This blog is the about things I find interesting. Things that live at the intersection between technology, creativity and people's changing behaviour. I've gathered them all here on The Way We Live because you might find them interesting too. Please take a look, and let me know what you think.
I've written before about the value of first-mover advantage when you're doing a technology-driven marketing stunt. New technology can be jaw-dropping, but the 4th time you see it, your jaw is most likely to be dropping into a yawn.
I'm happy to say however that my own client has proved me wrong.
The Millbank Tower in London has 800 windows, apparently. Nokia just launched the Lumia 800, running on the Windows 7 OS. From this very tenuous link / pun, they created a spectacle on Monday night that wiped the floor with recent large-scale building projections. And they did this with... a large-scale building projection.
If you missed it, here's the show:
And here's why it worked:
They didn't announce a building projection, they announced a free concert from a very up-to-the-minute DJ, deadmau5, brought to you by Nokia. The concert just happened to be backed by a spectacular buidling projection.
The projection was MASSIVE. The Millbank Tower isn't the tallest building in London, but it's 120m high and more importantly it dominates Westminster. This projection was pretty difficult to miss.
Nokia did a great job on the pre-event PR. I must have read about the event 10 times over on blogs, in London newspapers, in social channels. Some of these channels are managed directly by Nokia but most were not. This is where the 'free deadmau5 gig' story really paid off.
The people who went along to the show tell me that thousands of people turned up. It's a bit early to say whether the event was successful or not, but a big crowd is a good indicator. Other evidence:
If I search for 'nokia + deadmau5' I get 1.5M text results and 350K image results, pretty much all of which were created in the last few days
I received a whole bunch of tweets and updates from the gig from people not connected to Nokia
The trade blogs and local papers I read covered the gig extensively
So the signs are that it worked.
Despite the '800 windows' product tie-in this event was more about re-invigorating the Nokia brand in the UK. There's a lot of work still to do, but by adding to a tried and tested mechanic, Nokia have proved that technology-first executions have a longer shelf-life than I previously thought.
More importantly of course, they've shown that they can innovate with the best of them.
In 1981, Xerox released the first recognisable graphical user interface that adopted the metaphor of the office - files, folders, waste bin etc. It was called the Xerox 8010 Star:
One of the best stories from Steve Job's biography was Jobs getting into a lather about Microsoft 'stealing' the graphical user interface from Apple, only for Bill Gates to reply:
Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbour named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.
Both Apple and Microsoft used the office metaphor to govern the way people interacted with their computers for years afterwards; both still do with the latest versions of their operating systems. Windows 7 and OSX Lion are direct descendants of the Xerox 8010 OS.
More recently, in summer 2007, Microsoft released Surface and Apple launched the first iPhone. Both used a different GUI - multitouch - with much more intuitive information organisation and retrieval (think of all those videos of 2 yr olds / 95 yr olds picking up an iPhone and figuring it out instantly). We all know which business won this battle, so here's the MS Surface launch video for people who missed it - most of us by the looks of it.
The next stage in the evolution of UI is looking increasingly like gesture. This isn't new news; we've been able to do Minority Report UIs for a while now with projectors and motion-tracking sensors (I pitched an interactive mobile phone picker for retail in 2006), but the kit was never very robust and the costs were high; around $15k per week to lease.
The Nintendo Wii made the gestural UI mainstream. 90 million have sold so far, and smart hackers quickly figured out that you could do a lot more with the Wii sensor than go virtual bowling.
You need a spare hacker though, and your hacks are constrained by the need for a trigger of some sort, either a Wii controller or some sort of infrared reflector.
When Xbox launched the Kinect in November 2010 they did away with the need for the trigger. The Kinect's motion-sensing engine simply picks up on body movement and translates it directly into game action. I've written before about how awesome this is. As with the Wii though, Kinect hacks still require a hacker; someone who can write the software that takes Kinect's capability away from the console and into the wider world via the PC.
Microsoft have now removed this final barrier. They've created a software development kit (SDK) for coders to write applications that connect Kinect's motion-sensing ability with any computer running Windows. So, instantly, Kinect can plug into the most popular OS in the world, and this potential market will attract developers. And the more people that can develop for a platform the more likely that platform is to become a success, or as Microsoft puts it:
The world is starting to imagine things we never thought of.
Interestingly, Apple aren't in this game. They bet - and won - on touch, and will continue to make a ton of money with OSX (keyboard plus mouse) as well as iOS for iPhone / iPad / iPod Touch. As hardware diversifies away from the PC and laptop therefore, Apple are well positioned. Microsoft on the other hand need to explore other platforms, and by opening up the platform and leveraging the vast installed base of Windows devices they have a good chance with Kinect.
In the last 30 years of user interface evolution we've had 26 years of mouse + keyboard alone, 4 years of touch, and just over 2 years of gesture. At this rate of change we'll see the next thing any day now. I think we may need a bit of time to figure gesture out before we move on, but I'm betting we'll see some really scifi stuff sooner than we might imagine.
Another example of gaming intruding into a space where you don't typically find it; this time the music video:
We The Kings have woven a gaming narrative - bad guys have kidnapped the girl, you need to rescue her - into their video for "Say You Like Me".
Players progress through the game - and the song - by choosing to be different members of the band and completing challenges along the way. The challenges are all familiar to gamers - first-person shooter, platform etc. - and the execution is great; cartoonish, and a lot of fun. Finally, gameplay and music are seamless, with the music playing without pausing unless you wipe out.
And this is the issue for me. The gaming element is fun, but the point of a video is to support and enhance the music, not dominate. Problem is, unless I really concentrate on the game I don't get to hear the song in its entirety, and listening to the music is presumably the objective here.
Good effort though, and if it opens the door to other less intrusive types of gaming or interactivity in music videos then all credit to We The Kings and their label.
The keynote at this year's SxSW was from Seth Priebatsch, the CEO of gaming company SCVNGR. He said that:
The game layer is the next decade of human technological interaction...Its about using game mechanics in the real world to motivate action.
He may have a point. The gaming industry now dwarfs the movie industry. Zynga attracts hundreds of millions of players a month to its Facebook games. On your journey home tonight the chances are you'll see lots of people playing games on their phones. More interestingly (and more what Seth was getting at), Foursquare is essentially a game on top of a social geo-location service. Gamers helped solve a complex bit of biochemistry when scientists turned protein folding into a game. And so on.
Gaming isn't new news for marketers though. We've been pushing games for ages - on websites, on banners, in outdoor, on mobile - anywhere we can fit them really. Some work, but most don't. And the reason is always the same.
Good games, just like good movies, are difficult. We're so used to being offered games that we play only the ones that stand out. So the two questions we always need to ask are is the game interesting enough? Is the reward rewarding enough?
Two games have appeared recently, for Mercedes and Domino's. Let's see how they stack up:
Mercedes
I'm guessing the brief here was to make entry-level Mercedes more appealing to a younger car-buying audience. So they've gone all out. , with an integrated TV plus microsite game proposition. Here's the telly.
And here's the game. The production is excellent, with the game feeling just like the ad. A little too much perhaps, as they could have sacrificed a bit of craft in order to embed more gameplay. But nonetheless I really like the Matrix / X-Files tone, with appropriately enigmatic v/o and instructions along the way. I also like the interactive bits and bobs, and the [spoiler!] phone call at the end is a very nice touch.
That said, if I end up on the site without seeing the ad (as I did first time round) I don't really know why I'm there. It's all very mysterious. Is the game interesting enough? Yes, I guess so but I have to wait an awfully long time for it to start. Is the reward rewarding enough? Yes, definitely, but only if I know it's there.
Full credit to AMV / Weapon7 for the ambition of the campaign, the fact that they've gone way beyond an ad, and the integration across channels, but for me the balance between the gameplay, the incentive and the creative idea is a little cockeyed.
Domino's
This one couldn't be more different. Play a game on your iPad by making a pizza as quickly as possible from kneading the dough to placing the peperoni, rank yourself against other players and Domino's staff, and if you really like the look of your creation, order it.
Sadly there are parameters outside of which you can't venture. Pizzas have to be round. You can't add bananas and mustard as toppings. And you can't spell rude words with your mozzarella. Otherwise this is great. The game element is fun - any bit of dexterity or skill that's measured against the clock is always addictive. The sharing options make gameplay competitive, and the fact that you're measured against real pizza-makers just adds to the authenticity of the experience.
That Domino's will generate some revenue along the way is the icing on the cake (also a forbidden topping). These sales may just be cannibalised from elsewhere, but the extra engagement along the way makes it a value-added sale. And I bet some players buy a pizza who would not otherwise have done.
There are more than enough iPad users in the US (predicted to hit 40M+ next year) to give the app some real reach. I only hope Crispin Porter, who made the thing, have pushed for a decent communications budget.
Is the game interesting enough? Yes. Is the reward rewarding enough? Yes. Even though I may end up spending money on it. Which for me is the real genius of the idea.
The two have something in common though. The Phantom Ray (it even has a cool name) is not 100% 3D printed, but it does use a lot of additive manufacturing in an effort to reduce environmental impact and cut lead times from idea to finished product as far as possible. (Additive manufacturing refers to the building of parts by sintering ceramics and metals from powder, as opposed to reductive manufacturing where parts are cut from larger blocks of raw material.)
The Miniature Moments thing is built in exactly the same way (which if nothing else highlights the potential breadth of the technique):
Manufacturers like Boeing have been using 3D printing for some time, to produce highly complex parts that are difficult to machine otherwise, or to do rapid prototyping for wind tunnel tests, for example. The technique has made it into consumers' hands as well, either rich enthusiasts who need specialist parts for their vintage car fleet, or semi-academic tinkerers who are more interested in process than output.
The Miniature Moments offer is different though. It uses 3D printing to make bespoke products for a comsumer audience on a mass scale. This isn't just 3D printing for the Etsy crowd. I find it a bit weird that the first mass consumer 3D printing proposition (that I've seen at least) is a rendering of a 2D object, but that's just me being picky.
The Institute of the Future's First Law of Technology says "A consistent pattern in our response to new technologies is we simultaneously overestimate the short-term impact and underestimate the long-term impact." I think we're about to start over-estimating the impact of 3D printing in the short term, but not collectively figuring out what a revolutionary technology it is for a while.
Last word to Miniature Moments:
Up to now it's been a really expensive technique. That's changing, and we're really excited to be able to let you create your own unique objects using this amazing process.
Ultimately 3D printers will be cheap enough that we'll all have one in our homes. They're the future of manufacturing.
Creative work that's caught my eye over the last couple of weeks:
Lay's Machine
Just before I started at BMB the agency produced this poster, making the point that McCain oven chips are very, very simple; just potato and a bit of sunflower oil. They're processed, but there's no chemicals in sight. It's always been one of my favourite bits of BMB work.
Now though, in a cross between in-store sampling and the Wall's smile vending machine, Lay's in Argentina have gone one better than we did, and demonstrated the process of turning potatoes into crisps in this case for real.
I'm a sucker for MacGyverish bits of machinery in communications, so I was bound to like this one. My only comment is that I'd have put it somewhere other than a supermarket. I'd like to see crisps being made at a farmers market or food festival, so foodies got the message as well as grocery shoppers.
Coca-Cola Cascada
This one's very new. So new (it launched 2 days ago) that I can't find a video of it in situ, but it sounds incredibly cool. It's a 16m high interactive 3D screen that lets passers-by play with a giant waterfall of Coke. And although the creative work was done in London, Coke decided to unveil it in Quito, Ecuador.
South America is increasingly where it's at.
3D iPad advertising
I'm not sure this is 3D in the 'wearing funny glasses so things jump out at you' sense, but it's interesting nonetheless.
AOL recently launched Editions, their version of a aggregated content daily magazine on the iPad. There's quite a lot of competition in this space but actually the AOL app is pretty good. I've been playing with it for a few days and there's lots of content categories to choose from, the content itself is pulled from often quite eclectic providers, and the thing has some intelligence built in so over time the user gets more of what really interests them.
In addition though, the app also has ads. Nothing new here, loads of apps carry ads. What is new is that these ads allow brands to tinker with some of the native functions of the iPad. These functions have previously been available to brands only through the creation of their own apps, or by spending a fortune on iAds, Apple's proprietary app advertising platform that has never really taken off.
Here's what the AOL ad looks like:
The UK edition of Editions is currently ad-free (AOL says this is a strategic decision) but in the future I expect to see some ads I can play around with. It's what Apple set out to do with iAds, but they got their pricing model all wrong. I don't expect AOL, a publisher that knows how to charge for ads, to make the same mistake.
This post is a bit of a departure for me. I'm not talking about digital execution, but rather about marketing strategy. The consequences of this thinking may well play out in digital execution, but the post is primarily about consumption, the provision of experiences, intangible value and the role digital might play in keeping marketing successful. A bit more ambitious than usual then...
It goes something like this. People are consuming less stuff and it's not driven by the recession. People seem to value experiences over stuff. Marketers are particularly good at creating intangible value through experiences, and digital channels play an important part in the facilitation and dissemination of those experiences. Marketers should harness this ability to get people to buy experiences as well as things.
Peak Consumption
The Guardian recently ran an article about the consumption of stuff - material goods - in the UK, and the fact that it has been falling since long before the 2008 recession. The article quotes Chris Goodall, an ex-McKinsey Green party parliamentary candidate, who says that:
...2001 may turn out to be the year that the UK's consumption of 'stuff' - the total weight of everything we use, from food and fuel to flat-pack furniture - reached its peak and began to decline
and that:
...although the figures aren't yet available for 2010 and 2011, it seems highly likely that we are now using fewer materials than at any time on record.
Paper and cardboard, energy, new cars, water, transport, fertiliser, food (including protein) - consumption of all of them is dropping. And although outsourcing accounts for some of the drop, the fact that household waste levels are also decreasing suggests that exporting consumption of raw materials to China isn't the only reason. The level of consumption is still unsustainable - four double-decker buses' weight of stuff is used up for every man, woman and child in the UK every year - but the trend is downwards, to the extent that:
...we've significantly grown the economy without noticably increasing our resource use...Goodall believes that Britain has finally "decoupled" economic growth and material consumption.
In other words, the drop in consumption doesn't have much to do with short-term recessionary effects. They play a part, but the shift is more systemic.
(To stay true to the intent of this blog, I should also point out that the increasing digitisation of consumerism also plays a part in the drop in consumption - if the material cost of the second copy of any software, application or piece of digital content is essentially zero, then the bigger the market for, say, e-books, the fewer trees get cut down in Siberia, the less oil is burned getting the paper to Europe etc.)
The Experience Economy
13 years ago Pine and Gilmore told us we were heading into the Experience Economy - an era where goods and services are no longer enough and where Experiences become the foundation for future economic growth. At the time their thinking was dismissed as either facile - it's already happening in sectors like tourism - or frothy - management babble that post-rationalised the crazy valuations of mainly digital businesses not making a dime during the dotcom boom.
Turns out however that they might have been on to something. Psyblog recently aggregated some research that says we get more value from spending on life experiences than we do from spending on material goods. They summarise these findings neatly:
Experiences improve with time, resist unfavourable comparisons and are often mentally revisited (unlike stuff).
The article quotes research that says 57% of Americans surveyed in 2010 said experiences make them happier, while only 34% said that things make them happier. Significantly, experiences "tend to be social and social events (generally) make us happy. Things are often not that social."
Marketing and Intangible Value
Even if there's no causal link between the value we place on experiences over things and the fact of our consuming less stuff, the inferences are clear.
Marketers still need to sell stuff, but if people are consuming less of it, the marketers need to work harder to maintain revenue levels. Unless they're able to market more and more effectively, this effort will cost more, with an inevitable impact on margin.
It's not all bad news though. The psyblog data suggests that the provision and selling of experiences may lift revenues, open new markets and provide whole new arenas for NPD. The trick of course lies in the creation and marketing of experiences that fit with the brand and that resonate enough with people for them to a. want to spend the time and b. want to spend the money. Easy to imagine for high-ticket, high-involvement categories like car marketing, much harder for low-involvement category marketing like CPG or 'distress' categories like, say, insurance.
We don't all want experiences all the time. But even in CPG if the experience is good enough we might overcome our lack of involvement in the category and decide to play.
My wife had an autumn cold recently, a friend sent me a link to a Facebook promotion for Heinz soup, and I ended up spending £1.99 on a personalised can of tomato soup that said 'Get Well Soon Rach' on the label. The £1.99 included the material cost of customisation and delivery, but any margin on top was down to the experience - and most pertinently I haven't bought a can of tomato soup for years. They wouldn't have got me to purchase any other way.
The promotion worked as a piece of traditional marketing too - my experience was shared with my Facebook mates, who even if they didn't engage were exposed to Heinz communications. In this example therefore, moving from product marketing to the provision of a (social) experience drove extra revenue, created a new market, and paved the way for other 'product' innovation.
Marketers, of course, are good at this sort of thing. Here's Rory Sutherland speaking at TED about the sort of intangible (i.e. experience) value that people in advertising can create:
Digital channels play an increasingly important role in the dissemination and facilitation of (especially social) experiences. Heinz didn't need to use Facebook to host their Get Well Soup promotion, but the platform made the experience both simple for me the target and effective for Heinz the business.
That said, the Internet is awash with digital experiences that didn't work as intended. For every Heinz there are lots of Kingsmills. We all need to work far harder to make sure that the experiences we create are:
simple (they piggyback existing behaviours)
relevant (to both audience and brand)
valuable (social currency, 'individual' currency)
In other words, our experiences need to be compelling. If they don't pass the 'why would you?' test then there's little chance we'll get people to commit time to them, let alone grow our business by getting people to pay for them.
If we get the experience right though, we're onto a good thing. We get to innovate, we make money, and along the way we save the world by getting people to consume less stuff.
If that's not a good reason to go to the office I don't know what is.
A couple of years ago the agency I was at used the digital perimeter boards at Wenbley during the Carling Cup final to tell the crowd how loudly each set of fans was shouting. It worked, everyone shouted louder and we won some awards. You can see the work here if you want to take a look.
In Argentina, Coca-Cola have just done something similar, but this time they've taken the shouting out of the stadium and into the street. It's a great idea - keep making a noise or you don't get to watch the match - and as long as you equate being noisy with being happy, it's pretty squarely on brand.
At the time we had Virgin Active for a client as well, and we tried to get them to put interactive window displays into the front of their high-traffic gyms for ages. They never bit, and now Asics in New York unveiled an ad for the NY Marathon that gets people to run. Super-simple, good fun, and you know you'd have a go if you wandered past.
It's kind of like the Fun Theory work for VW, but for me it works better as even if the experience is less 'fun' it ties back more closely to brand and product.
Seems like mobile is all I write about these days. Partly because it's something I'm interested in, but mostly because it's where most digital innovation is happening. So here are three more apps, all of which use mobile AR, but with very different objectives.
The Excellent
First, Flow from A9, an Amazon subsidiary. Users download the app (iPhone only for now), then use it to scan the barcode of any book, DVD or packet of dried apricots (I made up the bit about apricots but they'll get there eventually). Amazon then overlay their price for the book or DVD, along with any customer reviews and other relevant content (exerpts, trailers etc.). They also provide app users with a big 'buy now' button. Users then have a choice. Either they give in to instant gratification and buy in store, or they 'buy now', avoid the queue at the till and get an Amazon parcel 3 days later. They also, of course, save money by buying from Amazon.
Why is this good? Amazon have a ready-made marketing platform to introduce the app to its customers. It's easy for them to download, install and use. It saves users money and time. It will generate additional revenue for Amazon and will bind users more tightly to its services.
Everyone wins, apart from the bricks-and-mortar retailers who'll lose sales. If they all go out of business however, app users will no longer have anything to scan. I wonder if ultimately Amazon will need to open stores, even if all people do in them is scan products?
The very good
Next, AR in publishing. I've always thought augmented reality and kids' books go hand in hand - readers already have a visual trigger in their hands and publishers have been looking for ways to further monetise the commodity bit - the ink and paper - for years. Paid-for augmented reality content that gives the readers something to enhance the experience of the book with is an obvious answer. Now someone's done it. Leo Burnett Australia in fact.
It makes sense to incorporate AR into a children's book - all the publisher has done is created a pop-up that moves. But there's no reason to stop with kids' books. Recipe books demonstrating tricky techniques, textbooks bringing science and the humanities to life in new ways; there are lots of ways publishers can use AR to prop up the revenue they lose by having to sell all their books through Amazon Flow.
The OK but I feel like I've seen it before
Finally, mobile AR from another digital innovation stalwart, Starbucks.
It's OK. Actually that's not fair. it's more than OK becuase it's been well thought out, and executed at scale. So it's available across iPhone and Android devices. It's not just coffee cups that animate but in total 48 different products that are found in most Starbucks outlets. There are 5 different animated characters to play with and if a user plays with all 5 he's rewarded. Sharing and gift-giving are built into the app - and so on.
But at its heart, and unlike the barcode / book examples, it's still a gimmick. And we've seen many, many AR gimmicks over the last 3 years or so. I'm sure it'll do well as Starbucks will devote significant marketing muscle to making sure it's successful, but augmented reality, for me at least, is all grown up now. I need more than a gimmick to make me sit up and take notice.
update: Take a look at the comments on the official video I just posted - looks like other people aren't too convinced either...
