Altacircle

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

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 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.

Lots of people call out great videos on YouTube.  The Keyboard Cat and Double Rainbow probably have as much unaided awareness as Coke Zero and this shouldn’t be surprising, video works.  TV advertising and millions of dollars of research has proven that over 50 years.

My question is as video moves online, how will it become more interactive?  YouTube has their Creative Gallery which talks about adding a set of different techniques:

• Overlay Information
• Outbound Links
• Branching Storylines
• Interactive Scenes

and there are a number of other companies offering tools like Video Tagging.  But none of these seem to be catching on a real advertising unit or interactive tool.
We can’t say it all hasn’t been hyped.  In 2006 Business Week ran an article “Video Tagging Gets Cool.”  In 2007 MGM Grand’s “Maximum Vegas Tour” had clickable areas for overlay information and navigation and won a Bronze Cannes Lion.  Today, Maximum Vegas is still on MGM Grand’s site, but it is a linear video.  Video tagging isn’t talked about and few videos include hotspots, branching storylines or even adjacent content tied to the video timeline. 
When you look at a case like Samsung’s “Follow Your Instinct” you see a branching video story that has high production values and sexy actors, but only 300k views.  Perhaps the product message is too strong to go viral like Double Rainbow (28 million views) or keyboard cat (15 million) or even Old Spice’s man on a horse (where the making of had 1.7m views).
It is well understood that video assets made for TV end up on YouTube and that they will be linear.  But all of us are also filming for digital channels and catching outtakes and looking to push the envelope to make our work more engaging. 
Why not more interactivity?

The big question is this a creative director’s worst nightmare?

Direct Marketing creatives have long been forced to consider results alongside aesthetics and concept in creating ads.  Either people respond or they don’t and it is usually anywhere between 3 days (for email) and 3 weeks (for direct mail) before you find out.

Now this level of measurement is coming to advertising.  Whether it is social media reaction, % of watches versus fast forwards on DVRs, or clicks on tablets, our industry will be measured.  And it will change the creative we produce because we have been hired as professional marketing consultants to get results, not as professional designers to deliver creative.  The more we add science to our craft to match the magic of a great idea, the better we’ll all be.

Does the collective subconscious of 90 people make a better judge than 1 Gerry Moira?

♻ Retweet

Gerry Moira Chairman & Director of Creativity, Euro RSCG says that this is a great ad:

Award Winning Freelander Ad.

He awarded it best ad of the month in The Anna’s saying “Against a long term car park of ads with shiny metal boxes, this ad employs a confident and differentiated use of illustration…”
But does it sell? We wanted to find out if it was effective in communicating key messages of ‘0% APR Typical*’ and ‘Why get a car when you can get a Land Rover?’
We tested it with 30 appropriate people recruited via in street intercepts to avoid any bias from a self-selecting sample who had opted in to be part of a market research panel. We tracked where their eyes looked and recorded their subconscious emotional reactions using facial coding whilst they looked at an appropriate publication that included the Freelander ad.

The heatmap shows what 30 readers looked at:

Eye Tracking Results From 30 Viewers.

 

Always a bit funny to see yourself speaking, but also a great way to be better!

This is from my Social Media Week presentation in Toronto.  The presentation is about 40 minutes but the Q&A went on for a full additional hour if you really, really have nothing else to do.

JWT presents Business behind the Buzz with John Baker from JWT Toronto on Vimeo.

I’ve been listening to Cory Doctorow’s podcast on the train and it is amazing how many ideas pop into your head when you hear a futurist and technologist — or at least a good one — speak.

Creative Process / Design Competitions

In a podcast today Cory talked about a game designer at IDEO that feels their is a failure in design competitions where a cash prize is held out for the “best idea.”  The reality is by definition the best idea is generated because the best people are competing and holding back their ideas from one another. 
By structuring the competition in another way this can be avoided.  For example if there is an open community board that works to solve the problem and the prize is awarded based on participation and quality of the ideas and commentary which is all recorded, then people will be open to collaborating.

Use of Twitter for Idea Generation

The growth of Twitter has surprised plenty of people but it shouldn’t.  It is simply the technology can be used so many ways that makes it so powerful.  From sharing banalities with friends, to being an easier way to blog, to idea generation.  Here is an obvious but solid Doctorow use:  Need a column idea for the Guardian?  Ask your twitter community and then re-tweet back the ideas that are the most interesting for a second level of comment.  The result, in 20 minutes really solid ideas are generated and vetted.

Application in Advertising and Digital Agencies

Idea generation in traditional agencies focuses on small sets of people iterating ideas in dark rooms.  In digital agencies the ideas tend to be more multidiscipline and include more brainstorms before documentation, but are still managed mostly without technology.  The big question is how can some of these ideas be applied without the “committee effect” that takes a nascent great idea for the horse, and turns it into a camel. 

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Technorati Tags: Agency Future, Software Develoment, Marketing

The story of Yahoo is an amazing story of the Internet and how quickly it moves and how ruthless it really is. 

I had lunch with Lewis Gersh the other day and we talked about the big ones — AOL, MySpace — but also the long list of others — GeoCities, Excite, Altavista, LetsBuyIt, Interworld, Netscape, The Globe, QXL — that crossed industries and have all disappeared.  The question of why is of course different for each one, but here is a very insightful post from someone that was inside Yahoo before Google was founded.

The big lesson I take from below?  Realize that if you rely on a website to succeed, you are a software company.  If you don’t understand how to get the best developers and keep them, you will fail. 

In my world of creative agencies we spend a lot of time understanding how to get and maintain the best creative culture.  How long before we realize we’re in the software business as well?

August 2010

When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing. It was supposed to be what Google turned out to be.

What went wrong? The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time, practically to the beginning of the company. They were already very visible when I got there in 1998. Yahoo had two problems Google didn’t: easy money, and ambivalence about being a technology company.

Money

The first time I met Jerry Yang, we thought we were meeting for different reasons. He thought we were meeting so he could check us out in person before buying us. I thought we were meeting so we could show him our new technology, Revenue Loop. It was a way of sorting shopping search results. Merchants bid a percentage of sales for traffic, but the results were sorted not by the bid but by the bid times the average amount a user would buy. It was like the algorithm Google uses now to sort ads, but this was in the spring of 1998, before Google was founded.

More

Interesting to see this article on IPG’s Media Lab.  We’ve been pitching dynamic advertising and targeted communications for years.  As Brian Monahan points out later in the article, it isn’t the technology that holds up implementing these ideas, it is how Madison Avenue (and clients) are organized.

All agencies across the spectrum from advertising to DM and PR will need to understand dynamic data elements being fed into interactive creative pieces.  Whether a banner ad (as described here), an e-mail or an side-bar given to the NY Times for the tablet version of an article — it is dynamic data that will get people’s attention and thus deliver the message.

Interpublic Takes Media Lab From Theory To Application: Initial Foray Focuses On, Well, Applications

by Joe Mandese, Friday, August 6, 2010, 9:11 AM

After years of studying the theory of how
emerging media are impacting the consumer advertising marketplace,
Interpublic’s renowned media lab is restructuring and shifting its focus
to practical , real-world application. Not surprisingly, one of its
first applications is, well, an application. Specifically, it will test
and deploy new forms of online advertising that dynamically connect with
other software or databases. The new format, which Interpublic
executives believe could be the next big breakthrough in advertising,
exploits so-called APIs, which in tech industry parlance means
“applications based interface,” but which from a marketer’s or agency’s
point-of-view means advertising will simply become a pathway to any kind
of programming a creative thinker, media strategist or programmer can
think of to connect with a consumer.

“We believe the next generation of storytelling will be fueled by
dynamic data elements,” asserts Brian Monahan, the head of social media
at Interpublic’s Universal McCann unit, who recently took over as
day-to-day director of Interpublic’s Emerging Media Lab, when former
chief John Ross stepped down to launch Shopper Sciences, a promising new
shopper marketing agency that will draw from many of the innovations
developed by the lab.

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