A lot of intense activity the last couple of weeks, with presentations and alterations has produced a new updated edition of the presentation The New Brand Landscape.

A lot of old stuff for old readers, but hopefully I’ve managed to add some fresh stuff. For new readers who might not have seen the first edition this hopefully will present some valuable and inspiring thoughts.

The New Brand Landscape 2 tries to explain some of the most important changes in digital media, it’s effects and the new opportunities for marketers.

During the last thirteen years of online publishing there has been a tremendous development in online content. Readers of digital newspapers and magazines have gone from text and hyperlinks, to videos and multimedia shows, from published content to participatory content. But for some reason publishers haven’t granted the advertisers the same investment in innovation as the readers have been given. Marketers having their opportunities and products almost frozen during the last decade.

Is there no competitive landscape amongst publishers when it comes to winning advertisers, no need to invest in innovative solutions? Or is it a lack of interest and ambition from advertisers, media buyers and companies? Or all of the above?

Hopefully this is all set to change. With the advent of new digital business models, outside the realm of existing online media. This will get publishers on their feet and start feeling the heat. The competition for advertisers investments won’t be between identical media models anymore, but between the publishers and the companies themselves.

Here are three and a half reasons why we will see immediate change:

1. Personalization, both in regards to the personalization of tools and services available to the participant, but also in the regard to the company. Why drown your communication in a sea of similar banner sameness when you could have your very own arena, with your very own idea and environment – all to your, and your participants self.

2. Digital services, enforcing and differentiating existing products and services. Why invest in just telling people about how great you stuff is, when you can prove it.

3. Richer solutions, which establish a connection and a loyal friendship between the company and the customer. Conversing with each other and sharing experiences over a longer period of time.

Looking at consumers and online participants, and comparing their new worlds to the products online publishers are offering advertisers, it is difficult not to notice the growing gap, and a bubble that is about to burst.

We are as marketers and digital strategists to focused on the tools and arenas we want to be “on” rater than our job; to connect consumers and participants to the brand.

Marketing and brand building is not about being “on” anything. It’s about uniquely communicating our ideas to the customer in a situation where your brand is given the opportunity to mean something with the result of establishing a relationship with the participant.

We need to approach digital marketing value first. Not selecting platforms first, and then try to uncover value through a clever choice of strategy.

In order for us to understand the New Brand Landscape we HAVE TO deconstruct our linear models for distributing content, take one step back, and start understanding how and WHERE people connect to our brand, and then start putting the pieces together in the right order – if there is any order at all?

I attended a brilliant talk Thursday by Jess Greenwood, Deputy Editor at Contagious Magazine. The talk ran through a range of ideas and exemplified them with campaigns, many represented in Most Contagious 2008, and all exploring the new digital landscape. But after seeing all this, we are stuck with wondering how and why do I get there? How do I come up with these great ideas, and not limit myself to the regular receipt:

Old model: Campaign site + banners + Facebook + mobile + large amounts of expensive media = Great Success

as compared to the

New model: value + situation + incentive + existing landscape = arena
(although it’s not linear like this)

Understanding the New Mindset:

1. Brand building is about communicating a unique value with the goal of connecting to people, resulting in extended loyalty and preference.

Communicating value is THE purpose of a value driven company, not banners, display ads, Facebook or blogging. The tools are not the goal, the purpose is. And the purpose is: Value, communication, loyalty and preference.

2. People only care about brands in situations where they are relevant. If I’m baking a cake, I don’t care about Nike, but if I’m exercising, Nike is everything.

This gives that brands need to focus on identifying the situation in which they mean something – the situations are the only events where customers would give a damn, and they are the arenas where the competition between brands occur.

3. Identify your value in the situation where you are important, it’s still not about your product, it’s about identity. Whirpool figured out that no one would hang around talking about dishwashers for weeks on end, and created The American Family Podcast, where Whirpool talks about the Family – for the 264 episodes. Beat that!

4. Figure out how to become accessible. How do participants and customers get a hold of you when they care.

This is where many brands fail, choosing only to be accessible online, via the laptop’s browser, when the customer is at home, after putting his children to sleep. Brands need to shed the notion of having an appearance, and start thinking about accessibility.

5. Landscape. What your competitors are doing are just as important to you as your own activities.

First of all “you can’t out-amazon amazon”; unimaginatively trying to challenge a market leader at their own game has failed many. Secondly, as Dove has demonstrated when developing their Real Beauty campaign, a result of admitting that their old adverts where so similar to their competition that changing the product shot inside an ad with a competitors product, made the ad seem for them, rather than Dove. And thirdly, if everyone else is doing it already, it’s probably easier to win by creating a new idea. In the food world everyone wants to become an online distributor of receipts, but there seems to be little understanding that many food brands are not about food, (like Whirpool being about the family, not cleanliness or appliances)?

So the golden rule of the new marketing landscape would be, given that the uniqueness of communicating your values will be as important as the values themselves: Build your own game.

6. Small successes, it’s all about moving your competitor through the snakes and ladders game board, every step is a success. Make sure you build and measure for all the small steps, with your eye on the final price.

Understanding collaboration through the lens of Itay Talgam and a collection of the worlds foremost conductors.

The best event I attended last year was the Picnic Conference 08′ in Amsterdam. Filled with interesting people and invaluable insights. Now they finally put the presentations from the main hall up on Vimeo, and I recommend most of them :o) – Thanks to Putting People First for “finding them”.

I’ve picked out Itay Talgam’s presentation on Conducting Creativity as my favorite, not necessarily because it contains a lot of relevant technical stuff or hands out project experiences. It doesn’t, Itay’s focuses on putting great conductors into context under the goal of teaching his listeners about creative collaboration.

This ads to the content on this blog, because.. carrying on the theme from some of the previous posts; in order to see solutions we need to understand humans, and the interaction between them.

This would have to go without saying when we’re trying to figure out the drivers and incentives for collaboration, community and participation. And is essential in order to understand what this would mean to your company and the amount of control one protects or releases to the public.

The talk creates a beautiful and valuable perspective, touching on a range of different features related to collaboration and creativity. And… it was the only presentation I can remember that got an almost never ending standing ovation!

Here is a selection of three quotes by Itam, or him quoting others, all found in the presentation:

“It’s not only about personal style, this is a part of it, and I think an interesting part. but it’s about creating a certain set of culture that enables certain modes of collaboration between people”

“Without order nothing can exist, without chaos nothing can grow”

“The worst damage I can do to my organization is to give them a very clear indication. Why? Because that creates a one on one relations between me and the players. Which makes the ignore the ensemble and work directly with me”

Have a look at Picinic’s Vimeopage for more videos from Picnic 08′.

Itay Talgam at PICNIC08: Conducting Creativity from PICNICCrossmediaweek on Vimeo.

According to the panelists Matt Jones of Dopplr and Jonathan MacDonald of Ogilvy at PSFK’s Good Idea Salon London, mobile is all about a patchwork of situated software solving people’s personal and local desires.

Matt Jones spread the concept of Mobile being all about Place, and place is where culture meets location. The future mobile landscape will be a range of small ideas, small applications all working together to create a global mesh - as in contrast to many of today’s developments, where the focus is on solving massive global solutions.

Jonathan MacDonald added that we need to de-silo mobile and start talking of what it does, not what it is. We need to think about what people do in their lives, it’s about every single one of us.

I couldn’t agree more, and found Matt’s additions to the panel remarkably refreshing, putting a lot of stuff into context. Trying to build it into a more commercial articulation I would say that:

1. Mobile is about people, and they stuff they do, where, and how they do it. It’s not about technology, handsets or applications. As I have personally experienced, it is through being inspired by the customers and participants that the really groundbreaking revelations happen. Not through workshopping with clients or reading quantitative analysis.

2. People care about what’s closest to them, this also goes for the situations products and companies want to be a part of. Massive solutions, solving problems on a global scale, will not be as relevant or as interesting as tailored and local stuff.

The patchwork part is also very interesting but probably not from a conscious consumer point of view. The Patchwork implies that it is the combination of intelligence in and sensing by these local applications that the “grand machinery” will be produced. Not by a dumber, global, giant solution.

As a result one can say that Mobile will be about combining people and their ideas (culture) with their location. This doesn’t mean serving me coupons when walking past a Starbucks or sending me an SMS telling me to watch a TV program in the evening because some products will be featured. It’s about understanding my life, the activities I perform, which ones are relevant for your company. And discovering how you can ad value to this based on presence (being accessible when the situation occurs, not on the laptop four hours later), people (person + herd = culture) and place (location + time).

I’ve included this interview with Jonathan MacDonald, by Intruders.TV, for your viewing pleasure. :o)

As participants worlds fragment across a range of platforms, arenas, channels and screens, companies are met with an opportunity to build behind bigger ideas.

This means both the opportunity to move the marketing from messaging, to content to context. But also to explore the Brand Situation. Where the brand fits into the lives of their participants, and facilitates the situation relevant to the product, in order to create value and become invaluable.

This slideshow is a follow-up to my last one, Three Major Changes In Digital Marketing, and it tries to put these three changes into a bigger, relevant context.

I’ve added some voice-over to this one as well, even though it’s not earth shatteringly brilliant :o) It hopefully ads more value to the experience.

Find it on slideshare.net/helgetenno, or below.

To anyone planning to attend Scandinavian Futures this tuesday. Hope to see you there as I am doing a 30 minute presentation on The New Brand Landscape.

This will be an updated version to anyone listening at the INMA Autumn Conference. I will be taking out almost all of the consumer insight content and adding a bit of the new stuff I’ve posted about on this blog in 09′. In other words, it will be even more about the new landscape, and less about the customers (as other speakers will cover that to an extent in their presentations).

Haven’t bought a ticket yet? Find one here. Mark will be putting out his valuable thoughts as well.

If placement alone where the ONE criteria for ad success this would be the solution. As it is not, this would only ad to all the other nonprofessional crap already to be found on the advertising airwaves.

Giving indifferent marketers without the skills or humility concerning the production of ads the tools to flood the sites and channels consumers and participants use each day is not a good sollution for the advertisers, the media or the consumer.
Link to video on YouTube.

Just as Michael Rosenblum finishes of his 90 seconds on the futures of news being participants producing and filtering video (via Punk Planning).. Moveon.org launches a video based persuasion instead of textbased. (Via Captology Notebook)

Video “just” found another vector, compared to HBO’s superseries available on iTunes or crap available on youTube.

What do I mean by vector:
“It always seems obvious to think in a straight trajectory, but it often is an unanticipated converging vector that changes the route of the current.”

It’s time to stop thinking that todays solutions are little brothers of what we will see in the future, it’s just one of the leaves on a much richer tree.

Aftenposten writes about knocka.tv and current.tv in a form that makes them stand out as the next generation video content websites. But what is so special about them?

The format of these to online video channels is that they do not allow the participant to choose their own content, but merely lets them watch a continuous stream of videos handpicked by experts.

This sounds a lot like TV, and that’s because it has got a lot of the same “features” as TV like;
1. LIVE (watch it now or never).
2. You don’t choose, we choose for you.
3. NO participant handling of content, we you just sit back, relax and make “lightning” comments, that appear Live and then dissapear.

Now, is this better than YouTube? this “Next Generation online video content”? I don’t think so.

To me it seems as someone has found that the traditional media/tv-model can fit right into the internet, just remove on of it’s most priced possessions; the democracy of the participants and the ability to watch it “when you want” – both which has been two of the most revolutionary concepts of online content.

But I’m sure a lot of people will watch it, but only the laggards, the ones who never got the new model but just want to sit back and relax to be entertained, not participate.

It’s so wrong to think about the internett as a passive medium, it’s active and involving. If you want success you can’t lazy people down. Then they can just as well watch TV. The important thing on the net is to activate them, entertain them and participate with them.

You see, that in contrary to what the article states.. YouTube is structured content, it’s a community for the participants that spend their lives there. There are participants wading through thousands of movies finding only the best content for you, and there are channels letting you subscribe to content you already appreciate. YouTube has it all. Yotube is not a videochannel, it’s a video community – and that is the reason for it’s success…

To me Current and Knocka seems like a medium sized idea. A familiar concept to the oldskool digital immigrants out there who never understood the new democratized models of the internet and have struggled for a couple of years in order to push the digital channel back into something similar to the older format.

PS. although it will be interesting to see if the participants embrace the possibility to participate in and create their own spheres, or if they just want to dumb down and let professionals do it for them….