This is Violence

Introduction to Iterative Marketing

The first week of February I was in New Orleans presenting this deck for WebTrends Engage conference.

As you can probably guess from the title, the goal of the session was get people thinking about a different way to look at how brands relate to their audience, how agencies can more consistently deliver better experiences to that audience, and how and why we should be thinking about the business of our clients. It is, in a lot of ways, a presentation version of this post

Creating Meaning Experiences in the Mobile Space

On December 7th I gave this presentation at the PSU Interactive Marketing Conference outlining how a brand or agency can begin to look at the value of creating meaning for their customers through mobile rather than viewing it a channel for pushing advertising.

NOTE: I feel I should take this opportunity to point out a small, tiny, insignificant change in this deck compared to the one I presented. If you were in the audience you heard me say that there are 600 million mobile operators in the world. This is not true. Though it would really help this economy if it were. There are in fact just 600 mobile operators worldwide. While making numerical errors in the range of 6 orders of magnitude are nothing new to me and well within my own personal margin of error, I’d like to apologize to both my audience as well as the 599,999,400 imaginary mobile carriers I just put out of business.

signifiers of good brand experience vs good brand experience

I know this video is a few weeks old, but I keep coming back to it. Partly because it’s just funny to watch, but mostly because it’s such a great example of advertising mentally in an experience world. What we have is the difference between wanting to tell people your brand is fun, and exciting, and all about them; and actually being those things. You can’t really fake this anymore.

Proto-idea: Asymmetrical Brand Landscape

Note: I’m going to try something new here. In the past, I’ve spent what I think was a disproportionate amount of time researching and preparing blog posts. Which is not to say that either of those things are bad, but in my case, I’m just not sure my posts where any better for it. With that in mind, I want to start tossing out ideas that maybe aren’t totally worked out, but that I’d rather work on publicly than just sit on for months. So with that I present: Proto-ideas! Basically half-baked concepts presented as absolute fact. Here’s one I’ve been kicking around the last couple months:

In the physical world, brand competition can be, and has been, essentially symmetrical. Even as new competitors come into the market, there are certain practical restrictions - legal, social and physical that they’re all bound by. Competing brands have similar opportunities based on similar goals, laws, availability of scarce resources, development of distribution chains, and access to communication channels. This symmetry helps to create a stasis that keeps established brands on top prevents upstarts from posing immediate risk to established institutions.

In the digital space though, almost none of this applies. Resources are not scarce to begin with, and become more widely available everyday. Practically speaking, there is no such thing as a distribution chain, and where there is something that might resemble one, the iPhone app store for example, access to it has nothing to do with the size of your organization. Because on the web individuals have access to the same level of technologies as any organization, and because they can distribute it just as effectively, it means that brands are now not just competing with other brands, but with individuals whose goals are not only not the same as a brand, but possibly in direct conflict. The competitive landscape is flat with established brands fighting what amounts to a global asymmetrical battle.

What this means is that when people lament the ability of something like Twitter to create a traditional business model, or even a business model at all; or when they mock Twitters inability to make a profit, I think they might be missing a more important point: Regardless of whether or not Twitter turns a profit, the fact is: Twitter doesn’t have to. Well okay - Twitter has sucked down enough other peoples money - they might actually have to turn a profit, but whether or not Twitter itself survives, the fact is: a couple people can, in their free time, disrupt the way people all over the world communicate. And even more importantly, this can and will happen over and over, and likely with increasing frequency.

I guess my point is this: if one wants an image of the competitive landscape of the web, picture an infinite amount of competitors, with unlimited resources and desire, and no constraints, financially, legally, or ethically. This is the baseline of competition online. As Chris Anderson points out in his book Free, technology is basically free, so the question of whether or not you can monetize something online is, for many people, largely moot. At the same time though, the projects individuals are making can and are disrupting all aspects of business. The people inventing the Twitters, Facebooks, and Napsters of the world are not faced with the same constraints that the Nikes, or Cokes, or Starbucks are. While the later is constrained with all the organizational trappings of being a business, the former can doing something because it’s “fun” while still having the same access to the same audience.

As the web has become more ubiquitous, the role it plays in our lives has only increased. As it increases, the ability of any brand to functionally, and successfully exist within it has also become critical. At the same, because technology allows for more and more individuals to operate essentially as brands, the future will favor those organizations who understand the web as more than a technology, but as a complex and dynamic and ultimately asymmetrical social construct.

My Magical Evening, Wherein I Spend 2 Hours with 4000 of my Closest Friends, Don’t See Dave Chappelle and Would do it all Over Again

We’ll set aside for a second the fact that I showed up at Portland’s Pioneer Square at 11pm based on highly dubious reports of a surprise Dave Chappelle show at midnight, and that I waited packed in with 4000 drunk and high morons (but not you, you’re terrific) for 2 hours, and that I left at 12:45am only to get a text at 12:55am that he’d finally shown up. We’ll put all that aside for now to focus on this: I would do it again in a second.

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?”

Conversations with Lions

“If a lion could talk, we could not understand him”

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.

Dark Games

If you grew up in the U.S., and were of the age to be interested in such things at the time, you know the video game Super Mario Bros. 2 as this:

A sunny game where tossing root vegetables were about as subversive as it got. It was an odd game, weird even, but enjoyable and operating in reality familiar enough that it’s oddness was entertaining rather than threatening.

But if you lived in Japan at the same time, you knew a different game.

This version looked and sounded almost identical to the original, but the surface level appearance was just the first of designer Miyamoto’s traps. This sequel was a game where the laws of physics were changed on a whim, where identical objects might save you or kill you without rhyme or reason, where birds swim and jellyfish fly, where you have to make a choice between playing as a character with soap for shoes, or one with lead boots, and where being lulled into believing the skills you acquired in the first game were transferable was part of a well planned nightmare. It’s rumored that Miyamoto was depressed when designing this version which has been described alternately as a cruel puzzle, a mean practical joke, or the video game equivalent of absinth: a bitter and acquired taste, that will possibly leave you insane.

Whether or not the stories of Miyamoto’s depression are true, I can empathize. I’ve been in a sort of Japanese Mario 2 headspace lately myself. Having spent the last ten years working with brands online, I find myself struggling lately to understand, or at least to clearly articulate the difference between the rabid success of Twitter vs. the success of brands ON Twitter. The success of Facebook vs. the success of brands ON Facebook. Or for that matter, the success of the web vs. the success of brands ON the web. The relationship between these things is clearly not coupled but we seem to operate as though they are.

With this on my mind, Mark Olson’s post “Authenticity vs. Authority” from a couple days ago was something I feel like should have left me feeling enlightened. I follow each of the people he spoke with, and respect all them. It’s a topic Dave (@pampelmoose) and I talk about, or around, regularly at Nemo. And it’s at the heart of my dilemma in explaining how and what makes a brand successful online to my clients. But reading it, I didn’t feel enlightened, I felt frustrated. It’s not the article, or the people quoted. They all say their usual smart things, but I finished the article and Brian Solis’ continuation of the topic and left both thinking: “So?”

It’s not that I think this is a dumb question, or that I’m not interested in their answers - eloquent answers I could repeat back to clients and sound far smarter than I actually am. It’s that I’m no longer sure we’re playing the game I thought we were. When someone like Olson asks the question “Authenticity vs. Authority” the basic premise of the question is framed around how a business relates to its customer (“consumer” in his post, but I hate that word). The question exists in an online reality that is more like the U.S. version of Mario 2: strange and weird, but ultimately familiar or at least operating by the rules we’ve come to expect. Recently though I’ve begun to question whether or not these rules even exist online.

In his response to Solis’ post, Dave brings it back to a familiar concept: …once we realize that technology merely shortens the distance between us, and while ’social networking’ online we are simply engaged in the same activity that we pursue offline, perception, then, ought to [be] almost identical…Any normal person therefore ought to do the same thing when they come across a blog or someone’s Tweets, Facebook page et al - use the gut check or better still Google them or tweet search them”

This of course rings true to me, and I think it’s a basic tenet of what both Mark and Brian are talking about.

I’m left wondering in the end if it’s ultimately possible for a business to pass this gut check test of authenticity without also acknowledging that they’re trying to make a sale. But then in acknowledging this motivation, do they destroy the type of peer-to-peer relationship that has become the hallmark of everything great about the web. Is that jaded? When we look at Mark’s question of “authenticity vs. authority” or Brian’s list of other possible dichotomies

Believability vs. Transparency
Contribution vs. Engagement
Participation vs. Conversation
Hearing vs. Listening
Connections and Collaboration vs. Relationships
Humanizing vs. Being Human

I end up wondering: are we trying to understand the nature of the human to human relationship dynamics or the ruleset by which we market, the hoops brands must jump through to make the sale? And if they’re just the new rules, is anything really different? Are we just playing a new game with the skill set we learned in a previous version? More scary though to me is that I’m beginning to think these rules we seek might not be static and that there might be little rhyme or reason to them. We operate with the assumption there is a static and fixed logic to the the environment we’re operating in and that once we understand it, we can craft and bend and will situations and relationships to suit our clients needs. But what if there isn’t? What everyday represents the possibility of a completely new world with new relationships and new dynamics?

Ultimately, it’s of little use to me to sit back a question the role or existence of these concepts. I still have to go to work tomorrow, and I still need to help businesses understand and hopefully succeed on the web. But I can’t help but wonder if the web has left us with a case-by-case world where attempting to codify, or simplify, or generalize the rules aren’t the answer but a sneaky Miyamoto-like trap. Maybe not every brand can have the sort of human-like, authentic interaction I’d like to believe they can. Maybe success for some is simply facilitating these relationships between others. Perhaps the only real solution is to slow down, and look at each brand and each challenge as completely unique with it’s own set of rules that are based solely on the specific combination of the time and space each brand exists in.