March 20, 2012

Everything’s a platform (sort of)

Nick Farnhill made a point the other week (during a teary SXSW comedown) about there being too much focus on the usual, obvious online channels and platforms.

Platforms with large communities, of course, come with obvious advantages. ‘Emerging’ platforms (Pinterest, anyone?) excite us but get us wondering when the tipping point will make it ‘worthwhile’.

But let’s park numbers for just a minute and look at two examples of alternative ‘platform usage’. First up is this recent promo for the movie, Prometheus:

It’s smart: a character from the movie gives a Ted talk in the year 2023. Of course, the concept of this character talking at a conference could have existed without the TED reference, but it wouldn’t have resonated so much. This TED partnership blurred the lines between the movie’s world and our own, the placement of the video within Ted’s own ecosystem completing the picture. (personally, I would have liked the production to match the feel of a real Ted talk and be less slick/acted, but still)

Next up is Umbro’s launch of the England football kit a couple of years ago:

Yes, Kasabian is a ‘platform’ of sorts too; its own ecosystem, connecting fans to Kasabian content and experiences on various platforms, including this stage. England’s football kit was seen for the first time on the torso of an Englishman (that many young football fans look up to) as he provocatively accepted the boos of a French crowd (England’s next opponents were to be France).

When you consider ‘platforms’, how often do you think about a band, or a brand like Ted? You might think of them in terms of ‘partnerships’, but that’s a subtly different thing.

They both feel closed off as platforms: ‘Ted wouldn’t let us do a fictional Ted video’; ‘Kasabian isn’t going to take our product on-stage’. But the right idea, which also benefits them (Ted cemented as thought leader; Kasabian as an English export in the limelight) opens up unlikely opportunities. And it can also generate huge amounts of noise, first via the passionate communities of those brands, and subsequently because of the novelty of the concept. No platform, of course, need be isolated from others.

Like most conversations, this is a semantic one. You’re probably rolling up your sleeves and getting your comment ready. What is a platform? What is media? Yada yada. We could argue it all day. But how we think about things affects how we consider them. And I’m saying that there are millions of opportunities out there that we won’t see unless we learn to see things differently.

I’ve always liked Made by Many’s line “We make new stuff out of the Internet”.  We make culture out of culture. Or we should. Question is, how much of it are you considering as ingredients?

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March 20, 2012

Spring/summer submissions open for Bad Dollar

Here. Please spread the word. Especially in the States. Where are you, American writers?

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March 15, 2012

On dismantling

I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that I go long periods feeling uncertain what I think about it all: about marketing, business, the web and culture. You know, ‘it all.’ Aren’t strategists supposed to be assertive?

But I’ve decided this is actually a good thing. Certainty is dangerous.

When we think of ‘Creative Strategy’, we think of the creation bit: the creation of principals, ideas, frameworks; shaping ways to see things. But it occurred to me that nowadays I spend more of my time dismantling concepts than I do assembling them. In fact, I think this dismantling has become the most important part of a strategist’s job. Because other people are way too certain about things. Frighteningly, and often mistakenly, certain.

So a creative strategist does not start with a blank canvas. Every project begins with a tangled nest of other people’s preconceptions, out-dated meanings and reckless terminology. This mess needs taking apart before she can even think about building anything meaningful. And the faster the world changes, the more mess builds up.

Before she can assert new ideas, she must help people to unlearn things. She is not just selling a strategy, she is selling new semantics. She must dismantle words, meanings and references; strip things down, isolate the elements and clarify their meaning before reassembling the raw building blocks. If she does it well, they will look brighter and clearer than they did before. The people around her will feel clever. They will understand the thinking vividly, because they will appreciate every nuance of its ingredients correctly.

Not being certain is okay. The trick is to get other people to be less certain too.

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March 13, 2012

Homeless Hotspots and blunt tools

If you’re the sort of person that reads this blog (just a wild guess) then you’re probably also the sort of person that couldn’t fail to hear about BBH’s Homeless Hotspots initiative in Austin. It’s been covered by, well, everyone.

It’s been fascinating to read all the articles and comments around it but if you have to pick one read this, as it gives a good balanced account.

When you read all this stuff it becomes clear that it is in the details where things go wrong. No one has a problem with the concept of homeless people being given the opportunity to ‘run a business’. It’s how it’s pulled off that makes people uncomfortable. In fact, it can symbolically be whittled down to this:

“the shirt doesn’t say, ‘I have a 4G hotspot,’” ReadWriteWeb’s Jon Mitchell points out. “It says, ‘I am a 4G hotspot.’”

I came to the same conclusion, within a couple of milliseconds of hearing the idea. (I also think the name doesn’t help — it places more value on catchiness than on tone)

To aptly adopt the language of the ad industry, you could say: well, that’s just the execution – the intention was good. The problem is that words like ‘execution’ don’t exist in the real world. Everything communicates. And the smallest gesture can convey the values of a deeper-rooted intention. Those small details become bigger than the ‘big idea’ itself, because they congeal in the hive brain of thousands of people, who duly amplify their message.

I’m not going to debate whether this was an altruistic or cynical stunt, but it’s a good reminder that the nuances of execution are more than mere details. We make marketing out of cultural building blocks and they must be handled with extreme care. Use blunt tools and you’ll make a blunt mark.

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March 1, 2012

If this, then that

If this then that just arrived in my life. In its creators’ words:

“Think of all the things you could do if you were able to define any task as: when something happens (this) then do something else (that).”

For example: ‘If the weather drops below 2 degrees, email me the night before’. The options are fairly basic at the moment, but the potential is exciting. It reminded me of a blog post I ‘almost wrote’ (one of those) a few years ago. In it I was going to show this video:

Everything we sense comes from an interpretation of information. What happens is that we get used to certain ways of doing this. Specifically, our five senses divide the world up into five familiar methods of interpreting it. So when someone ‘sees’ with their tongue, it jars a little, even though a familiar thing is happening: the same information (visual in this case) is being interpreted, just by a different operating system.

If this, than that is a perfect articulation of the building blocks of technology. It describes the same laws that Arduino shares (e.g. if the volume/temperature does this, the motor/device does that). When you break things down like this, things are both incredibly simple and mind-blowingly complex at the same time. The principles are simple. The possibilities are increasingly endless.

Every day, new ways of translating information/data into actions/experiences emerge. But more often than not, our human nature (and our pattern-forming brains) gets in the way of our imagination. In the same way we’ve got used to our five senses (five clear ways of translating information), we get used to a handful of familiar formats. If you want to create interesting new experiences, you need to get better at imagining that a tongue might help someone see.

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February 21, 2012

Introducing Bad Dollar

Today, I’m very excited to launch my latest side project: a self-publishing collective called Bad Dollar. The idea is simple: $1 stories about worse ways to spend a dollar.

Being a keen writer and Kindle owner, I’ve been excited about doing something with self-publishing for a couple of years. Bad Dollar is that something. And it’s also the result of another interest of mine.

I’ve also long been obsessed with the idea of making the act of payment an intrinsic part of a product experience. The thing about a universal currency is that it has no meaningful connection to the emotional experience of what you take home. That’s why the financial transaction always feels like a shameful, anodine bolt-on when you buy stuff online.

I thought it would be fun to sell each story for a very small amount; the sort of amount we readily waste on things that have little value (how many times have you bought a can of pop, or a weak coffee in a moment of boredom?). But then to make each story about a far worse way to spend the money. This way, each ebook is an advert for itself: an unquestionably better way of spending the money than in the story it tells.

At first, this was going to be a personal project (I’ve written one of the stories) but I decided to open it up and make it collaborative. So if you’re a writer and want to get involved, why not submit a story.

Hope you like it. And I hope you buy and enjoy just one story. I promise they’re a great way to spend a dollar.

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February 15, 2012

Looking for creative strategists

We’re looking for a creative strategist at the moment. 5+ years experience; a brilliant, creative, smart person. If you’re those things, plus have a great business mind, great ideas, are brilliant at all aspects of strategy and fluent in digital (awful phrase) then send an email to the address below with “Creative Strategist” in the subject. Please don’t contact me directly though.

I sent this image out yesterday (on valentines day). Was only a silly idea, but remarkably reached 40,762 people via a series of retweets. I thought some of you might find that interesting. Do we need recruiters any more? I’ll let you know ;)

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February 11, 2012

Hello Sugru

My brother bought me this:

Sugru is an “air-curing rubber that can be formed by hand. It bonds to most materials and turns into a strong, flexible silicone rubber overnight.”

Like this:

This is my kind of ‘hacking’. Straight out the packet. Now I am searching the house for things to ‘improve’.

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February 11, 2012

Dreamhost shows how to apologise

Saying sorry is tricky for businesses. Some people will tell you not to apologise too much, because it puts you in a weaker position, open to more criticism. Others will do that yucky, over-the-top fake-apologising that they think social media wants them to do. Smileys everywhere. You can be too chummy, too cold, not professional enough and so on. Tricky stuff indeed.

I got an email from Dreamhost today. And I think it’s a great example of getting the tone right. It admits failure without looking incapable, it is frank without being cold, it shows humanity, empathy and finishes with a positive, pro-active tone.

This is of course subjective. You could also argue that no tone of voice can resolve dented confidence – especially regarding security issues – but I still think there are lessons here in the broadest sense. Here’s the first part of the email:

Holy crap guys and girls.

Holy crap.

“NightmareHost” is a term that’s been thrown around by upset customers since the very beginning. Pick a name like DreamHost and you’re pretty much asking for it.

Sticks and stones, right? Not this time. This is the first month where we feel like we’ve actually earned the title. And we’re just as… nonplussed about it as you are.

January was a perfect storm of software deployment issues, critical networking hardware failures, and a security situation that prompted a large-scale password reset.

If you’d like to relive the magic of the last 30 days, January’s troubles were documented in great detail as-they-happened over on our system status blog:

DreamHost System Status

This should not come as much of a surprise – even if you didn’t notice any problems with your site in January, the email we sent out to all our customers was hard to miss.

We let you down – of that we are acutely aware. All I can say is we’re sorry beyond words and we’re working on fixing things – a lot of things. We’re hopeful that once we come out on the other side we’ll again be that gleaming paragon of hosting excellence that you were supposed to be thinking of us as all along.

There’s really nothing funny about January. Sorry.

The good news is we’ve got lots to announce this month, so let’s get this show on the road.

-Brett

 

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February 10, 2012

An amusing look back from 2062

Sometimes it’s easier to get some distance by manufacturing it.

via Percolate

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