Once you get past the self publicity panalists at these talks always bring with them, it’s actually an interesting discussion.
Monthly Archive for July, 2007
This 20 minute video from the PSFK Conference London 2007 shows the presentation given by Timo Veikkola, Future Strategist at Nokia, on a Vision of our Future. As design is the reflection of society, how can we envision the future through trends, observation and informed intuition. What values, attitudes and behaviours of today will shape our future?
Timo is an anthropologist and senior future specialist in Nokia’s consumer trends team, which sounds like an amazing job. He travels the world doing ethnographic research. Some key points:
* The language you use is vital… talk about “people” not “consumers”;stops you thinking of them as being like yourself.
* Innovation based on observation => “informed intuition”.
* “Can the human mind master what the human mind has made”
* “Graffiti and city landscapes are billboards for the state of society”
* Today’s society has just gone through a “noah’s ark period” with all the natural disasters.
* Green/sustainable had been round for years but only now has gone into the media…
* What will be the next step for Social media?
Marianina Chaplin, over at Web Analytics Princess, has written a couple of very interesting posts on “Social networking analysis meets web analytics meets marketing effectiveness” & also “Value networking analysis versus social networking analysis“, along with a link through to the Value Networks Consortium articles.
In it she goes into detail about how a MIT Media Lab/Social Media Lab study has designed a flexible tool for the content driven exploration and visualization of a social network. More specifically, this tool visualizes the true influence of comment flow from MySpace visitors.
Juda Phillips of Web Analytics Demystified writes about “Web Analytics and Social Networks” and also here.
I have no background in analytics, but my interest in it is based on wanting to better serve the audiences I build digital solutions and experiences for. As the metaphor of the page click-through dwindles and we see more thought being given towards monitoring what people are actually doing with their time on a site or within an application, I hope that we’ll be able to substantiate what the knock on effects are for the members of that social network which are touched by it.
I’m intrigued by engagement. I began my social network experience as a lurker. As I have become more comfortable with, and more confident in, using these social tools I am finding myself taking part and engaging in more of the conversation. I’m not alone, as the daily activity on my Facebook newsfeed can vouch for.
I think that many of the people who have signed up to Facebook, but who had not previously delved into MySpace, felt that the interface was a barrier to them i.e. actually doing stuff on it. Facebook is easier to use – ironcially because it doesn’t offer the level of individualism that MySpace was initailly celebrated for. For example, preventing people from changing the look and feel of their profile page and building an online community based on the people you already know cuts to the essence of social networking – which to me is maintaining relationships online with friends you have offline, however distant.
As more and more people feel at ease not only posting their own photos onto Facebook, but also commenting on the photos that others in their network have uploaded and truly engaged in, you’re able to build a detailed picture about the types of people they are, their interests, their likes and dislikes etc…I feel it’s this untapped knowledge which will lead to a much more considered approach to marketing and advertising in general, rather than the traditional method of ramming slogans and broken promises down people’s throats.
Tony over at Teknision has an update to a post his partner in crime Gabor posted a month or so ago that’s worth reading. In it they both discuss and refine the types of application that are currently being built on Facebook.
I’ve been in a load of discussions at work with people who want to create Facebook applications for clients and the 3 types Teknision have formulated are a good way of describing the current state of play.
However, I’m not sure they go far enough and they also don’t mention the types of application (For Facebook, For the Desktop and For the Web).
The popularity of these applications are really interesting, particularly if you take Teknision’s views on board. Whilst the most popular application for Facebook has just tipped 8.1million, the most popular application for your Desktop, the Facebook toolbar for Firefox, has only 161,000 and for the Web, Jobster has been downloaded a total of 33,000 times.
These figures go to show how confused and untapped the Facebook application landscape is and explains why brands have been slow to create their own branded applications for Facebook…so far.
A Nokia employee went to the iPhone line the morning of the launch and filmed this on his Nokia:
This is a brilliant example of how to take part in a competitor’s launch and stay relevant, with the effect that they become part of the story.
There’s a brilliant observation written by Mac Randall of Interactive Cognition concerning the success of Nike+ at Cannes the other week.
He describes the site as a ‘Branded Application’, a product. But what is a Branded Application?
“Traditional campaigns focus on entertainment to deliver a message,” writes Teknision, ” while Branded Applications provide a valuable service in order to deliver an emotional connection with a brand.”
So, Branded Applications offer valuable services which provide an emotional connection to a brand. Essentially, you’re providing something useful to your audience and at the same time you’re offering them opportunities to purchase some of your brand’s products.
As Mac goes onto say, “Brands that choose this path will be dramatically set apart from those that are still intent on interrupting the consumer wherever they are. Finding clever ways to yell “buy more” is a trite form of communication and is hopefully cruising towards its demise.
Branded Applications pick up where most websites fall short. The branded application is much deeper than a flashy microsite because there is an opportunity to excel where other experiences fall short. Applications like Nike + take the power of the web, the idea of community, the growing ability to build tools online, and run with it (yes, that horrible pun intended). The experience is sleek, useful, engaging, and most importantly begs to be revisited time and time again.”
Whilst I don’t agree with the last sentence – I actually find the site cumbersome to use for the most part – I do agree with the value it offers.
I’m interested in seeing the Nike+ application evolve for a different reason to Teknision. I would question how much elastic limit the Nike+ application has for more value to be bolted on to it. Applications by their very nature do one thing well. I believe Nike and RG/A are in danger of dilluting the value of the Nike+ product they’ve created by extending its functionality rather than taking what they’ve built and making it more stable, more reliable and a more solid product overall.
Rather than bolting additional functionality onto the Nike+ application, making it more unwieldy, light-weight applications which do one thing well and interconnect via an platform-like API – much like a suite of themed applications – would be better. Unfortunately, design implimentations like that only occur when you’re not working to the same timeframe as your marketing calender but instead for the benefit of your consumers and the long term.
Currently, at the heart of all brand planning lies the single-minded brand proposition. This is, by necessity, a highly focused and concentrated concept expressed in very few words (sometimes only one word). Its primacy as a planning tool derives from the fact that you need this level of focus to make an ad and ads have been the principal communications tool for most brands. However, we all know the world is changing away from advertising and the type of one-way, didactic advertising we’re used to.
Consumers want more engagement and conversation and the new media channels that are opening up also require this in order to operate successfully within them. The brand proposition is a singularly unhelpful tool as the basis for conversation or richer forms of consumer engagement. If a brand were to walk into a room of metaphorical consumers and, with a look of determination, say “Just Do It’, she would be classified as socially dysfunctional and avoided at all costs.
What a brand needs in order to be successful at a party full of consumers, is a story. Stories are richer and deeper than brand propositions and extend backwards into a brand’s category and history and also forwards into the functional reality of product delivery. It will essentially be the brand’s claim to trust and authority.
The old Packaged Goods Media (PGM) model, driven by compaines such as BBC, ITV and Sky, has evolved towards the new Conversational Media (CM) model driven by MySpace, GoogleTube and Facebook. WhilstContent is King, Conversations have now become the kingdom. Continue reading ‘Conversations are now the kingdom’
Dove’s “Evolution” and “Nike +” came out as two of the big winners from the Cannes Advertising Festival.
One of these is a compelling story. The other is a compelling experience (or brand application). Both leverage digital technologies to bring the consumer closer to the brand. But I’m biased. While I think the Dove video was a wonderful short film—brilliant in fact, I feel that pursuing this model exclusively will hinder the growth of traditional Ad agencies.
Re-purposing video for online media channels doesn’t make them interactive. Whilst traditional ads currently tell brilliant stories, there’s nothing interactive about them with the exception of clicking a virtual button to play it. In fact, the only re-tooling a traditional Ad agency needs to do to fulfill this model is to tell really good stories which people will distribute. They’ll have to do better than the typical 30 second spot, because videos that tend to go viral are usually emotionally charged in some way. They aren’t watered down. There’s also a danger to seeking “prestige” via video—a video can go viral and do nothing for the brand but everything for the agency who produced it. Dove does not fit this model—but others may. Tea Partay was cute, but honestly, I forgot what brand/product it was promoting in the first place.
So agencies who go after the holy grail of viral videos, just need to make sure they staff really good storytellers. But many traditional Ad agencies already have good storytellers, consequently, they’re bound to overcome the digital agency upstarts.
What happens if you go the other way and believe experiences are more persuasive than video spots. Digital agencies who create user experiences don’t always have the best storytellers working for them. Even if they’ve figured out how to design useful and usable digital applications which go beyond the Web, they sometimes lack the ability to tell a story that’s as powerful as something like Dove’s Evolution.
So what’s an agency to do?
The reality is that we don’t have to do anything. Agencies who know how to tell stories can adapt and tell these stories where the eyeballs are moving (Web, mobile, etc). Firms who have designed and built good user experiences can continue to do this both on the web and in other places. But imagine the opportunity for the company, brand, or agency who cracks the experience+storyteller code. Maybe it comes from one source—or maybe it’s orchestrated through the joint efforts of internal and external resources (including consumers). It doesn’t matter—as long as both storytelling+experience are there.
Another way to look at this is if Dove had come up with a “brand application” as cool and useful as Nike’s—or if Nike had produced a short film as compelling as Dove’s…that would have shown some real evolution within the industry
