Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

This Time It's Different

The Grand Fromages of media and marketing seem to have agreed that this recession is in fact a chance to 'reset' the industry.  By which, I think they mean, finally ditch old-fashioned processes and assumptions and define a new path in line with a digital world, where the majority of content is being produced by the people who used to just consume.  In fact, this has been the Grand Fromage soundbite of choice for quite sometime.  In practice it will (still) all come down to that old integration business.  But not the type of integration where a major network agency pays top dollar for a digital ninja to wheel out in client meetings, only to then pop them back in their playpen while the grown-ups go and make some TV ads.  Oh no.  This time it's different. Why?  Because the clients say so.  As Brandweek notes:  "The recession is also putting more pressure than ever on the age-old challenge for marketers: integration. All of the panelists expressed some level of frustration that they couldn't better integrate campaigns with their disparate agencies. The blame ends up lying on old structures. Clients have their own silos that don't communicate well, which is matched on the agency side. When integration does happen, the client executives said, it pays off in spades."  We understand the agencies say.  We will change.  Never again will we reach for the warm fuzzy haze of TV advertising.  We do understand that our previous behaviour has been unacceptable and occasionally destructive.  Please give us another chance.  This time it's different.

The Danger Of Likeminds (And Facebook)

Many thanks to the splendid Ian Collingwood for this thoughtful counterblast to my last post: "This  "circling of wagons" that you describe may be attractive, (especially for marketers) but is it, in fact, socially damaging? Surrounding yourself with "like-minded" people might feel good from the inside, but really you're building an echo-chamber for your own opinions - and I think that may be harmful to society as a whole. I'm not a fan of building walls, and I believe that it's not a huge leap from "like-minded" to "narrow-minded". Already this is happening in the real world - last week's Economist noted research showing that people in the States are increasingly choosing to live amongst those who share identical political views to themselves. I believe such communities are likely to be socially impoverished (not to mention, tedious and bland) and will tend towards the development of increasingly polarised and intolerant viewpoints. This cannot be a good thing in our current world. If this trend towards actively removing oneself from hearing or seeing anything that challenges one's viewpoint is replicated online through services like Facebook then I feel we will lose something enormously valuable. The Internet has always been a place for vigorous, challenging debate. Long may that continue".  Open ID for you then Ian...? ;-)

Facebook Knows You're A Dog

Peter Steiner's famous cartoon in New Yorker magazine first appeared in 1993 and has adorned a million powerpoint slides since.  The cartoon's single line, 'On the internet no one knows you're a dog', captured some of the crazy, frontier spirit of the web, where it seemed the normal rules did not apply.  However, that could be about to change as Facebook rattles its way up to 300 million users worldwide, making it more populus than all but four of the globe's countries, powered by its new Connect facility and Open Stream API.  In this instantly-seminal Wired essay, Fred Vogelstein makes the point: "Connect and Open Stream don't just allow users to access their Facebook networks from anywhere online. They also help realize Facebook's longtime vision of giving users a unique, Web-wide online profile. By linking Web activity to Facebook accounts, they begin to replace the largely anonymous "no one knows you're a dog" version of online identity with one in which every action is tied to who users really are."  Regardless of the way you may feel about Facebook, it's becoming increasingly easy to see how much better the web can be if you can search people - not just pages.  The result will be a very different looking web, where information-overloaded people circle the wagons to create troll-free social networks of their most trusted contacts, picking up whispers, buying tips and news only from within those groups.  For brands, the value of links from within those circles will be much higher than from any other source.  "Why settle for articles about the Chrysler bankruptcy that the Google News algorithm recommends when you can read what your friends suggest?", says Vogelstein, in a shift which FriendFeed users might recognise.  In other words, who wants to know what a dog thinks?  And the realisation of the value of this information is not lost on Google, as shown by the company's launch of Friend Connect and more recently individual profiles.  No doubt all driven by the ever-growing blackhole in its search results created by Zuckerberg's empire which is vast but invisible to the Google index.  But show me the money, right?  Well Facebook has quietly been building annual revenues to the tune of $275m.  Nowhere near the scale of the shekel machine that is Google.  However, as the Wired article notes, Messrs Page & Brin bowled along for five years before stumbling over the Adsense pot of gold.  And Facebook's recent credit system shows it is serious about innovation.  All of which could mean a troll-free web experience, a shake-up of Search and some genuine competition for Google.  And fewer dogs.

The Rise Of Funny Money

A much loved and admired uncle of mine who became very successful trading industrial optics, started his entrepreneurial career in pyjamas.  Yep, that’s right – pyjamas.  After the war, the government sold off vast amounts of the kit no longer required by soldiers and military personnel.  My uncle would go to the government's auctions and buy these items to sell on in civvy street.  After a few weeks he noticed thousands of pyjamas appearing separately as tops and bottoms.  So he started buying up all the auction lots of either pyjama shirts or trousers for next to nothing and then waiting for the matching halves to appear.  Obviously the reacquainted items were worth a lot more together than apart, so he could then sell them on to retailers and their thrifty post-war customers for a healthy profit.  This was a widely told story in my family and one that seemed to illustrate the reasons for my uncle’s success.  He had a knack of creating cash from nowhere.  Sort of funny money I always thought to myself, while admiring my uncle's counter intuitive nouse.  One aspect of the web that has sparked my interest in recent weeks has been the ever growing examples of such 'funny money'.  Where significant flows of cash or profitable trading environments appear from unlikely origins.  Part of my interest is because the web is now such a noisy place, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to sort...

How Small Change Became Big Money

About six years ago when my late mother was in her seventies she told me how amazing she found the choice that people had in the modern workplace.  'We just used to get any job we could and hold on to it for as long as possible', mum remarked, 'but you’ll see some interesting changes'.  'In new technology?' I suggested.  'Oh no, in people’s lives', she said.  I was reminded of this conversation recently when a super-talented designer friend of mine described how he had taken an idea for a new iPhone application to someone he knew at a major London advertising agency – who snapped it up for a MegaBrand client.  This turned out to be a bad move.  Many months of pain followed as my buddy defended his idea from the agency strategists, brand police and finance folk.  Including a demand for a multi-thousand pound insurance policy in case the app damaged the iPhone of a hypothetical customer in an unknown corner of the world.  At the end of the process (the app in question never made it online) my friend reflected that he should have cut out the agency and just put his idea straight up onto Apple's AppStore.  That he explained would have meant, ‘less pain and more money’.  And he’s not alone in this view.  There are currently 41056 apps available in the iTunes AppStore - many the work of individuals.  Between them they've been downloaded one billion times in just nine months.  Some estimate that the average revenue from a top 100 application could run to $12k per month.  While others are thought to make a lot more.  There’s no doubt it’s an extremely competitive, quite chaotic marketplace but considering it’s not even a year old that's pretty amazing.  Other direct routes for individuals to go to market include the Facebook Platform that allows people to create products and services and distribute them to the social net’s 200 million users.  SAI recently noted that Facebook developers, many of which are solo agents, will collectively make about $500m this year – possibly more than Facebook itself!  And then there’s...

Book Review : 'Ignore Everybody'

I first met Hugh 'Gapingvoid' MacLeod at Reboot 7.0 in 2005 (my all time favourite nethead do) and have got to know him a little since.  Initially, over a couple of great conversations related to his English Cut and Stormhoek projects; then at a fun evening watching the film he helped out with; on a very entertaining trip to a Microsoft bashola in Paris where we both got to quiz MS' Grandest Fromages; and at a fine dinner with the Edelman crew last year.  And like millions of others I’ve followed his blog forever and have always admired his ability to be one step ahead of the game with concepts like the 'Global Microbrand' and 'Personal Sovereignty'.  Both notions I have taken to heart in my own professional life.  So I was very happy to receive an advance copy of his new book, Ignore Everybody.  However, I thought it might all be too familiar to really enjoy.  But enjoy it I did.  It’s based on Hugh’s fantastic ‘How To Be Creative’ manifesto but could also be described as – ‘Gapingvoid’s Greatest Hits’.  It’s a very unusual mixture of business book for the networked age, observations about life and practical tips on becoming a creative professional.  All genuinely inspiring stuff with the trademark GV dark twists thrown in for good measure.  I’ve already mentioned the book to a few people in passing and have almost given them my advance copy to read.  But I’ve decided to hold onto it.  I think one day it might be a bit of a collectors' item.  So go and buy your own!

Breaking The Campaign Mentality

Two conversations I've had with smart marketing folk summarise the problems that the marketing industry is trying to work through.  Last year, a savvy executive at a global, mega-FMCG company told me, 'It used to be the case that if you made three good TV campaigns, you became Marketing Director.  That's not true anymore.'  He then expanded on the point by saying that it went beyond television.  It was just that TV was the main tool in the campaigning approach historically used by the marketing industry and that this campaign mentality was the real problem.  Particularly, he added, as the mega-corp at which he plied his trade was engineered around that mentality and entirely geared up to deliver massive campaigns into the marketplace.  The problem he noted was that the consumer is fed up with being hit by huge campaigns from brands that then disappear - until the next time.  Like a lot of thorny issues in the marketing industry, as it slowly grinds away from a traditional model and searches for a new one, this all sounds in theory like a load of common sense.  In reality, however, fixing it is fiendishly complicated.  As illustrated by the second conversation with a Grand Fromage at a media company who told me about the acid test he likes to keep in mind during these exciting but challenging times.  When a brand manager goes into present the marketing plan to a buyer at Tesco's, an individual who may be responsible for the majority of the brand's distribution, what's going to cut the mustard?  An ongoing, conversational marketing programme, driven by some Facebook applications and a new blog?  Or a £25m above-the-line advertising campaign?  Whilst not as simple as all that, the scenario does highlight the problems that the marketing industry faces.  On the one hand we have a smart brand owner who knows that current practice is increasingly out-of-whack with modern day life.  On the other, a forward-thinking media man who knows that, at least in the FMCG world where the right space in the right stores is critical to the bottom line, innovation isn't *that* welcome.  Tricky, eh?

Open Data And The Dangers Of Moats

As all studious web watchers know, the next wave of internet innovation has been brewing for some time, as massive amounts of data has been pumped onto the web and made available for people to share-and-compare, play with and link to.  Yes, prepare yourselves people, The Web Of Data is on the way.  A world in which databases sit out on the web instead of behind firewalls, allowing new powerful styles of collaboration.  For corporations that have built competitive advantage around IP and black box business models the idea of data being open on the web is, to say the least, a bit scary.  However, in reality, it's just the next step along the journey that the web is inviting the world to take.  Initially, the notion of sharing documents on the web seemed unwise, then opening up personal information on social networks appeared risky.  But both have quickly become the norm, and of course are made up of data.  So this next evolution is just more of the same.  None of which will stop the corporate fear rising however.  In the same way that strange ideas emerged about the dangers of sharing company information using simple social media tools, peculiar fears will surface at the prospect of sharing databases that have previously been held under lock, key and firewall.  In fact, many of these fears are based on misconceptions and misguided analysis.  For instance, in the corporate world ‘open’ is often translated as ‘anarchic’.  Despite the fact that, as with blogs and social networks, there is plenty of control built into new 'open' systems.  For example, if you don't want the crazies to...

Buffett On Newspapers

'If Mr Guttenburg had come up with the internet instead of Movable Type back in the late 15th Century and for 400 years we had used the internet for news and all types of entertainment and all kinds of everything else, and I came along one day and said I had got this wonderful idea, we are going to chop down some trees up in Canada and ship them to a paper mill which will cost us a fortune to run through and deliver newsprint, and then we'll ship that down to some newspaper and we'll have a whole bunch of people staying up all night writing up things and then we'll send a bunch of kids out the next day all over town delivering this thing, and we are going to really wipe out the internet with thing - it ain't going to happen.'  Warren Buffett talking on CNBC. (via SAI).

Can The Big Egos Please Leave The Building

Most marketing agencies have a few big egos knocking around, often in the creative department.  Frequently the belief is that such individuals are required to come up with the Big Ideas that clients love so much - the brand propositions that everyone in a company can convene around and CEOs can sink the big bucks into.  Sometimes these individuals are able to get away with *ahem* unusual behaviour because it is excused as the flip side of their Big Thinking.  However, this breed may well be coming to the end of its life-cycle.  Why?  As marketing communications become more about pull than push, community over control, peer power not promotion, the personalities involved will reflect that.  Skillful community managers tend to be thoughtful folk - and good listeners to boot.  They are blessed with a natural curiosity about people and an ability to promote the views of others.  Or in other words, a mental make-up that is diametrically opposed to that of your typical Creative Director.  Take Craig Newmark for example, founder of craigslist and one of the world's most successful online community managers.  He has built a 'community service' that covers 570 cities in 50 countries and serves twenty billion page impressions a month.  However, despite being one of the web world's real superheroes, Newmark is best known for his modest profile, including a job title that remains, 'Customer Service Representative'.  Indeed, the idea of a Big Idea seems to be entirely irrelevant to Newmark who says his online empire was built with, 'no vision whatsoever', and that it's, 'all about listening and then listening some more'.  His focus was purely to build a, 'culture of trust'.  Which, of course, all makes a lot of sense.  It's perfectly evident that people would want to join a community based on Newmark's guiding principles of, 'giving people a break' and, 'treating others as you want to be treated'.  Compare this to communities driven by the brand-as-hero school:  my favourite example of which remains Wal-Mart's short-lived community site, The Hub.  The network launched with a range of fun tools for customers to play with, including an invite to create a list of the things they would like to buy at, er, Walmart.  It was the online equivalent of an ego-maniacal CD - 'Enough about me - how do you like my hair?'.  So next time you are with a Big Thinker who is being 'difficult', just relax and let them talk.  Take heart in the fact that the world has heard everything they have to say.  And is just about to switch them off.

Scary Signals

'P2P is a demand signal from the market,' says Cory Doctorow.  If that's the case, what are we to make of The Pirate Bay conviction last week?  For those who don't know, Pirate Bay is one of the world's largest Bittorrent search engines.  It allows people to search through the gazillions of TV shows, films and other entertainment that sit on the web.  This content is broken up into tiny parts and stored across distributed networks of computers, until someone makes a viewing request at which point Bittorrent or another P2P technology will draw the pieces together and put them back in the right order, ready to watch as a film or TV show.  The problem, of course, is that this distribution method is not sanctioned by the people who make and own the content, most of which appears without any advertising.  That's the advertising that pays the wages of the people who make the films and TV shows in the first place.  In the Pirate Bay case these good folk were represented by the IFPI (aka Hollywood).  So why does the world's entertainment industry persist with legal recourse, instead of listening to the 'demand signals' being sent to them through P2P?  The main reason is that P2P file-sharers have been seen as people who steal valuable IP. They must, therefore, be treated as thieves.  But that's misreading the signals.  The real driving force behind the growth of P2P is that it's convenient and gives people what they want, when they want it.  What if you don't want to wait a week to see the next episode of 24?  Or maybe a friend abroad has told you about a great new movie and you want to see it now so you can discuss it?  And, vitally, P2P is also a way for regular folk to distribute their own content and pursue the rock star dream.  Furthermore, with one third of all broadband users worldwide admitting they use P2P there's a massive network effect in place.  One that the entertainment industry will probably never be able to reverse.  However, the truth is that all of these signals are just too terrifying for people in the industry to listen to.  As Mark notes about the latest Digital Britian bashola, many executives in the entertainment industry and beyond, 'are paid to keep the current model going and just don't want to see the digital technology as anything but a means to turbo-charge the current model. It's just too scary to contemplate anything else.'  And this is why Pirate Bay is just one part of the massive bout of creative destruction occuring in our time.  After all, there are plenty of others perfectly happy to listen to the market signals if the uncumbents are too scared.  And despite this court case, Pirate Bay and others like it just keep on rolling, allowing people to create personal media platforms and services of their own design.  As Doc Searls says, 'in networked economies the demand side supplies itself'.

Marketing Buffoons

If you are marketing into the social space you should read this.  A London-based blogger and mum tells marketing folk how it is: "This mass marketing strategy baffles and worries me in equal measure. When it's all a bit random, when it's clearly a case of "grab these email addresses, fire off some emails, tell 'em what a savvy blogger they are, and bingo, let's sell some washing powder"...I just think: there are a lot of unemployed people about, yet clearly the culling process has not yet extended to the buffoons in marketing."  The 'American companies' in question clearly need an outbound spam filter...