See the light
Posted: May 13, 2007 Filed under: interface, microsoft, programming Comments OffLast week at Mix, Microsoft announced a huge raft of new products. Attendees describe the wave upon wave of releases as somewhat disorientating, overwhelming in its sheer volume so that some of key details may have been overlooked by much of the audience. Certainly many of the developments (like the relationship with Hugh McLeod) point to a corporation which is reassessing its position with consumers and customers.
In particular on both, amid the release of Silverlight and Silverlight Streaming Services, as well as the more open Live Services Platform, it seems that much of the audience missed the annoucment of a 50k CLR. For 50k more download than the core Silverlight plugin, users can download a Common Language Runtime (CLR), enabling developers to build multiplatform objects in any supported language (compiled and uncompiled): C#, Java, Ruby and Python. This brings the promise of multi-platform computing which has been talked about for the last ten years to reality (if beta reality).
So while the delegates were talking about whether Silverlight was or wasn’t a “flash killer”, what was really being announced was the death of Java. Or, to put it another way, .net is now a mac development platform.
Stop me if you think that you’ve HERD this one before
Posted: May 13, 2007 Filed under: advertising, books, brand 2 Comments »I hardly ever give up on a book. There was a Kate Atkison book my mother gave me for Christmas four years ago but that’s about it.
Well Herd has stopped me in my tracks. This feels like real shame because I think the idea behind it is brilliant and the key insight is central to understand who we are as a race. And the author, Mark Earls, has clearly really put his back into it.
Apparently, The Guardian described the book as “Like Malcolm Gladwell on Speed”. Well that’s exactly right, although I suspect not in the way it was intended. Take the clear, insightful, reasoned writing style of Gladwell and make it verbose, egotistical, aphoristic, incoherent and go on too long, and you have Herd. For a writer who tells us there is no well defined concept of ‘I’, he is certainly fond of the pronoun. And some of the misadventures in reasoning are blinding. The works of Descartes, Hobbes, Adam Smith and Thomas Kuhn are covered in a couple of sentences each. The golden rule hypothesis, the source of language, autism and many more huge discussions become minor supporting characters in the grand Earl’s hypothesis that… we are a social creature.
A good summary of some of the key thinking of the book (and it’s application to CRM) is in this adliterate post.
In short I think the conclusions are right, if the journey slightly tortorous:
- People are social. They value social interaction and are made stronger by it. It is central to how we learn and develop.
- Market research is likely to be unreliable. Because people don’t really understand their own motivations, certainly not when quizzed outside a social context
- Consumers-to-consumer is more powerful than business-to-consumer (and of course, it is now possible en masse for the first time in history). If you can generate word of mouth marketing, it will be effective.
- Be more interesting
- Let go of the brand
- Don’t try and manage what can’t be managed. Be realistic about how much you can control and refocus your efforts on doing the things you can control – product, production etc – better
A couple of Bullmore quotes which I’ve had lying around for ages that seem to top that off:
“Brands… are made and owned by people… by the public… by consumers”
The image of a brand is a subjective thing. No two people, however similar, hold precisely the same view of the same brand.”
Like Cluetrain, Herd seems to describe what is happening with consumer empowerment and brands, without providing concrete advice to marketers about how to respond (if we can all agree that “co-create”, “be more interesting” and “harness word-of-mouth marketing” are not really practical advice). It’s easy to see why many marketers feel threatened by all this, as it marginalizes or makes impotent much of what until recently has been the day job.
I really like the idea that the new marketplace reduces “gaming”. What does that mean? Well in SEO gaming is obvious, it’s trying to artificially drive traffic to your site, despite not really being relevant. Indeed you can think of Google’s primary mission online to be to reduce SPAM and to fight against people who are gaming their system.
Now look at how they are looking to deal with video advertising (advertisers pay more for unpopular pre-roll ads). Isn’t it possible to see the empowered consumer network as a force against gaming in advertising – where that could mean the telling of lies, the telling of irrelevancies or using other mechanics which mislead or overpower consumers? This means we will drive out relevance and efficiency in consumer brand selection by forcing brands to communicate honestly, relevantly, interestingly and engagingly. And how do we do this? Together, using the internet.
The home of the journey
Posted: May 13, 2007 Filed under: advertising, meme, viral marketing 1 Comment »
Everyone seems to be raving about the Club Internet advert (above). Apparently it’s a new dawn of creativity online, going so far beyond what is possible on the normal or expanding banner advertising formats.
Well it’s certainly an interesting thing to watch. If you got the spare 25 minutes it takes to load, then the effect (of the actors in a l-rec style ad falling out of the ad format and continuing their fight on the page) is funny and entertaining. And it’s well executed by the agency that did it. It is also, however essentially a TV advert on the interweb. The idea is clearly about a webpage that turns into a battleground, but this ad would work better on the TV without the load time and lag, and without the need to look like the page works when actually its a big picture. Doing the ad on TV would also allow for a voiceover to explain what the advert is FOR. Since the offer (broadband for 30 euromarks) is otherwise completely lost as the page itself is background and is destroyed in the duel.
Much of this comes back to a lot longer-running debate, and what promises to be an ongoing and hotly contested fight about who’s best to do digital advertising (digital people or advertising people), and slightly more involved, where does the marketing stop and the business process start in such a connected environment.
All of these debates are posing difficult practical questions for clients and sending many traditional agencies into a bit of a spin. Well documented was BBH’s response when it won the pan European Axe work (it’s all about the creative idea). And we’ve seen it go the other way too. AQKA win Yell’s above the line account and Agency.com got Ikea’s. Once again, “it’s all about creative ideas” but with a bit more of the user-journey thinking built in.
This is the quote from John O’Keeffe - executive creative director of BBH London - which also formed the heart of a Campaign article
“A couple of years ago, we might have been at a disadvantage in a pitch like this, simply for lack of having the digital craft skills in-house. We now have that capability: whereupon this, and any other digital pitch for that matter, comes down to the same question that decides any such process: who has the best idea?”
As someone who has worked in this setting, I understand a little bit of what sits behind the headlines, and the functional problems that can exist trying to actually get these projects to work. Stories abound of the fairly disasterous digital audi work BBH has just completed and the departure of their head of digital production after only three months. There go those ‘craft skills’, which one has to assume were at least in part being borrowed from other agencies in any case for the pitches. Doubtless, though the very difficult traditional/digital agency mergers will continue for some years to try and solve these problems.
In a lot of cases (like the one we started with), the problem is that “creative idea” actually really means a visual or video idea. Becuase the sort of creative breakthrough which allows for really good user-engagement online, are actually creative planning ideas – consumer insights brought to life, combined with an understanding that online people take action rather than just builidng memories. But we also still see so many agencies unable or unwilling to take onboard the insights of the Cluetrain manifesto to understand why online is not another channel – you don’t always get to select the method and means by which you speak to consumers.
And the debate rumbles on. Ashley Friedlein of e-consultancy last week set the scene again for this most contentious of battles, which Jim Taylor has also done a great job of mapping out in his Space Race (very much an insider’s view, loaded with keen observation about the what real structural constraints that are driving the industry).
Is there an upside to this in-fighting? Although a few skirmishes still happen, the advertising agency world does seem to have at least withdrawn from the battleground of the functional website, thank heavens. What we need now is a new brand of agencies that can do for digital advertising what web agencies have done for websites. But those won’t be set apart by cunning production methodologies or outsourcing to India, but by a redefinition of what planning and creative mean in this setting, and how that relates to user’s needs and desires.
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