Usable Interfaces

The whole phrase is ‘Now we know what the future looks like, what would we like to do with it?’

For the second post in a row I’m afraid I’m in a rather idealistic mood. But it seems to me, now, that we look at the structure of business and marketing as it’s being done by the market leaders, we look at posts by visionaries like this one, this one and this one, and we think we pretty much know how this is going to shake out…

The question of micro distribution of corporate reputation has been answered. The question of finding value inside organistations through enablement of individuals has been proven. The question of whether we think better separately or together has been answered.

So, my point is this. In the Future (doesn’t really need a capital does it, since it’s only a couple of minutes away), if we assume that we will broadly have a marketplace of ideas where we all now can have our say. If we will have a world where communities of interest can be powerful, and massively devolved. If we will have a world where companies can thive by coming up with powerful ideas and finding ways to communicate them quickly and powerfully. Then what do we want out of that world?

It probably sounds a bit irrelevant but it’s an important question. Because we’re not, any of us, I think really after better mp3 players, nor mobile phones, nor fruit smoothies.

But we also don’t really have the passions of the past. If we live in big cities, at least, we’ve started to see the back of racism, sexism, for the most part, intollerance; what are we worrying about now? Knife crime? I know it’s a serious question but it’s very recent and very media orientated. House prices? Economy? That’s just not intereting, really.

I think it’s about this (you’ll read a transcript of a Clinton interview about finding similarities rather than differences). For all the things that have been resolved, we live in a world where far too many inequalities exist for the wrong reason (there are good reasons for alot of inequalities of course).

But I’m in intrigued about views here.

If we’re all going to be a position where we have all this extra information, all this extra access to cheap, easy, global media, all of this ability to form communities, how do we use this to moderate our behaviour for the better?

And more to the point, what is we actually want to achieve? Or are we all going to turn into Miss World, and look for world peace and happy families.

Today was interesting. It was Interesting 2008, the Russell Davies ‘unconference’; in its second year and continuing rude health. The underlying thought appears to be the same: the first step in being interesting is being interested. Accordingly a very large bunch (maybe 400) cogniscati gathered in an incredible (and extremely well buntinged) hall – Conway Hall in Red Lion Square - to hear some of the best presenters in the UK talk about their pet subjects.

If you were being satirical, you would say it was the world’s best people on branding, advertising, etc talking about their favourite colours, shoes, fashions, music or whatever. Of course, what it was actually about was people talking about things that were close to their own hearts, they thought would be interesting for 10 minutes (i.e. not their jobs) and where they’d found some interesting material.

We had Winston Churchill, Why horses are afraid of crisp packets, the extent to which we can really understand the second world war with only 60 years’ perspective, the relative density of World of Warcraft, the rise and fall of Patagonia, and why a lego fetish is a good thing.

I honestly don’t think there was a bad presenter all day. Although, this last bit – the selection of speakers – is really where Russell Davies showed his hand (despite very amusing and scene-setting opening- and closing- remarks).

Was it middle-class -bourgeoisie guardian-reading nonsense? Absolutely. At one point half the speakers joined together for a Guardaian sponsored recorder playing session.

Was it brilliant? Absolutely. A room in London was filled with some of the cleverest and most critical people of their generation, who allowed and understood their peers to do the most difficult presentation of their lives. We were a good audience – of course – but only for a couple of minutes. Meanwhile, intense acts of bravery were conducted on stage as people with a lot to lose tried to be interesting to this dragons’ den.

Hats off to Russell, hats off to the speakers, and here’s to Interesting 2009. I’ll definitely try to be there. I’ve been racking my brain all day about what I’d talk about and I’m coming up blank. The best I’ve got is:

• Untranslatable words / words that have never existed
• Object orientated programming and what it can teach you about knowledge and YOUR life
• How education works in other countries
• How the WestWing (the TV show) changed the world
• The Toyato Production Sytem, who nicked it and how it’s changed the world

Hopefully ee you there. And a pleasure to meet a whole bunch of you today, It’s been one of those days that makes it clear the new world isn’t a temporary one.

More: here and here

The new Red Brick Road site contains a neat little spoof site about overblown promises and ’strategies’ from agencies (”The Yellow Brick Road”). Particularly good is this fictitious company’s philosophy statement:

‘In today’s networked world, we understand that the customer is no longer just your wife, she’s the boss. That’s why we believe customers shouldn’t just consume our advertising but create it as well, something we call Brand Consumation(TM). Rather than just research customers, we get them to literally write and approve all our briefs, and to create all of work too. That way control is firmly in their hands before the process has even begun.’

Sound familiar?

If yesterday’s Mix keynote was all about products and developers, today’s was all about Ballmer himself, who was interviewed on stage by Guy Kawasaki.

Kawasaki, an ex-apple evangalist,  pulled no punches - poking Ballmer on Vista, Google,  Yahoo and Apple, as well as some pretty suprising jokes about chair throwing, anti-trust hearings and Ballmer’s infamous monkey boy dance.

All of these were met with surprising good grace (although his less calm side never seemed too far from the surface). At one point, Ballmer even performed a brief  minor variation of his dance on the request of one of the audience members, changing it to ‘I love web developers’. And, at one point we saw Ballmer goofing around and pretending he couldn’t carry Kawasaki’s MacBook Air because it was too heavy, and offering to get him ‘a proper machine’.

The strategy position in general was pretty clear. On the subject of Yahoo, the reason for the purchase it that Microsoft sees search as the killer app of online advertising, and it sees (as we heard yesterday) online advertising as its key monetisation strategy. The greatest ’synergy’ is pure scale. Does winning mean beating Google? Is it a zero sum game? Yes.

However, whilst Google was the enemy in Microsoft’s online ambitions, Ballmer made it clear that there were other competitors in the other major markets they operate in: desktop, server and enterprise, entertainment and devices. The competitors ranging from IBM to Linux.

One of the overriding messages of Mix08 however, has been that the other fights aren’t necessarily zero sum games, with Microsoft showing a genuine drive to interoperability in many spaces. Are they serious about this? Well AOL and DoubleClick were on stage at the key note, showing how their technologies fit with various Microsoft platforms. It all seems pretty genuine and various people have commented in a palpable change in the way Microsoft is now dealing with the outside world.

Interesting to hear Ballmer describe Microsoft’s Search offering as the ‘little engine that could’, and to point out that the giant was very much the underdog both here and in the personal devices market.

What about Facebook? He made it pretty clear the 2% stake in Facebook was a relatively small deal for Microsoft and that he cared more about their advertising ‘partnership’ with the social network than their stake in it; validating the view that the shareholding is a purely defensive manoeuvre.

The question and answer session came to a close with a very bizarre and slightly uncomfortable question from an employee at Avenue A Razorfish, part of aQuantive which Microsoft bought last year to get their hands on Atlas.

As a lot of people have noted, Microsoft is in a difficult position with Avenue A because of their relationship with other agencies. It’s been assumed it will be run independently or sold off. But the question from one of its staff in such a public forum: ‘What are your plans for us, we hear a lot of rumours’, must still have come as a bit of a surprise.

Ballmer seemed unphased, and said the business would be left to run independently so long as it remained profitable but I wonder if any chairs went flying after he exited the stage.

(More here)

Perhaps we have a problem with teenage violence but there’s nothing quite so unseemly as old people scrapping it out. It only makes it worse when those pensioners are millionaire bosses of major traditional media and marketing firms. As Brand Republic reports (requires free registration), Martin Sorrell and Maurice Levy have been taking time out of the Davos World Economic Forum to pull each others’ hair and trade petty insults.

The argument relates to Publicis’ and WPP’s relationship with Google. Sorrell, rather astutely, has previously described the big G as ‘a short-term friend and a long-term enemy’.

Levy thinks Publicis has a longer-term plan with the search engine, initially represented as a staff swap between the two companies.

Trouble started when Sorrell dismisses Publicis’ relationship as little more than having a meeting, adding:

“What Publicis is doing represents a little bit of a concern that they didn’t get the technology right. I think Maurice is acknowledging a bit of an Achilles heel when it comes to technology.”

Levy’s response was to shout back across the playground,

“I’m sorry Martin said that — it’s really cheap, but it’s probably the result of his lack of understanding of technology.

“He’s a financier, I’m an engineer, and you can see the difference. I’m pleased with what we have done, and I’m sorry that my dear friend has not understood it.”

I’m sure tetchiness will only increase as the effect of traditional ads (and the budgets managed by the leading agencies in these two groups), take a bashing. Worth remembering too that Google had only just dropped the ‘beta’ badge on their search engine in 2000, and is now the disputed girlfriend of these two older boys, who should know better.

Anyone who’s worked in either of these monolithic corporations is likely to confirm that on average, the individual operating companies are incompetent at digital. Some moments of inspiration tend to come from high-priced digital acquisitions (which are then systematically bled dry) while more traditional elements of the groups are firmly in denial about the whole thing.

Clearly the pressure of reforming the beasts is starting to take its toll.

(or ‘towards a complete redefinition on the role of the brand strategist’)

There’s a terrible joke or riddle I still remember from school: ‘What was the longest river in the world before the Nile was discovered?’. The answer, of course, is ‘the Nile’.

The launch of the landmark Stephen King retrospective on planning poses an similar question. What was King’s job (and Pollitt’s for that matter) before they invented planning. Presumably job titles like ‘head of planning’ were, at that point, unavailable.

The answer is different for the two men. King worked in JWT’s marketing department (which appeared to involve research and the setting of strategy - so broadly the same, although presumably very differently conducted), Pollitt was an account man who’d been put in charge of research.

And a bit like ‘Hitchhikers’ guide to the galaxy’ and the secret of life, the universe and everything, ever since their job was invented, planners have been  trying to work out what it means.

King, apparently lamented planning’s obsession with constantly trying to redefine its raison d’etre (as Jeremy Bullmore is supposed to have joked, it is a major irony that a profession that spends so much time looking for insight, still can’t explain itself), his own view seemed merely to be that planing was bringing science to the art of communication and persuasion. Famously he said the role spanned ‘grand strategist’ to ‘ad tweaker’.

So what’s the new planning? How do we start defining the role, the profession of the marketer / communicator / staff member who can drive business value through product and communication strategy nowadays.

Of course, if you speak to a planner, they’ll tell you that planning is the new planning. Indeed many of the leading lights of the new discussion (Russell Davies, Richard Huntingdon) and the most interesting and exciting thinking have come from this area. But that’s bound to happen, underlying truths about communication are indeed timeless, and the biggest and most insightful brains are the ones most likely to understand the changing face of the market (they’re the ones faced with the demise of the old paradigms)

But is ‘old planning’ the same as ‘new planning’? Hardly. We all see far too much ‘old’ thinking and approach being forced into the new discipline.

Perhaps marketers will lead the charge. Well again, there clearly are some marketers (like Godin) gearing up, but it’s certainly not most of them. What about designers? What about UEs? What about ‘Persuasion Architects’? Hell, what about cartoonists? That seems an equally rich vein at the moment.

So what are the axioms of this new group?

We take as our starting point that the adversarial unilateral relationship between brands and consumers is over. We understand that great, interesting products will succeed. The acknowledge that consumer insight must inform the product itself and not just it’s messaging or communications. We understand that the consumer will decide how they value goods and services.

Iain Tait’s somewhat tongue in cheek ‘why digital is better than advertising‘ speech at PSFK contained this gem (apologies for the transcription):

[in the traditional agencies, you find] structures that have been put in place  [...] to make well-understood units of advertising, that’s why you have planners, creatives and TV producers. It’s not the same structures you need for technical and cultural innovation.

But like the pioneers that brought science to advertising through planning, we must look at how we do that more broadly in a world where we no longer ‘game’ communications; where we return to designing brands that matter in its deepest sense. It will have to be someone who understands people - from meeting them in all contexts, through observing them, through understanding the latest drivers in society and culture; someone who understands the tonnes of research we can now gather constantly; someone who understands user-experience across multiple media; who understand the truths of communication and persuasion, and the limits of a huge number of media.

But let’s not try and pretend that there is one group ready to simply take the crown. There is not.

There’s a brilliant post here by George Parker. As per usual, no prisoners are taken as George savages advertising’s attempt to shove their films into YouTube with the new “Overlay ads”. George is a fan of dogs on skateboards. Personally I don’t think you can beat a cat with attention deficit disorder operating a toilet but hey, each to their own. What neither of us thinks particularly likely is that when watching our favorite pet misbehavior, we’re likely to want to watch an ad for the new Hyundai 4×4.

I know, why not force me to watch the ad by making it a pre-roll? That’d be even better. Or - and I know this sounds crazy - try and come up with something interesting to say that I might actually chose to watch?

There are a few things in life that sound like they’re going to be great but always seem to fail in practice: fondues, windows mobile devices, the conservative party. But surely king of the hill in terms of ‘will never live up to expectations’ is direct marketing.

Advertising is so random, we hear. So what we should do is collect loads of data about people and make sure they only get the most relevant messages. The only problem is - who do we put in charge of gathering all that vital data? It’s marketing people. They’d love to help, but they’re already a little late for lunch at the Ivy.

So we end up with content which is worse than proper advertising (creative means  “change the format” not “people will like it”) which costs more money than proper advertising, often involves huge and embarrassing environmental damage, and is harder to ignore. Incidentally “harder to ignore” is not a brand positive guys!

On returning home tonight, I had to force the door open - as usual - over a pile of Foxton catalogues (full of sold houses) and direct mail. Amongst the usual pile of nonsense I found this archetype of DM trash :

The ‘creative’ idea is that I should shred my bill from my existing  supplier, and they bring this to life by “shredding” half of the letter. Brilliant. On the reverse of the mail pack is the name and address. And here’s the thing about targetting.

A friend of mine used to regularly take business trips to Lithuania, a fantastic part of the Baltic Republic where the EU dollars flow freely and everything is just starting out.

On one of those trips he met a lovely girl our there called Asta.

A couple of years later they’d split up but Asta decided she wanted to try her hand in the UK. I had a spare room at the time, I got on well with Asta and she was the best looking person I’d met in real life, so I agreed she could stay in my spare room. She registered for one bill (Southern Electric I think) in order to be able to prove she lived in the UK in case she decided this was a long-term kind of thing. 

Three months later, she moved back to Vilnius. London wasn’t as great as it had seemed, and it certainly wasn’t easy to get a graphic design job here.

The electric bill is registered to me again. Yet still the direct mail like this one keeps coming (mostly from estate agents urging her to sell). This targeted, accurate medium which drives value through intimacy is still mailing someone who never really moved here, never had residency, and had a total family income under £10. Hard to argue that the money wouldn’t have been better spent on TV advertising - in Lithuanian!

You kind of have to take your hat off to Chinwag for having a go at organising a massive summer bash for an industry once again in rude health. Big Summer ‘07 is their attempt to bring the industry together for a big event, oodles of (social!) networking, a drink and a dance.

Well I met some nice new people, some very nice old people (not old old people, old acquaintances), had a good burger and some salad, and…. stood in queues and listened to people whinge about queues, rain and burgers.

I guess it’s a vicious circle. If the industry is on its knees then no one wants a party. If the industry’s booming then everyone expects waiter service and caviar, rather than being reminded of the last time they were in a student union without enough bar staff. Something tells me the sponsors’ pockets were deep but not that deep. Still I guess it’ll prevent a few unsightly hangovers.

Surely the next one should be some sort of Chinwag flashmob. Then everyone can bring their own drinks or drugs or whatever, and agency.com can still sponsor the lanyards.

Interesting to read Simon Gill over at LBi Framfab Wheel Icon gushing about the Goodby Silverstein-generated ‘Get the Glass’ campaign (which just won a Gold at Cannes CyberLions) in the same week that Planning for Fun remembers the genius of the classic 80s Ian Rush advert by the UK Milk Marketing Board.

If I could post a comment on Simon’s blog entry (you need to work there to do that), it would be this: “If the GSP milk adver-web-game is so great, and you’ve ‘engaged’ with it  so entirely, how many more glasses of milk are you drinking each day?”

In 500 words, Gill not once refers to selling a single pint more milk, nor driving any perceptual shift about the product’s position. It’s all about the craft employed in making it which is - without a doubt - amazing.

GSP’s famous “got milk” campaign (discussed heavily by John Steel in the excellent Truth, Lies and Advertising: The Art of Account Planning) spotted a consumer insight - that milk was most prized when consumed in combination with other food stuffs, cookies, sandwiches etc - to reverse a long term decline in the fortunes of the California milk marketing board.

Where is the insight in making a game about a family driving around in a little car with lots of milk bottles in it? I have a horrible suspicion the insight is that kids like computer games, so… let’s make a computer game with a milk bottle in it. Wow, that’s lateral thinking.

In fact, the only thing this beautfiul little game appears to be an advert for is the amazing production company that put it together - North Kingdom.

So, those of us that have a 8Mb broadband connection get to play a beautiful game with OK playability (but not a serious contender against proper games), GSP and North Kingdom get a night out in Cannes, a nice little statue of a Lion and some kudos. 1,000 CVs have the game added to them. But what does the client get? Or anyone in the target audience. A big fat bill for the cleint and a website they will never see for the audience.

I don’t get it. How do they get away with this? Getting the client to fund these overblown pieces of awards-fodder.