quality adwords

(click to enlarge)

and generally quality campaign: TV, site, facebook & twitter.

google new year

The genius of Google’s advertising is that it doesn’t look like advertising while probably doing a better job than most advertising. It’s so functional, so straight-up. It doesn’t even feel like false altruism where you know that your wallet will have to appear at some point. It’s just lovely, simple and it perpetuates the use of Google.

what's digital and why you should apply

Something I did for the folks over at AdGrads.

It might be overstated (there’s probably always going to be the “‘bed, bog, bath’ element”) but Mr Billingsley’s comment is almost certainly right: we’re going to be digital advertisers because the world is now digital, and getting more so.

What does all this digital malarkey mean for people looking to get into the communications business and, before we look at that, what does digital mean anyway?

One of the lovely insights of Dare’s grad video – where the parents of Dare folk gloriously fail to define what their children do – is that pinning it down is tricky.

Part of its slipperiness is that things just keep shifting. Facebook was born in 2004, YouTube in 2005, Twitter in 2006, the App Store in 2008 etc. The only constant is change.

The other thing about ‘digital’ is that it’s polysemous – it has multiple meanings. 

It’s used to refer to electronic media (web, screens, mobiles, ipods, nike+ shoes etc) but also, and more importantly, the behaviours those media have unleashed and fed: interaction.

There’s an important difference there that Jeremy Bullmore expressed perfectly in Campaign when he said,

There are two important things there for grads trying to get into the industry. The first is, “whose roof”?

Most of you will have been concentrating on the big above-the-line ones. That’s a good bet for a digital future as long as that ATL agency gets digital, which means they aren’t just talking about it, they’re doing it  (hmm, a black sheep has just popped into my head.)

On the other hand, another good bet are the agencies whose best is yet to come: the digital ones, primed as they are to thrive in the coming digital ecosystem.  

And now for the second important bit of Mr Bullmore’s quote: if you’re worried about applying to a digital agency because it’s got the word digital in it, don’t be: as he says, it’s not really about tech, it’s about interactivity.

And what's that? It's spreading the intelligence more evenly between people who make stuff and people who consume it. Sometimes it’s only a little, sometimes it’s a lot. 

This interactivity let’s you do a lot more than you can at your typical traditional ATL agency. Or to reunite that idea with its owner:

I think that's really exciting (and Mr Tait has 9 more great reasons digital is better for those interested). In digital you’re unshackled from just doing TV, print and radio to all sorts of exciting things like sites, applications, blogs, games, branded content, widgets, podcasts, social things and experimental stuff.  And a lot of this (not all) is actually useful to people; it's additive rather than interruptive. 

In my experience grads tend to think of digital as something on-the-sidey and techy. Maybe it once was. Now it ain’t. Technology is so ubiquitous, so ‘ready-to-hand’, that it’s becoming invisible and when that happens it gets socially interesting. In other words, technology and culture used to be separate, increasingly they are the same (look what you're doing now.)

It’s a brilliant time to get into an industry that’s only going to grow (even in these tough times) and that’s much more about interesting interactive ideas than it is about tech.

Go on, apply!

Obviously I am biased but this would be a good place to start...

(For those wanting more, I suggest you have a play in here, read this, canoe back up this and maybe watch this. That should be enough to be getting on with.)

50,000

Hit 50,000 hits today on Flickr for digitalbites and not much else happened so I thought it was worth a post. Good times.

getting creepy

New technologies can look like magic. That's Douglas Adams speaking.

But magic comes in two shades: black and white (which if the last posts are anything to go by seems to be a minor obsession at the moment).

The black stuff indicates some dark intention; the white stuff a benevolent effect.

New tech goes the same way. Phorm looks black. Genius looks white. But, in essence, they both do the same thing: use our data to sell more effectively.

And there's going to be a load more black technologies as the web breaks out and evolves into an Internet of Things.

Throw into the mix that data capture will get a whole lot smarter not only because of new ways of getting it (through GPS, RFID, accelerometers and the like [SPIME devices]) but because our increasing desire for personalisation means absolute transparency (that's Kelly), and you have some really quite creepy tech around the corner.

Stuff that knows about YOU. Where YOU are. What YOU like. Maybe even why YOU like it - and tense changes of all those. It's gonna get freaky.

The challenge is to tweak and present these technologies from having a perceived dark purpose (I don't really think Phorm does) to being understood as benevolent. We need to fuzz them up.

turn left where the telephone box used to be

storem/flickr

Thought it might be nice to record the Stage 1 IPA talks for selfish future referencing and for anyone else interested. They are a series of talks that aim to cover some of the essential truths of the communications industry. My posts will be pithy and I'll add bits in sometimes, esp. if there's a jump-off to psychology.

The first one was by industry legend Jeremy Bullmore. Here's his talk, triple-distilled:

• A man asks for directions to a shop in a small town. The postman tells hims to go up the road and turn left where the telephone box used to be.
  
  Why has the postman failed in his communication? Because he makes the assumption that the listener knows what he knows. Or rather, he fails to appreciate the listener's knowledge is not the same as his. This lacks a word in English but it's something like empathy. Psychologists, however, do have a term for this faculty, theory of mind. Using clever methods - like the Sally/Anne task - it is possible to see this mental trick coming online around the age of four in developmentally typical children. Autistics never master this. The point: communicators need a theory of mind - or the ability to see events through the eyes of those they are communicating to - in order to be successful.
  
  
• Passive audiences were never passive. Audiences have always actively understood communications, it's just that before digital they never had a way to express it; digital makes stuff that has always happened explicit.
  
  
• There are no such things as messages. There are stimuli and responses. 
  
  
• The best creativity elicits the best contribution from the receiver (the artist rules his subjects by turning them into accomplices)
  
  
• There is no dichotomy between creativity and effectiveness in communications. Effectiveness is the end; creativity is the means.
  
  
• Advertising creativity makes client's money go further. Anything outside of that definition is not creativity.
  
  
• Brand body language is what people read. When the body language doesn't match the communication, there's a problem. 
  
  
• Good brands make you feel safe, they release you from anxiety (mostly likely because of problems with information in market economies)

rebel selling

This is a screen grab from LastFM before they ruined their design. Putting that to one side for the moment, the interesting thing about it is that, after 'rock', 'alternative' came in as the second most popular tag. A screen grab from today shows much the same pattern.

[Aside: It's interesting how 'seen live' is a major label too. Like Kevin Kelly has said when stuff gets superabundant it gets cheaper to the point of being free. When this happens things that can't be copied become more valued by both the ordinary people, hence the tag's popularity, and record companies, hence the money in music now being in touring.]

There is more than a strong whiff of irony about one of the most popular tags being 'alternative': 'popular' and 'alternative', at first blush, cannot operate in the same place in a Gaussian distribution.

Now, it could be something particular about LastFMers: they might be alternative sort of folk. There's that. It's part of the reason the 'alternative' tag is so big. But, there's a greater truth too: 'alternative' is the driver of capitalism and culture.

Bakunin, Nietzsche, Sombart and Schumpeter all saw capitalism not for the homogeneity it created but as a fundamentally creative (and thus destructive) system. Capitalism and culture can be stated as the effort to escape sameness.

But you get information problems here. There are too many alternatives. Just like brands are there to help solve this problem, so certain things become pin-ups for 'alternative' to avoid the crippling effects of having too many alternative things. These things are then popular for being alternative. Here, then, 'alternative' and 'popular' can operate the same place on a Gaussian distribution: everyone is trying not to be mainstream.

(Another irony here: counterculturalists believe they are rebelling against 'the system' when they are most probably contributing towards it, because rebellion is in the very spirit of capitalism. This could be problematic: "Not only does it distract energy and effort from the sort of initiatives that lead to concrete improvements in people's lives, but it encourages wholesale contempt for such incremental changes [The Rebel Sell])

buy-product

thomashawk/flickr

The short version of this post is:

Selling on social networks can only be a by-product (hence the title 'buy-product'. Geddit? Oh dear, I am sorry) of the activities occurring on those sites, never a primary activity.

The long version is this:

In market economies there are two big problems with information: it's (occasionally)* inadequate and it's superabundant.

Why is information inadequate? Because you only know how good something is after you have bought it, so how do you choose between alternatives?

Why is there too much information? Because everyone wants a slice of the pie making those alternatives and the market gets flooded with products or services and thus information about those. (How do you choose between one-hundred types of olive oil? You don't for the most part. It's crippling. You move on.)

Add in the fact that this competition strips profits to the bone and you have three pretty good reasons for why brands should (and do so successfully) exist: to remove doubt about quality and ease the process of otherwise crippling choice for people who want to buy stuff, and pump scarcity (and thus juicer profits) back into things for people who want to sell stuff.

However, in the spirit of several recent books, solutions to the problem of inadequate and superabundant information can also be solved by [dramatic pause] other people. And more effectively because trust in other individuals is second only to personal experience itself.

Other people can literally 'test' products and services for you before you buy them yourself (by buying them themselves) and help narrow down the choice for you (by having had to narrow down the choice for themselves.)

People have probably been doing this since information in markets got to be doubly-dodgy. Nothing new in the behaviour. It even has a 5-syllable name: recommendation.

However, what might be new is that hitherto implicit recommendation could be made explicit and more useful with a dash of digital. Making stuff explicit seems to me to be the formula of the successful things in recent web (Facebook makes social relationships explicit, blogs records thoughts that would otherwise only exist in conversation or the mind, LastFM records the wake of your audio, StumbleUpon ossifies your digital discoveries etc.)

How would this work? Social networks would allow self-expression at a much finer level of detail allowing libraries of music, films, books, clothes**, etc that people have honed (not harvested automatically, which was the problem with Beacon). (Eventually content could be brought within such networks, so they operates as hubs of digital content.)

This in itself could present recommendations based on content (like iTunes Genuis) but also those made by other people in your group of friends. These recommendations wouldn't really be recommendations but comments/ratings tagged onto things by people. 'This track is awesome' could be really useful from someone who you (or your computer) knows you share taste with.

Picture time:

One of the nice things about such a system is that it's lovely for people, providing stuff they might be interested in. However, there is also an opportunity here for social networks.

Another picture first:

And now I am going to quote myself, which is probably a bit wanky but here we go from a few posts back:

"When people use Google, they're looking for information. When they use Amazon, they're buying (or researching). The ads are working here because people want information, it's welcome if its good enough.

When they use Facebook (or any other social media) they're expressing, communicating and interacting with others (being social not being cognitive). The same ads aren't working here for the same reason you'd be a bit miffed if someone marched into the pub, dropped a sausage in your pint, yaddered on about how delicious they are and, by the way, how they are half-price at the moment."

The point is that in the social space clumsy selling (ads) is not welcome: the communication gets tarnished by it, so it's ignored and disliked. But, that is not to say that selling as a by-product is out of the question. Links to things - and charging the producers a little for those links - suits everyone.

* I put 'occasionally' in brackets because as soon as information is partially inadequate it gets perceived at wholly inadequate.
** Self-generated recommendations will probably work for clothes; other-generated recommendations won't work as well. People like their clothes to be different (but not too different) from their peers.

negroponte's predictions

Prediction is usually a dubious business: things are way too uncertain and we just don't know what we're going to know in the future ('unknown unknowns' in NNT's terms). That's why Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte, which came out in 1995, is all the more freakish in its prescience.

Here's a smattering of things I liked, with the occasional few words after each from the perspective of now.


The tidiest way I have seen the 'receive -> interact' paradigm change articulated.


Basically, Apple's strategy and success.


RSS, Google Reader...


Creeping in more and more. He also talked about "the tiny hole or two in plastic or metal, through which your voices access a small microphone" (p.159). This is still proving difficult.


Things like Google Reader's Top Recommendations, Amazon's recommend emails and iTunes' Genius represent this one quite nicely. Although still some way to go here.


Hulu, BBC iPlayer and all the underground antecedents to these.


This idea - communication as well as information - is rephrased a lot by pundits. What's impressive about this is that it saw the value of social online before it was made explicit with, sorry, nasty phrase coming up, Web 2.0.


Blogging seems the best example.


Radiohead is my favorite example of this at the mo. (Also see here for what bitcasting - another of Negroponte's babies - is all about and how Radiohead's House of Cards 'video' is likely to have been the first example of this).


Very broadly gets to the nub of all the legal issues bouncing around online.

And a few others that didn't make it into digital bites:

"Clipping bits is very different from clipping atoms" p.59

"On the net each person can be an unlicensed TV station" (p.176)

One word. YouTube

"...bits that describe other bits...will proliferate in digital broadcasting. These will be added by humans aided by machines, at the time of release...or later (by viewers and commentators). The result will be a stream with so much header information that your computer really can help you deal with the massive amount of content" (p.179)

tags, labels etc

"automobiles will enjoy another very particular benefit of being digital: they will know where they are" (p.216)

SatNav.

"The important point is to recognise that the future of digital devices can include some very different shapes and sizes from those that might naturally leap to mind from our current frames (sic) of reference. Computer retailing of equipment and supplies may not be limited to Radio Shack and Staples, but include the likes of Saks and stores that sell products from Nike, Levis and Banana Republic."

Basically, the web breaking out from behind screens, which I have thought about here. Nike+ is the golden example of this right now. A continuation of this idea:

"When this happens in a tiny format, all "things" can be digitally active. For example, every teacup, article of clothing, and (yes) book in your house can say where it is. In the future, the concept of being lost will be as unlikely as being "out of print"

I like the nod to long tail stuff at the end there with "as unlikely as being out of print"

(Skepticism: the book, being widely read, could have prompted people to work on the things Negroponte predicted ('invented'), giving the impression that the book is farsighted when it may have been prescriptive to future-makers)

anxiogenic tv

bbaltimore/flickr

There is a lot on how the Google Generation (which is actually a very misleading idea) is full of a bunch of cognitively myopic and depthless individuals just skimming from one digital distraction to another. And somewhere in that there is probably some truth for some people.

But the assumption that the endpoint of all these new web behaviours is neuromush for everyone is wrong. That's why it's nice when you hear something that says, actually all this new media causes more cognitive sweat than the media before it. It might even be making some of us a bit smarter.

It's the same with TV shows. They are getting more complicated and we are having to be better decoders to understand them. Even 'rubbish' like Big Brother forces us to track a large number of relationships, which have to be continually updated. If this example is fatuous, shows like The Sopranos, The West Wing, The Wire, Prison Break, 24, Lost and so on are most certainly feistier than their antecedents.

As usual, someone else has thought about this a lot more and got it down on paper. Everything Bad is Good for You by Stephen Johnson argues that "that popular culture has, on average, grown more complex and intellectually challenging over the past thirty years" (xv). I agree.

But there's something else that I have been feeling in the last five years when I watch television, which is increased anxiety. The reason for this is that I can no longer trust writers.

Somewhere things changed.

For me, this point came with Season 1 of 24. With everything I had watched up to that point it was a fairly good assumption that by the end of a film or season everything would be nicely tied up - the baddies dispensed, the objective achieved, the romance consummated. More than anything, writers brought their characters close to death but pulled them back again at the last moment.

Then audiences got bored of this, the assumption was so strong that it started to dilute the experience because the outcome could be predicted. The reaction was for writers to start being ruthless and, to a certain extent, inconsistent when it came to dispensing with characters.

Now audiences were never really sure who was going to live or not because instead of pulling all major characters back from death they started popping them off left, right and centre.

I believe Keifer Sutherland is the only major cast member remaining on the television show 24 after its 7 seasons. Prison Break in its third season is considerably thinner on characters than when it started.

This has the effect of pulling you deeper into shows, because you face the confusion and uncertainly the characters feels instead of being able to watch the show with the saftey net below you.

As Johnson has noted, things like multiple-threading in TV shows have forced us to sharpen up cognitively. But, increasingly this and other devices are coupled with wanton disregard for nearly all of a show's major characters, which has sharpened our anxiety.

the future is streaming, not downloading

januszbc/Flickr

The news that major ISPs in the UK have agreed to smack the wrists of hardcore file-sharers is, ultimately, not really news.

This is because film, tv and music - the most popular shared content - is increasingly available in streamable form obviating the need to download at all. It's all going to be in the cloud.

The likes of LastFM and Pandora could take care of the music. iPlayer is already taking care of the BBC's output phenomenally well. Other places like TV Shack, Videostic and, legally, Hulu, are providing the rest.

It does tickle me a bit that just as the industry catches up, the ways in which we can consume music has moved on. Instead of owning content - and all the problems that brings if you have acquired it illegally - you just own links to that content and get served with ads or pay a small subscription fee for it.

This shouldn't be a new problem for the entertainment industry, it's a better solution.

Using the space

When digital media space is snapped up on a page by the same brand what usually happens is that two identical ads are shoehorned into their respective spaces after a bit of resizing. That's filling the space. In the Mac ad above the two spaces speak to each other in a meaningful way making the whole ad more engaging. That's using the space.

BBC Penguins

Seriously good work from RKCR Y&R (ergh, so many letters and, quick aside, who still has an entry page on their website?) and Passion Pictures for promotion of the Beeb's iPlayer. David Bainbridge, BBC head of marketing communications and audiences for future media and technology (his business card must comes as roll) said on BR: "It is also hoped that this creative device will not only celebrate what BBC iPlayer can deliver, but will also say something quite profound about the BBC's overall appetite for creative risk-taking and innovation." It does. (Although strictly speaking the innovation was out-sourced).

Blowtorch

(from chunyang @ Flickr)

How do you produce quality in new media and all the participation it offers without suffering the rubbish that is most user-generated content. One answer might be Blowtorch. It's co-create with high standards exclusively for 18-24 year olds. That is, audiences get a say in the creative output - the soundtrack, the editing, the cinematography etc. I can see this sort of thing being eminently attractive to certain people.

Set up by a satisfying mix of entertainment, technology and advertising pros, this gets me excited because it's progressive. Unlike the rest of Hollywood whose nerves about damaging their precious DVD sales have meant congealment, Blowtorch's new rules of participation and using all the different media pipes to engage is new and needed.

Medium-rare ads

(from splorp)

Media companies or algorithms decide how we get our ads served up. Hulu, one of the most promising legit video-on-demand sites, is giving its users more of a say in how they get their ads.

(from CNET)

Its inevitable that all TV viewing will be done online in the future because the choice is better (although something will need to be done about choice paralysis) and time and space are no longer constraining factors.

Time is irrelevant because shows can be called up on-demand, making the 'old' system of programming look as silly as everyone being served up with the exact same meal in a restaurant. Space - or location - is irrelevant because although TVs are stationary, screens are mobile. Content can be picked up anywhere as long as you have access to the cloud.

Online TV also has the chance to be interactive. People are already using traditional TV and online together to enhance the experience (and here). Online TV will just remove the space between laptop and TV, packing it down into one device.

Because of this inevitability, the move by Hulu to exploit the interactivity of the medium is a good thing.

If online TV is going to be free, it's going to have to be ad supported. It could be charged but when you have free vs paid, free will win out as long as the 'costs of free' aren't too great.

The 'cost of free' being advertising and the 'too great' bit being when the ads subtract significantly from the experience by being intrusive and/or irrelevant.

By adding choice to the ad serving process the costs are lessened because people will feel they have some choice in the matter and - now going beyond what is happening at Hulu - choice might improve relevance, the nirvana of advertising that has allowed Google to make billions.

I've got a few ideas about how more choice can be added into the mix to make people feel more in control and to give them better (more relevant) ads.

The first thing to note is the gulf between products on a show and buying them. The Internet could close this gap to a few centimeters. Take for example House's leather jacket, something that keeps him both "warm and cool" and something that was probably just chosen by the show's wardrobe people rather than any money changing hands for its use.


Yet, there is demand for his jacket; people are asking where to buy one. It would be fairly simple to have an overlay with a tagging system similar to Facebook's (below), except rather than being static, it would be dynamic; hypervideo. The tags would be put in place by the production team or automatically once the technology gets good enough at object recognition.

The lovely Kate, tagged on Facebook

Everything in a show becomes a clickable object. Links out to products could be collected on a little 'shelf' which you could sift through at the end of the show. The transient nature of things in video becomes irrelevant. Clothes worn, gadgets used, songs played could all be put on the 'shelf' for later inspection and possible purchase. People could chose a specific type of ad (like clothing, gadgets or music) depending on their whim. I would find this much more useful than interupting messages or even a pre-show ad.

For some, this might seem rather unpleasant because of the risk of corrupting artistic output. This is as naïve as the idea of the sentimentalist idea of the noble savage because creativity has always used the oxygen of commerce. John Hegarty, BBH's creative supremo, uses Titian's The Annunciation as an example: "In the bottom right-hand corner you will see a decanter. Why? Well, the Venetians had developed clear glass and they wanted it in there as an advert. So the connection between culture and commerce is hundreds of years old." (source)

Titian's The Annunciation (click to enlarge)

Second, I agree with Hegarty's other point that the only problem with such placement is when it is done badly, when it is perpendicular to the story. It reminds me of the deliberately obtuse faux product placement in the Truman Show by Truman's synthetic wife:

In this situation both show and brand come off looking bad. As Hegarty says, "It doesn't satisfy the viewer, so it doesn't work for the advertiser" (also see this paper by Nigel Hollis, Chief Global Analyst at Millward Brown for more on this). Put differently, corrupting artistic output is not in the interests of either the people making the shows or the advertisers.

I would much rather have something like this, where I get to chose the ads in a more ecologically valid environment than have my viewing experience lacerated by the tyranny of jingles and over-enthusiastic voice overs. And with the long tail this could be very profitable for shows and films.

Advertising is here to stay. The more useful we can make it the better it will be for all involved. And one way to do this is let people have more choice about the ads they consume.

Crystal Ball 2.0

Martin Wolf Wagner Photography

Advertising Age asked 150 power bloggers about what to expect from digital advertising in 2008. Some of my favorites:

1. Branded content - more services, less messages (Tom Martin & Joe Pulizzi)

2. Local search - digital microbiology not digital astronomy. (Andy Wibbels)

3. Simple mobile apps - splitting the bill, pre-ordering coffee, knowing that song on a TV program (Marie Lena Tupot)

4. Sociosemantics - culture into data into culture (e.g. LastFM music recommendations) (Jay Moonah)

5. SEO - cheap and powerful. Getting search right is gonna be important (Joost de Valk & Martin Calle)

6. Online TV - Real-time video ad-matching + droves of people flocking to digital TV rooms (Paul Cheney)

7. Social media - Facebook (Mike Volpe)

I would add:

8. Location-aware stuff

9. Games

10. Behavioural targeting (for an interesting take on this see Mindset Media, who have developed a personality periodic table)

Contravesy, truth and experts

Had another thought about experts and the media.

In the last post, Rethinking Expertise (here), I said the "media forged and perpetuated a scientific controversy [about MMR and autism] where none existed".

Sadly, this is good business. It is in the interests of commercial news outlets to perpetuate (and even serve up) illusory controversy.

Fox, ever reliable for being unreliable, admit to this. Although they may be operating ideologically as well here, Murdoch says there are business reasons for his network's radical stance on climate change.

Another reason why experts must be allowed to shout louder than ordinary people.