Dazzle Ships

Dancing on the ceiling...?

I’ve been fortunate (or unfortunate, depending on how you look at it) to have some spare time to catch up on my reading recently. One rather interesting book, Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everyone” gave a name to something we’ve probably all thought about in our day-to-day jobs. The concept Shirky introduces is the Coasean Floor, which he derives from Ronald's Coase's concept of The Coasean Ceiling; the limit found in business beyond which organisations will collapse under their own weight of workload and administration. Shirky's Coasean Floor is rather obviously at the other end of the scale, which describes activities that are just too small for an organisation to bother with. "Not worth getting out of bed for" if you like.

Shirky's focus is the Floor, and the way in which the internet makes "doing stuff" cheaper and easier. Meaning we now have organisations that could never exist without the Internet. For example Wikipedia, Linux and Flickr which have been built with the kind of user contribution impossible to envisage before the internet. 

This got me thinking. Undoubtedly he has a point about the Coasean Floor and the internet. And when thinking more specifically about communications, it's clear the internet has made brand dialogue easier than ever. In fact the range and depth of potential interaction can overwhelm both the marketed and the marketers! What I thought was interesting was to apply Coasean theory specifically to communications and brands, using the "Floor" and "Ceiling" to clarify the role of communications. So what's the very minimum a brand wants or expects from people in response to communication, and what's the very maximum? Is a visit to a high street outlet the "ceiling" goal for communication, and a visit to a brand's Facebook fan page the "floor". Or is the ceiling asking someone to buy a product, the floor to be aware of a product?

This also raises an interesting point about measurement of success. Defining a floor and ceiling allows for a scope of communications response, not simply one target. Practically speaking, these targets should be finite and measurable but ultimately allow for a more open-minded approach to communications.

In the currently fast-evolving communications landscape this kind of openness is going to be become more and more important.

Angus

Poor Phorm

The guys over at Phorm must wonder what on earth they have done to merit such a cold reception. For the uninitiated, Phorm is an online advertising technology which aims to track internet users throughout their total online journeys. Meaning users can then be continuously advertised to according to their behaviour.

Cue public outcry and campaigns including the Daily Mail’s histrionic “a spy camera in every home”. Hmmm not quite, but never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

OK you could say we may not be the most impartial of observers but nonetheless the reaction to Phorm does seem quite hysterical, especially when you consider what the UK currently tolerates in relation to their privacy.

For one, the UK is famously already The Most Watched Country in the World. Even although a recent Newsnight investigation revealed there’s about a million less CCTV cameras than we thought, we’re still ahead of the global pack. People of Wandsworth are living the Orwellian dream!

Tesco’s Club Card is another case in point, an enormous harvesting of the UK population’s data, registering around 10 million transactions a week. And of course data means money – they took £1 in ever £7 spent in the UK in 2008. Allegedly the government has even asked Tesco for their help in understanding ethnic groups, the retailer knows so much about the population!

And actually the sort of behavioural targeting Phorm are proposing is already possible across a number of websites and advertising networks. True, Phorm would be likely to bring more precise targeting, but nonetheless is not really a total innovation. And although they don’t use the word, Google's Cloud is naturally the elephant in the behavioural targeting room. The difference here is that these technologies have come about slowly and stealthily over time, rather than being announced as new.

So what is it about Phorm? Actually it could be less an issue specific to them, more intrusion online that worries so many people. Facebook experienced a similar backlash against their Beacon system a year or so ago. The UK internet population wouldn’t accept intrusion even from their most beloved social network.

We might be witnessing a paranoia unique to the internet; the invasion of internet freedom being what scares people the most. The United Kingdom traditionally prides itself on being an independent, autonomous group of people. But in the modern UK nanny-state people are finding this more and more under threat. Arguably for many the internet is the last place people are able to really do/watch/read whatever they want, across the full spectrum of acceptability! Of course for the vast majority this is about potential, rather than actual freedom, but when they find this overtly challenged they react fiercely. So fiercely that brands the size of BT and TalkTalk are forced to backtrack on their partnership with Phorm.

Inevitably this sort of targeting will become more common, but not necessarily more welcomed by the UK population. We would be well served to start considering this when using behavioural targeting, or indeed simply when communicating online. As people become more precious about their digital freedom, brands should tread more carefully in the realm of the digitally free.

 

Angus

 

Teenagers, twitter and cynical marketing

Unless you live in a cave, you will be aware that Morgan Stanley recently published a report into teenagers' media usage written by Matthew Robson, a 15 year old intern.  It was all over the media yesterday, reported in all the nationals, making the front page of the FT and prompting near meltdown in the 'blogosphere'.

The report itself is really well-written and nicely opinionated.  But, because it's based largely on anecdote, not data, contains a number of factual inaccuracies that I'm certainly not going to be churlish enough to bring up here.

What I most certainly am going to bring up, though, are Morgan Stanley's motives for kicking off this circus in the first place.

There are two alternatives :

1. This is a hugely cynical marketing ploy, designed to make themselves look simultaneously nice ('look, we're publishing the work of a 15 year old intern') and in touch ('hey, we get it'). 

or

2.  The report is indicative of the standard of all their analyst's advice, which may go some way to explaining the recent hiccup in the global financial system.

So, which is it?  I think we should be told.

-- Toby

Some influential research (from the competition)

Props to Bryan, who pointed me in the direction of this report from Ogilvy &  Razorfish, about what they call Social Influence Marketing.

It's got some greally interesting stuff in it that we could be using for our planning, particularly given that it espouses a number of our very own Influence principles like the role of influencers and an  undertanding of the path to purchase.

So get in there and get reading, but first some overall pointers;

1.  Ignore the rhetoric

There's a lot of obligatory bashing of the 'old model', including a section on the impotence of 'Top-down Branding'.  Actually the data doesn't support this conclusion, and it seems just to have been included for effect, ot to avoid the charge that they 'don't get it'

2.  Watch out for 'neophilia'

The notion that consumers 'own' brands not companies is nothing new, and has nothing to do with 'new' media.  Consumers have always 'owned' brands - something every smart marketer has always known.  Just read anything Jeremy Bullmore's written on the subject for the last 20 years.

3.  Get into the data

Forget the style (which I obviously don't like) and get into the substance.  There is great quantitive data on the nature of influencers, the roles of different channels along the path to purchase, the levels of trust placed in different sources (TV advertising does much better than online friends.  Shock, horror) and the role of different channels by category.

What you'll find is that it all backs up our own Infleunce research, but has some more granular digital data, reflecting, presumably, the involvement of Razorfish.

Enjoy.

-- Toby

A Trillion dollars = Cannes Grand Prix Lion

 

You may recall a post back at the start of April I wrote on the campaign to promote The Zimbabwean (a national newspaper not controlled by the local Government) that used real Zimbabwean currency becuase it was cheaper to use than buying in plain paper.  The aim was to drive uptake in ex-pat readership so that the owners could susidise the cost of the paper in Zimbabwe (where a 55% luxury tax imposed upon it meant a daily copy was costing more than the average monthly take home salary of the population).

Still no public news on whether this has been acheived by the campaign but it has secured TBWA/Hunt/Lascaris/Johannesburg (the creative agency behind the idea) both the Gold and Grand Prix Lions in the Outdoor category at Cannes this year. I'm hoping, as a numbers freak, that the submission did include some fantastic results!

Either way, it looks like committing trillions of dollars to ad campaigns may be the answer to winning major awards after all.......

Bryan aka ThePersuader

The mysterious case of the converging brands

Now here's a rum-do.

People, we're continually told, are faced with more choice than ever before.  The consumer is in charge.  So now, more than ever, brand differentiation is imperative for success.

So far, so true.

Why is it, then, that so many brands seem to say the same thing? 

They're all positioned in the same way.  If you don't believe me try playing the endline game.  It's an easy one this.  Pick a category.  Financial services is a good one.  Media agencies is even more fun, if you like that sort of thing.  Then take all the endlines and mix them up.  Do they still make sense?  If they do, then you've got converging brands.  Everyone's claiming the same thing.  No one's differentiating.

I blame consumers.  This may seem like an odd charge, but this is what I mean.

In the rush to become 'customer-centric', companies have spent way too much time asking consumers about what they want.  There's nothing wrong with this as long as you remember that what you get back from consumers aren't brand insights.  They're category insights.

So when you ask consmuers what they really want from your brand, what they are telling you is actually what they want from the category.

Not only that, but the same people (well not the same people exactly but you know what I mean) are sitting in another set of focus groups somewhere else saying exactly the same thing to your competitors. 

So as soon as you hear the sentence 'this is what consumers said they want from the brand' be careful. 

As Henry Ford said "If I'd asked people what they wanted, they'd have said 'faster horses' ".

-- Toby

Where's the tube? Augmented Reality answers

Finally, augmented reality is starting to become a useful reality for the (sort of) masses.  As you can see below, acrossair ("..a hybrid collective combining rockstar application and game developers with corporate infrastructure...") has developed a new augmented reality app for the iPhone (3GS only!),Nearest Tube, that answers that perennial late night drinker's question 'Where the hell is the tube so I can get home?'.

Hopefully this is the beginning of the realisation of the vision set out by Tonchidot with their proposed SekaiCamera ("World Camera" in Japanese) project launched almost a year ago.  Back then, following an very entertaining TechCrunch conference Q&A, one of the big questions was how the hell was Tonchidot going to manage and house all the data needed for the expansive system they proposed. 

This is still a huge challenge however I know of at least one global behemoth that has access to ridiculous amounts of data and the ability to manage it.  Given their moves into mobile with the Android system and the tidal wave of brand specific phones we can look forward to this Xmas, Google must be looking to develop this approach (in fact, rumors are that they are through a German application called Enkin).

Can you imagine Google's auction model in the augmented reality world with retailers (and their online competitors!) falling over themselves to outbid each other to be the first 'airtag' to appear on a user's screen on high streets across the globe?

Now all I need to do is to put forward the case for my company phone to be a nice shiny iPhone 3GS......

Bryan aka ThePersuader

FREE: What’s it really worth?

 

The launch of Chris Anderson’s latest book ‘Free: The Future of a Radical Price’ was a prime example of the lengths that people will go to in order to get something for nothing.

 

In this case, it was the prospect of unearthing the magic behind the word ‘Free’.

 

The launch event was held on one of the hottest evenings of the year, to an auditorium packed with marketing and advertising types, all clamouring to understand how to deliver value in a Freemium culture. Of the 90 minutes that we had all set aside for this event, we got ten minutes of Chris time. Not quite what I had expected. It was, however, a perfect example of one of the economic models he discussed. For a visualisation of the models click here.

 

It was a whirlwind speech that comprised of pronouncements that could be summarised as follows:

 

1)       the digital age places an unstoppable (downward) pressure on the price of all things ‘made of ideas’.

 

2)       The internet has shifted us from a scarcity-governed culture to one that is now immersed in abundance.

3)       all businesses must adapt and in order to find new revenue streams in a world of abundance.

 

4)       attempts to copyright content will fail and artists and companies must identify non-replicable experiences (such as staging concerts or producing limited edition merchandise) in order to make money.

 

The talk then ended, we were then held in the room for a panel, before being released and given a free copy of the book to find out more.

 

So after ploughing my way through it for more hours, this is what was revealed.

 

Some businesses profit more from giving things away than they can for charging for them. But for every example of this, there is another to show that premium-pricing models prevail. As Malcolm Gladwell’s much more thorough review concludes "the only iron law…is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws".

 

So my conclusion was that our challenge as communications planners continues to be this; to create a compelling brand stories that you can only read about, hear about or experience right here, right now.

 

But we knew that already.  

 

 

-- Chrissie

 

Branding in '4D'

I think I may have spent too much time reading TAC, but following the Better Mousetraps post of a couple of weeks ago, my antennae seem to be more finely tuned to the sorts of arguments I sought to dispel in it.

You can imagine my dismay when this article appeared in my inbox courtesy of Fast Company's daily newsletter.  It is typical of the genre. If you can't be bothered to go to the link, it's worth quoting at length :

Change the model.

(Toby - See if you can guess which model he's talking about )

People live life in four dimensions. We have functional needs, but we also are social creatures, have self-expressive needs, and crave content that we find to be entertaining and informative. Thinking this way reveals new ways of making your brand relevant:

• Functional: go from "product feature" to "solution-based" thinking
• Social: make your brand a celebrity that is fanned, friended, and followed. Or, create a thematic environment around a value shared by your brand and its customers (e.g. Dove and "the real meaning of beauty")
• Self-expressive: the brand must stand for something so clearly understood, it is cultural currency
• Content: become the logical and top of mind source for content centered on what your brand is about

But here's the catch; your competitive set will change as you offer new constructs…new ways to categorize. This takes us to the idea of a "mental marketplace" where your brand must vie for attention against other brands that are functionally unrelated. Product brands can even find they compete with celebrities and news publishers....

3M competes with Apple in the mental marketplace of innovation but they express their brands differently. Experience the Apple store in SOHO. Apple has leveraged innovation, cool, and edginess into self-expression, a sense of belonging and maybe a little bit of "theme park" thrown in. Oh by the way, Apple stores reached $1 billion in sales faster than any other chain in history (previous record-holder was the Gap).

So, where to start?

Well, let's start at the beginning.  His first assertion is that we have to change the model and then goes on to talk about the 4 dimensions.  Actually, these 4 dimensions look remarkably similar to (some of) Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs, a concept paraded around by account planners for as long as I can remember (and that's over 15 years).  Plus ca change indeed.

But the real nonsense comes at the end, with all this stuff about mental marketplaces and redefining your competition based on brand attributes.  Here's a few things to remember.

1.  People don't shop in mental marketplaces.  They shop in real ones.  Apple and 3M are both innovative companies with innovative products.  But people don't wake up in the morning and decide they want to buy 'something innovative'.  They wake up wanting iPods or Post-Its.

2.  Yes, attention is finite and, yes, getting consumer attention is harder, but to suggest that we are competing against everything that commands customers attention streches the idea of competition beyond the realms of usefulness.  And why stop at celebrities?  Why not go further?  My young son commands a lot of my attention at the moment, do I really expect advertisers who are targeting me to regard him as part of their competitive set? If they do, how will it materially affect their strategy?  If they don't, why does it make any more sense to regard Gordon Brown or Jordan as a 'competitor'?

3.  There is one area where some of this does make sense.  Search.  I've just come out of a meeting at which a new endline was presented and approved for a food brand ('fraid I can't tell what it is).  Typing this new line into Google brings up a media site, a personal finance site, a computing site and two news sites as the top five results.  So there is a sense in which these companies are your competition.

But only if people are as dumb as google.  Which they're not.

-- Toby