As a web designer who is always worrying about page widths and formatting of posts, I found this video clip fascinating. The proliferation of devices on which our page layouts can now be viewed is bewildering. So the ability to reformat your pages to any screen size is really important. I think the fold argument really now is dead. I’m really taken with the nation of ’stepping out of the browser’, as the web explodes across a whole range of devices. Here is an article explaining it all The New York Times envisions a version 2.0 of the newspaper, the video is hosted on vimeo too.
In my travels around the web, I came across this little video. I’m afraid showstudio don’t provide an embed file, so you will have to visit their youtube. Strangely, I personally think it makes more sense as a little film than as a cover. Which even though it’s a fold out cover, feels a bit vague. I suspect the music jollies the film version along for me.
Recently I have been thinking about those illustrated ladybird books, and I have also treated myself to the an anthology of Eagle cutaways. I am too young to have seen the originals but they hold an amazing position at a moment when people felt technology and its development should be easily understood. Anyway now they just seem quaint.
Just had a discussion with my manager about the anxiety of modern fathers over the fact that the creative skills children are developing these days are to do with the intangible virtual interactions, whereas my youth was about making stuff, physical interactions.
Jean-Paul Edwards from the agency Manning Gottlieb OMD spoke across a broad range of topics, giving a great overview of where he felt technology was taking the media market. The stand-out point I took from his speech was a metaphor he used about the fragmentation of the ‘media landscape’. He spoke of a ‘media landscape’ or ‘media ecosystem’ which was like an African savanna which has now, because it is digital, become a rain forest. This means that the big beasts of the savanna are the BBC (the big old elephant) and News Corp (the lion)… I don’t want to labour this metaphor… you get the point. Still a digital rain forest is full of lots of little animals multiplying in the trees.
It rather reminded me of Nicholas Necroponte’s writing about us all being digital and having to control lots of bits.
I’ll quickly whip through what I took from his presentation slide by slide.
Four million blogs, four billion mobile phones, eighty percent of new televisions are high definition, and two hundred billion emails are sent each day. There is a saturation of digital, and because it is so ubiquitous people use it in new and novel ways. In Africa, for instance, mobile phones are more secure and efficient than traditional banking so micro credit with SMs has really taken off.
Online ads account for £2.7 billion, and so are making more than terrestrial TV. Search makes £2 billion a year.
Jean-Paul then showed what his predictions for the future had been in 1998, and whether he got it right. Advertising > Communication > One-on-one Communication. Broadcast > Interactivity/ Accountability > Total integrated solutions.
So Forrester predicted the rise of engagement media, and certainly social media has had massive growth, but it supports little ad growth at the moment. Everyone is still trying to work out how to do it.
Manning Gottlieb OMD actually have a technology living room, which they stuff full of the latest gizmos and show to their clients to illustrate how everything is digitised, how we are all connected, technology progresses at an exponential rate, and that it is attention, not content, that is the scarce resource.
“The content cloud’. This is the notion that content data is all around us. This brought Jean-Paul to discussing cloud computing – the notion that, rather than all the things we create, store and archive being on an individual computer’s hard drive, you store it all on the web. In that way it becomes a cloud of data that follows you around. To make sense of all the data in this cloud, the data has data about itself that is machine understandable. This is the semantic web. An example that Jean-Paul gave was on an Excel spreadsheet programme: if you place calendar dates into a row and select the rest of the row it will automatically populate the whole row. With Google apps, in their spreadsheet tool, if your columns were football clubs it would be able to automatically fill them all out too. It would take from your initial entry that you were making a football league and go to the web and pull off all the other names.
The ‘marketing metaverse’ was the phrase Jean-Paul used to describe the notion that we all live in our own realities. So, as a child of the Eighties, your world was the paper your parents read, the BBC, and a radio station of your choice. Now you can construct your own reality. For music you have your own mtv group, your own facebook gang, and you interact with your peers through your Playstation’s internet access. This was a very powerful point – people can now construct their own reality to live in. Jean-Paul then gave the example of mini hompy. On the South Korean social network, cyworld, all users have a mini-hompy, or mini homepage, which is like your home on the web. It is very simple to use. The pages are headed with little rooms with your avatar in and your friends can come and visit you.
Not only do we all create our own realities, we are all connected. Understanding these connections allows you to understand how your market behaves. There are agencies that research these sort of groups and can give you a valuable insight, and influence how you would do viral marketing campaigns for example. The most familiar example of this would be Stanley Milligram’s Six Degrees study from the Sixties. People like Duncan Watts are now using computers to study these ideas in far more detail and with real world groups. The latest research seems to be stating that influence is incredibly hard to measure as it is very sensitive to the structures within a social group. There may be a parallel here for magazines in that they publish to niches so should be very aware and expert in meeting the needs of a niche audience group.
Attention economy is a model that the traditional advertising model doesn’t serve that well. If you buy a magazine no matter who you are you see the same advert. If you go to a website you actually see an advert that is relevant to you. This is the power of Google ad sense; they employ 5,000 maths phds, you can’t match that, but it worth taking advantage of.
Jean-Paul then talked about the media landscape, and how it has changed. I have summarised this in my introduction.
Jean-Paul, having outlined all these points, went on to say that this has led OMD to conclude that INFLUENCE is OMD’s planning philosophy. This influence is spread through three models of communication. Scale media – the more you have, the more you’ve got. Search, such as Google, but also things like classifieds. Social means such as word-of-mouth but also PR, and social web applications such as Facebook. Now in order to spread their influence, at OMD they try and do transmedia solutions. So for Heroes, the TV show, they did sixty different campaigns. In the TV show, they drive the sponsor’s brand of car. It may only appear in three episodes on TV but online one of the plot threads that isn’t explored in depth on the show, may be explored in the online comic. This may feature the brand of car on every page, and indeed it may be the focus of that thread. Also you can try many small things out which stick and develop them into larger campaigns.
This means you are building a value network as opposed to a value chain. Value moves in all directions. You have to try every idea. Don’t be precious about things – if they don’t work, just bin them. So you can develop millions of connections and eventually they boil down to a few stable paths.
Jean-Paul then fielded a range of questions from the room, during which he argued that OMD agencies understood brand and IPC understood consumers and that a combination of the two would be a valuable proposition but would require a level of experimentation by both parties. Of course that sounded very open-ended in terms of return on investment. But, as he pointed out, in a magazine you spend x and have no idea how effective it is. Online you spend x and you can track it precisely. This means you can tailor your ad spend to exactly your requirements. Put simply, because you can see the sales you get the money you want.
Having spoken with a number of people round the business it has been widely reported that it was a very well received presentation, and certainly raised a lot of questions for an established media business like IPC. Obviously in his role as “Head of OMD Media Futures’ Jean-Paul gets to evangelise on a wide range of broad trends in the ‘media environment’. For IPC the issue will be how to realise them. Certainly I am aware of the need for most advertising to span as many media as possible and in a way that is both integrated and engaging for the user. OMD would seem like a good place to start.
How do you tell when you’ve become set in your creative direction? By this I mean the processes, skills, disciplines and behaviour that you employ to be creative. For example wireframe > look and feel > prototype > delivery. These may be some of the creative processes a web designer may use to see a web development project through from beginning to end.
The notion of ‘push’ is when you push your content towards an audience who may or may not be aware of its existence. In a ‘pull’ environment the consumer pulls their content towards themselves because they are interested in it.
