The real revolution in social won't be online
One of the 24 illustrations by Eric Ravilious for Highstreet published in 1938.
We are undertaking a major project in Saatchi & Saatchi at the moment on the future of the high street. While this is a subject that has been repeatedly dug over in the past couple of years as the high street has imploded in the UK, we have chosen to look at a very specific audience. Rather than turning to the retail experts, household shoppers, urban planners or politicians we have focused instead on young people aged 16 to 29. If the high street has a future then this is it.
We have unearthed a powerful story about both the failure of the high street to meet the needs of this group and profound optimism for its future from these digital natives.
There are three fundamental things that young people are asking of the high street - social connection, local pride and opportunities for entrepreneurialism. And I have been giving a bit of thought to the first of these.
What gets me excited about the desire for social connection is when you move beyond urban planning solutions (seemingly always provided through copious seating and skateboard parks) and inside the retailers. The high street was always brilliant at ‘social’ as we now seem to call it - the authentic and engaged voice of the brand or business - after all this really was a place where everyone knew your name. But the truth is that modern retail has destroyed the sociability of the high street replacing it with something that is far easier to control from head office - service.
Now I am not arguing for one minute that service isn’t important in retailing along with the other elements of the retail trinity - value and quality. But that service has squeezed out sociability and that without it the high street really doesn’t have a hope since it can’t do value, range, or many aspects of quality or service as well as online or out of town. Nowadays a trip to your so called Sainsbury’s Local or Tesco Express can take place with absolutely no human connection whatsoever as you choose and pay for your goods on your own. And the fact is no one minds because the value of the social connection that preceded it was so low automated check out didn’t really make things any worse.
Of course there is a place where brands are tentatively experimenting with being more sociable, in social media. Of course this is proving profoundly difficult precisely because sociability runs counter to the instincts of big brands and businesses. However, I believe that the real revolution in social will come not when brands are sociable in social media (important though this is) but when they crack sociability face to face and specifically in their high street presence.
And one of the exciting things about this is that its can’t be solved with more data. In many respects the key to great service online, out of town or on the high street is great data but it is bugger all help in improving sociability - that is a deeply human skill that algorithms will never be any good as the principal requirement is humanity.
A rapid injection of sociability is not a panacea to solve the problem of our dying high street but an important part of the solution that differentiates this essential part of our daily lives from the retail alternatives.
Crimes against social
Image courtesy of freefotouk
2012 may not have be greeted by the industry with a great deal of enthusiasm, after all the big Olympic event that should have marked the end of our economic woes will now merely record their nadir. Nonetheless, it is a fresh, crisp, virginal new year so not only is it ripe and full of possibilities it is also as yet unsullied by much ghastliness from the advertising world.
So with this fresh start in mind I would like to make a plea, a plea that we have a quiet word with ourselves about social media. And in particular that we offer rather better advice to our clients in this arena than we evidently mustered in 2011 – given the social media fare that we allowed to pollute people’s lives last year.
The industry may be falling over itself to set up social media units, hire social media strategists, attend the multitude of social media conferences and devour the outpourings of the blogosphere and that’s all well and good. However, it doesn’t seem to be having much effect on output.
The involvement of most brands and in the social media lives of the public remains clumsy, inept and disrespectful. Driven, it seems, by a profound misunderstanding of our place in this world, our importance in people’s lives and the basic question that we should have learned a long time ago ‘why would anyone give a fuck?’ As my girlfriend incredulously remarked over the Christmas break, ‘how sad do you have to be to ‘like’ a brand on Facebook?’
So I thought we might make a little pledge, a pledge to eradicate crimes against social media that we are either perpetrating or more dangerously, allowing to take place on our watch.
In 2012 we pledge not to:
1) Bribe people to ‘like’ or follow our brands. Engagement with a brand must be driven by affection or admiration and if the truth is that you are short of either its not a social media campaign you need it’s something rather more fundamental.
2) Accept or set social media metrics as the KPIs for a campaign. We must demand an end to briefings that include arbitrary number of likes, views or followers as campaign objectives. While these are indicative of popularity they are only a means to an end and can never be the end in itself, we need to prove the value of these relationships.
3) Ask people to do something that we wouldn’t ourselves want to do or that requires effort far greater than the reward. It sounds bleeding obvious but how come we so very rarely learn this lesson and continue to ask people to confess, upload and create for us?
4) Desperately try and start online conversations with vapid inanities - you know the kind of thing ‘we love lemon cupcakes, what’s your favourite cupcake?’ If this were the conversational style of a real friend we would punch them repeatedly in the face.
5) Collude in the idea that social media campaigns provide a cheap or even free way to have a constant dialogue with customers and prospects. Providing constant content of sufficient quality is extremely difficult to pull off and it’s rarely cheap – though we need to develop new production models in order to deliver this and ensure that the task doesn’t fall to the PR agencies for reasons of cost.
6) Create mediocre content hoping that it’s going to ‘go viral’ – even worse paying someone to seed mediocre content. People only engage with content that is either useful or utterly delightful and delivering this takes a set of skills that we possess in spades but need to learn to deliver more consistently.
So let us commit ourselves to eradicate these and many other crimes against social media and help ensure that in 2012 social media marketing not only comes of age but grows up.
Content - lessons from the front line
Late last year I was asked to give a talk at the IPA, along with the brilliant Rachel Barrie (from sister agency Fallon), about content driven campaigns. Rachel talked about her experiences working on Gorilla and I talked about our learnings from T-Mobile Dance - both IPA award winners in 2010. It was a rather informal Q&A affair and so there are no charts but in an attempt at prep I scribbled down a few lessons I think that we have learned from our T-Mobile experiences and perhaps more latterly from WeightWatchers. So here they are with the minimum explanation.
1. The more you let go of control the more influence you gain - easy to say but hard to achieve. The long and short is the less it feels like an ad the further it will go
2. Drive mass participation or mass viewership of participation - never settle for marginal reach the only point of doing something is to do it big
3. Emotion is the highest form of participation not clicks or likes
4. The magic of creative development almost always happens in production – this makes the work phenomenally difficult to test
5. Don’t get too poncey about the idea - usually the idea is the hero piece of content and that's what you should integrate with rather than a broader communications idea. The dance campaign wasn't about people dancing in public spaces it was about 'that' dance.
6. Perfect context magnifies perfect content - you just need to look at the success of T-Mobile's Royal Wedding to see this in action
7. Excellence wins – excellence of idea and execution, excellence doesn’t come from the crowd
8. Catalyse always – always seed and never forget the power of TV
9. What do you love? – that’s always the best guarantee for success
10.Always ask yourself why anyone will be bothered to share? – bonding, group identity, status or more often, pure wonder
The Book of Revelations
Greetings from Charlotte Street. Image courtesy of Michael in South London.
Well you all know of my fondness for the idea of revelation as the new action standard for insights - astonishing disclosures about people, brands and the world in which we live.
So the book of revelations is the name for the new planning blog from Saatchi & Saatchi in London (AKA the SAS).
It's written by top bloke Tom Gibson. We are using it to inspire the agency but everyone is welcome of course.
Context is king
Out of context is viewing online commercially valuable? Image courtesy of papa'rocket.
As we career head long into the economic car crash that is destroying jobs, crushing consumer expenditure and ripping the confidence and profitability out of both client and agency organisations, one performance metric has emerged above all others to guide us through these tricky times.
It’s not a measure of efficiency like cost per response, it’s not a measure of likelihood to purchase like brand consideration and its certainly nowhere close to a measure of return on investment. It is the number of people viewing a commercial online.
Right now the advertising industry has become obsessed with this one measure of performance above all others, we even have our own chart at viralvideo.com to add a little competitive frisson between agencies.
Now, it is easy to see why ad people love online views, it is a pure measure of creative prowess. Of course a brilliant seeding strategy can turbo charge online distribution but by and large, unlike traditional media, you can’t buy the audience. Your content has either got what it takes or it hasn’t and that places real value on the thing that agencies value the most and get paid to deliver – creativity.
Of course we have to be realistic about the reach that online viewing can contribute. You have to have something pretty spectacular on your hands like the T-Mobile Dance ad or Cadbury Eyebrows spot to generate the big numbers that make online a serious contender as a distrbution medium. However, the counter argument is the value of an audience that elects to view a commercial message rather than one that is served it regardless of whether they are remotely interested or paying any attention whatsoever.
As a legendary house ad from the ad agency HHCL read while showing a couple going at it hammer and tongs on the sofa oblivious to the TV playing in the foreground, ‘research says these people are watching your ad, who is really getting screwed?’ It seems self evidently true that one voluntary and attentive viewing of a commercial is worth considerably more to the advertiser than the many potential views that a commercial break may or may not have delivered.
Now, not that I want to rain on the online viewing parade but I do want to encourage a moment of caution before we all drink the YouTube Koolaid. Caution inspired by the idea that it’s not only content that is king, context has a pretty good claim to the throne too.
When people watch an ad on the television it is delivered to them in a commercial break. A break in the content that is overtly signposted as an opportunity for people to sell their goods and services and understood as such. The audience has been conditioned to decode the content they then see as ads and that their job is to figure out what is for sale and who is selling it. No matter how eyewateringly creative or side splittingly enjoyable the work, this is clearly understood as a commercial transaction between advertiser and audience. And though it’s hard to quantify exactly, it is clear that this context adds considerably to the success of the content.
And that’s what concerns me about the hoopla around online viewing. Is an ad an ad when it’s viewed out of the context of an ad break? Or does it simply become a piece of sponsored content, engaging and enjoyable but neutered of its commercial power and therefore of dubious valuable to the Client’s business and a rather inappropriate a metric to be fixated on at this particularly mercenary time in the economic cycle.
Hat tip to Paul Colman who got me onto this and is undertaking some proper research on the subject as we speak.
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Image courtesy of badjonni
I have a very cruel, but accurate, joke about why planners have adopted social media with more enthusiasm than others in the advertising business. In advertising only planners blog, account handlers have nothing to say and creatives have better places to say it.
Indeed planners have taken to the world of online self-publishing with an alacrity they once reserved for pouring over extremely dull quantitative research. The same goes for virtually every other online or mobile tool that enables people to share their lives, photos, films and even powerpoint presentations. The online planning community is so vibrant that it even has its own name, the plannersphere.
This enthusiasm is very specific to the nature and role of planners. These are naturally the most geeky people in an agency, obsessed with why people do things and how to get them to do something else, so they have always naturally gravitated towards shiny new things.
They also crave community, since outside the major English speaking advertising cities planners are often on their own or in very small and isolated departments. The opportunity to join a network of people doing the same job and experiencing the same challenges has been a godsend to the planning diaspora.
There is also the distinct possibility that in many agencies planners lack a voice and and audience for their ideas and thinking and so have latched onto social networks as a way to ensure their ideas and opinions are met by welcoming ears.
Which simply leaves one critical question unanswered. How come there are precious few examples of brands using social media well? How come the great social media case studies of the moment start and end with Wispa and its army of Facebook fans. After all aren’t planners, as the architects of brand ideas and communications strategies, in a perfect position to influence brand behaviour online. Why haven’t planners translated their personal enthusiasm for blogging, tweeting, poking, uploading and sharing into the activities of their brands?
I maintain that it is precisely our familiarity with these tools that has placed a brake on their widespread adoptions in communication planning. It has always been the case in advertising that the more a medium means to the people in the business the more care we take over it. This partly explains why more love and attention has traditionally gone into TV advertising than into Direct Mail and Telemarketing.
So it is with social media, planners get what is going on and understand the nuanced etiquette that is expected of anyone wishing to participate in these communities. We understand the two key rules you must abide by if you are to take part in online social networks. That brands, like any of us, have to let go of the control they crave if they are ever to gain influence. And that social networks are built on simple human conversations, and a brand only has a role if it can make that conversation better. Above all we understand that the most rewarding presence that any brand can have is through the natural enthusiasm of its fans much like the devotees of Mad Men have done in twittering as members of the cast.
So forgive us for being slow in delivering plans that involve the mass adoption of the social networks that we love, it is precisely because we use and care about them that we are extremely cautious about the involvement of brands in this space. Meanwhile we will continue to use social networks in the way that best benefits our clients at the moment, as a means to listen to the conversation.
Emotion is the greatest form of interaction
I recently had the pleasure of judging two sets of industry accolades.
The first was the Account Planning Group’s Creative Strategy awards and the second, New Media Age's Interactive Marketing and Advertising Awards, at which I was the above the line cuckoo in the digital nest.
Now, we all have our own view of awards and their importance or otherwise to the business we work in. However, I never fail to find them hugely instructive as a barometer for the way an industry is developing and the ebb and flow of ideas and practices.
For instance, despite all the talk of digital shops getting planning and planners getting digital there is very little cross over between the entries at these two events. The APG still draws the majority of its entries (with one or two very notable exceptions) from advertising agencies and the IMAA from digital and media agencies.
I want, however, to expand on another and far more subtle difference with broader learning for the world of digital planning and creativity.
The fact is that I didn’t cry once while judging the IMAA. Over the week of shortlisting and day of judging I laughed, played, engaged, gapped in awe and doffed my technological cap. But not once did the tears well up in my eyes or the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.
Not so the APG awards. On more than one occasion I had to fight back my tears and swallow the lump in my throat in order to get on with the serious business of dolling out gongs. Most notable in the waterworks department was the Nike Air Max campaign that honours moments of devastating sporting failure to the strains of a dying Johnny Cash singing his rendition of ‘hurt’. It gets me every time.
However, this isn’t just a plea for more emotional digital work, although I think this development is inevitable as the discipline’s creative confidence and competence increases and the emotional bandwidth of the tools available increases. After all that is what happened in traditional advertising once the novelty of a brand going on TV ceased to be reason enough to go and buy it.
This is actually a plea to refine our definition of interactivity. As an industry we have a very one dimensional view of what constitutes an interaction between people and a brand and it almost always involves pushing some kind of button, whether on a remote control or a mouse. It’s a very physical thing.
This utterly disregards the fact that the most powerful form of interaction a brand can solicit is exactly the reaction the Nike work creates – emotion. This is a response you can’t measure with clicks or dwell time but in raised pulses, dilated pupils and the crackling sound of synapses firing.
That’s why we love Gorilla, Balls, Evolution and the other real stars of today’s interactive advertising landscape – they generate powerful emotional responses. And the more we learn about the way campaigns work the more we understand that emotional persuasion trumps rational persuasion every time.
So why is the simplest form of human interactivity somehow seen as illegitimate in the armoury of the interactive marketer? Why can’t the technology that we all delight in be used to bring emotion to the brand relationship not just the relationship between users? And why is novelty prized so highly over other, more subtly powerful forms of persuasion?
It is high time that we recognised that emotion is the highest form of interaction and prepared for the judging the next digital awards by stocking up on the Kleenex.
A version of this article originallya appeared in New Media Age.