Some arguments:

1. Integration is not merely about offering services where people are, it’s about implementing connected technology within our everyday objects, or designing new objects based on the new opportunities and additional meaning introduced by technology.

Which gives that this could introduce a completely new generation of needs and behaviors: In the words of Donald Norman;

“Need is created by technology, not the other way around.” Link.

2. With integration we are not only moving from destination sites to aggregate sites, from horizontals to verticals. We are moving from screens to objects, from input devices to sensors and from keyboarded instruments to everyday life.

Jesko Stoetzer’s RFID Sleeve prototype for the Betacup project is a good example. Showing how digital technology, using no screens, no keyboards, just an electronic augmentation and a redesign of an existing object, the cup sleeve. Can improve the coffee experience for enthusiasts, create new business opportunities and increase product sustainability.

3. Microsoft put it carefully in its Europe Logs on Report in April 2009:

“The use of Internet on PC’s will decrease from 95% today to only 50% the next five years.” – pdf

But Microsoft was only talking about our connected lives moving from PC’s to mobile, gaming platforms or “connected TV-boxes”. They where not looking into the emerging opportunities from smart objects, SPIMEs or coffee sleeves.

The Europe Logs on report were looking at machines. But the days when only machines were connected to the Internet is already in the past.

There is an important distinction to make in order to arrive at the conclusion that we are moving into a new Internet era, and that is the one between the machine and the object. What Russel Davies, in his talk “Printing the Internet out and squirting it into things” at the Lift Conference calls the device and the object.

Devices are machines where the structure of the object itself affords no utility, but there is a screen and a circuit board in there offering us a range of opportunities. And object is different, it already has an immediate utility, but technology ads a new layer of meaning.

“Devices fool us because they look like objects and do all this stuff, and we are kind of hypnotized by their ability to do all this stuff. Where as when you see an ornament in the shop you know exactly what it is and what it is for. And you don’t except more of it. I think some of the delights that some of these can contain is when it looks like a simple object but contains meaning that you weren’t excepting.” – Russel Davies.

4. Machines are hubs. Take the mobile phone as an example; it should be (and hopefully will be) connecting people to their objects, not filled with an application for each one (object).

Appvertising and applications belong to machines, and are just scratching the surface of connected technology, it is by and far only the answer to the following question: “What do people want access to all the time?”

Integration as a term is not about access, it’s about turning everyday objects into identities, which enables them to organize, create structure and through feedback add a new layer to spaces in our everyday life.

Bill Moggridge mentions in his book Designing Interactions, that there are not only three (spatial) dimensions to an interface, but also a fourth one; time. We are now building a fifth dimension; the digital identity of the physical object.

The digital life of physical objects is what Kevin Slavin discusses in his talk This Platform Called Everyday Life at the PSFK Conference in New York. This quote where he references a video of a cat molesting a Webkinz:

“This cat is completely unaware of the most important thing about this particular stuffed animal. Which is that it has a whole other life online. This is a Webkinz stuffed animal. And this cat has no idea. It thinks it’s actually engaging with the thing, and in fact it has a whole parallell life thats going on, that this cat can’t touch. And I want to make it clear, that this is where we are heading, towards a world in which entities have this physical presence as well as this digital presence.”

Conclusion:
The important shift with integration is not that we put technology into things (devices), but that everyday objects with an existing physicality and purpose, get a new dimension and additional meaning: A digital identity.

With these identities comes data, responsiveness, organization and connection.

The next generation is all about connecting our stuff, offering new layers of meaning to our objects, our situations and the world at large.

Find the presentation below or at slideshare.net/helgetenno.

As always find the individual slides under CC-license here: flickr.com/everythingnewisdangerous

I’ve included the part of the script describing the three areas of retail I’ve concentrated on; product, in-store and business opportunities:

Product opportunities
The product is not just a “brand” living on a shelf or being consumed by a member of the public. It is a character, which within the framework of a strong identity changes its characteristics to fit different roles through the stages of its own lifecycle; from the initial idea, the spark, to its realization (design), its distribution, shelf life, shared product experience and recycling (sustainability). Digital amplifies the characteristics, and helps the identity adapt at each stage.

In-store opportunities
The retail outlet is the most important arena for public choice. It is intense in its range of decisions, and numbing in its range of (similar) products. Inside this arena there are limited opportunities within frameworks. Frameworks put in place by the non-digital, non-organic world of cardboard and floor space. Digital transcends the limitations of the shop infrastructure, serving communication through personal devices controlled by a digital brain in “the cloud”.

In the advertising mindset the retail communication belongs to the “call-to-action” category. But this limits itself both in its expense on resources (financial and labor), scarcity of real estate and limited time span. In the design mindset the goal is rather strength through identity, creating a long lasting top-of-mind preference through establishing an interesting story, sharing values, creating memberships and avoiding the retail rock concerts of advertising.

Business opportunities
There are new business opportunities to be explored and discovered through the extension of digital and organic platforms. From engaging the crowds to taking the store to the world – not limiting access to it by physical destination. In categories where products follow patterns and become remarkably similar, it is digital and organic platforms that not only invite customers to explore and discover new, unique experiences. But also develop more layered identities, establishing thicker product relationships, and unwrap new business opportunities.

—

A special thanks to PSFK which as with a stroke of coincidence launched their brilliant PSFK Future of Retail Report just last week, adding a whole section to my presentation – I’ve been extensively referencing the source.

PSFK Future of Retail Report

I would also ad these brilliant people and publications as they all helped in filtering the cases and surfacing the best ones:

springwise.com
popsop.com
mashable.com
rubbishcorp.com
adverblog.com
Ingmar de Lange
mobilemarketer.com
digitalbuzzblog.com
Zeus Jones
storefrontbacktalk.com
cpbgroup.com
techcrunch.com
Seth Godin
Richard Murray (for giving us the best insight on retail)
and for his brilliant and extensive posts, *Supercollider at geoffnorthcott.com.

In my first presentation on media called Future Media, I focused on changes to the media business model (from products to value and from infrastructure to relationships). In this article I will try to present the second idea (of three). This one specifically on news content – which, because of its nature, presents its own opportunities.

The two faced monster of news

“The question is not what will happen to newspapers, but if we can save journalism”. - Clay Shirky

Why would this be true, and why is it over simplifying the role of media, journalism and the adoption of technology?

Journalists have been arguing for some years that the speed of online publishing is eating at the quality of their work. (Speed might be a constructed limitation; “speed is to the Internet what price is to retail”, and only one in 67 pages in this report include a reference to speed).

At the same time there is a huge debate on the quality itself of the Jorunalism-erati out there, especially after the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war.

A notion is that journalists used to have the upper hand, but media training and PR companies are getting so good at handling media that they are out smarting them ten to one. And as journalists faced with the difficult task of not having either the time or knowledge to challenge these peoples’ claims, they turn into distribution drones for messages the interviewees want to distribute to the public.

No, this is not supposed to be a political argument, but it is the core of the problem, because when journalists turn in to content distributors – then everybody can do their job.

When Twitter was the first with the Hudson river images – it was just content, and people have their own content networks – faster, and better connected than the media publishing platforms. But there is a difference between content and news, and this is what we fail to see as we focus on speed and speed alone.

Do people want smarter news, rather than just distributed content? Do they want to spend more time with news? Do they want their existing assumptions challenged, do they want analysis and insights?

Yes they do, but we don’t see it, because we confuse news with news!

In Norway people visit online newspapers 4-6 times a day, not because they are so hungry for the latest in political uproar – but because they want something fresh, they want a break from their routine and their brains want to be entertained. Online news is entertainment. And online newspapers is the best form of entertainment there is – it understands both the situation that people enjoying the content is in, and it understands the format requirements for fitting into this ‘quick break from daily chores routine’-culture. And it understands the function of the situation.

But people also want analysis, they want knowledge, and they want to learn, they even sometimes want their assumptions challenged. So they buy newspapers, they watch daily news shows on TV. They enjoy traditional news publications.

These are two completely different situations, with two completely different functions; the problem is that we have confused them with each other because, as opposed to the Eskimos’ that have 37 words for ‘snow’, we have only one word for ‘news’. We lack the articulation to discuss the difference between news as entertainment and news as information. And by that we fail to see that the stuff people eagerly consume online all through the day is something fundamentally different from the stuff that should be served in traditional publications – that people want to enjoy and spend time with.

These are of course just my assumptions, and the picture is a hundred times more nuanced than I present here, but assumptions that are trying to say that content is rich and diverse, and not because its on different technological platforms, but because we enjoy it in different situations. And people engage in different situations with different motivations and ambitions: each situation has it own function.

And we can see media understand this in its content – but not in its business models!

We are too focused on the abilities of the technological platforms that we ignore the situation where it is consumed, and we forget that technology itself seldom has a function. But technology induces new situations and these situations can cause radical changes to the demand from the content; its function – and create fundamentally new business structures.

So in my mind there are completely different business models here, for different kinds of situations. Where even the traditional news formats need to understand their “new” situations, and the value they are contributing to the function of it: TV is social, paper is personal, online is entertainment and so forth…

Mass media forces brands to find one consistent voice, communicating one story or one set of values to a large part of a population. This mindset is valuable for the mass media industry, which is fine. But online/organic/cloud based services’ and applications are not mass marketing, not media, and by that needs, or demands, a different mindset.

Where as display advertising survives on a marketing relationship approach (generic and universal) services and applications for organic platforms need a more individual and personal product relationship approach. This means that any destination – from your online web site to your smart phone application or a participation / dialogue initiative has to be built for the niches, not the idea of universals.

Malcolm Gladwell, at TED in 2004, talks about Howard Moskowitz, a psychophysicist that reinvented spaghetti sauce with the result of making the American people happier. Moskowitz can be attributed with discovering that there are no universals in the food industry. That reality is too diverse and can’t be identified by one or some universal principles.

At the end of the presentation Gladwell references one example with coffee, where he says that if he was to design one brand of coffee to fit everybody, it would rank at a bout a 60 on a taste satisfaction ranking from zero to a hundred. But he was to divide us into coffee clusters of three or more, he could tailor coffee to each cluster, which would heighten the rank to about a 75 to 78. The difference is “coffee that makes you wince, and coffee that makes you deliriously happy”.

“When we pursue universals in food, we are not only making an error, we are doing ourselves a massive disservice” – Howard Moskowitz

As Gladwell also notes: Moskowitz introduced to the food industry what people in science had been working with for a long time; the move from the search for universals to the understanding of variability.

In our eagerness to understand online marketing we have borrowed a range of shortcuts from the different industries. Many of them have been interesting and valuable choices, especially in the parts of online that resembled traditional media, but a lot of them have been failures.

My point is that we need to approach online marketing with an understanding of variability. That we can’t see online / organic marketing as mass media, but as individual relationships. That both individual devices, destinations and dialogues demand personalization and tailoring built in as fundamental features.

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.

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…

In the excellent book Business Model Generation, by Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur, there is a chapter on “unbundling”. Where the concept is that there exist three fundamentally different business types, and that a company should separate these types from each other to avoid conflicts and undesirable trade-offs.

From the book:

“The concept of the “unbundled” corporations holds that there are three fundamentally different types of businesses: Customer relationship businesses, product innovation businesses, infrastructure businesses.”

And then continues:

“Each has different economic, competitive, and cultural imperatives. The tree types may co-exist within a single corporation, but ideally they are “unbundled” into separate entities in order to avoid conflicts or undesirable trade-offs.”

Under the imperative “competition” there is an interesting revelation: Where product innovation focuses on being employee centered, and customer relationship management on being highly service oriented. Infrastructure management has its competitive imperative set to “Cost focused; stresses standardization, predictability and efficiency”.

Now looking at these three models I would say media definitely puts itself in the infrastructure category – which also might be its biggest mistake.

Media used to be in the infrastructure business, providing mere opportunities to traffic messages from the brand to the consumer. But today this is costing media dearly. Having little or no unique content, having standardized every piece of real estate available for the brands to purchase, and thus removing any advantage in the bidding war. Thus resulting in trying to sell its identical product by having the cheapest product (or the biggest discount) and flooding its editorial content with advertising in order to compensate for the low price per. unit sold.

Its sometimes seems like media doesn’t see that basic marketing economics (scarcity and demand equals higher price) also applies to their business.

If media is in the infrastructure business, it is in the wrong business.

I would suggest media position itself to the relationship business, and be selling completely different, more scarce and more valuable products to brands.

What I would like to see is a change of business model focus. From infrastructure destruction, to creating valuable relationships – providing new and interesting products for brands to sponsor in order to increase the value being created between media and the participant – as opposed to flooding the available real estate with messaging as uninteresting and generic as the format it has chosen to be presented in.