This is one of my favourite ads. ‘Ad’ doesn’t really do it justice. It’s one minute of film. One of the reasons I think it works is because they’ve actually folded the perceived negative aspects of gaming such as violence and sex into positive virtues of life, experience and learning. In other words it ain’t the media so much as what we do with it that matters; how we interpret, play, create. And the other reason is because it’s so moving because it’s about imagination and the power of dreams 
And it reminds me that we have such a janus-faced view of technological culture. We see it as contrasts, either as liberating or repressive, bad or good, enlightening or ’shrinking’. When of course it’s all of these things and none of them depending on how we relate to it. A progressive critique wouldn’t talk of morals but of effects which is inherently messier but far more interesting and personal. This ad kind of embodies that approach for me: dubious virtue.
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:
- you can’t present the outcomes easily and prototyping to pitch to a client is an expensive risk
- large organisations tend to have strict budget allocations and ‘utility’ probably falls in product areas or even worse between the gaps
- 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.
John Sanbourne has just talked through ebay express [which was news to me] at the [otherwise pretty disappointing] BTWEEN forum in Bradford. His slides should be on the BTWEEN site later. The development of express has been prompted by the market for ‘convenience’ purchases, instant gratification, rather than an auction, this is "buy now" as a sub-brand to capture those searching for products via search engines and make the process of purchasing a simple one. It’s interesting to see how they strip away the ‘experience’ that has made ebay such a phenomenon, the social, ‘frictional‘ experience and replace it with standard, homogenous experience in the form of style guides and shopping basket processes; go from the car boot sale of bric-a-brac to the retail store, from emotional, experiential purchases to more functional purchases – the sorts of things that you can search around and buy instantly [and of course price comparison sites are massive drivers for this development]. However, to do this is a massive job. Think of professional photographs for the things you may want to buy. Think of 11000 photographs of things you might want to buy at a category level! Express then serves to reinforce ebay as a key sales platform putting it up against direct sellers to gain some of the affiliate marketing so key to web revenue models.
Express comes to the UK later in the summer.
I’m struggling with the mantra of digital strategists like Seth Godin who argues that we need to make things as simple as possible for people:
We like things that are simple, not complex. Issues where we can take action without changing very much. If a marketer brings us a new idea, it’s either ignored or it’s a problem. A problem because we have to do something with the idea. Buy the new suit, trade in for the new car, install a new IT solution or change the way we feel about an issue.
The best problems, as far as a consumer is concerned, are those that can be solved quickly and easily, with few side effects.
In other words you keep things lubricated, you reduce the friction of the ’social’, you make things easy and value the ease with which you can engender a relationship. Compare this to the "ethics of inconvenience" put forward by Will Davies, who argues the need for an understanding of friction as social value…
I spoke at this conference earlier this year, discussing what digital technology offered the voluntary sector. One of the things I raised as an anxiety was an advert in the paper from that morning, in which Oxfam were claiming that ‘One click. That’s the difference between life and death for millions of people’ (part of their current I’m In campaign). On the one hand this is a fairly transparent and innocent attempt to ride the wave of the Make Poverty History campaign which ended last year, but on the other, it’s just a pack of lies. My medicine is a bit shakey, but I’m fairly convinced that One click is not the difference between life and death for even one person, let alone millions. The dilemma these charities face is how much to see the internet as a way of lowering barriers to entry, and how much to see it as a potential dilution of the issues at stake. And the problem is that barriers to entry tend to be constitutive of the value of action. The fact that it is a pain in the arse to write a letter, attend a meeting, dress up as batman and climb a monument, run for parliament or wage a decades long campaign for recognition, is why these actions are both admirable and effective.
I find both arguments persuasive. My gripe is not just with the ethics of saving-the-world endeavour being promoted as easy and simplistic but the glut of things that stem from it being easy to join making the attention economy such an issue in the process. Take Flickr. Every day I’m offered the opportunity to join a new flickr group – I’ve already got more groups than I possibly know and rarely use any of them – and am told I’m a new contact for blah blah, who it transpires has 3457 contacts. And of course it’s not just flickr, it’s the whole of social media where quantity equates with value. So much so that it undermines the social ‘media / ’software’ it is predicated on. In an online world the ease of being social undermines the value of relationships and consequently, over time, you put less effort in and you value the experience / contact / object less. Consequently, diminishing, if not negative, returns set in [and probably lower than the Dunbar number of 150 which has been identified for a community to be cohesive as you and your contacts do not constitute a community in this sense, more a cohort or sub-set within the community].
So if it is time we started appreciating quality rather than quality of relationships, friction rather than ease, how do we sell that into people? How do we make ’social media’ that values less rather than more? What does a strategy for ‘marketing friction’ to create lasting value between people and brands / issues look like? It’s clearly not what Oxfam are doing, so who is?
Sainsburys is to open GPs [doctors] surgeries in its stores. Are supermarkets taking their responsibility for creating a nation of lard-arses really seriously? This hasn’t been picked up much and I’m quite surprised it hasn’t. The move to incorporate Doctor’s surgery’s in store is obviously part of Sainsburys desperate attempt to make its stores competitive again [after failing against Tesco] and pick up custom by making its stores multi-use; spaces for a variety of tasks not just retail consumption. It’s a logical if not particularly welcome move on from coffee stores in books shops and banks and marks another nail in the coffin of the small retailer in Britain’s high streets.
What next? Hospitals with leisure facilities? Nurseries in supermarkets? Police surgeries in supermarkets – [done - this time at a Tesco's]?
And what of the social exclusion such policies entail? The cost of public transport or private transport means that actually getting to these retail spaces that will cater for our needs is going to be relatively more costly for those from poorer areas who will often have further to travel.
It’ll be interesting to see if the move to small being the new big online will affect our consumption patterns and use of larger offline stores. Will we be more likely to want smaller, niche offline suppliers? Or are these monolithic supermarkets, above, going to further drive out smaller suppliers through price competition and economies of scale, in all but ’boutique’ retail areas of larger cities. How will the nature of the products they sell determine their dynamics? For example commoditised products compete mainly on price and to a lesser extent customer service whereas service-based and niche products compete on the basis of provenance and knowledge of supplier.
Another innovation recently, this one in time rather than space: a surgery marketing plastic surgery you can have in your lunch hour. Needles to say it’s been lambasted by all the health pros and policy wonks and needless to say it will be hugely successful and copied by all.
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Thirty minutes into my daily commute this morning I realised that Edward Stourton wasn’t informing me of the news agenda on BBC Radio 4 but rather Chris Moyles was uttering inane gobbledygook. It took me thirty minutes to realise someone had reset the car radio from Radio 4 to Radio 1. Thirty minutes!
There was one interesting thing to come out of this babble which was that Moyles is using MySpace to connect to:
"… would be happy seeing some hot chicks! Really – only hot people get in"
Par for the course with Moyles. But it’s significant in the sense that he really is connecting with his audience on their terms, using their medium of choice, albeit in a rather tongue in cheek way. You certainly get a better sense of the man on myspace than on Radio1’s own site . Aled, who works on the show [and from what I heard was the best thing about it], seems to be making the most of his position to network – he has 2306 ‘friends’.
Culturesponge has a series of Vespa adverts from the 1950s and 1960s which are really compelling. My favourite are a set of Modern illustrations [as opposed to the iconographic pretty lady posters] of urban and rural life – positioning the scooter very much as a facilitator of freedom and self expression within the ‘progressive’ discourses of modernity. I’m surprised scooter manufacturers have not tried to offer a contemporary take on this…. in the way that advertising around urban redevelopment has sought to highlight the sense of "city living" as sophisticated, as the cultural body of existence and the scooter as a way to navigate this space, this ‘cultural life’. No, the images we get now are perhaps symbolic of the way we see urban life – of machines capable of dominating a space of speed and aggression and that from mostly the 50cc market aimed at late teens. There is another market though – of people engaging in city living and who can’t be arsed to cycle. I’m surprised no-one except Vespa get this.
The image reminds me of Trumpton the kids series from the late 60s and 70s [part of the "Watch with Mother" series] which has recently been re-ssued by the beeb – and from something I overheard on the radio the other day, and corroborated here [in a brief biog of Alison Price - the writer] is that the fire crew of "Pugh, (Pugh), Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grubb!" never put out a fire because they couldn’t animate fire at the time! Excellent – this belief in the ‘real’ in what was ostensibly a glorified childrens play set is quite charming.
I haven’t been able to shit straight lately for work pressure and family life. I’m a kinda of believer that you make your own time… you have the ability to slow down and speed up according to the activities you are undertaking. Quite what that means practically I’m not too sure. Quite how I convey that to my employers I’m even less sure.
Rather belatedly I’ve found use in David Allen’s book Getting Things Done [so popular it seems to have coined it's own verb acronym - "to GTD"]. Which allows you to do what it says on the book cover. Mr Allen has got a lot of cred from the blogger world – which makes me wonder to what extent most blogger types are not actually hopeless organisers and ENTP types [like me]. But David’s book works. If you can spare the time to read it then do. If you can’t then take note – the big things to remember are:
1. List all the jobs you have to do
2. For every job describe each task needed to complete that job
3. For each task see if there are any actions that you are unable to do for any reason or which require other resources to complete – list them.
4. When you’ve finished a task / action then tick it off.
By identifying and then writing down specific actions you put things in the "hard drive" of your memory [allen's metaphor not mine] and are better able to concentrate on the actions in the uncluttered RAM of your head. Simple stuff with potentially profound implications for your whole work / life balance. Unless you get complacent after week one and go back to the world of cramming everything into RAM and going into meltdown again. The book should come with electro-shock treatment to condition you into following his process.
And whilst I’m on the topic of organisation and time management I’ve been trying out Backpack and Basecamp [and all that clever 37 signals stuff] lately. These products and ones like them sell you the potential to organise your life. But from my experience they can’t deliver on it. Only you can do that.. Basecamp merely helps you to move things around more efficiently – it doesn’t help you with what you’re actually moving around, mores the pity.
In loo of a proper post the other things of late that have been stored in my off-site memory to come back to later are:
1. Time, again. A discussion on Radio 4 the other day on short-termism got me wondering whether we could plan for generational change. One comment about the way Daoism and its generational, long-term view has helped to culturally move some Asian economies to think about improving things for their children’s children was quite profound. Or I thought it was. Could we do that? Could we sacrifice our relative affluence and luxury knowing we were building the foundations for a better society? I think it’s unlikely but part of me believes that we can be sold the idea of hard work to make things better in this country and to move away from a privatised, individualised nation. But it’s a vision that lasts longer than a government term of office so it would require the political will which is quite another matter. Some brands have managed to create a long term plan by clinging to a vision – perhaps politics and nationhood can learn from them?
2. A mish-mash [with apologies to Things mag]. Peta getting a lot of viral attention for their milk ad which had me really weirded out [i can think of no English equivalent to sum my feelings up] / Business 2.0 talking about how Google will never conquer local search because small businesses need to be sold to, but I think this ignores the fact that readers are migrating away from bigs books in droves so local companies will have to adapt / Awards – with Saatchi and Saatchi annoucing their world changing innovation awards – which were actually pretty cool – and Yahoo! annoucing their not as cool best websites award - which seems so lame now, so 90s – why not let users decide? / And I guess I’m also kind of miffed because Etsy didn’t get into either award – I think they’re quite brilliant – not least because they’ve cracked the problem of ordering handmade goods online: if you can’t guarantee what you want is what you’ll get from handmade goods – then package it and conceptualise it as magic – Alchemy. Surprise! Genius.
Vidalia suspects Sony have been using graffiti to generate a some ’street’ cred’. Large corporations using street art aesthetics to align themselves with the values of the younger generation is annoying, especially when you know it’s a marketing ploy and so disengenuous.
See also !Habit Forming photo’s of other Fony Sony street ‘art‘
