monkey business. our only business.
Found a very quick way to structure a presentation last night. Scribble all your notes on a piece of paper, then just draw lines around the bits that contribute to a single slide. Obvious, but never done it before and it worked well, so will do it again. That is all.
OK so the topic of whether or not to move away from micro-sites is a perennial one, and I’ve just been asked to comment on the topic, so here you go. They are often viewed as being expensive, a pain to manage, transient and sometimes a waste of money. To an extent these points can be true, however micro-sites still have their place and value.
Anonymity
Building buzz around something can require a degree of anonymity. Take the Film and TV industries for example. Films and TV shows are frequently launched with extended teaser campaigns, sometimes along with a complex ‘game’ to reinforce the mystery or history surrounding the concept. The TV Series Lost launched with a plethora of web sites, OceanicAir, The DHARAMA Initiative, The Hanso Foundation as well as the official web site hosted on ABC.com. The point is, placing all these websites on ABC.com would have watered down the experience. Secondly, placing these ‘out there’ on the Internet can even re-inforce the anonymity. If the site is entirely unbranded, one way to find out if it ‘belongs to anyone’ is to do a simple ‘Who Is’ look-up of the domain name and hey presto you have to owner… ABC.com. But if the site is hosted on a URL who’s DNS entry is registered anonymously, the mystery can be retained. This you cant do if it’s sat on the parent companies web server.
Unconstrained Creativity
Agree with this or not, micro-sites hosted outside the confines of a core web site can allow for greater freedom of expression of the brand. Why? Simple, most major web sites these days are hosted of templated content management systems. Frequently, these don’t offer blank canvas that is required to deliver a highly interactive, immersive experience. Yes, this can be done to a degree within a templated site, but not to the same degree as outside. There is an argument to say that the kind of experience as offered via micro-sites should be constrained within a core or master site, but more often than not the freedom simply isn’t there.
Segment Specific
Campaigns, of which micro-sites are generally a manifestation, tend to be targeted at very specific customer segments. Engaging with these segments can be far easier, and less tonally awkward, outside the confines of a ‘master branded’ web site. Even though a brand may have a large teen audience for example, the master brand as reflected on the core web site, may not talk to the audience on their ground. A micro-site therefore may be the best place to do this, where the tone can be altered, without making the bran look like your Dad at a rave.
Another approach, as best demonstrated by Nike, is to make your entire ‘web site’ a collection of what are essentially micro sites: Nike Golf, Football, Nike+, Woman, NikeLab and so on. The master site simply becomes a pointer to a series of highly segment specific, targeted product sites. And lets face it, very few people say Nike.com is a bad thing…
Currently I’m faced with the challenge of answering the questions ‘What is a Brand’ and ‘What what will Branding be?’ both big questions. Branding has moved on a lot in the last ten years as a result of ‘digital’ (though I am fed up with that term so for a change may start using the Welsh: Digidol). Defining what actually constitutes a Brand these days is quite difficult: do for example the manifestations of a ‘Brand’ found online that are not originated by the Brand itself, but by it’s customers or community, actually count as part of the Master Brand or overall Identity? Something we need to answer. Initially I’d say yes, the challenge there is how the Brand influences this.
Anyway, a post on Forrester blogs, slightly un-relatedly, talks about how ‘digital thinking’ should span into other areas of corporate communication such as media relations and investor relations. Though I’m slightly stumped by the overall tone of the article which implies that digital or interactive thinking in these areas would be new. Uh, what do you think we’ve been doing for the last ten years Sherlock, pretty banners and ‘wizzy micro sites’? Anyway, back to Brands and Branding…
I guess the point is that, and sorry to state the obvious, that digital is now so critically important in practically every aspect of doing business and communications, that the art of Branding needs to move bloody quickly to re-define what we mean by ‘a Brand’, and how we articulate it across these channels. This is especially critical as to a large degree the deliverables of Branding exercises are still largely focussed on the non digital, in a visual rather than behavioral way. Branding agencies need to re define their deliverables away from what a Brand looks like, and spend a greater time focusing on how the brand behaves, the challenge with that, is how we articulate to our clients what behaviour actually means.
A good post from and ex colleague Geoff on the opportunities for Brands on Flickr has preempted something I was going to write on the same subject, but it’s interesting to see that Geoff came at it from a different, perhaps more positive attitude. I’ve long used Flickr as a gauge to research peoples perception of a particular brand. There’s no real technique to this, you just enter the Brand Name as a Flickr search and see what comes up…. simple.
A recent bad experience with Carphone Warehouse, that I’ll write up when I have time, got me to searching Flickr to find some images of a store that I could use in a PowerPoint deck… what I found however were lots of images tagged ‘carphone warehouse’ a bit like this:
Something to do with their Christmas Ball or whatever. As Geoff rightly points out, the amount of traffic Flickr gets, aside fro perhaps Google images, it’s pretty much THE image database of the Internet. What interests me, is not the opportunities as outlined by Geoff which are all valid and spot on, but how do Brands deal with the stuff they can’t, or perhaps can control? Do Brands need to consider what they allow their employees to publish in what is essentially their name?
When I started working commercially in the internet back in 98 (Oh! 10 year anniversary, Yay! ) the Agency that I worked in then had 5 kinds of people working for it:
Account Managers, Project Managers, Designers, Back End Developers, Front End Developers
That was it. Five. There wasn’t even much of a sense of rank or hierarchy. Look inside a Digital Agency now and it will look something like this:
All those discipline above exist, but may have within them 5 to 7 levels of seniority. The tech Department may have separated into technology disciplines: MS Practice, Java Practice, Data Warehousing etc. The creative department will now contain traditional Designers as well as Copywriters (of an advertising ilk), Flash Designers (not Flash Developers… they sit in Tech), more traditional Creative Teams of two if the Agency is biased towards online campaigns, 3D Animators, Video & Motion Graphics specialists. New disciplines have emerged or transfered form another mediums: Editorial and Content (written), Information Architects, Usability Experts, Usability Testers, Interaction Designers, User Experience Architects……. Planners, Strategists, SEO & SEM experts and so on…
The point is that many of the Digital Agencies that exist today are pretty mature, despite only been 10 to 15 years old. The people who have worked there through this period, now really do know their stuff. Forces to be reckoned with, digitally…. So why are most ‘traditional agencies’ now trying to compete with these guys on their ground? Advertising dollars, no shock there.
If you look at what digital agencies are trying to do, they all want a piece of the Traditional Agencies action… they’re now talking about Branding, Advertising and so on. The reason here not being dollars, but one of ego’s. Digital people now realise it’s ‘their day’, and after ten years of scavenging the crumbs of advertising dollars, want a seat at the table just like their big brother at the Ad Agency. Traditional Agencies on the other hand are now all talking Digital ‘cos that’s the way it’s going isn’t it… uh…. computers’. Both as bad as the other. The point is, both kinds of agency have fathoms of deep expertise in their own areas. Where is the experience deeper? On the traditional side, it’s been around longer.
‘Digital’ people who have grown up in web agencies do know a lot about technology, the internet, the world wide web and the magic therein that can be woven. Where we can lack experience is in a deep understanding of things like Branding, Design, Advertising, PR. Despite what we may think, we still have a lot to learn. It’s interesting that recently both AKQA and Digitas have launched content offerings: AKQA Film and Digitas - The Third Act. Why? Is that what thy are really good at?
Can we have National Arse Slapping day too?
LBI Is now publishing a ‘magazine’ and on first glance it looks quite interesting: LBIQ. “We’re not experiencing a ‘digital revolution’ and this isn’t a ‘digital age’ any more than the 50s were the ‘atomic age’ or the 60s the ‘space age’. We simply live, as we always have done, in fast-changing times. LBiQ is a response to this frantic pace of change, and it’s one that responds from an attitude and point of view that we’ve shamelessly stolen from Ferris Bueller: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
How it should have gone:
Videos of the complete Steve Jobs and Bill Gates interview via All Things Digital
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Prologue
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Part 1
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Part 2
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Part 3
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Part 4
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Part 5
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Part 6
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Part 7
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Highlight Reel
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Session Transcript
So in celebration of the fact that First Tuesday are returning to London and the inevitable carnage that will ensue, I’ve taken the liberty of re-branding FuckedCompany.com, y’know, so it’s all web 2.0′ish. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you:
Kevin Ham, the $300 million master of Web domains - June 1, 2007: “Trained as a family doctor, he put off medicine after discovering the riches of the Web. Since 2000 he has quietly cobbled together a portfolio of some 300,000 domains that, combined with several other ventures, generate an estimated $70 million a year in revenue.” [via cnn money]
MRM Worldwide / London, where I spend my days, has a blog.
Participation Marketing » About Participation Marketing:
“Suddenly everything has changed. In the new, democratic digital age, customers are taking control. Agencies need to work harder than ever to get their attention and their loyalty.
We believe that getting customers actively involved with brands – across all media - is the way to succeed in today’s marketplace. The deeper the involvement, the greater the emotional bond. We call this approach Participation Marketing.
Here are our some of thoughts and observations about the new era and the role of Participation Marketing in connecting with customers.”
BBC NEWS | Business | YouTubers to get ad money share YouTube founder Chad Hurley confirmed to the BBC that his team was working on a revenue-sharing mechanism that would “reward creativity”.
So Apple have done what they have done well…. hype…. everyone has posted a fucking picture of it or wrote about it like a daft bugger (me included).
But more thoughts….
1) Doesn’t it look like a PSP with the buttons cut off?
2) Oooooh isn’t it shiny… like a PSP? But ooooh…. wont it arf get scratched after a month in your pocket and all that prodding?
3) As JG says where’s the 3G and 5mp camera with a decent lens?
4) Actually it’s just like a Treo… or iPaq…. with a grooooooooovier interface
5) No really it is just a smart phone.
6) Uh…. 4 or 8 gig…. fuck’s sake. Is that the best you can do?
7) So if you’re not going to whack a 60gb hd in it, where’s the expansion slot?
8) Actually it appears to be a bit of a shiny all in one jack off all master of none device…. uh like an iPaq of Treo… just shinier.
9) Oh… can I run a Blackberry or exchange client on it?
10) OOOh but isn’t it shiny, can I have one?
So in summary without actually having seen the bugger…. very very very nice looking ui with some nice clever haptic stuff, but actually looks just like a smart phone…. just shinier.
Uh… isn’t a bit obvioius that Flickr should have built in e-commerce functionality to turn it into a stock image library? Me and everyone else I know now get images from it to use in presentations, design work etc etc (although within creative commons!). I think that would be kinda nice, there are some kick ass photographers on there that I’d have no issue giving my (companies) money to.
Uhhh, Natalie ordered some stuff from iwantoneofthose.com. You can see from the picture that the actual contents on the floor (photo wall hanger and a box of gonks or something) didn’t warrant the box or the packing material inside it (about 20ft of inflated polythene pockets). This has happened before. Not good.
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