A presentation on the future opportunities in media, turning threats into insights into opportunities.

The presentation future media – no more middle men, is an accumulation of a range of relevant thoughts from this blog, put into system.

It’s built as a master slide set (to pick and sort from), but I tried to ad some structure to it by identifying six major “forces” affecting media, and then a short final chapter summarizing a suggested future mindset.

I’ve also chosen to ad a lot of the explanatory text – not just the headlines – into the slides this time, hopefully this will create more context for the people reading the thing online.

Find individual slides available for download under a CC license on my flickr.com account everything new is dangerous.

Find the presentation below, or on my slideshare account slideshare.net/helgetenno.

With digital activities it is becoming increasingly easier to measure stuff, but this comes with a great caveat. The simplicity of measuring the simple stuff is removing us from exploring the difficult stuff and by that discovering what’s really important.

To me this can be exemplified by two facts:

1. The focus is on measuring the movement patterns instead of our ability to influence these patterns.

2. People don’t know what they want, stop asking them and start understanding them. (As we have experienced in a survey where respondents valued usability more than usefulness when asked what’s important with a web service.)

But we already know that we are filling peoples minds with our prefabricated arguments pro or con a service or applications abilities that they themselves had never spent an inch of attention on thinking about. But this is only one side of the problem…

The other part of the problem is that as we are getting more and more used to the mechanics of measuring the simple stuff it is getting more and more difficult to explore new ideas. We are becoming idiots instead of wizards and fail in demonstrating new values from new concepts that increase brand or marketing value through different mechanics and dynamics.

Over at Zeus Jones’ blog Adrian Ho writes up some great thoughts on measurement:

I now realize that’s the wrong question. I think that we can’t recognize what’s important until we start to measure it, and equally, we only see importance in the things that get measured. – Adrian Ho

Read Adrian’s blog post at over at From the Head of Zeus Jones.

This idea I feel is in relation to, and builds nicely on top of John Steel, who last summer said:

“I also think we should be angered by the accountability mindset that means we’re making more and more decisions based on what can be measured rather than what’s really important.”

In my mind we are starting to build stuff based on what’s cheap, fast and what we are already used to measuring, not what’s really important. As we are moving from messaging to services, from unwantedness to creating deliberate value, measuring the wrong stuff will cripple our ability to demonstrate the value of our new activities and ideas – and we will stay stuck in an old world.

In the traditional advertising mindset, brands are unwanted interrupters of ongoing conversations. Because of this tradition brands can still be very humble and cautious when it comes to creating deliberate value and meaning. Believing that they are unwanted, not valuable, in the minds of citizens. This attitude belongs to the past.

Brands are meaningful, they help people identify themselves and say something about who they area by letting them participate. But this commands a new and different mindset and different strategies for communication and participation. Where the goal is to help people connect, share and ignite.

In this new mindset the dogma is:
“People don’t just want read or watch stuff, they want to be a part of it”.

Let’s brake it down into three parts:

Content
Brands should find, create and make accessible content worth engaging with. This is the core structure of the strategy, this is the stuff people want to belong to.

Conversation
Content is not enough, on it’s own it just sits there, it needs to create conversation. Many online forums have great content, but haven’t built good enough mechanics or lubricated any social dynamics for stimulating conversations. Helping people converse is just as important as giving them something of value.

Contagion
We need to create conversations, not interrupt them. This is much easier than brands imagine as most online conversations are about content (MSN Research), and brands represent valuable content. But content is not only for sharing; just making something “viral” isn’t enough. It needs to ignite conversation, not just a solitude laughter from behind each individual laptop. So helping people share your content is important, but make sure this content gets people talking, not only sharing.

These are our initial thoughts on a part of this new mindset, something we call “Context”:

Context is all about creating a combiant :o) strategy of content/ideas and shareability. First, trying to identify valuable stuff people want to connect to. Then finding the stuff inside these ideas that are important and interesting enough to become social objects, and finally how we can, through a set of collaborative platforms, ignite conversations to help people connect.

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.

I wanted to try something different. Having “experimented” a bit with slideshare as a tool for communication and inspiration I thought I’d try something new.

In the context of “ideas in Mobile” I published a slideshow introducing this concept:

1. The browser is still the most important point of contact between a company and their participants.
2. But the browser is inaccessible in almost all situations where the brand is relevant.
3. The mobile on the other hand has become an integrated part of our everyday life. – Always at arms length, always on.

The only thing it lacks is ideas. Ideas treating mobile as something different, something unique, not just a smaller version of the internet.

The concept of the slideshow is that each slide carries a link back to a related post on my blog. So each slide becomes an idea. And the slideshow presents 20 ideas I’d hope could inspire and invite to new and interesting ideas.

I really haven’t got a clue how or if this will provide any value for anybody, but I hope it does. Anyhow, since it’s an experiment, if anyone has any feeback, it would be much appreciated, comment, tweet or email me. :o)

View it below, or on slideshare.net.

Companies and marketers should think of themselves and their content as igniters of conversations, not interrupters.

Discussing the findings in the Microsoft 3 screen Research these last couple of days, and reading the post “Give folk stuff to do together (again)” over on over at Mark Earls. It becomes interestingly obvious that marketing should think more about how to help people do or talk about stuff together. This gives me two thoughts:

1. If companies can ignite conversations and action, why do they continue to interrupt them? Is it because of a black & white perspective of advertising, that the only worth value it can create is encouraging a final “SALE”.



2. Making content shareable isn’t about getting people to forward an email with a URL in it. Sharing content is only the first part of the equation, real value is created when the content ignites conversations. According to Microsoft most discussions online are about content, so companies should help people find and share brilliant content that is worth talking about (I am starting to sound like Seth Godin four years ago :o).

In other words, go beyond shareability, create content to ignite conversations, not messages to interrupt existing ones.

Pranav Mistry of MIT demoes the new Sixth Sense wearable computer system taking us both one step closer to the Minority Report and one step beyond…

Read more on cnet..

Or watch the video below. (via Playfool) My favorite part is checking out product specs in the store, this type of functionality has unlimited potential.

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.

Marketing needs to extend the notion of value. In the event of adding smaller initiatives to the marketing mix moving customers one step closer to the till, or exploring social media to recruit participants, recognizing that value is much more than the final “sale” is important.

This might seem over evident, but in my experience, it often isn’t .

Patrick reminded me of this in a comment to my last post. Writing that it needs to be a “win win” situation between the brand and the customer.

Companies tend to view value as monetary, the final “sale”, but money is only the end result after several transactions with the customer, each taking her on step further along the snakes and ladders game board. Moving the customers from start to finish. Each of these transactions require communication, and in the event for them to be measurable and effective we need to define a richer set of success metrics.

The nature of Digital makes this especially important:

- As communication becomes a larger set of smaller ideas spread across a wider range of cooperative platforms, it’s important to recognize that each individual initiative is working on it’s separate goal. It is the totality of these initiatives that is working towards the final “sale”, but to measure for the success of the smaller ideas we need to give them different metrics than the final sale.

- Engaging participants through social media or starting a conversation are all parts of loyalty strategies. Getting people to purchase more than once, but the strategy itself is not focused on sale, it’s all about connecting with participants. There needs to be clearly defined wins along this axis to.

It is important to stay patient, to invest in initiatives that hasn’t got “sale” as its end goal, to be honest and measure correctly for we are building to achieve. If marketers aren’t relying on competitors to drive the category for them, then the marketing strategy is getting people from start to finish. This will mean at least 99 steps to make before customers can reach their final goal.

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.