Posts filed under ‘digital’
Advertising after messaging
Alex Steer writes: Chances are, if you work anywhere in marketing or media, you’ll have read something like this at some point over the last two years.
The advent of social media has changed the communications landscape forever. The old rules of advertising – in which brands pushed marketing messages out to consumers – no longer apply. Consumers, empowered by social media, are savvier and more demanding, looking for authentic brand experiences, not just messaging. To thrive in the age of social commerce, you need to provide dynamic opportunities for consumers to connect and co-create with your brand.
OK, I made this example up, but could easily have been pasted together from scores of white papers, blog posts and conference presentations. It’s the kind of rhetoric that makes us feel we can see the future, and that the future is nothing like the past.
Just one problem. It’s wrong.
Like a lot of wrong ideas, it’s a patchwork of truths. I’d like to pull out three of those truths here, then throw in one more obvious truth, to show that they create a different future environment for advertising from the received wisdom above.
The first truth is that good advertising is inductive. It presents a join-the-dots of images and information, but it leaves you to draw the conclusion, and make your own lasting association between product, advertisement and brand. That inductive spark is what draws people into good advertising – it’s why ‘Just do it’ (do what?) is a better slogan than ‘Nike products improve your sports performance’; why Apple chose ‘Think Different’ (about what?) rather than ‘Computers with an unusual operating system’. Good marketing involved engagement and co-creation long before it could be interactive.
The second truth is that digital media channels are taking the burden off advertising. It’s easy now to raise an eyebrow at old ads, crammed with product information and claims. But digital channels provide opportunities to connect with people at more points in the purchase cycle, from early consideration (websites, apps) to after-sales support (Twitter, instant messaging). In a ‘just-in-time’ information environment, less shouting is required.
The third truth, as Andrew Curry noted in his piece on the future of advertising, is that consumers are better interpreters of media messaging now. But this is a long-term product of the old media, not just the new. Sheer volume of exposure makes us both less attentive to individual messages, and more critical of them when we do notice them. Some long-term shifts in social values and attitudes to power and authority are also driving this.
I promised the fourth truth would be obvious, and it is. We may all know that markets are conversations, but this is often quoted as if all it said was ‘markets are not diatribes’. But conversations are purposeful as well as interactive. So the fourth truth is that, in a media environment with more noise and fragmented attention, it is more important for marketers to get to the point.
This fourth truth casts doubt on the idea that advertising’s role now is just to represent a brand’s values entertainingly in an ongoing dialogue with consumers. It suggests, instead, a future in which advertising messages need to be more surgical and more rewarding of attention – delivering that engaging, inductive payload to the right people, in the right channels, and just in time.
This is a moment of change. The power of media participation is in the hands of a public impatient with propaganda and noise. But the alternative to noise can be signal as well as silence. Advertising needs to step up, not give up.
The picture at the top is courtesy of Coker College, and is used with thanks.
A future made of screens
Alex Steer writes:
There was a lot of discussion in our London and New York offices last week about a short video called A Day Made of Glass. It’s produced by Corning, which makes specialized glass products, including mobile and tablet touchscreens, and the video explores a day in the life of a family in a not-too-distant future in which (surprise) there are screens, especially touchscreens, in just about everything.
The first thing that struck us was Corning’s imaginative approach to the dry task of selling high-tech glass. It’s a great illustration of what can happen when you apply a bit of futures thinking to your brand. It’s also smart as a piece of brand planning, focusing on the consumers at the end of the supply chain, not Corning’s B2B customers. Creatively, it’s well executed.
But it’s the futures aspect which has provoked the debate. The video is cheerfully optimistic about the screenification of the entire world, as you’d expect from a sales tool, and cheery optimism runs through the creative work too, presenting a perfect upper-middle-class family – mum, dad, kids, all so happy and healthy-looking – that feels more like a nod to the heyday of Madison Avenue than a look to the future.
Some of the futures thinking isn’t bad. Consumerism is one of the strongest forces defining technology innovation, and this trend is everywhere in A Day Made of Glass. Glassland is about user experience, good design and straightforward, seamless interaction. All the devices assume a world of rich information and always-on connectivity.
Which is what also makes this an extreme scenario.It assumes there are no limits to our attention, or our wish to interact with everything in the way we currently interact with our phones or tablets. The prevalence of touchscreens led one of our Senior Consultants to compare it to another video, for Microsoft’s Future of Work scenarios. In both, ‘the future looks very much like the waiting room at Heathrow Terminal 5’.
In information-rich markets like the US or the UK, the desire to stay updated is already clashing with the recognition that there’s too much information, and we’re looking for more efficient filters. There’s also an emerging awareness of the importance of continuous partial attention in our interaction with media, and the need for interfaces that are useful even when they don’t have our full attention (such as radio or TV).
The continuous interested multitasking imagined in Corning’s world seems, frankly, exhausting. Said one of our SVPs: ‘The woman emailing from her bathroom? I can pretty much guarantee that if you email me anything before I’ve washed my face and brushed my teeth in the morning you’re not going to get a “yes”.’
So in the end we were a bit sceptical. We also worried about the sheer energy cost of all those screens. But hats off to Corning for producing a thought-provoking piece of work that got us talking about the future of media and technology.
If you’re not paying, you’re being sold
Andy Stubbings writes:
One trend we’ve been monitoring for a while, as readers of this blog will know, is the rising level of concerns over data privacy and security to do with social networking.
We recently came across this chart (and shown above: it’s US data) which suggest astonishingly low levels of trust in the ability of social networks to look after personal data. They are trusted less on this than banks, credit agencies, or government departments.
This is consistent with other data we’ve seen on the topic, such as this year’s Edelman Trust Barometer, which also finds that technology is the most trusted industry, and media the least trusted. It would seem from this that, although social networks such as Facebook occupy a blurry position in consumers’ minds, we are probably more likely to think of them as media rather than technology brands.
As it turns out that makes a big difference. There is a saying in media that “if you’re not paying for content, you’re the product being sold”. I think consumers know this viscerally, and therefore expect that social media sites which are free to use are going to play fast and loose with their personal data, particularly those that are thought more of as corporations rather than associations or amateur networks. It is difficult to position yourself as a tech company and benefit from the associated halo of trust if you are actually in the business of selling your audience.
The brand and the digital conversation
Andrew Curry writes:
I was invited to Munich earlier this week by the insurance group Allianz to talk to its Brand Council about the brand in the age of the digital conversation. The company’s just launched its ‘One’ campaign, which promotes engagement with consumers through sharing. The emphasis is on real people in authentic situations giving or sharing useful advice or a valuable experience. Digital and social media are a central part of the process.
There are two things that companies seem most concerned about when they jump into social media. The first is that they are merely opening up a new channel for criticism and complaint, and they will be overwhelmed by this. But these conversations happen online whether or not the company decided to be involved, as BP discovered, spectacularly, with the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
The second concern is that consumers are interested only in price when they engage with companies online. It’s certainly true that the internet has created a whole new category of intermediaries whose only story is about discounting, and that the insurance industry (selling low involvement, abstract, commoditisable products) is particularly vulnerable to them.
But despite the recession, our Global MONITOR research shows that people are more willing to buy branded goods provided they are persuaded that they are getting value from them. And they need to be convinced of those benefits, in authentic everyday language, without being confronted by corporate-speak. Get it right, and you create a virtuous circle, as in the diagram at the top of this post. Get it wrong, and you get punished for it.
Elsewhere in the financial sector, Nat West has attempted to regain trust with its ‘Customer Charter‘, which has provoked as much scepticism as admiration. But in the digital age, markets and brands are conversations, and conversation is missing from the Nat West model. Their campaign could have run any time in the last 30 years.
In contrast, some of the early Allianz campaign executions involve their customers talking, in branch, unscripted, about what’s important to them. There are risks here, but at least it feels like a company stepping into the 21st century.
A version of this post first appeared on the blog of the advertising and marketing portal WARC, with which The Futures Company has a strategic relationship.
12 November 2010 at 9:32 am thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
Build it? They might come
Tom Richardson writes:
What people need is still more important for business than what businesses happen to be able to create – even though the gap between these two sometimes seems quite large.
Without research, and the freedom to pursue ideas that might never be profitable, some of the world’s most successful companies might never have become so. But this is different to throwing money at services that people haven’t told you they want, simply because these services seem to offer something “innovative”.
Innovation is the monkey to our organ grinder. It exists to find new ways of approaching age-old needs, such as reassurance, simplicity and community.
IBM, for example, has been working on a supercomputer called ‘Watson’ that can understand a question posed in colloquial language and respond vocally with an accurate, factual answer. The company says it’s designed for trawling through piles of papers such as legal documents to find an elusive fact.
Poor old Watson; destined to infuriate. It may respond to one of our needs (more time to do things) but even 99% accuracy isn’t good enough for a lawyer. Education helps us develop the ability to evaluate competing claims and make judgments about the information we really need. Understanding the use of language is only one part of that.
Why are we so bad at identifying tools that respond to human needs? They’re our needs, after all. Take Wolfram Alpha – again, an incredible product – that will make a lot of money through an expensive premium subscription that offers complex mathematical modelling. But at its launch in May 2009, it was seized upon by sensationalists at ‘the next Google’.
What Google has done, brilliantly, is to work hard in private on their sterile algorithms, while presenting a likeable human face to its users, with a visual identity that is colourful and simple. Google, like the iPod, is a human technology.
Wolfram Alpha, meanwhile, is a technology for technologists. It arrogantly (there I go again with the irresistible urge to anthropomorphise) tells you the answer, rather than humbly fetching information for you to interpret, like Google. If it gets the answer wrong, there’s no way to click back, think and discriminate.
The same delusion applies to social media. We know that no-one wants to be friends with washing powder. The company knows that plonking its washing powder down on Facebook makes it look awkwardly like the try-hard kid at school.
And, sadly, you can imagine the conversation around the water cooler in the Marketing Department:
“But have you seen the numbers?
“We have to be a part of this. Let’s ride this wave, let’s jump on board, let’s join the conversation!”
No. Go away. Really. No-one wants you here. You’re the wasp in my garden. And by the way, I resent your digital cold call.
The image at the top of the post is from the Museum of Mid-Century Illustration, and is used with thanks. http://www.plan59.com/main.htm
5 November 2010 at 12:31 pm thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
Looking for the answers
Walker Smith writes:
There’s something about building a new website – as we have just done for The Futures Company – which takes you back, deep, into the history of the internet.
The unexamined assumption of the original Information Superhighway idea was that people wanted to dive into a sea of data. This assumption was mistaken, which is why, today, we don’t have an Internet Information Superhighway in which individuals rummage through every bit and byte of everything ever captured, created or learned about every topic of interest or importance. Instead, we are headed towards a networked world in which we prefer the answers we get from those we trust most. At The Futures Company, we saw this coming.
As early as 1999, both Yankelovich and the Henley Centre – subsequently merged to form The Futures Company – anticipated today’s shift from deluge to direction. Yankelovich referred to this as the “pinpointing” trend, which would see search replaced by ‘smart search,’ thus anticipating years in advance the search model Bing introduced recently to an ever-more sophisticated marketplace as the emerging alternative to the Google model.
Even if people wanted to swim in a sea of data, it’s just not possible. Human cognitive capacity is bounded by fixed upper limits, something that psychologists have known and shown for decades. This is all too obvious in every headline about the dangers of phoning or texting while driving. There is only so much attention to go around, far less than the information available to fill it. As a result, two competing concerns crash into one another.
On the one hand, people insist on seeing more information as a prerequisite for trust. Yet, on the other hand, people are simply unable to process all that they see or assess its accuracy or adequacy. In a world of more information than ever, the imperative is to make do with less. Hence, smart search.
So it is with The Futures Company as well. Our newly updated client gateway is built as a smart search engine that doesn’t just list data, it points to answers. The ambition is to put the future at clients’ fingertips by offering a smart foresight tool, one that not only gives future direction but that is itself an embodiment of where the future is headed.
The image at the top of the post is from RENCI, in North Carolina, and is used with thanks.
23 September 2010 at 9:30 am thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
Losing interest in Facebook
Andy Stubbings writes:
“If you want to know how people will use technology tomorrow” a popular saying goes, “look at what young people are doing today”.
To add to the bubbling anti-Facebook resentment that we have discussed here before, we’re seeing growing signs of disenchantment and dipping enthusiasm for Facebook amongst younger people. One survey of teens by gaming site Roiworld shows one in five are using Facebook less; the main reason for this is ‘lack of interest’. After the buzz around ‘defriending’, there seems to be more interest on ‘deactivating’ or leaving the site – apparently quite an exhilarating experience, at least according to this account of a ‘post-college calibration’. And there are earlier discussions of why young people leave social networks – there’s too much drama, it’s not their space anymore, and people prefer face to face interaction where possible.
Curiously, this also tallies with a general trend that we have picked up with our Global Monitor survey this year – when asked, people in almost every country overwhelmingly expressed a preference for a small number of quality connections they can rely on rather than a large quantity of connections they can call on (levels of agreement are practically the same across all age groups as well – which you might not necessarily expect from those gregarious Millennials). Facebook’s business model is built on the opposite assumption – that people want to continually add as many contacts as possible (and then lump them all together in the same group as their ‘friends’).
There has been attention given to the fact that the average age of Facebook users is increasing, often arguing that this is a sign that the site is broadening its appeal by going mainstream. However, I’d suggest, tentatively for the moment, that a fall in engagement amongst younger people – and in this context the leading edge – represents a decline that will eventually ripple out to a mainstream made up by mainly by over-30s, a decline that will accelerate as soon as a genuine alternative to Facebook emerges.
Facebook isn’t growing up; it’s growing old.
The image is from the site of the web designer Sharath G, and is used with thanks.
Facing off about privacy
Andrew Curry writes:
The current row over Facebook’s successive changes to its privacy settings has several strategic implications for the way that businesses – not just in the digital sector – relate to their customers. In case you’ve missed the story: Facebook has radically reduced the default privacy settings for its users since the autumn of last year, meaning that users are likely to be sharing far more details across the internet than they previously did. (I’ve written about this at length elsewhere, but a visit to ouropenbook.org gives a sense of the scale of it.)
The reason? Well, the company says that ‘radical transparency‘ is good for you, in a moral sense. Others say that it is part of a long campaign by Facebook (two steps forward, one step back, according to Nick Carr) to set itself up as the owner of its users’ online identity, which is a more lucrative proposition than being a mere social network, even one with several hundred million members.
So what are the implications of this for businesses?
#1: When the mental map which your customer has of your product or service becomes too divergent from their experience of it, the business suffers. (This is what happened when Gerald Ratner described one of his company’s products as ‘crap’). In the case of Facebook, the actual experience is no longer represented by the map. The researcher danah boyd has explained this well:
A while back, I was talking with a teenage girl about her privacy settings and noticed that she had made lots of content available to friends-of-friends. I asked her if she made her content available to her mother. She responded with, “of course not!” I had noticed that she had listed her aunt as a friend of hers and so I surfed with her to her aunt’s page and pointed out that her mother was a friend of her aunt, thus a friend-of-a-friend. She was horrified. It had never dawned on her that her mother might be included in that grouping. Over and over again, I find that people’s mental model of who can see what doesn’t match up with reality.
#2: Privacy isn’t dead, although it is fashionable for digerati to say so. People still expect organisations they do business with to maintain appropriate levels of privacy – and to be able to check these for themselves. We think that this expectation increases as the web becomes more ubiquitous and more portable, and there are more opportunities for breach. At least some users will engage reluctantly because of fear of theft, fraud, or inappropriate social exchanges. In the digital world, companies which take care of their users’ privacy will be less profitable in the short-term, but more sustainable in the long-term.
#3: Facebook is effectively polluting the “commons” represented by the internet – all of the public resources and protocols – through self-interested behaviour. It is possible that other suppliers which also depend on a trusted internet for their business will intervene; Google, its own privacy problems notwithstanding, has done a little of this recently. But usually what happens when public interest goods are polluted by commercial interests is that regulation follows. The cases brought against Facebook under trade and competition law, along with the initial responses from privacy regulators, are harbingers of this.
The cartoon at the top of the post is one of a string of acerbic strips about Facebook at the excellent Joy of Tech, and is used here with thanks. You may enjoy this one as well.
Trying it on
Denise Hicks writes:
Next time you’re in a changing room or at home wondering if those shoes really go with that dress, don’t fear. Help is at hand online. Sign up to ‘Go try it on‘, post a pic of your questionable outfit, and receive instant feedback.
It’s an interesting idea in theory, and a great example of how the web is enabling users to solicit instant advice from online networks. However, it seems to fall into a similar trap as most online ‘forums’, which is that you don’t have any idea about the validity of the opinions offered.
Putting aside the fact that most people probably use it to confirm what they’re already thinking (be it positive or negative), why should you listen to what Jennifer C, or Alexa F, or any of the other 200 participants think? If there’s a debate going on, who do you trust? (Especially when there’s a penchant to say ‘change it’ rather than ‘keep it on’, for the sake of it).
There must be a way for these comments (and similar binary opinions on other forums) to be filtered via an attitudinal profile at the outset, so that you can prioritise the feedback of those who share your attitudes.
Certainly retail sites, and some restaurant reviews, are aggregating and cross-referencing previous feedback and purchasing data to help filter and edit your shopping choices. And sure, it may not be relevant for sites like YouTube that are geared towards capturing mass opinion. But still, if my mates aren’t there, or can’t be relied upon to give an honest opinion on my fashion sense, I want to know what ‘people like me’ think. Not the opinions of people who bought similar stuff, or the ones that most people agree with, but the ones who share my outlook on life, fashion and the universe – a group I can consider my ‘advisory panel’.
So when I’m told that ‘the puff sleeve with the high boat neck makes for too much bulk’ around my face, I can think ‘y’know what, Fawn G, you might just be right’.
The picture at the top is from Go Try It On, and is used with thanks. In case you’re wondering: Julia N needs an opinion on a super-casual look at her work.
Keeping Track
Eloise Keightley writes:
The industry for personal informatics is certainly one to watch. There’s even been talk of a ‘movement’ and unsurprisingly, the iPhone has spawned a host of personal informatics applications. These applications are tantamount to an omphaloskeptics’s dream: pretty much any variable of life can be tracked to the most granular degree. Users of personal informatics sites can log everything from vegetables consumed and number of migraines suffered to variations in mood and their feelings about particular places.
Perhaps evidence that consumers are seeking certainty in these uncertain times, the sheer number and variety of personal informatics applications suggests not only a rising interest in self-analysis (or an increasingly narcissistic society) but a desire for more control over one’s personal life. For starters, these tools help you to learn from the past and plan for the future – if you ate too many calories this week, you know exactly how many to remove from your diet next week. However, much of the allure of personal informatics lies in the visualisations these sites can produce with the raw data. Sites such as your.flowingdata.com allow users to create custom visualisation pages for what they’re most interested in and encourage you to ‘play’ with the data.
In theory, brands could have an enormous pool of data at their disposal should these tools become mainstream enough to attract sufficient users. While many personal data tracking accounts monitor health and leisure habits, many others track brand usage, product usage and attitudes towards brands. Personal informatics could help brands spot emerging competitors faster and track whims and fads with more agility than conventional methods. However, criticism of social networking sites that have deployed their members’ data for commercial gain mean that brands need to tread carefully: an assumption that you own the data simply because it is publicly available is imprudent.
On the other hand, brands are beginning to wake up to the potential of incorporating personal informatics into their business propositions – most notably Nike, through its joint venture with Apple and a handful of health clubs to produce the Nike + iPod package. It’ll be interesting to see how others follow suit.
The above image comes from Mapmaker, a user of the Mycrocosm personal informatics website, and is reproduced here with thanks.
