Russell Davies

engagement and attention 3

Stu was brilliant. As usual. Read his APG paper. (Go here and go to 'downloads'.) Lots of other interesting stuff this afternoon but I couldn't get the wifi to work and I can't go back on it now.

I think my thing was OK. It's not polished or really thought through but I think there's some stuff worth building on in there. Many thanks to everyone for the help. Jamesb - I was careful to dissociate you from anything that wasn't good.

Respect and thanks to the blogs I quoted: betapundit, Jonathan Schwartz, Team IE, Innocent drinks,  Church of the Customer, McChronicles.

Here's, roughly what I said:

I know a bit about brands. I know something about blogs, but only because I'm a blogger, I've never really thought about them, or presented about them 'professionally'. So I'm thinking out loud here.

This is the only element that I've used before in a previous presentation. (I've been boring people rigid with this stuff since Paul Feldwick introduced me to it at a conference Chris organised about three years ago.) It was to try and make a point about the roles for different layers of communication and to define some terms. I believe that the best, probably the only job, for TV advertising, is to wrap a bundle of feelings and associations around the brand. Good advertising is very good at doing this. (Not that there's a lot of good advertising around.)

That's not my topic for today though, the conversation today is more about brands engaging in two way conversation - not broadcasting. Or something. This bit was a bit wooly.

I basically said what I said here.

Then I did a lot of this stuff. But not the 'characteristics of a good blog' stuff which was too much like a tedious brand onion. This is where I referenced the blogs and stories mentioned above.

Then into:

I quite liked this bit. I got the interesting test down to this:

I think that's quite good. This is all to Jeffre's points about interestingness, if there's nothing interesting about you you're buggered. If there is something, to someone, then you should blog about that. If you do it honestly and openly, you'll be fine.

Don't think I was very clear about this.

I have a sense that at the moment the world of marketing etc is groping towards a marketing/branding/comunication version 2.0. And hurrah for that. But we know nothing works properly until we get to version 3.1. And I think this is true here too.

(Sidenote, not mentioned in the speech: Many of the theoreticians - for want of a better word - who presented in the morning reminded me that our new understandings of how brains, minds, people and society work are completely overturning the theoretical models we have about how communications and brands work. For all the great work being done in creating 2.0; innovative practises, more respectful organisation of relationships, bolder, more realistic media practises, this hasn't really been wedded to the implications of the thinking of people like Damasio. Many of the 2.0 people are doing tactics, and they're doing them splendidly, but they're not thinking about low-attention processing, implicit memory, humans as herds, all that.  Their theories of communication are still growing out of USPs, messaging, etc. When these energetic, respectful new tactics get married to this exciting new thinking - then we'll have 3.1.)

Anyway...

My actual point was that a blog is a great way to learn some of the skills you'll need to manage a brand in this engaged environment. One of those skills:

My examples were this and this.

Oh yeah, this is my other point about 3.1 (or whatever jargon one might come up with).

Let's assume that the 1.0 era - of messaging - is dead. And I think we can. The media reality makes it impossible and our new understanding of how brands/brains work makes it pointless.

Version 2.0 is supposed to be all about engagement, involvement, participation. Which is fine. But this is where we need to beware of...

Brands are not that important. They're not that exciting to people. Just because we've decided to engage, and entertain and participate doesn't mean anyone wants us to. While not many brands are behaving like this, it's quite effective, it's new, it's interesting, when everyone's doing it, it's less so.

Which makes me think about things like this. There are a few examples of this kind of thing out there and they make me wonder whether one strand of the future for marketing is to provide genuinely useful services, and do the delivery of associations and feelings around the edges.

I'm not quite sure what I'm struggling to say here. I know it looks kind of obvious just stated like this, but I think there's something more interesting buried in there, I'll try and dig it out soon.

As you can tell, I was petering out at this point.

But this was my big finish and I was pleased and proud to put it up. I've really enjoyed the process of writing this stuff and I'm really grateful for everyone's help.

Right now this whole thing is a pre-beta, version 0.1, bit of thinking, as soon as it gets to be a respectable beta I'll stick it on video and share with y'all. I'm really more excited than I should be to be exposing my doubts and inadequacies in public.

engagement and attention 2

20:20 have the best charts I've seen for a long time. I like them a lot. (I wouldn't recommend visiting their site though, lots of horrible flash barriers)

They presented a CSI:NY case study which was really clever, interesting and made me slightly uncomfortable. It seemed like an intense, invasive, digital version of urban spam, so not quite just ordinary spam, more like Psychic Spam. It's right on the line between brave and stupid.

Justin Gibbons of Work is being really interesting. He would appear to be a researcher who understands the new world he's in.

I loved the pun about their camphone based research - low involvement photo-processing. I can't find a site for his company, so I can't link to it. I think he'll be an interesting person to interview though, I'll see if he fancies it. Actually everyone here'll be worth interviewing.

warc and  engagement/attention

engagement and attention

I'm sitting at the conference now. Listening and writing my deck. Robert Heath, Caroline Whitehill and Ali Goode all very good so far. Too good for me to summarise on the run now. I need to write something bigger and longer. But I think two themes are gelling in my head:

1. Theoreticians are starting to supply the science/art which supports what interesting practitioners have been doing for a while. Which is probably how these things have always worked.

2. Many of the web 2.0 / marketing 2.0 / brand 2.0 people are just talking about tactics. They're talking about better ways of doing the old things. There's not a lot of new thinking about memory, psychology, all that. The people who are starting to question all the AIDA, USP, blah blah models are often people from an old Big Ads background. Because they've spent 50 years discovering that the old models for human relationships with brands are wrong.

Anyway, more of that later.

However, I do have time to lament the room. Why are they always like this?

I was talking to the organisers, it's not their fault (and the whole thing has been flawless so far). It's what the hotels build. If you're in Central London and you've got more than about 100 people then this  kind of thing seems to your only option. Is there a new generation of hotels/conference facilities  being built? I hope so.

warc and  engagement/attention

germany 0-2 italy

thanks

I just re-read all the comments on the various posts on this topic and I think I'm going to have to start like this:

thinking allowed - more thoughts and random charts

Is this boring you all to tears yet? Apologies if so. Writing this thing's been interesting for me, I've realised that I'm very happy presenting when it's about stuff I've actually done. So the last few years talking about Honda and Run London and stuff has always been a laugh, but now I'm going back into traditional planner's territory - here's a theory I've got - and I'm always less comfortable with that.

Also, I'm conscious that the people who are actually paying me to do stuff right now (there are a couple, thankfully) are maybe reading this and thinking - what the hell is he doing? why's he not working on my stuff? - which somehow seemed less of a problem when I was an employee, no reason why that should be the case, it just felt like that.

Anyway, some further thoughts:

I'm going to include Jackie's point about McChronicles under the 'engagement is not optional' thought, because I don't think brands should only get involved in this stuff out of fear of bad things. There's lots of goodness to be tapped into too.

I agree with all your points about human-ness and authenticity and stuff, but I also think it's worth remembering that often a brands (and blogs) worst problem is hubris. They try to do too much, they think themselves too important. It's perfectly possible to create a great blog that's mostly functional, doesn't require deep corporate soul-searching and isn't a perfect expression of the brand. It's just useful.

Which brings me to a chat I was having with Ben this morning and I think this is my big revelation about blogs and brands and I know as soon as I write it down it will appear startlingly banal. But here it is:

1. A blog is no use unless it's interesting to someone (doesn't have to be a lot of people but it has to be someone)

2. So what's interesting about your business/brand?

3. If nothing - how do you expect to survive, irrespective of whether you blog or not?

4. If something, but you're not willing to talk about it - how do you expect to survive, irrespective of whether you blog or not?

5. If something, but you don't feel capable of blogging about it - just dive in. If it's interesting, and you're interested in it, you'll find a voice and a way.

See what I mean about banal? But I think that's really all there is to it. A blog only works if you've got something to say, if you've got nothing to say, you're screwed anyway.

I'd better finish this later, and do some real work now. I'll try and get the finished thing up on here tomorrow. Incidentally if anyone else is going to be there tomorrow, and is likely to blog about it, how about we tag it warc and  engagement/attention ?

happy 4th of july

when our european knees start to jerk, let's remember:

david byrne, google, nicholson baker, hip-hop, bing crosby, skate-boarding, bacon, eggs and fruit on the same plate, portland's urban growth boundary, futura, rasheed wallace, spreadsheets, trouble funk, chuck jones, billy collins, eddie van halen, the justice league of america, the o'jays, the marx brothers, diner, convoy, star wars, manhattan, george clinton, bill clinton, clint eastwood, xerox parc, jeff mills, scott mccloud, burt lancaster, sideshow bob, le show, walk/don't walk, chic, the west wing, sports night, the six million dollar man, the old-fashioned, the banana splits, butch and sundance, jurassic 5, jesse owens, roy head, george costanza, chris rock, the internet, sonic recollections, blue highways, isaac asimov, devo, the pursuit of happiness, the survival research laboratories, the little train that could, NASA, TED, DARPA, HBO, C-SPAN, jam and lewis, lewis and clark, lois and clark, eric b and rakim, bill and ted, ghostbusters, they might be giants, an american in paris, chris ware, the new yorker, milt gabler, billy cobham, the moog rogue, house, bob newhart, the fedora, the frisbee, the feelies, atari, the wacky races, phil silvers, chas smith, steak sauce, tab, soup or salad? the cape cod baseball league, steve prefontaine, public enemy, hill street blues, this american life, richard feynman, edward tufte, area 51, shep pettibone, linus van pelt, jules pfeiffer, dorothy parker, the aristocats, the new york cosmos, orson welles, errol morris, daffy duck, malcolm x and the tuna melt.                  

thinking allowed - the random chartage phase

OK. I've got a rough idea in my head of what I'm going to say on Wednesday, these points, plus a couple more, plus some stuff I'll steal from you lot in the comments. What I tend to do now is create a set of random powerpoint charts that feel in the right territory, and in creating them, I start to get a better idea of the way I'm going to say things and in what order. This is also when I start looking for the stories which will bring the whole thing to life.

I think I might start with this:

Because it's reasonably topical and it illustrates the power that blogs have over brands - ie:

You can choose not to engage with your customers if you like, but if they feel like it, they will choose to engage with you. This Jupiter example might be a sobering case for a lot of the people in the room. In these circumstances:

Which is easy to say, but then everyone always says, what is a blog? why should we have one? what should it be like? who should write it?

Then I need a good analogy - blogs are like _______; there are tons of different sorts, you just have to work out the right sort for you.

Examples:

The voice from the top: Jonathan Schwartz

The voice of the insider:  Robert Scoble and 3,000 others at Microsoft (I know he's not there any more but, you know, whatever)

The voice of the brand: Innocent

The voice of something else: not sure yet

All of those have good stories to go with them. So that bit should be OK.

That then leads nicely into what characteristics these things have in common, ie what makes a good blog? for which I shall borrow liberally from your splendid comment contributions, but which you might sum up like this:

(asterisk is to say, I hate brand values charts that include human because they're always so fake, but what else can I say? actually I hate brand values charts, why am I doing this at all?) And ideally at this point I need another joke, video or good story that brings that point to life because I'm probably about 10 minutes in and they'll need waking up. Hmm. Anyone got any suggestions? I'm looking for something that helps me illustrate the importance of a genuine, human voice.

And this quote always comes in handy at this point:

It was true for advertising, it's even more true in the world of blogs and allied trades etc.

OK. That feels good for the first half. Roughly. I need to think about the second half later. Is this making sense to anyone?

warc and  engagement/attention

brazil 0-1 france

england 0-0 portugal (1-3 on penalties)

Funny day today. Neil's band was playing at a birthday party and their drummer couldn't make it so they asked me to fill in. So I had to be in a village near Cambridge at about 6 this evening. So I listened to quite a lot of the game on the God-like radio 5. And saw quite a bit of it on the telly at the services. I got to the party in time for extra-time and penalties but the frustration of the inevitable disappointment was increased due to the hysterial shrieking of the quadrennial football fans. (You know; posh people. Sorry, football bitterness brings out the class warrior in me.)

Actually drumming was fun though, I haven't played with a band for years and years (which showed) and I didn't know half the songs (which showed too) but there were about 8 bars there where I almost knew what I was doing.

Dazza trying to remember Sheena Is A Punk Rocker before we played.

Johnny, Nidge and Neil mocking him, helpfully.

The view from the drum stool.



Neil is so rock and roll.