DM : Blogged

Here’s an unremarkable proposition I think we can all agree on: if you have any responsibility for a brand, you know that communicating with your current or potential customers isn’t just about messages. It’s about content. And brands have to be in the content generation business as much as any analogue-world media brand.

Not a controversial thought, you might have thought. And yet, most brands don’t appear to want to learn all that much from content specialists, media organisations and others with editorial experience. Of course someone will chance some sort of tie-up with Vice, in the hope that the hipster pixie dust will make everything alright, but that’s about the extent of it.

So, in the spirit of bringing you insights from the editorial world, here’s something that you might have missed from a few weeks back: a report from the Nieman Journalism Lab, on how media companies are getting traffic to their sites. It’s well worth a read, but the topline is: the majority of visitors to the sites of brands such as the New York Times don’t bother to stop and say hello to the home page. Search engines still play their part, of course, but the ‘side door’ that is social media is growing ever more important. And while no newspaper website is in a hurry to ditch the idea of home page as front page, it’s clear that the instruction ‘every page needs to be a home page’ is truer than ever.

I hope this brief tour round medialand means you start thinking about the following: does your brand need a home page? Does it actually need multiple home pages? If yes, what needs to be on each of those multiple pages? What happens when someone tries to view the home page on a mobile? Do the 20 apps your team has launched in the last six months make any sense in the context of your brand home page?

Not unremarkable questions I know. But well worth answering.

Well that was all a bit special, wasn’t it? Apart from the closing ceremony that is, which was the only downer in the last two weeks of trashing the idea that Britain is great at music but rubbish at sport. So while the sun-kissed memories of the glory from London 2012 are still fresh, here are a few observations for you to mull over in a golden haze.

I’ll spare you all the ins and outs of my amazing day around the Olympic Park, but while the real-life experience was brilliant the digital side of things did leave a lot to be desired.

It was notable that what the majority of sponsors were doing in the Park wasn’t much removed from the ‘build a good-looking box and they will come’ approach, and as a result it felt like an opportunity to wow the hundreds of thousands of people on site with something interactive and engaging was lost.

And this is true outside of the Park as well. I don’t think you can point to much done by members of the Olympic family that’s been jaw-droppingly innovative digitally. No doubt some of the LOCOG restrictions played a part, but while these might have been ‘the digital Games’, it wasn’t necessarily true all the time.

Thank God for the BBC then, which really did win the Games in terms of digital hi-jinks. The smorgasboard of narrowcasting really, really worked. Who knew that the world needed eight hours uninterrupted coverage of the slalom kayaking? Its own data also showed, as if you needed reminding, that consuming content on the move is here to stay. So you’d better start empathetically designing for that second screen. Now.

LOCOG itself played a blinder in terms of digital and social media and this presentation will show you the jaw-dropping stats. And yet all this grazing on different pieces of Olympics content still didn’t dampen the ardour of people to sit around together and watch the big set piece events together. As much as NBC did things wrong with its coverage for the USA, clearly time-delaying certain finals worked, as they saw the biggest audience for an Olympiad ever.

And with the Paralympics already spawning great creative work – if you haven’t seen Channel 4’s superlative ‘Superhumans’ ad treat yourself now – I think the fun isn’t over just yet.

No doubt you’ve seen them. No doubt you’ve ignored them. I’m talking about those irritating pop-ups that you’ve stumbled across over the last couple of weeks when you’ve been online, that say something like:

Hello Visitor: the laws that govern the things that follow you while you’re on this website have now changed, in ways which we, or the people who drafted the new rules, don’t really understand. Until we get our interns onto this, please be reassured by our use of the words ‘changes’, ‘consent’ and ‘privacy’. And when you see ‘cookies’, think biscuits. That is all.

I exaggerate, but only slightly. As you are all of course aware, all this new cookie malarkey has come in at the behest of the EU, who have decided that tracking users’ data without their express permission is now to be an absolute no-no. And while it’s laudable that the fine folk of Brussels have decided to curry favour with the Facebook generation when it comes to one of their biggest bugbears, it doesn’t appear to have been implemented all that well. If at all. Meaning that the effect on people’s privacy appears to have been zip.

Assuming you’re in the camp of website owners who are waiting to see what the Information Commissioners Office says you should actually do, can I remind you that when you do get round to being legal, don’t forget about your users.

After all, while there’s little that a brand should take more seriously than its customers’ privacy, it’s also true to say that people will trade off some privacy for a smooth-running and easy-to-use service.

The advice here is simple: don’t fear your lawyer, fear the wrath of your customers instead.

Feeling informationally overloaded? A bit of digital ennui? Two-screen action making your third eye blurry?

I’d like to propose that, right now, there’s a hankering for everyone, and especially brands, just to slow down a little, chill out, and get back to what matters. And part of doing that is to value the tangible and real.

What does that mean for our little corner of the marketing world? Valuing craft properly. And I don’t just mean sweating the kerning, or agonising over every last Pantone swatch. It’s about recognising that, sometimes, it’s exactly the knowledge that a steady hand and a keen eye have combined with years of experience that means a communication is considered warm, charming and unique. It’s harder to tell that story when all you’ve done is press CTRL V.

We’ve been obsessed about this stuff a lot recently, because of a wee thing we’ve been doing for EDF Energy to bring to life its loyalty scheme, Thank yous. What better way to dramatise the breadth of the rewards on offer than a giant zoetrope with the utility’s lovable character on top?

Exactly. And, to answer some over-eager online commenters, no CGI was involved. At all. No, really. As the idea revolved around bringing some of the magic of childhood back to people, we wanted to avoid any digital trickery. Instead, we had an army of skilled craftsmen building 119 models, and using strobe light syncing to bring the Zoetrope to life.

A lot of effort, for sure, But well worth it. A warmth that, dare I say, you might not get if you jumped straight to your Mac and fired up AfterEffects. So pick up your pencils (and scalpels and glue) before you start pushing pixels. It’ll do you good.

On Twitter? Of course you are. Have an email address? Of course you do. So no doubt in the last few weeks your inbox, like mine, has chirruped with the arrival of an email newsletter from our favourite time suck of a social network.

As you might expect, our optimistic Californian chums were most excited about this. On their blog , they wrote:

This new email digest also features the most engaging Tweets seen by the people you follow, even if you don’t follow those who wrote them.

This ‘innovation’ has, as you also might expect, led to eyebrows being raised quizzically, and some attempts to justify why this is a good move, such as

Most people… may never see 95% of the Tweets that pass through their timeline. Thanks to the common convention of Twitter clients that snips out chunks of the timeline to let you see a reasonable amount of tweets at a time, they’ll see some old ones, then some very new ones. But they may never see the ones in between.

Let me raise an eyebrow even higher at that. For starters, the newsletter differentiates between ‘stories’ and tweets. What’s a story on Twitter? How’s that been defined? More broadly, who is curating this for me? How is what I supposedly missed being chosen? A closer look suggests that what I am missing is apparently celebrity narcissists and things that have been re-tweeted more than 100 times.

In other words, exactly the stuff that’s most boring about the platform. The magic about Twitter has always been about the serendipity of finding people you like and people you don’t – brands you like, and ones you don’t – and having a conversation with them.

If its future is to be a half-baked broadcast network doing the same stuff an AOL/HuffPo, then I fear that Twitter, if it hasn’t jumped the shark, is at least levitating above a bored dolphin.

So by rights I should use this post to exhort you all to develop a whizz-bang mobile commerce strategy, or get funky with your social shops, crowdsource your catalogues and the rest of it.

But in the spirit of cutting against the grain, I’d like to add to the sterling work that Saatchis have been doing to revive the high street by pointing out three things that you might have missed:

1)  Google has a concession in the Currys / PC World on Tottenham Court Road, so that people can start playing with their Chromebooks ‘in comfort’, says the press release.

2) PayPal has had a pop-up store in New York for the last three months, so that they can start flogging their mobile payments tech to retailers.

3) Amazon is going to open a shop in Seattle, dedicated to flogging Kindles, Fires and books… OK, I was lying about that last item.

As we all know, three incidences marks the beginning of a trend, and whilst it might be a bit glib to suggest that we can save local communities up and down the land merely by encouraging every tech brand to hire some architects and builders, I hope it reminds some brand managery types out there that everything your brand touches has to be enticing, superlative and brilliant. Especially in the real world.

Oh ok, here’s one social shopping idea you can have for free: a shop that aggregates the most popular pins on Pinterest, and allows you to buy them directly. When that happens in six months, remember where you saw it first.

I thought I’d tell you that up front, before you all started whining and going, ‘He’s a plagiarist! He’s a plagiarist!’ Talent borrows, genius steals and all that, and I have liberated the following insights from an interview that Jeff Bezos did with Wired) a few months back. It didn’t cause much of a stir, but it should have, as there was lots in it that’s relevant to you. And you:

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Happy new mince pies and all that. Let’s not dawdle, it’s going to be an insanely busy year after all, what with one massive excuse for fireworks and drinking after another. God knows how we’re going to get out of our collective economic hangover when we’ll all be nursing real hangovers for most of the year.

Well, here’s one way that I can see: brands allowing their customers and users to start making their own content, apps and other utilities.

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British Airways had a complete wrap of Metro today promoting their US fares.

I thought it was interesting that they were running a message of “because we partner with American Airlines we can fly you to the USA 50 times a day.”

It shows the challenge in articulating the consumer benefit of their relationship with AA. Not in the fact that they fly so often to so many destinations. There is clearly a convenience benefit there … perhaps. But more in the fact that they are promoting flights operated by AA as their own.

They appear to perceive that ‘the consumer’ does not care one jot about which of the two airlines’ planes they board to cross the pond. Or more to the point, which brand experience ‘the consumer’ enjoys.

I guess BA figure their service is purely about getting somewhere, rather than being an experience worth going somewhere for as their friends at Virgin Atlantic would no doubt say.

It’s a message that runs counter to the platform of ‘To Fly. To Serve’ at any rate!

Not usually one to use a blog for self-publicity (ha) but must admit I’m excited to be starting up our new agency founded today.

We’re a bunch of creative problem solvers, based in Southwark by the Tate Modern and loving our 5th floor view.

We’re listeners, inquisitors, strategists, planners, behaviourists, creatives, collaborators, orchestrators and more.

We know the traditional marketing approaches can still work, maybe just not quite like they did. And as complexity roars on, marketers need agency partners to get to the right solution for their business challenge.

That’s why our agency was conceived, to do just that.

We’re driven by behavioural impact – ideas that move people; business results – we’re unashamedly commercial; co-creation – working with you and your customers; open approach – creative solutions, not just creative work; and shared risk / reward– we seek a vested interest in your success.

We’re also committed to giving something back. And through our founded trust put aside both time and resources to support enterprises focused on social and charitable causes.

We’re hoping for a great 2012 and wish everyone the best for the New Year.