Alex Steer

617 words | ~3 min

Just seen the new T-Mobile giant participatory public-spacey follow-up-to-the-flash-dance-and-karaoke thing, which apparently ran across 80 TV channels simultaneously on Friday night.

To be honest, it's a bit like being hit by a truck.

Granted, it's impressive for sheer scale. The impact of it depends on knowing, as Campaign tells it, that:

An estimated 35,000 passengers coming through arrivals today [Wednesday 27th October] are being greeted by a crowd of around 300 people who are bursting into synchronised song and dance.

If you're there, aside from the minor coronary you might get from strangers running towards you shouting in a high-security environment like an airport, the effect is probably gobsmacking. (And yet, at the same time, probably a bit cringeworthy. One of the striking things about watching the spot is that you can feel people's embarrassment.)

For the rest of us, though, the impressiveness comes from being in on the secret (not that's it's a secret): believing that this is a form of highly-staged guerrilla improv - that not everybody on the screen knows what's going on. That, for all the slick editing, it's basically all real.

Because otherwise, really, it's just a big-budget ad. If all those people pulling their oh-my-goodness faces were performers too, it would lose both its charm and the sense that this was a massive event that took over a patch of the real world. We're asked to believe in the story behind the ad, in order for the ad to have maximum impact on us - the vast majority of people, who see the events on a screen, not in an airport.

But the media strategy kills that a bit for me. Putting it on 80 channels at once does not say, 'T-Mobile has made a moment of real-life magic so interesting and wonderful that you'll want to pass it on.' It says, 'T-Mobile has made an ad so massive that everything has to stop while you all sit back and appreciate it.'

Bang. Truck. Ouch.

I've grumbled a few times on this blog (I think) about the dark side to the kind of 'activation ads' that swept up the ad awards this year. Which is that, as well as obviously being great for their ability to generate empathetic delight (from viewers, for participants), they've become a vehicle for shock-and-awe advertising spending. Now that anybody can broadcast (cheers, YouTube), big activations are a handy new way to say 'I'm massive, you're tiny'. Can you build a giant treehouse? Can you bring the sun to some eskimos? Can you run through Heathrow singing at strangers without being shot? Thought not.

Oh, and can you block-book 80 TV channels at prime time? T-Mobile demonstrates that it is considerably richer than yow.

I'm deliberately over-reacting here, but I really don't like it. It's impressive, it's creatively very nice, but it feels bullying too, and precisely at a time when a lot of people are looking at their personal finances and have never felt smaller. It takes the feel-good edge off it for me.

Just think about what you could do with a 'Life's for Sharing' creative platform and a media budget of that size, in a country bracing for a huge contraction in civil society. Barclays, of all the brands, managed to come up with the London cycle sharing scheme. Imagine what T-Mobile, with huge resources and a nationwide mobile communications and data field, could make happen.

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Whatever you do, don't read my Delicious links. It's just a massive pile of stuff I think is interesting and I might need again. It's like reading the source code to my brain.

Yes, Delicious. And pretty much all the links are culled from Google Reader (thanks to the really handy Delicious extension in Chrome). Two technologies that were the Shiny New Thing a handful of years ago, and that people in the know now seem to have decided are dead. RSS and social bookmarking. I'm so 2006.

And they are brilliant. Brilliant because I don't feel I have to bother obeying any protocol. I rarely add notes, and I never tag or star items. I just use Reader to skim through over a hundred RSS feeds, really fast, and throw anything I want to keep onto Delicious. Retrieving it relies mainly on my own memory and my ability to use the simple search form.

In other words, it's exactly like my desk. Untidy, but useful, and mine. My disordered desk only makes sense to me. My mind happens to be quite ordered, which means I can find stuff in all the heaps of paper and scribbly writing.

Delicious now is the best version of the semantic web. Underpinned by strong semantic organization, but searchable (and therefore mess-about-with-able) on the surface.

I'd love to be able to shuffle my Delicious links around like notes on a desktop. Even things that emulate desktops (like Windows) never really feel mess-about-with-able. They feel rubbish for notes and work in progress - like you have to finish everything off so you can file it away neatly. I want an operating layer where I can leave stuff lying around, doodle on it, then either file it or throw it away.

In other words, I want a version of a filesystem that only really makes sense to me, with the upside being that it's completely intuitive. Hmm.

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Since moving to the US, I have learned a very important lesson, thanks to advertising. Which is that everything is massively, unbelievably important. Every issue, every previously trivial-seeming purchase decision, every household chore is effectively a matter of life and death. Pick the wrong shampoo, insurance policy or generic family car and you might as well shave your head, take up professional shark-punching and sell the kids into the slave trade.

So I think most of the ads here are ludicrously over the top. I started wondering if it was just a cultural difference - whether British (or for that matter South African) ads would just seem ridiculously round-the-houses and unclear here. Or whether this is a shift brought on by the recession, forcing marketers to reframe and reinforce their value propositions at a time of mass reconsideration by people about what's worth spending their dwindling spare cash on. There may some truth in both options.

But now I'm wondering whether advertising, on the whole, just lacks a sense of the trivial.

An essay on creative direction by Luke Sullivan, which I read today, used a phrase that will always remind me of someone I learned a lot about this industry from (because he used it a lot too). 'It's only advertising.' It struck me again how few pieces of maketing communication seem to have that sense of proportion.

For all that we'll tell you that the best brands are the most idealistic ones, or that engagement is all about rallying people around a big idea, in a lot of cases there's something a bit daft about the upshot of this: campaigns which try to make you feel like you're joining a social movement or extending the bounds of liberal democracy every time you choose a tin of beans. This may be good for the consciences of those of us that spend too much time with brands, but it stretches credibility a bit.

All this hard sell feels particularly wrong these days, because many of the most vibrant parts of popular culture, and especially Internet culture, thrive on the idea of not taking things too seriously. From Wikipedia to lolcats to #iranelection to blogging, the internet is the domain of the part-time project, the after-work spare-time pursuit, the collection of amateur enthusiasts making something great, taking it at once very seriously and not seriously at all. Wikipedia was built in people's spare time.

The kind of things we used to do in sheds, we now do on the web. Andrew Keen called it The Cult of the Amateur, and meant it in a bad way. I mean it in a good way.

The light touch of amateurism is one of the best things in the world. The combination of obsession and lack of seriousness is charming and powerful - the fact that we can spend so much time and energy on something, yet recognise that it's a bit trivial. Contrast that with so much advertising in which things are treated like the Holy Grail, and the ads end up sounding like the guy in the pub who never stops talking about work. (Again, irony noted.)

So maybe we need to tread carefully before we launch another 'massive idealistic movement brand' on the world. Maybe we fewer Brands With Causes, and more Brands With Hobbies.

In the words of every ad made in the last three years: What do you think?

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For whatever reason, today I found myself looking at this selection of corporate websites from 1996. That was the year I first learned HTML, so it's a bit of a trip down memory lane for me, as well as a chance to laugh at some howlingly poor design.

But as I looked, I realised something. These sites were thrown up in the days when digital marketing just didn't exist as any kind of discipline; when someone in the IT or marketing department with a bit of spare time and some basic image editing software would be tasked with chucking something onto the web server to stop it being empty. When there was, from the looks of it, very little oversight of what was being done.

And you know what? When you ignore the design, they're pretty good.

Have a look. Check out McDonalds, for example. The copy on the site reads:

Just click on the adults or kids to your right to enter our site as a grown-up or a child. Have fun! If you're interested in the fine print, now is an opportunity to check it out.

In other words, the kind of 'chatty packaging' tone that corporations now pay tone-of-voice consultants large amounts of money to reproduce.

Coke's weird little history lesson? Brand stories and heritage. Nickelodeon's 'Backseat Traveling Show'? A high-engagement microsite. Best Buy's extended holiday hours and terrifying animated pig? Brand utility and viral content.

Enough to reinforce the point I've long suspected. When someone asks you to 'deliver best practice in digital engagement', or whatever, what they're really saying is, please make your website feel like it was put there by a thinking, feeling, intelligent human being with a sense of humour and the ability to talk to people normally.

And from the evidence, maybe the way to start is to give your digital channels the kind of breathing space websites enjoyed back in 1996. Even if that does mean the odd animated GIF.

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Starbucks and L'Oreal are, apparently, trialling a new location-based mobile marketing service with O2.

What this means, in human-speak, is that if you've told O2 you're interested in, say, food and drink, whenever you walk past a Starbucks you'll get an SMS or MMS on your phone telling you you can get coffee there (in case you don't know what a Starbucks is, presumably), and maybe offering a discount coupon. As BrandRepublic explains:

When opted-in O2 More customers are enter a geo-fenced area 'owned' by Starbucks, and they have registered an interest in food and drink, they will receive an SMS offering them money off at a nearby branch of Starbucks[...] O2 said that such a service does not infringe its customers' privacy because it is opt-in and they make the opportunity to opt out obvious for them. It does not send spam, only messages that are relevant to the customers' registered interests.

Okay, so technically not spam, by this agreed definition, since you have to sign up for O2 More, O2's direct marketing channel.

But it's a Faustian version of spam: the kind of thing that's easy to agree to when you sign up. The kind that, I'll bet, feels like you're being spammed every time you walk past a Starbucks and your phone starts beeping.

Push messaging is at once one of the most intrusive and one of the most disappointing channels. Not only does it come without warning, it comes disguised as something you might really care about, in the form of a beep on your handset, the sort of thing that more normally signifies a message from a friend. I'm not sure any coupon can make up for that.

And, of course, geo-fencing may not always be so responsibly gatekept. The technology exists, and is presumably more cost-effective the less discerningly it is used (though I could be wrong - any experts on the economics of mobile reading this?).

So could we be entering an age of frontier spambulation, where every trip down the high street is punctuated with exploding offers in your pocket?

I really, really hope not. Especially because the idea of a share of the world's air being 'owned' by a retail chain, though already one of the tenets of private property, somehow seems more obnoxious when that air is being used to hurl cheap marketing messages through.

File it under, 'Just because you can, doesn't mean you should'.

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This barely counts as a thought, let alone a point of view, but anyway.

I was reading this, and I thought: what is it with medieval literature and modern internet culture?

As I've no doubt mentioned here before, like lots of planners I came wandering into planning from somewhere far away. My somewhere far away was medieval and early modern historical bibliography. I wrote an MPhil thesis on it, I used to teach it, and I used to do it professionally (as a surprisingly large part of my lexicographical duties). So I can probably talk about medieval literary practice for even longer than I can talk about advertising, and almost as long as I can talk about the history of the English language. All of which makes me the worst person to be sat next to at a dinner party. I can read medieval handwriting, I can do a half-decent physical description of a manuscript, I know more than is quite proper about vernacular miscellanies of the late thirteenth century, and I honestly never thought it would be of the slightest use to me once I moved away from that world in 2008 and went into strategic planning.

Wrong.

Because it turns out that the two things bibliographically-minded medievalists have to know about are two of the things that modern internet culture is learning about all over again: the relationship between form and content in communications, and the synthesis, transmission and reception of ideas in culture.

So I'll see your 'is Facebook eroding privacy?', and raise you a 'did print destroy intimate social networks of communication?'. Give me your retweets, and I'll give you Thomas More's Confutation of Tyndale's Answer (look it up, it's brilliant, like reading an email with too many layers of quoted text).

If you want to talk about the social life of media, find a historical bibliographer. I've worked out what this post is. It's a plea to people who teach what now normally gets called 'history of the book' to use the debates we're having now about communication to get people into their field. And it's a plea to any agency or organisation who cares about communications media to seek out the people who know a bit about its past. You'll find them in the library, thumbing through Pollard and Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue and muttering about signature numbering.

If they're anything like me, they might not have realised how interesting the future of the book is too.

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This piece in the San Francisco Business Times is extraordinary. It interviews the MD of Landor San Francisco on the subject of Gap's much-maligned new logo.

Soundbiting is always unfair, so do read the whole piece. Particularly because I suspect the fault may lie in selective quotation. But even so...

Reeser doesn't think that Gap's new logo deserved the tarring and feathering it got on Facebook, Twitter and virtually everywhere else. "I think there has been way too much made of this. I think this is an overreaction to social media sites and networks," Reeser said. "Once you start letting the general public tell you which way to go in a situation like that, where does it stop? And I'm sure the general public is not sure of Gap's longer-range strategic plans" and how the new logo fits with those.

And then there's this, though it's not direct speech:

Reeser worries Gap has set a dangerous precedent of companies reacting to mob opinion rather than committing to a well-thought-out, long-range brand strategy even if it is not at first very popular or well-understood.

In fairness, the advice gets a bit better, which leads me to suspect some selective quoting may be going on.

There is a lesson to be learned here that if you are going to make a dramatic change, and Gap's logo to my mind is a farily dramatic change... I think some type of advance warning and a story behind it could help.

But in essence, the way this article puts it, the lesson for brands is that you shouldn't really bother listening to all those stupid people out there on the internets with their worthless loony opinions about whether or not your logo is rubbish. Just crack on with your long-term strategic plan and ignore them and eventually they'll catch up to your vision. You're basically Galileo. One day they'll all understand. Cretins.

Of course, there might be a teeny tiny dissenting opinion to this obviously brilliant strategic counsel. One which says that if people talk about your new logo enough to make it trend on Twitter, and create spoof Twitter accounts for it, and build a DIY crap logo generator, and generate hundreds of thousands of words about you online, you might want to take them as seriously as they obviously take you. Yes, a lot of them seem to just want to batter you online, but you might want to find out why.

And lo, Gap is backtracking furiously and keeping the old logo. This will inevitably spark the 'was it a PR stunt?' discussion that always comes up when this sort of thing happens. My bet is that no, it wasn't. I think it's what happens when you assume you can do strategy in a vacuum.

Quick clarification/disclaimer: I work for WPP, and Landor is a WPP company. I've no idea who does Gap's branding and design (apart from Gap themselves, obviously). This is just my personal opinion, as always.

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So, I've now landed in New York, picked myself up and rearranged the furniture. I've also, happily, started at my new place of work. All of which means my several weeks of nomadism are over and I really should get back to writing here again now that I have a reliable internet connection to play with. (Which, by the way, feels astonishingly fast after a year of variable-speed South African broadband. No wonder so many digital strategies feel so impossibly grand. Who knew it was this quick? I'd quite forgotten.)

I've been thinking about South Africa again today, though, and over the last couple of weeks on and off, as part of an interesting series of chats with various smart people on the subject of consumer research, and especially international consumer research. Yes, interesting consumer research. Really. Don't stop reading.

Still here? Good. This is the bit where I remind you that selling anything (products, ideas, political movements, etc.) is a lot easier if you understand what's interesting to the people you're trying to sell to, and that a good way to do this is to understand what they're doing and feeling, and listen to what they're saying. Unlike the physics of jet propulsion, this is not rocket science. Unlike being hit by a rocket, it's not surprising, either.

But it's surprisingly easy to assume that understanding comes as a result of collecting the answers to lots of questions. So, if you make chocolate bars and you want to sell more chocolate bars in China, you might ask lots of Chinese people what they like and don't like about chocolate, how often they shop and how much spare change they have in their pockets, how concerned they are about their teeth rotting, etc. And voila, suddenly you have all the answers you need to develop your low-cost extra-cocoa sugar-free chocolate bar on the public and brief your ad agency to do a big brand campaign and some point-of-stale stuff to drive foot traffic in petrol stations and hypermarkets. Job done; thank you, consumer research.

And then the international cocoa trade collapses, and a set of draconian anti-snacking laws are passed, and peak oil shuts the petrol stations, and you've gone from Green and Blacks to black and blue.

Or, failing that rather drastic scenario, your target consumers don't change their opinions, and the macro-scale context of chocolate-bar making doesn't alter overnight. But you launch your chocolate bar, and after the launch the sales growth is a bit disappointing. You lie awake at night wondering why your bar isn't doing as well as its equivalents in the US and Great Britain. And only after a while do you notice that there's been a long-term shift, and most of China's spending power is not in the hands of the chocolate-loving old guard but in the wallets of a new generation of bubblegum-chewers who have no historical reason to find mashed-up cocoa beans interesting at all.

You realise that you either asked the wrong questions, or you asked the wrong people.

Which brings me back round to South Africa, a country where a lot of market research has started to learn that it's been asking the wrong people for much of the last ten years.

Marketers being pretty on the ball, they noticed in the mid to late 1980s that share of national spending power was gradually shifting away from rich urban white people. They identified a new segment of young, well-off black (and coloured, in the Western Cape) people whose interests and attitudes in the marketplace were different from those of the traditional consumer base. This piece from Time, back in 1988, was one of the earler pieces of international coverage of what came to be known as the 'Black Diamond' segment - young, black, upwardly-mobile, and a huge business opportunity.

Fast forward to the present and the black diamonds are ubiquitous in marketing. Cars, financial services, premium beer, you name it - pick a mainstream consumer category and you'll find ads full of aspirational young black men and women doing whatever young aspirational people do in ads. (Standing in posh bars laughing politely, mostly, or wearing suits.) In twenty years South Africa has moved from the point where no brands targeted the new black middle class to one where so many do that it's often hard to tell their ads apart. It's almost, but not quite, become an industry gag.

But here's the problem. While brands are still doing research, developing products and commissioning campaigns to target black diamond consumers, this is a story about South Africa that's twenty years old. That doesn't make it untrue or irrelevant. It's just incomplete. To put it very crudely, the story still goes that South Africa has shifted from having one major consumer segment ('rich whites') to having two ('rich whites', 'black diamonds'). A lot of consumer segmentations you see in South Africa still have this as their underlying logic, surprisingly. 'Black Diamond' is also pretty much the only story about the post-apartheid consumer landscape that's known outside South Africa, so it tends to be used as a lens for analysis whenever South Africa is compared with other emerging markets such as the BRICs.

In other words, a lot of consumer research is asking yesterday's questions, designed for yesterday's people. In South Africa now, the really interesting story is not the emergence of the small 'black diamond' segment, but the emergence of the mass market - the huge middle-income consumer base of black and coloured people who are well on their way to controlling the bulk of day-to-day purchasing power in the country, and whose circumstances, attitudes and behaviours make them very different from either traditional consumers or the fabulous but few black diamonds. Brands and marketers are rushing to catch up with this new market that's emerging within their own country. Most international research, which typically does like-for-like comparison of consumers in different markets, is still missing the existence of mass-market groups like this in many different countries, by assuming that below certain income thresholds one doesn't count as a 'consumer'. Brands' scramble for South Africa's new consumers is evidence that the 'global middle class' does not consist of a few hundred thousand newly-wealthy Indians or Nigerians, but of hundreds of millions of people coming in their wake, and bringing their money, votes and preferences with them to the marketplace.

Surprise.

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There's a good short piece in by Ratan Malli in this month's Admap (subscription required). Called 'Passive Chinese', the gist of it is that 'Chinese consumers are brand-loyal because they are reluctant to try something new, not because they actively love the incumbents'.

The article runs through some of the reasons for this, most of which boil down to reassurance. China is the land of dodgy brands. For years this has been a bit of a badge of pride: there's even a fake brand mall in Nanjing, apparently. But Chinese shoppers are starting to get nervous about the downside of the laissez-faire approach to product safety, what with the melamine-contaminated baby milk deaths and the Sprite mercury poisoning affair. So big, established brands represent a lower risk of you turning green and keeling over.

I have two slight queries about the article. The first is that it implies a sort of Chinese exceptionalism, comparing China to Taiwan, Korea and Japan. For the region, I think it's right, but the explosive growth of consumerism happening in China is better compared with what's happening in Africa right now, not with China's better-developed neighbours. The analysis rings true for a lot of African countries, where freewheeling consumerism and the relative novelty of packaged goods is also leading to worries about safety. Big brands benefit because they represent marks of trustworthiness, but that means they have to work hard to make sure their products are consistently high-quality and to combat the booming market for fake branded goods. If you're a brand trading in the South African mass market, for example, the anti-illicit drive is not just about protecting intellectual property, it's about stopping fake products from killing people in your name.

The other slight query is with the assumption that the natural driver of brand loyalty is love. ('Chinese consumers are brand-loyal because they are reluctant to try something new, not because they actively love the incumbents.') I'm a bit sceptical about this implication in an otherwise great piece. Brand love, let's be honest, is a slightly unnatural state compared to brand trust. The kind of lifestyle identification (etc.) that forms the basis of 'love' for brands only really means anything when your potential customers are safe and secure enough that they can devote time to wondering which brand of bathroom cleaner says most about them as a person. For markets where most consumers are a fair way down Maslow's hierarchy, the idea of actively loving a brand can seem a bit far-fetched.

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On the tube (underground, not television) last night, I saw the print version of this:

Yes, Brita water filters are now, at last, available in five colours. And you can go to their website and vote for your favourite.

Let me stop you there, Brita.

You have obviously been told by someone that consumers (which is what people in marketing call people) are desperate to interact with brands. You may have been pointed towards successful examples of fun promotions which make use of a voting mechanic, such as Walkers' rather brilliant Do Us A Flavour campaign from a couple of years back. This has presumably led you to the inescapable conclusion that everyone is going to have a point of view on the colours of your water filters, and will be so glad of the opportunity to make their preference known to the world. That's how you generate brand love, isn't it?

And who knows, maybe you're planning to showcase the winner in some sort of ad campaign, maybe with glowing testimonials from its superfans. That way you'd have ticked the box for 'user-generated content' too.

What may have escaped your notice, though, is that you sell water filters.

Water filters, for heaven's sake. It's hard enough to believe that anyone would really bother voting for their favourite-coloured water filter if they happened to stumble across the website. The idea that someone would feel strongly enough that they would see a billboard ad, make a mental note of the website, and sit down at the end of the day to exercise their democratic right to choose purple over orange is... stupid.

If you want to do market research, hire a market research firm, and if you want to advertise, advertise. Don't crash the two together under the spurious banner of consumer engagement. I can't imagine how much that must have cost to produce such a boring, insulting campaign. (Effectively, the message is, 'You will vote for anything; vote for this'.) A similar budget could, one imagines, have brought to life an interesting, creative campaign that would have stuck in people's minds, rather than a feeble lead-generating promo like this. And if you don't think you can be creative with the idea of 'our products come in different colours', I refer you to Dulux's Colours That Go campaign.

Brita's not the only offender in the 'rubbish consumer engagement' category. Pantene is playing the user-generated content game at the moment with its Make A Swisssh campaign, where you can show how much you love the Pantene brand by, erm, uploading photos of yourself... swishing your hair around...

Listen, Pantene, and every other marketer out there who thinks we're all desperate to get involved in the creation of branded content. We have jobs, and lives, and limited time, and we do those jobs to earn money, and in our limited time we go out to shops and hand over money for your products.

Do not expect that we will fall over ourselves to make your ads for you as well.

Unless, of course, the experience is exceptionally rewarding. It's No Picnic was brilliant because the basic concept was hilarious, and people got the chance to end up on TV. This isn't: it's just a feeble and slightly demeaning prize draw.

Put some effort in. Make your own ads. And make them good.