widgety goodness 3 - meaning and fun

Right. That's the two problems. Maybe not huge, but worth thinking about. Let's look at opportunities.

Before we start let me say that I'm fully signed up for the idea of brand utility. It is far, far better for brands to spend money on useful services for their customers rather than annoying them with pointless and insulting ads. Absolutely. 100%. In fact I'm probably one of those guilty of going overboard in favour of brand utility because we're ashamed of how useful and pointless most 'brand communications' are.  I'm also conscious that it might be a little soon to start a brand utility backlash given very, very few brands have actually done anything with the idea yet. Most of them haven't even started thinking about it.

So let's assume that we're a few years on from now, when every smart brand has built all kinds of useful services into their marketing, incorporating helpful advice and utility for their customers served up by discrete and elegant widgets. Good. Hurrah. Well done. Only problem. Isn't this is a little bit boring? 'Brand utility '- the clue's in the name. It's a utility, it's not very exciting. And, again, I don't want to offend the rational massive, but I think we might need (and want) to do a little more than that.

And Wattson, Dopplr and Plundr point at what I mean.

You'll have probably heard about the Wattson before. It monitors you're electricity usage and lets you know, in real time, in an accessible ambient way how much you're using. And, when they get the companion software and community working properly, it'll let you compare yourself with other people and homes. This seems, to me, to be more than just utility, this seems to be taking information that was perfectly accessible to you before - you could have worked it all out from your electricity bill - and presenting it to you in a way that makes it more meaningful. Not just more useful. Does that make sense? Or is that pushing things too far?

Or maybe Dopplr's a better example. It's built out of very mundane information - just your travel plans. And it does a very simple thing - share that with people. So you could use it as a great example of brand utility. I have done. I've cited it quite often as the perfect thing that an airline mileage company should have done, the perfect example of a missed opportunity for a brand utility. But the more I think about it the more I don't think that's true. Because Dopplr isn't really about travel plans; it's about friendship and serendipity. (I don't think it's coincidence that it was built by a group of friends.) There's a difference there, it's about more than information. It's about something bigger. And I suspect that if an airline had built it it'd wouldn't have been made with the kind of attention and love that gives you something as elegant as dopplr. And that's not just an aesthetic after thought, that's part of how the meaning arrives.

And that seems like a big opportunity for the widgetygoodness business. If there's a way to go beyond the exchange of information and create some additional meaning for people, that'd be good. If you're using my data to make a widget I want you to do more than just help me buy stuff, I want you to generate something meaningful for me.

Or, failing that, what about making stuff that takes my information and lets me play with it.

Plundr is a game built by area/code. (Only works in the States unfortunately.) When you connect to a wifi network it works out where you are and either tells you you're on a particular pirate island, or let's you name and claim your own island. And then, if there's anyone else playing plundr on that network you can fight their pirate ship with your pirate ship. Or, you can fight some automated ships or trade between networks.  It's incredibly simple but it's silly and captivating and fun. It's basically plazes plus fun. Plazes is great.  Useful. Kind of interesting. I use it. I'm just not quite sure why. Plundr takes my behaviour and makes play out of it. That seems like something we can learn from.

Area/code have also made Sharkrunners. It's a game built to promote yet another Shark Week on Discovery. You play the part of a marine biologist, chasing about looking for sharks, learning about them as you go. So far, so slightly predictable. But the bit that makes it almost magic is that you're chasing real sharks, it's based on actual live shark data from GPS-enabled sharks. That gives it a whole other dimension. It seems more meaningful because it's more real. And you're not just showing me information, you're letting me play with it.

Imagine if Tesco thought about the clubcard the same way. Imagine if it was a game you could play. Or if you could sign up for an Oyster game which rewarded the person who'd travelled the most on the network each day, or had made the fastest trip between stations. Or something. You know. You can imagine. Think of all the data we all generate all day. Not just online, in the real world. When you take that data and try and sell me stuff it freaks me out, maybe it wouldn't be so bad if you let me play with it. Imagine a Passively Multiplayer game built out of loyalty and membership card data.

As Dan points out in his InterestingSouth talk, we can generate both meaning and fun out of real world data. And we should. There's nothing wrong, and there's something joyful about entertainment built on a service.

This is Part Three of a very long thing four-part thing. (1, 2, 3, 4)

Comments

[Eamon]

'Before we start let me say that I'm fully signed up for the idea of brand utility'

- huh?

SKODA and THE SOUND OF MUSIC AD.
Do consumers really care about the difference in performance between one ordinary car and the next (surely it is only new technology that people care about in terms of information but not older, more established technologies where competitors have caught up with each other and are more-a-less the same, technologically).

YOUNG PEOPLE - UTILITARIAN?
Isn't is a bit geeky for young people to be interested in gathering information (they have to do it in class or in the lecture hall and college library as it is). Young people are more into experiencing time with others, travel, and so on. Adventure not facts.

LOADS OF MONEY
We are in the age of purchasing life experiences not products nor the bigness of a product (mine is bigger than yours) - surely that is so 80's ?

WHAT TYPES OF ADS ARE THE MOST POPULAR
The best ads ever are about emotions not facts (1. Guinness, 2. Sony
colour, 3. Some Things Money Can't Buy.
I don't think we should take advertising too seriously. Most people don't mind advertising. They know what it is. But it must do something for them (the above ads certainly do). They don't want to be hit with facts. They just want to relax and escape from the utilitarian world in their own office and the world around around them.
The emotive Guinness ads based around waiting-for-a-pint-of-Guinness-being-poured- have run successively for years, and still have life in them yet.

MARS - VENUS
Women are much more easily bored by facts in ads than men. Women are more emotional, visual when it comes to ads (i read something about this somewhere). We men are a bit more geeky when it comes to this.

- Just a few ranty, sort-of-random, three-quarters-baked, thoughts / ideas.

[David Hawksworth]

I think thats the point though that's being made. Most advertising doesn't contribute anything tangible to the experience of a product (except maybe the Guiness example that demonstrates the value of slowing, waiting, getting lost in the moment.) It is self serving rather than then serving any consumer benefit. The alternative? Make your brand out of substance - things that people actually want. These days the intangible parts are being skipped, opted out of, and dialed down so you have to go with real benefits which you could call brand utility.

But there is a problem with the word as it sounds like its there to milk all of the fun and excitement out of the brand industry but as Russell goes on to explain this need not be the case. This new type of brand substance could be a many wondrous, creative, magical thing - much more so than the advertising.

Take something dull like a painkilling drug. The advertising creative brief would probably never make it past telling people that it really, really works and its really tough on pain and all that... just enough to keep it unidentifiable from any other pain killing drug on the market.

Now think about the brand utility brief. Useful for this product would be in the territory of making people feel better. So how do you do that?? Not sure what the answer would be but it would be in the realm of sending flowers and chocolates, get well soon cards, free-phone advice with a good listener and whatever else you can think of. I'd rather work on the second brief personally.

David Hawksworth