kip/bot/blog

The following video is getting a lot of tweetage (at least I’ve seen it from 6 of my less than 400 followees):

This is Steve Jobs in 1997, at an internal meeting setting up “Think Different”. I’ve always felt that Apple is a brand that thrives on much, much more than advertising despite its consistently famous spots. So I was surprised to see Jobs eschew “speed and feeds, MIPS and megahertz”, talk about core values so removed from the boxes, and even praise “Got Milk” because the spot’s primary virtue is that it doesn’t even contain the product (except for the milk moustache, and the word itself, of course, but hey). Did I need to think differently than I have in the past about the need for brands to move beyond the abstract emotional idea connected to an abstraction of the benefit the product endows on its owner? ( in other words, #crisisoffaith?)

Thankfully, no. There are a lot of reasons to consider this video something other than “an oldie but goodie” as the poster titled it.

0) This was a very specific moment in Apple’s history. Jobs had just returned as Apple’s CEO and nearly everything about the company had worsened during his absence: focus, quality, understanding of users, design sensibility. While Apple was a world-famous brand even then, its smallish market share still marked it as insurgent — much beloved, to be sure, but by a small, fervently loyal audience that was turning fervently disloyal and feeling betrayed. A bold, 1984-like declaration that the brand was returning to core values, in other words a re-statement of the brand, is exactly what advertising is good for and the Apple audience, the advocates and the embittered alike, are always sufficiently passionate to be reliable viewers and consumers of Apple advertising.

1) This was in 1997, so consumer behaviors were still pre-internet. Yes, Bill Gates had, two years previously, admitted the boneheaded mistake of missing the importance of the internet, but AOL and Netscape and dial-up were still king. A look at archive.org shows that neither consumers nor brands knew the importance of the internet in customer conversation, information spread and transparency, and disintermediation.

2) “Think Different” ran five years before the “Switch” campaign (which featured my veterinarian!) returned to something closer to speeds and feeds, utility, and comparative performance over the Windows-based PC. WSwitch” was short-lived (a little over two years), but there is narrative continuity to “I’m a Mac” in the content. While “1984″ and “Think Different” were high-level statements of high-minded corporate values, the last 8 years of Apple advertising have been very, very focused on the boxes (or cases) and what they do for users, especially in comparison to the bumbling competition.

Reminding myself of these things, I am now much relieved that I don’t need to re-think anything. #braincellssavedforassassinscreed

Coda: anytime I think about Apple advertising, I fondly remember Kevin Costner looking very relaxed and successful while contemplating a simple spreadsheet with his dog nearby. Oh, that I could have a job this taxing:

After doing a BDW workshop in Toronto, BOARDS magazine, a co-sponsor of the event, invited me to do a piece about a slide in one of my presentations. The slide said “Utility is the only emotion”, an overstatement for sure, but not by so much. BOARDS is sadly closing down, but the piece is still up here. For archival purposes and my own traffic, however, here it is (without the picture of me):

Utility is the only useful emotion in a post-microsite world
Rapp Collins planner says consumers make decisions without encountering any big idea messaging
May 6, 2010

For years, emotion has been the most important, even solitary goal, of advertising. Over and over, planners look for the single most important thing we want customers to feel, briefs call for key emotional takeaways, and ECDs and EVPs look for the emotional climax in every piece of work. Emotion seems to be one of those enduring truths of the industry, immune to digital reality. But, as we move into the post-microsite phase of digital, where the voices of customers, trade press, and reviewers determine the fate of brands in real time - this exclusively emotional approach is reductive and ultimately counterproductive.

What we need to recognize, and adjust our work to, is that utility - how well a brand performs valuable functions for its customer - outweighs any emotion advertising can generate. The sense of satisfaction a customer feels with a product - its utility - is not only the most important emotion; it’s the only emotion that counts. Utility is what takes customers beyond fleeting, reflexive response and into meaning - direct evidence of how a brand fits into/enhances one’s life. And any brand that fails to be, or present itself as, consistently useful will #fail in the digital space.

Today, it’s possible, and increasingly likely, for a customer to go through an entire consideration and decision process without encountering any emotional, brand-generated messaging at all. Example: last year, I was going to Make magazine’s DIY event Maker Faire and needed a video camera to record it. I wanted something small, HD, durable, and that cost less than $400. I Twittered a call for advice from friends (and, via Twitter, Facebook statused as well). A user named @gadgetboy told me he was loving his new Kodak Zi6. I had thought Kodak was a dead brand, and was skeptical, but @gadgetboy is savvy so I heard him out. Another friend on Twitter pointed me to Zi6 videos he posted on Flickr. I also got some recos in response to retweets about the Flip and few other models. Within 24 hours, I had a solid consideration set - all from friends (and friends of friends) and including a brand (Kodak) I had previously dismissed out of hand.

Over the course of the next week, I went to blogs Engadget and Gizmodo and read the reviews. Then, at Amazon, I looked at the accessories and explored potential hidden costs. I was already leaning toward the Zi6, so I checked out Amazon’s customer comments on it and saw lots of !!!s and very few WTFs. I bought that camera, loved it, and now recommend it to others.

Was there emotion? Hell yeah! People said, “I love it!”, “Look at the picture!”, “I cracked the viewfinder and they replaced it overnight!”, “Didn’t read the manual cuz I didn’t need it!”, “Battery lasts forever!” But all the emotion arose from utility, rather than aspirations, segment beliefs, or cultural insights.

As a person who came up in digital in the mid-90s and is trying to break into the trads tribe, I feel compelled to talk about some ads to help make my point. Start with the obligatory Super Bowl reference and you can point to Google’s ad. What was it about? Accurate searches. The searches led to lovely emotional things like romance, love, and life fulfillment. But in the end, it was about the effectiveness of the algorithm, its utility.

Then you have last year’s iPhone commercials. They were all about task completion - finding a restaurant for dinner before going to the movie you just bought tickets for after checking the weather to see if you needed an umbrella. If you take the iPhone spot, drop the catchy tune, stick in my grubby fingers instead of a hand model’s, and make the lighting less pristine, you have what interaction designers call use case scenarios - demonstrations of the product’s utility.

These ads also highlight another dimension of digital - the increasing importance of ideas that aren’t so big. While I don’t doubt that a big idea can be found in both ads, the real energy behind each comes from the little ideas behind the brand’s utility. Watch the Google ad closely and you’ll see not only affirmation of the search algorithm’s accuracy, but the spell correction suggestion, Google Translate, and the presentation of search results as content. The iPhone ad is a presentation of one great app idea after another, with the promise of more apps. The creative here wasn’t a pay-off on the big idea so much as a narrative of little and medium-sized ideas that speaks to more people on a more personal level.

Brand story, message, and emotion can trigger conversation and consideration. But utility triggers decision, action, trust, and passion for a brand. It is the only emotion consumers ultimately respond to. And it’s the one that lasts.

In marketing, advertising, and many communications professions, we talk about channel-neutrality, channel-agnosticism, and multi-channel approaches to work. The point of these approaches is to be less TV-centric, or more idea focused. But recently, I’m convinced that the equation of the internet/interactive with TV/radio/print as a channel is a fundamental mistake.

A good place to start, and a recent one, comes from Steven Johnson’s TIME cover piece on Twitter. It captures a fundamental dynamic about internet/interactive that separates it from other channels:

Yes, the breakfast-status updates turned out to be more interesting than we thought. But the key development with Twitter is how we’ve jury-rigged the system to do things that its creators never dreamed of.

In short, the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it’s doing to us. It’s what we’re doing to it.

(Italics added)

This highlights a key thing about the internet/web/interactive that makes it subtly, but fundamentally and absolutely, different from TV/radio/print: users and its usage changes it and determines its ever-evolving shape.

William Gibson has a great line “that the street finds its own uses for things”. It applies mostly to digital technologies — sets of functionalities with some content — which can be adapted from its original purpose to a better, more appropriate one. All you can do with a TV is turn it on, change the channel, adjust the volume. All you can with print is absorb it or ignore it. Radio? Same thing: listen/don’t listen, change the channel. You have very little impact on its shape and its use doesn’t change.

With the internet we constantly encounter a mix of content, functionality, and the ability to adapt it. Any time a user encounters functionality on the web or even on a computer, more likely than not s/he is also being invited to create new uses for it. If there is no invitation to co-create at one location, there is more than likely a place where users are already creating/mashing/editing/trashing/hacking the content. In the rare instances where there isn’t already a location, a user can quickly acquire a domain and in less than ten minutes have a presence on the web and a set of tools for distributing that content and allowing others to interact with it.

The same holds even more true for applications and functionality. Any application that is meant for the general public is designed in such an open fashion that it constitutes a blank slate of creation rather than a form to be filled. Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Paint, Flickr, Blogger, WordPress, Access — all of them ask the user what do you want to do? Users with buttoned-up minds might look at these technologies, scramble to find an analog analogue (cute huh?) and port behaviors over, but, increasingly, users who are comfortable with technology will ask “what can I do with this thing?” and immediately and unconsciously use it for their own ends.

This dynamic of people finding their own use for things is so prevalent that products are being designed and launched with the expectation of emergent adaptation by its users. The increasing prevalence of open APIs and services and toolkits, the simple but rich functionality of Flickr sets, collections, groups and tags, machinima in games, all point to co-creation of the media as being a part of the media’s conception, not an after-publication hack. The best example right now is Google Wave, a set of functionality many are excited about even though they don’t know exactly what it is or what they’ll do with it.

A channel is a groove, a fixed shape through which things flow from one point to another. The word’s origin and current usage straitjackets us into reductive, broadcast, one-way communication thinking (note the image of a straitjacket — you can and some might escape, but it’s painful and limited). Time for a new one.

Wow. I hate this book and I suddenly think I understand years of suffering as an interactive designer.

Tim Ferriss (of Four Day Work Week fame) and Kevin Rose (Digg) discussed their top five must-read books. One of the books was The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding(*). I like both of these guys so I’m inclined to follow their lead on must-read books (and I tend to take must-read recos very seriously), so I bought it in minutes.

Today I started reading it on Kindle. It was, among other things I’ll get to later, one of the first times I’ve missed a physical book. Not for the pleasure of reading on paper, or the ability to take notes, but because I couldn’t tear it to shreds or throw it across the room without damaging worthwhile books. It’s one of the most reductive, simple-minded things I’ve ever read. It also explains much of the pain many of us in the industry felt during the first wave of dot-com presences.

Law #1 covers what’s maddening about it. The law states, immutably mind you, that: “It’s better to be first than it is to be better.” In the early years of the web, this kind of thinking predominated and resulted in a lot of wasted money. “First to market” was an obsession, “we can make it good later but we MUST capture the market!” The book’s author Al Reis, has a painfully unsophisticated mode of proving his point: everyone remembers Charles Lindbergh, the first person to fly across the Atlantic, but nobody remembers Bert Hinkler, the guy who did it the second time and in less time using less fuel. Hinkler did it better, but Lindbergh did it first and, because name recognition is all that counts, we can conclude that being first is all that matters.

The book was originally written in 1994, but I don’t think we’ve sufficiently purged ourselves of its thinking — there are all sorts of tropes about “owning” something, having a differentiator, recognizing that quality counts for little in the marketplace if you’re first, have a category that’s yours, and people recognize you. Perhaps Ferriss recommended it, because he’s so strong on building a personal brand rather than a product.

But the problem with all of this thinking, is that it fails to recognize that consumers are no longer passive. They are active critics of products, they are researchers and reviewers of the market, and they have way too much information and intelligence to overlook things like a product which is better but which came out later. The two best examples are the iPod and Google. Both of these products came very late to the market: Google got into the game in the 5th year of search engines, and grew for quite a long time purely on its superior search results; MP3 players were in the market for 3 years before Apple released the iPod, but the iPod thrived for a variety of reasons (tight integration of hardware and software, faster synching, a decent critical mass of music in its store, a simple if disempowering interface, flawless performance). Hell, even Blu-Ray won out! How often do we hear customers, in some way, refer to the 1.0 syndrome?

The other laws in this book follow in much the same vein: “if you can’t be first in a category, then set up a new category you can be first in” (novelty trumps quality); “it is better to be first in the mind, than it is to be first in the marketplace” (not bad, except first in the mind is a function of name recognition, not of quality, so this is still derivative of the first law and assumes that people aren’t thinking about products); “marketing is not a battle of products, but a battle of perceptions” (with some fairly explicit advice to avoid talking about products and their features and focus on the winnable space associated with them); “the most powerful concept in marketing is owning a single word in the prospect’s mind” (reductive, people are capable of complex thought and they seek them elsewhere).

One could argue that all the points have some validity and that the reductive nature of the rhetoric is intended more to push people out of their comfort zone, but it’s the “immutable” part that’s so frustrating. More than ever, marketers need to be flexible in their thinking, adaptive in their approaches to customers. They need an elastic mind that is responsive to changing behaviors and an imagination that can engage in conversations. They don’t need immutable laws.

Now that that’s off my chest, I wish I could do more than click a button to delete the book. But, I can take comfort in the warning sign that reminds me of the permanence of my action.

(*) The link does not go to the 22 Laws book, but instead to Anna Karenina. I cannot support, even remotely, this book. Blech, ptooey.

In my very first class of my very first day of college (Haverford), Microecon Prof Mike Weinstein (Stanford) explained to the class how he wanted us to write for our weekly quizzes and exams (paraphrase):

Every time you apply theory, I want to hear who is doing what to whom and why. If you can’t bring the theory down to real human interaction then you don’t understand the theory. And any theory that can be used to explain who is doing what to whom and why is useless.(*)

I am increasingly saying this phrase to nearly everyone I work with and talk to about marketing and design. There are so many words in both fields that put us as at a distance from the people we’re trying to talk to, interact with, sell stuff to, etc. More there are so many dynamics that we’ve captured in our labels that we’ve lost track of the dynamic or missed that the dynamic has changed. Finally, thinking in terms of these five Ws makes us write better sentences.

(*) This was in 1983 before maths took over large portions of the field and the ability to prove that y-markets containing n-commodities where n and y can go on to infinity can reach a state of equilbirium and growth (Walrasian equilibrium if I remember correctly) was a great feat.

Nice concept around Nokia’s (underrated) N-Gage platform. For years, their creative has been trying to humanize games and transform “gaming” (a word that dorkifies and marginalizes the product) into “playing”. This is a fun concept (which has gone viral . . . Or, put another way, was amusing enough to people for them to share it) and the game has some charm and visual surprise to it. Most important, though, it turns video games into things people play and unites N-Gage with Nokia’s larger brand promise of “Connecting people”

I’m quickly realizing that, in the context of my work as an interactive soul, I am a design thinker rather than a creative thinker. Really, I should say that I’m a designer and not a creative, but, given the way interactive marketing and advertising fetishizes the word creative (it’s a noun and a verb! it has BIG ideas!), I am afraid to relinquish the possibility of me participating in that word, even in a poorly-trafficed blog.

- Designers care about and enjoy how, creatives are bored by implementation

- Designers think god is in the details, creatives think the devil is

- Designers think about duration, durability, emergence, and long arcs of emotion; creatives think about the high, quick burst spikes of emotion

- Dare I say it: Designers care about foreplay and the afterward; Creatives focus on orgasms (seems like a way to show that I care about and understand sex as a motivator and maintain cred as at least a faux-creative)

- Designers are persistent, incurable foxes; Creatives are serial hedgehogs (See below for fox/hedgehog backgorund)

Different modes, different ways. I am almost at peace with this.

=-=-=-=-=-=-
Fox and Hedgehog

from Isaiah Berlin’s essay, “The Fox and the Hedgehog“:

there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single, central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms which they understand, think and feel … and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way … these last lead lives, perform acts and entertain ideas that are centrifugal than than centripetal

the first is hedgehog (creatives), the second is the fox (designers)

it will die as a marketing channel and survive as a social tool, or continue to grow as a marketing tool and die altogether. For the umpteenth time, I get a note alerting me to a follower. Having a spate of friends who have found me start to follow (a word I still don’t like, it’s like we bake competition and brand right into the experience), I clicked to see who it was:

In the last three weeks, perhaps post-Oprah, I’ve been getting followed by friends, professional contact, and various marketers and bots. The marketers and bots are still the bulk of the emails I receive. This is the kind of thing that will cause me to make my account less public, turn off the email alerts or ignore followers altogether. When that happens, twitter becomes less important to me as a social tool and I fade back to just using FB statuses, or stopping it altogether. Cuz, let’s face it, it’s really not that important to me and I managed to quit smoking, so I can kick this habit too.

Today’s NYTimes had an intriguing ad in its masthead, which I actually clicked:

“Sponsors of Tomorrow” is a little cheesy, but as an avid reader of the Science Times and a techno-fetishist, ii was drawn to it. When I clicked it, I got the usual metaphor of a room and cluster of objects as a way to engage me:

As everyone knows, people, especially NYTimes readers, are afraid of technology, so you need to give them a “virtual space” to lower blood pressure and reduce techno anxiety. In fact, so scared is the audience that you want to avoid text, and let users explore the almost-engaging images presented. (But they’re not clickable!)

So, the piece leads with the Virtual Wind Tunnel. That sounds geeky/futuristic/cool enough to check out:

Again, because I am so techno-phobic, I am gently eased into a screen with a picture with an explanatory sentence. When I click to say “Yes, when I said I wanted to explore the virtual wind tunnel I really meant it, so take me to the fucking virtual wind tunnel already”, I get this:

Now, I might be getting somewhere. There are clickable things at the bottom of the screen! Time to learn how Intel is creating the future, sponsoring tomorrow, blowing my mind with the possibilities of integated electronics. So I click the banana:

Ha ha! Funny! The “Aero Dynamic status” of the banana is “Non-existent”! (In the full sized-version of the screen, the punch line, or rather the “pay-off”, is buried in the upper left corner, in type barely distinguishable from the atmospheric data in the upper left. So, yeah, the actual design is pretty bad too.)

What about the bunny man? Is he aerodynamic?

No!! He “Might as well be a brick wall”! And that concludes the interactivity of this Virtual Wind Tunnel. I get to click five different objects and read the copywriter’s jokes.

In fairness, I have to admit some professional jealousy. I once had Intel as a client and I dreamed of being able to tell customers the deeper story of the amazing things Intel does. The making of micro-processors is, once you look a little closer, fascinating and nearly miraculous. Why not build the brand by telling that story? So, when I see something like this, it bums me out cuz it’s a missed opportunity (and blown budget), and it’s just plain bad click-n-play interactive.

Some things I would suggest to the next team who gets a shot at this (assuming they haven’t poisoned the idea for the next crew):

Remember that interactive is more than just an on/off switch — this experience is essentially an animation player and a weak one at that. It offers no information, no opportunity to go deeper, and, most important, no chance for experimentation and what if. (Actually, for Intel, the most important miss is that this really doesn’t make Intel look that smart or future looking — no processing power was needed for the conclusions we drew. Without the benefit of a computer, a 4th grader who has held his hand out of the window of a moving car could surmise that the able-to-fly humingbird is more aerodynamic than a guy in a bulky suit, and that scientifically dimpled golf balls have more jump than a banana. They might not know why that is the case, but this experience doesn’t help them with that.)

Don’t assume your audience is as dumb as you are — that’s really rude, but I have to believe that the on-the-ground creative team, who grew up with technology, were ready to tell a much smarter, deeper story. I’m guessing that the ECD-level people, who still have troubles with Flickr and computer games and are outraged at what txting is doing to language, insisted that they were the voice of the customer and they were the bar for the level of dialogue — so keep it really simple.

Remember why you bought the space — you went to the NYTimes to engage serious-minded, reasonably intelligent people, so why not talk to them at that level? Even when David Pogue is at his cutesiest accessible, he gets into speeds and feeds and explains real things.

Broaden the range of emotions you engage — go beyond wow, giggle, smirk, cool!, ha! pleasing, soothing, and allow that there are other emotions that can engage people: fascination, the thrill of discovery, the satisfaction of learning, the empowering nature of knowledge. People, especially those in the NYT reader demographics, actually make big life decisions in their careers and education around things that fascinate them, spark their imagination, and make them think.

What a shame. Will agencies ever learn to do truly interactive experiences?