mediation

Digital and OOH collide in Dublin: what happened when Playhouse and Daft.ie turned a buliding into a digital playground

Dancers from Playhouse on Vimeo.

so about to head for the weekend and XFactor but just picked this up on the twittersphere and thought it was a rather delightful thing to end the week on.  from the 24th of September until the 11th of October, Dublin's Liberty Hall is being transformed into a giant 50 metre, low resolution, TV screen.  the best bit - anyone can join in...  members of the public are being invited to create animations that will be displayed on the building as part of the project.

brilliant example of digital spaces and places being amplified in the real world.  echoes of the HBO project but with an added open invitation for anyone to showcase their creativity...

here's hoping that they're investing in amplifying it... desktop applications that show what's going on in real time, lots of YouTubeness, and perhaps some kind of digital book that captures and showcases the best examples.

more of this kind of thing please...  and if you want to get creating then click here.

Emperor's New Clothes, Meerkats and who clients should trust: dispatches from the edge of the social media debate

IPA publish and broadcast thoughts on social media.  "that's not very social" said some socially-minded planning types.  "no its not is it?!" replied the IPA, "let's change that" ...so it was that last night the IPA Social Media group hosted the most social of evenings to debate and discuss the ongoing evolution of all things socially media...

the always lovely Mark Earls kicked us off with five principles that outline the big picture:

1. connecting people allows them to behave less independently
2. connectivity makes things more volatile
3. connectivity disrupts existing and established power relationships
4. its not about what technology does but what it enables
5. technology allows people to spend more time with other people

well worth a read of Mark's full text here

Neil Perkins then took us through ten principles - thought starters and jumping-off points for discussion and debate on all things social media.  they and their authors are thus...

1. People not consumers – Mark Earls
2. Social agenda not business agenda – Le’Nise Brothers
3. Continuous conversation not campaigning – John V Willshire
4. Long term impacts not quick fixes – Faris Yakob
5. Marketing with people not to people – Katy Lindemann
6. Being authentic not persuasive – Neil Perkin
7. Perpetual beta – Jamie Coomber
8. Technology changes, people don’t – Amelia Torode
9. Change will never be this slow again – Graeme Wood
10. Measurement – Asi Sharabi

Neil finished his section with a quote by John Dodds that really got me thinking...  “Are we actually talking about social media or has the advent of the internet simply revealed that the advertising emperor had no clothes and should have obeyed the the principles all along?”

I Tweeted at the time to "be wary of John Dodds [you quote you understand not John per se - sure there's no need to be wary of him] ...Advertising is not the enemy, the too-narrow concept of the ad is. Fireworks are part of the solution"

the point I was making was that its easy and dangerous to treat social media as though its going to usurp the crass, unrefined and unsophisticated concept that is advertising.  which is just plain wrong.  a point made more than eloquently when Amelia Torode presented a case study of VCCP's Meerkat for Compare the Market...

Amelia was very keen to make the point that the Meerkat campaign wasn't a 'social media' campaign but a 'social' campaign.  but I think this misses the point...  Meerket isn't a social media or even a social campaign.  Meerkat is an advertising campaign, an advertising campaign that has made the most brilliant use of social media to extend the scope, levels of engagement and fame of the ad.

great advertising is John's Fireworks that get ooohs and ahhhs from people.  this is how one-to-many broadcasting advertising works.  its brilliant, but let's not pretend that its social-led.

we then had a break out session on which type of agency is best placed to plan social media...

there are echos of the "who owns communications planning?" debate here. the easy answer is that comms planning is owned by everyone and no one. the harder answer is that you have to understand the role of communications in conjunction with the capabilities of a given client.

great social media planning needs generalists who can understand the role that social media plays in a wider strategy and balance the weight of effort across different behaviours accordingly. but it also needs brilliant specialists who can bring the latest technologies and activities to bear on those strategies.

social media calls for new specialist agencies, but at the same time it calls upon all of us - no matter what our discipline - to understand the role it can play and how it might affect and change how we do what we do.

who should clients trust with their social media strategies?  they should trust the people most closely aligned to the role for communications...

• are you looking to use social media to tackle head-on negative brand perceptions? ...trust your PR agency
• social media to actively create sales opportunities? trust your media / direct agencies
• or to improve customer service? ...that'd be the call centre

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all in all an awesome night, but its only the start...  join in the debate via the facebook group, on twitter, or via Social on the IPA website.  and finally a big thanks to everyone who helped organise the evening...

When Waitrose dumped Fox: why its right for brands to cede control of their media schedules

Fox's Glenn Beck's controversial comments cost the channel ad revenues

Waitrose has responded to an unreported number of complaints and removed Fox News - which is carried on Sky - from its media schedules.  the move comes in response to comments by the station's Glenn Beck who in July called US President Obama "a racist" with "a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture" after the president said that police had "acted stupidly" in arresting the distinguished professor Henry Louis Gates.

a spokesman commented that:

"We take the placement of our ads in individual programmes very seriously, ensuring the content of these programmes is deemed appropriate for a brand with our values ... Since being notified of our presence within the Glenn Beck programme, we have withdrawn all Waitrose advertising from the Fox News channel with immediate effect and for all future TV advertising campaigns."

the removal of the channel won't see Waitrose's media schedule suffer too much as a result of the move; but its a giant leap for transparency and - more crucially - the involvement of customers in a brand's activity...

I've posted thoughts previously about the idea of careholders.  and suggested that brands, as well as being responsible to and addressing the wants and needs of shareholders, should also treat customers as careholders...  as partners with a right to a say in how that brand behaves.  the logical conclusion of this is the crowd-managed brand, but there's a myriad of ways in which brands can each day demonstrate how they're listening, engaging and responding to careholder concerns.

but it doesn't have to be a negative defensive play.  I've thought a few times before when planning comms how much fun could be had in letting the people we're trying to talk to help place our ads...  and there's a lovely positive feedback loop in the form of people looking out for the ad placements they voted for or wanted.

but for the moment a big shout out to Waitrose, who listened and responded.  their media schedule is the better for it.

Because your phone could be worth $10,000: what to make of the LG buy back

so the above came my way describing how LG are looking to buy back five of their chocolate phones.  the lucky owners are set to gain $10,000 if one of the phones are theirs.  one senses a PR machine behind all of this, but it does demonstrate a very interesting way of engaging with the owners of your phones...

all a bit Willy Wonkas Golden Ticket in reverse, but there are five LG customers out there set to gain a fair bit of cash and a new handset to boot just for owning one of the phones.  hope that it is able to go further and amplify the reason behind all of this so that potential customers are exposed to events...

because at the heart of this is a nice old Mystery Box.  why do they want to buy the phones back?  why just five?  why these ones?  and where there are mystery boxes there's media to earn.  and we like earned media, not just because its free, but because it comes from the conversation, from the buzz, the discussion and the debate.  and that's very valuable media.

all good, and if you own an LG phone... good luck!

2.2%: why it will take more than product placement to relieve the UK's commercial broadcasters current woes

Krishnan Guru-Murthy interviews Darryl Collins of SeeSaw media on last night's product-placement imagined Channel4 news

so six months after Andy Burnham ruled out the possibility the UK would seem to be on track for product placement after all.  the move - which would see independent broadcasters to take payments for displaying commercial products during shows (excluding news, kids TV and BBC) - will be announced by Ben Bradshaw next week.  shortly after the announcement all hell broke loose.

Metro reported Mediawatch-UK as suggesting that programmers had to be 'very careful' about which products were advertised, and Richard Lindley, of the Voice of the Listener and Viewer (just both of them?) as saying: "we believe that product placement destroys the trust of viewers in the programmes they are watching".  if that were the case trust would have already been destroyed - programmes are already packed full of brands (they're a reflection of the real world), its just that now broadcasters and programme makers will be able to monetise the exposure they give to brands in doing so.

there was an interesting exchange between Krishnan Guru-Murthy and Darryl Collins of SeeSaw media on Channel4 news last night:

CGM: do you think that brands can be trusted with this kind of power?

DC: erm

CGM: you work with them.  you know how cynical they are...

DC: of course.  what they're looking for is the greatest ROI ... so they're going to have a say in what's going on air, then if that helps generate extra revenue or sales ... then yes they will want to get involved

perhaps I'm just the luckiest of planners, but not many if any of the brands that I work or have worked with are that cynical.  most are interested in having a genuine, effective and engaging encounter with the people they are wanting to reach, and if placing products in TV shows allows then to do that then all power to them.  it will be a foolish and ill-advised brand that goes in all guns blazing - pissing off programme makers, broadcasters and ultimately viewers in the process.  no one will win, least of all the brands themselves.

finally a little context.  if, as estimated, ITV see about £30m a year of the £100m or so that's expected to be generated thru the move, its not going to have a huge impact.  about £1.3bn in spot revenues across the network, a good £60m more in sponsorship revenues and say £20 in online totals about £1.38bn.  £30m therefore represents about 2.2% of what ITV are currently generating.  even if ITV was to open the doors as per the below (which they won't), the promise of a few product placements is hardly salvation for the UK's commercial broadcasting sector.

ps thanks Bevvo for the stats and the vid...

Measuring the Groundswell: how Forrester are identifying and quantifying groups and behaviours in the social media space

so I've started reading Groundswell, a book about how social technologies are transforming business, by Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li.  some of its early content is a little objectionable, for example "some people were using Twitter in some pretty silly ways ... giving hourly updates on what they had for lunch or what meeting they had just entered ... that gets pretty insipid after a very short while".

tell that to the kids behind scanwiches - who've created an awesome space which displays cut profiles of globally inspired sandwiches accompanied by simple ingredient captions.  the point is that its not our place to judge.  the world is evolving, and what's a great more important that deciding whats insipid or not is working out how to help brands enter and thrive in a world of social medias.

fortunately then that the authors get beyond this to very usefully classify six groups according to the different activities and applications that people use in the Groundswell; the "social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other; rather that from traditional institutions like corporations".  the classifications are:

• creators - publish blogs / content, maintain a web page, upload content
• critics - who react to other content online, postings comments, ratings or reviews or editing wikis
• collectors - saving URLs and tags or using RSS, collecting and aggregating the internet
• joiners - participating thru maintaining profiles on social networking sites
• spectators - who consume what the rest produce
• inactives - the nonparticipants

all well and good, but  here's the cool bit.  they've created and made public their Social Technographics tool that allows you to profile a group of people based on age, country and sex against these six behaviours.  you can then index them against the general population, allowing you to plan and build social media strategies based on the kinds of behaviour people already demonstrate.  which in Mediation's book is pretty darn cool.

so the profile of 25-34 year only men in the UK looks like this:

with the most predominant behaviours being spectating and joining (66%  and 59% of 25-34 UK men doing those respectively).  but what's interesting is the likelihood of them being collectors, indexing 183 against the all adult population.  the list obsession so loved of the lads mag genre re-invented for the social media space.

does this tell you what your social media strategy should be?  no.  does it help you identify and quantify the predominant behaviours of the people you're trying to target?  yes.  and that's important.  I've sat in two many sessions where the phrase 'we'll get people to create content for us' has been thrown out.  it of course may be the right suggestion, but a little objective rigeur and analysis never hurt anyone.  even if it was about what you had for lunch.

How the times are a changin': what the response of two girls trapped down a storm-drain tells us about the nature of trust in a networked world

if only little Timmy O'Toole had been blessed with internet access to Facebook...  news today courtesy of Metro who this morning reported on the plight of two young girls trapped down a storm-drain near Adelaide, Australia.  panic they didn't.  rather they turned to Facebook.

well you would wouldn't you.  faced with a potentially lethal situation with nothing but a mobile phone to help you, why call the puny institutional emergency services when you're entire social network is only 140 characters away.  one Glenn Benham - who took part in the rescue - disagreed, commenting that "it is a worrying development.  young people should realise it's better to contact us directly".

perhaps, but the response of our real life Timmy O'Tooles to their predicament is testament to the extent to which trust in institutions amongst young people has eroded.  our two tweens placed far more trust in their peers, in the network they had already created and curated around them, than in the police.

because trust is what this is all about.  who two girls trusted with their lives...  not for them the remote, unknown and imposed structure of the emergency services.  rather they put themselves into the hands of the known network that they've invited to surround them.  they are their network and their network is them.  in the end, this was a simple act of self-preservation.

When a brand in hand isn't enough: why binding experience and sampling together is an opportunity most brands shouldn't afford to miss

grabbing samples at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival; (top) Fraser and me grabbing some Haribo, (bottom) Mark and I on the Dr Pepper

so my good mate Mark this morning sent me thru the above pics taken whilst we were in Edinburgh a few weeks ago.  during my heady couple of days of non-stop show-seeing and jumping around at the Fringe, we stumbled across a couple of brands sampling festival-goers on the Royal Mile.  hence the rather delightful pics above of my good self with Fraser and Mark (who doesn't normally have a moustache but who was in a show and so has at least one good excuse)...

which brings us to the subject of sampling.  when to do it, how to do it and who to do it to.  I guess my brief Edinburgh experiences tell me a couple of things; one - that its essential to get the right people at the right place (no poo Sherlock) but two, that I'm not very convinced that sampling on its own is enough...

to the first point; it was sunny, we were festivalled up, having fun and running around.  in that context both brands were spot on in terms of understanding who they were targeting and why.  a bag of sweets and a can of sugary good stuff were perfect additions to the afternoon.  for both brands, adding their fun-filled good stuff to such a positive and buzzing environment meant that they complemented and were complemented by what was going around the sampling teams.

but to my second point, what was the actual benefit of the exercise?  they got brand in hand but I'm sure there's more to the opportunity than this...  shouldn't both of these brands have been looking to add an experience to the sampling moment that made more of the sample's investment but also more of the person's investment in taking time to sample / experience the brand.

it is in many ways the opposite situation to that of Pot Noodle's (above) effort at last years Festival, where Mother staged a musical (which I wrote about here).  great experience but what about the sampling opportunity?  at the very least handing out pots of the stuff after the show...  but they could have gone further - what about Edinburgh Festival limited edition Pots, or a mechanic that incorporated a sampling experience into the show.

the bottom line is that sampling and experience are increasingly part of the same equation.  but not just in some strategic 'yeah cool lets join it up' way, but rather in an intrinsic, bound together, one can't and shouldn't live without the other kind of way.

a brand on which I currently work is using pop-ups shops to sample some NPD, because venturing into a space which lives and breathes what a brand stands for whilst being offered an opportunity to take a bit of that brand's product with you is infinitely more powerful than being handed it cold in the street...  and when that street in Edinburgh is one of the busiest, crowded and expectant streets in the world, that's an opportunity you couldn't and shouldn't afford to miss.

Thought of the day: What Eddie Izzard can teach brands about having a positive marketing attitude

"I don't feel I'm a capitalist, I feel I'm a creativist.  Capitalists make things to make money, I like to make money to make things - I love making things."

Eddie Izzard – Live from London (available on iTunes)

I was listening to Eddie Izzard's Live from London podcast - recorded at the apple store in Regent St - recently and was rather taken by the above quote.  Izzard was meditating on the theme of the banking crisis and observed that he was, in his judgment, a creativist.

its a great thought but what's even more powerful is the logic flow that sits behind it.  think about it.  brands and marketers that consider themselves to be in the business of making things to make money will, I suspect, end up behaving very different from those with a mindset of 'let's make money so that we can make more things'.

let's use marketing investment not to make money as an end in itself but so that we can make more (interesting, exciting, imaginative, engaging, challenging, fun) stuff as a result.  of course lots of businesses work like this - ROI from one year is reinvested into the next - but its indirect and not by any means guaranteed.

besides that what I think is more important is the attitude, the mindset that this thinking gets you into.  yeah, hell lets do some successful communications and make shedloads of money.  but let's be explicit about why we want to make money...  we want to make money so that we can increase a brand's presence in the world; not by being in more places more often and seen by more people, but by the creation of more things.  things created with people, by people and for people, that add value not just to brands but to our world.

from today I'm not a capitalist either.  I'm going to be a creativist.  and I'm going to be in the business of making money so that I can be the best and most interesting creativist I can be.  thanks Eddie.

Keep Calm and Carry On - the History of a Poster: and what brands should learn from the elegance and simplicity of its resonant slogan

I popped into The Only Place for Pictures on Upper Street over the weekend and came across the history of the Keep Calm and Carry on poster that's been in and around for a while.  fascinating history and a reminder that simple, elegant copy writing can lodge long in the consciousness, finding new and evolved meanings over time...  what brands would give for slogans with this degree of resonance so long after its original inception.

I've copied the full text from the note in the shop below, enjoy...

in the spring of 1939, with war against Germany all but inevitable, the British Government's Ministry of Information commissioned a series of propaganda posters to be distributed throughout the country at the onset of hostilities.  it was feared that in the early months of the war Britain would be subjected to gas attacks, heavy bombing raids and even invasion.  the posters were intended to offer the public reassurances in the dark days which lay ahead.

the posters were required to be uniform in style and were to feature 'special and handsome' typeface making them difficult for the enemy to counterfeit.  the intent of the poster was to convey a message from the King to his people, to assure them that 'all necessary measures to defend the nation were being taken', and to stress an 'attitude of mind' rather than any specific aim.  on the eve of war which Britain was ill-equipped to fight, it was not possible to know what the nations's future aims and objectives would be.

at the end of August 1939 three designs went into production with an overall print budget of £20,600 for five million posters.  the first poster, of which over a million were printed, carried a slogan suggested by a civil servant names Waterfield.  using the crown of George VI as the only graphic device, the stark red and white poster read 'Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution will bring us Victory'.  a similar poster, of which around 600,000 were issued, carried the slogan 'Freedom is in Peril'.  but the third design, of which over 2.5 million posters were printed, simply read 'Keep Calm and Carry On'.

the first two designs were distributed in September 1939 and immediately began to appear in shop windows, on railway platforms, and on advertising hoardings up and down the country.  but the 'Keep Calm' posters were held in reserve, intended for use only in times of crisis or invasion.  although some may have found their way onto Government office walls, the poster was never officially issued and so remained virtually unseen by the public - unseen, that is, until a rare copy turned up more than fifty years later in a box of old books bought in auction by Barter Books in Alnwick.

shop owners Stuart and mary manley liked the poster so much that they had it framed and placed near the till in Barter Books.  it quickly proved so popular with customers and attracted so many enquiries that in 2001 Stuart and Mary decided to print and sell a facsimile edition of their original poster which has since become a best-seller, both in the shop and via te internet.

the Ministry of Information commissioned numerous other propaganda posters for use on the home front during the Second World War.  some have become well-known and highly collectible, such as the acrtoonist Fougasse's 'careless Talk Costs Lives' series.  but ours has remained a secret until now.  unfortunately, we cannot acknowledge the individuals responsible for the 'Keep Calm' poster.  but it's a credit to those nameless artists that long after the war was won people everywhere are still finding reassurance in their distinctive and handsome design, an the very special 'attitude of mind' they managed to convey.

Primary source of information: Lewis, R.M., 'Undergraduate Thesis: The planning, design and reception of British home front propaganda posters of the Second World War'.  written April 1997.  accessed April 2007.

Barter Books, Alnwick Station, Northumberland NE66 2NP, England

Postscript: since the 'Keep Calm and Carry On' poster was rediscovered in Barter Books in 2000, it has become a national icon.  to read about the ongoing story of this remarkable survivor, click here.