I’ll be your digital strategist for the evening
Posted: May 31, 2007 Filed under: marketing, strategy Comments Off
As you’re about to find out, I’ve been thinking a little too much about the concept of “digital strategy”.
You probably know the scenario. You’re sitting in a meeting and someone says “What should our digital strategy be?” Everyone stares at the floor until, under the weight of expectation, someone with the ‘s word’ in their job title volunteers to do an initial write up for the next meeting.
It’s obviously particularly tough for people that work in digital agencies AND have the word strategy on their business card, or – and there seems to be more of them by the day – people with the job title “digital strategist”. This is a brilliant job title for all the important reasons – firstly it sounds fabulously up-to-date and secondly it confers on the owner a kind of Hawkins-esque intellectual fierceness. I’m just not sure it actually makes any sense.
And I’m not just coming at this from standard contrarian position that strategy is strategy, digital or not. Because actually, that’s not what people mean when they say it. Often people with fairly well defined commercial and brand strategies still fancy a third piece, their digital strategy.
I think it’s about language. And I think we’ve been fooled by the apparent syntactical ease of the phrase into buying it. After all, we never had analogue strategy.
Clearly the phrase “strategy” is massively over-used anyway to mean everything from a tactic to a method. Properly speaking, a strategy is a long-term plan to achieve a particular goal (that’s stolen from Wikipedia, so it must be half right). Alternatively you could say that it is “How you’ll get to where you want to be”, that’s stolen from a quite brilliant piece from Northern Planner which talks in interesting terms about communications strategy.
So for example a brand strategy is a strategy about what a corporation could do with its brand to become most relevant to customers, or to move itself into a different niche, or to redefine the niche it’s in. In fact the strategy will go further and will figure out which of those is the right thing to do. There’s lots of examples of that being done well. Brand strategy is often done by independent brand consultants work for brand owners.
What other words do we use to qualify strategy? How about range? For a retailer, range strategy is a method to look at what they stock and how they merchandise it to shift sales or customer perceptions and habits. A stratgey about range, done by a range strategist for people with ranges.
I could have an export strategy. That would be a strategy about my exports.
So if I have X, I can ask an X-strategist to develop me an X-strategy. So pick a word at random, which is a facet of what you do… returns for example. Can I hire a returns strategist to come up with a returns strategy (a plan to reduce returns most probably). Well I’ve never met one, but otherwise this seems to be fairly reasonable.
What other sort of strategies can I have. Well we’ve all heard about “aggressive strategies”, “collaborative strategies”, “defensive strategies”. Does that mean I can change career direction and become a “defensive strategist”. Well no*. Because there is a missing word in the phrase “defensive strategist”. What is the word? I have no idea. There’s a variety of possible answers. I can have a defensive brand strategy, defensive range strategy and even a defensive employment strategy.
And no more than I can employ a ‘defensive strategist’, should I be able to employ a ‘digital strategist’. I can have a digital brand strategist or a digital supply-chain strategist or a digital payroll strategist probably. The techniques to do those things will have elements in common, but they won’t be the same role. Anyone in one of those roles needs to understand digital technologies and digital trends, and quite possibly how compound nouns work.
* Although of course, all strategists are a bit defensive. Especially if you start messing with their planning key.
School’s out
Posted: May 28, 2007 Filed under: creativity, Futurama, Futurism, marketing Comments Off
A great video on Ted Talks from Sir Ken Robinson challenges the targets which we set for kids in school. He argues that modern teaching methods are virutally designed to hamper creativity, polarising right and wrong and setting a premium against exprimentation.
A brilliantly witty presentation in its own right, this talk brings to bear some of the same thinking that lean manufacturing brought to its world. Considering we don’t have, really, any idea of what our kids will be doing when they leave school in ten years time, Robinson argues that teaching creativity will be as important as teaching literacy and numeracy.
(via sixtysecondview)
Truth and classification
Posted: May 28, 2007 Filed under: brand, Futurama, Futurism, knowledge, marketing 3 Comments »
Like Antony, I’m waiting for Royal Mail (or rather Amazon) to deliver my copy of Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger. From reading around the book, it seems it will be a fascinating look at the role for taxonomy in the new world order of infinite capacity.
The traditional taxonomies of mass storage systems (that’s a euphemism for the fusty libraries of my youth) were necessary to make it possible to find stuff. Because physical items (books) must have a physical location, we need some way to map and understand that, hence we need some sort of filing systems, and we end up with taxonomies that put everything in its precise place: Non fiction > Travel > Humour > B > Bill Bryson > Neither here nor there. But we all know the limitations of that approach. What do we do when Bryson writes a book on copy editing, or the English language, or an autobiography about growing up in small town America (all of these things have happened). Now it looks more like a useful taxonomy is Authors > American > Slightly overweight > and funny > Bill Bryson.
And, of course, we get into the bizzare circumstance where the tail starts wagging the dog and it becomes a skill to navigate the taxonomies. It becomes something you learn in school, even though it is not a natural way of thinking. The brain is much more able to build rich adaptive non-hierachical maps of how things fit together (the packed cupboards of the Advertised mind).
In this interview, Weinberger points to the underlying belief (which he describes as Aristotlean) that there is a perfect classification of things. Of course Aristotle was never faced with some of the quandaries we have today like the Jaffa Cake problem (is it a biscuit or cake). And indeed many brand marketers are now employed specifically in order to challenge and break taxonomies.
But the bigger problem is an even older debate, and it is the most fundamental taxonomy decision: true or false. I might be able to say something is green and yellow. I might be able to describe something as old-fashioned and trendy at the same time. I can describe something as a tool, an advert, and an event at the same time. But can I describe something as true and false simultaneously?
The question becomes more obtuse when we look at socially owned knowledge like Wikipedia. Can a post in Jimmy Wales’ encyclopedia ever be truly correct?
Again, we can thank the ancients here. And this time it’s Plato, and in particular some interpretations of Plato which place knowledge as an unchangeable mirror of underlying forms and essences. This has led many to expect certainty in knowledge which in our day-to-day experience is simply not there. If all our knowledge had to stand up to that level of inspection, we’d never get out of bed.
How many of our views could not be reversed without damaging our overall framework? What if – for example – it turned out that the world wasn’t round. I don’t mean flat, or polo shaped but, lets say it’s actually shaped like an egg. I’d carry on my life with little disturbance. So which of our truths aren’t like that. Could George Bush be a quiet genius with a dastardly plan to fool the world? Perhaps that’s taking things a little too far.
I was lucky enough to study under Michael Welbourne many years ago (and millions of brain cells ago) at Bristol University. One of his central beliefs and areas of study was about the role of testimony (telling) in knowledge transfer. In fact, having been told something by a source we trust is the source of much of what we regard as knowledge. So what has changed recently isn’t perhaps the nature of knowledge but the nature of testimony. Historically we may have had to have been told something directly to believe it (and incorporate it into our ‘knowledge’). Now we can co-opt whole knowledge frameworks, and whole authority frameworks straight off the web.
As seen on Web 2.0
Posted: May 28, 2007 Filed under: advertising, brand, marketing, media, meme, web2.0 1 Comment »
Antony’s Map, Monitor and Engage mantra was a great rule of thumb for brand marketers looking to take their first steps in social media. Unlike most 1-line solutions it has the benefit of being usable and meaningful; providing an actionable plan for sometimes very hesitant marketers. First of all work out who your community is, then track what they’re saying about you (and everything else) and then – and only then – consider how to engage with them. Easy!
It (or this approach at least) also led to few practical mapping/monitoring tools, often called “webmaps” such as Jon‘s and one from Spannerworks. I’ve heard of two or three others, and just today seen this interesting post from a staffer at VML, who are using their seer solution to alert brands to problems (unhappy conversations) so action can be taken. The Wall Street Journal discussed how Seer was used by Addidas to spot a problem with its Predator boot which led them to provide customers with care advice. Perhaps it would be preferable for customers to be having those conversations directly with the brand but this is a good second best.
More importantly than the fact they’re clearly getting better press coverage, VML certainly has won the battle for the coolest (if not strikingly useful) visualisation.
Hey, what’s the big idea?
Posted: May 24, 2007 Filed under: advertising, agencies Comments Off
If we got rid of blog postings about whether big ideas are essential to advertising, we could afford to make the whole internet 13.2% smaller (approximately). However you do that.
It’s like a compulsion in AdLand. On and on and on it goes. In conversations in RealLife(TM), I’ve been party, within advertising circles, to discussions about whether X agency or Y agency even understands what a “BIG” idea is (the ideas are so big that you need to use capital letters or wave your hands a bit). I’ve even been known to noodle on about it myself.
A really good post on Brand New today explains that research agencies (presumably working for the department of the blindingly obvious) have now proven that just being interactive (i.e. in an interactive or ‘high involvement’ medium) does not in and of itself make an ad effective. The ad must have interesting content too. In other shock news, drinking alcohol may effect your ability to operate farming machinary.
Gareth follows up with a great quote from Gossage,
“Nobody reads advertising. People read what they want to read and sometimes it’s an ad.”
The research agency who dropped this bombshell go on to explain how to add interesting content to advertising, rather missing the point and suggesting attention grabbing colours and high contrast for type.
Gareth goes on to say “how about the gift of an idea”.
Of course, this is completely right.
But it it did get me thinking. We need ‘big’ ideas for advertising because they are interuptive and consumed incredibly quickly or even subconsciously. If we’re going to get people, we need to hit them quick with something before they get a chance to move on. And, to make it through the clutter and the ad defence, it needs to resonate emotionally.
But with longer-term, higher involvement brands, we need to do exactly the opposite. Using “big ideas” in a longer-engagement situation is like George Best on Wogan – ready for the one liner but not really up for a coherent chat.
Is this why ad agencies are making a bit of a hash of a lot of these campaigns. Is what they really need not a big idea but a long one, or a wide one, or a generous one.
It must of course be an idea with the brand built into it too, and a brand a beneficiary of it. But perhaps we don’t need to shock and awe any more when we can calm and convince.
Quantity over quality: weak thinking and disgusting coffee
Posted: May 24, 2007 Filed under: advertising, coffee 2 Comments »
There’s an absolutely fantastic post from Richard at AdLiterate about the worthlessness of brainstorms. Richard points out that many years spent in his own career attending and facilitating brainstorms have simply failed to create good ideas – not a single commenter disagrees.
(UPDATE: dissent has since erupted).
Perhaps the most surprising thing is that this viewpoint hasn’t come out with such vehemence in the past. Encouraging loads of people who know nothing about anything to sit around a room and express their opions without any onus on being thoughtful or self-critical produces excaclty what you’d expect, comments like ”why don’t we have a square circles” or “we’re all about being professional”. It is a plain and simple waste of time, and should be eliminated, unless it’s a team building exercise, in which case, it should be made more entertaining and possibly involve cheap red wine. If AdLiterate could now just do a piece on the pointlessness of bullet-pointed PowerPoint presentations, we’d all be living in a better world.
With a level of tenuousness normally reserved for politicians’ answers on Newsnight, I would like to take the same approach (shooting sacred cows) to the much more important battleground of coffee on the go.
At some time at the end of the 70s or in the early 80s – when I was too young to campaign actively (being 10) – it sems that it was decided by royal decree that Italian coffee (or indeed, any substance that had been forced at high pressure through any other substance), was better than any other way of making coffee. This was around the same time it was decided that it was easier for customer to add their own sugar to coffee, preferably while carrying two mobile phones, a bag and a newspaper, rather than this function being carried out by the coffee shop “server”.
Follwing the royal decree, the poshest cafes would buy hugely expensive and often very beautiful espresso machines which would hiss and steam to produce a small very strong little cup of coffee. The machines themselves looked like something recast from the industrial revolution via the italian fashon foothills. I can almost see where the romance came from, especially if the alternative were stewed tea or something out of a jar.
But the whole thing has stuck, and not just stuck, it has kind of displaced reality. If you go into a Costa Coffee today and ask for a filter coffee, they look at you like you’ve asked for a glass hammer or a cup of smoke. Then they shrug and make you an “americano”. Completely straight-faced they will charge you £1.50 for an espresso shot and a pint of boiling water. Of course, it would taste better if they went back to the 70s and added the water to a teaspoon of gold blend.
Italy may still be in the 70s but we should have moved on. We’ve invented the personal computer and the internet for heaven’s sake. We should stop being impressed by the ability to have compressed steam indoors. That’s not even what you’re getting now anyway. You’re getting a cup of magic froth from some machine that has a fake tub of coffee beans glued to the top and can make anything you like, so long as it’s not tea or coffee.
I mention this because I checked every outlet in King’s Cross this morning for the presence of a single filter coffee machine, and it was all big magic boxes ready to produce burnt coffee taste with water.
So brainstorms produce nothing like ideas, and coffee machines produce nothing like coffee. The antidote? A visit to the London’s best coffee shop for a quiet chat (ask for a filter).
Atomic experiments
Posted: May 22, 2007 Filed under: atomisation, marketing Comments Off
It was a pleasure to go along tonight to the final event of widget week, NMK’s Widget Nation (part of the Beers and Innovation series). The panel was Fergus Burns of Nooked, Ivan Pope of Snipperoo, Matt Looney (who was chairing) and, slightly bizarrely, me.
It turned out to be a very different evening from the Chinwag widget event, even though Fergus was on both panels. If the downside was a smaller crowd, the upside was that the whole setting felt more intimate. There were certainly more questions, and more open discussions, without the pressure of a 200-strong audience.
While the panel did spend a lot of time on definitions, we also touched on broader topics with plenty of detailed discussion about copyright and monetisation.
All round, an enjotable experience, so many thanks to Ian for inviting me and for keeping up the excellent work.
PS: Unlike the last one of these I was on, I had been asked to prepare a little intro to me and my views. It came out very differently on the night but here’s what I had planned to say!
I’m from Conchango. For those of you that don’t know, Conchango is one of the biggest and best digital agencies in the UK.
I work in the interactive media department of that company. Traditionally that’s meant doing a lot of big sites for big brands. More recently it has meant lots of smaller widgets and lot of proofs of concept around widgets.
Quite a few of the people who are here tonight (including Fergus in particular) were at the Chinwag event last week in a slightly less salubrious pub about 500 meters away! Like all of these events we ended up in this strange quagmire where everyone had been talking about widgets for some time with relative confidence before some one put their hand up and asked what a widget was.
This would have been less worrying if they’d got a straight answer from the panel but there still seemed to be a fair amount of confusion.
One audience member suggested that widgets were the “bumper stickers of the internet”. Well I’m sure that’s a great definition of something, but certainly not of widgets.
While we try and define widgets using metaphor and simile, we’ll become unstuck. Widgets are a symptom, in my view, of a much broader shift in how we consume information and services.
We can call the new paradigm “atomization” and say that it is about streams of content being delivered seamlessly into new and alien environments – like the adwords that sprouted overnight onto just about every surface of the internet in 2003.
We could talk about the new paradigm being about personalization, users can now take just the content they want and see it just where they want it.
But the real shift is deeper than that. It is the resolution of all of the systems integration problems which made it difficult to deliver truly customer focused website solutions the first time round in “Web 97”. RSS does bits of that, and so does XML. Although personally I think it’s crazy that the public to know about RSS. It is like them knowing about SQL and C#.
RSS is just the tip of it, of course. For an industry that normally can’t agree on anything, it’s amazing that there are now shared paradigms in webservices, in APIs. There are standardized design patterns for cross site interfaces of all types. And this is why we now have mashups all over the place – both very publicly on the web, where you can see them, and more quietly in lots of back offices, where you can’t.
Widgets are a symptom of that. For a developer of a large website widgets are a way to get their services out there (in this respect content is a service). And that is why they are often seen as little more than affiliate marketing schemes; designed to return traffic to the mothership
From a pure developer’s point of view, widgets are a great way to expose one webservice or a number of webservices to users. They’re also often the easiest coding project in the end-of-year computer-science project.
But widgetisation isn’t the end game. It’s the middle game.
I don’t know if you’ve seen the Last FM / MySpace widget. You go to Last FM and type in a few details and WHAM, they go and stick a load of javascript onto your myspace page, to make it look even uglier. Think the Last FM / Facebook integration will look like that? I don’t. I think it’ll be properly integrated to create a good user experience.
As with all significant technological improvements, users will adopt it when they hardly even know they’re doing it. We can’t very well make that claim now for adding widgets in Vista. It’s easier on Live.com or iGoogle but is still not easy enough for my mum.
So many widgets are born in the name of “branded utility” (the idea that brands should “do something” for their customers). But what good is a widget with all the utility in the world if only the uber-geeks can get the bloody thing working.
To install a third party widget on my desktop the other day for Nike + ipod, I had to agree to seven Vista security warnings- each with a bigger and more inflamed error message. And that was after spending 5 minutes finding the bugger.
Even then it didn’t work very well. No branded utility there.
Apart from poor usability (and to a certain extent, findability), what else will limit the spread of distributed technologies, not just widgets but general integration across systems and desktops? Well content owners are going to have to find a way to let go a bit, and yet still keep their eyes on revenue streams. If this means advertiser funded content, then we’ll have to find a way to make that acceptable. If it’s micropayments, then we’ll need much lower barriers to entry.
We hear the cries of foul play from Newspaper owners like the Telegraph about RSS content devaluing or ripping off their output. These sectors should look at what’s happening to music now and for the last couple of years. Don’t fight the tide, find a way to profit from what consumers want, because they will get it in the end.
Taking the broader picture of data and service integration, if we look at the medium term we’ll be seeing plenty of plays in Software as a Service from people like Google and Microsoft, and webservice integration will be a battleground, not because customers want to tailor the interface themselves or geek around with mashups, but because they just want it richer and more fulfilling.
On the flipside the idea of ‘download’ will become fairly meaningless with the speed of connection and the ability to install light, protected applications within the new operating system frameworks, or even straight within browsers will seem like a good, helpful thing for users. And we’ll start to see rich interface applications which again will be fully integrated but don’t just reside in the sidebar – ‘widgets’ plus.
My favorite prediction du jour is not just a facebook widget for my mobile phone, but a facebook app for my phone that replaces it’s current, annoying interface with one that tells me the status of whoever I’m about to call, their location and their last change of favourite film and all that. Think what we can do when we start thinking seriously about integrating these services quietly at the back-end rather than painfully on our desktops, phones and browsers.
Future of facebook
Posted: May 20, 2007 Filed under: Futurama, Futurism, geeky Comments OffRather than trying to predict new trends across the whole of the interweb, let’s take things one at a time and try and trend spot just what will happen on Facebook, the site which – within the agency echo-chamber at least – appears to be becoming a bit of a phenomenon.
With the minor exception of their API privacy policy which is a mess as Antony points out, the extremely redundant message below, Facebook have done a very good job of delivering only useful features and extremely usable interfaces so what can we expect to see in the next 6-12 months?
- A tie up with Last FM. That was easy, it’s trailed on the Last FM website. I think we can expect statuses to change depending on listening habbits although the sheer voume of Last FM current output could be a bit overwhelming.
- In-page instant messenger (linked to existing platforms such as Live services perhaps)
- A partnership with a phone service like Skype or Google Talk
- More Mobile. In the states, they’re already doing a really sophisticated mobile service by SMS. Their mobile version of the main platform is really good already but I’d expect closer integration and maybe even a download. In fact that could be the real killer app for mobile – the whole communications experience re-engineered around a social network. A facebook branded phone perhaps. Be interesting to see how the networks would take that on!
There must be more, I’m sure I’ve only just scraped the surface. Anyone from Facebook fancy leaking a few, or any other suggestions? Answers on a postcard please.
Size matters
Posted: May 19, 2007 Filed under: advertising, Futurama, Futurism, geeky, google, marketing Comments Off
The site that promised to measure the size of the internet has failed dismally. It failed for the same reason that “viral” campaigns fail on the internet and in the real world – because the message or motivation wasn’t strong enough. But this shouldn’t be suprising, messages that captivate everyone are incredibly rare. Advertising people should beware – great ideas are great but they have a limited audience. Event the greatest ideas are limited by this.
Incidentally, if the plan were working, maymapname would have 600,000,000,000,000 registrants (that’s actually more than the population of the world) but it actually has 18,000. That’s six thousand more than they had on day five. Well done to them for at least trying (if not that hair cut).
So who will carry out this internet survey? Well facebook is looking like a likely candidate right now (some stats), or MySpace (with 10,000 times the membership of mmn (above)). Or why don’t we just take the Unique Users from Google.
No logo?
Posted: May 19, 2007 Filed under: marketing, social networking, usability Comments OffWhat’s missing from every page of YourSpace except the home page?
Give up?
It’s the logo stupid. Aside from the URL and a couple of subbranding elements (like the player), there is no MySpace branding. The site hands ownership properly to its users but has done a very neat trick through being recognisable just through its (ugly, illegible) UGC design patterns.
(Incidentally, what is all this nonsense about Lily Allen (who I used for the grab above) being fat? If we let Girls Aloud people criticise proper musicians for not being anorexic, we really are in trouble – 2338 responses to that post!).
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