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.
This week I have been listening to classic Japanese pop from the 1970s and 1980s – late Shōwa era for the win! The Shōwa era means ‘enlightened harmony’. It covers world war II and the subsequent economic miracle, right up to the bubble era of the Japanese economy. What we saw during the post-war Shōwa era was a massive outpouring of quality content in entertainment, film, music, product design, the arts and architecture.
Canadian tourism board anime
Canada’s tourism board has been running a campaign in Japan. They got the studio behind anime blockbuster ‘Your Name’ to do this 30-second spot in an anime style rather than the more traditional approach of using b-roll footage.
It’s an interesting choice, especially given the dramatic scenery available in Canada and shows how important Canada must view the Japanese market. By comparison, there doesn’t seem to be any campaign targeting the UK or Ireland at all.
The Isle of Dogs marries anime with Wes Anderson and looks amazing. The Isle of Dogs in question, is an artificial island in Tokyo Bay rather than the region of London.
Porsche have done a great piece of content marketing about conductor Herbert von Karajan’s 1970s vintage Porsche 911 RS. von Karajan was famous, even amongst non-classical music fans for being a long time conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic and his recordings on Deutsche Grammophon. This was probably helped by his recording being some of the first CDs available.
While it might be seen to be a source of inspiration for PR stunts or experiential marketing, it fits into the idea of live advertisements that agencies and brands have been experimenting with over the past few years. More at Thinkbox here.
Scott Galloway talks about the way brands are using AI (machine learning) and the examples are very much in the background. Welcome to the sublime world of machine learning where the impact on the customer experience won’t be apparent. In many respects this is similar to how fuzzy logic became invisible as it was introduced in the late 1980s.
The Japanese were particularly adept at putting an obscure form of mathematics to use. They made lifts that adapted to the traffic flows of people going in and out of a building and microwaves which knew how long to defrost whatever you put into it. Fuzzy logic compensated for blur in video camera movement in a similar manner to way smartphone manufacturers now use neural networks on images.
The Japanese promoted fuzzy logic inside products to the home market, but generally backed off from promoting it abroad. The features just were and consumers accepted them over time. In a quote that is now eerily reminiscent of our time a spokesperson for the American Electronics Association’s Tokyo office said to the Washington Post
“Some of the fuzzy concepts may be valid in the U.S.,”
“The idea of better energy efficiency, or more precise heating and cooling, can be successful in the American market,”
“But I don’t think most Americans want a vacuum cleaner that talks to you and says, ‘Hey, I sense that my dust bag will be full before we finish this room.’ “
This was also the case with the use technology companies made of Bayes Theory. This was used by the likes of Autonomy and Microsoft Research.
A second technique was rules, put simply IF then THAT. This kind of technology has been used to drive automated trading models and credit card approvals for decades. Pegasystems are one of the leaders in developing rules based processing. Rules based systems could even be built in an Excel macro and would still count as a form of machine learning.
Finally machine learning needs to think about a number of things with regards the models being used:
The importance of accuracy in the use case
The level of precision required and ways to indicate that precision means
The cost of generation versus other methods, this is very important in terms of computing power and energy consumption
A couple of years ago I did a presentation on connection planning and much of that thinking still has value. But some of the tenets of connection planning are now challenged by changes in marketing practice and strategy in the business to consumer space.
The focus on user engagement has been affected by three things:
Social platforms have been moving their business model and interactions towards traditional brand advertising models. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter are structuring their algorithms and advertising closer towards the reach and repetition model of traditional broadcast advertising. TV advertising dollars are what social platforms are chasing, rather than going after Google
Consumer brands, particularly from publicly listed mature players are facing business pressures from the threat of private equity ownership that would look to sweat the assets at the expense of longer term brand performance. No one is immune to this, not even Nestle that was thought to be protected due to Swiss regulations. This has led to a resurgence zero-based budgeting that is locked in focus on return on investment over a shorter time period. From a communications planning perspective there are no sacred cows, no guaranteed longer campaign story arcs or brand engagements as spend has to be justified from a clean slate each year
Most marketing spend tends to be around existing products, often in mature markets. New products run a high risk of failure. New products in new categories are generally the province of start-up graveyards – we remember the few successes rather than the legion of failures. Marketing thinking for mature brands in mature sectors (so most FMCG categories and established brands). This change has been driven by research financed by FMCG companies including Coca-Cola, Mars, Kraft and Kelloggs at the Ehrensberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science. Ehrensberg-Bass’ Byron Sharp book ‘How brands grow‘ is the talisman for these marketers and their agency side media planners
The shorter focus of consumer marketers makes it much harder to build a brand culture that sticks like Red Bull has managed to do. Flow of storytelling becomes less important than reach and stream of repetition.
On the face of it The Inevitable is a less ambitious book than What Technology Wants. And when I started reading the book I didn’t get the kind of electrifying feeling that a big idea can bring, like when I read What Technology Wants.
In the book Kevin Kelly touches on the kind of areas one would expect in typical presentation given by an innovation team at an advertising agency. He is an unashamed techno-optimist, but the key difference in his thinking is two-fold:
Kelly pulls it together as a coherent idea rather than 12 slivers. He provides in-depth cogent arguments that bind the trends together
Kelly argues that transparency in governments will compensate for the erosion of privacy. While I understand where the idea has come from, I don’t agree with this particular viewpoint at least as it would manifest itself in the west. I certainly don’t think that would be the case in the East either. The Nazis use of IBM technology damn near destroyed the world as we know it. The level of trust between the government and the governed is in decline
I have grown tired of a ridiculous statistic being used so frequently that it becomes marketing truth. It’s regurgitated in articles, blog posts, social media and presentations. The problem with it is that affects the way marketers view the world and conduct both planning and strategy. The picture below is a goldfish, his name is Diego. If you’ve managed to read this you aren’t Diego.
I realise that sounds a little dramatic, but check out this piece by Mark Jackson, who leads the Hong Kong and Shenzhen offices of Racepoint Global. It’s a good piece on the different elements that represent a good story (predominantly within a PR setting). And it is right that attention in a fragmented media eco-system will be contested more fiercely. But it starts with:
Over the course of the last 20 years, the average attention span has fallen to around eight seconds; a goldfish has an attention span of nine! The challenge for companies – established and new – is to figure out how to get even a small slice of that attention span when so many other companies are competing for it.
Mark’s piece is just the latest of a long line of marketing ‘thought leadership’ pieces that repeat this as gospel. The problem is this ‘truth’ is bollocks.
It fails the common sense test. Given that binge watching of shows like Game of Thrones or sports matches is commonplace, book sales are still happening, they would have to be balanced out with millisecond experiences for this 8-second value to make any sense as an average. The goldfish claim is like something out of a vintage Brass Eye episode.
To quote DJ Neil ‘Doctor’ Fox:
Now that is a scientific fact! There’s no real evidence for it; but it is scientific fact
Let’s say your common sense gets the better of your desire for a pithy soundbite and you decide to delve into the goldfish claim a bit deeper. If one took a little bit of time to Google around it would become apparent that the goldfish ‘fact’ is dubious. It originally came from research commissioned by Microsoft’s Advertising arm ‘How does digital affect Canadian attention spans?‘. The original link to the research now defaults to the home page of Microsoft Advertising. Once you start digging into it, the goldfish wasn’t actually part of the research, but was supporting desk research and thats when its provenance gets murky.
PolicyViz in a 2016 blog post The Attention Span Statistic Fallacy called it out and provided links to the research that they did into the the goldfish ‘fact’ in 2016 – go over and check their article out. The BBC did similar detective work a year later and even went and asked an expert:
“I don’t think that’s true at all,” says Dr Gemma Briggs, a psychology lecturer at the Open University.
“Simply because I don’t think that that’s something that psychologists or people interested in attention would try and measure and quantify in that way.”
She studies attention in drivers and witnesses to crime and says the idea of an “average attention span” is pretty meaningless. “It’s very much task-dependent. How much attention we apply to a task will vary depending on what the task demand is.”
There are some studies out there that look at specific tasks, like listening to a lecture.
But the idea that there’s a typical length of time for which people can pay attention to even that one task has also been debunked.
“How we apply our attention to different tasks depends very much about what the individual brings to that situation,” explains Dr Briggs.
“We’ve got a wealth of information in our heads about what normally happens in given situations, what we can expect. And those expectations and our experience directly mould what we see and how we process information in any given time.”
But don’t feel too bad, publications like Time and the Daily Telegraph were punked by this story back in 2015. The BBC use the ‘fact’ back in 2002, but don’t cite the source. Fake news doesn’t just win elections, it also makes a fool of marketers.
This whole thing feels like some marketer (or PR) did as poor a job as many journalists in terms of sourcing claims and this ‘truth’ gradually became reinforcing. Let’s start taking the goldfish out of marketing.
. The books make sense as ideal companions for each other, despite some overlap in terms of proof points.
. And when I started reading the book I didn’t get the kind of electrifying feeling that a big idea can bring, like when I read What Technology Wants.
