Lightning strikes, maybe once, maybe twice

So I went on a wee tear the other day, and in response to Bud Caddell's pondering if the future needed agencies, posted a series of points on what was and was not going to work for companies who sought to play the kind of role in business agencies have played thus far.

As part of that piece I wrote the following:

Agencies with big technical production capabilities need to send the work out to be done more cheaply, take the best and brightest they have and remake that department as a research & development arm. There is no reason Foursquare could not have been created by Zagat’s; but nobody was working on that kind of problem.

I bold the particular line there for the following reason: FourSquare have just posted this on their Tumblog:

And today we announced a partnership with Zagat aimed at rewarding foursquare users for discovering and experiencing Zagat Rated places in their city.  If you’re in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago or Boston you can now “follow” Zagat on foursquare to unlock insider tips about nearby restaurants. And of course, we’ve added a Zagat “Foodie” badge that can be unlocked by dining at some of these Zagat Rated restaurants.

...I'm just saying...

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It's as simple as that

One of the big ideas I'm working on right now is a statement: everything gets easier. It brings together a few chains of thought, but primarily Fred Wilson's notion of life being "end to end digital", and something else I saw summed up brilliantly on Tumblr from Amanda Mooney - it was a John Maeda quote that went as follows:

If there were a prerequisite for the future successful digital creative, it would be the passion for discovery.

The fact is, the future does not belong to the people building walls around complex things in order to keep them complex, it belongs to those who recognise the sooner everyone understands something, the sooner we innovate and get to the next thing, and so sets about trying to demistify that which is currently complex. It belongs to the passionate and curious, wherever they are.

I was reminded of this reading AVC today and seeing Fred Wilson talk about a company called Twilio. From their own site:

Maybe we want a customer to be able to call in and get information, or maybe we need to coordinate our employees more efficiently. Before Twilio, you would have had to learn some foreign telecom programming languages, or set up an entire stack of PBX software to do this. At which point, you'd say "aw, forget it!" Twilio lets you use your existing web development skills, existing code, existing servers, existing databases and existing karma to solve these problems quickly and reliably. We provide the infrastructure, you provide the business logic...and together we rule the world.

That is just a simple example of the kind of application Twilio has, and maybe a telephony app doesn't excite you, which is fine. But the point is important - everything gets easier. This also creates a new ecosystem of value that others can build upon; but that's for another post entirely.

But I first had to take care of the world I know

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="248" caption="Bud Caddell, as surrounded by Post-It notes."][/caption]

So nothing like 2 hours in customs and then more hours sitting on the runway because it's snowing at your destination, but it gave me time to read through this thought-provoking article from Bud Caddell on the future of the ad agency.

First off, it's great; it doesn't claim all the answers but it probes in all the right places. And for whatever reason I was thinking about this a lot over the weekend, and you should totally read Bud's piece first, because this is my take, and there are a bunch of synergies.

1. We do not need more web shops.

Now, I say that with a lot of friends running their own places, so let me qualify that statement. Most companies only need some simple hosting, a Wordpress install, and should spend the majority of their money on design. To saddle people with cumbersome, proprietary content-management systems and code re-written from the ground up when someone else's plugin will do exactly what you want is morally bankrupt.

On top of that, it can be done more cheaply and to a reasonable level of quality for around US$20 an hour. Sad for some, but it is the modern equivalent of the industrial revolution. And the money is best spent elsewhere.

2. This is "elsewhere".

Content. Content content content. I recently did an audit for a company and came out of it with the exact thing I expected: they didn't give their customers anything other than coupons, so subsequently that's all they talked about.

3. Everything gets easier.

This is the biggest truism, and it exists as uch inside the ad industry as it does outside it: everything, I do not care what it is, will get easier. It will happen in manufacturing as much as it will happen with technology, so companies whose existence relies on technology have but one choice: to make problems that are difficult easy for the people facing them.

Agencies with big technical production capabilities need to send the work out to be done more cheaply, take the best and brightest they have and remake that department as a research & development arm. There is no reason Foursquare could not have been created by Zagat's; but nobody was working on that kind of problem. Not hard enough anyway. The digital shops need to go back to their engineering roots; they need to sit a bunch of curious minds from across the board together and be inventors; that work is far too important to leave to agencies - and they're not going to do it anyway.

4. No points for second place.

One of Al Ries' 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing said it was better to be first in a new category than 2nd in an old one; that is basically positioning but it speaks to a fundamental truth: marketers need to stop inventing problems for products to solve and focus on creating products that get back to the existing ones, which I suppose just echoes what I said in point 1 more generally. And particularly in the CPG space, they need to udnerstand the conversation around the product is always more interesting than the product itself (e.g. baby formula or parenthood? Which is more interesting?).

5. What we used to call digital will lead, and it won't survive without traditional talent.

Bear with me: it doesn't make sense to talk about "digital" anymore, it's too ubiquitous to mean anything. What we're really looking at is a kind of "curation of connections", which happen in various places. Great strategists can lead that, but they're going to need content produced - and occasionally a short, branded spot or a still image. One thing traditional advertising still has over new media is the ability to tell a story in a heartbeat; we'll always need that sort of eye, but there's no longer any reason for it to lead, its importance is decreasing by the day.

6. This only applies to the companies that don't create true value.

Apple, Zappos, and the other handful of brands that create products and services so compelling they don't need to market the way everyone else does are going to continue to chart their own course. Long term, companies are better off focusing on that than trying to advertise their way into people's wallets, as that stops working the second the ad stops.

So, in summation: the agency will be replaced by strategists defining touch points and curating content for those points, and that can be a 3rd party or it can be a savvy brand manager. Regardless of who it is, a lot of people currently in agency land are simply not capable of that. It isn't a sell, it's leading by being meaningful, and advertising just isn't good at that.

Web shops who want to remain web shops need to use the cheapest technologies available, and make their own approach more turn-key. If they don't, they will lose out to overseas suppliers who can do it all cheaper (and likely faster). The whole notion of a "digital" agency needs to be ditched, we're talking user-experience and connections, regardless of whether that happens virtually or in the real world. The shops who don't want to do that need to be inventors.

And brands that don't want to deal with either need to create products so compelling and in-tune with their customer base they largely sell themselves. Advertising was always the price you paid for being boring, and shortly it may not be a price you can pay at all.

I need some time to ease my mind

When I was writing Digital Strangelove, it was born largely out of work being so busy that I didn't have time to write semi-daily about the things I was thinking, and I'm starting to feel like I'm all clogged up again in my head - a week where one of your days runs over the course of 18 hours will do that to you.

Anyway, enough of my complaining, I've wanted to write this for a couple weeks, and I'm excited to now as I feel really strongly about it. Your friend and mine Fred Wilson was interviewed in January and one of the questions asked was "What common mistakes do start-ups make?" He responds with this:

One mistake  see people make is that they hire out the development of the technology...I think that's a huge mistake. I think the companies need to have the engineers as part of the core founding team...and a company needs to own its engineering and product in a way that you could never own it if you hire somebody else to build it.

Back in March 2008,  wrote the following:

I’m a big believer in a business being free to focus on its core product(s). If it ain’t what you do, then it ain’t what you do! Far too many times I’ve seen companies get distracted by an interesting piece of technology or an idea outside their scope or ability to act on. When that happens, your core product suffers, and your competitors who may have been running a distant second seem to close the gap over night.

At the time I was thinking about the future of a start-up I was working in at the time, Hippo Jobs. Hippo had made a range of decisions ranging from ones I agreed with to ones I didn't agree with at all, but that is going to be the case in any workplace where you are an employee and not an owner, and I don't pretend for a moment to fully comprehend the situations that lead to some of those decisions.

What I believed then and believe now however is exactly what Fred said; a company needs to be in control of its lifeblood and make everything else someone else's problem. When Yahoo! finally outsourced its search to Microsoft, it acknowledged what everyone else had long known - they were not a search company. Mind you, neither is Microsoft, which is why I can't see them taking that battle to Google in a meaningful way.

Hippo had chosen to work with Areeba, an innovative and talented dev shop in Melbourne, Australia. The issue was never the quality of the work, it was a team that cared about the product in a way that was more than a job. Where Fred says "a company needs to own its engineering and product in a way that you could never own it if you hire somebody else to build it", listen to it. He also says the key engineer(s) need to be founding members of the company, which again I agree with.

At the end of the day, ideas are a dime a dozen, and you need the people who can execute to have as much skin in the game as you have; anything less is a recipe for disaster.

See video below, quote begins at 4:48.

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.920536&w=425&h=350&fv=]

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NYC 3.0 Interview

NYC 3.0 is a website that covers the NYC tech startup community. It was started recently by two Columbia University Journalism School students. A few weeks ago, they sat down with me in my office and asked some questions like...

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.920536&w=425&h=350&fv=]

more about "NYC 3.0 Interview", posted with vodpod

What more can I say?

That is all.

I'm gonna take you on a surfin' safari

While back home over Christmas, I caught up with your friend and mine Ben Rennie to discuss Digital Strangelove, media business models and a host of other things. This is the first of three videos, I'll be sure to link to the others when they're ready (those reading this in email or RSS readers can click here to see it).

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.918325&w=425&h=350&fv=]

posted with vodpod

Ben is also continuing the good work he started last year with Innovation Forums with a couple events coming up soon. The next is in Melbourne on February 23rd, and there are still early-bird tickets available for a paltry $29!

Ben will be following the Melbourne event with one in Sydney shortly afterwards.

Give me something I can write about

From the It's-been-sitting-open-for-a-week-just-write-about-it Department, this great short video called Making Is Connecting from David Gauntlett, Professor of Media and Communications at Westminster University. In it he argues tools that exist to facilitate expression of one's self are inherently more powerful than tools that exist only as an expression of someone else (think the rise of social platforms versus the dominance of 20th century media) as this connects us to the world around us.



Gauntlett backs up his ideas not with the latest digital media thinkers such as Charles Leadbeater or (my hero) Clay Shirky, but with quotes from Ivan Illich, a philosopher from the 1970's, and William Morris, a textile designer from the 1800's. The examples point to something I've been banging on about for quite some time: the rise of social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc. are an interesting development, but they are successful due to facilitating expression of self, and conenction with like-minded others.

As I wrote about Posterous last March, tools will continue to rise that make it easier and easier to express yourself, creating content for others to consume in the process. Making is connecting indeed, and as the world gets radically smaller on a daily basis, understanding this becomes ever more crucial.

(found via altnytterfarlig)

Tell me that you'll open your eyes

From the desk of Iain Tait, who wrote about this video simply saying "Best. Lecture. Ever." My vote there goes to Sir Ken Robinson's excellent TED talk on how schools kill creativity, but on the proviso I won't have the chance to repeat childhood and not go to school, then this is certainly the next best thing.

The speaker in question is Professor Barry Nalebuf, author of a book called Why Not?: How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small. I only assume the ideas in the book are the same he expresses here, it's earned a spot on my Amazon Wish List and it's probably worth a spot on yours too.

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.917784&w=425&h=350&fv=]posted with vodpod

Best. Lecture. Ever.

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.917784&w=425&h=350&fv=]

more about "Best. Lecture. Ever.", posted with vodpod

Right on time

Looking at yesterday's post on Conan O'Brien's situation within traditional media, this announcement from Boxee comes right on time:

Image via CrunchBase

...users will be able to make purchases with one click on the remote. The content partners we launch with will offer shows, movies and channels that were previously not available to Boxee users. The content owners will be able to package and price as they wish, including pay-per-view and subscription. Content partners will have the flexibility to decide what they make available, whether it’s premium content, content from their existing library, or extras that will never make it “on air”.

...The Internet represents a great opportunity for the major media companies and for the independent content producers to create more engaging and immersive experiences around their content and for them to be paid for more eyeballs on yet another screen.

Now Boxee itself is a service not too many people know about. And while it is now relatively easy to hook a computer up to a TV, there is a mental barrier Boxee have to overcome, as they're pioneering an open source approach to this.

The flip side of this is something I got at in Digital Strangelove - we're moving from a place where the type of media has been defined by the medium (a TV show versus a movie, which happens in a theatre) and is now in a place where we'll just talk about video, text and sound as the environment in which it is consumed ceases to have anything to do with what type of media it is.

Boxee moves that agenda along in a fairly dramatic fashion; it will be interesting to see how content producers respond.

This might offend my political connects

I notice a bunch of places where people talk about how they haven't adopted RSS readers, which I find fascinating and frustrating at the same time. I often will add new sites to my reader and forget about them, often just to stumble back across them like i have done this morning on this post from Clay Hebert on why Conan O'Brien should eschew the traditional TV model and go direct to his audience:

1) Full creative control over his own content
Now he writes a lot of his own stuff but imagine if he wasn’t censored at all. Look out.

2) Not working for Jeff Zucker3) Not working for anyone

4) Online video worked well for Gary V. and the Monty Python guys.


5) Never having to worry about ratings again
Let Leno have the “ratings” on NBC. His demographic is not Conan’s anyway, so why try to fight for it. It’s sort of like Newhart and Family Guy jockeying for position.

6) Any format, any device
Conan’s demographic consumes content differently. He could make videos of any length that his audience could consume and stream anywhere. iPhones, iPods, Droids, iSlates, other tablets. Design the content to be snackable and sharable and we will snack and we will share.

7) Watching a show at its original time slot is obsolete
I’ve seen plenty of clips of Saturday Night Live in the last few years, but never on Saturday night. My social network does the filtering and the best and funniest clips bubble to me on twitter and Facebook.

8 ) Your own channel means your own audience and unlimited bandwidth

This idea echoes some thoughts I had while back in Australia over Christmas. I recorded an interview with Innovation Forum's Ben Rennie which I will link to when he posts it, where I said the traditional TV model no longer makes sense; it is a business setup to sell advertising, not to entertain - in fact the entertainment is the expensive part of what they do! Whereas people like Conan are setup to entertain.

The NBCs of the world may still have a role to play for the time being in helping talented people find an audience, but once that happens they swiftly lose a reason to exist. What we're seeing is a revolution in ecosystems of value, where the content which has been at the periphery for so long is being pushed back into the centre.

The revolution as we all know will not be televised. But it will be everything else.

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That's not the shape of my heart

Interesting video the magic that is The David Report turned me onto, looking at and thinking about the future of magazines. I am somewhat of a junkie for the form and don't doubt it will continue (in some fashion).

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/8217311]

This has me thinking also about devices as a whole, and particularly the arms race that is on in the mobile space.

Everyone is excited to have Google's skin in the game with Android, and are touting them as the challenger that can actually take on Apple and their much-loved iPhone. The problem facing Google and its partners is not developer support, of which there is plenty, but control over the hardware environment.

See an iPhone developer makes an app once, and releases it. They don't need to deal with different specifications regarding screensizes, peripherals, keyboards, cameras, what have you. An Android developer has all of that, plus chipsets from Intel, Nvidia and others. The increased overhead in supporting multiple platforms will, I believe, lead us to a place where apps exist on one Android device and not another, leading to negative user-experiences which will directed partially towards the manufacturer, but more so towards Google. Contrast that with the iPhone, which while it has well-documented flaws, is a consistent experience for every person that owns one.

I'm in the camp of people who think Android is the platform that will challenge the iPhone for dominance of the market, Google to need to invest more in the hardware for this to become a race; right now they're just running warm-up laps.

I love it when we do what we do because we do what we do until it's done

Can I get an "Amen!"?

Found via the lovely Conversation Agent.

What time is love?

From the equal parts genius/niceness that is Andy Whitlock and the team at Poke.

In December, we had a hack day at Poke. In a nutshell, we had 24 hours to come up with an idea and make it an online reality...Our team’s idea was to create an egg-timer that served up a Youtube video to match the exact length your egg needed to be boiled for. No staring at the egg. No staring at a boring timer. Just watch the video and you’re done. And it dishes up different videos depending on how you like your egg. Have a look for yourself over at eggwatchers.com.

<3. Srsly. The importance of this sort of thing perhaps won't be immediately apparent to anyone who still wants to make TV commercials. For the rest of us, we can be thankful places like Poke exist.

And dream of working there.

--

P.S. I've tagged this in the "branding" category of this blog to make a point - it's activity like this that builds Poke's own brand. The same way traditional agencies built their names on their work, so too do the modern shops, the difference being only one of those groups is still willing to run with the bulls.

Someday soon this will all be someone else's dream

I was watching Steve Ballmer's keynote at CES last night, thinking to myself "This sort of address has its days numbered." My penchant for drama would have me state we're witnessing an empire in decline, but I don't really think that would arrive as news to anyone.

I have a few good close friends who work at Microsoft, and it's a source of endless debate. At the heart of the issue for me is the lack of clear, single-minded purpose, of intent to do anything other than compete. See "compete" isn't a strategy, it's aimless and has you swinging in the direction of anyone who looks like they might do what you do, instead of focussing on the way forward, staring blatantly and openly back infront of you.

A good portion of the talk was spent showing off what other people are going to do with Microsoft's platform, but devices designed in different ways isn't really a sexy story. The compelling work, and in my opinion the jewel in Microsoft's crown (in the same way the Playstation became everything Sony lived for) is the Xbox 360. It is, to my mind, the only space where they are clearly innovating and driving their own path forward, backing it up with an impressive lineup of content. In Xbox they really appear as masters of their own destiny; everywhere else they seem callous, and forever peering over their shoulders at what someone else might be doing.

I highlight Xbox and specifically avoid their much-hyped Project Natal. A tech demo in very controlled environments does not a product make, and having spent a previous life making games for consoles, if the software isn't there to drive the thing when it launches, it simply won't matter. There's also an issue of adoption; I haven't seen recent figures but traditionally the percentage that even owns a second controller is well below 50%; recent success with music-based games requiring plastic guitars and microphones has surely begun changing that behaviour, though thaty category as a whole is starting to wane.

As for other categories, the less said the better. Microsoft needs a new vision, and it being the media centre of the family home is as good a move as any. Your friend and mine Vik twittered this during the keynote:

Agreed Win7 is a popular & well built OS. But as netbooks become more prevalent, is this what customers will want on their machines?

There's an increasingly rapid transition going on to web services and away from non-core applications. A friend who came to visit me in Toronto recently only traveled with his iPhone, saying it negated the need for him to have a laptop with him at all. If we entertain the notion for a moment that that is the start of a larger trend, lauding last year's operating system starts to look less like a success story, and more like a fossil somehow reanimated.

For a brief and fleeting moment I suspect.

Let's get together and do it again

JP Morgan's Imran Khan (different Imran Khan) is tipping online display advertising to grow this year by around 10.5%. Which is obviously massive. He also cites a few trends that seem to be moving the industry away from naff executions - aka the banners that neither you nor I ever click on. Which, let's be honest, is all of them. He is talking though of a trend more towards what Banner Blog exists to share with us, which is great.

That's not what I want to talk about though. In the same article Khan talks about mobile growing 45% (!!!) this year, winding up with $3.2 billion spent on SMS, $253 million in mobile display, and $321 million in mobile search.

A few things:

1. As the mobile platform improves, the notion of display as distinct on mobile from PC will disappear


2. It will however give way to services sensitive to your platform and do other interesting things around location, and device-specific functionality


3. I don't understand what constitutes "mobile search" - maybe someone can explain it to me?


4. Advertisers who invade the phone like they have every other medium are going to get smacked; it's still too personal

Aside from all of this, it's the same Mcluhan-esque mistake (slide 44) made in online advertising where we take what we did before and force it into this new shape because we don't know any better. If anyone truly believes the best way to use a mobile phone is to send people SMSs, they deserve the rapid demise their business will receive.

Frankly it speaks to the lack of vision and general laziness that pervades the entire ad industry. With the simple days of TVCs and print long behind it, rather than thinking about how it can reinvent itself to be relevant in a new era, it consistently mines tired ideas that speak to the silo-mentality of 20th century media.

People, look at foursquare, get in and use it for a few weeks. That, right there, is a perfect storm of local marketing, small business marketing, and mobile. If you do not see it, either try harder, or find a job where you do not need to.