Communities Dominate Brands

How to annoy customers part x: bluetooth intrusive ads

And here we go again with innovation about interruptive ads

Yes, the mobile phone is a wonderful new channel attracting the interest of advertisers. And yes, it is personal, it is interactive, it has the ability for direct call-to-action. With 2 billion mobile phones by end of next month worldwide, it is the most prevalent media as well. In almost every way it is superior to any other existing media that a advertiser could choose. Yet those getting into mAd (Mobile Advertising) are in a hurry to destroy the media. Prime example: Bluetooth enabled proximity-based (aka Location-Based) advertising.

Today's Wall Street Journal Europe has a big story about this new proximity/location-based Bluetooth advertising being introduced at Heathrow airport here in London. I just landed in Heathrow a few hours ago from a trip in Asia and ruined my morning by reading this story in the newspaper. Luckily my Bluetooth is permanently turned off on all of my wireless devices, that at least I was not a recepient of this latest form of intrusion.

Here is how the advertising works. There are Bluetooth sensors in the airport at given locations, such as the Virgin lounge. They can detect any modern mobile phone that has its Bluetooth short-range wireless feature turned on, at a range of about 50 meters (150 feet). If you walk by, have your Bluetooth on (on your mobile phone, PDA, laptop, etc), you get pushed one of these ads. It appears on your phone as if you had been sent a message. You click on the link and get the full message. One of the first ads is a short videoclip about the latest car from Range Rover.

Now the ads are free to the recepient. And the attraction of "why do this via Bluetooth" rather than as MMS etc messages via a moblie operator's network, is that the airtime on Bluetooth does not cost, at least in terms of a fee to the mobile operators like Vodafone, Orange, (Virgin Mobile) etc. The WSJE article reports that a recent mAd campaign generated a 15% response rate.

Here is what is wrong about this idea. First, this is the SAME intrusive interruptive annoying advertising that we all are trying hard to avoid today. It is the identical "free and annoying"  ad strategy as putting banner ads on the internet, and follows on the idea of interrupting movies etc on TV with advertising. The public does NOT want this. The evidence is very plain. Dont' be fooled that an early campaign has generated a 15 percent response rate - that is the novelty factor, and many of the recepients were unaware that those messages were ads. Most people are willing to accept ads but only if the advertising is pre-approved on very specific personal topics. I personally will accept car ads but not on any "luxury" brand, definitely not Range Rover. I would only accept car ads if they come from Audi (or Aston Martin ha-ha), not even closer rivals such as BMW or Mercedes or Jaguar.

Secondly this is NOT the philosophy of "permission-based" but rather a perversion of that. They push links to your phone without your permission, and then ask if you want the full ad. I don't want ANYTHING pushed at my phone without my express prior approval.

More dangerously, this is a means that will soon shut itself down. There are already mobile phone viruses that disguise themselves as Bluetooth messages. How soon does one of these figure itself out to pretend to be a car advertisement at the airport and start to infect dozens, if not hundreds of mobile phones about to depart that airport (and spread the virus rapidly around the globe). This is not science fiction, those viruses already exist, and they appear exactly like these ads, with a link asking you to accept a message and store it on your phone.

And about the users. How many mobile phone users are so dumb as to keep their bluetooth turned on. First, it eats up your battery life. So if you're into music or pictures on your phone, you will soon discover that keeping Bluetooth turned off as a default will extend your battery life. Secondly, there are an increasing amount of proximity based pranks that rely on Bluetooth. Annoying little messages that send rude messages etc to any phone nearby that has Bluetooth turned on. Again, if you currently don't have Bluetooth turned off, within the year you will learn to do so, as the annoying messages will proliferate.

Bluetooth enabled, proximity-based mobile advertising is a BAD model. It is easy, it is inexpensive, and that may make it appealing for those in advertising who are lazy, who just want to quickly get into mAd. Yet the real opportunity is in true engagement marketing - understand your target customer. Offer him/her a service or some content that is truly appreciated. Ask for permission before offering it, and do it at a fair and agreed timing/model/location etc. Lets do real interactive engagement marketing, and use the mobile phone for it. That can be wonderful. But of course as in anything in advertising, if you want to do it well, it requires true competence and skill. Its not easy to identify your target markets, get to understand them, and then to generate unique mobile-phone based content (such as advergames etc) to actually bring value to your target users. But yes, this is time-consuming and costs money. Proximity-based spam is cheap and fast. And stupid.

But just when this Generation-C population has managed to steer away from interruptive ads, lets not now pollute the mobile phone as yet another vehicle for interruption. It will only generate upset customers. Bluetooth based proximity advertising? A very bad idea !!

News from the front line

Wired Magazine have done a great piece on US soldiers blogging from the front line in Iraq.

This excerpt from the piece The blogs of War by Sgt Missick whose blog is A Line in the Sand

Never before has a war been so immediately documented, never before have sentiments from the front scurried their way to the home front with such ease and precision. Here I sit, in the desert, staring daily at the electric fence, the deep trenches and the concertina wire that separates the border of Iraq and Kuwait, and write home and upload my daily reflections and opinions on the war and my circumstances here, as well as some of the pictures I have taken along the way. It is amazing, and empowering, and yet the question remains, should I as a lower enlisted soldier have such power to express my opinion and broadcast to the world a singular soldier's point of view? To those outside the uniform who have never lived the military life, the question may seem absurd, and yet, as an example of what exists even in the small following of readers I have here, the implications of thought expressed by soldiers daily could be explosive.

John Hockenberry who wrote the piece for Wired says:

Strong opinions throughout the military ranks in and out of wartime are nothing new. But online technology in the combat zone has suddenly given those opinions a mass audience and an instantaneous forum for the first time in the history of warfare. On the 21st-century battlefield, the campfire glow comes from a laptop computer, and it's visible around the world.

Other sources: The Mudville Gazette
Blackfive
From the Washington Post The New Ernie Pyles: gtlizzie and 67cshdocs
Thunder6

Release Hollywood movie... via blogsite?

This is soooo cool, I had to blog about it even though I am on vacation.

A Hollywood producer, Kamal Aboukhater, has released his movie, directed and written by James Orr (previous work includes Father of the Bride, 3 Men and a Baby etc), and starring several legitimate Hollywood actors, entitled "Blowing Smoke". A small-budget very dark comedy, it might have slipped under the radar. Except that this launch was not via the artsy cinemas for alternative comedies, nor direct-to-DVD, etc. This is the world's first full-length Hollywood movie that was released directly to....   yes, blogging !!

Take a look at the blogsite   www.blowingsmokethemovie.com   and you will immediately be hit by both the stylish nature of the movie, and its non-politically-correct subject matter. Its about gambling and poker and there's a hot sexy woman in the middle of it all, as you might expect of anyone releasing something with an edge. And then there are the cigars. Not just like James Bond briefly smoking his cigar in Die Another Day. No.

This movie is all about the love of cigars, eg "mine is bigger than yours" and thoughts in that direction. Go check out the blogsite and you can download the trailers for the movie for free.

This is a revolution. This is a radical new way to market and release movies. Watch this space, it won't be the last time this happens in Hollywood.

And the movie itself - absolutely brilliant, go see it !!!  But enough of this commercial break, now I gotta go back to my "reality" ie my vacation, return to the beach here in Lankawi Malaysia   :-)

Living in a consumers republic

I came across an interesting book this week by Lizabeth Cohen - Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies, Dept. History Harvard University. Entitled A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America

Cohen explains:

What I discovered was a shared understanding among many Americans, beginning right after World War II and lasting into the mid-1970s, that the best strategy for reconstructing the nation's economy and reaffirming its democratic values lay with promoting the expansion of mass consumption. Policy makers, business and labor leaders, along with many ordinary Americans put mass consumption at the center of their plans for a prosperous postwar nation. Not only would a dynamic demand-driven economy provide the best route to recovery and affluence, but it would also, they hoped, nurture the long-sought ideal of a more egalitarian and democratic nation. Citizens, living better than ever before, would be on an equal footing with their similarly prospering neighbors. So being a good citizen and a good consumer became intertwined.

Sometimes its easy to forget our recent past and the drivers for significant policy decisions. which in turn become imbedded and forgotten.

But the nature of consumption has changed , as content has decoupled from its format - superdistribution, the move from the agricultural clock and industrial mindset to a 24/7 world means that we have to stop and think afresh what we make, why we make it and who is going to use it.

Alan Mitchell says:

The information age won't reach its full potential just because of a few inventions like the internet. It needs to create a new and different system capable of unleashing the win-win potential inherent in plummeting transaction costs, ever richer content and new flows of information. And to do so it needs its own web of institutions, practices and concepts: joint-info-stock companies or consumer agents, relationships and communities, consumers as information investors and co-producers seeking value "in my life" - and buyer centric marketing

In this context conventional notions about marketing and mass consumers marketing is like the silent movies of the 21st Century.

Simon London Wrting for the Financial Times (Monday 27th June 2005) wrote

In business as in art, we live in a postmodern era. Old certainties are being demolished and relationships redefined. Everything you thought about business has been upended. The relationship between companies and customers is no exception. The old notion that producers produce and consumers consume is regarded passé by management theorists.

Into the Darknet

I am just in the process of finishing Darknet Which I would strongly recommend to anyone that is interested in how communities, and peer-to-peer networks are changing the structural nature of how we consume content, and how big media are in a vicious dogfight over who has control to the kingdom of content.

J.D. Lasica has written a well researched and important contribution to the the debate about what our digital society will look like in Darknet: Hollywood's war against the digital generation

His treatise is that there needs to be a very different model by which all content is distributed, shared and how this is more an opportunity rather than a threat for the old guard of big media. If only they could see it.

There is a strong resonancy between Darknet and Communities Dominate Brands. Although starting from very different worlds, we have arrived at similar conclusions - though Lasica has shown the clear demarcation lines in the US, between big business who want to retain the status quo and customers who as Ed Richards of OfCom describes as having experienced A gentle, gradual, evolving, historic act of liberation. via technology.

History has shown, once you have stormed the Bastille, you don't go back to your day jobs.

And the empowered consumer is not going to give the bastille back - and why should they? As we all know, all media in the US was built out of a desire to drive mass consumption via mass media. This is no longer the case, as we and Lasica have amply demonstrated.

Traditional companies are fighting this situation like days die, gasping for every last ray of light. And Lasica describes this many times over, cataloguing how hard the music and film industries have strong-armed the legal system, the FCC, and Government into an effort to snub out, file sharing, peer-to-peer networks, inventive and collaborative technologies and attempting to coerce the consumer electronics industry to lock down its products, to protect its own interests.

This has resulted in "cyberspace speakeasies and high tech Cotton Clubs of the Darknet."

Lasica argues

the overall trend is toward greater engagement. We are becoming more selective in our program choices, more vocal about the kinds of entertainment and information coming into our homes, and less willing to lend our eyeballs to a single entity to engage us for an entire evening.

Poor America, is all I can say. It seems even your rights to share home movies is a bone of contention with the media moguls. And their reach stretches across the Atlantic as one coder discovered to his cost. In his foreword Howard Rheingold mentions the efforts of big media attempts to lock down the internet and limit the ability of ordinary people to produce cultural works that threaten to compete with media conglomerates

At least we have the BBC - who have already understood what it will take to successfully survive in the digital age . And when one combines Darknet with Robery McChesneys book The problem with the Media It looks like a US civil war is being fought between the old analogue media world and the people that want more control over their media choices. I will imagine this will only intensify over the coming years.

Lasica says:

A lot of kids feel they're being gouged by big coprorations.

And of course big media see it very differently.

But what I really like about Darknet is Lasica's efforts to proscribe a world that could work for everybody. And I am all for signing up for that. Because ultimately that's the point - of envisioning a world, a new future, that benefits the many people. More access, a better distribution of the profits and revenues for all. Of course there are going to be some that really don't like that idea. Shame.

When you think it through, folksonomies like flickr.com or wickipedia , the underground file sharing masses like waste , blogs, iPTV, Skype, the people that run radio for their local communities, freenet spell the end for mass media as we know it.

Lasica reminds us that when Napster was shut down 57 million people were using the people-powered music swapping site. That is almost the entire population of England. Are all these people criminals? Or does this saying something fundamental about the relationship between big business and its customers?

It represented the first public wave of a media revolution that is continuing today.

And as the Economist said on 2 April of this year

Many firms do not yet seem aware of the revolutionary implications of newly empowered consumers. Only those firms ready and able to serve these new customers will survive.

That what our book is about, and how better to engage with them.

Finally I quote Jonathan Taplin, a proponenet of on-demand media, who told a senate committee in 2002:

Our country has a choice of two visions of what our media culture might look like. One might be five hundred channels (owned by six corporations) and nothing on. The other might allow consumers easy on-demand access to a world of unique artistry of such power and grace as would melt the heart

23 reasons why the future of work will be more collaborative

The Future of work have delivered an interesting theses on why and how the future of our working lives will be different from today .

Go and have a read of the whole blog if you are interested but here are the headlines:
1. Social bonds between worker and firm will decrease
Historically workers have been subservient to corporations because companies owned the means of production, such as factories. Individuals’ livelihoods depended on companies and they formed close connections with employers, often for life. These dependencies will decrease because large organizations are not needed to create value in a knowledge-driven economy.

More on this from Soshana Zuboff in her book the Support Economy

2. People (atoms) will combine into teams (molecules)

5. Work will take place in a greater range of locations
About 50% of the workforce will work in multiple locations depending on the task at hand, the “tools” available, and the requirements of the customer. The industrial model of everyone at the same place, same time (which was built on an ‘economy of scale principle’) will begin to disappear. Work activities will be distributed across central offices (40% of time), remote locations (40% of time) and transient community locations (20% of time).

6. Work will be spread out in time (not the 8 to 5 agricultural clock)

8. Work will be more collaborative, less individualistic
People will shift their work activities to their core competencies for approximately 80% of their time. Everything else will be handed off to someone with complementary competencies. Individuals themselves will become less ‘vertically integrated’ and grow loosely coupled collaborative networks to meet their needs outside their core competencies. No more "jack of all trades.’" The remaining time will be devoted to learning new skills and competencies.

9. Corporations will morph into confederations with shared liability
Modern corporations are an artificial legal structure created within the past one hundred years to minimize the risk associated with control of large asset bases. As Peter Drucker so aptly notes, they have out lived their usefulness. The assumptions that have underlain their need are not longer valid.

Primary among those assumptions is that large organizations were required to capitalize the investments required in the ownership of the means of production, such as factories. With a shift to more knowledge work this isn’t necessary for a much larger portion of the working population. Confederations of business clusters will instead move to the forefront. They will be held together by strategy, rather than by ownership of assets.

11. The stars will be "producers," not CEO’s

12. Employment law will change to recognize a new category of relationship of people to organization

There is lots more, interesting stuff and has echoes I think of Richard Florida's book the Rise of the Creative Class

Customer Advocacy: A new era in marketing

Glen Urban , I believe has made an important contribution of the field of marketing research, and has had an influence on the writing of our book and the work we do at SMLXL .

It seems from our IPA talk that the world still needs to catch up. The future has arrived, its just that at the moment its not very well distributed. This raises some interesting questions and dilemmas.

1). Companies that grasp this opportunity today can start to realise the potential for future growth and build customer advocacy into their communication strategies.

2). Currently it’s a harder sell for companies like SMLXL, so do we dilute what we do to sell more of what we do? The answer to that is NO. Because the work we have done speaks for itself.

Also we know of a recent straw poll in a large global business that is deeply dissatisfied with what it, as an organisation, gets from its agencies. Costs too high, deliverables too variable. Whilst at the same time marketers are under pressure like never before to deliver.

Surely, it is time to take a small part of the marketing budget and experiment with some marketing communications innovation. End-to-end to see what results you get?

In his opening paragraph Urban says:

My work has been centred on new product development, with models from assessor to information acceleration. Most recently, I have been working on issues of trust, advice for consumers and the discovery of new product opportunities by “listening in” to the online dialogue between trusted advisor and customer (Urban & Hauser 2004). Because I have done this recent work on the internet, I sensed a sea change in the underlying consumer behaviour. Something has shifted, and it took me a while to discover that customers had gained new power in buying decisions. Since 1950, marketing has been based on a push/pull model in which the manufacturer designs a product to fill a need and then convinces the consumer to buy with aggressive advertising, promotion and distribution tactics.

The increase in consumer power changes the equation, and I believe that this shift in the power relationship will define the dividing line between Eras IV and V of marketing

Urban expands his thinking about customer advocacy:

A company might choose to embrace advocacy by becoming a faithful representative of customers interests. Under this approach, a firm provides customers and prospects with open,, honest, and complete information. The firm gives customers advice so that they can find the best products, even if these products are not the company’s products. Far from being foolish the honesty of advocacy reflects the reality that customers will learn the truth anyway. If a company is distorting the truth, customers will detect the falsehoods and act, accordingly

This is one way to build advocacy, but thinking about advocacy vs. stand-alone CRM programmes offers up innovative ways for companies to engage with their newly empowered customers.

But, I believe that the Guinness Visitor Centre in Dublin can also be argued from the standpoint of customer advocacy.

Mediated Teen Queens

From the Observer on Sunday, Thomas de Zengotita a leading New York Academic writes a piece on teenage girls and their use of media .

This is what Thomas has to say about teens and media:

Media are inherently flattering. We are hard-wired to respond to attention at some level, just as puppies are compelled to wriggle with delight under the ministrations of a stranger. Media, by their nature, address us, attend to us. They make us self-conscious. They constitute an environment of windows and mirrors that allow us to reflect constantly upon ourselves in comparison with others. The more mediated our surroundings, the more self-conscious we become.

In the last decade or so we've reached a whole new level. 'Media' now means much more than newspapers, TV, and radio - it also means all the venues that computers bring to us, email, web sites and blogs. It means all the little devices that intensify our connections, the digital cameras and pagers and BlackBerries, the answering machines and mobile phones. Mediated representations of inescapable ubiquity and fabulous quality now provide us with instant access to everything there is - and everything imaginable as well. They offer limitless possibilities for self-definition in an ever-expanding horizon of ever-changing commodities, mannerisms, tastes, opinions, styles. The comfortable classes in overdeveloped nations have been invited to live in worlds of their own design - little MeWorlds, to each his own.

Then Zengotita says something very interesting:

These are communication technologies, after all, and communicating between MeWorlds is a big part of the magic of the screens. Instant messaging. Smiley faces. Just 4 U. And U and U too - because there are networks of Us and each one is at the centre of a morphing circle of presentations and representations.

"A morphing circle of presentations and representations" - what a beautiful expression.

So, its not the technology thats important. What the technology revels about ourselves is that we are highly social animals, flowing, morphing between our social groups. The technology enables this flow to be more constant and more frequent.

Mark Earls, planning director at Ogilvy believes it is important to understand this, because the place where brands can succeed in the future is facilitaing greater c2c interaction, rather than focsing on b2c.

Zengotita also discusses how teens consume, information, brands and content.

Worth a read.