The Strategy Review

More on the "behavioural backlash"

Clearly the subject du jour, consumers' increasing discontent with the new targeting, and the implications for advertisers, are examined again by the excellent Liz Jaques in today's Mediatel Newline.

With astringent thoughts from your humble author for extra zing ...

The new window-smashing French intellectuals ...

For some months now I've been admiring the writing of Frederic Filloux and Jean-Louis Gassee, the French co-authors of The Monday Note.

Today's TMN edition has prompted a rare post in this blog ... Filloux writes a searing yet icily-argued attack on assumptions re Google and Facebook's respective futures in ad revenue terms, using the Do Not Track controversy, and Microsoft's apple-cart-upsetting declarations, as his departure point.

Connected to this, but standalone in terms of its vigour and urgency, is Gassee's equally thoughtful yet brutal body check to what he calls "The $20B Opportunty Mirage" of mobile advertising. I've leave you to read it, but it's bracing stuff.

Overall, their positions (a) that ownership and manipulation of data confer no intrinsic value or entitlement, and (b) that simply pointing to how enormous mobile advertising could/should be consitutes proof of commercial potential, are very much in line with my own views.

They also bring a wealth of evidence to their arguments that make this work credible as well as invigorating reading.

An essential book for students of what's happening

James Gleick's masterful work "The Information" is taking my breath away.

The quality of scholarship combined with the accessibility and the sheer excitement of information's journey from pre-history to present, post-social, day is superb.

Make a point of reading this remarkable book.

"Otherwise Engaged - Branding In A Connected World"

The digital edition of my recent mini-book on engagement is now available to download free of charge here.

Download Otherwise Engaged by Michael Bayler

(If you still feel compelled to own the remarkably expensive printed version, it's available from Amazon here.)

Kevin Slavin on how algorithms shape our world

Kodak Syndrome makes it to "Market Leader"

So proud to have piece on #Kodak and #theartist in latest "Market Leader" not least because of the intelligence of all the other writers #in

— Michael Bayler (@michaelbayler) March 7, 2012

"The Artist" - Fresh air ... or musty nostalgia? A bit of cultural context

 

Having grown up glued to black and white Hollywood masterpieces from the Golden Age every Sunday afternoon - at the time, it was that, football in the street, or homework - The Artist draws on references that are almost every one entirely familiar. And of course, like almost everyone, I love it.

It's funny - in a sneaky, better-than sort of way - to hear about the poor punters who demanded money back when they found the movie is - well, 99% of it - really silent. And all black and white.

Take a little Singin' In the Rain - well, OK, rather a lot of it - throw in the better Astaire and Rogers masterpieces and a generous sprinkle of the Pickfair silent dramas of pre-1929, when as we know The Jazz Singer blew silence away forever, and, aside from the genuinely glorious acting that features in every minute of The Artist (and how good to see the great Malcolm McDowell, in a tasty cameo role that surely he'll treasure more than much of his later work) you've got a good summary of the tone and structure of the movie.

There's been - if only prompted by the Academy Award nominations that the movie has earned - a certain amount of soul-searching Way Out West about THE MEANING of The Artist. At a time when the major studios are scrambling to differentiate their still-potent output from the millions of frat-party fart-lighting and cute kitten clips on offer to the less discerning audience via the usual sources, any film this quiet, this unswashbuckling, this unstarridden, and, well, this small, is going to get folks a-talkin'. And a-worryin'.

It strikes me - not that I know much - that THE POINT of this lovely film is to remind us that magic - and Hollywood was always about magic - only works hand-in-hand with severe restriction. An empowered, choice-spoilt audience with all the magic they'll ever need in the palm of their hand, will paradoxically find magic almost nowhere. (Magic is also about the things that you could never imagine yoursself doing. Not just special effects. It's more about writing, in the end, than CGI.)

But put them (well, me, and many thousands of others, anyway) in front of a black and white, silent film for 100 minutes on a cold, wet afternoon, and The Artist returns magic, along with romance, compassion, tragedy, comedy, pathos, cuteness, in spades.

I keep telling anyone who'll listen - for reasons I'll explain below - that in 1929, 95,000,000 Americans went to the movies every week. Of course, like my Sunday afternoons with Busby Berkeley and friends, they had nothing better to do. As the every-tiggerish Umair Haque pointed out some years ago, before moving on to larger econonomic matters, there was a time when attention was infinitely plentiful, and media - stuff to watch - was rare, to the point of being god-given.

And this - actually rather brief, in the grander scheme - Golden Age of the screen was very much built on the profoundly humble, often mundane, rarely privileged, and perhaps above all, physically grounded lives of its audience.

Which brings me to my conclusion.

Any nostalgia that I felt on seeing The Artist was, in the end, little to do with a hankering for the age of the silent movie - those Sunday afternoons weren't THAT much fun, believe me - and all to do with a pang of the loss of a simpler age in the much more recent past ...

One where our infinite connectedness, power to choose, limitless access to channels for self-expression, and our regal bestowing of attention on media objects on the merest whim (with disenfranchised consumer brands creeping around the edges of Facebook, Twitter and the rest, beckoning and gurning like the dancing dads at your 18th) had not yet made us like cranky, jaded children after far too many sweets, allowed to stay up far too late for our own good.

Is The Artist, therefore, one last longing look back, or a sneak peek forward, with perhaps a promise of happier times for moviemakers, beyond today's gruelling battle for the attention of these spoiled, rather unattractive children?

I'll say it's neither, not for me anyway. It's a glorious example - reminder in fact - of what occasionally happens when storytelling and acting talent is left alone to do what it does well, which is not merely to give us yet another expensive, instantly-forgettable chunk of content (I love blockbusters as well as the next bloke, by the way) but to touch our hearts deeply, with a far smaller, more daring, more caring slice of real magic.

Dedicated to the late Jonathan Cecil, who cared enough to dig out and bring me hard-to-find, connoisseur's books about the great silent movie stars when I was a silly South London boy, and who would have adored - and written far more insightfully and lovingly about - this film. R.I.P.

 

The End Of Strategy? Post #1

Introduction

This is the first in a series of posts that will form a rolling white paper, examining and getting to grips with what I have come to think of as the remarkable challenge facing organisations of all kinds - and above all, businesses: the state of perpetual disruption. 

In the two areas I work most in - media and marketing - and in particular at their points of overlap, where questions about, for example, the role and value of advertising, and the true impacts of social media, continue to proliferate without satisfactory resolution, there's a pining for one outcome above all. 

When will things go back to some sort of "normal"?

The Year Of ... 

Every year in recent memory has been "The Year Of Something", hasn't it? The last 5 years have each been The Year Of Mobile, for example. 

And what happens? The devices come thicker and faster, consumers pick them up, run with them, co-create with both each other and the new technology giants - GAFA as I've heard them dubbed (Goggle, Apple, Facebook and Amazon) - myriad new forms of value. It all rushes forward. 

But here's the thing. "The Year Of Mobile" never actually arrives. And no one gets more of a real grasp on things than we had last year or the year before. 

And yes, it has indeed been "The Year Of Apple, Google (incl YouTube) Amazon and Facebook" ... for each year as long as we can clearly remember. But the GAFA giants are now almost ecosystem fixtures, the shiny utilities of some kind of new economy. They'll quite happily take the dollar bill in their respective business and revenue models, but really they have no more useable insights for us than British Gas or Thames Water. 

Asking Google or Facebook what you should do, is rather like asking Lloyds of London where you should make your investments. They're generally nice enough people, but it's not their job to care. (And actually, they don't know either.)

We are, it seems, on our own now. 

The new normal

And there will be no returning to "normal" any more, in the sense of familiar, predictable models and markets for exploiting content, for building brands and above all, for developing and executing strategies. 

I intend no melodrama, but it's really over. 

If strategy is above all about the way we think, then an environment in which what we think - and what we think we see - are  now invariably inadequate, always too slow, and often badly wrong, no longer lends itself to what we can call outbound strategy - where we plan for and then "do things" to our markets that create competitive advantage.

Strategies overall - and strategies for innovation are no exception - are only meaningful when their objects, and, just as crucially as we'll see - the contexts within which those objects exist, and within which value is identified, articulated, productised, communicated and eventually delivered, remain more or less fixed, relative to meaningful market coordinates. 

Things need to sort of stay where - and indeed what! - they were yesterday, if you like, for new forms of value to be confidently developed and placed into the market.

This is no longer the case, and sets up a powerful cause of the perpetual disruption that, I am arguing, will plague businesses and their brands in the post-digital era. 

We learned, at a fundamental level, to view change as occasional, disruption as rare - to be feared, exceptional - and innovation as something elusive but achievable, that businesses "do" to markets, to sustain and now and then refresh what has been, till recently, broadly visible, explicable and manageable positions for their various brands. 

But Normal, from here on, is a state of perpetual - and accelerating - flux. 

Impacts and implications

We are already, for practical purposes, passing through the so-called Information Age. Where are we now then? 

On one hand, I'd feel comfortable calling this "The Age Of Disruption". But that - as well as leaving us despondent and rudderless - implies that there's a plausible end point to this new state of perpetual flux. No, we need something both a little less apocalyptic, and a little more realistic. 

I've written periodically about The Age Of Meaning for the past 6 or 7 years, and while I wouldn't dream of claiming to have had the answer to our profound conundrum all along, I do feel that when we come to grips with perpetual disruption, it will be in part because we have finally - with backs against the wall - learned the fine art of the management of meaning.

I'll be returning to the management of meaning later in this process, but for now, I'm sticking to the exploration of the problem. To jump ahead too quickly, to rush a solution, will be to underestimate the problem and compromise any sort of useful insights and ways forward. 

For now, we have a huge conundrum to deal with. 

The trading context of customers, competition, culture and communications is constantly accelerating in both speed and scale, already far beyond a level at which business can usefully react with so-called innovations .

This context has become, in the end, irresistible. It consists, at its most basic, of billions of connected consumers, the technology giants that both enable and add value to their connectedness, and the second-by-second interaction between them, that feeds and fosters an especially concerning new kind of value. Benckler, in his contemporary economics masterpiece The Wealth of Networks, calls this "non-market value": an inauspicious term, no?

Our issue here is not merely the now-tiresome challenge of how to evaluate and thence monetise, for example, the big social networks. It's more far-reaching, and concerning. 

The new post-digital trading context is more than just value-neutral ... It's "value-hostile", precisely because, unlike any other in history, it's no longer neutral ... passive ... waiting, if you like, for something to happen, for our decisions and actions to stir it up. We have, till recently, been able to take quite well-researched products or services (indeed, more recently, consumer experiences) and push them into the market, accompanied by a fairly cogent but above all confident program of communications.

This happy paradigm - whatever happened to paradigms, by the way? - has been supported and reinforced above all by a context that kindly agreed to stand still while we marketed to it. Channels - even early online channels played nice - were neutral; consumers were usefully bound by a combination of postcode and ponderous research programs; insights were valid and fresh for, well, sometimes years! 

Oh, and data ... Well, there was so little of it, and it changed so rarely ... We were even able to sometimes make use of it, before the music and the dance started again. 

I don't have to bang on, surely, about how little of this comfy value chain remains. Dismantled byinformation, wielded by immensely fluid tribes of flattered, entitled consumers, whose very empowerment and daily delight by the GAFA Crew, is paralleled by the disempowerment and daily dismay of the enterprises tasked with somehow delivering - let alone maintaining (let alone predicting!) - something called shareholder value. 

There will be answers. But first we need to fully explore and grasp where the levers of power have moved to, and which of those we are entitled and able to get a grip on to begin navigating a cultural and commercial landscape that will no longer stand still.

Till next time. Thanks for reading.  

 

Bob Lefsetz on Kodak

The great Bob Lefsetz weighs in on #kodak ... always worth a read. lefsetz.com/wordpress/inde…

— Michael Bayler (@michaelbayler) January 9, 2012

A closer look at the implications of Kodak's demise

Billions of utterly unique, deeply meaningful images

The Kodak Brownie transformed personal human experience, in that it enabled people worldwide to capture, own, and share (note, not in the way we “share” today, but at a genuinely physical, intimate level) images of their own lives.

In a sense, Eastman Kodak was the Ford Motor Co. of modern personal identity. And the deep, sustainable and above all personal meaning that those gawky, prosaic, kiss-me-quick shots offered to consumers was nothing short of immense.

When Kodak eventually invested in some formal brand positioning work, they were able, without effort or loss of credibility, to take global ownership of one, fundamentally human idea.

Kodak decided to own “Memories”. Sounds easy, in a way.

But the key insight here is not that a brand agency then created a marketing and advertising manual, that then enabled all sorts of other agencies to create all sorts of brand communications that cemented their commercial monopoly over Memories.

What we need to grasp is the sheer human impact of the Kodak brand and its technology, but most of all, the cultural and personal weight that the process and the images that emerged represented …

… from lugging that bulky clunky item of luggage on holiday or to a wedding …

… through how to load a film without exposing and ruining it …

… then how to take the film out when you’d finished it, again without exposing it …

… to the simple joy of waiting for your prints to come back in the post or from the pharmacy …

… through to the – often awful, sometime happy, but always very meaningful – shared experience of “our holiday snaps”!

So what happened to Kodak?

Did “Memories” suddenly lose their value? Did a Shawn Fanning sweep in with some illegal Napster or Grokster for photographs?

Well, we can obviously say that “digital happened”. And certainly Kodak was terribly slow off the mark when the digital image came to town.

One senses that the Kodak board saw digital – like so many other industries have … let’s make sure we’re not marching in that number – not as the global cultural earthquake it would shortly become, but more as a supply chain issue with minor implications at the consumer interface: digital cameras at one end, CD’s instead of prints at the other, and so on.

No, it was infinite copy and infinite sharing that did for Kodak.

Because, missing from that formerly unassailable position astride all the world’s “Memories”, was a simple fact that has great relevance for our current discussion. It was the context, not just the content, that created and sustained an awful lot of the Kodak value.

Until we were all joined up by networks, Kodak’s Memories (moments of profound personal and family meaning, if you like) were special, unique, one-of-a-kind, and could only be shared with a privileged few.

In other words, it was not just the images themselves (quality of photo, with a nod to the obvious exceptions, never per se made them intrinsically meaningful) but the severe technical limitations within which they were captured, processed and shared, that gave them their rarity, their exclusivity, and, in the end, their commercial value. It was hard to take them, hard to make them, and very hard indeed to share them.

New players, new rules, bad ending

But when Flickr, PhotoBucket (among countless others) and ultimately, that category killer of all category killers, Facebook, became the new platforms for worldwide photographic activity, meaning and value, that rich, snug, primitive context that gave Kodak’s snapshots their wonderful, now lost significance … disappeared.

And of course, the cameras built into mobile phones threw the iconic snapshot into the eye of the connectivity storm.

It’s universal access and shareability, not just “being digital”, that dilute to oblivion the traditional impact and power of the physical image.

When my photos, yours, Britney’s, Robbie’s and Justin’s, are just confetti in the hurricane of billions upon billions of deeply personal, but somehow now entirely anonymous, meaningless snapshots … what happens to the brands, products and the services that supported them?

 

More on those Chinese Apple stores ...

Y'know, I can't get this story out of my mind. And I'm mystified that we haven't seen a MASS of fuss around it.

If I'm right, at the last count there were 22 fully-functioning, fully-branded bootleg Apple stores that had been discovered in China.

Now, I'm an old music business hand, who recalls when it wasn't consumers (with the hysterical exception of the "Home Taping Is Killing Music" campaign that ran in the 80's when I was still working in retail ...) who were held accountable for piracy, it was Middle- and Far-Eastern factories.

Those appalling quality bootleg cassettes of Police albums that overseas travellers brought back with them still live in my ears.

A very funny twist to the story is that of course, of all the companies that feature more recently in the music industry's "we are victims of the most appalling crime" complaint, one of the most reviled is ... Apple. While Steve Jobs was welcome with joyful weeping when iTunes launched, now almost everybody on the business side hates him. Nothing like a little "you stole my toy" resentment.

So now, we've come full circle in a way that you really couldn't write ... the same relentless commercial amorality that produced those unlistenable copies of Outlandos D'Amour - selling product that of course comes out of the back - or front even - of the factories that make the very same beautiful laptop on which I'm writing this - has produced a fully-working facsimile of the entire Apple brand experience.

Some of the kids who work in these bootleg stores truly believe - or at least want to, or maybe just don't care ... - that they're working for the man. The Jobs man, I mean.

But the thing that tickles me most of all is that, of all the many things that music business hacks lament, right up there is the demise of the old-style, mom-and-pop record store. And guess where all that buzz has migrated to? Well, think back to your last Apple Store visit.

Hmmmmm ....

Oh come on!

Nuff said ...

Apple iPhone scandal (and Google ads)

This article from The Independent today worth a read, but you gotta love the Google ads that run alongside ...

 
 

My name is Michael ... and I'm an Apple addict

Well, I've taken the first step and put down the drugs.

I mean of course, that I almost bought - to the point of actually putting in the order and paying for it - an iPad for delivery in early June. 

I got over-excited after a rather good day at the office. I decided I needed a reward - deserved it indeed. I'd had THAT email - announcing the availability of iPads in the UK from May 28th.

I've gotten into the habit of glancing at THOSE emails briefly and binning them ... you know why. This one I kept, sensing that I might need to come back to it. And yesterday, after my moment of excitement, I surged through the process, put down £600 on my card, and logged off.

I couldn't sleep. For the first time, I felt that I'd been mugged by my own relationship with the Apple brand. Not that the iPad isn't a glorious piece of kit. But it's not - right now at least - for me. 

What put the lid on it for me was when I got the order confirmation back this morning. The May 28th availability had turned into a 2nd week of June delivery.

Reader, I've had enough. I love my MacBook Pro, I love my iPhone, I'm really excited about OS 4.0.

But I went back, cancelled the whole order, and I don't - really don't - think I'm in the market for an iPad.

As of now - one day at a time - I'm Apple sober.

Understanding Engagement - Part Three: Getting Past Digital

Technology alone doesn’t tell us where to anchor the value of digital to a brand. 

Digital tools and systems are by now ubiquitous on both the demand and supply sides of the market.

It’s to affluent consumers themselves that we must look. Their expectations of complete control, “my time, my place, my terms” access, and their consistent avoidance of interruptive messaging, define the rules of attention.

Digital tools – the web, the mobile, IM and so on – are most usefully distinguished in this complicated landscape by their unprecedented closeness to the consumer. 

If mass media provide a sort of background chorus, the new digital services, in sharp contrast, are leading players … they have the ear and eye of the consumer at close quarters. In other words, this is a new challenge of Intimacy between consumer and brand.

And Intimacy, as we all know, is not that easy.

Digital tools are as much guardians of consumers’ pet likes and hates as they are – more traditionally – vehicles of consumption.  They express and enact the needs and values of the consumer. 

Getting close to our consumer – getting inside the gate in order to communicate with any credible effectiveness against the background of media noise – now requires the delivery of “up-front value”, rather than a bland, one-size-fits-all brand promise. 

It requires the sort of recognition and intelligent sensitivity that you’d expect from the concierge in your favourite boutique hotel. 

This is all about what we can call The New Intimacy. And let’s be clear: owning information about an individual is nowhere near the same as having a meaningful relationship with them. 

The intimate consumer relationship is built not in the database, but at the interface. Intimacy happens at close quarters, in real time. 

And this, if you buy the argument so far, is both the real promise and the massive challenge of consumer connections planning.

The networked, digitally empowered consumer has created an “infinitely small, infinitely large”, intimate media space, owned no longer by the media industry, but by this increasingly private - yet increasingly tribal – individual

We can call this the I-zone, as in I for Intimacy

Crossing the chasm both into and across the heart of the I-zone, is perhaps the most urgent challenge in consumer marketing today.

Tribes as well as individuals have their I-Zones … both are ring-fenced by digitally managed preferences, and tend to vigorously resist invasion by uninvited guests.

Why? Because the I-Zone reflects and supports the identity of individual or tribe … just as we feel slightly mugged when we’re sent mobile spam: individual or tribal … it’s all Personal.

It’s no longer just “media”.

Where does this leave media then? 

Stepping back, the most significant single impact of the digital revolution is a complete flip in value.

The Morecambe and Wise Xmas show – perhaps Carson in the US – in their heydays commanded the sort of audience numbers (and, importantly, their undivided attention …) that we dream of today.

Attention was everywhere – and media was very very scarce …

… meaning that consumers would happily pay for their entertainment by allocating their (cheap and plentiful) attention to brand communications;

Now media is everywhere, and the attention of the valuable consumer is the rare, precious commodity we must court;

This leads to a new model of media value and a new currency: Return On Attention.

So … what are the new rules of “ROA”?

Today’s consumer is spoiled for choice in terms of free, powerful, accessible and easy-to-use digital tools for play, creativity and communication: we can call these “Box X”: they’re what’s expected, almost a birthright for the younger consumer.

Attempts by brands to apply Box X-type offerings as engagement tactics (Coke’s early music downloads promotions service is perhaps a case in point) tend to be met with a consumer shrug.

However, when we a) understand what’s already happening in the Box X of our consumers’ digital life and then b) find ways to enhance those activities with experiences that are otherwise difficult for consumers to do themselves …

… we’re creating what we can call “Box Y”. 

This is where the value-added Return On Attention begins, and where powerful, sustainable consumer>brand Intimacy originate.

Understanding Engagement - Part Two: Looking "Behind The Line"

Advertising used to be all about media. Media is all about buying and selling consumer attention. Consumer attention used to be a more or less passive player in the game of media.

Think of a bowling alley, with the alley as a channel, the ball as a brand; the skittles at the end of the alley, waiting to be knocked over and racked up again, are … consumers!

The bowler – just like an agency managing a campaign – hurls the big heavy ball again and again down the alley, scoring points by knocking over as many skittles as possible. 

This is how the traditional eyeball/impression-based media planning and buying business of reach and frequency works. And when we’re looking for large-scale brand awareness, there’s still no better way to achieve our goals.

And let’s not imagine that it doesn’t take considerable skill and size to knock over lots of skittles, and do so repeatably. It certainly does.

The problems for bowling alley-style advertising begin, however, when the hitherto passive skittles wake up, start chatting to each other, and moving about.

With the Internet, an entirely new and disruptive type of dynamic appeared in media. If Media 1.0 is best summarised with our bowling alley analogy, then Media 2.0 resembles nothing so much as a pinball machine.

We fire the ball (which again stands in for the brand) – with perhaps an illusion of control – up onto the board. 

Note that the board is sealed in glass: we can see exactly what’s happening, but can do more or less nothing about it (we’ll come back to flippers and nudging …) after launching the brand/ball into play.

And what does happen to the ball? 

It’s the bumpers at the top of the board that produce the high scores. With all the flashing lights, pumping and thumping noises and bells, our brand/ball is bashed back and forth around and between the bumpers. 

And note: each of these bumpers has what our skittle consumer entirely lacked – an energy of their own. 

They push back.

This is what today’s active, tribal consumers do with information, with brand communications, with media of any kind. 

With the new control and energy provided by the web - also by increasingly rich-featured mobile – they, not we, determine the flow of the game and the score.

We do in pinball have access to those feeble digits, the board’s flippers: in the course of a campaign, we have the occasional opportunity to step into the game. 

To do what? One thing only: to use the “flippers” to drive the ball back to that high-scoring cluster of rambunctious bumpers: to keep the brand in the new game of tribal media.

When all else fails, perhaps we can try a frustrated “nudge” of the pin table. But when we push our 21st century consumer too hard, most of the time the machine just tilts, and it’s game over.

This is dramatically different from what went before.

Doing it for the experience

To Olympia this morning for a quiet Adtech London conference, where despite the evident impact of - yes it's still there - the recession on attendance, we had a very lively and enlightening session on customer experience.

I moderated, with the iron grip they expect from me, and on the excellent panel were Lawrence Merritt of Photobox, Matthew Cashmore of Lonely Planet, David Chalmers of Cisco and Benjamin Braun of British Gas.

Our focal points - which (see iron grip above …) mapped neatly across the key strategic emphases of the panelists, were a) where does customer experience - and its associated benefit, customer engagement - now live in business and brand strategy, b) how does that proceed to play out in terms of the way experience is viewed and managed and c) what approaches to measurement are being adopted?

Without going into too much detail on individual points made - all very succinctly and credibly expressed of course - the following headlines emerged.

First of all, where, till relatively recently, customer experience was just a problem for customer service divisions, it's now - certainly across all the panelists - perceived at the highest levels in the business as a critical driver of marketing and sales value. 

For Photobox and Cisco, the medium is to an overwhelming extent, the message, and not only is their brand equity overwhelmingly held in customer tribes, but remarkably high percentages of revenue - with, one gathered, highly efficient cost levels - are achieved with astute leveraging of both experience and engagement.

Lawrence stressed Photobox's lack of dependence on traditional forms of advertising and its corresponding focus on customer advocacy - what some are calling "earned media" if you like - to drive both brand awareness and hard sales.

For British Gas, a brand with a number of unsurprising challenges, in that customer experience has been - especially around service and billing - till recently so ill-regarded that positive engagement of any kind has been out of the question, a fresh range of online and mobile service initiatives are clearly and meaningfully reversing the experience trend, directly empowering the customer, and establishing both control and clarity to replace the previous sense of murky disinterest. One was struck by the common sense pragmatism and - key element of all experience programs - Utility (OK no pun intended) of the activities Benjamin outlined.

Second, a rigorous and attentive approach to the management and refinement of customer experience - and, critically, processes for the recognition and reward of value-adding customer engagement - feature highly in all successful experience strategies

For Lonely Planet - a bold innovator from their DNA on out - the engagement IS, to a large extent, the business. Matthew reminded the audience that the publisher's earliest days were peppered with thousands of copies of their guides mailed back to them by passionate (not to mention engaged …) users with scores of corrections and additions hot from the field. 

The brand is carrying that focus into all its threads of activity, as their customer base shifts from real to, if you like, virtual backpackers whose concern is less "How do I get there and where can I lie down?", more "How can this location provide the depth and relavance of overall experience I seek from leisure travel?" Matthew also talked in some detail about the attention devoted to testing and refining even the most trivial elements of, say, a web page to ensure that the online experience is as rewarding and engaging as possible.

David talked about the very effective recognition and reward dynamics among passionate Cisco users, to the extent that many of the businesses most valued support teams and even sales people … are customers too.

Third, and perhaps from my own point of view most essential, all of these very diverse operations are, at a gratifyingly high level, acknowledging in their expressed strategies and activities, that the customer really DOES own the brand, and that they - indeed all of us - ignore the impact of customer engagement and the role of customer experience, no longer as a chore, but as a core builder of competitive advantage, at our peril.

Data and conservatism

David Stoughton of ValueKinetics writes:

What, I am tempted to ask, does the UK government not understand about an admonition to stop hoarding DNA data? Or, for that matter, about the huge waste of public money that is the ID card scheme. But such questions are fruitless. We are faced with a regime that perceives the gathering and storage of data, any data, as a universal panacea. "Can't think of anything to do about it? No problem! Just collect the data, then we can tell people it's all under control"

That data will solve any problem is almost a religious creed, and not just amongst tired, fractious, cabinet ministers bereft of other ideas, it's becoming an imperative of action-man politics. As with all political shibboleths, we are shortly going to witness the very real downside. No! Not I'm not referring to more of our personal details left on trains, or emailed directly to the fraudsters without passing Go, I'm talking about a serious loss of competitiveness and the stifling of innovation.

Data is, in reality, being used to centralise power. Not just in the executive, though that's the epicentre but in the, otherwise challenged, institutions of the state like the NHS, the police and local government.  And we, the public, are being sold the story that this is a good thing. Treatments (well, OK, waiting times) will improve, crimes will be solved, terrorists apprehended before they can act. Without the data it's all going to get worse, much worse, believe me and so on, and on ....

Evidence for all this is very scant - indeed most of the improvements that ministers point to prove illusory or gained at the expense of other, equally important, benefits - but polls indicate that the public has been persuaded that data hoarding is essential to their health and security. Meanwhile the very real problems that the belief in centralised, institutionally-administered, data are storing up are off the radar.

Here's the issue. Centralised data, in the hands of the few, is being used to embed and conserve existing practice. It is, whether intentionally or not, a way of resisting change. All the evidence shows that real, IT-enabled, change happens bottom up. There are obvious examples out there, social media and mobile culture among them. There are also many, less evident but more telling, examples in the worlds of medicine and finance amongst others.

As a special report, 'Medicine goes digital', in last week's Economist pointed out, there are medical facilities in India and Thailand where digital patient records are far in advance of anything we have here - at a fraction of the cost - precisely because these initiatives are not centralised ... and, also because they are not centrally directed, such schemes are evolving fast. Commentators in the report agree that the impending medical revolution will happen only when patients, who know far more about what's happening to them now than the doctors can, become central to the process. That is, anywhere but here, where the old adage,"doctor knows best", is reinforced by control of the data.

Similar developments in finance, like Zopa, are not going to be initiated by banks, especially when governments regulate them to death. It is likely that stricter regulatory regimes will mean that real developments in personal finance - the ones that will replace our current, broken, systems - will also take place anywhere but here. Indeed I hear that Thailand is, once again, the unlikely venue for some interesting new thinking. I wonder also about the work of Dr Capra on mobilising distributed data, previously referred to (Security is so yesterday); will that be killed by an insistence on centralisation and regulation?

I could go on, but the point is this. Centralised, data-driven, heavily-regulated systems are the tools of the new conservatism. They are being used to entrench institutions in which the public is enjoined to place unquestioning trust, working against a tide of distrust in institutions that seemed almost unstoppable a few years ago. These schemes militate against innovation, and they jeopardise more than our personal data and our freedoms, they threaten our prosperity too.

Security is so yesterday

David Stoughton of ValueKinetics writes:

The other night I attended a dinner at which we heard brief presentations of their research from a number of ambitious computer scientists. A lot of interesting work is clearly being done on enhancing graphics and on modeling biological systems. The presentation that most struck me, though, was one from a Dr Capra, part of whose work is focused on how the information collectively generated by remote and mobile devices can be used to increase the efficiency of real time decision making.

Very briefly, it is increasingly the case that the content of mobile communications and the information from RFID tags can help us adjust our plans before we encounter the problem, or opportunity, that would compel us to adjust them anyway. Thus if a tube station is out of action or the supermarket is out of Rye bread we could, with the right systems, glean that information before we set out, and without Transport for London or Tesco having to broadcast it. Broadcast would require indiscriminate information provision and create huge problems of relevance and search; whereas the pull model - leveraging what is already available - could, by contrast be highly efficient. The problem is to know what information to trust, or how much of it is required  to engender reasonable confidence.

At the time I only commented on how all of the research activity seems to be, in one way or another, about media, in the McLuhan sense of tools that enable us to manipulate the world. But afterwards what struck me most was the contrast between what Dr Capra described and the discussion around the table. The vision she presented is surely one of an increasingly self-organising society, and was totally at odds with the conversation about keeping information secure that was going on around me.

At the same time as, or perhaps because, trust drains away from institutions and comes to rest increasingly with peer groups, so this possibility of self-organising social systems is emerging. Viewed in that light, data security as we know it is a problem of institutions. In a society where the young are increasingly at home with multiple persona's, and  where protecting your privacy is tantamount to a refusal to participate in the dance of mutual self-affirmation, the only information that the individual needs to secure is that required of them by institutions. In a very real sense data security, an apparently huge problem, may in fact be only a fin de siècle challenge - one of transition.

Of course it's not as simple as that, and I am not naive enough to believe that a fully self-organising society which at the same time guarantees the safety and opportunity of all its members will emerge any time soon. But it is interesting to reflect that security and surveillance are, in a very real sense, about institutions fighting for their right to exist. The natural authority with which society once imbued them has gone - now they assert it through exactly these tools of control. I'm uncomfortable with that, more because it smacks of an authoritarianism that has not been publicly legitimised, than the way it impacts me on a daily basis. Security has become the modern manifestation of the divine right of kings.

Books that point the way forward - 1964 to today

Two great movie quotes from the golden age of media keep coming back to my mind … “Who are those guys?” (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) and “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take it anymore!” (Network)

Why so? Well, they speak to me not only of the chasm of alienation (the “otherness” if you will) that is growing between Big Media and the mobile networked consumer, but also the impression of this consumer actively pulling away from prescribed content, brand messaging and anything at all that isn’t, well, 100% on their terms.

A number of excellent thinkers in recent years have taken on the intimidating challenge of helping us a) to understand who those guys are and b) why we/they are mad enough not to take it anymore.

Why isn’t the old model working, how could we reconnect with this lost consumer? Above all, can we stop obsessing the technological and commercial issues, and turn our attention to where value is really being driven, to the social and cultural drivers of Media 2.0.

The New Economist: Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks
Benkler’s weighty and ambitious 2007 masterpiece (the bold title of the book harks back of course to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations) digs deep into the dynamics of what he calls “non-market” value creation (of which User Generated and Shared content is perhaps one of the more simple examples). When the means of production and distribution are free, and when open source culture continues to swell, what are the Big Implications for world commerce. If you’re feeling less than robust, a good idea to pay someone else to read this one for you.

The New Utopian: Pierre Levy, Collective Intelligence
Ah, the French point of view! Always refreshing, always quotable, wildly ambitious, quite frequently wrong … and always guaranteed to upset somebody. (A good thing in itself, I’d say.) Think Baudrillard, think Foucault, think Derrida and dozens more. While clearly off the same style farm, network visionary/sociology professor Pierre Levy’s passionate, smart and very comprehensive look at “just how far we could go” in the era of social networks is a powerful antidote to the (now thankfully dwindling) tsunami of Web 2.0 lunacy

The New Populist: Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody
Now in paperback common language work of genius that manages to do what no one else here has done … to bring the subject of social network value and cultures to life for the ADD-tinged colour supplement readers among us. I fell in love with the title before I even considered buying the book. Probably the must-have in this list, or at least a very good starting point for deeper inquiry.

The New Marketer: Grant McCracken, Flock and Flow
Marketing is no longer the fluffy job it used to be, and the no-nonsense NY-based consultant Mr McCracken takes as his key premise the pivotal Road Warrior (back to those movie lines again) quote, where Mel Gibson (formerly known as Mad Max, now … OK, don’t go there) drawls “You wanna get out of here? You talk to me.” Flock and Flow takes on the fierce task of describing how and why market dynamics now create such challenges for brands, and a manual for how to stay ahead of the curve. An astringent and ballsy work that you need to buy, if only to make sure he writes the next one.

The New Sociologist: Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-identity
With the exception of the next work listed here, the oldest publication. But Lord Giddens’ insight into the touchpoints between self, society and new technology remain to my mind unsurpassed. If you want to know why ringtones are more prized than MP3’s ever will be, but don’t want to read any more about ringtones, MP3’s or anything to do with mobile content (and I’ll bet you don’t …), read this book. Slowly. Sorry, no pictures either.

The Old Master: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
I’m still startled at how many folks in our line have managed to reach maturity without reading the work that started it all in 1964. If you find yourself in that endangered species, I won’t grass you up. But do something about it sharpish, OK?

The Shameful Plug: Bayler and Stoughton, Promiscuous Customers, Invisible Brands
Published in 2002, still more or less holding its own as a manual for digital value creation.

The media metaphor of doom

Delighted that a recent metaphor developed in our TouchStone framework development work with Bacardi Global Brands' Digital and Insight and Planning teams, is gathering currency amongst both friends and colleagues ... If you watch this and then this first ... 20th century media was about targeting and hitting consumers with the same message repeatedly - and repeatably. All the energy was provided by the planning and buying investment of the brand. We can also call this MacroMedia. This is where the bowling analogy seems to explain the dynamic neatly ... whereas ... In the 21st century, we score highest - as per the pinball analogy - when we get the ball (the brand) into the high-scoring bumper zone at the top of the table. This is relatively out of control, serendipitous, and the only control we have is the feeble flippers at the bottom of the board. And we use those only to try to get the ball back up those riotous bumpers - just like tribes of networked consumers, who when they take on a piece of media or an idea and start kicking it about, brand awareness and often equity explode upwards. We also call this MicroMedia. Key takeaway? The energy in the second model - the pinball machine - is primarily owned by the consumer tribes. Excessive brand energy? Well, neatly, it just tilts the whole machine and game over. I love this job sometimes!

What he said ...

Key thoughts from Scott Karp on the Reuters issue here.

RSS turns ad models around

Interesting short piece from BusinessWeek:

It appears that the people who visit a site through a search engine or a link are a different bunch than those who subscribe through an RSS feed. The people who go to the site through a browser might be shopping around for a wireless device so they would respond to an ad for wireless gadgets. But someone who subscribes a feed already has a BlackBerry and the gear that goes with it. An ad encouraging them to buy a BlackBerry or even to dump the device for a Treo wouldn't work.

Bebop finds gig listings from your iTunes list

Great little idea this - check it out.

Spirit of 2.0 - the mashup

This from Dion Hinchcliffe expains a lot if you're looking to understand the spirit of Web 2.0:

2.63 new mashups a day.  That's what John Musser's terrific new Mashup Feed site says is current the creation rate.  If that rate flattens out today, which isn't likely, that's over 960 new mashups every year.  Mashups, composite web applications partially constructed from the services and content from other web sites, are taking off with an amazing speed.  Yet they are a relatively new phenomenon in terms of being this widespread and pervasive.  All this even though mashups, like blogs and wikis, were actually possible from the creation date of the first forms-capable browser.  So why the sudden widespread interest?

Google-Napster tie up - thinking about it ...

From The Deal:

According to a New York Post report, Google Inc. is in talks with Napster to either buy the online music service outright, or form some sort of partnership to offer a Google music service. Let's ignore that both sides have denied the rumors for a second and take a look at what this could mean.

Warners into P2P

Surely a smart move:

The firm will sell movies and TV shows over the internet in Germany, Austria and Switzerland from March. Its In2Movies service will use the same file-sharing technology that has led to an increase in movie piracy. Warner Bros did not reveal price details but said it planned to widen its international use of P2P networks.

A London Transport moment ...

.... not the usual kind, where rage, frustration and bewilderment send me home shattered and fixed in fight, flight or weep mode ... no ....

I was wearily gazing at the (new) plasma on-bus TV on the Number 18 to Chalk Farm this morning when I noticed a "25% off sale" ad for an Apple vendor, which caught my attention momentarily. What woke me up (activated my P300 waves ...) was the fact the the store was right on (or very close to ...) the route of the 18 bus. Contextual, behavioural? Interesting.

Thoughts on Google's rich media moves for AdSense

What changes when The G-men go fluffy?

Google AdSense is moving beyond the traditional text and graphical advertising to rich media, including interstitials, expanding ads and floating ads. AdSense began contacting publishers last week to be involved in the rich media limited beta test.

Voice drives video search service

From Search Engine Watch:

A new free service from multimedia search engine TVEyes allows a searcher to keyword search each and every word spoken during tv news segment from well-known news organizations. TVEyes is utilzing voice recognition technology to create a "Spoken Word Index" that makes these programs keyword searchable.