Dazzle Ships

More new old media

Mobile widgets, since the arrival of the iPhone and, latterly, the G1 are the brave new world of what we do, with BMB winning awards for their iPint, which we bigged up here before. 

(OK, so they nicked it.  The Awards judges didn't mind.  On the contrary, this seemingly inconvenient fact is, apparently, just an illustration of their 'ingenuity'.  Don't get me started. Seriously.)

It's not just 'gimmicky' stuff either.  There's a whole host of services springing up, like Yelp and LifeVine, which feel like their trying to take the things that have made social media take off (peer-review and social networking, respectively) and shoe horn them into a 'mobile' space.  It all feels a bit forced to me.  Though I'd love to be proved wrong.

One app i've found that is terrific, though, is the iNap.  It is basically a GPS based alarm - so you can program it to activate when you get to within 100m of your train stop (useful with the Christmas season coming up).

Another really interesting developing is PMc, a new fashion magazine that you can download to your iPhone or Touch.  Following the stuff we wrote about Distill last week, it looks like the fashion journalism is really embracing the new stuff.

New old media indeed.

Any more great examples let me know

-- Toby

Doom and Gloom. Explained.

Untangling credit default swaps from Marketplace on Vimeo.

Thanks to Bryan for this.

There's loads of other good stuff at the link.

-- Toby

BOGOF Kids

 

If you work with a Toy client, have kids, or are just a little bit creepy, you may well have heard about Webkinz.  Webkinz make fluffy plush toys like the ones above.  The company started in 2005 in the US, and is doing rather well for itself.  Each creature comes with a code that unlocks it's virtual self on webkinz.com that you have to look after and nurture, a bit like Simms.  Not an original idea you might thus think, but the incredible thing is that three years later, the company has just been valued at $2bn.   

Hasbro, Disney, Mattel and more have all since followed suit, offering toys with a virtual bogof attached.  With this in mind it got me wondering how long it will be before many more brands start doing the same.  The brilliance of the Webkinz idea is that kids often discard toys after a few days, but once you manage to hook them in to the vitrual world, they come back again and again. You build greater loyalty, along with a desire to get yet more fluffy pigs, cows and more, because clearly you have their permission to immerse them in the brand story.  

What started as a great marketing idea to build and reward involvement, has since become an incredibly valuable virtual world in itself.  How long will it be before each car you buy entitles you to enter a worldwide rally championship with real world prizes; each CD you buy invites you to interact and go behind the scenes with their virtual celebrity doppelgangers; each Coke can opens a worm hole in to the virtual happiness factory etc. 

Sounds like a far more interesting way to offer value to consumers, than the usual buy one get one free that only ends up devaluing your brand in the long term.

- Sam

TheyTube

News came through a couple of days ago that YouTube have agreed a deal with MGM to feature full-length movies on the site, in an MGM-branded channel. You Tube already has a deal with CBS to show episodes of all sorts of stuff like CSI or Big Bang Theory, but this will be the first content that stretches to really significant length of viewing experience for consumers. The titles being talked about for launch are hardly earth-shattering (Bulletproof Monk, anyone?) so it feels like a fairly cautious approach from MGM for launch, but nevertheless it's an interesting development.

So, we move away from the snackable, 'you own it' style of content that YouTube built its reputation and massive following on and shift to a much more traditional channel through which to broadcast content from the establishment.

What does this tell us? Is the bubble bursting on UGC? Well, its true that this style of content becomes less appealing (for older viewiers at least, I would think) as the broadcasters catch up with technology. Now I can get 'decent' content at lunchtime through iPlayer, ITV.com, Channel4.com etc, I'm less interested in watching people break their femurs whilst attempting a 360 heelflip, or at least I think that was it as the resolution on his mate's cameraphone is so shit I can't really see anything.

Closer to the undoubted truth is that this is all about money. YouTube struggles to generate advertising revenue against a load of home videos that shiny brands don't fancy being associated with. Films are another matter - that I can buy!

Going back to the resolution issue, one has to assume that YouTube will broadcast these movies in something worth watching as opposed to grain-o-vision. Even then though, will we want to sit for two hours in front of our computer monitors?

But maybe this is nothing to do with me. I'm too old. A generation of people are being brought up with this as a main method of consuming content. Their experience of it is all that matters. Resolution be damned! Immediacy wins over quality. And portability is a big draw. With YouTube naturally synced into the current generation of mobile handsets, films on YouTube become a free library of movies on the move. With this kind of content perhaps YouTube is cracking how to monetise the modern viewing habits of youth.

Might need something better than Bulletproof Monk though.

-- Alex

Marketing Obamania

 Since Barack Obama's historic victory this week, it appears that marketing people the world over are rushing to tell us what we can learn from his campaign.  A search for 'What marketers can learn from Obama's campaign' yielded over 2 million hits)

Now, we've been talking about this for a bit anyway (even further back, on the old blog), so we're not going to re-hash it all again.

Far better that you read this piece by Al Ries of Wolff Olins on the importance of positioning in the campaign, and this piece by Seth Godin which discusses some of the bigger themes.

I think Seth says some really interesting stuff ('Motivating the committed outperforms persuading the uncommitted') and some really stupid stuff ('TV is over'), but all of it is a bit more original, and a bit more 'big picture', than the rather repititive 'It's Web 2.0 wot won it' rhetoric.

-- Toby

The Curse of Knowledge

Thanks to my old gaffer, Mark Palmer, who encouraged me to get off my arse and get cracking with Made To Stick, which has been sitting in my 'to read' pile for about a year now.

I'm only a couple of chapters in and am loving it.  I'll hope to do a full review when I've finished, rather than a load of little updates, but one thing I've already read really struck home and picks up on some of the stuff we've written about before.

The authors talk about the 'Curse of Knowledge', what they mean by this is, essentially, that once you know something it's very difficult to imagine what it's like not knowing it.  They illustrate with a great story, which you may be seeing coming to an Ignition session near you soon.

In 1990, Elizabeth Newton got a PhD in psychology from Stanford for the following very simple experiment.  She asked people to pick from a list of twenty five famous songs and tap them out on a table top.  Thse people were the 'tappers'.  There were also 'listeners' who, obviously, had to guess what the song was.

This is the interesting bit.  The 'tappers' were asked what proportion of the songs the 'listeners' would guess correctly.  They reckoned 1 in 2.  The actual result.  1 in 40.  That's quite a miscalculation.  The reason for this is simple, when the tapper tapped out a song they were singing it in their heads.  The taps were just a bit of added percussion to their own personal soundtrack.  They couldn't hear what the listeners heard, which was, pretty much, just a series of random taps.

Try it.  But be warned, being a 'tapper' is absolutely infuriating.  You simply can't believe that the listener can't understand what you can so obvioulsy hear.  This is the curse of knowledge.

Now think about the process we go through with our clients.  We work for months on new launches.  We know exactly what the product spec is, and how it stacks up against the competition.  We know what the communication strategy is (we probably even came up with it ourselves). We understand the media plan in its entirety, knowing exactly which channels start when and how the story unfolds between them.  We've seen the ads dozens of times, in all their iterations.

And then we're completely infuriated when consumers don't get it. 

So get fresh eyes on everything you do.  And if they really don't get it, don't argue with them, try to persuade them you're right or dismiss their stupidity.  Take on board what they say and refine your ideas till they stick.

-- Toby

Seth's 3 boxes

Some of you will remember me posting about the 3 Boxes after the Vegas jaunt earlier this year.  We liked this way of looking at things for its simplicity and flexibility.

So when I read Seth Godin's post about Reacting, Responsing and Initiating, I couldn't help but be reminded of it.

The post divides our time into, wait for it, 3 boxes, labelled as above.  His contention, with which I would agree, is that we spend most of our work time reacting and responding (he defines the difference in the post - you'll have to read it).  Actually, we should be spending more time initiating, but this is the easiest thing to push down the list.

The other advantage, of course, is that the more time we spend initiating, the more we force our competitors to react, giving us even more time to initiate.  And so on.

Think about this.  And think about what you do all day.  Then think about what your clients do all day.  Are you initating or reacting?

Remember to focus on the important stuff, not just the urgent stuff.  They're not always the same thing.

-- Toby

New old media

 

Via the always fascinating springwise, developments in print media, showing that pre-occupations such as personalisation, content aggregation and The Long Tail are not restricted to our cousins in didge.

Item 1 is Distill magazine.  As the name suggests, Distill is a collection of fashion and style editorial from publications across the globe, aggregated together and published bi-monthly.  A fine example of attempts to m op up the Long Tail and repackage it profitably.

Item 2 is MagCloud. MagCloud operates firmly within the Long Tail itself, indeed makes it longer.  Basically, the idea is that they will convert pdf files into magazines, for a basic cost (20c per page, plus a $13 cost for shipping up to 100 copies).  So if, on your business plan, you can turn a profit on this cost base, this is the site for you.  Good luck.

-- Toby