Tag Archives: Communications

18Jan / 2012

On 2011: Every time someone says engagement a fairy dies

I blogged a rather paltry 11 times in total last year, don’t feel bad, I had better things to do. 

But to be honest, aside from starting work at Naked and getting married I blame advertising and planning really.  It doesn’t feel like 2011 was as good as it should’ve been for the industry, progress made, but a bit on the slow side. In fact to quote a bit of Dickens:

“IT WAS the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way- in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only”.

So to get me motivated this year (albeit it negatively) here are my reflections on 2011:

 The language is still shit. Did you know every time someone says engagement or participation a fairy dies? We also need a wider range of verbs in marketing.

We still didn’t realise that a lot of stuff touted as new i.e. participation (a fairy didn’t die unless you are reading this out loud) is in fact old. It’s always been inherent in us and been happening pre-Dickens.

We keep making words up to make us sound clever or create some headlines. Good to see the first one for 2012. Ergopsychonomics. (Again making something old sound new in the process).

People kept telling me there was only one way of marketing and that something else was dead. I should have put this at number 1 to be honest. The world would be boring and very uncompetitive if there was only one-way of doing things. Oh yeah you’re right, it is…but the point is it shouldn’t be. 

We still keep hanging on to the past. OK people are watching more TV than ever before but it doesn’t mean anything. It’s the wrong question. It still doesn’t mean they are watching your ad, it doesn’t mean they care. Jees, we still spend $ billions on TV based on ratings from a 1,000 set top boxes. Technology I might add that cannot tell if people are putting the kettle on, having a dump or using their smartphone to do a multitude of things whilst your ad is on.

Last but not least we keep mistaking what is right for what is easy. 

Anyway…onwards and upwards. Here’s to a cooler more interesting industry 2012

 

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15Nov / 2010

Is a good product the new advertising?

I can’t remember where I recently read a quote saying something along the lines of advertising now being a tactic used to address defects in a product (if it’s you let me know, I’ll give you a HT).

But it’s true, with the exception of leading brands the majority of categories essentially tell people the opposite of what the desired audience believes. From finance to automotive, brands have spent the last few decades generally asking people questions like: “What’s your issue with said brand and/or category?” Then they spend stacks developing ads that address the said ‘insight’. If they’re marginally smarter they will create a helpful online tool or cool piece of content that is intended to make people forget about the problem in the first place. Why? Because it’s much cheaper and quicker than addressing the actual problem with the product.

This Adage article highlights the trend of marketers taking money out of product development and ploughing it into advertising at the expensive of the product quality.

“For decades, the focus of many companies has been taking cost out of their products, often to invest in marketing and always to increase profit.

“It all raises the question of whether efforts to cut production costs have gone too far and whether marketers would be better off putting more money back into quality control — even if it means spending less on marketing”.

I believe we have gone back to the days where the strongest brand survives. The best products will generate the most conversations and therefore the most sales. In today’s networked economy it’s no longer possible to get away with an average product that has its cracks covered up by half decent advertising.

Being more optimistic, the rules are now slightly different. We are seeing product and marketing essentially becoming one in the same thing. Technology increasingly allows us to not only improve the product but do it in a way that’s actually networked. Think Nike Grid, Visa’s Right Cliq, iTunes Ping, Starbucks and Foursquare to name a few.

Posted in Advertising, Communications, Product innovation, Technology

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04Feb / 2010

Be stupid and forget the single moment

I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes, mostly because it’s not just another UGC competition. They have really thought about what happens before and after the thing that a lot of marketing peeps probably focus on and that’s the competition bit.

Why do I like it? It takes an interesting position. It’s aimed at an audience capable of creating content that the rest of its actual audience will find interesting. It then becomes Diesel’s next catalogue. And not just any catalogue, it’s a music video catalogue.

We spend too much time thinking about the ad, the event, the email or the Facebook group and not enough about what happens before and after we create it. I don’t believe that thinking of communications as a bunch of single moments leads to interesting communications. When you scratch beneath the surface Diesel’s Be stupid campaign is more than just a UGC competition.

Posted in Advertising, Communications, Digital, Digital Strategy, Strategy

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18Dec / 2009

A reflection on planning by planners

Nothing better than some intelligent reflection to finish the year. Spur by Redscout (hosted on PSFK) has recently produced a series of vids from smart people talking about the role of planners today and in the furture. Really good stuff.

1. Is planning impotent?

2. What makes a good planner?

3. Are planners glorified researchers?

4. Is planning handicapped by advertising?

5. What is the future of Planning?

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25Nov / 2009

This year’s thoughts on marketing next year: The prelude

There’s been a lot percolating in my head over the last and it’s about time I got it out in a series of posts relating to marketing as I’ve seen it this year. Hopefully you’ll find it mildly helpful and interesting…and not too rambly.

Correct me if I’m wrong but I think anyone who works in a digital agency probably spent most of last year trying to demonstrate how modern marketing needs a distinctive and somewhat evolved approach to work in digital I daren’t say different because that merely feeds the binary decision making and black or white thinking that hinders many organisations. But as Eric Schmidt highlights, we do need to stop making a distinction between media.

That’s not to say that brands aren’t doing good things, it’s probably the most exciting time to be doing what we do. However things are still broken on a vast scale and the problems lie in systems, business models, metrics and marketers being outpaced by how people are using technology.

To use a Mark Zuckerberg quote: “A lot of this (change) is just social norms catching up with what technology is capable of.” The problem is of course, social norms are way ahead of most brands thanks to said technology.

My esteemed colleague Iain McDonald likes to use this little thought experiment to highlight how ridiculous some of our thinking actually is when you look at life through a digital lens.

First of all imagine if the Internet, as it is today, came before TV. Then someone said to you we are going to put a big box in the corner of your living room. You can only watch certain programmes when we say you can and then every 15 minutes we are going to show you half a dozen ads that are 9 times out of ten, irrelevant and uninteresting. We will then repeat many programmes that you have already seen throughout the year. You would obviously tell them to get stuffed.

Online behaviour and the use of technology is changing people’s expectations of brands and how they actually behave in the real world. I will cover a few things before the year is out that will hopefully help you for the next – a fresh start and all that guff.

Things like the re-calibrating of businesses, forgetting what you know, the great digital realisation that people don’t care about brands, marketing to networks, convergence of media, media slices rather than chunks, the system of objects, innovative research and measurement. Next post to come shortly…I hope.

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05Nov / 2009

A socially social campaign fuelled by social – Why Movember works?

[Sorry, I had to use all the various meanings of the word just to ensure there was no misunderstanding as to what this post is about]

At the moment my Mo looks more like I’ve drunk 10 cans of Coke and licked my top lip, but it is still early days. However this isn’t about me and my Mo, although you can sponsor me here should you wish, it’s about why Movember is a perfect example of marketing in a social world.

It has social object

OK it’s for a good cause and bog paper might struggle to emulate this, but it demonstrates the need to unite people around something compelling enough. In this instance it happens to be a good cause, but it could just be a good idea.

Secondly raising awareness and funds for Men’s health is arguably under represented compared too many other causes; you could say it’s a challenger. Everyone wants to support the challenger.

It gives people something to do

It’s not just a Facebook group where you sign up and forget about it or where you change your Twitter avatar and feel pleased with yourself. It requires people to actually commit to doing something. We all know actions speak louder than words these days.

It makes things spread

It unites groups of people with some real social fuel. There is something to talk about, it’s highly competitive and narcissistic (in a weird and slightly perverse way). Nobody wants to be told they have a dirty lip now do they.

It visualises things happening within groups. People copy each other and the more people that grow a Mo, the more people will a) find it acceptable to grow one or b) Feel left out if they don’t and follow the crowd. Nobody wants to be the first person at the party, so brands need to try and visualise activity and interactions happening, so people feel like everyone else is doing it.

Movember relies on both strong AND weak ties. In order for it to gain significant traction with the population in a short space of time, the ‘handful of influencers’ need to be exposed to the masses – the Mo being the social lubricant and object that is shared across these groups. Brands should ensure that they don’t spend all their efforts on the clump of interconnected cool kids and remember Joe Public needs to be exposed to what is happening.

Social mechanisms

It obviously has the standard Facebook, Twitter and email options so you can spread the word and generate donations, but there is more to the way they feed the fire.

It gives you the tools and reminders to upload and document your progress – as well as fundraising rankings. This keeps you promoting yourself and pushing your efforts through your networks. Brands need to give people something to follow and talk about in order to keep people interested.

Movember gives Mo growers rewards for raising money, including a tickets to the end of campaign party. It inspires people to really push for more money through the month rather than just an email at the beginning. Brands should reward people on a regular basis for giving up their time for you.

Last but not least – it’s useful

For those of us unfamiliar with growing facial hair there is a full on style guide and grooming tips. This should come in handy when rectifying my dirty lip.

Visit Movember and track down your friends and fellow Mo growers

AU_MObanner02

Posted in Communications, Marketing, Strategy

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29Oct / 2009

Context and a world of perfect media harmony

I can’t stress enough how important understanding context is when it comes to communications. In fact, I don’t think there is a more helpful word in the marketing dictionary of wank. Agency silos, land grabbing and out of date marketing department structures have a huge part to play in this, so without going into too much of an obvious rant here, there are two things that don’t allow us to see context.

Sorry, kind of a rant already, but the first one is opposites – the age old human behaviour (and marketing sensationalism) that requires you to fall on one side of the fence or the other. You can’t possibly believe in the power of influencers and mass media. And we all know that one media has to be dying in order for another to flourish.

The second is our inability to be human focused. Let’s be honest we all think we are, but stuff gets in the way of actually observing things through the eyes of actual normal people that buy our products. Things like numbers, brand tracking studies, media plans, focus groups and important meetings all contribute, as well as it feeling just all too simple.

However I came across this great post over at Plannerliness highlighting Ray-Ban as a classic example of this. Everything is happening in isolation without much consideration to other stuff that is going on around it. The result is below.

A lovely looking, well presented brand site

rb2

That is probably found via a line of text on Google surrounded by a lot that is probably unhelpful

rb1

It really shouldn’t be that hard to get your social media come, digital PR, come PR agency to strategically ensure that all search results on that first page are from positive and trusted sources. It wouldn’t be hard for a creative copy writer to work with the search agency to develop some good Keyword ads that are contextual, even if people don’t click on them.

It wouldn’t be that hard for an above the line agency to come up with a TV campaign that is more participatory and spills out in to Youtube, Flickr, Facebook etc. You get the drift, but it highlights how media, despite being fragmented, is more dependent on each other than ever before. I think Faris phrased it well somewhere as media now being additive not repetitive.

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24Jul / 2009

The top 5 ways to enjoy Twitter and avoid the Twitter cult

Number one is stop titling blog posts, with top ten lists. I thought I would do this to get some reach and make a point. But before I finish the list, here is a minor whine, it’s not the cult of twitter that’s getting a bit tedious, I like Twitter, it’s the twitter cult that bugs me.

Now is it just me, or is there this weird group of fanatics growing that think they are influencing the whole of mankind in 140 characters? Seriously, it’s like a cult with chapters and stuff. Yes it’s important, rapidly growing, but let’s get some perspective and just a touch of rigour around some of the claims being made

- Apparently a marketing campaign is only successful unless the cult says so. In fact the cult is becoming a whole new segment to target your campaigns at. Think of Skittles and Moonfruit.

- MJ was officially dead only when the cult said so

- The cult has even delivered democracy to Iran through turning their avatars green

- Most recently they have single handily ruined Sacha Baron Cohen’s life by saving the world from his latest film Bruno

It’s this last one that pushed me over the edge and the media has to take some of the blame for link baiting the cult and feeding the beast. They title things in really sensational ways, even if it’s not related to the point they are actually trying to make. Why? They know that the cult will see it in their RSS reader, take in the first 4 words, then incorrectly Tweet about it claiming another victory for social media over evil and artificially inflate the impressions for advertisers. Get down to the 3rd or 4th paragraph of both of these articles, here and here, it isn’t really just about Twitter, it’s about today’s speed and potential effect of communications, Twitter is a small part of this.

The most salient quote of these articles is this: “Film marketers look at weekly declines in ticket sales to judge fan buzz. In recent years, those “drops” have widened significantly as communication has speeded up thanks to the internet and, more recently, social networking services such as Twitter and Facebook”. Backed up by this research.

So to get back to finishing my list…

2 – Crunch some numbers before you join the cult. A bit budget I know but using socialmention.com, for every negative comment about ‘Bruno’ on Twitter, there are 3 positive ones. So why didn’t sales rise if the cult is so influential? In Oz Bruno’s first weekend has done over 50% of its nearest funny rival The Hangover that has been running for about 6 weeks.

There is at the very least only about 600K active people on Twitter in Australia, and that’s being generous. There is nearly 6m on Facebook. If something influenced sales it was the latter

3 – Look at the wider context of Twitter and the way people use it.
“All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values” Mcluhan The 60s some time

4 – Compare Apples with Apples. Bruno is a higher cert than Harry Potter and even Borat in some countries. It’s even school holidays. Bruno is almost cult in itself and has a smaller potential audience.

5– Follow interesting people not the cult, your experience will be much more fulfilling.Use them as a filter for great content, not bombarding you with crap. It’s the people that influence you not the tool.

Sorry about the rant!

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13Jul / 2009

Influencing the influencers – then what?

‘Influencing the influencers’ is fast becoming one of those really annoying phrases that I hear a bit too much at the moment.

I have a number of problems with this statement. First of all it suggests that there is a one size fits all, Holy Grail of a strategy and that is to appeal to the cool, ‘hype connected people’. You know, you infect the select few that have a blog and are on Twitter and hey presto, you have yourself an epidemic.

I’m a different strokes for different folks kind of guy so I don’t really fall on either side of the Gladwell or Watts fence, but I have to say, Watts is largely underrepresented in marketing column inches/blog posts/tweets. Whilst Gladwell champions the ‘law of the few’, Watts suggests things are more random and that a middle range of connectivity (mass market) is more effective than those groups who are highly connected i.e. some groups can be too highly clustered, connecting to each other and not across other groups in the population, hence things don’t spread.

Think of Susan Boyle. This didn’t spread because of the few and I don’t believe that 5 years ago she would have been able to have got the exposure she did this year. Five years ago she may have got some good figures on Youtube, but the very thing that catapulted her to stardom was how media channels and distribution mechanisms, shared and overlapped with each other like never before. The same is true with MJ’s recent departure. Stuff needs to move between the small hyper connected to the large moderately connected. From the online to the offline. It wasn’t a handful of viewers that told their friends about it on Facebook, it’s much more complicated than that. Media just didn’t work together as it does now.

Whilst age old, I always thinks of Fallon’s Cadbury’s Gorilla case study. They created the first 90 second TV spot with the web in mind. Knowing that people would be searching for it on the web, as soon as it aired it was on Youtube. They didn’t ‘seed’ it before hand, or give a sneak preview to a select group of influencers. They went straight for the heart of the network that they want it to end up in.

It’s all very well identifying the few people who are believed to be the influencers but it’s irrelevant if they are not connected either directly or indirectly to the rest of the population. This is a fundamental point, that is fundamentally ignored and something we need to try and design for. So when someone says you we need to influence the influencers, ask them ‘who are they really?’ And ‘then what are you going to do next?’

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18Jun / 2009

Think like a Sociologist not a marketeer?

04.0820.cartoon_large

I like to think of myself as a bit of an amateur sociologist because a) it’s the most interesting part of my job, but b) its actually the most helpful way of thinking about and approaching marketing. Particularly with all this new social media stuff pissing on everyone’s fireworks.

So the point of this post and inspired by Everyday Sociologist, is about not thinking like a marketer, or even a social media expert for that matter, but a sociologist. Here’s their 5 steps for thinking like a sociologist

1# never assume anything
Easier said than done I know, but it’s arguably one of our worst traits. Assumptions about media, assumptions about our audience and assumptions about how our audience uses media are the main culprits. Oh and assuming people actually care about your thingummyjig that does doodah.

2# Get ready to be wrong
Nobody likes being wrong, but it’s often a good thing. It means someone has potentially seen something you haven’t and dare I say it, perhaps an innovation? Obviously challenge people and don’t always take an opposing hypothesis on face value, but don’t be afraid to accept that there might be a better way.

3# Ask even more questions
It’s not good enough having a nice pithy way of describing a target audience or an excel spreadsheet telling you how many times you are *potentially* going to bash someone over the head. Roll up your sleeves and ask the questions that tell you what your audience are really doing and thinking. Whlist you might not like the answer, it makes life more interesting trying to understand the why as well as the who and where.

4# Make the everyday strange
Who likes stuff these days that isn’t strange or different? What happens if I create a TV ad that will have more success on the web? What happens if I create a website that is more like a TV channel? What happens if I create a banner ad that’s a booking engine? What happens if I create a campaign that is really an involving story? All of these have been done of course, but don’t let other people be the first to do something that seems strange. Today’s strange is tomorrows normal.

5# Embrace life’s complexities
Oscar Wilde once said: “Life is not complex, we are complex. Life is simple and the simple thing is the right thing”. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all for simplicity, but only up to a point. After all he did say this in 18 something and something and he also said: “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative”.

We understand a lot more about people these days, how they behave, how irrational they can be and more importantly the context of various media and how they are intertwined with each other and networks of people. Technology enables us to collect vast amounts of data and see things that we would never have seen before. Yes it can be difficult to get your head around but it’s not an excuse to say something is too difficult and opt for the ‘let’s just keep things simple’ or the ‘big eyeball buy’ routes.

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