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?
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.
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.
Unintended consequences
Posted: September 21, 2009 Filed under: marketing, twitter Comments OffI’m facinated by unintended consequences.
Tiny, or apparently unrelated acts, can hugely impact people’s lives.
The introduction of rabbits in Austalia is a good example. One expatriate British landowner wanted a little of his home country and so brought out 24 rabbits for hunting to Australia. Within ten years, millions of rabbits plagued Austalia, destroyed the top soil and led to widespread desertification.
Password complexity is another great example of a process which gets so lost in implementation that the original goal is lost. By insisting that passwords are changed monthly, aren’t re-used within 7 months, contain various sorts of characters etc, you are pretty much guaranteeing that users will write them down. They are unlikely, conversely to make them any more secure, chosing instead, a less memorable version of what they were going to have in the first place, i.e. ‘Password1234‘.
Or take the example of Russian car crime quoted in the Register. Concerned by increases in car thefts, Russians took to installing car alarms. The result was that thieves would lie in wait until the owner arrived, shoot them and take the keys.
The last couple of weeks, I’ve been involved in what must surely be an example of ‘unintended consequence’ closer to home. And I think this is something with which probably an increasing number of people can identify.
Having had a pretty sketchy experience with both BT and Paypal, with different levels of unsatisfactory customer service, I mentioned my puzzlement on Twitter.
Now I’d never done this before, so I didn’t know what to expect. To be honest I didn’t really expect very much at all, perhaps a few of my pitifully small band of followers would say ‘yep, I’ve had problems with Paypal too’ or ‘BT are shit’ or whatever. Perhaps they’d even pick up on it themselves and offer to resolve it, but both organisations seemed unlikely to be this switched on.
So, imagine my suprise, when within the hour, both sevices were basically mugging me on Twitter. Ostensibly they were trying to help. Although, of course, help they did not.
Paypal were the calmer of the two, trying to switch almost immediately to a non twitter public channel and find out what had happened. Within a day I was escalated to ‘executive escalations’, who gave me a piece of advice I’d be very suprised to hear on Twitter – that I should charge goods back to Paypal, because their own policy didn’t cover the eventuality of the product I had bought with them not working. Very polite throughout, and frankly wise enough not to battle it out in public, although I continue to believe they mis-sell their buyer protection abilities substantially.
BT on the other hand were like a group of mad relatives. And mad relatives that don’t talk to each other. I’d already had different advice from two different customer service reps about the issue (which was that I failed their credit check, despite being an existing customer and having passed it numerous times – this is something BT can do ‘nothing’ about!). They just kept firing @messages at me, as well as a few directs. They asked me to email them, to phone them (all of these done already) and seemed quite narky about the whole thing. It did nothing to resolve my issue and certainly nothing to make me think more highly of BT customer services.
This raises a couple of questions. Why pay people to sit and watch Twitter unless they stand a chance in hell of helping people. If they’re just there to say ‘phone customer services’ then what, frankly, is the point; except for an unwanted invasion into social media.
Secondly, and more importantly, is it possible that we are teaching customers that the best way to complain about a product or service is loudly and publicly. If I get screwed over again by either of these companies then I know that on Twitter I’ll get a faster response, a generally brighter respondent, and it also feels like – while it remains public – I’ve got a bit more chance of getting a result.
The moral here is – as often – beware oversimple advice from social media gurus. An excellent definition of unintended consequences is the failure of an attempt to model a complex problem with a simple solution.
If your consultants are telling you to be on Twitter to answer customer queries, then remember the prerequisites: am I providing the best possible customer service elsewhere?, and will the poor twits I’m hiring to track the conversation acutally be able to do anything other than produce hot twitter-flavoured air. If not, you’re likely to be part of the problem, not part of the solution. And, what you get for your ‘customer service’ investment may be a lot more flack you couldn’t deal with in the first place, but this time it’s there for ever and out in the open for customers to see your problems.
Hierachy of feeds
Posted: April 4, 2009 Filed under: marketing, psychology, twitter 1 Comment »I’ve gotten into a bad habbit. Recently, I’ve found myself only wanting to write about topics when I can think of a good headline. Which reminds me, a new high-watermark was set by a genius in the copy-editing team at the Sun this week. A front-page banner headline relating the Jacqui Smith expenses furore (over her husband claiming for some dodgy movies on a hotel bill) reads ‘The Porn Ultimatum’. The Sun has always had great headline writers (e.g. two previous corkers associated with the John Darwin story: ‘Canoe accompany us to the station’ and ‘The liar, the witch and the wardrobe’) but I thought this was real ‘stunna’.
Anyhow, I digress. And in fact, today’s headline is acutally more of a polish than an invention. The Innovations Diaries’ post is called ‘Hieracy of Tweets’, and it came along just as I was thinking about precisely the same issue: what have a 1940s psychologist and a 21 century microblogging service got in common?
What Innovation Diaries were talking about is the psychology of twittering. If we look at the bizarre range of stuff that comes up on the trendy microblogging site, it maps across base human desires and needs – hunger, tiredness etc – through higher-order needs such as love and belonging to the grandly named ‘self-actualisation’, relating directly to the concepts to Maslow’s famous hierachy of needs.
This connection is a very interesting one, although I think there’s actually more juice to it than you might get from the examples given in the diagram or in the post.
At the base of it, the needs themselves are real. It is not enough to talk about eating cake – people must actually eat it. Twitter’s not a lot of use for that (although let’s not rule it out: ‘CAKEIFY: just twitter with #blackforrestgateaux…’), but it can be of help at the other end of the spectrum where we’re talking about morality, creativity and problem soliving. So we can think about how people can directly meet the ‘esteem’ need or the ‘self-actualisation’ need through twitter rather than just reflect upon it.
This is an approach to planning and design in digital which we’ve been talking about for a while now, and there are some good examples of it in the wild. In a very real sense, people who are generating content for places like YouTube, or doing work with mashups in technology are squarely exercising their right to self-actualise (and, isn’t that a charmless phrase).
It’s also worth noting (as Innovation Diaries do), that not all of the base instincts are strictly physical, psyiological needs. We’ve talked here in the past about Intermittent Variable Reinforcement, the addictive property which comes from plugging yourself into a unpredicatable but constant stream of updates. Modern relationships are moving towards placing a hugely increased value on ‘ambient intimacy’ in the emotional rhomboid.
People like Forrester talk about a ‘ladder of participation‘ for social media Just like the government and parents think cannabis leads to harder drug use, the analysts believe that the internet people are weaned on a diet of commenting and rating, before eventually picking up blogging and twittering. Certainly we know from building sites and things that participation does seem to drop off in accordance with required sophistication and effort.
To mix metaphors, Twitter has arrived on the ladder at an odd time. Or perhaps blogs did. I’m certainly not saying that Twitter is low-brow, although it can be. But it requires a weird mix of low involvement and high sophistication. Twitter may be the new black, or the second coming of the messiah, but its use would appear ‘lower’ down our hierachy of needs than many more expressive and creative formats. If the conservative party weren’t so busy jumping on bandwagons, or the Daily Mail knew what it was, they’d both be criticizing it for ‘dumbing down’ social media.
A revolution that started with the highest of brows (endless blogs about politics, philosophy, (marketing) and (ahem) blogs) appears to be descending towards our more reptilian insticts.
I think the reason is that Twitter has no antecedant at all. Blogs are like articles, Facebook is like an address book (or facebook), Myspace is the teenager’s bedroom wall. But we’ve had nothing like twitter before.Were any of us taught at school to communicate in single thoughts?
Hopefully with mainstreaming of Twitter will come a rebirth of blogs and other, richer social media – a chance to get people thinking about more than one idea at time, and in more depth.
You can’t say that in 140 characters.
Just because you can
Posted: March 28, 2009 Filed under: agencies, marketing, twitter 2 Comments »
I’m not a twitter expert. This seems to put me in the minority. And it’s a great thing that so many people have a view on what the microblogging service is doing in communications and how people, and companies, should be interacting with it.
Over at e-consultancy there’s been a couple of recent interesting outbreaks of expertise. The first was the victim of poor research. John Gaffney went about a critique of Walmart and Best Buy’s social media strategy. His assertion was that the brands ought to be on Twitter and were not. I’m guessing the author was probably more suprised than anyone when the first comment came from the Best Buy community editor themselves and talking about the amazing work they are actually doing. Other commentors pointed out the author himself had only been on the service 1 month and had posted 14 times. The author apologized, the editor delivered a half-hearted apology, Ashely Friedlin jumped in with something more closely resembling attrition, and the post itself was updated to recognise the error.
So far, so much schadenfreude. I’m sure Gaffney will not repeat that mistake, and I’m sure e-consultancy will in general continue to be the broadly respectable rag for news, opinion and social media that it has been to date.
The post was then followed up by e-consultancy editor Chris Lake carrying out a sort of half-arsed audit of what the biggest agencies in the UK are doing about twitter. Essentially he had taken the NMA top 50 agencies (overall) and looked to see whether they had a twitter feed under their own name. I think it would be fair to describe the research in this case as brief, consisting of how many followers and posts each account has and so on.
Without wanting to repeat the debate which became lengthy, the point emerged fairly quickly that agencies (like mine which is in the list) have often started out with a company feed, only to move to individuals twittering under their own names fairly quickly. I think it’s also fair to say that the mere presence or absence of a twitter stream does not confirm or deny a reasonable approach to the medium – just as the presence of a brain does not imply brain activity.
I sort of pointed this out on the post (and to be fair, unlike the e-consultancy twitter feed, the author was all over the replies). It has taken me a couple of days to spot the gotcha in this part of the author’s response to me:
I’ve seen thought-leadership work wonders for agencies and Twitter enables that quite brilliantly. No longer do you have to release a white paper, or in-depth blog posts, but you can communicate at a micro level on a platform that is targeted to people’s interests.
I’m sorry it’s taken me a little while to realise what is was that was jarring in the author’s response but isn’t ‘thought leadership’ something that PR people invented in the late 90s. I don’t mean promoting yourself through good ideas. I mean the concept that a single thought-leading idea will be used in marketing or PR. Isn’t is an idea precisely oriented to single-track mass media of which Twitter is the antithesis?
For me, the benefit of Twitter in terms of promoting our agency is that people can see that there is a great deal of (leading) thought going on, and they can get involved in those thoughts and start a debate. But EMC Conchango as an entity doesn’t have a single view on anything. It’s got 400 views. Some are about technology, some about society, some about e-commerce, and on and on. We’re a pretty engaged bunch and we talk about stuff a lot, so we’re often broadly in agreement on certain points but the suggestion that there is an EMC Conchango view point on anything (or indeed an e-consultancy view on anything) seems wrong to me. That would be a denail of thought, and certainly wouldn’t be an indication of our leadership position. Unless we were following the North Korea model.
Of course, one size will not fit all, and it will make sense for some organisations (especially one-man agencies – or two-man agencies where one man doesn’t have any opinions) to blog as an enttity. I for one am delighted to know that more big agencies are prefering to let staff think (and communicate) for themselves in such a personal new medium.
A funny thing happened on the way to the forum
Posted: March 12, 2009 Filed under: advertising, agencies, marketing, skittles 2 Comments »
In the last post, I talked a bit about the new Skittles site. This post really comes by way of an apology for a small experiment I ran following that post, and a couple of unexpected observations that came out of it.
The experiment was to try and take over the twitter search feed which had previously been (all of) the Skittles new ‘social media concept’ home page. The idea was to turn it into a large advert for something other than Skittles. As alluded to by Amelia , I could have chosen a a very ‘specialist’ or even offensive product. Instead I went for a simple, delicious and peanutty competitor, Reese’s Pieces - not least because I’m mildly addicted to them.
Unfortunately by this stage, the Twitter feed was no longer the site’s home page (instead being relegated to the ‘chatter’ section). Something tells me it might quietly disappear altogether fairly soon.
Frankly, it was very easy to do. Indeed, it could easily be accomplished using brute force alone. All you need to do is set up a twitter account and constantly repost comments about your product with the word ‘skittles’ (not even the hash tag) in them.
So far, so good. I coloured it up a bit by also creating an identity for my product and an appropriate little picture.
Manually putting the posts in is a bit dull so I set up a (google) app engine page to do it, using one of the Twitter APIs. That sounds fiddly but actually wasn’t much more complex than adapting some code samples from the web. App engine itself is relatively easy to understand, and it’s free.
I’d originally plalnned to post ‘Personally I prefer Reese’s Pieces to Skittles’ at regular intervals. GAE doesn’t currently have prebuilt fixed interval event calling (what’s called CRON) although this approach would still have been easily done. Instead, I turned it into a poll, where other users would click on a link saying, basically, ‘click here if you prefer RP to Skittles’. Each time it was clicked, the poll question was reposted.
And that was it. Every post on the Skittles chatter page for most of the weekend was someone saying they prefer a competitor product, and showing a picture of it.
There were a couple of issues, aside from being pointless. Firstly,Twitter limits tweets per hour which made the page hijacks bunch up a bit (although, again, I can think of multiple straight-forward solutions, if this were a serious attempt to cause trouble).
Secondly, someone – perhaps Mars or their agency, perhaps Twitter themselves, perhaps a search engine or a spammer was following posted links automatically – leading to loop that would ‘vote’ for RP every second or so – until tweet sending per hour was reached. Again, this could be easily fixed for a proper attempt to regulate the flow.
Was it vandalism? It certainly looked like it on their site, but really that is more a reflection of the Skittles’ approach. The way Twitter search works means that a feed with no followers, which is only a few minutes old, can dominate the search results. There is no inbuilt mechanism in this sort of setup to infer the authority of the post or the poster.
Clearly I was being a pain deliberately but there can’t ever be a reason why a lonely twitterer shouldn’t be able to say what they want to themselves (bear in mind that ReesePieces1, my Twitter identity had zero followers for most of the experiment – although even this bizarre character picked up three SPAM followers in a couple of days). And Skittles can scarcely object to their customers using the brand name – that’s the entire premise of this whole stunt.
So, my apology is to anyone who found the experiment intrusive or annoying, although it certainly showed what I wanted to test.
Whilst I’ve found the whole Skittles site launch most peculiar, it has been interesting to watch both the reaction to it, and the variety of thinking about what it means.
For me, the most telling aspect has been the brand’s reaction to trouble. Having Twitter as the dominant social media format certainly was quite brave. When that started going wrong, they switched to Wikipedia. Well it didn’t talk about deviant sexual practices, but you’d have to conclude that no one at the agency had really read it.
This is what it said at launch:
Skittles is a brand of chewy fruit candies produced and marketed by Mars, Incorporated. They have hard sugar shells which carry the letterS. The inside is mainly sugar and hydrogenated vegetable oil along with fruit juice, citric acid and natural and artificial flavors.
…..
Since then, the main Wikipedia entryhas been toned down a bit (by the agency?) and the Skittles.com links to Wikipedia have been updated to point at this bland varieties page. The Skittles.com home page now points to the brand’s YouTube channel (the area they control most) and shows the brand’s TV ads… which is exactly what every other ‘convenitional’ FMCG brand site is. Was it worth it?
No crisis wasted
Posted: February 21, 2009 Filed under: marketing, recession Comments Off
One of the most compelling, and commented on, phrases that has emerged from the new Obama administration is that ‘no crisis should be allowed to go to waste’. There’s some not very subtle code in here, regarding redistribution, and of course some powerful rhetoric (as we heard in inaugaration) about a new era of responsibility.
Similarly, most of the building blocks for the current surge in web usage came from the post-meltdown era for .coms in 2001/2002. What is the combination of conditions that make recessionary or post-recessionary periods so fruitful?
Part of it must be the better allocation of funds to ideas. In 1999 and again in 2007, every startup with a stupid and unpronoucable name was scooping millions from VCs fairly indiscriminantly, which began to make some people nervous about bubble 1.0 (which arrived) and bubble 2.0 (which may still be as bad but hasn’t been yet).
Now all these megzutulu.coms are quietly shutting their doors, perhaps we are in better shape to nurture the new YouTube; the new ideas that have value.
The same seems true of individuals. In the good times, our companies might be full of people saying ‘bollocks to the revenue, let’s just do lots of stuff’. Recessions favour the pragmatic who will make something of the best ideas that have come out so far.
Whatever you get told in the introduction to brainstorms, there is such a thing as a bad idea. And, in a very real sense, when the filter is removed, the bad ones can crowd out the good ones. A positive effect of recession is to stop for one second the constant drive for the adoption of every new ideas and to try and make the old ones work a bit.
Like Lehmans, the collapse of the never-going-to-work.com should be met with a solemn and slightly-disappointed cheer of approval.
From a more technical perspective, a lot of consolidation in the early noughties drove business agility – in architectures, in standards and in thinking. Standardisation of systems and interchanges on many levels opened the door for faster business change. A similar drive for price efficiency is what’s driving the architectural revolution of virtualisation and, now, ‘in the cloud’ application development. Today’s speculative new technologies like Google’s app engine, Amazon’s EC3 and Microsoft’s Azure will be tomorrow’s everyday development springboards.
There are risks in the clensing effect of these disruptions:
1. Good ideas get snuffed out prematurely.
2. The tyranny of ‘consistency’ and ‘efficiency‘ thinking. Anyone who has worked in or with a large company will know how negative and thought-free a drive for ‘consistency’ and ‘efficiency’ can be. Companies that describe themselves as ‘entrepreneurial’ in good times often seem to lose their nerve entirely in bad. I’ve started to refer to consistency as ‘the c* word’, as it is so often used mindlessly to justify low-value (and high-cost) consolidation programmes.
In this setting, many companies seem to forget that they employ people, not resources. And that no good idea has ever been created in Excel (Umair Haque: ‘spreadsheets are not strategy’). There seems to be an active effort to forget that the lowest common denominator is always less than the highest common multiple. When we are talking about costs, we are rarely talking about value for business or customers.
Where it makes sense to create ‘efficiency’ is in the ability to be more creative, not less. It is not creativity which incurs costs, it is bad or lazy thinking. We all know intuitively the difference between pointless ‘make work’ schemes and teams that are genuinely trying to drive the business forward – they should not both be stubbed out together.
The recipe, therefore, to come out of all of this on top, should be an agility agenda, combined with rewards for innovation and frameworks for creativity, rather than 1,000,001 cost saving ‘initiatives’.
Crisis in branding 2 – the revenge
Posted: January 7, 2009 Filed under: marketing 3 Comments »Disorganized ramblings from the ‘trying things out for size’ department and the ‘Yesterday was Epiphany’ team:
The original crisis in branding in the 70s – staring Bruce Willis – was a result of the multiple retailers asserting the power they had over the consumers’ attention spans to push out brands and promote own labels. And, of course, the ad agencies – including JWT who named the phenomenon – responded with oodles of ads featuring puppies to find a way to drive consumer demand for particular brands, via the mass media.
Today’s crisis in branding feels somewhat more intractable, although the response has been the same. The onslaught this time, of course, is coming from consumers retaking control over their media environment.
Clay Shirky today took an interesting viewpoint on twitter: “when someone asks ‘how does this social media stuff really scale?’ they really mean ‘how do I become a spammer?’.
Was mass meida advertising SPAM? I think Russell Davies’ analysis is the clearest discussion of this I’ve read: advertising is tolerated when it is part of a value exchange; everything else is SPAM.
Is all online advertising SPAM? Well not the search stuff obviously, because its quite useful, at times – although, of course, advertisers are still using SPAM to try and get up there in the natural listings. But in the context of the internet, which is after all 99% SPAM in the first place, I’ve not seen much display advertising has can even match the charm of Coronation Street break-bumpers. Perhaps all banners should have a strip at the top saying ‘we’re paying for all of this you know…, so give us just a second of your time’.
If the challenge in traditional advertising is likability, online is way behind. First, we’ll first need to get to a situation where the ads are even perceived.
Even the agencies themselves seem to be wondering about the future of advertising. How many ads are BBH buying for Mrs 0 I wonder. Or is not advertising part of zagging?
Of course there’s branded utility. The second Nike+ should be along in just a moment. And of course, we learn that making better products will produce talkability. But how about these incontinence pants I need to market?
If money can’t buy you attention any more, and your product is never, realistically, going to be a purple cow today, how can we get the word out?
The solution for brand managers – unenviable title of the week – lies where they think the problem is… these damn kids. ‘Talking about brands’ is something that focus groups do, and agency directors, and my great aunts. For brands within genuine youth networks, brands are linguistic or social tokens.
Clearly, we’ve all seen that attempts to crassly motivate these networks; to feed in messages and propositions as we did with mass media, are prone to failure. Crass value exchanges – here’s a pacman game from Haribo – are not a lot smarter.
Instead we need to motivate discussion, to take themes that exist and amplify them or the communities that use them.
Soap operas
Posted: November 20, 2008 Filed under: advertising, Futurama, Futurism, marketing, web2.0 Comments Off
So Ted McConnell, P&G’s general manager for interactive marketing and innovation has just told a conference audience that he didn’t want to buy any more ads on Facebook (thanks to Dan W for the link).
He succinctly summarises his thinking:
“What in heaven’s name made you think you could monetize the real estate in which somebody is breaking up with their girlfriend?”
This might come as more of a shock if anyone were actually currently buying the endless inventory of Facebook. Despite the fact that you can theoretically target your audience by the colour of their pubic hair and their cat’s favourite cheese, most of the ads I see (and lets face facts, I barely even notice most of them) are for… Facebook ads:
I really hope someone can tell me that ad has been taregeted to me (twice).
The truth of course, is that the last place you can reach your customers before they search, is on Facebook itself – they’re way too busy finding out which of their friends is now in a ‘complicated’ relationship or is playing a new game of scramble.
McConnell hints at the very conceit in the constuction of the phrase ‘social media’ and ‘consumer generated media’. It may be both social and consumer generated but that does not mean it’s a place where people want to hear about low-fat yoghurt or taking part in medical trials.
Social media banner placements are so woeful they make traditional online media placements look good. But, we all know most banners are still ignored. In a social setting, they are completely invisible.
Of course, this is good and bad. Its good because hopefully it will reduce the amount I need to learn about teeth whitening, sanitary protection, mid-sized family vehicles and no-end of products which simply are not relevant to me.
It’s bad to the extent that virtually every good idea we hear about on the internet is supposed to be supported by advertising. And of course, now we’re in GRAVE FINANCIAL PANIC, it’s no longer fashionable to have no viable business plan. It’s like the dull old early noughties all over again, for heaven’s sake. Facebook, presumably, can go on for quite a while selling pieces of itself to MIcrosoft for eye watering sums. But what about the other poor souls. Who’s going to stump up for the Twitter SMS bill? Will you buy just one advertising campaign for this poor suffering dot.com. Your £15,000 can pay for a branding exercize for a start-up today!
Economics, presumably, will do its thing. As more inventory arrives on more and more sites where the user will work harder and harder to assiduously ignore the ads, the price for impression will fall forever lower. What’s the lowest it can be bought now? 5 cents CPM? 3? Soon, Startuplr.com will need to show 100,000 terrible, ineffective impressions to make $1.
At these sort of rates and responses, direct mail is starting to look pretty sexy again. As is prayer. And of course, all the while google get to charge upwards of $20 CPC for some of it’s best keywords.
To get back to he point, the interesting question is where will P&G spend their money. Utopians might say ‘on the product’ or ‘on utility’ but the truth is that branding and brand promotion must still exist. And it must still exist because consumers use non-rational methods of making decisions (debate). And so, it still makes sense to try and add to the pure satisfactions of the product or service.
I think we’ll see lots more experimentation and some pretty bad mistakes. We’ll see lots more ads, and ignore almost all of them. And , at some time in this period of self-imposed adversity over the next 14 months, someone will find a way to more perfectly capture, understand and influence users’ intent and interest. This will keep Facebook’s over ambitious promise of capturing users before they acutally search and will make someone new a great deal of money (incuding P&G’s). Unless Google gets there first.
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