A banner ad for Alliance & Leicester proudly displayed at The Times website today.
How can anyone possibly miss that typo! Maybe one of those crafty compeittors (sic) meddled with the ad.
This is one of the most insightful things I've seen in ages. A really simple construct to show the effects of combining deadly sins in pairs. My favourite is Gluttony + Pride = fat men in speedos!
Reminds me a bit of the Nike "brief-o-matic" that you can find within this blog post from Pink Air.
Simple ways to get to interesting ideas must be the way forward!
Whilst I'm on the subject of TFL there's been something bugging me for ages. When you arrive at a London Underground station, you'll see a sign that looks something like this:
Whilst out buying a sandwich today, I spied a group of yellow-bibbed Transport For London (TFL) workers and police taking people's details and fines for not paying fares on the bus. This was quite a commotion, presumably intended to be a show of strength that "we'll catch you if you're bad".
On the back of the TFL yellow-bibs were the words "Revenue Protection" which no doubt is the name of the department the employees were from. However, in the light of recent massive transport price increases I think this wording conveys a poor impression of TFL. It doesn't say "we need your fares to reinvest in the system so your journey gets better" it says "we must make profit". I'm sure this is a cue for many people to avoid paying fares (obviously not me as I am such an honest citizen).
How different it would be if the bibs instead displayed a message intended to impact customer behaviour or attitude. Even a less obviously profit oriented department name such as "Fare Dodge Squad" would be an improvement. Fare dodging is naughtiness to be reprimanded, whereas taking money from a corporate hell-bent on making profit at all costs is surely an objective that would encourage many.
Either way, I doubt this activity will change fare-dodgers' behaviour. They're fare dodgers after all and the thrill of getting away with it, as opposed to simply trying to avoid payment, seems to me to be half the point.
Sorry for the pun, I couldn't help myself.
The Wii is a global success, despite its curious name. Nintendo realised that they couldn't and shouldn't try to take Xbox 360 and Sony's Playstation 3 on head to head. Instead they have come up with a new way to interact with games - appealing to a softer breed of gamers. The success is commented on by Seth Godin here.
It's also a fine example of a product that has inspired users to create their own content. Not just the usual YouTube videos (this from Three Minds shows Wii being used in a cinema), but also Flickr groups, the really quite odd wiikitty website and the highly entertaining sites which show damage caused by wii-abuse - wiihaveaproblem and wiidamage (plus here's a T-shirt on a similar subject!).
An effect that I think will have come as a bit of a surprise is the beneficial effect on health. Several colleagues came back to work after Christmas complaining of stiff muscles from Wii gaming. This page describes how a guy monitored his loss of weight and body fat entirely due to Wii-ing. (Thanks to Three Minds for the link).
Create a remarkable product...
True to form, Steve Jobs delivers the iPhone (the bottom QuickTime link focusses on the launch) to the public in an examplary way. Whether or not you give a proverbial about the technology, watch this from a presentation style point of view. His visuals always support what he says, never the other way round. He constantly repeats and summarises so the key information comes across clearly. He's well rehearsed. He uses humour appropriately.
If you like this, get to Presentation Zen sharpish.
I was chatting with a colleague earlier today about "Mapvertising" (see here for Universal McCann's paper). We got talking about the various mash-ups which incorporate map information with other data such as pictures from Flickr. I got searching...
"Rendezvous" is the legendary film of a Ferrari driving through Paris at stupid speeds early one morning in the 70s. You can see it at Google Video and You Tube. Well worth a look.
Some kind person has taken the time to map the journey the car takes using Google Maps. You can see it here. Take the time to read the instructions in the top left or you could be in for a confusing ride! This is what the internet is made for!
This is an earnest plea to everyone who works in marketing to carefully consider their words. It’s a riff I picked up from the musings of Seth Godin, Doc “Cluetrain” Searls et al that I don’t think has received sufficient credence. Times have changed yet we are still using the marketing language of yesterday. The main culprit is that most turgidly robust of words, “consumer”. It’s refusing to die, but it should. It is entirely inappropriate in today’s marketing context.
Back in the early days of advertising, media choice was limited. The people of Britain had only one channel with adverts to sit in front of, blankly absorbing messages. And we lapped it up – we trusted ads and companies back then. They wouldn’t lie to us. So perhaps we deserved the term “consumer”. We were docile and passive. Like cattle chewing the cud of commercials. And “the consumer” is apparently still alive and well today.
A Consumer
Much is talked about media fragmentation, web 2.0 and generally an increasingly complex environment for marketing. In this new context, people do not buy in the way they used to. Cheap & fast internet access has set information free. People are becoming comfortable with, and highly adept at, identifying their ideal purchase for themselves. They research, they compare, they carefully select. If they like your product and brand enough they’ll even create their own ads and PR.
Does this sound like a passive, docile creature – a consumer? I suggest not. To me it is a far more predatory behaviour, far more sentient. People are actively hunting out the opinions of other like-minded souls and trusting this view more than the corporate message. We need to stop talking about “consumers”. The term is generic, mass-market and it does nothing to describe the purchaser of today, who is now an active participant in the media world.
But what is the alternative? Some people want to cling to “consumer” from what amounts to a brutal lack of imagination: “But what will we call people who are not customers?” The imagination-lacker has unwittingly answered the question adequately themselves – “people”. Or, if you must use jargon, then how about “prospects”, “suspects”, “potential customers”? My preference is for anything that reminds us that we are not marketing to a demographic or a database segment – we are always talking to human beings with brains just like ours.
I recently attended the IAB’s “Engage for Autos” conference. And very good it was too. The presentations were all delivered by web-savvy, smart people who know about media-fragmentation and how empowered the customer is and the necessity to engage individuals. And yet they all talked about the mass, generic “consumer”! It felt so wrong.
So please stop using the term “consumer”, unless of course you’re making a parody of what marketing used to be like in the bad old days.
Always a good read...
http://www.trendwatching.com/trends/transumers.htm
I've been working on a new business pitch recently to extend our remit on an existing Client. We can obviously offer our Clients economies of scale from a financial point of view. But we can also offer the equivalent from a thinking point of view - the Client doesn't have to pay twice for the same thinking applied to different channels of customer communications. I'd like a good phrase to describe this. "Thought Consolidation" is my best so far. Any ideas?
I was recently asked to write a "thought piece" for mobile phones and the youth market. I used this "Youth of Today" document from ChangeThis and a Business Week article "The MySpace Generation" as part of my inspiration.
The next generation does not see a difference between on and offline. For them digital technology is not a channel, but an intrinsic part of life. It’s how they organise themselves, interact with friends and express themselves. However it still remains a tool – it is a means to an end.
The universal driver is to feel belonging, to be able to identify with a scene, an attitude or group. The children of “Generation @” are Skaters, Riders, Townies, Technos, Goths and Geeks. Finding a sense of identity is paramount. And technology is the key to finding it. Marketers speak to the youth audience as a homogenous mass, yet they see themselves in clearly segmented groups that have strict attitudinal and behavioural demarcations.
Their attention is divided and reactive to the myriad incoming communications they receive via their handsets and computers, so they’re hyper-distractible. As a result they’ve become a generation highly adept at dodging messages, not listening long enough to hear and also filtering out what’s not important to what they’re doing. They’ve evolved a 6th sense for spotting fakes – obvious ploys to infiltrate their world for commercial purposes rarely work (Google will need to handle YouTube very delicately if it wishes to continue to see exponential growth).
The next stage of connection for this youth audience is predictable – as accessing the internet and digital content via mobile handsets becomes a more and more plausible option, “Generation @” will be conducting the vast majority of their inter-human connections via their handset. This will correspond to a significant revenue opportunity for whomever is providing the handsets & network services.
Retail trends away from ‘price’ to ‘authenticity’ are highly relevant to this audience – they want to buy into a genuine story, something they can identify with and believe in. When they shop they’re seeking an experience. They want to be able to try products, get some proper advice and be treated with respect – witness the success of Nike Town and the ever-burgeoning Apple Store retail experience.
In summary, there is huge potential with “Generation @” to be the provider of choice for the identity-giving technology they crave. Delivering an authentic experience is the key to this, playing on their terms – creating a virtual store in Second Life will get a conversation started with the right audience, but if it is not delivering something exceptional, then the conversation won’t go quite as you planned.
I recently saw a comment that some copy should be written to "make it sound like it was written by a copywriter". I assume that this meant that it should be written well - I can't imagine anyone wanting their copy written badly!
On deeper consideration, this comment is so utterly redundant. A copywriter, by definition, does not write like a copywriter. Their job is to write in the style of the brand they are representing. The writer themselves may well have their own style of writing that it quite different from the work they produce for their Clients.
Here's a few links that serve as a summary of Second Life, the digital world with seemingly endless possibilities.
An author replicates book for launch...link
US presidential candidate makes a speech...link
Replicating the Burning Man festival...link
U2 allegedly play a gig (there's dispute it was really them!)...link
And finally - BBH launches in second life!...link
Seth Godin observes that taking the "cheap" route is the soft option - link. It's also very hard to stop doing "cheap" once you've started down that path.
Found this picture over at Presentation Zen. This exemplifies so many things about poor presentations. Check out that visual aid - text too small for the audience to read and way too complicated (the audience will be struggling to read rather than listening to the speaker). Check out the presenter on the right - text book crime of reading from the slide, alienating the audience. I can guarantee that this was one hell of a dull presentation.
Throttle. Marvellous. It sounds & feels satisfying to say. It conjoures up images of Spitfires and the early days of aviation for me. You know that someone knows about engines when they refer to a throttle rather than an accelerator or some other comparatively banal terminology - perhaps a racing driver, but definitely a Spitfire pilot and certainly my Dad. I also like the fact that more throttle means less restriction on the fuel supply, so technically less throttling being done! Presumably the issue the throttle was created for was to limit the speed of an engine rather than increase it. Here's a Wikipedia description for those wanting some technical detail.
This is hilarious - a chap creates graffiti by cleaning urban surfaces. The authorities are in a right mess! - link (from Boing Boing)
