Feeding the Puppy

Your iPhone is now... a credit card payment system

Oh my giddy aunt.  I talked before about how the digital applications of phones will increasingly replace the solid hardware we've grown up used to...

...I used the example of the iPhone camera apps which replaced the functionality of Lomo style cameras and so on.

Now, via Mark, I've just seen Square for the first time...

It's basically a 'square' device that plugs into the standard jack socket of ANY mobile device smart enough, and lets you receive payments for goods or services.  Yeah, I know.  REALLY.

 


So anyone from a street vendor to a design freelancer has an instant payment system available to them to receive their money. 

Which in turn means everything from the chip & pin systems in shops to the invoice process for freelancers can now change, and be wrapped up in the device folk carry with them anyway.

If this isn't huge, I'll eat my hat.

Then buy a new one, from a guy in the street who's using the system that was even better than Square and hence freed him up to set up his hat stall...

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.

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"...

Is Idea Bounty our 'Myspace'?

There was all sorts of kerfuffles kicking off over on Amelia's blog yesterday in response to her post on the whether "Crowdsourced Advertising can work"... the chief protaganists in the story are Idea Bounty and the Peparami brief that Unilever famously put on there...

  

You should go on over and have a read of all of the points of view that people contributed around the issue... it's clearly one that, unsurprisingly, has niggled away at a fair few people.

My contributution wasn't really to do with the ins and outs of how the crowdsourcing works in this form, who spots the best idea, asking people to create a derivation of existing agency work and all those sorts of things.

It was more of an overall thought, and thinking about where this trend might end up...

What we do know about digital information on t'internet is that whenever things become digital, they lose 'value', no matter that they cost the same to 'produce' as they did before.

Music tracks being a prime example, of course.

And if there's a place where these newly digitised pieces of information can be gathered at almost no cost to the creator, that place will become swamped with stuff that just crosses that threshold of 'good enough'.

 
Like Myspace, for instance. The home of a million 'ok' bands (mine and yours included).

...so...

...do we run the risk of making the main thing our industry has to sell (the 'ideas') into our equivalent of MP3s? Hosted in the idea equivalent of Myspace?

Or does it not matter, because every advertising/media/digital agency could never monetise 'the idea' anyway, it was always about product/commission/build etc?

It's been gnawing away at me for the last day or so too, so I thought I'd take the comment, put it on here, and see what you all think.

If we digitise the 'ideas' part of the industry, and create an open, democratic, myspace-esqe platform open to all ideas, will we indeed drive the 'price' of ideas down like MP3s did to music?

And what happens to 'quality'? 

When the process of submitting ideas is as quick and painless (and most importantly as CHEAP) as this, will it just encourage many environments around the internet to spring up and become 'the home of OK ideas...'?

Or is it the turn of agencies, like record labels, to realise that the world has changed and the way that they once made their living isn't as viable as it once was..?

Read the book? Or watch the film..?

The IPA's Behavioural Economics workshops are being held the week after next (16th-20th November), and a select few PHD'ers are heading along.

(If you want to find out more about the workshops, you should speak to Victoria at the IPA...)

In preparation we're all reading / rereading two books; The Paradox of Choice, and Nudge.

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...