Digital’s introduction to retail, be it a slow one, will accelerate as the understanding of the width of web and mobile broadens from being all about destinations, to integration into every aspect of business:

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.

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:

Online advertising will change fundamentally during the next year to four years. The reason is more unexpected, and with larger consequences, than anticipated.

I’ve written previously on how both the competition to the online ad product (ie. earned media) and our citizens’ change in online behavior should be forcing online media to innovate its advertising and marketing products. Now it seems these symptoms where only the tip of the iceberg: a change in the fundamental business model of the media industry.

In 2009 media has been failing, and it’s failing fast. All hands are on deck and the ability to think disruptively, not only incrementally, has invited people to rethink the whole structure of their business model. This will affect their income strategies and the companies sponsoring these income strategies.

In other words: online advertising is changing, because the media business model is changing.

This is the case I’m trying to make:
Media has been stuck for some time, but the scalability of the online advertising real estate, and the enormous market has kept the ball rolling. Not sensing that the drive for traffic and the drive for more ad space lessened the editorial product and made the media brands invisible.

As Kristin Skogen Lund, CEO of Aftenposten, one of the biggest newspapers in Norway said at a talk last week:

- ”We’ve been to identical, bought cheap traffic at a cost to our brand for to many years.” - Kristin Skogen Lund, CEO, Aftenposten

Scott Karp, editor of the Publishing 2.0 blog ads another argument:

“most newspaper websites sell SPACE for commodity advertising — display ads and classifieds — and thus are hard pressed to compete with ad networks that specialize in selling commodity ad space by the megaton” – Scott Karp, Publishing 2.0

The result is that the display advertising model works just fine for media buyers, but for brands they are receiving a decreasing amount of effect – and compared with the effect from earned media the investment at times can seem as a complete waste. At the same time media companies have brought a knife to a gunfight, they are competing against the networks, a game they can’t win, and are destroying their most valuable possession – their brand – along the way.

So something has got to change!

An incentive for change:
Two important facts where laid out by Skogen Lund at a conference last week:

- Only 5%
Skogen Lund stated that Aftenposten’s online revenue only represented 5% of their total revenue. Scott Karp confirms this as representative for the whole industry:

“That’s why the newspaper industry is worth about $60 billion offline but only $3 billion online — they only have about 5% of the pricing power that they did when there was only a finite amount of space in for printing ads.” – Scott Karp, Publishing 2.0

Online advertising in it’s current form is not a big revenue model for media companies, which would incentives innovation. If only one believed that online customers where better customers… Are people worse customers online? Hardly, FEED: The Razorfish Digital Brand Experience Report / 2009 states:

“Brands that use digital to drive awareness also drives sales: 64% of consumers report making a first purchase from a brand because of a digital experience” – FEED 09

So there is nothing wrong with the platform, there is nothing wrong with online, it’s how we’ve utilized it for advertising, and as a business model, that has been completely of the mark.

- Advertising decreasing, subscriptions increasing
A second interesting fact presented by Skogen Lund was a graph showing how advertising has represented a sharp decline in revenue, while subscriptions a sharp increase this last year. This at the same time as we are seeing niche newspapers, with strong brands and identifiable products, increasing their subscriptions in contrary to the mainstream newspapers which are declining. This tells us that there is an interest in a strong media product, and people are willing to pay for it.

My conclusion is this:
Media is a product (a membership), has always been a product and will continue to be a product. But somewhere along the way someone found that sponsoring it with advertising was a god idea. (Brilliant video for Norwegian readers to be found here (Thx. Freddy)). Which it was, to some extent. But the consequence was that the drive for traffic became more important than building a strong brand and a unique product.

Today when advertising sponsorship is failing as a business model, media has to start charging for something. But since they are left with a generic product it is impossible to charge for content that can be found for free ten other places.

(which is probably why Murdoch is shutting out Google, and also the argument of Mathias Dophner here. They want to protect it before they create it.)

So I anticipate that blood will continue to flow in the Media industry – because there is not enough money to finance all these institutions, and there is not enough strong brands to charge for their product.

Which leaves us with advertising: Advertising online will change because the media business model will change. Media brands seeing that they either don’t need to garbage their stories with competing stories, as Scott Karp says:

“advertising isn’t more valuable when placed next to premium content because display advertising has so LITTLE value to begin with. In fact, display advertising creates so little consumer value that it actually SUBTRACTS value from high quality editorial content when placed next it.”

Or because they find that people reading their publications are there because they get provided a value, and that brands in a lot of instances can co-produce this value. That NEW BRANDS are value creators, and that NEW MARKETING IDEAS are about creating additional value – not a competition between the attention of stories. And that this value, and a relationship built on trust between the media, the brand and the participant, will create a new, valuable, membership based content system.

That brands, as Forrester already has anticipated, will sponsor niche arenas where they can build direct relationships with their participants and members. What these arenas are, how large, small, niche or commercial, content, conversation or context based is completely up to our own imagination and creativity.

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.

As technology immerses into our daily life and disappears, value based marketing becomes available through new behaviors, inside situations where it is meaningful and useful.

This turns marketing into the experience surrounding the product – and in some instances becomes the experience people connect to and build relationships with. The marketing becomes the product, and the product becomes the marketing.

This is a presentation held for a class of students in electronic business development at BI, in Oslo Norway.

I’ve been invited to do a five minute presentation on Context at Paris 2.0 this Tuesday. Working my way through the script I decided to put the whole thing into the presentation and upload it. Love to get some feedback on this before Tuesday :o) Thank you in advance.

(View slideshow at slideshare.net)

The script:

The immersion of digital stuff, making the accessibility of media-, communication- and social technology almost ubiquitous, has led to a behavioral change in our everyday lives

- (it will mean so more next year, and more the year after that) – Kevin Slavin….

This is interesting, not because we think this means that marketers can reach people all the time, they can’t, but because people can reach marketing all the time, which is much more significant.

Brands now have the opportunity to be reached, by people, when people want to.

This turns marketing up side down….

Marketers used to be the people that reached the people (the customers), now the people (as participants) are the ones who reach marketers.

The great shift is this:
When marketers were controlling the situation, marketing was done blindly through media channels, affecting people’s anticipation of a situation outside the situation itself, manipulating their feelings about it. We were telling people how to feel at a point in time when they didn’t feel anything. (Who cares about shaving while enjoying a 2pm break from boring work routines?)

Today marketing is accessible inside the situations, so the job changes.

When marketing exists inside situations the brand’s own story is irrelevant, the experience itself will always be stronger.

(why would I stop doing what I’m doing just to listen to your version of what I’m experiencing right now?).

Marketers stories become irrelevant inside situations because they are different from peoples own stories.

So marketing changes …

The only reason for people to access marketing inside situations is because they gain something valuable.

And if marketers can’t tell their own story, the goal becomes making the participants story better.

So how do you make it better?

By understanding the context, and adding value to it.

This is the new marketing economy:
The goal of marketing is not to win the battle of stories (as is the case for traditional media marketing), but to understand the abilities, emotions and activities of a situation – the context – and add deliberate value to it. Making it better, becoming indispensible as a value provider, and gaining ownership to people through direct relations with them over time…

To understand this we need to accept that products are worthless. And only become valuable as they are introduced to a situation where they are relevant. That brands aren’t product providers, but value providers, something they have always been – marketing has only spent its time distracting our focus from this and done its most to become unwanted.

Products are worthless:
A toothbrush is worthless outside its context, taking up much needed space in the bathroom, but when it comes to tooth hygiene, it becomes indispensible.

The New Marketing economy says that the context is larger than the product, much larger, and that marketing is about increasing the value of this context – and growing the context itself.

As Whirpool found when they went on to increase their value by launching a podcast about the American family – not talk about their home appliances..

Or Fiat as they use personal environmental initiatives to create value – not brag about their car.

Or Wasa, as they help you get a nutritious breakfast – not sell their delicious bread/cracker things.

Or BakerTweet – making sure you enjoyed the product in its best possible context – when it’s steaming hot…

Brands need to see themselves as value creators, adding value to contexts where their value is appreciated and needed. They need to investigate and explore these contexts, surrounding their brand and products, and take ownership of them.

The next marketing arena isn’t similar formats in similar media, it’s becoming the most valuable brand inside the experience surrounding the product and the brand.

The marketing currency is not about attention, interruption or interest. It’s about creating deliberate value. Building direct relationships and great marketing through connected services, utilities, arenas and stuff.

The new Marketing economy is about understanding context and adding deliberate value…

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.)

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?

Storytelling is packaging, a vehicle designed around an idea in order to increase its effectiveness in communication.

According to Al Ries, advertising is storytelling:

“Without a story, no advertising, no matter how brilliant, is going to work.”

Is Al Ries still right, or does this mindset belong inside the limitations of the message based advertising landscape?

It raises two questions:

1. Is advertising to focused on stories? On the brand representing an idea cocooned in a narrative?

2. In a wide interpretation of the word “story” a lot of things could fit in, but does the limitations of the terminology limit us from exploring opportunities outside the mechanics and dynamics of “the story”? Which is vital in the every day life mindset.

In the case where there is no need for advertising to interrupt, engage or entertain. Is there a need for story? Does a utility serve the purpose of the story or the idea?

The message based media model is changing from THE way to advertise to A way to advertise, alternative opportunities are surfacing. Where the story produces some great qualities, these are there to convey a meaning inside a given format, as this format changes the qualities change as well.

As transmedia on the one hand is doing a great job in exploring stories in a new converged participatory culture, is there also emerging a new form of “story-less” advertising?

The first ten years of digital was (to a large extent) the same siloed ideas that we’d already been exploiting for decades on other content and messaging transportation infrastructures (media). It was a carbon copy.

It is only in the last 2-4 years something interesting and revolutionary has surfaced through the emergence of social media (the collective exchange of ideas) and digital utilities.

This creates a new currency for marketing online, not replacing traditional advertising / messaging but competing for the same budget and offering a completely different set of returns.

Since posting this presentation two days ago, I’ve added some ideas to it, relating to Time and Direct Relationships.

Apologies for re-posting, but this is the conclusion to my series on the new currency online, with special focus on opportunities for media companies.

- What is value in Everyday Life marketing
- A New Business Model, for content that Grows, Connects and Augments
- The Direct relationship Business

Find the Slideshow below, or here.
(If you have already seen the first version the second one might not cache, there should be a yellow ribbon in the upper left corner if you are watching the updated version).