Only Dead Fish

Media = Maths + Magic

Before Christmas, in an exceptionally insightful post on Ad Age, Adam Cahill suggested that it was time to change the orientation of media agencies and departments to be more reflective of what people do and toward what he called the math and the magic (hence the borrowed title to this post) of media. The maths bit of this referred to the kind of automated trading platforms and exchanges (like DSPs) that are becoming increasingly prevalent in traded digital media, and the magic referred to an approach driven by creativity that seeks to bring people in to fun/interesting/entertaining experiences.

"Math is about dispersion: the functional delivery of impressions to people who haven't asked for them, but whom we hope to influence. Magic is about attraction: creating impressions so perfect that people choose to spend time with them, and maybe even pass them on."

Of-course, much media is still traded in non-automated ways, but you can quite see that as more media becomes digitised and therefore more advertising becomes ad-served, margin pressure and the need to facilitate real-time optimisation across channels will drive trading relentlessly towards automation. The win is just too big for all but a minority of specific placements not to be traded in this way.

This, as the piece points out, changes the whole notion of digital media planning. With automation, the emphasis changes from specific media channels to the skills of the people using the platform. More agile and adaptive approaches become far more of a reality as planning becomes a process of testing hypotheses, learning, adapting and optimising rather than a laid down, upfront plan. So the best plans, as it were, will likely not be plans at all.

The magic comes from a particular breed of people - tinkerers: "people who are immersed in digital culture, and who see connections between trends and technologies that others don't, and then fuse those things together to create programs that otherwise wouldn't have existed". Unlike its more scientifically driven counterpart, whilst paid media is important to these ideas, they are not driven by it. Instead it is motivated by the desire to create rich, unique, ambituously distinct experiences. The kind of ideas that are not originated from an RFP process.

These points are echoed nicely in Graeme's exceptional deck on the future of media agencies. There's lots of rich stuff in here, building on some existing smart thinking and taking it on to make some great points about the evolving and future capability of agencies. It's definitely worth a look:

Media Positive Planning

View more presentations from Graeme Wood

As a part of this, Graeme makes some good points about a key part in this jigsaw: content. One of the big challenges for brands and agencies is just how content hungry emerging, always-on channels are. As more activity and spend flows into these areas, the appetite and need is for not just a continuous feed of high quality content, but for a longer-term content strategy that looks quite different to that which might be originated for campaigns. Part of the solution to this (ironically) lies in automation. Curating content through algorithm and aggregation. But a big part also lies with people.

Having worked media owner side I can appreciate the unique skill this kind of content production and thinking involves. In the face of potential dis-intermediation (as brands become content producers in their own right and establish direct unmediated relationships with customers) and commoditisation (as an ever larger proportion of media trading becomes automated making it increasingly difficult to maintain premium yields) the biggest opportunity for media owners is in their content expertise. This is not about one-off sponsorships, content syndication deals or even branded content campaigns, but rather far deeper and longer-term partnerships that externalise content expertise in ways beyond current practice and thinking.

As Adam Cahill points out, the maths and the magic of media may come from totally different places, but both involve a hands on approach to digital media and both require the kind of skills that are in pretty short supply in the industry. The agencies and media owners that will win, will be those that can find a cogent and compelling balance between the two.

Reinventing Libraries

According to the 2010/11 Taking Part survey published by the Dept of Culture, Media & Sport the proportion of adults in the UK who visited a public library in the past year fell from 48.2% in 2005/6 to just 39.4% in 2009/10. At that rate of decline in less than two decades nobody will be visiting libaries.

This upsets me. I remember weekly childhood visits to my local library, gathering up another small pile of books to take home. Those visits were full of anticipation. I can remember the almost overwhelming sense of wonder when I first walked into the Library at the sheer number and diversity of books in one place. But in the face of our modern day almost universal access to knowledge and information through digital means, libraries are slowly becoming irrelevant.

In response to Kodak filing for bankruptcy protection, I saw a tweet that opined that the company's long-term decline had come as a result of misunderstanding their core business: "They were in the memories business not the film business". In his Observer column on the subject, John Naughton paraphrased Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma, saying that whilst big companies are often good at fostering 'sustaining' innovations (the type that enhance their positions in established markets) they are (perhaps inevitably) much less adept at dealing with innovations that completely disrupt markets. To me, libraries have a Kodak problem - they are shackled to a legacy medium and model (books and lending) from which (despite efforts to diversify) they seem unable to escape.

And yet I believe there is an extremely useful long-term role that libraries could still play in local communities. The first thought most of us have when we think about libraries is that they are places to go to to borrow books. Yet if I think back to those visits to my local library the thing I was really excited about was the opportunity to connect to amazing stories and how those stories made me feel. Borrowing books was merely the means by which this happened.

The art of storytelling is one of the greatest of human attributes. So what if community libraries became places that were dedicated to that art? Places where people could connect and interact with stories in a hundred different ways. Story centres, if you like. Places that were about inspiration and firing the imagination. Places that were equipped not only with books, eBooks, and DVDs that you might borrow, but with the tools for digital creation and the means to inspire and enable people to create stories of their own. Places that were not just about quiet, passive appreciation but active, noisy, exciting learning. Places that might connect the young to the great stories inherent in film, literature, and history in meaningful and relevant ways. Places that involve people with the stories of their local area and the people who can tell them, and maybe even lived through them. Places where people could go to celebrate great storytellers and hear them speak. Authors, film-makers, game-makers, artists, animators, illustrators. Or to be a part of a massive but very tangible story-telling network spread out around the world.

There are plenty of reasons why this might be a good idea. Some have said that storytelling is dying art, and yet the diversity and depth of the tools we have at our disposal to create stories has never been richer. The creative industries in the UK employ around 1.5 million people and their contribution to the economy is growing. Think of the ground-up innovation this could galvanise. Think of all the stories that could be brought to life that would otherwise be forgotten. Think of all that might come from people inspired not just by reading, but by doing and making. But this is also about reconnecting people to their local communities. How great it could be. Re-invigorating a national infrastructure that has enormous potential to bring even more value to millions of people. Capitalising on the amazing things that can happen when you bring people and technology together and add a dash of inspiration.

So that's what I'd do. Turn every library into a story centre. I don't think we should accept a slow gradual decline for our libraries into irrelevance. I have some sympathy for the long-suffering librarian attempting to deal with increasing expectation and dwindling resource. But instead of disenfranchising them, we should empower them. There are no doubt plenty of reasons one can think of for not doing this. But I think there's one very compelling reason for believing that there needs to be radical change - in less than a generation community libraries may well not exist.

HT to Diemkay for the DCMS link

Image courtesy

Shut Down Or Restart?

Regular readers will know my views about the need to completely reinvent the ICT (Information and Communication Technology) curriculum in schools. Having written a few pieces on the subject I was invited along last week to an interesting meeting of representatives from industry and education (including Google, Microsoft, Rewired State, Nesta, BETT, the IPA and UKIE) who have come together to structure a response to the government-sponsored Next Gen report which called for a radical revamp of the tech curriculum.

The good news is that there seems to be real consensus about the need for change and a constructive approach toward building a new curriculum that will better equip our shcools and teachers with a relevant course of study to replace the old one as it is phased out, and better equip our kids for the kind of world they will emerge into as adults. It will be interesting to see how this response shapes up over the next few months and how the government will react to it, so watch this space.  

In the meantime, it's worth taking a look at the Shut Down Or Restart report from The Royal Society (another attendee at the meeting) which provides a great summary of key issues and recommendations that have provided some good focus and direction for the response. Critical to the report are recommendations around terminology (disaggregating the amorphous 'ICT' into clearly defined areas such as digital literacy, Information Technology and Computer Science to enable proper focus on under-represented areas - notably recognising Computer Science as a rigorous academic discipline and making it available to every child), recognition of the shortage of specialist teachers, industry help with the continuing professional development of teachers, the development of fit-for-purpose technical resources and school infrastructure, and proper incentives, resources and qualifications to help teachers build long-term change.

This is a subject I believe to be critical not only to our education system and our kids, but to the future of our country.

What Is Competitive Advantage?

Terminology like competitive advantage, differentiation and value creation tend to get overused in businesses. This HBR piece on the work of Michael Porter from Joan Margretta who worked with him for almost 20 years succinctly captures how often such terms are misappropriated ("Competitive advantage, for example, is often used to mean 'anything we think we're good at'. Any plan or program is called a strategy. Managers confuse differentiation with being different…most companies think they have a strategy when they don't"). It pulls together a list of Porter insights that are so pithy I'm going to re-produce them in full:

1. Competitive advantage is not about beating rivals; it's about creating unique value for customers. If you have a competitive advantage, it will show up on your P&L.
2. No strategy is meaningful unless it makes clear what the organization will not do. Making trade-offs is the linchpin that makes competitive advantage possible and sustainable.
3. There is no honor in size or growth if those are profit-less. Competition is about profits, not market share.
4. Don't overestimate or underestimate the importance of good execution. It's unlikely to be a source of a sustainable advantage, but without it even the most brilliant strategy will fail to produce superior performance.
5. Good strategies depend on many choices, not one, and on the connections among them. A core competence alone will rarely produce a sustainable competitive advantage.
6. Flexibility in the face of uncertainty may sound like a good idea, but it means that your organization will never stand for anything or become good at anything. Too much change can be just as disastrous for strategy as too little.
7. Committing to a strategy does not require heroic predictions about the future. Making that commitment actually improves your ability to innovate and to adapt to turbulence.
8. Vying to be the best is an intuitive but self-destructive approach to competition.
9. A distinctive value proposition is essential for strategy. But strategy is more than marketing. If your value proposition doesn't require a specifically tailored value chain to deliver it, it will have no strategic relevance.
10. Don't feel you have to "delight" every possible customer out there. The sign of a good strategy is that it deliberately makes some customers unhappy.

I'll admit there were a couple here that made me do a mental double-take (in a good way). I'm curious to know what everyone here thinks of them.

Image courtesy

Stop SOPA And PIPA

It's a day of many voices of protest across the web (even on the Google homepage), but I didn't want to post about anything else today. I don't believe that censoring the web is the right thing to do and I don't believe SOPA and PIPA are the right way to end piracy. So for what it's worth I'm adding my voice to the many calls to vote no. If you are one of my US based readers, please consider signing the online petition.

#lookupmore

I'm loving Instagram's weekend hashtag project. It's a simple but rather lovely curation of Instagrams around weekly themes that have included stairs, reflections, corners and shadows. Ages ago, I started hashtagging a few pictures that I took with #lookupmore. It's a simple thing really. Rushing about every day, I think it's easy to only look at the stuff we see at eye level or what's down at our feet. This is a way of reminding myself of all the good things you see when you occasionally pause, lift your head and look upwards. Since I started posting on the hashtag, a few others have used it too, which is nice. So any suitable Instagrams you'd like to add to the group would be lovely to see.

Massive-Scale Online Collaboration

I caught up with the super-smart Richard Sedley yesterday and he pointed me at this astounding TEDx talk by Luis Von Ahn, who was one of the people that invented the CAPTCHA. Luis talks about reCAPTCHA, the project to create human gain from the 200 million CAPTCHAs that are solved by humans around the world every day and apply all those millions of tiny actions towards helping to digitise old books (apparently over 10% of humanity have so far helped digitise human knowledge).

As if that weren't amazing enough, he then goes on to explain his subsequent work to create a product in which millions of online users around the world work together to translate the internet as they learn a new langauge. For free.

What's so fascinating about these ideas are the models and economics they are based on. The indirect but not insignificant benefit that can come from millions of actions from millions of people at a scale uniquely enabled by the internet. Fascinating.

Intimate Networks

Since its redesign, Path has gotten a lot of attention. Many would say that having created a ground-breaking piece of mobile UX this is deserved. I've had Path on my phone for a good while but not really used it. The redesign has tempted me back to play around with it, but it's not yet something I open up regularly, partly because I'm not sure what place it has in amongst all the stuff I use on a daily basis. That may change, but for now that's how it is.

One of the interesting things about it though, is that it was designed from the outset to be an intimate network. When it began, the number of people you could friend on it was capped at 50. They've since relaxed that limit to 150. But they're still clear about where that reasoning comes from:

"We are inspired by Professor Robin Dunbar from Oxford University, whose research delves deeply into the number of trusted relationships humans can maintain throughout life. We tend to have 5 best friends, 15 good friends, 50 close friends and family, and 150 total friends. At Path, we're building tools for you to share with the people who matter most in your life."

Whilst Facebook, they say, is primarily about sharing with all of your friends and acquaintances and Twitter is primarily about public sharing, Path is about creating "a safe, intimate, judgment-free space". 

Much was made of this when it launched but if I'm honest, I didn't really get it. Since then though, I've been enjoying the relative intimacy of Instagram and Google+. That's not to say that more connections and more 'noisy' networks like Twitter are inherently a bad thing (although I do have my reservations about so-called frictionless sharing on Facebook), but perhaps it does suggest that there is definitely a need for places to go where there is more signal and a little less noise. Path may not be it (I'm still not using it after all) but the functionality on the big unrestricted networks isn't perfect either so who knows, maybe it will turn out that it is.

Imbalances

Frederik linked to this short video of Sir Ken Robinson. It's not a new talk but a section of his session at the RSA about changing education paradigms. Specifically the bit in which he talks about divergent thinking (it's not brilliantly shot but it gets the point across and you can also watch a longer RSA animate of the talk).

Seeing this powerful reminder of the dominance of convergent thinking (the kind of thinking that believes there is only one answer to a problem) in not just education but also in the world of work made me wonder whether in tough economic times, this imbalance within companies gets worse. My hunch would be that as pressure intensifies on reaching short-term targets, the desire for certainty and efficiency increases, leading to a propensity to favour singular solutions that often lead to incremental gain. Making decisions is no bad thing, but this leaves little room for the kind of continuous cycle of divergent and convergent thinking (or creating and making choices) of the kind that Tom Hulme of IDEO talked about at Google Firestarters, and which inevitably creates greater opportunity for real creativity.

This reminded me about that well-linked-to but exceptional Forbes piece late last year by Steve Denning, writing about the ideas contained in Roger Martin's book Fixing The Game. The article, and the book, talk about why maximising shareholder value is (in the words of Jack Welch) "the dumbest idea in the world". Not just because it encourages the worst kind of short-termism, but because CEOs and senior management are hugely incentivised to focus most of their attention on the expectations market (the market in which investors assess the activities of a company today and form expectations as to how the company is likely to perform in the future, which in turn shapes the stock price of the company) rather than the real market ("the world in which factories are built, products are designed and produced, real products and services are bought and sold, revenues are earned, expenses are paid, and real dollars of profit show up on the bottom line").

It's a compelling example of misplaced value. The kind that can lead us to focus on the wrong targets, the wrong measures, the wrong things. The worst thing is that such imbalances can have huge consequences in both education and the workplace.

HT to Tom for the Forbes link

Post Of The Month - December 2011 - The Winner

Quite a battle again in the vote this month but in the end the winner was Tom Ewing's excellent post on music, digital streams and nanoculture: Take Me To The River. So well done to Tom - as always, he gets not only the props of his blogging peers but is also entered into the hall of fame. Thanks to everyone for taking part and don't forget to bookmark your good reads to nominate for next month.

Post Of The Month - December 2011 - The Vote

Thanks everyone for your nominations. Our shortlist and vote this month is between:

Take Me To The River by Tom Ewing

The Importance of Being Awesome by Faris Yakob

The Rocket Sled Goes Too Fast from Ernie Schenck

Dear Men, Please Listen, Love Man from Mark Sorrell

Social Media, The Ego, And The Self by Aaron Balick

Something Disintegrates At Burger King from Dave Pell

And you can vote below:

Post Of The Month - December 2011 - Nominations

Time to open nominations for Post Of The Month for December (hopefully we can remember as far back as 2011), so please nominate your favourite posts that were posted in that month, in the comments below. As usual, I've listed a few of my own favourites as a starter, but please do add to them and once I have a good list I'll stick them all up for a vote. OK, my starting three are:

Take Me To The River by Tom Ewing

The Importance of Being Awesome by Faris Yakob

The Rocket Sled Goes Too Fast from Ernie Schenck

Please do nominate your own in the comments below.

Observations From Two Years In The Wild

It's been nigh on two years since I made the leap from 20 years in corporate world to making a living for myself with little more than my MacBook Pro, what I know and who I know. It's been simultaneously challenging and exhilarating, but I'm fortunate in that it has grown into something bigger and filled with more possibility than I had imagined all those months ago. 

A number of people have asked me during that time for advice on making their own leap, and I'd started to put down some thoughts about things I'd learned along the way that I thought might be helpful. But, if I'm honest, I found it really hard.

That's not because I'm short on observations about two years in the wild. I had wanted to talk about how the experience has stretched me (in a good way - I've learned more in the last couple of years than I did in my last five as an employee), how important it has been for me to be continuously adapting what I know and do, and about how it's all about momentum. I'd wanted to talk about how important it is to value your network, and your time, to value people who support you, to learn when to say no. I'd wanted to talk about the importance of working on projects with awesome people, to work hard and be nice to people. All these things have been vital to me.

But there is lots of good advice out there already, and I'm sure that everyone's experience will be different. So somehow, it just wasn't coming together. And as we move into a new year, one that quite possibly will bring even more challenge and change for all of us than the last one, I wanted instead to emphasise one thing that I think is more critical than ever, and will be important for me in the coming year: to create some space.

By that I mean space to think, space to slow down, space to create, space to look, space to experiment, space to play, space to create new ideas, things, connections. I think it's very easy to be head-down, focused on the here and now, the next deadline, the urgent job. Those things are important, but when we are disciplined about leaving some room, amazing things can happen. Things which we really cherish. Things which build for the future. Things that we'll always remember. I'm not big on New Years resolutions but if I had to select one, that is it.

Why Do Big Companies Get Rid Of Talented People?

A strange thing happened this year. A number of highly talented people I know were made redundant from the (typically) large companies they were working for. Good people. Capable, bright, knowledgable people. People skilled in digital and who were willing to challenge the conventional ways of doing things in order to find a better way. 

This makes little sense to me. I recently worked on a fascinating piece of research on behalf of the smart folk at Econsultancy into how organisations are resourcing their digital marketing capability. One of the findings was that companies are finding it increasingly difficult to find talented people with both a depth and breadth of digital skills and knowledge. And yet some people who seemingly have all the skills and attributes that you would *think* would be highly prized by organisations (particularly those looking to adapt to the challenges brought by digital and emerging technologies) have been 'let go'.

In a recent post Rishad Tobaccowala defined strategy as 'Future Competitive Advantage', and described the two biggest challenges for firms seeking to deliver on a strategy as being to address their organisational design (processes and products that are optimised for existing customers) and their talent (attracting new skills, or up-skilling, and building out new incentives).

Despite talking a good game, many large organisations remain relatively poor at moving talent around the company. The silo culture that still characterises many businesses doesn't help. Requirements and expectations become optimised to local needs rather than those of the organisation as a whole. Strangely, the people who can really see the bigger picture and are often the ones to challenge existing assumptions are the ones that begin to not fit so easily into those silos. So companies take the easy option.

In my view, it's their loss. As Rishad says: "Strategy has a better chance of becoming reality if we keep in mind that the future does not fit in the containers or the mindsets of the past." That applies as much to talent as it does to business models. But sometimes finding the talent of the future is less about talking to headhunters and more about looking right under your nose.

Identity Is Prismatic

Chris Poole, the founder of 4Chan, About.me and Canvas, gave an interesting talk at Web 2.0 back in October about how one dimensional the existing ways in which services enable us to represent our identity are.

The portrait of identity online, he says, is often painted in black and white - who we are online is assumed to be a mirror of who we are offline, and anonymity is seen as something dark and chaotic. We all have multiple identities and there are many lenses through which people view us, yet Facebook (for example) has driven an over-simplifying, consolidating, one-size-fits-all, 'fast-food' approach to identity.

His argument is not about being disingenuous about who we really are, more about the limitations of being able to represent identity with sufficient nuance within different contexts ("It's not who you share with, it's who you share as"). Our options to do this, says Poole are eroding and this is happening to the extent that we're about to sacrifice something that is hugely valuable.

Thinking about this reminded me of the Alter Ego project by Robbie Cooper, which featured a whole series of photographs of virtual world gamers set alongside their online avatars. The project brings to life how some use their avatars to experiment with new identities, and others create ones that are extensions of their real selves, but most avatars have at least an echo of the person that created them, if not in their physical appearance then often by reflecting aspects of their creator's personality.

I am perhaps a little less pessimistic about this than Chris. The possibilities for self-expression online have never been wider, and online identity is still a relatively distributed construct. But with the ever increasing ubiquity and embedded nature of online services like Facebook, the launch of new features like timeline which are designed to lock our identity in, and with identity being such a key part of the context layer of the vertical stack, it's a really interesting question to ask.