Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

The Unthinkable Marketing Industry

Clay Shirky’s latest essay, that encourages us to 'think the unthinkable', set me wondering about what the marketing industry could be like.  The part of Shirky’s ‘unthinkable scenario’ that leapt out for me was the suggestion that, ‘people would resist being educated to act against their own desires’.  Shirky is, of course, saying that one effect of a networked world is that people have less faith in the lessons being handed out on Madison Avenue.  Now it’s quite clear that media is still the dominant force in the brand and marketing business, which despite tough times, remains a trillion dollar global industry.  Indeed, the idea of building brands through massive investment in this industry is the reason most marketing folk get up in the morning.  And media metrics such as reach and frequency have been a reliable way to fill marketing directors’ pension funds for a long while.  But that’s not the point of Shirky’s challenge.  His suggestion is to think the unthinkable by, ‘simply looking out of the window’.  So, if people are resisting the Mad Men's tutorials and the stranglehold of media is loosening, what’s next?  After all, people still want to find good stuff to buy and use, right? The end of media doesn’t mean the end of consumption or indeed of brands.  All of which requires markets.  But if those markets aren’t going to be media-driven, what will keep them moving along? What will make people act upon ‘their own desires’, and in doing so, keep the shekels flowing into our factories, showrooms and shops?  Where do we begin?  How about if we follow the advice of...

Are You A Rational Consumer?

If you aren't feeling very rational on the morning of the 9th February, you may like to spend a few hours at NESTA in the company of myself, Johnnie Moore and Mark Earls, kicking around the challenges created by a P2P world.   After all, when you get up in the morning do you feel like a 'rational consumer'?  No, nor do I.  But that's how the marketing industry has always viewed people and largely still does.  As predictable individuals who can be influenced through big media and the crafting of key messages.  But growing networked media environments, such as the blogosphere and social networks, have made that view of the world seem simplistic.  We know things are changing fast when an ex-Deputy Prime Minister freely blogs that he is 'furious' with a former colleague, FT journalists Twitter about their commuting hell, the old-Etonian chairman of Arsenal FC is interviewed on a fan's podcast, or people book their holidays according to the views of strangers they've never met.  All of which makes the marketing industry look a little too rational.  Of course, brands as markers of trust aren't going to change.  However, the tools and techniques that are used to create and maintain them, most definitely are.  Hope to see you on the 9th at about 9ish.  And if you need some rational reasons, it's free, NESTA does quality catering and it should be fun.  You can book yourself a spot here.

Obama - The Revolution Will Be Televised

When it comes to online marketing and fundraising Barack Obama learnt everything he knows from Howard Dean, the Democratic nominee in 2004, and his adviser Joe Trippi who documented the campaign in all its failed glory in the must-read book, ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’.  It’s a great title but turns out to be totally wrong.  The Obama revolution is being televised on a scale that dwarfs all other campaigns.  So how is it that the world’s first presidential candidate to really 'get online' is such a big fan of TV?  The answer lies in the fact that Obama and his team learnt a lot about what works from the Dean campaign, but also a lot about what doesn’t.  In short, Dean’s online campaign ‘Blog For America’ did a great job of bringing supporters together into a movement, but that movement wasn’t very successful as an advocacy vehicle.  Obama has addressed that – and in some style.  He has encouraged his online movement to become an incredibly powerful advocacy tool and get beyond existing believers, in three key ways.  Firstly, he asks people to draw on the energy and inspiration of the massive Obama community by becoming involved and interpreting it for themselves.  Secondly, he gives people the tools to direct their efforts to recruiting new volunteers, not just reinforcing one another’s view of the world.  And finally, using the mind-boggling funds he has generated with these first two techniques he has ensured that the message comes blasting out of the community to the wider world - on TV.  Thereby avoiding the echo-chamber effect experienced by Dean and many other communities.  Obama's campaign illustrates a point I have been making of late.  Frequently in my conversations about networked and social media there is a sense that people feel they have to make a choice.  That they can either stick to traditional techniques or go all out and embrace the new world of community-building, blogs, networked or social media and other peer-to-peer techniques.  My point is that the choice is not one or the other.  The best thing to do is both.  To take the best of the old and the best of the new and blend them together to create a superior modern approach.  No one (in their right mind) believes that television is about to disappear, although it already looks very different from the past, and is losing its utter dominance of the media world.  However, it still reaches the parts that other media cannot reach.  It’s not just the world that Obama may change next Tuesday.  He could be rewriting the marketing books along the way.

Official : The Web Is A Sink Blockage

If your sink is blocked for a few weeks and you remove the plug to dig out the obstruction, the offending mangled mess of soap, fish bones, human hair and other horrible gunk in which bacteria has set up home, is exactly like the World Wide Web.  That may sound odd but it's how Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Web-inventor and all round good guy, described it in a talk I went to last night at NESTA (which is btw a client).  So that's good enough for me.  He was emphasising the complexity of his creation which he says will see radical changes in the coming months and years - not least the growth of open data.  To understand better the web's gooey tangled mess he has set up the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI), a joint effort between Southampton University and MIT.  TBL said Google's success in creating radically better search was the first serious attempt at web science and the WSRI will be applying similar methodologies.  (Made me wonder if he thinks the Messrs Brin and Page needs some competition).  Other highlights of the evening were his response to a comment that the semantic web was a 'top-down project'.  "Who told you that!?", he asked in disbelief, in a moment of clarification that will surely live with the questioner for some time.  In response to extending third-world web access, Sir Tim made the point that the current web is mainly text and therefore of little use to an illiterate farmer in Africa who needs to find out how to cure his sick cow.  The answer is video which could, TBL noted, mean a major retooling of the cloud.  The great man clearly isn't a fan of the latest release of top-level domain names which he likened to the creation of new real estate for 'boring' commercial reasons.  In fact, he said, he'd like to be able to buy URIs for hundreds of years and give over their management to a massive, slow, international bureaucracy, thereby safeguarding their existence through inertia!  And finally I thought his answer to the notion that too much is expected of the web resonated with everyone.  "The web is merely a reflection of humanity.  I think the danger is not that we expect too much of humanity, but that we expect too little."

[Update : Really, make sure you watch the video here.]

Arseblog, Modern Marketing & We Think

One or two readers of this blog may have seen me at live events combining web strategy with my passion for Arsenal Football Club.  Sometimes I read out two match reports about the same game, one from Arsenal.com, the official, but dry, website and one from Arseblog, an unofficial, but massively blogger.  The intention is to demonstrate how restrictive official-ese can be in networked media.  Last week I noticed that Charles Leadbetter, who came to an event I spoke at last year, had included the little gimmick and the example I used that evening in his new book We Think.  If you are interested it's the introduction of the second chapter...now complete with an (online) attribution.  Leadbetter picks up on the fact that Arseblog has a thriving community and real influence among the Arsenal faithful, despite being the work of one man.  How?  Well, while Arseblog offers insightful, balanced football analysis his colourful language is very much of the terraces - not the boardroom.  For instance, here's a description of the morning-after his return to Dublin, following a long stay in Barcelona : "My brain is discombobulated and I have had to send Blogette off to her new school wearing my runners which are at least 4 sizes too big for her because all of our stuff is in a box coming from Spain. I now have no shoes at all but I am wearing her fleecey red dressing gown. So all of you who might have a hangover today at least be thankful you have some shoes. I have no shoes.  I am like a bag lady in a red dressing gown without any bags."  You would be forgiven for thinking that such rhetoroic wouldn't ingratiate him with the club, a famously conservative organisation.  In fact, the opposite is true and the Arsenal Chairman, an old-Etonian, and Amy Lawrence, a journalist at the Observer, are both regulars on the blog's Arsecast podcast.  Of course, the language used isn't the only secret to its success.  Arseblogger has created a forum with a life of its own and huge Ooomph Factor by bringing together a disparate community.  As Leadbetter notes in his book, "Sir Tim Berners Lee was probably not anticipating Arseblog, when he wrote the original software for the web at CERN...Yet in some respects it is a realisation of his vision that the web could be a platform for collaboration not just a new way to publish information."

How Do You TV?

TV used to be a thing.  A single thing that everyone did.  Now it is a leisure activity.  An activity to which everyone brings their own requirements.  In my post below, I described 11 different ways to TV.  And in the comments a few more arose.  Charles says he likes his TV, "in the background as a 'radio'" when surfing the Interwebs.  Which resonates with Angus.  Ed says, "MS Media Center (thought it was dead?) rips all our viewing as it records into formats for other computers and on my aging Nokia mobile. All formats of a show are deleted when we zap the master recording. Almost everything is time-shifted (even big games), and we skip (almost) all ads, except for the Superbowl where we skip everything else. Recently watching presidential debates it has been fun to keep an eye on the back-channel (e.g. on Twitter), and that wider social aspect would be about our only reason not to time-shift."  Neil says, "In my house TV has become steadily less significant over time. We probably watch about an hour a day average but often that's time shifted or it might well be a film on Sky which doesn't have ad breaks. I think it's a little ridiculous to suggest that people have any kind of decent take out from an ad seen at 30 times the speed. When we do watch, we're often on the internet at the same time or reading or talking."  Which rings true to me.  But David Brennan from ThinkBox kindly drops into offer a cautionary word of warning following a mega-research study:  "I am convinced that the entertainment value of TV advertising can create engagement unlike anything else - not many media can boast people laughing, singing along, dancing & clapping, talking about the products being advertised, playing 'guess the ad' games, mimicking the voice overs word perfectly....and the list goes on!"  Which is not a picture I recognise but does also makes TV sound more like an activity.  So come on folks - how do you TV?

Turbulence Is Entertaining - Who Knew?

This year I helped out the splendid folk at Favela Fabric with an event they were running for KLM at the mega-social-tech bash PICNIC '07 in Amsterdam.  It was the first step in the airline putting a toe in co-creative waters as part of an innovation programme called Flight of the Future.  There's a write-up (in German) about it in Handelsblatt here.  The format was to invite together all sorts of people who have an active stake in the airline including KLM employees from every area of the business, journalists, analysts and customers to talk about the future.  My job was to bring alive the power of open web platforms which I did by talking about why I hate RyanAir so much and to moderate the open conversation.  In our planning sessions we had discussed the topics that might be raised but it was fascinating to see how greatly our forecasts differed from the reality of the mini-Bazaar created by Favela.  Although the environment was a natural concern, my impression was that customers presumed this was something KLM were already working on (which they are).  On the day, the most passionate area of discussion was how to make flights less boring - which hadn't really come up in our planning at all!  And the ideas to brighten up flights were incredibly diverse.  One person suggested the very practical notion of letting people flag their interests at booking...

Are You Watching Me?

Many thanks to Research Magazine who gave me a mention in their '50 To Watch' feature.  "Using a blend of research, marketing and branding nous, Cherkoff offers the corporate world a thorough grounding in how to capitalise on blogs and online communities. He brings an energetic, and often evangelistic, fervour to this task".  Very kind - thanks guys!

The Deep Waters Of Second Life

Deep End is a phrase Johnnie and I use when helping brands understand how modern web technology and cultures can quickly take them out of their comfort zones and into powerful currents.  Likewise, there's plenty of warm, shallow pools where they can splash around safely to their heart's content.  The problem is judging the depth of the water from the sidelines.  Some very inviting streams actually run quite deep and diving in without checking the tides can mean losing touch with shore.  Second Life is a case in point and Wired has a great article about brands that have dived into the metaverse, only to find it less than refreshing.  At first sight SL looks like a fun, albeit fantastic, manifestation of the modern web and a perfect place to splash around.  However, as I've mentioned before,  it's really an alpha-geek paradise run by a hardcore of freedom-loving hackers - not exactly mainstream retailing heaven.  Furthermore, they come tooled up in the shape of the Second Life Liberation Army, which undertakes disruptive action, including hiring mercenaries  to carry out L$1000 (virtual) hits on content developers bringing brands into SL.  "I felt like I was in The Shining," Wired reports a marketeer from Coke as saying after a recce of the metaverse.  The modern web is a wonderful, diverse environment.  But before diving into the next bright and shiny waters, make sure you know where the bottom is...

Tremor In Cincinnati Felt In Adland

Kevin Dugan writes about P&G's Vocalpoint (part of the Tremor system) being used to encourage soccer moms to visit downtown Cincinnati with great success.  Tremor is an intriguing - and closely guarded - part of the modern marketing landscape.  But is also a best case study.  So much so that the system is bought into by brands beyond P&G's own stable including WD-40, Animal Planet and People’s Choice Awards.  ABC TV even uses the system to get input into its programming feedback.  It's no surprise as the system has signed up 225,000 teens and 500,000 mums across the US.  All of which are handled with the type of care and attention that shows up the common marketing 'eyeballs' parlance.  However, Tremor isn't magic - it's a well-organised, useful social network which, as we are all very aware by now, people like.  The question is what does this all mean for the marketing industry?  An example given by Bob Garfield in his recent AdAge article illustrates the issue:  "Listen carefully to Jan Leth, executive creative director of OgilvyInteractive North America, as he tells a funny little story about an agency assignment for Six Flags:  'They had a promotion for their 45th anniversary. They wanted to give away 45,000 tickets for opening day to drive traffic. So we got a brief to do whatever: ads, microsite, whatever. But our interactive creative director just went off and posted it on Craigslist. Five hours later, 45,000 tickets were spoken for. No photo shoot. No after-shoot drinks at Shutters,' he adds, with faux regret. Then, with somewhat less irony: "Now, the trick is, how do you get paid?"