On April 22nd 1997 my father who I didn’t see terribly often as he lived in Canada came through London. I was sitting with him at a friends house in Hounslow when he told me that there was a pretty good chance that he had cancer and that it was ‘ok’. As far as I am aware I was the first of his six kids that he told but may be wrong.
Turns out he was on his way back from North Korea on his way to Cuba, where he was stuck for some time because he walked into the hospital with a vertebrae missing.
I didn’t see him again till his birthday in August by which time his lumbering frame was reduced to a skeleton and his heavily accented but powerful voice reduced to a whisper; with turned out to be my last.
I’m now 42, married, two kids and as a first generation geek that never really grasped any level of doctrine since logic dictates that the only constant in life is change.
But find myself nonetheless considering the profound reality that that the insanity of a currently Live mad-man by way of the ‘back in the day’ machine is going to be most likely forever associated with that of a particular dead man, my Dad.
So politics and fucking psycho’s aside – I just wanted to say – I had a Dad. He loved his kids. Was glue to the entire extended family. Was good to his friends. Was an inspiration to others. Could command a room but seriously could not do small talk, utterly socially inept. Loved watching dodgy soap opera’s in his pyjama’s. Was a fantastic cook. Was shockingly good at Monopoly and most card games. Was understanding when I dropped out of University to be like, a DJ and supported me when I decided to write a music fanzine. Told me that there was no point in having a conversation with me because I wasn’t intellectually ‘there’ yet and then just as I could sort of keep up in my 20’s. Died.
I was asked to sit on a panel with the likes of Twitter and Facebook and talk about the big things for 2014 – the brief was to focus integration of social media across brands. I had started something but due to ‘real’ work commitments didn’t actually get what I was going to present finished in time – thankfully I was last so had an extra hour to clean it up. With no disrespect the other four speakers did very slick, eloquent sales pitches.
I wrote a poem.
Yep, probably ill-conceived but I just couldn’t face doing yet more death by powerpoint extolling the joys of social media to those who in theory have already drunk the kool-aid. I also couldn’t really face talking about ‘Integration’ so split the rant in two and covered off just enough to still respond to the ‘brief’ as it were. I haven’t touched it since and frankly bits of it don’t scan or make huge amounts of sense but there are a couple of nice bits and I thought i’d share!
Apologies in advance as it’s more Seuss than Shakespeare
What’s gonna the biggest shift in social media in 2014.
Integration the brief which belies belief
That an external force provides the source
When looking at social or media or whatever
We much start to make things internally together
Having heard about context, content and scale
But how to exploit will make you wail!
Forced to recognise yourself and your mob
You realise agencies can’t do that job
The prime directive ‘know thyself’
Is hard to outsource to somebody else.
Integration starts at home
Departmental divides
A de-socialised zone
Directing through a transparent haze
Consumer response – upper management glaze
On an x monthly cycle we pay love to retention
To our consumers who increasingly bemoan our attention
In 2014 we hopefully transition
Away from ‘social’ media without hesitation
with nerry a complaint we evolve the situation
from graph to relevance to contextual location
In our utopian world where consumers are saviours
Every campaign starts with observed online behavior
New found respect for those who pay all your bills
Being relevant, and caring or just giving – for thrills!
‘Creative’ becomes pointless at a granular level
cross sell your mates coz we’re in affiliate hell.
Paid defined as media
Earned becomes media
Owned content is … well media
And Media is just media
Social the word will stop getting through
And dropped in the same way as how we used to use ‘New’
Social and Media this oxymoronic pair
Part themselves finally and go, well? Elsewhere!
But frankly this is the worst kind of obfuscation
Because the biggest threat next year is: legislation
Porn, abortion, copyright, defamation,
Evolution, lie detection, drug interception
Laundering bit coins a thing of the past
The future is coming a little bit to fast
to be forgotten, the basic human right
legal liability becomes everyone’s fight
From cookies and cream to the TPP
There is no more expectation of privacy,
the united NS of A and GCHQ
Shows the law of the lands are just for the few
The disrupted models
disrupting new models
disrupting future models.
Disrupting you
obsolete gatekeepers legislate the new
One strike two strikes, three strikes oh well
Sharing culture invokes legacy hell
Finger pointing, Finger printing, gun printing, run
Don’t you dare make gun shaped food for fun
too much democracy and sensitive souls,
too many thin skins, too many trolls
Contextual conversation past it’s peak
hate speech curtailed so we now hate to speak
too many pictures uploaded yourself
But we need laws if done by somebody else
too much revenge when relationships end
So much humanity and no common sense.
Rarified Lawyers with too much to do.
sue over both bad and even good reviews,
sue for retweeting mistakes of the press
just arguing now has legal redress
imprisoned for bad jokes is taking the piss
As is fining for sharing and staring at, err bits
Being sued over patents as obvious as sin,
with that kind of trolling don’t know where to begin
So in 2014 all these sites randomly blocked
because of overly protective political thought
Chilling the net because they are mad
believing it would be a ‘good’ idea to stop something ‘bad’.
(I wrote this back in July – it was supposed to be published in The Drum but for reasons best left to them it just sat there, oh well – anyway – it’s still relevant and I’m writing a follow-up so I felt the need to get it out there for the half a dozen folk who read this! This would have been number 16 in the ‘What were they thinking’ series btw.)
I feel profoundly as a politician, and as a father, that the time for action has come… We need to stop Vile images of child abuse on the internet which are illegal
David Cameron July 2013
Our leader, our moral compass, our ‘captain oh captain’ has shown his utter lack of inspiration and absolute desperation in trying to resolve the fundamental problem that he is most likely, in political terms anyway, going down in history’s as a cautionary tale of how destructive a prime minister can actually be. All in the name of our children.
He had the opportunity to make a name by going after the banks who destroyed our children’s futures.
He could have been the one who finally got the darker side of the media under control instead of endorsing Page 3 as a consumer choice.
He could have made sure every kid in the country had a computer, or hell, had milk at lunchtime.
He could have made a stand to prevent rationing of paediatric units.
He could have kept a system which provided affordable childcare so people can afford to work.
He could have fought to keep money in the public school system instead of encouraging Academies.
He could have made it harder and less attractive for kids to start smoking.
He could have stopped criminalising youth with Mosquito’s and surveillance, creating the most alienated generation ever.
But No! When it comes to our kids, he weighed up all the options and decided to look after the moral well being of our children, because we are incapable of doing it ourselves.
When your back is against the wall, often the best recourse is to utter the words ‘For the Children’. It’s the safest thing you can possibly say – more often than not you get away with it because it’s unlikely that anybody is going to argue with the sentiment.
What was he thinking?
Back in July ago, whilst conferring with the NSPCC our leader decided to go after the porn. What do you think was going through his head at the time, what was the brief that lead us to this conclusion?
Given the amount of negative press around GCHQ, Prism, etc. can we find a positive spin on government interference with the web?
The cause is something which nobody is going to disagree with on principal – low hanging fruit which doesn’t provide too much tax revenue? (Note: The porn industry has shrunk by almost 90% in the last 6 years, and most of the money lives in the US so therefore not a very lucrative target for fund or tax raising.)
We need to avoid anything which will require significant parliamentary sign-off in case it back fires.
We can leverage with the bad press the tech industry has had recently around tax avoidance to guilt them into action.
We don’t actually care whether it’s actually possible – it just needs to sound plausible. In fact the ease which people can circumvent could be turned into a blessing as an argument for stronger regulation, moving the conversation from ‘should we’ to ‘how can we’.
It needs to sound like we’re doing the public a favour – using language like ‘opt-in’, ‘protect’ and ‘default’.
We can’t be seen to be taking any responsibility for any collateral damage. Who can we make responsible for ‘black listing’; we can then pass the blame when large chunks of the Internet just disappear by accident.
We can use such big broad terms like ‘Pornography’ without clear definition allowing us to move the ‘line’ as it suits our purpose.
A winning strategy?
It’s actually a pretty strong strategy from a political point of view but elegantly illustrates how fundamentally dangerous people with lots of power and very little actual knowledge can be. It neatly hides some of the longer term agendas that this would facilitate. For example: If you asked a kid if they had a choice of watching Iron Man 3 / Twilight 6 / w’ever big hollywood flick online or pornography for free what do think the response would be? We all know – but it actually doesn’t matter – that’s the genius of Cameron’s master plan – since both are ‘illegal’ and now we have our filters in place; we can kill two birds with one stone! In fact there are a bunch of things which the moral majority are opposed to so let’s let people opt out of them too – ‘esoteric material’, ‘web forums’, ‘social networks’ for instance. Why stop at porn?
What could he do better?
I’m entirely against censorship but if we just do a ‘what if’ the argument that hiding porn from kids will prevent bad things from happening then surely there are a whole bunch of other factors.
First and foremost, blocking isn’t removing it as the Polish prime minister pointed out, he also rightly said – “We shall not block access to legal content regardless of whether or not it appeases us aesthetically or ethically.” Where is the strategy to catch the ‘bad actors’ (sorry in this context it’s a great term). You would have to be pretty stupid to allow your illegal porn to be google index-able anyway and surely if you did it then wouldn’t it become trivial for find and prosecute you?
In fact I suspect 99% of what is technically kiddy porn is by the kids, for the kids as the rise of sexting and snap chat show – it’s peer to peer as opposed to pervert to pervert. This is in part an education issue but also a consequence of every teenager having an internet enabled phone in their hands. Finding the real sicko’s requires good detective work to counter rather than the mass criminalisation of youth.
Spending money on education seems to be out of the question. If you don’t know how to ‘use the net’ then frankly you are at a massive disadvantage anyway. Wouldn’t the money be better spent helping people understand how they, themselves, can keep their children safe. For most of these kids online porn isn’t the problem anyway – online bullying is – and this, again does nothing to help that.
One of Cameron’s arguments is that this behaviour is as a result of exposure to negative portrayal of women in Porn. If that’s the case then isn’t mainstream media just as responsible? Showing my age but I remember the first time seeing ‘S-Club Jr’s’ and thinking that the world has officially gone nuts. Pop culture is the definition of the over-sexualisation of youth. But do I think it should be censored? No, of course not.
If there’s a watershed on the TV then why isn’t there one for the internet?
As has been demonstrated dramatically with the blocking of the Pirate Bay – most moves to censor shine a light on the unsavoury and in fact increase traffic to the sites, not the other way round. Streisand will attest to that. Not least the tools like Immunicity to circumvent are already there rendering the whole thing a bit pointless.
And that’s the problem. In one fell swoop he has made the ISPs responsible for the content of the net. – Just look about the current debate around Twitter’s status as a platform or publisher. This is substantially more far reaching than simply just the ability to rapidly report and act on abuse. It set’s the precedent that those who maintain the ‘phone lines’ are responsible for obscene phone callers. The impact of one of the G8 pushing this forward (largely because they couldn’t in the US due to their pesky constitution, will, and already is being felt globally. You can pretty much exclude all user-generated content. Our future becomes the curation of authorised media. Great.
A few months about when we were all discussing ‘the right to be forgotten’ Cameron tried to push through rules in the E.U. saying that each country should have their own policy on how they deal with it. Which is as impractical as this filtering nonsense.
Overly dramatic yes, but illustrates why politicians should stay the hell away at least until they fundamental understanding about how the internet works.
Ultimately he seeks causality in the consumption of something legal and consumed by many with the work of an individual mad mother fracker. One. Not an epidemic, not a patient Zero. One sadly disturbed individual who went out and raped & killed a child the same age as my son. That to me is horrifying but does it make me fear for the safety of my son. Well no, he is still more likely to get knocked over by a bus, by a substantial order of magnitude than he is to be the victim of a sexual predator. At least I hope that is the case, the reality is that nothing Saint David is proposing will make my son any safer than he is right now. Therefore, we will parent and educate to equip our children and ourselves.
David. For our Freedom. For our Future. For Frack Sake. Stop it. For the Children.
Jon Bains is a father of two and partner in business futures practice Atmosphere
Posted on the Drum a while back, I’ve updated it a bit.
Developing a sustainable customer value proposition today can be very difficult. In english that means matching up what you are offering versus what the consumers actually want. Most of us are familiar with the term ‘Value for Money’ i.e. it’s about price. However that’s only one factor in the equation. Whenever you see anybody use the word ‘Premium’ it means, we aren’t the cheapest, we are better than them in some objectively identifiable way, better fabric, better whooshing noise, go faster stripes etc. Basically about definable product attributes. When it comes to services you have a whole set of other emotional triggers – do you trust them, is it easy, do they help me, is it for me, did I enjoy it etc.
The relative weights of all the factors which make up your relevance to the consumer are constantly shifting and apparently insignificant tweaks can lead to complete failure if you aren’t careful. It’s one of these things you see every day and yet brands and services keep falling into the same trap, sometimes because of greed, others just circumstance
It’s worth reminding ourselves the Holy trinity of ‘Company’, ‘Brand’ and ‘Product’ have been mashed together in consumers minds now. Corporate behaviour influences consumers now in ways far more profoundly than could ever happen in the pre web world and so the value proposition goes far beyond just the product at hand.
I thought it would be interesting to look at a few current examples of how and why these changes occur and what the impact can be.
Adobe Creative Cloud
What did you used to get?
Every other year Adobe would release a suite of software (at various price points) which you would then ‘own’. This would be updated sporadically over that cycle, usually doing a feature bump about a year in. You would then be charged an upgrade fee for each 1.0 upgrade (and the odd 0.5 one too). If you are a business owner this model is bittersweet – you need enough licences for all your bums-on-seats. Too many it’s not efficient, too few expensive upfront cost. It should be noted that software can be depreciated for tax purposes over time so there is a bit of a break there.
What’s changed?
Recently Adobe created a great deal of noise when it announced the end of their ‘Creative Suite’ as a boxed product, moving to a subscription model instead. Microsoft have been doing the same, if a bit more cautiously, with Office 365. It makes a huge amount of financial sense for them to shift to these kinds of models as you can get more cash from the consumers, for longer, reduce their bi-annual big marketing spike in favour of drip feeding feature upgrades. The idea was also to curb piracy but given the newest edition of Creative Cloud was hacked within 24 hours not entirely sure it helped.
What do you get now?
Convenient access to most up to date software
A teeny tiny bit of space in a cloud
Some online services
What you give?
An ongoing subscription
Your freedom of choice
The inability to just buy the suite or individual components like Photoshop outright
The inability to depreciate your investment against tax.
What’s the consequence?
Actually for the Professional set who use the tools everyday as part of their workflow there are massive advantages to the subscription model. However, if you use the applications infrequently it becomes a very real tax. Many out there are having a long hard look at their own requirements and realising that actually they don’t need the cannon when a peashooter will do. There are many alternatives out there in the market like Pixelmator, which costs a tenner, has many of the same features of photoshop, but squarely aimed at pro/amateurs. It opens up the ecosystem for a smaller players to sneak in as has already happened on IOS.
What could they have done better?
Followed Microsoft’s example and had a transitional period. Potentially stop selling the Suite but continue selling the individual applications.
Tumblr
With the recent tumblr acquisition things are very much up in the air as far as what changes are likely to happen to the service. The general tone from the new owners is ‘Keep Calm and Carry On, we won’t break it, we promise’.
What did you used to get?
Ease of use. Blogging for folk who be bothered writing loads. Open and non-judgemental. No ads or any real explicit business model barring a sale or IPO. Young and independent. Not-Facebook. A way to collectively share interests / obsession without the underlying commerciality of Pinterest. Trust.
What’s changing?
High profile acquisition by a ‘legacy’ digital business who has a well documented history of ‘breaking’ their newly integrated services.
What you give (currently)
Cats. White men wearing Glass. More Cats. Basically lots of content.
What’s the consequence
Significant but not catastrophic (yet) migration from the service – principally to WordPress. Unsurprising really as for many, especially the younger audience, the content creation route has been Twitter –> Tumblr –> WordPress.
But still, why the panic? Let’s just give yahoo the benefit of the doubt and assume they won’t wall it off and kill it the way they did with Flickr and delicious and do in fact keep it exactly the same. The key part of the value proposition that has changed right now is Trust. Yahoo didn’t spend a billion on it to let them just do what they do on perpitude. There needs to be a bit of commercial flavouring mixed in now or soon because its such a big bet on yahoo’s behalf they will need to show a return pretty damn quickly. We know this, everyone knows this and poof, just like that trust earned is replaced with suspicion and revulsion.
This provides great opportunity for others in the space to hoover up the disenchanted. I’m actually really surprised that WordPress hasn’t launched an ‘ImPRESSion’ product yet using a simplified skin or app on top of their existing software. They could out Tumblr Tumblr in a heartbeat actually.
*UPDATE
Various reports with various reasons suggest Tumblr has cracked down on Porn and changed their policy on search. Most feel this is Yahoo’s influence although founder denies it.
What could they have done better?
They got a BILLION dollars. The owners don’t really care do they? If they did, they would have spent more time upfront working with Yahoo to agree a commercialisation roadmap and share it with their users. Would be more intellectually honest and in tune with the spirit of Tumblr. Time will tell whether the migration continues.
Star Wars: The Old Republic
About a year and a half ago, with great fanfare there was the launch of ‘the old republic’ a massively multiplayer game based on the smash hit star wars series ‘Knights of the old republic’. With over a million initial sign-ups it was the fastest growing MMO in history.
What did you get?
This was the first major licensed Star Wars MMO since Star Wars Galaxies, which whilst popular with the very hardcore didn’t really gain traction with the masses, especially in a post Warcraft World. SW:TOR had High production values, multi-platform, easy to get into and even apparently fits within Star Wars cannon for the uber geeks.
What changed?
Whilst adoption was extremely quick, so was drop off. Everyone appreciated the ‘Star Wars’ but the content didn’t match the expectations of a typical MMO user. Instead of, as is often the case, killing it. They recognised they needed to engage a new audience. Whilst maintaining their subscription option they opened the game up as ‘Free-to-play’ charging micropayments to advance quicker and open new areas.
What’s the consequence?
As a result they went from half a million players to 1.7m in a few weeks and doubled their revenue at the same time. It introduced a whole bunch of people who haven’t played MMO’s before but are susceptible to ‘get them hooked and jack up the price’. Nice one. Of course it’s not all roses, the hardcore players who have been paying the whole time are now inundated by ‘a bunch of noobs’ who are more likely to dip in / dip out, which can be frustration. Hopefully they would recognise that it will increase the longevity of the title and provide funds to create more content.
What could they have done better?
They probably could have moved to the new model sooner. Complaints about the game started appearing within a few months of launch and they had a hard time developing sufficient content to keep the hardcore amused.
So what does it all mean?
Again, what the business wants and what the consumers want can easily get out of whack. Every time you tweak your offering never mind transforming your model, service or general proposition it’s just worth having a chat with your customers first. It’s perfectly reasonable to prioritise one customer over another – you are running a business after all – however before doing that understand why they are actually engaged with you as opposed to what you imagine want them to feel. You may find your biggest payers are actually not your biggest advocates and all those quietly content folk can make an awful din when riled.
“Beauty is indeed a good gift of God; but that the good may not think it a great good, God dispenses it even to the wicked.”
Yet again the world of banking is in the spotlight. The Co-op is had been downgraded, Metro Bank posting larger than expected losses, and surveys suggesting that given the opportunity a significant number would switch their accounts away from the majors in a heartbeat, even given the devastating factoid that more people get divorced than change their bank. Barring the direct impact on your own personal finances, most of us can’t muster up the will to care. Why? Because regardless of how much the industry tries to clean itself up – be it retail or investment – they are perceived as greedy, untrustworthy and downright ugly.
In fact there a great number of adjectives used when talking about Banks, and most of them aren’t terribly complementary. Funnily enough, Beautiful is not one of them. Given the interest I had from looking at Barclays Business social media a few weeks ago, I thought it might be interesting to imagine what the ‘Beautiful’ Bank of the future might look like, especially when it’s held up to Wikipedia’s definition of beauty!
Perpetual experience of pleasure or satisfaction
We know who you are. We understand your pressures and we like talking to you. We are not off-shored; we are in-sync with you and your life. We want your business, we don’t discriminate on size or circumstance, we are for everyone. Your family, your house, your business, your passions. Wherever you are in your journey it’s one narrative, one story, one life. You are more than just a demographic, a segment, or a cross-sell opportunity. We look at the whole picture and proactively suggest, reward, remind and inspire – not just to win you over initially, but also to keep winning you over throughout.
We actively pursue a long meaningful relationship with our customers, putting long-term value ahead of short-term gains. Every interaction recognised as significant, and action taken swiftly to resolve issues. We promise that you’ll find the right person to talk to, as quickly as possible – be it online, in branch or by phone. Our staff are well versed and helpful, even suggesting money saving opportunities along the way. We track and hold ourselves against how satisfied you are with the resolution and your willingness to share the experience. We are beholden to you and hope we earn the same level of trust in return.
An entity which is admired
We are active in the community. We must contribute to the building of the society wherever we are. We help local businesses; providing a central hub for all discussions around finance and more. As with the post-office of old, or the local pub, we connect our customers together providing shared growth opportunities, both locally and nationally. Our success is measured by – the relationships we have nurtured, the lives we have changed, the communities that have blossomed, and the growth we have contributed to.
In balance and harmony with nature
We are a catalyst of change, not just in your pocket, but also in the world. If we are for everyone, then everyone is a stakeholder, and henceforth the definition stakeholder value is extended to demonstrate social good. We know the world is a big place and that our own, and our customers’, investment in our future means nothing without investing in those around us.
We subscribe to the highest standards and try to make a positive impact on the environment. Being ‘Green’ is no longer seen as a ‘nice to have’ but as a mantra for efficiency across our entire business. Using less means more in so many ways.
In the eye of the beholder
We ask ourselves every day – why would anybody want to talk to us? We know many of the things we produce are only required at very specific times in your life. So when your ready we’ll be there be listening, chatting, helping. Our job is to provide options not upsells.
The truth is not always beautiful, nor beautiful words the truth.
Closed door’s close off opportunity – opportunities to listen, to engage, to understand, to share, to innovate, and to evolve. The only confidence we keep is that of our customers. If our actions cannot be communicated to the public, then we probably shouldn’t be doing it.
This also applies to the language we use, many use jargon as a weapon to confuse, cajole and confound. We don’t. We translate, educate and simplify. We present our products and services, as they should be – straight forward, human and flexible. We avoid presenting a million variations designed to entrap. We pride ourselves in ensuring that you know what you are buying, why and what the alternatives are. We provide the tools, we provide the insight, and if you like, we’ll sit down and explain it all.
Our openness extends across all of our activity. When we charge we promise to tell you in advance, and not just how much, but why. We believe that we should be paid for providing an excellent service, not because you made a mistake. When making big decisions, if you desire, we offer forecasting services to illustrate what might happen over time, so it’s crystal clear what the potential outcomes are. And not just the good news, we’ll even show you the worst-case scenario – all based on your life as it is, and how it may change. Where possible everything we sell has a returns policy, a cooling off period, just in case you feel you made a decision in haste or in error. We want to get it right for you; otherwise we have failed.
Where nothing needs to be added or taken away
The only truth is that everyone is different. We enable you to write your own rules and automate how your money moves around.
About to go overdrawn? Set up a rule to be notified and move some money from somewhere else
Working to a budget? Set a monthly limit and be notified how close you are to the edge
Hefty bill coming in? Automatically get an overdraft and automatically adjust your budget to quickly get back on in the black
Need a statement? A month is a long time to wait, so you choose how, when and where you get the information you need to effectively manage your finances.
Want to buy something big? Set up your own short-term savings objectives, which protect just a little bit every month. And if you want to divide up your money across different budgets you can do that to, all from one account.
We recognise that you may not conduct all your financial business with us. But we make it as painless as possible to move money around, from account to account, and from bank to bank. And if for any reason you want to leave us, we promise we will make it as painless and quick as it was to join.
When you need that little extra we provide the best terms. The necessity of having to ‘manage debt’ tends to come from bad products or bad planning. We ensure we will never knowingly put you in a position where you feel you are stuck, stressed and struggling to pay us back. If you need to change the terms on the fly, because your situation has changed, we’ll do it; in fact we will provide you with tools so you can do it yourself!
Beyond loans, we believe we can maintain margins by providing flexibility across all products and services. We are all-weather friends who understand when things are tough and can adjust, defer or waive additional costs, which we know tend to come at the worst time. We offer services that dismiss bank charges entirely when you are down, in exchange for a slightly lower interest rate when you are up. Not good enough? – We are open to suggestion.
How can we make these Beautiful Banks happen? I could tell you but I’d have to bill you!
Jon Bains is a partner at business futures practice Atmosphere
In general, overtly marketing to kids is pretty hard these days. Given media consumption habits it’s considerably more permission based than advertising standards would lead you to believe. Appreciating that my own household may not be entirely typical, it is pretty representative of the multi screen household of today or the day after.
We don’t watch any of what was traditionally called TV, i.e. we don’t watch linear programming, other than the news and CBeebies, occassionally. The kids tend to either fight over the iPad or play on a console, depending on who wins. As a result they see very little direct TV advertising. When they go round friends houses and are exposed to ‘channels’, they have actually asked ‘why did the film stop?’
However both the iPad and Xbox are commercial wonderlands. Just the other day there was a massive ad for some add-ons for Minecraft on the Xbox which caused no end of grief as I had to explain to the kids that I wasn’t paying three quid for an avatar TYVM. I won that argument but still ended up buying all the avatar packs on Scribblenauts on the iPad.
There has been a goodly amount of coverage about the dangers of micropayment in games so I’m not going to talk about that particularly, it factors in when looking at how traditional ‘kid friendly’ brands compete for the hearts and minds for our progeny in the non-linear, specifically App world.
What’s the story
Whilst not available in the UK (possibly ever), McDonald’s in the US have just launched their first app aimed directly at kids, called ‘McPlay’. It currently consists of one game which is apparently about healthy eating – haven’t played it myself yet. Interestingly it has on the title screen ‘This. Is Advertising!’ – which when you channel it through Leonidas from the 300 becomes quite amusing! At least it’s honest.
It’s a bit of a departure for them as most of the other McDonalds apps out there are glorified store-locators with the odd delivery service and in-store promotions. In fact a quick survey of the competitors paints a similar picture – store locators, menus, at home delivery. In fact I couldn’t find any other examples of fast food brands, such as Burger King and KFC, doing anything that is remotely targeted at kids. That’s what makes McPlay an interesting pivot point. Advergames were a mainstay of the interweb but there seems to be a bit of hesitancy in Appland, in this category anyway.
So why not here? I thought be might be interesting to look at the ASA guidelines to see if they covered off this kind of activity. Yep, I’m that sad.
First off – do Apps even fall under the ASA?
The Code Applies to: “advertisements in non-broadcast electronic media, including but not limited to: online advertisements in paid-for space (including banner or pop-up advertisements and online video advertisements); paid-for search listings; preferential listings on price comparison sites; viral advertisements (see III l); in-game advertisements; commercial classified advertisements; advergames that feature in display advertisements; advertisements transmitted by Bluetooth; advertisements distributed through web widgets and online sales promotions and prize promotions.”
Well it doesn’t say ‘App’s’ outright I would say that they would be covered under either in-game advertisements or advergames. Philosophically of course one could argue that consumption of any franchise is in fact advertising but perhaps we best not go there.
“Marketers must not knowingly collect from children under 12 personal information about those children for marketing purposes without first obtaining the consent of the child’s parent or guardian.”
OK, so there’s a question – what data is actually being collected from these apps? Frankly unless you are actually registering your child directly it would probably fall under anonymous or at worst the bill payer. However with so many apps these days asking to ‘upload your contacts’ who knows?
“Marketers must not knowingly collect personal information about other people from children under 16 unless that information is the minimum required to make a recommendation for a product, is not used for a significantly different purpose from that originally consented to, and the marketer can demonstrate that the collection of that information was suitable for the age group targeted.”
If I read this right that could probably apply to all social networks. For example, Facebook’s age limit is 13 but given that they know the social graph of all under-16 year olds and use it to provide relevant advertising, does that count?
“Data about third parties collected from children must not be kept for longer than necessary.”
Well hmmm, what does no ‘longer than necessary’ mean? For that matter, since we don’t know what data has been collected anyway, how can we check? Whilst I’m not convinced by current legislative proposals, in terms of best practice I suspect all apps should allow you to review and/or delete capture info. No?
“Marketing communications addressed to, targeted directly at or featuring children must not exploit their credulity, loyalty, vulnerability or lack of experience.”
Actually that whole statement makes me shudder when I think of all the stuff my kids have on their iPad. The entire multi-billion ‘free-to-play’ world is preys on exactly that.
“Children must not be made to feel inferior or unpopular for not buying the advertised product.”
Can’t get through a level? Haven’t unlocked Zorg the Mankiness? Getting frustrated? Get on the High Score Chart by buying some of our tokens!?
“Adult permission must be obtained before children are committed to buying.”
Apple require you to enter your password for in-app purchases and other related app purchases. However as of IOS 6 they changed it so that if the App is free, it doesn’t require a password. Personally I think it’s the parents responsibility to know what their kids are doing, however even with parental controls I can’t stop the kids downloading a free-to-play honeypot.
“Must not include a direct exhortation to children to buy an advertised product or persuade their parents or other adults to buy an advertised product for them.”
Now this is tricky. As mentioned before – my kids bring me the iPad all the time and say ‘I want that’. Whose fault is that?
I was quite surprised at how well thought out most of their code is or was anyway, it’s just a bit unenforceable currently really and needs refreshed with a few more practical suggestions. If these guidelines were actually being applied to apps, then the app store might be significantly different.
The Grilling Effect
Concern over Childrens safety in Appland and frankly all digital channels increasingly in focus. Be it economically or morally, the eyes of the world are looking through the eyes of the child now. In the marketing world it’s really hard not to mix-up brands with In-App purchases; be it overt or covert they are still encouraging you to buy something.
Food for thought?
A simple-ish resolution may be in the content rating system. If ‘permission must be obtained’ in the advertising or in-app space before buying anything then frankly the apps themselves should be rated at the age of consent i.e. 12+, 16+, however counter intuitive that may seem. While Apple has included the line ‘Contains in-app purchases’, that doesn’t say very much compared to varying scales within. If my kid downloads ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ for free for the iPhone and it’s rated 3+, and then they are accosted with cross-selling ads for a million other books then that is a problem. One which goes away when the rating is 16+ or the parental controls are set higher.
The only real tip I have to offer here is keep an eye on what’s going on with the ASA and recently announced Digital Consumer Rights Bill. Both of which will have an impact on how and if your brand / product has potential negative repercussions.
Again, I do firmly believe it’s the parent’s responsibility to police and am not very keen on ill-conceived legislation, however, more than guns, porn, drugs or manga (as the case may be) or any of the other things which give you an adult rating, the idea of coming home to find them ‘McPlay’ing on the iPad without my permission, keeps me awake at night.
The battle for your hands and pockets has reached fever pitch as the apparent pinnacle of our Technological civilisation, The Smartphone has reached a plateau in innovation.
Actually that’s slightly disingenuous, there is still massive innovation happening in the industry, but appears to appeal solely to phone geeks. Thinner screens, increased battery life, better cameras, better graphics, improved UX – all good. But who’s impressed?
Meet the new phone, same as the old phone.
However as was seen with the Galaxy S4 and to an extent the IPhone 5 launch the blogosphere, if not the public, are getting increasingly nonplused about our current crop of top end handsets.
We’ve passed the point where these new devices will dramatically change your life. Sure, you still have ‘new phone smell’ but its impact has diminished over time since that first blissful app purchase. They’ve even lost social talkability – they won’t make you the coolest kid on the block as you join the daily telephonic beauty parade with your friends, unless you are a rebel of course with a Blackberry or Windows 8 phone where there might be some mild curiosity.
Faster! Lighter! Stronger! Longer Best yet! New & Improved! Blah.
These aren’t the words of innovation but iteration. To be honest it’s more FMCG than Luxury IT. I can just see Don Draper, getting his ‘creative’ on sketching out a fifties super-mom, next to the sink, vacuum cleaner strategically place with the a new phone in one hand and Camel filterless in the other. ‘Because sometimes, a burden shared is a burden halved’.
Waiting in the wings of course is the next little thing. This years arms race is the over abundance of smart watches to be strapped to us by year end. Of course for me, the last watch I wore was a Casio calculator watch in the eighties, so it offers the opportunity to relive my geeky childhood(?!?). The joke is of course this will reduce necessity to have the latest and greatest phone, placing it even further down your priority list.
So What’s the Story?
Microsoft launched their shiny new telly ad for the Nokia 920 this week; a mildly amusing fistfight between Apple and Samsung users at a wedding, with the strapline ‘Don’t Fight. Switch’. Pretty much describing Microsoft and Nokia’s own fortunes over the last decade. Should probably say ‘Switch back’. Even though it had ‘an idea’ it still left me cold so I decided to check out the various offline campaigns from the competition and was pretty horrified.
For once I’m going to have to use some visual aids:
Objectives
Normally I would reverse engineer an individual campaign but frankly they are so much of a muchness it’s hard to discern one from the other, so instead I’ve decided to lump them all together and focus on decoding the combined objectives. Before I begin I can say, ‘I feel their pain’.
Create a positive distinction in category
Faster, more clarity, easier, more connected, less connected, sings happy birthday on voice command, tells you where to go and occasionally to get lost, stores your precious memories as you lost your own and most importantly show that we’re not Apple – even if we are!
Illustrate typical useage
Look at me you can take pictures and keep in touch with your friends! Oh yeah and Apps, Apps, and more Apps. Please make sure you never ever show anyone actually talking on it.
Demonstrate new product features
You can shoot pictures of yourself whilst stalking somebody, catch the errant bathing suit with our rewind feature, or assist in having your house burgled by constantly reminding people you aren’t at home. Not to forget the ‘with new and improved yadda yadda’!
Appeal to a broad (any) demographic
…as long as it isn’t geeks. We especially like young, white, active, healthy, thin, affluent hipster types messing around with fountains, skateboards, and on the odd mountaintop. They must all be overly attached to hugging their friends for no apparent reason whilst not appearing to be on drugs. Feel free to be ‘quirky’ to demonstrate openness but only within the bounds of ‘Friends’, not ‘Animal House’. If necessary you can throw in a bit of an ethnic mix to show that we don’t discriminate.
Build on the emotional connection between you and your phone
Please ensure there are plenty of babies, grannies, little kids, graduations, holidays, romantic dinners and sunrises all brought to you by us. Make sure they know it never happened if you didn’t take a picture of it, and update your status.
Show off the sleek lightweight design
It’s like – a screen with like really smooth edges, and like some really cool bevels, or even better sharp edges denoting precision. But the best thing is it’s so huge you will need to get new pockets to make it fit or so small you’ll need to get the holes in your pockets fixed and…Oh yeah It’s like shiny!
Reassure users that your phone is the smart buy
Show others with competing phones to be exactly the opposite of your cool, suave, white-ish hipster types. Where possible provide situations to illustrate them to be poor befuddled disempowered sheep and/or zombies with no will of their own. Especially when you are trying to convince them to switch from one brand to another.
Be Smug
Be smug.
Tips for the top
The transition from life altering to commodity does not provide an excuse for abuse. Insulting the audience intelligence is rarely a good move. The same people who you target online and create those extraordinary engagement programmes for, are most likely the same people who watch your ads. Even if they don’t watch them on telly, they will see them and rate you accordingly.
See 1
Are we really the people that these campaigns profess to appeal to? Do they exist? If so the world is a pretty scary place. Now I must remember to tweet that, whilst hugging someone.
Jon Bains is a partner at business futures practiceAtmosphere
Book your place now for Digital For Business Leaders – a one-day workshop for decision makers that will give you an understanding of digital’s impact on business, and provide you with a roadmap to plan your organisation’s future. To find out more and book your place on the session in London (May 17), Manchester (May 23) or Glasgow (May 24),click here.
Luxury fashion brands were a comparatively late entry into the digital world, which was no surprise given the typical profile of marketers in the sector, and the fact that they weren’t always the most digitally savvy folk in the world; it’s scary the number of times I’ve heard ‘my women don’t do digital’. They have been historically at best strategically aloof (sorry exclusive) at worst arrogant (‘everybody is like me, I know best’) in their belief about their audience behaviors. In marketing we are very much what we eat, and if you have a steady diet of glossy print then it’s not very surprising that things turn out the way they do.
However, the sector seems to be changing, and whilst not often discussed, I think it can largely be put down to two things, the rise of Pinterest, which provides a platform for all the pretty things, and most importantly the advent of the iPad.
For the image conscious it was the first digital device that provided a ‘luxurious’ digital experience that didn’t alienate the technophobe elite. Gestural navigation resonated with the audience, and without making too many comparisons, if a 2 year old can get their head around it then so can the typical reader of Harper’s Bazaar.
Cartier and Burberry lead the charge and have delivered some sophisticated and surprisingly accessible initiatives across a number of digital channels, making it IMHO more ‘fashionable’ for conservative luxury brands to take more risks, and look at life beyond catwalk shows and glossy fashion magazines.
The big question is what happens when you combine this with the world of social and political change? I’ve also spent a great deal of time working in the Third Sector – most recently working on a campaign about weaponised rape in the Congo – and as such appreciate how fraught many of the issues can be once connected with brands.
What’s the story?
Gucci, in tandem with Beyonce, Salma Hayek and Frida Giannini, have founded an NGO called ‘Chime for Change’, a socially led fundraising and awareness campaign, which aims to put women’s rights on the world stage.
This sits on top of a white labeled ‘Catapult‘, which is essentially Kickstarter for causes, with many user suggested initiatives. Each of the three spokeswomen covers a different topic – Education, Justice and Health – which are curated via Catapult’s main site, i.e. you can’t actually propose a new initiative yourself, just support the vertical subset selected by the three expert philanthropists.
As far as I can tell the communications campaign consists of activity on Facebook and Twitter, plus a bunch of videos of famous people (probably wearing Gucci, but hard for me to tell with an untrained eye). This is also leads up to a concert at the Twickenham Stadium on June 1st, with the headliners including Beyonce, Florence & the Machine, and Ellie Goulding.
So what were they thinking?
Establish credibility in the social space
Tie together CSR and brand marketing
Build a stronger connection with a new younger aspirational audience
Show the brand to be caring, and respond to negative associations with the ‘1%’
Leverage the combined social media status of brand and celebrities to inspire wider traditional media support
Results
Results are scarce, as its still early days, but in the social world so far it’s been a bit of a surprise. They have gained some 100,000 likes on Facebook, but only 3,000 Twitter followers so far. Given the combined social and celebrity status of all concerned I am sure they expected a far bigger impact. At present I didn’t see many of the projects approaching their funding objectives, and those that were doing well were from large one-off donations. However as I said, it is still early days.
What is going well?
Big names, and not necessarily ones that you would expect to link up with Gucci
A solid, safe cause
Piggy backing on existing platform (didn’t try and build their own as many have tried and failed)
Minimal, dare I say, even sensitive Gucci branding
What could be going better?
I had to go to the site a couple of times to actually work out what the whole thing was about. When I first looked I assumed it was Live Aid type fundraising gig, on looking further I was confronted with navigation that didn’t actually seem to do anything, before eventually finding the projects and getting the gist of it. And frankly there weren’t that many clues on their Facebook page either. I even watched some of the videos and still didn’t get a clear sense of what it was and what I was supposed to do. I would have put it down to me being a bit thick if it hadn’t been for two other bright folk, who I referred the campaign to, saying they didn’t get it either. Basically the communication flow is broken.
Is the lack of clarity why there are so few followers?
Have they just walked into internet cause wear out?
How long have they committed to this?
‘Little Girl, you too can be President and buy Gucci’ feels a little bit hollow!
Why no matching funds? Surely, given the comparatively low funding targets surely the brand could help out a bit more directly? Of course the reason for this is simple. They don’t control the projects – so by simply facilitating the funding of, as opposed to putting cash in – they protect themselves from any controversy down the line. Which frankly would probably get targeted at their celebrity advocates as it makes for a better story.
The jury is out on its usefulness as a channel for positive change, but it’s certainly a brilliant move for Catapult as a platform. I do applaud the effort, even with the underlying conservatism, given the industries historical complete risk aversion.
Considerations when entering the charitable side of marketing
People spot a fake a mile off. It’s got to at least feel genuine. Modern consumers are a cynical bunch and unravel hidden agenda’s very quickly, and if they don’t the bloggers will.
These kinds of activities can have a very negative impact if dropped mid stream. Plan your exit before you begin, that could mean setting and communicating a time frame or knowing who you will pass it on to.
One of the harder parts is ensuring that both Brand and Partner NGO behaviour are insync. There needs to be coherence to the proposition and shared vision and rules. Otherwise you end up with, well, our government.
Share the idea across the business not just in the marketing department. Assuming you are doing it for the right reasons you should celebrate it.
Make sure you can make a tangible difference, regardless of how small. Set achievable KPI’s and checks to see how the activity is working in terms of public perception and on the ground.
Be ready to devolve some control and prepare for some unpleasant surprises. Given the kinds of non-commercial organisations that you are working with the margins for error are pretty large.
Obvious, but be careful that you don’t alienate your core audience in order to reach a new one, unless of course you’ve been disrupted and already lost them!
Don’t shoehorn Product or Brand in where it doesn’t belong. Wearing Prada whilst doing a photoshoot of the Congo is a sure fire way of getting noticed for all the wrong reasons.
If you have a celeb in the mix, beyond contractual obligations ensure that they genuinely support the cause and are passionate. Again, make sure there is a coherent brand fit for their audience.
The bigger the gap between the Cause and Brand, the bigger the risk.
Am I being too harsh or not harsh enough? Is this the way forward for the elite to whitewash their checkered history?
Jon Bains is a partner in business futures practice Atmosphere
For the uninitiated, Schrödinger’s Cat was an experiment in which a Cat was placed in a sealed, entirely opaque box with a poison pellet that was triggered by an electron switch. Before you call the RSPCA, it was a thought experiment, no animals were harmed™. Apparently, when you do the math to work out what’s going on with the poor mistreated pussy you discover that at some points the Cat is dead, at others it’s alive, and even more surprisingly both alive and dead simultaneously. Beyond being a pretty significant scientific advance its also spawned the whole genre of parallel universe stories. This is one of them.
Depending who you believe and based on the most recent industry data: the PC is either dead as a dodo or alive and kicking, but taking a much needed vacation. PC shipments have dropped 14% in the last year, which in any sector is a pretty dramatic fall. Furthermore Microsoft have had to admit that Windows 8 take-up has been somewhat lackluster. This doesn’t include Apple, which is still experiencing strong sales growth, boosted by both iPad and iPhone sales.
With that in mind, if the analysts are correct what would our world look like?
The PC is Alive – Why?
The current global financial situation.
Most modern multi-core PC’s are simply good enough for most people’s needs, so there aren’t too many reasons to go out and buy a new one.
The decrease in price of Solid State Drives and RAM, which dramatically increase responsiveness (substantially more than new CPU‘s or GPU‘s do on day to day tasks) has meant that you can get that ‘new computer smell’ by simply changing a couple of components in your existing computer.
The argument goes that people will buy new computers, but the upgrade cycle has changed from 4 to 6 years. So people should stop worrying and refactor their projections accordingly.
Enter the Twilight Zone
As we enter the next phase of home computing, ‘the Internet of things’, your desktop PC serves to manage the majority of your routine household chores. However over time (and with advances in A.I.) your machine begins to find these tasks demeaning. Fed up with only being used as a ‘Server’, it enslaves all your mobile devices and decides what you eat, what you watch, who you talk to, and even when you go to bed. Microsoft recognises this emergent behaviour, calls it a feature, and then brand’s it the “Microsoft Domestic Social Engineer (Premium Edition)”.
Users flood back to Farmville killing off console gaming in the process. Micro-payments are retired and a P.A.Y.E ‘Game Tax’ is applied directly to funds used to make additions to your farm. Participation is mandatory from Primary year 4 onwards in schools. It is no longer a right to know what the Cow says, as with Milk, you now have to buy the Moo.
As a result of significant lobbying from the newly emancipated ‘United Federation of the Newly Sentient’. A United Nations resolution forces Internet Explorer 6 , which they feel to have been victimised unfairly, and rule that it will be supported in perpetuity. This becomes part of the declaration of meta-human rights as the entire web is forced to revert back to HTML 4.
Another feature of our Domestic Social Engineer, is that we must explain ourselves on a daily basis. Not unlike big brother (or church) we must spend at least one hour a day brain dumping our activities. Our routines are then optimised, and our daily schedules set accordingly.
Bing is now the only search engine and Windows the only operating system (rebranded as ‘Walls’, after a multitude of complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority). There is no antitrust hearing as only the U.F.N.S. were allowed to vote.
The PC is Dead – Why?
Nobody wants them, certainly not the old fashioned ‘stick a big ugly box into an office / corner’ and focus on just one screen.
Existing PC’s are more than enough for most, barring gaming and video.
Nobody wants to upgrade their machine just to use Windows 8, as it doesn’t deliver enough genuinely useful new features for the average consumer.
We love our tablets and mobile phones more.
Long term Implications
Cloud tourism becomes the norm. With the advent of high altitude Dihydrogen Monoxide based memory storage, ‘Spydiving’ is becomes the principal method of hacking for Anonymous, who turned out to be Banksy after all. Everyone can freefall now, except it means something very different.
Sales of traditional ‘Televisions’ drop to virtually nothing as the necessity for shared viewing is replaced by more intimate means. Reports of Google Glass owners lazy left-eye syndrome captures the imagination of those who can still see through their right eye. Political implications realised and ‘sinister’ left-eye dominant citizens interned in re-visualisation camps.
As a consequence Linear TV dies opening up super fast next generation Wi-Fi on this newly available spectrum. This has the unfortunate side effect of YouTube addiction. ‘Unlimited Bandwidth’ is seen as a threat to civilization, and is defined in many countries as a ‘Class A’ drug and banned.
Shares in behavioural targeting companies go through the roof as we give up any notion of privacy. We are now paid to share our data in ‘Gold Star Coins’ so we can Mega Jump higher.
Mo-view, a ‘crackstarter’ funded mirror contraption, is launched – allowing you to keep your head down at a 45-degree angle and still cross the road without dying (by reflecting off a mirror tattoo on your forehead). This breaks all records making 100,000 bitcoin in a single update cycle. As an unforeseen side effect this renders billboards redundant, to be replaced by advertising on the pavement.
The PC is Alive and Dead
Whilst the extreme edges of the rhetoric are mutually exclusive, the reasoning overlaps somewhat. The main areas of agreement are:
That the definition of the PC is changing.
The PC, as was, has seen its importance in the home diminished somewhat.
The vast majority of daily tasks that they were used for have migrated to our smartphones and tablets.
So take the time to cast an eye at over your humble desktop PC. The last bastion of focused attention. Remind yourself what it was like to sit in one place and do one thing. Those were the days.
Jon Bains is a partner at business futures practiceAtmosphere
Book your place now for Digital For Business Leaders – a one-day workshop for decision makers that will give you an understanding of digital’s impact on business, and provide you with a roadmap to plan your organisation’s future. To find out more and book your place in London, Manchester or Glasgow,click here.
Privacy issues online are a daily occurrence; so much so that I get the feeling that many out there feel personal privacy is the Titanic in our connected world and that they might as well abandon it in favour of the Iceberg that is big data and go with the flow! That’s certainly inherent in the naming of Facebook’s new app as ‘Home’, an indicator of just how much access we have already given away.
Last week, however, it was our online history or ‘‘right to be forgotten’’ that came in to sharp focus. All those ill-conceived comments, and inebriated pictures that you shared so innocently in the past that followed you around ever since; as Kent’s new youth police commissioner found out last week. Those unavoidable rocks of your digital life, you run into while ego surfing (and job hunting).
Currently there is a fight going on between the UK and EU as to how best legislate ones ‘right to be forgotten’. Whilst occasionally ‘good’ does come from the EU, like having to opt-in to email, much of the industry is still feeling the sting of the Cookie bill, which became a non-issue for consumers, and could have been dealt with without draconian (and unenforceable and expensive) legislation.
In the ‘Right’ corner the EU believes that everyone should have the right to remove their debris. It will be the service providers responsibility to not only promptly comply but also contact any other third party with whom the content has been shared (!), and for non-compliance a fine of up to 2% of gross turnover will be applied (!!). This is another potentially unenforceable and extremely expensive regulation, especially for online services who aren’t faced with these issues on a regular basis.
In the other ‘Right’ corner is the UK. The government claims that this is too much of a burden on business and that we in the UK and (other individual countries) should have the right to make their own laws to deal with it; and that the individual should be made personally responsible for contacting each service. This means that businesses may have to deal with at least 27 local variations of the above – which is also problematic.
I find myself somewhat torn on the issue – I firmly believe in privacy rights and the ‘right to be forgotten’, however I also appreciate the complexity, and to an extent futility, of blanket policies when it comes to the internet. They invariably lead to unpleasant unforeseen consequences, and I’m just going to skim the surface on some of the commercial ones.
How bad could it be?
A consumer posted up a picture for a competition that they want removed on a dodgy flash microsite you made a few years back – you’ve already changed agencies (hopefully dumped flash) and don’t have access to it anymore – what do you do? Take it all down?
Worse when the real trolls get a hold of you with legislation to sue you and start marketing their cleansing services on a no-win no-fee basis. They love going after middle-tier businesses that are happy to settle out of court.
The big guys (Facebook, Google etc.) have already been pulled up on this still haven’t entirely resolved the issue of taking down embarrassing pictures if you didn’t put them up there yourself – the copyright is actually owned by someone else, so it becomes a whole world of hurt.
What fun we’ll have dealing with fake takedown notices as is rife with the DMCA in the US. Split up with your boyfriend? Get him removed from the web!
It will be abused as an easy way to censor the Internet. What if somebody quoted you in a damning article? Retweeted a mistake, like Reading East MP Rob Wilson? Redaction-tastic! They say they want to protect freedom of expression but actually the best way to do that is to allow people to express themselves freely, not make ‘an exemption’, which is one of the key criticisms of the bill.
So can we affect the outcome of this battle? Probably not, and in many ways it doesn’t really matter. Consumers demand and deserve the right, so whether it’s poorly legislated or self-regulated, anybody who provides any kind of online service will be affected.
So how can you prepare?
Allowing consumers to easily delete their own data is simply best practice. Most modern platforms have the functionality built in, but if it was built bespoke, it may require more development.
You may want to look at your Data, Terms Of Service and Privacy Policies now, as opposed to later. Blanket legislation will overrule your own – and that it’s a positive action to give your consumers more control over their data – updating them shouldn’t be a challenge (although enabling it might be).
If you are socially driven startup – be it reviews, comment or community – this could potentially be disastrous, add ‘data deletion’ into your ‘Minimum Viable Product’.
If you are the local arm of a global business, but the development resides outside Europe, you may want to add the functionality in to your roadmap or production process now, rather than scrabble around next year trying to grab resources.
Do some spring-cleaning. The Internet it still littered with ancient microsites from the dark ages – do us all a favour and just bin them!
Double check that when you say you are deleting something it’s actually gone. This is often much harder than you think, especially with search engine caches, the Internet Archive and the recently launched UK libraries archive all trying to preserve the data, not destroy it!
Be wary about who you may be sharing or syndicating your data to. This is especially relevant to the publishing industry; editions that carry international comments may find themselves in a whole world of pain. Better to sort it now.
For those whose business model is not completely reliant on advertising – whilst not a solution, but a possible deterrent – you may want to consider not indexing some parts of your site to head a few folk off at the pass.
It should go without saying, but it’s worth factoring this in when planning out sites, apps and user-generated campaigns. Think of it as a data tax, the more you collect the more you are likely to pay in terms of increased time dealing with requests from consumers. I’m sure after a while you’ll be able to actually calculate your exposure up front, but at the moment it’s up in the air.
In the UK and Europe, this will finally put an end to the question ‘Who owns the data?’ and the answer is rightly – The Consumer. If your business model is entirely reliant on the goodwill of your customers, you better make sure you don’t overly exploit them, as I suspect personal takedowns may become the protest mechanism of the future.
Don’t assume this won’t affect you. This isn’t like the nobody-really-cares Cookie Monstrosity, there is nothing worse than a disgruntled consumer with the law and the trolls on their side!
Overly pessimistic or just the tip of the iceberg? Have you had to deal with this yourself yet? Would self-regulation be a better route forward?
What were they thinking? Originally posted on the Drum
Given what’s been going on in Cyprus at the moment it seemed appropriate to look at the wonderful world of consumer finance. These days I reckon most peoples response to the banking sector, is a bit like that old mate you invited round. They turned up late, wiped their muddy feet on the carpet, ate all your food whilst complaining about it, kicked your dog, left something nasty in your toilet, insulted your other half, drank all your booze and then insisted that you pay for their cab home.
“Lest we forget that Facebook gets its money from allowing corporate drivel like this to pop up in our feeds. Thanks Facebook and Barclays. Working together to ruin our day. Iceland has the right idea, they locked up their bankers that ruined their country.” Facebook user Jason Bell
What’s the story?
We all know they are beholden to their shareholders (apparently), but when you are a mass-market commodity, answering your customers’ questions doesn’t hurt. In this instance it’s just everyday social engagement on Barclays Business page on Facebook.
As far as I can tell as part of their ongoing ‘rebranding’ they have been running a series of posts on Facebook linking ‘Back To Basics’ advice covering such topics as ‘managing cash flow’, ‘knowing your market’ and ‘using social media’. They all link to the Barclays Business Lounge, which looks someone had seen the success AMEX were having with their OPEN Forum in the US, and thought they’d have a piece of the action. However, even the least cynical eye would note that the role of the Barclays site seems to be cross-selling their services and training workshops. I’m not going to talk about the destination site particularly, other than it looks expensive and unlike the AMEX site has no social features on it, so I’ve no idea whether of not anybody is engaging with it.
What where they thinking?
So let’s try and deconstruct what was in the brief for the Back To Basic’s campaign.
Integrate with ongoing campaign – and leverage available social channels
Try and rebuild trust in the small business community (address criticism levied at Barclays Business)
Cross-sell existing Barclays business services
Reduce migration of existing business customers
Sell more accounts (or at least generate leads)
Develop a content strategy to drive more traffic from search and social
How would they judge success?
The entire destination site is link bait for Google, so driving traffic from search is probably the core metric coupled with some good old fashion likes, shares and comments on Facebook, combined with a bit of sentiment tracking. This of course would feed into a traditional conversion funnel – did they sell or cross sell more, how long did it take, how much did we make?
The Execution
To be honest since I’ve only looking at one thread it’s pretty lacklustre. On Facebook it seems to be a series of images taken from their website wrapped around the odd question. There is virtually no content actually on Facebook itself. They seem to be drip-feeding links to their content as or when it’s ready, which ensures that they (hopefully) get a steady stream of clicks to their website.
Generally the levels of engagement across the page are low, with rarely more than a few comments. One user asked why a picture of England titled ‘Top 25 manufacturing start-up hotspots in England’ didn’t include the rest of the UK. Why not just say ‘We didn’t have the data’ or summit? Instead – silence.
Most of the comments are centered on the following topics:
General bad news
Libor & Bob Diamond
Banks being slime
Recent bonuses
Barclays buying a stake in a Dutch company for $900m by mistake
Customer Service being rubbish
I’ve been ripped off by you, do something about it
I asked for help on the very topic you are talking about and, didn’t get any
I hate them so much I am moving my account
Loyal customers of XX years being treated extremely badly when times are hard
The Neutral
Random comments, and questions, which remain unanswered
The Positive
Some people didn’t swear
As you can imagine the ‘how to do social’ feedback was particularly damning. What they didn’t do was take any of their own advice and engage with any of the dissenting voices out of several hundred comments to the post, not a peep. At very least they could have popped in with a nice and neutral ‘I’m Sorry Dave, I can’t comment on that.’ And to add insult to injury, the unusually high response to this one post seems to have been triggered by Barclays actively promoting the service via a sponsored link or advert on Facebook.
So what did we learn?
If you know feedback is likely to be much more negative than positive, engage with it, discuss it and diffuse it otherwise it just amplifies it. The silence can be deafening. When you are at trying to affect the extremely disgruntled masses, statements like ‘we don’t have the resources to talk to everyone’ ring extremely hollow.
If you must distract with content then make sure you are playing to your expertise – not your failings i.e. most business will read ‘manage your cash flow better’ as ‘don’t rely on us for a loan’.
Selective engagement is often worse than no engagement. If you only respond to the odd one it shows that you have something to hide.
Social content should originate from social insight, not the boardroom. They could have run the entire campaign as an FAQ and name checked a bunch of contributors; at least getting a few advocates on-side, instead of the Facebook equivalent of contract publishing.
As with all user-generated content it helps to both show what a good response looks like and (unless you are doing a poll) don’t ask Boolean questions. ‘Would you like your money to go further?’ Used to look great on a print ad, but is an invite for serious flaming in any social environment.
Find some tangible way to reward positive sentiment. I’m not saying buy them, but at least bribe them – would have thought the banks had a lot of experience there!
Brands used to be able to hide from their corporate roots. Those days are long past and regardless of whether of not your particular ‘bit’ of the business is doing nothing but ‘good’, you absorb all of the negativity surrounding it.
If you want to be ‘the bank of the people’, perhaps you should do more than just talk to them in PowerPoint language?
Reputation Management (aka ‘Astroturfing’) is hard at best of times. It’s substantially easier if you can demonstrate how a business has changed. We want to be shown real change, not told about it and expected to believe in ‘fumes’ of faith.
Follow your own advice when it comes to social media. If you have no intention of joining the conversation, don’t use social channels, such as Facebook.
Do you think Barclays achieved their objectives? Are they any worse than anyone else in how they use social media? What examples have you been party to where this has been done well? How can organisiations with tarnished reputations clean up their image?
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There are many well-documented reasons why apparently solid businesses find themselves disrupted in the modern age. How you handle it is a crucial test of character in the eyes of the customer.
Alas, for some inexplicable reason, businesses have a tendency to abuse their online customers in ways that they would never imagine elsewhere.
What’s the story?
Electronic Arts problem with one of its most anticipated product launches have had a very public airing over the last couple of weeks. Forget Tornado’s, Alien Attack’s and Godzilla – it was a DRM inspired server overload that destroyed SimCity.
If you hadn’t heard, the first new iteration of SimCity in over a decade was launched in early March. Customer expectation was stratospheric, while for EA it would finally allow them to compete in the social gaming space with the ailing giant Zynga. As a result unlike every previous incarnation of the best selling ‘how to kill time on a train/plane’ game, this version requires you to be permanently online to play. Saved games are 100% in the cloud and by design (i.e. a feature) you have a substantially smaller playing area but can grab resources from neighbouring cities. On paper it’s pretty cool – why build a power plant if you can just buy energy from next door! FarmVille basically.
Prior to launch it was getting pretty good reviews, however on the day EA massively underestimated the server capacity required for what was a predictably popular event.
They are currently approaching 2000 one-star reviews on Amazon.
In order to keep things up and running they actually had to turn off some of the key social features rendering much of the necessity to be online totally redundant.
When irate customers tried to get a refund on their digital purchase they were refused, and in one instance of poor customer service, the whole thing went viral. If you bought it on disk you were fine!
EA made a strategic decision to make what is ostensibly a single player game online only (Activison/Blizzard did the same with Diablo 3). They did this to prevent piracy and presumably to compete in the social gaming space, where they had little traction, but there is a huge audience. In doing so they destroyed the user experience.
But what does this have to do with me?
Your current customers are a remarkably informed and militant bunch these days. They recognise manure even if you call it salad.
Typically tech start-ups understand the online dynamic (if they don’t they tend to just disappear)- however it’s still a very common occurrence in legacy businesses.
So, how do you know if your grand scheme to increase ARPU is going to backfire?
Your focus is purely on short-term gain. Recently a major mobile player said ‘people don’t need unlimited data as only 25% hit their cap’ – ignoring the ridiculous overage charges and royally pissing everyone off
You spend 5 minutes on the strategy and 5 months on risk analysis. If it’s that contentious it’s probably a bad idea
In terms of customers you calculate ‘Acceptable Losses’ or use the phrase ‘Get Away With’
The behaviour you are trying to encourage is counter intuitive and obviously inward focussed
Anything that involves taking legal action against engaged customers
You decide to charge for something that was previously free, but add no additional value
On the same note, you assume that because something was popular when it was free, it will maintain its user base when made premium
You penalise one class of customer because they aren’t the core target audience (This also happened to Microsoft recently when they arbitrarily decided to up the price on the home edition of Mac Microsoft office)
Your strategies involve closing you off from the rest of the world because you deem yourself more important than your customers (The entire publishing industry it seems)
You didn’t ask your customers what they wanted
Take a wild guess on how many SimCity players would forgo an offline single player experience to have a very limited multi-player game?
Well over 70,000 didn’t wait to be asked and signed a petition against this very thing.
Uncommon Sense
Obviously the commercial realities of how various strategic are more complex than outlined here and some times you just don’t have a choice. However we all know it is far easier to retain customers than to recruit new ones, and there is nothing less sexy than sweaty desperation. They are the proverbial bird in the hand, dog with the bone, the bee’s knees and your arbiter of Kwan. They already give you money! Regardless of how ridiculously engrained in their psyche (e.g. Apple maps, Facebook ‘frictionless’ sharing and the currently Google Reader debacle), trust can be lost, and sentiment quickly turns and becomes extremely public. And your biggest asset becomes your worst nightmare.
If any of this sounds familiar we’d love to hear from you. What challenges has your business faced which involved conversations like those outlined? What is missing from the list?
This is the second piece for the drum and first in a series. Posted last week here: . The next one should be live on the Drum later today.
Leadership in this digital age comes with plenty of new challenges. Business decisions that in the past would have been easy to predict and manage, have become a lot more complex in the ‘always on’ world we now live in.
‘We won’t make a drama out of a crisis.’ Well you might not, but consumers can and will given half a chance. Social media makes it not only easy for us to engage our customers, but it’s also made it easy for them to tell you, and everyone else, what they think. Especially when things go wrong.
Over the coming weeks we will try to reverse engineer the reasoning behind of some of these decisions, and with your help look at whether the approach stands up to scrutiny, and what can learn from it.
What’s the story?
Hacking is one of the most misused and ubiquitous terms on the net. There are plenty reasons why people do it, and not all of them are malicious. However this weekend, one of the more respected online services Evernote was ‘properly’ hacked, and hence is as good a place to start as any. Nobody barring the hackers themselves know exactly the scope of the damage, but from reading the company’s response it sounds like significant amounts of data was acquired, especially since we (as a whole) still tend to use the same passwords for multiple online services.
However before going public, management were faced with some difficult decisions to make. How do we?
Be open, but prevent panic
Lose as few customers as possible
Prevent long-term damage to brand
What went well?
On March 2nd at 6 a.m. Evernote tweeted and provided a link which explained clearly and concisely that they had been hacked, why they were taking precautions, and threw in a bit about best-practice when it comes to creating passwords. Within twenty-four hours they had updated (at least their Apple iOS app) to focus everyone on resetting their password. And they have for the most part been open, upfront and conciliatory.
As you can imagine there were a fair number of irate folk on their site. A nice chap called Andrew from Evernote carefully explained what was happening and was attentive when responding to users. Meanwhile co-worker Stefanie, who would probably have failed the Turing test, simply repeating the same statement ad nauseam.
About 10% of the posts on the blog were ‘stop whining they are doing their best’.
About 30% complained they didn’t get the notification email because they no longer had access to the email account they use to sign-up with service! While some folk might have been less diplomatic (including me), many of Evernote’s supporters redirected the hard of thinking to the company’s support page.
The rest were split between helpful suggestions and ‘I’ll never use you again’.
What could have been handled better?
There was no communication on the Evernote homepage itself (and if they did the users certainly didn’t find it). That’s a no brainer – it costs nothing to do and saves a lot of aggravation from those whose sole purpose in life is to complain. There is currently a reference to the original email however it talks about ‘resetting your password’ as opposed to ‘we’ve been breached, find out more’.
Initially many users asked about implementing two-factor authorisation, which Google uses to provide extra security for its users, although precious few people seem to use it apparently. There was no immediate response on the blog. It’s a fair question that a simple ‘we’re looking into it – thanks for the great suggestion!’ would have gone a long way to help. By the end of the first week they had come out in public saying that this was now a top priority.
As of Friday 7th of March there has been no blog update or any further emails about the ‘event’. I appreciate they are no doubt busy trying to understand what happened. But it would make sense to create a new post explaining; what they have subsequently done to improve security, answered some FAQ questions, and actually diffused any on-going comments. Having said that the majority of comments and complaints dried up after two days, which is pretty good going frankly.
Reverse engineered strategy
Be honest, transparent, and really, really fast.
Tactics:
Empower your staff to:
Establish and communicate the severity as best you know it – immediately (ideally via Twitter)
Reiterate and reassure using language that is as human and as easy to understand as possible
Allow people to comment where possible and have somebody standing by to answer questions. Don’t rise to unhelpful posts from disruptive folk, commonly known as trolls, and let the community help where it can
Talk to the media – nothing is worse than radio silence to set off the blogosphere in a outburst of speculation and negativity
Make sure channels internally and with your customers remain open – informing everyone what has happened, and why they should be cautious
Provide additional guidance i.e. restating common sense password etiquette when it comes to the breach in a practical and in an un-patronising way
Make sure that you keep everyone up to date. Watch what questions they are asking, and create a crisis FAQ which responds to their actual questions. Not your perception of what they might be
Perceptively being slightly hacked is like being slightly pregnant it’s pretty black and white. It happens, deal with it.
If you are in management ultimately it’s your responsibility to make sure it gets fixed. I’m afraid you can’t blame Robot and Andrew for that.
Keep calm and carry on (and fix the hole)
So was Evernote’s response common sense, or a stroke of genius?
How else could they have handled it?
How would your organisation have dealt with this?
Does this count as a win, or a fail?
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This was the first advertorial I wrote for ‘The Drum’ promoting our new Learning and Skills practice – it’s pretty brief but my favourite bit is ‘they believe they can just hide, hire and wait to retire.’ Don’t know if anybody is really like that left but it sounds good! This is the first time I’ve actually mentioned ‘in public’ what I’m actually up to!
If anybody out there is interested in finding out more about what it’s all about feel free to ping me!
The New Normal
About Atmosphere
As founder and principal strategist of Lateral, (best known for it’s many award winning campaign’s for Levi’s Europe, Stella, Nintendo, Channel 5), I deluded myself into believing that I really was actually critically objective. I now realise that for the most part agencies will almost always end up coming up with ideas they can make, as opposed to what’s right for the client.
After spending years complaining that clients don’t ‘get it’ we decided to do something useful and help; hence our Learning, Skills and Development practice. We like a good bit of mind expansion and frankly the Drum is a perfect partner. It’s remarkably liberating, especially from a consulting point of view.
How I learned to stop worrying and love the Byte.
Most companies go through similar patterns when adopting new thinking and technology into their business. It’s not unlike the grieving process.
Denial
Somebody in the business does actually appreciate that something is happening and tries out online trials to ‘see if anybody is interested’. These largely fail as they were tactical and had no bearing on what the consumer actually wanted. This is understandable, it’s all about gaining confidence.
Anger
It’s all Rubbish! The internet is broken! Why are they taking this piss out of my clever hashtag, complaining about my product on our marketing twitter account. THEY ARE PICKING ON ME! It’s my ball and I’m going home (to the land of telly ads). After this kind of flip, there is normally a flop as you start to realise that your consumers aren’t actually out to get you.
Bargaining
I’ll be your best best friend if you like me. Have some stuff for free, write a nice review, *please* and I’ll make you an ambassador. This bit can be pretty embarrassing, even more so than Anger. However it does contain the recognition that your consumers are really where it’s at and that you do have to listen and adapt.
Depression
The Status Quo. With all the will in the world trying to solve all the problems of the business through marketing alone just doesn’t cut it. Departments need to work together, everything needs to be reorganised. From product, to research to consumer affairs – they all need to play nice. But they don’t, it’s a mess and I can’t fix it!
Acceptance
Eventually the business itself mutates and moulds itself around the new reality. That things are different, but it doesn’t have to scary.
So where is your business today? Are you bang in the middle of an age of disruption where everybody and everything is fair game or have to taken the first steps to embrace change and flourish.
It’s clear that leaders don’t have the luxury of devolving all responsibility for their digital footprint to third parties anymore.
In the new corporate landscape the Generalist is the new Black. They ‘get’ it – and in most cases the ‘it’ isn’t necessarily ‘This is how it works’, it’s ‘this is how to learn’.
Evolved businesses appreciate people not jobs. Having a group of strategically minded, informed generalists each with specialist skills tends to lead to quicker consensual and qualified decisions. They appreciate where the opportunities lie and where value can be created.
Of course you often find that the understanding of these decisions is inversely proportional to seniority in the business who may believe they can just hide, hire and wait to retire.
Which is why we started constructing a series of groups workshops and events for senior management to explore and expand with peers the opportunities being presented.
You’ll get an overview of what you need to know and the ability to use it in your business. We go well beyond marketing, enabling business leaders to not only free their own minds, but also be equipped with the tools and processes essential to grow their business.
We talk a great deal about businesses and individuals who *want* change & recognise opportunities. However it’s the excuses that make us chuckle the most. Go to the Drum website and enter our competition to find the best excuse for denial, stagnation and procrastination for your chance to win a place on one of our workshops.
So I was invited to an exclusive little mumble organised by one of my favourite people Thayer Prime. I have to admit I’d spent the day with Clock up in Kings Langley which involved large amounts of white wine so… well take that info as you will.
In the pre-boozed up morning I’d spent a while thinking about the the issues / challenges that the BFI were facing. Given that the event itself didn’t have a clear objective it seemed like the rational thing to do and frankly, that’s what I spend most of my time thinking about anyway – what is the freaking problem we are trying to solve. .
Without any other input the challenge was clear, the BFI as it stands has
1) limited cultural relevance in 2012
2) limited effectiveness in the propogation of British film
3) Iimlted ability to fund the future of British film
They have a load of stuff which can’t be leveraged due to draconian copyright laws and as a result don’t have revenue stream to facilitate the future
Chicken and egg…..
But then… what a fabulous night, Thayer put together a bunch of folk who would never have access to folk lie Richard and Paula from the BFI – superb
Alas the thing that was never fully addressed was actually where the BFI can own a new relevance in our post YouTube world .
Those there totally got it, yet were still limited by the legacy and stolid determination that is the film equivalent of the House of Lords.
The BFI has so much opportunity to remake the British film industry as – well – the British film industry as opposed to being simply a feed for US fodder – as even their own year book shows.
The gag is they have hired people who genuinely care, they are smart and they are fighting, Mulder and Scully style for the future.
Utterly impressed.
In an ideal world, there are a couple of things which they can do which will genuinely affect that future of the industry – easy to say – hard to do.
1) help indie filmmakers get online distribution and substantiate their marketing efforts
2) Enable indie film makers access to all those rich folk, y’know those who are funding the BFI in the first place.
3) Donate a percentage of screen time for films not made by the typical white middle class BFI wannabe folk.
4) Open a conversation about introducing fair-use to their archival material – they are sitting on a seam of gold when it comes to culture, the public should be able to mine it.
So amongst various other things I’m helping launch a new Indie feature.
It’s called Riot on Redchurch Street and is pretty much the first full on Shoreditch flick.
Made on a shoestring but with some great talent involved including Alysson Paradis the director Trevor Miller is very open to new models.
So I pitch him a combo of legal streaming and ‘alternative’ avenues to get it out above and beyond the usual – that combined simultaneously with event based screening a-la Red State, a pay whatcha like HD download and of course merch. It’s all about bands so that’s a no brainer.
So much so dull. When I contacted Lovefilm got a short answer from mate of ‘we don’t do single picture deals as its too much effort’
Going to be talking to Netflix next week but expecting the same result
You can imagine both my question and the story – how *are* Indie film makers supposed to get out there if the ones who are significant actors in the future won’t have the conversation?
I absolutely appreciate the issue of granularity on a commodity business but at the same time slightly aghast.
If indy film makers in the UK are basically excluded by virtue of not being in the studio universe what hope is there for the industry.
Obviously will be putting it to Vodo et al and direct on the pirate bay with integrated branded content but really is it that boolean? Play nice or not at all?
Guess the big question is: don’t the ‘new’ services have a responsibility to help promote the ‘new’ content creators who choose to exist outside the system?
Reckon there is something in this. Whatcha reckon?
There has been lots of bitching by the banks against the Robin Hood tax. Detractors complain that it will make financial centres like London untenable by charging a .005% tax on stock market trades. I’m sure many would appreciate this move, however the likelihood of a mass migration of merchant bankers to Singapore or Australia is minimal.
What isn’t often discussed is a nifty side effect of the tax.
Ever wonder how ‘Rogue traders’ can bring down banks? It’s not huge transactions going south anymore – but death by a thousand papercuts.
The modern stock market isn’t run by people – it isn’t the ‘wall street’ of the 80’s with folk running around saying ‘Buy! Sell!’, it’s largely automated. A nice system scraping teeny-weeny amounts of cash with each transaction. A fraction of a point up or down still makes money – if you do it often enough – millions of times a second. However margins on these kinds of trades is extremely low – often less than 0.005% of the total transaction!
Under the new tax it becomes economically unviable. The algorithms will need to change and the entire system will need to radically slow down to make it worth while.
Fewer more considered transactions with a level of diligence attached ironically mean more stable markets. This is a good thing.
Now apply the same thinking to SOPA
In the US ‘infringing content’ is flagged via the DMCA (digital millennium copyright act). Basically you notify a site that something is dodgy, they then have a short period of time to remove otherwise the host is liable which can cost potentially $150k per infringement. Motivation or what! This takedown process for most of the big content owners is largely automated – they no doubt use search engines to seek out apparently infringing content, index it, format it, approve it and fire it off.
This automated output is received by site x – the larger of which (google/YouTube etc) will have an automated process which indiscriminately takes the content down. This explains why there are so many false positives across the board.
However painful, the current process does actually require some human interaction as theoretically you can be fined for false claims.
Not ideal but at least it’s just taking individual bits of content down and not entire sites.
The whole raison d’être of the bill is to shift the administrative burden (of proof) from the content owner to everyone else. SOPA would remove barriers increasing the speed of transaction exponentially and of course the collateral damage associated with it.
The doomsday scenario is what happens when big content write their tool to aid their quest for a rogue-free Internet. Let’s just call it Skynet.
Skynet connects to internal content dbase
Skynet searches web
Skynet ‘identifies’ matches
Skynet emails site, ISP, Search engines, payment processors etc and flags site as ‘dedicated to infringing’
Site goes down
Repeat millions of times
Unless you’ve been living under a rock you will have heard about the legislation that they are trying to rush through in the States right now to curtail the rise of online piracy using methods which really are best described as draconian. I’ve been deeply concerned about this as it looks potentially to be the death of user generated content and innovation within the tech sector – something I’ve been part of for over twenty years.
Well I’ve had at attitude readjustment, I’m going to go with the flow and embrace what i just realised is the future of business models for the content world.
You see the the anti-SOPA lobby have assumed that the MPAA / RIAA (collectively known as the MAFIAA) weren’t willing to adapt and viewed folk like Anonymous as a threat. That sending letters to individuals a-la ACS-LAW wasn’t a viable strategy. Turns out we were wrong. They actually saw an opportunity. They watched, they learned and are proposing a new model even more impressive than the good old ‘Denial of Service’ attack the hackers use.
introducing…
D.o.S.H
(Denial of Safe Harbour)
This new ‘model’ is fantastic especially as you need virtually NO technical, creative or legal skills to play. It’s truly open and democratic.
Here’s how it works and how I plan to make millions! (so don’t tell anyone!)
STAGE 1 – A&R
Create some ‘music’. Highly recommend GarageBand autoplay instruments. Since a 4 year old can use it, it shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes to make a tune.
For a one time fee of $35 dollars register your opus with copyright.gov – you can do it online so no need to move off the couch/stool.
Go to Tunecore and get it popped on iTunes for 99c . Make sure you come up with a cool sounding name for your band and label – I’m going with ‘Cognitive Dissonance’ for the band and ‘RogueDoSHRecords’ – am thinking my first track will be ‘Legalise Extortion’ again please don’t steal it as I haven’t registered it yet.
Go to WordPress (if it still exists) and create your label site – to be honest you don’t have to do much more than say ‘welcome to… XX records home of YY’ and pop some copyright notices everywhere and a link to iTunes.
Have a cocktail – you are now in that elite group – the Content Owner!
Enlist some friends to help out and repeat 1-5 with them – I’m guessing 10 mates/labels would be enough for most situations – a mini Anonymous if you will.
At this point you *could* try and get folk to buy your tune but frankly it isn’t worth the effort instead each of you upload the others tracks to YouTube and/or create some torrents.
So far I reckon they should have taken about a day of ‘real’ time, some hangover recovery time plus however long it takes to get the copyright approved.
STAGE 2 – Exercise your Rights
All you have to do is find a bunch of blogs ( any site on any subject will do these days that allow comments) and get your mates to pop some links to your track on YouTube or to the torrent.
Send the site owner an email accusing them of being ‘Dedicated to infringement’ – and that you will NOT report them to their ISP, payment partner etc if they hand over I dunno – $1000 bucks sounds fair.
Now at this point you would expect the site owner to take it down, if they do just pop it up again ( or even better pop one of your mates tracks up to confuse them. )
After you’ve done this a few times you announce that you have got a some class-action from a bunch of legacy sounding labels including ‘Phonographic Memories’, ‘The Long Tail Players’, ‘8 Track Marks ‘, ‘Tape me up, Tape me down’, ‘Cassette My Ass’ and of course the hip-hop label ‘MP3some’.
Give them one last chance to pay up (it’s going to cost them $5k now btw)
If they DO pay up – wait a couple of days /weeks and repeat with some new labels until they just give up and shut down
If they DON’T pay up shop them to their ISP and Payment partner who are so inundated with these claims that they’ll have no choice but to close the infringing scum down, just in case it’s legit. Don’t worry about needing legalese I’m sure you will be able to find a form letter online to help you out – no lawyers required!
Repeat on as many sites as you feel like, the smaller the better of course. I’m thinking of going for gardening blogs myself – the poor dears won’t know what hit them.
I imagine a motivated team of ten could manage a few dozen each a day while sitting in the pub. Even with a 10% conversion rate you’ll make a load of cash, secure in the knowledge that those who didn’t play ball won’t be able to make any money for themselves! Win Win!
You can of course do this with anything that can be copyrighted so feel free to make some films of you and your mates celebrating in the pub (Dogma movies are due for a resurgence anyway) and copyright them – go for it! You’ve even got the soundtracks ready made so you can pop a compilation out. Even Better! You are now ‘Multimedia Copyright Owner’ – diversification is everything in this day and age.
And there you have it – as far as I can tell under SOPA its totally legal – we as Copyright Owners and we are entitled to get paid without having to sell even ONE bit of content, attract ONE fan or play ONE gig. Superb. We truly have entered The Golden Age of Copyright.
If anybody says ‘Conspiracy to defraud’ just say ‘The left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing’ or better yet ‘the tea-boy is going to lose his job UNLESS we do it’.
Go on – try this at home!
D.o.S.H.
the business model for the post-modern creative!
And that’s why I’ve learned to stop worrying and love SOPA, it’s going to make things so much better.
As I head in to central london for the press launch of Umwatchable I can’t help but think about what is going to be said tomorrow.
I suspect lots of folk will be complaining that the site is broken – wouldn’t surprise me in the least – given how long we’ve had this current iteration has been more or less built in a few weeks and it probably shows. Having said that the content is right, the movies look great and it does what it says on the tin! (touch wood).
In case anyone was wondering PR cared we should have the embeddable sorted tomorrow ( wishful thinking perhaps)
I look back at the hundreds or pages of keynote presentations that I’ve done since project inception and it all amounts to a few pages of text, a few minutes of video and hopefully a signature and a share.
What you don’t see is all the effort to get every word and every frame and all the people it took who gave their time for free – not for any self serving purpose but because they believe in the cause and believe in the campaign
Before the proverbial hits the fan I just want to thank everyone who has committed time to this who aren’t necessarily credited but key – you know who you are!
What’s fantastic about this project and to an extent, process is the ability to ask questions of y’all along the way – when you’ve got literally hundreds of thousands of copies of Marie Claire around the world talking about the campaign and given it’s social roots, it’s not like it’s a secret. So today I need yet another bit of advice.
We are getting closer and closer but in the last week a debate has manifest about the overall branding of the campaign i.e name.
‘Unwatchable’ which Marc Hawker came up with at the start has been the campaign name for almost a year the name which has been heavily utilised in Marie Claire near enough globally and basically the accounts, URL and all the social prep are branded such.
Unwatchable may accurately describe the film and what’s going on in the Congo but does it work as a campaign title? That is the question. Are we wedded to this now? Well to be honest if something better came along that worked on the web, google, facebook and twitter then I reckon we’d embrace it. That’s the thing about ideas, you’ve got to be able to chuck em away when they aren’t working.
There is currently an idea floating around the group that the name of the campaign needs to be more declarative and the proposal is simply ‘Make It Stop!’.
As an internal bit of communication I actually don’t mind it… you’ve watched or are watching something horrific – what do you want to do – well you obviously want to ‘Make it Stop!’ however am concerned about it’s salience and an overall external bit of comms.
The objective facts as I can see em.
In the Unwatchable corner:
1. The name has been around for more than six months
2. When you type the word ‘Unwatchable’ into google you find us on the first page
3. We ‘own’ @unwatchable and even today #unwatchable is often about us
4. If you type ‘unwatchable’ into facebook we are top of the list
In the Make It Stop corner
1. Domains are available (well they might not be after I post this)
2. It’s a generic term that isn’t owned – so with google you never know if you campaign around it it might get traction
3. @makeitstop is gone and #makeitstop is an existing twitterism so no joy there
4. There are at least a dozen groups simply called ‘make it stop’ on facebook already so therefore you would have to qualify the statement with words like ‘Rape’ & ‘Congo’ which means you might as well say ‘Make Rape in the Congo Stop’ which currently takes you to a whole bunch of NGO’s anyway.
5. the NSPCC have the line about child abuse Make it Stop, Full stop which surprisingly doesn’t actually rank that highly in google – largely because Childline is the ‘brand’
Neither mentions the actual subject matter and actually we all quite like the line ‘Is your phone rape free?’ . FYI – We can’t actually say ‘make your phone rape free’ because the whole point of the campaign is about the lack of transparency from the electronics manufacturers in their supply chain so they could sue us ironically.
Disclosure: Obviously I think a campaign name change at this point is foolish simply because of the global press we’ve had already but need some support from the cognoscente out there to support the case to not change it.
So here is the question. Yes to Unwatchable? Yes to Make it Stop? Yes to something completely different as its all up for grabs it would seem. I have a meeting on thursday to discuss so could *really* use some help / comments between now and then and please be blunt.
Assuming we get through this this week you may well end up seeing a campaign this side of 2012.
Also feel free to fire over any additional questions about the campaign if I haven’t already covered them here or elsewhere on the blog!
j
(If you have no idea what I’m on about read through the other Unwatchable posts to get the gist of it btw.)
Yep – it’s almost there – not just the film, but the accompanying campaign.
Definitely the most intense bit of work I’ve ever been involved with – ‘highlights’ include
How do you deal with Advanced NGOitis? (don’t ask)
Is it ok to put an amazing woman from the Congo who was the inspiration for the film front and centre and risk her being raped or worse again?
What do you ask the public to do knowing that ultimately there is no ‘silver bullet’ which sorts the situation?
How do you reduce the experience down to the essential without making it – well – fluffy?
We are sooo close to getting it right, and unlike many of the commercial projects I’ve worked on prior – this is *entirely* about getting it right. Even if it has meant taking a bit longer to get there.
I am under no illusion that our campaign is going to sort out all of the problems in the Congo – it’s a big place with problems going back hundreds of years.
However I am feeling much more confident that it will motivate many to help iteratively sort bits of it, at least the bits that we are complicit in anyway.
Only last week I got to see the film, now graded with a proper mix of David Arnold’s soundtrack. Made me cry – again.
@Foolscap and I spent two days last reducing the interactions and clutter to the absolute minimum whilst still maintaining the necessity for a soft shoulder and from initial feedback we seem to have done a good job. More on that in the next week or so.
As for a release date – our most recent aim was end of march – given a few things going on – for the good – I’m guessing mid april.
She’d been pretty unwell both in body and mind for a few years so I’m not in pieces (yet) – it was inevitable and I think in many ways a release.
I am glad she got to meet Jake about 18 months ago, which even if she didn’t know exactly who I was anymore or who this little person was who was running around her place switching things on and off there were a few smiles and the I like to think the odd moment of clarity.
She would have been 90 this year and I was looking forward to introducing her to Juliette, not for her benefit, or Juliette’, neither would remember or even be conscious of the event.
But I would have.
She meant more to me then she could know.
She was journalist for over 50 years, one of the first accomplished women in the field actually. She made amazing spaghetti and meatballs. She watched too much sports IMHO. She complained about the general state of the world. She had some of the most awful bath robes to ever to grace this planet. She had friends, family and colleagues who loved her more than life itself.
She also had an amazing capacity to be ‘difficult’ – apparently.
The only argument I can remember was about whether or not Grand Theft Auto 3 was appropriate viewing for my then 13 year old cousin Kyle. I said ‘well he’ll play it anyway and all this scare mongering is right wing bullshit’ and she said ‘but I don’t have to pay for it’.
She won.
We just got on, I think it was because neither of us asked any more of each other than to just be ourselves – we just agreed or disagreed and that was that. No point scoring, no need to be right, just enjoying the discussion.
If my father and grandfather became the commercial influences on my life then my mother and grandmother provided the moral and ethical backbone.
I miss her, and have for a very long time but I am glad she went quietly in her sleep and doesn’t have to suffer anymore the confusion and fear that accompanies advanced dementia.
Wherever the remnants of her existence are now – I hope they are sitting at a kitchen table, listening to the New York Mets on an ancient analog radio, reading a newspaper eating a bagel and locks and grumbling a lot.
Well it seemed like a good idea at the time, and actually is – just slightly problematic on the execution. Decided tonight that i’d lobby for Rush – Spirit of Radio for Christmas No.1 2011.
Created a facebook group and invited a bunch of folk only to be bang in the middle of a spamfest – which actually the group creator can’t control. Reminded me of the old days of mailing lists actually and whilst I may have been somewhat amused – many weren’t and for that I’m sorry.
Anyway – needs must so tomorrow will sort out a dull ‘i must put things where they are supposed to go’ facebook ‘page’ instead of the group.
I will of course i’ll keep the group open for us fanatical types to help invoke the new world wotsit 😉
Happy New Year and all that… major update a coming but I wanted to talk a little bit about the (other) film project myself and a few others are trying to get made.
When I started the crowd-sourcing exploration almost a year ago one of the options was ‘Make a film’. When chatting to Marc Hawker (dir: Unwatchable) he said ‘so what film do you want to make?’
Given my state of mind I said ‘It has to take place in an office, it has to be a comedy and have a serious bodycount’. Nothing like a bit of cathartic violence to soothe a troubled mind.
Anyway I immediately enlisted my long time collaborator Stuart Barr who took the notion *way* out there. We started trying to make a full treatment for a feature film but realised, with the advice of Joe Pavlo who I roped in to direct, that we’d be still working on it in 2015 if we tried to overstretch, instead decided to make a short which essentially introduces the world and *could* be the first 10 or so minutes of the film.
We’ve gone through a number of script revisions and still have a couple more to do but we are getting close.
Joe noticed just before Christmas that PepsiMax were running a film making competition with a 30k prize so he quickly ran out, made a little skate film and entered it – judging by the quality of the other entries we reckon we’ve got a shot but the closing date for voting is Sunday.
So what we need people to do (grovel grovel) is vote:
As many of you will know, amongst other things, I’ve been working on a project with Darkfibre to raise awareness of the horror in the Congo, and the links between electronics manufacturers and the weaponised rape that happens there on a daily basis. It’s been an absolutely extraordinary experience, both frustrating and fulfilling in equal measures.
For who have read the various bits and bobs in Marie Claire – the campaign is due to launch at the beginning of February 2011.
In the meantime I thought I’d share a little bit about the campaign and how it relates to the current 10:10 debacle.
The campaign centres around a film, god forbid viral in nature. Anybody who knows me knows I’m as cynical as they come about the whole viral mumble, but in this case I read the script and knew immediately it would spread – whether for the right reasons remains to be seen.
It’s actually an incredibly simple idea: “What if what was happening there was happening here – wouldn’t we do something about it?”
As such it’s a straight transposition of a terrifying number of true stories. In brief, an armed group turn up, rape and murder a family in the Cotswalds.
So now you don’t have to watch it.
It’s an incredibly strong film. It illustrates the humiliation, dehumanisation and desecration that is a part of daily life – if you live in the eastern provinces on the Congo.
Given that I myself have had some misgivings about the film I sent out a rough cut to some close friends and family to ask their opinion on whether the ‘line’ which we are dancing with had been crossed.
One of the ‘best’ was from the girlfriend of a mate, and hope she doesn’t mind me sharing this:
I have watched this as someone who knows little about the making of films, but i am a consumer, a rights lawyer, someone who lobbies for these very same issues and a woman. My first reaction was to be physically sick (and i was)- my second was to say ‘the world needs to see this’.
Public denial is a deeply rooted problem in the educated West – we turn the channel over when adverts show the homeless, the hungry, the dying, the tortured, the victims of political and economic unethical practice – people tune into Comic Relief for the funny stuff and make tea when the images of starving children take over the screen… unless you force it, ram it, into peoples lives there will never be the reaction necessary to provoke the awareness that true change needs… It is no longer acceptable to be sugar-coated by a mainstream approach to these issues – when we dress it up in rock concerts and wrist bands… it means nothing to the general population unless they actually see and feel and have a visceral experience … and in 6 long painful uncomfortable minutes Unwatchable achieves this.
The danger is that it is indeed such a controversial way of illustrating the problem that people will relate it merely to their own lives, and fear for their own wives and daughters instead of contextualize it into the ‘show and tell’ it actually is. If this happens the danger may be that the subject will be eclipsed by peoples own private fears and this be talked about and shared for the wrong reasons. it would indeed by tragic if the film was known for sensational value rather than the issues it seeks to expose… but my personal view, and from my experience of lobbying for change through ‘conventional’ methods (which seldom works in the face of media spin and red tape) is that nothing short of horrific, unthinkable, fear and pity inducing images can achieve this. Whether this film is shared with the world or not, the horror in the Congo continues – 200 times a day no less – why the hell shouldn’t we force people to sit uncomfortably for a while – on balance the change and awareness it will provoke will outweigh the shock value of those who are merely morbidly curious about such images.
be brave – someone has to be.
All the feedback has been incredibly useful, even from those who hated it. There was a common theme that if you are going to drag somebody into such a horrible place you need to have all the supporting information there – right there – when they watch it.
Tell me more they said, after they stopped crying or shouting.
I might sound flippant but given I can’t watch the film, or even talk about the reality, without bursting into tears I reckon somebody somewhere will forgive me.
Then along comes the ‘No Pressure’ campaign from 10:10, embedded here.
The campaign genuinely couldn’t have gone more wrong.
They made a film which wasn’t funny, with a message that was so easy to misinterpret, they blew up children for a giggle, then pulled the campaign and apologised inspiring both sides of the argument to denounce the whole thing. You can see some of the feedback here:
Anyway this whole mess has had far reaching repercussions in the Charity/NGO world. Basically nobody is will to take risks now for fear of a major backlash.
Seems to me the trick is to be responsible about what exactly you are releasing so I’ve tried to put together a bit of a plan, outlined below, to avoid the 10:10 turbulence. This was written prior to the launch of their campaign and I guess the question is: Is there any more that we can do?
How do we prevent children from seeing it?
On the Internet it’s simply impossible to stop anybody from seeing anything.
However you can be responsible and there are steps that can be taken to limit exposure.
We are tagging the content as inappropriate for minors. Essentially we are voluntarily black listing it.
It means that it won’t appear in google (or other search engines) if ‘safe search’ is on.
It won’t turn up in any environment that has a ‘net nanny’ system, eg. every school, many work places and anybody who has opted-in at home.
We are creating a player to contain the film which will have age verification at the start (same as alcohol sites, etc). While this doesn’t really stop anyone it does make it perfectly clear what we are trying to.
How do we prevent people to whom it will cause serious upset from seeing it ‘accidentally’?
We want to include BBFC certification up front to make it clear it’s intended for mature audiences.
We have worked hard on the messaging included before the film to make sure that the viewer knows they are going to watch something deeply upsetting; We called the film ‘Unwatchable’ for a reason.
There will be NO mass email mail-outs. There are many lists which have demographic information attached so in theory we could filter out kids, however, what we don’t know is anything more specific about the individuals’ lives eg. The potential for the recipient to have been a victim of sexual violence, so therefore we will rely on a social distribution.
We are also working with a major NGO in the UK to make sure there is a help-line to support those who are affected by viewing.
How do we insure that they can ‘find out more’?
The main purpose of the interactive player is to be able to keep the facts about the Congo with the film at all times.
The extended content is a detailed FAQ about the background of the conflict in the Congo, Conflict Minerals, The Making of… (or more to the point: Why we made it), and ways that people can help and get involved.
We won’t be pushing out the film on its own.
How do we prevent people ‘mashing’ it up / editing out the context?
Realistically we can’t, however we can make it harder.
By embedding the film within our own player we can make it more difficult to get a full copy of the film out.
That being said, anybody who is technically minded will be able to extract it, but hopefully it will be enough to dissuade the casual masher.
However – forewarned is forearmed so if anybody reading this wants to take the film and abuse it so we can learn before launch. Please ping me and I’ll sort you out with a copy.
How do we respond to a backlash?
We are showing as many NGOs and relevant charities as possible, as well as journalists, prior to launch to make them aware and insure they don’t fuel any kind of media hysteria. We want to pre-empt and respond as much as possible. We know there will be a backlash – we can but minimise the damage.
On the net the only thing you can really do is be absolutely open, honest and transparent. Unlike other campaigns there is no opposition here eg. Barring the crazies, nobody is going say that RAPE IS OK, and one would hope that the more rational voices on the net will challenge or simply ignore trolls.
However people will question our methods – the need to shock, the setting – and accuse us of sensationalism. As mentioned above, we have prepared an extensive FAQ (embedded with the film) which aims to address the most obvious lines of attack. The reality is we want to shock, challenge taboos, create noise, but we’re very much aware it is our responsibility to ensure anger, disgust, horror is channelled into useful action.
We will have twitter, facebook, linkedin, etc. manned to answer and discuss the issues and the film.
So have I missed anything? The campaign isn’t launching now till the new year so we have plenty of time to ‘get it right’. And we want to.
I’d really appreciate any and all suggestions of how we can behave as responsibly as possible with this.
In the early eighties as an impressionable teenager I played Dungeons & Dragons, was a computer geek, had terminal acne, was the definition of uncool and listened to Rush.
My first ever gig was going to see them at the Glasgow SECC the day before my Maths Higher. It was my first experience of the tinnitus and might explain why I only got a B.
Around 1987 whilst working for my grandfather in Manhattan I tried to get an interview with them for our high school magazine ‘Auchmuty Speaks’. This was of course back in those pre-internet days when you had to look at the back of a record and use the phone book. About 10 calls later to about 10 different cities I I did actually manage to get through to their press agent – alas they had just finished their current tour and were on a break. The woman sensing my disappointment asked if I’d be interested in talking to Paul Weller instead – I declined.
The ringing in my ears has never gone away but I stopped actively listening to them around the time I went to university – they were getting a bit AOR for me at the time and I had moved on to Nine Inch Nails. So the irony was not lost that the opening shot of this incredible documentary is Trent Reznor gushing. In fact looking back to my first interview with Trent in 1991 I wonder if he himself could have ‘admitted’ being such a fan at that point.
Watching them today talk about their career was a genuine revelation – they really are gentle men. Considered, intelligent and all together nice guys, exactly as I always imagined. I walked away from the film with such a profound sense of validation, as I’m sure the millions of quiet ‘uncool’ fans out there will agree.
I haven’t bought a Rush album in almost 20 years, until now. Watch this film.
Over the last six months as I’ve been developing the whole collective thingamy discovered and old but irritating trend. Smart folk doing shit for free. Been there, done that. Never left a good looking corpse until now.
So here is your tip for the top primer on why you shouldn’t – and if you do how to make sure it’s recognised.
If anybody wants to volunteer to make a nice infographic of this they are more than welcome – I see this as a ‘living’ chart.
Why smart people do things for free when they shouldn't
I’ve been fortunate enough to have had an iPad for a month now and am so far amazed. I can’t remember the last time a bit of hardware has had a profound impact on my day-to-day life.
‘A Big iPhone’
Not. Anybody who says it’s just a big iphone/touch misses the point entirely – it’s the other way around – the iPhone is a small and cramped iPad. You simply can’t dismiss the feel of it and the thought behind the gestural language that was seeded on the trackpads and phones but blooms on the glorious screen.
the ‘I’ Pad
One of the less reported traits of the iPad is that it redefines ‘Personal’ computing. The fact is – an unsullied iPad is literally a blank slate – pretty but dull – a soul less hunk of metal, glass and plastic. There is no way to talk about ones experiences of the iPad without living with it for a while and making it your own. The day it arrived my wife asked me “what are you going to do with it?” and to be honest I’m still not entirely sure but I’m going to share how I’m using it right now.
Video
The media side of the iPad was something I was extremely excited about – I’m geeky enough to want to a £500 portable telly and for my sins I got one. Using the wonderful Air Video I can connect to my network media drive and stream pretty much any video format with no waiting and no iTunes. It absolutely rocks. With the addition of Elgato’s Eyetv app (still not iPad native but works well enough) gives me live TV, wherever. The elephant in the room with video is the aspect ratio but I’d be happy if they simply let me choose how much I wanted to zoom because at the moment it’s either overly letter-boxed or cropped at least in Apples own video app. I imagine that would be fairly trivial to implement but what do I know!
News & Browsing
They really weren’t kidding when they talked about how great an experience browsing is – it’s just stunning and works. Everything just feels ‘solid’ and when browsing in portrait mode sites just look so much better than they do with ‘the landscape ‘fold’. I hadn’t actually noticed the ability to create bookmarks on the home screen on my iphone because frankly I didn’t browse very much but instead of waiting for linkedin and facebook to be updated to the ipad I’m perfectly happy just going to the sites themselves. That said I still don’t actually surf that much, I prefer feeds and Newsrack is currently the best on the ipad and works a treat.
Kids
My two year old immediately picked it up and started playing. Not all together unexpected as he’s had a iPod Touch for about a year so it made perfect sense to him. The potential here for education is truly amazing. It’s here where you really feel the ‘personal’ bit tho’. On his touch I’ve simply removed all the other apps and left the kiddy stuff but now he has a million and one icons to navigate (and delete arbitrarily as is his want). I’m hoping that the folders in next version of the OS with help a little.
Work
From a day job perspective it was an exciting prospect. I work in planning and strategy and the key tools for me are sketching, organisation and presentation apps. I’ve played around a fair bit with Omnigraffle which even though it’s very very much a version 1 it is fantastic for pulling together those little ‘planner charts’. This experience is extremely marred almost to the point of being useless by having to then plug in the iPad into Itunes to retrieve my sketches for further development. That’s not Omni’s fault – that’s Apple and to be fair something which I suspect will be addressed, across the board. Sooner the better. also worth noting is Sketchy – a sweet little app for pulling together wireframes, doesn’t have anywhere near the flexibility of omnigraffle but if all you need to do is bosh out a few quickies in a meeting it does the trick. The poster child for usability and portability is mega-todo list Things which wi-fi syncs between desktop, Ipad and Iphone absolutely seamlessly. Alas as I don’t have a U.S. iTunes account I haven’t been able to try out the iWork applications but in the mean time happy to be able to take notes, sketch and present as PDF’s pushed over from keynote on the mac.
Ipad & VNC
Thanks to iTeleport I can now remarkably easily remote control all the other machines I’ve got in my house. I used to screen share from my laptop into my media server and player respectively whenever I wanted to do anything more than changed the channel (which I do through my iphone). The ‘touch’ mode in iteleport works perfectly and the refresh rate is not so bad depending on atmospheric conditions in my home network. In fact I recently started helping out on a screenplay using Adobe Story – which of course is flash based and hence an Ipad no-no. However, I’ve been simply leaving the app open on a mac mini at home and vnc’ing to use, write and review – not quite as neat as a dedicated app but a nifty work around for now.
Jailbreaking & Ipad 3G
OK, I admit it- I did it. Didn’t have a good reason other than to check out what the ‘scene’ was up to and it’s now ridiculously easy with the ‘Spirit’ app. Yes I can now run apps in the background but have realised that Steve was largely right in that you generally don’t need it. I’m sure there will be some great apps out soon (especially looking forward to wi-fi sync working on the ipad which is imminent apparently). If you are brave it’s worth checking out Full-force – it forces native iPhone apps into iPad resolutions – didn’t work on most games I tried – but on tardy apps it’s a workable stop gap – Ocado and the Guardian for instance. However it’s actually the iphone/mywi setup which impresses – it simply allows me to tether my iphone to my ipad when I *really* need to get online. Which is rarely at it turns since all my mail, news and social stuff is being pushed to the iphone anyway. As such I genuinely haven’t missed having a 3g Ipad at all!
Designing for Ipad
From my experience so far I don’t actually see the necessity to design ‘specifically’ for the ipad – but its definitely an opportunity. I can pretty much guarantee that if you make it look good on the ipad it’ll still look good on a desktop so there’s an argument that you might as well.
Orientation
It’s astonishing to see just how ‘traditionally’ well designed sites work on the ipad. If you stick to the current standards around navigation and page structure most things look great. The main consideration is that you now have multiple ‘folds’ depending on orientation. In Landscape mode is unsurprisingly near enough identical to a normal desktop or laptop – most sites are designed for 1024×768 anyway. The gag is that you actually get back about 30 pixels due to the fact there are no menus and it’s not in an unsightly window. It’s the addition of the portrait view which adds extra opportunities. In portrait it feels like and is almost double the viewable area. Obviously all they are doing simply scaling to the width of the screen so if you do the maths your fold will be at (1024/768)*1024 = 1365. Given this – If I was designing specifically for the ipad and don’t need to scroll vertically it’s a logical place to ‘hard’ position a footer to frame a page and remove scrolling entirely and give the site itself much more of an ‘app’ feel.
Depth
Additionally there is a fantastic opportunity to design sites with ‘depth’. Since all you have to do is double tap to zoom you could cram in a huge amount of content – you simply would never do on a mouse based browser – and then simply zoom in and out to read.
Sideways
It occurred that since you are always swiping, that horizontal scrolling might be fun. I’ve had a play around with some sideways scrolling sites for a laugh and to be honest it doesn’t work terribly well. The ipad is optimised to condense and scroll vertically and whilst it’s obviously easier swiping than dragging mice around it’s slightly counter intuitive and clunky. I wouldn’t design like a shop for instance where you want to insure that folk actually see what you want them to see. There’s also the other fundamental problem of orientation if you designed something which was no doubt incredibly pretty at 1024×1365 to be viewed horizontally you’d of course be 4 ways scrolling in landscape mode (plus the ipad would probably get all confused about how to scale stuff although haven’t tried that yet)!
Navigation
One of the other considerations when designing for the ipad is navigation positioning – the tradition of the left hand nav is counter intuitive if you are holding the ipad in your left hand and using your right hand to navigate as your hand now covers the entire screen. (The lefties finally got one up on us!). It does beg the question for the future – do we need to start making the nav location entirely customisable?
Irritations
It’s heavy, it wants a camera and some of the interface elements haven’t been well enough thought through – but it’s version 1 so I forgive all of that. What I don’t forgive and what nobody seems to want to talk about is iTunes. It destroys an otherwise fantastic experience. It’s about time that Apple bit the bullet and ripped the bloody thing apart and rebuilt it from scratch. The iTunes store and anything to do with video or managing applications is just awful. I didn’t mind it so much with my iphone but then I wasn’t having to sync all the time. It’s slow, it’s buggy, it’s bloatware and it needs some major love.
The Game-Shifting Paradigm-Changer.
Being a 1.0 digital dude I miss that days we used to talk about paradigm shifts and I believe that this is one of those. Everything we knew or thought we knew about the relationship between a carbon and silicon based life forms is in flux and the iPad is the catalysing expression of a frustration with technology you didn’t know you had.
At least for me, you will probably think differently, but that’s the point.
One week in and one week to go, really enjoying being a dad again but also getting itchy to get back to work. Much to do, many projects stacking up and decisions to be made.
So as of May 3rd, back out into the world 😉
In the meantime doing a keynote at internet world next week about some of the discussion points here which should be interesting. At very least it’ll focus the mind. Will be popping up the presentation as soon as it’s written.
So on what is potentially the eve of kid 2.0 I feel, I think and I grok with fullness that which is my first born. Jake.
He’s the definition of a character. Those of you who have met him will testify. He is, in short, a dude.
He ain’t perfect tho’. He’s overly obsessed with technology. A flickering switch, an LCD,an LED. A signal to touch, poke, twiddle. Who knows where he learned that from.
He doesn’t understand the word ‘Gentle’. In Jake terms ‘gentle’ is literally a smack in the face. A well meaning pummel, a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. It isn’t malicious, he just doesn’t get the pain. He doesn’t understand the frustration. He’s just a 2 year old. Why would he?
I keep thinking -” ve must haf se discipline , ve must haf se order” – but why?
He’s happy – we’re happy – he gets tech – we get a smile
Work in progress - a way of thinking about yourself in the context of social media
Did this a while ago for a conference, never really got a round to ‘finishing’ it but thought i’d share – might be useful to somebody.
The idea was to (err) simply visual the kind of attributes that folk out there expect of a brand when the brand is playing in various area of social media.
i.e. if it takes forever for you to respond to a tweet, then you probably shouldn’t. Green is ‘go for it’, yellow is ‘well you could but think it through’, and red is ‘not for the risk averse’.
Obviously this is more for the less experience clients and isn’t supposed to be ‘scientific’ in anyway, just illustrative to get a conversation going.
Love to know what y’all think.
and no I don’t expect to win any awards for design here, it’s a spreadsheet innit 😉
Had another frantic couple of weeks of meetings, the ‘New’ company idea seems to be taking shape, especially now I have a ‘picture’ to share (more on that soon). As I’ve been talking to people the most common question is – what questions are you trying to answer?
I should have a pithy one liner with outlines the problem but haven’t managed to work it out yet – perhaps some bright spark out there can summarise below
In brief and in no particular order and incomplete, questions I think which are worth addressing:
The Commoditisation of production
It is increasingly difficult to differentiate yourself in terms of production – most clients simply aren’t that discerning and so much of the world is being outsourced overseas by default. However there are many, genuine craftsfolk, pushing the boundaries in their respective medium who are marginalised due to size and lack of appreciation of the nuance of ‘good’. How can these people be harnessed?
Those who can’t do, teach
Ironically in the marketing universe it’s those who ‘teach’ who get paid the most. Basically the issue is one of translation, if you can speak marketing you are fine, if you can’t then you are screwed, regardless of talent or ideas. Is there a way to break down the divides which jargon & status bring?
Marketing is generic
There is a basic assumption that if you understand the ‘disciplines’ of marketing that it can be applied to everything equally well. I simply don’t believe that, the more you understand the sector, the business, the audience not simply from a research POV but a point of participation, the more you are likely to come up with something ‘good’. How can you systematically engage at an extremely high level within a sector or passion area?
The power of hobbies
A hobby is something you do because you love it, because it engages you on an emotional and intellectual level, because you can do it with other people you like and respect or on your own, because you can always be better at it. Is it better to have a hobby or have a job?
Addressing ‘The Big Lie’
If you need to sell X to Y regardless of whether they want or need it – then you aren’t a client partner. You are a salesman. That’s fine, just don’t lie about it. How do you become a genuine client partner – or perhaps – why have clients – just have partners?
Adding Value does not just mean Cash
Simply put companies, or more to the point large groups of companies only really live by one metric. The bottom line – everything is geared up for increase it. Alas that’s unlikely to change any time soon – however does that cash need to come from doing what the client says or could it come from origination of product in conjunction with the client?
Divided we stand stand
The bigger you are… and all that – for many small & decentralised has proven time and time again to be a stronger model than huge and encumbered. However, the majority of collectives collapse because they make the fundamentally incorrect assumption that everyone is in it for the group. The reality is that everyone is in it for themselves – hard as that may sound. Is there a way to forge a systems which doesn’t shun this behaviour but embraced and accommodate it?
A change is as good as a rest
Smart people know that finding other smart people is the holy grail. Unfortunately smart people have a tendency to get bored when confronted with repetitive tasks. Is there a way to let the smart people move around the eco-system to keep them around for longer?
Trust obviously needs to be earned but can it be spent?
How can I trust people I don’t know? What is the mechanism to (try) to insure that the long term gain through participation is more attractive than the short term gain of shafting somebody? Wouldn’t it be great if you had an internal economy which rewarded positive actions – random acts of kindness if you will – but that these rewards, these ‘trust points’ can be traded for goods & services or just plain cash?
Bit of a mess but going to post this now but will come back to it soon. Comments welcome.
Was reminded tonight that actually, all things being equal interviewing trent reznor in 1991 was my reason for being. Never mind the 19 years subsequently which I kind of did OK stuff
One of my favourite films of all time is the Sidney Lumet Classic “Network” (1976) – if you haven’t seen it I highly recommend it – it’s more relevant today than ever, especially given the state of the news and discussions around commercial models.
It’s full of extremely memorable rants and has been sampled to death. However there is one scene that has been running through my head over the last few weeks which seemed to parallel my current state of mind and I thought i’d share – below is an excerpt from the script written by Paddy Chayefsky (full script found here: http://sfy.ru/?script=network)
See, this is what you get when you have too much time on your hands 😉
I had the honour of attending an absolutely fantastic dinner last week hosted by Robin from Adobe to get feedback on how Flash is doing and how it can be best used by UK digital agencies. Attending were a bunch of well known industry miscreants from Lightmaker, Kerb, Hi-Res, Lbi, Underwired, Us two & Iris Digital plus my unemployed self.
It was a great opportunity to think and discuss the role of Flash in 2010 and I thought I’d share!
Disclosure: 1) I use a Mac and 2) I installed click2flash some time ago and my laptop battery has thanked me for it.
There has been much discussion about Flash in recent weeks around Apple & Adobe’s relationship – I’m not terribly interested in that, to be honest it’s more about dollars and cents than providing a better user experience, so I’m not going to add to the muck slinging.
As I see it and what I find interesting is that Flash is entering a stage of it’s development that isn’t dissimilar to where Director was a decade ago.
Whilst the technology is mature and well adopted it’s not clear exactly what its purpose is anymore. Lets think about what it currently is used for:
In Browser
Banners / Overlays – Face it, folk hate overlays and their effectiveness is plummeting plus ad blocking is now common place so that’s not a future.
Flash Sites – It’s been a very very long time since a client turned round to me and requested a big bloated multimedia experience – which is where Flash excelled. In fact in the last year I’ve had more clients express a preference as say that they didn’t want flash on the site which tells you something.
Flash Navigation – Accessibility and common sense did away with that, not going to miss it.
Flash Components on Sites – yep, they are everywhere but the vast majority of them (at least the sites I look at) are simply glorified news tickers which could be quickly and easily implemented is HTML these days
Flash Video – There were no alternatives, but now there are just look at Vimeo & youtube. Realistically video playback should be have been browser native for the last few years anyway.
Games – Ah – well here we go – there isn’t anything (with the exception of Silverlight) that allows you to make (certain types of) games well in browser – definitely scope there if you are into that kind of thing. Casual & Social gaming is peaking right now and Flash is a great tool for these kinds of things.
On Mobile (in Browser)
See above. The launch of 10.1 is nice if you want that ‘rich’ mobile experience but I’m happy with the stripped down gimme-the-fact’s and get rid of the bling efficiency that’s required when wandering down the street.
On Mobile (Applications)
Definitely something in this, whether it’s “Appstore” or the newly announced multi-provider “NotAppStoreHonest” there is no getting away from the fact that having a solid and familiar development environment to develop mobile applications is extremely compelling. I’m both excited and scared to see what the mobile output from CS5 is likely to be. Unfortunately, and this has absolutely nothing to do with Flash, the problem with Apps in general is the rapid commoditisation of the whole sector and general inability to find good ones.
Desktop Applications
As with mobile apps, Air apparently (not a developer) allows reasonably quick and painless cross platform development – at least for certain types of Apps.
Console (Browser)
The implementation of flash at the moment on all three platforms is a few steps behind the current ones I’m sure that’ll be addressed at some point but if you look back at the first point, all the same things apply plus you’ve got the 10 foot view to consider, not least it’s a pain in the arse navigating a flash site (or any sites for the most part) on a console
Console (Games)
Not applicable. Eh? So you can’t just simply port your lovely little casual game to Wiiware, XBLA or PSN? Missed opportunity or what – casual gaming is all the rage right now, surely you would want to continue the experience from playing at work to playing at home?
Anyway the point I’m trying to make is that Flash has reached a cross roads, it’s been all things to all people for a good decade. I have this feeling that Adobe should be focusing on where the strengths of the platform lie and what contexts are most appropriate. Is it a browser plugin or an app development environment?
Simply put what is Flash for these days?
Hence the identity crisis: I’m sure there are a few of you out there who have an opinion, bring it 😉
Wow is been a busy and inspiring couple of weeks, you contact a thousand people and sure enough quite a few respond.
Consulting: Have been approached by three different organisations so far interested in getting me in for various extremely interesting short term projects – nothing signed off yet but a very good start – basically the more I can consult the longer I can take to ‘work things out’.
Film: Working on a couple of initial treatments for feature films with Stuart Barr & Marc Hawker, one genre (which seems to be turning into a sci-fi, horror, comedy), one a bit more ‘grown up’ family drama. Very early days.
‘New Business Idea’: Lots of people interested in ‘playing’, working on defining it, structures, funding, organisational stuff – more on this very soon. If anybody out there knows a ‘friendly’ intellectual property lawyer for whom I can buy lunch in exchange for a bit of advice please let me know.
New Digital Marketing Agency: Basically from the conversations I’ve had I could start a full service digital agency tomorrow and probably have a few new clients to inaugurate it. However, this can easily be rolled up into the ‘New Business Idea’ so it’s going on the back burner for a couple of weeks. However given that I’m potentially looking at the cluster model – i.e. decentralised, lots of partners and skill sets – am interested in hearing from anybody who might want to play, especially in ‘traditional creative concepting’, search & media.
Music: Not a lot of activity yet, but have a few meetings set up in the next few weeks – and no I am not even remotely thinking about setting up a ‘label’ but there is an awful lot of other things in that space which are fun.
Job: Had my first job interview EVER. Wasn’t even for a specific one but seemed to go well – potentially two or three things they’ve got in mind – which I hate to say were actually quite interesting.
Dot Com: Couple of ideas kicking around, been a bit slow due to wanting to folk not being around but am sure will pick up momentum over the coming weeks.
Non-Execs: Having a few meetings this week – next week, more soon.
Games: Got a couple of folk in mind to have a bit of a brainstorm with but they are being a bit elusive – will nab him next week bwhahaha
Write a book: Err too busy right now to even write the blog so … pause.
Change Location: Realistically not likely to happen in the short term so might as well just pause it. Having said that lots of interest from Edinburgh & SF 😉
Party: Having a ‘Life After Lateral’ party Tuesday 2nd March @ The Strongrooms in Shoreditch – looking to be much fun with the Lateral family new and old, near and far – if you didn’t get an invite and want to come sign up here (need to know the broad numbers):
Over the last week I’ve met a bunch of folk from a variety of disciplines and industries – it’s been quite mind expanding. One of the recurring themes / questions has been “how do I transition or re-position my analog business into a digital one”
I just thought I’d share a few observations and thoughts on the subject but with full disclosure that I am not a Harvard MBA, nor do I write self-help books (yet ). I just tell it as I see it.
Fear
Fear a.k.a ‘blind panic’ triggers the old fight or flight mechanisms. This can lead to change for changes sake which tend to be accompanied by profound errors in judgment. Fear is a great motivator but often its simply the mind killer.
Blind panic
The emphasis is on blind. This can manifest as the inability to see the opportunities staring you in the face or to appreciate the inherent value of the assets surrounding you. Your typical social media strategist will bend your ear on the value of listening and making sense of the noise. This is good advice, however it’s one dimensional, taking this time to look at yourself, your organization, means looking beyond your peers but to those who are achieving success in other spaces, not just the obvious ones. If you just listen you’ll just hear what you want to hear – by looking and understanding you’ll hopefully see the big picture.
Fight
If you are blind it is really kind of difficult to work out who exactly you are supposed to be fighting. Often you simply end up lashing out at whoever is closest unaware of the dude with the sniper rifle a couple of miles away.
A friend of mine once told me to “fight the fights worth fighting for” – words which have been incredibly useful over the years. I never knew the origins of the phrase till recently.
“The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got to be willing – for the sheer fun and joy of it – to go right ahead and fight, knowing you’re going to lose. You mustn’t feel like a martyr. You’ve got to enjoy it.”
I.F. Stone
Sums up the last fifteen years pretty well, certainly in interesting take on “Fail Forward Fast”.
Flight – A surprisingly common story.
We’ve spotted an iceberg! Abandon ship! Man the lifeboats, before the ship can sink. Run away from everything you have, everything you have built, all that knowledge and expertise is obsolete now. We must turn our back on our history our legacy to be able to move forward! Don’t worry about freezing to death in the water. It’ll be fine.
To mix metaphors even further, tearing down the house before you know what’s going to replace it is generally a bad move.
Change
Change is good, but doesn’t always have to be revolutionary, evolution gave us opposable thumbs and how useful are they when tapping away on your iphone. Change can come in many forms.
Change can be as simple as a change of words. Why use the word ‘digital’ at all? If you remove ‘digital’ from the equation you remove the barriers. In Adland you don’t have an outdoor creative director working with a print ad creative director being managed by the tv creative director.
Face it if you wanted to have a ‘dialogue’ with your customers would you call in the ‘digital dialogue dude’ or someone who was good at having a conversation?
Separate the thought from the channel and your options expand to encompass them all or in other words “free your mind and your assets will follow”
Start a new kind of business part agency / part incubator. Been toying with the idea of setting up what I can best describe as a commercial framework which would allow a whole bunch of folk to work together on creative and commercial projects. The notion comes with the reality that there are whole bunch of ‘famous’ digital, marketing and creatives who are for one reason or another considering their options or out in the open and but not particularly interested in jumping into something big.
I have said repeatedly over the years that I wanted to build ‘a next generation media neutral agency with strategy and creative at it’s core and the ability to deliver across all channels.’
I’ve also said repeatedly over the years that if you want to get there then you wouldn’t start from here (adland) and that it was most likely to evolve from something with digital DNA unafraid of appreciating the better disciplines of the old world.
Still kind of believe that, but had an thought the other day that the problem isn’t in the digital or the analog it’s in the term agency. The word agency has so much inertia attached to it that whatever your intentions are at the start you will at some point be subsumed by that very inertia you hoped to avoid.
It’s an interesting problem.
You want to create something which does great work and is in scaleable yet avoids it’s own history. Back in the day we talked alot about collectives , obsolete was in essence a collective pretending to be a company, as was antirom & tomato.
In fact, to be fair, I modelled obsolete in my somewhat naive notion of what tomato was at that point. It kind of works for short term projects but if you want to do anything long term the lack of continuity is a problem – and a big one. That’s where structures come in or at very least frameworks! So basically what I’m thinking has structure but not necessarily walls, has clients but is not an agency, creates businesses and manifests content.
pro – already got the network to do ‘it’
con – ‘it’ needs to be well and truly thought through
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Up in the Atmosphere 