A Donkey on the Edge

So Charlotte wants me to spread the web2 love re ex-classmate Dirk Blackman's new production Outlander and why not? (that's our in-house Viking Haldane on the big-boy climbing frame over there on the left for our family readers)

As Eva Metalios puts it:

Subject: Fw: Dirk needs our help
Hey all -
After working in the Sisyphean task of being a writer in LA for over two decades, and the three year odyssey that OUTLANDER took to actually be made, the movie our friend Dirk Blackman (Columbia class of '85) authored with his partner and the project's director Howard McCain, is coming out. It is a sci-fi take on the Beowulf legend, nach.

C'mon, we are talking Dirk here. This is not
your daddy's Viking movie.

And Charlotte makes the point

Douglas,
the Norway thing, the Columbia thing, the media thing...

Well, yes, she's got a point I guess (and only Charlotte and my mother can get away with calling me Douglas).

The Norway thing huh? well we named our boy Haldane in an attempt to ping him into investigating his Norse roots... He is named after King Healfdene (lit. "half-dane") whose name has survived from myth into modern Danish under the popular form Halfdan

I initially wanted to call Hal Healfdene but worrying got the better of me and in the end I didn't want to relive a boy named Sue so tried to anglicise it some. We could have gone with Haldan, also in use in modern Danish but in the end we settled on Haldane (also good because it's a Scottish name).

Oh, right, back to the link love;-)

• the Morwen character is in development here: G4 video
• Healfdene Goguen is as far as I can tell the only man online to sport the BW original spelling
• and here's another site about Outlander
• here's the trailer on Youtube

Judging from the amount of traffic already generated, Dirk's project doesn't need any help but I liked Eva's closer make the Weinstein Company to feel the noise. Take that Harvey!

I've been trying to get Nick interested in personal branding after listening to @garyvee at Seed3. Gary made a bunch of interesting points and got me thinking about how Nick should develop on her work so far as a journalist. The woman has huge amounts of life experience and when fueled, can tell many an exotic tale of Argentinean vineyards, Tuscan raw-food cooking or tea tasting in the Indian Ocean...

Tim says

...and translate it into an action model for your personal bottom line--how your brand will generate personal wealth ( Me Inc. ) and how you will create social impact ( Me.org )...

Which really resonated... Does Nick settle on a business partner or employer who can work with her to create value using whatever existing methods they might have in place and picking and choosing from a small selection of Nicki's mojo as required?

Or does she choose to leverage her whole experience and develop on her own, working to distribute her mojo-assets socially to a large audience?

I can't help thinking that option one sounds like a bit of a waste...

I think the nice man who went in search of my Identity theft woes last week would have liked me to update my previous post.

So here goes: according to his findings there is nothing wrong with either his payment-processing software or hardware and a review of staff at the branch revealed nothing untoward.

So just to confirm: all is well at Eat. You can pick up your soup and sandwiches safe in the knowledge that these guys pay attention to detail, act fast when required and are just generally a bunch of excellent people!

eat.co.uk

Wow, when was the last time you thought you'd get a response as a result of filling in a form on the web (never mind a rapid response)?

Well, I had a little grief from the fraud protection mob at Firstdirect this afternoon and as a result posted this note in the feedback form on the Eat website (and I won't go into the domain name resolution issue on the site which means if you load the flash movie by entering the domain without the 'www' the links to the feedback form are broken--I wonder how much more feedback they'd get if that was fixed...)

At 14:31:55 on 27 June 2008 (roughly an hour ago) I purchased a soup and sandwich from your 15 Basinghall Street shop.

When I returned to my desk to eat my lunch I received a call from my bank (first direct) informing me that there had been fraudulent behaviour on my switch card.

According to their records, the transaction I had just made in the City of London was routed through a supplier in Equador.

The security guys at the bank where I work reckon this is a man-in-the-middle attack and that someone has tampered with the keypad in the store (similar to attaching card readers to ATM tellers, to harvest card details).

Please review this situation asap.

All the best,
Dug Falby

To be honest, I really didn't think I'd get an answer (strangely, the Flash front-end is what gave me this impression: If it's not a real html form, how can it yield real results?) but I did.

A nice man called Martin (I think he said he was head of business communications?) rung up to explain what was going on as a result of my note. From his description, I pictured a black helicopter appearing over Basinghall street and special forces whisking the card-reader off to a controlled explosion. It was very impressive, he said he'd frozen all card transactions at the store, notified the card processing supplier who are going to come in and refit the store tonight and would double-check records for staff access to card processing stuff.

He also made a point of checking that I had notified my bank and assured me he would get back to with with any progress relevant to my situation. Prompt, courteous and thorough, just the way it oughta be.

Which of course means I'll be all the more likely to go buy delicious soups and salads from Eat:-)

Well, the panel is finishing up and we'll be heading out for wine soon. As per Serge's request, I'll try and get some notes up tomorrow.

Well, the afternoon was pretty good too, but with a dead powerbook battery and no charger I ended up sending commentary via Twitter.

13:00 -- Lunch

One design direction will do -- AMEN

12:38 -- Larissa Meek (AgencyNet) Getting your designs approved: 12 Simple Rules
watching a demo of an Aston Martin website and I hate it! Hard to beleive but this agency team is making exactly the same mistakes the boo.com crew. They are trying to replicate a sensual experience using tech and it just doesn't work :-(

... and at this point, Dug's battery expired and he switched to iphone mode. I can't believe I forgot the bloody charger this morning!

Casino is a "feedback engine" (he's describing what the adiction thing call "near-win experiences" ie gamblers never loose, they just almost win) Vegas master of feedback...

Creating delightful experiences: Innocent's "stop looking at my bottom", fun, easter eggs (find it and share)

Andy just said "social object"

11:36 -- Andy Budd is doing great things showing examples of great experience curves

[ interview break ]

I just interviewed Steve Pearce, I wanted to ask him the agency questions I posted earlier. How does Poke get clients to focus on the bottom of the iceberg after the pitch was won on the basis of the shiny top of the iceberg.

He reckons Poke has solved this by saying "no", by never going to the client with a ready-made solution. In ongoing work, he always keeps referring to interaction, thinking about the backend and appserver looking for hooks into the experience. He quotes the example of the Topshop re-skin where his team looked carefully at the appserver and found a number of services that had been disabled, never implemented or under-used. As a result, he was able to use an up-sell module to create a dynamic user-ratings system.

The second question is the Hugh McLeod question about agencies being asked help clients redefine their business and how agencies are going to fit into this new world. Steve's take on this was

that agencies live the client's product (use Windows machines to sell Microsoft products) and build deep relationships with clients such that the feedback mechanism from agency to client can be about a lot more that just the current project.

Finally, Steve reckons

that Poke is based on values and that if those are always kept at the core of all projects, the thinking about the project (and by extension the client's business) will naturally flow back to the client.

11:25 -- Andy Budd (Clearleft) is doing "Designing the User Experience Curve"

(Break: back at 11:20)

10:42 -- Andy Clarke of Stuff & Nonsense & Steve Pearce are taking questions

Well, I came to see Steve Pearce from Poke and managed to catch the last five minutes of his chat.

He did an interesting presentation on the process of creating user experiences. He uses a great iceberg metaphor (see others on this) to describe the process.

It's an interesting parallel to Jesse James Garett's "Elements" in that in the iceberg metaphor you dive under the surface to the bottom of the experience and then float up to the top will in JJG land you float up from abstract to concrete via the stages of strategy, scope, structure, skeleton and surface :-)

Wow, you know, I don't normally read Bob Lutz's stuff over at the GM FastLane Blog which is odd because I quote the blog to clients all the time. Just took a peek today and saw this:

... In the end, it cost us much more than that; it cost us our reputation for technology leadership and innovation.

We made that mistake once. We won’t make it again. I think the whole company has learned when you step out and do bold things, you win and when you're cautious and let other people do the bold things, you lose.

Many great ideas die every day because we value the safety of the tried-and-true over the risk that true innovation requires. This is not going to be the case with Volt; we are going for the brass ring.

Great stuff, a senior VP publicly admitting he fucked up (and promising not to trip over the same log twice).

So this volt thing seems pretty cool. It's a different strategy than the Tesla plan. The board at Tesla Motors are banking on a high-performance car (the 2008 Tesla Roadster) to get the ev ball rolling and they plan to roll out an inexpensive family saloon after that.

Also, the Volt is an E-REV so still factoring in the petrol pump...

You know, the last couple of years I've bought conference passes and then failed to escape work long enough to attend which is daft really... so I'm going to fowd this year ok?

Anyways, I signed up on the carson website and was reading the about the speakers (looking forward to hearing Steve Pearce) when I stumbled on a link to Headscape the online home of conference chair Paul Boag.

Now, Nicky always has to explain jokes to me and I'm never sure if people are serious or not and this gets worse as I get older... So I'm gonna take a punt: I think headscape could do better. A lot better.

A nice man called David tweeted me yesterday with a link to a video of Russell Davies talking about interestingness, size and creativity. In the video, Russell refers to a project I did a couple of years ago for Birdseye. I just wanted to thank David as it's always nice to know there are people out there who share the passions I get out of bed for:-)

I've been thinking about advertising agencies big and small, partly because of the LGFE reunion this thursday and partly because I'm pretty much always stuck in the thick of one or other user-centred design process debate.

I sent the following question to a recruiter this morning as we're talking about maybe working together. I don't know the answer, but I'm pretty sure it's tough for a passionate user experience person to work without discovery...

Here was the question I had in mind:

80% of the magic of user-centered design happens in the discovery phase, prior to the IA proposing the information model for an interface. As most pitches involve going to the client with a ready-made proposal, agencies tend to find it difficult to produce user-centered design. Does your agency have a strategy in place to overcome this challenge?

I suppose the answer is "win the business then shove the IA through the door" but I can't imagine this guy or this guy playing it like that...

Are you a senior agency bod? How do you handle ideas of value, resonance, co-creation and needs assessment? I'm still working on the question :-)

Get ready for a crackdown on broadband use

Man, this pisses me off. The only person who gets to decide the value of a good or service I invite into my space is me.

Right now, my ISP isn't providing me with value, not even close as my connection rarely gets over 64k (yes, k not m) and the damn connection won't come up after a router power cycle or other network crash.

If the service was a little closer to what was advertised I could start building my own value with it. Because I work in the internet industry, there's a really good chance my connection to the cloud allows me to create stacks of unique value. You know, just doing a quick mental calculation I'd be happy to pay my ISP say £40, £50, maybe even £75 a month.

Of course given past performance, I'd say the chances of my ISP being interested in understanding how I create value are pretty much next to nil.

When are businesses gonna get on the damn bus?

Alex over at artflutter just posted a link to an mp3 of the Banksy Paris Hilton Danger Mouse Remix I mentioned in an earlier post which is great because the link I posted to the pics no longer has em but Alex has posted a full set of liner mods.

Thanks Alex :-)

So I used to think I was subverting from within. That's bollocks, of course. David always reminds me of that. I've decided I'm not going to work in advertising again, the daily round of social network metrics and the constant quest to shove us through some absurd value funnel (ad agencies are still in the process of discovering the creation of unique value, not exactly at the cutting edge of stuff really...) just goes against my belief in a collaborative internet.

A new-year's prediction from Zero Influence really cheered me up. Dave reckons that this year will "reward participation that does not seek measurement nor reward�

You go girl!

I love this photograph for the Natural History Museum kids only sections (sorry about the image quality, snapped on a bus stop).

The portrait had to have been done in a massive black poly tunnel and considering the background is exposed to a stop more light than the foreground the dynamic range of the shot is astonishing. Information exists in the darkest shadows and none of the white fabric definition is lost on the sides of the hood (which are white on white after all). They should use this shot in lighting school.

Oh, and the art direction is lovely too;-)

You know, I was gonna comment on the Skype blog Heartbeat (no, not on the bit where if they had decided to use computers equipped with a proper operating system their crash and subsequent total meltdown wouldn't have happened in the first place) (and no, not on the bit where for the same reason they can't manage a reliable single-customer view grrrr) no, I was going to comment on the email I received earlier today:

As a goodwill gesture to all you faithful Skype Pro, Skype Unlimited, SkypeIn or Skype Voicemail customers, we're adding an additional seven days to your current subscription, free of charge. And even if you didn't miss out on using Skype last week - you can still have a week free on Skype, on the house!

So my first reaction is that

1. customers that aren't those listed above can just fuck off
2. a customer worth building a relationship with is one that commits to a financial transaction with your brand. Gosh, how 80/20 nineteen-eighty-seven of you...

But then I thought to myself, you just nicked the nine quid I had in my account three weeks ago. True, you did explain that you had to, and you did make it theoretically easy for me to protect my dosh while giving me ample and repeated fair warning.

But you know what, if you clean out the balance in your customer's accounts that's all they're gonna see.

Come on, this is sooooo not a modern approach to marketing. Your empty gesture has left me with exactly the same balance I had just before your meltdown--zero.

Niklas Zennström, you're a smart guy, my guess is you can do a lot better (and you can start by giving me my money back)

Last year I built a couple of sites for a guy that I frequently collaborate with. The sites talk about diamonds, the diamond industry and luxury more generally.

He was wondering about SEO issues and to illustrate a point, I'm posting this link to De Beers diamonds. We were curious why the De Beers consumer website fares so poorly in Google. I did a search on "They are the ultimate gift of love" a sentence from the introductory paragraph and the string "De Beers" appears nowhere on the first page of Google results. Weird;-)

Actually, not so weird as the html is pretty much not semantic even a little tiny bit. In any case, I'll check the position of this post in a few day's time and see how it compares with the corporate site.

Mike Butcher points out that new European legislation will make astroturfing illegal.

Which of course is a good thing, but how are they going to enforce this? The higher end PR firms are creating great thinking about their clients by actually participating in the debate or even initiating it themselves.

I guess the Barry Scott test is going to become this law's Turing test;-)

This photo really doesn't do the quality of the repro or indeed the quality of the original photograph justice. It's taken with a Nokia 6300 in the Paris Metro.

France may not be a force for innovation right now but I keep spotting print ads in the Metro that are just beautiful. There's an ongoing campaign for the Bon Marché department store which has classic-but-mesmerising photography (and repro)... The campaigns tend to be very 'old fashioned' in the sense that the ads obey 1960's ad rules (the headline and visual take on a new meaning when seen in partnership and neither repeats the other as in "think small" or "so here's a tart on a bar" etc).

The above ad for the Guide du Routard is a case in point, the headline reads "notre guide on l'écrit avec nos pieds" which I guess would translate to "we write our guide with our feet". No paradigms being redefined, but lovely, quiet work:-)

Well, I'm glad I'm not the only consultant out there to get into trouble with Tagged.com. The more I look, the more I find people sharing similar experiences

So here's a public service anouncement.

If you're pissed off at receiving the damn emails, why not threaten, or at least hurl abuse at, the VCs behind tagged.com? Here are some bits to get you started:

enjoy :-)

This 'stream-of-listening' feed was provided for folk that couldn't make the event. In the end I'm not sure it's very useful, so today I'll just take notes and publish more structured thoughts after the event.

In terms of getting a better idea of what speakers actually said, I strongly recommend Lars Plougmann and his amazing mind maps which are both complete and accurate, and are of course released on a CC licence.

And that, folks, was day one of FOWA 2007

DIGG "crowd generated media"

Kevin Rose talks about the Digg ecosystem

• Why should the crowd care?
• Create incentives on every level
• Why should people submit content
• Why do people digg
• Content -> Diggs -> Quality --> WOM --> More traffic --> 3rd party site traffic --> Smart Digg buttons

Now we're talking about enhancing Digg (swarming the story, better fact checking, location-based opinions).

Benefits of Flash visualisation, could make tools to help people understand how their shifting opinions interact with others - visualisations of swarms.

Big announcement, support for openID
(applause)

Stéphane from Soocial

The future of contact management

(does demo mmmm...)

Two nice chaps talking about quotes

http://quotationsbook.com

Very interesting stuff, will need to pass on to a few folk who have been working with citation indexes.

The spotlight section, first up, BT's Stephen Stokols

Converged communication online

Stephen promises us that the wifi cloud might be available for tomorrow (audience cheers)

Four online trends driving shift

• Lines being blurred as online cos move into telecoms space
• P2P proliferation (need to embrace it)
• Advertising funds free models
• 1 to 1 voice no longer good enough - 1 to many is emerging

Telcos need to embrace shifting landscape turn threats into opportunities

(Gordon Bennet, no cliché left unturned)

Shows screengrabs of BT Contact. (kind of looks like what I'm currently working on...)

(free sms etc)

See btcontact.com

Bradley Horowitz Yahoo VP of ADD (Advanced Development Division)

"User rehab, a story of redemption"

Few creators, many consumers

Need to lower barrier to entry

Uses Flickr as an example of how to do this:

Talks about "interestingness" (photographs that have been interacted with more than other by analysis of log data)

Talks about tagging (mentions speed) the ease goes to the lowering of barriers to entry.

Mentions folksonomies

Mentions ZoneTag. Not having to remember the tag for an event (system merges cell data and other info from upcoming.com to come up with suggestion)

Clustering by sense

And now we're talking about pipes, as in Yahoo Pipes, very cool:-)

Pipes is sampling, not synthesizing

We're now asking questions...

Werner Vogels, CTO amazon.com

Here to talk about Amazon EC2 and S3

Web scale computing (compete on ideas not resources)

Alternative resource model:

• Increasing uncertainty
• Move from push to pull (socially, industrially, culturally)
• Move to mashing up on the fly
• Co-creative effect of customers (power of the consumer)
• Greater focus on learning and improvisation

(this guy has so totally read CK Pralahad)

Claim and release resources dynamically

(points out that the pull model doesn't let VCs take such a big chunk of you)

Talks about "Getting Real" by Jason Friedman. Chapter 4, scalling is too hard to plan for at the start.

Don't worry about tornados and SLAs

Only pay for what you use

Examples:

• smugmug.com
• Second Life
• youos.com
• Render Rocket

Mentions the mechanical turk as part of the AWS product family

Check it out at http://aws.amazon.com

Google Jason Chuck

Open apis

KLM in maps (channel 4 ticket price)

Sketchup (promoting user generated)

Talks about tomorrow's discussion of the new apps, spreadsheet etc (and their guy will discuss best practise)

Thinkfree (SOA)

• browser neutral
• speaks MS Office

Free mashup mashup api :-) Let your blog visitors view office documents without using MS Office software

Cool:-)

http://viewer.thinkfree.com/html?url=http:domain/file.xls&action=view&pageurl=uri

OK, gotta try this

Lessons from Last.fm Matt and Anil

Connect people to the music they love

Audio-scrobbling (listen -> share -> discover)

• 15M tracks scrobbled
• 175 scrobbles per second
• 10M artists
• 70M tracks
• 700k tracks streamable on last.fm
• 17M items taged
• 145K artist wikis

Matt is talking about the collaborative requirements of developping a sharing application. Keeping it as open as possible, reward participation as much as possible, be realistic with finances, building engagement from your community, be transparent (downtime charts published)

...people sending us money after each server failure to encourage us to upgrade the server...

establishing an open protocol from the start got scrobbling off the ground. Before long, loads of music players supported the protocol.

Anil takes the mike to talk about growth

What happens to the team?

• The changes when you get to 30-40 people
• People trump processes
• Use simple tools and adapt them

Shows irc transcript from their developer channel (osmotic communication)

What happens to the product?

• Plan for going global
• "everyone's going to want a piece of you"
• Embed your service in others
• Make transition from service to platform (think about your service as a platform)

Liking what you've got to say Anil:-)

Matt comes back

Attention data
Scrobbling data is attention data Powered by AudioScrobbler, Myware is 'spying on yourself'

He shows us the 'events dashboard' (gigs near me)

Anil comes back to talk about monetising attention data

Monetising attention

• Sponsored airtime
• Personalise based on attention data
• New attention metrics
• No more cpm - the scrobble is the unit

Dealing with tag cloud spam

• Censorship is not acceptable in a folksonomy
• Attention data does not lie
• Weigh user tags by volume of attention
• Attention earns trust

Matt comes back to talk about what Last would like to do in the comming years.

• Fewer interfaces
• More ambient findability
• Reduce barriers to entry (hard to start when prefs are not established)

Questions session

The VC bit (Danny Rimer couldn't make it)

mmm...

Simon Wardley

From hot stuff to yawn, the commoditisation of IT

(note that Simon says IT not IS...)

Goes through example of electricity

(Simon is a great speaker, he's doing crowd-pleasing things with graphics - big tag clouds with ducks and ponds)

Talks about yack shaving to introduce the idea behind his startup. Build what you want and pay for what you use (zimki)

Tara 'miss rogue' Hunt

What community is or isn't...

(mentions her blog)

What is community?

• co-creation leading to relationships
• sharing profiles
• User benefits, self policing, increased loyalty

(the 'free' wifi turns out to be a solitary OpenZone base station which is currently struggling to keep up...)

Examples

• Lightweight social processes (voting, digging)
• collaborative information structures (YouTube, Odeo, Threadless, Flickr)
• High end collaboration - Wikipedia, open source projects (Lostpedia)

Themes

• Sense of fun
• Keeping the dialogue going
• Simple platforms
• Compelling stories
• Rewarding community members

(what is it about Wordpress that people are happy to wait for messages like "woa, only x comments a minute, slow down cowboy")

Compares yahoo maps to Google maps:

Yahoo experience totally rocks, Google maps v. empty and boring but: developers currently working with mapping apis 51% Google to only 4% Yahoo!
(stats from programmableweb)

Fostering your own - fertile ground

What is sense of community?

• Feelings of membership (inside the boundaries, do I belong here?)
• Feelings of influence (voice heard, learning from the group, feedback)
• Integration and fulfilment of needs (shared values, the feeling of being supported by others)
• Maslow

Be patient! community takes time

Edwin Aoki

Web-based email leading driver of page views

Dissagregation and syndication

(Dug is beginning to daydream about bacon sarnies and a steamy latte...)

Edwin says "drag and drop" arrrrg!!!

Interesting slide about the developer's responsibility to society.

• Tools must be safe, effective and neutral (v. relevant to the work I'm doing now).
• With great power comes great responsibility. For instance, it's our responsability to ensure that the default behaviour of the systems we build is the right behaviour, the safe behaviour

(and break...)

Mike Arrington

On YouTube: 1 Million dollars a month but it didn't burn because it provides an IPTV service (as opposed to user-generated content).

AMIE St. first self-regulated music market.

Buzz Factor - Solve a problem.

Mike is talking about what makes a successful startup (and what to look for in a failing one. One point is: don't raise too much money).

Offline/Online = Apollo. If you don't use it, you're wasting money. Apollo looks to bridge the overhead of bridging the file system and the cloud.

And we've stopped for questions...

Meet BT Contact :-)

Well, Russell's just been hit by his first evil little troll.

I suggested he post the links to the swine so we'll see what happens.

I was reminded on my own Troll, a nasty man (who, well, yes, nonetheless made some very good points but just not in a full-size-human kind of way...) called Andrew MacLaren who left a comment which had me floored for a week or two.

I posted the full text at the time but I'm not sure if that helped. Here's a taster:

...by some unfortunate deep linking i somehow landed at your 'website', having spent a few miserable minutes reading your mostly uninspiring and often self-rightous (pap) posts, it would appear to me that in many ways you come across as a borderline wanker, and although that may seem harsh i've just had another look and to put at nicely its a bag of shite! and from what i can gather this is what you actually do!??

Anyway, not going anywhere in particular with this, just felt like pinging some support to Russell.

Total fabulousness, now that's what I call a desktop.
(get yours at shilpa-shetty.com)

So it turns out Cisco have a corporate blog:-)

They even use Movabletype, very kosher. Not sure who is the mind behind the stories, it seems like a PR firm is uploading stuff prompted by employees. In this instance, a note from Mark Chandler, Cisco's SVP and General Counsel on the iPhone trademark infringement thing. No amazing news but I'll be keeping an on it...

(Photo: Clementine Falby by David Hockney)

So I've just finished a user experience consultancy gig with a major mobile network operator based in France. It's an interesting project which I'll be picking up again in the new year. I've been working alongside product owners (ie individuals who are assigned with owning the business of a part of a website or service) and have been factoring their business objectives into the objectives versus needs process. Having just spent ten months working through the objectives of a UK network operator it was interesting to see the different approaches to the business. I can't really go into any details, but one of the key differences is that the French team have managed to build a business treating their products as containing inherent value. For example, the French customers are apparently happy to pay extra to add services to their account which the English would have added to the service for free in the interest of building a better experience, getting closer to the consumer and starting to build the bonds of trust that are a key component of the d.a.r.t approach.

I was reminded of all this when I rediscovered the fd's Flickr toys page. The tools (and many, many, other wonderful ones elsewhere) are built thanks to the public Flickr api. The tools let users discover value in their photographs beyond what the camera or the storage/sharing/hosting service can offer. The fd page is such a great example of what happens when openness and collaboration build on an already great service.

Note to mobile network operators everywhere: I get so much value out of my interaction with Flickr I would gladly pay triple what I pay today for my account.

Jonathan and Ross over at TMW are working through the Thresher promo thing apparently organised by Mr Gapingvoid Hugh Macleod. They both make some good points and Ross points out that the promo represents a 7% increase on discounting to coincide with Christmas and that after all the hooha, this may not harm Thresher's bottom line at all.

Well Ross, I have to ask, does this suggest (given Hugh's track record as a marketer) that this 'accidental' release might not be so accidental after all?

Gosh, the word "Starbucks" appears twenty-three times on this Lonelygirl15 comments page...

A Tribute to Lonelygirl15 - Blog Archive - Fleeing The Watcher

I'll be happy if we create a single cheer chain," said Brad Stevens, VP-marketing for Starbucks. He said he's more interested in the qualitative response, as the effort has no traditional marketing metrics tied to it.

A lot of the folk I've been working with this last year are really hung up on metrics. Now, in this age of controlled procurement and tighter budgets I can sympathise with the need for clear ROI but it's nice to see businesses experimenting with engagement.

I'm sure we will eventually figure it all out, but in the meantime, advertisers could be getting a move on. If I have to go to another meeting that concludes with the client asking "could I see one you've done before" I'm gonna scream...

Advertising Age - Starbucks' Holiday Viral Effort Doubles as Social Experiment

Those nice folk at TMW have started to blog. It's a brave step for a traditional agency and one I hope that will energise their collaborative media activities. Getting into the spirit of the thing, they have started debating in public and are asking questions about some of the thornier issues of the day

Disclosure: I helped set up the blog and occasionally post to it.

Also, while I'm doing the link love thing, (on the topic of social and collaborative media) you could do worse than visit The Lecture List you'll be surprised to hear it's a list of lectures:-)

Anyone can post their events to the site regardless of size or funding. The service is free and entirely self-service. It's a completely open system but the content is moderated so please keep the evil horrid stuff to a minimum.

The company has the balls to invite bloggers into its press and analyst program, to ask tough questions of executives at a time when industry analysts and journalists increasingly ask only softball questions in public.

I can't tell you how many conversations I've had the last two months about blogger relations programmes. Impressed to a player as large as SAP doing the right thing:-)

James Governor's MonkChips: Blogger Relations at Adobe, Oracle and SAP (and a bit of IBM, Microsoft, Sun)

Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing: Social Value First, Brand Value Second

An example of this was Nike's mega, Google-powered community Joga, which whilst on the surface seemed to be doing everything right, quickly revealed itself to be high on brand value and low on social value.

I posted this over on the TMW blog but this one is both spot on and important so I thought i'd cross-post it. A must-read for client-service types new to the collaborative media space.

I get a lot of questions about MySpace from clients.

For the most part, they find the site confusing and don't understand the mechanic it supports. In a nutshell, the service essentially allows you to spread the word in a seamless way--take a look at the Dixie Chicks movie above, their site had a single-click experience to copy this. The same site allowed me to express my support (and outrage at monkey boy) by posting comment, marking them as friends and recommending them in my profile.

Check out the Chicks' blog they're using Wordpress and it looks good. The only shame is the flash front end doesn't let you record name and email so my post went up as "anonymous blogger"

Just saw this item on Slashdot. A classic example of a big corporation not getting the new consumer.

In a nutshell, in the guise of protecting its intellectual property (IP) against illegal merchandisers, Universal is throwing out a lot of babies with the bath-water. The whole Joss Weedon, Firefly etc. type-thing is the foundation for huge amounts of high-quality fan-art and the fans that create, buy and wear it want a stake in the outcome. They promote the TV show and want nothing more than to be a small part of the magic.

Except that nowadays, the fanart IS the magic. Without this degree of customer participation, films like Serenity and shows like Firefly just wouldn't have the same reach, nor the same staying power (the stuff that sells season X DVDs long after the closing titles have rolled).

The core of the problem is simple. Traditional IP owners think of the IP as being the primary source of value for them. In essence, they pay guards to surround the mine and miners to extract the value. The whole idea that the consumer could be adding equivalent value is alien to them and their infrastructure doesn't allow for flexibility or evolution (they are frozen in time by legal agreements and the lawyers that protect them).

The punch-line of this particular piece is that the fans are sending Universal an invoice for their services (more details here). You go girl:-)

A colleague just pointed me to this video which a friend of his (Bjorn Turmann) posted to YouTube to promote the launch of his new book

I think the film is a little understated so may not do tremendously well on YouTube which does tend to feature the more explosive videos.

Still, it's a very interesting experiment in getting messages out across media. It reminds me of the James Bond book launch I worked on a few years ago were the story ended, and on the last page, we put a message from a sinister security organisation asking for recruits. The message had a url which led to some recruitment tests which in turn led to an adventure game where the reader had to work with other readers to save a beautiful (of course) scientist from the grips of an evil overlord.

Got this a couple of weeks ago from Chris, a man I trust.

Hi Dug,

The running place both we got our kicks from is called Runners Need (http://www.runnersneed.co.uk), unfortunately as north as their branches are is Camden (with other shops in Holborn and Liverpool street). All the shops specialise in one thing and one thing only--running kit. All the people working there are seasoned runners and serious about ensuring you get the right stuff for your foot (I promise they haven't paid me to say any of this...)

They either put you on a treadmill or take you outside and watch you run, how your foot hits the pavement, the pressure exerted, pronation, etc. and then get you to run in a few different types of shoes that cater to how you run.

Good luck.

Now, I'll be the first to admit I don't know what pronation is but Nicki really needed some running shoes that fit her properly so I sorted out a fitting for her birthday.

Her feedback is that the shoes are not only a perfect fit but just right for what she wants to do with them.

Each customer works with the in-store experts to create unique value. Where do you run? How far, how fast, in what weather? Whether the customer is training for a marathon or simply wants to get better mileage out of her kneecaps, the in-store experts help build an experience with the customer that ultimately adds value for both the store and the runner.

Now so far so good, I only wish the website offered the same value co-creation potential...

I love this little story from the innocent website. In fact i love most of the copywriting on the site. I would have thought they'd passed the tipping point of evil by now but you couldn't tell by looking at their website:-)

In fact, being accountable to our customers is something that is in our blood. In the summer of 1998 when we had developed our first smoothie recipes but were still nervous about giving up our proper jobs, we bought £500 worth of fruit, turned it into smoothies and sold them from a stall at a little music festival in London. We put up a big sign saying 'Do you think we should give up our jobs to make these smoothies?' and put out a bin saying 'YES' and a bin saying 'NO' and asked people to put the empty bottle in the right bin. At the end of the weekend the 'YES' bin was full so we went in the next day and resigned.

I should start paying Iain Tait for the amount he totally cracks me up:-)

I just noticed this piece posted last Friday:

Anyone know where I can get the ‘urban youth cliche clipart vol 7 cd’? I’m searching for a bmx-ing blackberry user and a skater grinding a PSP.

I first approached a major FMCG client about helping their brands join the conversation over three years ago. That particular contact kept my original email so there was at least a degree of interest at the time.

The last three months have been very interesting. I finally managed to get an FMCG brand to have a go at transparency (see Birds Eye's pea harvest blog) and even more recently I've been flooded with enquiries at work. The good news is that most, if not all the clients I discuss co-ceation, blogging and transparency with actually get it.

I think we're about to see a whole bunch of really exciting communications initiatives coming from traditional brands as department heads realise they can build social software into their product offering (we're currently discussing how that might work with a restaurant!) without needing to struggle past big IT or big brand budgets.

So Faris, that's my 2¢ for your presentation:-)

Talent imitates, genius steals: Blogs and Brands

Love Coudal's response to the agencydotcom Subway thing

My thoughts...

• White people dissing the poor
• The ad biz can now generate its own w.o.m. effect (well, we knew that already--see viralmonitor)
• The hairdressing budget must have been massive
• Miami has ad-schools?

Futurelab's Blog: How Agency.com Pitched Subway Via YouTube

How Agency.com Pitched Subway Via YouTube at ExperienceCurve

So I finally finished my first Chocolate phone film. If you want to add your own, the tag is objectsofdesire

The film, on YouTube

(Video not working? Get it from YouTube)

Just got back from UGtv, crashed on the couch and have just woken up to Open University classics. How to give yourself jetlag without ever getting on a plane...

Basically it was reasonably well attended with a few interesting speakers (and good catering too). I was hoping to hear about innovative image and film creation based on partnerships between production, broadcast and audience players. In the end, most talks and their associated questions were largely to do with how cheap UGtv is... More later if I can muster the enthusiasm.

The obligatory YouTube videos and Flickr photo set

Technorati: ugtv, ugtv06

Am off to UGTV '06 — User-Generated TV summit I'll let you know how it goes.

Technorati: ugtv, ugtv06

Wow, thanks to all the great folk out there commenting on the Pea harvest blog project:-)

Polkadotholes: Birdseye blog!

Russel Davies has some nice things to say about Colin Wright's pea harvest blog russell davies: blogging for peas

Thanks Russ, it's been a long journey getting here and I hope it's worth it:-)

I've been working with a man called Colin Wright over at Birdseye. It's been really interesting helping his team get started online. We helped the corporates look into their organisation, find a voice with a genuine passion and then stand back and let him get on with it.

The result is Life on the pea harvest, a diary held by the team responsible for the harvest with hosting and tech support paid for by their employer.

I think Colin's voice resonates on a number of fundamental levels. You can't help but respect his nutty obsession with peas and his constant struggle for quality. It turns out he's got a dog too (she's called Doris) and he phones his podcasts (peapods?) in from the field every morning at 5:30 as he meditates on his life and shares his thoughts with Doris...

Piers Fawkes has come in to tell us about his new research stuff :-)

Just came across a fantastic video on youtube. Matt, the guy responsible writes about the adventure on his blog: Where the Hell is Matt? New York, NY It's Done

What I want to know is, what exactly is the connection between Matt and Stride gum.

If you head on over to the Stride site, you'll notice the little dancing character on the bottom-left. See how his dance matches Matt's. Now I'm not suggesting foul play here, far from it--it looks like Matt secured sponsorship from an FMCG company which has allowed him to have a truly life-changing travel experience.

But Matt, could you explain who is the chicken and who is the egg? Is this a brilliant advertising idea or the result of a determined individual's struggle to fund his dream?

Matt?

So this one sounded good. I'm thinking 'power and control' sounds a lot like the mantra du jour "less control, greater influence". I'm thinking, crikey, they have Naomi Campbell and John Malkovich and they're doing some super-clever multilevel exploration of them (the company? the artists? the characters?) losing control and gaining influence mixed in with the 'power is nothing without control' brand message in a sort of advertising meets internet culture message mash-up...

But no, not really.

Hey, try and watch the film and feel like Eeyore:-(

Good piece on FMCG blogging over at Positive Impact (one of Hill & Knowlton's Collective Conversation channels)

He mentions Stormhoek among others and includes a link to comments about Flora pro.activ's Lulu activity.

Many good points, but I wanted to add a wee clarification about Flora.

I'm currently working with Flora's agency to investigate and define ways the brands can collaborate (and co-create, of course) with digitally-enabled communities.

While the Lulu activity was before my time, I thought I'd mention that it was never supposed to be a blog (as I understand it the word 'blog' never appeared in any of the ads).

The idea (from looking at the work) was to suggest a feeling of closeness with a celebrity (getting past the bodyguards and high fences). Unilever has a page on the Lulu activity on its corporate site.

Once you're operating in the celeb space the rules change and you need to work with a whole set of assumptions (say, for instance, that celebs don't write their own copy). I think the man on the street understands these mechanics and I doubt any mums out there thought Lulu was actually blogging her experiences as you or might have.

That said, Lulu did genuinely have high cholesterol. She did eat all the products and believe it or not, they did help lower her cholesterol:-)

This highlights one of the conundrums faced by brand managers who want to enter the co-creation space: many brands have real, positive stories to tell, but even these seem to fear the airing of a single item of bad news or off-message content. Getting over (managing) that barrier is one of the toughest challenges I can see for them.

University of Pennsylvania are introducing a tagging system to complement their library's traditional structure:

PennTags - When card catalogs meet tags. Many-to-Many

I know us advertising types don't think of library science as particularly cool, but example is relevant to what we do.

Put it like this: It would be like consumers collaborating with brands to design and build information architectures that are relevant to each consumer as an individual. Traditional segmentation struggles to deliver co-creation's "experience of one" and this is a nice example of how that might work in the future (make that later this afternoon).

(Thanks Mr Monkchips)

When Daniel and I were very young junior art directors pounding Manhattan pavement armed with our absurdly large black boxes in search of our first job in advertising, all we could talk about was British ads. It was a great time, surrealism was going strong and creatives and model-makers were getting ever weirder and ever more wonderful. This was the time of we can't tell you anything about Winston cigarettes so here's a tart leaning on a bar and the fabulous B&H gold campaign.

I mention this because for the last week I've been bikeless and so have been spending time on the tube. I need to spend more time on the tube, it's a great place to see ads (is it because you stand in front of them for ages?). Anyways, my crappy cameraphone picture doesn't do it justice, but have you seen this 48-sheet for the Daily Telegraph?

It stopped me because it had the sheer beauty and lightness of touch of those earlier British ads. Not only is the pun relevant and subtle, the production quality is astonishing and I just can't tire of looking into that etching and wondering how it was done.

Strangely, the idea itself isn't that great and while the agency has extended the campaign to include other authors the posters don't work. They lack the chemistry of Des Lyman and the bard himself (a strange cocktail of sexy, rude, witty, manly, curious and creative) so fall a bit flat...

Hey, I finally figured out what to do with the KG800 chocolate phone the lovely people at Hill and Knowlton sent me a few weeks ago. I think I'm going to shoot some videos on the theme of objects of desire and see where that ends up...

Prolific Web2 blogger Dion Hinchcliffe comments on the Tahoe campaign fallout (The Web-Powered Control Shift: Social Computing (web2.wsj2.com)) and reading his blog--actually, I tend to spot his awesome graphics on Flickr first--I was reminded how hard it is for ad agencies (such as the one where I spend my days) to generate creative that invites co-creation and does generally give a stake in the outcome.

More often than not, the stake is more of a stick twig, maybe having your words appear on a website or entry into a prize draw. I mean sure, a lot of agencies are 'getting it' but can't we do something better?

After finally tracking the website down (it's all Flash of course, so that even if "moonbathing" had become a popular tag, googling it got you nowhere) I spent ten minutes the other day inputting garbage into the Levi's moonbathing site (something about time travel, base-jumping off a Park Lane hotel roof and a bunch of other gibberish). It just doesn't deliver any sense of satisfaction, worth or fun. Mebbe I'm just getting old, but I've been describing the internet as a collaborative space for the last ten years and if this is as good as it gets I'm a wee bit depressed...

One thing I'm increasingly noticing is initiatives that are much more inclusive being driven by PR companies and I'm guessing this will increasingly become a challenge to us agency folk.

(btw, just dug out the Levis uri again. It's http://eu.levi.com/index.jsp?lang=en&region=uk -- catchy, no?)

American car company Chevy decides to let folks create their own Chevy ads (very zeitgeisty dear, well done...) and then this nice man decides to use the same tool to point out how evil the SUV is.

Nice.

(And yes, I still own a Jeep. It's long story)

Been doing some research on the old co-creation thing for a presentation at work and came across Mastercard's priceless site. The site gives you two videos to watch (they don't work on Mac/Firefox) and then asks you to participate by writing the script.

I can't help feeling it's not much fun.

Not only that, the entries become property of Mastercard (no, fuck-off) and I can even argue which film should be the winner--my stake in participating is down to some faceless pr company's deciding if they like my script:-(

Still, I'm sure many budding Bernbachs will take part and the offer of making your mark "officially" will compel enough entries.

Probably a lot more fun is to just do one yourself and whack it on Google video for all to enjoy. I found the following with a quick search for "Mastercard". I love the blow-job one:-)

• Blow-job
• Pete Townshend
• Halo videogame

Interesting read over on noodlepie it's primarily a blog about foodie stuff, but recently, Graham Holliday has started blogging some pieces he is writing for the NMA (a UK new media rag). What's neat is that he is trying to open up the process of writing as much as possible and is benefiting from the feedback of fellow digerati. Of course, the NMA is a print publication so they've frustrated his attempts to publish early and often...

noodlepie: Writing a feature

Spotted this bus heading down Golders Green Road. The picture shows an open laptop with the caption Notebook. Photo album. Jukebox. Check-in desk.

Does BA understand its target market's digital lifestyle?

For an above-the-line ad this is pretty unusual... I guess one could interpret this one of two ways. Firstly, we understand how important your digital lifestyle is and we'd like to suggest that BA can be a part of it and this is most likely the intended message (of course, it could just mean you can now book online using your laptop).

But you could also read it the way I did, as I absentmindedly pulled up behind the bus: the BA site now offers all the integrated tools you need for your travel activity

I guess I was thinking they had grabbed the Flickr api and done something really nice with it (a club to share images along a theme - like all the BA customers flying to Barcelona for 3GSM could share there Flickr folders) and more along those lines (imaging being able to share iTunes playlists with other people on your long-haul flight)...

Anyway it was a bit of a daydream and even though it's not gonna happen I'm still pleasantly surprised they're now talking digerati:-)

Don't keep up with my Modern Marketing feed as frequently as I should -- James has always got some interesting stuff to say...

In December, he posted Honda's Inaccessible Dream a nice little flag about the W+K film (the one that starts on a C50 and ends up in a hot air balloon over the Victoria falls) and how while it's a fantastic epic, it doesn't let us join in.

He posted a few links in the time honoured fashion (pioneered by Dean Allen) and I just wanted to publish them here in a more accessible format:

• Its a great car (this one almost feels copywritten?)
• My Honda sucks (so much so he's hired a lawyer)
• Common problems in Honda Civics (very measured and believable)
• Lost confidence in the Honda CR-V after brake failure (customer reviews)
• Honda on Flickr

So yeah, James, I totally agree with you :-)

So I've been driving past this 48-sheet for a company called "Beyon" every morning this month and every time I pass it I wonder about how totally misguided the thing is...

For starters, the graphic itself--I mean is it just me or is that not a visitor's booth in a prison. Can you not see the guy speaking into his phone and pressing his hand against the glass, prompting his faithful partner to do the same?

And the headline, confidence at work again, am I the only one who thinks the word 'confidence' has mostly negative connotations in this context? You know, as in 'con artist', 'confidence trick' or just plain 'con' in the sense of a prison-dweller?

Anyhoo, it always amazes me what creative teams can get past the client:-)

photo: JCDecaux

Maddox adds to the debate on the rise of Citizen's Media

If these words were people, I would embrace their genocide.

(While you're there, check out his 'hate mail' section)

I realise I've been doing a lot of quoting these days, but I love this comment by Hugh Macleod over at gapingvoid.com

Getting too metaphorical about one's product kills companies.

(This is in context of Dell loosing it, btw)

Not marketing-related, but the quote has the same rythm as another favourite of mine

even anarchists spend all their days in meetings

Name that picture:-)

[Friday morning] Well, the front of the house is still there, so clearly the bomb on the bus was a false alarm. Still, no harm in being jumpy. I guess we'll be keeping an eye out for abandoned parcels in the tube again. I think once the IRA stopped blowing stuff up we Londoners may have gotten a little lax in that department...

[19:13] Arrive home in West Hampstead just as a rather young-looking Metropolitan Police officer is wrapping copious amounts of "police no entry" tape across my street, effectively barring entry to my house. I drive straight across the (very empty) road and into my front garden. Turns out there's a lone bus parked right across from my flat and the bus driver is being told to "keep walking quickly" down West End Lane.

It does seem very unlikely, but it looks like we might actually have a legitimate bomb-scare in our front yard.

(Clemmie is asleep out of range in the back room and Nicki and Dug are going to have a drink next door)

(although by some perverse arrangement of cat-like personality features, Nicki is insisting on looking out the front)

(more later...)

Several blasts in London this morning.

• Roads jammed up--made it to work driving (partly) on the pavement
• Closest 'blast' (still unknown if bomb) a few streets away in Russell Square
• No news--home secretary due to anounce at 12:15
• Phone lines are jammed--can't get through on mobile or land-line

It's a little scary not knowing exactly what's going on, but Nicki and Clementine are fine.

This is one of those

...and then a guy in a Porsche with his radio hit his horn
and told us the news...

moments.

[11:55] Everyone leaves their desk and heads downstairs to hear the PM on TV

[13:11] Charlotte just wrote in from the US. Glad to confirm friends and family still OK

[13:21] Orange still have nothing on either their UK or global sites

[15:44] Co-workers are being told leave early. Overland train services are mostly working, but no buses or tubes are operating

[16:31] Letter from Mike comes in:

Just wanted to send out a quick email to say that the plan for tomorrow night remains the same, I'll be buggered if I am going to let today's incidents get in the way of us all having a bloody good time! The buses will all be working by tomorrow, and I believe much of the tube system. When the tfl site is back up, I'll look into bus details for getting to the venue and send them out for y'all.

I hope you are all in agreement, and look forward to sharing a beverage or three with you tomorrow.

Hear hear :-)

The Wall Street Journal says:

Walter Carl, a professor at Boston's Northeastern University who has studied "word-of-mouth" communication and marketing, says blog-watching services "are very useful for quickly getting the lay of the land" in trends and consumer reactions.

Well, I guess we already knew that but then

Blog-monitoring services typically charge big companies $30,000 to $100,000 a year.

Which seems like extremely good value. I think it might be time for us UK consultants to take our rates up a bit;-)

It all started with Snow White.

It seemed harmless enough--a beautiful family favourite for generations--wholesome family entertainment, what could go wrong? Nicki sent me this shot of little Clemmie yesterday. She's decked out in Disney merchandise from head to toe.

Normally, I would never recommend building a composite brand, but Disney has taken three, totally unrelated cartoon characters (Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White) and merged them into a composite brand known as "Three Princesses".

In most cases, this kind of 'bolting together' never goes as far as the real thing, but in this instance, Disney has hit on something that resonates with little girls. Girls can now buy everything from buckets and spades to plasters via the ubiquitous diamond tiaras in between--all marked with the innocent, smiling faces of the Three Princesses.

This stuff resonates with Clemmie so much I can see her head vibrate...

Just been contacted by Francis Poku at specialopsmedia.com re featuring the new ER game on Donkey.

The bumpf reads:

As the new intern in the ER, you’ve got your work cut out for you. No sleep in 36 hours and you lay down for a well-deserved rest. Then the call comes in; there’s been a freeway pile-up with multiple victims.

To be honest, I can't imagine how the gameplay can work. I mean I'm a huge fan of ER the television series but this looks like it uses the same engine as the Sims. Not sure how all that lovely tension, pain, suffering and redemption are supposed to emanate from those goofy pattern-mapped stick-figures. Anyways, if Francis gets it together to send me a copy, I'll let you know...

Oh, and the other thing is that Donkey likes freebies, so keep 'em coming. I will happily review your luxury spa holiday, just get those tickets down here pronto--'comp' is my middle name.

And speaking of freebies, if Francis plays ball, I may have a bunch of junk on hand to give away:

In anticipation of this release, Special Ops is offering copies of the game for writing reviews as well as “Doctor Bags� for giveaway on Donkey on the Edge. These doctor bags include a copy of the game, chocolate band aids and stress cards. This sure beats the standard giveaways we usually run.

Ah marketers, dontcha just love 'em...

Doing some background reading for a big IA project and came across this classic from Edward Tufte

Information itself cannot inherently be misleading or difficult to understand, but its visual representation or interpretation can be.

Just got this from Flickr...

You may have heard on the grapevine that we planned to reward our dear Flickr members who bought a Pro Account in the early days. Well, it's true! And since you're one of those lovely people, here's a little something to say YOU ROCK!

1. Double what you paid for! Your original 1 year pro account has been doubled to 2 years, and your new expiry date is Jan 4, 2007.
2. More capacity! Now you can upload 2 GB per month.
3. 2 free Pro Accounts to give away to your friends! This won't be activated for a day or two, but when it is, you'll see a note on your home page telling you what to do.

Thank you so much for putting your money where your mouth is and supporting us, even while we're in beta. Your generosity and cold, hard cash helped us get where we are today.

Kind regards,
The Flickreenies.

Goodness;-) The extra year sure is swell. Anyone need a free Pro account?

Don't miss OK/Cancel's fabulous new 're-experiencing' of their site :-)

When we completed our initial brainstorming, we continued onto the IA. Here, we recruited Thomas Vander Wal, credited for inventing the term “folksonomy� to help us create a new navigation structure. The result is a nav structure that was based off of the most common tags used to describe items.

Thus, “Home� became “Me�, “About� became “That�, “Archives� became “2005", “Features� became “Thingie�, “Store� became “Orange�, “Resources� became “Resorces� and of course, “Jobs� became “Money�.

However, before we implemented this, we got a second opinion from Peter Merholz, who thinks we’re simply wasting our time creating any user experience at all and that we might as well just go and die.

Or perhaps we misunderstood.

And in the spirit of lo-fi open source advertising, check this out. Anup Kurian is the director of an independent film showing at the Waterman's in Brentford. He wrote in asking for help. Read the post, but go see his film (March 11 to March 17 at Watermans, 19 to 20 March at the Tricycle Cinema in Kilburn)

Dear Dug,

I chanced upon your blog - donkeyontheedge.com and read your posting on Google courting Entertainment Marketers.

I am the writer-director of feature film Manasarovar - www.manasarovar.info - (India / English / 90Min).

The film plays in London at Watermans Center - for a week starting March 11 and later at Tricycle Cinema.

Manasarovar, film made for about 20,000 pounds on a 16mm camera bought from EBAY has won many awards and participated/selected in prestigious festivals.

• Aravindan Puraskaram for Best Debut Director in India
• Gollapudi Srinivas National Award for Best Debut Director in India
• Official Selection - London Film Festival 2004 (only feature film from India)
• Opening Film, Indian Panorama, International Film Festival of India, Goa, 2004
• Best Film and Special Jury Prize, International Film Festival of Mumbai, 2005
• Fukuoka International Film Festival, Fukuoka, Japan, 2005

Needless to say we have zero marketing budget.

It would be great if you can mention the film and the screenings in Watermans and Tricycle in your blog. And it would be even great you and your friends can catch the film.

• Watermans Center - March 11 to March 17 - http://www.watermans.org.uk
• Tricycle Cinema - Sat 19th- Sun 20th March

Detailed screenings of the film are available at
http://www.manasarovar.info/where.htm

Here is a recent review of the film

Thanks and regards,
Anup Kurian

Well, Google is courting entertainment marketers apparently. The piece explains how new Google film listings are making studio bosses nervous. There's some classic old-world thinking

If I'm a movie studio, I'd want the official movie Web site to come up as a result, and I wouldn't want to pay for that. It makes me nervous that they're trying to be too much to everybody

I bothered to read the article because I'm still forging ahead with my search for a new advertising. Actually, it's increasingly looking like the agencies are drinking the Cool-Aid and getting on with the new order.

For my part, I'm about half way through (and two weeks behind schedule) building a tool that will allow entertainment marketers to tap their activity directly into their potential fan bases.

More on this one as it happens...

On the one hand, the deal is an old-fashioned sponsorship arrangement, but Sony's marketers are testing the waters and this could be an early move towards a new kind of advertising that "does" more than "says".

Tradition broadcast messages, however elegantly crafted and delivered just don't hit home like they used to. The digital consumer isn't watching and has most likely made his own schedule on his Tivo. You can be pretty sure that schedule doesn't include your 30-million-dollar spot with George Clooney and a cavalcade of Camargue stallions.

What's potentially very cool about Sony's move is the awareness it shows on their part.

As brands go, Sony probably has one of the busiest online personal publishing spaces. A quick Google reveals that Sony has legions of unofficial fan sites, user groups and forums (fora?) buzzing about them everyday. (For example, agoraquest.com, the unofficial site for Sony products has 60,000 active members cranking out Sony-related content daily).

It looks like Sony is connecting the dots. My guess is that as they begin to interact more closely with these online communities, their ad creative will follow.

I used to spend a lot of time explaining to clients how powerful website personalisation was going to be for them and researching the technologies to do it. I remember one day, the people at Broadvision (a personalision software company) invited me to a seminar on the topic and showered me and a bunch of other agency folk with quality baked goods and average coffee.

Anyways, I was reminded of this last week when someone at work said something that sounded exactly like an old Broadvision pitch and we all laughed and got to thinking about what happened to all those amazing self-adjusting sites we going to build. In the end, they just didn't happen.

That was this Friday, and I just got my newsletter from OK/Cancel today. Tom Chi asks

There was a period in the history of the web when personalization was going to transform everything -- making the buying experience vastly more inviting for customers and lucrative for business. I'm not really sure what happened.

He's spot on as ever. Read Getting Personal

I think by now we no longer need confirmation that the blog is an accredited part of the communications mix. I'm guessing 2005 will see more mainstream blog awareness in the UK and who knows, by the end of the year we might be catching up with the US.

This article from Clickz just landed in my inbox. It includes a nice quote from JupiterResearch Senior Analyst Gary Stein:

A corporate blog strategy that focuses only on the creation of corporate-run blogs and the running of ads on external blogs is only half-right," Stein said. "Companies need to remember that there are most likely already discussions happening about them in the consumer-generated content space. Before using blogs to talk, they need to make sure they've got their listening operation in place.

How nice, a lighter touch :-)

I'm just going to post this as is. I read a piece by Mark Kingdon To Flash, or Not to Flash? on ClickZ and was prompted to send a reply.

Most Donkey readers know how I feel about Flash, but this was different. This was one of the industry's most senior marketers advocating irresponsible behaviour. OK, that's an over-statement...

Anyway, here was my reply. Must flesh these ideas out properly.

In six years of energetic debate, this is the first time I've seen Flash v. antiFlash make it out of the studio and into the world of the senior marketing consultant.

While the topic is the nearest thing we get to living in Northern Ireland or the Balkans (few other topics engender such headed and irrational debate), Mark Kingdon's words carry weight, so I feel a responsibility to comment.

I don't want to bore you with the nitty-gritty of what the latest greatest version of Flash can or cannot do better than clever, standards-based programming. Lets just assume we all agree on where Flash is appropriate.

My concern is what we as an industry are doing to the internet and how ultimately that will harm our customers.

"Flash will continue to play a major role creating increasingly more sophisticated Web applications and brand experiences that will ultimately propel online marketing further."

I agree, but Flash movies are not part of the Semantic Web. Flash interfaces and content are always islands of content. So I have to question how creating web services that do not build on the internet as a whole can bring long term benefits.

What are we talking about here? Is Mark just pushing expensive Flash design solutions on his clients? Once you've hooked a client on Flash content they'll never go back. The buzz they get from showing their little Flash movie to friends and family is too great.

I am concerned that Flash content erodes budgets that would otherwise be spent on good AI and big picture thinking. We need to present big, compelling ideas for services that reach out and grow organically over time. Modern marketing should be about steadily growing long-term relationships. Flash can be a part of that but only if rigorously managed.

As an industry we need to guide our clients to create marketing that respects and benefits the internet and its citizens as a whole. So let's use Flash to create an interactive walkthrough, but let's not forget that true interactivity is what happens when you connect people. It's the bit between the computers, not in their web browsers.

All the best,
Dug Falby

Tom Hough recently commented on an older post about BT.

As with a lot of the “enraged mutton” posts, it was a bit of a venting session, but I’ll reprint the BT phone number here. I can’t garantee it’s still live, but here goes nothing;-)

…a very nice lady called Alita calls you and gives you a phone number (an 0800 number no less) that gets you straight through to customer care—no queue, no delay, no option-3, just straight through to the nice lady.

So got a problem with BT? Need to vent? Here’s the number:

0800 800 871

That ends this public service announcement…

It's nice when a blogger says something short and to the point:

Why is Big Media Losing viewers? (...) The actual answer, which lies unspoken between the lines of all discussion on the subject, is much simpler: people are abandoning Big Media because it sucks. (From a great post by Aaron Swartz)

I'm still struggling with that document I've been writing--sort of a Pelican Brief for ad agencies prompting them to start shaping a new kind of creative. Big media losing eyeballs is one of the bigger reasons they need to get a move on...

I'll post the damn thing if I can ever get it somewhere in the region of coherence.

So I'm still digging around the advertising industry looking to see if I have an idea or not...

Firstly, Bill Bernbach (the guy in the picture) would have shot someone for this--I mean can you imagine the marketing team at Avis (long story, see quote in before-last post) saying We're going to try harder for our customers, give them the best possible service. Unless they're not wearing a new suit, in which case we'll tell'em to go get a new suit before we'll talk to 'em--yeah, that's the ticket...

Secondly, compare these two statements:

Tribal DDB (January 2004)

We plan, build and market successful businesses in the digital marketplace with stirring ideas that stimulate, respect and serve our clients' customers and this is our driving obsession.

Pumpernickle (May 2002)

It is our belief that businesses benefit from an active participation in internet culture that contributes to and respects the many online communities and market places. Pumpernickle plans and designs projects that respect this environment.

Which is heart-warming for me, really as Tribal must have got something right, so we couldn't be too far off the mark... Anyway, am off to put thinking cap back on. This is refreshing, I haven't spent whole days thinking about the business in years :-)

Yeah...

So James and I have spent quite a long time struggling with a coherent positioning statement for Pumpernickle. In a nutshell, what do we do?

Back in prehistory, when Andrew and Duncan set up Offworld, it seemed simple--we make websites was a statement that most people could understand. It was also (or so we thought) a comparatively well defined offering: you type a thing called a URL in a thing called a browser and voilà a website was what you saw :-)

Only now it isn't quite so simple (actually, with hindsight, it wasn't simple then--Offworld would still be trading if it were).

Over the years, senior people at companies like Pumpernickle consulted at board level with a number of clients, offering advice about all sorts of issues from technology, marketing, usability, human-computer-interface, advertising, internal process management and so on.

During the first few 'boom' years of the commercial internet, people like James and me where asked for advice that we were empirically not qualified to supply. We had no degree in IT, no MBA or other management experience or skill, and still, the CTO of General Electric sent his right-hand-man to chat us up at a big dinner-do for suppliers. This sort of surreal rendez-vous kept happening for a few years (at one point, a client had my head insured for 10 Million pounds and at another I was advising the head of a British nuclear utility on what sort of companies to buy) only to stop when the industry imploded in 2000.

I mention all this to put our current predicament in perspective.

While we don't have the specific degree or certification, and we certainly don't have the sort of single-career expertise of someone who has manned a certain type of lathe his whole life, the advice we can offer is still as valuable as it was. We can help people save money on digital communication. We can suggest activities that will get a brand noticed, trusted or loved by the right audience. We can hold a CTO's hand while he goes shopping for new toys and we know who to call if he needs some tech specifics. We can help non-profits, charities and underfunded councils build exciting interactive tools that will engage and usefully serve their constituents, and we can do this on a shoe-string.

These are all useful skills to offer, but put together they don't make a coherent offering. In a weird way, our specialty is that we're 'general practitioners'.

It's now four years since the big internet crash and the marketplace has thinned somewhat. Most of the smaller 'generalist' agencies have closed, the larger ones like Agency.com have refined their offering to be much less 'catch-all' and more tightly integrated with the 'specialist' services supplied by other companies in the same group (media, marketing, integration, advertising).

I was having a look at Agency's website to see how they solved the position problem. Their site used to be a soup of services, part business consultancy part marketing strategist part IT consultancy. The skills they started with are still there--though I suspect the headcount has shrunk a bit--but the new site lists a brief menu of services (online marketing, website design, user testing, intranets and portals, content management).

The list is almost humble. It's almost apologetic You know, our chaps have consulted at exalted levels, but we're happy to just make you a little website or even Why of course we'd be happy to review the usability of your site even though you had it done by another supplier. Once upon an internet boom their site was all e-enabling and redefining your business and let's have six grand just to have our discovery team look at your project.

Just for a laugh, here's a quote a friend at another big interactive agency sent me (probably feeling nostalgic for the good ol' days...) -- this is a quote to review a project, ie to scope it, as in at the end of this process, the customer still doesn't have a website, you know, not even a proper feasibility study: Estimated costs for discovery phase two: client services: 30,000; strategic services: 3,500; creative: 98,000; project management: 35,000; technology: 48,000; quality assurance: 1,750

Folks, that's a grand total of two-hundred-and-sixteen-thousand pounds just to take a look at the project (wipes tears of laughter from eyes).

Anyway, where was I going with this...

Oh yeah, picking a position. Well, to date, the only one that excites me is to redefine the way the advertising marketplace works. Pumpernickle's core creative proposition was that a client was always better doing something for his (potential) customer rather than just saying something. This clicks with the coming of age of the commercial internet, but the problem is trying to convince people who are used to spending a budget on one thing to spend it on another.

So, here's my ad industry wish-list:

• Make less traditional above the line advertising
• Charge clients less, but take a much bigger chunk of their budget
• Instead of spending the money on media, spend it on services that benefit people
• Manage the process of who makes which services in a creative and engaging way

So in a full-circular kind of way, we'll have unqualified people (admen) giving advice they can't possibly expect to be taken seriously giving (suggesting great business ideas to their clients).

In a way, this isn't new at all. Name that creative: "We just can't afford dirty ashtrays. Or half-empty gas tanks. Or worn wipers. Or unwashed cars. Or low tires. Or anything less than seat-adjusters that adjust. Heaters that heat. Defrosters that defrost" :-)

Donkeyontheedge is all about internet citizenship.