Ged Carroll

Category: ideas | 想法 | 생각 | 考える

Ideas were at the at the heart of why I started this blog. One of the first posts that I wrote there being a sweet spot in the complexity of products based on the ideas of Dan Greer. I wrote about the first online election fought by Howard Dean, which now looks like a precursor to the Obama and Trump presidential bids.

I articulated a belief I still have in the benefits of USB thumb drives as the Thumb Drive Gospel. The odd rant about IT, a reflection on the power of loose social networks, thoughts on internet freedom – an idea that that I have come back to touch on numerous times over the years as the online environment has changed.

Many of the ideas that I discussed came from books like Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.

I was able to provide an insider perspective on Brad Garlinghouse’s infamous Peanut Butter-gate debacle. It says a lot about the lack of leadership that Garlinghouse didn’t get fired for what was a power play. Garlinghouse has gone on to become CEO of Ripple.

I built on initial thoughts by Stephen Davies on the intersection between online and public relations with a particular focus on definition to try and come up with unifying ideas.

Or why thought leadership is a less useful idea than demonstrating authority of a particular subject.

I touched on various retailing ideas including the massive expansion in private label products with grades of ‘premiumness’.

I’ve also spent a good deal of time thinking about the role of technology to separate us from the hoi polloi. But this was about active choice rather than an algorithmic filter bubble.

 

  • Integrated agency wins

    I started thinking about integrated agency wins when I read that Asda appointed Publicis after a short pitch process this week.
    ASDA
    What was notable about the win was that it covered both creative and media briefs. Notable enough to become a conversation topic when I met up with industry friends for coffee. Integrated wins are not that common.

    WPP has managed to win global single agency accounts:

    • Ford Motor Company
    • HSBC
    • Colgate-Palmolive
    • News International
    • Bank of America
    • Miller Coors
    • Ford Motor Company
    • Mazda
    • Huawei

    Then there was Enfatico for Dell.  Enfatico struggled with personnel changes at the client and client culture.

    The Publicis deal is is more modest in one respect, it only affects Walmart’s UK business, but is still £95m.

    On the face of it, integrated appointments have a lot to offer, so why aren’t they more common?

    Let’s first look at the pros of an arrangement:

    • Better chance of not getting silo-ed thinking from the agency. Both creative and media can be part of the ideation process. One of the big parts of WPP’s early success was a focus on media investment management. This broke the symbiotic creative relationship between media and creative. It worked well for a number of years, but with integrated agency wins, the pendulum seems to be swinging back the other way
    • New ways of audience targeting as part of the creative process. The concern is the combined profitability of the account. Rather than a focus on media profitability

    Barriers to adoption:

    • Current contractual timings don’t allow for pitching media and creative business together. It seems so obvious, but there may not be a convenient break clause in place
    • Pitches are often driven by procurement teams; who look at better value in continuity, rather than a more holistic approach

    Weakness of a combined media and creative agency arrangement:

    • The marketing group may not have strength in all areas. I worked for a large marketing group which held the global account of an FMCG company. Despite being part of a global marketing group, we couldn’t execute in two markets for the client. This affected the social media marketing work we did for them and they weren’t happy
    • Dependent on the marketing team, they may not want to work with a media agency that:
      • Operates an arbitrage model. Having bought the ad space from the media, they then sell it on to clients with targeting data
      • Operates a model that isn’t media neutral to meet wider internal goals
    • Clients often think of the arrangement only as a way of cost reduction

    There are also weaknesses with the single client agency model as WPP has done it:

    • Set-up costs are usually shared across clients, but where there is dedicated infrastructure. This cost will have to be borne by the client, upfront or salted in the fees
    • From a client perspective there is moral pressure to maintain the agency relationship. This complicates the client’s ability to ensure cost-competitive rates
    • Less opportunities to cross-pollinate ideas across categories. This is because the agency is focused on one client only

    While Asda have taken an interesting first step, hiring an integrated offering. The hard work is only now starting:

    • Putting in place the right working practices client and agency-side
    • Changing the creative process to take advantage of integration
    • Have a proven positive effect on Asda’s sales figures in the face of competition from Lidl and Aldi

    More posts on WPP here, and Publicis here.

    More information
    Asda hands £95m media and creative to Publicis Groupe in double coup | Marketing Magazine
    WPP Folds Ill-Fated Dell Agency Enfatico Into Y&R Brands | Advertising Age

  • Facebook Live + more things

    Facebook live

    A Facebook live streaming service (a la U-Stream and YouTube) was newly launched this week. You can stream on your page or in-group. There is a map to discover streams going on in realtime. I already  found one seminar by Nu-Skin a multi-level marketer of wellness and beauty products in Hong Kong as an example of where Facebook Live was being used from a commercial perspective.

    The Stanton Warriors embraced the new Facebook live streaming service to promote further fan interaction whilst they were in the studio. It will be interesting to see the best and worst that brands do with this medium. From a piracy point-of-view I would imagine that it is likely to be used for streaming live sports coverage – expect the Premier League to be very unhappy.

    RUN and RUN

    Not exactly the same sound but J-Pop act lyrical school’s debut track RUN and RUN has a really clever smartphone optimised video with amazing breaks of the fourth wall.

    UPDATE: Our James pointed me in the direction of an even better link for the RUN and RUN video on Vimeo that I hope works here

    RUN and RUN / lyrical school 【MV for Smartphone】 from RUNandRUN_lyrisch on Vimeo.

    If you can’t see anything point your browser here.

    Godzilla

    Japan’s king of all monsters, Godzilla returns from chilling out on Monster Island for his 31st outing in the Japanese cinema. This new trailer is interesting as the visuals evoke Fukushima Daiichi  nuclear disaster and the Great Tohoku Earthquake of 2011. Check out the Cloverfield-esque shots in the 30 second trailer below. There is a longer trailer where Godzilla appears fully in shot leaving no mystery to how bad ass he is this time. This means that the film is likely to go beyond his usual mayhem and might touch on contemporary issues.

    Vintage CGI

    Last, but not least; a vintage show reel by 1980s CGI shop MAGI Synthavision in its full neon wireframe magnificence and southern country rock soundtrack. More similar visual stuff here.

    More everyday tools in part three.

    More information

    Right Relevance website
    Klout – ignore the measurement, but stay for the content recommendations

    Reddit
    techmeme – curated by a mix of algorithms and an editorial team
    Hacker News – based on a community who find interesting geeky stuff around the web

    Newsblur (once you subscribe it provides you links to the different mobile apps)
    Reeder – a third party RSS reader for OSX which supports Newsblur

    Buffer

    Weiyun English interface
    How to use Weiyun

  • Hemingway + process

    I use a range of tools including Hemingway as part of my content creation process. This came out when I had a meeting with some junior marketing agency staff last week. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss content strategy across different clients. In the end an good part of the conversation went into process and content creation.

    Given that conversation I thought it might be fruitful to flag up some of the technologies that I use.

    Hemingway

    I use Hemingway ( a web application and a native OSX application) to write. Hemingway has two writing modes:
    Hemingway - editing mode
    Editing mode looks at your copy as you create it:

    • It looks at readability providing a reading age score. (Grade six is equates to 11-12 years old). The lower the reading age, the clearer the writing is. It has also aids in SEO
    • It examines sentence structure, the harder a sentence is to read, the more ambiguous it may be.
    • Hemingway suggests simpler alternatives to phases
    • It looks at adverbs and use of the passive voice

    Hemingway is like having a sub-editor sitting on your shoulder at the point of creation.
    Hemingway - writing mode
    Writing mode clears the real-time editing functions to the right of the screen. It allows me to get content down as a stream of consciousness. It allows me to get ideas down before I lose the train of thought.

    You can then switch to editing mode to go back and clean up your copy once you have it down.

    The OSX version allows you to save documents down as a HTML file, from which you can cut and paste into a destination. It just works whether its a presentation, document, WordPress or social platforms.

    Pinboard

    Pinboard is a social bookmarking service that now costs $11/year. It allows me to store links and notes about websites that I find of interest.
    Pinboard - home screen
    Pinboard is a web service so my bookmarks go where I can get a web connection.
    Pinboard - bookmark screen
    I use a bookmarklet that sits in the chrome of my browser. Every time I come across something that might be of interest, I click on the link and complete a simple form.

    • URL – I only change the link if it is a temporary link such as ‘feedproxy.google.com’. I expand the link or change it to any permalink that is on the page
    • Title – I edit this as necessary to reflect the article title and the website name
    • Description – this is a quick explanation of why I thought the page was significant. It might be an article quote or top statistics mentioned
    • Tags – categories or labels that I assign to an article which allows me to find it based on a relevance. Tags are used by other applications as well

    I use Pinner for iOS on my iPhone. It integrates into the system level sharing functionality. I can create bookmarks on the move as well as at my desk.

    Terminal

    The Terminal app in OSX allows direct access to the power of the operating system. It is also unforgiving. Getting a command wrong can have serious consequences.
    Terminal app - introduction
    There are a few things that I can do faster in terminal than via other methods. From checking  differences in documents, to batch processing file archiving. To get you started here are two examples that you can try: to see if a website is up to getting a weather forecast.
    Terminal app - check the weather forecast
    Terminal app - ping a website
    I have a copy of UNIX in a Nutshell from O’Reilly Media on my bookshelf. I use this as a back-up when I can’t remember the proper  syntax or a command. I can also recommend Learning Unix for OS X: Going Deep With the Terminal and Shell also from O’Reilly Media.

    IFTTT

    At the beginning of 2007 Yahoo! launched an experimental product called Yahoo! Pipes. It was flakey, it was unreliable but also revolutionary. Pipes was an easy way to stitch together services without programming expertise. After years of flakey service it was shutdown by Yahoo! in June 2015.
    IFTTT
    Pipes inspired another service IFTTT. IFTTT stands for ‘If then, then that’. It is a simple cause and effect framework that allows for the automation of actions over the web. These cause and effect formulas called recipes. It supports a range of web services and apps. Most of the discussion around this for Intenet of Things automation. I use it to automate my web content content.

    More in part two.

    I pulled part one together in a companion presentation.

    More related content can be found here.

    More information

    Hemingway OSX application

    Pinboard

    Pinner app for iOS

    IFTTT – (If Then, Then That)

    Books

    Learning Unix for OS X: Going Deep With the Terminal and Shell by Dave Taylor

    UNIX in a Nutshell by Arnold Robbins

  • Platform utility

    Silicon Valley VC Andreessen Horowitz put togethers slides that cover platform utility and the role of network effects. The  presentation does a good job at providing a taxonomy on different products. It comes in handy when thinking about channel role / platform utility from a media planning perspective and also evaluating start-up ideas. They define platform in terms of development, but for advertisers we can think of it wider as we are likely to be making API calls in terms of data, targeting and ad placement. It is something that we are building demand or brand equity on.

    Key takeouts from the presentation

    • A network effect occurs when a product or service becomes more valuable to users as more people use it

    Network effect benefits

    • Create barriers to exit for existing users
    • Create barriers to entry for new companies
    • Protect from competitors eating away at margins
    • Creates a winner takes all style market

    Communications networks laws that provide indicators likely platform utility

    • Sarnoff’s law – the value of a network is proportional to the number of viewers
    • Metcalfe’s law – the value of a network is proportional to the square of number of connected users
    • Reed’s law – value of a group forming network is proportional to the number and ease with which groups form within it (subgroups grow faster than sheer number of P2P participants

    If it isn’t clear where they fall within these networks, it’s a warning flag for brands on whether to invest in the platform.

    User modes

    • Single ‘player’ mode – the product has immediate utility for a single user. Examples would be Flickr in the early days for photo storage, Foursquare in the early days to bookmark places you’d been to as a locative memory. Social bookmarking sites like Pinboard, or Delicious would have been in here had it not been retired
    • ‘Multiplayer’ mode – the product has no utility for a single user. This is particularly true for communications products. Examples would be Viber, Skype, Slack, Zoom etc.
    • Products can be both single player and multiplayer. So the community that built around Flickr for example.
    • Single player is more powerful when accompanied by an initial tactic to drive early network growth. Instagram photo filters was a way to post pictures on Twitter before there was enough critical mass. They help with adoption in the early days of a product when network effects aren’t sufficiently strong yet.
    • What’s the initial growth lever or tactic that will get it to scale?

    Case studies

    • Facebook found that connecting a new user to 10 friends within 14 days of sign-up was key to improving retention
    • Focus on daily usage (habit building) to help grow network. Focus on engagement rather than just overall number growth
    • Growth usage, even as user numbers grow is a sure sign of network effects at work
    • Facebook took a clustered approach: Harvard, then Stanford and eventually other universities in the US and abroad. Rather than focusing on growth. The immediate ‘single player’ utility they offered was an online school directory
    • WhatsApp had a different network type to Facebook. Each WhatsApp user had about 20 connections compared to approximately 980 friends on Facebook. Fewer connections also meant clustering around family, close friends of interest based WhatsApp groups with more engagement
    • AirBnB had two sides of their network. More hosts attract more guests and even become guests themselves. More guests means more business and money for hosts
    • Medium found that ‘single player mode’ can help get to ‘multiplayer mode’ through building sufficient critical mass.