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:

Mobile is at the forefront of representing a completely new way of thinking about marketing.

But in order to understand this we need to look beyond the SMS and the text voting, and start exploring the real potential of the platform.

Since the Mobile Abilities Map pdf, published two weeks ago, has received a great deal of interest. I thought it would be a good resource to readers if I collected and published my inspiration and ideas to each topic. Hopefully getting some inspirational juice flowing.

- I’ve added links to each resource on slides where this was possible.

I hope people appreciate the presentation, and continue sharing great links on their own blogs (and link back here) or in the comments section on this blog.

When attention and engagement becomes less important in advertising and marketing, things are going to get a whole lot healthier.

1. This, the last from a series of posts I’ve published during the last week questioning some of the terminology we use as advertisers and marketers. (narrative, content, individuals).

2. It’s an idea, and hopefully, during the next couple of weeks, I will be able to elaborate and present examples that prove my point: That the terminology we use needs to change if we are going to build better, healthier marketing in a new brand landscape. Where we are allowed access to peoples personal lives, and where positioning a brand means something completely different than telling a story about it.

The problem with attention is that it becomes a reference to quantity, not quality, often leading to success metrics’ related to time or clicks. Which bears little relevance to positioning the brand or product in any way. Brains don’t make their minds up based on how long or how much they engage with an activity, they build their impressions on quality not quantity. read more…. (Although, quantity has always been kind of a life west for bad communication).

The opportunity we get from thinking outside of attention and engagement is that it opens the advertising to a much healthier degree of brand and product positioning. Because we can say that the goal of the advertising is to create value, in a way that puts no demand on stealing time away from people, keeping people interested long enough to tell a full story, or limiting our marketing to those who are interested enough in our advertising to actually spend a lot of time with it.

As I’ve noted before to marketers: “People don’t care about your brand all the time, they care about it sometimes.”. We (the advertising business) need to keep in mind that people don’t care about advertising, at least not advertising the way we see it. And that making stuff interesting enough to create attention isn’t a decisive element of positioning.

Thinking outside attention and engagement also opens up the strategic and creative process for the new brand landscape, the Everyday Life, saying that the goal of any advertising or marketing activity is to create something valuable – without limitations on what form or format this will take. Be it a story, an exchange of ideas, an object or a utility etc..

If we remove the inherent need for time or narrative from the process – where would our ideas go?

- Let me use social media as an example. Our focus on attention and engagement frightens marketers as they see SM as something very time consuming, but this very seldom needs to be the case. SM presents a whole range of abilities that companies and organizations would find valuable outside the metric of attention and engagement: Authenticity, relevance and trust being some of them.

My question is simple. Even though attention and engagement have become simple buzzwords for labeling advertising, are they creating a useful reference for success? Or are they distorting the picture?

In a media world exploding with information, how can we make less noise? Is it reducing the content? Making it more useful and relevant? Or do we need to change our whole perspective on content all together?

I find these perspectives inspiring:

First of it’s this film on Creative Commons (via @jameschutter):

“…you need to move away from thinking about content to thinking about communities. Communities that develop around content.”

Secondly Kevin Slavin of Area/Code states in this interview on Picinic:

“Maybe what augmentation looks like is reducing, knowing a little bit more about a lot less. And not adding things to the world, but taking things away”

Kevin Slavin of AREA CODE at PICNIC NYC Salon from PICNICCrossmediaweek on Vimeo.

The last perspective is from Kenya Hara, challenging the whole problem with content and information as something “media-ish”. What is information? Is it the quantity or the quality that is really overwhelming us?
(Thanks to Niko Herzeg for recommending the book Designing Design):

“Although today’s society is said to be in a state of information overload, in fact it may not be an excess. It’s just an overflow of odd and fragmented information in the media. The amount of information in each fragment is in fact quite small. In this slew of half-baked information, isn’t the brain oppressed? The stress on the brain isn’t because of quantity, but because of limited quality.”

Hara talks about information through sense-driven design. Using the example of walking barefoot, where our soles explode with information sensed from the ground we walk on, as opposed to the numbness we feel today wearing shoes and socks. There has been a removal of information suggests Hara, not an increase. The problem rather lies in the quality.

All three perspectives touch on a subject close to hart:
First that advertising and marketing is to focused on tangible content. And secondly that content needs to be the result of understanding context and value, not a goal in itself.

We seem to be looking for universal principles, when we should be looking for fragmentation.

It’s quite common when trying to understand something that we try to simplify it, searching for consistencies and core principals. The problem is when we apply the find to other stuff as well as a universal principal for everything similar.

Even though universal laws or guidelines might seem like a good idea, it is often the complete opposite of something useful.

Take the Music Industry as an example. These days they are trying to find the ONE law to rule them all, to solve the problem for both universal, international, national or independent artists and bands – but is there ONE undiscovered answer? Or should there be many?

As we become more insightful and smarter regarding a subject, our articulation of it increases which leads us to discover details that we didn’t know existed to begin with. As a subject gets bigger we also find minute differences and details that make what seemed similar quite opposite.

Ignoring the nuances and fragmentation’s inside a subject as we try to make our ideas accessible to other people through graphs and sound bites :o), makes it easier to get understood, but demands the reader to ask more questions. (which is a good thing)

I hope the people reading this blog understand that I’m not trying to find universal answers. I’m exploring a landscape, square inch by square inch. And one answer might be a good solution to one problem, but might not give a full and complete answer to a lot of other stuff, or even be downright terrible.

Malcolm Gladwell inspired me to start thinking of this whole thing as a giant puzzle:

“We are all collecting small pieces of the same puzzle. One day maybe we’ll get so far that it starts making sense.”

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.

Digital is not about technology, it’s about people and the situation their in. Finding brilliant solutions is all about studying these situations and discovering the contexts where companies can contribute, ad value, create meaning and become indispensable.

Steve Cunningham reminded me in a comment to one of my last posts that I was falling into my own trap (not his words, but mine :o) in regards to the fact that I was trying to limit Twitter to conversations, when in fact people should be allowed to use it any way they please.

This should be obvious to me, as I use my own Twitter account not for conversation, but as a feed from this blog and an inspirational desk drawer I update. But, in the heat of battle i obviously slipped up a bit…

So I wanted to take a step back and give a bigger view on my take on technology, people and situations.

First, the short history of developing technological solutions, a combination of thoughts from amongst others Jeffery Veen, Indi Young, Robert Hoekman, Mark Earls and Donald Norman:

- In the beginning of technology, we asked ourselves what can technology do? And then we built it, long lists of it, presented it to the customers and they found some of it interesting and useful, and a lot of it not.

- Then we started talking about users, these soulless mouse button clickers who have no ambition, motivation or context. We started asking people to envision what they thought they needed in constructed situations, the result being even longer lists of stuff that might be important to some people, but a lot of it not.

- So eventually we started thinking about situation, and a bigger picture outside of technology and “users”. We started saying that peoples anticipation, motivations and desires arise from the context they find themselves in. At the same time our/companies ability to ad value into this context is entirely dependent on our understanding of the situation as a whole and finding our role in it – and of course exploring new ways to make the situation even more valuable to the people and participants.

- Finally other people have been added to the equation, as an individual is the product of the ideas of their community, and can not be seen in isolation. They think and act as a result of their interactions with others.

So this is why I think saying it’s about people is a bit to narrow, it’s about context and culture, it’s about situation.

And this is why I’ve been trying to write some stuff on Situation Marketing. Where the goal is not to do stuff because technology can, or produce stuff because the people we ask say it would be a good idea. Our job is to study people in real situations, and be inspired by their every day life. It sounds a bit elitist, but I believe new ideas come from experts. People brilliant at articulating solutions within the context being studied, in this the role of people is to inspire the right thinking.

- Both Malcolm Gladwell at PopTech and Donald Norman in Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things point this out, saying that asking non-experts to articulate their understanding of an object or situation leaves them to become conservative and articulate solutions they later on will be unhappy with.

To sum it up:
It’s about situations. We need to explore these situations in order to identify which contexts companies can add value and where they can make a difference. And then, by understanding people and technology, choose the appropriate tool to achieve the goal.

And an extra thanks to Steve for the heads up :o)

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.

Two articles published the last week both reference research by Gary Small claiming that the old “truth”; that the brain doesn’t change (just because we have a new kind of technology) is only partly true.

Read articles:

- Is surfing the internet altering your brain.
- Social Techies rule ‘New social order’. (thx Joakim)

The point being that, as we know, the brain learns through trial and error – or trial and reward as the brain repeats action based on a “reward chemical” being released in the brain when doing something we should do more (read more).

So, the concept of how the brain works is based on how we learn stuff. And the people being brought up with technology learn stuff differently than people without. This doesn’t affect a lot of the primal concepts of the brain, but it affects how we communicate and connect with people – which certainly should be important for brands.