So 2009 - recession, downturn, credit crunch, doom, gloom - you know the drill.

Those big fat advertising budgets are almost certainly going to be slashed (the global ad market is predicted to be the weakest since the 2001 downturn) so it’s likely that change is coming in marketing departments across the globe, as well as in the White House.

The UK media sector will fare the worst of any developed country in 2009 with total advertising spend set to fall by nearly 6% year on year, according to a new report.

The forecast from WPP’s media buying subsidiary Group M makes for grim reading, with UK national newspaper advertising set to be down 12% year on year in 2009, regional titles down 13%, and the business-to-business magazine sector down 14%…

TV advertising will be down 6% year on year, a solid performance in line with the overall downturn in total ad revenue next year, radio ads down 8% and the consumer magazine market down 8.5%.

So yeah, media buyers? Ad agencies? Time to tighten those belts. These changes won’t be so great when the gravy train starts to dry up.

But as a great man said in 2008, change we need.

Brands have relied on the same old same old, tried-and-trusted marketing mix for years, falling back on the backbone of TV, with some outdoor, radio or press chucked in, and maybe a slimline digital budget (of search and banner advertising) to ensure they’ve got a truly ‘multimedia’ schedule. So far so good, no?

The econometric model says it works, doesn’t it? The tracking says it works. The chairman’s wife saw the ad in the break of her favourite ITV drama, and in her weekend supplement (tick). So, it’s a successful formula, right?

Only it’s not working as well as it did. And without the same big fat budgets, the best chance you have of maintaining that all-important share of voice is hoping that everyone else’s budgets have been slashed in line with yours.

Not surprisingly, the likes of the IPA and Thinkbox’s answer to marketing in a recession is to keep on spending. Keep that gravy train running boys.

Lots of brands will keep on doing what they’ve always done, because, well it worked before, so why not now? And their agencies will keep telling them that TV ads work because that’s what they’re in the business of making and buying, and it’s how they make their money. And anyway, telly’s cheaper than it’s been in ages so what have they got to lose? Happy days.

But other brands won’t have the ‘luxury’ of being able to spend their way out of the recession by blowing their budgets on telly. They’ll need to start thinking differently.

Thinking differently is a Good Thing. Brands are going to have to learn to get creative with smaller budgets, and move away from the old gold standards of reach & frequency.

They’ll need to shift their focus away from awareness towards engagement, and replace broadcasting to mass audiences with careful nurturing of brand communities.

Instead of shouting as load as they can, as many times as they can (Ve haf vays of makink you listen!), brands will have to start engaging in conversation with people, and listening to what they have to say - and sorry chaps, this includes the bad stuff as well as the good.

It’s not all going to be plain sailing. Some brands are going to make some almighty cock-ups on the way. We’re going to see some brands marching headlong into an ill-formed social media campaign (note campaign, not strategy) and getting it wrong. Really wrong.

But even that’ll be worthwhile. OK it’ll be pretty hideous at the time, but those brands that do get it wrong will learn how to do it better. And hopefully others will learn by example.

The traditional advertising model is about endless pre-testing, research to make sure it’s watertight, huge investment into a massive broadcast campaign, then post-campaign evaluation to see what worked.

The digital world is in perpetual beta. Try lots of things and see what sticks. Sure, do your research first (please, do your research first!), get to understand the community you’re trying to engage with, and understand how you can add value. But recognise that not everything will work. And that’s OK. Failure is good. Try lots of things and there’ll be some stinkers. But hopefully some gems. Which you’d never have got if you hadn’t have tried in the first place.

Brands that take the bull by the horns and think differently will reap the rewards as they leave the outdated one-way model behind, and move towards a much more rewarding engagement model. Brand that keep their fingers in their ears, and hope that throwing all their money into cheap telly will do the trick, will have a rude awakening when they realise that their lower-spending competitors have stolen a march on them.

This is the change we need.

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Tags: Communication, recession advertising brands change

If you’re tired of endless plastic toys at Christmas (and may well have been guilty of buying some for your child / niece / nephew etc), why not try the charms and delights of the Foldskool Heroes

Marshall Alexander is a Dutch graphic artist whose childhood memories - probably like yours and mine - consisted of videogames, bright plastic toys and TV cartoons. He now spends his spare time illustrating his childhood memories and designing paper toys. His speciality is these utterly wonderful one-piece paper toys that consist of a single flat piece of paper, which though intricate folding and glueing is transformed into a beautiful 3d model toy.

All the templates are available for download - I feel a sudden urge for scissors and glue coming on!

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Tags: origami, paper, robots, toys

So I managed to wipe out all my 2008 posts while upgrading wordpress

Oh COCK.

I suspect this will be a lost cause but in case anyone’s wondering where all the archives went, I’m a HUGE spanner.

You know that database backup plugin? Helps to use it before you upgrade the script. (Yes, I’m an idiot and hopefully this’ll learn me)

Ho hum, no sense crying over lost, er, blog posts.

Update: Thanks to the wonders of Google cache, I’ve got all the posts back. Just a hideously boring process of reposting them all individually. But better than losing it all. Comments will be lost in the ether, but in the grand scheme of things, not that big a deal compared to losing a year’s worth of posts. And that backing up the database thing? SO won’t be making that mistake again!

Fuckbeans.

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Tags: upgrade, wordpress

So with a bit of fiddling with blogger (old blogger was so basic I had to republish to blogspot and then import to wordpress) have managed to import my old blogger posts from 2000-2004. Because blogger didn’t use the same post title + post body format, the formatting’s not exactly bang on. And loads of the links won’t work because they were from 8 years ago and it’s a safe bet most of those sites and links will have long changed.

But as a basic archive, it’s quite mad to look back at the blog as a record of my life back then, as well as a snapshot of the nascent culture of blogging - back in the day when the launch of a new UK blog was a landmark event, and the blogging community was pretty small and tight-knit. And no one really got what this weblogging this was, and couldn’t fathom why we were writing stuff online about our thoughts and lives - or why people were reading it. They thought we were a bit mad, and this blog thing wasn’t likely to go anywhere. Plus ça change…

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Tags: archives, Blogger Archives

You’ve probably already seen this, but it’s so bloody cool I thought I’d blog it anyway.

Phil Clandillon and Steve Milbourne, who work for Sony/BMG in London, have created what they call “the world’s first music video in Excel format,” for AC/DC:

“Basically, it’s come about because we recognized that a lot of people have fairly restrictive internet and security policies at work. What we really liked was that we could actually subvert the corporate firewalls by including AC/DC’s music in an Excel spreadsheet, because that’s allowed through every corporate firewall there is.”

Download the video in all its spreadsheety goodness here

[ via Wired ]

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Tags: ac-dc, excel, Music, music video

So yesterday I went to the presentation of Hall & Partners’ ‘The Big Digital Experiment’, which promised to “get under the skin of what consumers really think” about digital.

Except that it didn’t quite do that. They did a shedload of in-depth research all about consumer perceptions of online advertising (banners, MPUs & microsites), which is all well and good, except that it’s a very small piece of the digital pie. So to then say that the vast majority of digital communication is focused on direct response and lacking in creativity, is a bit like only trying plain biscuits and saying that all confectionary is crap.

And a slightly sweeping conclusion to observe that digital communication isn’t being used very effectively for brand-building, without having looked beyond straightforward advertising to see how brands are using digital to engage with consumers.

You would have thought that a research piece called ‘The Big Digital Experiment’ would have drawn out the fairly obvious point that online advertising ≠ digital communication, no?

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Tags: conferences, digital communication, hall & partners, online advertising, talks, web 2.0

[ Photo: Chris Jackson/Getty Images ]

Last Wednesday I went to Googleworld at the ICA, featuring
Randall Stross - author of Planet Google: How One Company is Transforming Our Lives: How One Company Is Transforming Our Lives ( or if you buy the US version, Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan To Organize Everything We Know) - and Andrew Keen - author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy.

Whilst most of us are probably slightly uneasy about the sheer volume of data held by Google, and might occasionally ponder the rapidity of their growth, I think many of us are just as guilty of accepting the onslaught of Google as a certainty, turning a blind eye to any uneasiness because - let’s face it - apps like Gmail and Google Docs are just too bloody useful.

However it’s astonishing to think that Google’s original mission statement was simply to “make it easier to find high-quality information on the Web” - and has quickly evolved into the all-encompassing ambition to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. At the heart of which is a radically expanded definition of ‘information’ - no longer simply indexing the web, Google wants to digitally capture all and any information its algorithms might potentially one day be able to parse: coming up with increasingly creative methods of collecting data (e.g. the launch of free telephone DQ in the US to harvest voice data, in preparation for future voice-activated search).

Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt reckons that c. 2-3% of today’s information has been converted to searchable form - and estimates that in 300 years time, Google will have sorted and indexed 100% of the world’s information. By which time Sergey Brin hopes Google will have achieved HAL-like artifical intelligence.

As Stross put it; “the ultimate goal is to provide Google’s software with enough personal detail about each of its visitors that it could provide customised answers to the questions ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’”. In effect, Google wants to index and capture the inner workings of our minds. Pretty scary when you consider that via much of our behaviour in Googleworld, we tell Google things we don’t tell anyone else.

Both speakers touched on some really interesting issues, such as the inherent conflict of interest between Google as an indexer of the web vs. as a provider of information (and the shift from trying to get you to wherever you wanted to go as quickly as possible, to trying to keep you in Googleworld as long as possible); the heart of the algorithm as the ultimate expression of the wisdom of crowds; whether in fact Google is just a scapegoat for our more general nervousness about the evolution of the net?

For me the most thought-provoking part of the discussion focused on the role of a carefully-built brand in shaping our perceptions of Google, and the extent to which we’ve permitted it unprecedented access to our lives.

It’s pretty striking when you compare the sinister overtones of the company’s mission to “organise the world’s information” with the brand credo of “don’t be evil”. Why aren’t we more uncomfortable with Google holding the level of information they do?

Obviously one factor is that people simply aren’t aware of the scope of data Google hold on us. But another, posed by Stross, is that the benign and friendly brand image that Google have created helps to distract us from their rather more ominous business practices. A brand image that’s been built without advertising - from the lighthearted daily logo change, to the widespread promotion of their relaxed working culture. US college students rated Google as the #1 company they’d like to work for - Microsoft didn’t rate nearly as highly, because the Microsoft brand didn’t engender the same feelings of warmth or admiration.

Which is fascinating, when you consider that Microsoft’s abortive Hailstorm project was shelved due to concerns about one company holding too much sensitive personal data. Microsoft was - and is - felt to be a corporate behemoth who had to prove they could be trusted to hold that much consumer data (they couldn’t). Yet Google, Stross argues, have gone far beyond what Microsoft sought to achieve with Hailstorm, largely unchallenged - in no small part because they’re simply perceived to be a more benign, trusted organisation than Microsoft.

Whether or not the numerati - the data geeks - will eventually rule the world remains to be seen, but Google are certainly giving it a damn good go…

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Tags: google, ica, talks

So Paul Boutin, correspondent for Valleywag, has deemed that ‘Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004′ in an article penned for Wired:

“Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter…

…Further, text-based Web sites aren’t where the buzz is anymore. The reason blogs took off is that they made publishing easy for non-techies. Part of that simplicity was a lack of support for pictures, audio, and videoclips. At the time, multimedia content was too hard to upload, too unlikely to play back, and too hungry for bandwidth.”

In case Boutin hasn’t noticed, the purpose of all these tools is to enable users to share stuff that interests them - whether that be a link, a photo, a video, a tweet, a lengthy blog post or any other piece of content, how they do it is wholly irrelevant. What tool they use to do it is irrelevant. It’s the same behaviour.

And in any case, most people aren’t using these as an either / or choice - they’re choosing to mix and match different tools and services to let them publish different forms of content in the way that suits them best. The fact that Jason Calcanis has ditched his blog because it became “simply too big, too impersonal” for him doesn’t mean that blogging’s dead. It just means that as someone with a hugely public online profile found that actually how he wanted to interact with others online changed.

Boutin goes on to say that today’s bloggers are “expected to write clever, insightful, witty prose to compete with Huffington and The New York Times” - which may be true for a commercial blogger whose salary depended on the traffic his blog posts generated, but this doesn’t make it the rule for the rest of the blogosphere. So to say that Twitter is better than blogging because the character limit puts everyone back on equal footing, letting “amateurs quit agonising over their writing and cut to the chase” seems bloody ludicrous. Especially because it’s the same bloody behaviour.

Sweeping generalisation, anyone?

[ image courtesy gapingvoid ]

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Tags: Blogging, human behaviour, Technology, twitter

So Nokia have created a transmedia narrative for their latest global campaign:

Nokia is to launch a global ad campaign involving more than 3,000 pieces of content, from Facebook posts and text messages to TV ads, giving the public the chance to follow in real-time the mobile-centric lives of three twentysomethings.

The concept behind the campaign is that in a digital age a mobile phone can provide a window into someone’s entire life.

Content for the Nokia campaign encompasses Facebook pages on which the public can post messages; while fictional friends build the plot by sending text messages, posting comments and leaving video and voicemails. There will also be TV, press and outdoor ads.

Each of the characters also has their own website where people can go to see the interactions they are having with friends and family. The mobile numbers of each of the characters will be made available so those following the campaign can influence the direction of their lives.

At least once a week there will be TV ads, on youth-oriented channels such as E4 and MTV, that will round up the story so far. At the end of the six-week campaign, which aims to promote Nokia’s youth-focused range of Supernova handsets, the stories will end with the characters needing to make crucial decisions.

There’s no question they’ve built in some wonderfully rich depth into the story - e.g. Anna Randall is a model from/living on Fårö Island who’s leaing to move to London, her brother Lennon’s a surgeon, and she’s got a fashionista friend called Serena who has her own group on facebook (only 2 members so far!). And it’s great that users can interact with the characters as the story plays out.

However as rich a tapestry as they’ve created, the fact is that it’s still essentially a campaign, albeit a campaign with a cracking back-story that users can interact with - it’s not, as some users had hoped, an ARG that they could truly play along with

Which is a little surprising when you consider that Nokia are (as one of the posters on the unfiction.com boards put it) purveyers of vintage ARGs - since Nokia Game, first launched in 1999, actually prefigured The Beast and I Love Bees, traditionally cited as the progenitors of the genre.

Nokia Game incorporated pervasive play but did admittedly lack the narrative element we’ve come to expect from ARGs. However the genre’s moved on since then, brands have learned a lot, users have come to expect a LOT more - so it’s perhaps a little disappointing that Somebody Else’s Phone has incorporated the narrative element, but lost the pervasive play along the way.

I’m not trying to knock it, because it’s still terrifically exciting, and a hell of a lot more interesting than most digital marketing out there. And the insight behind the campaign, that “phones are now much more than just a means of communication… they hold people’s hopes, fears and dreams and provide a window into someone’s life” has undoubtedly given rise to an intriguing and involving creative campaign. It definitely ticks the boxes of true cross-platform entertainment - a story told across a variety of channels which wraps the audiences in a unique, immersive experience

But given that Nokia were the trailblazers of using immersive play to engage with consumers, doesn’t it feel like they’ve missed a bit of a trick here?

Update: my mate Tom has blogged a cracking riposte to this post - well worth a look. Probably the one point I think I’ve failed to articulate clearly enough is the fact that with ARGs there’s a reason for people to interact with the campaign - there’s a payoff: both in the thrill of the puzzle and in the ultimate prize. As a colleague observed, this campaign feels like it’s from the Kevin Costner school of marketing - build it and they shall come. The fact that they’ve produced “more than 3700 pieces of content” as part of the back stories is all well and good - but just because it’s there isn’t a good enough reason to join in - what’s in it for the user?

[ Somebody Else’s Phone via the Guardian ]

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Tags: arg, narrative, nokia, nokia game, storytelling, transmedia

Very nifty installation from the ICA running over the next three days [8-10 Oct]: Memory Cloud combines the 5,000 year old medium of smoke, with the 20th century medium of text messaging. Visitors can text any message they like to the artists’ creation, and that message will be grafted onto plumes of smoke and lit up for display in Trafalgar Square.

The method of textual inscription works with light as virtual ink that perceptually writes and erases through a cinematic interplay with the external environment. Memory Cloud aims to motivate social interaction through the construction of an environment that is given form through a collective act of writing space.

Alongside the predictable marriage proposals, pop philosophy and jokey messages, you might expect that brands would try and hijack this: hence advertising and political messages are off limits.

Either way, I love it when old meets new. Very cool.

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Tags: art, ica, memory cloud