Only Dead Fish

What's Next

Early last year Paul shared an excellent presentation on What's Next In Marketing & Advertising. At the time, I commented to him that I thought there might be a media and content perspective that would compliment  what he was saying, and he said he'd love to see it. So his presentation became the inspiration for What's Next In Media (which happily has had almost 40,000 views since it was put up on slideshare a year ago).

Anyway, the good news is that he's done an updated version which is just as good as the first one. The themes that Paul touches on are familiar, and echo a lot of those that are talked about on this blog (like how the future of marketing is generous, honest, playful, collaborative, experimental, helpful, participatory - all good words), but as is usual from Paul it is a refreshingly well put together piece that is well worth a look. Hmmm, perhaps it's time to update What's Next In Media too...

What's Next In Marketing And Advertising (2009)

View more documents from Paul Isakson.

Flight Patterns

Love this. A short film by Charlie McCarthy based on 156 long exposure photographs of bugs under a streetlight.

flight patterns from Charlie McCarthy on Vimeo.

Great catch by the Creative Review blog.

The Irrelevance Of Digital

There's been a few things I've read recently questioning the relevance of the word 'digital' in marketing, suggesting that in light of the digitisation of all media it is losing its meaning, that the days of specialism are over.

I think Marc Cridge is right when he says that 'digital' played to a different set of rules, and that social has now changed the game again, and that "you can’t simply take the old ways of doing things and apply them to any new medium in exactly the same way".

But I also think that the distinction we make is getting less meaningful. And as I've said before, people don't think in channels, they think in terms of entertainment, information, enjoyment, usefulness - being able to get what they want, when they want it. As content becomes unhinged from legacy devices, as media 'channels' become blurrier, so the separation between 'platforms' becomes less and less tangible.

As Mark Anderson has said, content is already at the point where it has few or no boundaries, where it is provisioned for every device, where it is increasingly less defined by its 'platform', and in that way becoming more invisible. By expanding, the web disappears.

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Russell made the point that this all gets really interesting (or scary, depending on your point of view) as more products start emiting data streams, as objects start communicating and get more informationally connected, and that this is what advertising and marketing and media people really need to get afeared by: "All this web stuff is going to look like a picnic compared to the horrors that will be dealt to the agency and media businesses when every product has a communications channel built right in."

To quote William Gibson: 'One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real'

And yet the majority of advertising content is still provisioned by channel, media is planned and bought by channel, and I agree with John - it often seems that common sense is not so common. Or put another way, we can't afford to take for granted that the things that we take for granted are taken for granted by everyone else. If that sounds a little pompous, I don't mean it to. But the point again is that the view from inside the world of advertising and media is not necessarily the same as that outside of it.

I don't have the answer. But I suspect that the question ain't going away anytime soon.

The Candle Problem

Rob left an insightful comment to my post on failurephobia:

"...in a world where companies budget by week - let alone by quarter - is it really surprising that only certain industries and categories happily invest in R & D (or should I call it 'adventures in failure')?"

Rob's point is that having the confidence to fail comes with an attached cost to business that has to be understood and appreciated by all stakeholders (the company, shareholders, clients) in order for this kind of culture (for it is a cultural thing) to really succeed.

It's a great point. And one that I've talked of before. Business model innovation is a very different type of innovation from product or process, and one that established competitors find difficult because when they're chasing the next quarter's number, it often doesn't make economic sense. To paraphrase Costas Markides the real issue is not discovery, it is organisational.

If you're sitting in a small, agile business that embraces failure, it probably seems like the most natural thing in the world. If you're not, you'll appreciate the scope of the challenge that this presents.

It's about challenging toxic assumptions - the kind of assumptions that are deeply inherent in a business and deeply unchallenged. It's about understanding the difference between technical change (focused on process, providing solutions, clarifying roles, restoring order, maintaining norms) and adaptive change (identifying the challenge but resisting the urge to clarify, asking the right questions rather than providing the solution, challenging current roles and unproductive norms). It's about being comfortable with ambiguity, something that big business is not good at. It's about admitting that you don't know all the answers (something else that big business is not good at) but that instead it is often enough just to frame the question. And it's about understanding that what works, and what doesn't, is often counter-intuitive.

I read a great example of this yesterday in this post by RSA CEO Matthew Taylor describing a TED Global talk by Dan Pink, the central theme of which was that crude incentives (like big financial bonuses) damage performance in complex tasks. He goes on to describe an example given by Pink in his talk - the famous candle problem:

"In this exercise subjects are shown a picture of a table next to a wall. On the table is a candle, a book of matches and some drawing pins in a box. The task is to attach the candle to the wall over the table, light it, but not let it drip wax on the table.

On average it takes people about ten minutes to identify the solution. This is to take the drawing pins out of the box, pin the box to the wall, then stand the candle on the box so the wax drips on to it rather than the table. This requires the subjects to make the lateral leap of seeing that the box holding the pins is not just a receptacle for another object but an object in itself.

In this test those who are offered a cash prize for completion perform less well than those who are simply asked to solve it as quickly as they can. Fascinatingly, if the test is made easier - by taking the pins out of the box so it can be seen from the start as an object in play - then those offered incentives perform better than those not."

Matthew goes on to make a great point in relation to the banking crisis ("why is it that powerful people in important jobs don't want to discuss research showing that being given big rewards might damage their performance. The answer, of-course, is in the question."), but as I said in the previous post, acheiving change of this type has a lot to do with how you define and reward success. To quote Sir Ken Robinson: "If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original"

Resonant Frequencies And Failurephobia

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I once had a boss who said "failure is not an option". In this rather sobering post, Jeff Jarvis quotes Craig Newmark who, upon returning from a recent trip to the UK has commented on an apparent culture of failurephobia amongst UK business. In Silicon Valley, says Newmark, failure is just a phase of ones career. I'm not surprised about that, but is failure really that stigmatized in the UK? God I hope not.

Jarvis talks about how granting the license to fail enables the courage to innovate. It is (of-course it is) a cultural thing, so cultures that don't allow failure equally don't tolerate risk. But the courage comes from the individual. I believe that the capacity to originate great ideas exists within everyone in an organisation, but I also believe that there are some people that positively thrive on it. People who might not have the word 'creative' in their job title but who are nonetheless creative thinkers, generative, and bothered enough to go out of their way to create something that wasn't there before.

Business, and especially big business, should be openly embracing these people wherever they sit in their organisations (and now more than ever), but somehow I doubt that that often happens. It's not just about creating the space and taking the risks, it is as much about how a culture defines success as how it handles failure. Too narrow or inflexible a definition does not enable the courage it takes to do something different. As Jeff says, success is as much about not holding perfection as the standard of success as it is about the need to risk and fail.

There's a quote in this wonderful post, written by Jane Young of Scrmblr (HT to JMAC for the link):

"Everything has a natural frequency of vibration, i.e. its resonant frequency, including us. Just as a glass smashes when you hit a certain note, so too do we resonate at certain frequencies, seeking and finding meaning in different experiences, clans and value-sets."

There is something here about organisations finding (or enabling) the right 'resonant frequency' for this kind of talent to flourish. Ideas are nothing without action. But they are also nothing without the culture to enable people permission to stand up, stand out, take risks and maybe, just maybe, fail now and then.

I know this has been said before. But its worth saying again. As Jane says, sometimes you have to lose yourself to find yourself. So here's to the crazy ones...

Re: Selling Out

Good catch by PSFK, who highlighted this video by You Tube blogger Kristina Horner who posted in response to some criticism about approaches by brands to bloggers. Kristina, who did some stuff as part of the Ford Fiesta Movement, is eloquent in her defence and makes a clear point:- the approach felt right because it was made clear that "our success is their success". A must watch for any brand who wants to work with bloggers.

HT to Nick for the link

Exhaust Data

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There was something about Adrian's thought-provoking post on the digital blurring between objects and people that reminded me of reading Grant McCracken's thoughts a couple of years ago on 'Phatic Communication' - the kind of communication that is all about sharing feelings or sociability as opposed to hard information or ideas. Says Adrian:

"things like Twitter and Facebook, flatten out the distinctions between people, objects, companies and ideas as all of these things (and more) now have the ability to create a profile, collect friends/followers, describe their tastes, preferences and affiliations and generally build data that describes them and their social graph"

As we make our way around the web, we leave vapour trails of data that define us. And not only the more tangible, obvious data like the profiles we create, the files we download, the websites we've visited, the searches we undertake, the videos we watch, the things we buy. But also the less tangible, 'phatic' data like the comments we leave, the interactions, the status updates, the tweets, the wall posts, the stuff we write.

Adrian makes the point that it is interesting to speculate about how language may hold us back from seeing the new possibilities that come from objects, ideas and people interacting at the same level. It's equally interesting to speculate about where an increasingly sophisticated understanding and application of this kind of 'exhaust data' might take us.

Data As Art

These data visualisations from Chris Harrison are so beautiful they are an art-form in themselves:

Digg Rings
Using data from the digg API, the top ten most-dugg stories of the day over one year rendered in a series of tree-ring-like visualisations (moving outwards in time). The colour of the rings relate to digg's eight top-level categorizations, the thickness of each ring is linearly proportional to the number of diggs the story received.

The Colour Flower
Using a data set of colour names collected on the internet featuring more than sixteen thousand colors labeled by people online.

The Internet - City To City Connections
Using data from the Dimes Project, showing how the Internet's routers are connected geographically. Almost 90,000 connections between cities all over the globe are shown.

Amazing. More here.

Consumers Are People (2)

Looks like I struck a bit of a chord with my protestations around some of the language we use in our industry. There were some great comments and some good discussion around my post (thanks), some good follow up posts, and plenty of action on twitter. John even put together a natty widget aggregating the tweets containing the #StopUsingConsumer hashtag he's championed.

Several comments on the post made the point that it is behavioural change that is required, and I agree. The point for me I guess, is that language perpetuates behaviour. These kinds of descriptions are embedded in the practice of our industry. If we're really serious about changing behaviour then thinking more carefully about the language we use is no bad thing.

The Wrong Summit

This short 3 minute TED talk by Arthur Benjamin makes a simple but very perceptive point, that the teaching of mathematics is now out of step with the modern world. Moving beyond the foundations created by arithmetic and algebra, Benjamin suggests that as the world moves from analogue to digital the curriculum should move with it and embrace the more modern, discrete mathematics of randomness, uncertainty and data, and that the 'summit' of the subject should change from calculus, to statistics and probablility.

If the subject was more aligned with the changing world, Benjamin argues, maybe more people would find it relevant and interesting and maybe, just maybe, we wouldn't be in the economic mess we are in today. It's such a compelling point it makes me wonder how many other 'wrong summits' we're still aiming for.