Archives - January 2010


Time to move on from military marketing

[ photo courtesy ]

The below post is cross-posted from the newly launched WARC blog, where I’ll be posting the occasional ramble – nothing remotely groundbreaking here for regular readers, but musings I thought worth raising for the WARC audience:

 

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that the holy grail for marketers is engagement – to build meaningful relationships between people and our brands. And yet the way we think about marketing is frequently diametrically opposed to the desired end result.

The vocabulary of marketing is largely one of warfare – with the consumer as enemy combatant, on the receiving end of our merciless attacks. The etymology of the word ‘strategy’ is military – literally meaning ‘the art of a general‘. And it’s just as applicable to the world of marketing as it is to the battlefield.

Think about it. How many times do we start by referring to the ‘target’ when considering audiences? (The fact that we talk about ‘consumers’ rather than simply ‘people’ is another strange beast, as it automatically frames people purely within the context of consumption rather than as the multifaceted human animals that we are, but that’s a whole other issue). So we launch aggressive campaigns carefully designed for maximum impact and to gain captive audiences, thinking about strikeweights and guerilla tactics to do battle, gain market dominance and kill the competition.

Hardly the language of fostering engagement and relationship building, is it?

We all know by now that people aren’t receptacles waiting eagerly for our advertising messages, and very often could quite happily live without whatever we’re trying to sell – but surely trying to conquer the enemy and beat them into submission isn’t the most effective solution? Isn’t trying to earn the right for our brands to be a part of people’s world, rather than trying to force our way in, ultimately going to be more valuable in the longer term?

We’d probably all agree that this is what we’re trying to do, and that a relationship based on permission and trust is far more desirable than one of force and conquest – and yet the language of marketing doesn’t appear to have caught up.

The vocabulary we use undoubtedly affects the way we approach things – both consciously and subconsciously. So if we want to actually develop marketing that’s based on marketing with people rather than to them, awareness of the language we use, and a concerted effort to move away from thinking about marketing as warfare, has got to be a move in the right direction.

January 26, 2010 in Advertising | Permalink | 11 Comments

Collaboration vs Competition

[ photo courtesy ]

There is no limit to what can be accomplished if it doesn’t matter who gets the credit.

Normally attributed to either Ralph Waldo Emerson or Harry Truman, this quote is one of my favourites as it’s a pithy reminder of how much more we can achieve through collaboration than through competition. And a reminder of how much we often fail to achieve because we’re so focused on trying to make sure we get the credit.

It’s true in so many walks of life, but sadly particularly true when it comes to agencies’ work. We all talk the talk about integration with agency partners – but when push comes to shove, everyone’s constantly fighting to get the credit. Because in the main, we work within a model that doesn’t really reward collaboration, and in practice rewards singular ownership of ideas. Sure, awards entries may get jointly submitted, but the winner will always claim it as ‘theirs’. And of course the same examples appear in multiple agencies’ creds – and rightly so because good ideas have many fathers (or mothers) – but in each case you’ll generally have each agency claiming each idea as ‘theirs’, relegating agency partners’ contributions to the sidelines.

At Naked a lot of our IMC processes revolve around co-creation with multiple stakeholders, including people from around the client organisation and different agency partners. But when we share examples of work resulting from various IMC programmes with new prospects, we’re frequently met with a response along the lines of ‘yes, but whose idea was it‘.

Ideas are our currency. So it’s totally understandable that we want to protect them, lest they be stolen by a competitor and they claim the credit – with damaging consequences both to our reputations and our bottom lines. But in doing so, we lock great ideas down, stifling the potential of what they could be if we could collaborate instead of competing. And maybe it’s a utopian view that’s incompatible with the stark business realities of our industry, and how much appointments and remuneration are tied with being able to claim ideas as ours.

But just think what we could achieve if we were truly, genuinely able to be more open and collaborative in our day-to-day working practices, instead of worrying about who got the credit?

January 20, 2010 in Business | Permalink | 5 Comments

The Click Moment

[ photo (c) LEGO ]

LEGO just get it. And keep doing fantastic stuff to show how much they really do get it.

They recently launched a really natty free iPhone app, LEGO Photo (iTunes link), to Lego-fy your pictures [check out the Flickr group celebrating the awesome stuff you can do with it]

And now they’ve just launched the LEGO CL!CK community, a “collaborative environment designed for inventors, artists and creative enthusiasts to share their vision about new products and toys” – a virtual canvas of shared ideas and quirky stories intended to inspire and delight.

It’s got the usual social boxes ticked, so it’s got Facebook & Twitter functionality, and selected posts with the #legoclick hashtag will appear on the website, and users can offer feedback or submit their own ideas. But the overall idea is to get creative minds talking and sharing ideas about how to use LEGO for play and innovation, which can’t be a bad thing in my book. Unfortunately the actual execution lets it down, in that the site isn’t particularly easy to navigate, which is a real shame – but their heart’s in the right place.

What I love about LEGO is how they’re so comfortable in both the physical and virtual worlds – as demonstrated through their video games, the forthcoming LEGO Universe MMOG – or indeed bridging the two, through such initiatives as LEGO DesignByMe or LEGO Mindstorms.

Because actually, LEGO aren’t a company who sell plastic bricks – they’re a company who sell play and tools to spark your imagination. They seem to get the difference – unlike the likes of Polaroid who didn’t realise they were in the ‘telling stories through pictures’ business, rather than ‘manufacturing film & cameras’ business until it was too late.

And if all that lovely LEGO goodness wasn’t enough for LEGO geeks like me, they’ve created a delightful little film to celebrate the eureka moment when great ideas are generated – what they call a ‘Click moment’. Lovely stuff.

January 14, 2010 in Brands | Permalink | Leave a Comment

The On Demand Echo Chamber

[ image courtesy hugh ]

On-demand programming is ace. I love iPlayer (especially now I can access it on our Wii), 4OD, Apple TV, Virgin Media On Demand and so on. I can’t wait for Hulu and Boxee to come to the UK, and the (eventual) launch of the long-awaited Project Canvas. We get to watch what we want, when we want, personalised to our own tastes. Brilliant.

But one of the more interesting debates around the shift towards on-demand is around the thorny issue of public service programming and content. It used to be (and still, in the main, is) public service broadcasting, but now of course it’s not just a case of mass national broadcast.

And of course content – public service or otherwise – takes many forms. We consume content in myriad ways, with an ever expanding choice of outlets to satisfy our desires. But when we choose to consume what we want, when we want, we’re by definition playing to our own personal biases – our cultural choices are dictated and shaped by our own experiences, tastes and points of view. And we usually choose to consume content that satisfies these cultural mores. And more often than not, that’s content that chimes with our own personal perspectives and opinions.

I recently listened to the Episode 7 of the fabulous Shift Run Stop podcast from the ingenious and supremely talented Leila Johnston and Roo Reynolds, featuring a fascinating interview with Adam Curtis (of The Power of Nightmares and It Felt Like a Kiss fame). I’d recommend the series generally if you like geek culture, games, comedy and the like, but even if that’s not really your thing, I’d definitely recommend this particular episode for Adam Curtis’ provocative points of view.

He touches on his disenchantment with our fascination with recombinant culture, bemoaning the observation that in our endless remixing of the past, we’re failing to make cultural progress and come up with anything entirely new (although it’s worth pointing out that he also charges himself as guilty) – and that it’s symptomatic of a larger societal malaise and lack of progress, and a sense that we’re simply standing still.

Roo brought up Jane McGonigal’s World Without Oil – an ARG designed to tackle the very real-world problem of oil dependency (funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting) – as an example of a new form of cultural content designed to forge genuine progress. Curtis responded that actually this wasn’t anything groundbreaking, that there were people in the 70s who tried to imagine what a life without oil would be like, and they were called hippies, who went to live in Buckminster Fuller domes to explore a different way of life, which wasn’t dependent on oil. The point he made was that the 70s hippies carried out their lifestyle experiment, but never “worked out how to challenge the the structure of power to change the world to get what they wanted” – their experiments quite literally took place in a bubble, with little effect on wider society. And that the kind of people playing a World Without Oil were likely to be people who were already interested in exploring the issues in question – and that it was preaching to the converted.

Whether or not you agree with his view is academic: for my money the most salient observation that Curtis made was that if you want to change the world, you have to change how other people think who don’t necessarily share your beliefs – and our own views are continually being reinforced because cultural content is being divided and subdivided so that it’s only playing to people who already believe in what you’re saying.

Being able to consume the content we want, when we want, how we want is great – except that unless we actively seek out the unknown, we’re less likely to end up seeing, hearing or experiencing the unexpected. Which is a shame from an individual perspective of experiencing culture, but also potentially damaging from the perspective of a well-informed and progressive citizenry.

Curtis said that he came into the world of broadcast TV because he wanted the opportunity to get his point across to people who didn’t already agree with him. I don’t know that simply maintaining public service broadcasting is enough to break out of the echo chamber – the array of content available is so extensive that even if broadcast TV has the potential to reach the masses, there’s less likelihood that they’ll be watching (see the 2009 Ofcom PSB report).

I personally don’t agree with Curtis’ view that intiatives like World Without Oil are simply “playing in the sandbox” (his words, not mine) – and I believe that game based learning will continue to be a crucial tool to educate, inform and encourage behaviour change. But the underlying issue is a fascinating, and scary, conundrum – how do we encourage people to choose to consume content that they might not agree with. How do we break out of our echo-chamber?

January 8, 2010 in Communication | Permalink | 5 Comments
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