Happy Customers!

They say a happy customer is a repeat customer. But..

"Our relation to happiness often betrays an unconscious desire for disillusionment. The wanting of it and the having of it can seem like two quite different things. And this is what makes wishing so interesting, because wishing is always too knowing. When we wish we are too convinced of our pleasures, too certain that we know what we want. The belief that we can arrange our happiness, as though happiness were akin to justice, which we can work towards, may be to misrecognise the very thing that concerns us."

Adam Phillips on The Happiness Myth from The Guardian, via Bobulate.

I spent a lot of time thinking about happiness a few months ago. I thought maybe I could compose a few drawings, write a few thoughts, bind it all into a volume, and, possibly get closer to somewhere I wanted to be by crafting something of value. That way I could use what I'd learned and apply it to my work. Happy customers, buy more product.

But in frustration, I realized it was in folly. To try to define or explain or even sometimes pursue happiness feels to be a quagmire. Happiness is not a new problem and there wasn't much I could add to the conversation that hadn't already been said. There is no need for redundancy.

And then, I found Maira Kalman's blog And The Pursuit of Happiness, you need to scroll about 2/3rds of the page down. I think it's the best rumination on happiness I've witnessed recently. No where is there a mention of "this is how you achieve it." The perspective is always "this is what I saw", "this is what I enjoyed." This seems preferable, this seems healthier and wiser.

Maira Kalman's, The Pursuit of Happiness can be bought here. I know it's on my reading list.

It reminds me of what it is like to sharpen a knife on a whetstone. It's a laborious affair, pushing a blade against the slab, consistent in pressure and varying in angle and velocity. It's a process ripe with friction and frustration.

Excellence comes through an evenness achieved by variety. When through, one is left with a sharp knife and its remnants, sloughed off particles of the shorn blade in a slurry on the surface on the stone. Could happiness be that slurry, a residue of the process of sharpening ourselves through variety, frustration, and friction?

Maybe. But, I'll probably never know. Because happiness is not crafted, happiness emerges. And Brands need to understand this. Don't just tell me how good your product is, show me, and help me experience it myself.

Or has Louis C K got a far better handle on it. :-)



And how long is a happy? I think you can probably deduce a lot about a person and customer, from their answer. A moment? A day? A life? Right now? On the whole, I think it's very short little moments all strung together like pearls on a necklace. Maybe you don't get big happys until you're older, or maybe it's because you grow more contented. Demanding less of everything around you.

I don't know how you can really measure happiness. Ask any planner to comprehensively measure happiness in a focus group. It seems a silly question to ask "How happy are you?" On a scale of what to what? "Oh, you know, on a scale between Found A Penny and Three-Day Weekend". "Well, I'd say I'm about an Ice Cream Cone of happy."

Certain things die when you count them. People don't want metrics on their joy. But they do understand the appeal of the idea, as lots of us seem to think that if you force data through logic, you get control. But, it doesn't always work that way because people are emotional and not always logical. Pancakes for dinner tonight made me happy. Pancakes for dinner tomorrow night will make me sad. And the logic machine overheats and smokes away furiously.

I used to play hide and seek with my niece. It was fun and infuriating. She's not very good at hiding, so I'd have to pretend that I didn't see her. "Where is she? Where could she be?" I'd stumble around the house. Eventually, she'd get so impatient she'd yell hints. "I'm not over there!" or "Come upstairs!" or "You're on the wrong side of the room!" After more of my poor seeking, she'd get frustrated, pop out and say "I'm over here!"

It was more fun that way, than if I had seriously looked for her. And maybe happiness is a bit paradoxical like that. If you stop pursuing it, there are fewer places for it to hide.

In today's era of infinite consumer choice, paradoxically, there's a danger that to much choice only leads to greater dissatisfaction. And brands may well benefit from quality of communication over quantity of communication.

The more you just have to be listening when it says "I'm over here!"

Open Data. And how we can benefit from it

Open Date for the Arts - Human Scale Data and Synecdoche.

This is an article from BERG by Tom Armitage. One I'm sure, given the subject matter, he wont mind me sharing with you here.

Here's Tom's original post.

BERG are both developer and innovator, in all things that interact and inform people on a wide variety of platforms. And I have to be honest, out of all the feeds I follow, BERG is by far and away my favourite.

"This is a short talk that I gave as part of a 45-minute workshop with Matthew Somerville at The Media Festival Arts 2010 . As part of a session on how arts and cultural bodies can use open data, I talked about what I felt open data was, and what the more interesting opportunities it affords to are.

What is open data?

I’d describe “open data” as: “Making your information freely available for reuse in practical formats with no licensing requirements.

It’s not just sticking some data on a website; it’s providing it in some kind of data-format (be it CSV, XML, JSON, RDF, either via files or an API) for the intended purpose of being re-used. The more practical the format, the better. You can still own the copyright; you can still claim credit. That doesn’t stop the data being open. But open data shouldn’t require payment.

More importantly: What isn’t open data?

It’s not just sticking up web pages and saying it’s open because you won’t tell me off for scraping it. It’s not any specific format. One particular crowd will tell you that open data has to be RDF, for instance. That is one format it can be, but it doesn’t have to be. The success of your open data platform depends on how useful people will find it.

How do I know if it’s useful?

A good rule of thumb for “good open data” – and, by “good”, I mean “easy for people to use”, is something I’ve seen referred to as “The P Test“, which can be paraphrased as: “You can do something interesting with it – however simple – in an hour, in a language beginning with P.”

Making something super-simple in an hour in Perl/PHP/Python (or similar, simple scripting language, that doesn’t begin with P, like Ruby or Javascript) is a good first goal for an open data set. If a developer can’t do something simple in that little time, why would they spend longer really getting to grips with your information? This, for me, is a problem with RDF: it’s very representative of information, as a data format, but really, it’s bloody hard to use. If I can’t do something trivial in an hour, I’m probably going to give up.

What are the benefits of open data?

The big benefit of open data is that it gets your “stuff” in more places. Your brand isn’t a logo, and it isn’t a building; it’s this strange hybrid of all manner of things, and your information is part of that. That information might be a collection, or a catalogue, or a programme. Getting that information in more places helps spread your brand.

As well as building your profile, open data can also build collaboration and awareness. I can build something out of someone else’s information as a single developer messing around, sure – but I can also build products around it that stand alone, and yet build value.

For instance, Schooloscope. Schooloscope looks at data about UK schools and put it together to give you a bigger picture. A lot of reporting about schools focuses on academic performance. Schooloscope is more interested in a bigger picture, looking at pupil happiness and change over time. We built this site around DFE data, Edubase data, and Ofsted reports. We’re building a product in its own right on top of other people’s data, and if the product itself is meaningful, and worthwhile… then that’s good for both your product and the source data – not to mention that data’s originators.

But for me, the biggest thing about open data is: it helps grow the innovation culture in your organisation.

The number-one user of open data should be you. By which I mean: if your information is now more easily accessible via an API (for instance), it makes it easier to build new products on top of it. You don’t have to budget for building interfaces to your data, because you’ve done it already: you have a great big API. So the cost of innovation goes down.

(A short note on APIs: when you build an API, build good demos. When I can see what’s possible, that excites me, as a developer, to make more things. Nothing’s worse than a dry bucket of data with no examples.)

Similarly: the people who can innovate have now grown in number. If you’ve got information as CSV – say, your entire catalogue, or every production ever – then there’s nothing to stop somebody armed with Excel genuinely doing something useful. So, potentially, your editorial team, your marketing team, your curators can start exploring or using that information with no-one mediating, and that’s interesting. The culture begins to move to one where data is a given, rather than something you have to request from a technical team that might take ages.

And, of course, every new product that generates data needs to be continuing to make it open. Nothing’s worse than static open data – data that’s 12, 18 months old, and gets updated once a year as part of a “big effort” – rather than just adding a day to a project to make sure its information is available to the API.

What’s the benefit for everyone else?

This is just a short digression about something that really interests me. Because here’s the thing: when somebody says “open data”, and “developers using your information”, we tend to imagine things like this:

Schuyler Erle called the above kind of map “red dot fever”: taking geolocated data and just putting it all on a map, without any thought. This isn’t design, this isn’t a product, this is just a fact. And it’s about as detached from real people as, to be honest, the raw CSV file was.

So I think one thing that open-data allows people to do is make information human-scale. And by which I mean: make it relevant, make it comprehensible, move it from where the culture might be to where *I* am. And that lets me build an ongoing relationship with something that might have been incomprehensible.

I should probably show you an example.

This is a Twitter bot that I built. It tells you when Tower Bridge is opening and closing. I stole the data from their website. Or rather: Tower Bridge itself tells you when it’s opening and closing. Things on Twitter talk in the first person, so it should be itself. It becomes another voice in my Twitter stream, not just some bot intruding like a foghorn.

It exposes a rhythm. I built it because I used to work near Tower Bridge – I saw it every day. I liked the bot most when I was out of London; I’d see it opening and closing and know that London was still going on, still continuing. It has a silly number of followers, but not many of them interact with it daily. And yet – when you do, it’s useful; some friends found it helpful for reminding them not to leave the office for a bit.

And, you learn just how many times it opens/closes, but not in a numeric way; in a visceral way of seeing it message you.

This is Low Flying Rocks by my friend Tome Taylor. It’s a bot that scrapes NASA data about asteroids passing within 0.2AU AU of Earth (an AU being 0.2 of the distance from the Earth to the sun). That’s quite close! What you discover is a) there are lots of asteroids passing quite close, and b) we know that they’re there. You both learn about the universe, and a little bit about our capacity to understand it. And you learn it not in some big glut of information, but slowly, as a trickle.

It feels more relevant because it’s at my scale. And that leads to my final point.

Synecdoche

I want to talk about synecdoche, because I think that’s what these kind of Twitter bots are. Synecdoche’s a term from literature, best explained as “the part representing a whole“. That’s a terrible explanation. It’s better explained with some examples:

“A hundred keels cut the ocean“; “keel” stands for “ship“. “The herd was a hundred head strong“; “head” stands for “cow“.

So, for me, Tower Bridge is synecdoche, for the Thames, for London, for the city, for home. Low Flying Rocks is synecdoche not only for the scale of the universe, all the activity in the solar system, the earth’s place in that – but also for NASA, for science, for discovery. Synecdoche allows you to make big, terrifying data, human-scale.

I was thinking, to wrap this session up, about a piece of data I’d like if I was building a Twitter bot, and I decided that what I’d love would be: what the curtain at the Royal Opera House was doing.

It sounds boring at first: it’s going to go up and down a few times in a performance. That means once an evening, and perhaps the odd matinee. But it’s also going to go up and down for tech rehearsals. And fire tests. And who knows what else. It’s probably going up and down quite a lot.

And, as that burbles its way into my chat stream, it tells me a story: you may only think there’s a production a day in the theatre, but really, the curtain never stops moving; the organisation never stop working, even when you’re not there. I didn’t learn that by reading it in a book; I learned it by feeling it, and not even by feeling all of it – just a tiny little bit. That talking robot told me a story. This isn’t about instrumenting things for the sake of it; it’s about instrumenting things to make them, in one particular way, more real.

Yes, from your end, it’s making APIs and CSV and adding extra functionality to existing projects that are probably under tight budgets. But it allows for the things you couldn’t have planned for.

Open Data allows other people to juxtapose and invent, and tell stories, and that’s exciting."

The World Is Full Of Interesting Things

Here's an interesting presentation from Google Labs. They collected the most recent inspirational ideas and web projects in this document of 119 pages. It gathers a variety of different topics such as, advertising, history, politics, sport, art... under one roof.



Full page size here.

Notice and Wonder

Robert Krulwich, of Radiolab fame, is starting a new blog at NPR. So, first, NEW ROBERT KRULWICH BLOG! My enthusiasm is palpable. I just tossed up a handful of confetti.

Second, there's some really juicy bits in the first entry about the focus of the blog and its content. I'll just let Krulwich speak.

I like the word "wonder." It seems to me that near the heart of wonder is the simple act of noticing. I plan to pause, look, and notice the little wonders that catch my eye. Because there are a lot of people who do this very well. I'm going to follow the better noticers, the great field scientists, the best artists, photographers, journalists and peer over their shoulders to notice what they have noticed.

Biologist (and writer) Bernd Heinrich in his book "A Year In The Maine Woods" points out that because we humans are biggish creatures and so much around us is small and delicate (or shy), because we are busy and very into our lives, our minds, our problems, "most of us are like sleepwalkers here." We walk through our yards, our streets, our parks, through our days and "we notice so little. We see only bits and pieces, and then only if we look very, very close, or for very, very long."

Did you notice that? Yep, I just tossed up another handful of confetti.

So, wondering and noticing are tightly woven together. This reminds me of an interview the AIGA ran a couple years ago with Steve Portigal and Dan Soltzberg about the benefits of noticing.

It is ironic, people don't notice that noticing is important! Or that they're already doing it. It's kind of like breathing we're not usually that aware of it. It's much easier to recognize more outbound activities like brainstorming, testing, designing, refining. But noticing is just as important it's really where everything begins.

There's a funny Zen saying about that: "Don't just do something, sit there." It's a reminder to let yourself take things in as well as output them. Inputting is hard. Reading Krulwich's observations and reading the conversation between Portigal and Soltzberg infers that a couple things might be necessary, quiet (or a slower pace), and a willingness to intently focus on the things outside of yourself. Good noticing is selfless.

So how do we build up our noticing skills and spidey senses? Portigal has an idea for that too.

Circulate through an environment and note everything you observe, but using only one sense. First, observe from a distance, say, from on high so you can't hear what people are saying. Then sit in the middle of an active zone, but close your eyes. You may notice how rapidly one sense fills in for the other. Noticing is tough, yet rewarding work, and it begs to be documented.

We've more tools than ever to do so. I walk everywhere with a phone camera in my pocket, and I suspect you do too, so documenting visuals is easy. I can type on my phone, so I can capture text or overheard conversations.

I can record video if necessary. And then I can dump it to a Twitter account or a Tumblr blog to catalog everything. And if it's any good, maybe the noticing starts to arrange into larger patterns or if there gets to be a lot of documentation. I could maybe even print up a book of all the things I had noticed.

And wouldn't that be a nice thing to have on the bookshelf? My Year of Noticing and Wondering 2010.

As a person constantly in a position to produce works of communication or ideas, or whatever it may be, it feels good to give myself permission to kick back and inquisitively absorb things as they come. Part of noticing isn't seeking, it's highly reliant on serendipity and unexpected relevancy.

People are always surprised when they realize how many things they are actually experiencing but not really noticing. And it's such a simple activity.

A Happy Life

I'm fascinated by the fact that our everyday living spaces, continue to grow with intelligent electronics. Making our homes increasingly sentient. But one day you may well wake up in a house that knows more about your family’s state than you do. A helping hand, too much information, or 1984?

Designers James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau are investigating if such technology would be helpful or too invasive. Their HappyLife project consists of a visual display linked to the thermal image camera, which employs facial recognition to differentiate between members of the family.

Each member has one rotary dial and one RGB display effectively acting like emotional barometers. These show current state and predicted state, the predicted state being based on years of accumulated statistical data.

The end result is an ambient display that should represent the emotional state of the various family members. The additional quality of the installation in comparison to simply looking at the face of your daughter to see how she feels, would be that it provides you with a sense of how your family members are doing, also when they are not in the home.

There is no written feedback on emotional state, it is left to the viewer to interpret this final position of the dial: ‘Is it where it was this morning?’ ‘Why has it spun so far round?’ More complex narratives based have been explored in the following vignettes, written in collaboration with Dr Richard M. Turley.

We installed Happylife. Not much happened at first: an occasional rotation, a barely appreciable change in the intensity of light. But we felt it watching us, and knew that some kind of probing analysis had begun. After only a few months, we found ourselves anticipating the position of the dials. The individual displays rarely contradicted our expectations, but when they did it encouraged us to look inwardly at ourselves.

 It was that time of the year. All of the Happylife prediction dials had spun anti-clockwise, like barometers reacting to an incoming storm. we lost David 4 years ago and the system was anticipating our coming sadness. We found this strangely comforting.

We were all sitting in the lounge, like any evening. Sandra and I were watching some nondescript documentary and the kids were playing with their Lego. The moment stole up on us. Paul was first to notice the unusual glow coming from Happylife. It continued to brighten – a gradual, barely conspicuous build up of intensity until we had to look away.

The morning Paul had to go, Sandra’s dial was barely registering. I’d seen it that pale only once; then for obvious reasons it stayed that way for weeks. I tried to comfort her, saying it wasn’t as if he’d be away for ever. She turned to me with her face blank and puffy and then ran out of the room.

I arrived home from the meeting, pushed off my shoes and glanced up at the Happylife display. Sandra’s dial had rotated 2 clicks further than I’d ever seen it. The orb was pulsing wildly. She’d seemed fine when I left.

Happylife is the result of a collaboration with Reyer Zwiggelaar and Bashar Al-Rjoub of Aberystwyth University Computer Science Department.

The Brilliance of Batman

If you spent your childhood growing up in the 1970's and early 80's. Who doesn't remember seeing Kerplatt, Thwack, Bam, Boff and Kapow, plastered across your TV screens? To name just a few.

And if you didn't actually see those very words, I bet you think you did. Powerful stuff. Plus, not forgetting Adam West's iconic 'holy macaroni', 'holy doughnut', and yes I swear to god it's true, 'holy inflatable shark'.

Batman, the 1960s American television series, based on the DC comic book character of the same name. Staring Adam West and Burt Ward as Batman and Robin, two crime-fighting heroes who defended "Gotham City". Is an iconic classic that stills holds a few lessons for the advertising industry of today.

Dreamed up by Bob Kane and Bill Finger, with ABC first screening it to American households in 1966. For two and a half seasons from January 12, 1966 to March 14, 1968. Despite its short run, the show had a total of 120 episodes, having two weekly installments for most of its tenure.

After a hesitant start William Dozier and his Greenway Productions were charged with bringing the comic strip to the TV screen. Dozier, who loathed comic books, concluded the only way to make the show work was to do it as a Pop Art comedy. Generally keeping the scripts more on the side of Pop Art adventure.

And along with an attempt to ensure that the TV series appealed to the child audiences, who'd been it's most loyal comic book supporters. Dozier decided to take the comic strips penchant, for embellished every fight scene with liberal and internally memorable doses of onomatopoeia words, over to the screen. Through the introduction of a more Pop Art approach.

Eighty-seven wonderful onomatopeias from the Batman television series, right here.

Onomatopoeia words are those that imitate or suggest the source of the sound that it describes.

The fact that the show's marriage of fight scenes and onomatopoeia words, left such a lasting and power impression. Is in part, testament to the insights held by the producers, of both it's child and adult audiences. The power this technique holds in both association, recall and involvement. Along with an entrepreneurial spirit to go with their experience and confidence, believing in something that hadn't seen the light of day before. It reminds me of Mad Men and Maddison Avenue from the 1950's and 60's.

Advertising has already used onomatopoeia as a mnemonic, helping consumers to remember their products. Take Rice Krispies, whith it's "snap, crackle and pop" every time you bathe them in milk. Or in road safety advertisements: "clunk click, every trip". Click the seatbelt on after clunking the car door shut.

But to date, no one's employed the technique of mixing association, recall and involvement, quite as memorably or as successfully as that of the 1960's Batman TV series. With their marriage of verbal and visual onomatopoeia.

Yes Rice Krispies has it's "snap, crackle and pop", that you could argue holds household status. But Kellogg's has had the budget to push that particular Brand for the past 80 years now. Originally airing in 1933. Where as Batman only had two seasons, and delivered it to far greater effect.

There's one word I've mentioned, that keeps coming back to me, Iconic. When was the last time you saw advertising achieve icon status, without having the stratospheric budget to match.

Your childhood may hold more that it's letting on.

The Rise of the Mobile Social Network

With the rapidly expanding mobile internet and interest growing in our uptake of it. Here are three Infographics, showing the numbers behind our usage of mobile social network browsing.

The first's from Flowtown, on how mobile is shaping the way social media is consumed. It’s interesting to see that from these stats, 25% or more than 100 million Facebook users access from a mobile phone, and those who do, are twice as active on social networks compared to people accessing from a computer! Plus, in January 2010, more than double the number of users accessed Facebook from their mobiles, over those in 2009.

The 35-54 year old bracket is the most active mobile social users!



Full size image can be found here.

The second's also from Flowtown, on how teenagers use mobile phones in the US. Some of the key findings from their research is that 75% of all teenagers in the US now have a mobile phone, while almost 35% of teenagers send over 100 text messages per day, one in three people text while driving and one in two talk on a mobile phone while at the wheel. But only 25% are using social networks on their phones, with females still being the highest users of mobile phones.



Full size image can be found here.

The third one's another great infographic by Pingdom, this time on Instant Messaging. There are some pretty crazy stats in there like the 47 Billion daily instant messages sent, or the 40 million simultaneous logged in windows messenger users. I see a lot of media plans buying Windows Messenger banners, it’s a popular (and pretty cheap) buy, which is clearly due to the serious amount of impressions they’d serve every day!



Full size image can be found here.

The Disappointment of Things. A lesson for Advertising

The other day, I came across Psyblog's 'Six Psychological Reasons Consumers Culture in Unsatisfying' taken from a series of studies by Carter and Gilovich. It's an insightful read and I urge you to read it, along with the links found within.

Where research shows that buying objects is ultimately more disappointing than buying experiences.

Psychological research tells us that this disappointment is particularly pronounced when people buy things like mp3 players or watches, compared with experiences like vacations or concert tickets. The researchers explore six reasons why objects are less satisfying than their experiential counterparts:

1. Objects are easy to compare unfavorably
2. A “maximising” strategy leaves us less satisfied
3. Material purchases more likely to be re-evaluated
4. The new option effect
5. The reduced price effect
6. A cheaper rival

This seems problematic. The research suggests then, that if we design objects in the context of a larger experience, we’ll lower the risk of disappointment. What is the difference between 'object' and 'experience' though? That distinction seems very much at the discretion of an individual, not the Ad men and women.

I have always been of the opinion that the guise of time changes our opinion on purchases. The value of things decreases with time due to simple depreciation. Conversely, to me, it seems the value of experiences seems to increase as time moves along, because they are transient. If they are good, I remember them fondly. And the fondness seems to be able to grow exponentially: the next time, I not only remember my fondness for the experience, but also the other times I’ve thought of it when it has made me happy. Stuff can’t do that.

This got me thinking on how you'ld go about, integrating the longer lasting and greater enjoyment, that comes from an 'experience'. With the material purchase of buying an 'object'. To date I don't know of anyone who's successfully married the two, with a product that's readily available.

I know of VW's TheFunTheory.com campaign.

Musical stairs.



An interactive Bottle Bank.



Musical Bin.



Bergs play with a computer linked desktop man, that responds when your MSN friends log on.



Georg Reil's 'Fine Collection Of Curious Sound Objects'. Musical household and personal objects, that respond to your use of them.



Plus Nike's DJ Music Trainers. Although these aren't intended for sale, as it's clearly just a branding campaign. But the campaigns existence does help to promote the arrival of this new user interaction, and the possibilities that are now available to us. One that open source tech has delivered.



But no one has yet delivered it for real. Amongst the bunch, it's VW that expresses the sentiment of the 'experience' better than the others. Better than Nike anyway, as the other two aren't really products, just developers.

I've also noticed that the two main ingredients being used, are sound and movement.

At worst, VW's TheFunTheory.com is just an analogy, at best, a philosophy. And while I'm genuinely interested in where they're going to take it, and how they're going to incorporate this belief into their products, cars. I suspect it'll be through a rather tenuous link, with the very latest technology in driver aids and passenger environment. I do hope I'm wrong, and that the link is much stronger than that.

If Nike take the opportunity, or even know that it exists, in successfully delivering a marriage between 'experience' and 'object'. They're probably better qualified to deliver this, to great effect, than any other brand I know.

Through their strong brand links and heritage with contemporary fashion and music, as seen in their ad above, allowing them to integrate the necessary ingredients of sound and movement. Again, as the add so beautifully expressed. Well for starters anyway, as this combination is the most obvious place to start from. All they need to do now, is make it happen. Delivering a pair of trainers that really do allow you to walk, or run in rhythm, to a rhythm of your choice. One's that would hook up to your iPod. Now that's an 'experience' Nike could own.

One again here's the link to 'Six Psychological Reasons Consumers Culture in Unsatisfying'.

But before you read it. I noticed the outtake from it all, is that, advertising that promotes an emotional reaction/message, over that, that promotes a cost reaction/message. Lends itself to an 'experience' far more successfully, than those, that lead with a message of cost. Supporting the belief, that Brand campaigns really are more effective at generating positive reactions, from the customer at large, than Promotional campaigns do. And it's this, that lift's meaningful long term sales.

Six Foundations of Great Digital Creative

The AdAge 2010 Digital conference has just been and gone, with it came a few fantastic presentations that I hope to post over the coming week, so to kick them off, here's a great presentation from Ashley Ringrose who runs BannerBlog, on the 'Six Foundations Of Great Digital Creative'.

I thought this was a pretty inspiring piece, it combines all the key base creative elements that a lot of agencies have trouble combining with digital creative. The presentation also has many click-able digital creative examples to help make the point.

AdAge Digital 2010 6 Foundations of Great Digital Creative

View more presentations from Soap Creative.

The Social Media Effect

I know it's well know, but this infographic is a great way and simple reminder of looking at the way content development, is used to create all sorts of goodness for your brand inside and out of social networks. Everyone knows that content is king for search engine optimisation, but can often forget that content is a primary driver for social media buzz (in turn helping your organic rankings), and to leverage the power of the chart you’ll find below (The Social Media Effect) brands need to focus on developing great content on a consistent basis.



He's the link to the larger size image.

The World's Largest or Longest Email DM

The world of email commerce has become something of a forgotten and neglected art form. With social media, viral, web and iphone apps getting the red carpet treatment, it was a pleasure to find this hidden gem. Simple but very effective, it cleverly uses the way we read emails to it's advantage. Disarmingly simple.

Rules of Engagement

Being a great admirer, follower and constant student of the Frank Chimero. There are precious few people who's commentary, essays and anecdotes on life, I look forward to as much as I do of those from Frank. So much so, I'd like to share one of them with you. Along with some of his worked mixed in amongst it.

Rules of Engagement

"We used to have audiences, but the information age has transformed them into users who are no longer satisfied with the passive consumption of content. They desire interactions and opportunities to connect and contribute. Designers are placed in a position to plan and produce the systems, platforms, frameworks, events and artifacts that work as a conduit to facilitate these interactions and experiences.

Unfortunately, there’s little information to cite about what works and what does not in these sorts of endeavors. We’re left looking in the periphery for wisdom about the process, trying to find patterns in other realms that can be mapped into this new space.

The best way to gain a bit of insight is to consider the best, most social, interactive work designers are producing as frameworks for improvisation. To develop a vocabulary, frame the process, label characteristics and potentially predict success, we can cite the wisdom of the other arts that use improvisation as a cornerstone: areas such as jazz and improvisational theater. From this, we can begin to dictate best practices.

The above Poster line... 'A Light That Never Goes Out'

Limitations

Every game needs rules, and every successful framework for improvisation has limitations. These limitations can be internal to let the creative get to work, but can also manifest outward to act as rules of engagement for contributors and participants.

Limitations can be useful to help a creator or contributor begin working in a general direction, then, use the feedback of the process to steer their decision making. This is how improv theater works. Most sketches begin with a prompt, then the actors let the momentum of the narrative snowball by working off of the limitation of the prompt and any rules the improv game may have.

The utility of restraints is that they give the participants common-footing, which allows them to get started. Motivation doesn’t disappear, it evaporates, and this seems crucial when a designer is either trying to get to work, or is working to ensure their users remain engaged. One strategy is to create a purposeful set of limitations I like to call a “pseudo-structure.” Pseudo-structures act as a framework for creative activity and improvisation. Limitations are the playground of a creative mind. They are a latticework on which to hang ideas.

Many of the greats used pseudo-structures when working. Vivaldi wrote four violin concertos: one for each season. Shakespeare’s sonnets follow a specific rhyming scheme and are always 14 lines. During Picasso’s blue period, he essentially only painted monochromatically. There are also ample examples of limitations being used to frame user’s contributions, such as Twitter’s character limit on posts or the formulaic approach to creating a proper LOLCat. (Oh hai.) Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher’s Learning to Love You More is a project made of a series of pseudo-structures that asks contributors to complete the task, document the results, then submit them to share online.

The restrictions of a pseudo-structure can take many shapes. They can be conceptual, where the restrictions determine the subject matter of the work. (See Vivaldi’s concertos or any illustrated Alphabet book.) Limitations can also be structural, where compositional restrictions are created. (Such as Shakespeare’s sonnets, Twitter’s character limit, or choreographing a dance where the dancer doesn’t step outside of a specific space.)

When choosing limitations, the designer needs to be careful to not make them too&emdash;well—limiting. The idea is to use the pseudo-structures to promote activity, not suppress it. When done correctly, limitations can be used as a tool to overcome the gap between finding the desire to do something and knowing where to put one’s efforts. A good limitation makes the contributor feel like they are already halfway done: all that is left to do is to sort out the details and execute their idea.

The above Poster line... 'The Films of Sergio Leone'

Acceptance and Ambiguity

One of the core beliefs of improv theater is the idea of “Yes, and…” meaning that each step in an improvisational process is accepting previous contributions and is additive in nature. Improvisation is more akin to building with clay than sculpting out of marble: things are added and attached rather than excess being carved away. The process is not freeing people out of blocks of marble, it is building something out of nothing. Rejection squelches unforeseen possibilities in the interaction and cripples participants’ desire to contribute. Frameworks for improvisation must remain positive and accepting.

The challenge (and potentially the art) of creating these frameworks is balancing the inherent incongruency of some ideas that comes with setting limitations versus trying to create an atmosphere of acceptance that maximizes potential. The art is having participants understand that anything goes, but not everything.

Creating these frameworks and building them on the idea of acceptance means that there will always be an element of ambiguity in the results. But, designers and users will become more and more accustomed to ambiguity as more of these platforms are built, because their utility will not be obvious. As the format of contribution proliferates through more of what designers make, more new, powerful tools, devices, sites and ways to interact will not have a clear value proposition. They can’t say “this is important because it lets you do this” or “this is the specific reason this thing exists.”

Ambiguity begins to explain why Twitter is different from Facebook. The value proposition of Facebook is clear: stay in contact with friends and share with them. But, what’s the use of Twitter? No one can say definitively, because there is no right way to use it. For some, it’s a news feed, for others, it’s a way to communicate with friends, and for others, it’s a way to keep in contact with brands.

It’s why Twitter fascinates some and beguiles others. Twitter can’t craft a clear value proposition on their homepage to say what the site is for, and if you are someone who needs convincing, that’s frustrating, because everyone is talking about the site. If you are observant, Twitter’s popularity in spite of its utility ambiguity is a sign that something big is happening on a larger scale. We are no longer building hammers with one specific use, or even a swiss army knife that can do many different things. What we are building is more akin to two pieces of stone, from which someone can make their own tool for their own specific uses: arrowhead or hand axe. The most flexible frameworks for improvisation will not only have improvised content, but also improvised utility. Often times, the utility is the interaction.

Lessons from Jazz

The predominant cultural example of an improvisational creative endeavor is jazz. Learning about the history of the music and listening to musicians talk about jazz, one will hear things that can make these frameworks make more sense. Jazz is about improvising, and it’s about having the musicians and audience meet the music halfway. Jazz is a platform and a cultural vessel. And it’s incredibly difficult to summarize in words without seeming hyperbolic. It’s value is soft, but we some how perceive it to have value despite it’s ambiguity.

Design seems to be the same way. It is about improvising (we can’t boil it down to a hard set of rules to follow). It’s about meeting messages at a halfway point where the creators and users overlap. Design is a platform and cultural vessel prone to hyperbole. And it has a soft value that is often difficult for outsiders to discern.

The primary trait of both jazz and improvisation is process. To truly partake in it, you have to visit a place to see it in progress. Every jazz club or improv comedy theater is a temple to the process of production. It’s a factory, and the art is more the assembly than the product. One could say jazz is more verb than noun.

That makes me think that the most successful of these improvisational frameworks we create should be verb-based, and focus on creating meaningful experiences, interactions and connections. We’ll use nouns and artifacts to act as facilitators, but the real point of the exercise is the experience.

Designed frameworks can be platforms for experiences. As our skills in making them mature, the basic trait for platforms will be interaction and the basic need of its contributors will be connection. The success of a framework will be measured in enthusiasm. But, it should be said that platforms and their frameworks are not a destination, but an environment: less a sandcastle and more a sandbox. It has been frequently noted that the tools of our trade have been democratized and everyone can access them. If we’ve all a shovel and a pail, the sandboxes we build become incredibly important. So, time to play."

Poetry In Motion

With Apple announcing that the iPad will be available in the US from Saturday 3rd April. Landing in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland sometime late April. Now's probably a good time to take a look at how some of the US's biggest magazines, are going to tackle the question of how do you serve magazine content on it.

Furthest down the development line, showing us exactly what’s in store, is VIV Mag. With this video demonstration, showcasing a behind the scenes look at what went in to creating their very first, up and running, interactive magazine for the iPad.

VIV Mag



Below, you’ll also see the cover and a feature spread.



And the VIV Mag iPad front cover.



Wired

Next up is Wired Magazine. While less elaborate but no less inventive, is their vision for the future: Digital Story Art. And allowing that to happen is of course, the iPad, showcasing the experience WIRED will be delivering to their readers in April, they released their demonstration at TED a few weeks ago.

The WIRED Magazine’s iPad experience is very rich, and believe it or not, is developed in Adobe AIR (even if flash is banned!) which is said to be the technology behind the iPad’s rich text, imagery, interactivity, animation and dynamics.

There are lots of great little interface and experience features of the WIRED iPad Experience, but I think the seamless use of the 360 degree product views, dual axis navigation, favourite bin (very handy) and standard social integration are the standouts in this first glimpse.

However, the thing that a lot of you will be interested in is how advertising is represented. About three minuets into the video they showcase an interactive ad for Teslsa Motors, it’s a nice clean ad but didn’t seem to create the expanded interactive experience I thought an iPad Ad would deliver. But I’m sure it’s just the very start of what’s to come.



Sports Illustrated

And with Sports Illustrated going the same way as the aforementioned. It just serves to reaffirm and demonstrate that the future of magazine publishing very probably lies in incorporating video clips, interactivity, branded content, games, content sharing and rich, interactive advertising possibilities. But it has to be noted, all this looks and sounds an awful lot like the websites of today.

Don't Touch That Dial

An insightful article from Vaughan Bell that being scared of new media technology isn't new. In fact it's very old, right down to the first major media revolution.

"A respected Swiss scientist, Conrad Gessner might have been the first to raise the alarm about the effects of information overload. In a landmark book he described how the modern world overwhelmed people with data, and that this overabundance was both “confusing and harmful” to the mind. The media now echo his concerns with reports on the unprecedented risks of living in an “always on” digital environment. It’s worth noting that Gessner for his part, never once used e-mail and was completely ignorant about computers. That’s not because he was a technophobe but because he died in 1565. His warnings referred to the seemingly unmanageable flood of information unleashed by the printing press.

These concerns stretch back to the birth of literacy itself. In parallel with modern concerns about children's overuse of technology, Socrates famously warned against writing because it would "create forgetfulness in the learners souls, because they will not use their memories." He also advised that children can't distinguish fantasy from reality so parents should only allow them to hear wholesome allegories and not improper tales, lest their development go astray.

The Socratic warning has been repeated many times since: The older generation warns against a new technology and bemoans that society is abandoning the wholesome media it grew up with, seemingly unaware that this same technology was considered to be harmful when first introduced.

When radio arrived we discovered yet another scourge of the young: The wireless was accused of distracting children from reading and diminishing performance in school, both of which were now considered to be appropriate and wholesome. In 1936 the music magazine the Gramophone reported that children had "developed the habit of dividing attention between the humdrum preparation of their school assignments and the compelling excitement of the loudspeaker." And described how the radio programs were disturbing the balance of their excitable minds.

The television caused widespread concern as well: Media historian Ellen Wartella has noted how "opponents voiced concerns about how television might hurt radio, conversation, reading, and the patterns of family living and results in the further vulgarization of the American culture."

The skepticism and fear continues today:

"By the end of the 20th century personal computers had entered our homes, the Internet was a global phenomenon and almost identical worries were widely broadcast through chilling headlines: CNN reported that “Email hurts IQ more than pot,” the Telegraph that “Twitter and Facebook could harm moral values” and the “Facebook and MySpace generation cannot form relationships,” and the Daily Mail ran a piece on “How using Facebook could raise your risk of cancer.”

But we’ve not a shred of evidence to back up the claims:

"All of these pieces have one thing in common, they mention not one study on how digital technology is affecting the mind and brain. They tell anecdotes about people who believe they can no longer concentrate, talk to scientists doing peripherally related work, and that’s it. Imagine if the situation in Afghanistan were discussed in a similar way. You could write 4,000 words for a major media outlet without ever mentioning a relevant fact about the war. Instead you’d base your thesis on the opinions of your friends and the guy down the street who works in the kebab shop. He’s actually from Turkey but it’s all the same though, isn’t it?"

Mmmm, Kebabs. But alas we need to be scared of something:

"In contrast the accumulation of many years of evidence suggests that heavy television viewing does appear to have a negative effect on our health and our ability to concentrate. We almost never hear about these sorts of studies anymore because television is old hat technology scares need to be novel, and evidence that something is safe just doesn’t make the grade in the shock-horror media agenda.
In short, older media institutions whipping up fear of the newer media institutions."

For the full article click here.

What People Are Really Buying Online

This beautifully designed infographic from Permuto visualises some of the latest shopping data from the US Census Bureau. What’s interesting to see, is that e-Commerce (including phone & catalogue sales) is starting to “out sell” many of the traditional bricks and mortar categories in the US. There is some debate as to the exact numbers being used in this chart, but overall it tells a pretty important message to brands and retailers.


The see the infographic in it's full glory, allowing you see the e-Commerce and In-store sales difference click here.

The Minority Report

The future of Public Space Advertising as seen from the Minority Report. Arriving sooner than you think?



I remember when this scene from Minority Report generated some visceral reactions from the marketing community. Some of us thought what a clever idea, why haven't we been able to do that yet? And then some of us recoiled in horror at the invasion of privacy and realization that maybe consumers might not want brands to be on a first-name basis. However one might feel, the science fiction of the film is fast coming true, right now, with the arrival of principles behind Augmented Reality.

The first real foray into this was in the early 2000's. It was the localised wireless distribution of advertising content associated with a particular place, commonly through bluetooth-enabled phones. First it was BIG in Japan but bluetooth marketing gained steady traction before stalling. Lots of factors stalled proximity marketing, mobile device penetration rates, low Bluetooth adoption and brands really weren't ready to move budget from national mass marketing to highly-local mobile marketing. Bluetooth marketing is finally doing better in markets where mobile phone penetration is higher than computer penetration, in third-world countries.

Today, however, digital, direct marketing, social media, and mobile marketing are speeding toward convergence. Ushered in by the iPhone, Android and to a lesser extent Garmin and the automakers, brands now have the ability to know where we are (or at least the early adopters) in order to target us. They know because we tell them whenever we do an online search from our mobile, or ask for directions through our car, or update our location via Tripit, or use an AR app to find the subway. At least they have the option to know.

The interactions we have online identify and in some cases predict what we'll like and buy based on real-time, real-place data and perhaps most importantly, who we associate with. Think of it as a multi-dimensional view of you based on the information you provide through your social graph and online activity.

Specifically, the dimensions are:

- Who you are (your social profile)
- What you do (your perceivable actions on a networked device)
- When you do stuff (your schedule, real-time or virtual)
- Where you do stuff (your location, physical or virtual)
- Who you do stuff with (your social graph)
- What you intend to do (your plans, intentional or not)

Not quite an avatar but maybe a doppleganger or a digital ghost, it is this multi-dimensional view of you that brands will soon be observing, monitoring, analyzing and designing for, to better be able to influence you.

And while the below links aren't examples of it in action, remember, we don't have it just yet. Combined, they very much look like the beginning of it to me. It's just a matter of refining and combining. Sometimes I feel technology is moving quicker than I can write about it.

Pattie Maes from TED. Ideas worth spreading.




GE. Plug In To The Smart Grid.




AntiVJ. Light Projection.



BMW Servicing.

The recipe for success

I want to tell you a secret. Something that might change how you see our profession, how you go about learning and how you perceive your position in it. Come closer. Closer still. OK, ready for this? Here we go.

"There are no recipes."

I say it quietly but I want to shout it. Scream it. "There are no recipes."
Stop looking for a recipe for success. You want it? So far as I can tell it is to relentlessly do what you're best at, keep at it, and to keep moving and take advantage of opportunities.

Stop looking for recipes about how to find work. You want it? Do what you're best at, tell people about it, make incredible work and every once in a while remind people you exist in a way that best represents you. There's no one true way to promote.

Stop looking for recipes about how to optimize your workflow. You want it? Get rid of stupid fluff and do things that matter. Do one thing at a time. Work like your grandpa did. Yeah, the world is different now but humans have always had to make decisions about where to put their attention. We've just lost our spine.

Stop looking for recipes about how to finish a project, treat a client, manage your email, optimize your sleep, get over a creative block, get your first job, maintain focus or stay fresh. They don't exist. Or they're common sense. Eventually you'll grow out of wondering How-To. Hopefully you'll progress into Why-To.

Why do we look for recipes? Because we're risk averse. If we fail it's because someone else gave us the wrong recipe. We get to skip on the blame but can claim the success.

I myself find that I trust my own work the most, and others seem to trust it too. That gives me courage and comfort. But to be honest, I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing from day to day. There are days I question. I don't think that ever stops.

Take identity, it's something we've been fighting with for a long time. It's an individual pursuit, so it's not knowledge that can be downloaded or picked up from another individual. Human kind has a pretty good institutional memory, but it just doesn't work for these individual pursuits. I suppose that's what makes them so special and so hard. It's why we write books and make movies about this stuff. They are our own voyages: we have our own boat on our own sea with our own map. We must own the responsibilities and the outcomes of the expedition completely. It's an opportunity and a millstone.


Socrates said "Know thyself." But he didn't go on from there, sad. But if he didn't want to touch it there's no way my weak, flabby mind is going to try. Maybe he knew something we don't. Or maybe, just maybe, he did not.

But there's money in recipes. If there's a recipe, that means there's a secret. And you can sell a silver bullet. The thing is most people that are giving you a recipe are pandering to your fear. "What if things go wrong?"

Let me let you in on another little secret: failing isn't as risky as it used to be. You're probably not running a factory that employs thousands of people. You're more than likely mostly anonymous. If nobody knows who you are, no one notices if you screw up. If people do know who you are and you screw up, there will be something new in 5 minutes to steal their attention. Sometimes an audience's fickle attention can be an asset. The world will move on. If you work digitally and you make something awful, you can delete it. Liberating.

Thinking and learning are bound up with action. Recipes fail because to really know self-promotion (or anything else) you have to do self-promotion. Recipes are pseudo-action, a visage of a person doing the movement you yourself want. Looking for a recipe is no better than hang-wringing or navel gazing.

Recipes don't work because it means that things need to be able to be boiled down to a set of hard rules. But most things are different than a series of if-then logic games. This is why cooking recipes work. But most of the things we search for recipes on, are dependent on the situation and practical know-how is always tied to the experience of a particular person.

You can't download experience. You can only live it. Stop waiting around for someone to save you with a recipe. Stop being helpless. Go do something and save yourself.

The recipe for success is to keep moving.

Google: Interesting Facts & Figures

Another infographic chart from Pingdom for anyone who takes an interest in Google, and while there is nothing groundbreaking here. It’s a great compilation of key Google Facts & Figures that tick along month after month.

Jeremy Bullmore: Behind the Scenes in Advertising

There are some books you can't put down, but this is in a different league. The second I finished this book I picked it up and started again.

While I can't yet say I've read them all, trust me I'm trying. The quote "if there's just one book you read on Advertising this is it" must surely fit, Jeremy Bullmore - Behind the Scenes in Advertising (Mark III) like no other book possibly could.

The 2002 edition covers forty eight years of experience delivered in a pragmatic, warm, charming, sensible and hugely informative style. Which is both easy on the eye and mind.

A series of short essays used to illuminate, educate and comment of the myriad of subjects that we call work. Always entertaining and deceptively disarming. I challenge you not to find yourself hanging on to Jeremy's every word.

You'll chuckle. Nod in approval. Wish if only you'ld had the opportunity of working for him, you too could of achieved great things. Admire his genuine willingness to share everything he knows, singing like a Canary he's holding nothing back. No corporate fear of letting too many trade secrets out. These trade secrets are for the good of the industry alike. You'll find yourself thanking him for a personal tutorial, knowing that you've found a reference book of great value.

A brilliant mind and giant of an intellect in our business. Giving you the impression that he reaches every conclusion through nothing more than common sense. Making every answer look blindingly simple and really rather obvious.

Like I said, I know I've found myself a reference book of great value.

Jeremy Bullmore - Behind the Scenes in Advertising (Mark III)