Posts Tagged ‘ linkedin ’

May the Force be with you as you Tumblr your way though the Creative Cloud.

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.

Jon Bains is a partner in Atmosphere

2013
07/23
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Downsizer – to the MAX

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:

http://bit.ly/gGyL0J

Five star of course! If we win the competition we’ll have Downsizer made by the spring and I promise you won’t be disappointed by the results!

2011
01/06
CATEGORY
future
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Feelings about ‘unwatchable’, 10:10 and the wonderful insanity of the Internet

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:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/green-living-blog/2010/oct/04/10-10-activism

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.

Thorts?

2010
10/13
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Thoughts on the Ipad

Thoughts on the iPad

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.

2010
05/19
CATEGORY
future
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Resuming activities

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.

2010
04/23
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Projected attributes of social media.

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 😉

2010
03/27
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It’s not the answer, it’s the question

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.

2010
03/09
CATEGORY
future
rants
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1 comment

Future Finder

Did this about a month ago as a way of thinking about find projects to work on with folk – thought i’d share

2010
02/24
CATEGORY
future
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1 comment

Adobe Flash, an identity crisis?

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 😉

j

2010
02/17
CATEGORY
rants
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3 comments

Brief update

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):

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?invites&eid=338182684664

I just want to thank everyone who is participating in this little experiment, your words and support continue to absolutely blow me away.

j

2010
02/17
CATEGORY
future
rants
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3 comments

Analog to digital conversion

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”

Don’t be afraid to try this at home.

j

2010
02/08
CATEGORY
future
rants
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2 comments

A ‘New’ business concept

A ‘New’ Business concept
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
2010
02/03
CATEGORY
future
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7 comments

A Little help

So I really don’t know what I am going to do next. On one side I’m terrified, with the whole wife, 1.9 kids, mortage deal. On the other I haven’t felt this excited and inspired in over a decade. But right now I have a smallish window prior to the birth of Kid 2.0 to take a step back, think and find some new collaborators. I would like to invite anyone and everyone, friends, family, clients, cohorts to help me work it all out. Basically I intend to crowd source my future.

So – ways you can help:

1. Check out the Blog (www.jonbains.com) and please don’t slag off my shoddy word press skills – i’ve only had a couple of days to pull this together.

2. Most of the posts are some of the options I’ve come up with so far, some of them commercial, some more creative, some geographic and some probably  just plain stupid. At the moment they are just big broad brush strokes but over the coming weeks – with your input – I’ll start fleshing them all out – what I’d like is yes / no / maybe’s additional pro’s & con’s, other ways to look at things. If your interested in ‘playing’ with me in trying to build ‘summat’ please let me know.

3. I’m also totally up for meeting up to discuss “stuff” i.e thoughts, projects, avatar, w’ever –  although I’m fairly limited at the moment to day-time hours due to family and all that. My brand new google calendar is here

3. I’d also really appreciate any recommendations you feel like putting on my linked in profile. (http://www.linkedin.com/in/jonbains), follow me on twitter (jonbains) as I’m probably going to decouple twitter from facebook updates soon, and feel free to harass me on aim (contact me for details)

All comments welcome! I have only one tiny request – please don’t ask questions about my exit from Tangent – I legally simply can’t answer them –  suffice to say that I was made redundant.

2010
02/03
CATEGORY
future
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3 comments

An end and a beginning

As you might know I have now left Tangent / Lateral, and therefore am concluding a story that started almost 15 years ago. What word do you use to sum up 15 years? I’ve racked my brain and consulted the thesaurus and only one word seems to fit.

Family.

Family is a powerful thing. They help each other, support each other, fight but then make up, offer advice and provide the shoulder to cry on, they inspire, they build, and hopefully together they succeed. They make mistakes but in time are forgiven. They don’t do each other favours, they simply ‘do’.

It is often said that you don’t choose your family, usually in the negative, but the execution of this is simply not true – we choose all the time, whether to engage, whether to help, whether to call –  the relationships which we choose are the hardest to break even if the frequency of contact is limited. I see this as the most wonderful thing.

I may only have been a biological father for the last couple of years and I definitely don’t speak to the rest of my biological family enough –  but for  the last 15 years I’ve been  a dad, a brother, an uncle and even occasionally a mom. I believe I am one of the most fortunate people alive because I have not one but two families.

I have no idea what the future holds, what I am going to do, where I am going to go, but what I do know is that my family, both new and old will be there to help.

Jon Bains

Family Man

2010
02/03
CATEGORY
future
rants
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