second brain

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...

web 2.0: don't believe the hype

i am sceptical of the feverish chatter around 'social media'. Apparently it's the future of the web and humanity and everything. The 'Web 2.0' meme is the perfect hype-magnet: it sounds kind of cool, and it's baggy enough that anything vaguely social (which, on the web, is pretty much everything) can be stuffed into it. What's more, it comes with a built-in hype-accelerator ('web 2.0 is totally over - web 3.0 is the new new thing!'). This isn't to say it's all rubbish, just that there is a lot of rubbish talked about it.

so i was pleased to read this entertaining takedown of the web 2.0 bubble by michael hirschorn in the atlantic, from which:

as a fairly regular user of MySpace— an unbeatable tool for tapping into youth culture—I can vouch for both the intoxicating appeal of the experience and the strung-out, crispy, crawling-home-from-a-nightclub comedown that quickly follows. After a brief rush of “friend”-gathering—I know maybe half of them in real life—I now spend most of my time fending off the same type of spam that used to litter my dial-up AOL account, while ignoring endless ads for the True singles service.

few of the social networks have yet proved adept at truly linking people of like-minded interests, and many of the networks being started now, especially by entrepreneurs and corporations looking to grab their slice of 2.0 glory, tend to miss the reason the best sites work: they facilitate behavior that people already engage in.

read the whole thing. He's particularly good on the murky future of myspace.

bracketological enlightenment

bracketology is the answer to everything, or at least everything that involves a long list of options, like your favourite ever film or the best ever ad slogan or what to call your child. It's a devilishly simple technique that works by turning your list of possibles into one big knock-out tournament, pitting every option against every other option, one at a time. Do we have a brainstorming technique here that might actually simplify rather than confuse?

lost is the new sergeant pepper

the clever buggers who make lost are masters at creating content that the blogosphere goes crazy about. They embed all manner of clues and puzzles into each episode. This makes people want to watch again (which enhances the value of DVD and syndication rights) and encourages viewers to engage in feverish speculation on the web about the drama. the latest trick is to encode a mysterious audio message into an episode, that can only be heard when you play the scene backwards. Somebody, conveniently, has done just that and posted the result on youtube (click and play above to see the result). You can hear a voice saying 'only fools are enslaved by time and space'. Quite.

two goliaths

Virgin has been the great british branding success of the last twenty years. It has proven again and again how a strong, consistent brand positioning can enable a brand to succeed in whatever category it enters.

so what has that brand positioning been? Although Virgin has never sought to define its brand explicitly, there is a general consensus that, at root, it is a 'David and Goliath' story. Virgin's biggest successes - the airline, the mobile phone network - involved taking on a big, established, dominant competitor or oligopoly that was seen to be exploitative in some way (BA, the big phone networks) and offering a fairer, better experience to consumers. When they've failed - Virgin Cola, for example - it's because they chose the wrong enemy. Nobody thought Coke or Pepsi were ripping them off.

what's clear from reading the reports of the current clash is that 'David and Goliath' no longer works as a brand story for Branson, or Virgin. Verbally and visually, the story that the media is telling is about Murdoch and Branson going 'head to head'. This is about two billionaires locking horns; not an upstart taking on a giant. Branson may yet make a dent in Sky's business and brand - but he won't be able to draw on the British love of the plucky underdog anymore, because he's made too much of a success of that story for it to be any longer credible.

not only that, but he's also up against new, rebranded Murdoch Mark II, otherwise known as James: young, attractive, environmentally conscious. Branson is the establishment now.

UPDATE: and what an awful mess the launch campaign for Virgin Media has turned out to be.

making friends with the enemy

the music industry has been trying to work out how to cope with the disruptive effect of the internet for longer than the film or TV industries, which makes it a useful bellwether for the challenges faced by everyone in the business of marketing entertainment content.

the music guys have changed tack in recent years. Instead of fighting the effects of the web, they are learning, slowly and gingerly, to embrace it for their own good. Three of the music majors (Universal, Sony BMG, and Warner) took small stakes in YouTube shortly before the company was bought by Google. They have also worked out that peer-to-peer file sharing is a marketing opportunity as well as a threat. Jay-Z released an eight-minute clip of his live show complete with promotional clips for Coke. According to a statement from his attorney:

"the concept here is making the peer-to-peer network work for us. While p2p users are stealing the intellectual property, they are also the active music audience...and this technology allows us to market back to them"

the key phrase here? the 'active music audience'. What Jay-Z and his guys have worked out is that the people doing all this illegal downloading are also the big music fans - and fans are much more likely to forward and recommend and generally publicise content they like than the average consumer.

the US tv industry is cottoning on to the same thing. CBS have just published the results of a poll which demonstrates that people who download shows watch more tv, not less, and become fans of more series. They have found that people will watch new shows on the web, and indeed become fans of them without ever having seen them on TV.

CBS have been posting clips of Letterman on YouTube regularly, and garnering huge numbers of hits, which they believe have contributed to an increased audience for the tv show.

the US networks now see the internet as another channel for content, and one that can be monetized:

"we're looking at this as a key change in direction for us now and looking at our programming as dual distribution programming--over the air and on the Internet," CBS Corp. research chief David Poltrack told reporters today.

rule no.2 of the 48 Laws Of Power (much beloved within the hip-hop community and elsewhere): learn how to use your enemy.

ranKing ranQueen

in this age of abundant consumer choice - in everything from entertainment to loo brushes - the role of brands in editing or curating that choice becomes ever more important (that's why predictions of the death of the channel are foolhardy). Consumers don't have the time or patience to assess all the options - they want simplification. ranKing ranQueen is a chain of stores in Tokyo that understands this only too well. It sells stuff from a huge range of categories, from pasta sauce to cell phones. But here's the thing: it only ever sells the most popular items in Japan, in each category. More specifically, the top selling three (or five or ten) items. They base their rankings on sales data from the big Tokyo department stores and independent research. Every week the rankings are updated, and those items that fall out of the hit parade are ruthlessly removed. Genius.

the hero inside

Heroes from NBC is a show about a group of otherwise ordinary people who discover they have superhero powers. It was the surprise hit of last year's fall season, besting more lavishly produced, post-Lost paranoiac dramas like Kidnapped and Vanished. Why? Here's a theory.

in recent years we have become ever more aware of how our lives are being shaped by forces beyond our control: terrorism, war, global warming, killer epidemics. Most people cherish the idea that each individual is the master of his or her own destiny - and nobody more so than Americans. But many feel alarmingly powerless in the face of these global forces. Then along comes a fantasy about ordinary people possessing superhuman powers...

the age of transparency

this is a neat little chart (apologies for the quality but if you click on it everything will become clear, so to speak). It demonstrates, circumstantially at least, the link between consumers' increasing use of the internet as an information source about products and brands, and the increasing importance they attach to a company's ethical stance. Of course, ethical policies are only part of it: the bigger picture is that consumers are expecting and demanding a more transparent, open relationship with brands in general.

serious comics

one mini-trend that caught our eye recently is the growing appetite for sophisticated comic books (or 'graphic novels') tackling serious subjects.

marjorie satrapi's account of her childhood in iran became an unexpected best-seller.

more recently the official 9/11 Commission Report (itself a surprisingly good read) has been given the graphic novel treatment, to rave reviews.

back in the day, The Simpsons broke new ground when it took the cartoon into the territory of the adult (or family) sitcom.  How long before someone makes a credible documentary or factual series using animation?

a million penguins

penguin is a venerable book brand that is canny at marketing their old world medium in the new media age. They have a rather smart website with a blog and podcasts (slightly awkward efforts but at least they're having a go) and a stream of eyecatching little ideas like user-generated book covers.

now they have launched an experiment in writing a new kind of novel: the wiki-novel. The idea is to create a collaboratively authored novel. Anyone can write, edit or contribute to it - it works the same way as wikipedia does. You can read the opening pages here. The whole thing is presented in a slightly windy, academic way (it is in collaboration with a university after all) but it is nevertheless an interesting project and a good way for Penguin to signal their modernity.

current tv

in between losing an election and becoming the world's foremost Green crusader, Al Gore helped to start a cable news network in the US. He and his business partners believed that young people weren't being served by existing tv news, which was either dull or very right-wing.

The new network would not have political leanings, Gore said, but would serve as an "independent voice" for a target audience of people between 18 and 34 "who want to learn about the world in a voice they recognize and a view they recognize as their own."

the result - current tv - is a very interesting experiment in user-generated, participatory content. Its programmes - called 'pods' - are all short (3-7 minutes), and 30% of them are created by users (called VC² Producers). The aired content is chosen by the channel community - registered users who vote via the website on what they think should run.

viewers can also create their own ads, for the channel (who pay a flat rate of $1000 if they air it) or for commercial advertisers. Clients (including Toyota and Sony) post a brief describing the product they want an ad created for, and award a prize of up to $50,000 to the winner.

at the time of its launch in 2005 many predicted failure for current tv. But whilst it is relatively small scale, it has survived and prospered on its own terms, and represents a fascinating glimpse of the multi-platform, viewer-centric future.

paris, queen of links

paris hilton: seemingly there is no beginning to her talents. If you marvel at how she has sustained her celebrity for so long (she's been a tabloid fixture for several years now), you are not alone. There's an interesting theory floating around on the web that might explain her relative longevity:

in today's media-saturated society, attention is one of the most valuable commodities around. Paris is an expert at sourcing this commodity, and - importantly - at distributing it.

when her 'user-generated' sex video went global, precipitating a tsunami of attention, Paris consistently used it to namecheck consumer brands. She rarely talked about herself in interviews, but she would talk - lots - about what clothing brands she wore, what cars she drove, what burgers she liked. Designers, club-owners, and marketers realized what was going on, and lavished her with gifts and further exposure. She became a walking billboard - or a walking website, throwing out links to other brands. 'Paris Hilton' is not a person: she's a media platform, like YouTube.

the flipside of this, however, is that whenever she has tried to promote herself - for example by recording an album - she fails. Nobody is interested in Paris Hilton's inner life or artistic vision. They're interested in what she's wearing, and where's she's going clubbing tonight.

2007: the year TV and PC get married?

the internet has been threatening to turn the TV industry on its head for a few years now. It's already begun to change it, via on-demand downloads and online streaming. But so far we've had to watch this stuff on our computer screens, which isn't ideal: everyone's favourite device for watching great TV or movie content at home is still the television.

the real revolution will happen when the PC and the TV get married, that's to say when I can easily watch the content I download from my broadband connection on my TV. New devices are emerging that will make 2007 the year in which that starts to become a reality rather than a prediction:

BT's set-top box (BT Vision) has a connection to the internet that allows users to download content and watch it on TV - although presently you can only watch the content that BT wants you to.

we've mentioned Apple's iTV - due to launch in February 2007 - before. It's a set-top box with a wireless connection, so that you can download content via your broadband and then watch it on TV. Given Apple's knack of making user-friendly gadgets, this could be massive.

sony are launching a gadget that will fit on to the back of their Bravia TVs and deliver online video direct to the TV screen.

finally, it is strongly rumoured that a new version of Microsoft's X-Box 360 will incorporate an IPTV receiver. This means users can switch between games, DVDs, and on-demand video streamed directly and effortlessly from the internet, via the X-Box, on to the TV set.

of course, it will be a few years until these devices - and others like them - achieve critical mass, and we move into the kind of fluid, free-floating world of on-demand TV content that everyone is predicting. But 2007 may go down as the first year in which that much-heralded development started to feel truly imminent. So, if not marriage, then definitely an engagement...

born to ride

harley-davidson is a fascinating brand. One reason for its sustained success in the face of fierce competition has been its single-minded focus on a brand ideology or philosophy: individuality in the face of authority. Like other successful brands - Nike, Apple, Jack Daniel's - it conveys a strong sense that it believes in something over above its own commercial success. By doing so, it's created a community of believers, not just consumers.

Click here for the latest example (it's pitch-perfect, apart from the bit where they say they wear black because it 'doesn't show dirt'...a bit girly for H-D riders, surely?)

comic-book Heroes

the surprise hit of the season in the States is Heroes, about eleven otherwise normal people who discover they have superhuman abilities. To complement the TV series, NBC.com has created a series of graphic novels, only available online, that allow viewers to delve deeper into the world of the show, adding depth and backstory to the TV narrative. They hired renowned graphic artists to create them.

why is this worthy of note? Because it's such an intelligent use of new media. When TV companies think about how to use the internet, it's often regarded simply as an alternative means of distribution for the same content (VOD etc). This is an important role, of course. But different media have their own strengths and weaknesses, and where possible content can and should be imaginatively reshaped to reflect them, rather than simply transferred from one medium to another. This is a great example of how to do that.