Mobile is at the forefront of representing a completely new way of thinking about marketing.

But in order to understand this we need to look beyond the SMS and the text voting, and start exploring the real potential of the platform.

Since the Mobile Abilities Map pdf, published two weeks ago, has received a great deal of interest. I thought it would be a good resource to readers if I collected and published my inspiration and ideas to each topic. Hopefully getting some inspirational juice flowing.

- I’ve added links to each resource on slides where this was possible.

I hope people appreciate the presentation, and continue sharing great links on their own blogs (and link back here) or in the comments section on this blog.

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..

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?

This last year has seen logarithmic changes in marketing, fueled by different concepts like Utilities, AR, The Collective Exchange of Ideas, Transmedia, Digital becoming ubiquitous, Mobility and more.

I have tried to be a part of some of these discussions online, and have as a result of other peoples shared and collective wisdom published a range of posts, presentations and tweets on the subject.

What I wanted to do before leaving on a short summer vacation was recombine all the best ideas, into ONE Post Digital Marketing 2009 presentation. Summarizing all the major thoughts finding its way to my “ideas”-folder this last year.

View presentation below or here.

Hopefully it will both be interesting and inspiring to some, and the format introduce what Erin McKean defines as Serendipity:

“Finding something you weren’t looking for because finding what you are looking for is so damn difficult.”
- link

Please enjoy, and have a nice summer (winter).

Best Regards
Helge

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).

Jeff Jarvis in this video, from the Nokia Ideas Project, states that since the Internet is a connection machine, anything creating artificial middle men, preventing companies from connecting directly with their participants, will become problematic.

All that is true for the old Attention Web, but the whole problem seems to be turned into an opportunity when we change to the Everyday Life mindset: In which digital media companies become partners with their clients in order to supply a direct relationship with the readers and participants.

As Geoff Northcott of *supercollider pointed out very clearly in his post “visualizing the decline of the destination web, the rise of the social web”, the destination web is on the decline. And if Jaap Favier of Forrester is correct, then the Media Companies that will survive are the ones that create and facilitate arenas for brands to connect with their customers on.

This would give, that in the new perspective of digital media, what Jarvis points out is not a problem, it’s an opportunity. In the Every Day Life mindset, digital media is in the “Creating Direct Relations” business, not in the “messaging” or “middle men” business.

There is a big difference between how the existing media business models work in the old landscape compared to how they will work in the new.

Blindly copying concept from platforms where content actually disappears removes us from the ability to create value in an updated reality where content is stored in the “long here”. Where it isn’t static, but grows, connects and augments.

If media is to take advantage of the opportunities in the Everyday Life marketing landscape we need to shred the idea of short term, Attention Web concepts like clicks, views or time.

Explanation of terms here..

As some of my readers know, I’ve tried the last week to digg up some hopefully interesting or inspiring thoughts on the challenges of the media industry. I believe in the industry, but I also believe it needs to break out of the limitations of their traditional mindset if they are to discover new and innovative opportunities. There is a lot of artificially constructed walls limiting their creativity when it comes to developing new ideas.

Understanding how the concept of time has changed, unlocks a few barriers:

1. There is no time. As I stated in my introduction. Content doesn’t disappear, it gets more valuable. We need to connect companies with this content, help it grown, and build mutual and extended value.

2. Time introduces an artificial constraint into the company / participant relationship that limits the participants opportunity to engage and connect with the companies brand values.

Now it’s artificial in the sense that it is not designed by the value proposition offered by the brand to the customer (summer, Easter or Christmas related products could have done that), but it’s limited by money. To be more correct, it’s limited by the cost of running messages in media.

Now in the Everyday Life marketing landscape the goal is to connect and share values with the participant. Constraints on time creates a problem, best articulated by Amanda Mooney back in January:

“If you’ve only budgeted 2 months to be available to our community, we’re only going to give you 2 seconds of our time … at best.” – Amanda Mooney

As I see it, if Media Companies are to have a role – or get value out of the Everyday Life Marketing potential they need to put aside this limitation, they need to develop products for companies and participants without the constraints of time attached. Not putting clicks or views or days as a business model – but shared value.

As people are discussing whether or not they had the creativity to ask Wolfram Alpha a smart enough question, if Bing is a real threat to Google or if Google Wave could be the new fusion of everything social and information. I’d like to think that even though all of these ideas are smart, some even beautiful in the most digital sense of the word – they are not the future of information or collaboration online, they are merely iterations of the dreadfully slow and unnecessary process that is part of what could be called Conscious Computing.

Conscious Computing is where we ignore the fact that as digital and real life is fusing, we need to make sure customers’ forced interactions with us is on their terms and natural to their non-digital every day life. After all – digital, much like the violin, is not a natural extension of our every day life – it’s a complicated and slowly learned instrument.

But videos like this one, a bit of topic, but showing great potential, might seem to indicate that a lot of this is changing.

(via offworld)

And in this instance, as engineers figure out how to make computing more gestural, marketers have to figure out how to make information less “information technology”, and more human.

The answer, unfortunately, is not a clear cut scenario, as illustrated by Godin and Brown:

Seth Godin once wrote:

“If the computer is so smart, why do I have to do all the work?”

Contrasted by the first minute of this interview with Tim Brown, from the Nokia Ideas Project Website:

Where Brown states that making a service that the participant is not forced to “do”, one that disappears into the background, is useless. The whole goal of a service should be to help the participant actively enjoy it.

So, as we are becoming more and more conscious of the forced interactions we are having with computers – at the same time as invisibility threatens the value exchange between companies and participants, an interesting challenge to marketers is this: When do I need to invite the customer to participate, and when do I need to take care of stuff for them?

Technological and media related innovation is not moving us forward, it’s not really moving us at all, if anything we are expanding. Innovation is extending our opportunities and perspectives, not finding new stuff in order to kill of the old stuff!

- Things don’t die, they reformat.

I believe this means that the opportunities are getting more and richer. Which again gives us a greater chance of finding what’s right for us, not having to force ourselves into available formats because there are no other alternatives.

The problem is that we are too used to having a limited set of opportunities. And since we at the same time are using the wrong analogies to describe media related innovation (“moving forward”). We are creating an atmosphere where we think old stuff needs to die in order to make room for the new stuff.

It couldn’t be more wrong!

We seem to think that the situations is constant, that we need to fill it with certain stuff – stuff that needs to innovate. Not the other way around, that the stuff can stay (almost) constant, but the situation is the one that needs to innovate and change…

Like TV advertising, or the website (Mike has a related discussion here). In the same breath of air we discuss if we do or don’t need them. If they are “excepted standards” or old formats, if they are obsolete? In my opinion it’s not about the objects, it’s about the eco-system.

What we should be working on is the richness, the palette, the opportunities, the reformatting. The chance to choose a tool that fits the person or the company. What we should be embracing is the bouquet, not the flower.