One that I wanted to share and hope he doesn't mind me doing so. As you'll also find it on VCCP's twitter page.
This isn't just another wooden soapbox parked in speakers corner. But in my opinion, a well observed and insightful piece on what digital and social media hold for us all.
1. The year that people get to grips with marketing on social networks.
2009 has been the year that a few brands and agencies have produced stand out work that properly leverages the scale and features of social networks and utilities such as facebook and twitter. 'Tag a sofa' campaign for Ikea by Forsman and Bodenfors, Whopper Sacrifice by Crispin Porter + Bogusky and the awesomely popular 4320:LA for V Austrailia by Droga5 are beginning to show people that you can have product relevant, powerful and spreadable ideas that exist in these previously hard to tame media spaces. These campaigns have opened people's mind to a new way of thinking about this sphere that is much more focused on the individual functionality of the platform. Finally, people are recognising that for an idea to work, it must be landed in an existing behaviour.
2. The year that brands begin to realise it's about lighting lots of fires in different places.
Agencies have known that the days of a monolithic creative idea are dead, spending 99% of the pot on one idea, was ironically, how the clients were used to working....all your eggs in one basket, anyone? It's taken a while, and a lot of work from digital agencies and industry folk such as Mark Earls, for clients to catch up. The fact is, digital work is far harder to pre-test than more traditional work because it often involves a new set of behaviours and a deeper, more active experience that the effect of which is much harder to gauge if it's on a smaller scale. How do you test if a viral is viral on a small sample? How would Whopper Sacrifice work if you disabled its 'pass-on' mechanic? Brands who are doing digital best such as Burger King, Penguin Books and Diesel are au fait with creating many cheap, scalable ideas and launching them all, conscious that not all of them will stick. At £50,000 a pop, you could launch 4 ideas for the cost of a TV ad production budget or 4 full page inserts in the nationals. You light 4 fires, you pour petrol on the ones that take, and then you remember what works for next year.
3. The year it becomes less about technology showcases and more about ideas.
I don't think I'd be exaggerating if I said that here is one of the most often clicked, longest played with online ads that has ever been launched. This one probably isn't far behind. You'll notice something about these executions, they are brutally simple and utterly devoid of anything other than basic flash programming. No one is asking permission to access your webcam, asking you to blow into your microphone or making you get tangled up in interactive film. Digital agencies from the early part of the decade were constantly trying to one up each other with new ways of using technology to make even more novel executions, often, at the cost of the idea. Awards were won with novelty, but in the days when consumers have mind-blowing technology coming out of their ears, there's been a clear reversion to the quality and originality of the basic idea. Good news.
4. Someone will figure out how to do something interesting with Google Wave.
I have no idea what it is yet, but it'll happen. I've got my thinking cap on.
5. The Android is nigh.
2010 will be the year that Android grows and grows. It was released early to fanfare amongst geeks and not much noise elsewhere, Android 2.0 is being released as we speak and it will mean that the various devices that run it will get a worthy, mass market, operating system. For all the talk of the size and popularity of the iPhone app store, iPhones are still and will remain a minority. Android will become the mass platform of choice and the integration it offers between cameras, microphones, maps, social networks and GPS will mean that there's potential for brands to release some killer applications.
6. Transparency gets even more radical.
fmylife.com, facebookfails.com, myparentsjoinedfacebook, untagmondays, textsfromlastnight.com etc, the list is of bare-all, social network based sites grows ceaselessly. The teen to 20-something demographic has opened itself up more than anyone could've ever predicted. These sites are pretty relentless and have effectively dissolved privacy boundaries. There's an opportunity for the right brands to be bold enough to get down and dirty in this sphere, or perhaps even figure out applications or spaces that give their audience more opportunities to brag, shame and untag.
7. Crowdsourcing.
Momentum is building, I'd need several more hands than I posses to count the amount of times that Dell's Ideastorm or 'My Starbucks idea' are wheeled out in presentations, yet clients, especially in the UK have been slow to respond. These ideas need continuing investment and can often have an impact on the structure of a business. Walkers managed to get involved to great success with 'Do us a flavour' but opportunities to ask a client to hinge it's whole budget on a crowdsourcing idea that requires above-the-line support don't come up that often. Expect to see smaller initiatives coming out, in CSR, product development and marketing development. This is one of the small fires that Marketing Directors should be very keen to begin starting.
8. The internet will bleed into reality.
People will sort of cut up the internet and use bits of it to augment the real world. It's a hard thing to explain, but you can see a nice example of what I'm talking about below, where Poke London built, using Arduino technology a device that lets the baker tweet out his freshest produce to the surrounding shoreditch ad-men and fancily sneakered designers so they can take a break from Powerpoint and flash coding to gobble a pain au chocolat and a double espresso.
BakerTweet from POKE on Vimeo.
Devices like the Nabaztag (Armenian for rabbit) were way ahead of their time, this was an internet/real world crossover device that launched in 2006...expect to see more of these in 2010.9. Everything will change, but nothing will change at all.
Just as with online ads, the sooner people obsess less over media and technology and more over insight, originality and creativity, the better the work will be and the less presentations you'll have to listen to about 'Why X is the next big thing'.
There is only one big thing, be that in digital or DM. That, my friends is an engaging idea.
10. People will switch-off.
My flatmate arrived home the other day to show me that on his ‘jailbroken’ iPhone, he's programmed buttons on his homescreen which enable him to choose not to receive calls, just be able to make calls and just be able to use the 3G data connection. He's reached the point where he needs to switch off, and so do a lot of people. 83.9% of people sleep with their phone switched on beside their bed, we're so addicted to attention we even want to be woken up by a text at 2.37am, but we're tiring of it. Twitter will have opening hours. Phones will have buttons that let them only be used as data devices or cameras, you'll be able to choose for facebook to only allow you to login 10 times a day. Gmail is already testing a take a break feature that allows you to get on with some real work, and the wonderful Herraiz Soto of Barcelona have produced a writing program that blanks out everything else and plays you soothing music so that you can actually use your laptop to write something of quality, instead of badly formed 140 character sentences about what you had for breakfast that morning.
Ommwriter from Herraiz Soto on Vimeo.
Without doubt, the brands that can get a handle on the fact that people don’t always want to be in touch or pestered will be the brands winning people’s hearts in 2010.
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