Ever since July 22nd, about the time the Old Spice campaign ended, I’ve been tracking their twitter stats. How many people they follow, how many people follow them, tweets, and so on. Why track this? I’m not really sure other than that I found the campaigns transition from T.V. to the web unique and I wanted to see what the tail looked like. While I think things like ROI are critical, without continuous access to sales numbers all the industry talk about the role this campaign played in that regard is really just blog fodder. It’s fun, but sort of pointless. What really interested me was the nature of the campaign – how it existed in the context of contemporary advertising.

I’m not an analyst of any sort, and until I heard about Dean’s presentation, I hadn’t done anything other than keep a daily (or nearly daily) tally of a handful of numbers. Hearing about the PAF event though, I decided to dump them into a spreadsheet and see what, if anything, was there. Here’s what I got:

From 07.23.2010 through 08.29.2010 the Old Spice Twitter account looked like this
They followed 719 people
They had 116,848 people following them
They were on 3,669 lists
They tweeted 1859 times
Note: that tweet number is slightly odd though because on 08.26 they had 1909 tweets.

If you’re curious what that looks like – here you go:

Interesting.

Much of the conventional wisdom around brands on the web these days centers on the notions of communication and reciprocity. The idea here is that if a brand wants to be successful within the context of the “social web” they’ll need to act a lot more like people and a lot less like companies. But looking at the Old Spice campaign – I have to question some of that.

It’s worth noting that the Old Spice account follows back less 1% of the people that followed them. Also, their rate of communication is about .8 tweets per day. At the same they have about 1% daily increase in followers – about 1,000 per day. Basically – @oldspice was looking a lot like a celebrity account: lots of followers, very little following. This had me wondering if people were following Old Spice the brand, or Isaiah Mustafa, the spokesman? Further confusing the issue though is that unlike those accounts, there isn’t much human connection coming through the account. It’s mostly humorous non-sequitors, and even then, there’s not much of that being produced.

In fact – nearly the entire catalog of bi-directional communication, supposedly the point of brands in the social space, happened in a very short window right before the end of the campaign. This was the time when Wieden was staged their famous video twitter responses.

And here is where I get to the confusing nature of this campaign. For a campaign that’s been regarded as the best social media campaign of the year, and even the best web campaign of the year – it doesn’t look a lot like what we’ve assumed social media and the web look like: It’s not interactive, it’s not communicative, and the one technical boundary it pushed – the video twitter responses – was a boundary of traditional media, not digital. To the extent that there was engagement at all, it was limited to the terms of the brand: they choose a tiny fraction of the communication directed at them to respond to, and then retained absolute control over the tone and length of the “conversation.”

In the end, this all sounds a lot like a different medium: T.V.

Now, it seems like lately, “T.V.” or “broadcast” has become a sort of dirty word in digitally minded circles, but that’s not at all how I mean it here. But everything I’ve written to this point raised a big question for me: was the Old Spice campaign one of the best social media/web/interactive campaigns ever, or, was it actually the perfect example of what a post-web T.V./broadcast/traditional campaign should be?

If it’s the former, than I think we in this industry need to reexamine our canon of what makes great digital advertising – because we seem to have gotten a lot wrong.

If it’s the later, than I wonder if this isn’t an accidental (or intentional?) example of just how effective the internet and the web have been in totally blurring the lines where content lives and instead leaving us to focus entirely on the nature of the content – in this case, traditional “lean-back” content using Twitter as a distribution channel.

BPGlobalPR
Sometimes people ask me about the name of this site. The answer is projects like BPGlobalPR. BPGlobalPR is a perfect example of the asymetrical nature of competition on the web.

In a time when corporations seem able to actively limit journalism, BPGlobalPR may be one of the few points of commentary on the matter generating any large scale response. I’ve read that it was the images of dead sea animals and destroyed landscapes that fueled a national boycott of Exxon after the Valdez. Absent that, this may be the best we can do. Without a press free to report on the actual situation, this stands as a small beacon of hope that multi-national corporations and their PR firms don’t control everything just yet.

Lost
Yeah, okay, so I just yesterday wrote a post about Lost as a cautionary tale for designers. I stand by that – as a product, Lost ended up being pretty terrible. But there was a reason I watched it for 6 years – aspects of the show were also pretty amazing. So much has been said, it seems silly to write more, but I can’t think of a program that has done more to layout a map for what narrative television could be in a post-internet world than Lost. Whether it was their consistent usage of DVR easter eggs, ARG’s; their direct response to conversations with fans written into the show, or their usage of other non-connected mediums to tell the meta-story (how many books were referenced in the show?); Lost stands a milestone in post-modern T.V. narrative.

The Texas Tribune
You could be forgiven for believing there are just two sides to the problem of journalism and the web – pay wall, and no pay wall.

The fundamental question these two sides actually seek to answer, though it’s rarely stated as such, is: “How do you maintain exactly the same business model you’ve always enjoyed in technologically and culturally changed landscape?”

The answer is becoming increasing clear to a lot of people: you don’t.

Enter the The Texas Tribune an online, non-prift news site started about 6 months ago to try a different path. This is from their About page:

“Because the Trib’s focus is exclusively public policy, politics, and government, there’s nothing to distract us from the task at hand. Because we’re non-profit, we don’t have to sacrifice our mission at the altar of commercial considerations. Because we’re nonpartisan, we’ll give you the straight skinny—the facts—without an agenda or bias. Because we work for you, the people of Texas, not shareholders or other corporate overlords, we’ll never get our priorities out of whack.”

The Texas Tribune I think makes clear a needed distinction in the conversation about the future of journalism: are we fighting to save journalism, or fighting to save profits? Looking the Tribune, I’d say journalism is alive and well.

The Tribunes 6 month report card

AfriGadget
This morning I’ve seen a bunch of tweets about a rumored update to Apple TV. Google just announced their version, Google TV. In a couple weeks we’ll all be seeing the next iPhone. For many of us, innovation can add new levels of convenience, new ways of creating, or new ways of communicating. Working in marketing, innovation can quickly become something viewed in terms of new “brand opportunities.”

The AfriGadget blog reminds me on an almost daily basis that for a lot of people, innovation is a matter of life and death. This isn’t capacitive touchscreens, or 1000fps cameras, its car batteries, broken mirrors, and old bikes, each of which is having profound impacts on peoples lives.

Okay – so that’s only 4 things, but it’s my first try. 5 next week for sure.

Two quick stories:

Story One:
I think I had a fairly common high-school experience: I got by okay, though I was not what one would call “popular”, I was an average student, and for the most part I found the U.S. school system, like most social systems, to be designed to support the personality types of those who designed it. I did had a private studio in the basement of the school where I spent about 1/3 of my days doing “self-guided” (read: alone) industrial design study. While I can’t say high-school was the torment for me it was for some of my friends, I would say it was decidedly NOT the “best years of my life”.

Story Two:
In 2000 I found a design website called Extra Lucky run by then San Jose based designer Joe Stewart. After exchanging a couple emails, I began writing for the site, and at the same time started a near daily conversation with Joe that has lasted almost a decade, through his time in New York during and after September 11th, though two cross country moves, my engagement, his first child, and next week my participation in his wedding. Important to note though: we’ve been in the same room exactly 5 times in those 10 years.

I bring this up in response to several articles about or around Vincent Nichols, the Catholic Archbishop who recently described the social web as leading to “transient relationships”, “dehumanizing” community life and, causing a general loss of “social skills”. His commentary came up after the suicide of Megan Gillan who overdosed on sleeping pills after being bullied on the social network Bebo. What’s troubling to me though about the Archbishops position, and those that support him, is that by focusing on the social network specifically, or the web broadly, they’re hoisting up a convenient straw-man at the expense of actually helping anyone while trying to tear down the a major support system for a lot of people.

In George Pitchers article in the Telegraph he asserts that there is something fundamentally different and fundamentally less human now in society than we were pre-internet. But while it’s undoubtedly true that the world is different, I’m not sure we can honestly say it’s any less human. The logic here assumes that relationships we have in person are somehow intrinsically more profound than those we have online. Anyone who’s worked for any length of time in advertising, where “friend” gets tossed around with great freedom, knows this is not the case. More importantly to the subject at hand, anyone who’s ever been to high school also knows this isn’t the case. So while I met my finance in person, in high school, most of my communication with my actual friends is over IM these days. I’ve met more people face to face that I first connected with on Twitter this last year than I met total in the previous 3 or 4. I’m just not sure we can point to any specific coloration between relationships online and off in terms of quality. Though my feeling is that this has less to do with technology and much more to do with our notion of “friend”. In Andrew Keen’s article Social Media Can Open Our Eyes to the Value of Physical Life Robert Scoble says of the effects of the web on society “What we are really yearning for is intimacy”. But has that ever not been the case? I have to wonder if we what ascribe to social media, or the web isn’t a new problem at all, but rather something we’re only just openly talking about, perhaps ironically, because of the social web. Was there ever a time when we didn’t yearn for realness? If we’re to look back fondly on a time before the web, don’t we also have to acknowledge the very dark, isolating nature of those times too? History has a funny way of remembering the winners, those for whom the system worked, while quickly forgetting those that didn’t succeed, those that got lost along the way.

Ultimately though, I wonder if the Archbishop is even asking the right question. Whether or not social networking, or the web, Bebo, or any of it is “dehumanizing” us is moot. For better or worse, this is a major component of human communication now; and the reality is that what it provides isn’t a less human relationship but rather a different type of relationship, and for many people, a better type of relationship. I say better because for the most part human social systems are designed by people for whom society already works and everyone else either learns to deal with it or gets left behind. The web has been the exception. It has become the place where those who might have stayed in the corners can and do have a voice, and more importantly, can create social systems that make sense to them. So while the relationships developed online might not look real, or useful, or complete to those getting by with society the way it is, they are clearly tremendously valuable to many people and by understanding this and acknowledging it rather than demonizing it, we can turn our attention to helping those who actually need it rather than wasting our time lamenting technology.

A lot of people will point to last night as a triumph of social media, or of Twitter, or Facebook. And they’ll be wrong. Last night was a triumph and a stark reminder of the power of brand. Any one can get on Twitter and pitch their product or give away iPhones, but how many brands could tell a hand full of individuals about an event and have 4000 people show up, at mid-night, and then when you’re an hour late, and no one can ever hear you, still view it as a success?

So next time you’re in a meeting talking about your ‘consumers’ and ‘targets’ and ‘units moved’, consider the power of ‘fans.’ Are you treating your customers like they’re fans? Do you ask yourself “Is this tweet actually interesting?” or “Is this a great experience?” or “Am I making this website to actually benefit my customer?” Being on Twitter or Facebook or anything like that doesn’t mean that you now relate to your customers. Relating to your customers comes from just that: relating to you customers, as humans, not cash machines. There is no short cut. There is no technology solution.

Trevor Warren said on Twitter

“Right now 1000s of social marketers are licking their chops wondering how to recreate the #Chappelle event for some new juice shop.”

I’m sure he’s right, and this is the sad part of all this. The burn this event had through Twitter and Facebook had nothing to with ‘social media marketing’ and everything to do with a passionate core of fans and a brand that has created great experiences for years. There is literally nothing you can do on Twitter to make 4000 people show up at midnight for your event. There is no advertising in the world that will fix a broken experience. What you can do is start today asking “Is this is a great experience for my customer? Will this make them a crazy, ravenous fan?”

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s statement from Philosophical Investigations is a sort of heartbreaking realization for anyone who has ever bargained with their pets, as I have, offering all sorts of rewards if only they would admit that they can speak. At it’s core though, this idea also rings fundamentally true to me, separating the concept of hearing from understanding and asking if we can ever really understand something without the empathy that comes from similarity.

A few years ago I was listening to Andrew Keller give a presentation about CPB and at one point he asked the audience, maybe rhetorically,

“Why didn’t Kodak’s agency come up with Flickr? How much more relevant might Kodak have been in digital photography if they had come up with Flickr?”

The question has stuck with me since, serving as a sort of a personal challenge. Over time, I’ve posed this question to a number other people, and although almost universally their response has been that it wasn’t possible, rarely could anyone articulate exactly why. This just added to the challenge for me. Why not? What was so fundamentally or structurally different about Flickr from any other run of the mill marketing site that made people so certain that it was impossible for some agency, somewhere, to create it?

What I’ve come to believe is that it has nothing to do with the idea itself but rather it’s that, from the perspective of the advertising world, the web is Wittgenstien’s lion. There are instances where agencies hear the web talking and they recognize the words it’s saying but, in the end, the web, the people who create for it, and the social dynamics that drive it are that lion. There is no understanding because there is empathy because there is no similarity.

It was dysfunctional from the start, going back to the very beginning of the relationship between agencies and the web both as a concept and a practice. For the most part agencies didn’t get into the web because they had any great love for the medium, but rather because there was money to be made by adding another channel to the mix. Viewed as addition to the creative arc that existed, the history and the nature of the web was never really a consideration and as time has gone on, the web and agencies have drifted further apart.

Part of this drift I believe is rooted in the structure of mediums that make up advertising. A key element of what makes agencies work is being able to reduce a medium down to a set of finite, permanent truths and techniques and then codifying them. The existence of these fixed rules and the mastery of them is what allows an agency to focus on concept and execution rather than having to spend their time constantly reexamining the core fundamentals of the of any given medium. The web on the other hand, seems to defy consistent explanation. If I describe the web as a system of hyperlinked documents, thats technically true, but it fails to explain the underlying power or social importance we know the web has. Even trying to explain the technically simple Twitter to someone who’s never used it can prove perplexing. What use does anyone have for broadcasting 140 characters worth of content? But further, listening to people explain Twitter more often turns into an explanation of that person’s experience with it. For some it’s a CRM tool, for others it’s quasi instant messaging, for others its a news stream, for many it’s a combination of all of these and more. For Maureen Dowd it’s the end of civilization. Most often, what I hear is: “you just need to try it to understand it.”

To see this in action, you don’t have to look much further than the Modernista! “site” or the Skittles attempt at the same thing. In both cases the “words” of the web are all there: Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Google; but what’s not clear is whether there is any understanding. Certainly Modernista! understands the mechanics of each of these, they get the function. But why did Modernista! put portfolio on Flickr for example? Is it to have a conversation about the work? As far as I have found, no conversation exists. What does Skittles want me to know about them from a tweet stream? That people eat their candy? In both cases, the goal seems more to demonstrate their mastery of the toolset than to engage in any meaningful way with the web as a social construct. Moderista! is a useful example, but they represent the rule when it comes to agencies and the web. Take the new site for Booneoakley. Lauded by the ad world as “embracing social media”, it is, in my view, a commercial. Yes, the videos are on YouTube, but thats the end of it. Again, it’s reducing the web down to a set of tools on to which one sets graphic design.

But in my mind, and even bigger part of this drift is based in the motivations and definitions of success within agencies. Advertising is, as a culture, about a single great event. It’s about the rush of make or break moments and the success of individuals. Its entire structure both physically and culturally has evolved to support this, from the make up of project teams, to the relationships with clients, to the award shows. The precognitive creative director, the image of the art director and the copy writer sitting around late into the night until the perfect idea is hatched, the pressure of the pitch, the reveal of the single amazing idea; these moments are mythic and they have been repeated season after season, year after year for decades. But this high risk/high payoff endeavor also requires fixed targets and the ability to master techniques. It becomes almost impossibly difficult to justify investing hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, the reputation of the agency and ultimately the client’s brand on a concept whose technological or social underpinnings may be irrelevant before the concept is even executed. This is why T.V. is to advertising what the web never has or could be: For 60 years the fundamental nature of the medium has remained fixed, allowing people and agencies to become masters of its manipulation rather than having to re-learn the fundamentals every 6 weeks. The ownership of the medium extended past the creative execution to ad buying and even to defining the measurements of success. It’s this history that drives articles targeting agencies with titles like “10 tactics for success in social media”, “How to measure ROI on the web” or “Whats the Next Hot Thing Online?” It’s the need for solid and stable jumping off point, the need to have mastered the fundamental framework and have it reduced to simple, repeatable process.

For the most part, none of this really exists with web projects. This is evident in the content of those articles and the fact that article by article, week by week, it would seem the rules and advice constantly change. And of course, they do. The web is, by the most generous estimate maybe 15 years old, still in its primordial state, undulating, cracking and rebuilding. This might offer some hope that as it matures as a medium, it may gain the stability of something like T.V., but I think this is unlikely. Practically speaking, without something like the FCC, there is simply no organizing force to create stabilization. But more importantly I think it’s unlikely because, going back to the attempts at defining Twitter, the first task in stabilizing something is to define it, and rather than moving towards definition, the web is racing faster and faster away from it. As connectivity become more ubiquitous, the web as a concept is actually broadening so far it’s now beginning to consume other mediums. Take Hulu, for example. What part of that is the web and what part is T.V.? Or XBox’s platform for networked gaming, which currently also allows for the streaming of movies, and will soon include the ability to browse movies as well as integration into Facebook and Twitter. Or, consider for a moment that as this connectivity shrinks the distance between us it will also force us to acknowledge that for most of the world, the interface of the web isn’t through a laptop, but through a cellphone. And finally, we must reconcile the fact that they very notion of “laptop”, “cellphone” and “T.V.” are changing right in front of us.

Going back to our initial question, it’s easy then to understand why Flickr didn’t come out of an agency. Rather than the single big idea or the snappy slogan, Flickr is the result of a constant collaboration with members. Rather than a fixed structure, Flickr is a reaction to the ever changing technical and cultural landscape of the web that surrounds it. Rather than the vision of a single Creative Director or copywriter, Flickr represents the work of user experience designers, interface designers, analytics experts and developers of all stripes. Rather than seasonal campaign, Flickr is the result of years of consistent development and refinement. It lacks nearly every characteristic that would be recognizable to an agency. But, how valuable would have it been to Kodak? How might it have changed their relationship with their customers? If value on the web is about the experience, what’s the value to a brand to own an experience like Flickr? If attention is the only scarce commodity online, what is that attention worth?

There will probably always be a need for advertising. The sheer ubiquity of the web though will require brands to rethink their value to their customers and reconcile their place online. If the agencies of today want a part of brands finding that place, and I would argue if they want to continue to stay in business, there will have to be more than an evolution, there will have to be a revolution. Agencies will not only have to reinvent the way they see themselves, but the way they see the world, the way they relate to their client and to dramatically broaden their understanding of why they exist at all. Our notion of hierarchy will have to change. Our concept of how a project lives and grows will have to change. Even our idea of what a project is or can be will change. The web breaks down so many of the structures weve built, and the same flattened landscape that our clients will have to deal with faces us as well, a failure to come to terms with this will ultimatly threaten the existance of what we call an agency. It’s a lion speaking to us, and our survival depends on not just hearing it, but finding some way to understand it.