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125 banners, not so much clicking
I’ve read too many blog posts recently about pay walls and the future (or lack thereof) of journalism. With the debate raging and being nowhere close to resolution, I needed to remind myself of just how much online advertising sucks.This chart is based on my browser history from yesterday (Monday 7 June). Over the course of my working day, 125 banners were displayed in my browser, some more than once.I can’t say that I saw them, because my eyes filtered out every single one of them – if it weren’t for creating this chart I wouldn’t have a memory of a single one of them. Needless to say I didn’t click on any of the banners either.I sometimes think it’s a miracle that online advertising even exists.I’ve read too many blog posts recently about pay walls and the future (or lack thereof) of journalism. With the debate raging and being nowhere close to resolution, I needed to remind myself of just how much online advertising sucks.
This chart is based on my browser history from yesterday (Monday 7 June). Over the course of my working day, 125 banners were displayed in my browser, some more than once.
I can’t say that I saw them, because my eyes filtered out every single one of them (and if it weren’t for creating this poster I wouldn’t be able to remember any of them either).
Needless to say, but I didn’t click on any of the banners.
I can’t help but think it’s a miracle that online advertising even exists.
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Will Technology Creation enter its own Age of Abundance?
The proliferation of computer software and the internet has brought many powerful tools to the masses.
From desktop publishing to cheap and powerful design tools, from affordable HD cameras to global publishing platforms such as blogs and YouTube, and self-publishing and self-marketing platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, technology has given power to the amateur and the semi-professional — the power to create media and content that can been seen by millions of people, quickly, cheaply, whenever and wherever.
This is the Age of Abundance. People love it. Now, anyone can create fan sites, parodies, anti-adverts and dissenting PR for their favorite/most-hated brands that are seen by millions. It creates challenges and opportunities for the worlds of marketing and advertising.
John Winsor, for example, created Victor & Spoils to build on crowd-sourcing principles. Victor & Spoils aims to tap into a broader client talent base than can be maintained within a single company and, notably, to co-create with consumers as well as with other creators. It is using this abundance to create a more diverse base of creativity.
At the same time, this technology shift has created a new opportunity to add value in a networked age. Call this ‘Ideas that do‘ or ‘marketing with meaning‘, advertising as a service, brand utility or one of any number of other terms, it involves leveraging networks in order to target specific users or customers. A large part will be technology creation, not just web platforms and iPad applications but networked FMCG products and internet-enabled real world devices.
In the past the advertising industry was able to create long-lasting cultural impact through Big Ideas and broadcast media but now the major effects on our culture, especially the ever-increasing network culture, are caused by innovations in technology and software platforms. To offer these same effects in the future we must look to Technology Creation.
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“Sometimes you have to destroy something you love”
That’s one of the many stirring quotables from a blog post published last week at John Winsor’s blog.
John is the CEO of Victors and Spoils, the new model (ad) agency that’s applying crowdsourcing models to creativity.
The piece is really quite inspiring, drawing a distinction between the great people and creativity you find in advertising, and the business of that business “which really sucks”.
In the post, John discusses the impact of abundance on the advertising industry. It’s a big theme that we saw Clay Shirky applying to the broad sweep of human history and nature at SXSW this year. In this context, both John Winsor and his guest and recent investor Jon Bond chew over the way the ad industry mistakes abundance for over-supply and commoditisation of their business models. This reminds me of another nugget from the Shirky keynote, which was actually the most re-tweeted line from it:
“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”
Both men lament the fact that structures, complexity and fear are blinding agencies to opportunities, but I have to say that neither is holding out a quick panacea – or any kind of panacea – to the legacy players. I don’t think they believe that it’s possible to change things gently and piece-by-piece without really radical renewal, by which I mean epic-scale, biblical, creative destruction. It’s not about tinkering about at the edges any longer. This paragraph nails it:
I love ad people and the ideas part of the business. It’s the “business” of the business that really sucks and brings down the rest of it. Sometimes you have to destroy something you love in order to rebuild it again, and that is what the new models, like Victors & Spoils, will do. There will be pain. But there is no alternative to the slow, painful death that has been eating away at the soul of the business for the past 15 years.
That’s my highlighting – but it can’t make for very happy reading if you run a big holding company, unless of course you don’t believe the hype and think things will sort themselves out just like they always have. I think that’s ignoring the bigger picture. I know it’s hard to imagine chaps, but what’s happening is somewhat bigger than the ad industry.
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Propagation Planning
Over the last year or so, one of the kinds of planning that I’ve been hearing more and more of is propagation planning. Propagation planning is planning that reaches a tier of people beyond those your agency directly connects with through its work, by providing a core group of people with material they find useful enough to spread on their own.
In the words of Griffin Farley, Strategy Director at BBH New York, “planning not for the people you reach, but the people that they reach, by giving them assets to propagate.”
Propagation planning has assumed increased importance lately because it puts influencers in the limelight, as opposed to assuming they are just another cog in the generic PR wheel, which encompasses multiple traditional offline PR elements as well as digital ones.
Word-of-mouth initiated by influencers is key to the success of any campaign or project, and propagation planning makes the spread of word-of-mouth a more researched exercise. I’d like to clarify two things here: one, that by word-of-mouth I don’t mean merely blogger outreach, which a lot of social media agencies do, and two, that by ‘influencers’ I don’t necessarily mean people who are big in the social media world – I mean people who are passionate, knowledgeable and who occupy positions of influence within niche communities. These communities will need to be selected according to the nature of your campaign (tech people, parents, artists, writers, movie fanatics and so on), and the strategy shouldn’t take a ‘one size fits all’ approach.
At Made by Many, we’ve made propagation planning a larger part of our work over the recent past. As I searched for relevant information about this discipline, I realised that there just wasn’t enough, and that what existed was dispersed across a number of places. Taking matters into my own hands, I decided to set up a wiki to document all these pieces of content, and Griffin kindly agreed to be a key part of it.
You can find the wiki here. Don’t forget to check out the sidebar with its different categories (including useful files and Slideshare presentations from Griffin). Comments, suggestions on information that should be included, and discussions about propagation planning itself are welcome here. I’ve kicked the first one off: how is propagation planning different from engagement planning and connections planning?
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The Kingdom of Awesome
We were milling about at @LenKendall’s @the3six5 meetup at The Ginger Man here at SXSW last night when Greg Christman, aka @reelspit, came over to say hello. Greg had recently taken part in a creative workshop we held at BBH NY to generate ideas and test thinking for the next phase of Metrotwin, a site we created and run for British Airways. What a dude.
The place was packed with South By’s itinerant freak scene of start-up makers, innovators, journos, digital and new model advertising folk. I was hanging out with Utku from Mint Digital and, in jest, we discussed how awesome it would be if this group could be a country or city-state. This prompted Greg to whoop loudly that we should call it the Kingdom of Awesome and design our own awesomeness flag, and run the whole place using Foursquare. As an aside, I’ve heard a few people recently suggest that the word “awesome” is over. My friends, you misunderstand the meaning of awesome if that’s what you think – but that’s another blog post.
The idea of a Kingdom, Republic or Nation of Awesomeness – depending on your political persuasion – is funny (especially after quantities of booze on a warm evening), but it reminded me of a tweet I’d seen earlier in the day from Jeff Jarvis:
I don’t want to get carried with all this but I think The Kingdom of Awesome is real – real in an allegorical, Utopia sense: a metaphorical ‘State’ of hive-mind.
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A call to arms. Make way for ‘the builders’.
Rishad Tobaccowala’s blog post at Reinventing, and his speech at the American Association of Ad Agencies Transformation conference, are both incredibly exciting.
With both, he calls for renewal and appeals to the ad industry to save itself by hiring in top tier talent to build a new world, specifically:
“This is the time to build. The talent we most need are builders, sculptors, painters. Folks who create and not just manage.”
And what should we be building?
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How Facebook is digging a grave for online marketing
This morning, as you do when you quietly settle in at your desk and get prepared for a long day at work, I logged in to Facebook to check what my social circle around the world is up to. For whatever reason, my eyes fell on the forbidden spot, the advertising in the right hand corner. Oh wait, I know why. It was ’speaking’ to me:
Look at that! Not only does it know I am 39 (nearly as old as Tim) but it also knows that I am female, and although I can’t say this for sure, this little ad also seems to have figured out that one of my favourite colours is … pink (No, I haven’t revealed the colour of my bra in my status line).
As it happens, super agency Made by Many is already supplying me with an awesome phone, but I got interested in this deal nevertheless. Not because the offer was appealing, but seemingly offered exclusively to me, I could not resist clicking on the ad to find out more. I wanted to know why this offer was made to 39 year old women… is this for real…? So I clicked the ad…. and… Read full post
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Car ad agency brilliance
Ad agency Nova Vista in Norway has found an innovative way of keeping cars clean. Buckle in tight, here it comes……Female drivers.
The agency is now on the lookout for 70 (tidy) women to drive their ad decorated cars around town. (sorry, link in Norwegian)
“Seeking clean women is a visual way of communicating that we’re looking for people who will keep the cars neat and tidy. Great ambassadors, it’s that simple,” said Nova Vista’s MD.
Speaking to the Norwegian paper Dagbladet, he also tells us that the added bonus by using women is that we also don’t drive like pigs.
Finally time to do away with that old silly expression that either starts or end with “women behind the wheel”, is it then…?
To bad that the chief editor of the feminist magazine Fett (Fat, directly translated to English – meaning awesome if used as slang) kind of steps in the salad when she comments that this is really a very old fashioned view. Men are just as good as taking care of their car as women, “…if not better” she claims.
She’s got one point, though. “It might be 70 very tidy women driving around in these cars, but they might not be very smart” she adds. Each woman must pay NOK 1790 a month to drive the car. That’s nearly £180.
Well, it made me laugh this morning:)
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Looking swell online: How avatars suit you
My avatar has changed.
Uh oh. Big deal, you might think – some people change their avatars as often as they change shoes. And so do I – but not here at my work blog.
For the past half year I’ve been writing under a stranger’s face – a “spare” avatar bestowed upon me by Isaac until yesterday.
At first, I found it awkward to write and felt slightly irritated by being represented by a stranger. Whenever I published a post, this mean, hungry little lady with black hair and a sour pout would pop out like a Jack in the Box from somewhere deep inside Wordpress, ready to devour my every character. I’d look at the site and feel disconnected from my words. Now the blog post was hers… she even wore my name!
At Made by Many, we have a love/hate relationship with our work avatars. Drawn by an artist who’s been given quite a lot of artistic license, we’re not always in agreement weather a whiff of green to our skin tone or a splash of purple hair really help bring out our best features…. Some of us have now and then been known to refuse to blog under these “dreadful caricatures”, but the truth is that they do make us feel like a team and we all wear them like a badge of honor. “At least we don’t take ourselves too seriously!” says William.
But self-representation and avatar usage can be a serious matter online. The avatars we chose to represent ourselves have an impact on how we behave and also on how we’re perceived online.
That’s why sites that easily allow you to change your avatar often are more engaging and interactive. People change their avatar to reflect their mood, send secret messages to other friends, display self- attributes, social role, a fantasy representation of who they want to be or they might just want to provoke. Just look at this collection of people from the Metrotwin homepage:
Metrotwin people
If you look closer at the Metrotwin people, you’ll find a lot of stereotypical usage: The football enthusiast, the pet lovers, the travelers, the proud parent, the beauty, the humorist, the hobbyist, the eye, the cartoonist, the standard portrait and so on. And if you hit refresh when you’re on the site – you’ll see these types repeat again and again. I find this incredibly fascinating – seeing people’s creative use of avatars make me much more interested in finding out what’s going on at a site and communicate with the people who use it.
But not all of us are fans of creative self representations online… In a talk on Facebook given by Blake Chandlee last year, he mentioned his dislike of people who aren’t using their real photo to represent themselves, especially those touting a pet pic on their profile.
I first thought he was just being funny… but then I came across this thread on a FB discussion group where people complain that their profiles are deleted when they use “fluffy” avatars and “kittens” as profile pics. Says Pamela Noordman:
Facebook is one of the better examples there is of a site that makes it easy and fun for people to maintain multiple avatars. So why they give their user this functionality just to tell them later they don’t like the way they use it is beyond me…
Although I’d always be supporting the user’s right to wear the hat they want and my Facebook avatar seldom stays the same for more than a few days – I’m not entirely disagreeing with Chandlee. The amount of complaints I’ve gotten from twitter followers who’re confused when they come from twitter to this blog proves the importance of a consistent, recognizable avatar.
I’m very happy to finally blog under an avatar that look and feel more like myself, although the first comment I got on my new, real avatar was someone questioning weather or not I was wearing a fox on my head…now that was a bit rude, don’t you think?
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