Communities Dominate Brands

Gates sees accelerated decline of traditional media's ad model

Microsoft thinks the advertising business model for traditional media those venues where advertisers still channel most of their spending will fall apart faster in the coming five years as the kind of interactive, targeted advertising that is defining the Web comes to the fore.

We're saying newspapers will go online, and there will be massive innovation that comes out of that. We're saying that TV, the biggest ad market in the world, will completely go online and have the kind of targeting interaction that you only get out on the Web today. As dramatic as things happening on the Web are, that's actually what all advertising ... will be in the future.

Though it will be the mobileweb

You can make of this as you will - but I think that the infrastructure of the mass media is unravelling which will accelerate. we will go from CPM's to Cost Per Relevant Audience

Good night and good luck or as Walter Cronkite used to say

and that's the way it is

From the The Seattle Times May 8, 2007

How do you re-build the social fabric of towns and cities??

Asks Strategy and business

Business leaders are increasingly aware that the health of their enterprise is intimately connected with the health of the communities where they operate. As employers, they sometimes find themselves drawn in to help solve local problems. But they are also often frustrated by those efforts, and no wonder. When a community sets out to address complex problems, such as economic stagnation, sprawl, and failing schools, the effort usually ends up going nowhere. Competing agendas surface, members delegate responsibilities to staff, difficult decisions get postponed. Hopes fade and interest flags as the hidden challenges and underlying conflicts become apparent.

And the reason is hierarchy something I touched on yesterday

The quiet failure of such initiatives is often attributed to human nature, or to some flaw in the process that shaped the effort. But in fact, the problem usually starts when the project organizers compose their first list of proposed participants. The organizers ask themselves: Who are the power brokers around town? Who are the key players? Who from business, government, education, and nonprofits should be involved?

Ergo top down not bottom up. Not conceived as an egalitarian exercise.

The very people that need to be engaged are not a shared vision is never conceived. Getting buy-in is the hardest thing to do - that takes leadership but very skillful leadership

Libraries of the future

Interesting ramble into the user centered library

Here

The discussion centers around how to make libraries more relevant, to attract and engage their users, to be user centric not process centric

Accountability and the modern state

On Monday this week I sat down with Euan Semple to discuss a project that I have in mind.

It centered around the concept of Engagement as a bigger idea beyond marketing communications.

How could we evolve to be more engaged citizens for example was one strand of the conversation. How could we evolve to a better society?

And why was it that in a modern society we seem to struggle with pretty much everything? The word that we arrived at was accountability. We have become used to not being accountable to each other, unless some other higher authority steps in.

Let me give you a direct example. 2 weeks ago driving home in my car another driver drives directly into me smashing the entire passenger side of the car. The driver came from a T-Junction onto the main road.

The drivers response to me was a). I was in his blind spot, at which point I think he must be blind and b). He can't admit it was his fault because that might affect his insurance.

To my mind there is a complete lack of accountability here. A moral one.

Simon Jenkins writing in the Guardian yesterday had this to say

Others suggest something should be done about parents, the police, teachers, social workers and the latest guardians of the social contract, alcohol salesmen. Something should always be done by the government. Responsibility is never active and first person singular.

Something is missing from this cacophony and I know exactly what it is. A tier of social control has been lobotomised from British public life. There is nothing between the individual or family unit on one hand and the central state on the other. Britain has fallen into De Tocqueville's trap of an atomised society, where

"every man is a stranger to the destiny of others. He is beside his fellow citizens but does not see them ... while above them rises an immense and tutelary power, that of the state".

We have lost the habit of association.

This I believe is a powerful insight. Barabara Ehrenreich writes in her book Dancing in the Streets: A history of collective joy

Everyone is vaguely aware of the decline of community human societies have endured in the last few centuries

In this context it is interesting that the digital world is literally running towards social connections, social communications, belonging and communing together. We are driving the technology to this end. And that is why I describe the guff about web/mobile/business 2.0 as in fact a We Media for We Species

Ehrenreich also points to this transition from We to I - or the conscious self which did in fact start 400 years ago. Lionel Trilling wrote in 1972

in the last 16th and early 17th Centuries something like a mutation in human nature took place

Ehrenreich continues

This change has been called the rise of subjectivity or the discovery of the inner self, and since it can be assumed that all people, in all historical periods, have some sense of selfhood and capacity for subjective reflection, we are really talking about an intensification, and a fairly drastic one, of the universal capacity to face the world as an autonomous "I"

And there are consequences for this as the opposite of "we" is

isolation, loneliness, a sense of disengagement, a loss of natural vitality and innocent pleasure in the giveness of the world and a feeling of burden because reality has no meaning other than what a person choses to impart to it.

Durkheim believed that

originally society is everything, the individual nothing... but gradually things change. As societies become greater in volume and density, individual differences multiply, and the only remaining bond among members of a single human group will be that they are all men.

At which point we have lost completely this collective sense of accountability to each other and the modern state steps in. Is it doing a great job we have to ask ourselves?

Simon Jenkins continues

The nearest any British community has to local government these days is the police force. Local leadership is a 999 call. Whether it is a rape epidemic, an unruly school, trouble with immigrants, a released paedophile or bingeing teenagers, the community appears before the world as a police officer. There may be walk-on parts for a firefighter, a priest and, bringing up the rear, a national MP. But the figure of reassurance and authority in any British town nowadays is in uniform (which is why Muslims turn to their mullahs).

The engineering of the modern state has stripped us of that collective sense. There are many noisy ghosts in the machine called society as they struggle to find a sense even of the self. Ergo how can they become accountable to others?

Jenkins

The still stumbling urban revival in Britain requires anonymous party-based councils to plead with regional offices of central government. Local elections no longer make an appreciable impact on policing, health, education or economic development. Councils retain no fiscal discretion to aid communities with social clubs, sports halls, libraries, parks or playgrounds...Cynics sneer at the "calibre" of local councillors. Yet nobody will exercise leadership in a community if denied the power to make it effective. I do not believe that British citizens are unique in Europe in being incapable of taking responsibility for their communities. They may prefer to sit at home and blame others but if you reduce local institutions to consultative status, consultation is all you get, not leadership.

Of all nationalisations in British history, none has been so corrosive of the public good as the nationalisation of social responsibility. I am not starry eyed about the vigour of local democracy abroad. It is messy, bureaucratic and often corrupt. But it appears to yield communities more able to discipline themselves and their young, and more satisfied at the delivery of their public services. They do not throw nearly so many people in jail. Local newspapers are not, as in Britain, filled with impotent whinges against central government. Local leadership is considered a duty by citizens permitted to exercise it.

So what sort of society are we living in? Guy Debord called it

the society of the spectacle, an epoch without festivals

A time when we do not commune together generating our own collective pleasures but instead we as individuals

absorb, consume, the spectacles of commercial entertainment, nationalist rituals, and the consumer culture, with its endless advertisements for the pleasure of individual ownership

This I believe is social engineering on an epic scale, something that I explored in Dancing in the streets and the architecture of authority

So where do we end up? In fact it seems that rather than offering up a freer world the modern state is rather more in mind of exercising its authority over us as Henry Porter pointed out this Sunday

The database state is part of a long-term project devised by the civil service and the high command of New Labour. It is far easier to allow a stealthy expansion of surveillance and data collection than bring the issues to parliament and alert us all to the profound threat to our liberty and privacy.

The database state vs. communities

In recent years, a phoney mantra about civil society has been preached by Gordon Brown, David Miliband and Hazel Blears, usually presaging an expensive and meaningless "conversation with stakeholders". Such top-down paternalism is not self-government and never will be.

Again this is why we see so much debate and activity online in the digital ream as it is not neutered. But the state plays a dangerous game. If we are unable to feel that we have a role, if we believe that we are only accountable to ourselves then society deconstructs itself to something that has no value.

We are already witnesses to that today.

Ehrenreich in her conclusion writes

Nor can the growing size of human societies explain the long hostiity of elites to their peoples festivals and estatic rituals – a hostility that goes back at least to the city states of ancient Greece, which contained only a few tens of thousands of people.

It was not a concern about crowd size that lead to Pentheus's crackdown on the maenads or Romes massacre of its Dionysian cult. The repression of festivities and estatic rituals over the centuries was the conscious work of men and occassionally women too, who saw in them (festivals and communal activity) a real and urgent threat.

The aspect of "civilization" that is more hostile to festivity is not capitalism or industrialism – both of which arefairly recent innovations – but social hierarchy, which is far more ancient

Margaret Thatcher famously said "there is no such thing as society" and that is because it seems the modern state has no interest in it. She perhaps was speaking for more people than she realised?

Mobile applications: a new story of evolution

The business of making native apps for mobile devices is dying, crushed by a fragmented market and restrictive business practices. The problems are so bad that the mobile web, despite its many technical drawbacks, is now a better way to deliver new functionality to mobiles. I think this will drive a rapid rise in mobile web development, largely replacing the mobile app business. This has huge implications for mobile operators, handset companies, developers, and users.

Via Mobile Opportuinity

More in depth Point of view

Joseph Pine 2 talks about the experience economy and also the 7th Mass Media

Joseph Pine speech at Mobile Monday Amsterdam

Pine argues says is the universe is a trinity of; time, space, and matter.

Manuel Castells says that this linear process has been inverted. Time is condensed and stretched. Past, present and future and altered and reconfigured.

Material existence becomes less relevant in a world of networked and information based social networks.

Negroponte says its Atoms vs. Bits

And of course for our digital natives its a blended reality. Virtual becomes physical and physical becomes virtual.

The Engaged Learning Community

The Horizon Report examines emerging technologies that could/will play a major role in transforming education.

Educational uses of the two topics on the far-term horizon, collective intelligence and social operating systems, are understandably rarer; however, there are examples in the worlds of commerce, industry and entertainment that hint at coming use in academia within four to five years.

We have

Grassroots Video
Collaboration webs
Mobile broadband
Data Mashups
Collective intelligence
Social operating systems

These are becoming the tools of engagement and as a consequence releases us to each fulfill our true potential?

On Collective Intelligence the report states

Two new forms of information stores are being created in real time by thousands of people in the course of their daily activities, some explicitly collaborating to create collective knowledge stores like the Wikipedia and Freebase, some contributing implicitly through the patterns of their choices and actions. The data in these new information stores has come to be called “collective intelligence” and both forms have already proven to be compelling applications of the network. Explicit knowledge stores refine knowledge through the contributions of thousands of authors; implicit stores allow the discovery of entirely new knowledge by capturing trillions of key clicks and decisions as people use the network in the course of their everyday lives.

Nobody is as clever as everybody

We have to ask the question - where does our future productivity come from? The answer is our children.

Invest in the future.

Regional Press Owners Need to Get with the Beat: Intelligence

Posts Roy Greenslade referencing a Paul Bradshaw post Local news is changing - but not fast enough

As the digital revolution moves forward are regional newspapers moving fast enough to appeal to online audiences? That's the question asked by Paul Bradshaw that should stimulate not only a wide debate but some swift action. There are two drafts, one published here by journalism.co.uk , and a slightly longer version on Bradshaw's blog here. In fact, his central argument is less about a lack of speed and rather more about the lack of intelligence in the application of video technology, the most potent form of story-telling now available to journalists. Despite considerable investment he argues that "there are few signs of real innovation or thinking beyond the obvious."

Indeed - if you look at itvlocal.com you can see that if ITV were to get their strategy right, they could transform regional news Journalism and cannibalise regional press revenues. By offering better reporting, connectivity and via Social Advertising Intelligence deliver a more targeted audience with better reporting, accountability and ROI. The Journalism becomes more relevant and engaging and the advertising services that form around the platform become a higher currency - beyond display advertising and banner ads. We migrate from Cost Per Thousands - to Cost Per Relevant Audience. In the digital environment how value is created changes because the technology allows us to improve that value. But this becomes a conversation beyond Journalism in the digital age to what are local newspapers in the digital age and HOW do they provide value for their advertisers and their readers? Yet we know that most sales people selling digital are also selling analogue display advertising. Have they sat down as a group internally and discussed - what is the role of our media platform in all its guises? How do we enable the local community? Because if life is local then the regional press really does need to address that core question.

Greenslade continues

Bradshaw, a lecturer in online journalism at Birmingham City University's media school, concedes that journalists are doing better than the earlier embarrassing examples of the genre. But there is still vast room for improvement. As he implies, the daily output on YouTube illustrates a greater sense of adventure in engaging clips that are clearly very appealing.

Bradshaw writes

...at most newspapers there is still some separation which, combined with the gap between the digital natives (some journalists) and the digital immigrants (most editors) is leading to a real neglect of the possibilities of new media.

And

The real opportunity of web 2.0 - the web as a platform - is begging to be explored. While local journalism is supposed to be all about community, local journalists’ relationships with communities online are for the most part non-existent, or one-way. Online, it’s fair to say that you get what you give out. By contributing to the blogosphere, to Flickr and YouTube and Facebook, journalists will generate contacts, leads, contributors and readers. Similarly, newspaper websites that don’t ghettoise readers into forums, that don’t publish blogs that are simply rebranded columns, but that genuinely invite readers to contribute to the newsgathering and verification process, will reap the benefits.

For example Gannett to Crowdsource News

I would also say its web and mobile. We have seen the impressive early results from Blyk. If I were the CEO of anyone of the big regional press players, I would be looking hard at what advertising could be like in the 21st Century, researching successful digital plays and then try to model what that might mean for my business. Trying stuff out and seeing what works, testing new revenue generating possibilities combined with a more engaged approach to my readership.

Hollywood does its best to ignore the Internet

My jaw dropped when I read this in the Economist - There will be blood

IN 1948, when only one in ten Americans had seen a TV, Time magazine sized up the new medium. Its quiz shows, cooking lessons and vaudeville were perfectly watchable, it said, but the films were awful.

And

As it prepares for its 80th Academy Awards this weekend, Hollywood is facing another new medium—the internet. Instead of using the web to get films to people, studios are still in the cabbage-rolling business: they use the web mostly as a medium to show dross, and just a handful of decent films. Yet, if the studios hope that by ignoring the web, Tinseltown can put off change, they are surely wrong Hollywood needs to confront the web—by embracing it.

The internet could be a boon for Hollywood—but only if it can conquer its fears Another Economist story and last year we asked Has Hollywood Gone with the Wind?

The DVD - was the main engine of growth between 1999 and 2004. In the past two years, DVD revenues dropped by 11%, to $11.1bn. "It is undeniably true that DVD revenue, which had been responsible for the big boom that has happened in the past few years, has plateaued and now gone into decline," said Michael Gubbins of Screen International magazine.

And of course it was David Soderbergh who upset everyone by tampering with the short dog of movie distribution.

In our post Hollywood - The silent movies of the 21st Century we quoted John Naughton who was reviewing a recent Hollywood initiative.

Trust Hollywood, as one Silicon Valley wag put it, 'to "embrace" peer-to-peer distribution and all the economies and efficiencies that go along with it and then ruin it by using it to peddle an inferior and overpriced product'. Nothing changes

Only 1% of all films made in any one year are shown in the US - there is an imperative for Hollywood to become part of the network - Networks: Economic, Cultural and Media are becoming the nervous system of society, believes Manuel Castells and this suggests that our world of media and communications is evolving from the straight road of an industrial era to the more complex and networked world that mimics nature.

Networks – Castells says are common to all life.

Eyeballs vs Co-creating Consumers: Measuring Blyk

I want to comment on a brief story at MoCo News about Blyk, entitled "Blyk Advertisers, Skeptical on Subscriber Numbers, Just Don't Get it" referencing a story at New Media Age (which is a subscription site). Apparently there are media buyers in Britain, who are thinking that 28,000 Blyk customers in Britain is somehow too small a target audience, that the "numbers needed to be plenty higher" and "doing a campaign was more hassle than it was worth".

Any advertising executive who looks at this number (28,000 youth on Blyk, and thinks it is too small an audience is totally missing the point of Blyk.

Wrong measure. Lets go back 50 years. If you measured television advertising by the "size" of the ad on the screen (square inches, square centimeters, equivalent to column inches on a newspaper or the magazine page size) - the economics of TV advertising would have been astronomically IN-effective. Far too costly.

But we know today, that most of the second half of the 20th Century, a major TV ad campaign would outperform a major newspaper or magazine ad campaign. The TV introduced the moving image and sound to what was static ads on magazines and newspapers (like on cinema ads); plus the TV was more immediate, consumed simultaneously (like ads on radio).

What Blyk is doing is going beyond the interruptive ad model that we have in magazines, newspapers, billboards, the cinema, radio and TV, and still about half of the ads on the internet. Blyk is also going past the inter-active ad model we have on the other half of the internet (ie Adwords on Google). What Blyk is doing, is creating a new engagement advertising model.

CO CREATE ADS

User-generated advertising !  (or more accurately, user-co-created-advertising).

This is a total shift in the advertising paradigm. No longer is the perfect ad campaign designed in New York, with the ultimate supermodel (or sports hero) selected as the spokesperson for our brand; now the users themselves select which is their favourite celebrity to be used in the ads. No longer is the brilliant ad graphic designer selecting the absolute most amazing colour shade for given product, whether lipstick or designer suit or Nike sneaker or BMW. No matter how perfect the artistic vision of that graphic designer, there are always more of an audience who have a favoured OTHER colour than the one selected. Now the colours are selected by the consumer of the ads. No longer is the dialogue in the ads produced by a master award-winning copyrighter on Madison Avenue, now it is co-created with the teenagers who are accustomed to mashing, who co-create all the time on social networking sites, and who prefer to write in their cryptic grammr & spellng of txt mssgng.

What we are witnessing with Blyk, is the dawn of the next Era in advertising, a new Golden Age. They aren't the only ones doing Engagement Marketing, for sure. But they are very visibly leading that space and thinking, in particular for the whole English-speaking world where most major Ad companies reside.

An Advertising Executive who dismisses the 28,000 Blyk customers, is very literally cutting off his/her future. These 28,000 customers have already LEARNED to co-create and customize the advertising for themselves. They will actively REJECT the old-fashioined interruptive ad models, as utterly speaking the wrong (old) language.

These 28,000 will never go back.

These 28,000 will bring in their friends. The subscriber numbers on Blyk UK will continue to grow. That is an ever increasing segment of the youth market that can't be reached with old-fashioned media methods.

POWER OF ALPHA USER

But much more importantly, they are influencers. The customers that Blyk is signing up are brought in by invitation only. Blyk is giving limited numbers of invitations to its major brands, so they can bring in THEIR influencers.

We write about Alpha Users in the book and on this blog (the Alpha User was brought to the mainstream marketing terminology only in 2004 when I released my third book 3G Marketing with Timo Kasper and Sara Melkko). The Alpha User is the ultimate influencer. We discuss Alphas in two separate chapters with Alan Moore in our book Communities Dominate Brands. As we quote numbers calculated by the social networking analytics specialist firm, Xtract, only 2% of any given community's membership are Alpha Users, this is far less than the Early Adopters the marketing concept that is more than 30 years old. Early Adopters were the previous advertising target for most campaigns. With Alpha Users we can target exactly who influences the market success of any given product or service.

FIFTY TIMES GREATER REACH

Assuming Blyk is careful with its early invitations to its service, and Blyk has used its partners to help target early invitees, by using the 2% rule-of-thumb, these 28,000 Blyk customers WILL influence (not that they have the capacity to influence) 1.4 Million UK youth customers.

That is the number. Not the 28,000 who are on Blyk today. They will directly be influencing the purchasing decisions of 1.4 Million British customers. No other media can find or target the Alpha Users this accurately (nor indeed, efficiently). This is the power of Blyk. On TV you pay through the nose to advertise on "Ant & Dec" or Big Brother and you hope that of the TV show's ten million audience, a part is in your age bracket. Then you hope they are not fast-forwarding past your ads. Then you hope your ad talks to them. And you hope that causes actions in the consumer to go buy your products or services.

On Blyk, all customers actively refine and customize and co-create the advertising experience. They want to make the advertising ever better. They want to engage with the brands. And as they do, they become evangelists for the brands. As Alan Moore says, we embrace what we create. These 28,000 UK youth customers are the hidden gold, the black gold of the 21st century.

The ad executives who look at the numbers and think 28,000 is too small a demographic, that they could get a larger reach on a youth magazine, are dynosaurs, soon to become extinct. Their jobs will soon be eaten by their younger more new-media savvy colleagues.

ENGAGEMENT TAKES CREATIVE EFFORT

Those ad executives who think that a campaign on Blyk is "too hard" - it takes too much work, creative effort, to make happen - those are lazy and deserve to be fired. The mobile phone is the newest mass media channel (the 7th), it is the furthest-reaching mass media, and it is a very tightly restricted mass media. Like radio in the 1930s and 1940s, when compared with magazines, newspapers and cinema. It was a very restrictive media. You could not show the product. And the ads were horribly short. The radio ad design had to learn to use sounds (imagine a coca cola can being opened, the sound of the fizz, that kind of sounds). That didn't stop radio becoming a major mass media.

The mobile phone has the smallest screen. The attention span is often very brief. We take it as a most personal mass media channel, and want all our ads on it to be customized and personalized. We often do other things while consuming content on the phone. These all make it a challenge to produce successful ads on mobile.

That means it is more rewarding for creative talent. They can excel. It is not something that just about anyone can do on their camcorder at home or on a PC screen by cut-and-paste methods, like today you can create web ads. Mobile is challenging, but it will also be rewarding.

When the engagement marketing campaigns are developed for mobile, those will be the masterpieces for the ad industry in the next decade. Learning that today, any intelligent forward-thinking ad executive needs to get to mobile ads today. Few countries have strong cultures in mobile ads (like Japan, South Korea and Spain) so in most markets the industry needs to learn from the begininng.

But Blyk is a clear leader in this space. Their 28,000 customers are influencers, their power goes far beyond their number - and these influencers, once they "go engagement" they will never go back to interruptive ads. And for ads on Blyk (and other mobile advertising platforms) - yes, that is hard work. You have to learn what is Engagement Marketing. You have to surrender some control to the community. You have to invite them to co-create and join. You have to reward them. But if you do, there is a career path in advertising for the next decade. If not, you go on counting eyeballs on TV and your advertising career will soon disappear.