Uneven Distribution. | Uneven Distribution is a collection of thoughts on the digital world, its future and current trends, and the effect they have on brands, advertising, and people.Uneven Distribution. | Uneven Distribution is a collection of thoughts on the digital world, its future and current trends, and the effect they have on brands, advertising, and people.

Chasing Big Data Unicorns

13-05-2013

This piece appeared in the May 10 print edition of B&T Magazine.

It’s 2013: welcome to the future.

In the past few years the advertising industry has transitioned from handshakes, lunches, and the big idea, to a data-driven, real-time world where endless creative options are dynamically tested, optimised and iterated to make every marketing dollar more accountable and effective. We’re already putting radio on DSPs, and in a few more years TV buying will be fully automated, print will be dead, and the desks of three-quarters of the people reading this will be in the cloud.

Big data is at the heart of this. We’re finally able to take billions of pieces of information and create super accurate models of audiences. We can put the right ad in front of the right person at the right time – and then we can measure how effective we’ve been.

The human bandwidth for advertising is disappearing.

By: nichodges

07-05-2013

Advertising, Data, Media, The future

I presented this chart as part of a talk I gave at the Interactive Minds event in Brisbane last week.

It’s a simple (perhaps overly so) representation of the amount of information contained in standard ads delivered in different types of non-broadcast media over the past few decades.

A single-page full colour print ad is around 25MB of data. The equivalent online format – a rich media banner – is around 2MB. While mobile ad standards are loose at best, size restrictions dictate that 20KB is about as big as a mobile ad can be.

The human bandwidth for advertising is declining consistently by orders of magnitude. The future bandwidth available for advertising is 200 bytes – a little more than the amount of data in this sentence.

What will that future look like? The ‘Glanceable UI’ is a term coined by Misfit CEO Sonny Vu that perfectly describes how we will consume our content in the future, and why brands will be mostly absent.

Nike Fuel created a glanceable string of LEDs to communicate how much you’ve moved today.

Pebble Watch created a monochromatic glanceable screen to show you only the critical information from your smartphone.

And Google Glass gives you a glanceable heads-up display as a consumer device, not just military wizardry or sci-fi gadgetry.

When our screens are nothing more than a string of LEDs, there is no room for the insignficant.

Despite being an advertising company, Google does not allow developers to serve ads on Glass.

With screens shrinking, the first thing to suffer as a result will be advertising. In a world where the human bandwidth for advertising is approaching zero, content providers will face the challenge of having to adapt in order to remain profitable.

The New York Times, a business that is slowly weaning itself off a reliance on advertising, has released its Glass app. While a media company like Google seem to be perfectly positioned to survive in a glanceable future, it’s not so clear how – or if – the New York Times and others like it will.

Do Social ads suck?

By: nichodges

19-04-2013

Advertising, Data, Facebook, Marketing, Media, Privacy, Social Graph, Social Media

The below is a bit I wrote for Marketing Mag last year. I completely forgot about it, but then it was published this week. The question posed was “Do low-impact formats handicap hyper-targeting?”. Interestingly, in the months since this was written Facebook have moved to be less reliant on ‘social’ and more reliant on ‘behavioural’ targeting data through FBX, indicating a slow but clever move to being a hybrid ad/data company rather than a pure ad company. Head over to Marketing Mag to read the other responses.

Regardless of how targeted or how social display advertising is, it needs to be acknowledged that this is a low-impact, low-performing format.

Putting ‘hyper-targeted’ and ‘social’ in front of something doesn’t necessarily mean a lot beyond hype and perhaps a slightly higher cost per impression. Yet there seems to be an assumption in the market that social media advertising allows a level of targeting previously unfathomable by ‘traditional digital’. This is not true.

Meaningful, accurate audience models can be built outside of social platforms – it’s simply a matter of how well you can manage and model data.

The assumption that hyper-targeted social is the next big thing stems from the fact it’s a lot simpler to explain how you can create highly-targeted audiences with social data than it is to explain how to do it with less-obvious data. The former just requires an understanding that every detail of your life is available to Facebook. The latter actually requires hard maths, good technology, and clever people.

The truth is, the fact I visited a brand’s website is far more meaningful than the fact I like a brand on Facebook. And putting a banner ad in front of me, or a promoted post on Facebook, is not the best use of that data.

So what is all this data useful for? How about actually making stuff that people want to interact with? Or generating unique and previously unknown insights about your brand and your audience? Or using data and conversations to develop new products?

We need to move away from actually thinking display advertising is an effective format that we should continue to expect growth from. Whether it’s hyper-targeted and social or not, display advertising is a low-impact format that we need to evolve into something much, much better.

Like books? You might like Kindred.

By: nichodges

01-04-2013

Data, Mobile, Personalisation

Short version: If you read books and have a Kindle (or use the Kindle app on another device), check out Kindred.

Longer version: I read books. I don’t read heaps of books, and almost none of them are fiction. But I do like the idea that the second best way to learn from someone or about something is through reading (the first best being meeting the person, which makes the second remarkably more common).

Every physical book I own is usually scattered with dozens of tiny post-it note markers highlighting all the bits that resonate with me and I’m likely to come back to.

Since I got a Kindle three years ago, every book I’ve read has been an eBook. When I made this switch I thought this would make the way I use highlights much simpler and much better – after all, every highlight from every book I read is now in ‘the cloud’!

The reality, I quickly discovered, wasn’t so great. The ability to access your Kindle highlights is limited to a web interface that resembles Yahoo circa 1998. There is no API allowing people to build on top of the service, and in three years it didn’t seem like Amazon were at all interested on improving the experience.

Talking to a few friends, it seemed this frustration wasn’t mine alone. So I set out to build a solution that allowed me to access, read, and share my highlights.

After a couple days over the Christmas break, a few late nights and a few more early mornings, the result is Kindred. If you’ve always wanted a better way to read or share your highlights from Kindle, head over and sign up. Kindred loads up your Kindle highlights, and allows you to easily select books, read through and share. You can also have a random highlight emailed to you daily or weekly, something that paper books always struggled to do.

The interface is minimal, but it works across all the various screens people are using. On iPhones and iPads you can even add it to your homescreen and it will work as an app. There’s already a few new features in the works (search and notes being top of the list), but if you’d like to see anything else included let me know.

Enough with the ‘Innovation’

By: nichodges

07-01-2013

Advertising, Media

Given it’s the start of a new year, I thought this was worth posting. It was also published on Mumbrella. It feels like the whole 70/20/10 model has already become passé, which is a good thing. But the core idea here – that brands are looking for innovation in the wrong place, and as a result are about to be massively disrupted – is more important than ever.

70/20/10. If you’re to believe the hype of every digital marketing conference these days, these three numbers are the saviour of every brand. Just spend 20% on moderately interesting work, and 10% on “innovation”, and watch those sales skyrocket. Agencies are loving it – finally the freedom to pitch those disruptive bottom drawer ideas and put all those Creative Technologists to use. But is this approach working? Is it right? Or are we all missing the point?

Every brand rightfully now sees innovation as a key to future success. Almost every client has an “innovation fund” (but very few have ever used it). Everybody wants to create the next Nike+. The only problem is that nobody seems to be doing it.

In almost every category there’s no shortage of innovative and disruptive ideas. The problem is that they’re not coming from agencies, or their clients. The Dollar Shave Club in FMCG, Shoes of Prey and Warby Parker in retail, Uber in transport, The Pebble Watch in technology, Spotify in entertainment, and Project Glass. These are just a handful of the new ideas that have brands reaching desperately for the innovation lever.

A slightly pointless, but interesting calculation.

By: nichodges

11-07-2012

Advertising, Data, Video

Walking through the agency earlier today, I noticed Ken Block’s Gymkhana Five video playing on at least four monitors.

The latest installment of the DC Shoes co-founder screaming around San Fran sideways in a rally car racked up 7 million views in it’s first 24 hours online. There’s no doubt that these videos are an epic example of how to do branded content. But that led me to think – what’s the cost of all those views to the global GDP?

Turns out, with a few assumptions, it’s about US$32,653,499. In one day.

Google Docs spreadsheet, with references and assumptions is here.

Creativity.

By: nichodges

10-07-2012

Advertising, Art, Creativity

Quite liked this from James Carse – Finite and Infinite Games…

Artists cannot be trained. One does not become an artist by acquiring certain skills or techniques, though one can use any number of skills and techniques in artistic activity. The creative is found in anyone who is prepared for surprise. Such a person cannot go to school to be an artist, but can only go to school as an artist.

In pretty much every business I’ve worked in, the edict that “everyone is creative” is thrown out with incredible frequency. Which makes life kind of awkward for the people who have “Creative” as a job title.

It’s not that the statement isn’t true, it’s in the details. Everyone has the potential to be a creative. Beyond that it’s an attitude, or as Carse puts it, “anyone who is prepared for surprise”. From now on I think “everyone is creative” should be forcibly postscripted with “if they’re prepared for a surprise”.

A few quick notes on Fairfax, News, and the future of print.

By: nichodges

29-06-2012

Fragmentation, Media, The future

I’ve had a few emails and conversations over the past week post Fairfax and News admitting to the existence of the broader digital world. I haven’t had the time or inclination to put together a full article, there’s plenty of more qualified people doing that. But I thought it worth posting a few different thoughts from a few different emails and conversations.

Have the New York Times got it right finally with their Flipboard integration?

I’m not sure how it took so long for this to happen. Forward-thinking publications like the NYT and FT and the Guardian realised years ago that they’re in the content game, not the publishing game. The best thing a news organisation can do right now is abandon every aspect of their business that focuses on distribution (which they’re terrible at), and focus on the one thing they’re good at – creating content using words, pictures and video that people want to read and watch, and that set the agenda for the community, country, or world.

It’s more than a year since I wrote about this on the re-release of the Fairfax app, and I didn’t think it was a terribly groundbreaking idea at the time. I’m not sure why it’s taken so long.

Is there any way paywalls can work? Or are they a band-aid on the bullethole?

It’s easy to write off paywalls, and most analysis is correct in doing so. But that analysis only holds up when you look at publishers in isolation as a business. Almost every single business that is growing today is doing so through meta diversification. Supermarkets are banks. Search engines are mobile phone manufacturers. And in the communications world everyone is going for the triple-play of mobile, ISP and TV provider.

News is in an amazing position here with their 25% stake in Foxtel. Almost a third of Australian homes have a Foxtel box in them. And that means almost a third of Australian’s are already consuming content behind a paywall – but it’s TV. A News/Telstra/Foxtel triple play for subscription content could work, and could be implemented fast and soon.

Will the rate at which consumers accept they have to pay for online news content move more rapidly now?

I don’t think you’ll find people in Australia “accepting” that they need to pay for content. Ever. Especially now you have a generation of people who have grown up with free content entering the workforce/consumerforce.

This question seems to come from the same line of thinking that has led Fairfax and News to be in the position they are now in – they think they’re facing competition, when they’re really facing obsolescence.
Consumers will pay for content if it can be delivered to them in a seamless, interactive, and useful way. The content cannot be monetised, the method of delivery can. One of the biggest oversights of the past couple weeks is the critical need to decouple the content creators from the content distributors when looking at future business models. The journalist has no connection to the printing press any more.

Why are digital dollars worth less than print?

The audience are (for the most part) fully aware of the basic economics of physical distribution. They understand that the reason their newspaper is 20% ads, and the reason they have to pay a buck for it is because that physical item had to be created and transported into their hands.

From the beginning of newspapers the content has not been the valuable element in the transaction. It was replicated across every other version of the newspaper. So the value that we placed on the transaction was the ability to have our copy of that content.
With digital that model was flattened. Digital allows copies to be made for no cost – and the legacy attitude of “I pay for the physicalness of this content” is one that is hard to shift. Contrast this to books, where the value proposition has always been about owning the content. The acknowledgement in the transaction was that you were paying for the words that the writer had spent time crafting, not for the physical copy of the book. It’s a small difference, but it’s one of the key reasons that the newspaper world is falling apart, and the book world is not.

Lessons from Peter Thiel for non-startup people.

By: nichodges

22-04-2012

Art, Conversations, Creativity

A 0 to 1 startup involves low financial costs but low non-financial costs too. You’ll at least learn a lot and probably will be better for the effort. A 1 to n startup, though, has especially low financial costs, but higher non-financial costs. If you try to do Groupon for Madagascar and it fails, it’s not clear where exactly you are. But it’s not good… The path from 0 to 1 might start with asking and answering three questions. First, what is valuable? Second, what can I do? And third, what is nobody else doing?

A chap named Blake Masters is taking Peter Thiel’s class on startups at Stanford. He’s posting all of his notes on his Tumblr. Startup people can obviously learn a lot from them. But a lot of it applies to pretty much any person who wants to make things – whether it’s a interweb startup, an ad, a new bike shop, or a new piece of music.

Facestagram – 3 reasons the deal went down.

By: nichodges

20-04-2012

Advertising, Facebook, Mobile

This piece was originally in AdNews.

Dennis K Berman, marketplace editor for The Wall Street Journal, summed it up with a single tweet: “Remember this day. 551-day-old Instagram is worth $1 billion. 116-year-old New York Times Co.: $967 million.” While the rest of us were scoffing down our Easter eggs, Mark Zuckerberg splashed out $1 billion to buy a mobile app that makes your photos look like they were taken in the ’70s.

The numbers are mind boggling. Instagram had less than 100,000 users in October 2010. By December, 1 million. Three months later, 2 million. By the start of November 2011 photos around the world were being vignetted and overshared by 12 million iPhone users. On April 3 this year Instagram launched its Android app, and picked up a lazy 1 million new users in a day. By the time founder Kevin Systrom was calling Zuckerberg “boss”, the app was being used by over 35 million people. To give that number some perspective, Instagram was installed on 1 in 10 iPhones in the world.

Unsurprisingly, in the last week there’s been a wave of speculation around why Facebook acquired Instagram. For advertisers, there are three key motives worth paying some attention to. And it’s not necessarily because they paint a rosy future for mobile and brands.

— Uneven Distribution.

Chasing Big Data Unicorns

The human bandwidth for advertising is disappearing.

Like books? You might like Kindred.

Enough with the ‘Innovation’

A slightly pointless, but interesting calculation.

Creativity.

A few quick notes on Fairfax, News, and the future of print.

Lessons from Peter Thiel for non-startup people.

Facestagram – 3 reasons the deal went down.

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