Encyclopedia Britannica and FHM to cease publication (images via Guardian and Mumbrella)
news reached mediation last week of two very different publications that are set to cease print publication. at first there may seen to be little in common between the 244 year-old Encyclopedia Britannica and FHM - but they are both, in their very different ways, equal victims of media natural selection.
if we have ever needed evidence of the extent of the change that is afoot in our industry, it comes in the form of the fates of these two very different titles, both of which are victims of the impact of the social web.
the fact is that wikinomics killed the print edition of EB. Wikipedia is the primary symptom, but the cause is a great deal deeper. EB print's demise is a result of the fact that all of us are smarter than any of us, and now we have the tools to manifest that collective knowledge.
talking to The Guardian, president of Encyclopedia Britannica Inc Jorge Cauz counters that "We may not be as big as Wikipedia. but we have a scholarly voice, an editorial process, and fact-based, well-written articles ... all of these things we believe are very, very important, and provide an alternative that we want to offer to as many people as possible". like many businesses, EB are looking to fight 'free', and win.
the same of which can probably be said for the demise of FHM in Australia. much debate has been had on the Mumbrella thread, with everything from product quality to porn to blame. but the fact is that FHM face a very similar battle to EB - they're fighting that fact that people are generating content, for free, that competes for the time and attention that men's magazines used to enjoy from readers.
in the magazine sector's case this is translating into very challenging times. the latest SMI figures (courtesy of Lucy) show that across all media, February '12 was pretty much flat YOY (+0.7%). whilst key growth areas for Feb were Cinema - up an astonishing 83% YOY (YTD it’s up 32%) - and Digital, which is up 29%. by comparison Newspapers and Mags are down 12% and 15% respectively.
in the we-fuelled revolution (the wevolution if you like) brands and businesses that don't quickly evolve are being taken down... in the same week that EB and FHM made their respective announcements; Twitter acquired Posterous, CNN was rumoured to be buying Mashable for upwards of US$200m, TED launched a education-based YouTube channel, LinkedIn hit 3m Australian members, The Australian announced that it has 30k paying digital subscribers and Hungry Jacks sold 485,332 burgers in a Scoopon deal that crashed the site, oh and a video called Kony 2012 became - with 100 million (yes that's right) hits in six days, the most viral in history.
blink and you miss it people, blink and you miss it.
here's the question: how is the wevolution affecting your brand and business? how prepared are you for the change that you may not yet have even seen coming? and how do you avoid the fate of EB and FHM?
Yoruba ceremonial drums, Nigeria. picture from here.
so the lovely Emily got for me a signed copy James Gleick's The Information for my birthday (thanks Emily) and whilst I'm only a couple of chapters in, its already proving to be a bit of a treasure trove. the first chapter discusses the African Drums. when 18th Century Europeans first heard the drums, they had no idea that they were conveying information. yet the drumbeats contained detailed and what seemed to be superfluous information.
"Instead of "don't be afraid," they would say, "Bring your heart back down out of your mouth, your heart out of your mouth, get it back down from there" ... the drums generated fountains of oratory"
the explanation for the elaboration is fascinating.
"in mapping the spoken language to the drum language, information was lost. the drum talk was speech with a deficit ... the drum language began with the spoken word and shed the consonants and vowels. that was a lot to lose ... consequently ... a drummer would invariably add "a little phrase" to each short word. Songe, the moon, is rendered as songe li tange la manga - "the moon looks down at the earth" ... the extra drumbeats, far from being extraneous, provide context"
James Gleick, The Information, Chapter One
there's a beautiful parallel with the world and brands and communication. the moments in which brands connect with people are fleeting and becoming more so. there is a very narrow opportunity in which a marketer can convey information. messages need context, and brands provide it.
so rather than someone hearing "we make cars" (the message) they hear "we make Jeeps" (the branded message). this context takes the message from a simple "this is what we do" to a more richly imbued communication embodying all the associations someone recalls when they hear "Jeep's cars".
this context is crucial ... "we make cars", becomes:
we make Jeeps
we make Toyotas
we make Hondas
it's a useful thinking framework - to separate the context and the content. marketers work in challenging times. the potential opportunities to make meaningful connections with people have never been greater; but with opportunity has come complexity. how are communications cutting-through? how to create the most distinctiveness in market? how and when to engage audiences through media beyond which that I buy?
separating context and content helps to address some of those challenges.
creation of context is the creation of brand meaning. what does my brand stand for? why does it exist? what are the associations I want to create (or reinforce) when someone recalls my brand. this is a long-term process, and it's contribution to a brand's business not always easily measurable. but it's crucially important context - and the marketer is responsible for continuously creating it.
creation of content is the creation of the message. we're having a sale this weekend. new model now available. we've improved our fuel efficiency. the role of content is to influence and stimulate an action or a response. these are shorter term, and the extent to which they permeate and become salient in market are very measurable. they can also be spread with huge efficiency by media other than that which is bought.
separating these two elements helps navigate increasingly complex waters. how can I - as marketer - create context for my brand? a context unhindered by the need for immediate ROI in market. what platforms (through owned media) can I create to hold and communicate this context?
...and how can I efficiently and effectively deploy my messages into market? how can I inspire and encourage people to pass-on that message on my and their behalf?
the combination, like the African drums, are simple messages imbued with the richest of context ... so that the content is un-mistakenly attributed to its brand. the add the pieces together you first have to separate them.
which brings us, of course, to Harry Potter - and this week's announcement that the upcoming Deathly Hallows Part 2 won't be the end of the Potter franchise.
Potter as brand is now established. seven books and eight movies have communicated the narrative and its characters, all of whom are now familiar memes in our culture. like Star Wars before it, Potter - because of the human stories it tells - is now firmly embedded in the popular psyche. but context and content have hereto been one and the same; the experience absolutely binding the two together. books and movies as one-directional communication of story. around this controlled narrative a user-generated culture arose, but it never penetrated back into nor influenced the context or content coming from JKR, Bloomsbury and Warner Bros.
that's about to change. Potter is about to undergo a context content split.
Potter as a brand is now evolving to have two distinct streams. the context will continue to be provided by JKR and co. both the ideological: what are the rules and conventions of the Harry Potter universe? and the physical: in the form of the Pottermore owned-media platform (which will also be the sales platform for HP eBooks).
but content will now, for the first time, be created by JKR and anyone else with the passion and energy to contribute. the long-term building of the Potter brand co-existing but separate to the short-term creation of Potter content.
the evolution is already apparant ... the above announcement inviting and teasing its audience to "follow the owl" - an ARG element signalling a shift in the Potter brand to one that is co-created, crowdscourced and owned by everyone.
Josh Spear is "from the internet". no really, he is. he put everything owned in the Internet and now has much of his possessions stored in the cloud.
his website, JoshSpear.com emerged in 2004 from the back of a Journalism 1001 class in which he was disappointed with the way academics ignored blogs as an emerging media. Josh describes his home as "a daily source of inspiration for marketers, brand managers, advertising executives, and a wide range of everyday people from around the world who love to stay ahead of the curve"...
which I guess more than qualifies Josh to be talking to us at Circus. his theme was 'the Fringes of the Internet', and the way the internet is affecting people and businesses.
he described how shortly after starting his blog he was approached by businesses who wanted to put ads on his site, this turned out to be a fine way to made money, and led to a conversation with advertisers about how effective the ads on his site were. very effective it turns out ... they were seeing click-through rates of 2%...
two percent? asked Josh. yes, they replied. that's a 98% failure rate, said Josh. yes they replied, impressive isn't it!
Josh guessed then that the internet would have a major impact on businesses, and co-founded Undercurrent, a digital strategy firm that applies "a digital worldview to the challenges and ambitions of complex organizations"
"It's about the human behaviour we're going to talk about not the specific websites"
4chan is bad place on Internet but it's also important. it's anonymous. people respond to photos with photos. [it's a bit like the Abyssal plain of the internet; a deep, unexplored region rich in biodiversity that influences the rest of the ocean in ways that we're only just understanding] ... it's where 'I can haz cheezburger?' began ... the LOL-CAT meme. a meme which now results in tens of thousands of cats created every day. like this one:
the misuse of worlds isn't an accident, it's very deliberate. and globally consistent and understood. it's a language called LOL-Kitteh. the Bible has been translated into LOL-Kitteh.
Rick Rolling began on 4chan. in fact "anything funny that's unexplainable starts on 4chan". to the extent that a Time Magazine poll ranked Moot (4chan's creator) as the web's most influential person. only later was it noticed that the first letters of the ranked online poll spelt out a phrase. an incredibly sophisticated and advanced work of electoral engineering / hacking.
Time Magazine's 2009 online poll results. the first letters of the top 21 names spell out "marblecake also the game". marblecake is the name of the IRC channel where Anonymous started their campaign against Scientology, and "the game" is a reference to "The Game" meme source: Wikipedia
the rabbit-hole, it would seem, goes very deep indeed. "4chan is 'the bottom billion' pageviews on the Internet". Spear points out that two things consistently happen to Moot (who is called Charles) (1) he is forced to dump 4chan's data every 12 hours due to hard drive space and (2) every week he is served a subpoena for the information he holds (before it's dumped).
[this is all pretty mind-boggling I'd have thought for the average brand marketing manager, and you can see how they would be queuing up for the elvish Spear to safely have them gaze down the rabbit hole without falling down.] things used to be simple. then there was digital. which disrupted. everything. this is such a familiar phrase that it's beyond cliche, but Spear asks a very interesting question:
"is there a unit of disruption?' ... and how do you stay on top of the disruption? which happens all around you all of the time and increasingly finds ways to impact on your sensory sphere. much as this blog discussed in a January 2010 post, Spear describes Tweetdeck as one way to control the disruption. he has "become an air traffic controller of my disruption"
we are our social graph. we're made up of our disruptions [connections], a point made wonderfully and elegantly with this map of the world, a map formed by nothing but the connections on Facebook.
What happens to a generation of people growing up in the world as drawn by this map and 4chan? a world populated by cat memes and Rick Rolling? a world in which gifts are given virtually. Spear pointed out that thousands of dollars are spent on things that don't exist. virtual economies are springing up everywhere. Farmville makes $50m a month. when Bear Stearns collapsed, a friend of his at Facebook didn't contemplate the collapse of the further banks but rather was promted to think that Facebook should start a bank.
Virtual economies are being used by brands - for example the number of tweets Uniqlo products received affected their price - a fascinating dance between buzz and value.
Radiohead invited people to pay what they thought their album was worth, an invitation that made more money than all other record sales combined. People's idea of money is changing.
the same goes for people's idea of location... take Foursquare, which introduced game mechanics in the form of mayors and badges. Foursquare also allowed tips to by left inside the check-ins, inside the game. tips linked to location so that they're readily available to those who enter the space. Foursquare allows reviewing in realtime on a geographical basis... Spears asked why people share all this information, and showed a slide outlining three reasons why we share adapted from MIT research and Henry Jenkins:
Strengthen my bond - you are what you share in your social graph
Define collective identity - you are based on the five people you spend most time with
Give me status
Viral = a bad thing, something you catch
Spears notes that 'pass-along' is made not of viral, it's made of people sharing something with more than one of their friends, and so on. reaching people is about tapping into cultural resonance. to test this, Spear's office put an image of a funny(ish) joke about Tiger Woods on the web. the pic got 30,000 views in first 48 hours, created a 'microblip' of cultural resonance ... a map of interest, which could then be observed. so how, in Spear's opinion do you create cultural resonance?
group of people + unique culture = amplify to affect society
it's about tapping into a shared interest online because you can't rely on time and space, as shared interests are a way of creating cultural resonance. connect your brand to this. or don't. these interests are being shared whether brands get involved or not.
but be careful brands - angels fear to tread where P Diddy TV trod with Burger King. the video has long been removed, but fortunately for us Lisa Nova's spoof lives to remind us how it want down (nb Nova is now working in TV comedy - she got noticed because she understood the rules of the internet)
in Spear's opinion the fringe of the internet has a novelty scale:
the fringe's novelty scale, as presented by Spears
Spears says that agencies who want to use things like crowd sourcing or 'the fringe' to do their work need to either be the lowest cost option, or the best. if you're neither, you're stuck in the middle, and the middle is not a great place to be.
Spears asks what is the Internet good for? advertisers and agencies may answer that it's good for awareness [incremental] and persuasion. but Spear observes that this is not what the Internet is meant for. the internet is meant for sharing, cooperating and collective action. the latter of which is, in Spear's words, "the holy Grail of humans using technology"... at the fringe are the beginnings of these kinds of great examples...
the Copenhagen wheel collects data from your bike. one person doesn't generate enough data to paint a picture of a city, but eveyone's data does ... and allows the aggregation and interrogation of usable data to generate insight and utility.
Ushahidi encouraged free and fair elections in Zimbabwe, and in the aftermath of Haiti and Christchurch interactive maps directed resources in realtime to where help was most needed. the US state dept now relies on this kind of information to coordinate relief efforts. crowd sourcing is used to collect and sort data. organisations no longer ask for money but for a little bit of time and effort. Alive in Egypt transcribes voice messages into tweets, allowing people to deploy messages and information even when access to the internet is being blocked.
So what has 4chan guy got to do with the fringe?! well what if all the people sending cats around every day gathered intelligence instead? they already have, it's called WikiLeaks, and "we can't yet imagine how this will affect the world"
Some challenges for brands:
how do you change from interrupting people into adding utility for people?
How can brand engage with born digital consumers in their language?
If you take a brand into the universe of the internet, ask yourself if you are following the rules of that universe?
Are you surrounding yourself with enough people that speak digital?
the contents of this post [unless in square parenthesis] is the content of a talk given by @JoshSpear at Sydney's Circus in February of 2011, thanks to Josh for his input in writing this post
so you've seen the above already ... T-Mobile's latest real-people-crowd-mob-activation-engagement thing, which took place at Heathrow's Terminal 5 not too long ago. big thanks to Laura for sending it in my direction.
I've had two totally separate conversations about this activity. the first was on Saturday, where in a discussion about T-Mobile's latest effort my general line of observation was along the lines of 'yeah but they've pretty much done that now ... where can they possibly go? ... they're in danger of becoming a one-trick pony - I fear I may have even gone as far as to use the phrase 'jumped the shark'.
my thinking was that it all sounded rather a bit much. a tactical idea that started - brilliantly - at Liverpool Street a couple of years ago is now being stretched just a little too thin. been there, seen T-Mobile doing that. singing to people as they arrive at Heathrow. really T-Mobile? really?!
the second conversation I had about the effort was this afternoon. a full six hours after I actually took three minutes out of my life to watch the above video of the effort. it would seem that Mark Kermode - who says never critique a movie you haven't seen - is totally right...
strategically this is a tactical activation re-imagined in a new time and place. strategically this is an inside-out TV ad and not a lot more. strategically this is a PR platform that engages relatively few people in the actual experience. strategically we should all be really very over this already.
only I'm not over it. I happen to adore this tactical replay of a PR-led inside out TV ad.
I adore it because of the dedication and effort to make it executionally so polished. because of the realness and authenticity of people's reactions. and because it's a piece of communication that reflects a genuinely positive aspect of the human condition.
strategically this shouldn't work. but in execution, it delivers in spades. a strategic one-trick pony it may be, but as ponies that do a trick go, you've got to admit its a pretty good one...
Zaac pointed me in the direction of the above this morning. it's the trailer for MTV America's remake of the UK's beloved Skins. as someone who watched and loved the show it makes for strange viewing. on one hand the new cast and setting looks strikingly different. but after a while the similarities between the above and the original UK version become not just clear but blindingly obvious.
the car going into the water. the quick edit phone conversation. taking to one's own genitals. even the back garden (yard now) trampoline. all conspire to indicate that this is a clean remake of the show. something which, if true, presents not only a missed opportunity but a huge failing of producing.
a missed opportunity, in that the best adaptations of shows for US audiences haven't been remakes but remixes. same show, different culture. think about how The Office transferred from Slough to Scranton, or how the boys from Manchester evolved into a very different Queer as Folk Baltimore. great remakes, or should I say remixes, protect and nurture the truth of a show whilst mixing in a new culture and society's perspectives and nuances.
from Slough to Scranton - same Office, very different culture
from Manchester to Baltimore - same, err, well totally different actually...
that "the remix is the very nature of digital", is of course now so widely held to be true that it's almost too obvious to quote it. but Gibson's elegant maxim is too often ignored. by TV makers and brands alike. just as in the case of TV shows that fail to capitalise on the opportunities that a remix affords, how many global ads do we see land on the screens of shores a far cry from their (often European or American) origins? or worse, dubbed out of their native tongue, so that we are sold to by smiling fresh-faced lip-synced avatars...
the pressure to create ads that can be deployed across a multitude of regions leads to centrally developed, but often locally less-relevant communications. distinctiveness in communications is key - it mitigates misattribution and builds brand cues that extend the return of a media investment out of the short term and into the longer term. simply deploying a global property locally is no guarantee of success.
this presents a problem for TV producers and brands alike ... a problem that, for the latter, will only be exacerbated by a shift away from broadcast interruption as the de-facto method for audience reach, towards a two-way content and community-led platform that seeks to engage an audience.
MTV's gamble with Skins - to create what looks like a remake rather than a genuine remix - should give pause for thought for marketers. to what extent are we acting in a brand's best interests by picking up and redeploying content into a country - and culture - for which it wasn't designed? how many opportunities are missed, and investment wasted, by failing to reflect the nuances of a culture with whom you seeking to engage?
it has been many moons since Mediation bemoaned Michael Bay's tirade against Paramount's marketing for the dire Transformers 2. you can relive the magic of those crazy days here, but the point of the post was that advertising can't turn a bad product into a good one...
we all have instant access to what the world knows. we can research, reveal and review products and services in a second. no one takes a punt on anything anymore - why would you when everything has been reviewed and rated by the crowd... we don't rely on the promise of a glitzed up poster any more.
I made the point that some of the best marketing stories emerge when communications are a natural extension of product. and that no one knows this better than movies... Transmedia storytelling via the The Matrix, Cloverfield's Mystery Box marketing, The Dark Knight's Vote Harvey Dent ARG to name a few.
the last few weeks have continued the theme of the best of marketing initiatives emerging from Hollywood. the above is for Universal's Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, an adaptation of the comic book series. the whole marketing effort is pretty much text book. there's an incredibly immersive iTrailer (you can put an i in front of anything these days) above, leading to an awesome website which - via its socialrama - is social to the extreme and which actively encourages remixing of the marketing material to propagate content and word of mouth.
the Scott Pilgrim movie website, or is it a comic book? or a mash-up of both?
the socialness of Scott... a plethora of ways to share and engage across you nearest available social network
other recent marketing efforts have continued the innovative theme... this glorious 'Call To Arms' trailer for The Expendables directly takes on the competition that is Julia Roberts' Eat, Pray, Love ...
the trailer observes that the likes of Twilight, Sex and the City and now Eat, Pray, Love, are taking over the cinema, and that this is men's last collective chance to take cinema back. it makes the delightfully honest observation that the place to see The Expendables isn't "off your torrents but in a f***ing theatre (where violence belongs) ...if this loses to Eat, Pray, Love you don't deserve to be a man" - in the spirit of the movie, no punches pulled then.
Hollywood seem to be learning fast. illegal file sharing and the rise of better-than-cinema home entertainment (where you can enjoy movies sans other people talking and on a sofa) continue to threaten box-office revenues. Hollywood need to innovate to keep people in cinemas.
but there's a further interesting angle on all of the above examples of Hollywood entertainment... in that they all start to slash the required marketing budget. they all take advantage of the studios' owned and - predominantly via activation in social networks - earned media.
it's not unusual for a $150m movie to have a marketing budget of $100m+ ... anything that the studios take off their marketing budget goes straight back to the bottom line. movies also have the double advantage of being content rich and very topical, there's a new and shininess which adds to their social appeal.
movie marketing is increasingly getting that marketing isn't about ensuring that as many of the target audience as possible are aware of a movie, rather its about creating value for enough of the right people and encouraging them to propagate your message. the implicit promise... that the product you buy will live up to the marketing, is made explicit by marketing that adds value to a movie's audience before they've ever entered the cinema.
slash your marketing budget via content and sociability that adds value to potential customers. sounds so easy that anyone could do it right? so why aren't you?
Personalize funny videos and birthday eCards at JibJab!
so a little while back, Lauren sent me the attached clip showing us both and the rest of the Twitterpod here at PHD Australia as we'd be cast in MadMen. it's pretty funny and pretty cool and anything that puts me in the same frame as Don Draper is to be welcomed.
but it got me thinking about how much this little video can tell us about the emerging media paradigm that's challenging brands, agencies and the media industry... I think it can tell us a lot about idea-driven planning and the importance of doing multiple smaller things not fewer bigger things. let me explain.
if you've worked in media as long as I you were probably taught that the role of media planners is to link three things together. link the brand to the right media in order to reach enough of the right people, enough of whom will then do or think what the brand requires of them to make the media investment worthwhile. a bit like this.
how I was taught: the right brand in the right media reaching enough of the right people
it's a model driven by impacts - the more impacts the better, which is all well and good. but the above video JibJab video doesn't work like that at all. the brand (MadMen) is there, but media is replaced with a platform - in this case the JibJab video utility / site - and the audience is replaced with the few individuals who get exposed to the video via the link that the originator sends... so the model looks more like this.
how it think it is now: brands using platforms to plug ideas into networks of individuals
this is a model driven by ideas not impacts... rather than having an audience who receive a message, we instead have a few individuals who engage with it. and whilst on the face of it the overall impact is a lot less, this isn't necessarily the case - a few quick numbers...
in the first model let's say you deliver one million impacts. at a click thru rate of 0.1% a you'll get about 1,000 people to click thru to the place or space a brand wants them to go (I appreciate that this misses the brand effect of the other 999,000 people who see the banner ad but run with it) ... the JibJab MadMen requires only 250 to make a video and send it to the three other friends who are in it reach the same number of people.
the emerging model also offers significant benefits. the first is in targeting. from a brand perspective, this model is a lot more likely to reach people who are into the product (in this case MadMen). the second is the level of engagement with the content - and in this instance people are part of the content, which I'd suggest makes it pretty engaging. the third is that it's inherently viral, the products of the model are things that people will want to share and propagate throughout their networks of friends and peers.
the challenge is that you simply don't reach enough people, but you can always amplify... there's no reason why you couldn't use the one-to-many model to showcase certain videos, perhaps even as a promotion or competition mechanic.
there's a big implication too. there's no way that this model replaces the scale and reach of the broadcast model, but that can't be ours to mourn... if scale is what you're after then there's only two ways to get it. either you have the best ideas (in the long tail of an ideas ecology the impact of the few biggest ideas will greatly exceed the individual impact of any of the majority of others), or you create more ideas.
in that context, screw fewer bigger better ... the best performing brands will be those that can scale the output of the quantity of their ideas. a marketing effort spread across multiple smaller ideas will be better, and a great deal less risky, than the same effort invested in fewer bigger ideas. not sure what Don would have to say about that...
the established institutions of 'old' media were always going to take the hardest hits as the combined effects of a global advertising slowdown and a digitising media economy came to bear. such seems to have been the case. according to Warc's latest Consensus Forecast, 2009 TV revenues in the States will fall 10.9% yoy versus total global ad spend yoy decline of 10.5%. more substantial 2009 decreases in TV are anticipated in the UK, France, Germany and Japan.
looking forward to 2010, TV could very well be the area of media that not only emerges most strongly from the recession, but charges out guns blazing leading the brigade of other media behind it. the same Warc report suggests that marketers in two-thirds of the sample are intending to devote more revenues into TV next year, with Brazil, China and India up by more than 11%, the US by 1.8%, and France by 1.3%.
in fact whilst advertising revenues have declined throughout the recession, there seems to have been limited disruption on the quality of networks' output. new offerings, such as the US's FlashForward or Australia's Celebrity Masterchef have emerged and more than held their own. and whilst it could be argued that reality TV has more than shaped current TV output globally, it hasn't stopped the likes of Glee and Modern Family making their mark.
but despite strong content and a return of ad revenues in 2010, viewing will surely switch online right? well no necessarily so. this week also saw a report from the UK's Enders Analysis arguing that the scale of the VOD market has been overplayed, and that by 2020 the overall national UK average of VoD viewing will be 5%;
"and at these levels, and after taking into account the lower tolerance of interruptive advertising in on-demand programming, non-linear VOD services are unlikely to have a significant impact on commercial spot advertising revenues during the next 10 years ... the traditional linear broadcast TV model continues to work well in terms of reliability, simplicity, ease of choice and ability to deliver popular programming with mass appeal"
but all this is without taking into account the phase shift that could and should happen with TV in the year ahead. 2010 could be the year that TV genuinely goes social... as the Guardian observed in a cracking data-fueled article on Jedward's storming of the Twittersphere;
"Every Saturday and Sunday night, Twitter is exploding with real-time boos, back-pats and reactions to the show's performances. It's a re-imagining of the old-media watercooler ("Did you see The X Factor last night?") in live, online space ("Omg jedward are through!") - and it could point the way to the future of TV..."
as Gary Hayes, a former development producer for the BBC who now lives in Sydney and blogs rather awesomely here, points out:
"we now know when our attention is required, especially those inciting moments when emotion or serendipity may be possible. So with these two things happening there are a growing number of services trying to glue the two – either bringing the TV to the back-channel or layering the back-channel ‘over’ the TV" (source)
hayes has aggregated a whole host of services, either existing or in development, that are bring TV to the social space and vice-versa. here are three of my favourites (all sourced from Hayes' original post):
EpiX has high-profile backing from the likes of Viacom, Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios and Lionsgate. it's a platform for viewing content online, but specifically you can invite your mates to private screening rooms and interact with them... ITV if you're listening, X-Factor was made for this...
another favourite (and another example of the increasing warmth between and cooperation by the Gates and Murdoch organisations) in the shape of X-Box and Sky who have teamed up to make the latter's content available on the former's entertainment console. but the basics of the streaming aside, the really interesting bits are when the TV screen pans back and your in a room with your and your mates' avatars. representations that you can support, deride, encourage, laugh at or ask questions of. real social interactivity in real time with real people...
there's a full video of a presentation that Xbox product manager Jerry Johnson gave to paidContent:UK here - jump to 5 mins 40 secs to get the social bit:
finally, on the mobile front there's tvChatter, a iPhone application that allows you to connect TV content to the Twitterstream relating to that show in real time. you can follow Tweets from everyone or just from people you follow. and if you're not sure what to watch, you can see which shows are generating the most interest and check them out:
this is exciting stuff. and I'm not pretending for a second that its anything new: we've been talking about, SMSing and debating TV for years. but never have we been so connected to so many people we know in real time to do so. never have the conversations about the TV we love been so prevalent and so accessible. I hope then that 2010 isn't just the year that TV sees a resurgence in revenues, but also the year that TV finally gets social... we will never look at our screens in the same way again.
so you're Skype and you're brilliant and everyone using you loads for free internet to internet calls. but the value ready to be unlocked in your business is in paid for calls to mobiles and landlines. what to do? ...well in an email this morning from Skype they pointed me in the direction of their solution... in a cool idea, Rob Cavazos has journeyed into the middle of nowhere and is awaiting our calls, whilst always staying within the frame of a camera.
the website seamlessly introduces you to the idea whilst clearly articulating the options and benefits of adding credit to your Skype account so that you make calls to non-internet destinations.
the challenge now is amplification, amplification, amplification. Skype need to ensure they capitalise on their investment in getting Rob into the middle of nowhere and land the idea in spaces and places beyond their site. they have a YouTube channel which is a great start, but I can't seem to track down any kind of live feed? the project now needs to go into overdrive to create WOM and conversations in and around what's going on with their experiment...
getting their man there was one thing, I look forward to seeing if Skype can pull off the other trick of ensuring that the idea has traction and momentum so that their idea is a starting not an end point.
one of the biggest challenges and opportunities we face is bringing to life our collective understanding of people in meaningful and engaging ways. beyond the demographic, beyond the observation or statistic, beyond the quote or the screen-grab ...there lies insight and understanding of people (I nearly typed consumer there) that inspires, influences and dictates the best of what we do.
its awesome then to see such interesting work emerging from the boys at BAMM, who sent me a note describing what they'd done for Nokia in Africa...
"As part of an international project for Nokia we looked at bonding behaviours in different cities across Africa, Asia and Europe. The team spent a week with a middle-class family in Lagos. We observed, interviewed, photographed and filmed Amaka with her extended family. We were guests at the naming ceremony for her eight-day old baby, which gave us better insights into how her community bonds."
in a world where more information about more people is more available all the time, experts who can go somewhere, experience a place in time and the people within it, and return with valuable, genuine and actionable insights about what they saw and heard becomes increasingly valuable. whenever I see what these boys do I redouble my own efforts to go beyond the observations and stats and mine for myself the insights that make our communications as meaningful and effective as they deserve to be. brilliant stuff.
you can see the video of what BAMM did for Nokia here
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