HOW TO THINK DIGITAL

A very different Cannes

2009-07-01T15:47:00.003+01:00

This year was a very different Cannes, as can be seen from this Wunderman Cannes report.

Why doesn't the District Line tweet?

2009-06-20T11:54:00.000+01:00

Everyone in London has done it: dashed to the Tube station, only to find that the system is down and nothing is working. No one checks the website, because they don't expect to need to. But those on Twittr read tweets most mornings. It might work.

-- Post From My 2G iPhone

Is Digital Greener Than Analog?

2007-12-12T22:54:00.001Z

This viral makes the case.

New 128-page Book On Digital Media

2007-11-30T22:59:00.000Z

Check out my new book. The PDF is downloadable from here. If you want a hard copy, try Amazon.

Send a friend a moccachino via your mobile phone

2007-11-01T18:58:00.000Z

Social networking may be the big trend in the United States and Europe in 2007, said Sooyoung Choi of 24/7 Real Media at Stream, but most of what is happening in the West today happened first in South Korea in 2001.
The dominance of the SK Telecom group allowed them to set up CyWorld, a portal that gives every member a virtual living room or ‘minihompy’ that they can furnish and decorate to impress their friends. And South Koreans have been paying real money to do so.
Today almost half the entire South Korean adult population is signed up to Cyworld. And a good looking minihompy is an essential accessory to a sociable South Korean.
And things continue to more on.
Whereas in the West in 2007, people spend their days sending virtual beers and donuts to each other on FaceBook, in Seoul people can send real gifts to each other via their phones.
To do so, they choose a gift on their phone, anything from a Starbucks to a green tea ice-cream, and text it to their friend. The charge goes on their mobile phone bill.
When the friend receives a message, they click on it, and a barcode appears on the screen of their phone.
The shop assistant or barista then merely scans the barcode, and hands over the gift.
It’s happening in South Korea today. So expect this to be the big thing in the U.S. and Europe in about 2010.

Anarchy OK

2007-10-21T18:56:00.000+01:00

There are no fixed sessions at Stream. You just write what you want to talk about on the big boards, and at the allotted time, a group of people turn up at your conference room, or lawn, or bar table, ready to talk about it.
No one is in charge, because no one can be in charge. Such is the speed of change and transference of ideas in Web 2.0 that any discussion scheduled three months before the conference would no longer be worth having.
And that leads on to the thing that is different about Stream.
Most conferences are full of managers dressed to impress, cautiously agreeing with their bosses about measured corporate objectives. Not so at Stream. Here anything goes, and anyone can – and does - disagree with anyone.
Most conferences are about etching a corporation’s policies into the minds of its managers.
This unconference is different. The discussion is genuine. And the outcome is genuinely useful.

Mommy’s little helper

2007-10-20T18:56:00.000+01:00

Meanwhile in the Orange room, the Jory Des Jardins of blogher.com talks about blogging by American mothers, the so-called ‘mommybloggers’. Their influence on the U.S. food, packaged goods, and medical marketing scenes is great.
The difficult issue of how to put commercial activity in the heart of blogs comes up.
Do you pay per plug? Only the most cynical of bloggers and networks will agree to do that. It’s a bit like the respondents who turn up to focus groups claiming that they are a heavy user of whatever grocery product you are researching this week, or Laura Linney turning to camera and plugging food brands in The Truman Show. You can smell the insincerity.
The better way is not to try to influence editorial, and let the best bloggers get on with what they do best – turning their everyday lives and experiences into something thousands of women in similar positions find compelling.
But then the marketers struggle.
This isn’t polished corporate editorial like Company or Good Housekeeping.
The reason websurfing moms find it so compelling is because it is people’s real lives.
It is blogging verité.
And do marketers want their cuddly fmcg brand next to mom’s discussion of her bipolar disorder?
The ethical dilemmas for brands are growing and growing, as are the opportunities.
It is this area that Jory Des Jardins handles with such aplomb.

Battle of the Titans

2007-10-15T18:55:00.000+01:00

In the White Room, the debate is about ad exchanges - the TV and print equivalent of Google’s Adwords classified advertising model.
As many see it, Google and Microsoft’s tanks are squaring off against each other on media buying companies’ front lawn. Digital Armageddon is forecast.
But is it going to happen?
Google have revolutionized classified advertising with their Adwords. Search for a specific car component in conventional newspaper classified ads, and you’ll be searching for days. But type the name of that component into Google, and you will be surrounded by highly targeted ads offering that component within a second.
At first glance, it seems quite logical to extend this idea to TV and print.
At the moment, like classified ads, analog TV advertising is only weakly targeted. If you are a 35 year old man, most of the ads you see in a typical commercial break on television aren’t talking to you – they’re aimed at women, at kids, at men aged 18-24 or at older people.
Similarly if you are a 20 year old woman. Most of the food ads are aimed at women aged 25-45. If you don’t have three kids, the ads for people carriers aren’t talking to you either. Most TV advertising lands on the wrong people.
The Google/Microsoft models change all of this, by sending different ads to different people, even though they may be watching the same show on TV. Rich people get ads for investments and expensive cars. People who spend a lot on clothes get ads for clothes. It’s all perfectly possibly via a smart computer and a fast broadband connection.
The models clear up the inefficencies in TV advertising placement using cutting edge, 21st century use of computers. They aim to send ads only to the right people. And by reading consumer habits via behavioural targeting, they aim to send them only at the moment of truth, when those consumers are already about to buy.
But therein lies the problem.
They locate exactly the right prospects for the brand, and then they swoop in at them – and offer them a 30 second TV commercial – a fifty year old analog advertising format.
It’s a bit like building a cruise missile, and then welding a cannonball to the front of it as a warhead.
Wouldn’t they do better to use the awesome computing power to offer the prospect something more compelling? Or as Esther Dyson argued in the discussion, wouldn’t they use that opportunity at least to build a relationship with them?
The other issue with the ad exchange networks is that they extrapolate behaviour from the Google Adwords model, and that this extrapolation may be dangerous.
In the classified advertising world, because most people only need a central heating plumbing specialist once in a blue moon, they are happy to wait until their central heating blows up before they search Google for a solution.
But in many display advertising categories, this isn’t the behaviour.
If you are pregnant, you don’t wait until you give birth and then rush to your computer and type ‘baby’ into Google for information. You spend months learning up on your baby, and then you actively seek out information and advice from sources with a reputation. In the UK, one of the best is the Tesco Baby Club. And because babies are so important to their mothers, Tesco doesn’t need to spend money attracting them to the club, because half the mothers-to-be in the UK, and nearly all those who shop at Tesco, already sign up for it.
Similarly with airlines. They don’t need to talk to frequent business flyers via behavioural targeting because most of the frequent business flyers who use that airline actively seek out membership of that airline’s frequent flyer club.
An airline is so important to its frequent users that they actively seek out the frequent flyer relationship – because they know that they will otherwise be spending their working week seated in Row E.
Will advertising exchanges happen? Probably.
But as for how advertising will then develop, all bets are off.

The gadget arms race

2007-10-14T18:54:00.000+01:00

In the main bar area at Stream, the gadget envy is palpable.
Everyone is sitting at tables with laptops.
Heaven help you if you have a pre-Intel Mac, or a Vaio with less than 2GB of RAM, or no wifi.
It’s the same with the phones.
What’s the point of having a device that can make phone calls when it doesn’t have a five megapixel camera on it, plus wifi and GPS?
And for those attendees toting separate camera, that camera had better be a Leica M8.
Such is the state of gadget oneupmanship at Stream.
But being up to date is not the only way to win on gadgets. If you’ve kept your ‘boneyard’ of discarded toys of yesteryear, they too can now be used to wow Stream delegates.
So the 1980s proto Blackberry is there, with its kilogram-sized battery, and dull mono screen; someone else produces a collection of every single Apple Newton ever made.
Of course, some people cheat with their gadgets.
All the Americans have iPhones with them. The onlookers from Europe and Asia are envious as the Americans swirl their fingers around the touchscreen interface.
Is that a European I see in front of me pretending to make a call on his iPod Touch? It has the same awesome interface, but it doesn’t make calls. Is the iPod Touch becoming like the fake phones that gas stations used to sell in the eighties, so that people stuck in traffic jams could pretend to other drivers that they had a car phone?
In the evening, the competition hots up, as the gadget competition, or Gadgethon starts, and everyone tries to out-geek the others.
Someone reveals his barbecue tongs with inbuilt lighting.
Others have robots, remote control helicopters and the highest of hi-tech toys.
Scoring is done via clapometer, linked to a video screen.
As the Gadgethon progresses, others wander out on to the beach to discuss mobile media.
Will mobile phone marketing break out of the SMS ghetto?
How to we sell to people via their mobile phones, when most people are still struggling to operate half the features on them?
The questions multiply.
Meanwhile on the side of the lawn, the BT wifi satellite uplink quietly hums as it sucks gigabits of data down from the heavens.

So what’s it all about?

2007-10-12T18:59:00.001+01:00

‘Digital media are all about computers like astronomy is all about telescopes.’ said someone recently. And therein lies Stream.
Digital thinking is now escaping from the narrow confines of geek discussions and becoming mainstream.
The computers are fading into the background.
To the adpeople of the 1950s and 1960s, television was an amazing new technology. It took fifteen years for Marshall McLuhan see the big picture and make arguments like ‘the medium is the message’.
To subsequent generations, TV was just infrastructure, as much part of the homes they grew up in as the cooker or the bath.
Today, no one worries how things happen on social networking sites or on YouTube. They just do. The computer, and the servers and the software are now becoming just infrastructure.
Five years ago, technology and bandwidth limited the possibilities of digital marketing. Today, as the technology and bandwidth keep racing ahead, the limits that matter are just the limits of the marketing imagination.
This is our challenge as marketing thinkers and doers. To lift our eyes from the HTML, the Flash and the website logs, and to see the bigger picture.
To go boldly, where communication has never gone before.

No hiding thoughts

2007-10-12T18:59:00.000+01:00

You cannot be private at Stream, because the place is full of bloggers.
You say something and with minutes it is flying through cyberspace, being picked up and discussed in Los Angeles or Tokyo. Such is the speed of digital discussion now.
And that discussion is being measured.
We learn about VML’s SEER tool, which allows us to map the shape of the blogosphere and who is influencing whom. The nature of influence is becoming clearer.
For many people, accustomed to hiding their thoughts from others, and only sending them out into the world once they have been carefully honed and refined, this is unsettling.
But for Generation FaceBook, accustomed to sharing digital information with friends, and allowing their co-workers to listen to their most intimate of thoughts, perhaps this is not so much change.
If you spend your youth rating your co-workers on their movie tastes and level of ‘hotness’, and then sharing with them via FaceBook that ‘wish you’d left last night’s party before Listerine became a viable mixer for vodka’, sharing intellectual thought comes easier.

The body count is horrific

2007-10-12T18:53:00.000+01:00

Whilst the sea and pools are empty, the Stream gaming arcade is full.
Whether from Seattle or Japan, many of those present will remember autumn 2007 as the time when their key leisure time objective was to finish Halo 3 before Grand Theft Auto 4 came out.
And finish Halo 3 some have – even though it was released only ten days before Stream.
Those who have finished the game mutter that the alien race they have spent the last few years of their lives so savagely killing turns out not to be as evil as they had thought. A sense of uncertainty and guilt is entering the homicidal mind of the gamer.
For others though, the gaming arcade is about less gory forms of competition.
Becoming a star at Wii Tennis.
Or at racing.
Or becoming a great guitar hero - knowing full well that if they don’t rock in time to the music, the motion detector in their plastic guitar will report their lack of enthusiasm to the controller, and they will lose points.
Around the gaming arcade the conversation turns to gaming as a medium.
Is dropping static ads into games ever going to work? Don’t brands have to be more integral to the action? Or is the model Burger King used, of giving out free, good, playable Xbox games with their meals the best way of using games to build brands at the moment?
The gaming debate becomes urgent. Because if the issue isn’t solved, then game consoles will just become a new nail in the coffin of interruption advertising, as young Americans start to buy and download movies directly to their Xbox 360, and watch them on their console, completely free of advertising.
The one thing everyone can agree on is that gaming is massively compelling and immersive.
And as gamers are now becoming the mainstream of society, as sixtysomethings adopt the Wii as their exercise machine, and as SingStar parties become the teen girl sleepover party meme across the planet, gaming has to be regarded as just as mainstream a habit as watching television, and exploited as such.

Geek island paradise

2007-10-11T18:52:00.000+01:00

It is a beautiful Greek resort. The sky is blue and palm trees wave in the wind. The temperature is hot, moderated only by the breezes blowing from Evia across the sea, which laps on the other side of the lawn.
But the sea is empty, as are the pools.
This is Stream 2007.
And for the three hundred digerati present, living at Web 2.0 speed means sleeping when they die, and probably waiting until then to fix their suntan too.
The conversations at Stream are bracing.
Some people are working on cutting edge social networking. Others have collected $100 million in venture capital and are working out where to place their bets. Others are on the front lines of digital media production.
Everyone is in a business that is undergoing rapid fundamental change.
The newspaper owner who is redefining his product into a mobile and online proposition is there. The TV company executive charged with rewriting its advertising models is there. The people from Google and from Microsoft are there, squaring up for digital Armageddon over advertising exchanges.
Stream is a microcosm of the impact of digital change across the world’s media industry.
But for all talk of digital wars and wrenching change in media that we read about in the press, the most interesting thing about Stream is the sense of co-operation.
The digital world is moving so fast that even people working in the same area see others less as competitors and more as potential collaborators.
The pie is already so large, and is growing so rapidly, that fighting over slices of it seems somehow illogical.

The iPod Touch is not an iPhone

2007-10-09T13:11:00.000+01:00

Yesterday at Stream 2007, I saw someone taking a phone call on what looked like an iPhone. But when I looked closer, it was just an iPod Touch - a music player with no phone connectivity.
In the early 90s, when most people could not afford a mobile phone, gas stations used to do a roaring trade in plastic fake carphones, that people could pretend to talk into whilst stuck in traffic jams.
Is the iPod Touch destined to perform this role?