We already have digital versions of ourselves populating our increasingly digital world: Your Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter profiles, your Amazon and Google footprints are all examples.
For the most part they are not yet autonomous. But it cannot be long before the 'MeBot' - an autonomous and intelligent you - becomes a ubiquitous part of our daily interaction with people, things and data.
All of which strongly suggests that brands and organisations must start developing strategies that place the digital customer at their heart.
Let me be clear, that digital version of you will always be informed by and learning from the real you. But increasingly it will be the digital rather than analogue version of you who will be making the transactions (tilting, as these thing are, to online more heavily by the day).
And if Digital You has got the spends - Digital You is going to be the target.
So what does advertising/targeting/relationship-building/comms/PR/you-name-it look like when it is aimed at our MeBot?
Well - I suspect MeBot's will rapidly learn which lies to ignore, which content sources to trust, which deals are for-real. They may even be less swayed by the Herd mentality humans find it so hard to resist (think of the impact on the Stock Markets...).
This is likely to starkly expose some of the realities and truths of relationships of trust - such as...
Customers are not inhabitants of your omnichannels waiting to be managed from one to the next. They live in a 4D world with limitless touchpoints. The analogue digital combination will evidence that by the truck-load. Map that!
Customers are not waiting to be engaged, made your friend, or have anything else 'done' to them. They need a reason to interact with you... which leads us to point 3.
Customers are not loyal. Forget loyalty - focus on proof of value. Unless you are offering a good enough value proposition your wheels will just keep on spinning.
The Minority Report nightmare, of personally-targeted ads no matter where you turn, has already been superseded. It's become product placement on digital TV.
Those products can be digitally airbrushed in to respond to who is watching, where and when. And with so much of TV consumed via digital means today, that's easy to know down to the individual.
God help us as we take our first wobbling steps into an always-on world of virtual reality through such devices as google glasses.
When the virtual layer is applied in response to who we are, where we are (whether in your head or via 3D narrowcast to instances where-ever we turn) we won't know whether the product we are looking at, picking up, drinking from, is what we thought it was, or a product 'placed' by a rival. Think you've picked up a Coke can and opened it? It's actually a Pepsi you are drinking. Ha! Made you take the challenge. Aaaargh!
The reason this is so scary is because it is both so do-able and so predictable given how the marketing industry has remained so wedded to old models of interruptive advertising.
The radical digitisation of product placement as seen in the BBC example linked to here is a response to the fact that they've noticed we don't like to be interrupted by ads. Digital TV allows us to effectively adblock - by zipping past each ad break because we aren't watching live.
Instead of learning the lesson that we don't want interruptive ads, they move the ads into the bit we want to watch uninterrupted (the shows) in the form of placements.
I'm wondering what it will take for some of these guys to let go and refocus their smarts and their tech on a model that both their clients AND their clients' customers, would actually welcome.
I fear some will be painting the sky while we stare pointedly at each other before they get the point.
Facebook's valuation is - apparently - justified by how much more accurately it will be able to target folk for 'conversion' very soon.
Not a religious thing, but that greater than ever ability to spot you and sell to you that you've been waiting for (ah hem).
Hmmm.
Our pension fund holders are really going to pile into Facebook based on last-century's ad model?
Let's review for a moment.
Facebook is not an audience. It is an aggregation of small groups of people who care about each other (mostly) and a few that circulate around brands (mostly as a badging excercise or in hope of being thrown a fish or two).
I don't know of any groups that formed to be marketed to (either on Facebook or elsewhere). Facebook could test this by setting up the 'I signed up in order to be better targeted by advertising' group and counting the likes...
It's a shame that Facebook's share of the big brains can't be refocused, that Facebook can't take the opportunity to build new relationships between brands and their customers, to help shape alternatives that do fit the networked model.
Where is Facebook's product suite for innovating with customers - for making customers partners with brands in pursuit of things they both care about, for example?
I thought we'd all established we don't want to be targeted, we don't want to be marketed to, we want to join in, we want to market with.
We don't want better messages - we want better things.
Of course, we've said all this before (see below). I guess it wasn't a £100bn question last time.
I'm not knocking the concept. Peperami essentially get 1185 people to pitch them on the hook of a $10,000 prize. No doubt an ad agency would bill them more for the creative time. So on the face of it, it looks like a very efficient solution for the brand.
I'd love to show you the outcome but... er... the video can't be shared from the Brand Republic site it's shown on. Score that how you wish (I'll be scoring that very low, just so we're clear).
Anyway, once again, rather like Nokia's collaborative co-creation of a phone, there is only one outcome here. Only one winner. Only one version of 'good' - and that good judged from just one perspective.
And since we know relevance beats quality every day of the week... it's throwing away a load of the long-tail value being generated.
Peperami should be creating a platform for people to make their own shareable versions of the story, ones which matter to them and their mates - not just coming out with the 'big hit' winner - which is meant to one-size-fits-all suit the lowest common denominator.
Every one of the 1185 entries tells Peperami what people think of its brand. But in isolation only.
The process isn't collaborative. It's silo'd ideas in competition with one another. And that isn't how ideas spread (the intended outcome surely is a spreadable idea as a minimum?). What's missed when you miss out on collaboration is that very critical human element - social influence. What does your idea mean to other people? How would other people reshape it? What do they choose to pass on? What do they choose to adapt?
The problem is that the key outcome of this process is aimed at creating a TV ad. When you start with that as a premise, you're bound to take a very broadcast approach; always an odd match with the networked world the idea is aimed at engaging.
E-Consultancy have signed me (and 90:10 Group) up for a UK mini-tour in November this year. This consists of breakfast briefings in London, Manchester and Leeds.
They offer an opportunity for me to spread the word about the real value of social media - the bit that's less about messaging and more about innovation. For the full outline, see below.
If you'd like to be at any of them use the following links to sign up:
Social media offers much more than an opportunity to ‘reach new audiences’. It offers powerful new efficiencies, better fit marketing, products and services your customers demand and care about – and new business models.
It can’t be layered on to your current strategies. Better-than-ever-connection with stakeholders (customers; potential customers; suppliers; employees; and anyone who cares about achieving what you have set out to achieve) places social media at the heart of what you do.
It creates disruption and opportunity in equal measure. These breakfast briefings will identify who is taking advantage – and how you can, too.
Areas for discussion include:
Location Based Services: 90:10 Group has researched the impact of LBS in social media. We’ll answer which brands are having success with FourSquare, Yelp and Gowalla and whether there is scale for LBS to matter to enough of your customers in the UK and beyond.
How innovation must shift from making better messages to making better things:
We’ll address how using the tools and techniques of social media delivers the ROI of better things, more fit for those they are intended for and how those better things come pre-loaded with the peer-to-peer power of the advocates who helped make them.
Scaling co-creation:
Bringing people together to share ideas and inspire creativity is nothing new. The scale and affordability delivered through social media is. What does this mean for everything from Marcomms planning to customer service, New Product Development to sales?
Innovation in the org:
Those who take a few steps into social media soon discover that old silos and ways of organising fail. What is CRM is PR is Customer Service is NPD and R&D.
We’ll make the case for change in the way organisations should organise and how they should now define their role as platform organisations.
Based on the forthcoming book: Platform thinking: How social media changes the organisation of business and the business of organisation.
All of this will be supported with case studies and data to take us from the theory to the practice.
I like Ikea. So please, this isn't meant as a specific attack - more an illustration of a general point.
And the general point I'd like to illustrate is: It ain't customer service until the customer receives the service.
Case in point: I left Ikea in Milton Keynes today having handed over a bit more at the till than I had expected. Now, anyone who has wandered through an Ikea store will tell you this is not an unusual experience. By the time you've thrown a dozen or so items of small value alongside your main purchases, you're soon in the realms of 'guess the basket'. I am used to failing at this game. So when my bill rolled up at approximately £15 more than my ready-reckoning had reckoned, I thought little of it - paid up and headed home.
En route my lovely wife and I did a bit of mental totting up. No matter how many times we did this we still fell short of the total Ikea's happily chatting checkout staff had got to.
So when we pulled on to the drive at home, I rooted out the receipt and... sure enough, we'd been double charged for a picture frame.
No matter, I have the receipt - and it's full of very useful info. Including a number to call for this kind of eventuality. Yes it was a call centre and yes there were a number of robots to select options against between me and a conversation with a human (a couple too many for comfort) but when I finished the interminal option dance I got straight through to a very nice, friendly lady. In customer service.
And what she did was tell me that this was absolutely no problem, they had a record of the transaction, they could see the error, they'd refund my card. One small snag... she couldn't actually refund the card herself. That's down to the store. Who she would alert. And they'd call me back. This afternoon.
They never did.
And there-in lies the problem. Ikea's customer service is just more marcomms unless it can actually deliver the service the customer needs. And it can't. So it's a misnomer.
Customer Service, it appears, is actually DONE (rather than talked about) in store.
And the bottom line is this: no matter how charming the people you call your 'customer service' team, no matter how professionally and courteously they deal with the customer's call, they are just another marcomms lie unless they have 100% back up from the do-ers - the deliverers of their promises.
The distance between what you say you will do and what you actually do, is a lie.
Harsh? Perhaps but for those on the receiving end of this mismatch, it's painfully true
UPDATE: Aug 7, 2010. I had to call them back today - having not heard from Ikea to refund the money they had taken from me. This time they told me it 'takes 12 working hours'. When I probed further it turned out they would be reviewing CCTV evidence before giving me the money they have misappropriated from me. And that wouldn't happen today. I may get a call on Monday at the earliest. I told them in future I would be going v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y through their checkouts. And I advise everyone else so to do.
The initial pretence of trusing the customer was clearly a sham - a pretence - a lie. Marcomms at its very worst.
Now I'm not only out of pocket - I am angry about the misinformation and misdirection.
Ikea, not only is your customer service a misnomer, it's clear you actually don't trust your customers. Well, in at least one case, that feeling is now entirely mutual.
Facebook - and social networks like it - succeed when they make it easier for people to form communities of purpose - groups. They lower the transaction cost of finding each other.
In the case of Facebook they have removed the heavy-lifting of manual discovery by using profile data and content shared by individuals to 'auto-suggest' friends you should connect with.
LinkedIn has similar functionality.
It makes sense. (image, Getty, via Zemanta).
(This paragraph updated May30, 2010 in the pursuit of clarity - on the suggestion of Jay Rosen)
Lowering the transaction cost of group forming is fundamentally what the internet is for. This becomes ever more evident, even for those who would have you believe the web is one large conduit for content/knowledge sharing, when you add consider the dawning of the ‘web of things’. In the web of things each element of content is another node capable of expressing its meta data to all other things and all other people. Both content and people find each other – forming nodes in a group; a community of purpose.
The problem for the likes of Facebook is that lowering the transaction cost of group forming is incompatible with charging for advertising.
How so? You have to attempt to create an artificial scarcity in our ability to discover each other.
ie An advertiser must pay to connect (via the brutal interruption of an ad) with a person for whom their advert is (at least they believe) relevant. The advertiser is paying a third party, a mediator, for the connection, the ability to form a group with you (he'd obviously like the group to be rather more than just you and he...)
Why can't the advertiser just go searching for people who will find their product relevant?
Ah, that'd be why the artificial scarcity gets deployed. To prevent them from doing precisely that. It is the flipside of the Facebook privacy issue.
Privacy - or who controls who gets to connect with whom - is the artificial scarcity Facebook relies upon to create value for its ads (and it is now the clear and dominant leader in display advertising online).
It's got there through artificial scarcity. But the web - and its driving group-forming purpose - equates to the imperative to go round artificial scarcity; barriers, paywalls, copyright etc
I think Facebook understands that and, in its constant push-back against privacy, is seeking to remove the artificial scarcity it has created to seek new business models ('Like', for example, or even the platform-thinking solution I have previously suggested).
But to return to my original thought, ads are always an example of one party charging another for access to connect. In the group-forming world of the web, mechanisms to limit that access (create scarcity) must always be artificial. So they can only ever enjoy a limited lifespan.
Artificial scarcity has no future on the web. And without that, online advertising has no future either.
I'll be attempting the equivalent of the Reduced Shakespeare Company tomorrow when I'm one of four keynotes speaking - very quickly - at Being Social. Don't be late (we kick off at 1:45pm, registration at 1pm) - and don't blink - you may miss me. I'm talking about TheDeath of Advertising (at least a 7min summary of it). Seriously; scheduled time for my speaky bit is 2pm. I'm then part of a panel straight after with my good friends Antony Mayfield and Chris Thorpe et al. We'll be talking about “How Social Media is changing how we communicate”.
The full slides in support of my speaky bit (in case you need to go back and fill in the blanks) are as below. Tommorrow I'll be focusing on the end section - discussing the need to change the focus of innovation.
It comes down to transmission: In social spaces the only way something gets distributed at all is because it is passed from one person who finds it useful/cool to someone else they think will think it useful/cool, too. (image courtesy furiousgeorge81)
So you have to provide messages that can be adapted. Jokes that can be retold in the form people wish to retell them. Unfinished articles. Messy kitchens.
The message you send out isn't how it'll be passed on. It never was anyway. There is more on that in this deck:
The uk's advertising standards authority wants to apply the same rules to brand-run Twitter accounts and Facebook pages as it does to TV ads and billboards: (via The Guardian) http://bit.ly/darbhb
On the face of it the drive to enforce legality, honesty and truthfulness seems wise.
They (the Advertising Association) even say they are advocating this primarily to protect children; Always a good tactic to deploy to deflect those who would oppose.
You have to ask how they expect the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) to police this?
And more importantly, why they think they are better placed to police this than those they seek to protect?
It's another example of the advertising world attempting to place a broadcast, centre-out solution on a peer-to-peer space. You ain't in Kansas anymore, Dorothy.
They make the assumption that the act of setting up a page or account and filling it with dishonesty is equal to broadcasting that dishonesty to unsuspecting audiences. Which is to fundamentally misunderstand how distribution happens in social media.
We ONLY pass on that which we think is useful to those we think will also find it useful.
If we get that wrong our followers stop being our followers, our friends stop being our friends. It is in our interest only to share what we judge to be the honest and truthful (we make our own judgements about the legal - file sharing etc).
We are best placed to make these judgements in the context of OUR communities of purpose (yes, and kids too - by the power of the wisdom of their crowds). We make those judgements fast, and, since the crowd offers self-correcting mechanics, we make them accurate and relevant.
We at the edge, not them at the centre - and certainly not the ASA.
Sorry but your rules - quite literally - do not apply here.
As promised, here's the slidedeck Jamie Burke and I presented in Madrid last week. By way of disclosure we were in Madrid for the official launch of 90:10 Spain - and took the opportunity to present our thinking at the OMEXPO.
The slides ask the question, if advertising didn't exist today, would you reinvent it? We think too much digital tech, innovation and effort has been focused on making a better message when what is better for all parties is that we should work together on making better things.Platform thinking that delivers value innovation.
It's time time to end the insanity of repeating the failed experiment of advertising. Time to start creating platforms for change.
I'll be in Madrid for the OMEXPO on Feb 24-25. I'll be presenting alongside Jamie Burke (CEO at 90:10) on the, obviously, non-controversial subject of: The Death of Advertising.
This is how our 45 minutes is being sold:
90:10's Jamie Burke and David Cushman confront you with the end of business as usual.
They'll examine how everything you thought you knew about traditional advertising will fail you in the rapidly emerging and increasingly dominant networked world.
They'll explain how the shift from a broadcast world to a network of peers disrupts content creation, distribution and user experience.
And they'll ask what lessons Spain's advertising industry can learn from the peer-powered disruption tearing the UK's media landscape apart.
If you landed in a world without advertising today, would you reinvent it?
And, of course, I'll be making the slides available via slideshare shortly after. Expect some conclusions involving platforms, naturally.
Jamie and I arrive around 1pm on the 24th and leave on the evening of the 25th. If you'd like to meet with us while we're there, please drop either of us a line: david AT ninety10group DOT com or Jamie AT ninety10group DOT com.
I've been writing about the platform as primary organisational (and conceptual) framework pretty much as long as I've been writing this blog.
But I've never stopped to pull the essentials together.
What is a platform organisation? How does yours become one?
Let's start with a definition. Mine: A platform organisation uses its available resources to find, connect and support those who share its Purpose.
To be clear, I mean both within and without the organisation's own membranes. Those membranes must become permeable.
Of course, it does this with certain outcomes in mind. And to my mind these are they:
Why be a platform organisation?
Crowd-sourcing solutions offers three key benefits:
1. Value innovation: Access to more 'customer' minds in real-time increases the likelihood of 'blue ocean' solutions. These are those which seek to create new market space - where competition is irrelevant and benchmarking forgotten. Internal-only teams are more likely to default to tried and tested, me-too iterations delivering incremental efficiencies within current market confines. Value innovators look for things that customers value in common. Crowds deliver this. Then they ask: "what if we started anew?" 2. Better-fit solutions. Involving those for whom an outcome is intended in shaping that outcome results in a closer fit with their real needs. You make what you want; We make what we want. 3. Increased marketing and advertising efficiencies. Outcomes are more likely to be embraced by those who have played a part in creating them - the perfect start point for peer-to-peeradvocacy.
There are others; You get closer to your customer; the customer feels they have skin in your game; you matter more to them; you get low-cost NPD, R&D, marketing, PR, advertising, customer support etc etc - but I think all these fall into the above three key reasons.
How to be(come) a platform organisation:
Start with the big why:Purpose. Platform organisations thrive on bringing people together to create best-fit outcomes but why would those outside your org want to join with you? What is wrong with your industry, the way stuff gets done, how people are treated... the world... What is wrong with any of those things, that your org is out to put right? Know this and express this through action. This is your first step to the Purpose-Driven Collaboration that platform organisations can share in.
Discovery and introduction: Through expressing your purpose, and actively seeking those who share it, the latent community will emerge: those who care about the same stuff you do and who are willing to join you in working on it: communities of purpose. Join them, support them, contribute to them, provide for them. They were always there, the platform organisation's role is to discover and introduce them.
Community - groups People join groups for three reasons: 1. Self-expression 2. To talk about the thing they care about 3. To fix the thing they care about.
Plenty of community tools enable 1 and 2. But 3 is too often disregarded. It is the key part. Social tools are not simply for connection, they are to enable outcomes that those people connecting care about. The platform organisation understands that 'social media' is 90% social, 10% media. It brings people together to make better stuff, not better messages.
Better messages are a necessary consequence of better stuff.
So ensure that their wikifixing contributions can be surfaced, acted on and the value created, shared.
It's nice to know that people are talking about you, saying nice things (or bad things) and where those things are being said. But much better to surface their concerns and join with them in addressing them - find ways for them to collaborate with you in fault finding and fixing and integrate that into work flows.
Systems which enable you to prioritise response and identify shared pinch points - from sophisticated conversation auditing to simple votes - offer some of the tools.
But the first step is to be open to collaborative change in the first place. And that starts in your head.
I came across this recently. A list of blogs in which FasterFuture emerges as No1 in the UK (No 11) globally.
|It always interests me; the lists this blog ends up on. What is pleasing is that there is never one type.
On this occasion it's a list of the '100 Top PR Blogs' derived from those in the Adage Power 150 ranking (which lists advertising/marketing/pr/marcomms types of blogs). As an aside, looks to me like Neville Hobson's blog is missing from the list - and that certainly sits higher than FasterFuture in the Adage rankings.
And it's currently listed in the top 5000 of all blogs (there are some 300m globally) by the up-and-down-o-meter that is Technorati. Interestingly I saw FasterFuture appear in Technorati's top 100 small business blogs at one point, not so long ago, too.
Marketing? Advertising? PR? Publishing? Business?
Yep, FasterFuture is about all of that.
In a converging world where (as David Bausola so nicely puts it) Mess is Lore, I'm happy not to fit comfortably in any centrally contrived niche :-)
Twitter has made me accutely aware of how many 'internet marketers' there are out there. That I have 'social' + 'media' in my bio seems to attract a steady flow to follow my Twitter account. In that respect Twitter has surfaced the volume of people in this game to me. I was not looking for Linda... (for Pat Kane fans).
It strikes me as more than a little odd that Internet Marketing is regarded as a specialism - a career even. I appreciate you can become adept in the mechanics of some tools.
But EVERYONE is an expert Internet marketer. It's a peer to peer realm. My peers are those best placed and equipped to market most effectively to me. That's true for you, and everyone else, too.
Perhaps ALL our Twitter bios and Linkedin profiles should read: Internet marketer, web publisher, online advertising expert, distribution doyen.
And as we understand the power we have wrested from traditional media, we'll add new areas of 'expertise': Team building (as leader and participant), R&D, new product and service development, self organiser etc
Perhaps, instead, we should start telling people the more specific value we all add?
Update: After discussion below perhaps that question can be couched as "What can you do better than my friend?"
Internet marketers are going to have to become much clearer about what they can do that all of us can't. And fast.
Update: They aren't alone - any mediator faces the same challenge.
Jon Hansen was kind enough to invite me to be his guest on his BlogTalk Radio show yesterday. It was broadcast live at 5:30-6:15pm UK time on October 8.
I very much enjoyed and - and Jon's invited me back to do another show in the near future - which I'm going to take him up on.
"...today’s show regarding the differences between traditional media such as newspapers and the emerging social media world, delivered an incredibly insightful and powerful message in terms the future of these paradoxical mediums. "Unexpected . . . certainly not given guest David Cushman’s level of expertise regarding the subject matter. "What was surprising is the level of interaction within the confines of the show’s on-line chat room which even had one listener post a note asking me to take callers earlier in the show. "While there have been segments in which I have had 19 or 20 people in the live chat room at the same time, the activity was noticeably brisk during today’s segment. "It was also considerably more active than it was during the 90-Minute Buy American Special that featured a brief interview with Canada’s Trade Minister. Perhaps Dave should run for public office."
Listen to it for yourself using the player, below.
So why don't I have Adsense on my blog? Google keeps pushing it at me. Why don't I take this free money?
The first reason is simple and mercenary. The payment I may receive via Adsense is too low to tempt me. The return on my time not sufficiently rewarding. ( I know, I've tried in the past).
That may be because there are insufficient advertisers for the Adwords related to the stuff I blog about. And that means the ads served seem rather less like the helpful content that Adsense promises and more like the spam it seeks to avoid. (image courtesy)
And I don't want to put you off, dear reader. I value our relationship more than I value a few cents from Google.
A lot more actually, which is where RoI comes in. Or perhaps we should call it RoR - return on reputation and/or relationship?
By allowing advertising which could sell you something I have not tried myself, I can't give it my endorsement.
I can't recommend it to you. In fact an ad may pop up for a product or service I will actively recommend you do not use. Each time this happens our relationship is damaged and my reputation with you is diminished.
Adsense takes no account of the value we both place on this.
I'd like to think the niche nature of this community is such that should I recommend a product, service, event etc you will give it quite serious consideration.
Our conversations can be – and regularly are – one to one. And this is the reality of the future online as more and more we become The Eighth Mass Media - the publishers, advertisers, marketers, distributors, connectors.
You'll give me the time of day because over time you have come to learn from experience that we share the same thirst for knowledge about certain things, have similar problems to solve etc. We are one of my favourite things - a community of purpose.
In short, we have a relationship in which we exchange trust to build reputation.
I described a simple model previously which could value reputation using something like Adsense. It may be worth reviewing again.
I think if a model could be devised and implemented which raised the valuation of reputation and therefore of our recommendations, one to another, it would kill the incumbents.
Who would stick with the few cents of Adsense if instead you had a way of being rewarded for the recommendations you give freely to those you know will value them?
It’s a micro-relationships model, but not a micro-payment one. Car manufacturers have been know to pay up to £300 to large media outfits for a lead which results in a test drive. We as individuals will come to expect equal returns in our niches.
That’s mostly because our recommendations come with our reputations and micro-relationships tightly bundled to them.
We don’t give our recommendations lightly. False recommendations are taken personally. We lose friends. Your recommendations would become ultimately worthless. And we understand that recommendation is in the eye of the perceiver – and we don’t want to lose face by giving friends something they perceive as ill conceived. (Yes, I do think my recommendation to you is more valuable than a recommendation from some form of mass media broadcasting at the lowest common denominator of its audience.)
We know our friends (our communities of purpose) in ways advertisers – even Google – can’t touch.
The future is not in-context, related, targeted. It is in conversational flow (with all the real-time that suggests), peer-to-peer recommendation and consistently and constantly validated reputation - otherwise known as human relationships.
I've really enjoyed the righteous abandon with which some sections of the traditional media have crowed about one 15-year-olds insight that his friends don't use Twitter.
Among the other details of his note for Morgen Stanley are that online advertising is 'pointless' (I'm pretty sure he means interruptive traditional style advertising of the kind that sustains traditional media) and that no kids are reading newspapers.
That teenagers aren't using Twitter (much) comes as no surprise to anyone whose been watching the regular stats that role out of Nielsen, Comscore and the like. That it took an 'intern' to tell Morgen Stanley is perhaps the greater surprise - but that's by the by.
What is of more concern to me is the considerable amount of barking going on up wrong trees around this.
First, why does it take one intern's paper to get media owners jumping up and down? Kids are available to speak to every day of the week everywhere. Take them seriously and they will speak to you. Ask Ruby Pseudo. Same message goes to Morgen Stanley. Publishing the bleeding obvious as 'insight' doesn't do you many favours.
Second. Please, please, please don't think that the behaviour (particularly what they say they do compared with what they actually do) of teenagers is an indicator for how the world is changing and a guide to how you should respond.
As Clay Shirky put it if you want to know what technologies will succeed don't ask what teenage boys are doing - ask what their mums are doing.
Mums are busy. And if the tech doesn't make a material difference to their lives they don't use it.
How many mums are on Facebook, how many on Twitter? How many using email? Text?
You can be sure there are many. They are organising their lives and the things they care about with these tools.
They are showing these tools matter for very many, now. Enough to change the world? Not yet. When we stop using terms like social media and just get on with organising ourselves - then we'll know the world has changed because enough of us find it everyday ordinary enough.
Follow the teenage boys if you wish - I'll be watching the mums.
So, I'm hearing this ad described as the 'best banner ad ever'. Not a trophy I'd like to lift.
In fact, it's just been awarded the Cannes Cyber Lions Gold. Lord help them all...
I speak of the Pringles 'Can Hands' ad in which you, dear interactor, are encouraged through the use of witty banter to continue clicking.
And clicking, and clicking... and I did... and I did... but I still can't answer the question:
To what end?
Well it's getting some online chatter. People saying stuff like 'it's the best banner ad ever'. Like I say, super.
I guess the idea is you think of Pringles as the witty, funloving FMCG to stuff down your throat. But more likely you rush to slap the agency on the back for a fun, innovate interruption. That's what the Cannes Lions award is. Puts me in mind of this Honda creative. People marvel at the ad. Rarely at the product.
Stick a picture of a girl with her hand stuck in a can of Heinz Baked Beans and you get the exact same result.
Point is - it's all about the creative - not really about the product at all.
At least no one is claiming it's social media.
So I have to ask; What group of people are being brought together to act to achieve something they care about by this particular piece of content?
This is brilliant. No, really. A fantastic bit of creative from the ad industry. I do urge you to watch it. You'll be entertained.
And if you watch it in the context of the Vimeo takeover I first saw it in, you may even rave that this is the 'future of internet advertising' or 'pure innovation' - judging from the 367 comments in the last 12 days.
It works on so many levels.
Trouble is, it doesn't work on the one that counts.
ok. If you saw the sheep thing from Samsung (at least I think it was Samsung... and we'll come back to that) you might not think the content is that much of a breakthrough.
The point is it is really well executed and a neat idea and people are talking about it. But almost every one of the comments is about the wonder, impact and technical achievement of the advert (and a broadcast advert it most assuredly is, no matter how 'interactive' some may describe it. There ain't no two-way flow going on here).
Anyone mention Honda in all this? Honda Insight? Hybrid Prius rival? er... all quiet there.
Well... all quiet apart from a smattering of relatively negative stuff. For example:
‘honda, how about coming up with some real solutions for the obvious problems, instead of this feel good, lifestyle eco shit?’ … totally not impressed by the car.
‘it's baby steps in the right direction - research Honda's FCX for a real life-changing car’
'If your selling point is being environmentally-friendly, I don't think it's a good idea to have a commercial that drives a hundred cars out into the desert just to make a light show.
Honda's ad agency has given people something to talk about. The ad is also used for TV (at least, it has been in the UK). So make your guess about the response to the TV ad too.
A big spend on a neat piece of entertainment. And?
And for many that's job done. But the connection between something memorable and the behaviour changing thing they'd like you to remember has not been made.
I wonder if they may have had more success in this regard by creating not something for people to talk about, but something for people to do together - something truly interactive.
For example: Perhaps a way of creating your own versions of the movie, spelling out your name, drawing pictures that matter to you, so that you might be willing to share your personalised versions with people you care about and who care about you. The result becomes yours to share - not theirs.
It would have been a start.
But greater impact comes when the creative is led by the purpose. And the purpose here is a greener world.
Instead of the broadcast entertainment experience, think of ways of bringing people together to make a greener world which the Honda Insight could make a valuable contribution to. Build from there.
Less shock and awe - more shared and sustained relationships.
The rate of change is so rapid it's difficult for one person to keep up to speed. Let's pool our thoughts, share our reactions and, who knows, even reach some shared conclusions worth arriving at?
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