Altacircle

Love what gets forwarded around a good digital team.  This one goes to Ume for forwarding around an interesting YouTube link. 

This actually is a related video — a well presented and well thougt-out approach to spatial computing.  What is also really interesting is the quick intro into why our computers are the way they are:

–Command Line – the earliest interface relying on text commands – type in and it responds (1:20)
–Paper Paradigm – Current windows / mac desktop approaches where the computer manages 2D spaces (1:40)
–Spatial Computing – Current thinking about allowing computers to work in 3D space (2:45)

This is an interesting presentation by Giles from Ogilvy on social media that gives a good insight into how they are approaching integration and social media. 

The full video on his site looks at a case study from Lenovo on the Beijing Olympics which I wish I had built, but picking out just parts referring to how Ogilvy works with digital shows how much things have progressed since I was there.

• Digital is not a silo – Digital, as well as social and mobile (and new ones to come) are all cross discipline.  This was well underway when I was at OgilvyOne and makes sense when there are over 150 digital professionals spread across 14+ companies (in the UK alone).

• Discipline Heads, Digital Hearts and Multi-Disciplinary Muscles – this is a nice way of putting it since clients often want to engage with a specific discipline, even to buy integrated solutions and digital is not a silo.  The question back to Ogilvy — since OgilvyInteractive isn't called out — is who takes the call when the client wants a Digital discipline lead?
• Brainz – looking to fundementally revisit how work is created by having a social network that allows crowd sourcing solutions
• Blackbook of Suppliers
• 80/20 – From Mckinsey – 80% what works well and 20% innovation and testing

It is true that digital is pervading all of the traditional disciplines of marketing (advertising, direct marketing, PR, promotion) and that teams across all of these disciplines need to be able to understand and respond to digital questions.  If the speading around doesn't dillute the skillset — and using good technology can help avoid this — then it looks like a good approach.
 

Is this a great piece of technology that really could change the game — if it can be made practical?  Or as CES closes and everyone waits for Apples big release, are the rumours just building to get us all engaged.

Recombu does a nice piece of analysis on why it is possible.  And even why it would be a very Apple thing to do.

Apple has historically adapted niche input methods and popularised them for a mainstream audience. It did it with the computer mouse in 1984, and then again with the touchscreen in 2007. Both technologies had languished in esoteric devices, or in the case of the mouse, in the labs of Xerox Parc. To imagine today’s PC without a mouse is unthinkable. The inclusion of eye-tracking tech in the company’s forthcoming tablet would be Job’s magnum opus. What better flourish to a career that began with the popularisation of windows, icons, mouse and pointer than to usurp them all?

And there is a bit of substance in the a patent application in place and reported purchase of eye tracking units from Swedish technology company Tobii. 
Overall to me I'd be surprised if the iSlate launches with real eye tracking.  I'm still waiting for decent voice recognition before I buy into an electroencephalographic headset to finish my powerpoint presentation.

  Interesting Eye Tracking Links:
 

http://www.simpleusability.com/services/usability/eye-tracking/demo – interesting video of eye tracking controlling a mouse
http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2006/06/13/eyetracking-worth-the-expense/ – some of the learning of eye tracking research / heat mapping on website usage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw&feature=player_embedded – classic video of headtracking's impact on the Wii experience

A small step into the work of ecommerce affiliate fun that you just can't do on wordpress.com.

And a quick collection of interesting books.  I can see this will have to make it's way to a library page when I get the time.  For now it is simply amazing that one can add a functioning affiliate widget … in less then 10 minutes.

If you haven't read them, want to read them or or going to buy on of them anyway, click through from here!"

CES is awash with people talking tablets and slates, and e-readers are finally getting traction.  That is fine and exciting from a hardware point of view, but what about design?

Ever since Jakob Neilson gained popularity and promoted usability (often with top-left nav approaches), the web has been wrestling with usability versus design.  I've been looking for a good visual summary of web page design from single column early sites, to top-left, to innovations like flash navigation, cover-flow, panel-driven interfaces and tabbed content elements (yahoo) but haven't found one yet.

Regardless, there is some really exciting work going on for electronic delivery of magazine.

This video from Bonnier, a Swedish media group, shows some amazing thinking and a great prototype. 

It demonstrates what we all feel:  that electronic delivery of magazine content can improve the user experience and that magazines online are not just about putting their content on websites. 
 
 

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Or if you would only like to see the prototype in action from the video:

It has been a while since I've updated my "who's winning" table on agency performance, but I think the real prediction is to say before we know the winner, it won't matter.  Everyone is running to the middle and soon enough all of the big agencies will quickly resemble one another in an integrated heaven!
That said competition runs deep in humans and there will be plenty more news bulletins of battles won and lost, and strategic analysis of how the war is progressing.
This opinion piece from Ad Age by Barry Wacksman, Chief Growth Officer from R/GA (of course), is a really well written argument.  No question the best way to win a war is to have the best army. 
If we can get our teams focusing on being a strategic advisor to clients with a big dose of innovation, solid delivery and passion for analytics on peformance we'll get out of being commoditized creative brokers and back into being non-procurable consultants and all win.  Bring on the new age of the strategic agency partner.
 

Forget Being a 'Lead' Agency; Strive to Be a Dream Agency
And It All Starts With Innovation

by Barry Wacksman
Published: January 11, 2010

Three recent articles in Ad Age have spurred a furious online debate about whether digital agencies are ready to "lead" and whether the industry even needs big digital agencies anymore. All three suffer from multiple misconceptions about the agency business, so it's time to offer another point of view.

The very idea of a lead agency as the center of command-and-control for other agencies has outlived its usefulness. The model was appropriate for the mass-media age, when the most important thing a brand could do was tell its story through paid media. Long ago, clients separated agencies from the "lead" and formed direct relationships with a mix of different firms. They may have spent more time (and money) with their traditional ad agency, but even this has changed. In some cases, so-called digital agencies have larger budgets and better access to senior client decision-makers, and this trend is growing.

We should worry less about being a "lead" agency and more about being a "dream" agency. We should ask: What do clients need today, and who is best equipped to deliver? This is what all agencies must consider as they create new business models appropriate for the digital age. So, if a client could build the dream agency today, what would it look like?

It would have a thorough understanding of how consumers think and feel, but also how they seek and make and share and transact. It would recognize that the lives of consumers have dramatically transformed in the past 10 years. In an era where Facebook has 350 million members and Google is the world's most valuable media company, the idea that consumers lead increasingly digital lives isn't debatable.

It wouldn't be wedded to a specific craft such as TV or print. Nor would it only think about designing a website. It would do all of those things without bias toward any strategic or tactical solution.

This agency would have innovation at its core and the ability to craft campaigns to promote these innovations. But it would start with the innovation — not the other way around, as most traditional agencies reflexively deliver campaign ideas as the first step.

Data would be its guiding light. It would have the right people to mine the data, interpret it and, based on the results, provide direction on whether and how to proceed to achieve the best ROI.

It would produce things with efficiency and fidelity, recognizing that brilliant ideas can fall apart with poor execution (a bad user interface, for example). It would understand that clients have an unprecedented opportunity to deliver massive amounts of content via free media channels such as YouTube and Facebook, as well as owned media channels, such as their own websites, mobile apps and Twitter feeds.

Whichever agency gets to this state of Nirvana first is likely to be the most important strategic and creative partner for clients — even if it's no longer called a "lead" agency. So, who will get there first?

I'd bet on the current crop of large, independent digital-age agencies. The most evolved have the skills to formulate and execute ideas that are digital but extend far beyond it. These agencies have had the advantage of evolving alongside the biggest consumer trend of the 21st century, the digital revolution, just as their predecessors had evolved alongside the biggest consumer trend of the 20th century, the mass adoption of TV.

The question — "Are these agencies ready to lead?" — has already been answered by the many clients who have appointed them as their primary strategic agency partners.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Barry Wacksman is exec VP-chief growth officer, R/GA.

1 Comment
Subscribe to comments on: Forget Being a 'Lead' Agency; Strive to Be a Dream Agency
  By JMorganBaker | London January 11, 2010 06:42:35 am:
This is a really well written piece and having been in digital market for 10 years now, it isn't a surprise that I agree completely. One thing to remember though — "execution" which you use as an example poor user interface, is also client management. Traditional agencies have real skills in gaining consensus around creative ideas that digital agencies–because we work with such complexity–often miss. Also if you replace "innovation" with "creativity," you have the argument all of the integrated agencies are making in the market today. It really is a rush to the center — is it easier to teach print to digital creative than vice-versa? Probably. Will digital agencies continue to see big growth, definitely. But the scale difference between big traditional agencies and big digital agencies means the big agencies will have time to learn how to be consultative, integrated and innovative.

Ever wanted to see some of the biggest names in the Internet commenting on the past, present and future? 

Comscore was started in 1999, and in the last 10 years has built itself a great corner in measurement.  Reaching out to John Battelle, Esther Dyson, Fred Wilson, Andrew Braccia and others they have put together a 6 minute video commentary.  It wanders into periods of smaltz promotion at times, but generally is quite good.  If only to be reminded of the faces to the names.

Comscore 10th Anniversay Video

What was I doing in 1999?  Aside from setting up an office in London and trying to be useful in the chaos that was boo.com — going to a lot of "launch parties," speaking to the BBC at First Tuesday and talking e-commerce at European HP summits. 

All good fun.

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Seem funny?  Actually this is the post from migrating my blog to a self-hosted environment.  Watch out developers, getting serious.  Seems only fair that I should understand a bit about plugins, CSS and social networking tools since I talk about it endlessly.

Only 3 hours in at this point, probably another 3 and I’ll be just where I was with Wordpress.com!

As my brother used to say when starting my truck and hearing a solid crunch, “nice starter motor, change it yourself?”

If anyone tells you digital marketing isn’t technical, tell them they are crazy.  It is true that you don’t need to understand compression ratios to drive a car, but you better have hand-eye coordination!

Just came across this again haphazardly–or not so haphazardly if you consider that I was reading a feed of Clay’s writings–and thought I would post it again.  It is really a great piece of thinking:

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London. And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders–a lot of things we like–didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan’s Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.

This hit me in a conversation I had about two months ago. As Jen said in the introduction, I’ve finished a book called Here Comes Everybody, which has recently come out, and this recognition came out of a conversation I had about the book. I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, “What are you seeing out there that’s interesting?”

I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus–”How should we characterize this change in Pluto’s status?” And a little bit at a time they move the article–fighting offstage all the while–from, “Pluto is the ninth planet,” to “Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system.”

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn’t know what to do with it at first–hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn’t be a surplus, would it? It’s precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.

The early phase for taking advantage of this cognitive surplus, the phase I think we’re still in, is all special cases. The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of things work: there’s an interesting community over here, there’s an interesting sharing model over there, those people are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can’t predict the outputs yet because there’s so much complexity.

The way you explore complex ecosystems is you just try lots and lots and lots of things, and you hope that everybody who fails fails informatively so that you can at least find a skull on a pikestaff near where you’re going. That’s the phase we’re in now.

Just to pick one example, one I’m in love with, but it’s tiny. A couple of weeks one of my students at ITP forwarded me a a project started by a professor in Brazil, in Fortaleza, named Vasco Furtado. It’s a Wiki Map for crime in Brazil. If there’s an assault, if there’s a burglary, if there’s a mugging, a robbery, a rape, a murder, you can go and put a push-pin on a Google Map, and you can characterize the assault, and you start to see a map of where these crimes are occurring.

Now, this already exists as tacit information. Anybody who knows a town has some sense of, “Don’t go there. That street corner is dangerous. Don’t go in this neighborhood. Be careful there after dark.” But it’s something society knows without society really knowing it, which is to say there’s no public source where you can take advantage of it. And the cops, if they have that information, they’re certainly not sharing. In fact, one of the things Furtado says in starting the Wiki crime map was, “This information may or may not exist some place in society, but it’s actually easier for me to try to rebuild it from scratch than to try and get it from the authorities who might have it now.”

Maybe this will succeed or maybe it will fail. The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don’t pan out. But the ones that do are quite incredible, and I hope that this one succeeds, obviously. But even if it doesn’t, it’s illustrated the point already, which is that someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough of the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you couldn’t have imagined existing even five years ago.

So that’s the answer to the question, “Where do they find the time?” Or, rather, that’s the numerical answer. But beneath that question was another thought, this one not a question but an observation. In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: “Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves.”

At least they’re doing something.

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don’t? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn’t posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it’s not, and that’s the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

And I’m willing to raise that to a general principle. It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, “If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.” And that’s message–I can do that, too–is a big change.

This is something that people in the media world don’t understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race–consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it ’s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

And what’s astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something interesting, is that they’re discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they’ll take you up on that offer. It doesn’t mean that we’ll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we’ll do it less.

And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we’re talking about. It’s so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that  is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?

Well, the TV producer did not think this was going to be a big deal; she was not digging this line of thought. And her final question to me was essentially, “Isn’t this all just a fad?” You know, sort of the flagpole-sitting of the early early 21st century? It’s fun to go out and produce and share a little bit, but then people are going to eventually realize, “This isn’t as good as doing what I was doing before,” and settle down. And I made a spirited argument that no, this wasn’t the case, that this was in fact a big one-time shift, more analogous to the industrial revolution than to flagpole-sitting.

I was arguing that this isn’t the sort of thing society grows out of. It’s the sort of thing that society grows into. But I’m not sure she believed me, in part because she didn’t want to believe me, but also in part because I didn’t have the right story yet. And now I do.

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

It’s also become my motto, when people ask me what we’re doing–and when I say “we” I mean the larger society trying to figure out how to deploy this cognitive surplus, but I also mean we, especially, the people in this room, the people who are working hammer and tongs at figuring out the next good idea. From now on, that’s what I’m going to tell them: We’re looking for the mouse. We’re going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, “If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?” And I’m betting the answer is yes.

Thank you very much.

Today as ever brand marketers are wrestling with how much of their media spend to put online and are looking for case studies that allow them to “trust digital media” the way they do traditional media.  All of the unique visitor metrics and total impressions numbers aside, there remains a confidence gap until big brands start to circulate big cases where digital has delivered big results.

Now they are starting to come in like this one from Ford published in the WARC News Email:

In April, Ford, the automaker, asked 100 influential US bloggers to test drive its new Fiesta for a period of six months, and regularly post their opinions of the car on portals like Facebook and Twitter.

By October, it estimated that the resulting material had received 4.3 million hits on YouTube and 3 million comments on Twitter, while 540,000 people had viewed photos hosted on Flickr.

According to Jim Farley, Ford’s group vice president of global marketing, recognition rates of the Fiesta have grown rapidly, despite the fact it won’t be available until mid-2010.

“If you would have told me that we would have 100 vehicles in the US … and we would have 60% brand awareness in the segment, I would have said there is no possible way,” he said.

“To get 60% awareness in traditional media, it costs somewhere north of $50 million (€33.6m; £29.9m),” continued Farley, who added that the web is now a viable, and more low-cost, alternative to these channels.

“Online has become mass media. A Yahoo or Google page takeover actually gets more eyeballs than a network TV commercial now. That hasn’t happened before.”

In April, Ford, the automaker, asked 100 influential US bloggers to test drive its new Fiesta for a period of six months, and regularly post their opinions of the car on portals like Facebook and Twitter.

By October, it estimated that the resulting material had received 4.3 million hits on YouTube and 3 million comments on Twitter, while 540,000 people had viewed photos hosted on Flickr.

According to Jim Farley, Ford’s group vice president of global marketing, recognition rates of the Fiesta have grown rapidly, despite the fact it won’t be available until mid-2010.

“If you would have told me that we would have 100 vehicles in the US … and we would have 60% brand awareness in the segment, I would have said there is no possible way,” he said.

“To get 60% awareness in traditional media, it costs somewhere north of $50 million (€33.6m; £29.9m),” continued Farley, who added that the web is now a viable, and more low-cost, alternative to these channels.

“Online has become mass media. A Yahoo or Google page takeover actually gets more eyeballs than a network TV commercial now. That hasn’t happened before.”