Usable Interfaces

Another really good post from Hugh at Gapping Void. Ostensibly it is on the subject of Nike moving some campaign activity from Wieden + Kennedy (or at least adding other agencies to the roster). However, the interesting bit is the idea that W+K are being penalised for failing to match the success of Nike + iTunes in providing value to communities rather than just promoting products.

That’s a pretty high bar! An innovative product in its own right, generating a very definitely web2.0 pile of content, offering genuine and uncopyable branded-utility.

Hugh’s summary is

Buying space in someone else’s brain is far harder than buying space in someone else’s media

Very nice. One of the follow up comments is:

marketing should be built into your product from the start, rather than slapped on afterwards in the from of advertising

But that’s not it is it? It’s not marketing that needs to be in there from the start of the design cycle for a product. It’s the user. Or in a non-digital setting, the customer. That’s what Nike did (presumably) and I don’t see any reason why an ad agency, just as much as a digital agency can’t do it. We’ve said it before though, that Nike has been putting the user at the centre of their brand since before the interweb was a twikling in Berners-Lee’s eyeball.

Turn your back on the big G for two seconds and look what they go and do.

First of all they added cool skins to Personalised home page which reflect what time of day it is where you are:

And then in gmaps, the integration of pictures and extended related search pannels. You start to understand what Larry Page might have been talking about when he said that we’ve only seen the tip of the search iceberg:

Here’s the initial listing

and the expanded panel

Tonight was the promisingly named “PPC Earthquake” for Chinwag(#3). Each of these events has had an unusual noun appended to it (I suspect for searchability and Flickr tagging purposes), but this little bit of hyperbole was the most impressive and misleading to date. Unless they meant it would involve mindless destruction of my evening.

Putting aside the poor staging – constantly interupted by technical failures and squeeking doors – and the rude audience members carrying on conversations during the proceedings, our host for the evening Mike Butcher ranged between bored and aggressive as the pannelists (with the exception of Nigel Leggatt from Microsoft) said not very much at all about anything.

Considering the amount of general press and blog attention for the new Yahoo platform, the discussion tonight was fairly redundant as we cycled to the conclusion that the big three would scrap it out, unless…. er…. someone else came along to challenge them.

Mobile search might be interesting, but everyone agreed not quite yet. At one point someone in the audience said “shouldn’t we be more user-centred”, meaning – I think - why are the main engines not providing better user experiences (incidentally a point I would dispute, they’re all pretty bloody good from all the tests I’ve seen). But the point did have relevance tonight. Get someone to oil the door, fix the lights and apply electric shocks to the pannelists when they’re saying nothing. That would have been more centred around tonights poor ‘users’.

For what it’s worth, I think Chinwag, should either declare itself an industry event (i.e. about the structure of the industry and industry politics, and pick some really contentious industry debates – who’s best placed to do search, an open debate on advertiser funding etc.), or broaden the debates to cover something actually new, something outside the audience’s comfort zone.

I suspect their current mild ambivalence to matters of interest is caused by the need for a sponsor, although senior people from big mouth media (tonight’s sponsor) were noticably absent from the event. This is a particular shame since 10 minutes of Steve might have made all the difference.

I’ve never really understood Twitter. I regard this as a weakness. All the coolest people seem to love it, and I can see how it’s a neat concept. I just wonder what I’d put: “Doing sudoku on tube”, “buggering up a lasagne”, “In meeting”, “reading in bed”. I’d bore myself.

Well I’m delighted to see that I’m not 100% alone in my luditeitude (I hearby create a new word!). This brilliant ‘Creating passionate users’ post by Kathy Sierra goes well beyond that initial suspicion that there’s something a bit freaky in it, putting a (very cool) name to a phenomenon I’d been quietly aware of for some time.

In the quite brilliant Perfect Pitch, Jon Steel talks about how constantly receiving and checking of messages can (temporarily) lower your IQ by 10 points.

We now know what it’s called:  ”intermittent variable reward”. Or, in other words: behaviour which is rewarded/reinforced intermittently, rather than consistently – is the most difficult to extinguish. Or to really reduce it to simple terms, the addiction to email and Blackberries is similar to slot machines. As Patricia Wallace put it in Time magazine: “You are not sure you are going to get a reward every time or how often you will, so you keep pulling that handle.”

Not content with revealing the real reason for email addiction, Sierra goes on to explain the emotional dissonance that arises out of “virtual” interactions – although this is not necessarily a twitter phenomonen – it applies equally well to TV. The brain feels like it’s experiencing social interaction but is missing an element – body language etc, leaving the subject feeling disappointed and dejected.

Finally, Sierra brings in the concept of “continual partial attention”. Thinking-wise, what we as humans enjoy most is deep thought and processing. But what we do now is the opposite, we constantly pay partial attention to a huge range of inputs. We care more about not missing anything than about actually focussing on and achieving anything.

Who would have thought that making your motto “don’t be evil”/”do no harm” would have be effective enough strategy to get everyone to quietly ignore everything you were doing that was a bit dodgy. Well it’s worked for doctors and, of course, Google.

Now don’t get me wrong, I have strong belief that most doctors act in the best interests of their patients, and would even without the hipocratic oath. It’s more of a formulation of the principle than a rule to live by.

I’ve got no particularly strong reason for doubting the intentions of the big G either. But if anyone else – and I mean anyone, not just Microsoft or IBM, I don’t even mean the British or US government, even if it were our parents, friends… the clergy – knew about us what Google knows about us, there would be public demonstrations.

I’m not immune to this view. I have Google desktop, I use Gmail, I’ve even been known to use the Google’s search engine, Google Reader is my favourite RSS reader, I’ve seen a couple of OCD cats on YouTube… but this *will* be an issue.

Here’s the beautfully-made video of their alleged masterplan (bear in mind, no one is denying the genome bit).

Here’s a great little debate on relative anonymity in Google which adds the privacy concerns of Google Checkout and the cookie-placing of adSense and adWords campaigns.

As I mentioned before, Economist had a really good explanation of what the value exchange actually is. 

Oh yes, and this: the Google phone to phone your g-Broker and arrange the g-Kids g-School.

Incidentally, I am currently reading the book The Google Story – a thoroughly unremarkable book about a thoroughly remarkable business. The author has a quite horrific style not quite up to the standard of a royal biographer but some of the annecdotes are quite interesting so far.

It’s easy to become so engrossed in the genius of blogs like Antony‘s, adliterate or Russell Davies‘ that you start thinking that the mainstream press can’t contribute to the debate about the changing consumer (the change in the media power relationship).

But there’s a great article in this week’s Economist about exactly that. And it’s a very interesting take on it.

Starting with the premise that what Google is really doing is selling information about user’s preferences and interests in a very niche way, the article “They want their share”, looks at start ups which are looking to allow users to perform this swap themselves. The idea being that consumers will store their preferences (browsing history, search history, emails) and swap them for money at the point at which advertiser’s can speak to them. There’s even the (faintly ridiculous) suggestion that consumers would opt in to bulk email (aka SPAM) on a paid for basis.

I’ve heard similar predictions from Ross Sleight and other’s under the heading “attenioneering” being what brands will need to think about as media ownership fragments.

Some of this stuff seems pie in the sky but the underlying point is pretty exciting:

• If it can be enabled, why shouldn’t consumers be paid for opening themselves up to advertising.
• By being elegant and very clever, Google has managed to do a smash and grab on people’s private date without anyone noticing.

One of the themes we’ve been  talking to everyone about recently is how the old rules of marketing still apply. I know it’s not fashionable to think this way but it’s obviously true. If planning became popular in the 70s because it’s about identifying a real consumer need and meeting it in communications, don’t we need more – not less – of that.

Now to be fair and disclose everything, I work for Chime, so Lord Bell is technically my boss (for one more day at least). But look at the startling insight of some comments he makes in a New Media Age interview with Nic Howell – who incidentally is on a run following a blinding interview with Bogusky (of Crispin, Porter Bogusky fame – NB the best digital and direct agency in the world is neither digital nor direct).

 This is nicked from NMA’s article:

Why do you think this country is such a crucible for what’s interesting in digital media?

Because we’re a nation of gossips. Look at what is really successful in this country: soap operas, gossip columns. We’re obsessed with gossip. The internet and the mobile phone are two devices whereby people can gossip non-stop. YouTube, MySpace – they may be called social networking sites but what they are is gossip sites.

On the role of the internet and reputation

“… you have to look at the internet as being something where other people say things about you. It’s very complex, but not impossible, challenging.”

On PR and the internet
“Now we are in a very diferent world because everyone has access to everything. So what we’re now trying to do is join those conversations and be the most persuasive or the most informative or the most impactful.”

I’ve got Vista on my laptop at home.

I think I really like it but I’ve started to doubt myself.

Am I crazy!? I’ve just done a google search for “Vista great” and I get no entries that aren’t on the Microsoft sites and several with the word “not” inserted.

It’s quick, its cute, it’s stable. They’ve thought a great deal about the interface. The widgets are fab. It’s very good with pics, music and video.

Is it 10x better than XP? Well no, but then XP was pretty good really. Is it better than the latest Mac? Well I think it’s probably pretty similar because I don’t think we’re looking at a lot of room for improvement.

 Is it excessively chunky – well yes, but 500 terabytes of RAM is now £4.60.

Jon Leach has spotted a very important pattern on his blog of the same name Pattern Recognition. He’s a fellow Chime person and is commenting on Resonate winning a digital-only pitch. I’ve spoken to Michael Frohliche about how much of his pitches are digital and his view is very straight-forward this: “They’re all digital pitches”. And like BBH winning a digital account, or indeed Agency.com winning an ATL pitch for Ikea in adland; we can expect to see much of this across marcomms in 2007. And it’ll be extremely punchy with it.

But just to bring it all back together. Here’s an excellent piece about whether or not pattern recognition is practical anymore.

The new pattern, it seems, is that there are no more patters. Or the opposite. We’re not sure. 

A few declarations: I currently work for VCCP (in digital) which is part of Chime, as is Resonate

New gadget I’ve just downloaded: The Filter from Exabra is excellent. It mood filters your own record collection (as well as pointing you in the direction of tracks to buy should you wish). I tell it I like Concrete Sky by Beth Orten and it creates a playlist including “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” by St Etienne and “And She Was” by Talking Heads. Brilliant.

(I promise I’ve only just noticed in writing this that my new company Conchango is part of this. Even better!)

Incidentally, and it really is a very small grumble for such a good product, why do people say things like this – taken from the download page – “The Filter makes listening to music easy and enjoyable”. This is the language of hype which is simply unnecessary. They’ve got the tone on the first page: “those playlists you never get round to making… this gizmo does them for you”.