wii fashion

Needless to say, the Wii craziness paid off (albeit without the help of bidnearby.com ). But is also a first hand account from a frenzy.

Amazon announced they would have some on sale today between 7 and 11 am, so there I sat at breakfast hitting refresh endlessly. They were gone from one refresh to the next.

Later (after a refreshing game of mini golf with the kids and my cousin (in law) Steve), I optimistically popped in to a Game Stop. They had some that morning but were gone (drat) but had heard that Best Buy down the road had some (hurrah). 10 minutes later and I am told that I just missed the last one by 15 minutes (double drat). At which point I all but give up, but on our way to pick up lunch, we decide to give Target one last chance - especially because it seems that the Wii delivery truck has been doing the rounds today. Needless to say we struck gold.

The system is indeed great. But reflecting on my day, it was the "herd effect" of the search and frenzy which is most interesting and greater than my desire for the system itself. I did more frenzied research because of the frenzy others were (or perceived to be) in: it became almost competitive.

This is an interesting view into the way fashion works or is accelerated. It is not the innate degree of desirability of the product that makes something a fashion item as much as it is the tangible, public evidence of people's actions for that desirability (these two are obviously related, but not identical). So, does the fact that it is easier to know how hard people are looking for something (or how much want it) help give more items "fashionability", or make us more immune to it? Do Amazon lists and places like this next make us want see more different kinds of items as "wanted", and will this make us blaze about that phenom?

PS The L.A. Times had a great article about Nintendo's marketing tactics for the Wii, which included the hiring of "alpha-mums" to host parties and spread the word about the console among non gamers. Influx Insights has posted the details of the article here

wii seeker

I'm down in SoCal for the holidays this year and, for many reasons, am finding that Christmas is not really Christmas (at least here). To start with, there is the Christmas phenom that our antipodean cousins are used to - 72 and sunny on December 25th. To top that off (like the good Jews we are), we went to Disnbeyland on Christmas day expecting it to be empty. Apparently, either the idea of a traditional Christmas is not that big here or we should expect mass conversions to the minor religions.

Then off course there is the holiday shopping - or rather post holiday shopping. Given the mall traffic, my sense is that it is OK to give gifts post Christmas - especially items like short of stick Wii's and PS3's. I must admit that I am aching to get my hands on a Wii and have resorted to all sorts of dark search tactics.

My favorite is this little tool from Bid Nearby which tracks Wii shipments in your area.

seaon's best

I hope you all have/have had a safe holiday with family, friends or people who just make you laugh a lot.

Thanks for reading this blog, but most of all, thanks to the whole planning/brand community for contributing and allowing me to keep learning.

learning and advertising

If you (broadly) define learning as the absorption and processing of new information, then advertising could be defined as a learning mechanism. It has been and is (to a lesser extent) a way people find out about products on the market and is a signal of quality, company size etc. So I thought it would be interesting to look at advert sing through the lens of learning models.

Traditional advertising models, research methods and media planning have based on the notion of rote learning. Even models such as Heath's low involvement processing posit that rote learning is good and that it happens at low levels of consciousness.

However, rote learning has also been shown shown to create learning without understanding and (what's worse) the tendency to forget facts after a short period of time. That's because fewer neurons fire in the brain during this whole process and fewer new synaptic connections are made and it explains why, the stuff you study for your biology test is impossible to remember the week after. Worse still, it explains why traditional ads and ad models are bad at communicating the complex, but interesting brand ideas we need in order to survive in the marketplace.

This article shows an alternative (but by no means the only) theory called Constructivist learning, which (using newer brain research) suggests things like:

1. The brain is a parallel processor - it simultaneously processes many different types of information, including thoughts, emotions, and cultural knowledge. Effective teaching employs a variety of learning strategies.
So having different ways of communicating and and different levels of communication might work best


2. Learning engages the entire physiology -teachers can't address just the intellect.
How can communication be physical outside of retail and online?


3. Learning is enhanced by challenge and inhibited by threat
So be positive


4. The search for meaning occurs through 'patterning.' Effective teaching connects isolated ideas and information with global concepts and themes.


5. The brain processes parts and wholes simultaneously. People have difficulty learning when either parts or wholes are overlooked.

One of the underlying principles of this theory is that there is knowledge independent of that personal and social meaning we (help) give to facts.As such, we cannot force facts on people only encourage them to create new meaning out of what stimulus we provide. In that sense, every ad is like a brief. It needs to open doors for people in order to help them learn. And maybe that can give us a different sense of what we as planners do.

tagged

Leland and Emily have tagged me into telling you five things you probably wouldn;t know about me. So here goes:

1. I used to have dreads

For about 4 years at university in my music phase. I even went to a job interview with the Bank of England still wearing them - not the smartest move :)



2. I have worked as a foreign exchange trader and as a research assistant to a member of Parliament

3. I have a lifelong devotion to Liverpool Football Club, despite never having even been to Liverpool in my life.



4. I was a volunteer for the RNLI (an organization in the UK that does many of the same rescue functions as the US coastguard) and did actually go on a rescue mission.



5. I can fake my way through most languages.

Don't ask me how or why - probably due to the fact that I grew up in a country (Belgium) which had two official languages, neither of which is my mother tongue. But stick me anywhere and I'll have a nice chat with the cab driver for an hour or so.

I'm tagging....

David Armano , Joseph Jaffe , Dave Nottoli , Lee McEwan and The Staufenbergers

the new TV

Fresh on the heels of recent posts about Skype and The Venice Project (as well as some older posts by John Grant on the future of TV), is this article in the Financial Times talking about Skype's TV ambitions.

Given the number of content providers/creators is greater than the distribution venues, the potential for this type of technology is as big (if not bigger) than You Tube. The distribution of content is highly regulated and structured, and therefore ripe to be toppled. But there is one hurdle that, while it may look small, is pretty big. The main reason why there are local network affiliate stations in the US is local news and sports programming - very popular content that depends that the stations depend on for ad dollars. People will not be likely to give up their TVs for good if they are not able to get this kind of thing, thereby still paying the cable bill and be a little less likely to pay to watch this type of content. This is TVs equivalent of the telecom last mile - not unsolvable but not small either.

free present

Friday was the first night of Chanukah (the Jewish festival of lights that always falls around Christmas and involces lots of present giving (mmmm...coincidence?)).

The best present is the one that doesn't cost money: watching kids reactions

(PS the video was taken with the Pure Digital camera I blogged about a while back - I think I will officially abandon still photos if things go on like this because the video is always on hand).

brand culture

Skype continues to be one of the most interesting companies around and a standard bearer for the "give it away and they will come" idea.

However, the acquisition of Skype by eBay looks like it may be a classic tale of a job badly done. After buying the company eBay sent in a number of its own executives to run the company, displacing a lot of Skype folks (who left or were fired) and shutting down it's biz dev group (which accounted foe a lot of the company's growth). The result has been that a lot of the vaunted synergies of the deal have not been seen and, apparently, the company has not been making its numbers (to the point where the founder's earn out goal was in jeopardy)

Experience from all sorts of deals suggest that eroding a (successful) company's culture is a sure fire way to cause a deal to fail. This is especially true when you have a start up company taken over by what is essentially, a giant. This is not new news, but it serves to make a point. Over on Adliterate Richard Huntington has sparked a debate about why there are so few great brand ideas. The answer (which some people have posted on the site) are that great brand ideas are baked into company cultures - no an easy thing to do. They are fragile and easily destroyed, so when you have one (as Skype seems to have done), destroying it is tantamount to corporate suicide. Even though Skype is a tech company the tech rests in people's heads. and the culture is what keeps those heads together.

digital scratch

OK, so I know this turntable came out in 2004, but just seeing all of the fun a non-DJ like me could have with the Technics SL-DZ1200 is making me rethink my holiday gift list. We talk a lot about video editing being more accessible but less about sampling and music editing tools doing so. I don't think that there is less interest, but maybe fewer venues and less chance for instant viral reaction. Still, when these things come down in price -watch out. And check out the intro video at the site with Louie Vega.

miami ad school

Down to the Miami Ad School today to give feedback on some planning student books. I think it is tough to try and "teach" planning, especially in 3 months. Nevertheless I was impressed by a couple of the books that I saw. Since I don't get people presenting me with lots of briefs or ideas (usually vice versa) it reminded of how the creative presentation of the idea matters so much in terms of how you react to it.

I was a little disappointed that no-one tried to incorporate a media idea into the brief or even any thoughts on where to engage with the target. If we don;t give an understanding of how our target interacts with culture, how can we expect to engage them?

un-media planning

we are in the middle of a pitch with the normal request to present some thoughts on media. Engaging in this made me re-realize just how unprepared we are to really innovate around media planning in the current agency model.

We know the intent: in a world of branded utility the question is not how to reach people but how to engage with them (or , to use
John Grant's new phrase how to enthuse them). But the job and the tools of media planning today is to tell us where not how. We do not have the tools to figure out how much time people spend doing what or what might be acceptable for a brand to do in paid media. Worse still, finding out what people like doing now is like looking in the rear view mirror.

One thought I had would be to change media planners into cultural attachment officers. These moves it from being about how to reach eyeballs to understanding how people in a group are most likely to attach to or create culture. That means Mum's at soccer games is just as valid a cultural attachment point as Mum's watching Desperate Housewives . This helps creatives figure how to tell the story at or across several places ( Faris's Transmedia Planning) and helps planners get a broader (quant) picture of how these people live. It also moves brands further into the fabric of people's lives rather than an intrusion and forces them to provide some brand utility (I would hope brands don't think about turning up at kids football games with billboards)

The main challenge with all of this is that it does not put marcomm into a nice easily buyable bundle for clients. I do not think there is much we can do about that other than prove it works :)

stealth sites

For a while, "stealth" sites were all the rage: a way to engage with consumers to enable them not to feel sold to (and least temporarily). W+K's Beta 7 and Wong Doody's Alaska Airlines work were two of my favorite ones.

That being said, the tactic might be wearing a little then (Edelman's recent travails on behalf of Wal-Mart not withstanding seem to show consumers are not always willing be fooled).

So consider two sites. One is this site from The Venice Project - what sounds like an exciting project to develop a streaming TV system using P2P technology. The site has credibility because it was actually a beta and the developers were trying to make their peers salivate and join in (something that worked well judging by this post).

On the other hand you have the Conservative Party in the UK running this site. It has great intentions and as a way to give their brand a new tonality (its not very Margaret Thatcher is it), it may work. But I don't the brand has the credibility to pull off a (half) stealth introduction nor do I think the site will cause people to challenge existing beliefs (even weak ones). It smacks a bit of Wal-Mart - where is the authenticity.

Perhaps should only be a tactic used after a brand has been well established rather than before. You have to be genuine before you can hide.

rolling in green

John Grant has just posted a great article about the potential for sustainable brands in the drinks business. But the drinks business seems a likely contender compared with banks.

There is a distinct lack of ethical banking and investment options in the US (compared to say the Coop Bank in the UK). This is why the launch of the New Resources Bank is both interesting and encouraging. The bank's founders are a mix of bankers, entrepreneurs (including the founder of Ofoto) and environmentalists. Their aim is to help give sustainably oriented businesses access to financing - something they often do not get because traditional banks of not understand (or aren't prepared to accept) the business forecasts and models that sustainable companies have.

From the consumer side, they give people the choice of a bank that minimizes it's carbon footprint, a debit card that gives money t non-profits every time you use it and home loans that specialize (or give benefits for) green construction. You might admittedly expect this kind of a bank to be in San Francisco, but with the rise of P2P lending (e.g. Zopa ) and the wrath of scandals still fresh in people's minds, maybe Living Richly will not be enough.

the intersection

Why are there creative teams? Probably because two heads with two skill sets are better than one (I am sure there is a more romantic story but this seems like a good reason). So I have always wondered why there is not such a thing as planning teams. I always find my thinking gets better by talking about what's in my head, and at KB a while back we assigned thinking partners across the department to help us gain perspective on the brands we worked with. It was nice and it worked.

What started me thinking about this issue again was this article and interview on the Harvard Business School site. It covers research by Karim Lakhani showing how numerous scientific problems were solved (and more likely to be solved) by broadcasting the problem to a wider audience outside of the organization who owned the problem. Although he acknowledges the concerns companies have about intellectual property issues, he points out that most knowledge is sticky and can't be used or operationalized in a different context.

He also gave a very telling quote:

"Innovation happens at the intersection of disciplines"

So this is good news for planning - we are at the intersection of creative and something else (research, strategy?). But what about helping us find solutions? Lakhani's thought points to the usefulness for conversation with experts in areas outside of advertising vs. conversations with consumers. It also points to the need for planners to have strong social networks across various disciplines. I am sure we have quite a few friends who would gladly and ably bat around ideas with us on a quid pro quo basis.

And what about open source planning? Would/could an agency solve a brand problem by blogging about it? Perhaps behind closed interactive doors where clients couldn't see and a voluntary code of conduct existed. If we have global coffee mornings, about global planning thinking?

moto backstory

A while back I posted about the power of the backstory and I've just seen a great example of this. Motorola have launched this site to give the background to its new phone designed for the global market. Interestingly, they tell you about the research they did, what they found and how the designers brought it to life. Not only does this make the company feel open but it gives the new phone owners a real sense of connoirseurship - they know what they bought and can back it up.

Perhaps the next stage is to take this further - to share insights with a specific kind of consumer or influencer and have them build a number of solutions with you/for you in the way that open source coders might.

planning job

Tribal DDB in San Francisco is looking for a planning director, and given the success of people who have posted stuff on Russell Davies' blog I thought I would give it a go here.

We are looking for someone fairly senior (7 to 10 years) with a mix of online, offline and general business experience. We aren't just looking for someone who is comms focused, but a person who can generate business building ideas to. In return you get a chance to help the Interactive Agency of the Year expand even further into the world of 2.0. Current clients range from Clorox to Nike and everything in between.

If you are interested email me using the link on the right and will pass it on to Liz Ross and Kristian Schwartz who run the office

mindless eating

There is an interesting article in the New York Times about some new experiments by Professor Brian Wansink into eating and why we over do it. His work clearly shows that the environment in which we eat - everything to the size of the bowl, the size fo the spoon and who we are eating with -impacts why we eat to much and why we don;t realize that we are doing it.

I love this kind of work because it gives me hope that looking at it, clients may realize that they have no hope of understanding ads in focus groups or quant testing! But seriously, it makes me wonder how the response to advertising differs from who is in the room with you when you are exposed. When you can talk to someone about what you are seeing, are you more likely to be engaged than by yourself and (possibly) multitasking? Are you less likely to change the channel? Does it matter if you are watching TV or reading in bed vs. in the living room?

My guess is probably - but does anyone know if this work exists??

the smell of San Francisco

Goodby have come up with a great media idea for the Got Milk campaign: using people's sense of smell. They are putting strips in bus shelters that give off a chocolate chip cookie smell (shelters that will, of course, be covered with Got Milk ads). When an insight is so clearly around one of the sense, it makes sense to use that as a medium. But although this is innovative, it is still interference advertising (although the opposition the article speaks of is probably a little trumped up or over exaggerated). Which begs the question, when you have a product or brand that has such an instinctual trigger, but is releatively low involvement, is there a point in conversation (a question clients often ask)? My feeling is that by having conversations about things like the health of milk and/or cookies , creating branded utility by (for instance) distributing free milk and cookies wouldn;t the Milk Processing Board be doing more than just an ad?

behind the battlestar

The original series of Battlestar Galactica was one of the few shows I could watch in English as a kid so I have a soft spot for Lorn Adama and his original cohorts. Now Slate has posted an interesting link that gives a behind the scenes peak at the series, including unedited recordings from the writer's room. It's a great peak inside the creative process of Hollywood and it just goes to show that the issues, discussions etc. are not that different to any other creative discussion in another industry (especially advertising).

likemind - cafe de la presse

A nice turnout for coffee at a nice place. A couple of the folks who are doing the Miami Ad School planning program came along, like Tim (who works at DDB but whose picture I didn't take), Denise (who works at DDB Mexico) and Laz.



Brendan is an Aussie who just moved up from LA and Vandy is on her second stint in SF.





One of the things he and Nick are chatting about here is Skype, how it's now a business essential for most of us and how eBay hasn't seemed to do much with it.

eBay console war fun

The relase of the PS3 and Nintendo's Wii has been fun to watch from both a business and personal sense. I am finally getting off my rear end, breaking through the strenuous objections of my wife and actually buyn a system (rather than user/observe the one at the office). In addition, I've found that eBay is a great tool to judge the true market value / demand for all these devices.

There were always lots of reasons not to get one (mainly money and the threat of divorce), but the Wii finally wone me over with the notion of the interactive console (and the price point). I tried it out tonight at a local store and the ability to actually drive a truck or wield a sword brings the game to a whole new level. In addition, like the simplicity of iPod, it breaks down the barriers to actually playing the game (something that turned me off to the PS2.

However, finding a Wii is almsot as impossible as the PS3. The local stores are sold out of both (even though the Wii had more units shipping) and the eBay price ranges from $300 to $500 plus shipping.

The PS3 is equally sold out, with people queing overnight at the SF Sony store to buy them (even after they went on sale). Here the eBay price is $700 to $1000, but this is down from a week ago when the prices were $1500 to $2000. Some of it is no doubt due to the wearing off of turkey/thanksgiving driven insanity. But the other reason is that PS3 word of mouth is turning negative. Reviewers have noted that the graphics are not much better than the Xbox 360 and that the system is more complicated. One of the main reaons people seem to be buying it is that it is a cheap way to get a console and a Blue-Ray DVD player.

Whether Sony's shortage of the PS3 was deliberate or not, the appearance and availability of Wii (at a lower price point) seems to have taken some of the wind out of it's sales. Wii shipped more units but has sold out (temporarily) and may well have drawn off people new to the category (like me) looking to get a system.