A decade ago, in 2001, BMW unveiled a series of short films, collectively known as The Hire, but commonly called BMW Films.
High production values and big name actors and directors highlighted what the cars could do in dramatic situations and kick-started the burgeoning world of online branded content.
Since then, the world has shifted, ever so slightly…
Let’s lay this oft discussed issue to rest, shall we?
I have long held and espoused the view that All Market Research is Wrong.
The idea of researching a market makes sense to anyone who is about to invest money into engaging with one, using products, services or communications.
However, the basic idea underlying all market research is epistemologically specious. That is to say, it seems to make sense, but, under examination, it does not.
In essence, the foundation of market research is that, by asking lots of people questions, or asking a smaller group of people more in depth questions, we can gather dependable insights into why they buy what they buy, and whether or not they will buy something in the future, perhaps after having seen some advertising.
I don’t believe this is true. For two, very simple reasons.
1. We don’t know why we do what we do.
We make these [and most] decisions at a subconscious level, which means, by definition, the operations of the decision process are inaccessible to our conscious minds.
That doesn’t mean people won’t answer though.
They will happily answer, erroneously, in a way that seems to make sense, as their minds create explanatory fictions to explain their own behaviour to themselves, or the interviewer.
2. The gulf between claimed attitudes [and intentions] and actual behaviour is vast.
Asking people if they intend to buy something is analogous to asking them if they intend to go to the gym – the results may not correspond well with future behaviour.
Focus groups are particularly fraught: they create utterly artificial data as a response to utterly artificial situations and social dynamics.
I wrote a paper about this a while ago – you can download it here if you want
- and recently a nice person called Hilary sent me a review copy of an excellent book called ‘Consumer.ology’ by Philip Graves that examines, in much more persuasive detail than my paper, the same issues.
I recently gave a talk at an IAB Conference on Mobile Marketing. You can flick through the deck above.
The talk begins by pointing out that Everyware is stolen from the book of that name by Adam Greenfield about the internet of things and the future of ubiquitous computing.
As Adam himself recently pointed out, he wrote it in 2006, before the iPhone changed the mobile landscape, and so it doesn’t take into account how much the ubiquitous computing future would be a function of mobile phone technology.
The second bit is from Copernicus.
He was a smart dude and renaissance type polymath, who dabbled in astronomy mostly as a hobby.
He began to suspect that, contrary to what EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD believed, and what our senses tell us, that the sun didn’t go around the Earth.
So he went back to older sources before Ptolemy to find anyone else who had suspected this, and he found some, which helped him light the way to a cogent heliocentric model of the solar system.
So my points were: sometimes we can use the past as a lens to help us look into the future, when we do look forwards we are often heavily biased by the concerns of the present, and that sometimes the thing we are focusing on gets in the way, and maybe it’s the other stuff that’s moving.
Then you get to watch some awesome AT&T ads from 1993 that predict the future with the voice of Tom Selleck, directed by David Finch.
In the bit below, I talk about some use cases for mobile.
I am often fighting back, as I have before right here, about the way new technology platforms as subsumed into our worldview as ‘channels’. New things don’t fit into the old boxes – new digital platform aren’t like previous media – receptacles for certain shapes and sizes of content.
They are functions as well as containers – digital things can take any form, and digital platforms are convergent – things that receive can broadcast, things that consume can produce.
Hence the endlessly heralded year of the mobile will never come – by the time that it does ‘mobile’ will be the ‘web’. Increasingly the idea that channels are discrete I find unhelpful.
This is why I think it’s useful to think about mobile not as a channel but as a tool – something someone is using, not just viewing.
[Although with the iPhone, the highest definition screen anyone owns will be their phone – it is significantly higher resolution than full HD TVs. This means that, should you want to create transmedia content, you would need to record for the iPhone and degrade the footage down to HD for broadcast.]
Your mobile exists in a constant state of NOW – which is what leads to the Google Use cases I highlight in the video.
But Google’s bias is that of a company built around information retrieval. My contribution to their use cases was the addition of TIME SHIFTED NOW – when you use your phone to make sure you do what you intended.
I suspect there is a role for lots of brands here, in helping people act the way they think they will tomorrow, NOW.
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. He argues that the impact of digital is spilling off the screen into the real world, changing the way we think.
Originally, media was all about recording the world. We wanted to capture what we saw, freeze it in time and space, show other people.
Analogue media forms an attempt to recreate the world faithfully, transposing variations in amplitude and frequency to recreate the impact on our senses. It takes a property of a medium and modulates it to transmit information.
In analogue sound recording fluctuations in air pressure [that we hear as sounds] strike the diaphragm of a microphone, which induces corresponding fluctuations in the current produced by the electromagnetic microphone. That current is therefore an ‘analog’ of the sound.
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.
As the video above admirably explains, ‘Robin of Shoreditch’ is an anonymous group of creative outlaws looking to take from the rich and give to the poor.
The rich, in this case, are the top100 brands in the world, as measured by brand value according to WPP’s BrandZ study. Read the rest of this entry »
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].
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A decade ago, in 2001, BMW unveiled a series of short films, collectively known as The Hire, but commonly called BMW Films.
