second brain

mirror neurons: fire!

A small but brilliant example of social contagion, from the Sasquatch Music Festival:

(Via Jonah Lehrer, who links it to the Milgram experiment and to Jane Jacobs's wonderful dictum "Life attracts life".)

political animals

Our Prime Minister lives to fight another day. We can leave the politics to Marbury - here I want to point out how Brown owes his survival to the convergence of two powerful social-psychological phenomena.

First, behaviorial norms. The meeting of Labour MPs at which Brown received his party's backing meant everyone was in one room and 'visible'. By packing it with supporters and making the most noise, the Brownies successfully created powerful social momentum for their man.

Second, loss aversion. The Euro election results were so bad that, paradoxically, it has made the party want to stick with what it knows. Labour MPs are now in a position analogous to that of voters following the economic crash, who were suddenly drawn to the PM. Once they knew the sky wasn't going to fall in, voters deserted him again. If and when Labour starts to rise in the polls as the economy recovers later this year, Brown might start to feel more confident. But according to my reading, this will be exactly when he needs to worry about his own MPs again.

where our knives have fallen

This is from an Ipsos/Reuters poll that's based on data from 23 countries that make up 75 percent of the world's GDP.

re-twittering

Nielsen made quite a lot of headlines a few months ago when it published data purporting to show that Twitter has very low retention rates (certainly compared with facebook and myspace). I was inclined to believe this, given that I'm a mild Twitter-sceptic myself (albeit a user). But I've just come across this counterblast that argues convincingly that Nielsen's analysis is flawed because it failed to take into account migration to third-party applications.

when it comes to pleasure, are you myopic or hyperopic?

If you're a government - or a brand - how do you get people to spend during a recession? This stimulating piece by Virginia Postrel in the Atlantic focuses on our inherently schizo natures:

Behavioral economists, whose work combines the techniques and ideas of economics and psychology, have long focused on what Thomas Schelling, the 2005 Nobel laureate, called the “intimate contest for self-command”—the all-too-familiar inner conflict between the would-be disciplined self who wants to get up early, exercise, and lose weight and the pleasure-seeking self who prefers to sleep in, watch TV, and eat chocolate. These two selves, Schelling noted, don’t necessarily exist at the same time. The disciplined self imagines future virtues, while the pleasure-seeking self succumbs to present urges. “If the person could make the final decision about that action at the earlier time, precluding a later change in mind,” Schelling wrote in 1983, “he would make a different choice from what he knows will be his choice on that later occasion.”

dept of creative media placement

From Indonesia: an ad in a shopping centre that only works when you're looking at it from above:

the unsuggester

I can't tell you how much I like this idea. It's a library service that turns up books that are least likely to be associated with the ones you type in.

In other words, it does the opposite of what intelligent recommendation engines, from Amazon to iTunes, aim to do ('if you like this, you'll like that...").

In practice I'm not sure how much I'll use the Unsuggester, at least as it currently works. But it's the idea of it that I find attractive. The danger of recommendation services, and of the way that digital media is structured more generally, is that we all end up burrowing around our own rabbit holes, and rarely find ourselves sniffing the air in some unfamiliar locale, trying to work out what the hell this is all about. Which is bad, in my blog, because it stifles creativity. Now and again, we need stimulation from sources we'd never have sought out on our own.

(Discovered via the always-stimulating Sparkthinking)

fly little birdie, fly

Well, I'll be darned if this ain't the cutest thing I've seen this year:



Strategically it's quite interesting too - they're targeting people's sense of altruism rather than going straight for the selfish jugular. Or at least, slightly more cynically, the selfish sense of gratification we get when we're able to do something nice for someone else. Though actually that's not cynical at all - it's what makes the world go round.

meerkat magic

What a brilliant, unforgettable, deliriously silly idea. My campaign of the year for 2009 so far - and it might still be by the year's end.

coping strategies

Amongst the industries struggling to navigate a path through the age of digital disruption are newspapers, and porn.

Slate's Jack Shafter ponders the possibility of iTunes for newspapers here.

The Atlantic's Tom Johansmeyer surveys the recent travails of the adult entertainment industry and glimpses the future: iPorn. Handy.

Relatively small, fragmented, and unaccustomed to outside investment, the U.S. porn industry (which generated roughly $12 billion in 2007) is some­what buffered from today’s credit crunch, but it has its own problems. Video sales have been falling by 15 percent a year since 2005, and online content doesn’t deliver the returns it used to, now that Web sites such as RedTube and PornHub basically give it away. Struggling companies need investors to help right their operations, and those that are thriving in a brutal market need funding for growth.

Enter Koenig and AdultVest. He sees the porn downturn as temporary and believes that technological improvements will trigger a turnaround. One example: iPorn, a start-up in AdultVest’s portfolio that is developing an application to deliver porn to the Apple iPod. “The industry’s not going anywhere,” Koenig says. “You’ve got 6 billion people on the planet,” he laughs, “and they’re all horny.”

too much looking in the rear-view mirror

Thomas Friedman nails the reason that the American car industry hasn't been able to turn itself around:

Over the years, Detroit bosses kept repeating: “We have to make the cars people want.” That’s why they’re in trouble. Their job is to make the cars people don’t know they want but will buy like crazy when they see them. I would have been happy with my Sony Walkman had Apple not invented the iPod. Now I can’t live without my iPod. I didn’t know I wanted it, but Apple did. Same with my Toyota hybrid.

clever targeting

Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein's book Nudge was one of the most influential books of the year, finding its way into the speeches of Barack Obama and David Cameron and generating a huge amount of discussion. Its basic premise is that small changes in the way that choices are presented to citizens or consumers can have big effects on behaviour (for a fuller explanation, here's a video of Thaler). One of the quirkiest examples of "nudging" can be found in the men's urinals at Amsterdam airport, where an astutely positioned painted fly has been found to reduce "spillages" by 80%:

the shaping of things to come

Not sure about the coinage but this does sound interesting: Bruce Sterling's book on the future of objects that are half real, half ethereal:

We have moved from an age of artifacts, made by hand, through complex machines, to the current era of "gizmos." New forms of design and manufacture are appearing that lack historical precedent, he writes; but the production methods, using archaic forms of energy and materials that are finite and toxic, are not sustainable. The future will see a new kind of object—we have the primitive forms of them now in our pockets and briefcases: user-alterable, baroquely multi-featured, and programmable—that will be sustainable, enhanceable, and uniquely identifiable. Sterling coins the term "spime" for them, these future manufactured objects with informational support so extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system. Spimes are designed on screens, fabricated by digital means, and precisely tracked through space and time.

it's the customer, stupid

I've seen ads for the new touch-screen Blackberry that describe it as "purpose-built for Vodafone".

I'd rather it was purpose-built for me.

whither jamie

Jamie Oliver's current series, in which attempts to teach Rotherham - and by extension the whole nation - how to cook, may be his best show yet. It's certainly his most socially ambitious. Although he's been derided for patronising the working classes (almost always by middle-class TV critics) I think his refusal to accept that a whole stratum of people should be eating appallingly badly when they can, at no extra cost, eat much better, is brilliant. He's astonished at the way some people eat. And astonishment - in our knowing, relativistic culture - is an increasingly rare commodity. I admire him for it, and for the determination and imagination with which he sets about attacking the problem he's identified.

The question I have is about whether he'll continue to to believe that Channel 4 is the right partner to work with. I have no idea what the terms of his deal are or have been, and C4 have obviously been enormously good to him over the years. But Oliver isn't satisfied with being a celebrity chef these days. He wants to change the world. Or at least the country. And the natural home for such social crusades is the BBC, for the simple reason that they reach a far bigger audience that C4. Not only would Oliver's TV ratings increase on BBC1, but the BBC can deploy its whole formidable arsenal of media outlets on his behalf. He is, after all, performing a public service now. I wonder if, come his next project, he'll be tempted to move to the home of public service broadcasting. It seems a natural fit.

obama and that cadbury ad

For the few of you that haven't seen it before this is probably the most popular and successful UK ad of recent years.

It wasn't acclaimed by everyone as brilliant when it launched, however. Far from it. The most common complaint was, it doesn't make sense. We're used to ads that tell us a simple story that ends with a clear link to the product and a reason to buy it. But in this ad, we see a gorilla playing the drums. Then the milk chocolate bar appears at the end over the familiar (to British audiences) line "A glass and a half of joy". Eh? Why didn't they make the link to the product clearer? Why didn't they spell out the benefit - our chocolate brings you joy, just like music can? And why is it a frigging gorilla?

The people behind the ad realized it didn't quite all add up. But they had a hunch that the ad's very ambiguity would make it successful. They were right. The ad was talked about incessantly, in living rooms, playgrounds and pubs. What was it all about? Was it genius, or rubbish? User groups formed. Emails were sent with YouTube links embedded. The ad was posted on millions of Facebook and MySpace pages. Hundreds of remixed versions appeared, unbidden. And, in the end, more chocolate bars were sold.

There is a parallel here - albeit a tenuous one - with the Obama 'brand'. It's frequently remarked that it can be hard to get a grip on what Obama stands for beyond certain vague notions of 'change' and 'hope'. He is - perhaps sensibly - usually reluctant to take firm, unhedged positions. Nor is it easy to place him in a political or cultural milieu, as David Brooks remarks this week. Obama is well aware of this ambiguity in his image, and cultivates it. He has written that he "serves as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes can project their own views." More recently he said that he has become "a symbol of America's best traditions." He was rather unfairly pilloried by John McCain for this. Rather than self-glorification, he was trying to deflect attention from himself - to say "it's not about me". Elsewhere he referred to himself as "just the excuse". He seeks to remove or at least blur any fixed notions of who he is, or what he stands for, from the campaign. He embraces ambiguity.

Obama and that Cadbury ad are both successful, at least in part, because people are not quite sure what they mean. So people want to talk about them, and write about them, and debate them at length. And - crucially - email, post and create their own user-generated videos about them. In this way do the chocolate bar and the politician become media phenomena. In the age of the web, a little bit of ambiguity is a very powerful thing.

(cross-posted from Marbury)

who is the prettiest of them all?

From a stimulating little piece about mirrors in the NYT:

For that matter, humans do not necessarily see the face in the mirror either. In a report titled “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Enhancement in Self-Recognition,” which appears online in The Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Nicholas Epley and Erin Whitchurch described experiments in which people were asked to identify pictures of themselves amid a lineup of distracter faces. Participants identified their personal portraits significantly quicker when their faces were computer enhanced to be 20 percent more attractive.

planners need to get out more

I visited my alma mater JWT last night to attend its Planning At 40 event, a celebration of the day Stephen King and Stanley Pollitt invented account planning. Industry luminaries, including Jeremy Bullmore, John Grant, Jon Steel, and JWT's Guy Murphy, made speeches on the future of planning. The event was held on JWT's extraordinary Knightsbridge terrace, under blue skies. Drinks and canapes were served, and there was plenty of time after the event itself to catch up with some of the lovely people that have passed through and around JWT in the last forty years. So the whole thing was very nice.

As to the content, well. I'm probably not the best person to judge. I'm interested in a long list of stuff going on in the world, and a lot of that stuff relates to brands and communication. But I have to say, the future of planning languishes somewhere near the very bottom of that list. I suspect I'm not the only one. Several of the speakers seemed a bit bored by their own speeches. I don't blame them.

I wish one of them had reflected on the possible connection between the decline of the traditional agency network and an inward-looking culture that results in agencies holding seminars on their own internal processes, rather than on things that clients - or anybody outside of agencies - actually care about. Stephen King may have invented planning. But I'm sure even he got more excited about brands than he did about planning itself.

Apart from the unimaginative choice of theme, I was struck by how nearly all the speeches could have been made at any time in the last five, or even ten years. None of the speakers got stuck into the intellectual, cultural, and social trends that are shaping the way we all communicate. For instance, the influence of 'wiki' thinking and social networks were barely mentioned. For the most part, 'Planning' was discussed in a kind of timeless bubble in which capacious, wind-tunnel nouns like 'ideas/creativity/strategy' stood in for real thought. There were many fond glances to the past, and few wide-eyed stares into the future.

It's all very well to criticise of course, but what, if forced to speak on this subject, would I talk about? Well, I think I would have at least nodded to a few of the current fields of discussion about how human beings relate to each other, all of which have huge implications for what brands do.

For instance, the burgeoning fields of neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, which are opening our eyes to the enormous power of our unconscious selves to shape our behaviour; in particular the way in which emotion shapes our rational decisions. There are revelations and data here to delight any curious planner.

Or behavioral economics and social psychology. Books like this and this will shift the emphasis in communications from how we get people to think or feel things to how we get them to act.

Or, as mentioned, the pervasive spread of social networks and social media in general.

Plenty of stuff for planners to get their teeth into. And all of it a hundred times more interesting and important than 'planning'.

marketing to the long tail

Chris Anderson's book has spawned a lot of guff about what the long tail means for marketing. A new epilogue to the book outlines his more considered view on this topic:

if you're selling things, you don't necessarily need to massively expand your product range to tap LT markets. You can instead just reach the "long tail of customers", which is to say all the potential pockets of demand that don't necessarily lie within your normal marketing channels. This is the smaller potential customers, the ones you don't know about, the ones you never considered and the ones who didn't even think they were potential customers until they heard about your products from someone they know.

people like us

The UK ad industry is enjoying a rare fit of self-righteousness over Heinz's decision to pull this ad after a few hundred complaints from the public, or at least from a well-organised pressure group.

There is a near-universal consensus - evident in the pages of the industry's trade mag Campaign - that Heinz have supinely succumbed to the aggressive lobbying of a bigoted but vocal minority. But why are they so sure that discomfort with male-on-male action is a minority 'issue'? A few commentators refer to such discomfort, contemptuously, as Daily Mail thinking. As if the Mail is some fringe pamphlet read only by the crazed few. To paraphrase David Ogilvy, the consumer isn't stupid. She's a Daily Mail reader. I think most people outside of Soho are probably uneasy with this kind of thing being repeated daily in prime time. Not everyone is as marvelously enlightened as we are.

One Campaign commenter gives the game away when he says "I'm offended that Heinz was forced to take it off. It says a lot more about the British public than it does about the ad or the industry."  The reverse is true of the industry's commentary on this event.

The Beatles and Harry Potter

Daniel Hall at The Economist ponders why music consumption seems to be following the law of the long tail, whilst book stores rely, more than ever, on blockbusters:

One of my friends proposed a theory I find compelling: Our cultural consumption exists on a spectrum from "individual" to "collective". Technology has shifted the balance for both books and music. Digital distrbitution and the iPod have made music consumption much more individualistic, while the internet and global branding have made book consumption increasingly collective.

netflix for magazines

A brilliant idea

god we're such assholes

Flynn asserts that immediately after one person performs a favor for another, the recipient of the favor places more value on the favor than does the favor-doer.  However, as time passes, the value of the favor decreases in the recipient's eyes, whereas for the favor-doer, it actually increases.  Although there are several potential reasons for this discrepancy, one possibility is that, as time goes by, the memory of the favor-doing event gets distorted, and since people have the desire to see themselves in the best possible light, receivers may think they didn't need all that much help at the time, while givers may think they really went out of their way for the receiver.

From Cialdini via Cowen

how to make friends, influence people

Well it turns that the answer to being popular is to, er, be popular to begin with. This study of how reputations develop in business school shows that no matter how much co-operative behaviour a student displays, they'll never catch up with those who had a good reputation to begin with. Here's the key point:

It turns out that your reputation for cooperativeness is only affected by your behavior if you're already popular. If you're not popular, it appears that no one takes notice of your behavior, so it has no impact on your reputation. People with lots of social connections can build a good reputation -- or a bad one -- with much more ease than people with few social connections.

facebook can make you fat

So far, social networking sites have been talked about as new forms of communication, and it's been recognized that they're an important new ecosphere for the spread of memes/ideas/culture.

But it's only now that evidence is emerging for their ability to affect real world behaviour. An academic study in the US found that obesity spreads from person to person via social networks. Another found that a person's decision to stop smoking is strongly affected by what their friends and contacts on their network are doing.

The power of social networks to influence what people actually do is exciting - how much a influence a brand or government can exert on any particular form of behaviour via these channels is another question.

why wait buy today get hard tomorrow

spam just turned thirty

free

There's been a lot talk about 'free' recently. As in, business models that have giving stuff away at their heart. Sounds like a recipe for disaster. But it's how much of the TV business, here and in the US, has made its money. ITV, or NBC, offer consumers free content via TV, then sell the resulting audiences to advertisers.

Funnily enough, at a time when the TV companies are having to think about new ways to earn money, the basic 'free' model is being adopted elsewhere, for other forms of content.

Particularly music. Today's report in The Guardian on We7 (an online music service) and its deal with Sony BMG lists a number of collaborations between the music industry, online services, and phone companies (both handset manufacturers and network operators) that all involve giving the consumer music for free, in the hope of either tying them into a longer-term relationship or persuading them to spend time with advertisers.

for politicians, read brands?

here is Karl Rove, evil genius of political campaigning, writing in the Wall Street Journal on what this year's Presidential race has taught us about political communication in 2008. It reads like an allegory for the whole mediascape:

television ads don't matter as much as they used to. Going on the air with the earliest and most ads doesn't count for nearly as much as it once did. Campaigning this time has been so intense, long and geared toward retail politics that people -- especially in the early states -- form opinions that are difficult to alter by early and voluminous advertising. Mr. Romney, who spent $2.4 million on TV ads in Iowa beginning last February, found that out.

voters are discounting advertising. They may be blocking out ads, relying more on personal exposure, information from social networks, alternative information sources like talk radio and the Internet, and local media coverage.

the 20th century's closing decades saw the rise of the TV ad man as the most potent operator in presidential campaigns. The 21st century's opening decade is seeing the rise of the communications director and press spokesman as the more important figures on a campaign staff. It is the age of the Internet, cable TV, YouTube, multiple news cycles in one day, and the need for really instantaneous response. Ads and ad makers are still vital -- but not nearly as much as they were just a few years ago.

high frequency radio

the digital revolution doesn't always bring more variety. Here's an interesting piece in the NYT on the strategy that many US radio stations are adopting in response to the new competition from the internet and digital music players: play fewer songs, more often.

while the overwhelming majority of Americans still tune into traditional broadcast radio each week, they are listening less. And they are increasingly drawn to the dizzying choices of music and other programming available on iPods and satellite and Internet radio. But many pop radio programmers appear keen to repeat the biggest hits as much as — or more than — ever...of the 10 songs that have notched the most plays in one week, 8 joined the list in the last three years. And the oldest of the 10, Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated,” dates only to 2002.

executives at some individual stations say they are playing hits more heavily than they did even two years ago. That is not so much out of concern over digital competition as it is a desire to respond to listeners’ busy lives, said Kat Jensen, music director for KKMG-FM in Colorado Springs, which played “Apologize” 78 times last week. “There’s a very limited window. If they’re going to listen 15 minutes a day, you want to make sure they hear their favorite song in that 15 minutes. It’s really the fast-paced life style that we all live.”

i suppose this is the counterpoint to long tail economics - some times it will make more sense, at least in the short term, to focus more than ever on your big hits in order to win the attention of consumers who surrounded by more choice than ever.

the account man's statue

i went for a walk around the new, or new old, St Pancras today. It is, as everyone else has said, a very impressive place. But stuck at one end, greeting every visitor and returning native as they get off the train, is this stunningly bad monument to kitsch.

you can kind of see how they got there. They wanted to celebrate the romance of train stations, which house so many emotionally charged meetings. A really talented sculptor (say, Gormley, who admittedly would probably have erected a statue of himself) might have taken that brief and created something that none of us would have thought of but all of us recognised as meaningful. But they gave it to a hack, asked for something 'iconic' (can someone take that particular cliché outside and shoot it?), and ended up with something that looks like it was ordered from the pages of a Sunday supplement.

people who work in advertising agencies talk about the 'account man's ad': that is, the ad that meets the brief in a literal sense but which embodies no creative flair or imagination whatsoever. The account man's ad is not meant to actually get made - it's a starter for ten for the creative team to better. This one got made.

caucusing is easy, apparently

hillary is (kinda sorta) the gordon brown of american politics. She's been around forever, been close to power but never been number one, is highly intelligent and politically brilliant, but lacks something - humanity, wit, the ability to improvise - that the person she hopes to emulate had in abundance (for Tony read Bill). The rather clever little virals her campaign produce is evidence however, of her (or her team's) ability to adapt, and evidence too of the sophistication of American political communications. The latest is a funny and sharp two minute video about how to vote in the Iowa caucus. 'Caucusing' is not an entirely straightforward affair, and the big worry of all the candidates is that their supporters won't bother to turn out for them. This is a great attempt to minimize the apathy or apprehension of her potential voters.

ps this, on the other hand, is simply crazy, and possibly great (from the rising star of the Republican field, Mike Huckabee)

battle of the networks

interesting angle on the contrast between the two, from a not entirely unbiased source:

facebook is pretty cool, but it's like a utility. MySpace is more about media. We connect different cultures, different interests, from all over the world.

this sounds vaguely credible to me. MySpace is a much richer, culturally dense, and tactile environment. Facebook is elegantly designed and very useable but lacks a sense of place, somehow.

What's certainly true is that both will be sticking around for quite a while and will compete with each other on the basis of their underlying strengths and appeals, and will not (as many an overheated media consultant will tell you) dramatically implode or explode depending on what 'the kids' are into next month.

never can say goodbye

generation me me me

from the atlantic:

Young people are generally full of themselves, but a new study suggests that today’s kids are far more self-centered than preceding generations. A team of five university psychologists analyzed the results of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, a 40-question survey administered to 16,475 current and recent college students nationwide between 1982 and 2006; the test asked students to agree or disagree with statements like “I think I am a special person” and “If I ruled the world, it would be a better place.” The results, the authors argue, illustrate a steady increase in narcissism—a “positive and inflated view of the self.” Overall, almost two-thirds of the most recent sample display a higher level of narcissism than the 1982 average. Why the increase? The researchers speculate that technology may have something to do with it. Narcissism is especially acute among students born after 1982, the cohort most likely to use “self-focused” Web sites like MySpace and YouTube. Whatever the cause, the researchers argue that increased narcissism can have pernicious effects, on the individual and on society. They cite previous studies showing that narcissists have trouble forming meaningful relationships, tend to be materialistic, and are prone to higher levels of infidelity, substance abuse, and violence.

scamming the scammers

419eater.com is one of several sites that have been set up to combat the practice of 419 scams (named after the section of the Nigerian penal code that addresses such crimes). These are fraudulent emails, often claiming to be from a government agency, asking for the recipient's help in tracing a large sum of money, a cut of which they are promised. Now, if they could just help out with a few hundred dollars to meet some short term issues...

419 eaters specialise in turning the tables on the scammer, promising all sorts of riches if only they will accede to certain ridiculous, often expensive and time-consuming demands. Anti-scammers compete with each other to see who can get the scammers to do the most ridiculous things. The Trophy Room of the site shows some of the best results (the chap above got away lightly - one man was persuaded to carve a Commodore 64 out of wood and send it to England).

onion tv

Al Qaeda Also Fed Up With Ground Zero Construction Delays

it is tremendously hard for media companies who grew up in one medium to transfer their strengths into other media, as the internet demands they do. Here's one who is doing it pretty well: The Onion. First it was a website. Then a print 'newspaper'. Now, they're doing TV (or A-V or whatever), and I'm relieved to find that they seem to be doing it very well, if the above example is anything to go by. In fact this post is really just an excuse to put something funny up.

home ain't what it used to be

this excellent short piece by jeff jarvis outlines how the architecture of the web is changing, from a collection of websites-as-destinations (each with their own homepage) to a network of feeds:

now that content is distributed this way - displayed in many places, next to others' content - this begins to collapse the notion of destinations on the web. It makes us see the web less as self-contained sites and more as networks. This essential change in the ecosystem of the web is what inspired CBS TV in the US to serve its video in many places; YouTube is its friend (even as CBS' corporate cousin, Viacom, is suing the service). Said CBS interactive president Quincy Smith: "We can't expect consumers to come to us. It's arrogant for any media company to assume that." Right.

unlovely

this new ad for skoda fabia really irritates. You don't know who it's for until the end when the car appears, which means, nobody will remember the brand. It's nice to look at - mmm, cake - but the pay-off - 'full of lovely stuff' - is such a pitifully contrived link back to the car that you just feel let down. It's flamboyantly meaningless, and an extravagant waste of money.

which ever ad agency made this probably feel very proud of themselves, and there will be lots of pats on the back from their peers, maybe even a few awards. They'll be so busy congratulating themselves that they will fail to hear the public's interest and faith in advertising disappear, like air whistling out of a balloon.

face to facebook

although we can all theorize about the web and social networking there really is no substitute for actually doing it, even if it makes you feel uncomfortably like a teacher gatecrashing a student party.

thus it is with my new favourite website, facebook. It would be tedious to list all the differences between facebook and myspace but suffice to say that facebook offers a neater, more organised and clinical world than myspace's shabby glory. First off, you can't contact or look at profiles of people you don't have a connection to (myspace makes a desultory attempt to pretend this is the case but of course it isn't). Second, there are all sorts of clever tools for organizing your friends and contacts into discreet but overlapping networks, just as you often imagine them in your head (my college friends, my work friends, my met-them-down-the-pub friends). Third, it makes the shape of a person's social existence instantly discernible to an observer - your 'social capital' is laid bare, its dense web of connections tidied into easy-to-get bundles.

when you sign up, in common with some other networking sites like linkedin, facebook searches your email address book and tell you which of your friends/contacts is already on the site. Then you can instantly sign them up as your first friends. Inevitably this throws up people you haven't contacted in years. You will find yourself almost irresistibly drawn to contact them via the site, if only to say 'hey look at us, we're on facebook!'.

which leads me to reflect on how these networking sites throw a new light on communication. Sites like this lead me to contact people that I may otherwise never have contacted, not because I couldn't track them down if I really had something to say, but because - well, because I can.

the intuitive way of thinking about communication is this: a person has something to say, then they find the appropriate medium in which to say it. That medium might be the voice, the written word, the telephone or email or smoke signals or something else. The medium carries the message to the receiver, who may reply or may choose not to return your calls, ever. But what the web networking sites show is how the medium can precede the message - I want to use this medium, therefore I'll think of a message to send this person. It's a kind of McLuhanism of everyday life.

mystery solved

i'd been noticing the words 'never hide' stencilled on the streets of central london and wondering who put them there.

then someone sent me a link to this funny film on youtube. Right at the end i saw those words again.

so i googled them, and clicked on the second link that came up - and all became clear.

he didn't buy myspace by accident

in this short piece for Forbes magazine rupert murdoch gets to the heart of how the world of media and content is changing:

media companies don't control the conversation anymore, at least not to the extent that we once did. The big hits of the past were often, if not exactly flukes, then at least the beneficiaries of limited options. Of course a film is going to be a success if it's the only movie available on a Saturday night. Similarly, when three networks divided up a nation of 200 million, life was a lot easier for television executives. And not so very long ago most of the daily newspapers that survived the age of consolidation could count themselves blessed with monopolies in their home cities.

all that has changed. Options abound. Fans of small niches can now find new content they could never before. Going elsewhere for news and entertainment is easier and cheaper than ever. And people's expectations of media have undergone a revolution. They are no longer content to be a passive audience; they insist on being participants, on creating their own material and finding others who will want to read, listen and watch.

geek shall speak unto geek

channel 9 is the name of a website created by microsoft employees as an informal way  of communicating with the outside world, particularly the software development community. It has grown organically into one of the key interfaces between this massive company and its customers. For non-techies like me, most of its content might as well be in a foreign language, but even I can tell that in its design and its tone of voice this site helps perform the impossible task of making the behemoth human.

channel 9's doctrine - a series of principles for employees who wish to participate - could act as an excellent guide for any company coming to terms with how to communicate in a networked, participatory world:

1. Channel 9 is all about the conversation. Channel 9 should inspire Microsoft and our customers to talk in an honest and human voice. Channel 9 is not a marketing tool, not a PR tool, not a lead generation tool.

2. Be a human being. Channel 9 is a place for us to be ourselves, to share who we are, and for us to learn who our customers are.

3. Learn by listening. When our customers speak, learn from them. Don't get defensive, don't argue for the sake of argument. Listen and take what benefits you to heart.

4. Be smart. Think before you speak, there are some conversations which have no benefit other than to reinforce stereotypes or create negative situations.

5. Marketing has no place on Channel 9. When we spend money on Channel 9 the goal is to surprise and delight, not to promote or preach.

6. Don't shock the system. Lasting change only happens in baby steps.

7. Know when to turn the mic off. There are some topics which will only result in problems when you discuss them. This has nothing to do with censorship, but with working within the reality of the system that exists in our world today. You will not change anything by taking on legal or financial issues, you will only shock the system, spook the passengers, and create a negative situation.

8. Don't be a jerk. Nobody likes mean people.

9. Commit to the conversation. Don't stop listening just because you are busy. Don't stop participating because you don't agree with someone. Relationships are not built in a day, be in it for the long haul and we will all reap the benefits as an industry.

so here's the bad news...

jon fine quotes Murdoch's main man, Peter Chernin, on the brutal truth about newspapers' single largest source of revenue, classified ads:

the classified business at newspapers is in freefall and the internet will never help us compensate for what it was

the first bit we knew, the second bit must be a bitter pill to swallow. So who will survive and how will they make money? Nobody's quite sure. News Corp are getting together to, er, brainstorm some answers...

alanis finally gets the meaning of 'ironic'

well I never thought I'd say it, but this alanis viral (her savagely satirical take on Black Eyed Peas 'My Humps') has made me think she's cool. Apparently lots of other people are having the same reaction. YouTube offers - if you're very smart - a fantastically cheap way to drive brand reappraisal.

shuffle culture

i'm thinking there is a tectonic shift in people's emotional relationship with music and other cultural content, which proceeds from our different technological relationship with it. I'm calling it the rise of 'shuffle culture' until I think of something better.

speaking very broadly, the 'old world' of media and content, in which a few companies tightly controlled the distribution of the stuff we like, encouraged very intense relationships with certain genres, certain artefacts, mainly because there were fewer of them and we had more time to get to know them. So you were a Mod or a Rocker or a Goth - each of those 'worlds' had its own set of behavorial norms, cultural codes, and so on. Or -your favourite band was Led Zeppelin and you'd listen to their new album over and over, getting lost in it, worrying over every chord change, deciphering every lyric.

the new world - in which choice is infinite and content is far more freely distributed and disaggregated, and easier for consumers to get and discard and manipulate - encourages a pick and mix, skimming and shuffling relationship with it all. And arguably a thinner emotional experience.

this is clearest in music. I know from my own experience that I rarely become immersed in an album or genre any more, but instead download hundreds of individual tracks from different artists and genres, enjoying them for three minutes at at a time, rarely going deeper. A friend of mine with a thirteen year old son described the other day how ruthlessly efficient his son is at picking the tracks he wants from a new album and discarding the others. The idea that he'd take time to get to know an album, sink into it or let it sink into him, is alien. He's on to the next thing.

Of course there are still people who become obsessive about certain bands or artefacts, but there's far fewer of them. For most of us, an increase in choice has meant a decrease in the emotional intensity of our relationships with content. Thoughts prompted in part by this interview with the brilliant music critic simon reynolds:

the landscape is completely transformed by all these massive changes in retail, distribution, media...I put the references to Top of the Pops and Radio One in the introduction to indicate that my particular expectations of pop are very much the product of an era, a particular apparatus that created certain kinds of intensity. A new landscape is emerging that is doubtless generating new ways of experiencing and discovering music, new forms of collectivity around music, yet it’s hard for me to see the changes as anything other than dis-intensifying. The web has extinguished the idea of a true underground. It’s too easy for anybody to find out anything now, especially as scene custodians tend to be curatorial, archivist types. And with all the mp3 and whole album blogs, it’s totally easy to hear anything you want to hear, in this risk-less, desultory way that has no cost, either financially or emotionally. I sense that there’s a lot more skimming and stockpiling, an obsessive-compulsion to hear everything and hoard as much music as you can, but much less actual obsession...

thinking versus doing

Bernard Matthews' plan to extend its brand into the organic sector seems like a necessary, albeit defensive, move to me, sending a much-needed signal about their quality credentials. But in an article in Marketing Week the move gets criticised by a succession of commentators, including the MD of Interbrand, who seems to see it as superfluous:

(Gareth) Hales says that many brand marketers do not realise the value of the brands that they are looking after but instead "want to be seen doing things".  He adds "They want to create action and have ideas..."

they want to actually do things? gosh, we must put a stop to that.

now, mr hales may have been quoted out of context - but I mention his quote here because it states the inverse of the real problem with much marketing, particularly at traditional FMCG companies. The problem is, marketing has become an abstraction. Marketing people (and their agency accomplices) have gotten too comfortable sitting around talking about 'brand values' and have left the 'doing' to everyone else in the company. If this was ever acceptable, it's certainly not now that the current media environment demands a stream of fresh initiatives from every brand, and the line between product and branding has become increasingly blurred. We all need to remind ourselves that 'brand' is a verb, not (just) a noun.

think local, act local?

of course, we all know the world is flat and getting flatter, that we live in an increasingly globalized world. But to every trend there is a counter-trend.

in the uk and other developed economies there is a nascent and growing movement towards localist consumerism. People in supermarket aisles can be seen picking up their frozen chicken to see if it was reared in their region or shipped in from overseas. Localism sits at the convergence of a few different things:

first, green consumerism. No Impact Man and his followers are suspicious of any food or drink (and, increasingly, anything) that has to travel more than a few hundred miles before it reaches my home or my mouth.

second, authenticity.  The search for what is real and uncorrupted becomes ever more urgent as the developed world gets ever more over-marketed - and what is local is tangibly authentic.

third, cultural production. As the internet and other technologies allow consumers to generate their own content, people are getting used to the idea that they can create their local media or use the internet to generate local activities.

this presents an interesting quandary for global brands. The imperative to integrate your communications to local markets becomes more urgent than ever before. But it's not just about communications in the traditional sense - it's about what you do for and within a local community. How do you become a genuine part of the fabric of a community? Are there implications for your supply chain? How do stay true to your global (or American or Swedish) heritage but reinvent yourself at different levels of localism? There are no easy answers. But unless your brand is thinking about them it may quickly find itself out of touch and out of place.

albums ain't what they were

the music industry is out in front of the rest of the entertainment business when it comes to dealing with digital disruption. So this NYT article about the US music industry is a must-read.

it's about how the album - the mainstay of the music industry's profitability for forty years - is in decline, and the single its getting its revenge:

"a decade ago, the music industry had all but stopped selling music in individual units. But now, four years after Apple introduced its iTunes service...individual songs account for roughly two-thirds of all music sales volume in the United States."

album sales have fallen 16% so far this year. The steepness of that trend is unlikely to sustain but that is a scary, drop-off-a-cliff figure. Record labels are responding by constructing deals with acts that include a series of singles and ringtones but not albums. Instead of releasing an album and going on tour every two years, acts will have to get used to providing a constant stream of content, to keep people interested. One possibility is that artist 'brands' become more like record clubs, with fans paying a regular subscription in order to receive a series of recordings, videos, and other products. As one music exec puts it:

"perpetuating a business model that fixates on a particular packaged product configuration is inimical to what the Internet enables, and it’s inimical to what many consumers have clearly voted for"

tv channels ought to be paying close attention to this, for obvious reasons.

indeed all marketeers should. The 'brand idea' is the album of marketing - the central vehicle that everything else has to be subservient to, the thing that consumers are expected to swallow whole. Traditionally of course, this idea lived on tv and was repeated until people couldn't avoid it. But consumers now expect to be re-delighted and re-surprised and re-entertained in dozens of different ways by a brand, forever.

that's why the premium on creativity is higher than ever before.

thisisboring.tv

the launch campaign for playstation 3 is very of the moment. You can only imagine the buzzwords that have been thrown back and forth between sony and its agencies over the last year: transmedia, engagement marketing, brandertainment, and so on.

the idea seems to be to create a digital world called thisisliving.tv that draws people in and gets them spending time with the brand. Traditional media are used as feeders to the full interactive experience. The tv ads are cryptic affairs that merely direct viewers to thisisliving.tv, which is the heart of the campaign. The press ads just describe each of the 'characters' involved at great and tedious length. You have to look very hard for mention of the product.

the result is a sprawling and mysterious multi-media campaign (should that be 'brand experience'?). Only problem is, it's truly f*****g tedious. Much like the barbican centre in london, it is crippled by its lack of a defining entrance or centre. It  just kinds of oozes over various surfaces without grabbing the consumer by the throat and pulling them in. The website itself makes you feel lost as soon as you enter it, and not in a good way. And I can still remember two seconds of a little boy in a hood saying "i've commanded armies" from ten years ago...

which makes me think, now that the thirty-second tv ad  is dying a slow death, perhaps we should think about what we want to save from it? For instance, the discipline of  compression. When you only have thirty seconds you need to leave people with something simple and clear and powerful very quickly. But when you're all about 'experience and engagement' that discipline no longer applies, or seems not to. So you're free to create complex, multi-layered, expensively-produced worlds that nobody wants to live in...

is tv broken?

thinkbox, the body responsible for marketing that unfashionable medium, has published a powerpoint deck summarising the case for its enduring commercial viability (download here)

john lowery, of Grey Advertising, has posted some questions about thinkbox's more surprising findings, like the data showing that tv's commercial impacts are growing, prompting a reply from tess alps, thinkbox chairman. Tess explains the growth in impacts as a function of multi-channel growth:

the biggest driver of the continuing growth in commercial impacts is the growth of commercial TV's share of broadcast telly at the expense of the BBC. This is in no way to criticise the BBC; it's just the inevitable consequence of homes getting one of the three main forms of multi-channel TV: digital terrestrial, cable or satellite.

(worth noting that multi-channel broadcasters are allowed greater commercial minutage than the commercial terrestrials, so as multi-channel share of viewing increases there is a compound effect in terms of increased commercial impacts).

tess remarks on the evidence that PVR ownership increases tv viewing and thus total ad consumption - and reminds us that people now have more ways than ever to seek out ads they like:

people do like good TV ads, are happy to watch them, stop and rewind them to watch again on their PVR and search for them on Youtube. We just have to make all our TV ads brilliant which of course is a doddle!

she also makes the following point:

TV is also growing via new technologies like mobile, internet and IPTV, none of which are measured by BARB yet. TV content is in massive demand and the internet is facilitating this.

i agree.  The simple fact is that, from a consumer perspective, TV is getting better. PVRs are brilliant. Increasingly we can all watch the stuff we really like, when and where we want to watch it. However much we like interacting, there will always be a massive role for great entertainment that we just sit back and enjoy. Indeed, you might say that TV is colonising other devices - in a couple of years the main way in which I use my PC and broadband connection might be to download TV content, ditto my games consul.

so anybody predicting doom for the medium as a whole has got it wrong. But the last sentence quoted from Tess above reminds me how people are accessing TV content these days - ie, not necessarily via broadcast brands. Yes, people still love TV - but do they love TV channels? The answer, by and large, is no, with a few exceptions, like Channel 4, who have managed to build brands with a strong sense of values.

TV is going to be fine. Brilliant advertisers are going to be fine. Strong channel brands are going to be fine. It's everyone else that should be worrying...