Only Dead Fish

Something for nothing

Free heads up for all Only Dead Fish readers...NME.COM is hosting the worldwide debut of Arcade Fire's highly anticipated second album Neon Bible. The album is available for streaming in its entirety exclusively here for one week before it's scheduled release in the UK on March 5 and in the US on March 6. And it's just gone live - happy listening...

Scary thought

Larry Page , co-founder of Google, has apparently announced that the web behemoth is in the development stages of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The realization, it is claimed, may not be as far off as we think. Yesterday I left a comment on John Grant’s blog about companies that embody innovation. I used Google as an example of an organisation that allows it’s staff time to innovate. And how. The thought that the company that has the largest conglomeration of digital information and computing power in the world may harness this to develop AI is quite astounding.

Courtesy trendhunter and threebillion. Image courtesy Bladerunner

Consumers are pigs

“I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.”

This is a quote from Winston Churchill.

How should brands treat social media? With caution, according to Richard at AdLiterate. His slideshow on the subject (‘Brands and 2.0…Proceed with Caution’ ) captures eloquently exactly why social media is potentially such a problematic area for brands. It demands, he says, that you trade control for influence and if brands are uncomfortable with this then they should stay clear of it. It is also difficult to measure. And brands have to work extra hard to appeal. Media is now a conversation but ‘brands only have a role if they can make the conversation more interesting.’

There’s already some well documented cases of brands getting it very wrong. Walmart’s attempt to create their own social network fell badly at the credibility hurdle. It just didn’t feel right.

Yet there is a seemingly unending consumer appetite for greater levels of communication and the technologies that drive them. Even as new technologies have come along, more traditional forms of communication (like post for example) have remained relatively healthy. They may not have grown materially, but neither have they declined. We still watch more hours of TV, buy more magazines, see more outdoor advertising than ever. Yet somehow we are managing to fit far more opportunities for communication into our waking hours.

The driver behind this is the insatiable demand for higher levels of social contact, particularly in the UK, where it is more prevalent than our European counterparts. According to work done recently by The Future Foundation, we are an extremely sociable bunch. We rate aspirations which involve social interaction highly, to the point where the overwhelming majority of people believe that such social aspirations as having friendly neighbours and being able to go out with friends and family is an ‘absolutely necessary’ part of their lives. Absolutely necessary.

For brands, they say, the fact that UK consumers "are actively seeking to gain interest on their social capital should be a given for anyone trying to communicate with them." More than that, it is an opportunity.

But first, some things have to change. For a start, change the language. The vernacular of planning is often militaristic. We speak of target audiences, bombarding consumers, strike rates. We talk about exploiting opportunities, delivering messages or targeting consumers, phrases which all imply things we’d like to do to an audience whether they like it or not.

The Fallon blog perceptively called participation, ‘The 5^th P of marketing’ . Invitation, enticement, collaboration, sharing, consulting, contributing, community. As soon as you start using words like this, our objectives change. We no longer want to just get our message in front of our audience, we want to involve them in it.

The Brand Channel paper linked from the Fallon post ( How to Crash The Consumer-Controlled Party ), talks of a new hierarchy where brands are "like the kid at the park with potential, but they're rarely picked to play in the big game."

So why are consumers like pigs? Because they respond to being treated as equals. They don’t want to be falsely idolised, nor do they want to be talked down to. The Internet is the greatest democracy on earth. It is the great leveler. It feeds from egalitarianism, fairness, opportunity, balance. So don’t abuse that – you’ll get found out. It is more critical than ever that brands adopt the right tone of communication.

And if our objectives have changed, then what we are measuring and how we are measuring it should also change with it. In short, we need to transform our currencies. What is the use in securing large numbers of eyeballs if none of them connect to the part of the brain that changes perceptions and behaviour?

The brands that get this will be the ones that will be able to generate significant social currency and, I believe, significant reward as a result. Brands are right to be wary of social media – if it means that they take more care to adapt their models, their criteria for success, their language. If they do this, the rewards will be great.

Image courtesy podchef

Magazines for the creative

Couple of things for the more creative amongst you...First up Wallpaper*. Always daring to be different, the March issue features a limited edition moving lenticular cover previewing Hussein Chalayan's mechanical dress. Also just in, courtesy of magculture, the latest print edition of thisisamagazine.com features (sometimes slightly bizarre) material collated from the website remixed with a number of printer tricks including fold-outs, die-cuts, tip-ins...amazing what you (and we) can do with a bit of paper.

A mini video adventure

Given BMW’s previous venture into branded web-based film content, I guess it’s no surprise that the Mini is now following suit.

The US division is developing a series of six films featuring a seventies action hero called Hammer and his car ‘Coop’ (Mini Cooper…geddit?). They were directed by Todd Phillips, who also did the Starsky & Hutch film. The first two were launched here on Monday, following offline teasers. They're not as slick as the BMW Ritchie films but a lot of fun nonetheless - and there's some gratuitous car washing to boot.

Next month, they will be doing a faux music video for 80’s MOR classic, Heat of the Moment by Asia. Can’t wait for that one (no, I actually mean it)

Is advertising becoming less important?

It seems like the elephant in the room but perhaps the painful truth is that this is indeed the case. According to the Bellwether marketing survey, Media budgets have declined as a proportion of total marketing spend from 37% in 2005 to 33% in 2006. The budget is shifting to below-the-line, to sales promotion, direct marketing and as we well know, under pressure from retailers, to in-store support. Should we be bothered?

A recent post on the Brand Strategy blog revealed the quite amazing results of some research conducted by the consultancy firm Prophet that showed that senior marketers feel they have virtually no control over the elements in their organisation that they believe are considered critical to business growth.

Over three quarters of them (76%) believed that customer experience and service were considerably more important growth drivers than business strategy and marketing strategy, and yet a sizable 24% of them admitted that they had little or no influence on either of them. Similarly, significant numbers felt they also lacked influence in other critical areas such as distribution/sales force strength, pricing, and product development. Almost a third even admitted to having little or no involvement in online/direct marketing.

Whilst 40% of marketers believed that brand and marketing activities had a high impact on their company’s growth, more than 60% of the companies questioned have no formal mechanisms in place for measuring that contribution to growth.

And, a quarter of senior marketers viewed advertising as an important driver of growth, but only five per cent considered it to be the most important factor.

Have we lost our belief in the power of great advertising to drive material business growth?

Mash-ups for the masses

Mashing up feeds just got a whole lot easier with the recent launch of Yahoo Pipes. In it’s simplest terms it allows you to easily combine multiple feeds into one, stringing together many simple operations, piping the output of one to the input of the next, to create something new and more complex. It has a graphical pipe builder that allows inputs from different feeds (Yahoo local, CraigsList, Flickr, RSS) which can then output the results as an aggregated feed or a web page.

More to the point it's easy to use. Could this be the start of something really big? The idea that users can easily mash-up multiple feeds to personalise pre-selected content from around the web takes this whole idea to a new level of usability. Perhaps in the not so distant future models of this kind will form the basis of how we aggregate all our text and visual feeds from around the web into a usable interface that gives us everything we need. As also seen on Giles's blog where you can check out the Ogilvy Blog pipe.

Thought for the day

"Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do… The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything"

So speaketh  Alan Kay in 1971. Alan, the inventor of Smalltalk (the inspiration and technical basis for the MacIntosh and subsequent windowing based systems (like MS Windows), was in a meeting between PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) and Xerox planners at the time.

Courtesy Ian Jindal

Pimp my blidget

Widgetbox now allows you to create your own Widget for your blog (nattily called a 'Blidget'). You can get mine here. You can get your own here.

Digg Spy

Following on from my earlier post about mapping the internet, Digg labs have been at it again with Big Spy...this time stories appear realtime, the size of the font indicating how popular they are, and then move down as new stories appear. Not sure why you need a study to find out 'why it's gross to kiss your sister' (see visual) but there you go. Strangely addictive nonetheless. As also picked up by Chroma