mediation

Fighting the Future: reaching a rose-tinted concensus at the IPA 44 Club's Future of Advertising in a Networked Society

A short history of marketing from jabi on Vimeo.

the rather lovely above video - by jabi - neatly sums up the collective dilemma of how brands, marketers and, specifically, agencies address the challenge of social media.  the issue was the topic of discussion last night at the IPA 44 Club's inaugural event of 2009: The future of advertising in a networked society.  quite the session it was... here's the gist:

part one - report findings

• social media = the online tools and platforms people use to share information, thoughts, opinions, content etc
• problems is that brands are "crashing the party rather than hosting it" (Russell Davies)
• many brands are experimenting but not getting traction in the area
• we need a model of comms that reflects 'ME' as opposed to 'brand'
• a model that's about conversation and participation rather than interruption and engagement
• a model that incorporates David Armano's thinking about 'influence ripples'
• Johnny X by Dare is a cracking example
• which succeeded in concentrating the feeds into and out of it's online space (64% of upstream and 84% of downstream feeds came from 10 sites each)
• planning social media should focus on targeting the few, that demonstrate: (1) expansiveness (propensity to chatter), (2) popularity (propensity to filter and target) and (3) reciprocity (likelihood to act)
• network size is predictable, as is network flow, as is circulation

part two - agency survey

• brands in a socially-networked world are more responsible for creating and disseminating the right information - brands should be more discretionary in what they produce [Mediation found this less than substantiated and at odds with Clay Shirky's comments at the MGEITF this year on filtering in a content-abundant world being after the fact, ie produce then allow the network to filter]
• the way to reward brand advocates is not through financial incentive
• the industry disagrees on two areas: (1) that advertising principles are the same in a networked society and (2) that social media behaves in a fundamentally new way
• it is believed that most revenue is up for grabs in content creation, then data & insight, then market research & insight gathering (amongst others)
• these new revenue streams represent £11bn of additional revenue opportunity, with another £5bn potentially
• ...which would be (exactly!) enough to meet the £16bn shortfall in industry revenues by 2016 predicted by the IPA's Future of Advertising and Agencies report of two years ago (£16bn = the difference between the IPA's 'Central' and 'Consumer' Scenarios)

part three - the discussion

I won't bullet this because it's getting late and you had to be there, but this was the better part of the evening with discussion ranging between philosophy of brands in a social media space to the (inevitable) measurement and accountability of such activity.

for me a kind of rose-tinted consensus was reached; consensus that went along the lines of:

• marketing has always been about great social networking, the challenge is the same - getting the right content in the right place, its just that...
• (1) people power is more potent (we have 500 networked connections not 50 disparate ones) and (2) we need to react to the context our message are in rather than control the context our messages are in
• it's brilliant because we can react to real people in real time in the context of a real conversations
• social media isn't a bolt on, it has to be woven into every brand touchpoint
• brands need to behave differently, and understand that their relationship with consumers is - to consumers - much less important than consumers' relationships with other consumers

so in a nutshell social media is great because it's as old as the hills, better than the disruption model, measurable ...and there's a freak-off big commercial opportunity for the brands and agencies that get it right.

I just don't think that it' that easy.  our industry is woefully unprepared for the future.  there's some brilliant thinking and debate going on, but the commercial models, joined-up industry measurement systems, and marketing best practice principles - from a 'what works' as opposed to a 'self-regulatory' point of view - just aren't moving fast enough.

most importantly, not enough consideration was given to the integration of broadcast and social media.  they're not going to exist in isolation and broadcast media is going nowhere. iTunes didn't kill CDs and Amazon didn't kill Waterstones.  social media certainly won't kill mainstream broadcast media; the same mainstream broadcast media that in the vast majority of instances provides social media users with the content they comment on, pass on, or reappropriate for their own ends.

the other interesting question is how the behaviour of digital natives will evolve...  we're familiar with the media 'hubs' that are the current crop of adolescent's bedrooms; they're multi-tasking away across ten devices and infinite bits of content.  but what happens when they grow-up?  how much of their social media behaviour will they take with them into adulthood and how much will they replace with the aggregated broadcast consumption of their parents?

we live in interesting times; and I guess we wouldn't have it any other way.

one last word, I urge you to read JVW's post about the event and specifically his debate on how the IPA can use social media to get their social media report into more people's hands whilst not impacting on revenues.  a pleasure and a joy.

Listening and learning: Contagious and Naughton on the importance of responding to conversations

Twas the day before Christmas, when all thru the comms industry; Not a planner was stirring, not even a still-drunk buyer from the Christmas party the night before...

and so the last post before Chrimbo brings the loveliest of Christmas pressies from Contagious, who have given us all their Most Contagious review of the year for free.  it's packed full of cracking examples of the best marketing and comms ideas from the last twelve months, some of which pick up on what was their anticipated theme of the year - the conversation:

"If 2006 was about user-generated content and 2007 about social media, then 2008 is about the conversation.’ So predicted Contagious editor Paul Kemp-Robertson in The International Herald Tribune back in January. ‘In other words, brands will have to steel themselves to the idea that marketing is a two-way street, not just a conduit for directing their messages toward pliant consumers."

I hope that's true.  I want it to be true.  I want 2008 to be the year that our conversations stopped being one-way, and where marketing and communications learned how to listen in interesting and relevant ways.  because listening isn't enough; it's easy to say 'we're listening' with one hand yet continue to deploy messages for perception or behavioural change in the broadcast streams with the other.

and if 2008 was the year of the conversation, I hope that 2009 brings the year of informed debate.  the year that we can use those conversations in ways that influence how we go about doing what we do and saying what we say.

this importance of conversation was highlighted in a great article by John Naughton in the Observer, who reports on how a WSJ article failed to correctly understand a story on Google's relationship with ISPs.  more crucially though, when the blogosphere went about correcting the article, their contribution was then largely derided by the broadcast stream.  Naughton observes that:

"Watching the discussion unfold online was like eavesdropping on a civilised and enlightening conversation. Browsing through it I thought: this is what the internet is like at its best - a powerful extension of what Jürgen Habermas once called 'the public sphere'."

this is the ambition, this is the hope.  that brands not just only listen in on the conversation, but then act on the information and opinion discussed within it's increasingly public sphere...  have awesome Chrimbo's guys, here's one last little treat from those crazy kids at AKQA, enjoy.
 

From theory to practice: the challenge of planning Transmedia

Keith Arem's graphic novel Ascend, for which a game is currently in development

it's now been over two years since Faris bought transmedia planning to our attention in his post of the same name on TIGS.  the theory has been well expounded in the period since then; with a post by Jason Oke at Leo Burnett Toronto which explored the TP concept within the context of a single ad quickly kicking things off.

I'm sure that the idea of TP has cropped up in most media, comms and ad agencies by now...  it certainly has in Mediation's.  but we've yet to see - as far as I can make out - a significant campaign emerge based on TP principles.  the same is actually true of the entertainment industry; in an interview with Games TM magazine(edition 75), Henry Jenkins - the Godfather of TP - concedes that truly persuasive examples have yet to arrive.

they're doing better than us though.  transmedia planning should be everywhere by now.  the theory is familiar and is not only relatively unchallenged, but is offers the very solution to some of the biggest marketing challenges of the moment.  of its many advantages, the primary benefit has to be the extent to which it pays back on the time taken to consume it.  Jenkins goes on to observe that "regardless of the commercial motives behind it, transmedia entertainment done well also provides rewards for fans".

so why is getting the theory working in practice so difficult?  here's some starters for ten...

firstly, the financial investment required.  the reason the best examples of TM largely remain in the entertainment arena (the Matrix, Cloverfield, Heroes, Lost etc) because it takes a significant chunk of investment to develop and then create the content often required.  the commercial models for Fox or Paramount are set up to do this, the commercial models for marketeers often aren't.

but this is a bit of a cop out.  for the cost of making three 30 second ads you can certainly afford to make an episodic drama for online distribution.  and no it doesn't matter if it's not going to go on broadcast TV because those people who consume AV content online are exactly those people most likely to 'get' transmedia narratives...  this means of course that the media budgeting has to evolve just as much as the production pot.

no, the real issues in making TP happen lie much closer to home than 'we don't have the budget' territory.  they are twofold, the first of which is we're bound to the conventions of the media spaces we use.  in the Games TM article mentioned above, Keith Arem discusses the TM principles behind his graphic novel Ascend (the image above).  he observes that:

"if a project requires a 30-minute budget introduction, games can do that, but the medium could just as easily offer six high-budget five-hour episodes to revolutionise the story.  film and television are still limited by rigid series structures and minimum lengths".

advertisers on those channels are bound by those same conventions; conventions we as an industry - planners, buyers and media-owners (and indeed Ofcom) alike need to start challenging.  it's the limitations of the spot model that in many cases is preventing transmedia's breakthrough into broadcast channels; and as long as transmedia only exists online, it's unlikely to capture the imagination of marketeers or the budgets of FDs.

but the final barrier to making TM happen in brand comms is the closet to home of all.  Jenkins notes that TM experiences can "be a source of ... frustration [for consumers] if it's inconsistent, undermines the coherence of the work, or promises insights it never delivers".  Arem's solution is simple: "have a good team of like-minded individuals around you ... my philosophy for all of our projects is to have a core team to supervise all creative and technical aspects of the production.  the main focus of that team is to keep the story and assets consistent, and integrate them with the entire franchise".

I think you know where I'm going with this.  agency structures are lucky if they can do this internally let alone with other agencies, resulting in the presention of a joined up and unified transmedia solution to a client.  not only might different creative agencies have to work to one vision, but that vision has to be molded by the space planned by its media agency, and of course vice versa.

the reality is that as long as the conversation with a client only gets as far as "how big is the pack shot?", both agencies and clients will be bound to a dynamic that not only acts as a barrier to transmedia planning, but actively works against it emerging into the mainstream where it so surely deserves to belong.

When Boris, Ken and Brian met George, Zippy and Bungle

a lovely bit of remix for the London Mayor elections which sees Boris, Ken and Brian meet George, Zippy and Bungle.  brands need to learn to more easily move this quickly, attaching themselves where relevant to current events.  the edit quality on this is superb - check out Zippy's look of horror when George makes his accusation...  Adland watch and learn...

Build then advertise it, and they will come: how the iPlayer delivers and relies on BBC's platform-neutral offering

news that the BBC's iPlayer delivered 42 million downloads in the first quarter of 2008 confirms the success of the BBC's online offering [source: MediaWeek].  it doesn't come as a surprise.  the player is simple to use and easy to navigate, and crucially the streaming option allows you to dip into programmes without the drawn-out drama of downloading and saving to your hard-drive.

it marks the most important of what is a range of moves to ensure platform neutrality of the BBC's offering.  hot on the heels of it's Virgin Media and iPhone deals comes the news that BBC will be joining forces with Wii to deliver it's content on Nintendo's home entertainment system.

the strategy is as spot on as you can get as we approach digital switch off.  Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture introduced us to the notion that it's not technology (and applications) that's converging but rather content.  we're consuming converged content on our terms across a range of platforms to suit our needs.  brands and other advertisers could learn a thing or two.

that said, you can sympathise with the criticisms of commercial broadcasters, especially those beyond page one of the EPG.  the BBC - despite the fallout of it's current restructuring, has investment to spare in developing the iPlayer - it's remit to digitise the nation being a keystone of it's license fee settlement.  they are in an enviable position, being a broadcaster that knows what you have to do is one thing; having the investment to make it happen is quite another.

of course the other benefit of being a big broadcaster is being able to cross-promote your platforms.  the iPlayer is as reliant on the eyeballs delivered by it's more established parent as the parent is on the 15-34 reach delivered by its new offspring.  and the BBC trumped it again here.  their penguin trailer on April 1st was just class.  enjoy.

Darth Vader and The Evolving Ecology of TV

I was shown the above - somewhat delightful - clip at a conference last week.  a subsequent forwarding on to a colleague reignited a question I gave pause for thought to a year ago when I asked what is TV?  the answer I came to then is the same answer that I stand by now...  that TV is the act of consuming aggregated audiovisual content.

I pointed out at the time that this definition implied that, should you run with it, YouTube is television.  and I believe it is.  in Dec  06 I wrote:

"the aggregation of TV requires content and distribution.  technology has allowed citizens to produce the former, and the internet has allowed them to do the latter.  we are all - should we wish to be - content aggregators.  we are all budding broadcasters.  and a generation is learning to watch TV aggregated by commercial entities as well as fellow citizens."
mediation post Weds 6th December 06

an obvious question then in all of this is - who is to do the aggregation?  ...commercial broadcasters or - via PVR on TV / subscriptions on YouTube / wall posts on Facebook - viewers themselves?  in negotiating the future of media and communications - the aim of this blog - we have to accept the inevitable conclusion that it is of course both.

in the evolving ecology of TV (in both the broad and narrowcasting sense) the question in not who aggregates, but who - at a given moment in time - we want to aggregate for us.  its a question of context...  Saturday evening on the sofa is very different to 30mins web surfing on a Friday lunchtime.  as a viewer, my individual needs vary massively over the course of a day or week.

commercial broadcasters and internet unilateralists continue to be at war over the issue of who aggregates.  the battle is pointless.  in the year since I wrote my original 'what is TV' post, commercial TV has been under what seems to be continuous fire, not from futurologists predicting their demise, but from a media who have witnessed compromise after compromise of viewer trust.

if broadcast TV thinks it needs to win a perceived war against the internet by cutting corners and taking shortcuts in order to be as popular as possible, then it is fundamentally flawed on two fronts.  one; there is no war - both commercial and viewer-aggregated TV are here to stay, and two; the role of commercial broadcasters in this new ecology is not compete with YouTube by being as popular as possible, but to inspire it by being as original as possible...

the role of broadcast TV is to be the source of original, intriguing, inventive, surprising and high-quality content.  content that demands to sit alongside it's online counterparts.  as Stephen Poliakoff comments in today's MediaGuardian, "if you commission it, the viewers do turn up."

...just as millions turned up to see Darth Vader in cinemas in Empire Strikes back in 1980 (and on TV and DVD ever since)  ...and just as millions have turned up to see the clip at the top of this post.  together they're a great example of this new relationship: content originally produced commercially by Fox and Lucasarts as high-quality content, remixed by DoomBlake for fun, as parody, as art.

both are entertaining, and both have their place in the new TV ecology.  it's notable that DoomBlake's recreative remix is  entertaining because of the original context as defined by Lucas's commercial creative vision.  these content siblings need each other - one as source material, and the other as a way to stay contemporary in a changing world.

The Potential Watershed in the Mobile Media Stagnation

it one of the great wonders of the modern media world; why mainstream use of mobile phones for broadcast media consumption has never really been adopted - despite some very good reasons...

one; the mobile is ubiquitous.  there were well over two billion of them in the world by 2005 (source) and in the UK we have more mobile phones than people (source).

two; we're very emotionally attached to our phones, as Ahonen and Moore observe in Communities Dominate Brands p129;

"a cellular phone is distinctly personal ... this personal association creates a very powerful attachment ... one very close to addiction ... European cellular phone companies have coined a name for the new concept, called "reachability" ... on the fixed line phones you call a place, on a cellular phone you call a person ... reachability is the human need to feel connected ... a passive continuous connectedness in case the important call arrives or event happens ... reachability is the single most addictive aspect of a cellular phone"

three; it's already a device we use (in albeit for some a limited capacity) for interaction with other (mainstream) media, as anyone who's ever voted on a Simon Cowell show can testify.  whilst out on Friday night a friend sent a facebook message via his mobile - essentially disintermediating the phone network in the process.

four; unlike the internet, we're willing to pay for stuff on our mobile phones.  a report cited by Dr Jaques Bughin in an essay for IDS' volume 'New Language for the New Medium of Television' (see here for details) found that mobile users would be willing to pay between 5 to 10 euros a month (and up to 15 euros for month).

five; mobile phones have won every battle they've taken on. in 2001 global sales for camera phones numbered less than 2 million, with digital camera sales well over ten times that amount.  by 2002 camera phones were up to 18 million worldwide, 84 million by 2003.  and by 2004 digital phones outsold digital cameras by 4-1.  the rest is history.  a similar stories can be told for PDAs vs smart phones, and many more people play games on mobile phones than any other platform (source: Ahonen + Moore p49, 55, 68).

but for a combination of reasons - including-but-not-limited-to - lack of a standardised revenue model, downloading capacity and hardware and software limitations, media consumption on the mobile phone just hasn't happened.

then last week the omnipresent Google - the highest-profile member of the Open Handset Alliance made an announcement.

the Android platform  is (arguably) Google's answer to the i-phone.  but it is not - repeat - not, a phone.  its software.  software that is open to be developed by anyone - including advertisers and brands - who'd like to develop some.  the opportunities for brands are multiple and varied - TV access, gaming, retailing (eBay phone application to track your auctions anyone), or bespoke applications that allow consumers integrate and interest with broadcast advertising campaigns... in real time, whereever they are?!

Google have even put $10m up for grabs to those that develop the best applications.  as Google point out, the vast majority of stuff that will work on phones isn't out there yet.  what's new news is that creating that stuff just got a lot more accessible...  does it represent a watershed?  very possibly.

the mobile phone's waited longer than it would have liked to become a mainstream media device, and now with Google's backing, that ambition could soon - finally - become a reality.

Making Media: Negotiating a Truce in the Broadcast | UGC wars

I caught the above on Faris' blog as part of a post on read-write culture.  it's from the brilliant TED, where here Larry Lessig makes the case for a revision of copyright law, in order to negotiate a truce between two sides: on one, the corporations who create original content and seek to protect it in every possible way, and on the other, a new generation of consumer creators who in response are aggressively challenging copyright law and the very nature of copyright itself.

he argues for a private solution that seeks to legalise (and realise the economic potential) of competition between the two sides, and calls for two changes:

1. that artists expect and permit their work to be made more freely available (for example in cases where it's not for commercial gain)

2. that businesses embrace this opportunity, allowing the ecologies of corporate and consumer creation to co-exist

it's a theme that any TV channel controller or magazine publisher (and indeed any editor / aggregator of advertiser-funded content) should be familiar with; how to retain a relevant place in the world as audiences fragment not just to other media channels but to content created by other consumers.

but there's also a clear consequence for advertisers in this evolution.  if consumers (especially younger tech-savvy ones) are essentially disintermediating broadcast channels and sharing content to each other via their participatory networks, then it follows that advertisers and the brand communications they deploy must seek to engage with these new cultural read-writers within the networks.

as far back as 1991, W. Russell Neuman observed that "The new developments in horizontal, user-controlled media that allow the user to amend, reformat, store, copy, forward to others and comment on the flow of ideas do not rule out mass communications.  Quite the contrary, they complement the traditional mass media" (for more see here).  Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture agrees:

"...convergence culture is highly generative: some ideas spread top down, starting with commercial media ... others emerge bottom up from various sites of participatory  culture and getting pulled into the mainstream ... The power of grassroots media is that it diversifies; the power of broadcast media is that it amplifies."

smart advertisers will utilise and integrate both grassroots diversity and broadcast media to communicate their brands; not only to fundamentally communicate with both broad aggregations of audience, but more importantly to be full participants in this re-emergence of the re-write culture.

we've barely begun to scratch the surface - think about Carphone Warehouse's sponsorship of the X-factor; which populates their idents (broadcast amplification) with audio clips from viewers (grassroots diversity).  there's clearly much further to go, but some brands have started.  the question for every other advertiser remains; do you want to participate in the remixed culture or not?  it's not, when you think about it, a question at all.

When Words Collide - a perpective from DDB

thanks to John V Willshire who pointed me in the direction of this video featuring Matt Dyke, Worldwide Planning Director DDB and Jeroen Matser, Senior Planner DDB, discussing the new landscape of digital innovations converging with the physical world. much is said about convergence but this take on how the internet is colliding and interacting with the too-often-overlooked offline world is timely and refreshing.

The Black Box Fallacy

there's a very compelling theory that at some point all our media will be accessed through a single black box.  a box that will deliver our TV, gaming, email, movies and web surfing all to one (or multiple) screens through a single access point.

it's very compelling because it sits so neatly with our concept of convergence; with the idea that technology will be developed (and indeed already exists) to deliver a range of content to our TV screen.  the much-anticipated PS3 not only does games, but does HD DVD and can wirelessly access the internet to boot.  Sony doing internet, Microsoft doing TV etc.  convergence right?

wrong?

the more you think about it the more you realise that there probably isn't going to be mainstream adoption of a little (or big) black box.  firstly, there's no historic evidence for it; as Henry Jenkins notes in his book Convergence Culture;

"I am seeing more and more black boxes.  there are my VCR, my digital cable box, my DVD player, my digital recorder, my sound system, and my two games systems, not to mention a hug mound of videotapes, DVDs and CDs, game cartridges and controllers, sitting atop, laying alongside, toppling over the edge of my television system"

he's not alone.  we have all experienced not the convergence but the proliferation of black boxes.  even when a device can do multiple tasks, it doesn't necessarily replace a separate device dedicated solely to that task.

but the second reason why the black box theory is a fallacy is that context in which we consume stuff changes.  my wants and needs as I type this were very different from my wants and needs last night when I was watching a movie.  Jenkins quotes a Cheskin Research report * as pointing out that:

"The old idea of convergence was that all devices would converge into one central device that did everything for you ... What we are now seeing is the hardware diverging while the content converges

... Your email needs and expectations are different whether you're at home, work, school, commuting, the airport etc., and these different devices are designed to suit your needs for accessing content depending on where you are - your situated context"

"Designing Digital Experiences for Youth", Market Insights Series, Fall 2002 pp. 8-9

there's a fundamental difference between access (hardware) and content, and where there is evidence for convergence is with the latter...

the above is from the Animatrix.  one imagined world; with a multitude of different content; but all designed to be accessed differently across different channels; movie's at cinemas, DVDs at home, MMOG via PC.  its a big early commercial example of what Jenkins has termed Transmedia storytelling, Faris Yakob  wrote a great post about it here.

it is content that converging.  so that we can access it whenever we like on whatever terms we choose.  its for this reason - its worth noting - that we have seen technological convergence outside the home in the form of the mobile phone (which is also a camera and MP3 player and soon TV too)...  we have a luxury of choice inside our homes - PC for working, TV for movies - that we don't have outside.  hardware convergence happened on phones because the contextual need for the convenience of one device, was more important that the contextual need for different devices to be designed for individual tasks.

of course there will be some hardware convergence, but there is unlikely to be a killer-ap black box adopted by the mainstream.  the fact that technology exists is no reason for it to be adopted.  we stubbornly continue to allow human context to determine how we adopt and use technology.  good job too.

whats going to be fun is to see to what extent commercial advertisers use transmedia storytelling.  at the moment a campaign idea tends to be executed across different channels.  there's little consideration given to how what is produced can be contextualised from the off.  and there's massive opportunity for the advertisers - and indeed the agencies - that learn how to do this best first.