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London Riots: A User Journey

It really struck me how slow the traditional TV news channels were  in covering the London Riots. Several times I felt frustrated as I was gathering news of events on the ground via Twitter's "citizen journalists" only to see the TV stations seemingly unaware and not reporting them. 

Over the last four days I have been accessing the riot news through a wide range of channels: Picked up first via word of mouth in the office, I jumped to watching live images on a colleague's computer, then later just gently checked into Twitter to get a sense of the scale of what was going on.In the following three days I used TV for more substantiated, verified and summarised reports. I read articles in the London Metro (free paper) and via two iPad newspaper apps and listened to the radio. When things got hectic and nearer to home on the worst night, Twitter seemed to be more on the ball and that's where I picked up links to mashup map APIs that popped little fire icons over London's streets. 

Including word of mouth, I count 7 different touch points, accessed in no particular order other than what was the most convenient or the most available at that point in time. None was necessarily superior and each played a specific role. Breath-taking shocking images on bigger screens, personal sentiments on Twitter and Facebook.

Can we learn anything from all this?

Amongst other things, it tells us that we cannot assume a neat and tidy sequence of channels, or messages. Even though clients and their agencies persist in planning as if journeys were linear - "first we'll engage them emotionally then we hit them with some rational Reasons To Believe". The old model, where we drive tiny replica consumers down a funnel of messaging - from broadcast through to more interactive media - is too simplistic. It can just as often go the other way.

Instead we must ensure that every thing we do works on it's own as a distinct element of the story. Even better if even the slightest of touchpoints can act as a microcosm of the bigger story as well  - that's why consistent and recognisable identies, taglines (and perhaps hashtags?) are so important.

What The Wheel of Concept tells us about the state of digital marketing

I’m sure you’ve all seen the wonderful Wheel of Concept app from Tribal DDB (former employers). You name the brand, its spins the wheel and delivers you a fashionable digital concept (think Crowdsourcing, iPad app, Augmented Reality etc).

The ideas is so funny because its so cynical. And so true. Another former Tribal strategist wrote a great piece last week in London’s Campaign magazine on the fetishing of technological novelty in the creative industry. There is a distinct tendency towards neophilia in our world. I guess if you’re trying to present yourself at the frontier of marketing innovation you’ve got to throw some cool new shit around.

Is it this constant fascination with the new that makes us forget our true calling: to create strong emotional connections between people and brands. All the evidence suggests that it is emotional engagement that delivers the behavioural change we’re seeking. I recently called on Twitter for examples of awesome digital campaigns that genuinely moved people emotionally (almost all responses were video-based BTW). The best by far was the iHobo app from the De Paul charity. 

You download a homeless person to your phone and have to care for them for three days. While they take drugs, get soaked, sick and threatened. It dragged me into their cause and I actually ‘felt’ for this virtual hobo (and yes, I’ve been buying The Big Issue homeless person's magazine since).

I’m as excited as the next geek by the potential of digital technology to change our lives and societies for the better. But let’s not forget that the marketer's job is to make stuff that works, even though it might not emplpy cutting-edge technology every single time.

BRAND PROPOSITION OR BLAND PROPOSITION? The questionable role of the Planner's sentence.

Writing short sentences on pieces of paper is still core to the craft of Planning. But is it still relevant to the world we are all living in? I'm wrestling with this one a bit, so help me out.

Since I was a wee Planner in a DM shop, I've been writing short, terse statements for brands. Always under 10 words, ideally less than 5, sometimes just 2 or 3 words long. I've used them just because that was the way it was done. It was something you had to learn to do as an agency Account Planner, something you needed to have signed-off as an account handler and the focus of terrifying critical attention from some gnarly Creative Director. It's an ingrained habit and a real core of the Planning craft. We used them on creative briefs and in PowerPoint documents. We spoke of them in in lifts and stairwells and taxis.

They go by the name of propositions, or positioning statements or brand statements or brand ideas or big ideas or brand themes or challenges or sometimes still, essences. Many an hour is spent whittling away at these sentences, word-smithing, the occasional reach for the thesaurus, waking-up at 6am with a brand statement circling around your mind. But can you reduce a brand to a short statement? Indeed should you even try?

Can love fit into a sentence?

My daughter is dear to me. I've grown to know her habits and traits, her character and personality as she develops. She is someone I have a close relationship with. We have a strong connection. I want to speak to her, hear whatever she is up to, be a part of her world. What brand wouldn't aspire to a similarly close connection with their customers? But one thing I couldn't do is turn all that into a short sentence... "the essence of my daughter is..." it just wouldn't get anywhere near capturing the richness of my interactions with her or the depth of feeling. This is the era of social branding. Brands are desperately trying to become more like people. A friend, someone you want to talk to and share with in a social environment. Does a short statement still have a role in this modern marketing reality?

Sentence Defence

I suppose if you are really focusing squarely on Paid media, then proposition statements still have a role. You are paying for it, you have every right to say whatever you want (though I might not listen). The proposition ought to convey some benefit to your audience and if you can create a distinct tone of voice for it, then you might be on to a winner. If you want it to be memorable it had better be short - so keep it pithy.

Via neting.glogster.com

 The well-written brand tagline also has a real rallying power. You can't deny that Just Do It or The Futures Bright are pretty memorable sets of words, invested with meaning through millions of dollars of adspend. Slogans are ancient ("Honit soit qui mal y pense" anyone?) and they are probably here to stay. They can do justice to an idea, think Workers Of The World Unite. But would you say those 5 words truly encapsulate Communism?

Embrace Complexity

Can you really reduce a brand's strategy,its core meaning or cultural myth down to a sentence. What's the sentence that encapsulates my iPhone? Or the Apple Store shopping experience? Or my feelings for my slightly battered estate car? Or even my country? Perhaps that's why complex characterful entities like Nation States have songs... National anthems convey mood and meaning in more than just a few words. Perhaps that's why the best way of expressing a brand in all its richness is often a short film. There are hundreds of live Creative Briefs around the world right now, with a sentence on them that will have little or no connection to the eventual creative outcome. I should know, I've written loads of them.

Simple Reductionism

As a planner or strategic person-whatever, I'm supposed to be a reductionist. Take the complex and make it simple. And I do love that part of being a Planner. But I take issue with Planning (and my Planning) when it stops there. Surely today we need to think more richly, more responsively? By all means let's have some guiding tenets - the rules that allow the game to take place. But let's not kid ourselves that a short sentence is sufficient.

A better way?

I wonder whether it isn't better to define brands and their strategies using a combination of their;

1. Values (just not bland, fat ones like "Innovative" but a genuine point of view on the world)
2. Voice (if sufficiently distinctive, think Marmite, or the exhaust note of a Subaru Impreza - play from 0.13")
3. Behaviours (how they act, what they do and don't do)
4. Physical attributes (how they feel, what they look like)

Of course this sort of thing looks a lot like what Brand Consultancies do, and mostly these guys are somewhat derided in creative ad agencies. But perhaps they were on to something after all. I think that if we do this instead of just landing on the sentence, then we're focusing on actions and interactions rather than on some abstracted philosophical, quasi-Platonic essence. Of course we could do with templates for this. Easy ways to convey the aspects above to a client and to everyone working on a brand's business. Little tricks to help a brand find it's voice in social media. Perhaps its just me, but why aren't we making more short briefing films - it ought to be easy with sites like Jaycut.com.

I guess this might all be rather obvious to most of you and I may be just out of step with the times anyway but I would love to hear your comments.

Can you Win Friends and Alienate People?

Thought provoking article for Admap written by DDB UK's very own Sarah Carter and Les Binet. Enjoy.

There is one word which crops up very regularly on creative briefs - the word is “without”. It seems that communication involves a precarious balancing act. We want our brands to appear “confident without being arrogant” or “traditional without seeming old-fashioned”.   

Last week we came across an old favourite example of this “a without b” syndrome. The brief for a new campaign warned “We want to appeal to new younger soft cheese users without alienating existing loyal users of our brand.”

Grrrrr… Alienating loyal customers would obviously be a bad thing for any communication. But does it really happen? We’ve been evaluating advertising for nearly 25 years, and neither of us can think of a single campaign that has appealed to new users but actively turned regular users away from a brand . Nor on a personal level can we think of any campaign that “alienated” us so much that we stopped buying the brand. And we take much more notice of ads than most people.

Fundamental misconceptions

The fear of alienating existing customers is understandable. But it is misplaced- because it is based on two fundamental misconceptions about how marketing works.

The first is that real people don’t have strong opinions about brands. People just don’t tend to care enough about brands to feel alienated by them, or indeed to have any strong feelings about them, good or bad. Working in a world where brands are everything, that’s hard for us to understand. Picasso said it took him 60 years to see like a child. It seems that most marketing people don’t do it long enough to be able to view their brands like a real person.

The second misconception is the view that users of a brand are very different from non-users. The real world is a lot more blurry than this. Empirical data tends to show that within a given category, the “non-users” you want to attract, actually tend to be pretty similar to the users you are so worried about alienating. In fact it’s usually misleading to call them “non-users” at all. In most cases they’ve probably bought your brand before, and were quite happy with it. It’s just that they don’t happen to buy it very often. This means that even if you tried, it’s pretty hard to come up with communication that appeals to non-users and “alienates” users.  They are basically the same people.

And even if they are not, and you are going for a radical repositioning, we know that habits are hard to break. People who are regular long-term users of your brand are unlikely to defect just because they dislike a couple of new ads.

Many years ago, Supernoodles radically repositioned their product away from a children’s tea -time food to a post-pub blokes’ snack. Some irreverent ads were made, showing in one instance, a dog licking the noodles off a plate.  They sensibly understood that the risk of alienating the regular buying mums was pretty low. And they were right. Usage for children’s teas went up nearly as much as for late evening blokey snacks. Good ads tend to work on everyone.

Alienation Paranoia

A lot of this alienation paranoia is fuelled by the artificial nature of market research. Force people to focus on and analyse a new, more provocative way of talking about your brand, and you may well see signs of “alienation” in your research. People by and large don’t like change. They prefer the ads they are used to.

As part of the “love it or hate it” Marmite campaign, we once came up with a brave ad designed to appeal to new younger users. It showed a young couple on their first date going back “for coffee”. After eating toast and Marmite in the kitchen, the girl returns to the sofa. They kiss. Her boyfriend retches violently at the taste of Marmite.

Most people in research thought it was very funny. But older Marmite users hated it. It seemed too irreverent. You could say they felt “alienated” by it. But the ad ran, and those older users soon changed their minds when they saw how popular it was. In fact, it turned out to be the seminal ad of a famous, long-running campaign, awarded both creatively and for its sales success.  Market research over-estimates how sensitive people are to change and boldness, and under-estimates “herd” effects of this kind.

As the Marmite story illustrates, alienation paranoia is not just misplaced. It is downright dangerous, because it can kill the bold, penetration-gaining ideas that are the key to brand growth. So remember to relax: it’s actually quite hard to win friends and alienate people.

Speed Kills

We did a talk at the Eurobest Creative Awards festival last week. It was entitled Speed of Culture. We argued that whilst brands and their agencies need to move at the speed of an ever-accelerating popular culture, their marketing actually tends move at the speed of production. Its hard to be 'always-on' and reactive if it takes you three months to produce something.

For some the problem goes deeper. We heard a story about a famous FMCG brand who's marketing processes are so sluggish that they can't get innovations to market fast enough. Why so slow? Because they can spend up to a year *or more* making a single TV commercial. Nor are they particularly active in realtime social/digital channels.

Launch and Leave

We gave some examples of work we were doing to move away from the traditional 'Launch and Leave' mentality of most of the marketing industry, to embrace a fleet-of-foot, realtime and adaptive kind of mass-marketing. This means responding to opportunities that allow your campaign to grow and evolve once it has broken. We talked about making additional, entertaining and exclusive content available if the campaign begins to create traction. We talked about how you try to capitalise on popular interest and feed it to build a bigger effect.

The challenge of all this of course is that most of us in marketing or the creative industry still work for fairly big businesses that come encumbered with all kinds of legacy systems. Slow processes, repeated intermediate sign-offs, researching micro-components of creative ideas ad nauseam, slow production lead times and of course risk-aversion. Rather than moving at the speed of culture, picture a dinosaur plodding through thick mud.

I heard another story this week, a friend at a ad agency told me they'd received a brief to quickly produce some cheap (but sweet) videos for online distribution.  Everyone agreed about the need for speed and accepted lower production values yet they still went and popped the brief into the old production processes. Within hours they'd arrived at a three week turn-around, involving creative teams, producers, third-party film crew and of course the cost rocketed upwards of 20K. Which is odd, given that they can get a pitch video made in a night if they need to. Or indeed a smart DV cam operator and a smart agency executive could get something decent together in 24 hours. The outcome? The client went to a low rent video production outfit and got a tighter turnaround and lower price. You can see where this is going...

Fast is the new Big

Someone much smarter than me recently said "Fast is the new Big". I'm fascinated to find examples of big agencies and brands that are managing to move really fast - what did they do to free their people and unlock their systems? I'll be looking at this in more detail in the next post.

I suspect the need for speed will have an aggressive evolutionary effect on the marketing industry in the next few years - there will be the quick. And the dead.

After the Revolution: The Age of Terror

This image: The Death of Marat 1793 by Jacques-Louis David

From fabulous ideal to harsh repression

The funny thing about revolutions is how they so often turn sour. The French revolution had fabulous egalitarian ideals but quickly descended into the harsh repression of those not sufficiently on-message. Same deal with the Bolsheviks, the Maosists,  etc etc. (My pal Allan Blair reminds me of course that it wasn't the Bolsheviks who descended into terror but the Stalinists - either way more grist to the repressive mill).

And same deal with both the digital revolution and now social media. We see The Terror stalking the streets of the marketing industry as the digital sans-culottes go about rounding-up anyone who argues for TV and beheads them. In the cold light of dawn the simple fact of the scale of TV's reach has seen its restoration as a healthy part of the marketing mix.

Social mob rule

We're seeing the same thing in social - Gap ran terrified from the mob. Or rather an imagined venemous mob. Not everyone will like everything you do - accept it. Anyway, most shoppers at Gap this weekend won't have heard a word about the failed Gap logo. And never will. Not every campaign needs a social idea plugged-in. Facebook is probably still not the answer in most cases. Social monitoring often won't  radically enlighten you.

In short: I'm a big fan of change and creating exciting momentum but let's not allow the ideals of revolution turn into the horrors of repressive Terror.   

Questions for you:

1. What mob rule are we allowing ourselves to be terrorised by right now?
2.  What do you think is in need of Restoration?

Social Media Will Eat Itself

But the demise of social-as-specialism is already underway. Whilst
marketers argued over who had the right to sit at the top table as
chief social media counsel, they failed to see that everyone has a
right to (and a responsibility towards) social media. Social is
relevant to all the marketing disciplines because its bigger than
marketing communications. Social media is already giving way to social
business as Jeff Dachis and others have argued for a while.

Social monitoring, into which companies are leaping head-long, leads
to one inevitable conclusion; people talk about brands without
respecting the borders of the brand's marketing department. Customer
service complaints on your promotional facebook page? Deal with it.
Companies need advisors who can see beyond social as marketing
amplification. They need people who can socialise their businesses.
Who would you entrust that task to?

If you're a social media type sitting in a marketing agency, your true
purpose is to socialise your company's culture and operating model.
Teach them about dialogue, participation, sharability, being nice,
being always-on, being fast. Show them the power of lo-fi content and
shareworthy applications. Help them rebuild their processes to move at
the speed of culture, not the speed of antiquated production.

In the post-social world, social, like digital, will be intrinsic to
every department, to every supplier, to every employee, to every
marketing agency. And just as the first generation digital agencies
are integrating vertically to offer clients non-digital strategic
advice and offline creative services, so it will be for the social
media specialists. Integrate, get bought or die.

Sure social tactics are useful (if increasingly just another form of
marketing wallpaper) but clients need intellgent, data-driven
strategic advice and we all know that the best and most social objects
will always be original ideas. So who's got those skills at their
disposal today?

The success of social will be its total integration into every
department and into every agency. The mark of of a social specialist's
success will be her own redundancy. Social Will Eat Itself.

Integrated Marketing: Meat & 2 Veg or Sumptuous Dining Experience?

This post tells a story.

A story about a recent buying experience and how it shines a light on the way the marketing industry treats integration of marketing channels and activities.

*First, the story*

We're going on holiday soon and since we don't know the area we were thinking of buying a SatNav. Great for tinkering down country lanes.

On Saturday morning we were in a car accessories retailer. So I picked-up a SatNav box, had a rough look and a quick glance at the prices. This normalised the idea of actually buying one. But it also kicked-off a my desire to do due diligence and have a look online.

Sunday night and I borrowed my wife's login to the Which? Online reviews site. This was both reassuring and frustrating in equal measure. I read the buying guide, compared the products, specs and prices and got sucked into the miserable paradox of choice.

I needed to reduce my options. Garmin had a good review (so did various Tomtoms etc) but within 5 minutes I ended-up on the Garmin site. Why Garmin? I don't really have a strong view of their brand, I certainly don't actively remember any of their advertising, but I was at least aware of the name. And of course I've seen their kit in cabs.

The Garmin site experience wasn't brilliant (dodgy search function which underwhelmed me) but at least I begin to feel I was closing-in on a decision. At this point I began to worry about whether my chosen shortlist of models was missing the Traffic Update feature...

So back again to the Which? site. This time I saw the light. Or rather a video, on buying a SatNav which was far more instructive than anything I read.

After that I wanted to watch TV. So the decision was made, couple of final checks. And off to Amazon (Which? said they offered the second best price). Second best? That's right. The best price was about £3 cheaper but I just had no idea who they were, or whether if I paid for it online it would ever arrive.

The deal was sealed by a review from a user. Simple, well-written, one of us, a peer, a punter, a consumer of consumables. Thanks Mr P James, you sorted me out.

*So what does this story tell us about 'Integration'?*

First the industry goes on about how paths to purchase are complex these days. Then we bang out a big TV ad, backed-up with press and banners in the hope to drive someone instore or online. In my case it almost went the other way round. If the store experience had been compelling enough or a staff member had leapt on me I might have bought it then and there. The complex thing about integartion is making it so simple you just find it easy to buy!

Second, branding did play a role in my decision. In fact three brands played a key role in my decision (Which?, Garmin and Amazon). But it was less of a role than we sometimes allow ourselves to believe. I'd love to say that a deep-seated set of emotional associations, built panstakinlgy over years, kicked-in for Garmin. But if they did, I wasn't feeling it. I actually wanted a TomTom at the outset. Why? Because my taxi driver on Saturday night recommended it. So once again both he and Mr. P. James ended-up being the strongest direct influences on my purchase. Bring on the Social Meejah.

Third, moving images really *are* a powerful way to communicate. The combination of faces, words, sounds, music they really get inside your head. The art of film craft will only become more important. But you know that already.

Fourth, successful integration of your marketing channels and brand touchpoints is more like cooking a meal than doing a jigsaw puzzle. You need a blend of several ingredients that will really complement each other. None of the flavours should overwhelm the dish. And of course you really need to prepare the dish carefully, selecting just the right ingredients because each meal is different. Too often I think our industry is working on a 'meat and two veg' basis when they should be preparing a sumptuous dining experience.

Pass the salt?

(... And thanks for reading this far)

Social Capital: making sense of value in Social Media

(Revised 22.02.10)

Why?

We’ve been talking for a while about how to measure the impact and value of what people and brands do in online social spaces. And what’s the value of a conversation? There is no silver bullet to this, but having a good model of how it might work is going to be a hell of a lot more constructive than sitting around in Social Media ROI denial.

What is Social Capital?

Social Capital is the value exchanged in online social spaces. The success of a social network is directly correlated to the amount of social capital it helps its members build.

It’s really quite simple: People earn social capital and they spend it. Brands also have social capital, sometimes they increase it, sometimes they decrease it. And sometimes both people and brands go into the red (the irritating over-tweeter you just unfriended, the Toyota product recalls you heard about). It’s worth noting that Social Capital is not driven solely by what people or brands do in social spaces. Your social Capital with friends is much increased by you having dinner and drinks with them in the real world. And so it goes for brands, real world performance, products and (...gasp...) even advertising can build or diminish their stock of Social Capital.

This isn't a completely new idea; there appears to be a Sociological view of Social Capital and others have written about it here. But I believe its something worthy of a deeper look and more practical application in commercial contexts.

What is Social Capital made of?

Social Capital doesn’t directly equate with money, though I believe it will become more clearly monetised in future. For now, I’d argue Social Capital is made up of a combination of:

(1) People’s time and attention. I have a limited amount of disposable time, I’ll spend it on things that interest or entertain me. As the Attention Economy concept showed, this has a commercial value. As Dom kindly points out Time and attention are tied implicitly to currency, or newsworthiness. For example, lots of time and attention (and green profile pics) were devoted to the Iranian election protests on Twitter back in 2009. Whereas now hardly anyone tweets about it, so currency is a big contributor of Social Capital.

People will also trade time/attention for excitement, interest, relevancy, entertainment and so on. I think time, attention and interaction are a good proxy for Engagement. People’s time and attention is a function of their engagement with the conversation. As with friendships, if they aren’t spending time with you, you’re probably not very engaging.

(2) People’s influence and connections. Take celebrities, they have Social Capital in part as a result of their large fan base. If you have a lot of connections, you may have more Social Capital to spend. As Eric points out, its not quite that simple; we’ve all seen people with enormous numbers of followers and friends who’s posts are banal and tedious.  So along with connections, we’ve got to look at authority or influence too.

(3) The Social Objects people create. This might seem a bit strange at first glance, but since social gatherings and conversations tend to coalesce around Social Objects (the things people talk about, use and share in social spaces), the creation of them has a value. 

(4) People’s goodwill and personal recommendation. What PR’s often call Trust. The NPS crowd are big on this too and have demonstrated that a positive disposition towards someone or something is predictive of revenue growth. This is perhaps most important, since you want the time, attention, connections, influence and social objects to be positively, rather than negatively, viewed.

 In short:

Social Capital = Time / Attention / Interaction + Influence + Social Object Creation + Goodwill

So What?

Assessing someone’s Social Capital is one way to estimate their value in the social web. Twittratr and Twinfluence are good examples of tools designed to allow people to do just this, albeit in a limited way.

Social Capital might also be a good way for brands to work out just how much sway they hold on the social web. It would provide a benchmark for their performance over time and a way to compare themselves to competitors. I’m not advocating anything so simplistic as a single metric (we’re not trying to recreate Millward Brown’s much derided AI score here). Its more useful to understand a brand performance along the different dimensions of Social Capital.

But I would like to work out a correlation between Social Capital and revenue growth, I bet you’d find a strongly predictive link. Has anyone done this already?

But its not just about measurement…

Businesses are already earning and spending Social Capital. When Apple releases a new product, they immediately increase their stock of Social Capital as people devote time, attention, their opinions  and their connections to it. When Habitat began spamming Iranian election Hashtags on Twitter, they reduced their Social Capital as the Twitterati began to criticise them.

But it goes further than that, if businesses can understand just how they can help people build their Social Capital, I think they’ll end-up building Social Capital of their own. When OfficeMax created Elf Yourself, an amusing and viral personalised animation, they generated enormous Social Capital for themselves because they helped others be funny, amusing, smart and earn Social Capital from their own social networks.

What do you make of this? Is it interesting? Would you build on it? Would you pull it all down as a house of cards? Please let me know and let move the conversation on. Thanks

Transmedia Narratives: Fact of Fiction