How do we get new ideas? By hammering down on old insight, trying to figure out a new way of looking at it? Or going straight to the core and finding a completely new way of gathering knowledge? Where do the good ideas start?

In the new environment, with fresh ideas, tailored to new behaviors in a post digital / post-shift media landscape, the core challenge is not to have brilliant disruptive ideas….

Ideas are the consequence of insight… and insight is the result of harvested knowledge, put back together in a successful way. The challenge today is on us, on the harvesters and the insight magicians – we need new ways of gathering the first glimpses of knowledge, and news ways of connecting them.

If we don’t change the way we gather knowledge and how we connect it, we won’t change the way we think and we won’t change.

Based on the stuff I’ve read and listened to during this last decade (not very scientific :), creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value (Ken Robinson), and ideas are what happens when two or more stored memory fragments in the brain (stuff is stored in fragments – not in videos or novellas) reconnects and creates something new. Now in order for there to be original insight one has to have original fragments, meaning original pieces of knowledge stored around the brain waiting to be picked out by eager ideas.

In a time where the pressure on creativity to contract, expand, change, stay the same and whatever, it all comes down to you – the first spark has as much responsibility to be trenched in originality, maybe more, than anything else – as it shapes the rest of the process.

We might be cautious of forcing new behavior on our participants, because of a reasonable fear that it will be difficult for people to adapt. So we try to find and design solutions inside people’s existing behavioral pattern. But this limits our ability to create better value in our relationships with our participants.

Behavioral psychologist Donald Norman says people adapt to technology; we have always made things that people had to learn – like a doorknob – which attributes new behaviors in their lives. It may have made their lives more practical or better – but they had to learn it.

In the context of company/customer relationships and through the lens of services, Tim Brown, of IDEO, ads to this train of thought:

“Any Service organization has got to get over the idea that a great service is something where the consumer doesn’t have to do anything. That’s a really bad service. A great service is where the consumer actually participates, and where they get drawn in, and where they become part of it.”

People following this blog might have already seen some of my frustration with today’s standards for graphical user interfaces, which I find are almost exclusively based on anything else than the human aspect:

It seems we are at the end of a period where interactive design was mere decoration. Where algorithmic logic and robotic rationality shaped the reasoning behind the interfaces trying to engage people in services, content and marketing. – http://www.180360720.no/index.php/archive/post-digital-design/

As the quote suggests we might be at the end of this era, forced through by a greater understanding for the human aspect as technology is immersing into our everyday life. And as a consequence of new platforms inviting us to interact without mechanical augmentations, such as the mouse and keyboard.

But this should not apply to only stuff happening on a two-dimensional screen, where the ability to involve and engage are limited, we should start thinking how to take our services outside the screen, and into the physical environment.

If one looks at a video game console like Wii, or even the physical augmentation of games like Buzz or Guitar Hero, we can ask ourselves, why aren’t banks, retailers or FMCG doing this? What is the barrier to thinking about physical objects when thinking of digital services?

There are already a range of brilliant and inspiring examples:
(Some of these are just concepts or prototypes)

The Copenhagen Wheel

Phillips – Direct Life

Charmr

The BP Photobooth

Sniff

Is media in the wrong business? Looking at business model imperatives it seems that it is…

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.

I’ve been spending my last evenings trying to articulate an article on the Mobile abilities map commissioned by Mediacoms Blink magazine. Thought I’d share one of the abilities here, and invite you to go visit the Blink site and hopefully look forward to the whole article is published next year.

- A relationship platform
In the words of Kevin Slavin of Area/Code:
“People watch a TV program once, maybe twice, but they can play chess a thousand times.”

This quote has great implications for how we think about marketing. We need to stop asking ourselves which platform is best suited for display advertising, there is no question, traditional media far trumps the ability of online and mobile. We need to ask ourselves; is online and mobile a direct sales medium for our brand? What are the connected platforms best abilities?

It seems we have been blinded by our eagerness to measure direct sale, the ease of analytics engines spewing out statistics on click rates and unique visitors at extremely low cost.

But this has lead us into a haze, where the simplicity of measuring our ability to transport people around the web, has come in the way of seeing the platforms real potential: Establishing lasting relationships with participants through fresh content, conversations, ideas and limitless value.

Online is a relationship platform, not a direct sales platform. It might be an easy platform to measure, but creating the illusion that most products can be sold through a display ad is at its very least misleading.

As the New York Times writes; more and more business models are focusing on subscriptions rather than single sales.

And as more and more products are becoming inherently similar, the unique offering of one business has to come through unique experiences offered through its marketing, rather than the product alone.

The question is: Where can we grow our most important customers? This is the single most important future role of the connected platforms.

Thought I’d share some of the ideas that’s been inspiring me the last couple of days. I’ve added some context to each quote so to show why and/or how I find them valuable and important.

As always, most slides are available under CC-license on flickr.

Update: Please add your voice to the stream and name your favorite idea/quote, and why, as a comment at the end of the post. Thank you.

1. “The inescapable conclusion is that anyone who thinks advertising is the key to sustainable online businesses in any field other than search should think again” – John Naughton

Context: The business and marketing opportunity online is enormous, but only a small niche of it is related to the traditional advertising currency. We need to unlearn the idea that online is universally a media channel, and start looking for real life currency.

2: “ComScore also concluded that a hard core of 8% of all internet users – christened “Natural Born Clickers” – are responsible for 85% of all banner clicks on the web.” – John Naughton

Context: The current prevailing business model for online media is no longer sustainable. I have previously pointed to both the external and internal challenges to the online display advertising format. None of this is news to media companies struggling to survive 09 and 10. But it only proves that we re running out of time, and that the next business model is not an incremental makeover of the current format, but that we need new ideas through disruptive change.

3: “A customer is a novel and stable pattern of human behavior.” -Marketing, Innovation and the Creation of Customers

Context: People are not demographics, and talking about them as if they are makes communicating with them seem much simpler and different than it is. Slapping on an algorithm online does not make your advertising work. It might incrementally increase the effectiveness of it, but still: The ability of a display advert to communicate with an inherently complex human being at any given time is impossible for an algorithm improve. It comes down to this: Demographics hides the real value and effect of the communication – and our measuring models continues to support this model for the worst for companies and customers

4: “The extension of online computer services to all individual in the form of mass information utilities may radically alter society as we understand it today. (1971) - Mass Information Utilities and Social Excellence by Harold Sackman

Context: We knew this almost 40 years ago, why did we forget it? Why did marketing overly focus on digital as a media channel, rather than a set of opportunities for integrating better experiences with the product?

5: “The next phase of media, I’ve been thinking, will be after the page and after the site. Media can’t expect us to go to it all the time. Media has to come to us. Media must insinuate itself into our streams.” - Jeff Jarvis

Context: The removal of destinations and increased attention to streams are increasing. This point is also enforced by amongst others Boyd and Jenkins. The idea of streams is more related to Shirky’s idea of journalism, rather than Murdoch’s business model approach. I reckon both will succeed, as opportunity for the niches seem to be the mantra of the web (long tail = stop looking for universals).

6: “My mind now expects to take in information the way the net distributes it: in a swift-moving stream of particles.” – “the narrative does not simply transmit information, but invites the reader or listener to witness the unfolding of events.” – Ben Macintyre, The internet is killing storytelling

Context: Both the idea of “stream of particles” and “witness the unfolding events” give a clear notion of the abilities of storytelling on connected and participatory platforms. Finally we are starting to see the potential rather than exploiting the interweb as nothing more than a distribution platform for existing stories built for static and traditional platforms.

7: Transmedia describes a new approach to telling stories given:

- TheTrendWatch

Context: Transmedia introduces ideas concerning far more than mere storytelling. It seems to represent the whole notion of how we communicate to each other through connected platforms. In other words: transmedia serves a mirror of our connected lives.

8: “Brands must understand that people have their own personal brands and are not willing to associate with anything lame.” Ajaz Ahmed, co-founder and chairman of AKQA

Context: A wonderful description by Ajaz. We are what we share (as I think Jenkins suggested?). How does your marketing help people tell their friends who they are?

9: “I mean, people spend maybe ten or twenty hours with one of my books. They spend thousands of hours in a gaming universe, and moving through it with a level of awareness and expectation for novelty that people used to approach, say, James Joyce.” – Douglas Rushkoff

Context: Douglas Rushkoff ads yet another voice to the notion that connected and participatory platforms are your best arenas for growing premium participants and customers. As I’ve quoted Kevin Slavin of Area/Code a number of times: “People will watch a tv program once, maybe twice, but you they will play chess a hundred or maybe a thousand times”.

10: “The traffic which comes in from Google brings a consumer who more often than not read one article and then leaves the site. That is the least valuable of traffic to us… the economic impact is not as great as you might think. You can survive without it,” - Rupert Murdoch

Context: I believe that the Internet is the landscape for the niches. And even if News Corp to no extent can be identified as a niche, there is true logic in what Newscorp is doing. The question is not if this will work or not, but rather why it might work. Lets spend our energy exploring this idea, and we will come out less as “free”-idealists, and more as believers in niches.

In the spirit of Planningness and Adrian Ho’s post on his and Rob’s session for creating the planning tools for new-marketing and new-planning:

“We’ll get the planners who come to help us create tools for new-marketing and new-planning. Then we’ll share them with the community on a wiki for everyone else to use, modify and improve.” – Adrian Ho

I’ve decided to share a tool I’ve been meaning to share for quite some time now.

This tool was built together with my former boss, squadron leader of government social collaboration (but a bit digitally shy): Kristin Halvorsen of Objectware. We designed the tool to give us a better overview of the different elements of a scenario/context.

The main idea is to break down the scenario into activities, and then break these activities into actions and these actions down into operations. This gives a wonderfully detailed view of the scenario as it plays out and gives us the ability to identify the opportunity for digital services (red markers). In addition we added descriptions, motivations outputs and more to the model so to include a richer understanding of the context, not just the activities themselves.

You can find a bigger picture of the model on my flickr.com profile, or download a scalable pdf of the whole thing.

I apologize for the second page. The example is just written down in order to give a better understanding of the logic of the whole model, not represent the details of an actual case.

Availability can not be underestimated, two reasons for this:

1. First, a minor mindset thing:
People want to choose their own arenas, not be forced into one because the company finds it sufficient to only make their stuff available in one place.

2. Then the bigger thing:
The missing link between something being a tool and something changing our behavior is its availability (link):

Clay Shirky’s famous quote:
“A revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new tools, it happens when society adopts new behaviors” – Clay Shirky, Us Now

Which, linked with availability, in a tools and services perspective could give this:

“The goal would be to make the service so easily available that it as a technology becomes invisible but contextually becomes valuable.” – Bridging the gap between technology and behavior

Pushing Shirky a bit, we could say that technology is tools, but services are behaviors. And that tools only become valuable services as they are made available within the context where the person naturally adopts them.

- That in order for people to adopt something within their everyday life, it has to be designed based on human and contextual abilities, not just to fit into technological or informational frameworks.

- Or, that publishing stuff only gives people new tools, but if we make sure the stuff becomes available to the point of becoming invisible it will change peoples behaviors in the situation surrounding the product – and that is the interesting shift when marketing stops demanding exclusive attention and starts becoming valuable (which means shareable).

Which, if I’m right, would also be very close to this; Purple Cow, and this, Baked In.

Now there are two types of availability:

1. Being where the niche is (Jonathan MacDonald). The old saying that everything is only one click away on the Internet is outdated. Today, hiding stuff away behind walls of technology or website cartography is as good as not publishing it at all. We have to make the stuff available so that different people in different contexts find their “natural” way to engage with it and become a part of it. (Tim Brown)

2. Design. At a seminar two years ago the brilliant people at TAT presented some insights into the fact that the visual presentation layers has to be tailored to the activity we want the participant to perform – not the economical preconditions of the technological framework. That design is one very important part of a service’s availability, and should not be underestimated.

(Also supported by Michal Tchao, presenting Nike+ at Picnic08: These things already existed, but we designed it in a whole new way, so that people were able to use it.)

This is what I’m trying to say: Just because the stuff is available on a companies website doesn’t mean people will find it or use it. It needs to become available on platforms and arenas that fit into peoples everyday life. Which means that we need to fragment our marketing much more (”light lots of small fires” – Mark Earls), and tailor it to fit into the participant-product context.

Understanding the challenges affecting digital media as a marketing platform introduces some new creative challenges. What we are seeing is very solvable, and they are triggering the start of a much more diverse and interesting time for marketing and advertising.

There are four main challenges disturbing the effect of marketing investments on digital media [DM]. Understanding their abilities, and why they are doing a much better job than DM on doing what DM originally did gives insight into what DM needs to offer in order to regain its value. (Sorry about all the DM’s :o)

The important thing is not to copy these abilities, because that would not be bettering digital media, it would be destroying it. We need to find the solutions within the context of the existing value creation of the digital media body. And this is where it introduces some great creative challenges for strategists and creatives.

The four horsemen in this case can seem very threatening; on the other hand, sometimes innovation needs to be forced by inescapable realities.

The Four Horsemen:

1. Earned media. We are increasingly seeing earned media outperform paid media and becoming the main driver of traffic to marketing initiatives.

2. Middle men. Media needs to build down the barriers between brands and participants online, today the artificial divide media offers are lessening the value compared to brands own initiatives.

3. New behaviors. Increased accessibility to tools and technology not only boosts media consumption, but also changes how the use integrates into our daily lives. Advertising models tailored for a more traditional media consumption looses effectiveness.

4. Brands as competitors. The competition is no longer between digital media channels with similar products; it’s between media channels and the brands own initiatives.

Looking at the larger picture there are already two visible solutions:

1. Media channels need to offer arenas where brands with shared values can build direct relations with the participants through offering deliberate and relevant value over time.

2. Exploring and understanding Media’s new role in online activities – defined by its abilities. And build products that fit better to this part of the online marketing eco-system, or create a new role all together.

Lets look at the horsemen, where are the opportunities?

1. Earned Media, this is simple. Earned media is earned, which means it finds and links to stuff that is valuable. (In effect this isn’t relevant to any advertising campaign that people don’t want to share. On the other hand…). If the advertising is valuable, then the media channel needs to offer the space for where the content resides. If brands build stuff on media channels that earned media links back to, you create a win-win situation. Simple :o)

2. Middle Men, a bit more complex. Media needs to get out of the way. At the same time they need their presence as they are dependent on not becoming invisible themselves. This creates a situation where brands and media need to collaborate. We already know that both brands and media channels are value providers, and it is the interfaces where they create shared value we are looking for. Media opens to such a collaborative opportunity through its development of arenas specially tailored to niche interest and niche brands.

3. New behaviors. Increased accessibility to information-, media-, and social technology first changes our tools, then our behaviors. What we are seeing now are people not only changing how much time they spend with media channels, but also how they use them. The jury is out on this one as the changes in behavior have just started, but both Transmedia, synchronized media activities across platforms and content enrichment through participation carries some very promising and clever inspiration.

4. Brands are the new competitors. As brands can create their own media channels and direct relations arenas, the need to use media as a vehicle for messaging decreases. This means that the competition for marketing dollars is not exclusively between the media channels but between the media channels and the brands own initiatives. What media needs to do is both understand how they can facilitate and increase the value of these arenas, by offering a new property tailored to each brands initiative. Top of mind this might be “free” traffic, but better and more unique values will be more connected to synergies gained from shared values.

Summarizing this into seven simple bullet points, digital media needs to do the following:

1. Start seeing themselves as value providers, not content providers.
2. Understand that advertising moves from just being messaging to becoming something useful and valuable.
3. Start selling long-term initiatives, helping brands build direct relations with people, and connect with them over time.
4. Produce content that is stealable and multipliable.
5. Build a portfolio of unique values – not unique content or formats.
6. Offer clear values as a part of a marketing eco-system, facilitate larger parts of this system.
7. And finally, offer brands marketing abilities that they are unable to offer themselves.

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.)

Studying referring site traffic to some of our online campaigns from 2007 to 2009 a very interesting shift not only seems to be emerging, but is already well under way.

Back in 2007 almost every visitor was either sent via direct traffic, search or paid media. Today this picture has shifted dramatically. Today, earned media is becoming the main source of traffic to our sites. This presents some exhilarating consequences.

There are especially two interesting things about this:

- The first being the fact that it is not necessarily social media that is earned media. In 2008 most of the traffic to one of our biggest campaigns came from earned media sites with no social media components.

- The second is a point similar to one I tried to argue in the presentation Changing the Currency. That attention is becoming less important than value (or worth according to Jenkins). Because in the new marketing economy, where marketing moves from existing inside media channels to becoming an integrated part of our everyday lives. Our activities start relying more and more on people sharing our stuff with others, rather than noticing a display advert inside some form of media.

“Value transports much better in everyday life compared to attention. Nobody spreads stuff because they noticed it, They spread it because it’s meaningful and adoptable.”

The bottom line is this: If the stuff we are seeing with our campaigns is becoming the norm, not an inconsistency. If this isn’t just a social media thing, but a larger media thing. Then strategy and creativity in marketing should be more concerned with creating something of shareable worth, rather than stories that interrupt and generate attention. Because these stories wont spread, and if it doesn’t spread, then Jenkins might be completely right: it’s dead…

Graham Brown over at Mobile Youth just published a video sharing his ideas regarding Earned Media in a bigger context. A good format and a very recommended watch: