Conversations | Uneven Distribution.Uneven Distribution.

Lessons from Peter Thiel for non-startup people.

22-04-2012

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.

On the changing blog.

By: nichodges

20-12-2011

Conversations

A few people have noticed that this blog has recently become more of place where I’m posting interesting bits that I’ve read, rather than writing long (and dull) articles about media and advertising. There’s a couple reasons for this.

First being that I’m not writing as much for the trade press. There’s a pretty simple explanation for this – the Australian trade press just isn’t as interesting any more. Gone are the original thinkers of the industry, and in their place are the anonymous comments and knee-jerk pieces on social media. I’m still writing the odd piece for Business Spectator / Technology Spectator, so expect the odd long (and dull) article still.

Secondly, we’ve just launched the MediaCom Labs blog (and site). Labs is the home of the MediaCom Innovation & Technology team in Australia. We’ve got big plans over the next couple years, so I’ll be putting a bit more energy into building robots and apps and writing posts over there as well. We’ve just launched our 2012 trends report, so there’s another reason to go have a look.

So that’s about it. I’ll be posting more frequently on here now, but just with little interesting snippets. So please do stick around if your’e finding those interesting.

The new marketing rule book (part 1)

By: nichodges

25-11-2010

Advertising, Conversations, Data, Fragmentation, Marketing, Media, Privacy, Social Media

I recently spoke on a panel at the Sydney Advertising Marketing and Media Summit in Sydney, on the topic of “The new marketing rule book”. It was a great panel, with a broad range of perspectives and some good debate. I’m also in Melbourne on Thursday at the Melbourne leg, and given I just realised I’m speaking on a different topic, I though it might be worthwhile to post up my notes from the day. As usual they’re rather long, so I’ll post them up here in two bits.

Rule #1: Everything is now a transaction.

We, as marketers, have exited ‘The advertising century’, and have entered ‘The transactional century’. Everything we do now as consumers is a transaction in some way. Whereas in the past purchase has provided transactional data, now every banner ad we see, search result we click, venue we check-in, and TV show we watch is a transaction, a point of data.
Essentially, getting someone’s attention, is now a transaction. And the data that is generated is now a valuable commodity. And importantly, a measurable one.
This works two ways, it’s not just about marketers collecting data, but it’s about consumers offering it up. And in this sense, marketers are ripping off the public. A lot of data is being collected, with not a lot being given in return. This will change, and it will change fast.
This data pool has the capacity to grow faster than we know what to do with it. Even at the moment it is underutilised. In the next few years we’ll see real-time exchanges for display advertising, unique content delivery of major sites and apps, contextually aware (and useful) non-disruptive mobile marketing, and sooner than you think household level TV commercial targeting.
Marketers need to consider every single transaction they are asking a person to make. And they need to consider them from two angles. Firstly, are you making the most of the data you are collecting? And secondly, is the transaction a fair one – are you suppling something of value back to the user?

Rule #2: There is no ‘best case’.

Best case scenarios are based on replicability. We can benchmark TV, Print and DM because the only thing that really changes from campaign to campaign is the idea. The execution is fixed. But in the digital space the execution is the idea, and the idea is the execution. Everything changes, every time.
Trying to replicate the stunning successes will fail every time. Subservient Chicken, Best Job, Old Spice – these cannot simply be replicated with a new brand and a tweak on the idea, because the user is not an idiot.
This makes integrated communications and integrated agency partners more important than ever. It’s only through having all the bits talking together that truly fresh thinking can flow through the whole process.
More than this, the key to becoming a ‘best case’ is to accept that ideas come from anywhere. The true art of marketing is now to spot that brilliant idea and bring it to life.
Stop looking backwards to move forward.

Getting over ‘who owns social media?’

By: nichodges

06-09-2010

Conversations, Facebook, Marketing, Media, Social Media

There’s a been a bunch of talk in the last couple weeks around social media, in particular the ownership of it from both an agency and brand point of view. I get asked the ‘ownership’ question a lot. And my response has been the same for a long time now. The best people to manage a brand’s social media monitoring or activity is whoever is best set up to do it. And that really does change on a case by case basis.

I had a few people ask me what was up with my quote in the SMH on Friday, and even though Nina Hendy took a very small soundbite from a much longer conversation, I am completely convinced that the best place for day to day social activity is within the client’s brand team.

But that’s a lot different to the monitoring and insights side of things.

And this is where I see the comments on the Mumbrella post that followed the SMH article getting a bit too simplistic. What gets lost in this debate about who’s posting on a Facebook page and replying to tweets, is the immense amount of insight social media can offer a brand. We’ve recently introduced a suite of social products for MediaCom that take the snake-oil out of social, and the key element that gets clients interested is almost always the insights part of the offering. By having an ongoing social monitoring program, and by having people in the agency offering insight and analysis on this data, everyone benefits; TV, print, press, display, and yes even the guys doing the social media engagement (whether they’re inside or outside the agency).

What I’ve realised through this process is that almost everyone overlooks this value that social monitoring brings to the overall marketing picture. And I now watch with even more interest on how specialist social media agencies (or divisions within agencies, as UM announced today) plan on selling and monetising their services. Because the bulk of real value that a social offering brings to clients actually lies outside social media, so having a business dedicated to just social doesn’t seem like the goldmine many still believe it to be.

I hope we’re beyond the era of snake oil salesman in the social arena, and as a result I hope the conversation can move on from ‘who owns social media, agency or the client?’ to ‘how effectively are you integrating what you’re doing in social into every other part of the marketing mix?’.

Why Twitter’s Titanium matters.

By: nichodges

07-07-2010

Advertising, Conversations, Marketing, Social Graph, Social Media

I decided to keep out of the whole ‘Twitter winning at Cannes‘ debate a couple weeks ago. But listening to the Mumbrella podcast yesterday, I couldn’t help but think we’re slightly missing the point.

The thing is, Titanium is meant to be the best idea in the world of advertising, marketing, and brands from the past year. And this year, Twelpforce won it.

The best way I’ve heard to judge ‘the best’ was that while gold might be an idea that makes you jealous because it wasn’t yours, Titanium is an idea that makes you humble. I like that, and I really believe it’s true (and not just for creative awards).

Nike+ does that. The Unicef Tap project does that. The Million Project does that. Obama for America does that.

So does Twelpforce make me humble? To be honest, it doesn’t. But it does makes me excited. I don’t have a problem with Twelpforce winning Titanium. The thing is, the discussion shouldn’t be around whether the judges were right to award it Titanium. The discussion should be around what this means. It’s a signifier that the advertising landscape has changed. And if we’re to believe the best minds in the idustry that are assembled into the judging panel, this is the idea that truly humbles them.

What an ace time to be in this job.

Because Twelpforce has nothing to do with a big idea. There’s no helicopters, no world-renowned director, no multi-million dollar budget. There’s simply a bunch of guys in an agency that saw what was happening on twitter, and sold it to their client.

So this year’s Cannes Titanium was a signal to the advertising world. The true talent and genius in your agency is not the awkward aspiring filmmaker who turns up at the agency at 11am, half an hour after getting out of bed. The talent is now found in the guys that can see opportunity in how people are communicating, and how to leverage it. And crucially, they can then sell that opportunity to clients. Make them comfortable, make them believe it, and execute it without backing down on anything.

Are brands investing enough?

By: nichodges

14-05-2010

Advertising, Conversations, Facebook

I wrote a short bit for B&T’s “Yes, no, maybe” section a few weeks back. The question posed was “Are major Australian brands investing enough in digital and social media?”.

Being the disagreeable type, I answered with “no”. I never actually saw it in the mag (our subscription didn’t seem to turn up that week), so I’m not entirely sure what the other respondents said. But i thought I’d post it up here to hear any comments, and also because I’ve got another post half done that follows somewhat logically on from this.

Most major Australian brands are at least on their way to spending enough in digital media. But this is just media spend, not investment, and the list of big brands investing sufficiently in digital and social is very short.

In social media, this lack of investment is almost understandable. From a client point of view there is still a lack of real measurement in social. Without proven and established metrics, it is hard to justify investment. I see this as a challenge to agencies (creative, media and PR) to create real, measureable effectiveness in this space.

In the broader digital sense, investment is lacking fundamentally because of campaign-based thinking. Short-term business objectives from clients result in short-term ideas from agencies. The real opportunity in digital is to create long-term platforms and an engaged audience that seek out your brand. But this requires investment.

It’s not a surprising situation to be in. We have clients and agencies climbing out of a GFC, with structures and processes designed for another world. And therein lies the opportunity to really stand out. Now is the time to be taking the lead, by thinking differently and investing in innovation.

Going analog.

By: nichodges

10-01-2010

Advertising, Conversations, Marketing, Personalisation

I really like George Dyson’s response to Frank Schirrmacher’s “Age of the Informavore” talk, published in Edge #303.

“Google, Facebook, Twitter, not to mention the Web as a whole — are effectively operating as large analog computers, although there remains a digital substrate underneath”.

It’s worth contemplating that the next time you think you work in digital. Because the really good work is no longer digital. Yes it uses digital as a platform, as a method for delivery. But the experience inherent in the idea, is truly analog. It’s foundation is always in an emotional response, a human interaction.

And then Dyson finishes…

“When you are an informavore drowning in digital data, analog looks good.”

Which gave me a glimmer of hope for advertising and marketing. Display advertising as we know it, all that intrusive and usually poorly targetted noise that we are bombarded with daily, is very much ‘digital’ advertising. Calculated through complex algorithms by cold computers who don’t understand me despite their 8-core processors.

But the work that I really admired last year was actually very much analog.

Analog rather than digital is the difference between going to the Volkswagen website to look at brochureware about the newest Golf, and downloading an iPhone game allowing you to race (essentially test drive) the same car. It’s the difference between putting your views on being the leader of the free world on your campaign site, and actively recruiting people to form communities and spread your word. It’s the difference between creating an online stats database for high-school footballers, and allowing you to visualise and compare your stats to your heroes and peers.

I think if we can start our work with the mindset of “What behaviour do we want to create that people will want and need?” rather than “How do we do this thing that we’ve alway done, but do it better digitally?”, we could more easily be creating these analog interactions in a digital world.

The more of these experiences that we create, the more experiences that people will actually seek out and want to be part of, the less interruptive and irrelevant noise we will need to create. And that can only be a good thing.

Postscript: Re-reading this post, I realise that what I’ve said is blindingly obvious to those of you that inhabit the echo chamber that is digital advertising blogging. But I’m going to post it anyway, partially because I wrote it, so I may as well, but also because I don’t think I’ve quite done justice to Dyson’s thoughts. So go check out his response (and the many other briliant responses) to Schirrmacher at Edge.

Plausible promises and the critical mass.

By: nichodges

08-12-2009

Advertising, Conversations, Fragmentation, Marketing, Media, Social Media

A post on Advertising Lab got my attention today. It’s a recently de-classified ‘rumour manual’ from 1943. And it’s directives and ideas seem to eerily echo (or perhaps just be interestingly relevant) to the modus operandi of today’s social media strategies.

Go check it out, it’s worth a read.

This military connection to what I do isn’t entirely new to me though. As I read through John Robb’s ‘Brave New War’ I was constantly drawn to the parallels between modern warfare and marketing (to the point that in some ways, you can see the future of marketing in war). I briefly mentioned this a while back in ‘Dark Blue Swans‘, but there’s a couple key paragraphs from the book that I thought were worth putting up here. I’ve always planned on putting together some form of thinking around them and making a nice cohesive point, but figure I’ll never get around to it. So here they are, with minimal commentary…

“The promise is the central connection between all the members in the community. Each member can have specific motivations that are substantially different from any of the others. In the case of warfare, these alternative motivations can be patriotism, hatred of occupation, ethnic bigotry, religious fervor, tribal loyalty, or what have you. It doesn’t matter as long as they agree with the plausible promise.”

I love this idea of a plausible promise. And I can’t help but think it’s an idea that’s somewhat foreign to marketing and advertising. Throughout warfare there’s always been a plausible promise. For a Trojan army of 30,000 it was a singular belief that they all understood and believed, and now for guerilla movements it’s a singular belief that can be fragmented into many different exegeses.

When it comes to marketing, I’m not sure that the promise (or single minded proposition or point of difference or whatever you need to call it) was ever that plausible. But it didn’t seem to matter. You shouted at people telling them your detergent gave the whitest whites, or your razor gave the closest shave, and the consumer bought it.

Now the market is fragmented and connected. Your plausible promise needs to not only be true, but it needs to be applicable to a range of market fragments. If it’s not true, the connected consumer will soon find out. And if it’s not applicable to diverse fragments, you won’t get the critical mass of communication that you need.

“A critical mass of participation is necessary. A certain minimum number of participants, either individuals or component groups, are necessary for microaction to translate into macroaction. It also means that without a minimum number of interactions between these participants, the statistical nature of macrointelligence won’t emerge. The simple catchphrase for this is more is different.”

This understanding of critical mass is hugely important, and up to now usually ignored. We’re guilty of creating niche campaigns that are designed to spread through social networks, but are only targetting a thin slice of a total market while completely ignoring the rest of the relevant slices.

If you can create a plausible promise that is applicable to a mass of fragments, you can gain a critical mass that will amplify your communication massively. It doesn’t matter if the interperatation of the promise varies slightly, if you have ten groups all spreading the same core promise in their own way, you will have something that is far greater than the sum of its parts.

In the case of warfare you’re talking macrointelligence, but in the case of advertising you’re talking macroawareness. And even though the digital marketing landscape might be about focusing on a more and more fragmented audience, it’s hard to ignore the power that this type of macroawareness could have.

Massive change.

By: nichodges

24-03-2009

Advertising, Conversations, Fragmentation, Marketing, Media

Online display advertising as it currently stands will die. It won’t happen tomorrow, but it will die. I’ve been thinking this for a while, and it was refreshing to see on TechCrunch that Eric Clemons seems to agree with me. The old school advertiser-publisher-reader model is so irrelevant in the internet age that we can now admit that newspapers will be as quaint to my children as Movietone news is to me. As a result of the demise of traditional publishers, online advertising as we know it will also die.

And what will replace it? We don’t know yet. And we won’t know until we finally admit that the old model is doomed and we move on to the next generation of advertising. And whatever this next generation of advertising reveals itself as will come from experimentation. There is a temptation to assume that the embracing of digital by traditional agencies, with traditional structures is the beginning of this next generation. But I don’t believe it. Even the best transmedia ideas come from a place that is thoroughly grounded in oldschool, top-down thinking. And while the abandoning of this method is unthinkable, so was the demise of the newspaper industry. Clay Shirky summed it up brilliantly in his post Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable:

“Experiments are only revealed in retrospect to be turning points….Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.”

Experimentation then. And lots of it. Sounds like a brilliant idea.

The only problem is that this leaves us, as people who do creative work for huge brands, in an extremely difficult place. The biggest agencies attract the best creative minds, and also the biggest clients. But while the former are capable of amazing ideas, the latter are unwilling to take the risk of experimentation. Yes, there has been a swag of what could be called experimental thoughts over just the past few months. Just out of BBDO Australia and New Zealand we’ve had the Yellow Tree House, Team Dry, and Christmas Clones, but these are still a long way from game-changing, and it’s certainly not enough to be considered “lots and lots”. I don’t believe that anyone has nailed the truly transformative creative thinking that will be advertising’s Craigslist or Wikipedia.

So how can we make this change happen?

One outlook would be a combination of long-term brand communications engagement, and brilliant short lived spikes of high engagement creativity. Essentially the people that love your brand or product will happily become a fan on Facebook, follow it on Twitter, and you can have an ongoing dialogue with them over months and years. But in order to remind them how cool the brand is, and in order to attract new followers, you need to have massive creative ideas that touch and entertain millions of people.

In this outlook, media agencies should evolve along with PR agencies, into macro relationship builders. They can focus on building these long term relationships. Getting the communication in the right space and keeping it consistent and on brand (keeping in mind that the idea of being ‘on brand’ will evolve immensely over the next few years).

Meanwhile creative agencies need to continue coming up with brilliant ideas. But better brilliant ideas. And this is where massive change needs to happen, from the creative agencies. How they think about what they do. We need to stop thinking about making ads, and start thinking about making things we don’t know how to make. Ideas that are authentic, adaptive, relevant, transformative, fresh, immersive and social. And nothing less.

The good news is that the next era of working in marketing and advertising could well be the most rewarding in history. No longer are you selling products that no one wants to solve a problem they never had. You may actually be helping people do stuff they want with people they like in places they want to be. Imagine that.

— Uneven Distribution.

Lessons from Peter Thiel for non-startup people.

On the changing blog.

Are brands investing enough?

Going analog.

Massive change.

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