Usable Interfaces

George Parker’s well aimed rant at weak minded advertising for weak beer, included a very interesting idea. While beer advertisers have reduced their media spend on traditional media by almost a quarter, overall market sales have gone up.

What do we learn from that? That the digital media advertising that’s taking-over the budgets is really driving sales? Of course not. It’s easy to forget that advertising isn’t really needed to prop up the segment itself; you don’t need to watch a load of tv spots to think ‘oh I fancy a beer’ or ‘I think I’ll continue to buy detergent’. 

Big budget bought media is all about driving market share for individual brands, and yes we will still soon this stop working. When the big spend (in Seth Godin’s terms in the TV-industrial complex) starts costing more than it brings in, then we really will see an inflection point in the decline of bought media.

(Fantastic cartoons, as usual, courtesy of Gaping Void).

I’ve been thinking about this topic – how the principles of lean manufacturing could teach us something interesting about marketing – for ages, but getting nowhere with writing about it.

Little things keep reminding me I need to get on with it. Like Amelia’s discussion about getting the most passionate customers involved in the marketing of the O2 Cocoon, George Parker’s scathing rant about Ford’s decision to allow its customers to pick more colours for their cars. And the latest today (buried amongst a huge volume of excellent posts all arriving at once) from  Russell Davies’ very interesting campaign piece on taking influences from outside the advertising echo chamber – and in particular from Agile, lean’s equivalent in software engineering – to actually find new ways to think about things.

In The Machine that Changed the World – the book which originally brought some of the secrets of the Toyota Production System (TPS) to the wider world, the authors discuss sales and marketing in the US and Japanese markets from a very academic stand point, as well as starting to extrapolate out what a ‘lean’ marketing system might look like in detail. That vision, written in the late 80s, is unbelievably similar to many of the ideas that are only now being adopted in response to the dwindling effect of purchased attention – or as Seth Godin has it, the death of the TV-industrial complex.

Of course, a lot of this comes back, actually, to product development, and building the right thing in the first place.

The number one manta of the lean movement is well known: ‘reduce waste’, the number two mantra is to fix problems immediately and relentlessly. What do we actually do – let’s be honest -in marketing in the UK and America? Does this description sound totally unreasonable?: we try and take the parity product our client has given us and create a layer of desire – either from a genuine product feature or benefit, or from somewhere else if necessary, to make people want to buy it. We then interrupt what they’re doing and shout that message at them. How often do ad agencies really go back to a client and say, ‘we can’t help I’m afraid, you’re product’s just too shit’?

How would it work if we actually tried to bring the user into the deep design process of the product and it’s marketing? Of course we’re not asking them to actually design the product themselves but we must understand what they want and need; what turns them on; what seems average, run of the mill, unexciting; what they would trade for something else?

We’re already seeing that happening, through blogs, good research and straight-forward customer intimacy from a number of companies, especially those who are changing their production methodologies so that new products can be released all the time.

Here’s another thought experiment. How about we try to rebuild the methods of making advertising in a lean vein. Here’s five things I think we can all agree would have to happen immediately:

1. There’s three people we’d include fully in the actual creative process who are currently excluded – the client, the customer (and/or research company), and the production company (or internal production staff). And we’d include them in planning too, and briefing, and production. And no, the planner can’t stand in for the customer, the account man can’t stand in for the client, and the creative director cannot ‘stand in’ for the team who will actually do the work.
2. Have you ever worked in an ad agency and watched a campaign go wrong? What do people really do when they see that happening? Do they try and fix the problem? Or do they just remove their arse from the firing line.  The closest I’ve seen to the TPS “five whys” of tracking down and elminiating the causes of defects was a marvelous phrase Charles Vallance coined (and lived up to) at VCCP: ‘tough on whingeing and tough on the causes of whingeing’. Having said that…How many times have you worked on an advertising campaign that was a crock of shit, you knew it wouldn’t work and customers would hate it, so did everyone else, but you just kept ploughing on anyhow. I’m going to raise my hand. Be honest!One of the tenants of TPS is the that everyone on the line can stop the process and raise a concern about quality. In fact it’s encouraged. This comes through to Agile and we add to it by ensuring the code must compile every day. Imagine the agency where every member of staff – from Creative Director to courier has a big red button on their desk to hit whenever they see a horrible campaign – there would be sirens going off all day.
3. When a campaign sails through research, is that good or bad for the research company, is it good or bad for the ad agency, is it good or bad for the client? So often we have secret communities of interest – or more importantly disinterest – within the groups working on an ad. That’s how we end up with the compromise agreements that fill our screens. In order for us to do the best work, we need joint responsibility for the overall output. This is what Womack et all (MTCTW) refer to as setting targets “one stage up”, and would essentially tie all agencies fortunes to the success of the ad itself.
4. There should be flexibility, within agencies for staff to move between roles. We’ve all met creatives who are ex-planners or planners who are ex -creatives and we know how well this can work. In terms of team responsibility, does the most experienced member of the team lead, facilitate or get to make all the decisions. There is a role for management in lean to simply enable staff, rather than have to constantly review and overpower their input.
5. Finally and I suspect the only thing that ad agencies will like out of what I’ve just said, is the question of how should the client pay. On results? On time and materials?, as a fixed price?, On the value of the ideas?This is the hardest bit. And that’s because it’s the bit where ad agencies have spent the longest trying to re-invent the relationship in their favor. The truth, I suspect, is that if we could remove the fairy-dust approach most agencies strive for in the creative departments, and work really hard to help the clients understand what happens to get their campaigns done, and to get them right, clients would be happier to cough up for what that should really cost.It’s a real cost of their business after all. But the situation we’ve got ourselves in is exactly the same as the adversarial situation mass-production car companies have found with their downstream suppliers (like the gearbox makers).Procurement departments won’t pay for any product investment or insight, so suppliers (the agencies) spend their entire time concealing their real costs in production, or the creative development.

   Just because some agencies will say they’re giving away the creative for free doesn’t mean procurement departments should buy it, and a low theoretical margin within a suppler is not always the best business choice.

   Part of the point about payment is the question of what the relationship between clients and advertising agencies should look like. For so long as clients or agencies prioritize things that don’t matter to the customer (I mean awards, but there are all sorts of things that can creep into the relationship), that relationship will fail. And it mustn’t be carefree either. It should be consistently transparent how things are going and if mistakes are made. But that won’t happen when there’s always the threat of the client switching agency over an immediate short-term issue. And, if the client does find a problem in their relationship with the agency, they should be able to help get it fixed by working together on the detail, not just switching to a new supplier. In TPS, senior supplier team members are regularly co-opted into product development teams of the assembler. Couldn’t something similar usefully happen in the marketing world. Similarly, senior assembler team members are sent to increase understanding and efficiencies in the supplier. Would that really be any bad thing?

There’s a lot in those five points, and I’m sure there are hundreds more ideas that could be borrowed from the lean movement in the marketing and creative service sectors, as well of course in the actual marketing departments of client firms. But it will be incredibly difficult for  an agency to really embrace these ideas in these most traditional of worlds? It’s a shame, because it’s about time.

Apologies in the delay in writing this up. I’m doing a little “timeshifting” of my own.

On Tuesday, I went to two unusually interesting conference / industry things. The first was e-consultancy’s roundtable on social networking and how it is affecting marketing, the second was Chinwag’s “Web TV takeover“. Both incredibly ripe topics, with some amazing contributors, although Chinwag’s was marred as usual by the venue. This is not something that can be said of the e-consultancy event, which was in a room with some of the best views of London I’ve ever seen (see top). 

Anyhow, e-consultancy are going to post the output of that roundtable which is also held under Chattam House rules so I don’t want to go into too much detail but suffice to say, it was fascinating to sit in a room and have a discussion which started out talking about how marketers can use social media and ended up being about how social media completely re-writes the landscape, forcing actual product innovation, deep customer insight and a whole new way to look at the companies’ relationships with their staff. Sort of Hughtrain meets Purple Cow, with a fair sprinkling of Facebook of course.

Web TV promised to be similarly fascinating, whether you’re a traditional broadcaster or a online specialist, the convergence of the two seems inevitable and fraught with difficulty.

As I mentioned earlier, as with previous events, The Slug and Lettuce on Wardour Street really didn’t spare any effort in attempting to ruin the staging of the event, including turning the volume control on their fridges to 11, staff walking out the kitchen shouting instructions, banging doors and so on.

This wasn’t helped by some audience members the wrong side of a couple of bottles of Chardonnay and shouting obscure tangential comments when not engaged in noisy side conversations.

Some really interesting takeaways in any case. Starting with definitions and a useful break down of the structure of the end-to-end delivery.

The whole panel agreed remarkably quickly that Web TV was IPTV and could be broken down into ‘closed’   networks (Virgin, Home Choice etc) and Open ones (You Tube, Joost). IPTV could also be divided between download and streaming (with the note that YouTube looks like streaming, despite technically being download), and the further consideration between what was sent out from a central point (e.g. 4oD) and what could be distributed over P2P networks (Joost).

In terms of modeling the business process, a good summary was given (by, I think Alexander CameronUPDATE (thanks to Sam Michel) by Alan Patrick of Broadstuff Consultancy). The stages are:

Content Creation: Whether that’s UGC, a studio or repuposing archives

Aggregation: Bringing the stuff together to make shows / channels

Distribution: Getting it to consumers. Clearly this being where the ISPs come in. A key point was made that the network operators on mobile arguable make too much on this. Online, perhaps, they make too little.

Reception: The cost of providing sophisticated set-top boxes may be prohibitive but it provides lock in in a way that using a browser doesn’t – although certainly a better experience. Clearly changing habits and technology in the home are as much a driver of this as what the broadcast networks want to do.

Each of these elements has unique (and often substantial) costs. There are only two real ways of making money – advertising and charging the user directly. Clearly the effectiveness of traditional, interuptive ad formats is being challenged (and a long debate over Google’s (and Bright Cove’s) overlay formats took place at this point). However, it was also suggested that customers would pick ad-funded free content over paid-for content every time. Cosmo Lush (what a great name) from 4oD explained that 4oD continued to experiment extensively with monetisation models and did not, for now, have a single settled strategy.

An amusing moment when Mr Lush (as the only real representative of the broadcast media) was asked whether advertising would completely migrate off traditional TV. His answer was “yes”.

He also talked briefly about a currently small market for “download to own” – the digital equivalent of the box-set market of old. This is currently constrained by confidence in ability to store digital media, but could become hugely lucrative.

The conversation then turned to piracy with Ben Lavendar from LoveFilm Alex Cameron pointing out that piracy was actually what people were doing most (the ‘predominant business model’ as he put it). Clearly the digital video content market will face many of the challenges of the music market in coming to terms with that.

BrightCove’s Raghav Gupta discussed whether a central repository for content would emerge. His answer was that content owners would need to think about a “blended distribution” of their content across multiple analogue and digital platforms. I couldn’t help but wonder whether we don’t have a single home for content already. BitTorrent.

However, the most interesting part of the conversation from my point of view came during the questions. If the current (internet) ISPs feel that they’re being relegated to “pipe-owners” in an increasingly commoditised market, how will they deal with ever more huge amounts of IPTV being run over their networks, with everyone but them seeing the benefit? The risk is that they will start to ‘shape’ (bugger about with) the traffic as it goes through their networks or even align with particular content producers and aggregators in return for a share of the revenue. This could be disasterous and threaten the open nature of the internet. It’s a debate we need to have soon, although not a particularly new one (see Net Neutrality).

It was suggested by one of pannelists that the BBC would deliberately kick this debate off around their new (and frankly awful) iPlayer. I hope they do. This is something we need to resolve before internet becomes the distribution channel for all TV content.

As Andrew Orlowski points out, the new iPod Touch (the iPhone without the phone bit) is, on paper at least, an overpriced, locked-down PDA and one without any games or even an email client for when you’re on WiFi. It is also, however, the only piece of consumer electronics on the market today that will without fail turn grown men and women into delighted children.

In the five days since I bought it at Apple’s Regent Street store, everyone who’s taken the little black gizmo for a spin has ended up staring in disbelief, wide-eyed, slack-jawed and saying ‘wow’ a lot. Think how amazed you were when you first saw the tiny nano, and multiply it by a hundred. One colleague, a little carried away in the moment and flicking through photos asked whether you could put music on it.

How does it achieve this? Obviously it comes in a very good looking case – all of the chrome of the original iPod, the front panel almost entirely a large and bright screen and wafer-thin.

However it is the software which amazes, and in particular, the multi-touch interface. By – just about – managing to get the interface to respond in real time and introducing many levels of immediate functional mapping, Apple has made standard handset interface look decades out of date. It’s as revolutionary as the effect that Apple’s first GUI had on the DOS prompt.

(Above: An add Macintosh ran to congratulate Windows on the tenth anniversary of Windows 95).

The opportunities presented by a malleable, multi-input screen are enormous, as we’ve seen a number of times with Jeff Haan’s demos. Apple’s actually been very retrained in their use of it, presumably on the grounds that people will need to follow a learning curve of some sort. However the interface is almost entirely intuitive with very few people needing even an introduction to the concept.

To start to see some of the potential of this new way of thinking, and how the relatively small screen size of the iPod Touch can be best put to use, we need only look to Facebook’s iPhone interface, which is an absolute joy to use. Perhaps 2008, at last really will be the long-awaited “year of the mobile”.

Yesterday’s keynote from Steve Jobs was, as usual, a great show, full of amazing new products and product innovation. The Nano got even smaller and got video, the shuffle got more memory, the standard iPod got a new name (“classic”) and more storage, the iPhone became a lot cheaper, and he launched the new iPod Touch, an iPhone without the phone bit.

Fascinating to watch and I wouldn’t like to be working at a competitor today, as Apple proves it is relentless in staying ahead of the game.

However, the bit at the end of the presentation was equally intriguing.  Steve Jobs gives up the stage to Starbucks’ founder and chairman Howard Shultz to explain in detail the companies’ new partnership.

Walk into a Starbucks (some time in 2008) with your iPhone or wifi-enabled iPod Touch and new button will turn up on the screen, a Starbucks button! This is so close to one of those Google April Fool’s jokes that it takes a second to realize that a) they’re serious b) what they’re talking has potentially huge impact.

Click (or rather tap, of course) on your new Starbucks button  and via free connection to the Starbucks network you can see what the currently playing song in the restaurant is (and the last ten tracks), and buy that track (from iTunes of course).

Both Apple and Starbucks have always understood the importance of experience design, and this points the way to a whole new generation of experiences that merge the boundaries between physical and electronic.

Shultz describes Starbucks as “a place to discover music”. So while HMV, Virgin et al are licking their wounds and shutting their stores, Starbucks and Apple marches in and takes what’s left of their market. How?, by making something of the experience.

How long before iTunes is the number one music store in the world (currently number 3 in the US)?

In case anyone missed it, Shultz punches home the point:

To build a great enduring company, you can’t embrace the status quo, you have to keep pushing for re-invention and self renewal, and no one has done that better than Apple.

This week is Google week at the Economist. The very funny front cover (above), the main leader (pay walled) and a three-page feature. The point they’re making is that markets don’t know what to make of a company that says it’s not there to make money – especially if it’s the most powerful force in the most revolutionary medium since the printing press.

They also point out that high-minded morals may sound great now but how will they sound if Google ever has to deal with the down times which have recently affected – for example – Yahoo!. And they tell some interesting stories about what it is actually like to work at the GooglePlex; the vision for Google’s cloud-style computing architecture, that the very famous 20% rule never really happens and that by hiring a company full of hyper-geniuses, Google has some difficult HR issues:

…everybody there is a rocket scientist, so everybody everybody is also insecure…. and the back-stabbing and politics are reminiscent of an average university’s English department.

Fascinating stuff of course, as it was when the rest of us were talking about it several months ago (:-)).

Obviously managing the finest minds in the world (there’s now almost 14,000 Google staff) is going to be tricky. Eric Schmidt is pretty clear on that: “tech companies that are dominant have trouble from within, not from competitors.”

But nevertheless Google has the crown jewels. Many of the  finest minds in the world, an amazing scalable computer architecture, the brand and the audience. Demise seems a long way off yet. 

Someone at Fallon must have had a couple of difficult meetings to convince Cadbury’s to do this. It’s a nicely shot little film which is… a Gorilla playing the drums along to a Genesis song. Funny, surprising and certainly unusual. If there’s an idea it is that drumming gorillas (skateboarding dogs?) make you smile, which is what Cadbury’s does?

I can’t decide if it’s very brave or very stupid. Perhaps if it’s outrageous enough, people will remember what the ad is for, but I can’t help thinking you could put any product at the end and make it work: how about the Nissan Micra or Bullmer’s Cider?

This quote comes from a business bigwig, asked whether he uses Facebook.

“No, but I think my secretary does”

I think she probably does too.

The context is this somewhat reactionary piece in the FT asking how businesses should cope with staff wasting hours on social networking sites when they’re supposed to be working. There’s been a lot in the press about this recently with claims that companies need to take action.

We hear that organizations including Transport for London and British Gas have now banned access to the site.

Dresdner Kleinwort are particularly snotty about it, saying: ‘We only provide access to the internet for the purpose of conducting company business.’

What else have they banned? SMS during work hours? personal email? daydreaming? Conversations at the water cooler?

It’s not as if we’re talking about McDonalds here. On their own site, Dresdner Kleinwort proudly boasts: “We’ve proven that we can deliver outstanding solutions for our clients by creating a culture where the best people have the freedom to think differently and to question convention.” … just so long as they don’t have the freedom to use computers to talk to people.

Is it really beyond the realms of imagination that their employees will benefit from communicating with other human beings (inside and outside the organization) during their working days? And since when did we get to such a position of mistrust between companies and the staff that work in them?

Back to the the article. At one point the journalist compares using social networks during work hours to throwing impromptu parties in the office, before returning to the real world with a quote from Gartner consultant, Anthony Bradley ‘if you have to know what employees are doing every hour of the day, you are a bad manager’ .

The article comes in the same week that the TUC, of all people, has put out much saner guidelines for employers about how to deal with the phenomenon. The report is called, “Facing up to Facebook’ (PDF). TUC counsel that allowing reasonable levels of use is perfectly valid, as well as discussing how companies should view and monitor the content which is being posted online.

Employees have a right to a personal life, and provided they do not breach reasonable conduct guidelines, employers should respect this. They wouldn’t follow an employee down the pub to check on what they said to their friends about their day at work. Just because they can now do something akin to this online, certainly doesn’t mean they should.

Thank heavens for a voice of reason.

Aside from this bizarre Dickensian belief that you increase productivity by reducing access to distractions, much of this talk blithely ignores that humans are social animals, who accomplish a great deal more in groups than individually. Faced with the realization that people love Facebook, companies should think laterally about how they can benefit from this, rather than simply trying to turn the clocks back to the good old days of chaining staff to their desks mentally and physically.

This was best phrased by Julian in a joint presentation we did about social networks when he quoted this blog post that 20% of Goldman Sachs employees are now on Facebook.

It’s been a long nine months since I left investment banking, and much may have changed since then, it is a volatile industry. But when I left it, people like Goldmans were not known to employ large numbers of unintelligent time-wasters.