In a recent panel featuring four of Norway’s most prominent CMOs, there was an agreement amongst several that their brand strategy was increasingly becoming an innovation strategy rather than a communications strategy.

This is only logical, as a consequence of the changes we have been seeing in the media consumption and digital communication landscape the last years:

- As the cost of having a story adopted through media – in a landscape of increasingly fragmented media consumption – is getting more and more expensive.

- As digital communication has been recalibrated to create products, not campaigns, experiences, not stories.

- As products and services has become something that updates, changes, tailors, perfects and redesigns itself digitally without the “physical” costs of scale, distribution etc.

What the four CMOs are saying is that the story and the media platform is no longer seen as the best place to invest if the goal is to create a unique experience that people value.

This is not a bad thing; it is a very good thing. For agencies adverse in digital communication and the design of services this is the best thing that could happen. No longer are they at the helm of traditional communication, trying to emulate the effect created on analogue surfaces. Finally we are seeing what digital is offering that is new and interesting outside the traditional formats of messaging and stories.

Companies are both tiring from investments in touch points that are disconnected from the product experience and seeing that marketing and brand strategy is an integrated part of the product design.

Companies are seeing that massive investments in the brand promise is of little value if the product itself fails to deliver.

- And, the fact that historically brand communication was invented as a cheaper alternative to redesigning the product itself. Which no longer seems to be the case.

- From promise to proof
According to Amanda Mooney what companies need to start doing is deliver on the promises that they have been serving their customers in the past:

“… the single most powerful, innovative, complex and challenging new idea in business is this: Helping our clients pivot our business, to be able to live up to all of the things they’ve already promised in the past…” – Amanda Mooney, Manager, Shanghai Digital Practice for Edelman China

Digital is helping us rethink our business / brand strategy. From promise to proof, from stories to services, from disconnected to integrated.

In several categories businesses are decreasingly meeting their customer through physical locations. Meeting places are being moved online, and it’s in these that the business is given the opportunity to design experiences that helps them live up to the promises delivered in the past – and present.

If the cost of redesigning the product experience becomes lower than the cost of having the market adopt our storytelling. If the product can communicate its own story and media starts failing in conveying its adapted version – then the foundation of brand and communication strategy is shifting, and we are moving brand strategy to an innovation strategy and away from a media strategy.

- Do we fail to see the extent of what communication is / has become? Here are 10 projects that should / hopefully would change / broaden our idea of what communication is.

Here are 10 projects that should / hopefully would change / broaden our idea of what communication is:

1. The Copenhagen wheel
The Copenhagen wheel is a perfectly designed combination of a lot of separate ideas, that collectively demonstrates the potential in modern communication. It offers both immediate interest and value through personal benefits in the context where it is used, but also ads a layer of communal value – and taking us one step further in creating the connected cities of the future. It’s an exceptionally complicated idea made into something people could understand and want immediately.

2. Life of George
LoG is a small initiative exploring the interface between technology and reality. It has been extremely well concepted and designed. This might not be an eye-opening revolution, but it is a very well thought through commercial mass-produced product. It has been through all the barriers and ended up as something that could easily, and hopefully, be adopted by the mass (iPhone-owning) market.

3. Sniff
Sniff is only a prototype, but demonstrates with beauty the life an inanimate object can have as soon as it takes on some form of well designed behavior. There has been digital technology inside toys for tens and tens of years, but Sniff approaches the idea of what technology is, not what it outputs.

4. Nokia Push Snowboarding
The way the technology has been implemented into the culture of the sport it is trying to augment is the most impressive feet. Nokia and Burton have pushed the snowboarding culture first – and then designed itself to it – which could not be said for a lot of other commercial technology…

5. Nest the learning thermostat
The objects learns by recording our behavior – and calculating something on top of that recording. Objects are still dumb, but in a very intelligent way. The Nest is an example of everyday appliances becoming a second brain, and a demonstration of how digital objects have gone from furniture you hide away in small offices upstairs to objects you display and want to talk about.

6. Up by Jawbone
How does a wristband with no screen and no sound communicate with its carrier? A vibration in itself says nothing, the interesting thing is how we learn what the vibration means in different contexts. This is a perfect example of the rich unexpectedness of communication – the one without the spoken/written language – and how quickly we adopt and learn new forms of communication.

7. Zeebox
Zeebox is one of several new products being launched to augment the TV experience. Behind it lies the concept of increasing the value of something local by connecting it to the rest of the world – through a parallel system. In this case the linear TV experience. Now any idiot could do that, but it is the tools by which they try to achieve the connection which is brilliant. Zeebox is a first generation concept in this arena, but demonstrates the potential of what is to come.

8. Waterpebble
Ideas don’t have to be big and shiny, they can be small and solve minute problems. It’s the aesthetic of the idea that is the important thing: How does the mechanic of such a small thing change the dynamic of something bigger… Now, if they only could connect it to the Internet…

9. The Wattson
The Wattson gives us access to things that previously where invisible and not present in our consciousness. Just because we can’t see things and talk about them doesn’t mean they aren’t important. The Wattson gives us access to a layer of reality that we haven’t been able to see before but which is highly real and important.

10. Nokia kinect
Now the first nine examples have been impressive, most of them include sensors and things which gives us access to a part of reality that we haven’t explored before. But it doesn’t stop with the invisible data… The next generation handsets gives us access to the layer of communication that emerges as objects becomes haptic and kinetic, opening a whole new world of interaction and behavior, through the sensitivity and richness of touch and force.

In conclusion:

“in the future we will communicate with identities, if these are people or objects doesn’t really matter” – 180360720.no

“Our goal is to first connect all the rabbits, and then connect everything else” – Rafi Haladjian

This is the second part of my presentation The next 80%, find the first part here:
Part 1: Introduction

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Let med demonstrate with a couple of examples how even minute tasks get unnecessarily complicated online.

Example A:
Comoyo is an Internet based content service. The first thing that happens as I fill in the form is that it refuses the password that I use on 95% of all my Internet accounts. Why would you do that? Why would you start of by inviting people to a service they don’t know what is, offer them a log in and the first thing you do is just crash the whole process? If the system is to complex then redesign the system. We are putting to much of the responsibility on to people, instead of IT.

Example B:
This is the beta version of my Internet bank, the picture is from a sneak preview they offered their customers. Now, I have a bank because I need help doing bank-things. Most often (95% of the time) this means checking my account or paying some bills. The best thing the bank can do is offer me a service that makes banking better. But they don’t. Approximately 15% of the interface is spent on banking, the rest of it is navigation, CRM or a media platform that wants to sell me stuff I don’t need. They give me everything except the actual banking service that I should be demanding (people are just to polite and don’t know that their experiences are being robbed online. In the words of Richard Saul Wurman, the creator of TED: “I would have designed a much better Google interface, it’s not difficult.”).

Now, the reason the Internet isn’t simple, is because of technology. We are treating online as something complicated, something that doesn’t work, something we don’t understand. – And my question is: how much do we really need to understand?

Take a look at other pieces of technology: bread, asphalt, language, bicycle, chairs, door knobs. Now do you think about these things as technology? They work and they are, no questions asked. But this is not the case with the Internet, why?

Understanding the nuts and bolts of the Internet is as important to a business as understanding the complexities of the mechanics that goes on inside the door when we twist the door nob.

Unfortunately the fog of technology diffuses the process of building something meaningful by trivializing the discussions and spending to much time focusing on irrelevant details. When we think of the Internet we are not thinking business models, identity and brand value. We are thinking users (what is a user?), HTML5, responsive design (why would you offer the same service in every situation?), apps or clicks.

The Internet is fascinatingly simple, if we just stop referencing it as technology and start thinking of it as a loaf of bread – because our customers already are.

People have an adoption mindset and culture, contrast to companies who calculate and protect.

As businesses are ready to settle for the first generation Internet, people are already adopting the second and third. This has created a gap that the presentation tries point out, and help corporations understand what online has become and where it is headed.

This is the first of several parts:
- The introduction, which is mainly concerned with stating the gap between people and corporations.

2. The gap: 80% of what Europeans do online today didn’t exist in their lives five years ago. – Microsoft 2010

3. Think about that, five years ago most people didn’t have either Facebook or smart phones in their lives.
- The Internet was nothing but a wall of web pages that you had to visit – with almost physically cumbersomeness. Hyper linking was the most impressive thing it did.

- Phones where something you used to talk to people, the buttons where numbers or letters – a button did nothing more than present a digit. Today buttons are applications, one push and the phone becomes a gaming platform, a social network or tool for locating you in the world.

Imagine the leap that people, you and me included, have made these last years.

4. This is the thing with people, they are crazy, and unpredictable … they are adopters, they are curious and they are looking for opportunities.

5. And this is where businesses are failing…

6. Because, polar to people, business is static and predictable. People are dancers and companies are calculators.

Businesses take steps into worlds that are already known and explored, or incrementally tries to improve something that might already be good enough or uninteresting.

If you want to see the future, you need to look at people – not businesses. And so we need to understand why people today, you and me included, are generations ahead of companies when it comes to exploring and taking advantage of connected technology…

7. Ask this question: Has corporations adopted new habits with the same eagerness and interest as people?

And why hasn’t it?

Is it because they don’t want to, or is it because their way of thinking when it comes to online is something completely different from the way people are thinking about and approaching online?

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8.Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com says: “We are at the light bulb stage of the internet”.

We are in the first generation of online services, and if the current generation of businesses are struggling with understanding the opportunities in this generation, then it’s hard to imagine how they will cope with the changes coming in the second, third and fourth generation.

Thanks to Olaf Molenaar for filming it all on his Flip camera and uploading it to youtube.com.

The videos used in the presentation can be found here.

This post is a collection of videos from this talk.

We are at the lightbulb stage of broadband.
(View the whole video Networked Society, on the brink by ericssonmultimedia here. )

Lego life of George

“It’s about the world talking to the world through these sets of networks” – Kevin Slavin.
(Find the uncut version on PSFK.com)

The Copenhagen wheel

Bakertweet

Nokia X Burton, Push Snowboarding @ US Open

2011 Hyundai Equus Commercial – iPad ownersmanual

Pioneer 2011 AV Receivers – iControlAV2

The following article is published on popsop.com.

There exists an interesting misunderstanding regarding the goal of digital / connected technologies – the ones that articulate themselves into utilities, applications or services. The claim being that although the goal of spending more time with people are interesting to most brands, the success of such a strategy will be limited as people already have enough things to fill their time with.

The argument is nothing but a perfect example of trying to put new ideas into old contexts. Limiting our perspective and seeing new technology as nothing more than a more efficient or effective version of old technology – in this case; media technology.

This “media mindset” is a one dimensional interpretation of marketing initiatives seeing them only as communication, stories or content – all three time consuming, and all three demanding exclusive attention to work.

(This is another misunderstanding of digital – we should spend more time thinking of things that are without screens rather than things that are on them).

This mindset is all well and good and runs like clockwork inside the media world. But, connected technologies is not a more efficient or effective way of getting peoples attention in the media landscape; it’s a new way of offering increased quality to experiences that are shared between the brand and the consumer.

(It is important to differentiate between “digital” – which is nothing more than a material technology on par with paper, plastic or the TV, and “connected technologies”. The latter is what happens as “digital” things and machines get connected to the Internet, gaining new abilities such as; real-time, synchronous, the cloud, sophisticated algorithms and memory, recording device etc. These abilities open up to a whole new universe of brand and marketing opportunities that we need to start exploring. Retail and in-store definitely no exception!)

The whole idea that the goal of a marketing activity is to spend more time with people, because time equals message penetration has past its expiration date.

Today we’re not necessarily working with media models we are designing the arenas and the experience around the use of products or interactions with the brand. Sometimes the goal of these interactions is not that they take longer and demand more attention, but might even be for people to spend less time with a brand and create less interference.

Let me present you with an example:
To a frequent business traveller, spending valuable minutes at hotel checkout waiting in line behind hotel-“amateurs” or foreign tourists with translation difficulties might create a bad and unnecessary experience that will reflect on the product and the brand. In this case a smart service offered to the hotels most important business travellers would be the ability to checkout via their mobile when they are already in their cab on the way to the airport. This offers a shorter, but more qualitative experience (they don’t even have to hand in a room key, the mobile application is the key).

Our branding, marketing and digital autopilot is programmed to create ideas designed to have people spend more time with the brand. Time, which sometimes can be an enabler of other success criteria, suddenly becomes a prerequisite or even a goal in itself. But time is often irrelevant and sometimes counter productive to what the marketing investment tries to achieve. Our autopilot has suddenly turned time into a success criteria or a goal in itself and we start to ignore our real job; to increase the perceived quality of the experience, and by that both increasing the likelihood someone will use, and return to our offer (goals of which time is not concerned).

In other words:
Brand currency, the value generated from our investments, is not equal to spending more time with people, but making the time they have to spend with us more valuable.

Traditional advertising and design has one goal: to deliver a promise, either based on what the consumer wants to become, or what the brand wants to become. All traditional marketing, advertising and design is built around this core idea: the transmission of an idea from a sender to a receiver. Inside this mindset digital offers some abilities that are new, and speeds up some abilities that are old. But in essence digital is nothing more than a technological option – a choice between newspaper, billboard, TV, radio or internet ++.

Now digital doesn’t change any of that; it doesn’t say that all this old stuff doesn’t work anymore – because it does. But online is not digital and online changes the game; it does something much bigger: It creates a whole new field within the concept of marketing.

It has found and mended a hole in the marketing structure that has been there since the beginning og marketing.

Which is delivering the proof – to the promise.

The short black and white version:
Traditional marketing delivers a promise to the consumer, but has never been able to deliver on this promise – this responsibility is handed to the product and business design team.

But, this has all changed – and we haven’t been able to see it, because we are stuck in a vernacular describing what we create as platforms and technology rather than basing it on its ability.

We are not creating websites, applications or services – this is the technological articulation of what we do that hides the insight and understanding of how we ad new value to the marketing platform from the discussion.

What online has done is something much bigger than offer new extensions to media, or surfaces – it’s creating presence – in peoples lives – we are designing and building meeting places between the brand and the customer. Equal in importance to the product design itself.

Online has added a new third to the marketing universe; the ability for marketing to start proving on its own promise – and that is an immensely powerful idea.

Now, I’m not critical of important discussions on HTML5 vs. Flash, web vs applications or social media versus media. But, when these become the hottest topics in our industry we are working backwards into the future. We need to stop talking as if we are mini-versions of advertising, design or IT and carve out our own niche. We need to understand the context of presence and proof against media, surface and promise.

We are standing at the edge of something completely new – and what we need to do is start talking with the right words and ideas – or we will still talk and think about websites, mobile, digital advertising or service design five years from now – which is not our vernacular, but theirs.

This argument purposefully leaves out relevant details and references that nuances my argument. My goal is not to be correct, but to ignite some thoughts so that we collaboratively can understand online better.

The presentation tries to look into how we measure success online today and if the limitations connected with this is in fact limiting us from following our customers as they develop and change how they interact with brands, each other and situations online.

And, as always, find all the slides online at www.flickr.com/photos/everythingnewisdangerous.

The presentation is work in progress, any comment, request, suggestion or critique is much appreciated.

Also, much attribution is needed to Kevin Kelly and his newest book What Technology Wants which I was reading at the time and reference a lot in the talk.

Find the full manuscript of the talk here.

Find the video on http://vimeo.com/28830253.

1. How do we create members instead of customers?
The obvious question is; why are so many companies treating their obvious members as customers (example: people paying a monthly mortage, or gym, mobile etc. are sold to once and then left on their own..) And, why aren’t companies with single sold products exploring the more financially salient route of subscription models and memberships?

2. How do we create loyalty nobody can take from you?
How do we build services and business models with such valuable features other companies aren’t able to match?

3. How do we deliver on our brand promise?
How do we utilize the one identifiable and unique thing about our company in order to differentiate ourselves in everything we do?

4. How do we earn money doing things that didn’t exist five years ago?
People have job titles that didn’t exist five years ago, people are doing things online they didn’t know existed five years ago – are businesses reflecting this trend?