Personalisation | Uneven Distribution.Uneven Distribution.

The beginning of chair piracy.

27-01-2012

Creativity, Data, Personalisation, The future

We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles. Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare sparts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years.

And with that, The Pirate Bay created a new category on one of the world’s largest piracy outlets – a category for physical objects. 3D Printers are now under $1000. And while the resolution, size and materials still leave a lot to be desired, it’s worth casting your mind back to your amazement at first seeing a domestic printer spit-out a colour printout that sort of resembled a photograph. Because that was likely less than 20 years ago. A few quick points on this:

This is the future. I love it when the future actually arrives.
Any (likely) arguments or discussions around IP are completely pointless. The piracy of objects is well an truly established across the world already. It’s not just fake handbags either, the Chinese have pirated a Rolls Royce. That Eames chair your sitting on is more than likely pirated.
This will eventually change how we look at products – the free availability of almost any design we want will ultimately lead to people thinking about their needs rather than their wants. Instead just buying what we are told too from the limited range available, we will consider what we need and how that need could be fulfilled through the infinite possibility of design customisation.
This won’t be a huge challenge for brands – firstly because multi-material 3D printing is still at least 10 years off, so you’ll be waiting a while to print out those Nikes. Secondly because even in a world of downloadable (and piratable) objects, the same fundamentals remain – brands are a heuristic, a shortcut to something we know and are comfortable with. If brands are providing good service, customer-centric customisation, and simplicity, the world of 3D printing is far more of an opportunity than a threat.

In the meantime, if you really can’t wait, your 3D printed shoes are available here.

Publishers, innovation, and failure.

By: nichodges

23-08-2010

Advertising, Fragmentation, Media, Personalisation, Social Media

Below is a talk I gave at News Digital last week as part of a breakfast talking about The Australian iPad app. Following me were Nick Leeder and Ed Smith, two guys who really get where their industry is going. I know it’s easy to bash the big publishers when it comes to paywalls and innovation in delivery, but I get the feeling that organisations like News are going to come out of this decade as big winners.

It’s no great revelation that social Media and the rise of digital communication have completely shifted the media landscape. The speed with which consumers have adapted to technology has outpaced the speed with which many organisations have adapted.

Technology, and importantly communication through technology, has become ubiquitous and transparent in the lives of consumers. And yet the digital world still feels awkward and ill-fitting for many businesses and brands.

And why is this?

Because the 2 billion people using the internet today have changed how they’re behaving.

They’ve started sharing their opinions with the world.

They’ve started making Skype calls to their friends on the other side of the world.

They’ve started using Google as a verb.

They’ve started to expect an instant reply.

They’re uploading 24 hours of video to YouTube every minute.

They’re watching 2 billion YouTube videos a day.

They’ve started to create advertising for the brands they love.

And they’ve started movements against the ones they don’t.

Almost one third of the world’s population is online, and they’re creating stuff. These 2 billion people have become publishers.

And if you think that these 2 billion people aren’t a threat to the way advertisers, agencies and publishers operate, I’d like to introduce you to Apollo.

Apollo helps you discover the best news content from around the web based on your preferences. Apollo gives you all the top news headlines in real-time, aggregated from 1000′s of the world’s top sources and personalised to your preferences. It is an up-to-the minute, mobile newspaper. As you use the application, the Apollo algorithm learns what articles and sources you enjoy and helps you discover new content based on your personal preferences and viewing history.

And importantly, apps like Apollo and social-news aggregator Flipboard aren’t showing users any ads. The users are the new publishers. The editor is now a combination of my social network and complex algorithms. And there doesn’t seem to be much of a role for advertisers.

Essentially, publishing is the new literacy. Publishing is now abundant. And if we look back 600 years to the birth of the printing industry we find that literacy became abundant at the same time as scribes lost their jobs.

So what of publishers, at the time when everybody becomes a publisher?

Publishers create immense value for agencies and our clients. Newspapers have for more than 150 years given us a place to get our message across to consumers. They have provided us with an audience.

And with the birth of digital, the publishers evolved. They created audiences, and gave us valuable spaces in which we could advertise. In less than 2 decades, digital advertising has gone from a non-existent industry, to one worth $2 billion a year in Australia.

But now, if we look at devices like the iPad and how it’s changing media consumption, it’s seems like we’re back at the starting gate again. Consumers aren’t paying attention to our ads online, and more and more they’re actually behaving in ways that cut us out. To continue to be able to talk to consumers, we need to understand that their behaviour has changed. They have become publishers, and that completely changes the landscape for advertisers.

Clay Shirky brilliantly highlights what happens when we move from a scarcity of publishers to an abundance of them…

…surplus always breaks more things than scarcity. Scarcity means valuable things become more valuable. Surplus, on the other hand, means previously valuable things stop being valuable, which freaks people out.

I think it’s a fair observation to say that, on the whole, many organisations are freaked out by the changes that they are seeing in the digital world.

But the challenge for publishers is relatively simple: Create something that is so compelling, that audiences will seek it out.

Create something that understands the changes in behaviour. That understands that people care about sharing content with their friends, and having content recommended back. Something that uses complex technology to present a simple, enjoyable experience.

It’s possible that in five or ten years, the launch of the iPad will be considered as the beginning of a revolution. We really don’t know what sort of impact these devices will have. But no matter what, experimentation and innovation are key.

The thing about being an innovator however, is that there will be failures. And todays publishers could learn a lot from looking at the people who were the catalysts for the revolution we find ourselves in. These innovators weren’t afraid of failure. In fact, in Silicon Valley failure is seen as a badge of honour.

While I’m sure today we’ll hear all about the success of News innovation with The Australian iPad app, It’s just as valuable to hear about, and learn from the failures. We’re on the bleeding edge here, and I can assure you that in the world of technology and innovation, nobody is getting everything right, all of the time.

The winners of the digital era will not simply be those that outthink, but those that outfail.

Communication has changed more in the last decade than it did during the first three hundred years of the printing press.

And this is not a change that can be resisted. This is behaviour, and it can only be embraced.

For advertisers, this change means being brave and stepping outside of your comfort zone sometimes. Devices like the iPad are giving us so many new ways to talk to and talk with consumers. These new opportunities won’t always look and feel like advertising as we know it, but to remain relevant in consumers lives we have to talk to them on their terms.

For media and creative agencies, it means we have to keep exploring and examining. It’s never been so important to understand the intricacies of consumers lives, how and why they’re doing what they’re doing. And this exploration informs our entire business, from the initial planning phase all the way through to the execution of an idea.

And finally for publishers, this massive change means they have to understand how and why people are consuming content. They have to innovate, and create something that people choose. Something that they seek out.

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.

Communication in an invisible world.

By: nichodges

19-09-2008

Advertising, Conversations, Data, Fragmentation, Marketing, Personalisation, Privacy, Social Graph

Reading Clay Shirky‘s “Here Comes Everybody” recently I came across the following idea. It’s a simple reminder that the advertising and marketing industry is heading towards a massive shift, one that many people still can’t see and one that I’m still not entirely sure how we effectively approach.

“It’s when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive it’s invisible, that the really profound changes happen, and for young people today, our new social tools have passed normal and are heading to ubiquitous, and invisible is coming.”

The invisibility that Shirky talks about here highlights a fascinating change and compelling challenge. And I don’t think his use of the term ‘profound changes’ is understating the significance. In the next few years, a huge slice of consumers will have spent their entire life online and in the social space. How they communicate, and how they expect to be communicated too, is vastly different to how ‘we’ (late gen Y’ers and up) experience the world, particularly when it comes to advertising and marketing.

So what exactly will happen when this change arrives? There are some things we know, as well as things we can fairly safely predict.

1. Privacy will become less of an issue.
Companies collecting digital information on you was once shocking. It’s now somewhere between normal and ubiquitous (depending on who you ask). But to those who have grown up with their Facebook or Bebo or MySpace conversations on display to the world, the wall between personal and private will become completely invisible (Facebook pun only slightly intended).

2. Amateur content, specifically targeted, will take precedence over professional content.
The natively-wired generation expect their content how they want it, when they want it, and as they want it. Mark Pesce explains the scenario well:

“When he weighs the latest episode of a TV series against some newly-made video that is meant only to appeal to a few thousand people – such as himself – that video will win, every time. It more completely satisfies him.”

3. Brands will no longer be a signifier of being cool.
The cool people will be the early adopters, those on the tip with the freshest content or latest meme. They will in turn create cool rather than have it dictated to them through the pages of a magazine.

None of the above are terribly groundbreaking thoughts. But it’s worth thinking about how the above scenarios affect traditional off and online advertising and marketing. How do we talk to consumers when almost every channel available to use 20 years ago no longer exists? With social media focused agencies like The Population opening up, it’s tempting to say that social media marketing is the answer. But I can’t help but think it’s simply an evolution of what we’ve always done as a reaction to how the consumer is evolving. We may need to move upstream, because once communication becomes invisible, we cease to have a forum in which we’re relevant. So what are some possible responses?

1. Become ingrained in their content creation.
I was fortunate enough to see a presentation of Smirnoff Secret Party campaign run by Amnesia a few days ago. While overall it was a great campaign, I really loved the final step in the discovery process whereby ticket holders would upload of a photo of themselves with their ticket. This is an extremely basic execution of the idea of becoming ingrained in content creation, but with the only other one beings Sprint’s Sellout, it’s probably the best I’ve seen (please let me know if there’s anything more out there). User generated content is shoehorned into so many campaigns today without the fundamental understanding that people will only create content for love or money. Convince people to love your product, and they will happily create content around it, and this is what their friends will be watching, reading, listening to, and sharing.

2. Allow everything to be remixed.
If people can’t take your content and your product and make it their own, express themselves through it, and create something with it, it’s just not as interesting. The idea of amateur content for many people conjures up visions of poorly produced and sub-standard videos, but this won’t necessarily continue to be the case. Collaboration and the removal of barriers to entry means professional quality content is becoming more and more achievable by amateurs.

3. Create brand ownership by involving them in the product development.
With rapid prototyping technologies, the idea of personalising a product to thin slices of your market is a reality. As a consumer’s involvement in your product increases, their brand ownership and advocacy increases (often at an exponential rate). There is no better way to create brand advocates and create better products than actually allowing consumers to have a hand in creation. Even if it’s just the packaging, or the naming, or the colours. Since the birth of Wikipedia we have seen that lowering or removing barriers to creation can result in quality content, and lots of it. There is no reason a company shouldn’t take those learnings into their product development and remove barriers to collaboration, ending up with both an amazing product and amazing consumers.

4. Rethink how we’re using the information we have about consumers.
There’s a theory in computer science based around ‘wasting cycles’ (covered in both Paul Graham’s Hackers & Painters and also Nicholas Carr’s The Big Switch). The short version is that if the developers of the next generation of software or hardware take away the restrictions of current computing power, they could dream big. By the time their dreams were a reality, the computing power had caught up. In the same way, what if we wasted data? Generate completely new ways to use consumer data. Rather than using it as a filter for messaging, use it as a platform to build a product, or move up the network and use social graph data to market to entire communities rather than individuals. Sounds counter-intuitive yes, but there’s no reason it’s not worth testing, all we’re wasting is data, and that’s almost free.

With all the talk of integration and social media, it sometimes seems that we’re doing little more than following the trends that a digital society has created. The idea that the tools people have only recently adopted for communication could become so ubiquitous as to become invisible in a matter of years is both remarkably exciting and daunting. As communicators, we need to better comprehend what this invisibility really means, and how we adapt or re-invent our thinking to accommodate it.

PubCamp. Part I

By: nichodges

22-06-2008

Fragmentation, Marketing, Personalisation

I managed to make it to PubCamp last week. After such events I usually end up with a few Moleskine pages of scribblings. These notes usually comprise of a few notable quotes from speakers (half of which no longer make sense as I can’t recall the context), a few interesting thoughts that were piqued by speakers, and usually a few ideas completely unrelated to any theme of the day, but which appeared as a result of some tangential catalyst.

So below is a list of people I managed to catch, and the expanded jottings which appeared alongside them. I’ve mentioned all of this because it needs to be stressed that what is written below isn’t what these people said (unless I obviously quote them), nor is it always agreeing with, or following the same logic of whatever their topic/argument was.

Tim Noonan (bio here)

Tim quotes ABS statistics stating 19% of Australians have some form of disability. Even if the true number of ‘access impaired’ people is more like 5%, accessibility is still treated as a ‘nice to have’ feature, rather than a core consideration.

While I don’t disagree with the intent, I think that before we go hard-coding accessibility into our processes, we need to go one step further back and actually consider the access impaired audience as a slice of our target market/end user. Thinking of the last few campaigns I’ve worked on, I know that this market share simply wouldn’t be significant enough to warrant tailoring communication to them. But before you hit send on that hate mail (or unsubscribe on this feed), now this approach has been brought to my attention, where the access impaired market is significant (even when it’s far from the majority), accessibility will now be a far greater consideration in what I do.

In the future people will be consuming their media via their preferred sense, rather than the way in which the publisher chooses. In this case, the rest of us will be following the lead of people like Tim in creating experiences. Considering vision impaired people can’t ‘see’ most advertising online, what outcome does this have for publishers who rely on advertising revenue, and advertisers who rely on online advertising? This really is just another (albeit extreme) future scenario that questions the role of marketing and advertising in our increasing online and increasingly filtered and customised lives. Can brands survive with nothing more than unpaid word of mouth, or do we need to continue to find engaging ways to offer positive brand or product experiences to the right people?

The increase in cloud computing means a new hardware interface should be possible for the vision impaired. Rather than look at the semantic structure of content, why not watch the visual experience and logic of a page and translate that? There is a visual language in most of the 2.0 web that is being overlooked by traditional approaches to screen reading.

JAWS (evidently the screen reading software of choice) is extremely expensive. Vision impaired people don’t see traditional advertising on the internet. At the same time, an entire industry of products for these people exists, and like any products, needs to be marketed. Why is there not a free ad-supported version of JAWS available?

Keeping Up With The Joneses Genes: Why 2008 will be the tipping point for life online

By: nichodges

09-01-2008

Advertising, Marketing, Media, Mobile, Personalisation

So everyone is busy talking about what’s going to be the big thing this year. There are going to be some cool things happen on the digital frontier, but what will cause possibly the biggest impact online will likely be nothing more than how people use the internet. People are finally realising how cool the internet is. It’s not something in their peripheral vision anymore, it’s something that is unquestionably and unremarkably part of people’s lives.

The thought of a computer as a singular object that we must dedicate our full attention to in one session will shortly be gone from the mainstream mindset. Not long ago you were an uber-geek if you pulled out your mobile at the pub to pull up wikipedia and settle an argument (more to the point, you were an uber-geek for having internet enabled on your phone). Today it’s almost second nature, and these people aren’t geeks in the slightest.

Sometime in the not too distant future you’ll probably start to get sick of how often you hear 23andme.com mentioned. It’s sites like this that perfectly demonstrate what I’m talking about. Or perhaps the fact that the ESPN NFL mobile site had more views last week than the regular site (4.9M views in 24 hours). Or maybe Apple’s projected sales of 10 million iPhones. People (real people, not just geeks) have absorbed the online world into their mindset to the point that online services and information are front of mind when they need anything.

The flurry of internet-based startups and mountains of cash poured into them in the last few years means that the tech industry is well and truly ready for this. Yes, a lot of these companies will die, but a significant amount will rise to the top and join the ranks of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to continue to challenge the oldschool media empires. Unsurprisingly this industry is already a few years ahead. I’m pretty sure my parents won’t hear about twitter, seesmic or etsie for a while still, but the technology and general way of thinking that services like this will produce will probably affect us as much as Amazon, Google and eBay have up to the present day.

But what does this mean for those involved in the online advertising and marketing of real-world brands? Scarily, the majority of big brands just aren’t ready for this. They’re not in any position to take advantage of the way people are going to start thinking about and using the internet. They’re dismally 1.0. There are not enough great services being offered by brands, not enough integration into the social graph, and not enough conversations with customers. There’s plenty of talk about how bad the music industry has handled the online space, and the sad fact is that most big consumer brands aren’t that far behind.

The parallels with the music industry probably shouldn’t be taken too far though. The only thing we really share with them is overprotective lawyers and uninformed high-level decisions makers. In short people have been too precious about their brands and too cautious about doing anything new, with the attitude that the online space was still niche enough to ignore.

And now the time has come. The good news is that because no one has really done anything, everyone’s on the same page. There is still plenty of room to make a move and really get brands online. But if it doesn’t happen soon than a vast majority of people will become comfortable with the way they live online, and that won’t include any sort of dialogue or experience with brands.

Note: Through all of this I’m talking about developed and mostly English speaking communities. Many Asian countries are in a slightly different space right now, and Japan is on a whole different highway. Meanwhile in developing countries, further adoption and reduced costs of technology will likely make a far bigger impact on the world as a whole than being able to get my genetic profile from 23andme.com. I hope.

A few links…
Marshall Kirkpatrick’s fantastic article on RWW, “Ten Common Objections to Social Media Adoption”
Jeremiah Owyang’s great summary of the Many Forms of Web Marketing for 2008.
Everyblock.com has had a lot of hype, and will probably get it’s fair share of press when it finally launches.

What’s so hard about Digital Media?

By: nichodges

11-12-2007

Advertising, Data, Fragmentation, Marketing, Media, Mobile, Personalisation, Social Graph

Next year is going to be cool. There’s going to be some ace stuff. With things like Android and the iPhone opening up we’ll start to see some really cool mobile startups; as people begin to grasp the social graph and data portability we’ll start to see some awesome tools in that space; and as marketers start to realise that a conversation with the consumer is more about offering an experience than a product we’ll get some really amazing campaigns. To keep up with this (and in fact to catch up with even where we’re currently at) digital media needs to change significantly in the next year. There’s a huge lack in Australia of media people who understand this space (especially among the traditional media agencies’ digital offerings) and as a result the creative agencies are, to a point, suffering.

So what are the media agencies doing wrong? It would be great to be able to say it’s a problem of deciding on a technology before a goal, but most of the time there isn’t even a consideration of technology. It’s simply display ads being offered up on the same predictable stable of publishers. Digital media requires a solid and sometimes instinctual understanding of online audiences and a geekish love of metrics, and it’s only going to continue down this route. In the future simply going down the path of least resistance and treating digital media like TV simply won’t cut it. Creative agencies shouldn’t (and for the most part, don’t want to) own the media process, but in the future everyone is going to have to work a lot closer together rather than just selling TVC’s and going home early.

In the past few years we have seen an increase in fragmentation of market segments, we now know more about smaller groups of consumers and media agencies need to react to this. As more and more data is gathered this fragmentation will continue (hopefully as a benefit to the consumer rather than some evil Orwellian entity), and we now have to start to consider this when thinking about the messages we create. The days of every campaign having the same over-arching brand or product message tweaked to each channel and segment might soon come to an end. We now have the knowledge, data, and capability to create extremely tailored messages for smaller segments, so we need to have the placement to back it up. But the answer to this problem isn’t as easy as “here’s the message, now show us the media”, there needs to be an almost symbiotic relationship between media and creative.

So cookie-cut responses to a media brief for a specific segment or product won’t work. No doubt media boffins in big agencies are hoping their global tools will work and they can move in and get the big slices of the massive online cake. But localisation means that some simple formula can’t be applied to global digital media. Even online, people in most areas want to stay local, and in the future this probably won’t change and likely will increase. As more and more and more users flood into the online world, it will become more important to people to have a sense of place in this space. This trend, combined with segment fragmentation and the already obvious fact that there’s not going to be any Rupert-esque media domination online means that local knowledge is essential in effective digital media buying.

Quick tactical response and effective data management are the final pieces that need to fall in to place to fully leverage the opportunities we’re facing. Tactical response will require solid client, ad and media agency relationships and will no doubt come once more advertisers see the potential of the area. Data might be a harder challenge. We are already facing a mountain of data that dwarfs the days of analog DM and focus groups, and we’re not even that good at collecting it yet. We have opportunities to collect all sorts of data regarding how, when, why, and where people are viewing, creating and interacting with digital media. Despite this there’s reluctance from most people in all facets of the industry to get out of the kiddy pool and start working with behavioural targeting, attention profiling, integrated CRM and seriously using the plethora of data consumers volunteer on social networking sites.

So for the media people, please jump at this opportunity. The future is way cooler than the past, and if you know and live what you’re talking about you will be an invaluable resource. For the big media companies who don’t seem to be getting it right, just get in people that know what they’re talking about. Get in geeks and skill them up in media, because it’s much harder to skill someone up on the intricacies of the digital world. For anyone else who thinks this doesn’t sound all that hard, jump in and give it a crack. Step up and start something, because there’s definitely a gap there waiting to be filled. And once it’s filled some really great ideas and great results will surely follow.

Are we crossing the Digital Rubicon?

By: nichodges

11-11-2007

Advertising, Data, Facebook, Google, Marketing, myspace, Personalisation, Privacy

In the past few weeks we have taken some major steps in the area of advertising and privacy on the internet. I’m not going to copy and paste the press releases of Google, MySpace and Facebook, but I will quote the always brilliant (and wonderfully sarcastic) Nicholas Carr…

It’s a nifty system: First you get your users to entrust their personal data to you, and then you not only sell that data to advertisers but you get the users to be the vector for the ads. And what do the users get in return? An animated Sprite Sips character to interact with.

Yes, apparently the future of advertising arrived this week. Zuckerberg pitched himself as a 21st century Gutenberg and marketers all over the world were loving every bit of it. And to be honest, it’s not all bad. Everyone working in the digital arena knew it was coming, but now it’s here we really need to think about what we’re doing with this future before we wreck the whole thing. To quote Uncle Ben, “With great power comes great responsiblity”.

According to Facebook, every user now has “a way to connect with things you are passionate about.”

But this is slightly misguided. Kids will always scribble brand names all over their pencil cases, but we’re talking a very small slice of brands. There are very few brands that people are willing to wear as a badge so publicly. So while Facebook seem to be preaching to every single brand manager in the world, the impact these announcements have on 99.9% of brands just won’t be significant enough to worry about. The only significant benefit for the majority of marketers is that now any brand venturing into these waters won’t be risking to the astro-turfing suicide of the past few years. And if the venture fails it will likely just fizzle out quietly (unless you’re Wal-Mart or McDonalds of course, in which case you’ll go down in a blazing Facebook fireball). It’s a safe way for any brand that has previously been hesitant about the whole 2.0 social web thing to jump in.

So while the direction we have taken in the past few weeks is exciting, it simply isn’t the knockout blow to traditional advertising that we’re being made to believe. It is the start of something big, but we can’t now just go out and start abusing this new technology and consequently the consumer’s trust. Everyone working in digital marketing and advertising has worked hard to earn the customer’s trust, and by giving consumers a voice in the social webspace brands have also taken a brave step. So before we go utilising the data that social networks will be so happily (and no doubt profitably) providing for our advertising, we need to think very hard about what expectations people have regarding their privacy.

Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.

I have written about what is essentially the Social Ads platform previously, and I still think it really is the only way for marketers to effectively and positively use uninitiated advertising on the social web. This is not to say the digital ad departments as they currently stand are going to disappear. The most effective use of the web in marketing and advertising in the future will still be user-initiated discovery. But issues will begin to arise when people are being marketed to by unknowingly using their social data.

Users are happy to go to Facebook or MySpace or Ning and have targeted advertising. Done well this may even become a key reason for choosing one social platform over another. But where a certain ‘creep’ factor (in both senses of the word) will occur is when social data is being used outside of that network. This will create an increasing public distrust for the platforms, sites and brands involved. Very quickly everyone will get the feeling that their social network platforms are some sort of Panopticon.

The danger is that once advertisers cross that point, users will simply abandon those platforms. And if that happens then we’re back to banner ads and Flash games.

A few links…
Personalisation vs. Privacy in CRM (Read/Write/Web)
replacegoogle.com, one view of the future
Nicholas Carr on The Social Graft
TechCrunch’s coverage of Facebook’s announcement
John Battelle on the OpenSocial announcement

— Uneven Distribution.

The beginning of chair piracy.

Going analog.

PubCamp. Part I

Keeping Up With The Joneses Genes: Why 2008 will be the tipping point for life online

Are we crossing the Digital Rubicon?

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