IAB SOCIAL MEDIA COUNCIL - MY AGENDA

I was recently elected Chair of the Internet Advertising Bureau's Social Media Council. See here for more detail.

The IAB social media council comprises of media owners, social networks, brands, creative, media and specialist social media agencies and was launched in 2008 to educate the industry about the opportunities within this space. With a range of experience and expert knowledge, the council’s collective remit includes word of mouth marketing and blogger outreach, content distribution, digital creative and social media research. I will take over the role from Lloyd Salmons, founder and CEO of agency Outside Line.

I will spend the year facilitating meetings, engaging with industry leaders and driving council initiatives, and acting on a proposed ‘6 Point Plan’ for the group:

1. Empowering ambassadors of specialist topics within the diverse membership of the social media council, thus giving every member a voice.

2. Sharing the council’s knowledge and practical guidance with the wider industry via editorial and video content each month.

3. Promoting the council as a ‘shop window’ for social talent and agencies.

4. To create standards, tools, templates, and systems to help grow the social media business in the UK.

5. To liaise directly with industry influencers on a regular basis with focused presentations and case studies.

6. To lobby and promote social media and the council to the major holding companies and industry bodies to ensure all relevant groups are talking in the same language.

Point 4 is of particular importance. Creating standards, tools, and systems will be key in growing the business, and upgrading it from a cottage industry. My aim is to bring some of the open source sensibilities already prevalent in social media into the social media council, so we can grow the overall business. We'll be developing tools, templates, and processes collectively, and will share these with the wider industry. We plan to break out of the confines of the ‘social media cluster’ and connect with the biggest advertisers and agencies in the UK, on their terms, offering training and support.

These goals will feed into the IAB’s ongoing role in supporting the social media industry via educational materials, dedicated forums for debate, marketing and consumer insights.

CONCEPTUAL CONSUMPTION AND THE BATTLE OF IDEAS

I recently found this clever infographic at thisisindexed and it got me thinking about information, and how we use it. Too much information is bad. Equally, too little information is just as problematic.

A recent paper published through Harvard Business School argues that "As technology has simplified meeting basic needs, humans have cultivated increasingly psychological avenues for occupying their consumption energies, moving from consuming food to consuming concepts".

The things we consume conceptually are memes. They are everywhere as we seek more and more conceptual consumption. There are more ideas out there than brains that can host them, which is why some ideas prosper and flourish, and others fail, and die. There is an evolutionary battle of the fittest happening on the web, and elsewhere everyday. We can now see what ideas are on the up, and which are on the way down using data visualisation tools, and even search traffic. Product lifecycles are much shorter now, musical sub-cultures come alive and then fade quickly, and fads and fashions disappear at the blink of an eye.

Is there an upper limit to how much, and how quickly we can process all these memes? There are more memes, and more people to connect with than ever before. Kenneth Gergen in his book The Saturated Self argues that we have reached a state of social saturation.

This all sounds pretty depressing, except for one silver lining, which is that we can now - more than ever befeore - process these memes collectively, using collective intelligence, and distributed brain power. Social media allows us to share and process memes. Think social boomarking on Delicious, and Digg, or Yahoo Answers, think Google search algorithms based on link popularity, think ratings, user reviews, and voting. These memes have forced us to our next stage of social evolution.

AXE'S CLEVER USE OF SMS AND PRINT ADVERTISING

This campaign is something cool I discovered on Adverblog recently. It's a cool use of SMS from Axe Uruguay. To see the complete picture of the scantily clad model, the ad simply asked the reader to text Axe to a short code after 9pm (to keep kids away). You then get to see the scantily clad model in her full glory. This is a smart understanding of the Axe brand (which is called Lynx here in the UK), and a great demonstration of how SMS and print can work together.

OUR ONLINE REPUTATIONS ARE BECOMING OUR REAL LIFE REPUTATIONS

It's always worth keeping an eye out for what is happening at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Tracking research at Media Lab can be particularly rewarding. Those clever people over there are constantly pushing out new innovations. One that I've come late to is its Personas project, that tells you how the Internet sees you.

My Persona is below.
Although not the most accurate portrayal of me, it does however reinforce how online reputations have become our real life reputations. The trend of Googling other people you don't know or people you want to know more about is part of this phenomenon. This is truly interesting stuff, and an important innovation.

The site describes the project as follows:

Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, recently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab (Please contact us if you want to show it next!). It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one's aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.

Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person - to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

Worth having a play with.

BREAKING THE SOUND BARRIER IN DIGITAL

My old boss shared this recent TED talk with me that he did around sound. Its great. Sound is such an unexplored field, and in the world of digital communications it is largely virgin territory. There's a type of sound barrier in digital, as we surf silently across the web. Convention holds that sound is defaulted to off on websites, and in banners, and little time is invested around thinking how sound in digital experiences could increase effectiveness. The type of thinking Julian Treasure is demonstrating in this talk could help start to break the sound barrier. Enjoy the video.

A FEW PREDICTIONS ON THE FUTURE OF TV

A couple of weeks ago the IAB announced that digital media spend overtook TV spend for the first time in the UK. But the lines are so blurred its a funny division to make these days, but satisfying none the less. In a recent issue of Media Week, I and a few others were asked to make some predictions about the media landscape in 2014 in a piece called, 2014: a media odyssey.

Here is the section on TV predictions:

The convergence of the TV and internet will change all the traditional broadcast rules. Suranga Chandratillake, founder of video search engine Blinkx, says: "Viewers won't depend on a schedule and there will be no such thing as prime time."

Chandratillake envisions a time when TV shows will be pre-programmed specifically for each viewer. He says: "It might be news tailored to the industry you work in or the weather forecast for your exact location. For light relief, your TV will find you some tennis, as it knows you like this sport from your previous viewing habits. On your commute to work, you might start watching the latest episode of your favourite soap on a mobile device, but pause it so you can watch the rest on your way home."

Nigel Walley, managing director of consultancy Decipher, forecasts that traditional broadcast will drop to about 60% of viewing time. He says: "Broadcasters will respond to this trend by making more programmes that demand to be viewed live by integrating their video-on-demand content into the broadcast stream and by building deeper relationships with their users through data, so they can do things like reward loyalty."

Tony Effik, chief strategy officer at Publicis Modem, predicts that Apple, Microsoft and Google will become significant TV players. He says: "Apple will launch an improved version of Apple TV linked to iTunes, YouTube and Hulu, and Google will work with Sky and Apple to offer pay-per-click models for the TV advertising. Pay-per-click will become hugely successful and will force change in TV business models."

Effik also forecasts better targeting based on Google technology, which will give advertisers viewing data on each household, as well as click data on advertising. He adds: "Targeting and pricing of advertising will be based on individual profiles, with some viewers worth more."

In addition, consumers will access sites such as Flickr and YouTube via the TV, and will watch with the constant accompaniment of a Twitter-type feed.

Damian Ryan, head of digital at consultancy Results International, suggests this could be called "Twelevision", enabling viewers to interact around content. He says: "There will also be the option for viewers to take control of broadcast under certain moderated conditions."

LIKE EVERY REVOLUTION, THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION WILL HAVE ITS MANY COUNTER REVOLUTIONS

In a recent issue of NMA Richard Huntington, Director of strategy, Saatchi & Saatchi, argued “if you're a digital shop, it's turning out to be anything but your time. Good news for digital, bad news for the rather quaint idea of the standalone digital agency…” If I were not worried about the next few years for the business as a whole, I might have been offended by Mr Huntington’s understanding of the transition in the digital business.

In any real revolution, the new king rarely looks like the old king. A real revolution changes everything. In the music business, the record labels, who were the kings of music, look nothing like the new king: Apple’s iTunes. In the classified advertising business, the old kings – the newspapers – look nothing like the new king of classifieds: Google. Advertising will be no different. The new king will look nothing like what he calls an orthodox agency. The new king will not even look like what a current digital agency looks like.

Every revolution has its counter-revolutions, and it is no different for the digital revolution. In 1976, Zhou Enlai - Chinese Premier from 1949 until his death - was asked to give an assessment of the 1789 French Revolution. He said: it's too early to say! Mr Huntington could learn a thing or two from Zhou Enlai’s caution. We are just at the beginning of this revolution, and it is still unwinding, and filtering through the system.

Its also perhaps more appropriate to categorise advertising agencies that have hired digital people as hybrid agencies rather than orthodox, particularly when you recognise that there are digital agencies, becoming hybrids, by hiring former advertising people as well. Digital agencies want the keys to the brand and orthodox agencies want to find a door that takes them to the digital future, The new kings of advertising will look nothing like what he calls an ‘orthodox’ agency or even a standalone digital agency, for three key reasons:

1)Marginal players on the fringes of the digital business – The Internet is as wide as it is deep and continues to grow. Even the advertising agencies that have best transitioned to digital, Goodby SilverStein & Partners, and Crispin Porter Bogusky, are still only playing on the edges of this unfathomable space. They do superb banners, landing pages, micro-sites, and viral videos, but are not on the roster for real deep digital work like global ecommerce website redesigns, digital anthropology studies, implementation of content management systems, search engine optimization projects, blogger outreach programs, and website analytics.

2) Subsiding digital growth – To play in the deep digital space, orthodox agencies still need to hire people from disciplines beyond the programmers Mr. Partington mentioned in his article. They will also need to resolve a problem that every digital agency is struggling to resolve: how do you resource, and cover such an unfathomable space, whilst still keeping those timesheets full. This is not a question orthodox agencies have worried about so far, as they have subsidised their digital forays with TV-scale budgets. As they cross the rubicon between the orthodox and digital worlds they will need to balance finances for both of these worlds. In a recent interview, Rich Silverstein, co-founder of Goodby Silverstein & Partners said” The internet is so deep its like drilling for oil. So far, I don’t think we’ve charged for all the time we’ve put into it”.

3) The New Peter Principle – I recently read an argument put forward by John Kay of the FT to explain the financial crisis. The original Peter Principle holds that individuals find their own level of incompetence, and eventually rise to a job they are not good at. Organisations, similarly, frequently find themselves diversifying to their level of incompetence. They extend their businesses into areas that trip them up.



Orthodox agencies have a shiny new bike they want to learn to ride, but they are making the same mistakes that digital agencies made when learning to ride their bikes. Many orthodox agencies are peddling like hell towards the digital future to substitute analogue for digital revenue, and staff up with digital people. Many do this without considering the strategic and financial implications.

The digital business is a deflationary force to the industry as a whole: digital has lower revenues than traditional media; and is more expensive to service. For orthodox agencies that do not understand the dynamics of this transition, they could be falling victim to the Peter Principle and diversifying to the point of incompetence. If Mr Huntington is right, this is an example of the winner’s curse. Ad agencies will be substituting high margin atl revenue with lower digital revenues that they do not really understand.

Its perfectly understandable for orthodox agencies to pursue digital, but its too early to say what the consequences of this race are going to be for both orthodox agencies and those quaint old digital agencies he refers to.

WHAT TYPE OF AGENCY IS BEST AT DELIVERING THE BIG IDEA?

I was recently involved in a project organised by PRWeek:

PRWeek launched a project to test how well agencies responded to a client's need for an overarching comms solution. The objective was to be discipline-neutral, picking one agency from the PR, media, digital and DM spheres.

The result is The Big Idea project, run in conjunction with the NSPCC. The children's charity body graciously agreed to put its 2010 Helpline marketing brief up for grabs. The four agencies - Porter Novelli (PR), MindShare (media), Publicis Modem (digital) and Lida (DM) - did the rest.

The process triggered a series of presentations, with each agency approaching the brief from a unique point of view. 'It reminded me how many different ways there are to come to a solution,' says NSPCC comms director John Grounds.

Click here to read up on what happened