A decade of digital: 10 things for 2010
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Faris Yakob is the chief innovation officer, MDC Partner, holding company of ad agencies including Crispin Porter + Bogusky and kirshenbaum bond senecal + partners and the former EVP Chief Technology Strategist at McCann Erickson NY.
A decade has flown by since Y2K arrived without a bug and digital marketing has grown up alongside it.
The emergence of a new media system is typified by a period of transposition, where the behavioural grammar of the previous system remains dominant. The first television shows were radio shows with people talking directly into camera. The first films were stageplays that had been filmed. And the first marketing forays online took what we knew about media and branding from broadcast media and applied it to a whole new space.
But digital is different.
Digital is not a channel. It’s a suite of platforms, channels and tactics that will, ultimately subsume its parents entirely.
Digital marketing is not simply a new place to disperse persuasive symbols, but the emergence of any entirely new behavioural grammar, as companies and their customer begin to engage with each other in entirely new ways in entirely new spaces, where everyone has an equal voice.
In the spirit of which, here are ten behaviours that will hopefully help the century grow into a surly adolescent, and then mature adult.
- Earn your own attention
The internet is the great dis-intermediator – it connects everything to everything else – so companies can communicate directly with customers, bypassing the traditional media traditionally used. However, this opportunity brings with it a new set of challenges. Previously mass media aggregated attention and brands bought it. To earn your own attention you have to do things, create content, that people elect to spend time with.
2. Stop saying viral
‘Viral’ was the magic bullet of digital marketing – the panacea that saved us from fragmented media and disaffected consumers. But the viral metaphor is unhelpful. It suggests that we can create something that is self-propagating, when in fact what we mean is that lots of people have chosen to pass something around, for their own social reasons. Focusing on those reasons is much more helpful than asking for a ‘viral’ for there is no such thing.
3. Be nice or leave
Social media is going to get more and more important – it presents an entirely new way for companies and customers to interact and comes with many specific challenges and opportunities. The grammar of social media is different from the grammar of commercial media. The rules, the motivations, the etiquette are all social. So learn to be nice or leave. Stop thinking like a company and act like a person.
4. Socialise your mainstream media
People need things to talk about, and often those things appear in other media. In fact, social media breathes life back into the idea of watercooler moments, as backchannels on twitter allow people to discuss what they are watching in real time. Ensuring that your mainstream media feeds and feeds off social is best practice from here on in.
5. Decrease the latency in the system
There is a correlation between the amount of time it takes for information to be transmitted, the amount of time it takes to have an effect, and the corresponding cultural decay rate. The real-time web of twitter and facebook has brought the cultural latency rate down to almost zero. In response, companies must act faster, responding in real time, to keep apace with its customers.
6. Abundance is more interesting than scarcity
Media used to be relatively scarce, which is why we have traditionally compressed things down into the smallest possible units, propositions and 30 second parables. Online, media is not scarce – it is practically infinite. In response companies can create vast reams of content and let it sit online forever until customers find their way to – a complete inversion of the current model of commercial content creation. New Balance launched its 365 range with 365 short films.
7. The audience, isn’t
The one-way direction of mass media led us to think about customers like Victorian children: seen and not heard. Digital culture is intrinsically participatory so, if we want people to engage with us, we should do things that give them a role. It can be as simple as voting or as complex as Nike Plus. People tend to be more interested in things that involve them, vain as we are.
8. Ideas that create content
Historically we have used content to create relationships with consumers, to express our offers and create premium prices points. In a world where the tools of creativity and capture become more democratic everyday, where a generation has grown up that demands to be heard, we should be creating ideas that create content, rather than ideas that are content.
9. Be useful for where they are
The promise of location-based marketing is upon us, as foursquare turns a game for geeks into a platform for loyalty programmes for Starbucks. The dangers are obvious – spamming people with offers as they walk by a store – but the possibilities are endless. The key thing is geotility – making your product, or service or content, useful for wherever they are.
10. Be awesome
In digital spaces, nothing stirs the soul and opens the wallet like awe. Be it Kobe jumping over a speeding car or a system that pulls data from your car and tells you how to drive more efficiently, things that make your jaw drop are the very stuff of marketing. Indeed, a study of the New York Times most emailed articles revealed that readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe. So do something awesome and it may just go ‘viral’ [just don’t call it that].
farisyakob.com
@faris
Posted: April 15th, 2010 | Author: elen.lewis | Filed under: Digital | Tags: Digital, Digital Marketing, Faris Yakob | 13 Comments »
Pithy decaplet :)
Especially like the “have ideas that create content not ideas that are content” point. Really useful way of thinking about what I’m doing.
(Few typos in there btw, probs lost in translation :-))
Thanks for sharing
These are great! Totally agree with #2. Should be called “spreadable” media because that’s what you’re creating – media that has the ability to spread.
thanks dudes!
typos are being fixed – translation from my increasingly Americanized English notwithstanding
FX
oh and i agree on the spreadable nomenclature
http://farisyakob.typepad.com/blog/2008/11/spreadable-media.html
FX
Insightful points with a good portrayal of social responsibillity. Rather than saying or doing “online” what we would not do in private, a generation growing up connected should, as you suggest, be awesomely nice and engaging or awesomely bad to be awesome.
I find it great that language barriers are becoming less & less of an obstacle as we have a greater impetus to communicate with ppl a-x the globe.
Awesome read Faris! Thanks! Agree with # 2 with Fitz, it should be called ’spreadable’ or ’spread’ since going ‘viral’ as people refer is only the result of the engagement of these contents.
BTW awesome t-shirt!
Great stuff again, Faris. “Ideas that create content vs. ideas that are content” can not be said enough. As digital continues to mature there will be more and more digital natives—inclusion will be an expectation, not the exception. Smart brands, products and services that understand this will gain a substantial leg up. Heh, and don’t get me started on the misuse of viral.
Agree with all of this, though I note with amusement that the word ‘viral’ is an example of a concept that has most definitely ’spread’.
Yr casual office browser knows what a viral is: spreadable on the other hand means margarine. Annoying embedded meaning or not, this game is basically over. If we like the principle of people taking ideas, making use of them and spreading them we should probably admit that the idea of the ‘viral’ has worked in exactly this way.
Muy bien, brother. Nowt to add.
Great nuggets. I agree with your distaste for the reference “viral” marketing. I refer to it as extensible marketing.
Faris – firstly congratulations on being winner “Post of the month” on Neil Perkin’s Only Dead Fish blog.
The benefit of your piece is to collate together the key elements of the communication environment we now face. I particularly like the “be nice or leave”. In this context it interests me how quickly the twittersphere kicks out spammers – this makes for a “clean” platform to operate in, avoiding unnecessary dross. And, “Stop thinking like a company and act like a person.” How true is that!
Tom’s comment on Spreadable is a bit old school!! There are now spreadable butters – nothing more natural than that!
A couple more digital phenomenons, some of which look towards the horizon: integrate with tangible activities to harness and maximize its full power; mobile is underestimated; information will at an increasing rate find consumers, for example such as geo-targeting, which is a relatively new techno-frontier and growing; and watch out for clutter and over stimulation, which is something that has occurred with all forms of media.
Phill Barufkin is a strategist, account planner and marketer who deploys integrated marketing programs and has experience with digital efforts of all shapes and sizes.
I love this article. Points # 1, 7, 8, and 9 are the ones that resonate with me the most.