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.

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.

Every traditional marketing campaign is a customer purchase, that is no revelation: ROI and CPC, CPM, CPA are all standards. But I suggest there is something wrong with that mindset. In fact, with the uncertainty of the future of media, everything might be wrong with that mindset.

Display advertising might still be around at the end of 2010, but what is the gain from buying 30 seconds from about 0,001% of viewers when your competition is racking up thousands of engaged participants and members?

This is not an argument against the format, it’s not the format that’s the problem. Its the alternatives, the future of media, and your competition.

(And the reason I’m saying end of 2010 is because media is changing, FAST, including their business model. And the outcome is highly uncertain.)

There is one more thing, of great importance and huge interest:

People will gladly spend a minute of their day composing and publishing their own version of the brand story, but they won’t give five seconds of their time to listen to the company tell their version of it.

I’ve put together a list for 2009/2010:

1. People talk. They don’t want to be interrupted, but they do want their conversations to be ignited and more valuable.

2. Earned media is becoming more and more important in the mechanics of the marketing eco-system. People don’t share stuff because they notice it, they share stuff because it’s valuable.

3. People are not on one platform, they switch between several – all the time. Only people building things for platforms care about platforms. Our activities need to give the participant the opportunity to choose how and where to participate.

4. People will share their version of a brand’s story with other people, but they don’t care to listen to the brand’s own story.

5. People are more valuable owning and using your product than thinking about buying it.

6. In the words of Kevin Slavin: “People will watch a TV program once, maybe twice, but they will play chess an hundred or maybe a thousand times”. Where would you grow your most important relationships?

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.

A couple of blog posts this last week, by garethk and madebymany, have been responding to a discussion on the role digital plays when it comes to serendipity. The interesting thing is that both sides of the discussion are right; they are just discussing two different kinds of “digital”, the one based in the technology era and the one growing out of the human era.

Erin McKean has a lovely take on serendipity in her talk at TED:

“Online dictionaries right now are paper thrown up on a screen … in fact online dictionaries replicate almost all the problems of print except for searchability. And when you improve searchability you actually take away the one advantage of print, which is serendipity. Serendipity is finding something you weren’t looking for because finding what you were looking for is so damn difficult.”

Erin’s talk is about rethinking the dictionary, and discusses the tool as it is built on technical and informational features, not human abilities. This has been the case for a lot of the stuff built in the first ten years of digital, there just wasn’t any interest in finding out what humans would do, only what technology could.

Most of the stuff from the early tech-based web era is non-human and “non-serendipital”. But the new social stuff, and the stuff designed with human activities and behaviors in mind – from the ground up. Is presenting a new league of beautiful and fruitful serendipity.

As Adam Greenfield states in his “The long here, the big now, and other tales of the networked city” presentation from last years Picnic:

“I happen to believe such projects start with the potentials of technology, rather than an accurate understanding or map of human desire.

I tend to believe they duck the real questions, the hard questions…the meaningful questions about the nature of the metropolitan experience, and how humans beings have always used these wonderful platforms for collective action and conviviality we call cities.”

Adam Greenfield at PICNIC08: The Long Here, the Big Now, and other tales of the networked city from PICNICCrossmediaweek on Vimeo.

“Digital didn’t change anything, but everything digital changed.” And the stuff we are seeing now, built around people, is different, and presenting us with some truly magnificent ideas, that probably is more similar to what digital will become in the future. Which is a richer better experience, more based on human collective action, and richer in both serendipity and, as Adam puts it, “conviviality”.

Conviviality: (of an atmosphere or event) friendly, lively, and enjoyable.

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.

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.

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.

If digital and real life is the same place, what is digital marketing? And is there a better way to articulate the new opportunities?

In the two previous posts in this stream (first and second), I try to argument that developers and designers of digital platforms are the only ones referencing digital and real as different. Technology’s seamless integration into real life has made it ubiquitous enough to become the same place.

This puts forth the interesting question: What is digital, and by which grounds do we treat it different from other options?

My take is that the focus on “digital” being a technology removes us from understanding it’s real opportunities, because in doing so we are fusing together concepts and abilities related to storytelling, conversations and utilities, not understanding them as different or exploring them as different.

The first post in this stream suggested that digital is not a platform because there is no “digital” in consumers lives anymore. Digital and real life has become the same place – so why should we separate the two – based on what?

The second post tried to state that by minimizing digital to being a “platform” we loose the focus on the richness of the opportunities and abilities gained from the maturing experience audience have with digital technology. And muddling everything together into a terminology that is unhelpful in understanding what we are able to achieve and giving clients fewer good reasons to invest.

What I am suggesting is that we rethink how we articulate the stuff we are doing every day.

New opportunities brought forward in the latest stages of social and cultural adoption of digital technology introduce a new set of abilities for marketers. It is infertile to discuss “digital”, “analogue” or “real life”, instead we need to dig into the abilities of our tools, identify their common traits and find terminology differentiating the different, and clustering the same. This is a suggestion, An Abilities Based Marketing Mindset:

1. Messaging.
Monologue or interaction where the goal is to control an experience the customer is consuming. This in order create or manipulate the receiver’s anticipation for a given experience, product or brand. Key words being control and anticipation.

2. The collective exchange of ideas.
The social and conversational approach. Where participants exchange ideas, creative content or meaning. The goal is to enrich or help shape the collective perception of an experience, product or brand through participation. Key words being collective and exchange.

3. Utilities.
Identifying a situation where the brand itself or its existing products or services are generating value, then building additional loyalty and preference in this situation through services. The goal being to extend the reach and value created by the brand to outside of what the original product provides, increasing loyalty and unique brand value. Key words being situation and value.