kip/bot/blog

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.

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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?

I’m reading Numerati, a fun read about the rising importance of data and modelling (and a healthy antidote to some of the extremes of Super Crunchers. In general, the book has a better, less fetishistic tone, one that acknowledges the power of what’s going on, but keeps it real:

The only folks who can make sense of the data are crack mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers. They know how to turn the bits of our lives into symbols . . . [he has a nice jag about using index cards to keep track of dietary patterns, and how inefficient that would be. It’s a bit of humanizing text, but I don’t feel like typing it.] The key to this process is to find similarities and patterns. We humans do this instinctively, it’s how we figured out, long ago, which plants to eat and how to talk. But while some of us were focusing on more specfic challenges, others were thinking more symbolically. I picture early humans sitting around a fire. Some, naturally, are jousting for the biggest piece of mate or busy with mating rituals. But off to the side, a select few are toying with stones thinking “if each of these pebbles represent one mammoth, then this rock . . . “

Somehow, those paleo-ners playing with the stones instead of mating or eating meat managed to survive long enough to pass on their genes until, millions of years later, they could become Hari Seldons of the 21st century.

The key thread of the first fourth of the book (which is where I am, according to the impossible to count progress dots on my Kindle), is how people are trying to turn data points into meaningful models of people. The first test cases are supermarkets, where discount programs and smart carts are being deployed to gather data points about people. One of the first things that emerges is that there are customers who do too good a job of taking advantage of sales and promotions. These people, called “barnacles” by the numerati and marketers who really never intended for people to take advantage of sales, are the people who watch the movies they rent on Netflix, rather than let them sit on the coffee table collecting dust, or the people who actually go to the gym and try to live up to their New Years Resolution or lower their blood pressure. These barnacles should be “fired” by retailers, as they drag down profits.

On the other side, you have “butterflies”: “customers who drop in at the store on occasion, spend good money, and then flit away, sometimes for months or years on end.” Since they’re unreliable, it a waste of time to lavish courteous, much less fawning, treatment of them.

I suppose that means that the most desirable customers are buffoons . . . those who don’t scrutinize, price-seek or use the products and services they buy and those who are easily ensnared in a seller’s field of gravity.

It’s kind of fun to watch marketing lurch between respecting the customer’s individuality and trying to model them into flippable switches.

From this week’s Nation, I learned the word prosopopeia:

One such device is prosopopeia, a rather literary term for what happens when the Pillsbury Doughboy persuades you to buy a bread product by giggling so charmingly after that poke to his puffy little tummy. Prosopopeia is the personification of an abstraction. As theorist Barbara Johnson says in her book Persons and Things, “A speaking thing can sell itself; if the purchaser responds to the speech of the object, he or she feels uninfluenced by human manipulation and therefore somehow not duped. We are supposed not to notice how absurd it is to be addressed by the Maalox Max bottle, or Mr. Clean, or Mrs. Butterworth.”

This is, of course, a fun, left pomo way to talk about Sarah Palin (and the Mrs. Butterworth reference is priceless). The article, which has some interesting cultural stuff in it, highlights the fact that Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech had been written weeks before she was even a serious choice for the VP slot. The article argues that the speech was waiting for someone who could personify it — Sarah Palin.

While I’m not enjoying the cheap shots being taken at the Dems, and I like even less the condescending way Dems are talking about how dumb she is and how dumb, by extension, her supporters therefore are, there is another interesting nugget in the column if you look past the ‘recall’ gag:

In the few weeks since Sarah Palin has become a household name, she’s often been glibly compared to a Barbie doll–and certainly her lack of knowledge of the Bush doctrine, or her comments about not knowing what the vice president does, make me wish she’d been recalled as fast as that talking Barbie who complained that “Math class is tough.” But I think the analogy is more apt when thinking about how Palin has been mass-marketed. As Barbara Johnson says, “The packaging is part of what the consumer buys: not only can Barbie not stand without the box, but in it she is positioned for maximum effect. Some dolls come in boxes that almost function like mirrors: the commodity is surrounded by a gleaming aura that adds glamour to its appeal.”

Leaving politics aside now, there is an interesting thing about the packaging support the product, or the packaging being the message, which covers public figures and even some of Apple’s appeal.

Anyway, it’s a nifty word.
Anyway a nifty word.