Alex Steer

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Updated 4 November 2013: Posterous.com no longer exists, so the WPP Marketing Fellowship blog is offline. Since this post still gets a fair bit of traffic (thanks!), I've updated the link to point to the copy of the post on the Internet Archive. If you're applying for the Fellowship, good luck. If you have questions about the process, feel free to get in touch with me.

Since I know a few people who are interested in the WPP Marketing Fellowship have stumbled across this blog, let me point you towards my post on the application process at the WPP Fellowship blog.

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Another on-the-fly post, this time on the rising popularity of rent-don't-buy initiatives from everything from transport (Zipcar et al.) to handbags. I've read a few articles lately claiming more strongly than usual that this trend represents a shift towards a less materialistic mindset, especially among young urbanites in rich developed countries. Like most trends emergent among young urbanites in rich developed countries, it gets a lot of attention from marketers, especially because it carries with it the lingering prospect of manufacturers selling less stuff.

I'm a bit sceptical, though, I'll be honest. Okay, attitudinal shifts happen for a reason, not usually in isolation from economic conditions, but I wonder if there's genuinely any other driver behind rent-don't-buy than infrastructural improvement.

In South Africa, trains are rubbish and buses are worse. As a result, if you can afford a car, you drive everywhere. There are a lot of terrible cars on the roads, often held together with little more than gaffer tape and hope. For that infrastructural reason cars are status symbols, so SA comes crazily high up the international ranking of luxury car sales.

Killing the culture of the car in the rich suburbs of Cape Town or Pretoria would take a massive change to the infrastructure of transport. More high-class Gautrains, fewer life-in-your-hands minibus rides. Something to make cars less necessary, and so stop the next generation of kids from riding round in their dads' old bangers, dreaming of Maseratis and Mercedes. Something to make having any car, let alone a posh one, a bit less explicable.

In other words, exactly what's happened in London or New York.

Rent-don't-buy happens when societies get so good at building infrastructure to solve problems that individual control of solutions becomes less necessary. The trains are good, so why own a car? Online ordering and courier services are good, so why buy a Hermes bag when you can borrow one for a bit? Good infrastructure formalises the arrangements engineered informally in communities. You used to borrow a bag off a friend, now you borrow one off a stranger (and so get exactly the one you want).

But that's not post-materialism, even if it's post-ownership behaviour. In fact it's a harmonisation of materialism at the level of the infrastructure. Being a member of Zipcar means implicitly agreeing with thousands of other people on a collective definition of what is desirable in a car: saying that Zipcar's fleet is good enough. And, because the materialist infrastructure is so advanced, it probably is good enough. We can have access to what we desire when we need it without paying over the odds. Thanks, infrastructure.

Ownership isn't dead. Firstly, there's real risk of over-generalising the habits of the infrastructurally rich. In the rest of the world product/service networks are less reliable and less trusted, and ownership has huge and growing cachet. Bling is king in many emerging markets, and you can expect demand for pretty much every kind of manufactured good to rise explosively over the next decade. And that's not even to mention rural areas.

But secondly, even in the rich old markets, cases for ownership can still be made and made strongly (a good sign that materialism isn't going anywhere). Look at the growth of consumer electronics, a largely selfish category where having your own kit (in the latest model) confers real beneit and cachet. I'd be surprised to see iPad-sharing taking off, for example. Even in categories thoroughly colonised by sharing, such as luxury bags, there's room to build value in ownership. If I were trying to help a super-luxury handbag brand fight erosion from rental schemes, I might start by asking people about the value of heirlooms.

That's all for now. I'm blogging on an iPod, so sorry for any hideous big-fingered typos.

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This is one of those posts on the run I promised I'd try to do. I'm back in the UK for a bit now. My weekends are a bit unpredictable and will probably involve dashing hither and yon to see family and friends, but happily I'll be in the London offices of The Futures Company on workdays between Wednesday 8th and Friday 17th September, catching up with people and projects before heading out to the NY office.

One of the pleasures of all this travelling is the chance to chat without distractions to a certain other planner for eleven hours or so on long-haul flights. And yes, I'm afraid we do sometimes talk shop, which generates better thoughts and ideas than I suspect either of us would have alone.

Probably our best conversation along these lines was about the 'death of the web' idea. In particular, about the tension between still-growing web traffic and the web's loss of share of internet use. This led to a good dissection of what counted as 'web' and what didn't, with both of us querying the assertion/assumption made in the infamous Wired piece that content served in semantically-rich XML within subscriber-only platforms doesn't count as part of the web. Restricting the web to what is searchable seems rather forced, and only really serves to make sense of Wired's claim that closed networks exist as attempts to take on a Google hegemony. (By this logic, building 'walled gardens' is an act of rebellion, as well as control.)

For my money, if it has hyperlinks, is accessible over an internet connection within a browser and is reasonably device-independent (loose definition, I know), it's the web. So I see Facebook and post-paywall Times articles as absolutely a part of the web, but not Kindle eBooks or iPhone apps - though these often mirror the web or share content with it more than a little. (I'd be happy to have my definitions pushed a bit here if anyone fancies an argument.)

The 'web' vs 'rest of internet' debate is interesting but a distraction, we decided, somewhere over the Atlantic. More meaningful is the whole issue of how we discover content online and what signposts we use to get to it. By that token, search is growing, but so too are non-search-based discovery methods, especially recommendation.

Thinking about our own browsing habits and how they've developed over the last few years, we realised we both rely more and more on what we called 'nodes' to direct us to content for entertainment. We follow links from people on Facebook and Twitter, or within news websites we enjoy, or from blogs we read to ones we might like. This is the 'internet balkanisation' problem in microcosm: we like the nodes because they help us find content that resonates with us; and the more of that content we take in, the more we agree with (and like, and trust) the nodes.

On the other hand, we're the kind of people Google all day for information at work. Search, not recommendation, is our default whenever we actually need to know something.

This led us to a couple of thoughts about the current rage for social recommendation as a media tool - the deftly-placed 'three of your Facebook friends bought this t-shirt' message. We wondered about the cases where it would work best, and worst. The thought we came down to is that recommendations based on social graphs are likely to be less useful than those based on shared behaviour around well-defined nodes.

Here's a thought experiment. There are tube strikes looming in London at the moment. You normally take the District Line to work, and one day it's announced that the line will be closed. Are you more likely to take advice on an alternative route from your best friend and housemate who takes a completely different route to his office, or from a fellow commuter whom you don't really know very well but who always takes the same tube train as you, or from the underground station manager? I'd pick the manager, because alternative route planning is largely a matter of fact (and of decisions based firmly on facts). This is the equivalent of Googling something you need to know quickly. If that failed, I'd ask the fellow commuter. Only if he were unavailable would I ask my friend, probably with little confidence of getting a really savvy answer.

It seemed to us that friendship-based recommendation is inherently perilous in matters of taste as well as matters of fact. For example, I like reading, and so do some of my friends, but there are very few from whom I'd take book recommendations, because I know that our tastes differ. I probably would take a recommendation from a stranger who I knew had also bought and read a lot of the same books as I had. That's why Amazon's 'People who bought this also bought' feature would win out, for me, over a 'Your friends bought' equivalent.

Which made us wonder what the role for friendship-based recommendations in marketing is. And we thought, maybe it's for going beyond fact and detailed taste into that territory where preferences are expressed seemingly at random, as between otherwise highly commoditised brands. This got us onto a slight diversion about the extent to which people really respond in detail to all the complicated lifestyle/aspiration/etc. cues which advertisers think are built into their brand communications, and whether those cues actually function quite basically, to say to people 'this beer/car/music is/isn't for people like you', and then let word-of-mouth and social network effects between friends and peers do the rest.

Got to run again now, so will leave it at that half-developed thought. More on this later, maybe. Closing questions: how do you work out whether to recommend (and so plan digital media) based on behaviour or the social graph? How do you make use of trust in nodes, like you do trust in friends, so as to give behavioural targeting the same kind of emotionally connective kick as as friendship-based recommendation?

I'll pick this one up later...

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This blog may go a bit quiet for a little while, as I leave Cape Town (and my agency) and head for the UK (for a fortnight), France (for a week), then New York (more permanently). I'll do my best to post on the run, but we'll see.

Meanwhile, I'll leave this thought here, from Harold Love (1993) Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England:

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By the way, the stats tool on this blog has completely fallen to bits, so I have no idea whether anyone has been reading this blog for the past several months. If you do, feel free to say hello in the comments to this post (or via email or Twitter, come to that)! Especially if you blog, tweet, or otherwise insert words into the internet.

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A stray conversation brought up this thought: are people who work in marketing unusually anxious about how digital they are?

I'm using digital in all the common range of ways: technologically adept, internet savvy, well-informed concerning (especially) social media technologies. As for anxious... well, if you work in marketing, or spend time with marketing people, you know what I mean. We seem to be obsessed with how digital we are. This can either mean we become the trainspotters-cum-trendspotters of the web, endlessly going on about (what we think are) bleeding-edge internet technologies, or it can mean we make a point of how unconcerned we are with the latest fads, which can itself become a sort of self-preservation mechanism, a sign that we're aware that the rest of the industry is pretty concerned with digital fashion.

Okay, we've found ways to be smart about it. Most of us know now that 'doing some digital' or 'being on Facebook' is a recipe for rubbish. But that doesn't stop us from obsessing about the channel, rather than the stuff that goes on it, as if we were saying, quick, let's do some television. (Actually, that happens.) We know the content we make has to be good (but of course we all think the stuf we do is good)...

Though stop there. Because I've just fallen for the same old trick. By describing the web as a channel for content I'm thinking about it like a media person, like a marketer. I'm obsessing. If I were feeling a bit Nike, I might dust myself off and say, stop worrying. Just do it.

But then again, without the media hat on, I remember that the internet doesn't feel like a channel when I use it. It's not like TV or the radio, or even like telephones or the postal system. Those are all media with which I have occasional interactions. The web's different. It's just this thing that's part of life now. I know how to live online. It's not a big deal.

Sometimes when I talk to marketing people about the web, I think, can't you just give it a rest? Why don't you stop talking about content and engagement and channels and user-generated content and crowdsourcing and touchpoints? Why can't you think about the web like the rest of us do?

Why can't you just get it?

I don't turn up at your house and talk endlessly about your fixtures and fittings. I don't meet you down the pub and tell you exactly what you're wearing, down to the last detail. Because that would be weird, wouldn't it? Just like it's weird to those of us who grew up online when you come along and you obviously haven't the first clue, not how all the bits and pieces work, but how it feels to use them without thinking. You remind us of those chimps in the PG Tips ads: almost like us, but somehow not quite right, like you might topple over any moment, or do something crazy.

Honestly, it's like speaking French. I understand French grammar and have a decent vocabulary, and I can read books and newspaper articles pretty well, but I've never taken the time to live in France, or attend conversation classes, or do any of the hard work that's needed to be really, genuinely fluent. That's why I'll never be able to wander into any French bar and start a conversation with someone, even though I can ask for directions and order food.

If you haven't put in the hard work of using it a lot (for stuff other than the odd bit of Googling and office emails), you don't really understand the web. Don't assume that because you work in marketing that you understand how to be online. You'll just end up standing on street corners, shouting 'OU EST LA PISCINE?'

And if you do actually get it, if you're one of those people that cares, don't pretend you don't. Just because you work in marketing doesn't mean you have to stop being a human being and start with all the engagementy consumery channel-blather between 9 and 5. If you've been using Facebook since 2005 and Twitter since 2007, chances are you know the rules of good behaviour and interestingness, just like you know the rules for generating sentences in your native language. You can spot the online equivalent of malformed utterances just like that. Don't pretend otherwise: don't offer spurious marketing-land justifications for not pursuing web marketing ideas, if the real reason not to do it is that you know, as an ordinary web user, that they're just terrible, boring ideas.

There are no short cuts here, and there shouldn't really be any leniency. If for some reason you want to spend your time on this earth helping products and services get people's attention online, learn how to do it well. That doesn't mean swapping case studies with other marketers. It means getting the social life of the web. It is like learning a language. There are lots of people who can help and advise you and stop you going horribly wrong, but unless you take time and take an interest there's only so much they can help you. C'est la vie, as they say.

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So, Wired has decided that the web is dead, despite all the very good evidence to the contrary, and is rightly being pasted up the wall as a result. As has been pointed out (not least in the above-linked NYT piece), what the web is, now, is huge. Which is not exactly new news.

What interests me, though, and what I feel might have triggered the ill-judged Wired piece, is that the web now feels huge.

Here's what I mean. If you're as old as me in geek years (like dog years, but more curmudgeonly), and especially if you're slightly older, you'll remember that web is short for World Wide Web, and that it's an abstraction based on a common set of protocols for the transfer of files across the internet. The idea of a worldwide web was only really interesting because, before it, computer networks were distinctly tribal.

The web was for finding stuff more than it was for doing things. The environments in which we did things with computers were far more local. Even when I was an undergraduate, in the early 2000s, I logged into one machine on my university's network to read mail, another to store files and read newsgroups, and so on. If I wanted to put anything on the web, I had a place to do that: a folder on that same filestore machine which was visible to the web. If I wanted people outside the network to be able to find one of my files, it would go into that folder and become visible at http://my.network.url/~myusername. Just as importantly, there were ways of putting up content that were only visible to others on the network: local shared folders, .plan files, etc.

Now the web is our operating environment - it's where we do things, not just where we find things. One of the actions that has shifted most firmly onto the web (as opposed to the internet) in recent years is communication with other people. It's helped collapse the distinction between publishing and communicating. Twitter, Facebook and the like have mixed parentage - email and instant messaging on the one side, personal web pages and .plan files on the other - though some of the offspring can be ugly, as Google Buzz found to its cost.

The world of tribal networking gave way to the world of social networking, and in many ways this has made both publishing and communication (and their hybrids) more accessible and easier. What I've said is just the old Web 2.0 conversation, except that this conversation is normally had in terms of its impact on media. You know: power to the people, breaking down barriers, empowering consumers, consolidating personal branding, etc.; the rhetoric of the hot, flat and crowded world of the social web.

The mounting online privacy debate offers just one perspective on the downside. As tribal networking on computer networks has become social networking on the web, we have lost control over the size of our societies.

Now that we all use the same online platforms, and especially as the divisions even between these begin to dissolve through the use of persistent online identities, we feel exposed to the huge, undifferentiated vastness of the internet. This may help us iron out some of our quirks (flaming, lying on CVs, drunken pics on Facebook), but it's pretty scary. I remember when Facebook moved from being a set of networks for college students and alumni and became, in effect, a completely different entity. As it becomes increasingly co-extensive with the web, it is losing any sense of social network-ness, becoming instead a global publishing platform within which fairly strong social network effects operate: i.e., you only read the profiles and updates of people you (vaguely) know in the real world. Only the vigilance of users concerned about privacy prevents Facebook from being almost completely open now.

Now we are waking up and realising that, oh, the online world we're forced to live in is huge. We have lived through the web's small equivalent of the Highland Clearances. Now here we are, blinking in the harsh light of the third-largest country in the world.

I'm not nostalgic for the technologies of the tribal internet. (Some were good and still are; others were clunky.) Nor am I purely concerned by privacy in the strict sense. But I am aware of the lack of replacement for the cosiness of the small worlds of the internet. These small worlds could easily have been replicated on the net, but as yet they have not been.

There are a few weak signals that they may yet return. The Facebook privacy issue is one. The emergence of Diaspora, the build-it-yourself peer-to-peer social network, is another. When it launched, it was touted as a possible Facebook killer, then slammed because of the need to set it up and maintain it yourself. In fact, I think the time and effort required to set up a Diaspora node will make it more appealing to those that want to recapture some smallness, localness and plurality in their web-based interactions.

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When the BBC News website links to a story titled the lexicography of Starbucks, how can I say no? Even better is that it's actually pretty good, asking some of the right people the right questions about the ways brands try to insert their own language into the world. (BBC News, by the way, has some of the best popular coverage of language and lexicography topics. Thanks to Jesse Sheidlower for pointing me to this piece on the inclusion of vuvuzela in the Oxford Dictionary of English.)

The core of the story - about an English professor and a coffee-shop worker who basically started fighting in a Starbucks over the former's refusal to say something unimportant about wanting no butter on a bagel - is, as the Beeb says, 'bafflingly trivial'. But the quotes from the experts genuinely have the rare ring of thoughtfulness about them, especially this one from Susie Dent:

It is every company's dream to get their language out there and being used - it's linguistic product placement

And this from Jonathan Gabay (which itself borrows beautifully from Little Britain, of course):

The problem is when it's too heavy-handed and and the staff are effectively saying, 'Computer says no.' Marketing is ultimately about communication and some of these companies need to put down the guide books and remember that.

So why am I writing about this, except just because? Because I disagree a bit with the final thought of the piece, from Tony Thorne:

"Some of this stuff is ludicrous in its complexity," he says. "They're not trying to turn us into food snobs - it's simply about imposing their brand values. "It's intended to bamboozle and intimidate. I see it as a form of corporate bullying."

There's a slight confusion here between what brand lexicons intend to do and what they end up doing. Given my background I'm probably hypersensitive to this sort of distinction, but still. Popular thought about PR has been bound up for a long time with popular thought about language use. The classic caricature of the PR industry (never better portrayed than in Absolute Power) is of the slick operators of language, compelling people to use new, euphemistic words in place of old, damaging ones. This is all based on the popular version of George Lakoff's theory of conceptual metaphor: the idea that if you change the words people speak, you change the thoughts they think. If you want to see why its application to political and public communications is flawed, read Stephen Pinker's devastating knock-down of Lakoff's book Whose Freedom.

The point is that brands themselves are not the smooth arch-operators of language. They're often at the mercy of their own words and phrases. When you work every day inside any organisational environment, it gets hard to remember that the people you're marketing to don't see the world like you see it. They may not share your unbridled enthusiasm for your new bottle-tops, your catalytic converter technology or your fifteen different types of cappuccino. The public lexicography of brands is often an overspill of that internal enthusiasm, based on the belief that your customers not only want to talk to you, they want to talk like you.

The language isn't 'intended to bamboozle and humiliate', or even to impose 'brand values'. Most of the time it's just trying to communicate those values, which often come down to little more than the enthusiasm of people who spend all day thinking about coffee (or whatever). Sometimes it's more deliberate, an attempt to convey something of the spirit of the brand that, to the people inside, seems to justify that enthusiasm. ('Hey, we don't feel like menial workers, we feel like baristas!') The problem is not arch-cunning, but forgetfulness. The users of these lexicons forget what it's like to be a normal person, with only a brief and fleeting connection to a brand; to have no desire to speak its language at all. It's a kind of accident, like when you show your friends too many of your holiday photos.

Far better are those brands who don't need a complicated lexicon to talk to people, because they remember how ordinary people actually talk, and find their way of fitting quite naturally into those conversations.

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I've spent the last two weeks exploring some parts of South Africa I wanted to see before leaving for New York at the end of this month. One of those was the Kruger National Park (which is, fantastically, the size of Wales).

Aside from suddenly feeling like a tourist again in the country I've lived in for the last year, the thing that struck me, as we drove around the park looking for animal sightings, was the way in which digital cameras have changed the way in which people's holiday snaps are boring.

In the age of print and slide, holiday snaps were dull because they were staged. When you only had 12, 24 or 36 shots on a roll of 35mm film, you chose your moments, so all of your shots were of you standing in front of things, or with people you met. There you were, frozen in time and usually frozen in position, near something that might be an elephant.

Now that photographs are not limited to rolls, they are rolling - a semi-continuous record of holiday activity, like a dotted line between the states occupied by instant cameras (pull face, check hair, throw away) and film cameras (pose, smile, snap, print, mount, review). Taking photos of events is increasingly a default behaviour, and I'm not convinced we post-edit as much as we pretend we do, now that disk space is plentiful and cheap. That's why your holiday snaps are boring now: because there are hundreds of them.

Early one morning in the Kruger, a lion ran out in front of our car, across the road, and back into the bush. It took ten seconds at most, and between braking, oohing and aahing we didn't have time to reach for the camera before it was gone.

There are no blurry shots of hide or mane; no tail disappearing into the trees. It's just a story.

It made me think: is the value of unsubstantiated stories increasing? Is there now something special about events and experiences that slip through the tightening net of recording media?

Look at a lot of this year's Cannes Lions winners and you'll see media activations that were designed to be amplified through media and talked about far beyond the places where they happened. Think Kit Kat Chairs, Gatorade Replay, and T-Mobile Singalong. These are brilliant experiential marketing ideas that are only allowed to happen because they provide content for mass-reach advertising (often quite cheaply through social media).

Most media budgets won't allow for small-scale creative work that only reaches a few people, understandably. Some braver marketers invest in staging events in the knowledge that photos and videos will be captured and shared, though increasingly there's demand for a 'helping hand' from activation and digital agencies to ensure they get reach, which smacks of lack of confidence.

I never hear of creative activations which are designed only to survive as an urban legend. Which could mean they don't work, or could mean they aren't tried. Where could you do them? In a remote rural community? In a library? Underground? Wherever personal and social media aren't these days. They would be risky, but they would be special.

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I wrote the other day about physically realistic interfaces and the dissatisfaction with signals and screens. I then followed that up with some off-the-cuff nonsense about modems.

My sense for fashion, design and craft leaves a lot to be desired, but I know people who know, as it were, and I'm noticing an expansion of the obsession material craft that characterises fashion, design and craft blogs. Look at WishWishWish, A Dress A Day, Designs and Wonders (disclosure: written by my wife), Conversation Pieces and the like. They're not just about designed objects, they're about the craft and the detail that goes into them. That can make them feel retro, but what they really are is materialist in the good sense of the word: obsessed with the kind of details and peculiarities that mass production often omits.

What's really interesting is that this good materialism extends to the blogs themselves, many of which are designed to look as 'made' as possible. WishWishWish, for example, clearly puts all its photographs through Poladroid or a similar image post-processor, to give them that old-fashioned, hand-developed feel. That pre-digital feel, I should say. It's a way of encoding a form of nostalgia for the harder craft of pre-digital production processes.

This jumps out at me because I'm seeing the same trend extending into the ways planners make presentations. Have a look on Slideshare and see how many decks you find that use images of old books, signs, posters, tapestries, paintwork, metalwork, and other residues of craftsmanship. Is this the first stirrings of a request that those of us who make our living designing and building digital products be treated, and be allowed to feel, like we're making things?

And, since it would be rude to talk about the party without going, here's a photo of me, on a boat in Cape Town harbour, run through Poladroid.