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.)

Storytelling is packaging, a vehicle designed around an idea in order to increase its effectiveness in communication.

According to Al Ries, advertising is storytelling:

“Without a story, no advertising, no matter how brilliant, is going to work.”

Is Al Ries still right, or does this mindset belong inside the limitations of the message based advertising landscape?

It raises two questions:

1. Is advertising to focused on stories? On the brand representing an idea cocooned in a narrative?

2. In a wide interpretation of the word “story” a lot of things could fit in, but does the limitations of the terminology limit us from exploring opportunities outside the mechanics and dynamics of “the story”? Which is vital in the every day life mindset.

In the case where there is no need for advertising to interrupt, engage or entertain. Is there a need for story? Does a utility serve the purpose of the story or the idea?

The message based media model is changing from THE way to advertise to A way to advertise, alternative opportunities are surfacing. Where the story produces some great qualities, these are there to convey a meaning inside a given format, as this format changes the qualities change as well.

As transmedia on the one hand is doing a great job in exploring stories in a new converged participatory culture, is there also emerging a new form of “story-less” advertising?

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

Kevin Slavin of Area/Code states in this brilliant video from 5D Conference (previously published on this blog) that TV is an event, something millions of people gather around at the same moment in time, creating an experience where interaction, collaboration and synchronous action can occur.

Putting media into this context, where we create cross-platform experiences around a massive, congregating event, might also help us find new business models, new value and new context. As the activity surrounding the participatory part of the experience might be suited for establishing and growing direct relationships between companies and participants.

Now this isn’t only a TV mindset, every form of mass media is an event. As Seth Godin puts it while adding the same train of thought to newspapers, in one of his latest posts, “Everyone else reads it”:

“we need to read what everyone else is reading in order to have a sense of being in sync. If it’s in there, it matters, because everyone else read it.”

In fact, media, in and of itself is in the event industry, something everybody talks about, shares and spreads. Something we have to be a part of as it is a part of our culture and frame our conversations.

Thinking of media this way, not only as a source of information or entertainment, not only a social family event or as couch surfing. But an arena where people with shared interest and enthusiasm converge around a shared idea, might be very powerful. The trick is to find where brands can help extend the experiences with value adding marketing, not interrupt them with irrelevant advertising.

Our discussions, especially around media, should concentrate on how this new stuff ads to the old stuff, not how it kills it. How experiences spread across platforms, not fit into one.

New media models ia about combination, mixing the role, or the best of traditional media with the abilities of new, not go looking for brand new solutions.

The Every Day Life / Post Digital culture is presenting us with new marketing concepts and opportunities. Changing our focus from creating customers through products, and better customers through line extensions. To focusing on direct relations, memberships and extended value.

Two things:

- Products are worthless until they are introduced to the situation where they create value. (link)

- It’s not only the content industries (music, film, media) that will be affected by the changes brought by digital communication. As both people’s behaviors, and their accessibility change, more and more business categories will find that the fundamentals for how they create customers, are disrupted.

In the words of Peter Drucker:

“The purpose of a business is to create a customer.”
“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself. ”
- Peter Drucker

This invites companies to think of themselves as value providers, not product providers, to understand that customers are created through members, not features. And that extending customer value comes from within the situation where we are already creating value, not artificial product line extensions introducing foreign situations to the customers.

A simple diagram to introduce some suggested changes:

As long as the standards for measuring value belongs the old Attention Web mindset, the ability to prove new value and need for new strategies will become increasingly difficult. Fortunately the solutions are right under our noses.

Explanation of Attention Web and Everyday Life mindset.

In this presentation, held at the INMA conference Wednesday, I asked if the numbers generated by web analytics software are generating the right kind of value? And to which degree the simplicity and accessibility of these numbers are moving our focus away from what’s really important, (creating “situational” value), to something that’s important for something else (understanding movement patterns).

It’s an idea I picked up from Adrian Ho a couple of months ago, which rings stronger and stronger as I see that the Everyday Life mindset demands us to understand that our solutions, even our brand foundations, might be built around a completely new set of values as both peoples behaviors, and their accessibility to companies change.

Slideshow below, or here.

How can we to effectively help companies and organizations enter a new digital mindset when the ways of measuring effect still relies on tools “invented” in the sixties. (Or so?) Where effect is measured AFTER an event has occurred when all authentic value has disappeared. We are left to rely blindly on people’s shoddy memory.

Two things:

1. People tend to remember events as they imagined them to be. According to Dan Gilbert our memory is a set of snapshots of an event, and remembering stuff consists of collecting all the relevant snapshots and filling in the blanks in between. We tend to fill these holes based on perception, not what actually happened. So asking someone about something would give you an answer more similar to how they perceived it to be beforehand rather then how they actually felt as the experience occurred.

2. We are already measuring stuff as it is happening. But this consists mainly of behavioral patterns, tracking people’s movement. The problem with this is that we only observe what people do, not discover why they do it.

So this is the challenge/opportunity: We need to get inside the situations and measure REAL value AS it is happening.

The Internet used to be simple, a digital reflection of the old media industry. The beauty of this beast was that media companies and media agencies really didn’t need to change that much. They kept their business models, they knew the formats, and they knew the product they sold. Everything was simple, undisruptive and perfect. The need for new measuring instruments – which measured different stuff in different ways wasn’t in demand.

Now, what I’m saying in the slideshow Changing the Currency is that we are entering a new digital landscape: The Everyday Life. This is a result of behavioral change from technology’s immersion into our daily life.

In this new mindset, value is not about attention, interest or in many cases sales. It’s about creating additional value, building relations and generating exchanges of ideas.

We are in a place where we need to start measuring completely different stuff from the stuff we are good or bad at measuring today. Because it’s not only media, the Internet or people that change, it is also the platform on which valuable companies and brands are built. And by that we also need new methods and tools to measure it.

My proposition is to learn from the car industry, Nike ID, Fiat Eco:drive, Nike Plus and the likes. Create an arena for measuring value. Where tools are designed to generate real time, live data, by the participants – to be shipped back to the company giving us the data we need in order to develop groundbreaking insights.

Measuring stuff in the Every Day Life mindset doesn’t happen outside an event, it needs to be integrated inside of it. We need to understand what value is and what’s important. And then have concepts built from the ground up around the goal of discovering new stuff, not add research on at the end as a way of finding out what we already knew.

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.