Be nice to get your thoughts on it.  

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3 accounts for 20 percent of UK digital music sales, originally uploaded by lynetter.

Lynetter keeps up the good work finding that 3 accounts for 20% of all UK digital music sales, second only behind iTunes.  Considering 3 is one of half a dozen mobile service providers [others being Orange, Vodaphone, O2, T-Mobile, Virgin], I’d say that’s a hell of a lot of 18-24 3 users buying downloads.  Students perhaps without a broadband connection in rented accommodation using mobile to mange their music collection? Odd, Interesting. 

Do people not mind having their music ‘stuck’ [getting tracks off the 3 network phone isn't easy - I've tried]?  How is the experience shared, if at all?  What are the cues for buying if, as she says they’re travelling when most of the downloads are bought at around 10pm: public radio, noise, boredom, communications [txts from mates, referrals]? And it points the way for 3 to design a service that exposes some of this mobile consumption data for friends, buddies etc. to create systems around, or perhaps create an app that ties into lastfm and work with them to create playouts for music trial or ping friends with 30sec promo tunes [30 sec are deemed to be promos and you don;t pay royalties, which in this instance is a nice way to kick of short almost synchronous comms]. 

Moreover, if 18-24 audiences are you audience on public transport, then that offers some great opportunities for the brand to communicate… perhaps by exposing most popular downloads in a given area or in another area – i.e. give it a geographical dimension to push navigation into the 500+ tracks; have a location based system of tracks ["you've just entered ** service area and the recommended tune is **** based on what others have downloaded here"] which would be great if, as we’re led to believe downloads are on public transport routes – nodes of music consumption.  The route to Chelsea vs the route to Holloway?

My Tool Box April 2006, originally uploaded by geishaboy500.
Link: marktd: Brands 2.0: Branded Utility – Jack Cheng

There seems to be a belated realisation that comms planning is all well and good but you need to have something decent to communicate and that over time it gets harder and harder to be interesting and communicate well and to enter the world of the individual.  Brands just inherently struggle to find things to talk about in a way that is interesting and believable.  I think this is where some of John Grant’s work on brands as cultural concepts, looking outward rather than than closing down and defining can be useful.  But the digital age requires brands to up the frequency with which they engage and of course engage in a more well, engaging way to cut through to the fragmented groups that come together often only to disperse again as quickly as they formed.  That, combined with peoples ability to ‘read’ marketing’s referential system in more sophisticated ways and of course more cynical ways seems to have led to this "branded utility" meme.  Provide some *value*.  Deliver. Don’t talk, *do*.  Which of course all seems so right for today’s [primarily younger] ‘audiences as co-creators’.  This isn’t of course to the exclusion of other more emotive, ‘fluffier’ stuff as Katie mentions with reference to Aristotle’s thoughts on friendship:

Take Aristotle’s concept of friendship. He proposed three models: friendship based on utility (a friend who provides something useful to us); friendship based on pleasure (we enjoy a friend’s company); and friendship based on virtue or mutual admiration (we find a friend who shares our values).

Whilst the latter are according to Aristotle the most enduring friendships, utility had the least longevity as it was based on a very functional relationship.  And you do need all three.  But from my experience of using Google‘s GTD product suite [and I think it can be called that now], wordpress, AIM in different guises, flickr, del.icio.us  [god and the list goes on.. magnolia, twitter - dammit!, the various extensions to firefox inc performancing and of course the myriad of widgets]… I’m far more likely to develop pleasure and admiration as a result of using those services and consequently utility for me is the driving force in brand engagement.  Services themselves enable a more emotive connection in the social web of things.  So why have we not seen much in the way of branded utility in practice?  I can only really think of the BA Google Earth mashup by agency.com as truly deserving of the name by a non-web business.  I’d love to know why it’s such a struggle to push utility / services through a marketing budget.  I’m imagining that it’s to do with the fact that:

1. you can’t present the outcomes easily and prototyping to pitch to a client is an expensive risk
2. large organisations tend to have strict budget allocations and ‘utility’ probably falls in product areas or even worse between the gaps
3. and of course a lot of clients still don’t "get it".  yadda. though how long have we been hearing that for now?

You seen any good utilities from non-web businesses? Why are they slow to come through? 

And on a similar note I;m going to try to post less stuff that adds little or no value to a conversation and do more stuff that does add value.  The noise may be the signal in development but I’m sensing in planning it’s still mostly noise. With that in mind perhaps we should propose "planning utility" with  the strap-line "more than just words"?  Mr. Richard Reynolds always seemed to me to be that kind of planner.  A do-er planner.

My uncle has been selling cloth by mail order catalogue now for over thirty years.  the operation is a might slimmer now that it was all that time ago, as is he.

He’s retiring soon.   For those thirty plus years though he’s managed to sell cloth by text alone.  Text.  No images.  I tell a lie, they produced a glossy brochure back in the halcyon days on the mid 80s.  It bombed.  There is something in his rather ‘lateral’ descriptions that people like.  He gives you the gist of what it is but doesn’t quite tell you.  It’s a bit of a game and people like playing, not loads, but enough to pay a wage.  I’m sad to think it won’t be around for much longer. There aren’t even that many archive copies to well, archive and keep for posterity and perhaps even repackage as a nod to a more fun yet innocent and certainly quirkier bygone business age [remember The Gaffer?]. 

He has a lot of fans does Uncle Alan, most of his customers buy because of him or rather their perception of him; they send him ‘fan mail’ disguised as orders.  He also pisses a lot of people off.  He can be pretty direct in his humour [I dare not show you the front cover of the recent catalogue].  No political correctness here which is quite refreshing in an age when everything seems so anodyne, watered down to offend no-one but please no-one either.  A friend of mine who works in advertising said it was the best bit of copy-writing she’d ever seen.  I think I agree.  Just thought I’d share that with you.

One of the most inspired presentations I’ve ever heard on IT Conversations by Jospeh Chamie, Director of Population at the UN.   It’s just a glorious lesson in how to engage an audience by the Civil Service equivalent of Woody Allen.

Via R-R-R-Russell.