advertising practitioner

olympics, culture, ads

From March 20th

Watching The Rise and Fall of The Adman, it was easy to be nostalgic for an age of advertising dominated by bold characters and extraordinary creativity. It seems like a time we'll never recapture, an age of daring, of imagination, of rule-breaking.  But the thought that kept nagging away at me was a slightly more cynical one. I was continually struck by how much easier advertising must have been then. Certainly great talent bestrode the land then, but, to borrow language from Olympic gymnastics, the level of technical difficulty is a lot higher now.

The obvious advantage they had was the established consensus about what good popular culture looked like, a consensus managed by a small group of editors, TV producers, publishers and ad execs, Mostly men, mostly white, mostly well-educated. That ironic, subtle tone that is so lauded about the 'golden age' of advertising wasn't necessarily reflecting inherent national characteristics. It was just what those people enjoyed. It resonated with the rest of the media culture because the rest of the culture was made by the same sort of people. And a large part of its success was due to the lack of an alternative; making an ad part of the national conversation is a lot easier if the whole nation only has one commercial channel to watch. And it's not like there was a plethora of other media to worry about either, or much of a hurry was required. Most brands seemed content to bang out an annual campaign of a couple of TV commercials, a poster or two and maybe something in the colour supplements. And some slightly grubbier agency, possibly in Earls Court, would be entrusted with shelf-wobblers and dealer handouts. No wonder there was time left over for legendary lunching and the cultivation of outrageous anecdotes.

The average advertising person today has a slightly different furrow to plough. The nation is not dragooned into consensus through monolithic media; the media landscape reflects the crazy mixed up character of the country. That makes mass marketing almost impossible, and direct but constantly changing conversations with discrete groups of people across a huge range of channels almost compulsory. Which means making good advertising is just much harder now. Of course all this wouldn't matter if the apparent golden age wasn't continually held in front of us like some sort of bar to be jumped. The remnants of that age linger on in boardrooms and on awards juries, lamenting declining standards and rolling out ancient layouts like aged generals, always fighting the last war. We should learn from their experience but today's ad people should also be proud of what they can achieve under much tougher circumstances. Maybe one day they'll get their own documentary.

privacy, pickles, phorm

From March 13th

Three technology stories stuck out for me last week; the PR pickle Phorm have landed in, the founder of Facebook becoming the world's youngest billionaire and (slightly more quietly) the beta launch of a new Yahoo! product called Fire Eagle. They stuck out because of a common thread; privacy and people's attitudes to it. Let's have a look at each one. Phorm are the latest people to promise more relevant, better targeted advertising. They're going to do this through partnerships with Internet Service Providers; watching the sites people visit and serving up more accurately targeted advertising through understanding that behaviour. They maintain that no-one's individual privacy will be violated by this process, that everything's anonymous and no particular individuals browsing habits will be trackable or recordable. Which is all fine and dandy and may well be true, it's just that, even so, lots of people are suspicious. It just doesn't feel right to many people, it seems too 'Big Brother-y'. And while these suspicions might be entirely baseless, they're troubling enough that Phorm is finding itself doing a lot of explaining.

Mark "Facebook" Zuckerberg has had his brushes with privacy too. Lots of the recent conversation about Facebook has been about the difficulty of removing your information from the Facebook servers if you close your account, about how secure that information might be in the first place, and about how much is shared with advertisers. Again, Facebook's practises might be completely above-board, but the perception of something troubling lingers. Which is why it's worth paying attention to the way Fire Eagle deals with privacy. Fire Eagle is a tool that lets you share your location with all sorts of services. You'll be able to transmit your position from a huge variety of devices, and specify exactly who gets to know where you are. This is going to be more and more useful as phones become more connected and capable. Imagine if FedEx knew where you actually were, rather than just your address, it might make deliveries more efficient. And looking for all sorts of information would be simpler if your search engine could make commonsense deductions based on where you were. All useful stuff. But location information is even more sensitive than browsing data so Fire Eagle has made privacy central to everything it does. A large, obvious button lets you hide yourself whenever you want to, and an equally large, equally obvious button lets you purge every bit of information about yourself from the site if you want to leave. It's this stuff that makes a service trustable, a place people want to share with. And, if you want to have any sort of relationship with people online, this is how you'll have to think.

non-obvious, surprise, reality

From March 6th

There's a guy in Las Vegas who builds computer systems and trains them in Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness. The casinos there are regular targets for fraudsters and tricksters, often colluding with employees, hoping to sneak themselves some undetected winnings under cover of the mass of gaming transactions that happen every minute. So these systems have to act incredibly quickly; matching information from employee databases with known lists of bad guys, arrest records, customer information, credit reports and all sorts of publicly available data. They're looking for non-obvious relationships - like the fact that the guy who's winning lots of cash on table fourteen shares a cellphone number with the dealer on the adjacent table. The kind of thing that should ring an alarm-bell somewhere and might save you thousands of dollars.

And there's a group at Microsoft working on what they call 'Surprise Modeling'. They've devoured huge amounts of data about Seattle's notoriously horrible traffic and about everything that might cause delays; the weather, sports fixtures, public holidays, and they set out to warn drivers about bottlenecks and jams. Which isn't really that exciting, because any experienced driver in the area already knows where the bottlenecks and jams will be, and no-one likes software that tells you what you already know. So this system goes a little further and works out which of the jams it's predicting are likely to be surprising to drivers; and only lets them know about those surprises.

And there's a team at MIT working on the 'reality mining' of personal devices like phones and iPods. They're trying to determine whether the things our phones know about us - our movements, our conversational style, our location, our music preferences - can be used to create aggregate pictures of the society we belong to; it's health, it's relationships, it's behaviour.

Why am I bothering you with this silly new jargon; 'Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness', 'Surprise Modeling', 'Reality Mining'? Because the future of marketing is in data, real data. Not the spurious marketing constructs we're used to - wooly things like spontaneous awareness and day-after-recall - but the live tracking of real world behaviour. The planet is full of objects beaming information about their status to anyone authorised to listen, from Nike trainers to Rolls-Royce aero engines. The objects we use are starting to tell stories about our behaviour. And the people who can find the patterns in that informational fog (who can mine the reality and find the non-obvious relationships) and those who can sort through it and find the stuff we should be worrying about (modeling the surprises) will be the people we'll be desperate to employ. Them and the folk who can connect all those databases together, without losing CDs in the post.

i can haz campaign

From Feb 21st

One of the challenges of writing these columns (apart from not starting sentences with 'And', wondering what headline Campaign are going to stick on it and remembering that you don't care what challenges I face) is the fact that I can't link to anything I write about. And if I do want to include a URL it'll probably occupy about half of my precious word-count.

It's a challenge newspapers face all the time and the most common response is to use a service called tinyURL - which exists to turn long web addresses into short ones. The only problem is that the tinyURL addresses - being mostly letters and numbers - are incredibly hard to remember. So, since I want to point you at a few things on the web this week, I thought I'd use Icanhaz.com instead. Icanhaz is a friendly little service that lets you shorten urls using regular words. (You'll have to use google to get an explanation of the whole "I can Haz" meme. We don't have time here.) I think it'll all become clear, so let's plough on.

The first thing you should have a look at is a piece by Kevin Kelly called 'Better Than Free'. You can find it via icanhaz.com/betterthanfree (see what I did there?) He addresses the whole debate about freeness as a business model (icanhaz.com/free) and points at some of the new scarcities that arrive with every new abundance. There's really useful thinking in there for media owners wondering how to compete with a world of 'free and quite good'.

Fretting about similar issues might lead you to a little post by Cory Doctorow, which is interesting about Disney's responses to piracy but contains a killer phrase which ought to be carved on every content-owners forehead - "Content isn't king...Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about". (icanhaz.com/conversation) Ah, I'm enjoying this, this is like writing for the web, you don't have to explain everything, you don't even have to have a point to make, you can just scatter references and let people find what interests them. So, finally, for those of you worried about the fate of brands, here's a must read piece by Umair Haque of the Harvard Business School website about The Shrinking Advantage Of Brands (icanhaz.com/shrinking). Because it's not really about that, it's really about the shrinking advantage of having a big advertising budget. And that's definitely worth worrying about for many of you out there. So that's it. I hope it wasn't too geeky, but if you only want to trouble yourself with remembering one of these links - go to icanhaz.com/campaign and I'll point you to everything referenced in this column.

links

Here are the links for the column of February 21st.

Kevin Kelly on 'better than free' is here.

Chris Anderson and Freeness is here.

Cory Doctorow and 'content is just something to talk about' is here.

Umair Haque and The Shrinking Advantage Of Brands is here.

microsoft, yahoo, ray harryhausen

This is from February 14th

Do you remember Ray Harryhausen? He's the guy that did all those early stop-motion animated monsters, like the skeletons in Jason And The Argonauts. Watching Microsoft circling Yahoo!, with Google waiting in the wings, reminds me of one of his famous creature battles. We're fascinated by these huge beasts tearing lumps of plasticine flesh from each other - we can't look away - until we remember that one of them is going to win, and when they do they're going to come bellowing and snorting at us, the puny humans at the edge of the battlefield and they'll probably devour us whole. Because what they're fighting over, mostly, is advertising revenue. And that's really what's frightening, because that shouldn't be their money, it should be ours. The world should be watching huge ad groups and media businesses squaring off over the advertising pie, not a bunch of coders and geeks. How come they stole our lunch? What went wrong?

Well, a lot of it comes down to two little letters; R and D. Microsoft said they'd spend about $7.5 billion on research in 2007. Yahoo! Research has locations all over the world and has found smart ways to learn from the communities around them. Google give their engineers a day a week to pursue their own projects in the hope that they'll invent the future of the company. And advertising agencies? Does any agency have a genuine research and development budget? Technology companies typically spend about 20% of revenues on R&D, is there an agency anywhere that spends even 1%? Media companies aren't much better; most TV producers think of R&D as inventing a shinier floor for celebrities to dance on. No wonder advertising occasionally finds itself outflanked. Even when agencies do commit to spending money on something forward-looking it's almost always just to garner some headlines or persuade a wobbly client that the agency is still vibrant and exciting. And, if most agencies spend money on new skills or development they normally just buy someone in; to bag some knowledge that someone else already has, not to create something genuinely new.

All of which makes complete short-term sense, but in the long-term means we've surrendered thought-leadership of the industry to the West Coast of America. I'm not suggesting that agencies need to put money into string theory or gene-splicing but it'd be nice to think that a media or communications business was committed to getting ahead of the technology businesses in some small aspect of what we do. Wouldn't it be great to have an influence on the battling monsters, to chuck a spear in there and bring one of them down. Not to be just sitting here waiting to be eaten.

attention, metaphors, glancability

From February 7th

One of the most best ways of understanding your own little slice of the world is to look at it through someone else's eyes; to grab a metaphor from another area of life and see if it illuminates something in yours. So I was very struck recently by a chap called Matt Webb who writes a blog at interconnected.org. In a throw-away moment he suggested that we were approaching the point of Peak Attention - borrowing an idea from the energy business and applying it to the worlds of communication and design. His thought is inspired by the notion of Peak Oil - the moment when oil production is at its highest. Before then it's cheap and plentiful, afterwards it's scarce and expensive. This doesn't just change what happens at petrol pumps, it overturns fundamental processes in the world - economically, socially, politically, militarily. There's much obsessing about exactly when Peak Oil will actually be, but what's more useful, and more interesting, is to think about what life will be like afterwards, to work out how to get the maximum value from each drop, and to look for alternatives. That's what makes Peak Attention an interesting thought experiment.

If we see advertising and media as extractive industries, dragging a scarce and diminishing resource from people, how might that help us raise our game? And there's no doubt that it's getting scarcer (the attention that's available to us at least.) Every new media choice that's adopted means less attention for everything else and we're starting to see people consciously thinking how much they're willing to devote to particular activities - based on what they need to concentrate on and get done, and on a recognition that their attention is valuable and can be sold. In the real world we're seeing informal attention management strategies like occasionally 'forgetting' your BlackBerry or judicious skipping with the Sky Plus, but online, where attention is measurable organisations like attentiontrust.org are giving people the opportunity to actively track and store their own attention data.

The active exchange of attention is something we're going to have to think harder about. Are we communicating as quickly and efficiently as possible? Are we siphoning the maximum value from each drop of attention? Are we offering sufficient reward in exchange for the attention we're extracting? This should force us to examine each bit of communication in different terms. Not just thinking of 8-sheets, 30 seconds and microsites but planning which elements of the communicative effort should be glanceable, which bits need to be studied, what it'll take to make that happen and what people will get in return. If we think about that stuff now maybe we won't have to worry about what we'll do when all the attention runs out.

magazines, subscriptions, st bride library

From January 31t

I went to this fantastic conference last week. At the glorious old St Bride Library off Fleet Street, all about the history and future of magazine design. You were probably all there. What could be a better place for an art director or media planner to deepen their expertise? I didn't notice any agency names on the attendee list though. Maybe you were all being anonymous. Hmmm. Anyway, for those of you who missed it, here are a couple of things that popped out to me.

The first thing I hadn't realised was how reliant the UK and bits of Europe are on newsstand sales, compared to the US and emerging markets like Russia and China. The physical scale of those places means the only viable way to do distribution is via subscriptions and a largely subscription based relationship with the readers let's a magazine take many more risks - both commercially and creatively. I guess that might not matter to those in the UK except that there are clearly commercial and ecological downsides to printing 200,000 copies of something in the hope of selling 100,000. You have to imagine sensible magazine owners are pursuing subscription sales wherever possible, and that must have implications for their relationship with advertisers.

There was also good discussion of how to react to the challenge of digital - best summed by Jeremy Leslie of John Brown and magculture.com saying that magazines need to get more magaziney. There are things only magazines can do; that solid object quality, the deep blacks of the ink in Grazia, the feel of the different paper stocks in Monocle, the striking cover images of Time Out, the unrivalled readability of ink on paper and all those little give-aways, tip-ons, bind-ins and extras that can make a magazine experience such a delight. William Owen of Made By Many was equally eloquent about the need for magazines to dive into the web without just porting their pages into a content management system. He summed that up rather smartly as 'magazine as service rather than magazine as product'. This means abandoning some of the magazine prejudices - beauty's more important than utility, the editor knows best - and embracing the community of readers, giving them a platform to create their own experience.

But the thing that's really intrigued me, and made me make plans to do more research, was realising how little advertising income magazines had during the 40s and 50s, a time when they did a lot that was innovative and important. There have to be some useful lessons in that for the future of magazines. We media folk don't know enough about our own history, if we paid more attention to the past maybe the future would be less frightening.

phones, attention, rods of media power

From January 24th

It's starting to feel a little late in the year for prognostication but, having spent the last couple of weeks gazing into some media futures, I felt I'd be wrong to ignore what'll probably be the most important media channel of the next 20 years; the phone. Or as we must learn to call it; the mobile device. Or PDA. Or something like that. Because whatever we call it it's going to key to how companies and brands are going to communicate with their companies, their partners and their employees.

The mobile phone's potential claims on the premier media channel crown are obvious and becoming more so every day. It's the most intimate media device we own, the one we carry with us everywhere we go and to which we whisper our deepest secrets. As many devices proved, but the iPhone hammered into public consciousness, watching extended bits of video on these things is perfectly possible. They're also increasingly how people listen to radio. They're already the dominant player in ripped and downloaded music. And other media forms are coming; novels written especially for phones are already huge in Japan, gaming on the phone gets better every day and widespread installation of GPS and maps will give them an ability to understand their place in the physical world which adds all sorts of creative and communicative possibilities.

But perhaps the best thing about the phone as a media device is the fact that you can do things with it, not just sit and receive whatever's being beamed at you. The average phonecam is a better camera than most actual digital cameras of only a few years ago. Phones are replacing credit and other payment cards in many parts of the world, and soon will be here. Everything we can currently do on our computers is very close to being easy and cheap on our phones too. This makes the phone a creative device, and it's all the more intimate because of that.

So, what should we do with these little rods of media power? What should advertising people think about? The first thing for many is to get over their suspicion of the limitations of the screen. It's so small - how can we display the boundless creativity of our brand on there? Well, yes, it is tiny, but never have the skills of advertising been more necessary. Advertising's finest moments always come in the compression of complex, confusing information into simple, stark, attention-grabbing images and ideas. That challenge is at it's greatest on the phone. We've always been used to competing for attention; with programmes, with editorial, with the real world, we have to try win attention away from the most attention-grabbing device yet invented.

video, film, rifle 3 positions men

From January 17th

The story of the communications technology is infuriatingly simple. Things that were once expensive and difficult become cheap and easy, and that upsets and confuses everything. It's happening now to video. It was once the most complicated, expensive, arcane and mysterious thing in our arsenal, surrounded by wizards and guilds who carefully guarded its mysteries, revealing them only to those who would cross their palms with silver. Or awards. Now, however, it's cheap as chips. Cheap to make, to store, to distribute and to watch. So all sorts of things start to change.

First of all, TV is becoming incredibly personal. YouTube led the way. The marketing industry tended to mistake it for a way of getting a viral 'out there' and would celebrate the odd film that got millions of views, but it was never really about that. It was a way of sharing video with your friends. Video which, because of the way both the maker and the viewer were invested in it and connected, became more powerful than any regular broadcast telly. And that effect is only magnifying as more video sites arrive, with new, more personal, more intimate, more customisable features. A couple worth looking at are Vodpod and Seesmic. Vodpod's interesting because it's not really about making video, it's there to collect, organise and share the stuff you've found. It's the perfect way to curate a video collection, and the very fact of its existence illustrates the wealth of content available. Seesmic.com (still in 'alpha' at the moment) is like a video version of twitter; it's a video conversation site that adds video to the banal, trivial, personal and therefore supremely important chatter of everyday life. The connective tissue that you once found on SMS or IM is migrating via seesmic to video.

At the other end of the scale Mr Bill Gates recently announced the first 'long-tail Olympics'. Microsoft's done a deal with NBC to offer massively extended video coverage of the Olympics, over 3,000 hours, either live or on-demand. So if you want to watch every heat of the '50m Rifle 3 Positions Men' you can. I'll be watching, I suspect we're in with a chance on that one. And, have you played with the BBC iplayer yet? The flash version? You really should, a couple of clicks and you're watching telly on your computer. Very, very easily. It's only the last 7 days right now, but that's a legal issue, not a technical one. This super-abundance of video is going to shake our little world up even more. I'm not sure what you should do about it, but I'm certain you should have a look at some of those sites and start having a think.