Altacircle

One of the topics we are constantly discussing is making advertising more authentic. A real POV, a big ideal, a non-manufactured reason for a brand or a company to talk sincerely to its customers.

The same challenge is there for managers. If the digital culture has developed a universal bullshit detector for advertising, we apply it everywhere. And the top place is management memos. When you create these communications working with comms folks, lawyers and 15 managers with 15 opinions, it is easy to understand why the human tone is lost, but the reality is the lack of damage by being bland and mundane is actually more damaging.

Look at the new CEO of Yahoo’s first global communication below. It is identikit corp speak and shows once again how far yahoo has come from an owner managed, entrepreneurial venture like Virgin or Facebook.

Yahoos:

Thank you for all of the feedback, support, and comments since our all-hands meetings in Sunnyvale on Monday and NYC on Wednesday. I’m fired up and I hope you are too. I believe in the power of what we’re doing. We have an incredibly talented team, unparalleled strengths in key areas and most importantly, I see the purple pride building everywhere. Let’s move forward quickly with conviction and confidence.

We have a lot to do. The most pressing thing I heard from you is the desire to clearly define our vision and strategy. I promise you we will be transparent and plan to articulate this in the coming weeks. Right now, we’re identifying the most critical priorities and initiatives, clarifying the scope and charter of teams, ensuring we’re positioned to build on successes quickly and effectively, and focusing on Q2.

This is a great debate that Brian Morrissey has picked up for the last story on the DigiDay Brands email or perhaps I shouid say “anchor position.”

I remember trying to launch Priceline in the UK in 1999 — we bought every banner you could, make great ads and no one knew what Priceline was when we were done.  Now that was 1999, but the same problem happens today.  Jerry Neuman makes an interesting case — direct mail has also chased brand building budgets and even though you can produce a stunning card, it hasn’t succeeded.

Of course to me the question really is moot — as TVs become more connected and video search extends to the living room TV will be more like the web with all of the ad auctions, targeting and remessaging that we see online.

The question is what wil the ads look like then?

As I like to say, when we realized we could do direct mail, we didn’t put a poster in the post.  And when direct mail shifted to email, the formats all changed again. 

So what will become of the 30 second spot when the TVs are all connected?

What If Online Doesn’t Work For Branding?

April 16, 2012 – 8:00 am  

Jerry Neumann is a partner in Neu Venture Capital, a New York City-based seed-stage investor group with investments in 33Across, Metamarkets, PerformLine, The Trade Desk, Optim.al, Media Armor, and Yieldbot among others.

Jokes all start with one of a few stock set-ups. “A man walked into a bar.” But the punchlines are all different. VC pitches are the opposite: the set-ups are all different, but the punchlines are all the same.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. “We enable the half of advertising that is not yet online: brand advertising!” Been hearing that one for more than ten years now. It permeates the hopes and dreams of every adtech entrepreneur and investor. And still no one has cracked the code.

My friend Tim Hanlon got together with Tim Chang a few weeks ago on AdExchanger to offer some reasons why this might be. Worth your time, but here’s the tl;dr:

• No standards or consistent measures of “success” other than outdated or inadequate metrics like CPM and CTR;
• Limited real-time intelligence;
• Unsuitable display ad formats; and
• Lack of creativity in formats.

The prize is huge. As Tim and Tim point out, two-thirds of advertising spending is brand advertising, but online only one quarter is. In fact, if brand advertising dollars moved online in the same proportion that sales advertising has, it would almost exactly close the famous gap between time spent online and ad dollars spent online. The $50 billion gap that Mary Meeker mentions is exactly equal to the missing brand spend.

I understand the urgent desire to figure out online brand advertising. If we did, we’d more than double the online advertising market. Online pubs would rejoice, online marketing pros would have more excuses to go out drinking with prospective clients, my portfolio value would quintuple overnight. Good things all. And I appreciate the optimism that Tim and Tim have, their willingness to keep suggesting solutions. But I think it’s the triumph of hope over experience. Each of the proposed solutions has been tried, and tried and tried. And still we believe that this time it’s different, that this year an online branding play will work. Online video maybe, or Facebook, or Pinterest. Every new company is touted as the one that will make branding work online.

But what if we try all these things, like we’ve tried everything before, and they don’t work? What if we eliminate all the possibilities and what remains is… nothing? I’m going to be branded a heretic for saying this, but what if online just doesn’t work for branding?

A year ago I published a post internally at JWT, and here on Altacircle, talking about why agencies need to learn software development.  The argument was that all good digital marketing is software at the end of the day, and that as long as most agency personnel respond with the expression “but I’m not technical,” it will be hard for us to do good digital marketing.   Today Joe Lozito, SVP Technology at Digitas, published a piece on Digiday titled "Why Marketers Need to Think Like Developers" on the same theme.

A big part of my argument from a year ago was that as our advertising / marketing industry changes, this is a big an opportunity.  IT spending is over 3 times advertising spending and as advertising become more technical, it is likely marketing will call on IT to divert funds from internal infrastructure projects to technical projects that are consumer facing.

Just this past December, Gartner has published its predictions for 2012 and has stated that by 2015 they expect 35% of IT expenditure to be managed outside of the IT department.  This can be seen as a threat if those budgets are handed to traditional IT partners like Accenture or the new breed like Sapient, but it is also an opportunity if the overall IT expenditure remains the same and the funds are shifted to teams that understand consumer needs and how to make a compelling user experience.

Of course these moves don’t happen overnight.  Technical projects include technical people and they have every right to question the capability of their partner doing the work.  So once again, agencies really do need to learn software development.

Marketing Code: Why Agencies Need to Learn Software Development

The world’s fixation with technology isn’t new.

CES is has grown so big people need Segways to get to their keynotes, Intel has posted the highest revenue in it’s 42 year history and  according to Gartner worldwide IT spending will be $2.5 trillion in  2011.  This is a number which is more than 3 times worldwide advertising spending.

What is new is that after years of curiously watching their IT  colleagues wrestle with ERP supply chain systems, marketers are being  dragged in.

Amends on a set of rich media ads aren’t covered in e-mail, they are  managed through an extranet bug tracker.  The campaign planning to  redesign a brand site starts with a workshop to agree use cases.  Under  half way into a six-month project to launch a set of in-store displays  we learn a three day delay on approving the concept will shift the  launch date three days.

This is the world of systems integration and you only need to  consider a few of the activities that make up marketing today to see why we marketers really need to learn software development.

http://altacircle.com/blog/2010/12/31/marketing-code…re-development/

Now that we’re actually talking to our teams in the various regions about dotJWT, we are also starting to PR.  Great to be back doing journalist meetings and being back in the press, of course.

To me the best part about meeting with journalists — and the industry analysts like Forrester and Altimeter and Recma fall in the same camp — is that you get such a great cross-agency perspective in the conversation.  Smart industry journalists actually have an even better perspective on the changes we are all going through inside agencies and with clients then we do.

http://mediaquestcorp.com/communicate/communicate/

Page 62-63

If you think of all of the types of civil dissent — marches, protests, sit-ins, occupies — this one is a new one for the mix.   Given the mess of a piece of legislation going through Congress, it is great to see the tech and internet industry mobilize a bit.

Self induced denial of service?

It is clearly effective since every major media outlet has picked up the story and generally put in on page 1, err, the homepage, err, the top of their feed.  Given how easy it is to contact your members of congress online, it isn’t surprising a change to Tumbler resulted in 80,000 calls to representatives.  Be interesting to see wikipedia’s response rates.

Of course as a reader of Cory Doctorow and supporter of the Electronic Freedom Foundation, it has to be said the issue is a complicated on.  Forcing DNS edits, allowing persecution of host sites and removing of links definitely seems like classic bad work in Congress.

And just at a time when the industry is making buying videos and magazines easy enough to provide real revenue and the ad industry is getting organized to turn the digital pennies everyone is complaining about into digital dollars that can support publishers as well as independent artists.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/18/technology/web-wide-protest-over-two-antipiracy-bills.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=global-home

Lifestreams.

I’ve just been reading an article in the WSJ about David Gelernter, a professor at Yale that published a book called “Mirror Worlds” in 1991.  In it he talks about lifecasting, which is effectively what happens when a series of objects are organized according to time.  As the article points out:

A lifestream is a way of organizing digital objects—photos, emails, documents, Web links, music—in a time-ordered series. A timeline, in essence, that extends into the past but also the future (with appointments, to-do lists, etc.). Facebook, with its “wall” constantly updated with postings by you and your friends, is a lifestream. Twitter’s feed is a lifestream. “Chatter,” developed by Salesforce.com for internal use by client companies, is a lifestream.

And this of course has implications for the future:

Web browsers will become stream browsers. Users will become comfortably accustomed to tracking and manipulating their digital objects as streams rather than as files in a file system.

There is no question being rid of the “file system” wouldn’t be a such a bad thing, but it will require people to give up on their property instinct. 

Think about music, although it developed through live music — ie “experiences” — it shifted to owning albums and CDs.  Music collections defined people.  Of course radio was available and what station you listened to also showed your style, the real focus was the collection.  The act of finding the music, buying it, listening to and sharing albums, and displaying it. 

With “personalized radio stations” and services like Spotify that focus shifts to curated playlists instead of collections.  Aside from the impact on music stores, it actually shifts how people think about ownership.  People are asked to revel in the demonstration of skill of putting together a great playlist of say 1920s early jazz, but there is no property there.  It is the shift from being an art collector to being an art curator.

Now of course being released of the burden of managing harddrives full of photos, documents and presentations would probably be welcome.  And if you take the concept to objects we all lease our cars, rent our houses and replace the random objects we lug around with us with temporary displays that demonstrate our personality at the moment. 

All nice but don’t we have 3,000 years of being taught the importance of property ownership?

For all of the talk of technology reducing the need for business travel, planes seem pretty full these days.

It is a true cliche to say that business is more global than ever and we’re seeing it on our dotJWT team with people working on the development that are spread from Buenos Aires to London to Dubai and Singapore.  The question I’d like to see research on is how often do you need to be physically across from each other and how much video, voice, IM and skype can work.

There is no question Kick-offs are critical.  People often don’t know each other and there is so much more communicated face to face in getting to know people.  In fact, sort of like the inane 18 hour university road trips that create life friendships, I’d say it has to be about more then dinner.  Teams that will work together have to be forced to sit in windowless office conference rooms for at least 6 hours before they can go to a fantastic trendy bar and celebrate together … for another 4 hours.

This punches through any posturing, gives time for differing agendas to make it out and allows peples real characters to come through.  And those are the characters that make or break a project.

That’s the easy part, but then comes the big question:  teams will drift apart pretty quickly if they aren’t pulled together and reminded of the common reason we’re all spending time on whatever it is we’re doing.  The Roman Army had a great way to keep people working to a common goal:  if a group broke ranks or lacked discipline, they drew lots and one tenth were then bludgened to death by their peers.  This could work for excessive use of powerpoint slides today but I don’t think it fits with modern motivation theory.

So instead we use Check Points to get teams in front of senior executives and remind everyone of progress.  Team Incentives can include business travel to nice places dolled up as “train the trainer” programs.  But at the end of the day, it is the routine communication that has to keep the team together.

So the question is:  Can technology do it?  Do extranets like Base Camp make a bid difference?  They definitely keep people informed.  Do video conferencing like our JWT Talking Heads tool do better then phone conferences?  You can’t put Skype on mute when you’re peering into the camera like LonelyGirl15 waiting for the conversation to come round.  As much as you may say “but I know what they look like” there is more bandwidth in a video call then voice alone.

And last is video conferencing rooms.  The great technology that was supposed to save us from the aluminium baloons that haul us — too slowly — across the planet.

I suppose the answer is all of the above.  Looking forward to reading more of the science and checking it against the ever so particular environment that is JWT, and then publishing what really works.

So on Friday night, after 3 weeks+ of trial and error, research and failed attempts I finally was able to hack my Nook Color and turn it into a full Android tablet.  Thank you Barnes & Noble for making a beautifully designed piece of hardware and making your Nook Color software available as an Android app which is what makes it possible to go for a full overwrite of the tablet software rather than the alternatives.
What did I learn?

• The android development community is amazing.  There is a ton of threads, instruction and patches to work with.  In fact it was actually too much for mere mortals like myself with limited time.
• There is definitely room for a 7″ tablet in our lives.  Riding the train with all of the ipadders it is easy to see the popularity but if you are carrying a laptop, and a phone, an 11″ tablet is overkill.
• RSS feeds matter.  Barnes & Noble and Amazon have to understand there is SO much content out there they can’t expect to fully control the publishing process.

How did I make it work and be stable?
The answer wasn’t putting Android or CM7 on a bootable SD card, couldn’t get that stable and realized I wouldn’t want to boot into the Nook OS once I could get to my books and magazines.  It also wasn’t wasn’t doing a “Auto-Nooter” upgrade adding Android Market to the BN Nook Color OS since the Nook is being updated regularity.
The answer was to use the Cynogenmod 7 Build 177 version of Android and it is a reasonably recent build but not the latest nightly upload.  Then the last “signed” version of Google Apps (8/28).  Big thanks to XDADevelopers and this guide in particular.

So here another brand gets into trouble trying to generate content from bloggers.  In this case a set of food and mommy bloggers were asked to attend an underground restaurant run by George Duran, the celebrity chef but for the last course, a Marie Callender’s frozen food was served, and the bloggers reactions filmed by hidden cameras.

Not a new technique, but a classic mistake given the bloggers cardinal rule against shilling.

So the question is it subtle?  Not really.  “Brands need to start behaving like human beings” is the phrase we are hearing more and more.  And that is simple enough.

But just as brands should put the customer first and every company knows it has to take care of its people as its most important asset, doing is much harder then saying.

And there is no question that social media is unforgiving, as the NY Times so well point out in their article.

Remember the AT&T “You Will” campaign from the 90s? 

It is the one that everyone got upset about because AT&T expected us to send faxes from the beach.

The ads also promised such radical things as getting directions from an in-car GPS, buying concert tickets from a cash machine, and tucking your baby in via video call.  Perhaps we need to recognize near future fiction can come true.  Whether or not AT&T is the company bringing it us is another question.  And then there is Tom Selleck.

AT&T 1993 “You Will” AdsTechnorati Tags: AT&T, Near Future Fiction, Advertising