Meme-tastic Project

I've decided to start keeping a little record of online marketing or content that is meme-tastic.

A meme is, roughly, a unit of knowledge. Memetics is the study of how memes are passed between people.

People, for instance, know they should plan ahead in part because of:

'a stitch in time saves nine'

'an ounce of prevention saves a pound of cure'

These are good ideas that have an elegant oral/cultural vehicle that passes them along. They're meme-tastic (I've made that up I think - out of laziness more than anything else).

My interest in this subject is partly due to the fact that it's a point of intersection of traditional and emerging advertising. Mark Ritson has done some really interesting work about how advertising effectiveness is drawn significantly from how people interact with messaging culturally - whether they ignore it or talk about it.

There's a belief around the office at the moment that the best medium for broadcasting advertising that makes people talk is television. While this may not be entirely true (there are an increasing number of internet-based memes that people have in common), it is still mostly true. The exception in advertising (as opposed to PR) is online viral advertising - a sub-industry that needs a lot of work.

Memetics is roughly related to viral advertsing. There are virals that are meme-tastic and there are virals that make everybody work a bit too hard. Bad virals sacrifice brand values in order to gain a foothold with an initial user and then over-incentivise people to spam their friends. A meme-tastic viral is worth sharing for its own sake and helps build a brand, attaching positive associations with the brand.

The aim of my 'project' is to put together a list of good and bad examples for future reference. These won't necessarily be viral campaigns. There are two kinds of 'meme-tastic' communication.

The first is where the idea/concept is brilliant or interesting - it fits perfectly with a social situation, a brand or a zeitgeist and people just want to pass it on. Take, for example, the way that everybody knows that Dell Laptop batteries have been blowing up, or how for six weeks this fall people have been saying 'Yagshemesh.'

The second kind of meme-tastic communication is for idea/concepts that are a little bit more banal but where the communication is facilitated by a cunning mass communicator or a piece of technology.

If you have any good examples I'd love to hear about them.

Zeddigital Conference

I spent a couple of days in Marrakech last week at a 'summit' attended by representatives of many of our offices around the world. As an advertising network we're really picking up some steam. Unfortunately, I missed most of the sessions due to a meeting on the first day of the conference - Marrakech isn't that easy to get to, even from London.

There were a couple of highlights from my half-day of sessions though.

One was a presentation by Joel Lunenfeld, who's a SVP at Moxie Interactive a US-based full service digital agency that was recently acquired by Publicis Groupe. They have a strong client list and are doing some great work, joining up creative, media, web development and data mining. I'm sure that there will be lots of opportunities to learn from them.

The other highlight was having a chat with Jarek Sosinski, a digital planner in our Polish office. Poland is a really interesting market to keep an eye on. It's rapidly growing into an economic contender and the impact is definitely being felt in the online advertising business. Jarek was telling me, though, that there are very few 'global' online brands operating effectively in Poland. Audiences are large and growing and usage is high but the only non-Polish brand that has succeeded in imposing itself is Google.

I get the impression that Poles like to do things there own way - if sites don't develop Polish versions (English still isn't common for adults there) then they're sufficiently entrepreneurial to develop their own content. They have, for instance, their own portals, their own advertising formats and their own instant messenger technology.

The market forces in Poland are such that things are developing at different paces than in other markets. Of all our offices they are the most experienced at engaging in forums and bulletin boards (i.e. User Generated Content 0.9). They're currently planning a campaign for one of our UK clients, advertising bank accounts to Poles planning to move to London.

Jarek and I also had a chuckle about Windows Vista - depending on the anti-piracy coding in it Poland may well adopt it faster then any other market in Europe.

Divining Rods II - Attentio

I met today with Per Siljubergsåsen, one of the co-founders of Attentio . I first learned about Attentio from an interview of another co-founder called Simon McDermott on Podleaders , a series of podcasts that I'd highly recommend.

Attentio is one of the tools that promise to deliver on the promises that remained undelivered-upon at the end of the last web boom. It has the potential (along with, presumably, its still small competitive set) to effective online consumer feedback the norm rather then the exception. It does so through facilitating the process of listening. It aggregates feeds from a careful selection of sources and gives a good snapshot of different web 'channels' (eg. news, blogs, forums...)

The tool, in theory, allows a marketer to use a single interface to have a dashboard quantitative view of the buzz relating to a product or brand online and then to drill down to the qualitative - individual entries. It also aggregates volumes of postings relating to pre-set topics of discussion and identifies new themes.

The tool in action seems to have more strengths than weaknesses and their business model looks like it has an interesting future. It looks like it has very good applications for tracking the effectiveness of marketing initiatives as the focus towards word of mouth (mouse) increases. It also has a lot of potential for feeding into product development.