The Strategy Review

A kind note from a good (and clever) friend ...

A lovely review of The Artist and what it means in a world of 'infinite connectedness' by @michaelbayler bit.ly/ygrGEV

— tom gueterbock (@tomgoot) January 25, 2012

"The Artist" - Fresh air ... or musty nostalgia? A bit of cultural context

 

Having grown up glued to black and white Hollywood masterpieces from the Golden Age every Sunday afternoon - at the time, it was that, football in the street, or homework - The Artist draws on references that are almost every one entirely familiar. And of course, like almost everyone, I love it.

It's funny - in a sneaky, better-than sort of way - to hear about the poor punters who demanded money back when they found the movie is - well, 99% of it - really silent. And all black and white.

Take a little Singin' In the Rain - well, OK, rather a lot of it - throw in the better Astaire and Rogers masterpieces and a generous sprinkle of the Pickfair silent dramas of pre-1929, when as we know The Jazz Singer blew silence away forever, and, aside from the genuinely glorious acting that features in every minute of The Artist (and how good to see the great Malcolm McDowell, in a tasty cameo role that surely he'll treasure more than much of his later work) you've got a good summary of the tone and structure of the movie.

There's been - if only prompted by the Academy Award nominations that the movie has earned - a certain amount of soul-searching Way Out West about THE MEANING of The Artist. At a time when the major studios are scrambling to differentiate their still-potent output from the millions of frat-party fart-lighting and cute kitten clips on offer to the less discerning audience via the usual sources, any film this quiet, this unswashbuckling, this unstarridden, and, well, this small, is going to get folks a-talkin'. And a-worryin'.

It strikes me - not that I know much - that THE POINT of this lovely film is to remind us that magic - and Hollywood was always about magic - only works hand-in-hand with severe restriction. An empowered, choice-spoilt audience with all the magic they'll ever need in the palm of their hand, will paradoxically find magic almost nowhere. (Magic is also about the things that you could never imagine yoursself doing. Not just special effects. It's more about writing, in the end, than CGI.)

But put them (well, me, and many thousands of others, anyway) in front of a black and white, silent film for 100 minutes on a cold, wet afternoon, and The Artist returns magic, along with romance, compassion, tragedy, comedy, pathos, cuteness, in spades.

I keep telling anyone who'll listen - for reasons I'll explain below - that in 1929, 95,000,000 Americans went to the movies every week. Of course, like my Sunday afternoons with Busby Berkeley and friends, they had nothing better to do. As the every-tiggerish Umair Haque pointed out some years ago, before moving on to larger econonomic matters, there was a time when attention was infinitely plentiful, and media - stuff to watch - was rare, to the point of being god-given.

And this - actually rather brief, in the grander scheme - Golden Age of the screen was very much built on the profoundly humble, often mundane, rarely privileged, and perhaps above all, physically grounded lives of its audience.

Which brings me to my conclusion.

Any nostalgia that I felt on seeing The Artist was, in the end, little to do with a hankering for the age of the silent movie - those Sunday afternoons weren't THAT much fun, believe me - and all to do with a pang of the loss of a simpler age in the much more recent past ...

One where our infinite connectedness, power to choose, limitless access to channels for self-expression, and our regal bestowing of attention on media objects on the merest whim (with disenfranchised consumer brands creeping around the edges of Facebook, Twitter and the rest, beckoning and gurning like the dancing dads at your 18th) had not yet made us like cranky, jaded children after far too many sweets, allowed to stay up far too late for our own good.

Is The Artist, therefore, one last longing look back, or a sneak peek forward, with perhaps a promise of happier times for moviemakers, beyond today's gruelling battle for the attention of these spoiled, rather unattractive children?

I'll say it's neither, not for me anyway. It's a glorious example - reminder in fact - of what occasionally happens when storytelling and acting talent is left alone to do what it does well, which is not merely to give us yet another expensive, instantly-forgettable chunk of content (I love blockbusters as well as the next bloke, by the way) but to touch our hearts deeply, with a far smaller, more daring, more caring slice of real magic.

Dedicated to the late Jonathan Cecil, who cared enough to dig out and bring me hard-to-find, connoisseur's books about the great silent movie stars when I was a silly South London boy, and who would have adored - and written far more insightfully and lovingly about - this film. R.I.P.

 

The End Of Strategy? Post #1

Introduction

This is the first in a series of posts that will form a rolling white paper, examining and getting to grips with what I have come to think of as the remarkable challenge facing organisations of all kinds - and above all, businesses: the state of perpetual disruption. 

In the two areas I work most in - media and marketing - and in particular at their points of overlap, where questions about, for example, the role and value of advertising, and the true impacts of social media, continue to proliferate without satisfactory resolution, there's a pining for one outcome above all. 

When will things go back to some sort of "normal"?

The Year Of ... 

Every year in recent memory has been "The Year Of Something", hasn't it? The last 5 years have each been The Year Of Mobile, for example. 

And what happens? The devices come thicker and faster, consumers pick them up, run with them, co-create with both each other and the new technology giants - GAFA as I've heard them dubbed (Goggle, Apple, Facebook and Amazon) - myriad new forms of value. It all rushes forward. 

But here's the thing. "The Year Of Mobile" never actually arrives. And no one gets more of a real grasp on things than we had last year or the year before. 

And yes, it has indeed been "The Year Of Apple, Google (incl YouTube) Amazon and Facebook" ... for each year as long as we can clearly remember. But the GAFA giants are now almost ecosystem fixtures, the shiny utilities of some kind of new economy. They'll quite happily take the dollar bill in their respective business and revenue models, but really they have no more useable insights for us than British Gas or Thames Water. 

Asking Google or Facebook what you should do, is rather like asking Lloyds of London where you should make your investments. They're generally nice enough people, but it's not their job to care. (And actually, they don't know either.)

We are, it seems, on our own now. 

The new normal

And there will be no returning to "normal" any more, in the sense of familiar, predictable models and markets for exploiting content, for building brands and above all, for developing and executing strategies. 

I intend no melodrama, but it's really over. 

If strategy is above all about the way we think, then an environment in which what we think - and what we think we see - are  now invariably inadequate, always too slow, and often badly wrong, no longer lends itself to what we can call outbound strategy - where we plan for and then "do things" to our markets that create competitive advantage.

Strategies overall - and strategies for innovation are no exception - are only meaningful when their objects, and, just as crucially as we'll see - the contexts within which those objects exist, and within which value is identified, articulated, productised, communicated and eventually delivered, remain more or less fixed, relative to meaningful market coordinates. 

Things need to sort of stay where - and indeed what! - they were yesterday, if you like, for new forms of value to be confidently developed and placed into the market.

This is no longer the case, and sets up a powerful cause of the perpetual disruption that, I am arguing, will plague businesses and their brands in the post-digital era. 

We learned, at a fundamental level, to view change as occasional, disruption as rare - to be feared, exceptional - and innovation as something elusive but achievable, that businesses "do" to markets, to sustain and now and then refresh what has been, till recently, broadly visible, explicable and manageable positions for their various brands. 

But Normal, from here on, is a state of perpetual - and accelerating - flux. 

Impacts and implications

We are already, for practical purposes, passing through the so-called Information Age. Where are we now then? 

On one hand, I'd feel comfortable calling this "The Age Of Disruption". But that - as well as leaving us despondent and rudderless - implies that there's a plausible end point to this new state of perpetual flux. No, we need something both a little less apocalyptic, and a little more realistic. 

I've written periodically about The Age Of Meaning for the past 6 or 7 years, and while I wouldn't dream of claiming to have had the answer to our profound conundrum all along, I do feel that when we come to grips with perpetual disruption, it will be in part because we have finally - with backs against the wall - learned the fine art of the management of meaning.

I'll be returning to the management of meaning later in this process, but for now, I'm sticking to the exploration of the problem. To jump ahead too quickly, to rush a solution, will be to underestimate the problem and compromise any sort of useful insights and ways forward. 

For now, we have a huge conundrum to deal with. 

The trading context of customers, competition, culture and communications is constantly accelerating in both speed and scale, already far beyond a level at which business can usefully react with so-called innovations .

This context has become, in the end, irresistible. It consists, at its most basic, of billions of connected consumers, the technology giants that both enable and add value to their connectedness, and the second-by-second interaction between them, that feeds and fosters an especially concerning new kind of value. Benckler, in his contemporary economics masterpiece The Wealth of Networks, calls this "non-market value": an inauspicious term, no?

Our issue here is not merely the now-tiresome challenge of how to evaluate and thence monetise, for example, the big social networks. It's more far-reaching, and concerning. 

The new post-digital trading context is more than just value-neutral ... It's "value-hostile", precisely because, unlike any other in history, it's no longer neutral ... passive ... waiting, if you like, for something to happen, for our decisions and actions to stir it up. We have, till recently, been able to take quite well-researched products or services (indeed, more recently, consumer experiences) and push them into the market, accompanied by a fairly cogent but above all confident program of communications.

This happy paradigm - whatever happened to paradigms, by the way? - has been supported and reinforced above all by a context that kindly agreed to stand still while we marketed to it. Channels - even early online channels played nice - were neutral; consumers were usefully bound by a combination of postcode and ponderous research programs; insights were valid and fresh for, well, sometimes years! 

Oh, and data ... Well, there was so little of it, and it changed so rarely ... We were even able to sometimes make use of it, before the music and the dance started again. 

I don't have to bang on, surely, about how little of this comfy value chain remains. Dismantled byinformation, wielded by immensely fluid tribes of flattered, entitled consumers, whose very empowerment and daily delight by the GAFA Crew, is paralleled by the disempowerment and daily dismay of the enterprises tasked with somehow delivering - let alone maintaining (let alone predicting!) - something called shareholder value. 

There will be answers. But first we need to fully explore and grasp where the levers of power have moved to, and which of those we are entitled and able to get a grip on to begin navigating a cultural and commercial landscape that will no longer stand still.

Till next time. Thanks for reading.  

 

The ever-thoughtful Brian Millar ...

The ever thoughtful @michaelbayler beat @theeconomist to it on Kodak bit.ly/xqdJIm

— arthurascii (@arthurascii) January 12, 2012

Bob Lefsetz on Kodak

The great Bob Lefsetz weighs in on #kodak ... always worth a read. lefsetz.com/wordpress/inde…

— Michael Bayler (@michaelbayler) January 9, 2012

A closer look at the implications of Kodak's demise

Billions of utterly unique, deeply meaningful images

The Kodak Brownie transformed personal human experience, in that it enabled people worldwide to capture, own, and share (note, not in the way we “share” today, but at a genuinely physical, intimate level) images of their own lives.

In a sense, Eastman Kodak was the Ford Motor Co. of modern personal identity. And the deep, sustainable and above all personal meaning that those gawky, prosaic, kiss-me-quick shots offered to consumers was nothing short of immense.

When Kodak eventually invested in some formal brand positioning work, they were able, without effort or loss of credibility, to take global ownership of one, fundamentally human idea.

Kodak decided to own “Memories”. Sounds easy, in a way.

But the key insight here is not that a brand agency then created a marketing and advertising manual, that then enabled all sorts of other agencies to create all sorts of brand communications that cemented their commercial monopoly over Memories.

What we need to grasp is the sheer human impact of the Kodak brand and its technology, but most of all, the cultural and personal weight that the process and the images that emerged represented …

… from lugging that bulky clunky item of luggage on holiday or to a wedding …

… through how to load a film without exposing and ruining it …

… then how to take the film out when you’d finished it, again without exposing it …

… to the simple joy of waiting for your prints to come back in the post or from the pharmacy …

… through to the – often awful, sometime happy, but always very meaningful – shared experience of “our holiday snaps”!

So what happened to Kodak?

Did “Memories” suddenly lose their value? Did a Shawn Fanning sweep in with some illegal Napster or Grokster for photographs?

Well, we can obviously say that “digital happened”. And certainly Kodak was terribly slow off the mark when the digital image came to town.

One senses that the Kodak board saw digital – like so many other industries have … let’s make sure we’re not marching in that number – not as the global cultural earthquake it would shortly become, but more as a supply chain issue with minor implications at the consumer interface: digital cameras at one end, CD’s instead of prints at the other, and so on.

No, it was infinite copy and infinite sharing that did for Kodak.

Because, missing from that formerly unassailable position astride all the world’s “Memories”, was a simple fact that has great relevance for our current discussion. It was the context, not just the content, that created and sustained an awful lot of the Kodak value.

Until we were all joined up by networks, Kodak’s Memories (moments of profound personal and family meaning, if you like) were special, unique, one-of-a-kind, and could only be shared with a privileged few.

In other words, it was not just the images themselves (quality of photo, with a nod to the obvious exceptions, never per se made them intrinsically meaningful) but the severe technical limitations within which they were captured, processed and shared, that gave them their rarity, their exclusivity, and, in the end, their commercial value. It was hard to take them, hard to make them, and very hard indeed to share them.

New players, new rules, bad ending

But when Flickr, PhotoBucket (among countless others) and ultimately, that category killer of all category killers, Facebook, became the new platforms for worldwide photographic activity, meaning and value, that rich, snug, primitive context that gave Kodak’s snapshots their wonderful, now lost significance … disappeared.

And of course, the cameras built into mobile phones threw the iconic snapshot into the eye of the connectivity storm.

It’s universal access and shareability, not just “being digital”, that dilute to oblivion the traditional impact and power of the physical image.

When my photos, yours, Britney’s, Robbie’s and Justin’s, are just confetti in the hurricane of billions upon billions of deeply personal, but somehow now entirely anonymous, meaningless snapshots … what happens to the brands, products and the services that supported them?

 

Big lessons from Kodak

Yet more interesting commentary on #kodak ... Folks are seeing the big entertainment analogy: Kodak's digital dilemma latimes.com/news/opinion/l…

— Michael Bayler (@michaelbayler) January 8, 2012

Cord-cutting update

More on this interesting thread ... Pay TV Subscribers Canceling Service, Going Online marketingcharts.com/television/pay…

— Michael Bayler (@michaelbayler) January 8, 2012

The eternal question ... consumer engagement: WTF? SWF?

Good question ... Why Is Consumer Engagement So Hard? adage.com/u/61SVYa

— Michael Bayler (@michaelbayler) January 8, 2012

Lessons from Sub Pop

Growing a great culture business in the face of digital, an essential read: Sub Pop a bright spot in record industry latimes.com/entertainment/…

— Michael Bayler (@michaelbayler) January 8, 2012

This move by an NYC actor made my day ... superb, subversive and ballsy

 

Jerry Lieber R.I.P.

In a rare moment of star time - at least one that I don't feel silly bragging about - I had lunch with Jerry and his delightful wife. Corky Hale (a jazz harpist ... figure that out) at their house overlooking Hollywood, maybe in 1986.

It's one of the few recollections I have of the music business that gives me unqualified joy, and a sense of real privilege. It's not just about the songs, it's about the spirit of the man, which came through loud and clear while he and his wife entertained a goofy and ill-informed young English guy. Who won't ever forget it.

More on those Chinese Apple stores ...

Y'know, I can't get this story out of my mind. And I'm mystified that we haven't seen a MASS of fuss around it.

If I'm right, at the last count there were 22 fully-functioning, fully-branded bootleg Apple stores that had been discovered in China.

Now, I'm an old music business hand, who recalls when it wasn't consumers (with the hysterical exception of the "Home Taping Is Killing Music" campaign that ran in the 80's when I was still working in retail ...) who were held accountable for piracy, it was Middle- and Far-Eastern factories.

Those appalling quality bootleg cassettes of Police albums that overseas travellers brought back with them still live in my ears.

A very funny twist to the story is that of course, of all the companies that feature more recently in the music industry's "we are victims of the most appalling crime" complaint, one of the most reviled is ... Apple. While Steve Jobs was welcome with joyful weeping when iTunes launched, now almost everybody on the business side hates him. Nothing like a little "you stole my toy" resentment.

So now, we've come full circle in a way that you really couldn't write ... the same relentless commercial amorality that produced those unlistenable copies of Outlandos D'Amour - selling product that of course comes out of the back - or front even - of the factories that make the very same beautiful laptop on which I'm writing this - has produced a fully-working facsimile of the entire Apple brand experience.

Some of the kids who work in these bootleg stores truly believe - or at least want to, or maybe just don't care ... - that they're working for the man. The Jobs man, I mean.

But the thing that tickles me most of all is that, of all the many things that music business hacks lament, right up there is the demise of the old-style, mom-and-pop record store. And guess where all that buzz has migrated to? Well, think back to your last Apple Store visit.

Hmmmmm ....

The fake Apple stores in China

This is the original blog by BirdAbroad with tons of photos and ... well ... pithy commentary. A must read.

MySpace sold finally

MySpace sold for more or less nowt ... News Corp to retain a small stake: as you would ...

A book that really matters ...

"The Secret War Between Uploading and Downloading" by Peter Lunenfeld is the most insightful work on web realpolitik I've read in a couple of years.

His analysis/analogy of how ideas emerge to take hold of public discourse and then fade again, based on the Gestalt notion of "figure/ground" (you'll get it when you read it ...) has altered the way I see the webworld, and will significantly change the way I talk to clients about what's going on out there.

Do yourself a favour: if you fancy the book, do the right thing, don't just hop onto Amazon, visit the amazing Artwords Bookshop on Rivington St in Hoxton (there's a branch in Hackney too) where Robert (thanks Robert!) turned me onto this very important work when I was browsing there the other day.

Smart, passionate shops like this clearly deserve and badly need our support.

Oh come on!

Nuff said ...

This looks like a great piece of real branded entertainment!

Finally ... maybe someone's got it right? We'll see ... the show launches today.

It's remarkable to see Hiscox, a totally B2B brand, take the leap in to BE. What's also interesting is how they've done exactly what they should strategically, by finding the elemants of their brand that need sustained dramatisation via narrative and translating them into a fun, shareable sitcom (yes, sitcom ...) that will appeal directly to their target audience.

We'll be able to see the growth of the show on YouTube. I've subscribed to Leap Year - something I almost never do - to see how this courageous move plays out over the summer. I recommend you do the same.

 

Social media, football and The Family ...

The Mafia - that most connected of organisations - has apparently been using test messaging via a popular football TV show to keep those behind bars in the loop.

Apple iPhone scandal (and Google ads)

This article from The Independent today worth a read, but you gotta love the Google ads that run alongside ...

 
 

R.I.P. Dennis Hopper ... a great talent, a great survivor!

One Nike ad to rule them all?

My name is Michael ... and I'm an Apple addict

Well, I've taken the first step and put down the drugs.

I mean of course, that I almost bought - to the point of actually putting in the order and paying for it - an iPad for delivery in early June. 

I got over-excited after a rather good day at the office. I decided I needed a reward - deserved it indeed. I'd had THAT email - announcing the availability of iPads in the UK from May 28th.

I've gotten into the habit of glancing at THOSE emails briefly and binning them ... you know why. This one I kept, sensing that I might need to come back to it. And yesterday, after my moment of excitement, I surged through the process, put down £600 on my card, and logged off.

I couldn't sleep. For the first time, I felt that I'd been mugged by my own relationship with the Apple brand. Not that the iPad isn't a glorious piece of kit. But it's not - right now at least - for me. 

What put the lid on it for me was when I got the order confirmation back this morning. The May 28th availability had turned into a 2nd week of June delivery.

Reader, I've had enough. I love my MacBook Pro, I love my iPhone, I'm really excited about OS 4.0.

But I went back, cancelled the whole order, and I don't - really don't - think I'm in the market for an iPad.

As of now - one day at a time - I'm Apple sober.

"Doghouse" ads for JC Penney 2008

From a couple of years ago ... perhaps the funniest long-form ad ever?

Also check out Return to the Doghouse ... absolute genius.

Unreleased Exile on Main St track with video

Remember when the music business was truly exciting? Exile reissue 17th May 2010 has obliged me to cough up £100 for the whole shebang ... vinyl, book, postcards, CD's and DVD ... and you know what? Feels like a bargain.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/mpd/permalink/m3LHHSYQZG7ZJ6

Martin Mills on surviving the Web ... and thriving

Always interesting to hear what Beggars are up to and - via Bob Lefsetz - I got to hear about this interview.

Let the man speak for himself ...

Smirnoff Experience - Berlin

Rarely does one get the opportunity to claim even vague involvement with a strategically sound and well-executed piece of consumer engagement blended with experiential.

Congratulations to all involved. Now do it again :-)

Understanding Engagement - Part Five: A Case in Point

Runners are Nike’s original audience … and they’re a peculiar, isolated breed: it’s a bit like fishing, an exclusive and mysterious passion.

Nike and Apple developed and announced their Nike + venture several years ago, bringing together two of the worlds brand icons in one tech-led brand experience initiative.

The Nike + product at its most basic tracks your runs, coaches you, and enables you to upload the details of every run. There are motivational tools too, as well as cute functions like a booster tune. Sadly perhaps, the most popular one is “Eye Of The Tiger”.

Tens of thousands of runners are using the service to form virtual clubs – and to tell the stories of not just their runs, but of building a more sweeping Identity story about the process of “becoming a bigger, better Me”;

The shared data of their runs is alchemised into personal and tribal capital, and this most isolated of hobbies becomes deeply social and powerfully rewarding.

With Nike +, a runner’s Identity is tribalised and legitimised: “I Am A Runner!”

A continuing socialised narrative of struggle, achievement and progress, gives regular, reinforcing Expression to that Identity;

These powerful, transformational experiences – both personal and tribal – grow Consumer Equity. We can see the fresh access and Brand Intimacy with key influencers and consumers that Nike has created – warmth, trust, and willingness to engage.

Understanding Engagement - Part Four: Advocacy and Amplification

We’re rightly fascinated by Advocacy. 

Not only because positive word of mouth has long been recognised for its power and relative impact.

But also because, in a media context where access and permissions become constantly tougher to achieve, and when online media and digital tools have created a whole new layer of consumer connectedness and influence over brand equity …

… the opportunity to go beyond mere “occasional serendipitous buzz”, to repeatably recognise, deliver, tribalise and measure networked consumer intimacy seems now within reach.

So what – really – drives the Advocacy that will drive our brands deeper Behind The Line?

The roots of truly credible, sustainable brand advocacy lie in smart, observant, consumer-led brand innovation. This “true advocacy” can’t be bought in the same way that we have historically bought media: the best brand advocacy is earned.

Despite a logical connection and superficial resemblance, advocacy is not the same as loyalty: the dynamic’s utterly different; furthermore, while any loyal customer is a powerful asset to a brand, our advocates need many specific extra attributes in order to be of positive value;

But first – and most -  of all, what’s in it for the consumer?

When consumers act as brand advocates, they’re rarely promoting the brand, but that aspect of themselves that the brand helps them feel good about: in other words, a facet of their own identity, not the brand’s – identifying with the brand, and then speaking about themselves, using the brand as a conduit. 

When we’re dealing with this phenomenon, traditional planning and measurement are less central, and personal media and tribal models of engagement become important.

This consumer – strongly influenced by tribal opinions and trends – controls the game of attention and media value, saying “Never mind about your brand. Tell me about … myself!”

So … advertising used to be just about distribution of content and messaging … here it’s consumers themselves who are distributed: their “personal brand messages”, pushed out via ringtone, via carefully-monitored brand purchases, and of course via their media selections.

This we can call “The Distributed Me”.

We know all about brand equity.

This new “Consumer Equity” is the extra value a brand creates in the experience of today’s in-control consumer, no longer just promising, but repeatably delivering enhanced Consumer Identity and Consumer Expression;

This is the new currency of premium brand communications: it’s this with this that we “pay the consumer” for the Intimacy – the warmth, trust and receptiveness and accessibility – that we need. 

What do we buy when we buy a premium brand?

Most of all, we buy access to a story of which we can take some personal ownership.

It’s the new, bigger, richer story of Me, and I need help to live in it.

This means I seek to accessorise myself with the tools of Social Display, because it’s not enough to succeed …

… others must see it happening and share it with me;

Today, the trappings of the premium brand are almost all social: it’s a new language spoken by the connoisseurs, the (very small) club of aficionados, the inner circle, the “people who know”.

Many of the most important communication opportunities and brand experiences in premium are delivered via or in the context of the tribe;

In fact, these days it’s also the tribe that defines many of those attributes.

Premium brand communications need to support and enable me to enact two ideas about my Consumer Identity.

I am both unique, and I am part of an exclusive tribe. 

These are interlocking, mutually reinforcing elements to be managed in parallel by the brand.

While personal concierge-type services and experiences are often used to build the sense of my special uniqueness, the complementary tribal affiliations are built with, for example, exclusive contract publishing magazines and restricted brand-sponsored events.

Tribal belonging is also powerfully built – not always by brands but certainly by luxury elites (art, wines, yachting, haute couture and so on) using private Knowledge and Codes.

These enable the all-important Social Display which commonly forms the Expression opportunity for the premium consumer.

How on earth can we engage with and manage this troublesome new dynamic? Don’t worry, we can do it.

The Whole Equation ... Revisited

Like many media folks – or the lucky ones – I just made it back to London from MIPTV in Cannes, in the wake of the Icelandic volcano crisis. Hopefully by the time you read this, it’ll be resolved and everyone will have made it home!

For the first time at MIP I think, the agenda, the featured speakers and the mood of the delegates came together to really embrace and engage with “what comes next”.

Talk of digital was everywhere, and the digitally-led “Content 360” element of the conference was both heavily attended and much-discussed. Interesting also to see not only Ogilvy – to my mind still one of the great agencies – supporting MIP for the fourth year running, but also clients from Coke and Nestle both in attendance, and actively participating in keynotes, workshops and branded content sessions. Finally an important corner is being turned, and we saw this at MIP 2010.

Entertainment, of course, has always looked dangerously simple from the outside. Listen to Scott Fitzgerald – one of Hollywood’s tragic casualties – writing in The Last Tycoon:

“You can take Hollywood for granted like I did, or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve for what we don’t understand. It can be understood, too but only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.”

But today there’s another Whole Equation (or perhaps a significantly extended version of the established one) that we in entertainment must engage with, analyse and solve, if we are to unlock the new value, models and revenue streams that are demanded by the profound cultural flux that processing power and connectedness bestowed on our generation.

It’s an equation with the new consumer – totally connected, empowered and full of high expectation – at its heart. And, just like the traditional Hollywood model, it looks at first sight deceptively simple.

I advise divisions of substantial media players such as Fremantle, SyCo, Sky and Sony ATV, and “across the bridge”, brand advertiser clients such as Diageo (currently the world’s largest spirits company), Telefonica (the giant Spanish telco group) and Bacardi Global Brands. Most of my work is with senior executives who are asking themselves of this new consumer, just as Butch and Sundance did as they were pursued across America by their righteous and relentless persecutors … “Who ARE those guys?”

If you believe, like most do, that there’s a troubling shift on the content side in terms of new models, walk a mile in the shoes of a global CMO. The tried and true models of advertising investment and return are just not hitting the button the way they used to.

It’s my job to help “These Guys” understand “Those Guys” … To get to grips with the new consumer, and find convincing, sustainable, repeatable ways of moving marketing investment into not just reaching eyeballs with brand messaging, but getting over the wall, to seize and retain the quality attention of this prickly beast and its equally challenging – and apparently limitless – tribes of globally-connected fellows.

What concerns me about any post-digital media and entertainment innovation initiative that – without hesitation – puts Content at the heart of the equation is that … well, it’s not as simple as that anymore. We’re finding on the brand side that consumer-centric thinking – and this starts with a lot of smart online listening and analysis – is beginning to yield the effective, impactful and measurable impacts in the badlands of social media, content strategies and mobile, that the faltering steps of traditional advertising now demands.

This is not to say that great entertainment providers should be quaking in their boots in the face of Facebook and Twitter. There are those who argue that, but not me. Superb movies, TV and music speak – and earn – for themselves. But my point is both more blunt and more subtle.

Brands are still spending all in about $650bn per year on reaching “Those Guys”. Many of the giant advertisers are currently – rightly I believe – obsessed with moving significant spend into what’s called engagement marketing. Much of the flurry around the subject of so-called Branded Content derives from this trend. An awful lot of brand spend is heading this way.

The big movie and TV studios do one thing marvellously well. You call it entertaining audiences. Brands call it consumer engagement.

If we’re going to make the 360 thing – which means different things  to different people – really work, we need to bring these two highly diverse groups together in the same meaningful discussion. The brand on one side and the content on the other, naturally have enormous roles to play. But at the centre of the circle – the equation if you like – sits neither of these. 180 + 180 does not in this case equal 360.

It’s the new consumer. Hi there!