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.

If people don’t treat digital and real life as two different things, why do agencies, marketers and companies?

(Read part one of this stream here…)

In my opinion the whole idea and discussion around “digital” is skewed. We discuss it as if the difference is related to distribution (especially outside the blogosphere), based on the choice of an analogue or a digital platform. And when trying to answer the question “what is digital?” we seem to muddle the picture by including traditional marketing techniques that have been translated into “digital”.

Digital storytelling is not a unique ability, it’s merely extending ONE of the existing abilities of advertising into new opportunities provided by the features of a new platform.

The new marketing opportunities isn’t related to technology (paper is as much a technology as a browser, and TV most certainly is) or distribution. But should be the product of what the company aims to do with their time together with the customer. Are their goals best met by telling a story, igniting conversations or providing deliberate value? (Or a combination of these) Do you want awareness or preference? Do you want to affect anticipation or involve them in an experience and connect with them?

The biggest problem with “digital marketing” seems to be the term itself: “digital marketing”. What we need to do is stop talking about the features and start talking about the abilities: messages, connect or creating deliberate value.

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.

One of the first slideshows I published on Slideshare, about two years ago, just reached 50000 views. It’s, as the subtitles explains, about websites, design and UX-strategy:

“Employing a winning website strategy through the tools of design, storytelling and emotion”.

As someone else explained it “A collection of quotes and anecdotes”. :o)

Slideshow below, or find it on slideshare.net/helgetenno.

In Kevin Slavin’s presentation “This Platform Called Everyday Life” he puts an excellent perspective on the mobile media plan. Saying that the most interesting thing with mobile is not the ONE object, it’s not communication between people, it’s stuff. And how people connect to stuff.

“Here’s your fucking mobile media plan, it’s a sneaker and a ball and a plant and a truck and a shark” – Kevin Slavin

via PSFK

His point being that increasingly our everyday objects will have a form of “intelligence” being able to communicate with us in some way enforcing it’s utility. What we as marketers need to understand, is that a mobile strategy is not about being accessible through an application on the iphone, it’s about helping consumers connect to stuff in the real world. “Mobile as a term is just a reference to an eco-system that phones are a part of..”

This is very much in line with Rafi Haladjian’s message in his talk at Picnic in September:

“Kevin Kelly said we have 8000 objects in our home, we have only five of them connected. So the remaining job is to connect the other 7995 objects.”

Kevin Slavin just put some more perspective on this as he states:

“You think it’s people to people, but when it gets really interesting is when it’s people to stuff.”

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.

Digital marketing is not advertising, because where advertising to a large extent focuses on creating situations, digital marketing is about finding them.

In the words of Henry Jenkins (via theengagedconsumer.power.com):

“as Jenkins gives his advice on “courting” community vs. “creating” community. Jenkins says that this starts by studying and connecting to existing communities vs. necessarily always building from scratch”

And connecting this idea to the utilities/services mindset; where companies need to explore existing situations and activities in order to discover where and how they can create deliberate value.

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.