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.

We might be cautious of forcing new behavior on our participants, because of a reasonable fear that it will be difficult for people to adapt. So we try to find and design solutions inside people’s existing behavioral pattern. But this limits our ability to create better value in our relationships with our participants.

Behavioral psychologist Donald Norman says people adapt to technology; we have always made things that people had to learn – like a doorknob – which attributes new behaviors in their lives. It may have made their lives more practical or better – but they had to learn it.

In the context of company/customer relationships and through the lens of services, Tim Brown, of IDEO, ads to this train of thought:

“Any Service organization has got to get over the idea that a great service is something where the consumer doesn’t have to do anything. That’s a really bad service. A great service is where the consumer actually participates, and where they get drawn in, and where they become part of it.”

People following this blog might have already seen some of my frustration with today’s standards for graphical user interfaces, which I find are almost exclusively based on anything else than the human aspect:

It seems we are at the end of a period where interactive design was mere decoration. Where algorithmic logic and robotic rationality shaped the reasoning behind the interfaces trying to engage people in services, content and marketing. – http://www.180360720.no/index.php/archive/post-digital-design/

As the quote suggests we might be at the end of this era, forced through by a greater understanding for the human aspect as technology is immersing into our everyday life. And as a consequence of new platforms inviting us to interact without mechanical augmentations, such as the mouse and keyboard.

But this should not apply to only stuff happening on a two-dimensional screen, where the ability to involve and engage are limited, we should start thinking how to take our services outside the screen, and into the physical environment.

If one looks at a video game console like Wii, or even the physical augmentation of games like Buzz or Guitar Hero, we can ask ourselves, why aren’t banks, retailers or FMCG doing this? What is the barrier to thinking about physical objects when thinking of digital services?

There are already a range of brilliant and inspiring examples:
(Some of these are just concepts or prototypes)

The Copenhagen Wheel

Phillips – Direct Life

Charmr

The BP Photobooth

Sniff

Adding digital components to increase the engagement in and value created from a TV event, means thinking outside the obvious Facebook chat integration, the PC, online, and even the TV event itself.

In a recent study by Kaiser on the trends of American youth, shared by JWT on their Intelligence blog, there are numbers stating the increase in multitasking while enjoying other mediums (TV, Radio, Computer). No surprise, but the interesting point is what kind of medium they are multitasking with.

Multitasking is the wrong word here, as the brain can’t possibly do two things at the same time. The correct description would be “switching focus”. As stated by the America Scientist: “psychologists know that multitasking involves switching rapidly between tasks rather than actually performing multiple tasks simultaneously.” JWT has decided to dub the trend Distraction as Entertainment. (But I am having a hard time finding any good articles on their definition.)

From the report:

“…almost half of kids (47 percent) report texting someone ‘often’ or ‘sometimes’ about what they are watching on TV—an activity that was almost unheard of five years ago.”

The device people were using together with TV is their mobile phone, up to half the kids are using it to keep in touch with friends and exchange ideas in this context.

This is interesting, with almost one in two kids talking with their friends about what they are watching on TV, and using the telephone – not a desktop/PC based social networking application – inspires to think about two things:

1. The Laptop + TV living room idea is great, but the potential in Mobile+TV might be even bigger. To be frank, the popular TV-event + Facebook chat integration really isn’t that impressive, and seems more like a “lack of imagination band-aid”.

2. Sending SMS is just a choice in regards to the goal of their communication – it’s simple, cheap or free and communicates short exchanges beautifully. Which means that we should be able to introduce new concepts based on a solid understanding of the context itself, low technological barriers and great rewards.

In my personal experience with games, it’s not the national or big games that create the best engagement; it’s the local ones. And not “local” in the geographical sense, but in a social sense, were one engages an existing group of friends. This is not because friends play more with friends online in comparison to with strangers, but because it enables the real-life dimension. Where the game does not exist exclusively online, but creates a form of social worth (a value defined by Jenkins) that ignites exchanges when the group meets socially in real-life. It becomes a valuable currency even when the game is not played. Something to talk about and share, at school, work or other gatherings outside the computer.

Using the game, not to play it online, but in order to share an experience that brings value both to their digital and real worlds (even though it’s the same place), it is the strongest enabler.

As JWT rounds of their blog post:

“Content creators can turn this trend to their advantage by layering a multitude of media into entertainment, producing an immersive experience designed for simultaneous consumption and engagement.”

And I would ad, that it’s when media, and especially TV, not only plays on what’s happening and created inside media, but also plays on the activities, dimensions and social groups that exists outside media – and with additional ideas and activities outside simultaneous – it becomes really powerful.

To sum it up; its when the layering (as JWT defines it) not only includes media but also includes a real world component, includes the idea of the engagement branching of and existing outside the TV time slot, and adding a local, social dimension, things become interesting. And even though the PC/Laptop is a brilliant tool, the mobile phone might be a better instrument in this context.

Three projects, that all bring different but interesting aspects into this line of thinking; Parking Wars, MTV Backchannel and Fantasy premiere League. (unfortunatley I can’t find any examples with mobile)

And of course, this does not only apply to TV events, but all events. As events are like products; an invitation to become a part of something valuable…

After publishing the slideshow Seven actionable marketing trends about a month ago, I asked if there was an interest in an expanded version of the slideshow. Elaborating on each trend and including some references and quotes from the insights behind them.

Unfortunately it has taken me some time to put this together, and I do apologize for the delay. But now the deck has been published via slideshare.net.

I would like to state that the goal of the document is not to work as a coherent presentation, but rather using the slideshare format to comprise and present a collection of valuable ideas that I felt was/is relevant in regards to each trend.

I hope you find the presentation useful, and that there are stuff/slides in there that proves to be inspirational.

As always, if there are any questions or comments, please contact me and I will do my best to reply.

Also, find most of the individual slides available under CC license on flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/everythingnewisdangerous

Find the presentation below, or here:

How come design for technology is so inherently anti-human that we had to invent a whole new industry around it just to band aid the wounds created by having the wrong focus in the first place?

Behavioral Psychologist Donald Norman has been quoted saying:

“Each time a new technology comes along, new designers make the same horrible mistakes as their predecessors. Technologists are not noted for learning the errors of the past. They look forward, not behind, so they repeat the same problems over and over again.”

When it comes to design for interactive platforms it seems that the knowledge from existing design practices have been overlooked in favor of designing interfaces more eager to ease the technological development budget, rather than accommodate the human mind.

The problem with this is that it prohibits technology of immersing invisibly into peoples lives, because the technology itself becomes far to visible. We need to understand that it is behavior that initiates innovation, not technology. It wasn’t speed that made broadband the game changer, it was how it removed technology (the dial-up and cost model) from the process of going and being online.

This first film is by Berg and Mag+, its a case study presenting some insights into and visualization of e-Magazines. It presents the kind of thinking needed in order to bring technology into peoples lives

It seems we are at the end of a period where interactive design was mere decoration. Where algorithmic logic and robotic rationality shaped the reasoning behind the interfaces trying to engage people in services, content and marketing.

Design is for humans not robots. And humans should force technology to adapt and evolve, not the other way around.

Both videos where found at the brilliant blog Mobile User Interfaces by TAT, which together with BERG provides a lot of brilliant insights and inspiration into the future of design on interactive platforms.

A company’s ability to engage and connect with people has to do with its imagination and not the product or product category.

A couple of days back a quite popular and knowledgeable blog wrote, as a small part of their quite smart overview on social media, that some brands don’t belong in it.

I do agree with their statement, but disagree strongly with their reasoning:

” Some brands do not need to engage with their customers online, period. Products like bread or socks, for example, are not the kind of things that people want to have a social relationship with anywhere, forget online. It just makes them look silly.” – madebymany.co.uk

Now to me, both bread:
- Bakertweet
And socks:
- LittleMissMatched (mentioned on several occasions by mister Godin)
have a potential following too them.

In my mind it doesn’t come down to the category. It comes down to the company – if you are boring and uninteresting brand, and never even tried to create something remarkable or interesting in regards to your product. Then social media, as would be the case with advertising, is not a golden ticket, and will either fail or prove you wrong faster – or both.

And it comes down to our imagination. Just because we haven’t seen it done before it doesn’t mean there isn’t a possibility that it might happen – in a way we could never imagine. In fact, having NOT seen it before only proves that there is a market and that it is there for the taking (if my initial statement is correct that is :o).

So, it’s not the product or category that defines a companies ability to connect and grow with its audience and participants. It is its ability to imagine something remarkable inside what to others seems like a lifeless and boring category.

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

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.

If you want to know what the future might look like, start tuning your antennas to the ideas of Kevin Slavin of Area/Code. In this talk he explores some ideas on “the new livingroom”, where TV and online participation converge into a new experience, where viewers and participants reconnect.

In the talk, which Kevin is holding at the 5D Immersive Design Conference, he is as disruptive as in his last presentation at PSFK: “The mobile eco-system”.

Not to spoil it, but to give you a heads up, Kevin talks about games and the convergence of TV and Participation through simultaneous online activities. (The new Livingroom):

“Games with computers in them” (not the other way around)
“Televisions amazing, because it’s an event”
“Viewers and users are the same people, and the question is how to reconnect them again”

“We forgot what was so great about television, that it was something we all did at the same time, and it was kind of amazing. There was something that happened, something we all experienced that we could all talk about the next day. We had this kind of common conversation that was provided by it. And this goes away when you start time shifting, but it is actually really magic. And if you start thinking of television as something that we are all huddled around, for half an hour at a time, like all of us. It’s actually really magic. It’s something that only television could do.” (a tad rewritten :o)

Via offworld.

5D Conference : New Television Pt 4 – Kevin Slavin from Dave Blass on Vimeo.