this is violence

More on asymmetry and the web

July 26th, 2010 by Justin Spohn

If you haven’t seen it yet, Jay Rosen has an excellent run down of some of the journalistic implications of the newest Wikileaks story around the release of the Afghanistan War Logs.

The whole thing is really interesting and you should read it all, but one of the most interesting for me was his fourth point:

“4. If you go to the Wikileaks Twitter profile, next to “location” it says: Everywhere. Which is one of the most striking things about it: the world’s first stateless news organization. I can’t think of any prior examples of that. (Dave Winer in the comments: “The blogosphere is a stateless news organization.”) Wikileaks is organized so that if the crackdown comes in one country, the servers can be switched on in another. This is meant to put it beyond the reach of any government or legal system. That’s what so odd about the White House crying, “They didn’t even contact us!”

Appealing to national traditions of fair play in the conduct of news reporting misunderstands what Wikileaks is about: the release of information without regard for national interest. In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it. But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new. Just as the Internet has no terrestrial address or central office, neither does Wikileaks.”

I’ve written a couple other times about the asymmetrical nature of the web, but what I find interesting about this is that it show a possible direction for the relationship between traditional, physical organizations and the more abstract digital ones.

How any organization bound by traditional rules of law and codes of conduct operates in a world where organizations not bound by these same rules become increasingly powerful is critical I think. In this case it’s journalism, but the same could apply to any brand.

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Putting the “ugh” in partner marketing

July 22nd, 2010 by Justin Spohn

The idea that Android is to the mobile space what Windows was to the PC space is an idea that crops up from time to time. My take on this is that the relationship between society and technology is too changed and too dynamic to make any one-to-one comparisons like that. Also, I assume Windows will be the Windows of the mobile space, but whatever.

One place though where this seems be to actually, sadly, true is in the rise of bloatware on Android phones. Having worked for a couple different Windows based computer companies, I was always amazed and dismayed at the power partner marketing groups within these companies had to force software and sometimes hardware onto machines.

It’s one of the things that turned to me to Apple.

My guess, and it’s nothing more than that, is that if Google wants to avoid some of the pitfalls that have plagued Microsoft as a brand, they’re going to have to do what Microsoft never did: own the hardware. Obviously the Nexus One was this, but it seems like Google didn’t, or doesn’t, have any long term vision for this product line in the way Apple has had for the iPhone. Without that, it seems like increasingly, the Android experience is going to be what carriers or handset manufacturers want it to be. At this point, I’m not even sure you can differentiate between the OS and the hardware it runs on. To have a coherent experience, I think you’d need to recognize them as intrinsically tied.

In larger sense it points out, for the millionth time, that if you want own your brand experience, you have to own it top to bottom, no matter what you do.

update
Microsoft doing what Microsoft does with these things: After spending a lot of time redesigning Windows Mobile 7 in an “authentically digital” UI, Microsoft had said they would not allow manufacturers to modify it. I thought this was a great move. While still not as good as MS creating it’s own hardware, at least they’d have some sense of what the end user experience would be. Then I read this today.

Oh well.

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We’re #1! Of the Worst!

July 16th, 2010 by Justin Spohn

Oh my god! Another Apple/Antenna blog post! I just made your day. You’re welcome.

Actually – this isn’t really about the iPhone antenna, at least not directly. Rather it’s about this page Apple put up today following their press conference.

Every smartphone has a cellular antenna. And nearly every smartphone can lose signal strength if you hold it in a certain way

I’m not sure what the right answer is for Apple in this scenario, but I feel fairly certain it’s not to say “the iPhone 4: just as bad as every other smartphone!” The page is a list of phones from Blackberry, HTC, and Samsung, along with an iPhone 4 and 3GS showing that iPhone performs no worse than those phones.

Apple is making the case that an iPhone whose phone function is similarly bad to every other phone is still the better device, and this is probably true. But it’s a coldly intellectual response that I’m not sure will resonate for an emotional customer base. For a brand like Apple, I’m not sure what is gained from even talking about other phones unless you’re talking about how much better you are.

It’s a small thing, and likely of no consequence to Apple. I’m not convinced that any amount of back and forth on something like antenna design is going to dissuade people from buy what is, if nothing else, an attractive phone. Frankly, at this point, there just isn’t a product on the market that represents a level of competition to the iPhone to render this kind of mistake meaningful.

Still, it seems strategically sloppy to me.

Also, this.

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And then what?

July 2nd, 2010 by Justin Spohn

Remember a few weeks ago when Nike dropped their commercial for the World Cup and it was the best commercial ever? And then remember when everyone was pointing to the survey showing that Nike and swooped in and stolen all the World Cup buzz from Adidas?

Well – this came out today. I’m always hesitant to reference surveys where I don’t know the methodology, but it does seem to suggest that Adidas’ consistent, multimodal approach is outpacing Nike’s single event.

“Half the game in buzz is ‘fanning the flames’. The Adidas football facebook page, for instance, is now up to over a million fans and they are dropping new content several times a day, all while the average post is generating upwards of 100 comments. At the end of the day, brands need to keep the buzz ball in the air as long as possible – sponsored or otherwise,”
- Pete Blackshaw, executive vice president of digital strategy at Nielsen.

Too often advertising gets confused with marketing, and the result are efforts that focus on single spikes of awareness rather than long-term affinity. Making a commercial like Write the Future is incredibly expensive and while it generated a lot of buzz early on, without support, there are just too many other things happening all the time for it to remain front of mind.

More over, this style of marketing lacks any ability to react or adjust. WK and Nike took a big gamble that least ONE of the players in the commercial making it deep into the World Cup, now it would seem they’re stuck with a commercial that is irrelevant. You’d think both WK and Nike would have learned their lesson after the Kobe/Lebron playoff commercials.

I wonder how much better that budget could have been spent developing projects to actually connect with fans regardless of the outcome of the games rather than a mini-movie. It’s not that great advertising isn’t important, but it’s not a replacement for being there, interacting with your customers and creating the kinds of experiences that can last over time.

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A Myth I Want to Believe

June 25th, 2010 by Justin Spohn

It’s hard for me to reconcile this idea with this blog. Oh well.

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Toast indeed

June 25th, 2010 by Justin Spohn

“For marketers … this is actually turning out, in my view, to be an ad-serving machine”
- Kostas Mallios, Microsoft’s general manager for Strategy and Business Development

Back in April, when Apple announced iAd as one of it’s “tent poles” of iOS4, I was pretty ready to just hold for Windows Mobile 7 and see how that looked. I’d had some time to mess with my sisters Zune HD and between that experience, and some of the Win 7 demos I’d seen, I was thinking maybe it was time to make a switch.

Not so much.

Of all the ways Microsoft could have gone after the iPhone – the hardware, the ecosystem, any of it – they pick iAd? The new platform is going by the name Toast for now and the goal is, as stated above, to turn their phones into “an ad-serving machine.” Good lord.

Like Apple, Microsoft is trying to spin this as a feature:

“For consumers, what this means is basically seamless experiences, seamless social connectivity”

Uh, what? On what planet is advertising a seamless, social experience? Advertising by its nature is about disrupting the users experience. It’s about taking them out of whatever they’re doing and saying “hey! look over here!”

What really takes this platform over the top for me is that while iAd is limited to applications, Toast runs in the main OS, serving ads right to the home screen of your phone.

I’m a bit a stuck record on this, but since we’re all here I’ll say it again: display advertising is an artifact of the print and broadcast worlds. It ignores all the best aspects of the web in exchange for showcasing its most boring. Worse, its left huge sections of the digital content economy in shambles, resulting stupid pagination schemes, and user hostile page layouts all designed to squeeze in one more ad. It’s bizarre to me that here on the cusp what should be the next wave of connected systems two companies that should be leading the charge are playing last decades game. I was genuinely hoping Microsoft would come into the mobile space with Win 7 and give Apple something to think about. But if this is how they’re going to do it, what’s the point?

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Things I Liked – week 4

June 18th, 2010 by Justin Spohn

Where Americans Are Moving
Apparently I like maps. Last week it was Flickr maps showing resident and tourist photo locations for various cities around the world. This week it’s migration patterns for Americans. What I like about the map is that you can pretty quickly see which cities are growing, and which are shrinking based on the over all color surrounding it.

Portland is, not surprisingly to any one who lives here, growing.

Detroit, not so much.

Creative Failure
A big part of working at Fight is trying things out. We try things all the time, most of them don’t work out exactly right the first time. The important thing for us to understand why they don’t work out, make changes and try again. With that in mind, I loved this interview with Adam Lisagor about the role of failure.

I was first made familiar with Adam Lisagor from his video work with Put This On, where he showed me how to tie my shoes. Yeah, I’m serious.

Good is Good
Last August I wrote a post defending the role of the web and social media as a functional component of peoples social interactions. I lead it off with this quote from the movie Heathers.

“People will look at the ashes of Westerburg and say, ‘Now there’s a school that self-destructed, not because society didn’t care, but because the school was society.’”

I was reminded of that when I read this charming little anecdote about a four year old playing Grand Theft Auto. Video games take a lot of heat for corrupting our society and our children, but reading this, it’s hard for me not to wonder if it’s the games doing the corrupting, or society.

“He was having a blast racing from point to point, picking up people in need, and then speeding off to Las Venturas Hospital. During one of his life saving adventures, he passed a fire house with a big, red, shiny fire truck parked out front. He didn’t want to let his passengers down, so he took them to the hospital and then asked if I could guide him back to the fire truck.

Getting behind the driver’s seat of the fire truck awarded him with the most fun he had while playing Grand Theft Auto. With sirens blaring, he chased down the first red dot on the map. As he approached a car engulfed in flames he began showering it with the truck’s water cannon. Fire after fire, he extinguished them all.”

Misreading the Twitter Revolution
Khoi Vinh posted a link to this article on the Foreign Policy site looking at the reality behind last summers events in Iran. As someone who loved the idea of Twitters role in building a revolution in Iran, I found this article not disheartening, but rather deeply fascinating. Getting insight into the realities of what happened, and what didn’t, helped to reconcile the disconnect between the story we got here in the U.S. and the eventual outcome, or lack thereof, in Iran.

Home Star
There is a lot of conversation right now about the role average Americans, or more precisely our use of fossil fuels, played in the gulf oil spill. Regardless of where one falls on the blame scale, I think most reasonable people agree that this is another sign that we all need to take a more proactive approach to how we use energy.

Good magazine had a great post this week about the Home Star program. Having spent the last few months working on energy saving programs for a client, it’s amazing how effective some really small, and really cheap, changes can be. Especially compared to the cost of cleaning up after ourselves.

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Culture for Change

June 17th, 2010 by Justin Spohn

One of the reasons I haven’t been writing here as much is because I’ve been writing a couple articles for other sites. One of those is part of a multi-part series for WebTrends on iterative marketing. Part two is now live.

If you missed it – part one is here.

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Things I Liked – week 3

June 11th, 2010 by Justin Spohn

Locals and Tourists
Turns out I’m not the only one who likes to pictures down in Brooklyn Bridge Park.

Locals and Tourists is a great little project by Eric Fischer doing just what it says: plotting the locations of photos taken by…locals and tourists in cities around the world.

Locals and Tourists #22 (GTWA #34): Portland

It’s interesting to me to see the geography of the cities become so visible through the data. Even more so to see the notion of “what’s interesting” about each city described through the cameras of people who live there and those that don’t.

The Christian Science Monitor’s Digital Strategy
Last week I mentioned the upstart Texas Tribune as an example of journalism alive and well online. This week I found this article by Folio about The Christian Science Monitor and their efforts to understand how they exist and what they mean in a digital world.

While many other, far bigger, organization continue to try to shove a square peg into a round hole, the CSM took a holistic approach, looking at their entire ecosystem and not just looking at their digital footprint. By trying to understand not just what they wanted as a business, but what their customers wanted, they have been able to design a complete system of inter-related publications, both on and off line. This quote from the beginning of the article shows their efforts to understand what they mean in the larger news/internet world:

“Our approach is a composite of the learning economy—we’re serving people without a lot of time, who are trying to understand complex issues quickly, and contribute to a solution. As one guy here says, our mission is ‘Help me get smarter, faster.’”

Kites and Oil
I continue to love seeing the way people use ever increasing access to ever shrinking technology to solve real world problems. I wrote early on about CubeSats and Make, and a couple weeks ago about the Afrigadget Blog. Living a world of Tivo’s and iPhone’s it’s consistently refreshing to see technology stripped down to it’s basic elements and used to serve an individual’s needs.

This week brought this article in the Times about Grassroots Mapping, a project originally designed to help communities create maps, now focusing on documenting the gulf oil spill. With BP trying hard to exert control on information getting to people about the ongoing devastation in the gulf it’s great to see ingenuity and simple technology outsmarting them and allowing everyone to see what’s actually happening.

Finally, I really want to do this to Marco.
Awesome.

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The Steak is so Cliche

June 6th, 2010 by Justin Spohn

My friend (and former Fight-er) Dave Allen just emailed me a link to this article and asked me what I thought about it.

Here is how I responded:

I think the author is well intentioned, and in a lot of ways, dead on about the issues of advertising online. My issue is that I don’t think fixing advertising is going to be what ultimately helps brands online.

My view is that advertising isn’t just a tactical approach, it’s also a way of thinking. It has fundamental notions of how the marketplace works and how brands relate to their customers. Advertising is about punctuating one narrative stream with another, something that doesn’t exist online. There is no stream online. Agencies, I think, often underestimate the power of the hyperlink. It defines the way people conceptualize the web, and it’s non-linear.

The web has fundamentally changed this brand/customer relationship though, and presented brands with opportunity to not just talk about themselves, but to actually provide a real and meaningful experience rather than just the promise of an experience at some later time. If a brand wants to know what the future is, or an agency for that matter, it’s not contained in the mindset of advertising, rather it’s in the world of product and service design.

There is a reason restaurants don’t advertise their food IN THEIR OWN RESTAURANTS. So much better to give them a great meal with great service once they’re already there. The web is a brands restaurant, the people are there. Give them something to love.

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