Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

The Gift Economy & Internet Karma

I thought Frances Grimble's comment about the way in which the Gift Economy has been adopted online but recently stretched beyond all recognition by mega-social nets is really insightful.  Here's a snippet : "But the Internet, and Internet-related businesses, have exploited this economy to the extent of breaking it down. E-groups consisting of hundreds or thousands of people are described as communities, but most of the members remain relative strangers, and membership is often anonymous or pseudonymous. So what happens is, a handful of people repeatedly supply the relatively higher quality of free information. Everyone else enjoys it with no sense that any return is ever required. There’s an assumption of a kind of Internet karma—no one feels obligated to return a favor because the person providing it will probably somehow, someday get some kind of return from someone else entirely. And, Internet companies where the users are providing the information/favors/freebies—Google et al—are doing their best to exploit any remaining feeling of obligation by taking the credit for what the users give away (or what they sell and parties like Google have appropriated) and transferring that obligation to their companies." Read it all here.

We All Love The Bazaar Now

Eric Raymond’s seminal essay The Cathedral & The Bazaar remains one of the most powerful analogies for the world of media and marketing today. In case you aren’t familiar with Raymond’s work, he explained how in the world of software design, for many years, engineers spent long periods locked away creating huge operating systems in institutional settings that were then wheeled out into the real world for people to admire and to obey.  However, the open source movement changed all that with online systems much more like global street bazaars allowing programmers to gather in informal networks and collaborate on technical projects in an organic manner, adding a little stitch here and a patch there, and always feeding their knowledge back into the main market, which remained forever in public ownership.  For many years Big Brands operated in exactly the manner of Raymond's Cathedrals, building towering spires that required Brand Architects and Guardians to maintain their sanctity.  However, in the shadows of these vast edifices grew global online Bazaars made up of people who found they could organise themselves around their passions, as oppose to the demographical pews ordained by the marketeers.  And gradually the flocks flocked out of the Mainstream Media Cathedrals into the hustle-and-bustle of these online markets.  However, this was just the beginning and people quickly realised that they could not only hang out in the Bazaars but could also bring their own soapboxes along in the shape of blogs.  And eventually, as these little soapboxes grew into giant social networking sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, the Bazaar morphed into a global conversation.  One where people trashed the Big Brand Cathedrals as they pleased, or even helped build new ones, ignoring the pained grimaces of the Brand Guardians and Architects who could only see desecration wherever they looked.  However, that’s now all changed.  Big Brands have come our from behind their lecterns and are fully signed-up...

The Joy Of A Gated Community

A couple of years ago, I heard Sir Tim Berners-Lee describe the muddled state of his splendid creation in  this way : ‘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’.  Now, for many tech-heads, geeks, tinkerers, everyone in Silicon Valley and other early-adopters it didn’t get much better than this organic mush.  And the gooey paradise remained intact for a long time.  However, for the mainstream (aka Everyone Else In The World) the web remained a mysterious, slightly sad place where only-the-lonely gathered.  But the online social revolution has blown away this view.  In part, by throwing up some gated communities, such as AppStores and Social Networks, where regular folk can talk to each other without fear of their Gucci loafers getting sullied by geek-grime.  In fact, for many, it even became rather exciting to mix with the technorati and let some of their magic coding dust rub off.  But not too much.  And certainly none of the whiffy stuff.  Personally speaking, gated communities where the comfortably-off huddle from the excrutiating ravages of real life, such as potholes and unmown lawns, always sound pretty dull to me.  However, there are times when we’d all like to withdraw into sanctuaries of expert topiary and poo-free paving, away from the open clutter of the real world.  In such harbours of tranquillity there are no worries about unsightly neighbours or anti-social viruses.  The no-nonsense management are constantly poised, ready to pulverise any shady individual who dares to disturb the peace.  For some, such walled gardens become claustrophobic as they tire of the same faces and fences.  The security guards start to look like prison screws and the disorderly streets where the everyday folk dwell begin to look enticingly vibrant.  (Not that I’ve ever spent anytime in a gated community you understand.  Although I did once spend two weeks at Centre Parcs and was very relieved to escape, er, I mean depart).  However, for many these well-ordered suburban enclaves that consist of friends, family and neighbours is exactly what’s required.  All the time.  And this is what the early-adopters, geeks and webnorati struggle to understand.  The gurus who rail against the vice-like grip of Steve Jobs brighter, lighter, whiter Appstore, or Zuckerberg’s perfectly manicured Facebook empire, overlook that most people don’t want to see what’s blocking their sinks.  And they don't mind if that hardwired convenience means the management is watching over them.  They just want to get on with their happy, gunk-free lives.

New Money

A couple of months ago I had the good fortune to hear Douglas Rushkoff expound his ideas about the changing nature of money and how private currencies could shift the way in which society organises its resources, loosening the grip of MegaCorps and even BigGov.  It was inspirational stuff and all very timely coming fresh on the heels of a financial meltdown driven by tricky derivatives traders and faceless ratings agencies plundering the goodwill of widows and orphans.  However, at the end of the talk Rushkoff, maybe suspecting his sober Swiss audience weren’t entirely convinced, found himself pressing that these ideas weren’t just pie-in-the-sky.  Now, while I don’t expect the world’s currency exchanges and the pound in your pocket to go anywhere soon, I was very happy to raise my hand and offer the room a few examples of where I thought Rushkoff’s private currencies were in action – albeit at a micro-level.  Firstly, I mentioned the Chinese Q coin, which is used by the 300 million users of the QQ instant messaging site to buy virtual goods.  Tencent, the owners of QQ recently revealed that 'internet value-added services,' or virtual goods, made up 78% of the company’s total revenue at the end of last year.  Enough to raise the company's international ambitions, including buying a stake in DST, the Russian company that owns a chunk of Facebook.  And Q Coins are now being accepted in exchange for ‘real’ goods on 3rd party sites, sufficiently broadly to raise the concern of the Chinese government.  I also highlighted the Second Life economy wrap-up that reads like a surreal corporate annual report, including tracking Linden Dollars and their transformation into ‘real money’ through the exchanges, LindeX or the Xstreet SL Exchange.  And, while not operating private currencies, I pointed to Etsy, Zopa and Betfair as examples of private marketplaces that are challenging the traditional corporate structures that Rushkoff believes will come under pressure.  These marketplaces range wildly in scale and nature.  Etsy is a giant P2P flea market where people sell each other about $22m of (often beautiful) homemade items, such as soaps they’ve made in their garden sheds.  Betfair is a vast £300m peer-to-peer gambling exchange.  Whereas Zopa is a P2P lending service.  All tiny in comparison to the industries in which they operate.  However, all very successful and growing like topsy.  And now we have Facebook Credits, the attempt by Mark Zuckerberg to create a currency in his world, that as it approaches 500m users is more populus than most countries.  Once again it’s all very early days.  At its outset, Facebook Credits is a way to unify...

Get Real - No More Dogs

There are powerful online trends at work sweeping away anonymity as a default position, creating many commercial opportunities for those with a light enough touch.  Firstly, there's Facebook, the web’s 800lb social gorilla.  Zuckerberg's service has given four hundred million people around the world an online identity and the norm is for users to provide 'real' information.  And it's an identity that increasingly follows you around the web, thanks to Facebook Connect.  Then there's the booming mobile web.  While PAYG allows people to disguise themselves, anyone using a contracted service instantly ties their data habits to some type of billing system, thus allowing certified transactions to occur.  Another mega-trend that will encourage people to 'get real' online is Rupert Murdoch’s decision to throw up paywalls around his online content.  Previously, people have been allowed to read the Digger’s content for free – and without flagging who they are.  However, now everyone behind the News International paywall will be attending a party where names badges are checked on the way in.  Then there’s ever faster broadband and the continuing march of Moore’s Law, making YouTube-style and webcam communication increasingly common, thus letting people see each other all too clearly.  And finally, but perhaps most powerfully, the law, in the UK at least, is swinging behind the anti-anonymity drive.  Lord Mandelson’s much-derided Digital Economy Bill may be heavy-handed in the eyes of many, but one effect it has is to batter the walls of the ISPs where, to date, anonymity has been standard fare.  All of which creates a self-reinforcing norm.  Transparency and genuine online identity becomes widespread, brushing aside the previous default so perfectly captured by Peter Steiner’s famous cartoon, ‘on the internet no one knows you’re a dog.’  This in turn creates an environment where people feel comfortable adding ever-more revealing layers of information to their online identities.  Including location, financial habits and information that, even a few years ago, would have seemed positively reckless to publish online.   As John Battelle writes, the Database of Intentions is extending beyond, ‘What I Want’, to ‘What I Buy’, ‘Who I Am’, ‘Who I Know’, ‘What I Am Doing’, ‘What’s Happening’ and ‘Where I Am’.  Of course, digital consumption habits have always linked to an IP address making it theoretically possible to identify who was snacking on what binary bytes.  However, this world was murky, with plenty of ways to conceal who was who, including floating IP addresses.  So what does this new transparent world mean for the marketing industry?   Well, increasingly, the vast oceans of data that flow around the web...

Nothing New Under The Sun

For a long time the marketing industry closed its eyes to the impact of networked media.  And while it looked the other way, Messrs Brin & Page ate its lunch and built the largest media company in the world.  Over the last year or so, however, possibly because of the Google experience, the marketing industry has done a U-turn and the consensus is now that the world has indeed changed forever.  So which view is right?  Unsurprisingly, the reality is somewhere in between.  A thread of my client work over the last few years has been challenging the notion that the maturing web means we should forget everything we’ve ever known and start again.  Forget the idea of brands, stop using TV as a medium, assume that the customer has morphed into a new type of being, accept that complete transparency is the only choice, believe that the only workable price point is free.  Only a total reboot will do, some claim.  However, this binary view of the world overlooks that while much has changed, more has stayed the same.  Corporations are still operating in markets where consumers are looking for value and trustworthy suppliers.  People are still motivated by the same needs – keeping up with the Jones’, caring for their families, exploring the world, self-expression, ambition, fun.  It’s just that the markets they use to find satisfaction have been rewired. ‘The problems which are not changing are human problems - which remain the same,’ noted Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google last year.  Take for instance, the social net de jour - Chatroulette.  It’s a perfect example of the many new wonderful and unexpected things that are emerging as a result of open networked media and widespread broadband access.  Built by an individual, using powerful distributed technology that now sits in bedrooms all around the world, it offers a P2P-experience that undermines traditional views of private and public identity and drives new types of social interaction.  And what is this remarkable bleeding-edge innovation used for?  Letting young men check out hot girls!  Whizzy new kit, same old motivations.  However, that's not to underestimate the ingenuity and scale of the new markets that people will build when they find their needs unmet.  I was lucky enough to meet Douglas Rushkoff last week and hear him speak about his belief that...

You Sell, Or Else...

I have moths in my house.  They are a real pain and as the Spring appears I know they will be making a reappearance after the cold winter months.  For the last couple years I have become involved in a Holy War against these little critters that has involved escalating levels of tit-for-tat violence.  They take out a treasured cashmere sweater.  I up the number of traps, sprays and any other type of micro-ordnance.  And guess which retailer has become my greatest friend in this battle against the pesky garb-munchers?  Rentokill?  Pest Control?  Mothball Express?  Nope, my accomplices in the clearance of my foe is Amazon.  A comrade that not only provides me with a wide range of munitions, but is also my accomplice, suggesting tactics and new devices 'used by others' to help me seek-and-destroy.  Now I’ve long been aware that Bezos’ empire was growing beyond books, but it was my battle against these flying clothes-gobblers that brought home the changing nature of retail in the networked media era.  Just 1-Click™ and my house is free of meddlesome midges.  What does this have to do with modern marketing, you ask?  In short, that most crucial aspect of markets and marketing, the Point-Of-Purchase (P-o-P) is changing quickly and in some very surprising ways.  In doing so, this shift is throwing light on some long-standing weaknesses of the marketing industry, whilst throwing down new challenges.  For example, I have a client who is fascinated by the fact that Apple now holds 100m active credit cards, primarily through iTunes.  The client in question runs a very significant online business himself, with about two million UK customers.  So he is fully versed in the value of those billing relationships that Apple has garnered.  He also has a theory that Murdoch’s insistence on a paywall for his online media is motivated by a similar vision to that which Apple has intentionally or accidentally executed.  If The Old Digger can use juicy new media content to gather micro-payments and therefore credit card details, it won’t matter if the newspapers are profitable or not.  They will become giant magnets for billing info, allowing Murdoch to sell wine and insurance products to the readers of The Sunday Times.  Even the forward-looking games sector has been surprised by the skewing of the P-o-P.  In his must-see presentation at this year's DICE, Jesse Schell, a game design professor at Carnegie Mellon University, summed up the rapidly changing nature of transactions.  He explained how the games development industry has been caught completely off guard by...

Rusbridger On 'Us Against Them'...

Alan Rusbridger, Editor of The Guardian : "BookArmy – though it avoids saying so – is an offshoot of Harper Collins. The two enterprises point in completely different directions. As it was explained to me, the point of BookArmy is to get as many avid book readers engaged as possible and learn as much as possible about their likes and dislikes. At some point in the future (the theory goes) publishers will no longer need to spend a fortune on marketing Max Hastings’ next book by lavishing money on Waterstones or in print. They will go to BookArmy and say, 'We know you have a database of the 80,000 people in the country who read books of military history. We’ll give you our targeted marketing spend instead.'  BookArmy is a telling illustration of two aspects of the digital world.  One is the ability of digital disrupters (in this case, even within the same company) to take one bit of a newspaper and do it with a conviction, range, depth and passion that a portmanteau print-based newspaper cannot match, especially in digital form. It is the unbundling of newspapers.  And the second is the only hope of matching the power of the these digital disrupters is to harness the same energy and technologies which they are using.'  See the rest here.  Excellent insights from a man right in the middle of the change being created by networked media.

The Rise Of Anti-Social Behaviour

At the beginning of last year, I helped put together an event at NESTA, where I detected for the first time an undercurrent of suspicion about social media and particularly social media consultants.  I remember the room recoiling at the suggestion that anyone in attendance was a social media advisor.  Perish the thought!  And again, at a bash I helped out with at the IPA, there was plenty of good discussion about social media.  However, also the same concerns.  As illustrated by this film - 'The Social Media Guru'.  Well worth a quick viewing if you haven’t already.  Since then, Business Week has advised wariness about ‘social media snake oil’, reporting that, ‘Critics complain that many of the new experts have adopted an orthodoxy that provides little flexibility for differing situations—or outcomes.  Their pronouncements follow a rigid gospel : Be transparent, engage with your customers, break down silos.’  Which has led one or two social media consultants to defend their practices as both professional and good value.  So why is this?  Is it just a case of caveat emptor applying to a new market as much as any other?  Or a natural backlash against the relentless hype of new social widgets and the rise of Facebook - the social world’s own 800-pound gorilla?  Personally, I wonder if this suspicion is because it’s not yet clear what role social media will have in the broader communications industry - particularly for brands.  At that IPA evening, the interesting part of the chit-chat, for me at least, was exactly on this issue.  Are we talking interesting new...

Advertising’s Omerta Begins To Crack

A Grand Fromage from a big agency network broke the advertising omerta with me over coffee the other day.  ‘Of course, we’ve never really been able to link campaigns to sales or ROI’, he whispered.  Let me tell you, I nearly choked on my almond croissant.  It’s the unwritten law among GF advertising executives that no one mentions how random the effect of brand advertising is.  When under scrutiny from client procurement executives the Big Ad industry has ensured success by rounding the wagons and sticking to the BARB-Nielsen script, or pointing to the latest Thinkbox research.  However, just as I was getting over this blatant breach of the rules another industry GF broke the code!  Writing on his blog Steve Henry blurted out that: 'I'm getting sick of saying this, but 90% of advertising goes out there and does nothing at all. (I heard a figure the other day for what the average ROI is for marketing in this country. I can't tell you the figure because I've been sworn to secrecy for now - but it's diabolically low)'.  What’s going on?  Maybe it’s just a case of a few loose tongues.  They’ll probably disappear next week as the Farm St lawyers hand out the super-injunctions.  However, maybe, just maybe, it’s because a few brave souls have noticed that technology is slowly making the mass marketing argument impossible to maintain.  For forever and a day, any ad executive worth their salt could deliver - with feeling - some variation on: ‘Maximum reach-and-frequency is the only way to build brand awareness thus creating equity that drives sales.’  Which paved the way for vast media spends that in turn justified chunky production budgets and maybe even an exotic location or two.  However, as all media, including TV, is slowly sucked onto one IP platform or another, thereby becoming highly measurable, the black box that the marketing industry used to keep its metrics in has been exposed to the digital sunlight.  The battering ram of reach-and-frequency is being replaced by granular laser targeting.  First there was Google and its ‘database of intentions’ where only people who were searching for something were targeted with related commercial messages.  Then came the rise of applications where people could choose content to run on their social networks, iPhones, iTouches and now Droids.  More recently, we’ve had Facebook and its ‘people not pages’ approach, where advertisers can target individuals who have expressed a particular interest through their profile.  Even the impregnable metrics maze that has driven TV’s vast global revenues has begun to open up.  Social networks make it all too easy to see what people are actually watching – and what they are not.  And finally, the promise of behavioural advertising looms large, where commercial messages are targeted according to the digital data trails that people leave behind them – not thrown over the nation like a blanket.  Now these developments do of course bring their own Big Brother issues.  But that can all all wait.  The Grand Fromage of advertising are finally taking notes.  And a few are talking outside of the old school too...