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.

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.

The relationship between media and social media is like the relationship between egg and eggplant: They share a couple of the same letters, but they are not in the same taxonomy.” – Kevin Slavin, Area/Code

This post is an exploration of a quote by Kevin Slavin from the Storytelling Throwdown panel at the CaT conference in 2009. The reason being that I find the comment so insightful and interesting I felt it deserved some increased attention. (video below)

Traditional media is a battle between stories. Where the reader, viewer or listener is already engaged in a story, the main story, the content. And the goal of the advertising is to create an even more interesting story so that the engagement switches focus. It’s a story competition.

In social media we are not engaging in stories, we are engaging in the exchange of ideas. Be that a conversation between friends, or the need to define ones identity or role in a group by sharing something. Social media is not a competition of stories, it’s a competition for the attention to each other.

In social media the relationships aren’t short, superficial, cliched or stereotypical, quite the opposite. People spend more and more time, delving deeper and deeper in into each other, connecting more and more.

This setting is very difficult to displace with storytelling in its conventional sense. What we need are narratives and systems that engage and work within this context of attention between people. Stories that accelerate or facilitate increased exchange of ideas, increased connections.

Our stories need to increase the social fabric between people, understanding the systems and drivers that come in to play when people connect to each other and help them continue strengthening their relationships.

“One way to think about it. It’s like the relationship between media and social media is like the relationship between egg and eggplant. They share just a couple of letters but they’re not in the same taxonomy. That it’s a fundamentally different experience.

And that it used to be when you where storytelling, that what you were competing for attention against where other stories. It’s sort of a story competition.

And the attention we are competing for now is the attention to each other.

That basically what we are doing during the day these days is spending more and more time, deeper and deeper connected to each other. And that’s very difficult to displace through storytelling in the conventional sense of storytelling. And I think its important to figure out how to think about narratives as systems that can engage that, and can sort of work within that type of attention rather than to pull away from that exclusively.”

- Kevin Slavin, Storytelling Throwdown at CaT

(I’m having trouble with displaying the video due to a security error, please find it here.)

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

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.

Technological and media related innovation is not moving us forward, it’s not really moving us at all, if anything we are expanding. Innovation is extending our opportunities and perspectives, not finding new stuff in order to kill of the old stuff!

- Things don’t die, they reformat.

I believe this means that the opportunities are getting more and richer. Which again gives us a greater chance of finding what’s right for us, not having to force ourselves into available formats because there are no other alternatives.

The problem is that we are too used to having a limited set of opportunities. And since we at the same time are using the wrong analogies to describe media related innovation (“moving forward”). We are creating an atmosphere where we think old stuff needs to die in order to make room for the new stuff.

It couldn’t be more wrong!

We seem to think that the situations is constant, that we need to fill it with certain stuff – stuff that needs to innovate. Not the other way around, that the stuff can stay (almost) constant, but the situation is the one that needs to innovate and change…

Like TV advertising, or the website (Mike has a related discussion here). In the same breath of air we discuss if we do or don’t need them. If they are “excepted standards” or old formats, if they are obsolete? In my opinion it’s not about the objects, it’s about the eco-system.

What we should be working on is the richness, the palette, the opportunities, the reformatting. The chance to choose a tool that fits the person or the company. What we should be embracing is the bouquet, not the flower.

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.

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)