truth in advertising

I remember when this was first circulating in the late 1990's. Have things changed?

fan zone

How will TV broadcasters going adapt to a world dominated by social media? One way has been to host community sites or conversations. However, the audience generated communities tend to be more authentic and therefore, potentially more attractive to people (the most popular Survivor and Lost are not network hosted).

One way to go beyond this is to integrate fans into the content. Fox Soccer Channel (long the savior of many a displaced Brit in the US), has an interesting way to do this. They rebroadcast an English Premier League football game and add commentary from two fans of the team playing. The fans are British, which makes it more amusing - though I'm guessing that Americans may have a tough time with some of the accents. Making the fans part of the game is another added level of comment and makes you feel like you're watching it with bunch of friends back home. Can you imagine doing this for Desperate Housewives ?

PS In case you don;t believe me, here's Bill Simmon's (of ESPN) opinion

fan zone

How will TV broadcasters going adapt to a world dominated by social media? One way has been to host community sites or conversations. However, the audience generated communities tend to be more authentic and therefore, potentially more attractive to people (the most popular Survivor and Lost are not network hosted).

One way to go beyond this is to integrate fans into the content. Fox Soccer Channel (long the savior of many a displaced Brit in the US), has an interesting way to do this. They rebroadcast an English Premier League football game and add commentary from two fans of the team playing. The fans are British, which makes it more amusing - though I'm guessing that Americans may have a tough time with some of the accents. Making the fans part of the game is another added level of comment and makes you feel like you're watching it with bunch of friends back home. Can you imagine doing this for Desperate Housewives ?

PS In case you don;t believe me, here's Bill Simmon's (of ESPN) opinion

community dynamics

A while ago David Armano posted an excellent diagram showing how news filters through web communities. One of the phenomena that his diagram reinforced was that the way offline structures and interactions have transfer ed online. When we refer to knowledge communities or even talk about collective intelligence, many of us assume a Utopian equality between that communities members. That one piece of information or opinion is more valuable than another. Clearly ( as David's diagram shows) this is not the case: information from some sources is more valuable.

This information asymmetry implies a relationship asymmetry. Again, I think we often think of the web as a utopian places because the means of production are in everyone's hands (Marx's ideal really). But in reality, there are leaders and followers, those in the know and those not. Henry Jenkins makes reference to this in Convergence Culture when he talks about Survivor spoilers online. Those people in the know or who had more resources to spoil were trusted sources. It was harder for an outsider (as in any community) to break into that group - especially when they had new information or a point of view.

This may be why brands that have tried to "break into" existing user groups or communities have not fared so well as those that have created new ones and drawn users to them. To mix metaphors in a horrible way: online, being a lighthouse is a lot more effective than trying to run with the bulls.

the boy(s) of summer

Last night I took my older son, Aidan, to his first baseball game. Despite not really understanding the rules (something I couldn't help much with) and losing interest after the 4th inning, I think he had a great time (I know I had fun watching him take it in). But the whole night out made me think about how a baseball game (and in particular the SF Giant's AT&T Park) is a brand experience where you don;t have to love the brand in order to enjoy it.

Yes, it helps if you want to sit through 9 innings of pitching, base stealing etc. But baseball is truly a summer pastime: you relax, sit back and treat it like a casual social event. It's designed for you to interact with your friends as much as the game itself. The food greases the social wheels. "Buy me some peanuts and CrackerJacks" the song goes, not to mention hot dogs, ice cream and beer (of course, tonight's game being in CA, wine was flowing to). This smorgasbord manages to consume a lot of attention of kids and adults alike.

Stadiums like AT&T park have taken this further. Firstly, there is truly no bad seat in the house - even from the back of the bleechers. What's more, while every stadium as some kind of infield entertainment between innings, they have gone further. A kids t-ball game (in a mini AT&T stadium), a giant slide and a Build-a-Bear Workshop all sit at one end of the park.

The whole place is cleverly designed to make it easy to serve multiple audiences. They have realized that to get people to come to ball games more often, that they need to not just attract the baseball audience, but the influencers to. Similarly, there is a restaurant in New York with a play area (and child minder) to sit with kids while adults eat. Ikea has been doing this for a while. But these example are few and far between. How many car salesrooms, fashion or department stores cater to the audience beyond the buyer and craft a holistic experience for the brand.

new ideas

Simon's (from W+K London) blog is all about posting one great business, cultural or ad idea a day - a great piece of discipline for thinking differently every day (and a great use of blog as a scrapbook). Other examples of the discipline aspect of this comes from Paul Colman and Russell Davies who have used blogs as ways to document (some might say force) changes in their own behavior by publicly posting them.

All this has motivated me to start imposing this discipline on myself. I can't promise an idea a day but here goes (though this one probably exist already). Why not create a mash up of Google Earth and something like Trip Advisor (or even just use Google Maps). The idea is to allow people to leave post-it's or tags at particular addresses - sort of postcards to the world about an experience that doing something or at a particular area. Visitors (or anyone else) who wanted to know about a particular spot in htat city/town/region could then search out that area on the map and see what others have said.

the gaming manifesto

The gaming industry, according to Manifesto Games's Greg Costyikyan, is running into Moore's Wall - the processing power of game console's is so great that publishers are forced to produce games with higher and higher graphics to meet consumer expectations. because this jack's up their development costs so much, this means they have to constantly produce blockbusters to make even a small amount of money. Inevitably this means (at least in part) focusing on "known" success formulas - car racing etc., and less on new, more creative, ideas.

His company, Manifesto Games, is an example of a game developer taking a long tail approach in the gaming industry. By focusing on a single platform, developing multiple games and going after the core 12-18 year old gamer, he aims to capitalise on their boredom with franchised games.

Read about it in his own words here , via GigaOm

what kind of creative are you?

Wired has an interesting article by Daniel Pink on types of creativity.
The theory Pink describes says that on the one hand, there are conceptual "creative" people who know what work they want to do very quickly. They have a vision of what they want and then focus on the right execution. This seems to fit the description of many creative directors I know, and a few planners (but not many).

Experimental "creative" people, on the other hand, build towards their best work - they need to do a lot of trial and error to reach their breakthroughs. Jackson Pollock was a useful example of this: not painting well in his 30's, he kept going and broke through in his 50's. Picasso, and other conceptualists, broke through early in life.

These kinds of theory are passably interesting (I suppose/hope), but they can actually be useful: knowing how you as an individual work means you can play to your strengths with clients and colleagues. I would place myself more on the experimental side (lots of gathering information, exploring hypotheses and letting it sit) vs knowing where to go - though when that does (occasionally happen I tend to feel much happier about it). Maybe it's the "Eureka" moment feels that much more satisfying than the slow build/step back?

web to print

With so much focus on online photographic sites like Flickr, it is interesting to hear about a business going from online to print, especially when they do it by combining the best of web 2.0 technology. 8020 Publishing takes user generated content, let's site users choose which pieces they like the best and then turns this into a high quality printed book. An example of a project they have created is JPG Magazine . Amateur photographers are invited to upload high res photos (that can only be taken with a DSLR) to the site and post photos to themes (one photo per theme). Users cast their votes on each theme, although editors do make a final choice (which solves what would otherwise be the site's weakness for me - popularity does not necessarily make for stimulating photos).

Via GigaOm

dwell on design

Over the weekend Dwell hosted a conference on sustainable design and architecture and I managed to drag Spencer to the exhibition (mostly by letting him take all the pictures). What was interesting was the wide range of ways that designers are incorporating sustainability into their work.





Tim George of Fusion Furniture had some great stuff which was either totally or partially made of reclaimed materials. This desk - made specifically for the US Army in the '60s - was one of my favorites. He has simply refinished the top to give it a mat stainless steel look, but the best part is the way it folds up to save space. As we move away from McMansions (I think I am right in saying that the average size of a US house is now shrinking), I can see form shifting becoming more important.





ModWalls are a very cool glass tile designs that come in sheets ready to be grouted onto the wall. The company that makes them, Mosaic Tile Market, have the sheets made locally using only people who have some learning disability (e.g. Down Syndrome). They pay well above minimum wage, and the product quality is great (according to the reviews). Of course, the sheets can be customised (something their site allows you to do)and the company is blogging to.






STAACH is a design collective from Rochester, New York. The line they were displaying did not use hard fasteners (which can, apparently be toxic) and have reverted to 17th century manufacturing methods in order to prevent waste.

But more interestingly, Seth from Saatch told me that he had going from simply making sustainable furniture to a sustainable business design. I'm going to hold off talking about that for a later interview that I want to do with him (and because there wasn't enough time to go into it at the exhibition with Spencer tugging at me).



Finally, a major part of the conference (which I did not go to) was focused on modernist pre-fab housing. This has been "in" for some time, but the manufacturers exhibiting here were very focused on making the houses highly energy efficient and using reclaimed, non-toxic materials. One manufacturer told me the annual energy costs for a house they built in the cascades (Washington State)were $350. Of course, solar panels came standard with most of the models, and the cost per sq ft ($under $200 in some cases) made it somewhat affordable. Check out Clever Homes (for no other reason than the name and the great "build your own" model they were giving away at the show) and Hive's b-line , which takes prefab away from the world of (expensive) architect designed building and into most people's price range.

favorite saying

..than words.

Of course - we've always known that. The saying is an old one

But I suddenly realized (in the middle of the night of all times), that it's the saying that I should have in my head (and probably up on the wall of my office). If you don't know or trust someone or something, you need to see them act first: only then can you listen. So, following this logic, instead of (re)launching a brand with an ad campaign, have the brand do something to show's that it's intentions are genuine - something with PR value that will get noticed and talked about. Nothing new, but something that people forget all to often.

spell with flickr

conversation

How do you have or create a good conversation with customers?

As we move into marketing 2.0 that is going to be a skill that many marketers have to learn. David Pollard has posted this list based on his research and observations. Though these are written in a one-on-one context, it is not hard to see how the same thing applies to a multiperson conversation arena like a blog. And while some of the rules may look simplistic, think of them in the context of the current Coke vs. Mentos controversy.

Here they are:

1. Listen as much as you talk, give and take, share the 'conversation space' fairly
prepare for the conversation by researching the subject and other participants in advance

2. Be honest and forthcoming, and reciprocate others' candour

3. Don't gossip (pass along rumour, or talk about people behind their back) or complain
4. Be willing to put forth and defend your reasons for differing

5. Keep your cool and your sense of humour

6. If you don't feel understood, re-articulate your points

7. Avoid conversing with people who manipulate, deceive, bully or condescend

8. If the viewpoints are too different, or the issue too emotional, consider whether the conversation might be futile

Also useful was his list of why people have conversations. Which one is your target looking to do? Is it:

- to recall past experiences/learnings (remembering)
- to articulate, validate, test and confirm your own beliefs and decisions
(reassuring)
- to acquire and provide information in a context-rich way (educating)
- to bring new ideas or perspectives to bear (conceptualizing)
- to achieve a specific, desired objective (prompting action)
- to persuade someone of you point of view (convincing)
- to help (or perhaps hurt) others (assisting)
- to help make up your own mind (thinking through)
- for fun/entertainment (entertaining)
- just to spend time with other people (socializing)

Thanks to Alexandra Samuel for the link

good

Practical environmentalism and sustainability are growing, as consumer behaviors, by the bound and seem to be only limited to product availability. But it is not the only way to do good. And increasingly I have the feeling that we are heading back into a time of civic minded-ness. Maybe it is wishful thinking, the actions of Cindy Sheehan or the number of people I meet or leave careers tot do something more valuable.

This is why there are magazines like Good , whose attitude is "America: Take it or Fixit". Good focuses on how capitalism and idealism can work together, but above all what I find most interesting is that: "while so much of today's media is taking up our space, dumbing us down, and impeding our productivity, GOOD exists to add value"

In short, they get it. Not just more content (like the countless other magazines, many of which are now closing down), but content that does something.

9/11

Today is 9/11. When the planes hit the towers I was about 20 blocks away at the Soho offices of Kirshenbaum Bond. On 7/7 I was just getting off the Heathrow express at Paddington. Either trouble follows me or I was lucky.

The imagery of both events is potent. And such potent imagery is never more prey for mis-use than in America during an election year. This is just one (though hopefully the worst) example of what we might expect (PS if you don't have windows media player it may not work). However, this is just the kind of messaging and imagery that can energize a Republican base. That party knows that it has an advantage in terms of pure numbers but that historically it has struggled to get people out to the polls. Scaring people is one strategy that does work in politics.

It has always surprised me that the US has not had it's Saatchi moment of political advertising. It seems that neither of the parties wants to risk pulling out of the competitive battle - rather like a lot of (old) US FMCG advertising. One reason for this may be because the candidates often do not inspire higher order or inspirational campaigns. The exception that proves the rule is Clinton in 1992: a charismatic man with a solid message for the middle ground (yet one that was very worrying to a lot of his base)

ben & jerry's pop-up store

Ben & Jerry's very kindly opened up a pop-up store right next store to the office as part of the launch of their new Mooshakes. Lots of sampling but also a missed opportunity.



There was nothing inside the store that had to do with the company. It was a nice place with a place to sit, but no reason to stay. It's a shame because it is a company that (for once) does have something to stay.

measuring complexity

Measuring is not sexy, it's just necessary. I'm not sure who said it first, but the notion of "what get's measured, get's done" is very true.

For some time, I have been vexed with the various tracking studies we use to measure what we do. Even the best trackers out there (e.g Hall & Partners) have changed in terms of what media to measure, but little in terms of how to measure.

Low involvement processing has been talked about in the UK for some time (much less so in the US unfortunately). What about making full use of online surveying and asking people about other (indirect) advertising) stimuli e.g. brand color, music etc.

This is a relatively simple thing to do. But if you agree with the argument that advertising needs to become more complex and less consistent, what does this do to the whole notion of tracking? It seems like we need to move beyond questions about specific brand imagery (which are always odd when asked in a rational, questionnaire environment) and concentrate on tracking whether people will be willing to spend time with the brand and advertising:

- it's a brand that is doing stuff I'm interested in
- is a brand with a point of view
- makes advertising I don't mind seeing several times over
- does things (advertising, events, promotionss) that I might email to friends
- is a brand with a stroy behind it

You might argue that this is an evolved form of salience. It is not just about whether you have heard about the friends and feel it has a sense of momementum. It is whether the brand has succeeded in attracting enough attention that you will give it time.

If we can start measuring these things and can correlate them with meaningful changes in business metrics, we stand a lot more chance fo changing the communication that gets made.

juicy graffiti

This will be the new Juicy couture store on Grant Street. Part of me hopes they leave the graffiti up. It is no Mission muraL but it does stand out from the other (posher) brands in that part of town.

sigmund freud: action hero

We took the kids to the Zeum in the city this weekend and found this gem. Presumably I will now be able to collect Maslow, Popper adn Rorschach.

end of the week

a few things I have found that have caught my interest during the week but that I haven;t had time to write up...

- A great post on Chroma about what planners should learn from DJ's

- PSFK/IF's interview with Adam Gaynor of thread. What I found really interesting about this was that the agency was actually working on it's own brand. I have some more ideas on this I want to talk about next week, but ultimately I see this as one future route for agencies.

- John Moore posts the manifesto for his book "Tribal Knowledge". John talks about the fact that Starbucks never sought to build a brand, they wanted to build a business. The leevl of excellence they sought naturally led to a strong brand.

fat belly

There have been a few interesting posts recently that add to Chris Andersen's Long Tail theory.

Robert Young writing on GigaOm has analyzed posting data on Digg to develop a "third way" between the Big Head and the Long Tail. He argues that for any online community to truly flourish and develop it does not need to be a massive hit, but it needs to have a solid middle class - somewhere in between the extremes of the power curve that Andersen lays out. His supporting Digg data shows that Fat Belly stories (which he defines as stories that got between 1,000 and 4,000 votes) got a total of 10 mi lion votes, whereas the hits (the 32 stories with 5,000 + votes), only got 250,00 votyes total and the long tail got around 2.5 million.

Brad Feld makes a similar argument here. He amends Pareto's law to 80-19-1 and makes the point that (as with Digg) 1% of your users may generate content, but the next 19% are the key to success. They are the ones who may not actively contribute but do not just drive by when searching for something related - they lurk, support the community with comments and contribute occasionally.

While my feeling is that the fat belly is really not that different than what we are calling late adopters, this is an interesting perspective on why that group is so vital and how late and early adopters interact in a web 2.0 world. Also it shows the changes in involvement or dynamic which needs to take place for a site to build.

business on ebay

You truly can get anything on eBay these days - including a web 2.0 business . It as though the inventors of Huckabuck (a customizable meta-search program) have several other projects going on and that this one has fallen to the bottom of the list. I am not sure that is going to inspire buyers with confidence but at $10 000 it is not to bad a loss.

This could be an interesting pre-cursor to the opening up of the private placement market. There were attempts to do this in web 1.0, but increases availability of information (and the ability to verify it through social networking), the open-ness of companies and their user feedback and the experience that people ahve accumulated may help lower risks of such a public auction

from consumer to crafter

Matthew Crawford has publshed this great homage to manual labour and craftsmanship in The New Atlantis . He makes the argument that as we place higher value on knowledge workers and shift manufacturing jobs offshore, we are losing a bit of our soul, a way of approaching problems and even a defense against consumerism.

Even though Crawford argues that we are losing these skills, more and more consumers are getting involved in craft like activities - be it the rise of knitting circles and craft sites or the DIY nature of the web. We curate objects, wanting to know the stories behind how they were made and rejecting those that do not have one. Today's average consumer, like the craftsman before them, are seekinbg to create meaning in what they do and how they act (vs. just accumulative consumption)- meaning which can turn them away from unnecessary spending and towards the building of memories and evidence of themselves in the world (as per Crawford's argument for craftsmanship as a defense against consumerism).

Is this, as with previous "arts and crafts" periods, a reaction to the nature of current, "Dilbert-esque" economic life. Perhaps we should be wondering how our brands help people create meaning or arm/approach them with craftsman like skills? Closer to home, how often do we speak about or treat planning as a craft within agencies?

edit

I'm trying out Blogger's new beta which allows a bit more customization than before, in all likelihood, I chuck it in and move to Typepad. So far it is fairly user friendly - each to change font, color, move objects around - but not enough options in each case (like changing the column spacing).

I'm reverting to something simpler so please bear with it and feel free to add comments/scorn as appropriate.

another quote

Maybe it's the changing of the seasons, but good quotes seem to just be appearing (or, of course, I could just be open to them). In a recent post, the ever brilliant Malcolm Gladwell had this to say about writing and using research:

"My intention is not--as it never is--to convert readers to my way of thinking, or have them abandon their own worldview for mine. It is simply to invite readers to share in the same wonderful experience that I had when I read through the literature--that is, to step inside a new way of thinking for a moment, and be challenged by it."

Inherent to what he is saying is the notion of discovery. It is discovery and realization that makes things surprising and new, that gives us that little shot of dopamine our brain is so addicted to. It is helping people discover that makes the difference between a good briefing or presentation and a bad one. And ultimately, if you help consumers discover - through an ad, a shop or a website - you have their interest and attention.

DM in an I age

With the shift to email well and truly in place in the US, what has been happening to direct mail response rates?

According to the DMA (US direct marketing trade organization), the average response rate in 2005 was not that different than I remember it being 10 years ago: 2.77%. In fact, this response rate was the same as the response rate for the average email campaign (2.68%) according to the same DMA data (though other surveys put click through rates at over 10%), and certainly higher than the average banner click through these days (0.5%).

I'm going to caveat what follows by acknowledging that response rates are only one way to measure the effects of these media. In my experience and in several research reports that I have seen, banners and dimensional DM have been shown to have a positive branding effect. That being said, there are two (basic and broad) conclusions I had when confronted with these numbers:

a) DM never was that effective, even though the low level of response could generate a positive ROI (depending on the product, mailer actual response etc). It's attraction is and was that it is more measurable, testable, profitable and appropriate for certain clients and products and therefore consumers.

Some support towards this conclusion is shown in the chart below.


(Source: AFSA)

One of the biggest direct mail oriented industries is credit cards. As the chart shows, the response rate to credit card offers is at an all time low of 0.3%. Despite this, there was a sharp increase in the use of DM by the industry between 2005 and 2004 - up 16% to reach 6 billion pieces. Obviously, it is still profitable (or else someone at Amex, Citi etc. is very bad at numbers)

What's more you could argue that there is an equilibrium level of response for all interruption media and that level is relatively low - we see banner ads and direct mail there now and email may trend that way. I'm concluding this despite the high numbers in the email response rate data, since email is measured against people who have opted in to a list vs. DM which is a random scatter shot.

In short, you could say that we have always known that interrupting people with no context didn't work that well (on average) - we just ignored the data.

b) The data represents a (low) average and one which technology will help us improve upon. As the data from the financial services industry showed, there are industries and campaigns with low responses, and certainly campaigns that work at higher response levels (particularly if they have other media support).

What we have not yet been able to do is to truly leverage data so as to know more precisely who to target and when to target them. Segmentation of lists continues to be on past behavior and is based on a principle of one way communication - we'll keep guessing what you want and hopefully one day we will get it right.

Opt in lists were a start in the right direction by asking people if they wanted mail in the first place. But how can we extend the option of 2.0 even further, simply by engaging people in a dialogue. How can we help them stop spam, get the right offers, the right products etc? CRM was supposed to help deliver this, but it failed due to (among other things) technology integration issues and lack of staff training. I am waiting for the site to start up that organizes consumers according to the offers they really want and sells those lists as the most valuable on the market. This is basically what sites like Lending Tree do: make it easy for customers to raise their hand without being inundated. My surprise is that it is not more popular and has not spread to other categories e.g. travel.

not what I meant

NPR's This American Life is a great weekly collection of (sometimes unusual) stories of life all over America - it's sort of a starting point for urban legends and anecdotes.

Last week's episode (titled "not what I meant") featured the story of a Chicago film critic who received an annonymous, and beautifully written, love letter in the post. Now I have no idea if this guy is married or with someone (it didn't sound like it), but even if he was, to receive th letter lie that is great for the ego and self confidence.

Well lo and behold, he went to a screening of a new indie film, titled The Love Letter, only to find the text of his letter and the film's center piece are one and the same. He obviously realizes it was a marketing campaign and was very angry to say the least.

This (finally) gets me to my point. We are all trying to produce clever communication, stuff that people want to spend time with. We are worried about urban spam and one way conversation. At the same time,there is still an unspoken social contract between consumers and companies (albeit one which is being renegotiated). On the face of it, the real life love letter replicated the effect of the film's fictional letter: left itself open to interpretation. It created a branded experience that was on brief. On the other hand it did not give the consumer the choice of getting involved or not. Leave aside the old school notion of linking to a brand name or even getting someone to take action - how about giving the person a choice.

The real test of the communication (be it a letter, store or whatever) is whether or not it is interesting enough for people to give us their time - even 30 seconds of it. Hiding the fact that you are communicating is not only (likely) ineffective - especially in a one shot deal - but not treating the consumer with the respect.

The exception or case that proves the rule on this for me was W+K's brilliant Beta 7 work. There everything was covered, but the subject matter was so extraordinary that most people new it was a spoof (even if it took people a while). What mattered was that they were drawn by the elaborateness and slightly crazy nature of the scheme. They chose it.

karl rove and facism...

In a speech this week, US Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfield branded the insurgents in accurate as: "a new kind of facism." This intrigued me both from a semantic cultural and strategic POV.

To invoke facism is to invoke a powerful memory in the minds of many. It akes the debate from a modern war (abuot oil and US politics) and transforms it inot a pat era. It is loaded with the image of good vs. evil, history and (for some honor). It continues to amaze at how Karl Rove (and other good political operators) use single words to transform debates in a way that advertising does not and/or does not seem able to do.

In addition, as Daniel (one of our copywriters) pointed out today, Rove is a master at seizing the intiative on his own weaknesses. The Bush administration could quite easily be assailed as being facist (or at least authoritarian) in this November's elections given their actions on various secrecy acts. By seizing the initiative and "owning" the word first, he prevents this happening. The same thing happened with John Kerry's war record in the last general election. Bush has no military experience, Kerry is a war hero: Rove neutralized it by creating a campaign questioning Kerry's actions in Vietnam, none of which were true.

Much as we may poo-poo competitive communication, if there is one man who has shown how to seize the initiative and use it devastatingly, it is Karl Rove.

the attitude of wisdom

I came across this great, simple thought from Bob Sutton that he uses to distinguish knowledge from wisdom:

"have strong opinions that are weakly held"


I love it because it distinguishes the will and thinking needed to sell pointed, difficult ideas, from the need to be open to hearing other's "adds". Another saying to add to the collection that apply to planning :)