Neil Perkin has posted an excellent presentation on where media is today and where he sees it heading. Take a few minutes to click through the slides, ponder it a bit, and then pass it along to others you know who are trying to sort it all out.
And by all means, share your thoughts with him in the comments to his post...
Chris Brogan shared this video as an example of how great branded content doesn't come across as an ad and in doing so, it stands a much better chance of getting passed along from one to many. I absolutely agree with him but that's not why I'm posting the video here. Nor is it because of my appreciation for street art and great street artists. The reason I'm sharing it is because of what gets said around 2:43 into the video.
The guys behind Montana actually paint, so they have an inherent feel for what makes great spray paint when it comes to writing graffiti. Not only that, but they also get out and talk to street artists to really understand what they need. Then they go back and develop those things. The entire video shows how Montana has specially formulated their paints and developed a variety of caps so that street artists can create better work.
This is what great brands do. They have passion for what they make and that passion helps them start out with a pretty good product to begin with. Then, they go out and spend time listening to people who use their products and find ways to make them better.
Great brands always consider themselves to be in beta - even if they don't use that term. They're always looking for ways to improve and be more meaningful to the people who use them. In return, this makes the people who use them even more passionate about them. In my book, that's never a bad thing.
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Side note: Chris also has a good post on thinking about your blog's design. It made me see the real answer to the question I had been asking myself with regard to my recent banner refresh - "Does my blog look fat with this header?" Thus the change to trim it down a bit. Next up is thinning out the sidebars a bit. Have a bit too much going on over there.
I'm sure you have seen this as it's been well covered this weekend and through today, but if not, be sure to go play around with Brand Tags.
It's a simple, interesting, and great idea from Noah Brier that lets you see what people say/think about a few popular brands. If you want to know more about it, Noah has written a couple of posts about it that provide a bit of the background.
This one has been bouncing around inside the cranium for a while now. Seeing this video last week and flagging it in my Tumblr with a note has inspired me to get it out. It's probably nothing new/that hasn't been said by others elsewhere most likely, but anyway...
Call it natural adaptation. Call it evolution. Call it design by God. Call it whatever you like.
I've been seeing a lot lately that makes me believe we have not even scratched the surface on what we can learn by observing how things work in our natural surroundings and applying those learnings to solving some of our most challenging problems.
I know there are scientists and engineers who do this for a living, but I don't know that enough of us outside of those fields look to these things to help us solve the challenges we are trying to address.
A particular example of this is when it comes to marketing/marketers and pretending brands are "people." We use things like brand personas, brand personalities, brand voices, blah, blah, blah, to try and make the brand more interesting and desirable.
We do this because this is what we believe will help people form an "emotional connection" with the brand. But then when it comes time to introduce this "person" to the world, we often make them the most annoying person we know.
They interrupt people. They talk and never listen. They yell. They demand to be the center of attention. They take way more than they give. They only engage us when they want something. It's all about them.
Who really likes this kind of person and wants to make them a bigger part of their life? Not many people I know. Not me.
So is it any wonder that advertising is in the state it's in? How in the world do we ever expect anyone to develop a true "emotional connection" to a brand when this is what they do to the people they're supposed to "connect" with?
If we really want brands to have emotional value to people, we need to model their actions after how people really form emotional connections with each other. We need to look at how people become emotionally attached to art, music, film, sports stars, etc.
I think we're doing things that could get us there. As an industry, we're bringing more and more ethographic methodologies and cultural anthropology practices into our companies and research models. Maybe we should open up the context of this research beyond peoples' engagements with brands and look at the bigger picture of their lives and relationships.
I suppose it all depends on the company/brand we're doing the research for as to if this is relevant, but maybe not. Maybe by just observing people and understanding why they do what they do we'll find better ways to help our clients be more useful.
Anything we can do to stop having our brands act like Gilbert Gottfried and start acting more like Oprah Winfrey is a good thing, I think...
Didn't get around to sharing this one last week, but meant to do it. Sorry about that.
Fallon planner, Aki Spicer, shared his thoughts on 10 Trends Marketers Should Know About Social Networking at the agency's Brainfood lunch both with the agency and beyond by broadcasting live across several social media platforms so that anyone could watch if they were so inclined. Sounds like it went pretty well. Wish I could have caught it live.
Aki starts off with a good quote from William Gibson: "The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet."
Much of this is inline with some of what I've shared here throughout various posts and comments elsewhere. If you're following the social media conversations around the blogs, then I would say this is a really good round-up/recap of many of those ideas with some great case studies, quotes and implications to support exactly what he said this is, "a kind of social media 101."
Anyway, give it a go if you're looking for a good perspective on this topic. If you've got comments or thoughts, be sure to leave them for Aki over on the SlideShare or on the Fallon Planning blog post.
So here are the slides from the presentation I shared with everyone at work on Friday during our monthly, "What's Next" lunches. These lunch sessions are one of my favorite things about working at space150. It's fun to see what people are interested in and what makes them excited to come to work every day. Not only that, but with my having only been here around six months, it gives me more insight into the people presenting, which helps me get to know them better. Anyway...
Quick background on these lunch sessions: Each month, three or four people are called upon to share either what inspires them or what's going on in a specific area. So far, I've seen some of our creatives talk to what motivates them and share trends and up-and-coming names in art and design; some of our tech team talk to emerging technologies, showing off what they can do and how they're relevant to our clients; and finally some of our modern media team share the newest ways we can help people find what they're looking for more easily and get more relevant information in front of them for our clients. Like I said, it has all been very fun to take part in as well as quite inspiring and energizing.
For this one, I was asked to share what's going on in marketing and where things are moving. What you'll see/did see is that I ended up using a little bit of what I've been posting about here and some of what has been getting covered both within the trade pubs and on blogs to give me the outline. If you follow the plannersphere and other social media and marketing blogs, then this probably won't be much new, but it might connect the conversations a little more. Or maybe not.
Mostly just wanted to share it since I did put a bit of time into pulling it together and was inspired by many of you who've been writing about similar subject matter. Also because what limited free time I did have last week went into putting it together instead of writing on here.
Note: Most of the examples in it are the more covered ones used to support the topics they're associated with. With limited time, I opted for the easy-to-find examples. Sorry about that. One that isn't as covered across the blogs and in the press yet is the My Vegas site. For more info on it see David Armano's post.
As always, if you've got any thoughts, questions or comments...
Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar have collaborated on a new project - I Want You To Want Me - which is now on display at MoMA as part of their Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit.
The details on what it is and how it works are on Jonathan's site, as well as within the IWYTWM site. Also interesting to view is the process of how the project came together.
Now, this is certainly a very interesting endeavor, as is much of the work from these two gentlemen, but that's not why I wanted to discuss it here. (But please do go read about it and if you can, go see it.)
As the volume on the "brands should be doing things, not saying things" song gets turned up louder and louder, we need to start moving from talking about doing, to actually doing, doing.
People are sharing more and more information publicly about who they are, who they want to be, how they want to be seen, how they want to be communicated with (not to), what they want, who they want to be with, etc., etc.
Whenever I look at some of the past work Jonathan has done, or see something new that does something similar - taking bits and bytes of shared information and making them more useful or interesting - I am reminded of this.
Opportunity is all around us to start helping our clients do things that are more useful to the people who use their products and services. People are sending out public signals every single day about their lives and giving us insight into how we could help them. Are you listening? Because they're telling us what they want. Sometimes yelling. Sometimes whispering. But always telling.
The brands that capitalize on this and are first to meet the evolving needs of people in ways that are relevant to their products and services are going to rise to the top. Brands that continue to think they know what people want and operate in isolated secrecy, well, their ivory towers are going to begin to lose a bit of their shine rather quickly.
In other words, tomorrow belongs to the brands that help people become the heroes of their own stories by listening to what people want and then giving them the things they need to accomplish their goals.
It's time to listen and do more than think and talk. Well, still think, but applied to listening and doing. Not talking. Which I'll stop doing now. Thanks for listening.
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Related note (2/26): NY Times review of the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit here.
A new report from Forrester has been covered in ADWEEK and WARC recently. (PDFs of articles below if links are broken.)
According to the articles, Forrester is stating that consumers don't trust the mass marketing messages cranked out by agencies and brands any longer. Instead, they are turning to family, friends and peers within their communities to help inform their purchasing decisions.
The report is also saying that to survive, agencies are going to have to change their ways from sending out one-way messages to taking part in communities and conversations. They go as far as saying that an example of this would be, "agencies comprised of community members – mothers for example, who would help, say, Procter & Gamble to play a constructive role within communities of other mothers."
Forrester believes creative and media agencies are lagging behind in truly integrating digital into their capabilities, quoting an unnamed client-side marketer as saying, "Most senior ad execs appear more comfortable with conventional channels, which they claim are 'integrated' because they have tacked on a website."
They state that digital agencies have a better understanding of how to deliver more "interactive" experiences but aren't competitive with the more traditional shops when it comes to branding skills.
Peter Kim, a Forrester Research analyst and co-author of the report, believes that there isn't an agency out there right now that represents what the agencies of five to 10 years from now will look like.
"I don't think agencies are going away," Kim said. "They're going to be the ones that help marketers to communities of mutual interest."
I completely agree that many agencies are out of touch and need to learn how to facilitate and participate in the conversations taking place vs. interrupting them. I'm also not surprised that they found people are distrustful of advertising and marketing messages as a whole. However, I don't believe the answer is an agency of mothers working with Proctor & Gamble to help them better communicate with this segment.
The answer, in my opinion, lies in agencies and their clients learning to look at things from a new perspective. Instead of looking at what brands can tell people, we instead need to be looking at what brands can do for people. How are people really using the products or services of your client? What are they actually saying about them? (No, not what they say in focus groups. What they really say about them.) What do they wish they could do better? What could brands do to make peoples' lives better/easier/happier/etc.?
It also means agencies and their clients need to start spending more time with the people who buy and use their products and services - both in the real world and where they spend time online. While communities and social networks are growing and expanding more and more every day online, people still do have lives outside of their computers and only looking at them through the monitor will not give you an accurate picture for how to create positive change.
Overall, a more collaborative model needs to take shape. One that more openly involves the interested parties in the process from the creation/evolution of products and services through how they are then communicated to the world. Instead of companies largely creating their products/services in isolated towers and agencies creating communications in theirs, both seeking only limited input from the people who will actually be on the receiving end of them, we are going to need to be more open and seek greater input and dig for richer insights with the people who actually use the products/services and receive the communications around them.
More thinking on this to come...
For a couple different views on the Forrester report, read what Mark Earls and Simon Andrews have to say.
For some interesting thoughts on new ways of approaching things, here is some thinking on marketing as a service and here is some more looking at using the idea of Transformation Design in terms of marketing.
Download the WARC article as a PDF.
Download the ADWEEK article as a PDF.
Gareth called my attention to these Converse videos/commercials making big, bold statements. In addition to the above video, there are five more on their conversetv YouTube channel. These same videos plus an additional one appear on their web site with the following statement:
"These short films are about being original. Feel free to share them, question them or better them. Just don't do nothing."
Below each of the videos on the Converse site, they link to a Facebook fan group that started in December of 2006 and encourage people to discuss them there. At least one person has taken them up on the request to "better them." Interesting conversations about the videos are taking place in the YouTube comments for each as well.
There is a lot I like about this campaign. They are using TV commercials to start a dialogue. They are pointing out the elephants in the room. They are recognizing fans of the brand where they already exist instead of trying to force the conversation on their own terms/own site. They are freely inviting people to challenge, alter or share their videos. They are provoking conversation and encouraging action.
All of this seems very appropriate for a brand whose name means, "to talk informally with another or others; exchange views, opinions, etc., by talking." And let's not forget the courage it took to see this approach through.
My challenge is, what is Converse doing to help right the things they're calling out? I can see that those who wear Chucks might have an anti-marketing voice. But let's not forget that Converse is a brand that sells product, I don't know if calling these things out into the open to start a dialogue between people is enough. I think people might expect more if you're going to make statements like these.
Yes, they're participating in (PRODUCT) RED™. But that doesn't really relate to what they're saying in these videos. As you can see in some of the comment threads on YouTube, more than a few people are calling them out for being hypocritical.
I'd love to know what others think. Comments are very, very welcome and encouraged...
Because you should be. People are talking about you. Telling others about you. Do you know what they're saying? I hope you do. And I hope you are doing something about it.
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