Only Dead Fish

Gone Fishing

I'm taking a well-deserved break for a couple of weeks but normal service will be resumed before you know it. Have a great couple of weeks. Back soon.

The Unbundling Of Advertising

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Last week I participated in a lively discussion over on the Forrester blog about digital content. Mark Mulligan had a post up about product innovation in the music industry and made the point that many of the fundamental challenges and solutions they were looking at applied far beyond the music business to all kinds of content producers. There was something that Mark said in response to one of my comments which was interesting:

"we believe that record labels should move away from releases in the traditional sense, where timings are dictated by the legacy of getting physical product to market, and instead move to developing continual releases as the basis of relationships with fans. In the digital age there is no need for the speed bumps in the artist-fan relationship which legacy release schedules place. And once you reinforce the artist-fan relationship, especially in the context of compelling legitimate services, you create more sense of belonging and community with the artists."

I'm reminded about something David Hepworth (founder of The Word) wrote once about how on-demand, the i-player and changing music consumption meant that content distributors could no longer dictate the pace at which the market moved:

"There's something vaguely pathetic about the average pre-release PR announcement nowadays, as if the person who typed it still lived in the world where everything seemed to stop on the day that their particular product 'dropped'. This doesn't happen anymore. Products slip noiselessly into an ever-swelling stream rather than dropping like a pebble in a serenely still lake."

I think there's an interesting parallel with advertising here. Conventional campaigning wisdom attempts to create just such speed bumps. Messaging is deployed at sufficient weight to guarantee reach to a large number of people in a short space of time (for TV, often at weights that mean that heavy TV viewers are likely to see the ad up to ten times - I'm not having a go at TV here, any medium deployed at that weight would be the same). Awareness decays until another burst kicks in. Speed bumps.

Yet as I've pointed out before, building relationships is not about speed bumps. Committing, as opposed to campaigning, doesn't have a beginning, middle and an end. You can't walk away from a conversation. It's not part time. The pace is not entirely yours. The schedule is not predictable. As Mike Arauz says:

"If you've put in the time and effort to show your fans that your listening, don't make the mistake of letting it all go to waste by going dark for 3 months while you get ready for your next big ad campaign."

The advertising process is still largely set up around discontinuous cycles. Yet your customers don't want interaction with your brand at your convenience, they want it at theirs. As advertising, in common with all forms of content, becomes increasingly socialised, it needs to work to a different set of rules. So isn't it time that the advertising process got a whole lot more agile?

The Social Ape (2)

Subbu left a comment on my previous post pointing at new research that suggests that an evolutionary adaptation to subtly imitate promotes the formation of social groups and so reduces conflict, aids co-operation and ultimately, survival.

The author of the study Annika Paukner, a comparative behaviorist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, makes an interesting point:

"In the past, we looked at imitation as 'What did [the imitator] learn?' But the role of the model has been largely ignored...Turns out, imitation is not just good for learning something new. It's also beneficial for the whole group—or whole species."

Interesting parallel to be had with communications, in considering the focus often placed on the individual recipient rather than the group dynamic of how ideas spread.

The Social Ape

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"We spend almost all our time attempting to change behaviour through overt persuasion - while paying no attention to influencing the other, barely conscious ways in which people behave." Rory Sutherland

Of all the marcomms (and vaguely related) books I've read over the past few years there have been a few that have really stuck in my mind (Convergence Culture perhaps, Purple Cow, Here Comes Everybody), but I think the one that has probably stood out the most for me is HERD, from Mark Earls. I think because it speaks of a fundamental truth that the ad industry rarely acknowledges - that people do what they do because of other people.

Early on in Herd, Mark talks about how primates are first and foremost social creatures and how this is our core evolutionary strategy. New Scientist recently linked to this fascinating essay by anthropologist Brian Hare and his wife, journalist Vanessa Woods, (also included in the 'What's Next? Dispatches On The Future of Science' book) which suggests that rather than it being intelligence that led to social behaviour, it was social behaviour that paved the way for the evolution of human intelligence.

Hare and Wood talk about what's called the theory of mind - the ability to think about what others are thinking about. Under the age of four, children can't model what others think - they think everyone knows what they know (example: give a four year old a packet of gum and ask her what's inside it she'll say 'gum'. Open it up and show her that inside is a pencil rather than gum. Ask her what her mother, who's waiting outside, will think is inside and she'll say 'gum' because she knows her mother hasn't seen the pencil. But children under the age of four will generally say their mother thinks there's a pencil inside because they cannot escape the pull of the real world)

A theory of mind allows for complex social behaviours (such as the formation of institutions, strategies, government). Experiments conducted by Hare with chimpanzees shows that in some contexts chimps possess the ability to think about what others are thinking, like in the ability to be deceptive in order to get food. But in other contexts they lack such an awareness and lack the ability to interpret simple human non-verbal communicative gestures, like pointing, which suggests that use of gestural communication of this type was something that humans developed after their lineage split from our common evolutionary ancestor.

The curious thing though is that some animals, like dogs, are very good at interpreting such gestural communication (think about how good a dog is at watching your body language when you're throwing a ball for them). Yet experiments done by Hare on wolves showed that they were no better than chimpanzees at acting on human behaviour. But puppies who'd had very little human contact were still able to. This suggests that since they split from their wolf ancestor and became domesticated over time, dogs have evolved to act on human social cues.

In the 50's and 60's, Russian scientist Dmitri Belyaev conducted a series of genetics experiments on silver foxes, putting one group under severe selection pressure - culling those that showed aggression towards experimenters, allowing those that approached them to live - and allowing another control group to breed randomly in regard to how they interacted with humans. Within only 40 generations the selected foxes had begun to show evolutionary change: behaviourally becoming friendly towards humans, wagging their tails, licking people's faces, and even physically changing as their ears became floppier, tails more curly, coats lost their camouflage, skulls became smaller - in short, looks and behaviour more akin to a domesticated dog. And the test foxes could read human body language just like a dog. The point being, that the foxes were not bred to be smarter, merely more friendly, but through that had developed skills by replacing a fear of humans with a desire to interact with them.

So Hare and Wood suggest that something similar could have happened in human evolution:

"Instead of getting a jump start with the most intelligent hominids surviving to produce the next generation, as is often suggested, it may have been the more sociable hominids - because they were better at solving problems together - who achieved a higher level of fitness and allowed selection to favor more sopisticated problem-solving over time. Humans got their smarts only because we got friendlier first."

If co-operation is a 'cornerstone of human acheivement', it is human's uniquely high level of social tolerance that has likely created it. New Scientist quotes Harvard University neuroscientist Jason Mitchell:

"The most drammatic innovation introduced with the rollout of our species is not the prowess of 'individual' minds, but the ability to harness that power across many individuals"

It is our unique level of spontaneous collaboration and co-operation that make us human. Ideas which capitalise on this are uniquely powerful. After all, people aren't so different, no matter where you are.

HT to Adland Suit for the video link

A Life Less Obvious

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I've been thinking a bit about authenticity recently through a small project I'm involved with via the IPA. Paul recently made a great point about how the nexus of advertising and social media will increasingly be about finding the center of what makes companies interesting and different - their culture, their soul and the humanizing elements that makes them what they are: "It’s that soul that can help us find the motivating message, that focused positioning that moves people to get beyond just liking us and get to liking to buy from us."

Richard built on this, creating the visual above, and talking about the idea that "the new sense of value that consumers have created since the beginning of the recession requires brands to be of value not just good value for money."

I've written before about how important I think it is for us to focus on the value we create for others, not just ourselves. It is a model that has the potential to be transformational:

It is a model that at times can be counter-intuitive:

“Apple’s goal isn’t to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products…We trust as a consequence of that, people will like them, and as another consequence we’ll make some money. But we’re really clear about what our goals are.” Jonathan Ive

But it is now the only way.

Post of the Month - July '09 - The Winner

Some brisk voting on this month's poll with the vote eventually becoming a two horse race between Paul's reprise of What's Next In Marketing And Advertising, and AdLand Suit's post on bankers and teenagers but in the end it was the latter that garnered the most votes. So well done AdLand Suit - you get the props of your blogging peers, and are entered into the Think Tank 'Hall Of Fame.

Post Of The Month - July '09 - The Vote

Some excellent reading in this month's nominations. Thanks to those who nominated, and now time to vote a winner. Our shortlist is:

Surfing The Waves Of Change - a guest post by Jane Young of Scrmblr on Alan Moore's blog

F**k Influencers and I Am Not An Influencer And We Are Not Friends (try 2) from Sean Howard

Is Your Company Thinking That Social Media Is A Job? by Valeria Maltoni

When Objects Become People and Vica Versa by Adrian Ho

The Generation M Manifesto from Umair Haque

2009's What's Next In Marketing & Advertising by Paul Isakson

Bankers Enter The World Of the Teenager by Adland Suit

And you can vote below.

Post Of The Month - July '09 - Nominations

...are open. Some exceptionally good reading to be had in July, as evidenced in the quality of the posts I've put forward below. As usual, please nominate any good posts you've read that were posted in the month of July in the comments to this post. As a starter, I've listed five of my own favourites. In a few days I'll stick these five, with any additional ones that are put forward up for a vote. OK, so the starting five are:

Surfing The Waves Of Change - a guest post by Jane Young of Scrmblr on Alan Moore's blog

F**k Influencers and I Am Not An Influencer And We Are Not Friends (try 2) from Sean Howard

Is Your Company Thinking That Social Media Is A Job? by Valeria Maltoni

When Objects Become People and Vica Versa by Adrian Ho

The Generation M Manifesto from Umair Haque

Nominate away...

On Intimacy

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Anthropologist Stefana Broadbent gave a talk at TED Global the other week (disclosure: sadly I wasn't there to see it) suggesting that rather than expand our social circle, modern communications strengthen our core relationships. She uses as evidence stats that show that 80% of phone calls are typically to four people, if you have 100 people on your IM list you'll likely only chat with five of them, and most people call only two others when using Skype. People are using communications tools, she says, to break the isolation that institutions impose on them - a process she rather grandly calls 'democratised intimacy'.

I'm not surprised at the suggestion that such tools serve to tighten existing close relationships (why would they not?), and it's not the first time I've seen stats that suggest that a highly disproportionate degree of communication happens with relatively few contacts within a group or a network. The study earlier this year by Facebook's in-house sociologist Dr Cameron Marlow showed that whilst the average number of friends in a Facebook group was 120, the number of people with whom people actively interact and communicate with was remarkably small. The more regular the interaction, the smaller and more stable the group. Let's face it, managing close relationships requires an investment of time and energy, both of which are finite resources.

But whilst network tools may not have increased the size of what you might call our 'social core', the more intimate of our human social groups, it stands to reason that they also enable us to manage all our relationships better, including our looser associations. The average twitter user has 126 followers but some (of-course) have many more. Whilst the number of people you regularly interact with might be much smaller, technology has still enabled large numbers of concurrent live connections.

A couple of years ago, Leisa Reichelt coined the phrase "ambient intimacy" (such a lovely phrase, don't you think?) to describe just this:

"Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible"

Like Leisa, I think it's just as interesting to reflect on the value that this 'ambient intimacy' brings for many people to the longtail of our digital connections, to the spread of ideas, and to our relationships with others.