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.)

What we talk about when we talk about Engagement

In the light of last week's Facebook IPO, now seems like a very good time to revisit the still-vexatious issue of Engagement.

This article, published today by the excellent MediaTel Newline, attempts to untangle some of the key misconceptions that appear to be holding us back.

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.

 

A challenge to Big Dada (yes, Dada ...)

With kind permission from the excellent MediaTel Newsline, this is a well-received, rather tiggerish piece I wrote in late April on the true role and value of data for marketers.

The goal was to debunk at least some of the Big Data nonsense, much of which is actually blocking the way forward for what I've come to call "Small Data" and it's crucial future role in creating meaningful consumer value.

The already over-extended notions of "targeting" and so-called "relevance" are also in my sights, I'm afraid. Sorry 'bout that, fanboys ...

Anyway, here is the piece, and I expect to have a second MediaTel article unpicking the conundrum of Engagement online early this week.

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.

 

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.  

 

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?

 

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.

Oh come on!

Nuff said ...

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 ...

 
 

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.

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!

Understanding Engagement - Part Three: Getting Past Digital

Technology alone doesn’t tell us where to anchor the value of digital to a brand. 

Digital tools and systems are by now ubiquitous on both the demand and supply sides of the market.

It’s to affluent consumers themselves that we must look. Their expectations of complete control, “my time, my place, my terms” access, and their consistent avoidance of interruptive messaging, define the rules of attention.

Digital tools – the web, the mobile, IM and so on – are most usefully distinguished in this complicated landscape by their unprecedented closeness to the consumer. 

If mass media provide a sort of background chorus, the new digital services, in sharp contrast, are leading players … they have the ear and eye of the consumer at close quarters. In other words, this is a new challenge of Intimacy between consumer and brand.

And Intimacy, as we all know, is not that easy.

Digital tools are as much guardians of consumers’ pet likes and hates as they are – more traditionally – vehicles of consumption.  They express and enact the needs and values of the consumer. 

Getting close to our consumer – getting inside the gate in order to communicate with any credible effectiveness against the background of media noise – now requires the delivery of “up-front value”, rather than a bland, one-size-fits-all brand promise. 

It requires the sort of recognition and intelligent sensitivity that you’d expect from the concierge in your favourite boutique hotel. 

This is all about what we can call The New Intimacy. And let’s be clear: owning information about an individual is nowhere near the same as having a meaningful relationship with them. 

The intimate consumer relationship is built not in the database, but at the interface. Intimacy happens at close quarters, in real time. 

And this, if you buy the argument so far, is both the real promise and the massive challenge of consumer connections planning.

The networked, digitally empowered consumer has created an “infinitely small, infinitely large”, intimate media space, owned no longer by the media industry, but by this increasingly private - yet increasingly tribal – individual

We can call this the I-zone, as in I for Intimacy

Crossing the chasm both into and across the heart of the I-zone, is perhaps the most urgent challenge in consumer marketing today.

Tribes as well as individuals have their I-Zones … both are ring-fenced by digitally managed preferences, and tend to vigorously resist invasion by uninvited guests.

Why? Because the I-Zone reflects and supports the identity of individual or tribe … just as we feel slightly mugged when we’re sent mobile spam: individual or tribal … it’s all Personal.

It’s no longer just “media”.

Where does this leave media then? 

Stepping back, the most significant single impact of the digital revolution is a complete flip in value.

The Morecambe and Wise Xmas show – perhaps Carson in the US – in their heydays commanded the sort of audience numbers (and, importantly, their undivided attention …) that we dream of today.

Attention was everywhere – and media was very very scarce …

… meaning that consumers would happily pay for their entertainment by allocating their (cheap and plentiful) attention to brand communications;

Now media is everywhere, and the attention of the valuable consumer is the rare, precious commodity we must court;

This leads to a new model of media value and a new currency: Return On Attention.

So … what are the new rules of “ROA”?

Today’s consumer is spoiled for choice in terms of free, powerful, accessible and easy-to-use digital tools for play, creativity and communication: we can call these “Box X”: they’re what’s expected, almost a birthright for the younger consumer.

Attempts by brands to apply Box X-type offerings as engagement tactics (Coke’s early music downloads promotions service is perhaps a case in point) tend to be met with a consumer shrug.

However, when we a) understand what’s already happening in the Box X of our consumers’ digital life and then b) find ways to enhance those activities with experiences that are otherwise difficult for consumers to do themselves …

… we’re creating what we can call “Box Y”. 

This is where the value-added Return On Attention begins, and where powerful, sustainable consumer>brand Intimacy originate.

Understanding Engagement - Part Two: Looking "Behind The Line"

Advertising used to be all about media. Media is all about buying and selling consumer attention. Consumer attention used to be a more or less passive player in the game of media.

Think of a bowling alley, with the alley as a channel, the ball as a brand; the skittles at the end of the alley, waiting to be knocked over and racked up again, are … consumers!

The bowler – just like an agency managing a campaign – hurls the big heavy ball again and again down the alley, scoring points by knocking over as many skittles as possible. 

This is how the traditional eyeball/impression-based media planning and buying business of reach and frequency works. And when we’re looking for large-scale brand awareness, there’s still no better way to achieve our goals.

And let’s not imagine that it doesn’t take considerable skill and size to knock over lots of skittles, and do so repeatably. It certainly does.

The problems for bowling alley-style advertising begin, however, when the hitherto passive skittles wake up, start chatting to each other, and moving about.

With the Internet, an entirely new and disruptive type of dynamic appeared in media. If Media 1.0 is best summarised with our bowling alley analogy, then Media 2.0 resembles nothing so much as a pinball machine.

We fire the ball (which again stands in for the brand) – with perhaps an illusion of control – up onto the board. 

Note that the board is sealed in glass: we can see exactly what’s happening, but can do more or less nothing about it (we’ll come back to flippers and nudging …) after launching the brand/ball into play.

And what does happen to the ball? 

It’s the bumpers at the top of the board that produce the high scores. With all the flashing lights, pumping and thumping noises and bells, our brand/ball is bashed back and forth around and between the bumpers. 

And note: each of these bumpers has what our skittle consumer entirely lacked – an energy of their own. 

They push back.

This is what today’s active, tribal consumers do with information, with brand communications, with media of any kind. 

With the new control and energy provided by the web - also by increasingly rich-featured mobile – they, not we, determine the flow of the game and the score.

We do in pinball have access to those feeble digits, the board’s flippers: in the course of a campaign, we have the occasional opportunity to step into the game. 

To do what? One thing only: to use the “flippers” to drive the ball back to that high-scoring cluster of rambunctious bumpers: to keep the brand in the new game of tribal media.

When all else fails, perhaps we can try a frustrated “nudge” of the pin table. But when we push our 21st century consumer too hard, most of the time the machine just tilts, and it’s game over.

This is dramatically different from what went before.

Understanding Engagement - Part One: "Who Are Those Guys?"

This series of posts is an introduction to how brands can convert digital strategies and tactics into manageable, measurable and sustainable consumer Intimacy, Advocacy and Amplification.

The overall dynamic – when we get it right – is about taking content and brand “Behind The Line” into tribal and viral media, and ensuring that a meaningful, sustainable dialogue with - and between - consumers and their tribes is ignited and managed forwards.

Let’s put this in some context.

Today, our sense of who we are, and our ways of making sense of the world, increasingly gravitate to People Like Us.

Trust in church, state and commerce have dropped dramatically in 15 years, in parallel with a huge surge in consumer to consumer (C2C) communications;

Especially among premium brands, permissions for brands are mediated and controlled by consumer tribes, while premium value is both conferred and driven up by acceptance and C2C messaging between tribal consumers.

Today, with so many compelling and free experiences being instantly available to the aspirational, connected consumer, smart brands seek to understand the experiences and lifestyle meaning these consumers find in their tribes …

… recognising that new type of value, and finding ways of significantly enhancing it with brand-relevant services, and being powerfully rewarded with networked approval and positive buzz.

Where previously the isolated consumer was the “final destination” or end-point of brand communications, now, remarkably, the tribal networked consumer is becoming a departure point for “direct to tribe to consumer” communications.

Brand messaging is carried to hitherto hard-to-reach locations, both into and across tribes of consumers: access, permissions and precious intimacy can turn into highly valuable advocacy and amplification.

The brand plays a critical but still partially understood role here, as a facilitator of the dramatically different new consumer experiences that the digital revolution has enabled.

When we make these socially aspirational consumers happy, we both equip and motivate them to share their stories – with our brands riding along in the slipstream – into, across and beyond the networked tribes.

Freely available media tools such as YouTube, and the very social networks within which these identities and narratives are enacted day-to-day, provide the means of very effective and economical production and distribution for all this positive brand energy.

So … it’s in recognising, supporting and enhancing this entirely modern new cultural process that the most powerful opportunities for brand value, access to the tribal consumer, and permissions to meaningfully and intimately engage, lie.

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!

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.

Security is so yesterday

David Stoughton of ValueKinetics writes:

The other night I attended a dinner at which we heard brief presentations of their research from a number of ambitious computer scientists. A lot of interesting work is clearly being done on enhancing graphics and on modeling biological systems. The presentation that most struck me, though, was one from a Dr Capra, part of whose work is focused on how the information collectively generated by remote and mobile devices can be used to increase the efficiency of real time decision making.

Very briefly, it is increasingly the case that the content of mobile communications and the information from RFID tags can help us adjust our plans before we encounter the problem, or opportunity, that would compel us to adjust them anyway. Thus if a tube station is out of action or the supermarket is out of Rye bread we could, with the right systems, glean that information before we set out, and without Transport for London or Tesco having to broadcast it. Broadcast would require indiscriminate information provision and create huge problems of relevance and search; whereas the pull model - leveraging what is already available - could, by contrast be highly efficient. The problem is to know what information to trust, or how much of it is required  to engender reasonable confidence.

At the time I only commented on how all of the research activity seems to be, in one way or another, about media, in the McLuhan sense of tools that enable us to manipulate the world. But afterwards what struck me most was the contrast between what Dr Capra described and the discussion around the table. The vision she presented is surely one of an increasingly self-organising society, and was totally at odds with the conversation about keeping information secure that was going on around me.

At the same time as, or perhaps because, trust drains away from institutions and comes to rest increasingly with peer groups, so this possibility of self-organising social systems is emerging. Viewed in that light, data security as we know it is a problem of institutions. In a society where the young are increasingly at home with multiple persona's, and  where protecting your privacy is tantamount to a refusal to participate in the dance of mutual self-affirmation, the only information that the individual needs to secure is that required of them by institutions. In a very real sense data security, an apparently huge problem, may in fact be only a fin de siècle challenge - one of transition.

Of course it's not as simple as that, and I am not naive enough to believe that a fully self-organising society which at the same time guarantees the safety and opportunity of all its members will emerge any time soon. But it is interesting to reflect that security and surveillance are, in a very real sense, about institutions fighting for their right to exist. The natural authority with which society once imbued them has gone - now they assert it through exactly these tools of control. I'm uncomfortable with that, more because it smacks of an authoritarianism that has not been publicly legitimised, than the way it impacts me on a daily basis. Security has become the modern manifestation of the divine right of kings.

"The data. The data." (After Conrad. And Copolla, I guess)

Feel compelled to comment, albeit briefly and without enormous insight, on the sheer amount of security / trust / other sneaky stuff, that's in the headlines all of a sudden:

• The Labour blogging scandal, good old dirty tricks with a 2.0 spin on it: ugly and stupid ... and got caught - the hat trick;
• Amazon's clumsy handling of the gay authors issue ...
• ... alongside their - I tend to think commendable - Phorm-blocking move;
• The UK Goverment, in January and effective from March, sliding the ISP citizen-consumer spying law into place, with the usual guff about "only in certain circumstances will this be used" ... see David Stoughton's excellent post on this blog for the full smart dirty on that one;
• And just today, Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys urges the dropping of hundreds of thousands of DNA records of entirely innocent people that the government and its cronies are saving up ... "just in case" ... Just in case, er, what? We suddenly run out of real villains and have to go after reg'lar folks?

Time - as I've done having discussed the ISP-bollox with m'learned friend Brian Millar - to give the Open Rights Group a bit of support.

PS something else that's been niggling me for many months now ... the stupidity of so-called smart advertising tools. Contextual, behavioural or whatever ...

Why on earth - when I'm reading about Nokia's 90% quarterly decline in profits (in itself an extremely important piece of business news) would I want to see an O2 ad offering me deals on Nokia phones? It makes, for example, blind cold-calling at home seem positively sparkling! This takes me back to my querulous post of a few days ago on how the future is no longer digital.

The end of the road for digital?

At the risk of being more controversial than this fragile market could bear, let me present a fledgling argument that keeps floating back into my head. I'll continue to explore it in the coming weeks.

I just don't think the future's digital. It is for you and I of course, as people, as citizen-consumers. We're still  in the foothills of the personal, cultural and social transformations wrought by web and rich-featured mobility.

I'm talking, for example, about music and for advertising, two industries (well, perhaps music's no longer big enough to be called "an industry") that are themselves in the foothills of post-Internet reinvention. But both are starting to accept that in many senses, digital is more agent of destruction than saviour of value.

Music has in the past year come to broadly accept that downloads will never replace physical sales. Having been initially too suspicious of the digital suitor, the business then jumped into its arms, and is now thinking about moving back to Mum's. But the old bedroom's not there any more ... we're forced forwards to ... what exactly?

This has accelerated, and made more urgent, the drive to the still-vague "bands and brands" field of opportunity.

Out of the frying pan and into the fire in a sense: advertisers themselves are in flux as well as crisis, and while always intrigued by the music discussion, still uncertain as to the argument for moving big money away from the home turf of big ads.

Outside of music and other forms of consumer engagement, advertisers are increasingly expressing a clear and just as urgent desire to move significant focus and spend away from "reach and frequency" based models of communication, and towards what are broadly talked of as digital channels. Social media in particular is viewed as a must-have area for consumer engagement: there's a sense that given the flight to Facebook and Twitter by their audiences, this is a nut that absolutely must be cracked to sustain any credible form of consumer connection.

All fine. But is this really about digital? I think not. The challenge for brands is exacerbated by the very word. Describing Facebook and Twitter as digital channels is not only tautological - it misses the point: they are, for more importantly, new behaviours that derive from quite fundamental changes in culture.

To approach such transformations in the marketing landscape as "digital" - and indeed from the advertiser and agency point of view, to see that landscape as still mainly concerning "media" - is to pose questions that yield feeble, disempowering answers. Social media are problematic precisely because they are only media in the very precise, academic, McLuhanist sense of being "extensions of man". This is not your mothers' media, and pumping content and messaging into such environments is not the answer.

So, both music - and perhaps eventually much of entertainment - and advertising, are hugely affected by the digital revolution, and indeed digital channels are where much of the battle is fought.

But look at the commercial value that the cultural and consumer impacts of the web have already sucked out. The future's digital? Certainly not. The future's ... what exactly, then?

More on this soonest, and comments more than welcome - urgently sought!

A look back at digital

Setting the context for the new debate

A critical piece of work in the unfolding set of new insights that inform the way we view the impact of the new media on culture, identity and of course commerce, is Mediated, by the US academic Thomas Zengotita, published in 2005.

The book – and this approach is a part of its genius – opens with a tale from the theatre. Students (our writer among them) in a method class, NYC 1963, are told as they warm up for a class, that John Kennedy has been assassinated. They assume – gloriously – that this is a game, nothing but a cue for an improvisation exercise, a classroom trick. Each student commences to evolve their own (unique, from the gut, utterly authentic) acted reaction to the fake tragedy for the no-doubt-soon-to-appear method guru whose approval – indeed whose attention of any kind – they crave.

They weep, gesticulate, freeze, frown. Snatches of practice script are tossed around. Each is in their own world. The assassination has been created for each of them, a command performance to set the scene for their own special performances.

But no: it’s true of course. Kennedy, it turns out, has died. And the gritty realities of their method preparations are shown up for what they are. The distorted, self-obsessed faces of children in the bathroom mirror, thrown into excruciating, shameful relief by, well, the real reality.

You at once get – as I did – the point. In a world where the media now form, contain, deliver, explain, validate and embellish – but most all define – so much of our lives, we’re told that the only performance that really matters any more … is our own. We have slipped from the stalls to the stage, we find ourselves suddenly behind the microphone, in front of the camera. And giving, it goes without saying, the performance of our lives.

The rest of this well-written, very readable book explores, details and proves the point. From teen queen in the high school playground, through the falls and rises of our many heroes, and why pop stars still matter so much … to the cosmetic surgery operating room, our mediated life is shown to us in riveting, living colour.

The implications for the future of culture, media – indeed human experience itself – are big. The author writes of “flattered” media consumers – those whose own mediated performance is not simply a partial replacement of time with TV, stereo or browser: it is now the most meaningful piece of their entirely reflexive life experience.

MySpace users, YouTube fans, passionate IM-ers, constant SMS-ers, are no longer “consuming content” except in the most generic sense. They are – every day – selecting, assembling and representing out to the network an entirely new persona: “The Distributed Me”.

They co-opt images and sounds snatched from Big Media. Note that these are referential borrowings, made not for the purposes of inbound entertainment, but to be used as outbound qualifiers for the way I wish to present myself today. The tribe – my social network near and far – I hope feeds back to me, builds on today’s “Me Hypothesis”, creating a reflexive pendulum of the most compelling, immersive (and, worryingly, exclusive) media experience you can imagine.

So, it’s their show, with Big Media second to the table. If, as we’re beginning to see, interruptive forms of media cut fatally across the bows of the networked consumer’s fantastic, flattered, voyage, where next for the producer, the rights owner and most of all, the advertiser?

Is digital media just about technology?

Media is in one way or another about the consumer from here on, in that the consumer, as opposed to the media industries, determines and captures – and in quite a few compelling instances as we saw above, creates and distributes – the value.

To assume, as has largely been done to date without too severe a penalty, that the Internet is “just another channel”, that digital media and marketing are simply the previous models, but with added technology, is to fatally miss the point. All media, to speak of, are digital, and all modern marketing – the exceptions being more or less marginal – depends on digital technology. In this sense, the technology angle is tautological, and adds nothing to our understanding beyond the obvious.

No. There’s something both bigger and more subtle in play here. Consumers … well they just don’t consume the way they used to, when it comes to media. The primary attribute of today’s affluent consumers’ media behaviour is not merely their usage of various digital channels and devices. It’s their “empowered elusiveness”. Their infinite power to choose, to put it simply.

This power enables consumers to select and control – in fact, to own – their media experience, to a degree unprecedented in the now-receding Age of Television. That previous lack of control – consumers’ dependency on the careful, corporately determined scheduling of content by the media owner, the model of appointment-based viewing – was indeed what enabled advertisers to enter the equation, as the gatekeepers of the consumer’s access to entertainment.

This is important background for our discussion: we assume that this commercial control of consumers’ media access and choice is the rule … in fact, it’s the exception. Only since TV really took off in the 50’s have advertisers held their powerful chokehold on media experience. It was the very limitations of broadcast technology, its peculiar combination of kludged systems and highly sophisticated compromises, that created the gap that advertising so completely filled, till the affluent networked m-consumer took back control.

“Brought to you by Brand X” used to really mean something, till consumer choice came along. Ads were an integral part of the entertainment equation, as opposed to the nose-against-the window image we have of them today, in a world of TiVo, the EPG, search, ad-blocking, and as we are seeing today, consumer-created media value.

So, the consumer in control. But with what? Well, with better technology really, constantly evolving tools that enable them to skip ads, personalise and trim content back to the bare minimum they need.

Need … in order to achieve what for themselves, exactly?

The concept of Return on Attention

I’d argue it’s the media experiences, not just on- but also off-line, that deliver adequately against the godlike expectations consumers now have, that are being initially sought and then managed here.

Let’s call this brutal measure Return on Attention.

My argument here is that, where the consumer controls the game and holds the ball, Return on Investment for advertising brands at the tail end of the Age of Television, is more or less completely predicated on the delivery, again and again, of Return on Attention.

We on the brand side may not be able yet to exactly define what does and does not meet the benchmark, but we all acknowledge that the m-consumer knows, almost in an instant, how, where and when to allocate - and equally when and why to withdraw - this priceless bargaining chip at the table of media – their focused attention to the content, the brands, the experiences we hopefully throw into their path.

Can mass media expect to support Return on Attention for this uniquely flattered and jealous new god in our marketing landscape?

We do know that mass media can continue to fill in the background – a sort of perpetual chorus line to the new digital superstars – in the form of the half-listened to radio, the always-on but patchily attended-to TV in the corner (remember when TV was “the new hearth”?) the looming, vaguely-noted billboard, the hardly-ever-even-scanned newspaper and magazine ads.

Note also that digital has its own mass plays, the largely derided and often ill-used banner ad, and of course (ironically constructed out of the gold dust of the CRM database …) the email marketing drop. And worst of all, we have the awful gibbering of spam.

Moving forward - advertising found

What to do? When media exposure is apparently driven and controlled by the tribal actions of consumers themselves, is any pretence at control and measurement of advertising now pointless?

Above all, advertising has been about brand awareness. In the post-Internet world, it isn’t any more: it’s about consumer intimacy.

This doesn’t of course mean that we don’t need people to continue to be aware of our brands. But we do need to move beyond counting impressions – eyeballs if you like – to creating and managing intimacy, by which we mean here a disposition to positively engage with our brand by consumers.

Three things about the way we approach advertising change fundamentally as a result of all this.

First of all, our focus needs to be dragged from the past – how well did the campaign do in terms of impressions? – to the future – how likely is this or that important consumer group to re-engage with our brand, based on what we’ve learned about them.

We can combine two critical marketing communications disciplines here – media planning and relationship management – to create a new and useful hybrid discipline called “Relationship Planning”.
Indeed, it’s conceivable that the valuation of a big brand will shortly be calculated – with refreshingly cold precision – by aggregating global “consumer futures” of intent to engage, either by purchasing a product or just allowing the brand into their closely (digitally) guarded field of attention.

Secondly, we need to radically extend our view of media-based advertising as being primarily an outbound, “brand>consumer” activity, to include a new and powerful inbound dimension.

Why? Because in our 21st century pinball machine model of media, the most critical messages are no longer those the brand attempts to disseminate to its audiences, but a) those exchanged about the brand and/or its desired area of influence between tribal consumers, and b) those messages that come back to the brand from the consumer.

The most powerful – and yet to be fully felt – impact of networked digital media on brand marketing is the opportunity – the imperative – to observe the marketplace in which our brands must exist, receive and make sense of the inbound intelligence we need, and rapidly respond with fresh, relevant propositions.

Thirdly, and most controversially for the media status quo, we move from buying our media in the bowling alley – to “earning our media” in the pinball machine.

Bought media, in this age of priceless, endangered consumer attention and tribal impact, has to fight at least twice as hard for its impact.

First to acquire the inventory where its messages will live and then to cut through the other messaging noise in the same channel, to make some sort of impression.

Earned media – where the brand/ball magically hits a sweet spot among a series of tribal bumpers and a huge wave of media activity – buzz if you must – is created and driven across networks, has dual benefits, in these tough times.

Costing in general a fraction of bought, and coming with its relevance and cut-through installed as standard.

Why? Because it’s largely “by consumer for consumers”.

Getting "Behind The Line" - the new marketing

Global advertising spend is predicted to exceed $700bn within 3 years. But there’s unrest among the big spenders: they know that their most valuable communications targets are decreasingly accessible to mass techniques , while increasingly concealed behind personal and tribal “firewalls” of digitally-managed preferences . The affluent modern consumer controls the game of media.

The scene is complicated further by the rapid “tribalising” of the networked consumer. Increasingly the most important cultural influencers in the lives of consumers are not state, church or any other recognised authority – they are … each other. So digital tools and media, far from being new and open channels for marketers, help active tribes of consumers form barriers – firewalls – of taste and relevance around themselves that filter and block almost all unwanted communications.

How did brand communications become “unwanted”?

Traditionally, advertisers have been concerned with eyeballs. The key metrics of Reach (number of key consumers touched by brand messaging) and Frequency (number of times per consumer such impacts have occurred) until very recently dominated marketing ROI .

And in a commercial and cultural context – The Golden Age of TV – where media were scarce (think of the Morecambe and Wise Xmas show’s legendary command of audience figures) and attention was plentiful, this performed more than adequately.

But the crucial impact of the digital revolution, in media and marketing terms, has been the dramatic reversal of this comfortable equation: while media (think YouTube and the rest) are now more than plentiful, consumer attention has become not just cripplingly scarce – it’s become arguably the single most value commodity in the world.

The result of this accelerating realisation, is that the world’s biggest advertisers are looking hard at ways to move their enormous investments out of traditional brand communications, and into places where the consumer attention is more plentiful, and genuine ROI – in the form of authentic engagement with valuable consumers – is both achievable and measurable.

In other words … how do you get “behind the line”?

This challenge is best met in the user-led tribal environments that loom so large in today’s online consumer culture: blogs, forums, wikis and social media sites.

The most advanced marcomms thinking is also waking up to the – previously heretical – realisation that intelligently-treated inbound spontaneous messaging from the consumer (and also among and between consumers in tribes) is ultimately of far more commercial value, than unwanted outbound brand messaging.

Most fundamentally, the thinking of brand advertisers must move beyond focusing on the successes or failures of the past (“retro-metrics” of previous campaigns) to the future, planning not just communications, but product and service offerings that will meet the capricious consumer where their declared and now understood intentions tell us they’re heading: the future.

Why did I stop blogging for over a year?

Because I had nothing to say!

Since October 2006 we've been working with O2 - more recently their owner, Telefonica really - and Bacardi Global Brands on initiatives that have taken our work and our thinking in very exciting new directions. We're delving deep in to 21st century media strategy, we developed The TouchStone framework for analyzing and evaluating 360 degree brand communication programmes, and more recently have been exploring advanced mobile marketing strategies.

I feel so privileged - despite the associated stresses - to have the opportunity to do this work. We have a way to go yet before the business is 100% stabilised, but it's looking OK.