As technology immerses into our daily life and disappears, value based marketing becomes available through new behaviors, inside situations where it is meaningful and useful.

This turns marketing into the experience surrounding the product – and in some instances becomes the experience people connect to and build relationships with. The marketing becomes the product, and the product becomes the marketing.

This is a presentation held for a class of students in electronic business development at BI, in Oslo Norway.

Availability can not be underestimated, two reasons for this:

1. First, a minor mindset thing:
People want to choose their own arenas, not be forced into one because the company finds it sufficient to only make their stuff available in one place.

2. Then the bigger thing:
The missing link between something being a tool and something changing our behavior is its availability (link):

Clay Shirky’s famous quote:
“A revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new tools, it happens when society adopts new behaviors” – Clay Shirky, Us Now

Which, linked with availability, in a tools and services perspective could give this:

“The goal would be to make the service so easily available that it as a technology becomes invisible but contextually becomes valuable.” – Bridging the gap between technology and behavior

Pushing Shirky a bit, we could say that technology is tools, but services are behaviors. And that tools only become valuable services as they are made available within the context where the person naturally adopts them.

- That in order for people to adopt something within their everyday life, it has to be designed based on human and contextual abilities, not just to fit into technological or informational frameworks.

- Or, that publishing stuff only gives people new tools, but if we make sure the stuff becomes available to the point of becoming invisible it will change peoples behaviors in the situation surrounding the product – and that is the interesting shift when marketing stops demanding exclusive attention and starts becoming valuable (which means shareable).

Which, if I’m right, would also be very close to this; Purple Cow, and this, Baked In.

Now there are two types of availability:

1. Being where the niche is (Jonathan MacDonald). The old saying that everything is only one click away on the Internet is outdated. Today, hiding stuff away behind walls of technology or website cartography is as good as not publishing it at all. We have to make the stuff available so that different people in different contexts find their “natural” way to engage with it and become a part of it. (Tim Brown)

2. Design. At a seminar two years ago the brilliant people at TAT presented some insights into the fact that the visual presentation layers has to be tailored to the activity we want the participant to perform – not the economical preconditions of the technological framework. That design is one very important part of a service’s availability, and should not be underestimated.

(Also supported by Michal Tchao, presenting Nike+ at Picnic08: These things already existed, but we designed it in a whole new way, so that people were able to use it.)

This is what I’m trying to say: Just because the stuff is available on a companies website doesn’t mean people will find it or use it. It needs to become available on platforms and arenas that fit into peoples everyday life. Which means that we need to fragment our marketing much more (“light lots of small fires” – Mark Earls), and tailor it to fit into the participant-product context.

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.)

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?

When attention and engagement becomes less important in advertising and marketing, things are going to get a whole lot healthier.

1. This, the last from a series of posts I’ve published during the last week questioning some of the terminology we use as advertisers and marketers. (narrative, content, individuals).

2. It’s an idea, and hopefully, during the next couple of weeks, I will be able to elaborate and present examples that prove my point: That the terminology we use needs to change if we are going to build better, healthier marketing in a new brand landscape. Where we are allowed access to peoples personal lives, and where positioning a brand means something completely different than telling a story about it.

The problem with attention is that it becomes a reference to quantity, not quality, often leading to success metrics’ related to time or clicks. Which bears little relevance to positioning the brand or product in any way. Brains don’t make their minds up based on how long or how much they engage with an activity, they build their impressions on quality not quantity. read more…. (Although, quantity has always been kind of a life west for bad communication).

The opportunity we get from thinking outside of attention and engagement is that it opens the advertising to a much healthier degree of brand and product positioning. Because we can say that the goal of the advertising is to create value, in a way that puts no demand on stealing time away from people, keeping people interested long enough to tell a full story, or limiting our marketing to those who are interested enough in our advertising to actually spend a lot of time with it.

As I’ve noted before to marketers: “People don’t care about your brand all the time, they care about it sometimes.”. We (the advertising business) need to keep in mind that people don’t care about advertising, at least not advertising the way we see it. And that making stuff interesting enough to create attention isn’t a decisive element of positioning.

Thinking outside attention and engagement also opens up the strategic and creative process for the new brand landscape, the Everyday Life, saying that the goal of any advertising or marketing activity is to create something valuable – without limitations on what form or format this will take. Be it a story, an exchange of ideas, an object or a utility etc..

If we remove the inherent need for time or narrative from the process – where would our ideas go?

- Let me use social media as an example. Our focus on attention and engagement frightens marketers as they see SM as something very time consuming, but this very seldom needs to be the case. SM presents a whole range of abilities that companies and organizations would find valuable outside the metric of attention and engagement: Authenticity, relevance and trust being some of them.

My question is simple. Even though attention and engagement have become simple buzzwords for labeling advertising, are they creating a useful reference for success? Or are they distorting the picture?

In a media world exploding with information, how can we make less noise? Is it reducing the content? Making it more useful and relevant? Or do we need to change our whole perspective on content all together?

I find these perspectives inspiring:

First of it’s this film on Creative Commons (via @jameschutter):

“…you need to move away from thinking about content to thinking about communities. Communities that develop around content.”

Secondly Kevin Slavin of Area/Code states in this interview on Picinic:

“Maybe what augmentation looks like is reducing, knowing a little bit more about a lot less. And not adding things to the world, but taking things away”

Kevin Slavin of AREA CODE at PICNIC NYC Salon from PICNICCrossmediaweek on Vimeo.

The last perspective is from Kenya Hara, challenging the whole problem with content and information as something “media-ish”. What is information? Is it the quantity or the quality that is really overwhelming us?
(Thanks to Niko Herzeg for recommending the book Designing Design):

“Although today’s society is said to be in a state of information overload, in fact it may not be an excess. It’s just an overflow of odd and fragmented information in the media. The amount of information in each fragment is in fact quite small. In this slew of half-baked information, isn’t the brain oppressed? The stress on the brain isn’t because of quantity, but because of limited quality.”

Hara talks about information through sense-driven design. Using the example of walking barefoot, where our soles explode with information sensed from the ground we walk on, as opposed to the numbness we feel today wearing shoes and socks. There has been a removal of information suggests Hara, not an increase. The problem rather lies in the quality.

All three perspectives touch on a subject close to hart:
First that advertising and marketing is to focused on tangible content. And secondly that content needs to be the result of understanding context and value, not a goal in itself.