“The application itself is not a goal at all – it’s an obstacle between the user and their goal.” – Robert Hoekman jr. Designing the Obvious

In UX-terms, applications are obstacles inside the situations where they are designed to create value – as, according to Hoekman, they represent an artificial tool between the user and their goal.

Products stand the same test. Being not only worthless objects before being introduced to a situation where they provide value, but also an obstacle inside this situation. This has been a known problem for quite some time and through the wisdom of Human Centered Design, amongst other things, one has changed objects from being bulky bionic body parts to becoming biological extensions of the contextual body. The result being that they are not perceived as obstacles, but value providers.

Where does this put marketing?

As the marketing mindset becomes more about immersion into contexts and products (immersed marketing?), it starts affecting applications and objects. And in this sense it becomes less about craving exclusive attention, and more about becoming invisible. Not in the sense of disappearing, but in the sense of becoming a part of the experience itself.

Invisible does not mean hidden, it means non-artificial. It means that marketing can extend on the situations surrounding the product, but inside the confines of the experiential or value based structure set by the experience.

Marketing is not an experience in itself; it’s immersed in the original experience.

Tim Brown corners this brilliantly:

“Any service organization has got to get over the idea that a great service is something where a consumer doesn’t have to do anything, that’s a really bad service. A great service is where the consumer actually participates, and where they get drawn in, and where they become part of it.”
- Tim Brown, IDEO, Nokia Ideas Project

The participation in this sense is the marketing, where additional unique value is created. The stuff that draws people in, gives them a reason to share and to become “a part of it”.

As a result of this the whole discussion surrounding “content or conversations as king” is disrupted, because it suggests that neither is right. Rather the focus should turn to experiential contexts and participation.

I’ve been invited to do a five minute presentation on Context at Paris 2.0 this Tuesday. Working my way through the script I decided to put the whole thing into the presentation and upload it. Love to get some feedback on this before Tuesday :o) Thank you in advance.

(View slideshow at slideshare.net)

The script:

The immersion of digital stuff, making the accessibility of media-, communication- and social technology almost ubiquitous, has led to a behavioral change in our everyday lives

- (it will mean so more next year, and more the year after that) – Kevin Slavin….

This is interesting, not because we think this means that marketers can reach people all the time, they can’t, but because people can reach marketing all the time, which is much more significant.

Brands now have the opportunity to be reached, by people, when people want to.

This turns marketing up side down….

Marketers used to be the people that reached the people (the customers), now the people (as participants) are the ones who reach marketers.

The great shift is this:
When marketers were controlling the situation, marketing was done blindly through media channels, affecting people’s anticipation of a situation outside the situation itself, manipulating their feelings about it. We were telling people how to feel at a point in time when they didn’t feel anything. (Who cares about shaving while enjoying a 2pm break from boring work routines?)

Today marketing is accessible inside the situations, so the job changes.

When marketing exists inside situations the brand’s own story is irrelevant, the experience itself will always be stronger.

(why would I stop doing what I’m doing just to listen to your version of what I’m experiencing right now?).

Marketers stories become irrelevant inside situations because they are different from peoples own stories.

So marketing changes …

The only reason for people to access marketing inside situations is because they gain something valuable.

And if marketers can’t tell their own story, the goal becomes making the participants story better.

So how do you make it better?

By understanding the context, and adding value to it.

This is the new marketing economy:
The goal of marketing is not to win the battle of stories (as is the case for traditional media marketing), but to understand the abilities, emotions and activities of a situation – the context – and add deliberate value to it. Making it better, becoming indispensible as a value provider, and gaining ownership to people through direct relations with them over time…

To understand this we need to accept that products are worthless. And only become valuable as they are introduced to a situation where they are relevant. That brands aren’t product providers, but value providers, something they have always been – marketing has only spent its time distracting our focus from this and done its most to become unwanted.

Products are worthless:
A toothbrush is worthless outside its context, taking up much needed space in the bathroom, but when it comes to tooth hygiene, it becomes indispensible.

The New Marketing economy says that the context is larger than the product, much larger, and that marketing is about increasing the value of this context – and growing the context itself.

As Whirpool found when they went on to increase their value by launching a podcast about the American family – not talk about their home appliances..

Or Fiat as they use personal environmental initiatives to create value – not brag about their car.

Or Wasa, as they help you get a nutritious breakfast – not sell their delicious bread/cracker things.

Or BakerTweet – making sure you enjoyed the product in its best possible context – when it’s steaming hot…

Brands need to see themselves as value creators, adding value to contexts where their value is appreciated and needed. They need to investigate and explore these contexts, surrounding their brand and products, and take ownership of them.

The next marketing arena isn’t similar formats in similar media, it’s becoming the most valuable brand inside the experience surrounding the product and the brand.

The marketing currency is not about attention, interruption or interest. It’s about creating deliberate value. Building direct relationships and great marketing through connected services, utilities, arenas and stuff.

The new Marketing economy is about understanding context and adding deliberate value…

Understanding the challenges affecting digital media as a marketing platform introduces some new creative challenges. What we are seeing is very solvable, and they are triggering the start of a much more diverse and interesting time for marketing and advertising.

There are four main challenges disturbing the effect of marketing investments on digital media [DM]. Understanding their abilities, and why they are doing a much better job than DM on doing what DM originally did gives insight into what DM needs to offer in order to regain its value. (Sorry about all the DM’s :o)

The important thing is not to copy these abilities, because that would not be bettering digital media, it would be destroying it. We need to find the solutions within the context of the existing value creation of the digital media body. And this is where it introduces some great creative challenges for strategists and creatives.

The four horsemen in this case can seem very threatening; on the other hand, sometimes innovation needs to be forced by inescapable realities.

The Four Horsemen:

1. Earned media. We are increasingly seeing earned media outperform paid media and becoming the main driver of traffic to marketing initiatives.

2. Middle men. Media needs to build down the barriers between brands and participants online, today the artificial divide media offers are lessening the value compared to brands own initiatives.

3. New behaviors. Increased accessibility to tools and technology not only boosts media consumption, but also changes how the use integrates into our daily lives. Advertising models tailored for a more traditional media consumption looses effectiveness.

4. Brands as competitors. The competition is no longer between digital media channels with similar products; it’s between media channels and the brands own initiatives.

Looking at the larger picture there are already two visible solutions:

1. Media channels need to offer arenas where brands with shared values can build direct relations with the participants through offering deliberate and relevant value over time.

2. Exploring and understanding Media’s new role in online activities – defined by its abilities. And build products that fit better to this part of the online marketing eco-system, or create a new role all together.

Lets look at the horsemen, where are the opportunities?

1. Earned Media, this is simple. Earned media is earned, which means it finds and links to stuff that is valuable. (In effect this isn’t relevant to any advertising campaign that people don’t want to share. On the other hand…). If the advertising is valuable, then the media channel needs to offer the space for where the content resides. If brands build stuff on media channels that earned media links back to, you create a win-win situation. Simple :o)

2. Middle Men, a bit more complex. Media needs to get out of the way. At the same time they need their presence as they are dependent on not becoming invisible themselves. This creates a situation where brands and media need to collaborate. We already know that both brands and media channels are value providers, and it is the interfaces where they create shared value we are looking for. Media opens to such a collaborative opportunity through its development of arenas specially tailored to niche interest and niche brands.

3. New behaviors. Increased accessibility to information-, media-, and social technology first changes our tools, then our behaviors. What we are seeing now are people not only changing how much time they spend with media channels, but also how they use them. The jury is out on this one as the changes in behavior have just started, but both Transmedia, synchronized media activities across platforms and content enrichment through participation carries some very promising and clever inspiration.

4. Brands are the new competitors. As brands can create their own media channels and direct relations arenas, the need to use media as a vehicle for messaging decreases. This means that the competition for marketing dollars is not exclusively between the media channels but between the media channels and the brands own initiatives. What media needs to do is both understand how they can facilitate and increase the value of these arenas, by offering a new property tailored to each brands initiative. Top of mind this might be “free” traffic, but better and more unique values will be more connected to synergies gained from shared values.

Summarizing this into seven simple bullet points, digital media needs to do the following:

1. Start seeing themselves as value providers, not content providers.
2. Understand that advertising moves from just being messaging to becoming something useful and valuable.
3. Start selling long-term initiatives, helping brands build direct relations with people, and connect with them over time.
4. Produce content that is stealable and multipliable.
5. Build a portfolio of unique values – not unique content or formats.
6. Offer clear values as a part of a marketing eco-system, facilitate larger parts of this system.
7. And finally, offer brands marketing abilities that they are unable to offer themselves.

Display advertising was designed to work inside a traditional media format, tailored to a certain context of media use. As this use-context changes with the accessibility of new technology – as readers become participants, as media gets integrated into everyday life and exported outside the browser – these formats don’t fit the context anymore and start to loose their effectiveness.

This is similar to saying “digital didn’t change anything, but everything digital changed”. Because with the advent of the Internet (before broadband) the old models didn’t really change that much, they just got digitalized –the use pattern stayed the same (looking at use statistics we see that the older the citizen the more similar their use of digital media is to traditional media). What we are seeing now is the alteration of the core concepts of the use part – which has a much greater effect on media and advertising than just moving some stuff from one platform to the other.

Regarding click-rates on online banners we’ve moved from being told a 0,15% click average is good to a 0.05%. This isn’t necessarily because we’ve got lower expectations. It might just be because the average drops – because the advertising formats aren’t following the changes in consumption patterns.

Now we are very busy measuring the amount of media consumption, and supporters point to every research showing an increase. But this only points to the amount of media consumed, not the pattern of the consumption – and this is where stuff has changed…

In other words, there is a new context for using media, and measuring how much we use it isn’t helpful as it isn’t relevant. What is useful is understanding how the use has changed, and figuring out how this should change media – and its advertising..

What are the challenges for FMCG brands in today’s post digital landscape? Especially, how does Digital Media facilitate good marketing opportunities in the Every Day Life?

The five ideas / suggestions presented are the following:

1. Marketing online has to impact how people feel about the brand. (it’s about ideas, not technology).
2. Build direct relations.
3. Be a conscious and active part of the every day life ecosystem – from at home, and out there, to in store.
4. It’s about them, not you – create contextual value.
5. Confusing social media with media.

…

It’s title and content is strongly influenced by the Brand Building in a Recession lecture by Richard Murray at D&AD earlier this year. A much recommended video.

Brand building in a recession: Richard Murray from D&AD on Vimeo.

The relationship between media and social media is like the relationship between egg and eggplant: They share a couple of the same letters, but they are not in the same taxonomy.” – Kevin Slavin, Area/Code

This post is an exploration of a quote by Kevin Slavin from the Storytelling Throwdown panel at the CaT conference in 2009. The reason being that I find the comment so insightful and interesting I felt it deserved some increased attention. (video below)

Traditional media is a battle between stories. Where the reader, viewer or listener is already engaged in a story, the main story, the content. And the goal of the advertising is to create an even more interesting story so that the engagement switches focus. It’s a story competition.

In social media we are not engaging in stories, we are engaging in the exchange of ideas. Be that a conversation between friends, or the need to define ones identity or role in a group by sharing something. Social media is not a competition of stories, it’s a competition for the attention to each other.

In social media the relationships aren’t short, superficial, cliched or stereotypical, quite the opposite. People spend more and more time, delving deeper and deeper in into each other, connecting more and more.

This setting is very difficult to displace with storytelling in its conventional sense. What we need are narratives and systems that engage and work within this context of attention between people. Stories that accelerate or facilitate increased exchange of ideas, increased connections.

Our stories need to increase the social fabric between people, understanding the systems and drivers that come in to play when people connect to each other and help them continue strengthening their relationships.

“One way to think about it. It’s like the relationship between media and social media is like the relationship between egg and eggplant. They share just a couple of letters but they’re not in the same taxonomy. That it’s a fundamentally different experience.

And that it used to be when you where storytelling, that what you were competing for attention against where other stories. It’s sort of a story competition.

And the attention we are competing for now is the attention to each other.

That basically what we are doing during the day these days is spending more and more time, deeper and deeper connected to each other. And that’s very difficult to displace through storytelling in the conventional sense of storytelling. And I think its important to figure out how to think about narratives as systems that can engage that, and can sort of work within that type of attention rather than to pull away from that exclusively.”

- Kevin Slavin, Storytelling Throwdown at CaT

(I’m having trouble with displaying the video due to a security error, please find it here.)

Studying referring site traffic to some of our online campaigns from 2007 to 2009 a very interesting shift not only seems to be emerging, but is already well under way.

Back in 2007 almost every visitor was either sent via direct traffic, search or paid media. Today this picture has shifted dramatically. Today, earned media is becoming the main source of traffic to our sites. This presents some exhilarating consequences.

There are especially two interesting things about this:

- The first being the fact that it is not necessarily social media that is earned media. In 2008 most of the traffic to one of our biggest campaigns came from earned media sites with no social media components.

- The second is a point similar to one I tried to argue in the presentation Changing the Currency. That attention is becoming less important than value (or worth according to Jenkins). Because in the new marketing economy, where marketing moves from existing inside media channels to becoming an integrated part of our everyday lives. Our activities start relying more and more on people sharing our stuff with others, rather than noticing a display advert inside some form of media.

“Value transports much better in everyday life compared to attention. Nobody spreads stuff because they noticed it, They spread it because it’s meaningful and adoptable.”

The bottom line is this: If the stuff we are seeing with our campaigns is becoming the norm, not an inconsistency. If this isn’t just a social media thing, but a larger media thing. Then strategy and creativity in marketing should be more concerned with creating something of shareable worth, rather than stories that interrupt and generate attention. Because these stories wont spread, and if it doesn’t spread, then Jenkins might be completely right: it’s dead…

Graham Brown over at Mobile Youth just published a video sharing his ideas regarding Earned Media in a bigger context. A good format and a very recommended watch:

Malcolm Gladwell can be quoted saying, “When you take the unconscious seriously you undermine virtually all quantitative market research and its focus.” In a similar sense it is in place to question quantitative website analytics when it comes to understanding or proving the success of social, brand or other emotional activities online.

[A recommended presentation by Malcolm Gladwell on PopTech from 07]

Borrowing some terminology from Jenkins we could say that the accumulation of visitors’ actions, measured by the web analytics tool, represent the value of an activity.

- Value gives an appropriate indication of whether or not the mechanics of the solution has attracted and kept the attention of enough visitors for a satisfying amount of time, or persuaded them to travel along a predefined path.
- Value is a reference to the success of an activity before we know if it has created any effect.
- Value is a quantitative.

On the other hand, the emotional effect of the interaction represents the quality of it. Borrowing from Jenkins again this could be defined as the worth of the activity.

- Worth confirms whether or not the visitor has adopted the idea, and to which effect the idea has been transformed, or as Jenkins defines it; multiplied.
- Worth is the effect of the activity after participants have been exposed to the message, absorbed it, multiplied it, made it their own and are ready to share it in order to confirm or disconfirm it in their own networks.
- Worth represents the transformation of a companies idea into a persons self. The idea has become something meaningful. This meaningfulness is the goal of the activity.

Today we measure mechanics and quantity inside the experience, as it is happening, and leave the qualitative measurements to some time after. I reckon this is not because we think ideas need time to “sink in”, but because our tools for measuring quality are expensive and limited to just a few performed pre- or post activity. In any case we most often want the totality of our activities to be finished before we try to find if it has been successful or not.

This is where the change is needed. In recordable media there is no need to wait for ideas to “sink in”. Ideas are best preserved if recorded before the weakness of the brains memory system manipulates the feedback the visitor is able to give.

What we need is to start tailoring solutions for immediate qualitative feedback, designing them to record adoption and transformation as it is happening. And to understand the worth of the communication, the meaningful stuff, before and without it being manipulated by visitors’ post-rationalization.

What are some of the implications and consequences for the post digital mindset?

Being interviewed by the brilliant people over at neboweb, I was asked to elaborate on some of the new abilities in marketing, universal identities, everyday life and design. Here are some outtakes:

To read the whole interview visit the Neboweb blog at http://www.neboweb.com/blog/everyday-life-interview-helge-tenno/.

- The attention web has some abilities that no other form of marketing can copy (attention and immediate effect), but as the number of tools in the marketing toolbox are increasing, so is the competition for marketing dollars. What I am anticipating is that brands will start to invest more money in areas with a different currency than mere attention and interruption.

- Marketers need to understand that as they gain access to people in a whole new way this requires them to rethink their value proposition towards their customer and ask themselves if the way we do marketing today is the right way and based on the right principles for doing marketing tomorrow? Has the whole way in which we create and provide value changed?

- As soon as a company owns the value creation of a situation, and starts offering this both to its own customers and to competitor’s customers, they are in fact removing all these people from the game board. Because the direct relationship which they are building with these customers will give them access to them, and their knowledge, in a way that is unrivaled by anything else. And that gets a foothold we have never seen before.

- It’s probably not a generation thing, it’s a mindset thing. Accepting that humans are complex and irrational – and building stuff for that, rather than for something that is controllable and rational (which is technology).

Read the rest of the interview over at http://www.neboweb.com/blog/everyday-life-interview-helge-tenno/.

If control is unattainable, what is the goal of our brand building efforts? The answer seems more related to adaptability and changeability than unanimity, let’s call it ability to multiply.

The lack of control is demonstrated to a grand scale by the traces people leave on social and recordable media. One brilliant example is Noah Briers brandtags.net, which quickly illustrates the illusory concept of a company representing a limited set of values. What is obvious, is that people have their own personal opinions of the brand (it is shaped by their daily exchange of ideas within their communities, but it is still personal).

Another example is brands’ fan pages on Facebook, full of peoples’ stories and descriptions of how they relate to it. Giving the impression that a brand is a PART of a person’s own story not a story in itself.

This should come to no surprise, and probably doesn’t. A brand is meaningless unless people can connect with it in the sense of relating it to their own identity and values. And they do this by transforming it so that it fits with a part of their world view. In other words, people make brands their own.

So, brands are absorbed by people, and to be successful at that they need to have the ability to mutate or transform in order to be meaningful. They need to have the ability to multiply. A concept inspired by Henry Jenkins who calls people multipliers.

A condensed and probably polarizing summary of “If it doesn’t spread it’s dead” by Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb Krauskopf and Joshua Green makes it a bit clearer:

- People share stuff in order to have something to talk about, we know that, but Jenkins also states that content is introduced into a social network only if it inhabits characteristics that will help define the identity of the participants sharing the content and/or their relationship with this community.

- People share stuff to articulate their persona and their role in the network.

- Now to achieve this a brand needs to be designed to serve its multipliers (customers). Jenkins states that a brand’s original message is one of mass culture, a commodity. In its current form it has no worth within a social network as it is “sterile”. In order for it to become shareable it needs to be transformed, so that it enters what Jenkins calls the gift culture, something of social worth.

- In order for content to transform, and multiply, it has to have a certain characteristic that allows for people to make it their own. It needs to be “open ended” and “producerly”. It needs to allow people to take the brand and fit it into their existing world view, and help them tell a small story about themselves.

This is something people already do with brands, to a large extent. And it’s very interesting to see how little effort it takes to create a lot of participation: Coca Cola.

The question is, if we build stuff to be producerly and open ended. If we design brands not for control, but for the ability to multiply. Will they become better, more popular, more embraced and more shared?