Russell Davies

roi

Having worked for a long time at an agency that resolutely refused to do any form of pre-testing I've had many long and involved conversations about measuring ROI. And they were always deeply frustrating and sterile conversations because we were never really measuring actual ROI, there was always some surrogate number in the way, and some embedded assumption about how communications is supposed to work. The ROI of communications is incredibly hard to determine. Even counter-productively hard.

So full marks to Alan Snitow who's trying to do some proper research on the topic. He describes it like this:

"The idea is to take a look and see what agencies today are actually doing, and how agency people really feel, when it comes to efforts to measure effectiveness and get to ROI for marketing communications.  For all the talk about it at conferences, by pundits, etc no one has ever systematically canvassed agencies to get a sense for what the lay of the land is.  I hope people will share their experiences so we can fix that.

And of course I will happily share my findings with anyone who participates."

Survey is here. Place to leave your email if you'd like a copy of the survey is here.

powerpoint as a toy for thought: part II

My original splurt on powerpoint/keynote inspired by Rich Gold's idea that powerpoint is a toy for thought drew a load of fascinating comments, ideas and links, so I thought I'd like to get some of them out into the main body of the blog and think about them some more. Thanks to everyone for chucking stuff in. I get the sense that there's a real appetite out there for a presentation tool that stimulates thought as well as marshals it and that allows presenting to become variously less formal, more theatrical, more improvised and more conversational.

I don't think we can do it all in one post so I'm going to tackle different aspects in separate posts. Today: what keynote calls Light Table and what PowerPoint calls Slide Sorter. ie this:

Now that's the view where I do quite a lot of thinking about structure. And I know I'm not alone in that. Dave says that's how he put the structure together for this, probably the best 20 minutes of PowerPoint you will ever see. Unfortunately the snap-to-grid linearity of the tool doesn't allow the kind of sorting, randomising and testing that you'd really like to do at this point. Kevin talks about his process of sorting images on the floor and that reminded me of a couple of possibilities I'd love to see in Light Table / Slide  Sorter, the first of which, I guess, is about more closely mimicking the actual physics of sorting slides.

So instead of being forced to sort in a fixed grid.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could pile, group and stack slides, and maybe leave  a couple on their own in the corner, because you know you want to include them but you're not quite sure where. Sort of like BumpTop. Well, exactly like BumpTop. That can't be that hard can it? You wouldn't have to have really complex physics, just the ability to break out of the grid a little. But it'd be great.

The other thought is a little sillier but I still think it'd be useful. And it combines two of my favourite interface/structural ideas - fruit machines and Runaround. I've always thought that more things in life could do with Hold and Nudge buttons. There are so many situations where you'd like to Hold one or two elements of a situation and stir up the rest.

Like that. So it might be useful to have a couple of slides you could Hold, you know they have to stay there as anchors in the story. So you could click a Hold button for them. But then you'd like to stir the rest up to try and create some interesting new variations and juxtapositions, to shake up your thinking. I guess if you were being consistent with the metaphor this is where you'd click a Nudge button, but that's not quite what I'm after. So I preferred the idea of a big Run Around button where everything just re-sorts itself. (And which should include a pleasingly silly noise.)

I'd like that, even if no-one else would.

And then, while I was putting this together, and looking through my flickr stuff for images of fruit machines I realised who could do this really well - flickr.

Flickr could become a great presentation tool. I bet people already store lots of presentation stuff in there. (Like this one I did for w+k). You could turn the Organize view into a slide sorter and add a presenter thing like Google's (but better). Or just do it in a browser. And I bet you could create interesting webs of slides using tags. Or something. Anyway, I'd love to see how the flickr people would do a presentation tool. That'd be brilliant. Anyway.

Next time we'll think about some of the other comments.

leakage

I've been re-reading Leisa Reichelt's fantastic thoughts on Ambient Intimacy and it reminded of one of the things I really like about twitter, which I don't think you get anywhere else, and I'd call it intimacy leakage if that didn't sound so yucky.

It's the phenomenon you get when someone using twitter on the phone accidentally sends a text meant for someone particular to all their twitter friends, normally shortly followed by the twitter equivalent of an apologetic cough. It's hardly ever anything very embarrassing or revealing, it's almost always something quite sweet. But I like the way you get a little innocent glimpse of another side of someone.

You don't get people accidentally blogging in the same way, blogging's too considered and its off in a separate space on its own. I guess that's part of why twitter works, it smoothly integrates into the fabric of our existing digital lives. Or something.

I guess I'm just pre-apologising for the moment I send an embarrassing text to twitter. Ahem.

neophilia

I saw this in Vauxhall yesterday and it reminded me why I'm such a neophile. I like getting to places early. They're less crowded.

good better than bad shock

Two things always bug me when it comes to the typical blogrant/article/argument about brands, media, the future, all that stuff. The first is one we all recognise but find it hard to resist. It's the tendency to argue that they arrival of X will cause the total eradication of Y. The internet will destroy television. Phones will destroy MP3 players. Curry will destroy chips. (That didn't happen did it?)

We all do this. I do it. You get carried away with rhetoric and enthusiasm and forget that the likely scenario will be that everything will be a blurry munge like it was before, with this new element added in. This BusinessWeek article does a kind of variant on it - Stop Doing X Because Y Is The Answer - but it's forgivable because he's trying to make a persuasive point.

But it's the second fallacy (which probably has a name and if I knew anything about logic or rhetoric I'd tell you it) that really annoys me. It's the tendency to compare good examples from the category you like with the bad examples from the category you don't. So again, in the same article from BusinessWeek, Mr Gobe seems to be comparing AT&T/Cingular's marketing with Apple's product design and ethos. (He also chucks in Crispin's Orville Redenbacher stuff). He deduces from all this that Advertisers Still Don't Get It. Well, blimey, isn't that a bit of a leap? Isn't that a bit like comparing a really bad round of golf with a really great game of tennis at tennis and concluding that golf is a worse sport than tennis? Obviously AT&Ts advertising is worse than Apple's product design. That's not because advertising is inherently a worse thing to do than design a great product, it's because AT&T are bad at it. How about we compare Nike's advertising with Amstrad's product design? What would that tell us? Mr Gobe makes a bunch of good points about the value of an emotional connection built into the product but he spoils it all with his specious comparisons. I don't know maybe he's got a book to sell or something.

This happens in the new media/old media debate all the time. People compare Tribal's brilliant Monopoly campaign, say, with the average rubbishy TV toy ad and go ah-ha! look digital wins! digital's better! No - something that's good is better than something that's bad. Of course, this is like shooting fish in a barrel with advertising because so much of it's rubbish, but so is most digital stuff, so is most television and journalism and art and everything. And more digital stuff will become rubbish as it broadens, enters the mainstream and more of it is done by (by definition) more average people.

Maybe it's a sign that old media / new media debate is still immature and unformed that this still goes on. (And again, I bet I've done it). But I suspect if we really want to think hard about the best tools to use to serve customers, build brands, have fun, we're going to have to get used to comparing the very best in one channel with the very best in another. Not good with bad. Maybe that doesn't happen because there's not enough talent around for a single organisation to be able to offer the very best in multiple channels but if I were a brand-owner that's what I'd like to see offered to me.

energy

There are some things coming together which I think are adding up to an interesting and useful way to approach brands.

There's John's enthusiasm thoughts (and here), which maybe relate to the Y&R Brand Asset Valuator ideas of Brand Energy - as Mark pointed out. And you can see it developing through Mark McGuinness's thoughts about Enthusiasm vs Confidence. I know Mark's talking about people not brands but I always used to hate seeing 'confident' in a list of brand values on a creative brief or somewhere. It didn't seem to tell you anything useful. Enthusiastic seems much better - because it demands to be tied to something - enthusiastic about what?

And maybe the 'enthusiastic about what?' question is answered by Richard's Brand Idea model. And with all that energy and enthusiasm safely directed then maybe deploying a stream of ideas makes some sort of sense (which is like John's molecule but with some added energy and direction). 

This is what I like about the blogosphere, some useful new thoughts can be spun up very quickly without being co-opted by proprietary agency methodologies. And this energy/enthusiasm thing hasn't solidified yet, but it's going somewhere good.

blurry

I did a presentation for a media owner last week and I thought I'd share a few charts etc. It wasn't a ton of new thinking, more of a restatement of some of the things I've been thinking about recently. And an attempt to share with them some of the things that advertisers are thinking about so they can prepare themselves. The summary would be: this is a difficult and blurry time for brands, media owners etc. They're used to living in a world of quite crisp lines but those lines are getting less clear. The best response, it seems to me, is to forget about the increasingly suspect goal of 'message delivery' and try and get more interesting, more useful or ideally, both. (Huge simplification I know). And I finished off by suggesting that brands could do well to learn from some of the behaviours that web 2.0 businesses exhibit, particuarly the idea of being 'always in beta'.

I don't think this is especially contentious. Lines are blurring everywhere. The line between customers and employees is blurring. The line between public and private is blurring.

The lines between media types are blurring, and the lines around media authority. Here on the public twitter feed you can see that the BBC's 'at least 40 people die in attacks across Iraq' is nested neatly beside Gretchin's 'getting some water'. That equality of media status doesn't exist in all places, but it's starting to blur. And the line between those who have media power and those who don't is blurring.

Allied to that is a blurring around what we're willing to pay for and what we expect for free, what we value and what we don't, and how we're willing to pay for things. Where do we want to see ads and where don't we?

And a blurring of the lines between advertising/branding and editorial/content. It's happening in dead tree media and it's certainly happening online. That hard and fast line between the two is getting rubbed out, never mind blurred. Brands are realising they have the opportunity to bypass media-owners and talk directly to their customers.

This is therefore a time of fear and opportunity for brand owners. Some are excited by the blur, realising there's all sorts of stuff possible now, some are paralyzed by the contradictions and uncertainties of this blurry world. (see also Grant McCracken on cloudiness.)

A lot of brands are realising this means they have to get interesting. ie they have to create stuff that people actually want to engage with, stuff that people will want to watch over and above any other conveniently accessible choice. This means abandoning the usual reductionist, bash-them-over-the-head-with-a-simple-message approach because it's simply not financially effective to spend the kind of media money that will let you do that. Or even if it is now, it won't be soon. This means being willing to embrace negative emotion, being willing to tell people incomplete stories, being willing to give them room to think and realising that the most interesting communications are sometimes contradictory. I've talked about this a lot before so I won't bang on about it again here. But I learned my lesson on this when we did the Honda work.

And then the other thing brands are starting to think about is: can we spend what would once have been marketing/advertising money on things that promote and enchance the brand by being useful to people? As in Branded Utility. This has obviously always been a good idea, but it's more necessary then ever now, and it's more possible than ever. The low cost of making digital stuff means brands can offer all sorts of gifts and services to their customers that enhance the brand, improve the product/service and provide new news to people. This is another well-discussed area. So, again, I won't bang on about it too much.

This final bit is probably a bit less formed in my head, but I think there's something here. Many web2.0 businesses talk about the idea of being 'always in beta' and I think it's a good way for brands to think too, because it might help them develop some of the habits they'll need to operate in a blurry, unpredictable world. I'm not suggesting that there's necessarily a literal parallel and that every brand in the world needs to start treating 'the web as a platform'. But I think there are some interesting characteristics worth noticing:

1. A constant stream of ideas, bundled together by a common brand/business purpose.

(Can you bundle a stream? Probably not, but you know what I mean.) The business environment these brands live in mean they can't simply do a big idea. They have to keep innovating in order to stay relevant and interesting. The old software model of a big upgrade every couple of years is being replaced by a stream of little enhancements and fixes. I suspect the same will soon be true for brands. The old model of a big launch of a big idea followed by cut-downs of said big idea to deliver mind-numbing levels of repetition simply won't survive contact with the contemporary media landscape. And a key characteristic of a brand that's likely to survive the modern world will be creative fecundity, the ability to just keep having new ideas and to keep putting them out in the world. My favourite example of this is the way Ze Frank keeps generating new stuff, and, especially, the philosophy he espouses here.

One of the other interesting characteristics about always being in beta is accepting that mistakes are going to happen. And preparing for them. And thinking about, maybe, trying to turn them into opportunities. Flickr's attempt to turn a 'we're down' message into fun probably annoyed some people but I liked it are clearly so did lots of other people. When you're moving at the speed that the modern world demands mistakes are inevitable. Being surprised by them shouldn't be. Mistakes are also when the veneer tends to slip, if there is a veneer. The authentic voice of a brand or organisation is exposed when something goes wrong, if it's not the same as the voice you normally speak with people will notice.

3. Building with your community

I guess a key idea behind web2.0 is that it's the community of users that provide the value. And that's increasingly true for brands. I don't think anyone would argue with that. My favourite examples are the Fiskateers and the Air Force One.

And that's it. As I say not a lot of new stuff, but I just thought I'd share. And I have some spare badges if anyone would like one.

confluence

Maybe it's because it's triangles week at Brand Tarot but I've been thinking in threes again. I've been working on some presentations (which hopefully I'll be able to share soon) and this diagram occurred to me. Not that it was particularly relevant to what I was writing about but you know how these things pop into your head.

I think what this describes is the world that planning is heading into, the world that overlaps with UI design, experience design, product design, media of all forms etc etc. I think the fact that ad planners have some facility in translating ideas between these worlds is why we're being sucked into all sorts of industries. What I like about the world of blogging is that you can see the thinking that other people in the culture/commerce/creativity overlap are doing.

That's it. This doesn't really go anywhere yet. Just thought I'd mention it.

blogging as archive

Neil just sent me a copy of the very lovely w+k book of 2006. Which made me realise one of those little sideline advantages of blogging which I suspect will get more important over time; the sense that a blog is a handy, ready-made, personal corporate archive. And that's as important for businesses as it is  for everyone else. I've worked on books and things like this before, companies are always wanting to do them and they're always a nightmare. No-one can remember when things happened, no-one knows where the pictures of the company picnic went, or who joined when, or where all the reviews of the ads went. Of course, if you're sticking all this stuff on the blog as you go, there it all is. Organised nicely by date. Brilliant. (I bet it was still a nightmare though, it is w+k after all, Neil?)

phones, the slow train and the modern antiquarian

I was playing with BuddyPing just after Christmas. While we were driving back down the M4.  BuddyPing is a way of sharing where you are via your mobile, based on your proximity to a cellphone tower. So I idly pinged them on some anonymous strip of the motorway and got this response:

Water Orton? It immediately reminded me of a Flanders And Swann song - Slow Train (though I think the definitive version is by The King's Singers). Slow Train is an affectionate lament for the railway stations lost through the Beeching Cuts, it lists a bunch of eccentric and evocative English place names; Millers Dale, Kirby Muxloe, Mow Cop, Scholar Green, Midsomer Norton, etc which instantly take you back instantly to a pre-motorway connection to place which I, for one, have never actually experienced but still like the idea of.

It turns out from pinging buddyping that celltowers have similar names, on that single stretch of motorway I passed Widney Manor, Bishops Tachbrook, Ambrosden, Ludgershall, Waterperry and Loudwater. All great names that could have found a place in Slow Train. At first glance this seems wrong and counter-intuitive. Cell towers lurk at the far edges of the popular imagination as dark, probably malicious, impersonal things. Yet they're not that different to railway stations; communications technologies plonked down on the landscape but intimately connected to and dependent on that landscape. That tower/station has to be there if the whole thing is going to work.

What buddyping accidentally does is reveal the antique landscape beneath the technology, something that presumably the phone networks have little interest in, but which is actually quite powerful. It's not a geographical connection in the click-here-for-the-nearest-dry-cleaner sense (or the this-yellow-sticker-points-to-something-digital sense) but it's a reminder of the communities which have lived in and created the landscape we whizz through.

I suspect this is on my mind because I've been reading Unmitigated England and England In Particular
as half-hearted research for IDOTO. (Why are these books always just about England? Don't they have the stamina to cross any borders?) England In Particular's subtitle is 'A Celebration of the Commonplace, the Local, the Vernacular and the Distinctive' and it's written by the folk behind Common Ground, a noble group, but one I suspect that has little affection for mobile phone towers. Maybe they should reconsider that, maybe there's an opportunity to reconnect to localness via cell technology in the same way there was via the railways. Julian Cope's The Modern Antiquarian is concerned with even more ancient connections but already has its huge database of megalithic sites integrated with Google Earth. I'd love to feel a connection to The Modern Antiquarian through my k800i. Maybe the mobile phone will become some kind of psycho-geographical dowsing rod.  Anyone want to sell that idea to Orange?