Never get out of the boat

Thursday, August 26, 2010

appointment to tweet

'Appointment to view' was a term used back in the day - before the introduction of devices like the pvr caused major disruption - to describe the experience of tv viewers who tuned in to programmmes broadcast at scheduled times.

Major spectacle-based advertising like the Super Bowl spots in the US and more recently stuff like Cadbury's Gorilla in the UK - which 'premiered' in the break of the Big Brother finale a couple of years back - also played to that notion.

With that in mind i'd like to suggest a new term into the marketers lexicon, with a nod to how the real-time back-channel commentary afforded by twitter (and the #hashtag) has emerged as an unlikely saviour of the live tv spectacle, as exemplified by recent transmediafication of political elections around the globe, things like the X-Factor and the unfathomable popularity of Masterchef, here in Australia.

- Enhancing the ‘scheduled’ viewing experience making it more entertaining to watch ‘live’
- Making it interactive and social on a many-to-many basis
- Connecting fans with other fans

Appointment to view shall henceforth be known as 'Appointment to Tweet'.

Thursday, August 19, 2010

slo mo

There's a long history of epic, beautifully crafted 'made from beer' ads for Carlton Draught at Clemenger BBDO, where I now work.

From 'the Big Ad' to 'Flashbeer'and many in between.

This new one, Slo Mo, is no exception.

Enjoy.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

LOLcats revisited

Sometime ago I speculated on the earliest known incarnation of the LOLcats meme, tracing it potentially back to 19th century Hampshire.

That speculation remains speculative, however all at Boat International Headquarters are grateful to Pierce from onlineeducation.org for alerting us to this infographic detailing the 'known' story.

value again

The story goes that one day, as Socrates was philosophising about one thing or another, an acquaintance approached him and said, “Socrates, do you know what I just heard about Diogenes?”  

Socrates: stopped the acquaintance and asked him to pass his message through the Triple Filter Test.

The three filters being:

1. Truth. Have you made absolutely sure that what you are about to tell me is true?
2. Goodness. Is what you are about to tell me about Diogenes something good?
   3. Usefulness. Is what you want to tell me about Diogenes going to be useful to me?

The fella was flummoxed as he could not back up the message with any of the 3 criteria and trotted off bewildered.

And Socrates never found out that Diogenes was shagging his wife.

This story retold from Jonathan MacDonald's excellent blog.

It made me recall the theory of value I posted about some time ago.

The components of tangible value being:

1. Beauty
2. Gain
3. Good

Notice that truth is not present in this triangulation.
For Socrates too, there was probably no value for him in knowing the truth about what his wife and Diogenes were up to.

There was a story I heard about a doctor with a pregnant Muslim woman patient. She asked for a line to say she was not pregnant when the truth was, she was.
The reality was that the woman faced being potentially murdered to preserve the 'honour of the family'.
The doctor took the view that the value of life was more important than the value of 'truth', and issued the note.

From an advertising perspective (that's what this blog is supposed to be about, after all) though the triple filter test is a good rule of thumb.

Truth - is the message being transmitted actually true and transparent? Or is it at least a 'true lie' - a story we are happy to tell ourselves?

Good - Is the world a better place for knowing or acting upon this thing?

Useful? - How does our product/service/message enrich the experience of the customer and make them want to share it?

Kinda thing.

Monday, August 16, 2010

the biters

No real reason for posting this other than it's Monday and it's the official NGOTB tune of the week.

Reminds me of pre-punk glitter/bovver boys like The Jook, Milk'n'Cookies (ask your dad/grandad), The Boys and maybe Hammersmith Gorillas with a dash of punchy power-pop melody and almost (gasp!) Cheap Trick hookiness.

The kids are alright.

trending on facebook

Booshaka reputedly measures which topics are trending on Facebook in semi-realtime.

www.booshaka.com

There’s about a dozen categories, including 'brands'.

When I last looked it was Hyundai and Ferrari top 2 trending brands.

The Hyundai trending article is a free car givaway promotion.
The Ferrari item is Ferrari Corse Clienti, a Ferrari Racing Day event in Budapest.

Which kinda tells it’s own story from a gimmick vs true fan-dom point of view...

Friday, August 13, 2010

smells like rockin' robin

Firm fave, Mark Vidler aka Go Home Productions is back with a new EP.

'Rockin' in San Francisco' contains three new tracks, including 'Smells Like Rockin' Robin', an outrageous Nirvana/Jackson 5 combination.
Ludicrous conceptually but somehow really works.

Get the full EP at gohomeproductions.co.uk

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

ghost town

'This town is coming like a ghost town'

So said the Specials in '79 and so it goes with the continued fascination with amassing hundreds of 'fans' to branded facebook pages where nothing ever happens.

The Facebook ghost towns.

Wikipedia's description of the ghost town goes along the lines of:

'Factors leading to abandonment of towns include depleted natural resources..roads bypassing or no longer accessing the town...economic activity shifting elsewhere, human intervention such as highway re-routing, and nuclear disasters (such as Chernobyl).'

Nuclear disasters aside all of the above apply to these desolate online spaces.

The avatars are there, for sure. A small glimmer of recognition that human life once inhabited these spaces for one brief 'like' moment.

In the absence of anything to DO, these settlers moved on.

What's the value of a Facebook fan?

Nothing, until you make it valuable.

Facebook fandom in an unactualised state is simply a low level permission asset, a bunch of people who don't particularly mind being spammed or opportunists happy to recieve free product.

Like most cases of shiny object syndrome, it's a case of technology for technologies sake.

Give it purpose, some meaning and a shared goal. Give those fans something to DO.
A reason to be connected to the brand, and to each other then theres the chance for all that potential fandom to be realised.

Better still, is find the community that already exists, that already has purpose and already has a goal. Find them and help them get to where they want to be by being useful.

So, how do we get people to engage with [our brand]?
How about, how does [our brand] engage with people?

'Do you remember the good old days before the ghost town?
We danced and sang as the music played inna de boomtown...'

Wednesday, August 04, 2010

the macintosh way

The influence of Guy Kawasaki has been apparent through these pages for a long time. Alongside Seth, Tom Peters and intermittent bursts of Malcolm McLaren pretty much all of the notes in this blog have been touched by the output of those minds in some way.

This week I've been fortunate enough to receive, from Guy, the working manuscript of his forthcoming book, Enchantment, to both read and fiddle with.

That's newsworthy in itself, I can't reveal any of the content at the moment but suffice to say it's dynamite, and his legend status has only increased for me.

In other news, Guy's first book, The Macintosh Way is now available online for free, some 20 years after it was first published.

On perusal I was struck by two nuggets in the early chapters.
Remember, this is 1990, as Guy describes the Macintosh way with regard to marketing.

Evangelism is sales done right. It is the sharing of your
dream with the marketplace and the making of history with
your customer. Evangelism is the purest form of sales. A
Macintosh Way company doesn't sell; it evangelizes.

Giving information and support to [fans] is word-of-mouth
advertising done right. [fans] are a medium
like print or television, but you can't buy them. You have to
earn them.

As every planning deck in recent months seems to include the obligatory paid-owned-earned slide and every tom, dick and social media expert illuminates us with the notion of co-creating with customers as the way forward, it's worth noting that these are not new ideas - or social media ideas - but plain and simple business sense ideas, that have been around, if you knew where to look, for longer than you might first imagine.

Tuesday, August 03, 2010

geek stationery

In the same manner that many iphone and ipad apps have an interface that mimics 'analogue', it also comes to pass that analogue interfaces should mimic their digital cousins.

So it goes with the Notepod notebooks. Yer actual paper notebook that looks like an ipad, ideal for for sketching out those proto app ideas.

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

what the papers say

A few articles this week in the australian press and ad industry media around my favourite subject.

Me.

The first out of the traps were The Age.
The Age is a broadsheet paper, one of the big two - the other being The Australian (I did an interview for them which they never published, I can't for the life of me figure out why they thought the announcement of the Aussie general election was somehow more newsworthy).

There was also a brief piece in B&T, a clearing house for all marketing, advertising, PR and media.

Ad News also ran the story.

The favourite is the piece from CampaignBrief. Arguably the most popular ad industry mag/blog, it also benefits from the quaint habit of it's readers to comment anonymously.
Proper old school.

I've still not heard from mumbrella or DigitalMedia.net.

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

product of the week #342

So you're standing in the 7-Eleven, a bit peckish and fancy a biscuit.

But what to choose?

Do I want a KitKat? Or Oreos?

But wait. I can have a KitKat/Oreo mash-up.

In terms of 'experience' it's about 70% KitKat, 30% Oreo, with the Oreo part heavy on the cream rather than cookie.

Another example of the 'truly special' relationship between the UK and USA.
More so than the conspicuously phoney Obama/Cameron love-in, anyway.

Thursday, July 22, 2010

#electionWIRE

Thanks to #electionWIRE from Youthscape - and this commoncraft style clip, I'm starting to get my head around the Australian election.

HT Gavin.

flipboard

I'm liking the look of Flipboard. It's an ipad application that creates a 'magazine' containing all the content people are sharing from your various social streams, plus other content curated by flipboard, in a nice 'analogue' style mag format.

They say:

'Flipboard is the worldʼs first social magazine. Inspired by the beauty and ease of print media, Flipboardʼs mission is to fundamentally improve how people discover, view and share content across their social networks.'

I just need an ipad now.

look back in anger

Seneca argued that anger did not spring from 'uncontrollable eruption of passions' but from reasoning. When things don't happen the way we expect or have rationally formed ideas about what should normally be the case, thats when we get angry.

So our propensity for anger can be tempered by altering our ideas about expected outcomes.

There are two principle catalysts for word-of-mouth, which Seth kindly reminded us of the other day. The second is commonly forgotten.

'Word of mouth is generated by surprise and delight (or anger)'.

I'll remember this the next time I am trying to get resolution from some automated telephone robot.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

findability

There's school of thought that goes something along the lines of; in conventional advertising material the 'message' (implicit or explicit) and the look and feel are the more important elements versus functionality; whereas, broadly speaking, in a piece of interactive media ie a website or application how-it-works is ultimately the overiding consideration rather than how it looks and speaks.

I've loosely cribbed that statement from a post by my good friend Alan Wolk, though I can't now find that particular article on his blog, the Toadstool, but suffice to say there are plenty more nuggets in there for your perusal.

I would add to this the notion of findabilty as being another consideration that is oft overlooked.

The most well designed and crafted website with the most rigourous user experience planning and the greatest resources and utility matters little if it it cannot be found.

This week I've been coming back to the subject of distributed content as opposed to the campaign microsite (or facebook fan page, for that matter) in some of the discussions we've been having.

It's no longer the case where advertisers can confidently talk about the reach of a campaign or communication. We still hear talk of 'driving' attention to a particular site or thing.

Due to the fragmentation of media (and attention) it's now more difficult to reach an 'audience', in fact one of my favourite nuggets (i can't remember where I heard it) goes along the lines of 'your competition for attention on the internet is EVERYTHING ELSE on the internet'.

This is not just about SEO or search , it's about discovery or serendipity, if you like.

Of course, as we know, around 60% of the touchpoints I'm likely to encounter on a buying journey are non-brand driven, word of mouth, independent reviews etc but
at the very least brands need be there when their customers are reaching out to them for information, wherever that may be.

Three things to consider:

1. Choosing the right places to be, where the the most valuable connections are likely to be made. It may be that Facebook is not necessarily this place, shock! horror!
I'm a fan of Steve Rubel's 'embassy' thinking. Particularly for non-sexy brands.

2. Being interesting, useful and valuable once you are found. What do the people who have found you care about? How can you be of service?

3. And when that connection is made, make sure that all roads lead to Rome.

pic hat-tip to Found magazine.

Monday, July 19, 2010

i scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream

In an interesting development - and more fuel to the 'email-is-broken' lobby - ice cream giants Ben and Jerry's announced to their UK database this week that all email marketing would cease and all customer communications would henceforth take place on the various social platforms, principally Facebook and Twitter.

A decision taken in response to feedback from their customers which indicated they didn't get much value from updates through the email channel.

Aside from the obvious move to communicating via channels that their customers pull in versus those that push, it's clearly a lot more economical for B&J, with dramatic reduction of costs (no email platform to pay for) and far more on-point (only those who want to hear from them will hear from them).

Add to this B&J have also made a foray into the tweeting-truck phenomenon, as popularised by Kogi BBQ in Los Angeles and Fojol Brothers of Washington, the B&J truck having just completed it's tour of duty giving away 50,000 ice creams in New York and set to move on to Boston shortly.

The B&J NYC Scooptruck tweeted it's locations aided by foursquare and also captured photos of happy ice cream beneficiaries which fed into their Flickr stream, tagged with the recipients twitter handle, of course, for extra spreadability measure (because it's all about me, natch).

For added flavour there's the B&J ipone app - Moo Vision - which opens up 3D Augmented Reality animations from the lid design using image recognition rather than a QR code.
A free prize outside rather than inside, if you like.

We watch with interest as again it's testament to the notion that increasingly digital marketing is about fanbase not database.

Sunday, July 18, 2010

a new job in a new town #update

The reason it's been quiet round this part of the blogosphere for the last couple of months can now be revealed.

This week I officially took up my new role as Director of Digital Innovation at Clemenger BBDO in Melbourne, Australia.

It had been on my mind to look for an opportunity outside of the uk for some time, so when the chance to work with, certainly the number one agency in Australia and arguably in the top five or six agencies in the world it was an offer I couldn't refuse.

If Manchester United come in for you, you don't say no, kinda thing.

Normal blog service should resume very shortly.

#update

I removed this post shortly after it initially went up as there was supposed to be an article in the press, we were going to let that run first before I mentioned anything here. The article has not materialised though.

You can now add you're messages of encouragement and goodwill in the comments, as usual ;)

Friday, July 16, 2010

part-time punks #4 - getting krafty

As I assimilate into Melbourn-ian culture and Australian society in general I've been paying close attention to Aussie tv.

There's one particular tv spot that has captivated me recently, though for reasons I cannot comprehend.

The spot is for Easy Mac, an instant macaroni microwave thing (as popularised by our Canadian friends as 'Kraft dinner').

A 20ft giant kid breaks into a biscuit factory, then raids an bakers van - his hunger cannot be satisfied - until heading home, shrinking to normal size and tucking into some instant macaroni.

On first look it appears to be merely some fairly predictable albeit mildly amusing gubbins, but wait. Look again...and listen.

The soundtrack to the ad is none other than 'Part-time Punks' by the Television Personalities - proto-indie agit-punksters (and firm favourites in these here Boat headquarters) from circa '77.

What does this mean?
What evil trickery is this?

I can think of 3 possible reasons.

1. This is the cleverest piece of subliminal targeting in advertising history, aimed at hypnotising 40-something ex punk rockers.

2. The creatives who conceptualised the spot were so bored that they somehow sneaked it in with some astute post-rationalising to the client in order to keep themselves interested.

3. Someone involved was at sometime the bass player in the TVP's with a co-writing credit looking to sneak some royalties.

Unless you know different?

Thursday, July 08, 2010

flock's sake

If it seems like it's been quiet round these parts for a while it's because I've been up to something in the real world that's taken up a considerable chunk of time.

More on that in another post, later.

In the meantime I've also been reading up on some stuff, including Alain De Botton's 'The Consolations of Philosophy' from which the following nugget is an extract.

'It is not only the hostility of others that may prevent us from questioning the status quo. Our will to doubt can be just as powerfully sapped by an internal sense that societal conventions must have a sound basis, even if we are not sure what this may be, because they have been adhered to by a great many people for a long time.

It seems implausible that our [society*] could be gravely mistaken in it's beliefs and at the same time we could be alone in noticing the fact.

We stifle our doubts and follow the flock because we cannot conceive of ourselves as pioneers of hithrto unknown, difficult truths.'

*industry?