Feeding the Puppy

Social Production... my 'big idea'

I was invited to take part in yesterday's APG/Campaign Battle of Big Thinking (yes, an honour to be asked, thanks guys), and managed to carry the public vote in the innovation section...

I talked about Social Production... I've put it together as a slidecast here, I'd love to know what you think.

John V Willshire - Battle of Big Thinking 2009

View more presentations from John V Willshire.

Just click the green 'play' button at the bottom to hear the voiceover... 

...it's not the original audio, I quickly rerecorded a track this morning, hence it being longer than the allocated 15 minutes...

Spotify, Lady Gaga, and the maths that don't stack up

The musician's lot is not a happy one.  We know this, we've seen plenty of evidence, but here's another piece (via Dan) that just might give a sense of just how futile the act of making money from music is becoming...

Over on TorrentFreak (a blog covering all things around bittorrent technology), there's a report on how much money Lady Gaga made from Spotify for a million plays of her songs...

 

How much do you think?  Go on, guess.  A MILLION plays.

How about $167?

Or, if you prefer, 0.017 cents per play, or to bring it back to real money, 0.01p per play.

Now, you maybe don't know if that's a lot or a little, compared to what musicians may be used to receiving for plays of their songs.

Well, not so long ago in 2003, if a song of yours was played on Radio 1, you'd receive a massive £18.44.  PER MINUTE (though of course the amount was less if you were on regional or local stations).

But still, one 3 minute play of a Lady Gaga song would make her £55.32. 

Or indeed a THIRD of the totally amount of money she's receiving for a million plays on Spotify.

Much as I love Spotify, I really can't see how it's going to continue if the people who're making the content for it only receive such paltry rewards for their efforts.  It's barely better than piracy...

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UPDATE...

So, the ever-on-the-pulse Dave Stone points me in the direction of this on Music Ally... a rebuttal, of a kind...

“Firstly, any payment to STIM would only represent a fraction of the payments rights holders receive and only for music played in one country (in this case Sweden) as we pay not only collecting societies, but also publishers and the record company to play their music,” says a spokesperson.

“Secondly, the figure (unrepresentative as it is) is from a short period just after our launch last year, way before we’d established ourselves as a music service and built up a large user base. Specific payments are of course confidential, but this is certainly wide of the mark.”

There's obviously more to this than meets the eye.  Yet until someone clarifies how 'wide of the mark' it is, we'll never know whether artists are getting a good deal or not.  I wonder if anyone will come out with some real figures..?

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ANOTHER UPDATE

So, Mat has found this... from Steve Lawson's blog, who's also done some quick maths on this, but using some sources suggestion that the real figures are ten times this (as the $167 is just a royalty payment... there are other things to include). 

So maybe the decimal point needs to come forward a place... 0.1p per play.

And it points out that's she's also had 20 million paid downloads...

...but that this is a TOTAL figure across every platform, not attributable to Spotify, but rather to the promotional effort as a whole.  She's not done badly, either way.

My point on the whole affair remains this though; compared to what they used to receive from listens to a song, there's another whole chunk of musician income that's disappeared.

The visual decline of the British Empire

My brother just sent me this.... it's wonderful, I shall say no more and let you watch it...

Bonfire Builders: Mark Earls

This week's Bonfire Builder is Mark Earls, author of Herd, formerly of St Luke's, BMP & Ogilvy, and "London advertising scene's foremost contrarian"... 

 

What are your thoughts on the social bonfire/advertising fireworks principle of ‘not either/or, but both…’?  A long term proposition, or just a step along the road to something else…

To be honest, I think that you're right about the need for both, but given human nature I also suspect that there'll always be more of a need to encourage businesses to do the hard yards of continuous daily interaction.

"Fireworks" seems so much more appealing if you're in the corner - as does magic, generally - but the real value comes from the daily commitment to the "bonfire" work.  To being open and responsive to the people-what-buy-your-stuff

Equally, I think this plays to the thoughts in my chum John Winsor's latest book: "Baked In".  We've allowed ourselves to believe that somehow the magic of communication can overcome mediocre product and service delivery. 

 


Just get the right ad, the right campaign architecture, optimise the spend etc etc... and it'll be sorted.

The truth is - and always has been, I suspect - that excellent communication can make the best of a bad job but the real value comes from making the job better.

Tesco is a great example here - while advertising has played a role and the strategy is good (though identical to the one that one Safeway received plaudits for in the 90s) the real value is created more in the way they keep on going - working out ways to make things better for the customer.

Bonfire communication enables this kind of approach to business - more two-way, more responsive, more human but much more hard work. By contrast, fireworks communication tends to be prone to the outbound dialling and pointless display!


You speak to a wide variety of folks around the world… who gets it, and who needs to get there quicker?

It's hard to generalise, but I think in the client community the biggest discriminator is probably those who see making communications as a factory function and those who don't.

By this I mean those who by dint of volume have had to professionalise and develop processes for communications development.  This tends to embed really unhelpful practices and ideas in the business (like "what's our message?") and make it harder to envision other kinds of communication.

It's also really hard to unpick the vested interests when budgets are huge - large amounts of money makes marketers conservative; they feel the need to not be seen to be p****** it up the wall.

For those who haven't professionalised communication as a core function of the business, it's easier to show how the bonfires approach can be embraced without entering the world of sharp suits and flower-arranging. 

Smaller, more entrepreneurial businesses tend to fall into this camp.


I guess the agency model we've ended up with doesn't always help.  I kind of see the purpose of a media agency like PHD being reframed as 'connecting companies with people', however that best happens.  It often involves talking to other people in organisations beyond marketing departments though (HR, IT, sales and so on...). 

Is it inevitable that marketing (and agencies) must break out of the 'mass communications silo' to take a much more company-wide role?
 
I suspect you're right here. Part of the problem for all marketing services businesses is that their ability to create value is often limited by the clients they have - by the marketing clients in particular.

It's not just creative agencies who come across as florists and astrologers: marketing people are often seen this way by other business functions.

It's interesting, isn't it: while marketing's big ideas are now everywhere (brand, consumer etc), in most organisations marketing is no closer to real leading the company's activities than it was back in the 1950s and 60s.


One of the central things you talk about in ‘Herd’ is the need to ‘light many fires and see which one(s) take(s)’... 

 

..how’ve you found selling that into marketers who’re used to lighting fast working fireworks?  Any tips?

Boring answer: the place to start is probably by understanding where the marketers are coming from - what the other issues and conversations they are party to which are shaping the context to this particular issue.

Sometimes there's already a willingness to accept the relative ineffectiveness of past firework activity; sometimes not. Sometimes there's a willingness to accept the world is complex and inherently unpredictable so you'd better; other times this just scares the bejeezus out of clients.

Find out this kind of stuff and adjust your pitch accordingly.


HERD answer: seeing what other companies are doing always helps. Particularly successful ones.


Finally, what do you foresee in the future for the bonfires and fireworks?

I rather suspect that the future for fireworks advertising is going to be rather less rosy than many imagine.

Of course, we'll need these gunpowder-fuelled punctuation marks (and shows of corporate virility) but increasingly a combination of the bonfires model and the Baked-In idea (making things better and making better things) are going to prevail.

Less glamorous but rather more valuable to our clients - and for those agencies who do it well, too.

Lego. Muji. Hello, Christmas list...

My enthusiasm for all things Lego needs no introduction here. 

Now they've teamed up with brilliant Japanese store Muji to create these paper/lego hybrid models...

  

It would have been straight on my Xmas list... had it not been for the fact that it doesn't appear to be available in the UK.  Sigh...... that'd have kept me occupied for hours when I'm stuff full of turkey.

Come on Muji, ship some over...

(Via Mat, cheers fella)

Taykt to the limit - smart free mbl txt srvc

Here's something cool that Dave told me about earlier.  It's called Taykt (pronounced 'Take It').  It's really very simple as a proposition.

Need to set up a text shortcode? 

Then just com to www.taykt.com, enter the keyword you want to use, and the message people get when they text... and you're off...

 

Wow, easy huh?  Anyone can do it.  None of this set-up fee, faffing with different providers and the like.  No worrying about cost, as it's all just '25p+network charge'... so say 35p typically.  Not too much at all.

I can already imagine lots of uses for this...

- small independent shops & bars could pick a 'word of the day' that's written in chalk above their counter or bar... if you text that word, you get back a token for half price drink that day, or 5% off your shopping.

- if you want to test the effect of sales by location, just set up slightly different keywords to text in, and monitor which works best

- not sure which offer is more appealing to people... offer a choice of words, and see which proves most popular

A really smart, simple service as far as I can see.  Thanks Dave :)

Space. No longer the final frontier.

Toshiba sent a chair into space.  Yes, yes they did.

(from here)

It seems that in the last year, lots of people have been 'sending stuff into space'.  Students from Cambridge, and Spain.

Then there was the MIT & Canon camera one. 

And I've just found out The Sun sent their 40th birthday edition up too.

 

(It looks kind of doctored, this image.  But there's more authentic looking pictures of them doing it here)

Anyway, I'd like to propose that 2010 is the year that nobody sends anything up into space.  Space is closed for sending stuff up into.  It's been done.  LEAVE SPACE ALONE.

It just goes to show you that Moores Law seems to work for Space travel too.  It now seems to cost $150 to send something up into space and have photographic proof that you did it.  Imagine how much that would have cost in the fifties...

Behavioural Economics (and the dullest blog post title ever)

Eh? 

Well, I'd put the ACTUAL dullest blog post title ever in, and just stared at it thinking 'who's going to read that', so thought I'd try and distract you with some humour.  Of a sort.

Anyway, here's the real title...
 

"Behavioural Economics and Measurement Anchoring"

(Told you it was dull.  The post itself may get more exciting)

A few PHDers and myself have spent the last couple of mornings at the IPA's Behavioural Economics (BE) workshops, run by Nick Southgate.

(As you may or may not know, Behavioural Economics is the focus of new IPA President Rory Sutherland; it's an exciting, innovative way to move the industry onwards I think, hence the continued Feeding The Puppy interest...)

The mornings focused on 'Choice Architecture' (just one strand of BE), and how we (as an industry) could begin to embrace this tenet to help achieve our clients' goals.

The one I was at was very thought provoking, even though I found myself in the 'how does this affect measurement and evaluation' group.

It's quite interesting when you start to think of what we do in terms of Choice Architecture, because it really does make you focus on the 'getting people to make decisions/take actions', rather the much more spurious, disconnected measures of 'awareness' and 'recall'.

But the thing that occurred in the group around measurement was not the BE tenet of 'choice architecture', but that of 'anchoring'.

 


A quick explanation; anchoring is basically where people are primed to expect prices, years or anything else number based to be at a certain level. 

So, for instance, if I kept talking to you about the values of various different smart phones on pay as you go contracts (£400, £500) then ask you how much you'd be willing to pay for a monthly contract, your answer will be higher than if I'd talked to you about the basic entry phones at £50, £55 and so on.

Read more on anchoring here.

Anyway, when it comes to evaluating marketing activity, why is anchoring important, and potentially troubling?

Well, when you're talking in terms of TV campaigns, you frame things in the language of 'reach'.  How many millions and millions of people will we reach with this?

But then when you start talking in terms of online & social activity, it's very rare that you'll get into the hundreds of thousands, never mind millions.

And yet the latter could be doing a better, more effective job.  But we've anchored clients, and maybe ourselves, to think in 'millions'.  Not thousands.  I touched on the 'thousands not millions' point before, you'll remember.

  

So, what do we do about it?

Well, here's a thought.  Rather than simply measure media in 'reach', for our clients we should start to turn the currency into the effect it has...

Rather than a TV campaign being measured in millions of reach, you take the average of the last few campaigns you ran, and work out the average number of sales it delivers.  I'm sure all the econometrics that clients use nowadays could give us a rough indication of this per client.

So when we started evaluating which decisions we should make from a communications point of view, the options are all laid out on as level a playing field as possible, and the anchoring issue disappears.

It's the general problem with measuring media in 'reach'... any number with the word 'million' on the end contains a lovely, juicy slice of 'potential' in it... "imagine if we convert just a TENTH of those"...

Mediaweek & the scary thing about the vanishing point in media

It's really sad see today that Mediaweek is to stop producing a weekly physical copy, and it's sister title Revolution is to become quarterly supplement in Marketing rather than a monthly title in it's own right. 

Both were splendid titles, written by passionate, knowledgeable individuals, and they will be greatly missed.

Perhaps as you'd expect, there is a heartfelt outpouring of sympathy for all the people involved in the titles (on Twitter, unsurprisingly), and no doubt that a lot of the shock is at the sudden nature of the news...

...in comparison, when the Londonpaper & London Lite both announced they were ceasing production, it was some weeks before they disappeared (maybe due to the intense production cycle making an overnight winding down tricky).

No one expects media that they read or watch to simply disappear... but I guess the expectation of when media will disappear for reader or advertiser is later than when it actually will from a commercial perspective.

For example, if the money coming in is in decline...

 


...and the money out, despite continued cost cutting measures, finally exceeds money out...

 


...then people do accept that, at some stage, something's going to give...

...but the expected 'vanishing point' in the heads of the people who read or watch media, and the companies who buy advertising in it, might be down here...

 

Yet from a business perspective, if you think that the 'money in' is simply going to keep dropping, the best 'vanishing point' for you is here...

 

Hence the sensation of shock when things we like disappear...

It happens before we actually expect it to, even if in the long run we could 'see it coming'... it's a very real reminder about the state of flux we find ourselves in.

It did make me wonder though... will seeing some beloved media properties disappear make us more likely to save other we love?

I have, in the past, referred to the fact that "you're going to miss us when we're gone" is not a viable business plan... people can't imagine, or motivate themselves to do anything about, a world without 'media' in it.  So when companies say "but you'll miss us...", no-one really responds...

 

But there is perhaps the chance that when some things disappear, the shock they cause and the gap they create in people's lives will make them more willing to fund the entities that still exist, or indeed regenerate ones that they did miss.

If you know that a magazine or newspaper you liked had disappeared already, and another one was under threat, would you be more inclined to do something about it (sign up for a subscription, say)?



Anyway, it seems that both Mediaweek and Revolution will continue in online forms which, given the nature of the fast-changing world we find ourselves in, I think will work very well for them in the future.

(I'm particularly keen to here more about the proposed "new blogging initiative" for Revolution, which I can really see working as a high frequency news/commentary service like Mashable or ReadWriteWeb.)

And I'd like to wish all involved good luck for the future... see you all in meadja land :)

A short rant at eBay (and some Jedward love)

Dear eBay

Hi, how are you doing?  Oh, not well? 

Well yes, I kind of gathered that from the fact that at the beginning of the month you started to send me (no doubt as part of some sort of 'lapsed customer re-engagement program') an email EVERY SINGLE DAY...

....under the snappily titled 'Daily Deals'.  Yeah, I spotted that they were daily.  Nice.

  

Every day.  Every single day, without me asking for them.  Thanks for that.

Just quickly, I thought I'd list down what actually may be wrong with this...

...partially for you, and other companies, to think about when looking at big email databases full of emails (including mine) and wondering what to do with it...

...and partially as a cathartic rant from a new dad who had five hours sleep last night and just needs to VENT.

1. It's just spam

No matter what sort of relationship you've had with customers before, if you start emailing them more than they deem 'socially necessary', you take the 'relationship' and turn it into 'advertising'. 

Which may be what you want to do.  But to the customer, it just becomes more spam clogging up their inbox. 

Use advertising as advertising, and use emails as the opportunity to start a conversation.

PS. There are Nigerian Princes who would consider sending you emails daily as overkill...

2. It's not even targeted

I've used eBay a fair few times... I'm not any sort of power user, but there at least 25+ transactions that may give you a hint about the sorts of things I like.  Guitars, gadgets, and other random micselleany.

I imagine you have all this saved up against my profile, and could use it to target the 'deals' you show me a bit more cleverly.  Instead, the things you've told me that I can buy (and therefore think I may be interested in) include amongst other things...

5-1 Disney Hair Styler
WWE Smackdown 2010 for Xbox OR PS3
Stila Make-up set and bag
Mega Bloks Streetz Construction set
Jedward T-Shirt
Hannah Montana Sleepover pamper kit

I don't know what I did in the past to persuade you that I was a Disney fixated, crossdressing wrestling fan who was supporting Jedward in this year's X-Factor, but I'm now kind of worried.

Either that, or you're just sending me a random list of shit that's available to buy in eBay. 

Oh, it is the latter?  Phew.  I can't let people know about my Jedward fandom...

 


...on which matter, now that we're talking about it, I'd like to confirm that Jedward are the single most likely entity to save music...

...as it's entirely possible that when they win X-Factor this year on charm and showmanship alone, it'll bring every eccentric in the country out of the woodwork and into audtions, and next year's competition and all those after it will simply resemble the clown school that the X-Factor actually is...

...which means people might actually having to look elsewhere to listen to music.  We can but hope, anyway.  Meanwhile, back to the point...

3. It's NEVER-ENDING

...ok, I exagerrate slightly.  It can be ended, as you helpfully point out near the top of the emails.  But rather than an instant 'if you don't want these emails, click and we'll stop', it instead has the following message:

"If you no longer wish to receive our Daily Deals emails, no problem,
just click here and you will be removed within 4 working days."

Oh eBay, I worry about you for two reasons. 

Firstly, you've clearly got such awful automation in your system that if someone does click on the link, of of your guys at eBay has to manually look through the database and switch off the link.  There's no other excuse for it taking four days.

Which means that secondly, if someone does think (like I did) that they really don't want to get an email with two pointless offers every day, then they have to go through another four emails of something they clearly don't like or want.  Which isn't really a great way to make people like you.

So, eBay, please understand that yes, you were kinda fun and useful once, but now that you have taken to treating me to daily spam, I shall from hereon in have to reciprocate with growing indifference, annoyance, and an increasingly small likelihood to ever use you again. 

Kindest regards 'n that

John

PS. Say hi to Boo.com when you see her...