busy in NY

In between the friends, relatives and general business of NY I have managed to snap a few things and see a few people.

As always it was good to catch up with Noah and check out Naked HQ. While there he gave me a sneak peak at their forthcoming blog which will be, as expected, novel, entertaining and just plain cool. I also spent some time with my mate Paul from NowWhat Research . Paul's an ex-planner and one of the only people I know using blogs in an interesting way to do research.



In between these two was some lunch at the Funky Diner , one of the few diners I know to combine the diner decor with upscale dining (no fancy mac and cheese, just good wine).



Down in Soho after visiting Paul there was some nice outdoor work (especially form PSP) at the intersection of Broadway and Houston, but i was more taken by this wild posting for Vans - street art sponsored by the right brand. Hopefully the size has/will (be) continue(d).



Finally, i came across this impromptu rave today in Union Square (in broad daylight). So, granted,this was no rave but rather a protest about dancing restrictions, but I thought a) how much of a better way to protest it was by showing people how harmless the people/activity are and b) how I wish there were more random midday outdoor clubs like this that just popped up and made people feel better by dancing.

sf 2 ny

I'm going to be spending the next few days in NY on a bit of a holiday so posting will be light and sporadic. Anyonoe who is NY and wnts to meet for a coffee, give me a shout.

myspace ROI

MySpace has just published some data regarding the ROI of some campaigns it has undertaken recently for Adidas and EA. The company's research claims that by building communities around the brand (i.e. creating a profile, promoting "friending" and running a promo), it reached and influenced people at a much lower cost than traditional media can.

While I am quite prepared to believe that brands can run effective campaigns on MySpace by creating communities, this explanation seems a little simplistic to generate the results that the study claims. Firstly, with the hundreds of brands now on MySpace, the amount of spam and the clutter of widgets, animation etc. on each page, the site is starting to feel like the overcrowded ad world. On top of that, the notion of MySpace and friending already seems to be losing some social currency. It seemed that after the Virginia Tech tragedy all of the tribute sites and activity were on Facebook .

Perhaps most disappointing was the fact that the study used traditional ad language (impressions etc.) to describe what they do. Maybe it was because they were talking to "old" media folks. Or maybe it's because we have failed to invent a new language for this media.

perception is not reality

Just in case you thought skewering brands and ads had taken a lull, check this out. Maybe for $5 (or after a few pints) we don't care, but it just makes me feel so dirty :)

conversation architecture

I found this interesting little diagram at Paragon's blog. The nice thing about this one (compared to the many other new marketing schema's out there) is that there is no arrow on the right hand side of the diagram - it can go in any direction, showing the true equality of all the players.

popular

Duncan Watts has published a great article of his research into the effect signalling has on purchases. No surprises - if everyone can see what others are buying, they tend to buy the most popular songs.
The article is great and provoked a couple of thoughts:

a) Does this explain the Double Jeopardy effect seen in consumer product markets - that big brands are bought by more people and more often than smaller brands?

b) Advertising has always served a role as a signalling function, telling people that the brand is big enough to advertise is a way of saying it's OK. Has that role now diminished and is this one major factor impacting ad effectiveness?

c) Saying your popular still shows you're not really popular (schoolyard logic rules). So the ultimate question is how to show people you are popular without bragging. Obviously w-o-m and viral marketing are part of this - but perhaps there are other ways.

information is the tie that binds -part 3

Mark Earls makes another great point about feedback mechanism based on the observations from his brilliant book: "Herd" .

As Mark points out, without feedback loops, we would not be able to model or even communicate behavior. So much of what we do (especially as children) is learnt through feedback. As we grow up, we learn that it is wrong to comment on what others do, so we look for/invent other signals to show each other what is right or wrong. We learn who to watch, what to watch for etc and the signals of when we have it right or wrong. This could provide a great opportunity for brands: providing feedback to consumers about their choices while they shop.

russell's breather

So Russell Davies announced that he is not really going to be blogging about brands and planning at this point but move, as he puts it "to the front of the train".

Russell's blog was the first planning blog I found (back in early 2005) when I first started looking into blogging and has been a real encouragement and guide as to what planning and brand building are like in this not world order. I can only say that my thinking has been expanded my it.

At the same time, his decision is not that surprising. The question we ask can't be solved or looked at only in a theoretical void. They are things that take doing and then post rationalizing (much like strategies themselves). And, as with many creative problems, it is only by looking at something seemingly unrelated (but interesting) that you often see the light.

On top of that, I've always thought that planners have a finite planning lifespan - a sell by date. Lets face it, the top of the agency triangle is thin so there has to be somewhere else for planners to go on to (and they can't all be consultants). More seriously/importantly, they are naturally inclined to get bored and move on to lots of different topics. that are only tangentially related to planning. What surprises me more is that you don't see more planners creating their own brands. After all, if the conclusion is that brands need to become more authentic,emotional, stakeholder and socially driven entities (vs. say image driven), who better than a planner to help do it.

in memorium

The events at Virginia Tech are obviously shocking beyond belief. But it is because of that, rather than in spite of it, that we need to put the event into context.

As with Columbine, Waco and other mass tragedies, America can have a short memory for violence. In the last 15 to 20 years, despite all of these incidences,, support for gun control has slipped and support for the NRA has risen.

There is no simple answer for why. Education and knowledge around the issue (especially first hand knowledge) are likely to bee strong candidates. Despite the level of gun violence in the US most voters are isolated from it. In addition, the casualty numbers pouring in from Iraq on a daily basis make people somewhat immune to large numbers. Familiarity may not breed contempt in this case, but it may be approaching apathy.

It's time for another Likemind. Lets have some coffee, enjoy the glorious weather and think sympathetically about the East Coast (but not to sympathetically).

See you at Cafe de la Presse at 8.30 am on Friday April 20th.

big games

PSFK has posted the presentation by Kevin Slavin of area/code given at their NY trends conference. It's all about the notion of big gaming and the impact of a gaming mentality on storytelling and therefore branding.

To supplement that I came across two interesting examples of storytelling through games: World Without Oil and Cruel to Be Kind . Both have a social goal: the former to educate the eventualities of when oil runs out and the latter to encourage random act of kindness. Both make the point about the power of action vs. "pure" communication really well.

TV emotion

I had lunch today with Amanada Miller from Flamingo Research and she mentioned some interesting research she and her colleagues have compiled.

We already know that TV viewing is passive. But all sorts of research into happinness shows that this passive frame of mind is correlated with less positive emotions - less happiness. In contrast, the active engagement of, for example, game playing (online or video) results in more positive emotion. The more control and involvement, the better the mood, and (in all likelihood), the the more positive the emotion associated with a brand.

On top of all that, there is a social benefit for not choosing TV. Accroding to an article from the HBR (via Bricklin) :

One sedentary behavior in particular has drawn the attention of public-health researchers. In a landmark study that compared watching TV to reading, sitting at a desk, and driving, Hu found that TV watching is far more likely to lead to obesity and diabetes than any of the other sedentary behaviors. First, Hu explains, "when people watch TV, they eat." Second, they tend to make bad food choices: TV watchers eat more junk food and fast food. And when people watch TV, their metabolic rate (the rate at which energy is burned) drops lower than when they sit and read or work on a computer. "The reason is that TV watching is completely passive," says Hu. "It is almost like sleeping -- sit back and relax -- that's the message." People who watch TV also tend to spend a lot of time at it (women watch at least an hour more per day than men). And so prolonged TV watching -- Hu calls it "a major public-health hazard" -- displaces other activities that would be better for people's health. Gortmaker, who pioneered studies of television watching among American children (60 percent of whom have a television in the room where they sleep), notes that among youth, time spent watching television is the one behavioral variable most predictive of obesity.

subversion

If you are coming to San Francisco before June I would seriously suggest seeing the Vivian Westwood show at the De Young Museum. It's a fairly comprehensive retrospective of her designs from the 1970's through to this centruy - from Sex to her more modern designs.

The show was an interesting reminder on the impact of reinterpretation and the alteration of the familiar. For her later designs Westwood did a lot of research into 17th and 18th century cuts and techniques and she seeing this in a modern setting was fresh. Similarly, the emphasis and re-use of "proper" materials such as tartan, corsets and crinoline show that even when we are focused on all this new technology, the past can be radical.

At the core of all this work though, is the brand idea. I found an interview with Malcolm McClaren in Archive and I love this quote:

with my projects...the most important point was always to come up with something that had confrontational abilities. I did that by making sure that everything had a degree of...subversion. I think it's the three S's - sex, style and subversion - if you have those then I tink you have a product

laurie rosenwald

I posted on Laurie Rosenwald's art after the PSFK conference - the "chaos" and randomness in her art is deliberate and what makes it inetersting. Here is a little video (thanks to PSFK of her presentation:

Click To Play

long bets

Long Bets is a site that does what itt says: it's a public gambling site for long term, long odds bets. Not the "Nottingham Forest will get back into the Premiership in 2 years" kind of long shot, but rather bets of scientific and social significance. Anyone can wager (if they're a member), which makes it an excellent "wisdom of crowds" testing mechanism that could be replicated for any kind of research.

information is the tie that binds (part 2)

Building on my post last of last week, let's buy for one sec we need transparency of information to grease our social wheels and build tighter communities. Why then is it that the lack of information fascinates us,motivating us to run off and search out unknown websites?

Sure, our love of dopamine continuously fuels our desire for the new. At a deeper level, you could argue that this is a Blue Pill/Red Pill issue , that our innate desire to seek the truth and find meaning drives us to investigate the things we do not understand. A less philosophical way is to take the argument that Mark Earls makes so convincingly in Herd> - that humans are social learning animals whose evolution is driven by that curiosity and a capacity to understand and share the consequences of that learning.

But whichever of the above ways of looking at our curiosity floats your boat, what underlies all of them is our drive to classify (or make sense of) information. And in fact, our ability to do that well (along with information manipulation) is now becoming a social marker in groups. So information not only acts as a framework for communities to become closer but a way to rank people within that community.

The dynamics of the flow of information in groups (particularly information discontinuity) have been studied by economists and game theorists, but never much brands. Today we are using scarcity of information as a means to engender curiosity, much the way we use scarcity if distribution tot do the same. But what we have not looked into is how brands can build communities around the manipulation and classification of information and/or engineering the flow of information to create a self fulfilling brand experience.

I'm not sure I have worked out a new fully fledged example off this but this best thing I can think of is Hollywood Stock Exchange. The game is not one of information scarcity, but one of information flow - knowing the right people and trading knowledge. HSX is a film/celebrity game so there is information to be traded that people are used to dealing with- but what about all the other adult games that people play where they trade knowledge. Fantasy Football is a prime candidate for this level of engagement with information, but it does not seem to be happening.

information is the tie that binds (part 1)

I've been reflecting on my last post about policing communities and what it takes to do that. While doing so, this post from The Guardian caught my eye and help summarize some thoughts in my head.

One thing the article helped me articulate is that strong communities establish boundaries and cannot function well without feedback mechanisms - mechanisms that render consequences for good and bad behavior. In the past the mechanism might have been to be shunned by society - not invited to the right parties, banned from the club. However, the breakdown of smaller social groups and more intimate physical communities means these mechanisms for being shunned are outdated. So now we have more literal feedback - pure information. eBay ratings are a good example: a public badge you have to wear wherever you go. Should you fail to play by the rules the consequences are obvious.

This is why brand transparency is so key. Without full disclosure you cannot rebuild the trust that may or may not have existed in the first place. Brand nudity in this sense, has an advantage - telling people what you don;t know, what you are and are not doing and seeking participation and further feedback build a community by itself, without the artificial methods used on many corporate websites.

This also seems to be where the blogosphere seems to fall down - transparency is optional. Forget fraud - I do not have to leave my name and address when I comment on an issue, leading to some of the issues that Kathy Sierra faces. Are we being hypocrites - demanding from brands what we do not provide?

experiment over

Maybe last week was just an anti-blog week. There were death threats on Kathy Sierra's blog, Russell had some rude remarks a while back, then I got a nasty comment or two on my little blog dating experiment. Now I guess you can argue that putting up someones photo on a blog asking if someone wants to meet them is asking for trouble. But should it be? You would not expect it on match.com or any other dating side (though these sites are obviously moderated).

While we all espouse the formation of brand communities and herds, the policing mechanisms they have and need are a good way to rate them. A truly strongly community should be able to band together when faced with some kind of intrusion or external shock. Co-operation - which can and may need to evolve slowly - has to happen quickly.If the community can;t deal with the intrusion, is it likely to last?

Another question is for brands is how much they want to moderate their communities for issues like this or encourage the group to deal with it themselves - ideally making them stronger.