Only Dead Fish

Squared

I've been involved with Google Squared since its inception some time ago. It's an intensive learning programme that set out to address the talent shortage in our industry, challenge the status quo, accelerate digital capabilities, and teach by doing (all things that I think are important), and has featured some excellent speakers including Rory Sutherland, Sir John Hegarty and Richard Eyre (and me). For a good while the focus was on graduates at the start of their advertising and media careers, but it has now expanded out to incorporate programmes that are run for senior level and also client side marketers.

The Squared folk have produced a rather lovely infographic featuring some feedback from some of the alumni which you can view in all its glory here. And it's worth noting that they are also taking the course online which should open it up to a larger number of participants - there's a live introduction to that happening this week on Thursday 20th at 1.00pm.

The Future Of Search

The Future of Search - Will Critchlow's presentation at FODM 2013

This talk by Will Critchlow of Distilled on the future of search was one of the best things I saw at the recent Future Of Digital Marketing conference that I also spoke at. One of the things that Will said was that the way people interact with search is more interesting than the algorithm, but the focus on the power of context was particularly interesting. Will talked about how explicit query data is being augmented by ever more sophisticated implicit query data (all the information Google has outside of the search term e.g. device, history, location etc), the latter becoming more and more dominant over time in providing us with ever more relevant results. 

As search becomes more conversational interesting things start to happen such as session matching, which can apply the context of our previous searches within the same session to enhance current results (search for 'what time is it in New York' in the Google mobile app, and then for 'what about Seattle' and the results will interpret that you're asking about the time in Seattle even though you didn't specify it in your search).

Functionality like enhanced campaigns lets you layer targeting options for PPC campaigns over basic phrases that can allow for targeting (and pricing) to take far better account of context and target by situation, not device. This is a more refined form of targeting since the fact that you are searching on a mobile does not necessarily mean that you're out and about (we all use our mobiles at home, no?)

I think the convergence of social and search is interesting here, due to the potential correlation between how people talk about your brand and how they search for it. The challenge for agencies is to enable the smart and seamless reapplication of data and insight from one to the other (like keywords or contextual insight from conversation to inform keyword strategy in search). As search becomes even more predictive and anticipatory, you end up with Google Now but as Will says, is this even search?

There were some common themes with my talk, including reference to the important battle for identity on the web and just why the log-in is so critical to the delivery of enhanced services and the ability to deliver seamless experience across multiple devices (one example is the new Google Play game services, announced at the recent IO, that enables synchronization via the cloud, so that you can save a game (or achievements, leaderboards) on one device, and pick it up from the same place on another device). Just as Google have Google+, Facebook have Facebook Connect and log-in (and a distributed presence which apparently tracks browsing behaviour even when we're not on Facebook) and interestingly Amazon have just launched an identity play.

We are only at the start.

The Future Of Digital Marketing

Future Of Digital Marketing London from Neil Perkin

I was asked to give a talk at last week's Future Of Digital Marketing conference in London. When we talk or think about a topic like this we often focus on the shiny new technologies, so for this talk I chose to talk about another, different aspect which I think is at least as critical - the importance of culture, philosophy and strategy. 

Some context for my talk was provided by a recent Cap Gemini and MIT longterm study of around 400 companies into digital maturity and organisational transformation (shown on Slide 2). They mapped digital maturity on two scales. 'Digital intensity' related to investment in technology-enabled initiatives that can change how the company operates. 'Transformation management intensity' related to the leadership capabilities necessary to drive digital transformation. The study found that the companies that focused on developing capabilities in both areas (the so-called 'Digirati') were 26% more profitable than the average across those 400 companies. But they also found that those who pursued technology without the foundation of good strategy, processes and structures (the 'fashionistas') actually damaged their business and were 11% less profitable than average. You can't have one, without the other.

Some further context comes from GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon – four companies that could not be more important to digital marketers right now) and a subject I have touched on before - the vertical stack. My own version of what this looks like features 7 layers at which GAFA are building out a presence and increasingly clashing, but the wider point is about each of them developing an ecosystem that have users at the centre, that deliver value through data and access, and that enhance through the application of context. The incorporation of Google+ data into search is just one example of extracting value from one layer of the stack (context) and reapplying it at another (access). In fact it's wrong to think of Google+ as a social network. It never has been. It is, as Ben Evans puts it, a "unified Google identity to tie all of your search and indeed internet use together", a social layer over other Google services.

These companies are also great at what I call distributed and destination thinking. Traditional destination thinking is all about bringing people to your domain since you have to be on our property for us to monetise the relationship. Newer distributed thinking means that you weave your presence (as The Guardian once described) into the 'fabric' of the web so that you might create value or monetise anywhere (e.g. search boxes in browsers, YouTube embed functionality and so on). One is not better than the other, but GAFA are great at doing both. Similarly ASOS Marketplace is a great example of a brand creating a property that is brilliant at both.

So applying the vertical stack idea to brands, a key challenge is joining stuff up, reapplying value gained through one touchpoint to benefit the experience at other touchpoints, and to make that holistic experience as seamless as possible. APIs (internal as well as external) are key tools in this process, and also in developing marketing and content agility.

I mentioned here the great talk from Harper Reed (CTO of the Obama campaign) that I saw at Next Berlin a couple of months ago (Slide 11). Despite the fact that 'politicians don't hire engineers', the Obama campaign invested heavily in tech talent (in 2008 they had 4 engineers, in 2012 they had 40). Harper talked about how an API had enabled them to act quickly and at scale, rapidly executing and shipping over 200 products in a short space of time, and how they were not afraid to use technology built by other people. Metrics drove execution ("Groundhog Day is a movie about multivariate testing”), and smart thinking enaled them to use the power of conversation within small groups (600,000 people using one of their apps on Facebook to encourage their friends to get out and vote). During the post-talk Q & A, Harper was asked about whether the technologies they built should be open-sourced and made available to others (including the Republicans) to use. He made the point that the platform they developed can only offer a competitive advantage for a relatively short period of time without the right people to develop it, which says a lot I think for the idea of advantage coming from agility, talent and approaches rather than secrecy and perfection.

Meanwhile back in the UK, the Government Digital Service are bringing a new found level of agility to what has to be the least agile, most rigid and complex of environments. The 7 GDS digital principles, and their 10 design principles, could be the foundation for a sound digital philosophy for any business: starting with user needs, if someone else is doing it link to it, using and providing APIs, learning from real-world behaviour, iterative working, making stuff simple to use, designing for people rather than a screen, and so-on. The point is that GDS are not simply applying the processes of agile, they are living the philosophy and mindset that surrounds it. Agile thinking, needs to be (and in some cases already is) applied beyond the tech team, into the teams that regularly interface with tech and beyond that so that it exists throughout the whole organisation (as an example, Hugo Rodger Brown made a great point just last week about the need for CFOs to reclassify web development as Opex rather than Capex).

Building on this, it's instructive to think about the cultures, structures and working practices at the two interesting (but interelated) extremes in our industry right now: creative and engineering/science. Pixar is a great example of a creatively driven technology culture that uses an 'ideas from anywhere' approach. Facebook's engineering teams utilise one of the classic technicques of agile practice, self-organising teams, as a way to combine bottom-up engineering input with top-down strategic direction. Amazon use 'two pizza teams' as a way of remaining agile as they scale. New roles like growth hacking cross the divide between traditional marketing techniques and product development, using metrics and skills from both to solve problems in a truly three-dimensional (rather than one-sided) way.

So the point is that the principles of agile and lean are applicable not just to startups but to every company, but unless they are embedded into organisational structures and practices, it becomes very difficult to realise the real benefit that they can bring. I've talked a lot about 70,20,10 models (70% on banker strategies, 20% on optimising off what works in the 70%, 10% on completely new or the experimental) that has a wide range of applications from resourcing (Google), to L & D, to content planning and strategy, and budgeting.

One of the reasons that 70,20,10 is so broadly applicable as a model is because new things rarely kill old things, we need to embed dgitally native practices like optimisation and amplification into our businesses, but we also need to leave room for continuous innovation. The three horizons model enables a portfolio approach to innovation, mixing incremental with the radical. Horizon 1 focuses on innovations that improve your current operations, or focus on existing markets or technology, and so are incremental. 70% of resource might be applied here. Horizon 2 concentrates on extending your current competencies into related markets, or existing technologies and markets that you don't currently serve/use. This might be your 20%. Horizon 3 is about innovations that will change the nature of your industry, or seed options for the future. This is the 10%.

A great example of the application of this kind of thinking is accounting software business Intuit (a '30 year old startup', a company of entrepreneurs making new things through constant iteration). Martin's great presentation on themes from SXSW 2013 has a slide that shows how Intuit use a 70,20,10 approach for the application of resource, relating both objectives and KPIs back to this idea. 70% is the 'rowing team', 20% are the 'white water rafters', 10% are 'diving for sunken treasure'.

It's very easy to focus simply on shiny new technology. But it's only half the story. The companies that will win will be those that understand the need to also fundamentally change the behaviours, practices and culture that surrounds that technology.

Post Of The Month - May 2013 - The Winner

Happy to say that the winner of this month's vote is Dan Hon with his post on The Tyranny of Digital Advertising. Well done Dan. You are entered into the hall of fame. Thanks as always to everyone for taking part.

Post Of The Month - May 2013 - The Vote

Thanks for the nominations. So this month's vote is between:

The Corporation is at Odds with the Future by Grant McCracken

From Arrested Development to Dr. Who, Binge Watching Is Changing Our Culture from Grant McCracken

After the Like, And After the Spike (Digital Shoreditch talk) by Matt Locke

The Tyranny of Digital Advertising by Dan Hon

Creative People Say No from Kevin Ashton

The ABC of Contemporary Creatives by Tim Nolan

And you can vote below:

Post Of The Month - May 2013 - Nominations

Time to open nominations for Post Of The Month. I have a starting list (including some great reads), but please do add to them in the comments with any great posts from the past month. Included in my initial list is a double nomination (unusual on POTM) for Grant McCracken with a couple of excellent, but unrelated pieces. So my starting five this month are:

The Corporation is at Odds with the Future by Grant McCracken

From Arrested Development to Dr. Who, Binge Watching Is Changing Our Culture from Grant McCracken

After the Like, And After the Spike (Digital Shoreditch talk) by Matt Locke

The Tyranny of Digital Advertising by Dan Hon

Creative People Say No from Kevin Ashton

And you can add your own nominations below.

Hustling

"There might be 20 jobs now where you’re set for life, but the rest of us will be hustling forever."

Alex Madrigal on 'getting off other people's ladders'.

How Memes Spread

“A movement starts because of the social habits of friendship and the strong ties between close acquaintances. It grows because of the habits of a community, and the weak ties that hold neighbourhoods and clans together. And it endures because a movement’s leader gives participants new habits that create a fresh sense of identity and a feeling of ownership” Charles Duhigg

Some fascinating insight here from (friend of ODF) Francesco D'Orazio and Jessica Owens from Face Group, analysing the spread of two of the biggest memes of recent times: Gangnam Style and Harlem Shake. There's already some good analysis into the development of Harlem Shake and how corporations, and not simply individuals, helped to play a key role in enabling it to take off in the way that it did. But this analysis goes further in defining the different shapes of each meme, and what impact that shape had on their longevity (Gangnam Style lived for longer):

"Whereas Gangnam Style offered a strong top-down narrative with an easily identifiable leader in Psy, Harlem Shake had a more distributed narrative with no real leadership and guidance outside of the format. Consequently it didn’t succeed in creating a ‘habit’ that would outlive the interest from the local and community networks who where the real engine behind this meme".

There's some interesting common themes that come out around spikey distribution patterns, how small communities drive virality, how both transcended geography depsite coming from specific geographical areas and subcultures. But there's some notable differences too including the tricky balance between community and top-down influence:

"It’s a difficult balance for a meme to strike. Community drives shareability but doesn’t give you scale (popularity). Top-down influence drives scale but kills shareability. While shareability is a key requisite of virality, scale is what enables and sustains exponential growth."

The key lesson? Once again that there is no simple answer, no one strategy, no single technique to how these things happen. But we are learning more about it all the time. Fascinating.

The Internet Slot Machine

A few years back The Guardian had a fascinating piece on how addictive (and also how disruptive to productivity) checking email is. The 'variable interval reinforcement schedule' of our inbox works in the same way that slot-machines do, rewarding actions only sometimes and not in predictable ways. Whilst there may often be little of importance or interest when we check, every so often there is something really good or that really matters. The unpredictable nature of the frequency of this occurence makes it not only compelling that we check repeatedly, but is one of the best ways to create the strongest of habits.

This FastCompany article (quoting Dr Tom Stafford, whose work was also mentioned in The Guardian piece) mentions about this same effect in the context of social media and browsing as well as email but also talks about how one of the reasons we follow so many rabbit holes and get lost on the internet is because in that environment we find it difficult to separate one task from another - we start with one objective and get led into fulfilling others. Since making decisions (and deciding not to do something is as much of a decision as deciding to do something) requires energy, which is a finite resource, we start suffering from decision fatigue. Says Dr Stafford:

"Technology is all about eroding structure but actually, psychologically, we need more structure, and those things are in tension."

Photo Credit: Mayu ;P via Compfight cc

Designing With Constraints

"You know this moment: time is running out, the team is down by one, a player arcs the ball from downtown just as the buzzer sounds—and sinks it.  it’s exhilarating. It’s heart breaking. And most of all, it’s good design."

Much has been written about how an astute use of constraints can help focus problems and promote creativity. Studies have shown that obstacles of form allow people to think in more all-encompassing ways and that the result of giving free reign to solve a problem is often that people will revert to what worked in the past rather than create an original and different solution. Some of the most creative strategies and executions in media and advertising have come from situations where budget was severely limited. Many believe boundaries like 140 characters or 6 seconds of video or an Instgram-sized square to be important contributory factors to adoption and usage.

So this short 99% Invisible episode on the development of basketball is fascinating in telling the story of how the imposition of constraints were so critical to the huge growth in popularity of the game. It's interesting in itself that for decade after the invention of basketball, the basket was closed at the bottom, requiring the manual retrieval of the ball every time someone scored. But the real turning point for the game came with the imposition of the 24 second stop clock and the heightened tension, emotion and anxiety that that restriction created. It was, in short, a brilliant piece of design.

The Problem With Retargeting

...is that it's not quite good enough. We've all had it. Go to a retailer's site, have a bit of a browse not really intending to buy anything, and then you're followed around the web for the next month by said retailer with (usually) not very enticing banner ads that sometimes contain the products you looked at all those weeks ago on the retailer's site. More recently, my own personal corporate stalkers have been a trainer company and an online retailer.

Such retargeting networks are dependent on tracking technology to identify users that have been defined by their browsing behaviour from large 'cookie pools'. In my case though, what the technology doesn't know is that the only reason I went to the retailers site was in the course of doing some research for a project I was working on. What the technology also doesn't know is that after visiting the trainer company's website, I subsequently bought a pair of trainers elsewhere and am now a satisfied customer who doesn't need another pair of trainers right now.

That's the thing about shiny new technology - we get all excited about the possibilities and then the early execution has a lot of holes in it. That's kind of OK, as long as the technology developes rapidly. The problem in this case with being not quite good enough is that it's been not quite good enough for quite some time and can actually prove quite annoying. I was once followed round the web by another online retailer for six months after I visited their site. I realise that it's dependent on the limitations of the data but I can't help but feel that if more care were taken around the execution (more use of frequency capping, more sophisticated application of the data to close the loop better with subsequent user behavoiur to redefine the context, for example) it would be better for everybody. It's about time we made it a bit better I think.

Photo Credit: SantaRosa OLD SKOOL via Compfight cc

A Missed Opportunity?

I had a fascinating breakfast meeting yesterday with Ed Bussey who is the CEO/Founder of Quill. Ed is a longtime digital and mobile exec and entrepreneur. Quill, his latest venture, is a rapidly growing content marketing company that specialises in content strategy, production and increasingly distribution.

There were several things that struck me as interesting about the way they work. They have built a global network of specialist writers, editors and producers (numbering in the tens of thousands) that is supported by a proprietary technology platform which provides the community and input interface. The workflow incorporates some technical quality assurance capabilities, which is then augmented by in-house editors in order to ensure a consistency in quality.

The platform optimises content for the web, and the use of local experts, writers and producers helps to alleviate one of the trickiest issues for global companies - the balance between global consistency and highly relevant localisation that goes beyond simple translation. 

Content strategy and production is informed by brand profiling tools that ensure relevant subject matter and tone. A platform API means it can be linked directly to a client company CMS, enabling content to be pushed direct to client owned media properties, subject to the approval of a brand editor if necessary.

Their vision is to be the leading worldwide platform of this kind but the most interesting thing is that their model of distributed production facilitated through technology potentially solves the extremely tricky balance of doing quality content at cost-efficient scale. It's interesting too that having started with production, they are now moving quickly (facilitated by client demand) into strategy, idea generation, content curation and distribution.

Companies like Quill are benefitting from the rapid growth in demand for tailored digital content which is in turn being powered by the increasing significance of always-on, content hungry owned and earned media channels. They are filling a gap, and it's a potentially significant one. It's kind of interesting that at a time when clients have ever increasing and very real needs for content, companies like this are moving into territory that advertising agencies and media owners have largely not adapted to address. Might this be a big missed opportunity?

Infinite and Parallax Scrolling

Thanks to Rubbishcorp for pointing at this wonderful Oakley site for their new Airbrake MX Google. It's a great piece of merchandising. HTML5 and CSS3 are enabling all kinds of design-rich in-browser experiences using infinite and parallax scrolling (where an illusion of depth is created by background images moving slower than foreground images). One of my absolute favourites is the fabulous Life of Pi site which is quite incredible. 

Here's a few others I really liked. Von Dutch used parallax scrolling to tell the story of its original founder in a rather charming way.

This site makes a great use of it to talk about the dangers of fracking. Peugeot created a rather cool autoplaying comic to promote its hybrid technology. Olympic and World champion cyclist Jason Kenny's site is about as nice a personal site as you'll see, and here's a great ad agency example. It's all rather lovely. There's even a rather nice one from a tatoo business. 

More here and here.

When Every Page Is Your Homepage

"Instead of adding new flooring and fixtures, they've taken the house down to the foundation"

Reuters are redesigning their site from the ground up and the approach that they're taking with it is fascinating. Most websites (news services included) put a lot of focus on the homepage to draw people into the site in the same way that contents pages of magazines are there to aggregate, highlight, and help people navigate. It's a model that is shackled to a print-based world. Yet whilst a proportion of readers may still enter the site via the home page, an increasing number come in from search queries or content shared on social media which are deep linked into the site ("The days when you could drive a big portion of your audience to any single page? That's pretty much done"). 

So what happens when every page is your homepage? The concept of a continuously updated stream of news is central to Reuter's DNA, so it makes sense that they should adapt this into creating a digital 'river of news' where stories are contextualised within the stream, and moving from one to another is as seamless as possible.

Take a look at the site preview and you see a heads-up display of market data across the top, the roster of Reuter's opinion writers (like the usually excellent Felix Salmon) down the side, and a news stream featuring a rolling feed of news, commentary, video, photography and even editorially curated links to relevant third party articles and content. Articles feature as part of a stream of related information with background pieces, data and commentary, and are positioned in the middle of a larger stream of content ("scroll up or down and you’ll find your story’s text actually lives in a bifurcated version of the Reuters front page"). And if you're interested in following a particular issue, topic streams combine multi-format content along with the latest breaking news around specific subjects.

The whole thing is far more reflective of how content works now on the web: living as streams, dynamic not static, effortlessly multimedia, surrounded by contextually relevant information, flowing seamlessly from one piece to the next, reflective of the increasing atomisation of content. A site where every page is the homepage.

Shifting to a content model such as this isn't easy. It requires a wholly different design approach, different workflows, and an in depth and ongoing understanding of user need and behaviour. The idea of context for example, is multi-dimensional, so serving up relevant associated content requires a sophisticated and intelligent tagging system, and staff with the know-how to use it in the right way.

But this kind of approach is a far more 'digitally-native' approach to news and content that reminded me a lot of the work done by MadeByMany in redesigning the ITV News site a year ago. That too featured a continously updated multimedia feed of news that draws on multiple sources, enables filtering by story, and is largely unshackled from legacy approaches. And it's not lost on me that this approach is fantastically suited not just to social and SEO, but also to mobile and tablet. Small wonder then, that unique views on the ITV news site have risen by over 500% since that resdesign.

Once again the value has come from unshackling approaches to content and design from legacy thinking and rebuilding a modern news service from the ground up. There are one or two similar examples of other media owners following suit (the WSJ's World Stream, and Canada's Global News) but the examples are surprisingly few. It strikes me that not only will we see more news services adopting the approach, but that there are lessons here for all content producers. 

Post Of The Month - April 2013 - The Winner

Delighted to announce that the winner (by a clear margin) in this month's vote is Antony Mayfield's post on his excellent Firestarters talk titled 'Can Agencies Innovate?'. So well done Antony. You are duly entered into the hall of fame. Thanks everyone as always for taking part.