Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

It's A Reformation Baby

Bouncing off this NYT article, Gareth at Brand New makes the point that co-creation is not about brands doing what they normally do and leaving a gap to fill in but about, "creating something people want to pass around, adapt, play with, share and talk about."  And from the article, "Grant McCracken, an author, anthropologist and consultant, takes a broader view, describing consumer involvement as a kind of branding Reformation: marketing professionals used to be the high-priest gatekeepers, but now we can all have a direct relationship with the Almighty Brand."  Wow, first a Renaissance and now a Reformation!  (Of course, we have our own 95 Theses.)

Off To Reboot A Renaissance

I am greatly looking forward to Reboot 8, having had such a good time last year. It's a seriously distributed format this year which sounds like the focus will be more on the social than the seminar - all with a Renaissance theme.  Johnnie and I are doing a couple of little sessions entitled Co-Creation Rules in which we will encourage some saucy collaboration and share a few observations from the brands we've been working with in the last year.  We are also going to try and gather some examples and opinion about co-creation to build into a changethis manifesto.  Here's the first draft - feel free to add, edit or leave a comment in the 'speak your brains' section at the bottom.

Loving Dumb Networks

I went to NMK's IP-TV event yesterday to get a little clarity about the area.  It was time well spent but I pretty much left with the opinion that I had when I arrived - increasingly intelligent devices are going to be sitting on the edge of an increasingly fast dumb network and that some of them will look a bit like TV and some of them won't.  But trying to lever other industries and their respective lexicons into that new environment just isn't very helpful.  For instance, the moment you try and talk about IP-TV you can't help but bring all the baggage of the broadcaster and producer along with you.  So much of the talk yesterday was based on the idea of saving *quality* programming from being swamped by the user-generated cesspool.  However, increasingly it seems...

Google Chiefs Q&A

Channel 4 has this extended video Q&A with Eric Schmidt and Larry Page from the recent Zeitgeist bash in the UK.  Once again it becomes clear that Google sees itself as being in the advertising business and is innovating like billy-yo in ways that the major marketing networks aren't anywhere near.  "When we have a competitive issue we come up with a new product rather than a new strategy and we redefine the market", says Schmidt in a barely concealed dig at Microsoft.  (And they even look like Ballmer and Gates).

Money Can't Buy You Community

These days we all know that communities are the end game for brands and organisations with the multi-faceted value they offer in terms of word-of-mouth, customer intelligence, increased sales and a nice juicy identifiable asset to boot.  But getting them started is not easy.  At one point it was thought that big brands needed to do no more than set up the room, open the door and let the clamouring hoardes pile in.  However, many of those brands flung open their gates to the deafening silence of tumbleweed blowing...

Is It The Direction or The Vessel?

The web has been asking serious questions of Big Media for some time now and last year we started to see the old school respond - reverberations which have continued into 2006.  But while this is all very exciting it's also quite scary, especially if you are in charge of a media-mega-tanker steaming along with your Broadcast colours flying.  One issue is that the captains of these super-cruisers know they must turn but they aren't too sure in which direction - because the the new compass isn't quite set yet.  Just putting the brakes on until the mists clear can just look like indecision - and there isn't a CEO alive who enjoys that look in front of the shareholders.  But, as Google shovels $6bn dollars of ad revenue off the media...

Web 2.0 In The UK

You can sense the Web 2.0 supertanker is about to dock in the UK - which means I will be travelling around with different versions of my presentation - A User Generated World.  On Monday I will be hosting a session at Web 2.0 for Good, organised by Policy Unplugged, for the Third Sector, at the RSA.  On June 6th I'll be taking part in Content 2.0 and in the middle Johnnie and I will be taking a little Sauce to Reboot in Copenhagen.  Splendid.

Look At Me!

In this WSJ interview, Vint Cerf, candidate for the least-mentally restricted-human-being-on-the-planet award, and Esther Dyson, the web's own Queen Mother, discuss what they expect from the Interweb over the coming decade - presumably Web 2.0 through 6.0.  Dyson says the Attention Economy isn't about paying for people to sit up, but more about a generation who prize self-expression.  Cerf asks if this is childish "Look at Me" or a more mature search for identity.  (At Modern Marketing we see it as more in keeping with Maslow).  Dyson also paints a helpful picture of future consumer dynamics: "I think you'll see a fundamental shift in the balance of power towards individuals. Individuals will declare what kinds of vendors they want sponsoring their content, and then those vendors will have the privilege of appearing, discreetly, around the user's content. There will be much less "advertising" and much more communication to interested customers. Advertisers will have to learn to listen, not just to track and segment customers.  So the message to marketers is...

Your Attention Please

I met up with Fergus Burns from Nooked at Internet World yesterday and we got to talking about the status of Web 2.0 in the UK.  While it's well behind the US the background noise is rising and it's possible to see the big themes emerging from the mega-quag of content being shared, packaged and despatched into the user generated world.  One such theme is the idea of The Attention Economy which starts with the not unreasonable premis that (loosely) there used to be more people than commercial content but now that situation has reversed.  Which results in a sparsity of - you guessed it - people's attention.  So in a world where information and content is almost free to distribute and growing like a pandemic, the only shortage is our ability to process the darn stuff.  Or in other words information overload - a sensation I think we can...

Inspired by Open Source

Writing in yesterday's Observer John Naughton writes about open source as an innovative process rather than a software platform.  He cites Steve Weber's notion that, "likened Open Source production to an earlier process which had a revolutionary impact - Toyota’s production system - which in time transformed the way cars are made everywhere. The Toyota ’system’, in that sense, was not a car, and it was not uniquely Japanese. Similarly, Open Source is not a piece of software, and it is not unique to a group of hackers. It’s a way of building complex things."  What is this doing in a blog called modern marketing you may ask. Well, as a marketing professional...