If you want to know what the future might look like, start tuning your antennas to the ideas of Kevin Slavin of Area/Code. In this talk he explores some ideas on “the new livingroom”, where TV and online participation converge into a new experience, where viewers and participants reconnect.

In the talk, which Kevin is holding at the 5D Immersive Design Conference, he is as disruptive as in his last presentation at PSFK: “The mobile eco-system”.

Not to spoil it, but to give you a heads up, Kevin talks about games and the convergence of TV and Participation through simultaneous online activities. (The new Livingroom):

“Games with computers in them” (not the other way around)
“Televisions amazing, because it’s an event”
“Viewers and users are the same people, and the question is how to reconnect them again”

“We forgot what was so great about television, that it was something we all did at the same time, and it was kind of amazing. There was something that happened, something we all experienced that we could all talk about the next day. We had this kind of common conversation that was provided by it. And this goes away when you start time shifting, but it is actually really magic. And if you start thinking of television as something that we are all huddled around, for half an hour at a time, like all of us. It’s actually really magic. It’s something that only television could do.” (a tad rewritten :o)

Via offworld.

5D Conference : New Television Pt 4 – Kevin Slavin from Dave Blass on Vimeo.

The first ten years of digital was (to a large extent) the same siloed ideas that we’d already been exploiting for decades on other content and messaging transportation infrastructures (media). It was a carbon copy.

It is only in the last 2-4 years something interesting and revolutionary has surfaced through the emergence of social media (the collective exchange of ideas) and digital utilities.

This creates a new currency for marketing online, not replacing traditional advertising / messaging but competing for the same budget and offering a completely different set of returns.

Since posting this presentation two days ago, I’ve added some ideas to it, relating to Time and Direct Relationships.

Apologies for re-posting, but this is the conclusion to my series on the new currency online, with special focus on opportunities for media companies.

- What is value in Everyday Life marketing
- A New Business Model, for content that Grows, Connects and Augments
- The Direct relationship Business

Find the Slideshow below, or here.
(If you have already seen the first version the second one might not cache, there should be a yellow ribbon in the upper left corner if you are watching the updated version).

How will brands change their marketing towards customers as our connected lives move from the universal and roomy interfaced libraries of the browsered internet and on to utilities and services on mobile handsets and things?

As Microsoft’s Europe Logs On report states, this scenario might demand our attention sooner than we thought:

“Internet use on PCs will drop from 95% today to only 50% over the next 5 years as other web enabled devices such as IPTV, games consoles and mobile phones become more popular”.

As we all know by now, mobile is not a smaller version of the PC/browser Internet, it’s a completely different platform with it’s own abilities and context for use. As customers increasingly will be more available on these smaller devices and less accessible through the PC’s browser we need to keep up with the development if we want to stay in touch.

But when the arenas where we meet our customers change, we also have to change the way we talk and interact on these devices – to best fit with its abilities. Let’s not make the same mistakes as generations before us, and unimaginatively copy “standards” from existing mediums.

My point in this is that up till now companies’ marketing activities in the digital sphere has been the “universal” approach. Where we view the website as a library filled with information rather than a utility to help people do stuff. This especially forces the design to solve the wrong problem (findability not utility), and puts the focus on availability not activity.

To me the new smaller interfaces and the contexts where they will be used challenges us to think more in micro activities. Identify core services, core activities and core consumers. Finding smaller unique solutions for different situations and different contexts. And moving much of our digital initiatives into micro actions and micro marketing compared to how we do stuff today.

In one or two short sentences, are you able to describe the essence of what you do, or your goal?

Inspired by the people at Undercurrent I tried to articulate my own “soundbite”.

The insight being that many of the brands and organizations we work with are familiar with the concept of their products and services creating value. But have a preconceived idea that their marketing or participation is perceived as unwanted and intrusive by customers.

Adding this to the concepts of context, arenas and utilities we get this:

“We help companies and organizations discover WHY they are valuable in peoples lives, and HOW they can create deliberate value on the arenas and inside the interfaces where they connect with them.”

Recording what people DO is much more valuable than asking them what they DID after it happened. Branded Utilities, services, mobile, are all recording devices and should be treated as such.

Clotaire Rapaille writes in his book, The Culture Code:

“The only effective way to understand what people truly mean is to ignore what they say.”

This is not because people willingly set out to deceive you, but because:

- The mind is to complex to understand (conscious/subconscious).
- We are to eager explain our actions (we always think there is a reason).
- And in Rapaille’s case, people simply reflect what they think other people want to hear, not what they personally mean.

So digital “recording devices” would work very well i this context, because they are not dependent on what people think they mean, but what is actually being done.

The first example I personally heard was by a car retailer in Huston, finding that the ratio of people choosing a red car when customizing cars online was nearly identical to the ratio purchasing red cars in store. This degree of accuracy was not to be replicated by any other form of research.

It has also been said that sites like Nike ID are not first and foremost online shopping malls for shoes, but consumer trend research by Nike.

In modern times many of the larger branded utilities do the same, Fiat eco:drive might be one of my favorites, tracking a drivers every decision and action.

The point of all of this being that setting out to create branded utilities is just as much about giving the brand a recording device inside the situation where the important stuff is happening. A device recording high quality, great insight which is almost impossible to get any where else, and insight which we haven’t been able to reach previously.

Our new digital abilities has opened up a whole new kind of marketing. I’ve previously called this both content marketing, situation marketing and even activity based advertising. But have after a rummage through my mac dictionary ended up with the slightly inexplanatory term Context marketing.

Context marketing is two directions of marketing: Collaboration and Utilities, and the convergence of them – which is where all the really juicy stuff happens :o)

I want to try to explain this by adding this slideshow, I find it incredibly difficult to not go into this mumbo jumbo kind of merry go round, so I kept it as short and precise as I could.

To sum it up in one sentence:

“it’s about earning ownership of the experience where your products are used and brands are shaped.”

Hopefully it it presents some valuable ideas, and inspire some new ones. Please let me know.

Digital is by some perceived as “marketing on sale”, maybe due to it’s lack of tangibility, “newness” or failing ability to show it’s potential as the common way of perceiving new stuff is through the lens of old stuff.

But online marketing seems to finally be outgrowing the display/message based advertising frame- and mindset. Starting to see an increased focus on deliberate, value adding services, accessibility and social interaction. In this context digital will and should become the most important interface between brands and participants and ergo the willingness to increase investment should hopefully be inevitable.

Digital marketing and advertising, and by that I mean EVERYTHING digital, should be your most expensive endeavor, and the reason is it’s abilities.

This is a short “Only in Digital” abilities list:

In the traditional brand and communication mindset brands have been thought that they are unwanted and intrusive, but this is not true. Brands and products create immense value in peoples lives, with digital they have been given the opportunity to add to this value through meaningful and deliberate action.

This is an invitation to start believing in your brand communications again…

The need for companies and marketers to “be first” isn’t diminishing with new technology, quite the opposite, it is becoming even more crucial.

The reasons are simple:

1. How you communicate is becoming as important as what you communicate. The choice of platforms, arenas, channels and technologies are growing so fast and giving each marketer so many opportunities, where one chooses to reach out and connect with participants will become as important as the uniqueness of the message itself.

2. Marketing and advertising are moving from display advertising in neutral media channels to creating deliberate value in situations and contexts where the brand is relevant. Being accessible WHEN products are used or WHERE our company and it’s values are relevant will be of vital importance to brands – owning the experience is crucial.

You see, it’s not about beating each other to death with competing punch line messages in display ad formats, it’s about earning ownership of the experience where your products are used and brands are shaped. Losing on these arenas has far greater consequences than loosing out in a standard format banner ad space.

In the traditional advertising mindset, brands are unwanted interrupters of ongoing conversations. Because of this tradition brands can still be very humble and cautious when it comes to creating deliberate value and meaning. Believing that they are unwanted, not valuable, in the minds of citizens. This attitude belongs to the past.

Brands are meaningful, they help people identify themselves and say something about who they area by letting them participate. But this commands a new and different mindset and different strategies for communication and participation. Where the goal is to help people connect, share and ignite.

In this new mindset the dogma is:
“People don’t just want read or watch stuff, they want to be a part of it”.

Let’s brake it down into three parts:

Content
Brands should find, create and make accessible content worth engaging with. This is the core structure of the strategy, this is the stuff people want to belong to.

Conversation
Content is not enough, on it’s own it just sits there, it needs to create conversation. Many online forums have great content, but haven’t built good enough mechanics or lubricated any social dynamics for stimulating conversations. Helping people converse is just as important as giving them something of value.

Contagion
We need to create conversations, not interrupt them. This is much easier than brands imagine as most online conversations are about content (MSN Research), and brands represent valuable content. But content is not only for sharing; just making something “viral” isn’t enough. It needs to ignite conversation, not just a solitude laughter from behind each individual laptop. So helping people share your content is important, but make sure this content gets people talking, not only sharing.

These are our initial thoughts on a part of this new mindset, something we call “Context”:

Context is all about creating a combiant :o) strategy of content/ideas and shareability. First, trying to identify valuable stuff people want to connect to. Then finding the stuff inside these ideas that are important and interesting enough to become social objects, and finally how we can, through a set of collaborative platforms, ignite conversations to help people connect.

If digital is not a silo, but a set of cooperative platforms, then it is all about using a collection of activities to send and ignite conversations between and on other platforms. Not forcing everything onto ONE campaign site but creating a range of activities each based on different platforms best abilities.

I’m trying to resurface the term “digital is not a silo” as even though it simple to say out loud, it carries a very complex concept on it’s back. I’ll give it yet another shot to deconstruct and explain it – love to hear your thoughts.

The greatest challenge to any advertising channel is getting filled up, clogged up and bogged down by more and more intrusive and obnoxious advertising. This is the challenge of display/interruption/messaging advertising – it fills up and becomes more difficult and more expensive to use with deteriorating success.

So, even though the format still runs like clockwork for advertisers, the future of advertising is not MORE display advertising, it is utilizing the mechanics and dynamics of the online conversation in order to create buzz, attention and interest on arenas where we are not interrupting conversations, but contagiously igniting them.

As the air around our citizens thickens with unwanted messages and interruptions, the goal should not be to ad to the unwantedness, but to create deliberate and appreciated value.

Because people won’t stop communicating, but will get better and better at filtering, so it’s the valuable stuff that will spread between people, igniting conversations between participants who trust each other and the content the other party is recommending.

In this context the silo-mindset becomes mindless, because it limits the communication to the platform chosen, while the goal is to ignite conversations through and across platforms and arenas. To use the display advert to ignite a mobile phone activity to ignite an online forum discussion to ignite a mobile application treasure hunt in the city environment to ignite a forum quest…

It’s only content producers and providers who care about platforms, people don’t. They care about concepts, ideas and conversations, about stuff that is meaningful. If it’s across anything it doesn’t matter – as long as it’s accessible WHEN and HOW they want it, with value that is obvious, uncomplicated and attainable.

“Digital is not a silo” means: creating contagious conversations between platforms.

- Which ads to the argument that it is not about technology, it’s between people.