an SMS resembling hate mail, only to find out it the result of a (practically unusable) iPhone keyboard, which the sender is yet to ‘master’.
But I think it is unfair to blame the technology press and general media for misleading the public about the qualities of the iPhone. The point isn’t that iPhone customers are duped into buying a product which is in some ways flawed. The amazing thing is that iPhone customers quickly accept these issues as facts and plough on being evangelical. Media couldn’t do this. It is the product of a piece of absolutely superb bit of software and hardware design, focusing not on the ostensible functions required of a phone (making calls, sending messages etc) – all of which the iPhone is at best medium at – but rather at looking at what the joys are of having a computer in your pocket (the iPhone has the same computing power as the first generation of iMacs).
Apple (under Jobs) has always been good at this, although it’s not original thinking (Theodore Levitt put it very nicely: “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!”).
It doesn’t matter if the Sony Vaio has better specs that the Apple Macbook. Why? Because the Macbook lets the guys with the funny glasses and the expensive jeans feel like they, not Microsoft or Sony, is in charge of the computing experience. With a Macbook or an iPhone, they are masters of their little computing universe (admittedly only for an hour or two at a time with the iPhone). Apple has given geek pleasure (of technology mastery) to the next wrung down the ladder – to the people without screwdrivers in their pockets, and they will forgive them a lot because of it.
The search is over
Posted: December 12, 2009 Filed under: google Comments Off
Any regular reader of this blog will know that I’m a huge fan of the Register and Andrew Orlowski in particular for telling it the way it is. Perhaps with a little added sneering cynicism thrown in for good measure. Orlowski’s retrospective on the good old days of Google ‘Google abandons Search‘ is very much in this vein, marking the decision of Google to move away from authority-ranking (dubbed ‘Page Rank’ in El Reg) and start including extensive ‘live’ social media content.
Of course, there are some catches in that last sentence. SEO experts will give you very different views on what relationship, if any, Page Rank had to actual page rankings (the term ‘Page’ refers to Larry Page not to web pages). And the ‘live’ social media in question may not be very alive at all, it’s probably turgid junk. But it is current and was generated by someone who likes to spend their time creating 140 character message so what the hell…
I’m sure Google’s still doing loads of fancy things to filter search results, but perhaps the leap that both Google and Bing have made to surface the latest, weakest content to the very top of their search results pages misses a point about why that content is generated in the first place. Which is that it was generated in a social context, not in the context of the whole web.
Whilst the content on Twitter is often unfiltered garbage, and an alarmingly high proportion of SPAM, it seems unlikely that many people are going to want to see it sitting at the top of their search results pages. And bear in mind, these results will not be filtered by being in my network. As it is, I mostly follow people on Twitter I actually know in real life and many of them still seem incapable of ever posting anything I’d like to read. But, listening to garbage is certainly easier to take when it’s generated by your friends and acquaintances.
And what is the equivalent of Page Rank (or any supposed Google technology to place a value on a piece of content)? It can’t be followers, follows, re-tweets. All of these things are thoroughly open to SPAM, and the formation of very narrow online groups.
Rather than venture further into the unindexed content which is on the web (some estimates put Google indexed content at 1% of total web content – see ‘Deep Web‘), as Google (and Microsoft and Yahoo) turn up the volume control on this often-vacuous content (ultimately from just a handful of sites), the effective change is much larger than has been reported – from a search-result world where quality and authority was valued to one where brevity, simplicity and speed are what matters.
Perhaps Google is trying to put us off vacuous micro-blogging content through overfeeding. Or perhaps it has – as Orlowski suggests – finally thrown its hands up in the air and given up. Both seem unlikely. What’s the really evil possible answer? Perhaps they’ve realised that by filling the top left of the SERP with user-generated gibberish, user will have no choice but to click on the paid-result on the right.
Eulogies
Posted: December 9, 2009 Filed under: anthony wilson, Durutti Column, factory, music Comments Off
Most people got to know the inimitable Anthony H Wilson, who died two years ago, by seeing him on Granada TV, or one of the Granada shows that was broadcast outside the Manchester region, like “Other Side of Midnight” or “After Hours”. And, a whole generation got know him from the Hacienda or other Factory experiments.
I first became aware of him because we shared my favourite band. I bought their records. He released them.
Wilson’s relationship with the Durutti Column has been described as tumultuous. They were the first Factory band, unpredictable because their main member, Vini Reilly was often ill, and if not temperamental. They were never going to be stars like New Order or Happy Mondays. But Factory kept them on board until the record label itself fell to pieces. Not least because Wilson himself was a huge fan.
From the first album (‘The Return of the Durutti Column”) in 1980 (that’s Fact 14 for the Factory geeks), it was obvious that Vini Reilly could express more with his guitar (and, in that case, synths and production from the great Martin Hannett) than most bands ever would with vocals added on top. Listening to the incredibly evocative “Requiem for a Father”, or the complex “Sketch for Summer”, you are presented with whole textures and emotions that seem much deeper than the tracks themselves.
But then from the second album, LC (Fact 44, 1981), Reilly started adding vocal tracks. More and more came on successive albums, with the exception of Without Mercy (Fact 84, 1984) – a quasi-classical album Wilson had twisted Vini’s arm to make. Wilson, you see, didn’t like Vini’s singing. And they used to row about it. Throughout the years the singing waxed and waned, almost entirely absent on some albums, replaced by extensive (and at the time, novel) use of samples, on others such as (eponymous) “Vini Reilly” (Fact 242, 1989) and numerous guest vocalists. Perhaps this was Wilson’s influence, perhaps just part of Vini’s evident desire to keep on experimenting.
Although some of the best Durutti Column tracks have vocals (“Missing Boy” – a tribute to Ian Curtis, “Requiem for Mother” on the Mercury Nominated “Someone Else’s Party”), it is easy to understand Wilson’s viewpoint. Often Vini’s singing is not great (he’s said himself in interviews, “I can’t sing for toffee”), often vocal tracks become a bit of a dirge. But more to the point, when you can make music like he can, why not leave it as it is.
Well now Wilson has his wish, and much much more.
While he was dying in hospital, Reilly visited Wilson often and created instrumental snippets to take to him in hospital, responding, I guess to Wilson’s long held request to take the music in a certain direction.
The result has now been turned into a fully fledged album, A Paean to Wilson (review and details) which will be released early next year and which has been previewed already at a number of concerts in Manchester and London.
The album is an extended reflection on Reilly’s loss of a long-time friend and manager; the guy that gave him his career; his number 1 fan, perhaps. The friendship of these two – one a man often portrayed as an egotist and cad, the other a reclusive musician seems strange. But it is celebrated throughout this incredible album, which is also Reilly’s best for years.
The album starts with a loop of Wilson asking ‘Are you an artist or just a technician?’ before the intense opening beats of ‘Chant’ which drives from a broody and insistent bass line, through an aria-like melancholy to the almost club-style repetition of one sampled phrase modulating up and down, with Reilly’s guitar filling the gaps delicately. The song is like an exercise in how much space can be left in the piece of music as it drifts seemlessly between moods.
Throughout the album, Vini plays alongside long-time (and more recent) collaborators such as John Metcalf, Tim Kellet (“Without Mercy”) Poppy Morgan, and – of course – Bruce Mitchell, generating new tracks, and reprises of old tunes which jump from classical through to hypermodern; from almost over-polished form to deeply discordant and suprising.
The final track ‘How Unbelievable’, captures the outrage that Wilson felt about the inability of the (current) Labour Government to narrow the poverty gap (a sample of Wilson is used towards the end of the song). The track powers through with trade mark guitar riffs and looping vocal track repeating over an over ‘most of all, we miss you’.
As with so many Durutti Column tracks (and again, without lyrics aside from the odd sample and loop), Reilly somehow summons powerful emotion from the tracks. And this isn’t maudlin funeral music. What comes across is a deep respect for Wilson and a deep feeling of loss.
The Independent rolled their review into a broader look at albums and tracks which carry the theme of loss and bereavement. So much of the Durutti Column catalogue has been about relating feelings of loss, of sadness, and, at other times, of exquisite happiness and awakening. It is not, perhaps a surprise then that Reilly’s response to such a major loss would be so powerful.
Wilson has got so many of his wishes. Another great Durutti Column album, Reilly back on top form, and not a vocal insight. Perhaps he’ll get his other wish too, a little more recognition for the other Factory legend.
Here comes the Sun
Posted: December 3, 2009 Filed under: advertising, news Comments Off
What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?
Well, we find out that either the force wasn’t really unstoppable or the object wasn’t really unmovable.
And so, the News International empire is about to collide with the self-appointed monarchy of the internet, Google. It’s tempting to paint this as a battle of good vs evil, and more than a few Star Wars analogies have been thrown around already. But really it’s not that simple, of course. More like the battle of the presumed innocent and the presumed guilty.
The delicate subtext to much of this discussion isn’t easy to miss. Protest as they may that Murdoch is a crazy out-of-touch Luddite, there’s an unmistakable absence amongst his detractors of either certainty that he will fail, or explanation of why he should. As per usual, Andrew Orlowski provides one of the most insightful takes on the whole subject and an explanation for the sudden desire for aggressive action:
Really it’s a cultural divide. The web divisions at media companies – who can speak fluent “clayshirky”, quote from Freakonomics and are invariably Twittering at a New Media conference – haven’t brought home the goods; media company boards and shareholders now see them more as part of the problem than as the solution.
The reality is that no one really knows what on earth will happen in this showdown, and not many media companies are ready to come out and say that they won’t jump on the band wagon if Murdoch does somehow manage to get it rolling.
And of course we’ll have fun watching. It’s a good fight. No one in their right mind writes off the man who has somehow convinced almost 10 million people in the UK to give him over £20 a month to watch TV which is (more or less) also available free. And few will write off Google, because they’re the only people who’ve so far managed to make big money from advertising on the web.
The freetards taste victory, but also fear the passing of the utopian summer we’ve all been having. I imagine Chris Andersen is busy trying to work out how he’ll eat all the words in his boring books if the crazy Australian manages to make it fly. Microsoft presumably can’t imagine their luck: there’s a battle going on, and they’re not the villains for once – although they may be crazy if they chose to pay Murdoch to list his content.
But as the debate rages in media offices all over country, there seem a few rather critical truths which are not being discussed:
- Search engine inertia – The thought that consumers will change engine in response to the content that is available gives the impression that most users understand the distinction between search engines and what they do (or even search engines and browsers). This has not been my experience in user testing. This isn’t a point about Google being so easy and fast that people are loyal to it. This is a point about users thinking Google is the web. Long-learned habits will take a long time to break. Clearly if Murdoch got almost all media outlets to follow him (not inconceivable), the absence of such results would drive users on, but as long as ‘Tiger woods crash’ returns hundreds of results, migration is likely to be slow.
- The BBC – In the UK, the BBC – also committed to open, free access – makes any such anti-Google cartel a paper tiger.
- Prisoner’s dilemma – the more media outlets are in the Murdoch alliance, the more tempting it will be to leave it.
- Cover price – The cover price of newspapers do not make them commercially viable. The value for media owners is still the value of advertising, not cover price. So unless we are planning on driving people away from the web, back to newsprint, subscription prices are going to have to be way higher than offline pricing, since internet advertising doesn’t work. Numerous free-paper wars have shown how advertising in print can deliver profits. And, of course, most newspapers operate an at-least partially free model: what percentage, for example, of The Times, are given away for free? Conversely, what would the cover price on the Sun have to be if it carried no advertising? £1? £2? Would it be any more commercially viable than the Sun on the web with a paywall?
- Purchase mechanic – It’s an obvious point but customers pay for newspapers with small change in an ad hoc arrangement. And the decision to purchase is often driven by the front page headline or image. Neither of these techniques exists online.
- The newspaper is not just about news and sport (or opinion) – much of the content of the Sun is already monetized online (Page 3, Bingo); further considerable portions are being monetized very effectively online, just not by News International (classifieds, reader offers etc).
- The print title is a social object – No I don’t mean in the tree-hugging, twitter-will-save-the-world way. Average readership of a national newspaper is 2-3 people. Being social, offline, supports advertising but not cover price revenue. Interestingly, most media owners love secondary reading, not seeing it a cannibalization of readership. Again, Murdoch risks damaging precisely this aspect of newspaper consumption. And, newspapers are social in another way too. Part of the attraction of mass media is that they can form topics for discussion in social groups. Online has actually been very efficient at enabling this. Paywall’s are very bad at encouraging this sort of behavior. Like music licensing, once I’ve paid for online content, I feel I should be able to share it, not with the whole web, but certainly with my immediate networks.
- Subscriptions are not rare – The failure of music subscription services and of registration / pay-walling in general are taken (by the ‘free’ lobby) to mean that consumers won’t pay for things by subscription . In fact consumers sign up to all sorts of licence / subscription deals: for their Sky packages, for their broadband, for their mobile phones, for their travel cards, for football seats. The barrier to subscriptions is not a general resistance but the ability to demonstrate value.
- Online all content is micro-content - At the point at which the consumer is going to be asked to part with cash, they are about to interact not with the entire contents of a newspaper, but with a particular piece of content (whether they’re searching on Bing, on Google, or on the Sun’s own website). Pricing, therefore needs to be proportionate.
So what it adds up to is the need to ask for the customer to pay more, for less, in a less convenient medium, in a way that they probably don’t know how to navigate.
But it’s not a one way lesson. Whilst Murdoch’s move creates uncertainty, the key lesson for the free lobby is that the content producers are being squeezed out of existence. Is this obvious? I think it is but it never seems to be admitted to by those hawking that ‘information wants to be free’. Or does information also ‘want’ to be of a high quality and across a wide variety of topics? An older and more certain cliche comes to mind: ‘you get what you pay for’.
Today newspaper websites are seen as a marketing tool rather than purely a delivery channel. The new marketplace means online papers will have to be commercially viable in their own right. With no indication of an acceptable online advertising model; we are still awaiting the revolution which does in fact come at the end of Shirky’s argument. Will we end up with free content? undoubtedly. Will it be any good? Will Rupert Murdoch own it? We’ll have to wait and see.
Care less Wispa
Posted: October 29, 2009 Filed under: advertising, agencies, social meaning, social media 1 Comment »Does anyone else think the following – one an honest-to-goodness advertising campaign (from Fallon no less) and one a piss-take of the world without computers – look suprisingly similar?
(And yes, that is Rolf Harris).
The entire cracked photoshop contest is a lot of fun, imagining what the world would be like if the internet disappeared tomorrow. Particularly good is the theatre audience watching a cat doing something cute (a la YouTube) and the real life Rick-rolling.
The Wispa campaign basically says: people like sharing this crap on the internet, now let’s take some pap and shove it on a billboard sign. There’s something interesting in the idea from the point of view of creating salient advertising – each poster will be unusual and might make the passerby wonder what on earth it is about? But – of course – it will also be meaningless to most people.
Salience is important, but… erm… what the hell has it got to do with chocolate bars.
The site explains:
“We’ve decided to give our advertising space to you guys as a thank you for all the love you’ve shown to Wispa.”
“We have bought thousands of billboards all over the UK and Ireland so that you can share your special messages with the world. Yes, that’s right, you let us know your special message and if it gets selected we will post it on a real billboard in the location of your choice.
“So if your mum lives in Birmingham you could post her a special message, say a poem, and we’ll try to give you a site as near to her as possible.”
Here’s one:
(It’s for a dog!)
All of them are up on the site. There’s also the ‘gold panel’ of ‘normal’ (there needs to be about five sets of inverted commas around this freak show) people like Cara Stripp. Does anyone older than Cluster (see above), really think that these profiles aren’t made up?
As you have probably guessed I love Wispa, and was really keen for Cadbury to bring it back. So a few years ago I got involved with the bring back Wispa facebook group, and even though it is now back, I still spend lots of time on the site chatting to other Wispa fans and getting involved wherever I can.
I love Wispa because it’s something that I grew up with and it holds good memories for me. Everyone remembers their favourite sweet as a kid and for me it’s never changed. I like the special texture and just the fact that it tastes so gooooood!
My love of Wispa has become infamous and I often receive Wispas as parts of presents from friends and family. I even have Wispa earrings and a necklace which were specially made for me!
The thought process seems to go along these lines: People are really motivated by social media. People follow recommendations from real people. So if we make up some ‘real people’ and have them recommend us, and then get a sort of weird implied (but not really obvious) recommendation in return for some free poster sites, then everyone will love us.
We’ve said it before but we’ll say it again. The term ‘social media’ is a bit misleading for the advertising types. It is media, but not in the sense of ‘media buying’. You can’t purchase a chunk of it.
It’s certainly a truthful observation that there is a phenomonen around social media that people like it and respond to it, but it does not imply that it can be used for commercial messages. Good commercial messages can be amplified by social media. But that will happen if they’re good, interesting etc; not because they appear to be social in nature. Fallon must know this… it’s the point of the Gorilla.
I find this whole stage of advertising evolution really embarrassing to watch. It’s like a Wispa sponsored X-Factor at Sunderland townhall: “People love X-Factor, let’s get us one of those…. obviously on a smaller scale though, cause we’ve only got a 100k budget”.
Last acts
Posted: October 1, 2009 Filed under: advertising, marketing 1 Comment »
I’m certainly not claiming to be any sort of advertising pundit.
However, the recent advertising campaign for Dixons strikes me as quite remarkable, and not in a good way. It has already sparked a lively debate. I’m sure that was at least part of the intention. In fact, I can just imagine a bloke from the agency with a La Roux haircut telling the client that this would make it ‘social media’.
First of all, no matter how good the strategy behind it, is it really a great idea to give your client the strapline ‘the last place you want to shop’?Clever wordplay it may be, but it also making a negative statement about the brand, and not a small one. It is acknowledging a commonly held belief that Dixons offers an unpleasant experience. Especially considering that the advert is for the online store rather than than the scrappy Dixons with abusive staff who have now disappeared from our high-streets (or become Currys), which brand would want to say this? Is there no worry that customers will remember it. Imagine it as a store fascia! Unsurprisingly, the strap line hasn’t made it on to the actual site.
Secondly, by reducing their offer to pure lowest price, Dixons is severly limiting any future value proposition it may put before customers. While Selfridges, Harrods and John Lewis (the stores shown in comparison) all have well deserved reputations for service; by lampooning themselves, Dixons can hardly expect any consumer to be left in any doubt about what they are offering now or in the future.
And here’s the other problem with going for a purely price-commoditised proposition. I have absolutely no doubt that consumers do go to stores to find what they want before finding the best price online. And, of course, geeks have already starting using phones to check competitor prices even as they stand in the competitors stores.
Now if you’re in Harrods, and not a total geek, I can imagine that a good sales person will be able to convince you to pay a small premium to have the product there and then, with Harrods’ service promise. This is not, however, a viable strategy for online. The sort of consumer who looks in-store and buys online is not going to stop at just checking the price on Dixons.co.uk. They will check it in Google, Kelkoo and the rest.
So to win in this strategy, Dixons would have to guarantee lowest prices. Of the products I looked at, they were matched or beaten by players like Amazon and Play in most cases, and even more suprisingly they didn’t appear in Google shopping, even for the very flat screen TVs they were talking about in the ad:
(Look over in the cheap seats (PPC slots) for the two DSGi brands).
Is it really possible that they didn’t think of this when planning the campaign?
The main point though is that I think this advertising is smart-arse creative written for smart-arsed creatives and planners. It’s an advert aimed at industry people.
But who is the real target audience? Is it really aimed at customers of Selfridges et al? If so, I think it misjudges the value those customers place on service. And, it’s not exactly an excerpt from ‘how to win friends and influence people’ to mock your customers. If it is aimed at a more standard high-street shopper, isn’t it just a bit too clever.
Indeed Neil O’Keefe, current DSGi marketing director says: “With this campaign we aim to reach an even wider, particularly younger audience.”
I would love to see the testing results about how this ad influences intention. For those who understand it at all, I’d imagine it’s more likely to drive people to the doors of Dixons’ competitors than to include Dixons in their online repertoire. In part because the younger, smarter audience understands the concept of price comparison, and in part because, in the hustle and bustle of the tube, or wherever you see these ads, people may not even spend long enough to know they’re not for Harrods, Selfridges or John Lewis. An interesting test is whether you’d ever run this creative on the web? When price comparison is one click away, they suddenly seem completely unusable.
Very strange. Slightly desperate. And, I’m guessing, the last thing the ad agency (M&C) will do for DSGi.
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