A few months ago I posted and circulated some work out of Sweden (Bonnier) and the UK (BERG) that was presented as a prototype for the next generation of magazines. 

Then everyone went tablet crazy at CES, the iPad launched and now Wired has released their new format. 

What is not surprising is that it is picking up a lot of the same design metaphores.  It isn't surprising because they make sense. 

My question is why is this limited to tablet devices?  We can replicate this on the web and it would be a big step forward for magazine content.  Especially when you consdier multi-touch track pads replacing mice as the primary pointing device.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/02/the-wired-ipad-app-a-video-demonstration

Some of the guys at work recently sent around this youtube video of the Google Liquid Galaxy. 

It is a 20% project by Jason Holt, a Google engineer who took 8 LCD screens, added voice recognition and created a global observatory meets planetarium thing and presented it at TED.

If you think about putting one of these in schools and adding the ability to "zoom in" on webcams running in international cities, you have a real means of making geography more than fun, provide a better approach to teaching architecture, and to really connect people.  Could really breaking down the stereotypes and prejudices that build up when people have never traveled. 
 

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
–Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (1869)

Ever the techno-optimist, this is an easy one!
 

Google Liquid Galaxy live demo at TED

Love what gets forwarded around a good digital team.  This one goes to Ume for forwarding around an interesting YouTube link. 

This actually is a related video — a well presented and well thougt-out approach to spatial computing.  What is also really interesting is the quick intro into why our computers are the way they are:

–Command Line – the earliest interface relying on text commands – type in and it responds (1:20)
–Paper Paradigm – Current windows / mac desktop approaches where the computer manages 2D spaces (1:40)
–Spatial Computing – Current thinking about allowing computers to work in 3D space (2:45)

This is an interesting presentation by Giles from Ogilvy on social media that gives a good insight into how they are approaching integration and social media. 

The full video on his site looks at a case study from Lenovo on the Beijing Olympics which I wish I had built, but picking out just parts referring to how Ogilvy works with digital shows how much things have progressed since I was there.

• Digital is not a silo – Digital, as well as social and mobile (and new ones to come) are all cross discipline.  This was well underway when I was at OgilvyOne and makes sense when there are over 150 digital professionals spread across 14+ companies (in the UK alone).

• Discipline Heads, Digital Hearts and Multi-Disciplinary Muscles – this is a nice way of putting it since clients often want to engage with a specific discipline, even to buy integrated solutions and digital is not a silo.  The question back to Ogilvy — since OgilvyInteractive isn't called out — is who takes the call when the client wants a Digital discipline lead?
• Brainz – looking to fundementally revisit how work is created by having a social network that allows crowd sourcing solutions
• Blackbook of Suppliers
• 80/20 – From Mckinsey – 80% what works well and 20% innovation and testing

It is true that digital is pervading all of the traditional disciplines of marketing (advertising, direct marketing, PR, promotion) and that teams across all of these disciplines need to be able to understand and respond to digital questions.  If the speading around doesn't dillute the skillset — and using good technology can help avoid this — then it looks like a good approach.
 

Is this a great piece of technology that really could change the game — if it can be made practical?  Or as CES closes and everyone waits for Apples big release, are the rumours just building to get us all engaged.

Recombu does a nice piece of analysis on why it is possible.  And even why it would be a very Apple thing to do.

Apple has historically adapted niche input methods and popularised them for a mainstream audience. It did it with the computer mouse in 1984, and then again with the touchscreen in 2007. Both technologies had languished in esoteric devices, or in the case of the mouse, in the labs of Xerox Parc. To imagine today’s PC without a mouse is unthinkable. The inclusion of eye-tracking tech in the company’s forthcoming tablet would be Job’s magnum opus. What better flourish to a career that began with the popularisation of windows, icons, mouse and pointer than to usurp them all?

And there is a bit of substance in the a patent application in place and reported purchase of eye tracking units from Swedish technology company Tobii. 
Overall to me I'd be surprised if the iSlate launches with real eye tracking.  I'm still waiting for decent voice recognition before I buy into an electroencephalographic headset to finish my powerpoint presentation.

  Interesting Eye Tracking Links:
 

http://www.simpleusability.com/services/usability/eye-tracking/demo – interesting video of eye tracking controlling a mouse
http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2006/06/13/eyetracking-worth-the-expense/ – some of the learning of eye tracking research / heat mapping on website usage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw&feature=player_embedded – classic video of headtracking's impact on the Wii experience

A small step into the work of ecommerce affiliate fun that you just can't do on wordpress.com.

And a quick collection of interesting books.  I can see this will have to make it's way to a library page when I get the time.  For now it is simply amazing that one can add a functioning affiliate widget … in less then 10 minutes.

If you haven't read them, want to read them or or going to buy on of them anyway, click through from here!"

CES is awash with people talking tablets and slates, and e-readers are finally getting traction.  That is fine and exciting from a hardware point of view, but what about design?

Ever since Jakob Neilson gained popularity and promoted usability (often with top-left nav approaches), the web has been wrestling with usability versus design.  I've been looking for a good visual summary of web page design from single column early sites, to top-left, to innovations like flash navigation, cover-flow, panel-driven interfaces and tabbed content elements (yahoo) but haven't found one yet.

Regardless, there is some really exciting work going on for electronic delivery of magazine.

This video from Bonnier, a Swedish media group, shows some amazing thinking and a great prototype. 

It demonstrates what we all feel:  that electronic delivery of magazine content can improve the user experience and that magazines online are not just about putting their content on websites. 
 
 

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Or if you would only like to see the prototype in action from the video:

It has been a while since I've updated my "who's winning" table on agency performance, but I think the real prediction is to say before we know the winner, it won't matter.  Everyone is running to the middle and soon enough all of the big agencies will quickly resemble one another in an integrated heaven!
That said competition runs deep in humans and there will be plenty more news bulletins of battles won and lost, and strategic analysis of how the war is progressing.
This opinion piece from Ad Age by Barry Wacksman, Chief Growth Officer from R/GA (of course), is a really well written argument.  No question the best way to win a war is to have the best army. 
If we can get our teams focusing on being a strategic advisor to clients with a big dose of innovation, solid delivery and passion for analytics on peformance we'll get out of being commoditized creative brokers and back into being non-procurable consultants and all win.  Bring on the new age of the strategic agency partner.
 

Forget Being a 'Lead' Agency; Strive to Be a Dream Agency
And It All Starts With Innovation

by Barry Wacksman
Published: January 11, 2010

Three recent articles in Ad Age have spurred a furious online debate about whether digital agencies are ready to "lead" and whether the industry even needs big digital agencies anymore. All three suffer from multiple misconceptions about the agency business, so it's time to offer another point of view.

The very idea of a lead agency as the center of command-and-control for other agencies has outlived its usefulness. The model was appropriate for the mass-media age, when the most important thing a brand could do was tell its story through paid media. Long ago, clients separated agencies from the "lead" and formed direct relationships with a mix of different firms. They may have spent more time (and money) with their traditional ad agency, but even this has changed. In some cases, so-called digital agencies have larger budgets and better access to senior client decision-makers, and this trend is growing.

We should worry less about being a "lead" agency and more about being a "dream" agency. We should ask: What do clients need today, and who is best equipped to deliver? This is what all agencies must consider as they create new business models appropriate for the digital age. So, if a client could build the dream agency today, what would it look like?

It would have a thorough understanding of how consumers think and feel, but also how they seek and make and share and transact. It would recognize that the lives of consumers have dramatically transformed in the past 10 years. In an era where Facebook has 350 million members and Google is the world's most valuable media company, the idea that consumers lead increasingly digital lives isn't debatable.

It wouldn't be wedded to a specific craft such as TV or print. Nor would it only think about designing a website. It would do all of those things without bias toward any strategic or tactical solution.

This agency would have innovation at its core and the ability to craft campaigns to promote these innovations. But it would start with the innovation — not the other way around, as most traditional agencies reflexively deliver campaign ideas as the first step.

Data would be its guiding light. It would have the right people to mine the data, interpret it and, based on the results, provide direction on whether and how to proceed to achieve the best ROI.

It would produce things with efficiency and fidelity, recognizing that brilliant ideas can fall apart with poor execution (a bad user interface, for example). It would understand that clients have an unprecedented opportunity to deliver massive amounts of content via free media channels such as YouTube and Facebook, as well as owned media channels, such as their own websites, mobile apps and Twitter feeds.

Whichever agency gets to this state of Nirvana first is likely to be the most important strategic and creative partner for clients — even if it's no longer called a "lead" agency. So, who will get there first?

I'd bet on the current crop of large, independent digital-age agencies. The most evolved have the skills to formulate and execute ideas that are digital but extend far beyond it. These agencies have had the advantage of evolving alongside the biggest consumer trend of the 21st century, the digital revolution, just as their predecessors had evolved alongside the biggest consumer trend of the 20th century, the mass adoption of TV.

The question — "Are these agencies ready to lead?" — has already been answered by the many clients who have appointed them as their primary strategic agency partners.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Barry Wacksman is exec VP-chief growth officer, R/GA.

1 Comment
Subscribe to comments on: Forget Being a 'Lead' Agency; Strive to Be a Dream Agency
  By JMorganBaker | London January 11, 2010 06:42:35 am:
This is a really well written piece and having been in digital market for 10 years now, it isn't a surprise that I agree completely. One thing to remember though — "execution" which you use as an example poor user interface, is also client management. Traditional agencies have real skills in gaining consensus around creative ideas that digital agencies–because we work with such complexity–often miss. Also if you replace "innovation" with "creativity," you have the argument all of the integrated agencies are making in the market today. It really is a rush to the center — is it easier to teach print to digital creative than vice-versa? Probably. Will digital agencies continue to see big growth, definitely. But the scale difference between big traditional agencies and big digital agencies means the big agencies will have time to learn how to be consultative, integrated and innovative.

Ever wanted to see some of the biggest names in the Internet commenting on the past, present and future? 

Comscore was started in 1999, and in the last 10 years has built itself a great corner in measurement.  Reaching out to John Battelle, Esther Dyson, Fred Wilson, Andrew Braccia and others they have put together a 6 minute video commentary.  It wanders into periods of smaltz promotion at times, but generally is quite good.  If only to be reminded of the faces to the names.

Comscore 10th Anniversay Video

What was I doing in 1999?  Aside from setting up an office in London and trying to be useful in the chaos that was boo.com — going to a lot of "launch parties," speaking to the BBC at First Tuesday and talking e-commerce at European HP summits. 

All good fun.

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Seem funny?  Actually this is the post from migrating my blog to a self-hosted environment.  Watch out developers, getting serious.  Seems only fair that I should understand a bit about plugins, CSS and social networking tools since I talk about it endlessly.

Only 3 hours in at this point, probably another 3 and I’ll be just where I was with WordPress.com!

As my brother used to say when starting my truck and hearing a solid crunch, “nice starter motor, change it yourself?”

If anyone tells you digital marketing isn’t technical, tell them they are crazy.  It is true that you don’t need to understand compression ratios to drive a car, but you better have hand-eye coordination!