But of course, the way that you sell a book these days is you talk about it to as many different audiences as possible.
And the people who invite you to speak may choose to film these talks.
And if the people who've invited you to talk are Google, then they'll probably film them, and upload them to a Youtube channel, in a series of talks they've invited authors to give at Google.
So, courtesy of Google, here's Richard Thaler from last year talking about the ideas behind Nudge...
...and Barry Schwartz from 2006 talking about the Paradox of choice...
I guess the only choice you have now is whether to read the books, or just watch the movies...
Barcodes? The future of shopping? Is this some weird sort of retro post? Like when the newspaper does 'today in 1972...'?
Because, of course, there's nothing new about the barcode... it was first tested in US supermarkets in the sixties. As technology goes, it's as old as the hills.
So how on earth can it be the future of shopping?
Because what matters nowadays is not the barcode itself, but the reader...
Supermarkets (and now other high street chains) have been putting the control of scanning in the hands of customers for a few years now... not as an advantage to the customer, necessarily, but as an automation of a job that used to be done by checkout assistants.
(...the economic labour market implications of this helps explain why the five members of Girls Allowed had to find alternative employment...)
It's not really a move that's putting the customer 'in control' of course... the important part (price comparison with other possible competitors) is locked away.
With developments such as this, and through years of watching shop assistants at work, we've all been taught by the shops how to scan barcodes...
However... imagine you could take that barcode, and scan it with something else... something that lets you compare prices across every outlet, order it online... and essentially through market forces means that the price you pay becomes as low as possible...
Well, that scanner is here. And it costs £1.19. And it's an app for the iPhone 3GS called Redlaser...
It works like this; you fire up the app, and it uses the camera on the phone to take a picture of any UPC barcode you hold in front of it, as the video explains...
When I first heard about it, I expected it to work on things like books, CDs and the like... but then I tried it on baby milk...
...which quickly told me that our local pharmacy were charging £1.19 for something that costs £0.58 in Boots.
I still can't quite get my head around just how big a step this represents in the way our economy works... but it's taken me back to my Economics degree and a thing called Perfect Competition.
Like many things in Economics, Perfect Competition was just a theory based on unattainable assumptions... infinite buyers & sellers, costless transactions, zero entry/exit barriers and so on
...but the one assumption that is close to becoming fulfilled by Redlaser is Perfect Information; prices and quality of all goods in the market are known to every seller AND every buyer.
Perfect Competition as a theory has many ramifications... but perhaps the most important is this; it becomes impossible in the long run for any company in the market to do any more than cover their costs.
So for instance, if I have perfect information about everyone who sells Aptamil baby milk, and there is no 'transaction costs' which set any seller apart (e.g. I can order from all store in bulk via the internet), then I'll always just order the cheapest one.
Which means for both the retailer (Boots) & manufacturer (Aptamil), I'll only ever give them the least possible money for the baby milk.
If everyone did that, for every product, that manufacturers and retailers would only ever break even, as market forces will continually drive down prices...
(Now, that's not of course how everyone behaves now... but it's got me thinking of something that's worth a separate post. And I think there's more implications for the Perfect Competition hypothesis from the internet too, but I'll go in to them on another separate post too...)
So we'll all have perfect price information, but what about the other half of Perfect Information; the quality of products?
How can we possibly begin to share the information about a vast array of products across society in a way that bypasses manufacturers and retailers...
...oh, hang on, right you are...
Whatever it is you're buying nowadays, there's a discussion/forum/review on the internet from other people which will guide you as to the quality of the product you're looking at.
What does it all mean?
Well, in a world where people have access to Perfect Information about just about every market, what implications does this have for branding?
Is traditional branding a mechanism that only works to protect price premiums in a world of imperfect competition? Will I find out about the quality of products from other people, then the cheapest place to buy it via mechanisms like Redlaser?
I'm certainly going to be thinking about this a lot more in the weeks to come... probably at 4:00am when I'm feeding James with all this bargain baby milk we've been buying...
Well, hello again. After a couple of weeks being on paternity not typing very much at all, I thought it'd be a good idea to try and get myself back in the habit by liveblogging from the Guardian's Changing Advertising Summit.
I barely remembered how to switch the laptop on... I hadn't realised how much I valued sleep until this morning...
Anyway, I attended last year too, and it was a fine event... this year it's being positioned as "How to retain your creative, commercial and competitive edge in the downturn".
So the underlying emphasis being that we're still in the downturn, and will be for a while yet...
...though I read something a while back which I liked about it being too late to prepare for the downturn, as we're in it already; you should be preparing your company for what you're going to do when we come out the other side.
Maybe that's because I'm a glass-half full kind of guy.
Anyway, let's see what the fine array of speakers have to say on the matter...
--------------------------------
Introduction by Mike Southon, today's chair...
He does a nice upbeat talk called 'preparing for the next upturn' apparently... how oddly prescient, given the above...
...then it's over to the first speakers. First up, three opening keynotes from Babs Rangaiah (Unilever), our own Damien Blackden (OMG), and Samir Arora (Glam Media).
Babs Rangaiah (Unilever)
Likens the change that's happening to his prowess (his tongue is firmly in cheek here)... before he'd have to take out lots of advertising & PR telling people he's 'a great lover'... and now it's women telling other women via social media how great he is.
"You cannot market in today's world without living the space that today's consumers live in..."
Babs gives people he works with a digital IQ test... are you on Twitter, have you played with Wii etc... He asks the room who scores ten, and a few of us do (though only a few)... there are a good number of 8/10s though.
"Running banners and buttons all over the internet is not the change we're talking about..."
"...it's about reframing how we think about using channels, and changing our behaviour in those channels"
For instance, Unilever created an 'Axe wake-up' service... teenage boys select the 'hot girl' they want to wake them up from their mobile phone each morning... and download the app to do it. More on that here.
Babs then points out that it's not just a shift in the western world... the change is a global phenomenon... the phone in South Korea is EVERYTHING... tube pass, bank card, alarm clock etc etc.
You also need to 'penetrate the culture'... really get involved in what motivates and excites people in their cultural lives (I guess this is really important for FMCGs, given the potential for the products themselves to be 'low interest'...).
"Walk away from the straight interruption that advertising is... well, I shouldn't say 'walk away' as there's still strength in advertising..."
Next point; think webspace (where people are going, interacting, sharing etc) rather than 'website'...
...which is true, of course... we're just about over the era when every advertiser assumed that they could create a microsite that people would flock to and use instead of social networks (Bud TV anyone?).
(Though part of me feels that whilst this approach isn't right for trying to replace 'advertising' style numbers of a million+ users, there's still a role for companies creating niche spaces for niche audiences where they don't exist... imagine a car engineering forum run by BMW engineers for the petrolheads of this world... it wouldn't be hug numbers, but it would be a strong way to engage a specialised audience).
"It's Our Time; We have to actually DO IT... just talking about it and thinking about it won't help make the change happen..."
Damien Blackden, OMG
Damien opens up talking about the maelstrom we agencies find ourselves in... it's 'Darwinian conditions'.
Technological developments are driving key human behaviours... those of the seeking out of new entertainment and information, and the desire to share and discuss these... Add to this the economic travails we find ourselves in... and it adds up to the perfect storm.
So, Damien says there are three things that will enable a media agency to create success for clients...
i) Strategies, supported by purchasing data... it's about taking the data that's increasing inherent in everything, and measuring and managing this effectively
ii) Holistic planning by technique... attracting & retaining a range of quality people within an agency who can, together, create something compelling for clients
iii) Optimisation of international values and local relevance... creating systems and approaches that can manage a client's need to appeal, dynamically to the world, and a specific location in one country all at the same time
Samir Arora, Glam Media
Glam started because of the changes that had started happening in the media world, and was created based on 'vertical media'...
"there is one very big difference of online media vs other media... there is absolutely no control of distribution"
4 things have changed the definition of media...
- Fragmentation of content (200m+ nice sites) - Long-tail & mid-tail (Blogs, sites, social profiles) - Fragmentation of traffic (topics & articles as 'landing pages') - Death of portals (decreasing share of time)
How did Glam solve this problem? If sites are going to be this fragmented, how do we bring about an aggregation of audience in these places?
Focus is on Audience (women), Context (lifestyle), have a network of sites (publishers), and create a premium brand engagement (rather than just an 'ad'...
They are now at 1400 publishers across the network... and it's an 'exclusive' network. For instance, they could offer a Unilever brand like Dove an exclusive tie-in around 'The Oscars' or similar event.
Glam act like a restaurant franchise... they seek out opportunities to be locally relevant and powerful, but aggregate this across the world.
So Glam are fundamentally 'a technology company' who bring together content, applications, advertisers and agencies, audience and 'distribution'...
They've also built tinker.com... as opposed to following people as twitter would, it follows topics across many streams (it's a bit like addictomatic, to be honest...)
and now... a panel discussion featuring all three speakers...
Question from John Taysun (We7)... how does the industry reconcile the 'targeting' issues with that of 'media buying'... "brand managers want targeting, some planners want targeting, but media buying is still looking for 'scale' and accepts there will be 'waste'...
DB: Everyone is interested in better targeting... we are now taking direct data feeds (not research) from media owners, and building these into dynamic impression buying tools
BR: For FMCG brands like ours, we still need tremendous scale (which we get through traditional routes), but on the internet we want to be as laser focussed as possible... what differentiates one detergent from another is the marketing.
SA: TV is no longer the most effective medium in america to do large scale branding campaigns... it's now the internet.
Martin Loat, Propeller Group: "you mentioned in passing that the Dove spoof got more views than the proper ad... what does that say to us about consumers nowadays"
BR: I truly believe that as time moves forward that content created by consumers will rival that which is produced by professionals... (hence the moves by Unilever like crowdsourcing the Peperami ads)
DB: you have to be authentic, realise that what you put out there will stay out there, and have things in place that will enable you to listen and respond...
BR: The companies that handle social media best are the companies who've already been punk'd by social media...
-----------------------------
Andrew Freeman, Harris
Andrew outlines the sheer difference in today's media landscape (everything from press & magazines to outdoor), and yet the ways in which we measure these core media channels remains the same...
...nowadays people make many more decisions and choices to edit down their own media choices, so that broad targeting approach of old school planning.
So planners today need to navigate a much more difficult landscape...
In 1996, there were only 75m indexable URLs, and Andrew reckons that the entire downloadable content of it could be stored on every phone in the room here...
...now, of course, it's huge and growing exponentially... the reality of which means there are hundreds of thousands of people trying to reach people.
For agencies, just trying to navigate this landscape with the measurement tools of yesteryear can't be effective. Tools like Touchpoints, Media DNA and RSVP help to draw a new map to help us out... but there needs to be a lot more work done to make sure planners have the tools that mean they can plan properly in the world we live in.
----------------------------------
Chris Ward, Creative director Comic Relief
Has worked with Friends Reunited, Comic Relief, and is now working on 1Goal (make poverty history, based around the world cup)...
...he's doing a top twenty of how to be number one... (I bet I miss one. At least...)
2. Give up control... and still win. don't moderate anything... allow the conversation to happen
3. People don't REALLY care about your product OR your great ideas... people only care for a very short period of time (Comic relief facebook example... 25000 fans in 6 weeks, then 200000 in the next four days)
4. Before you launch (or relaunch)... read THIS and THIS
5. Become a coffice worker... you become aware of what people like, and don't like. Or work in a shop.
I'm a big fan of this one... as I outlined in this piece a while back:
6. Run a great campaign before anyone knows if your product is any good
7. If the product is no good... change jobs (or change sides)
8. Manufacture success (Viral Loop - How the Smartest Businesses grow themselves)
9. Be relevant (to people's lives)... (Queen Rania example of education for 1Goal)
10. Get someone better than you to do your job... get someone in the 'inner circle' (eg Richard Curtis)
11. Tweet. Whatever your product is.
12. Enable Journalists to show off... find an angle
13. Go to the public... they won't be bothered to come to you. where people first engage, they want to stay engaged
14. Rip someone off... Comic Relief eyebrows ad:
15. Love celebrities (everyone else does). Comic Relief facebook page changed image to Chris Moyles... doubled traffic overnight
16. Make sure everything is sharable (Creative Commons)
17. Be boring... make sure everything works on every platform
18. Be flexible... go with it, whatever it is... don't be a tanker...
19. Be real...
20. Throw enough mud. You don't know which one ISN'T going to work... it's all cheap if you work with the right people, so test what works and what doesn't.
phew... got 'em all
Mike Parsons, Tribal DDB
"Grasping the bigger picture"... four thoughts that will help in the 'big new media world'.
When you're thinking cross-platform, and how a message can travel across paid, earned and own media... spend seems to be migrating from paid across earned and own media a lot more... brands understand how they might become publishers in this world.
Rule 1 - have a compelling insight...
The VW GTI project; the 24+ turbocharged male doesn't just love cars... they love the scalextric they grew up with.
So they recreated a mythical development room at Volkswagen, built a scalextric track there, with a scale model of the new car, and let people race the cars online...
Rule 2 - Be compelling...
Was way above any other casual gaming experience you could have online...
Rule 3 - Reach out to influencers
By finding influencers who are listened to by the audience, you can do so and make it scalable; the VW team reached out to just 20 people, who had enormous influence across the website, and then provided them with content to share
Rule 4 - Be brave
There is inherently more risk as you move away from paid for media... but there are rewards out there for the advertisers. this was the first time VW had ever launched a car without TV. 25% of the spend was on paid media, the rest was on the creation of the idea. And they sold 1000 cars in a depressed car market as a result... (no idea what the overall spend was, though...)
Barnaby Dawe, Turner
Demonstrating the role of TV in the new world... talking firstly about Ben 10.
One in FIVE toys sold in the UK is a Ben 10 toy. Wow. All product lines based on the TV series, which is really the revenue generating part of the business model.
A launch of a new Ben 10 series, with a 'Golden Ticket' style invite to 'The World's Largest Kids Premiere'. They engaged kids through Binweevils and Swapitshop... and produced over £2m of PR-ness.
Now talking about Turner Classic Movies... needed to revitalise the channel with newer films for a younger generation (Lost Boys, Caddyshack etc). Needed to engage with these people...
...so put all the budget behind 'Capture Your Classic' - getting people to shoot their own version of classic film moments... think Johnny Vegas and Denise Van Outen recreating the street scenes from Fame...
They managed to shift the average age of the channel from 55+ to 35+... and generated £4.8m of PR coverage.
They're nice case studies... but I disagree with Barnaby's point that it's showing that TV 'isn't dead' though... the ideas very much live online rather than TV, selling TV as a product, not an advertising medium.
Ajaz Ahmed, AKQA
Ajaz is going to share, for the first time, the internal things that power AKQA.
It's based around 'the fab four'; innovation, service, quality and thought. He then shows a video of... err, award titles they've won. OK then...
Anyway, 7 trends shaping the landscape...
- On-demand reality is here - Media fragmentation and ad-clutter is everywhere - Consumers customise and create - The profound rise of channel me - Marketing and product have converged (e.g. Nike+) - Entering the age of perfect information - Virtuality is reality
And then... another video. Which my friend sitting next to me tells me is also the global Nike video, so I guess AKQA made it for 'em.
It is best described as 'well weapon'...
Next up... the microwave Xmas card they did... which is pretty clever, I liked it a lot then and still now...
Then the Fabregas TV show, and another Nike user generated content video...
He then shows the US postal service thing they've created using augmented reality which is one of the best uses I've seen... it's a real, practical application:
Another video, for Nike Football+, then for Gap 's store locator app... in fact, the creds clips go on so long, there's no time for any Q&A session for the last four speakers. Hmmm, seems unfair on the other guys.
Here we go... it's a rock'n'roll presentation from...
Nick Manning at Billets... on, yep, ROI...
He starts with the example of the Tevez poster... just one poster, but it produced loads of PR, UGC versions, response from Alex Ferguson and so on... all for just £23k.
And then brings up everyone's favourite country & western airline bashing video... Dave Carroll's United Breaks Guitar song.
Two good examples about how the digital world re-defines marketing communications... it's no longer just about advertising.
How is the agency world doing at delivering this? The answer according to Nick is '...not that well at all' with a few exceptions.
The new currency in this world is 'data'... interaction is the key thing to understand, not a 'coverage and frequency' measure for the internet.
In Billet's view, communications strategy should be built around ROI... measurement via data analytics across multiple disciplines.
Their new model seems very cyclical... you start with what's been proven to be the most effective ROI channels, create a strategy within those channels, prove they work again, and use it to inform your future work.
.....HOLD UP...
How do you ever do anything new in that framework? Neither of the examples he gave at the start of how the world works fits in the proposed model.
Then he shows a pie chart of media split which suggests that TV should, for FMCG goods, not account for around half of spend... but in fact two thirds. There appears to be no space in his pie charts for online, mobile etc... I'll try and get the slides and look at that again.
I've no idea how the two ends of this presentation tie together... oh, hang on, here we go: "is it all about numbers and ROI... no, absolutely not... it's about ROI and also about using creativity to deliver the solutions that are a better return on your investment".
It's not one big recession, of course... it's about 23 million different recessions for every household in the UK... everyone reacts differently.
Now that marketing is much more adept at targeting more discreetly and at niches, we can actually communicate to people according to their recessionary circumstances...
Now, people who advertise in a recession are more likely to come out of that recession fighting fit... yes, there's a degree of self selection, but it's back to the 'prepare to come out' point again...
There's a 'marketing law of gravity'... growth/decline of brands is inexorably linked to category share of voice... if you outspend the market in a recession, it's actually very effective SOV to buy...
...but, wait, here we go... that's just ONE solution... and it only works if you have the money to spend at the expense of jobs, investment etc etc.
What's the other solution? Disproportionality.
Well, instead of the 'elephant' approach (invest everything in reproducing ONE elephant over 12 months, then caring for it) try the dandelion approach... produce lots and lots of spores, and a few will survive and thrive.
The digital world makes this behaviour much, much more achievable. TV is still an 'elephant'... costs a lot to get into.
"In the old world, success was proportionate to the amount of money you gave to Rupert Murdoch..."
"Before, marketing was a casino where you would put all your money on red... now you have to decide how much you put on each individual number..."
"Once you're given a large budget... you start looking for large budget things to spend it on..."
"Consumers have no sense of proportion..." ...so they'll appreciate
"I will have succeeded when people come and talk to advertising agencies when they don't have any money... there's a lot of creativity in advertising agencies, media agencies, digital agencies etc that creates ideas that don't need any money to be spent with Rupert Murdoch..."
Small behavioural tweaks can have massive impact... and in a recessionary environment like this, developing and implementing these ideas is hugely important.
Is there a way you can improve the services you offer through the provision of information?
Is there a way you can offer price discrimination, so the cash rich and time-poor people happily pay more?
Is there a way that you can ask people to help you make your service more effective? (He uses an Ocado example of the Green Van selection for delivery arrangement)
Finally... the most important thing we must use this recession to do is to move some degree of human understanding of business back away from the 'arithmocracy' of the financial people back to some sort of influence of the marketers... business without any understanding of their customers barely deserves to be called a business at all...
-------------------------------------
Casey Harwood, Turner Europe
Talking about more of the work Turner have been doing working on cross-platform solutions...
If people approach TV the same way the do music, and stop buying 'albums' (channels) and only buying 'songs' (programmes) then the TV industry will have to rethink the complete structure...
"The days of the regulated EPG are over..."
Measurement is key; retail, business, travel etc have all become dominated by data, and it's now media's turn... Turner have responded with a new way of understanding the nitty gritty of the numbers that come their way.
They've also invested in a new way of delivery content cleverly and automatically across their entire portfolio, then offer holistic opportunities to advertisers.
He starts with a couple of the first virals he ever saw... the guy blowing up the dingy, and the guy kicking the crap out of his computer... then the Trojan Games one..
...so what does the future hold, if that's the past?
20 hours of content are uploaded to Youtube every minute... it's not just about the video, it's now about creating ideas that will move through EVERY medium...
Like "The Best Job in the World"... starts with recruitment ads, getting people to submit videos, driving uptake through facebook, twitter etc... but only really 'scaled' when the mass media picked it up... and the BBC made an hour long documentary... they got over £100m worth or PR (apparently...)
Or like the Fiesta Movement... they gave various people a free Fiesta for six months, and set them missions to fulfill and film... pure online activity got 4.3m Youtube hits, which turned into 50,000 interested people...
Why is there so many bad virals out there? Quality control, says Ajaz... and of course thirteen year old kids are better at telling stories through this media.
Does viral still have to be naughty or disruptive to be successful (like the Polo that decapitated the cat)? Richard says now... shocking and funny still helps, but things like the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty...
Dan from Nokia says the benefit is that with twitter you can now get your message out a lot more quickly, but now sustaining the conversation is a lot more difficult...
...then Dan references the Bonfires & Fireworks analogy... it takes time, effort, and participation in not just your own bonfire, but joining in other people's...
thanks for the props, Dan :)
Katy from Tate has content (copyright allowing...), and so placing that content in provoking new places becomes quite compelling and people will join in, make their own versions, interactions, add commentary etc...
Dan's first viral piece for Nokia was 3 years back for NGage... edgy, provoking, and not something that everyone will have seen...
(I don't know what it was... but I just found this from N Gage, which is the first time I've ever played Bricked-Up with real people...)
in order to make it effective for more marketing more mainstream products, they're now using a balance between own, earned and bought media... starting conversations that people will feel that they themselves can take and run with, build on etc.
Richard complains about the clients who come to them with a piece of video and ask for it to 'be made viral'...
Dan: "I quite often will be sent something and asked 'can you send this out to your bloggers'... and I'll say'll no, because it's of no inherent value to them..."
Ajaz: The key role of marketing is to create familiarity... which means making sure every part of the experience from beginning to end is perfect. Red Bull is an example of an exceptionally managed brand...
Dan: The idea that everything has to be simple is wrong... we wanted to do a really complex ARG style game for the launch of the N97, and the broad comms team said no... they split the handsets available between the two teams, and there was way more coverage from the 7 devices used in the ARG than there was from the 90 used in traditional 'giveaway' comms...
Ajaz: "...that's because you didn't treat your consumers like dumbos"
Katy: Interesting... Tate are partnering with Miniclip, to 'swap' audiences so the Miniclip kids will play the games on the Tate Kids site and vice versa...
------------------------------------------------
Panel on 'Economic Fallout' - Iain Johnston, Loewy, Rob Grimshaw, FT, and Tim Lefroy of the Advertising Association
(Chaired by Mike Southon)
IJ: The old order is dead, and very little of it will be coming back in the future... the criteria that people are using to assess their marketing behaviour are really basic again; sales, revenues...
MS: Are the big budgets EVER coming back..?
IJ: The big budgets will still be there, but they will be parceled down into small, precise parts rather than huge £20m slugs of budget...
RG: From the FT point of view... "we're optimistic, but there is cause to be afraid... the downturn is secondary to the huge shift that has been going on across the industry for years... in the US all print in Q1 06 is worth $47bn, and in Q1 09 it's worth $31bn... it's seismic"
RG: "...it's not going to come back, the world is different, and publishers just have to respond to that..."
RG: "...there's a huge cultural change for the industry... publishing is a fundamentally conservative industry which has done the same things for a hundred years... I'm spending a lot of my time getting the teams in the business to be entrepreneurial, creative, pioneering..."
RG: "You absolutely can charge for content online, because we do, and you can place advertising into those spaces, because we do..."
...I'd challenge that it's because of the nature of the FT's content...
...it's timely by it's nature, and demanded by an audience who have billion pound organisations who will pay for that content for them...
...I don't believe that the same model works for 'normal' news...
IJ: The laziness and lethargy of big agency approach was rife... the harsh wind of economic reality meant agencies had to wake up and smell the coffee... nowadays though there are a lot more bits of the industry and traditional agency groups who are looking to solve problems with something that isn't a TV ad...
TL: It's half the fault of the agencies, and half the fault of the clients... because of the influence of procurement in an oversupplied market, clients are demanding good people at a cost that doesn't let agencies deliver those good people... how that's fixed industry wide is a good question though.
---------------------------------------
Lennard Hoornik, Sony
"It strikes me how hard it is to delearn... forget what it is you 'know'..."
The one problem with mobile devices... they are all becoming very very similar... the world of 'touch mobiles'... your value chain can only be defined by your users, if you try and do it yourself, you're in trouble.
You have to have a very clear idea about who your competitors are, what you're there to do, what direction you're moving in...
Everything is moving really fast, and new competitors emerge (Apple, Android, Dell...).
We expect our media partners, creative partners, digital partners to move and learn fast.
So why is everybody going mobile? It's the most personal, and it's in your face most of the day, it's with you all the time, it's always on...
Every mobile phone is no longer the same... as soon as it's bought, it changes, and is constantly evolved and augmented by the user... it's a gateway, not a finished product. And they power the social media world in the future...
Why did Sony E end up where they are in 2009 (market share down etc)? Because they admit they spent their time improving things that people didn't want. They didn't sell many walkman phones, so concentrated on making EVEN BETTER WALKMAN PHONES...
...which he likens to the TV landscape... if a TV ad isn't working, DON'T SPEND YOUR TIME AND MONEY MAKING AN EVEN BETTER TV AD... understand that it's a massive change, and TV ISN'T COMING BACK...
So, what are they doing?
Sony Ericsson has put the consumer back at the heart of the company... and in their advertising, internal communications, and brand.
Rightly, and in line with the Communis Manifesto stuff, they've realised it's about starting a movement INSIDE the company first...
...because if you as a company don't care, why would anyone else?
Their transformational strategy for the company is:
MAKE.BELIEVE
This new brand is "optimistic, playful, energetic and beautiful"...
...it's based on:
1. Be innovative 2. Be human 3. Be entertaining 4. Engage Communities 5. Enable Communities 6. Collaborate
...all the examples are nice, and you definitely get a sense of how they've changed their approach based on how the world really works now... it's heartening to see.
And by starting things in the heart of the company itself, I guess they have a much better chance of producing great phones again (they did used to have some awesome phones...).
"There's never been as an exciting time to work in this agency as now..."
...and it's another outing of the Socialnomics video... it was played earlier today by Babs, though with a different soundtrack...
Maybe everyone should talk about which videos they're going to play before conferences.
Talking about Obama, and activating communities... over a six month period, he went from outside long-shot to President of the USA.
"If we take traditional 'brand shouting' and put it inside social networks, people don't want this... people don't want brands in Facebook, Bebo, Myspace... that model doesn't work in these markets, we have to reinvent it".
Blake's friend Stephen asked his friend on Facebook for book recommendations... not Amazon, not a book store, not book reviews in newspapers... his friends.
"Anyone in advertising... if you're not involved in social media, you won't understand what's going on..."
The social graph is something that's existed for the whole of history... but only now is it being mapped, connected and enabled via technology... Facebook now has 300m users and STILL GROWING... 15% of pageviews, and 20% of all time spent in the UK on the internet is spent on Facebook...
...or, really, time spent with your friends and loved ones.
...speaking of which, I'm off home to spend a little time with this little fella...
Jason is Managing Director of PHD North in Manchester, and is nicely fostering the 'Feeding The Puppy' spirit there... he recently attended the 'Science of Success' seminar in Manchester featuring Malcolm Gladwell & Daniel Goleman, and has come away with four main thoughts inspired by what he heard there...
...'can I share them on Feeding The Puppy?' asks Jason. You certainly can, Mr Spencer...
----------------------------
4. Patience is a necessity
You can’t hurry success … but we want to see results by
Thursday.
In Outliers, Gladwell’s latest book, he focuses on what makes
people and groups of people successful. Time is a key element.
Not to mention
hard work, luck, persistence, collaboration and failure along the way.
Experimenting is key – if you only ever do what you’ve always done, you’ll ever
get what you’ve always got.
Fleetwood Mac are a classic example of this – it took 11
albums before they made their very own classic Rumors, one of the top 10 selling records of all time, as
Gladwell explained.
Too often nowadays, we don’t have time. Everything is moving faster and faster
in every aspect of our lives. Patience is needed.
The recent case of football clubs being investigated and
fined for poaching young players because it is quicker and easier than nurturing
talent, is a case in point.
Chelsea, take heed. Is it any coincidence that Peter Kenyon is now leaving suddenly? Let me know what you
think, but there is a certain irony in the speed of this too linked to this
overall theme.
So maybe we are now at a key moment where the excesses and
greed and impatience of recent times will enable us to take a more balanced,
long term and patient view on where we go next.
Football clubs will have to nurture talent as well as buy it
in.
Brands need to use media to create bonfires as well as
fireworks. Nurturing long
term relationships not short term fixes is where brands are headed next.
Is this really possible or likely or just some kind of
rose-tinted view of where we will end up in the next year or two?
Jason is Managing Director of PHD North in Manchester, and is nicely fostering the 'Feeding The Puppy' spirit there... he recently attended the 'Science of Success' seminar in Manchester featuring Malcolm Gladwell & Daniel Goleman, and has come away with four main thoughts inspired by what he heard there...
...'can I share them on Feeding The Puppy?' asks Jason. You certainly can, Mr Spencer...
----------------------------
3. Beware success
If you only ever shout about yourself, people are
going to stop listening…
It is all down to “expert failure” and how we deal with overconfidence in others.
We tolerate it rather than condone it. Or at least we have done until now.
This is essentially the chronology of the recent banking
crisis and can be specifically seen in the demise of companies like Bear Stearns for instance. In gathering as much information as
we can, we become more confident in our ability to predict outcomes. It makes us
experts.
This leads to a “miscalibration gap” as Gladwell coins it,
where we believe we have more knowledge and control over situations than we
really do have.
While a bit of overconfidence is no bad thing – do we really
want surgeons who fail to reassure us that everything will be alright? As
Gladwell pointed out – too much blinds us to the reality of what is going on and
clouds judgement. His view is we should encourage humility in our experts, rather
than expertise per se.
This got me thinking about successful brands. A little
humility goes a long way.
Big brand behaviour or behaving like a market leader is all
very well but it goes back to the point I make earlier around speed dating. You
cannot ignore the “you” in all this.
If you only ever shout about yourself, people are going to
stop listening.
Brand confidence is a good thing. But never forget that the
most important element – the target audience/consumer. Or it may end up in
disaster.
Does this work for brand leaders in practice as well as
theory? Can brands really suffer from some sort of Shakespearian hubris? Let me know what you think….
Jason is Managing Director of PHD North in Manchester, and is nicely fostering the 'Feeding The Puppy' spirit there... he recently attended the 'Science of Success' seminar in Manchester featuring Malcolm Gladwell & Daniel Goleman, and has come away with four main thoughts inspired by what he heard there...
...'can I share them on Feeding The Puppy?' asks Jason. You certainly can, Mr Spencer...
----------------------------
2. Social media as speed dating
If you are going to go speed dating, don’t just talk about
yourself. The same goes for brands.
Daniel Goleman cited the greatest Jewish philosopher, Martin
Buber, and his I and Thou Theory that there are 2 types of human
relationship:
I/it relationships, where the I considers the person they are
interacting with as an object and talks at them;
I/you relationships, where the I empathises and listens to
the other person.
Now it does not take a genius to work out which strategy will
yield the most success if you go speed dating, as Goleman pointed out.
But this got me thinking that social media is maybe just like
speed dating.
If you are inundated with lots of brands vying for your
attention, you will be drawn towards the brand that treats you as an individual
not an object. The brand that stands out because it listens rather than just
talks.
Without social media, every brand would be engaging in an
I/it strategy and whilst they would get through the highest number of its, they
would make the least “connections”.
If we want to get phone numbers and meet again, hey maybe
even go out on a few dates and have some sort of meaningful relationship, we
must listen and ask questions from the very start.
So I/you beats I/it every time.
For the record, I have never been speed dating. But I have a
friend who has.
If you have been speed dating, it would be great to know if
this analogy works for you (and if we can stretch it a little further)…
Jason is Managing Director of PHD North in Manchester, and is nicely fostering the 'Feeding The Puppy' spirit there... he recently attended the 'Science of Success' seminar in Manchester featuring Malcolm Gladwell & Daniel Goleman, and has come away with four main thoughts inspired by what he heard there...
...'can I share them on Feeding The Puppy?' asks Jason. You certainly can, Mr Spencer...
----------------------------
At the Science of Success seminar in Manchester on Tuesday
this week, Daniel Goleman and Malcolm Gladwell talked extensively about what
makes some people more successful than others.
Most of what they talked about
related to the success of individuals and groups of people, but plenty of it is
interesting food for thought for the world of media and brands. It was
fascinating stuff from really engaging speakers.
4 big themes emerged for me
where their ideas can translate into how we think about media and brands... this is the first.
1. The coming earthquake and the third space of decision
making
There’s a coming earthquake for commerce and industry… it’s
called “Ecological Intelligence” says Daniel Goleman.
Did you know there are 1,959 discrete industrial steps which
can be analysed in a drinking glass? Or how many times
you have to use a stainless steel water bottle until its impact on the
environment is less than a plastic disposable bottle?
The new measure of “junkness” (the extent to which brands and
products impact on the world around them at every step of their life cycle) is
set to revolutionise the way green is marketed. It is
also set to be the third space in which decision making happens – not just price
and quality but now also eco quality will help us decide which product to buy.
How? Here are 2 developments in the US set to take the UK by
storm soon.
Firstly, Walmart last month ordered its 100,000 suppliers to
reveal the ecological impact of their products on their label and are set to put
this next to the price on shelf. The message is comply or die.
Talking to the packaging team from Diageo over lunch, they
said it was already happening for their brand portfolio. Once global brands
like Unilever start doing this, it won’t be long before they roll out this
packaging globally forcing other local competitors to fall in line.
Secondly, take a look at www.goodguide.com which rates the eco impact of over 75,000
products in the US. Apparently it is an iPhone app too. It aggregates data
from over 200 databases and enables you to compare products based on their eco
impact. The new aggregators? It is not over here yet but surely it can’t be
far off.
Given the data still needs to be ratified and turned into
easy to digest consumer speak, we are not there yet. But companies will need to
think long and hard about whether to go into this first or wait and see how the
US developments impact on market share.
Initially it may be painful, but the ethics of weighing up
responsibility to the shareholder vs. responsibility to the environment, in the
current climate, is about to be brought into sharp focus. Has it happened to
you yet?
I hasten to add I only remember it from the repeats on kids TV in the nineties. I'm not fifty or anything.
I just showed it to someone here who didn't get it; you maybe have to own the small versions to get the joke that these are big versions. But then, being IKEA, most folk might have these in their homes.
But next time... what about a 30" tall Billy Bookcase? Everyone's got one of them.
Anyway, thanks for the smile, IKEA. I didn't take the catalogue as I'd have had to carry it around all day. But maybe on the way home.
I had an awful experience this morning, one of those real 'punch in the guts' moments where you see stretching out in front of you a road of high cost, endless customer service conversations, and all through no fault of your own...
...because when I switched on my iPhone, it looked like this:
Just a bright, white screen. THE WHITE SCREEN OF DEATH.
Nothing I did would get rid of it. At all.
I swore quite a lot. For about five minutes.
Then...
...rather than trying to find the instruction manual, or head to Apple's site or whatever, I just searched for 'iPhone White Screen'.
That top search result was pretty appealing... a solution? Really? Brilliant...
I click through, and get a video of RichyRich7777... an American fella filming on his webcam, telling you how to fix the 'White Screen of Death'...
The solution worked, perfectly. Thanks RichyRich7777. The sense of relief... words can't capture it
Anyway, it got me thinking. There's three things at play here which are characteristic of how the internet is changing the customer service model for companies.
Firstly, there's me, the customer. For whatever reason, I didn't feel that even a company like Apple is going to provide an easy to find solution on their own website. I didn't search for 'Apple helpdesk' or 'iPhone problem'. Experience with the internet has clearly taught me that the quickest route to things is to use Google to search on my precise self-diagnosis.
Then there's RichyRich7777, who's the service. He had the same problem I did, and found a solution. Presumably he didn't find it on someone else's video, because he felt compelled to save people the hassle of going through the same pain he did and filmed a video himself.
Finally there's Apple, the company.
On the search results, they just about manage to sneak onto the first page with a solution on their forum... to a different problem.
RichyRich7777 is providing the service, and has done so for free. And it works, it's simple.
So what should the company do? Point people to it? Recommend it? Embed it on their own website with the creator's permission? Or just leave people to their own devices like they're doing now.
When I was doing the IPA Excellence Diploma course, I picked up this from John Millar & David Muir's book 'The Business of Brands'...
For a company, good branding achieved certain things...
i) INCREASE the cash flow, as the number of purchases increased ii) ACCELERATE the cash flow, as strong brands grow and diversify more quickly iii) EXTEND the duration of the cash flow, as brands create habit in people iv) REDUCE RISK, as brands help guarantee the continuation of cash flow
But of course the world of branding is going through some big changes right now...
People have started beginning to change the relationships they have with the companies who supply their goods and services. Relationship is maybe the key word here; people talking to other people, because technology has made mass conversation possible, and desirable...
I've covered lots on social media before, or course, like Bonfires & Fireworks, so let's skip over that for now...
However, much is made of how preposterous this when you come to thinking about how people would form relationships with the everyday branded objects...
"These new humans want a direct relationship with their peanut butter maker and their muffler manufacturer. They want a relationship
with the company that makes their socks and their chairs. And their
pickles, and their half-and-half, and their mayonnaise, and their
cookies, and their tires, and their chewing gum, and their toothbrush,
and their umbrella, and their dishwasher, and their napkins, and their
toaster, and their gasoline, and their horseradish..."
...and so it continues (thanks to Jo for the heads up).
Now, I agree, it'd be completely unwieldy and unlikely to expect people to have a 'relationship' with all of these different companies... they'll still seek out and talk about/talk to the companies they think are remarkable, but it'll be one in a hundred perhaps.
But for the most part, a relatively unremarkable FMCG product is just a relatively unremarkable FMCG product. Why would you want to form a relationship with a 'soap powder brand'.
Yet this is where I think the 'private label' issue is the key one...
Why form a relationship with hundreds of individual companies, when you can build a strong, reciprocal relationship with one company who can deliver you all the products you wanted, of comparable quality, at a lower price.
Of course, the 'price' factor is often raised as the biggest factor in the private label vs brand battle... but that's only half the story I think; competition from private label products, and inferior brands, has always been around in the competitive marketplace of the last few decades.
The double whammy is that not only is private label cheaper, but it comes from a company people have an increasingly close relationship with.
People don't form relationships with brands. They form relationships with people, and with companies (who're just big groups of people).
Supermarkets have lots of people on the ground, and lots of initiatives, which are all fixated on building relationships with their customers (in order to prevent defection to other supermarkets). Relationships between people and supermarkets are really quite strong.
So I guess maybe the question for the producers of 'dull FMCG products' is 'how do I get people to form relationships with my brands?'. Because to justify price differentials, there needs to be a relationship differential.
In time though, I wonder if there's a need for FMCG producers to act more like supermarkets... it's not the individual brands and products they should look to for forming relationships, it's the companies themselves...
