#digital thinking

3 livres pour (un peu) mieux comprendre l'impact #numérique #Digital #Culture #Livres

Chaque page que l’on tourne, crée un frottement électrique. Il est suffisamment léger pour que nous ne sentions rien à notre échelle mais aussi suffisamment puissant pour pouvoir donner naissance à de nouvelles planètes. Chaque livre a donc le potentiel énergétique de faire jaillir une galaxie entière. (more…)

This is a work related post. I am a closeted planner (sort of). It is one of those career choice you can easily feel ashamed about because you're not really making things (more on that in another post). It is all about the gift of the gab, the quick thinking and being analytical (but nowadays pretty much everyone wants to be a doer) 

I did try the "do-ing" thing and I am not as good at it.

Anyway, enough about me. The case study that drove me into planning in the first place was Sainsbury's "Try something new today". If you haven't read the IPA paper please do so (here), it is the one of the best piece of planning thinking ever.

I was never really interested in planning in a traditional agency for some reason, digital was what I wanted to do. However I quickly realised the role of the different platforms. Digital in the purchase funnel was often limited to purchase with ATL being the main driver for awareness. In most presentation the media planner would recommend a page takeover (hello yahoo media buy) as a digital version of a TVC. I always found it pretty frustrating. 

Digital is either campaign or product site (you come to the site because you want to buy, you're driven to the site because you looked at our microsite/campaign/social feed etc)

It feels like we are often reproducing the traditional agency model with digital as a nice add on, but not mature enough yet as a stand alone medium. 

There is a disconnect between  the potential of digital and the way we use the ecosystem of channel. Data might be the solution. 

I first became obsessed with data reading OKtrends, a blog showing the dating research by OKCupid. Some of the things they talk about are fascinating from the time when people are more likely to respond to a message to the effect of no picture on possible conversations. 

They analyse every single interactions and put them out there. It is a goldmine for insights on people's behaviour. So when you are given all of those data how can you use them in a meaningful way. OkCupid doesn't need to but it can be done.

A most recent case study made me think about how the use of data can make the creative work works harder (in the same way Sainsbury's did a few years ago). 

All Things Hair - a partnership between Unilever and Google, masterminded by digital agency, Razorfish. Using data mined from 7 billion searches for "hair" every year, Google was able to help the company predict hair trends up to three months in advance and then employ popular YouTube bloggers to create relevant content hosted on a dedicated channel. Multiple Unilever hair care brands are featured, with viewers able to one-click-purchase specific products as they are pleased. All Things Hair has received 1,000 new subscriptions every day since its launch and is now the biggest dedicated hair care channel in the world.

We should make better use of the data available.

Trends come and go Nike +  and digital products were all the rage a few years ago. Otherwise, we tend to try and reproduce successful digital models for brands: from creating social networks for margarine and milk to building short lived micro-sites you can access by clicking on a banner. The overwhelming amount of brand sweepstakes, quizzes and competitions is extremely frustrating. But data speak about behaviour and intentions. 

Entre todas las apuestas y predicciones que se hacen en los finales de año, en 2013 la tendencia era predecir que el 2014 sería el año del big data y/o del ecommerce.

La realidad es que esta carrera comenzó hace ya algunos años cuando empezaron a constiuirse compañías y negocios alrededor del big data. Algunas son start ups que han nacido dentro de grandes organizaciones pero que éstas han preferido sacarlas de dentro del ecosistema de la “Gran Organización”, otras son simplemente empresas que han nacido por y para esto y  otras, compañías de muchos años que se han reinventado con nuevos servicios y nuevos modelos de negocio. Tres que destacan son :

I was asked to correct a typo the other day, concerned I was being self important and chatting all about me. Meme in fact. 

That was not the case. I'm too middle class and British. I was using the accepted shortform to describe a memetic device. A Meme. 

"An idea, behaviour, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture". Wikipedia article here

Meme's occur everywhere (even in the 'real' world), although the ability for lots of people to congregate around ideas allows internet memes to grow at astonishing rates, and achieve astonishing things. 

Some of it is fascile (LOL Cats are an internet meme), but when an idea spreads (or goes "viral") it is astonishging what it can do, ie the moving Embrace Life public service video about wearing a seatbelt with over a million views in two weeks

For a fatter list of 'internet phenomena' there is a fairly well kept wikipedia article here, or (and i've only just been sent this link, so haven't had a great look yet) knowyourmeme.com seems to keep on top of the new and emerging internet meme's.

Guilty of oversimplification and probably a case of correlation over causality but; should we be more parochial with our data and information architecture?

Mass agriculture has opponents and proponents, both with wide ranging and converging arguments. Although aware of global benefits born from the green revolution, one well documented issue with vast mono-crops is fragility in the face of a powerful virus. Bluntly, a lack of bio-diversity widens potential for wider devastation.

Would we benefit from learning lessens in how we maintain our data (farms)?

As with farming our early online practices look (now) parochial. Most web servers and data houses were built for specific applications, with shared attributes but inherent built in diversity. Some of that diversity was born out of market competition with different companies offering different blends of proprietary and ubiquitous software and hardware. Today the market is saturated with reseller programmes that trickle up to a shrinking number of origin points. Are we are breeding out the diversity that added a layer of protection. 

The counter argument would highlight benefits of enterprise technology protection, versus the (if we take the farm metaphor a little further) rickety gates of the original data cottage industry, and the 'meta' business is a concept baked into the internet with domain names bought through ICANN resellers (most of whom then added additional services like hosting and email).

Ask not what the crowd can do for you, but what you can do for the crowd.

After months of tortorous advertising experimentation from the Sydney Morning Herald (most of it horribly intrusive, overwhelming and focused squarely on interrupting readers with nonsense), finally they try something more social.

You can now see how many other people are reading the same article, submit a tweet about it, or see what others are tweeting about it. The only problem is that they seem only to do a Twitter search for their self-created hash-tags, as opposed to searching Twitter for any reference to the article’s URL. Oh, and they fail to use a URL shortening service like bit.ly when posting to Twitter.

So points for progress and dipping a toe into the social future of online media; implementation however is still a (closer) fail.