Alex Steer

542 words | ~3 min

It's December, which means everyone in the advertising, marketing and technology world is publishing lists of '2013 trends and predictions'. These vary, as usual, from the insightful to the deeply suspect.

Instead of adding to the pile (yet), I've decided to start making a list of all these lists, with the aim of doing a bit of a meta-analysis later on. If you know of any others, leave a comment or email me and I'll add it.

So, in no particular order:

• Millward Brown
• Landor
• The Futures Company
• Contagious
• PSFK
• Fast Company (tech)
• Fast Company (digital services)
• Trendwatching
• JWT
• Mashable
• Branding Strategy Insider
• Hootsuite (via, you guessed it, Fast Company)
• Digitas
• Acquisio
• Sense Networks
• Business Zone
• Content Marketing Institute
• HubSpot
• ExactTarget
• B2B Marketing Insider
• Gartner
• Social Media Today (several lists in one)
• IDG Connect
• ReadWrite

318 words | ~2 min

Just seen this for the first time. This is the US version (same creative, different voiceover artist):

I love the opening line - we're the people with the smile on the box - and the thought behind it. It's got a charm and humility that throws you, and changes how you feel about a corporation that most of us think of as giant and reliable mail-order service - from ubiquitous to familiar.

Sadly, what I love less is the thought that they've chosen to govern the whole ad: We're reinventing normal, again.

See, if you're going up against Apple, don't do what they did.

But worse, it's a tone that even Apple shouldn't have taken, the first time round. It said: we're massive, everything we do is epic, and all our new products are ipso facto revolutionary.

In other words, all the things we secretly suspect Apple thinks about itself. The brand's worst side.

The switch in the Amazon ad takes us from the best side of the brand to the worst side of pretty much every big company, and the worst side of advertising. It's pushy, arrogant and entitled. Here's a new thing, it says. We expect you to respect it.

Go with the first thought, Amazon. It's the best by a mile.

If you needed proof, here's the Post Office's new spot. It's a bit weepy and worthy, but the thought - part of everyone's story - is a cracker.

577 words | ~3 min

Today I remembered something I'd forgotten about the early years of Facebook. The rule that status updates had to start with the word 'is'.

This was phased out in November 2007, around the time that Facebook reached 50 million users. It was a huge win for thousands of users who had signed petitions to ditch the verb, and who (rightly) saw it as unnecessarily restrictive, a hanger-on from an early assumption that statuses were for broadcasting where you were, or what you were doing. Rather than, say, your thoughts or feelings. (Is it a cheap shot to make a joke about the inner lives of software engineers? Probably.)

I'd forgotten all about it. And when I remembered, I did a quick bit of calculating. Facebook has 955 million users (FB stats, 30 Sept 2012). That means that 95% of Facebook users don't remember the 'is'.

That means they were never burdened with the 'is' constraint. But it also means they don't remember the bizarre sub-genre of deliberately grammatically mangled status updates that it spawned. The Wired post nodded to this at the time:

Many people ignore it, choosing instead to commit grammatical atrocities such as "Sarah is likes to dance."

That's a rather tame example. There was some rare brilliance there - from 'James is pub' to 'Jenny is WHY DISTRICT LINE WHY???' The is-busting was deliberate and perverse and gleeful. Like putting stupid things in your 'Interests' and 'Political Beliefs' (before Facebook made it harder to enter free text in these fields), it was a way of playing with the conventions of the platform.

In that sense the loss of the 'is' feels like a slight shame, because it destroyed a kind of creativity that thrived under the constraint. But then, that's the same argument that turns minority cultures into museum pieces, or that insists that dying languages should be kept on life-support. So do I wish we still had to start our status updates with 'is'? No, but I think we need a better way of recording some of these fleeting online social phenomena - given that by definition digital activity should be recordable. Just as field linguistics has arisen in response to the need to keep records of dying languages and their stores of knowledge and cultural practice, without insisting that we should all still be speaking those languages, so it's worth having a way of capturing these behaviours before we move on, without insisting that we don't move on.

There's more to say on this, but the tricky part is finding the resources and will to do it. The actors involved in studying and responding to trends as they emerge (businesses, creatives, etc.) are not the same as the ones needed to step in as they decline (historians, archivists, anthropologists). And the incentives are, of course, very different. You'd struggle to make a living advising people on dying trends - or telling them to keep everything in case it comes in useful one day. But since I suspect the need for long-term storage is going to become a sore point in the adoption of big data technology, the relationship between innovation and archiving is going to need to be worked out.

385 words | ~2 min

I enjoyed this from Dave Trott on lateral thinking, but it shows the dangers of getting your sums wrong when you're trying to prove the effectiveness of advertising.

The post tells the story of how Play-Doh went from being a generic wallpaper-cleaning putty to a branded children's toy. It signs off (my emphasis):

In the years since, Play-Doh has sold over 2 BILLION cans. Even now, every year it sells 100 million cans in 75 countries. The original wallpaper-cleaning putty sold for 34 cents a can. Marketed as Play-Doh, the virtually identical product sells for $1.50 a can. That’s an extra $1.16 a can (a 300% increase) that can’t be attributed to anything but marketing and advertising

Yep. Except inflation, of course.

There's a good historical price inflation calculator here. Play-Doh went on sale under that name in 1956 - the latest possible date (and the most generous) to which we can assign the 34 cents price for the wallpaper putty.

If a can of wallpaper putty cost 34 cents in 1956, then we'd expect the equivalent product to cost around $2.70 today. If Play-Doh sells for $1.50 a can (actually a bit less, as three tubs cost $2.99 on Hasbro's website), then it's lost about 44% of its value.

That's not a surprise if you think about it. Wallpaper-cleaning putty was a much-needed household product, and Play-Doh is an inexpensive children's toy. Admittedly, you could be more optimistic about the value of Play-Doh if you added up all the sales of the product in the years since we all stopped needing wallpaper-cleaning putty. In that sense the brand has probably netted its makers millions - but then you'd have to compare that to sales of other children's modelling clay brands, and ideally make sure you were comparing like for like in terms of output, distribution, and other thrilling things like that.

Once you've done that, it's probably still worth a ton of money as a brand. But demonstrating that means proving it to non-believers (finance people, not ad-men), and that means getting your sums right.

Maths, eh?

928 words | ~5 min

This might get a little bit technical. But hopefully not too much.

If you work anywhere near software developers or digital project managers you'll know about agile projects, and the Agile Manifesto that underlies this way of working. If not, in essence it defines a way of working designed to make projects less slow, unwieldy and painful. It values:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

Good things, I tend to think. Except the last one.

Okay, controversy time. I make plans for a living. I try to make them as painless as possible for the people who have to work with them. That's why I think good plans need to be single-minded and minimally complex. I won't say 'short'. Sometimes they're long. But they should be as short as possible.

I also work in an agile environment, and I'm learning a whole new set of ways of talking about projects - as are many planners, now that planning is increasingly happening in technology companies as well as communications agencies and marketing departments. For those interested in some of the implications of agile environments on the job of planning advertising, I recommend Neil Perkin's presentations on the subject - first this, then these. The single most important point (for me) in all of it is the idea that advertisers shouldn't be too hung up on structures, roles and processes, and that planners should pitch in whenever they can be helpful. Which in turn just suggests to me that you should hire smart, quick-thinking, adaptable people. (Though I can't really imagine anyone ever advocating the opposite.)

But in the terms of the Agile Manifesto, planners don't really have a place on the project team - because agile teams value responding to change over following a plan.

So at risk of heresy, here's why I think this part of the Manifesto is a bad thing.

When you establish a culture that sees following a plan as a bad thing, you damage that culture's ability to respond to change in an effective, considered manner. What matters to that culture is the speed and vitality of the response - not its quality. And when you do that, you end up with the continuous iteration of rubbish. Yes, you produce lots of rubbish, with an air-punching sense of urgency and at breakneck speed - but it's still rubbish.

Privileging iteration over quality means you lose all the other stuff that the Agile Manifesto values.  Individuals don't want to interact with what you make. What you make doesn't work. And you can't collaborate with your customers because you won't have any.

Following a plan is not the opposite of responding to change. Plan-making is a response to change, and good plans let you assess the quality of your responses too, by defining how you will know if you're on the right track.

What the Agile Manifesto really tells us is that plans need to start with objectives, people and capabilities. What do you want to do? (Here's a tip: keep asking 'why?' If you want to build a website - why? If you want to develop a new product - why? If you want your ads to be funnier - why? Until you hit a wall you can't break down - the basic objective of what your organisation does, which is probably to make money somehow, if you're a business.) And how are people and capabilities going to get you there? What do your people have? What do other people want? What capabilities do you have (or need) to get where you want to go?

Agile projects can get stuck in feedback loops. You can spend a lot of time iterating, making incremental improvements to features. Sometimes this is fine - if it's provides you with the capabilities you need to meet an objective, in a simple and minimally complex way. But if it doesn't, sometimes you just need to chuck stuff out and replace it. Sometimes you even need to chuck out the plan - which is why a good plan, as I said, has those 'is this working?' tests built in. (This is a bit Catch-22, obviously - sometimes a bad plan is so bad, it doesn't let you realise it's a bad plan.)

This stuff isn't hard - but it does require focus. I've started watching the Tour de France a lot more this year, and am amazed at Team Sky's performance, which feels to me like the definition of agile strategy in action: a single clear objective, years spent building the people and capabilities, and enough common agreement that they know how to vary the formula day by day as circumstances dictate.

So all that said, I like the agile way of working. But it's not done yet, and as it moves from pure software development into marketing and other areas of business, those of us who think plans are good things need to find ways to include them in the process, for the benefit of the people along the way, and at the end.

514 words | ~3 min

Back in 2010 I wrote here about the idea that in a world where digital technology is the norm, our ideas about information have to change. I referred to the concept of a 'greppable world' (after grep, the faithful old Unix text-searching utility):

In a greppable world, nothing that is made public can be buried in detail. Form and arrangement of texts can be remade on the fly. Tasks like concordancing, which used to take years, can be done in seconds using a script. And, of course, huge stacks of documents can be skimmed for salient details just as fast.

So it's interesting to see Mashable's take on Facebook's acquisition of face-recognition company Face.com:

Right now, Facebook’s facial-recognition software can sense who is in your pictures and make tagging suggestions, but what if the social network could further learn behaviors and preferences by reading the Gap sweatshirt you’re wearing and seeing that Coca-Cola can in your hand?

What is it that's new and alarming about this concept? It's not the ability of Facebook to see the contents of your photos and make judgements about you. One reason we wear Gap sweatshirts or drink Coca-Cola is to make statements about our preferences. As the owners of the platform where you're hosting your pics, we know that Facebook could always have gone through your photos and used the information in them to target you. It's just that there are over 140 billion photos on Facebook, so it would have taken them a long time. Now (or at least soon), it could be done automatically, and much faster.

The arguments that we've seen about text mining over the last few years can now convincingly be applied to image mining too. As with the ability to hunt out text (impossible with books, then possible with documents and filesystems, now possible with huge unstructured data sets), we can argue about whether or not its applications are desirable, harmful, or intrusive. Those who disagree with the Mashable piece above can, I think fairly, point out that if you're that concerned about people not judging you for the content of your photos, you shouldn't put them online.

What's clear, though, is that rising processing power has privacy implications, because it changes the practical limits on information processing. Tasks that could be done slowly by people (like going through all your photos) can now be done quickly by algorithms. This does not mean they should be regulated - but they should be discussed. People should know that the time-and-effort cost of gathering and analysing information is falling fast; and this should change how they approach their personal privacy, their roles as citizens, and even what they expect from products and services. A faster world is a less private world by default, in practice if not in theory, and thought about privacy and openness needs to take this into account.

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The Cannes Creative Effectiveness Lions have been awarded - and the judges were pretty harsh on the standard of evidence in the entries, as AdAge reports:

Said Mr. Jones: "It's incredible how ever-impressed people get by their own social-media statistics," noting that one company's 500 likes could be another's 5 million likes. They were down on the lack of context, too, provided for some of the metrics. For example, saying that website traffic jumped 20%, but not providing a time frame of when that happened, and how it was directly linked to the advertising campaign.

Ouch.

Attribution in advertising is going through a bit of an odd phase at the moment. There are a few reasons for this. Clients are asking for more proof that their money is being well spent. New media are introducing stacks of new metrics that need to be learned and tested. And the current interest in social and integrated campaigns mean there is a lot more to measure. Suddenly, measurement and attribution is the thing to be talking about.

One side-effect of this is that a lot of people who like to say smart things about advertising are trying to out-do each other in the conversation around metrics that matter. Social channels have become a gold-mine for these sorts of arguments. You'll have heard the kind of thing. Is sharing important? Do 'likes' matter? Should you build fans? Does online video get results? And so 0n, all of them with many contradictory answers.

Obviously, the only answer that matters is: 'It depends.'

Do fans matter? Well, it depends what you're trying to achieve. If you're aiming to convert people to a sale as fast as possible, maybe not (though maybe). If you're trying to build a regular audience for communication over the medium term, then maybe (though maybe not). Does online video get results? Well, it depends on the objective. Like all advertising - actually, like all spending. Whether something is worth paying for depends on what you want it for and what you'll get out of having it.

So far, so simple - but it's amazing how many conversations about this sort of thing seem to be motivated by people wanting to have a flat-packed smart answer, rather than saying, each time: 'I don't know yet. Let's take a step back. It depends.'

But back to attribution. In a world where marketers say 'it depends' more readily (good thing), they also need to say what it depends on more often. When your 'it depends' becomes an 'it's impossible to say', you're in trouble. Then you get desperate, and start attributing any positive result to your activity. Then the Cannes judges will shout at you.

So do your clients a favour and start testing hypotheses. Start keeping records - baselines of what people are saying about your brands or products; traffic to your sites; how fast your fans grow; sales; things you don't know if you'll need or not. Learn to watch for patterns.  Learn about correlations and how to measure significant change in trends. Understand variables, build ranges of estimates, plan for different outcomes. Count things. Tell stories with numbers.

That way, when someone asks you how well a campaign is expected to perform, you can avoid either an awkward silence or an impossible prediction. 'It depends' won't win you any blogging awards, but it'll mean you're giving better advice. Which is what you're here for, after all.

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I spend a lot of time listening to pitches by media companies and tech companies. These pitches are directed at marketers, and they normally go a bit like this:

1. Consumers are spending more and more time online.
2. Media spend is following them.
3. Consumers are demanding more and more from brands, faster and faster.
4. And marketers are under more and more pressure to demonstrate ROI.
5. You need a technology platform that lets you build rich experiences fast - and measure the results.
6. Our platform lets you build fabulous interactive brand experiences.

So what's wrong with this picture? It sounds great, but there's a big unanswered question.

Who controls it?

Before you sign on the line, bear in mind that when a lot of these companies put your digital campaigns or products on their platforms, they own the data that comes out of those platforms. That often means you can only get access to standard reports, containing the metrics the platform providers want to give you. And, of course, if you're running multiple campaigns on different platforms, you end up with ten different reports, using ten different sets of metrics, that you can't necessarily compare. Not to mention the fact that the platform owners can change the rules of the game and really stitch you up.

I'm pretty sure the arguments new media companies are using to pitch their platforms are the same as were used to pitch TV in the 50s. And we know what happened there: agencies selling clients a hell of a lot of TV work because they were being paid a fixed share of the media billings - rather than the channel mix that will get the best results.

It's that, but far more fragmented these days. Many platforms, many tech standards, lots of isolated data pools, and a lot of competing sales pitches. So before you rush into a platform tie-up, make sure you're not giving your data away or locking yourself into a world of proprietary pain. And makes sure the people doing your data strategy and digital comms planning aren't making money selling certain platforms or media packages.

898 words | ~4 min

This is Gareth Kay's recent presentation to the ICA, and it's very good.

Five things in it that I loved:

1. 'Low degree of difficulty'
2. 'Muscle memory'
3. 'Ingenious and effective'
4. 'People at the heart'
5. '100 small fires'

Read it and you'll understand.

Now, I love this because I work in part of the industry that has a reputation as the enemy of creativity. The part that helps clients use hard data to make marketing decisions. Wherever that line is crossed between maths and magic - whether it's copy testing or targeting or decision analytics - you'll hear the same grumble. That the suits are taking over, that logic is killing creativity, and that it leads to what Jim Collins and John Hegarty brilliantly call 'wind-tunnel marketing' - where everything looks the same. When Douglas Bowman quit Google in 2009, he hit out hard at its culture of testing.

When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.

So, okay, here I am, writing from the dark side. The side that wants to take all your great ideas and put them through the maths-mangle. Is there anything we can add to the effort to bring back some radicalism in advertising? I think so. Here are my three tough lessons from the marketing technologists to the ad agencies. In the spirit of radicalism, they're pretty blunt.

1. Grow up

If you work in advertising, you work in marketing. While your job's to challenge lazy thinking and inject human truths, you need to be able to see the world from your client's point of view. And the reality is that clients are under more and more pressure to deliver growth, with fewer and fewer resources. If you work in a developed market, chances are you're going to be generating that growth by stealing share for the next few years, not from growing your market. We're talking small, grinding, hard-fought gains. Your clients are going to want to measure the impact of every little thing they're doing so they can keep their jobs and their budgets, and lots of companies are stepping up to help them. The way things are, your clients are easily swayed by arguments made on the basis of numbers - even bad ones. So you can complain about measurement paralysis, and be ignored. Or you can start advising your clients on identifying the right opportunities and finding the right measures rather than just the easy ones, and be the agency that keeps doing daring, different work (that works) when everyone else is churning out the same timid rubbish.

2. Know your enemy

I've said this before on this blog, but here goes. You need to advise your clients when they're picking their data analysts and marketing tech companies. On this side of the logic/magic line, we're as nervous as you are about surging demand for 'big data', because we know the scene's going to get packed out with charlatans. So make sure you're there, helping out evaluating proposals and meeting the analysts and tech strategists. Make sure they're people who get marketing, who have experience agency-side or client-side as well as in IT. Make sure they're people you can work with, who care about using data to help clients be creatively brilliant.

3. Streamline the right way

Advertising research done well doesn't kill creativity - it helps justify its breathing space. That's true of all the new tricks digital marketing's got at its disposal too - data joins, rapid segmentation, A/B testing, viral reach metrics, the works. The stuff that saves marketers money saves advertisers time by quickly getting to problems that need solving. And those tend to be the problems that connect most closely to the sort of truths that lead to really radical advertising.

The right problem doesn't just mean the most specific problem. Yes, a lot of new tools let you split problems into their smallest possible moving parts. Used unwisely that leads to pedantry. But used well it can help you get to work faster, run tests in parallel, light your 100 small fires quicker. So find people who are going to use it wisely - and who care about keeping a broad perspective and hunting for the less obvious solutions.

We're here. We count stuff. We're helpful. We're argumentative. We're nice. We're radical. Now let's get on with it.

465 words | ~2 min

The Atlantic asks whether Facebook is making us lonely. About two-thirds of the way through an astonishingly long article it concludes that, no, it isn't.

Loneliness is certainly not something that Facebook or Twitter or any of the lesser forms of social media is doing to us. We are doing it to ourselves. Casting technology as some vague, impersonal spirit of history forcing our actions is a weak excuse. We make decisions about how we use our machines, not the other way around. Every time I shop at my local grocery store, I am faced with a choice. I can buy my groceries from a human being or from a machine. I always, without exception, choose the machine.

Putting aside this horrible example of the Paragraph 19 Problem, it seems there's no end to demand for these 'is social media making us lonely/stupid/evil/dead/etc?' op-eds - from Sherry Turkle's Bowling Alone (mentioned here) to Nicholas Carr's The Shallows to the, erm, unique work of Baroness Susan Greenfield.

The logic normally comes down to one of those syllogistic fallacies that we use to teach kids about logical error.

1. We are lonelier than we were twenty years ago.
2. We use online social networks now and we didn't twenty years ago.
3. Social networks are making us lonely.

Except of course it's never put so confidently (unless you're Nicholas Carr). It's always phrased as a 'may be', or a threatening 'could be', or a question ('is it?'). Like when expert forecasters tell us confidently that a policy 'may lead to social collapse' (which isn't much of a prediction, now is it?).

All of which is a shame, because this is very simple.

Online networks are a form of social tool: they enable certain forms of social interactions between people - just like telephones, writing, marketplaces, wheels and smoke signals - and they inhibit others.

We create the social tools we want. And they, to some extent, create us - or at least confirm our social interactions. If we are lonely, it is as a side-effect of various social interaction choices that have also led to the appearance of online social networks in the forms they exist.

Loneliness is not born of social networks, any more than people are born from apes, or English is descended from German. They share common ancestors. The social tools will change (slowly, grudgingly) as society changes, and social change is neither fast nor easy. Pretending otherwise is just headline-grabbing.