Real World Wide Web

I was in a meeting with Tim Kindberg this week. He works for HP in research and development at the HP Labs in Bristol. One of his projects is physical hyperlinks. This is by no means a new technology - it's already been put to use by the BBC and won an award.

The idea is that physical objects could have a unique barcode printed on them that can be photographed by a mobile phone. The image leads to a unique reference point on the web which contains information. The technology was used as part of the BBC series Coast. Scenic walks were marked with posters that included these tags and linked to various pieces of information. You can learn more on the Active Print site.

There are a couple of barriers to this technology taking off. Having seen it in action, though, I'm much more convinced than I was. Properly integrated into phones it could be very easy to use and very useful. The phone tells you when you've succeeded in capturing the barcode - a major plus for usability.

There are, by the sounds of it, two major hurdles. The first is getting the appropriate software embedded into phones. The second is standardisation of codes.

This technology has all kinds of possible applications. The 'barcode' could, in theory, execute any number of activities on a phone. It could probably replace phone numbers on business cards, for instance.

It could definitely act as an easily traceable response mechanic on outdoor and ambient advertising. It could add real value to consumers and be easily trackable for media spend optimisation.

Some of the ideas that Tim covered were:

real time travel information at bus stops and on train platforms

in-store promotions

response mechanism on outdoor

incentive delivery on outdoor to increase footfall

map download from online to mobile

If you have another one, please feel free to comment...

Gartner Hype Cycle

Has the buzz about Second Life been annoying you? There's a conceptual framework called the Hype Cycle developed by Gartner that I find useful most weeks at helping me figure out my views on 'hot' technology news.

To be honest, I'm not sure how much rigour is behind it and I doubt that it's useful for definitive planning. It's extremely useful, however, in helping to maintain perspective, especially on new technologies.

The fundamental concept is that most or all technologies go through five phases of development that see the level of hype peak long before the technologies themselves become useful. Between excitement and usefulness there is a period where most people are decidedly underwhelmed by the technology.

If you take the mobile internet as an example, it was developed some years ago as a concept and there was a lot of excitement. This rapidly dissipated when people realised that WAP was really unimpressive and that no-one would be bothered with it. Now, WAP in its various forms is starting to make a comeback as phones have improved and people have found useful things to do with it.

I'd highly recommend reading through the concept and then doing a little search search of the interweb to see what people have posted (neglecting copyright of course).

Back to Second Life - companies that are making PR announcements or set up virtual shops in Second Life at the moment are very much taking advantage of the fact that the level of hype is extremely high. The vast majority of the value gained from these endeavours comes from association with the hype. There will be a severe drop in people's interest and the value to be gained from Second Life before there is any sustained interest from the 'general populaton'.

Second Life

There's been a lot of talk about Second Life recently. I wonder what the ratio is between people who've heard of it and people who have actually played with it (or, for that matter, people who have actually bought Linden Dollars).

Second Life has managed to sell some pretty significant companies into giving them free PR. Reuters, Sun Microsystems and IBM have all made something of a big deal about being associated with Second Life.

A lot of their success, I think, comes from the fact that the concept encapsulates so many different elements of the new web. It gives a physical (if virtual) dimension to web technologies and habits as varied as online gaming, instant messaging, chat rooms, Pay Pal and eBay for example.

I feel like it's pretty safe to say that in its current form Second Life will never become 'mainstream'. The future of the web lies in its cross-over with the real world, not it's ability to make a virtual one.

I do think that it's a step towards a viable replacement for conference calls (and instant messaging and chat rooms for that matter).

I think it's worth mentioning that my former colleague, Barry Lee , is sufficiently bleeding edge that he was presenting 3-D net meetings as an exciting development about a year ago...

Online Art

My cousin Daniel recently completed a Masters of Fine Arts at the Chelsea College of Art and Design. Since moving to London five years ago I've enjoyed following his various art projects - he brings a kind of whimsy to his work that I really appreciate.

He recently hosted a week-long art event on a small island off the coast of Croatia called Susak. Apparently it's a beautiful and somewhat isolated place. I've lifted some text from a forum site about the island:

THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG WITH THE PEOPLE LIVING ON THE ISLAND!!!!! (I can't seem to stress this one out enough)

So all of you that hear things about deliverance-type of weirdos and shit about mutants - You've been tricked. I can guarantee you that the percentage of strange people is far lower than in the town where you're comming from.

IF YOU WANT FREAKS, GO TO THE FUCKING CIRCUS.

The island doesn't really have roads so the all the locals have wheelbarrows to cart their things around. Daniel made a t-shirt inspired by this which you can buy from his site . During the Susak Expo Daniel undertook a project to paint as many of the wheelbarrows as possible bright orange. There are some great photos here . I'd particularly recommend clicking on the photo on the right of the old guy.

Daniel has invited me to collaborate with him in a project yet-to-be-defined. Hopefully we can think of something cool...

Divining Rods III - Pôle Nord

The acquisition of Pôle Nord by Publicis Groupe is very much of today's media zeitgeist. Not entirely unlike Rupert Murdoch's spate of acquisitions, it is 'old' advertising learning from new.

Pôle Nord as a company has earned its stripes by servicing e-commerce companies. For those of us who have worked in online marketing for established companies, this is an impressive place to prove yourself. Established companies tend to be burdened by complexities of multiple corporate objectives and legacy systems. E-commerce, typically, has a sharp focus on a single bottom line - delivering the maximum return on what is usually almost 100% online spend through a single sales channel.

This is the smithy at which Pôle Nord's tools were forged. As a result, they are very exciting. Word Catcher delivers unparalleled insights into SEM effectiveness charting brands against competitors within key categories in terms of volume of search terms and position on the listings.

Click 2 Sale is sufficiently flexible that it is an ideal divining rod . It's an automated bid management tool that works with APIs and javascript coding to create a platform which allows advertisers to maximise their investment by delivering as much relevance as possible - matching a wide variety of 'post-click actions' to keyword data with sufficient ease that marketers can devote their time to adding the human touches which are so important to real relevance.

The future of marketing will be when machines do jobs appropriate for machines, humans do jobs appropriate for humans and the rigour of e-commerce marketing meets the magic of 'old' advertising.

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.

Divining Rods

I saw three commercial proprietary tools for Web 2.0 in action today. The first two were developed by Pole Nord - a company acquired by the Publicis Groupe (my employers) last year. The third was developed by Attentio , a Brussels-based start up that aggregates online content into a 'buzz tracking' tool. All three were great examples of how it's relatively easy to develop ground-breaking tools in online marketing.

In each case the tools differentiate themselves from the competition by facilitating the manipulation of data in order to provide actionable insights (how 'bout that for marketing speak).

There is far too much data in the digital world and not enough insights. Great tools (and people who know who to use them) are too few and far between.

Minor SEO Win

I'm feeling very smug about my neo-logism. It will be a long time before Google recognises it as a word unto itself, in the meantime I'm happy to be top of the listings for people who search on "e-pisteme".

Digital Integrated Marketing

As part of the training sessions we had with him last week Mark Ritson led us through a case study about Walmart. Opinion is pretty divided about the values of Walmart but one of the things that they do undeniably well is information systems.

There was an example of how customer data allowed them to discover that when a hurricane warnings increased sales of strawberry Poptarts dramatically. Their systems are so good that not only could they identify this trend, they were able to respond to it and ship more Poptarts to the appropriate locations. I have a cousin who used to run the supply chain for Green & Black's chocolate and he had a similar anecdote about Tesco's here in the UK. He loved doing business with them as a result.

E-businesses have known for a long time that there is invaluable data in analytics and adserving spreadsheets. As online advertising grows and increases in importance, companies that have had little direct contact with their end-users have the opportunity to take advantage of new 'touchpoints'.

There is so much data in online advertising that it's easy to get swamped by it and I've yet to come across an over-resourced web team. One of the things that I'm most looking forward to in my new job is unearthing the hidden insights that this data holds.

Digital Integrated Advertising - A Case Study

When I created 'Digital Integrated Advertising' as a tag a week ago I intended to use it as a description for a trend that I see as rapidly increasing. Online and mobile advertising have, at least in the UK, remained relatively silo-ed, apart from other channels. First mover advertisers have made attempts to run campaigns that join up digital and non-digital media, with SMS response or strong websites for instance. Digital channels, though, have mostly existed in parallel to other channels - either online driving traffic to a website or building up the frequency of messaging of an offline campaign.

There are few campaigns that have succeeded in recognising that increasingly all parts of our life our digital. Last year, working with a number of agencies, we ran a successful and elegant campaign with British Airways that blurred these lines. We took excellent content that had been developed for a microsite about 'hidden gems' in London and developed it into a mobile guide to the city. This guide became part of an advertising campaign that ran in advertorials in Metro Newspapers across Europe and was also a very popular part of the microsite.

It's really hard to quantify the impact that this element of the campaign had, or qualify it for that matter. But here's why I think it was award-worthy (it won an NMA Effectiveness Award and probably should have won more).

it can only have helped BA build its reputation as a forward-thinking, premium brand. Unfortunately there wasn't a great deal of quantitative evidence for this apart from its popularity as part of the microsite.

people are still downloading the guide from the microsite

almost all marketing research points to word of mouth as a key influencer. Having portable content on a mobile phone probably contributed to hundreds or thousands of conversations about travelling to London around Europe

we gave potential customers something of value out of advertising

it was an efficient recycling of content

Media 2.0

There's a really interesting short essay from March 2006 on UX Magazine, a great little site that doesn't seem to publish often enough.

The essay is called 'This is Media 2.0' and is a good review and set of predictions about the impact of Web 2.0 on media. In Media 2.0 there are opportunities for publishers who act as platforms for user generated content.

Like most of Web 2.0 talk it sounds an awful lot like 1999 all over again. In fact, like most Web 2.0, there's a good reason for that - it's taken this long to get this far.

Troy Young, the author, makes some good points and it's worth a read. It isn't exactly cutting edge now that YouTube is ubiquitous but it was written in March 2006 and so seems relatively prescient. He makes some predictions, one of which fits well with some of the work we're doing as an advertising agency:

Media 2.0 companies will look to partner with brands, beyond selling audience, to offer value to community members. Media 2.0 will provide valuable opportunities for user research. Less reach, more partnership / affiliation.

Planting Change on Widsets

I recently discovered Widsets . It's a relatively modest site of uncertain origin that is doing something cool and relatively new. It's a bit like AvantGo 2.0. You download a client to your mobile phone and then you're able to subscribe to RSS feeds. They've also made it easy to publish your own feed.

It's similar to a service in the UK that's been advertising on South West Trains (Commuter trains in part of London) called Mobizines . Mobizines also involves downloading a client to your phone and then subscribing to content. You can, by the looks of it, also subscribe to RSS feeds but the majority of the 'pitch' is towards established media brands like GQ and Glamour. The Widset client feels much leaner than the Mobizine one and loads more quickly and smoothly on my Nokia N80.

I'm not sure how much I'll use the Widset client on my mobile but it looks like I have 5 subscriptions to my RSS feed (5 more than via the standard internet). I don't expect anyone to actually read the feed but you never know.

I've you're interested you should check it out:

My own neo-logism

It just occurred to me to search "e-pisteme". I'm really pleased with the word.

I've carried out a Google search and there were no relevant listings.
I also Yahoo!ed it to the same effect.
And Wikipedia-ed it.
Technorati turned up a blog called: http://giligil.blogspot.com/ that includes e-pisteme in a long list of e-words but it's since disappeared.
Icerocket has turned up a total blank.
Google Blogsearch has spotted http://giligil.blogspot.com/ along with my cunning link-farm ploy of using a disused photo moblog (it had a great deal of potential) to link to my neo-logism.

If it wasn't for the almost complete lack of my SEO abilities I'd be 100% pleased about this.
Roll over Baudrillard

I'm starting to get this blogging thing

Having taken spent many hours over the last couple years coaxing people through the complexities of online advertising, SEM and mobile marketing I feel like I'm pretty well placed to spot a communication technology epiphany. I've just had one. In theory I've known about blogs for a long time.

I could appreciate that blogs, spamming aside, fit somewhere along a spectrum. At one end are the millions of failed spurts of creativity that result in 1-5 unread posts on a forgotten blog (I can claim three of these). At the other end are the online media brands that just happen to use blogging software as their platform (eg. Gawker, Cute Overload, etc..). I knew that there were plenty of variations in between but I figured that they were mostly people talking about niche interests or about blogging. I still think I was right but mostly missing the point.

In a post that I found in an appropriately blogospherical way (through a trackback on a post I enjoyed), Chris Thilk has put together a really nice precis of the better understanding that I've come to this week.

Blogging gave me a voice. It gave people like me a voice. Part of me couldn't believe it. I had a voice. I could talk about what I wanted, what movies I was watching, what irritated me about Illinois politics and any thing else that flitted through my mind.

Old me says, "Brilliant bud, didn't you realise that you could bore people even more easily in the real world?" New me says, "Hold on, I'm reading this and it's interesting. I don't know this guy and I'll never meet him. This is an interesting 'conversation' that wouldn't have happened without blogging.

I've been initiated. People don't just gain a voice in blogosphere, they also find ears - their own and those of others. The gaining of the voice is interesting too - in real life I'm relatively apprehensive about appearing self-involved. I'm not saying it's necessarily a good thing (it's still TBD) but this blog seems to be freeing me of that apprehension.

And the reason that people blog so much about blogging (or podcast about podcasting for that matter) is that it is significant. In 'old media' you needed to step away from the technology in order to discuss the content (eg. Seinfeld chats at the watercooler). In 'new media' you need to step into the technology in order to discuss the content, and while you're in there you might as well talk about the technology itself.

Epistemological Shift

I've been reading some research written by Mark Ritson in the lead up to some training he's doing for us at ZO tomorrow.

It's great to see some words from my good old University days. It's not everyday you come across epistemological or ontological. It makes me feel like my degree was more than just fun.

I need to spend some time thinking about blogs with an 'epistemologists' hat on and see if I can come up with something interesting to say. There is definitely a paucity of metaphors/analogies to deal with the complexities of blogging. I might save that one for a rainy day though.

HP Blogging right?

I just left a comment on a blog set up on HP.com by Eric Kintz , a VP of marketing strategy at HP.


It looks like a really good initiative - a good way to get HP marketers thinking about the blogosphere. Most impressively, he invited a guy from Lenovo to comment. I've yet, though, to see anyone crack the complexity of blogging.

One of the things that I find the most interesting about digital advertising is that the subtlest technological changes can have huge impacts. The difference between a blog and a website is not altogether huge but the impact is massive. Websites have changed the 'media landscape'. Blogs, though, change the communications landscape, which is a shift of a different order altogether.

Tired Metaphors I - The Purchase Funnel

I'm working on a different way of approaching the concept of the 'purchase funnel'. I don't know if I'm just bored of talking about it or whether it's actually an oversimplification people's behaviour. I'm almost certain, though, that there is a 'friendlier' way for marketers to conceptualise their customer relationships (or webmasters their site traffic for that matter).

Steve Ballmer, Motivational Speaker

I saw Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, speak at a Digital Advertising conference in London last week. He didn't say anything new or particularly exciting. He's a great speaker though, with more than a passing resemblance to classic Saturday Night Live Chris Farley character - Matt Foley, Motivational Speaker.

The Passion Spectrum

Kathy Sierra who is, apparently an eminent commentator on 'Web 2.0' recently wrote a post referring to another post written by Scott Adams (the Dilbert cartoonist - evidently also a blogger).

Scott wrote that, in polling consumer opinion, the 'kiss of death' for a product or concept is indifference or mild approval. He says, relatively convincingly, that you're better off having a spectrum of passionate opinions, even if most of them are negative, as long as some of them are passionately positive.

"The opposite of love," one of my flatmates in University once told me, in reference to relationships, "isn't hate. It's indifference."

In the UK, Unilever are again making use of this spectrum of passions in an ad campaign for Marmite. They've gone as far as building a site devoted to what might be considered a 'basic' food stuff.

I'm not sure whether I should be pleased or annoyed that they've included an online drawing tool. This is an online fad, presumably born partly due to an advancement in Flash, that I've been cataloguing with some amusement.

There are, however, (literally) innumerable products for which people are mostly or entirely indifferent but buy anyway.

A broad spectrum of passions, I suppose, delivers inherent brand equity. This is a nice plus to a marketer but by no means a requirement.

Planting Change

The more information available to us, the more effort it takes to organise it.

This blog is, to a certain extent, an exercise in organisation. It's an attempt to:

develop a portable reference to the paradigms that define marketing communications in 2006 and onward

build a set of conceptual frameworks that help businesses respond to changes in technology