The Strategy Review

An essential book for students of what's happening

James Gleick's masterful work "The Information" is taking my breath away.

The quality of scholarship combined with the accessibility and the sheer excitement of information's journey from pre-history to present, post-social, day is superb.

Make a point of reading this remarkable book.

"Otherwise Engaged - Branding In A Connected World"

The digital edition of my recent mini-book on engagement is now available to download free of charge here.

Download Otherwise Engaged by Michael Bayler

(If you still feel compelled to own the remarkably expensive printed version, it's available from Amazon here.)

A video presentation on branding for startups

I just rediscovered this, a talk I gave for Sun Microsystems a couple of years ago. The video and slides are very well put together, unfortunately the host - who shall remain nameless - inserted himself rather shamelessly into the proceedings ... however, if you jump to 02.18 minutes in, there's some rather good stuff there.

 

Kevin Slavin on how algorithms shape our world

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.

 

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

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.

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

"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 ...

The Game of Plotwit

A number of people - not many - a select few - have been seeing cryptic references to The Game of Plotwit on Twitter and Facebook. I launched it a couple of weeks ago with friend and colleague Tom Gueterbock of the excellent gaming company 3rd Sense.

Plotwit's a parlour game designed for micro-media, based on the idea that - for some of us anyway - Smart, Quick and Funny is the new Sexy. We pick a title once a day - a movie or book - and players Tweet by replying to the original Tweet a three word "Plotwit" of the title. The smartest, quickest and funniest entries win the day.

So for example, "The Lord of the Rings" (the movie) could yield a player entry of "Tiny Little Legs", or 'Visit New Zealand". These appear in the world of Twitter as (challenge) #thelordoftherings and (entry) #tinylittlelegs, enabling players to track the game and their own entries - and vote for others (which is done by Retweeting) using the hashtags that drive Twitter.

The original Plotwit - and still to my mind the best - arose when I was talking one day with my friend Steve Brown, the great music consultant. I floated the idea of Plotwit - not at the time as a social game but as something that could be fun ... I said, "Take, for example, I dunno ... Kafka's Metamorphosis?" Without, as I remember, drawing serious breath, he came back: "Bug Goes Mad".

After rolling helplessly round on the floor for a while (well I did), we realised that there was something a bit special there. And that - about a year ago - is where The Game of Plotwit came from.

So, pop over to the page and follow it, if you're a smart / quick / funny person. Or like a bit of a laugh in the working day. Or, and we know you're out there, you're wondering what Twitter's actually for!

Malcolm MacLaren dead in NYC

R.I.P.O.F.F!

Perhaps this is one of MM's finer moments ... 

Prof Robin Dunbar gets deep around the "new friendship"

Key lecture at RSA on real social networking impacts by Connected author

Marketing guru does an E

In the ongoing thread of What Happens to Brands and Branding when the consumer leads the dance, m'learned friend Mark Sherrington's eBook "So You Wanna Know About eMarketing" is a mercifully brief and very rewarding read. Download here and then go back and read his other work ... Mark founded seriously clever and successful firm Added Value back in the day, and was a great inspiration to me.

Doing it for the experience

To Olympia this morning for a quiet Adtech London conference, where despite the evident impact of - yes it's still there - the recession on attendance, we had a very lively and enlightening session on customer experience.

I moderated, with the iron grip they expect from me, and on the excellent panel were Lawrence Merritt of Photobox, Matthew Cashmore of Lonely Planet, David Chalmers of Cisco and Benjamin Braun of British Gas.

Our focal points - which (see iron grip above …) mapped neatly across the key strategic emphases of the panelists, were a) where does customer experience - and its associated benefit, customer engagement - now live in business and brand strategy, b) how does that proceed to play out in terms of the way experience is viewed and managed and c) what approaches to measurement are being adopted?

Without going into too much detail on individual points made - all very succinctly and credibly expressed of course - the following headlines emerged.

First of all, where, till relatively recently, customer experience was just a problem for customer service divisions, it's now - certainly across all the panelists - perceived at the highest levels in the business as a critical driver of marketing and sales value. 

For Photobox and Cisco, the medium is to an overwhelming extent, the message, and not only is their brand equity overwhelmingly held in customer tribes, but remarkably high percentages of revenue - with, one gathered, highly efficient cost levels - are achieved with astute leveraging of both experience and engagement.

Lawrence stressed Photobox's lack of dependence on traditional forms of advertising and its corresponding focus on customer advocacy - what some are calling "earned media" if you like - to drive both brand awareness and hard sales.

For British Gas, a brand with a number of unsurprising challenges, in that customer experience has been - especially around service and billing - till recently so ill-regarded that positive engagement of any kind has been out of the question, a fresh range of online and mobile service initiatives are clearly and meaningfully reversing the experience trend, directly empowering the customer, and establishing both control and clarity to replace the previous sense of murky disinterest. One was struck by the common sense pragmatism and - key element of all experience programs - Utility (OK no pun intended) of the activities Benjamin outlined.

Second, a rigorous and attentive approach to the management and refinement of customer experience - and, critically, processes for the recognition and reward of value-adding customer engagement - feature highly in all successful experience strategies

For Lonely Planet - a bold innovator from their DNA on out - the engagement IS, to a large extent, the business. Matthew reminded the audience that the publisher's earliest days were peppered with thousands of copies of their guides mailed back to them by passionate (not to mention engaged …) users with scores of corrections and additions hot from the field. 

The brand is carrying that focus into all its threads of activity, as their customer base shifts from real to, if you like, virtual backpackers whose concern is less "How do I get there and where can I lie down?", more "How can this location provide the depth and relavance of overall experience I seek from leisure travel?" Matthew also talked in some detail about the attention devoted to testing and refining even the most trivial elements of, say, a web page to ensure that the online experience is as rewarding and engaging as possible.

David talked about the very effective recognition and reward dynamics among passionate Cisco users, to the extent that many of the businesses most valued support teams and even sales people … are customers too.

Third, and perhaps from my own point of view most essential, all of these very diverse operations are, at a gratifyingly high level, acknowledging in their expressed strategies and activities, that the customer really DOES own the brand, and that they - indeed all of us - ignore the impact of customer engagement and the role of customer experience, no longer as a chore, but as a core builder of competitive advantage, at our peril.

Citizen Kane | BFI

Seldom seen on the big screen in recent years, Welles’ witty, gripping film famously views the controversial life of the late Charles Foster Kane (Welles) – a media tycoon partly inspired by William Randolph Hearst – from the sometimes contradictory perspectives of his friends, employees and mistress. It’s an extraordinary work, not just technically (Gregg Toland's cinematography, Bernard Herrmann's score, the editing, design and quietly bravura direction are all superb); but in its dramatic sophistication and thematic richness. An affecting meditation on memory, self-knowledge, solitude and mortality; a wry reflection on fame, fortune and the spirit of America; an exhilarating exploration of the artistic possibilities of the film medium - Citizen Kane is all this… and so very much more.

via www.bfi.org.uk

This is Welles' original trailer for the movie, which the BFI is putting on cinema release on 30th October 09. Somewhat off-piste for this blog of course, but watch the trailer and you'll be - in terms of the dreary fodder we are often obliged to call entertainment - immediately refreshed.

Last year's writers' strike revisited

A personal hero of mine, and source of encouragement when times are tough for those of us loopy enough to dream we could make money out of ideas, is the legendary screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, the man who intimately acquainted an entire generation of movie-goers across the world with Sharon Stone in the hugely popular thriller Basic Instinct.

Joe is notorious for more than this in-itself immense feat. He champions – with the cojones of one who really does not care either way – the role of screen writers as core, not peripheral, to the quality and success of movies and TV shows. And he walks the talk. The man sold a four page treatment – a sketched idea for a movie – for several million dollars to a studio. Deliciously, the film was I gather never made. Joe is also – perhaps understandably given the context and history of his career – very tetchy about changes to his script … along the lines of, if you change one word, I pull the script and the movie is no longer.

Joe, therefore, knows the secret of life on and behind the screen. The only way to win and keep winning in Hollywood (at least at his Olympian level), is to be crazier than anyone who may imagine themselves more powerful than you are, and never, ever, ever, back down.

Perhaps the influence of Joe Eszterhas was finally felt, as the writers of many of the world’s most valuable shows took to the streets.

You can read the ins and outs of the writers’ strike elsewhere of course. But let me point out an interesting set of coincidences that played out around the same time across the globe.

France, as we all know, has been the cultural nemesis of America’s cultural products for the better part of a century, and it’s here that industrial – indeed cultural action – was getting mighty lively. Hollywood may do entertainment better – at least bigger – than the rest, but the French give great social mayhem. And it was the controversial (of course …) French philosopher Jean Baudrillard who pointed out that the true role of Disneyland was not to provide a childlike escape from the reality of life, but to persuade us that the utter fantasy of modern American life is in fact, real.

Moving away from strikes, let’s talk about the other end of the content pipe, and a debate that affects the very core of medial value. Those darn free papers! In London you can’t walk 50 yards without having a chunk of semi-adequate news thrust – literally – into your hands by beaming distributors. I can’t help feeling they suspect every passer-by to be the corporate equivalent of a mystery shopper, checking on levels of enthusiasm and aggression in this guerrilla distribution, this “pushy” media. Along with the “HELLO! Spare a minute for the children of the blind postmen sir!” maniacs who appear to occupy the meagre remaining pavement space left unoccupied by the free paper pushers, I’m afraid really wish THESE people would go on strike. Forever.

What am I on about, what’s my point? My point, or my main point at least, is that all these concurrent phenomena invite us to speculate about – to reconsider – the meaning and value of media content.

What was being withheld from us when Hollywood’s writers of dreams held the studios and stations to ransom? When the greatest television shows in the world … dried up? Was it the fantasy world of our after-dinner flop in front of the telly that suffered? If that’s all it is, then why do we feel this frisson of panic, at the unlikely closure of THE dream factory?

What is the effect of this determined thrusting of news into our hands, not to mention these “attention muggings” resorted to by worthy causes? We know that all of Big Newspaperdom is wondering – right this minute – whether a zero cover price is the only way to go, to sustain the consumer attention that feeds the ad sales that drive the presses. But there seems to be more here than simple commercial imperative.

And what, as stiff-upper-lip Saxons, do we feel when confronted – again via the news media – by those Ballardian images of French rioting?

It’s all about the fight for our attention of course. The French strikers – like it or not – commanded the attention of the authorities and the public – now worldwide. The paper pushers insist – on behalf of their own bosses – that all this selective content-browsing and ad-dodging has got to stop. Back on your heads, as the joke goes. And those patient geniuses behind the folks behind the cameras? They’re just reminding us – like Eszterhas, like Baudrillard, and like the French strikers – of the reality behind the fantasy of modern mediated life.

Books that point the way forward - 1964 to today

Two great movie quotes from the golden age of media keep coming back to my mind … “Who are those guys?” (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) and “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take it anymore!” (Network)

Why so? Well, they speak to me not only of the chasm of alienation (the “otherness” if you will) that is growing between Big Media and the mobile networked consumer, but also the impression of this consumer actively pulling away from prescribed content, brand messaging and anything at all that isn’t, well, 100% on their terms.

A number of excellent thinkers in recent years have taken on the intimidating challenge of helping us a) to understand who those guys are and b) why we/they are mad enough not to take it anymore.

Why isn’t the old model working, how could we reconnect with this lost consumer? Above all, can we stop obsessing the technological and commercial issues, and turn our attention to where value is really being driven, to the social and cultural drivers of Media 2.0.

The New Economist: Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks
Benkler’s weighty and ambitious 2007 masterpiece (the bold title of the book harks back of course to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations) digs deep into the dynamics of what he calls “non-market” value creation (of which User Generated and Shared content is perhaps one of the more simple examples). When the means of production and distribution are free, and when open source culture continues to swell, what are the Big Implications for world commerce. If you’re feeling less than robust, a good idea to pay someone else to read this one for you.

The New Utopian: Pierre Levy, Collective Intelligence
Ah, the French point of view! Always refreshing, always quotable, wildly ambitious, quite frequently wrong … and always guaranteed to upset somebody. (A good thing in itself, I’d say.) Think Baudrillard, think Foucault, think Derrida and dozens more. While clearly off the same style farm, network visionary/sociology professor Pierre Levy’s passionate, smart and very comprehensive look at “just how far we could go” in the era of social networks is a powerful antidote to the (now thankfully dwindling) tsunami of Web 2.0 lunacy

The New Populist: Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody
Now in paperback common language work of genius that manages to do what no one else here has done … to bring the subject of social network value and cultures to life for the ADD-tinged colour supplement readers among us. I fell in love with the title before I even considered buying the book. Probably the must-have in this list, or at least a very good starting point for deeper inquiry.

The New Marketer: Grant McCracken, Flock and Flow
Marketing is no longer the fluffy job it used to be, and the no-nonsense NY-based consultant Mr McCracken takes as his key premise the pivotal Road Warrior (back to those movie lines again) quote, where Mel Gibson (formerly known as Mad Max, now … OK, don’t go there) drawls “You wanna get out of here? You talk to me.” Flock and Flow takes on the fierce task of describing how and why market dynamics now create such challenges for brands, and a manual for how to stay ahead of the curve. An astringent and ballsy work that you need to buy, if only to make sure he writes the next one.

The New Sociologist: Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-identity
With the exception of the next work listed here, the oldest publication. But Lord Giddens’ insight into the touchpoints between self, society and new technology remain to my mind unsurpassed. If you want to know why ringtones are more prized than MP3’s ever will be, but don’t want to read any more about ringtones, MP3’s or anything to do with mobile content (and I’ll bet you don’t …), read this book. Slowly. Sorry, no pictures either.

The Old Master: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
I’m still startled at how many folks in our line have managed to reach maturity without reading the work that started it all in 1964. If you find yourself in that endangered species, I won’t grass you up. But do something about it sharpish, OK?

The Shameful Plug: Bayler and Stoughton, Promiscuous Customers, Invisible Brands
Published in 2002, still more or less holding its own as a manual for digital value creation.

Help!

Wonderful story in the Observer today about the restored version of "Help!" which is showing tonight on BBC 4. Many years after the film was made (obviously) Dick Lester got a formal letter from MTV declaring him, for the work he did directing both of the early Beatles films, "A Hard Day's Night" and "Help!", the father of the modern pop video. His response, apparently, was to IMMEDIATELY write back demanding a blood test! I love the "immediately" ...

Am watching the film now with the kids dipping in and out between it and Bebo ... Whatever's happened since - and with Lennon's murder (a movie about that just hitting the screens in London if you're feeling an excess of Xmas cheer), Harrison's death of cancer, and now the whole McCartney divorce thing - there's been a fair bit to feel dismayed by for a Beatles fan over the decades. Wonderful to get back to unadulterated Fab Four.

I still think the best thing about them was the laughs ... I love the story of Lennon, cornered by a US journo: "John! John! Is Ringo Starr the best drummer in the world?" Responded he, without missing the all-important Beat: "He's not even the best drummer in the Beatles."