Matter/Anti-Matter

Here's how you do product demos right: Advertising firm BBH has produced a series of videos for the Google Chrome browser, and you have to give them credit for creating such intuitive, almost naive metaphors for a very unemotional "technocratic" brand. Since Peter Greenaway, no one has married math and artistic expression more convincingly. It's truly "A New Way to See the Internet."

From the BBH labs site: "We took Google’s ingenuity & innovation as inspiration in developing the idea for seven short films (& an intro), demonstrating the benefits of Google Chrome. Every creation is built by hand, filmed in camera, with no special effects added. Even the music has Jacqui, the harpist, playing live on set. As it should always be with Google, the product is the hero. We celebrate the Chrome product, but we hope in a "Googley" way." 

A look behind the scenes

A full-page ad in USA Today and in the New York Times marks the next chapter of the never-ending “the conversation is your brand” saga. Trident, the chewing gum maker, bought the placements, and instead of using them to promote its latest product (Trident Layers) with the usual mix of emotionally resonant narrative, sharp copy, and persuasive imagery, it chose to feature select tweets about the product under the tagline “The people have Tweeted."

Trident says that the ten tweets featured were discovered by the Trident team using Twitter Search, and that they used Twitter to contact each party to secure their approval, but it is hard to suppress the perception of them being fabricated. Notwithstanding the question of whether or not the ad deserves the notion of authenticity, it presents an interesting twist in the democratization of brands. We‘ve seen Skittles (introducing the “Interweb," an aggregation of third-party conversations about Skittles, on its homepage), creative shop Crispin, Porter & Bogusky, social CRM provider Get Satisfaction, or Seth Godin’s Brands in Public embrace real-time Web-branded conversations – on the Web. Trident, however, can now pride itself with being the first brand to apply this principle in a mainstream print ad.

But not only that: The "People have Tweeted” ad mashes up the Trident brand by not so subtly borrowing iconography from other brands. The first thing you notice is that it leads with an oversize “hero shot” of the “naked” gum, staging it like a slickly designed consumer electronics device and making you wonder if this is indeed just a gum or the next, much-awaited Apple product. Moreover, the ad not only features content from Twitter but also somewhat overtly leans on Twitter’s brand, citing recognizable brand elements such as font and colors while downplaying those of Trident (there is no display of a Trident logo whatsoever). It is almost as if Twitter, Apple, and Trident merged and became one superconvergent uberproduct – which is, one would suspect, exactly the impression the advertisers aimed for.

Perhaps this ushers in the next era of advertising, one that is fueled by the paradigms of the social Web but applicable across all media: Brands that understand and capitalize on the insight that they’re not only shaped by the conversations of their consumers (fans and followers, that is) but also increasingly by the personas of other brands. Social, in this sense, means not only inviting employees and customers to co-create your brand, but also, openly or discretely, hybridizing, mashing up, or collaborating with other brands.

What a season finale it was. ‘Shut the Door. Have a Seat’ was a “tight balance of emotionally pungent drama and company coup d’etat,” the LA Times wrote. And indeed, Mad Men came through in the end. And all the mad men and women came through: Sterling, Cooper, Pryce, Pete, Peggy, Joan,  and, more than anyone else of course, Don Draper.

He took Conrad Hiltons’s advice to heart and instead of “crying and relying on other people’s moves” he became the master of his fortune and finally did something meaningful. You could see the glow in his eyes, the pride, and the deep satisfaction of someone who has found (or accepted) his calling. “So you like being in advertising after all?” Sterling asked (a rhetorical question). Facing a divorce from his wife and separation from his kids, Draper, for the first time, gained the stature of a man who has a moral compass. With faith both in himself and in others, the boss turned into a leader.

The final scene with the new agency crew gathered in the makeshift hotel room office poignantly displayed that Draper’s evolution mirrored the dramatic changes a whole society was undergoing at the time: Gender equality, democratization of ideas, flat(ter) hierarchies, and employee empowerment, and an angst, underlying all this progress, triggered by JFK’s assassination. “People used to buy things. Then something terrible happened. And people changed. They want different things now. No one really knows how everything’s changed. But you do,” Draper says in his pitch to Peggy, as he’s trying to convince her to join the new venture rising out of the ashes of the firm formerly known as Sterling Cooper. Although set against the backdrop of the early sixties, the Mad Men finale could be read as commentary on the current cultural climate. Times are as transformative as they were back then. The sentiment is equally nervous, and after 9/11 and the Great Recession people are looking for new meaning in a post-materialistic and, sorry Don, post-advertising world.

And yet, Mad Men’s finale represented both swan song and rebirth of an industry. It may be very American to consider every crisis an opportunity, and in this sense, the end of Mad Men season three was a genuinely American happy ending, or better, an ending with the happiest possible departure – the beginning of a whole new story. Peggy, the empathizer and Pete, the innovator, both had tears in their eyes when they were asked to join the new firm, because, at last, they were given the recognition they deserved, and the opportunity to “build something.” Happiness lies in its pursuit, as we all know, and the Mad Men finale reminded us of a great national pastime: If we throw all our talent and passion together, we can build something great. It can be an advertising firm, a movement, or an entire nation.

It's always good to be the first, and while crowdsourcing, the trend, may have jumped the shark, a fully crowdsourced creative agency is a bold creative experiment and still news. Two Crispin Porter + Bogusky alums, John Winsor and Evan Fry, together with Claudia Batten, the founder of Microsoft-acquired video game advertising shop Massive, have launched Victors & Spoils (V&S), "the world's first creative agency built on crowdsourcing principle."

V&S says it will "provide businesses with a better way to solve their marketing, advertising and product-design problems by engaging the world's most talented creatives." The press release promises that "perceived crowdsourcing flaws will be addressed through world-class creative direction delivered through the use of the reputation-ranked Victors & Spoils crowd" but stays mum on how exactly the crowdsourced creative department will operate.

In any event, V & S is eating its own dog food. The first line you notice on its web site (after the humble "Welcome To Victors & Spoils. Let's Change An Industry") is "Why does this site look so plain, Jane?" and the answer is: because the site design, the look and feel, and even the logo are being crowdsourced.

Whether crowdsoucing yields better creative results, who knows? It certainly is a differentiator. V&S COO Claudia Batten twittered that she got calls from five Fortune 200 CMOs in the first five days since launch. We will follow this one closely.

Forrester is about to release a new report on “Adaptive Brand Marketing: Rethinking Your Approach to Branding in the Digital Age,” in which it proposes replacing “brand managers” with “brand advocates.” Advertising Age provides a sneak peek at the ‘new 4 Ps of Marketing’ presented in the report: permission, proximity, perception, and participation. Other core elements include: “embracing an expanded role for consumer intelligence, focusing on strategic brand platforms, and empowering a federated organization."

A fervent advocate of marketing as a cross-organizational catalyst for change myself, I wholeheartedly agree with BBH Labs which believes the Forrester report points to a potentially larger opportunity for the discipline: “It’s not just the marketing organization that needs to reorient itself given the now normal digital age, but the company itself should consider how it reorients itself around its marketing organization. In most progressive companies, it is the marketing function that has most quickly and deeply engaged with the new interactive toolkit.”

This view is really becoming a groundswell, and you will be hard pressed to find anyone these days who would deny the profound change social media presents for all customer relations; the new need for openness, agility, and hyper-sociality; as well as the call for “networked” (or “federated,” as Forrester calls it) organizations. David Armano from the Dachis Group (“Social Business Design”), Francois Gossieaux (Beeline Labs), or Charlene Li and her Altimeter Group are just some of the pundits who have very succinctly articulated these themes.

Further reading:

HSM Interview with Amazon’s former Chief Scientist Andreas Weigend on the four P’s of marketing

Ogilvy and Acision white paper on advertising in 2020

Jones and Bonevac: "Should We Be In the Advertising Industry?"

Dave Evans: "Social Business: the New Black" 

John Ellett: "Marketing has changed"

George Potts: "Political Campaigns: The New Paradigm for Marketing Organizations in the Social Media Age"

Rob Rose: "Stop Being a ‘Data Driven’ Marketer"

For one week, Swiss author Alain de Botton was living the life I've always wanted to live. As the first-ever writer-in-residence of London's Heathrow Airport, he was working on his new book on site, observing, documenting, and philosophically charging the emotions and motions of the two arguably most interesting things in life--people and planes--in transit, in situ.

My own fascination with airports started at an early age thanks to the location of my parents' house. I grew up with planes taking off and landing at the nearby airport, and as a student I spent one summer vacation working as a baggage handler on the tarmac. Ever since, aircraft noise makes me feel at ease, and if I could, I would become a permanent tenant of Narita's Star Alliance lounge, where I would watch planes all day.

Airports have also long piqued the interest of artists of course--from Brian Eno's "Music for Airports," to Steven Spielberg's "The Terminal," to 747-turned-designer hotels. Exhibiting equally the technical routines and the emotional excesses of 21st century civilization, airports serve as mundane settings for the dramatic and dramatic settings for the mundane--de Botton, as Heathrow's writer-in-residence, set out to capture both.

The assignment was simple: De Botton was commissioned by the British Airports Authority (BAA) to spend a week in the middle of Heathrow's bustling Terminal 5 and write about life at the airport. He got his own desk, was awakened by Air Canada every morning, and immersed himself into the airport logistics while living his usual ascetic life (judging from all photos, he wore his signature blue shirt all week). Most of the time he observed and conducted what design researchers would call ethnographic research--knowing that you can best study human behavior, on any given scale, when you're close enough to the action but not part of the commotion. The personal union of researcher and writer raises some interesting questions: Where exactly do you draw the line between observation and interpretation? Where does research end and authorship start? Is research even possible without storytelling?

But these are technicalities. Of bigger concern for reviewers appears to be the "precarious line between creative independence and commerce," as the Guardian calls it. Blog site Gawker, among others, was fast in chastising the unconventional book deal as a shameless and rather desperate PR stunt, but the alleged cynicism reflects more poorly on the critics themselves: Isn't the greatest cynicism of all to look for the cynical in all things? For the record, de Botton insists that BAA gave him complete editorial freedom and that his writing was thoroughly subjective and as unbiased as it can possibly be. He is not the first writer to experiment with commercial book mandates (bestselling author Fay Weldon shocked the arts world in 2001 when it emerged that her latest novel had been sponsored by Bulgari) and smart enough to know that his "Heathrow Diary" project might stir up a controversy. It would have been much safer, from his PR point-of-view, to not pursue it.

Yet de Botton's interest in airports seems genuine: "There are many places in the modern world that we do not understand because we cannot get inside them," he told the Guardian. Moreover, he believes the project is philosophically sound and in fact truly innovative as it revives an old tradition of underwriting: "That one of the largest organizations in the UK should take an interest in a book is almost quaint, like sponsoring a poet," he said. "On behalf of my fellow beleaguered writers, it's nice that writers seem to matter."De Botton already has plans for the next underwritten project: "I'd like to be a writer in residence at a nuclear power station."

And sure--why not? I think we have to overcome the notion that a distinction between marketing and publishing is still possible. Herman Miller's See magazine was one of the most artful and best-curated print magazines out there, Strategy + Business by Booz is one of the sharpest business publications, and there are countless other examples of high-quality corporate publishing. What is wrong with the idea that not only marketers need to be good writers, but writers can be good marketers, too--for the common good of public life? Brands, advertisers, and PR agencies shape the cultural fabric of our societies as much as museums, galleries, artists, and writers do--if the mechanics of their complex interactions are more exposed these days, this can only be a good thing. As long as the involved parties' agendas are transparent--as they were in De Botton's airport project--readers can judge for themselves how valuable they find the products of such collaborations: there is no free lunch, there is no free content, after all.

Aside from that, it is naïve to assume that PR agencies and brand marketers are all evil and unconditionally push for a lopsided, overwhelmingly positive expression of their brands. By now, most of them are happy to tune into the choir of conversational marketing evangelists who understand that authenticity trumps news which may be good but lacks credibility. In this vein, Dan Glover, creative director at Mischief, BAA's PR agency, told the NY Times that "If we funded a brochure that said how wonderful the airport was, people would switch off because they'd think they're being marketed to." Instead, he added, the Heathrow Diary campaign sought to stimulate "branded conversations" among travelers "through the experience of seeing a top literary figure at the airport--and potentially being a character in the book--and by receiving an exclusive copy to read on your travels. The overarching objective is to make a passenger's time at Heathrow the best memory of the trip."

It all goes back to the pillars of "meaningful marketing": Add value, create a (social) event, be a change agent, engage the audience, don't market products, produce! Clients turning to artists and storytellers to create "meaning" for their brands intend that the return-on-meaning transcends the original assignment--the wealth spreads and generates a "meaning surplus."

In this case, De Botton wasn't hired to write an image brochure for an airport whose bad reputation is well known. The "Art of Travel" author took advantage of the opportunity to study one of his favorite subjects first-hand, and rather than just bitching and moaning about the notoriously inhumane experience of having to spend time at Heathrow, he and his client actually did something to make the experience better for travelers. The result of his work, "A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary," was published on September 24, and BAA is distributing 10,000 free copies of the book to Heathrow passengers (it is not devoid of irony to create artificial scarcity by limiting the book's free distribution to one of the world's most frequented travel hubs). Afterward the book will be available for sale through Amazon's British Web site and traditional bookstores. De Botton's "Heathrow Diary" benefits the publisher, the writer, BAA, and travelers--a win-win-win-win and a story with a happy landing.

Read excerpts from "Heathrow Diary"

[Image credit: LA Times]

Jeff Jarvis, who’s admirably trying to prevent the news industry from becoming the next music industry, recently wrote an interesting blog post in which he heralded “hyper-distribution” as a valuable new business model for news organizations. Responding to some industry pundits who propose embracing shrinking audiences as an effective means of consolidation and audience loyalty, Jarvis argued:

“Since when did it become OK for media people to shrink their audiences? Since they gave up on the ad model, that’s when. But I am not ready to surrender to the idea that advertising, which has supported mass media since its creation, is over. Yes, ad rates are lower; welcome to competition. That’s all the more reason why publishers must attract larger audiences publics – make it up on volume – as well as more targeted and valuable communities.”

To grow audiences through hyper-distribution, Jarvis proposes that news outlets utilize readers as distributors and embrace the very hyper-fragmented forces of the social web that might pose the most existential threat to them: reverse-syndication, “embeddable paper” formats, APIs, specialization, and engagement on social networks.

These are viable concepts (and some of them are already used, i.e. by the New York Times, the Silicon Insider, and others) but, if you were to be cynical, you could also view them as belated means of catching up to a new media reality in which the traditional notion of an advertising- funded news market is no longer valid. While hyper-distribution may provide formats for the post-article era, it still clings to the idealistic assumption that the world needs professional news organizations. But what if it doesn’t? What if the student who famously told the New York Times a year ago, “If the news is that important, it will find me,” doesn’t really consider news media to be trusted sources of news anymore, no matter how good they are in deploying social distribution channels to push them to him? What, in fact, if news brands don’t really matter anymore to Gen Y – as sources of news, trusted or not?

Arguably, CNN has lost some cachet through its #CNNfail debacle during the Iranian election (and similar defining news moments that seem to have shifted the intertwined powers of authority and attention to Twitter, i.e. the Hudson River plane crash and so on), and already, individual experts manage to establish themselves as the nimbler news aggregators on Twitter, cultivating individual audiences (of followers). What if the new news brand is @name? Or newsrooms, dispersed online, that converge amateurs, professionals, and experts? Google’s Marissa Mayer has hinted at what this scenario might look like: "hyperpersonal news streams," in which stories break like (Google) “Waves” and become the publication of collaborative processes rather than finished articles – constant iterations instead of interpretations.

Hyper-distribution may indeed overestimate the demand for trusted commercial news providers. As long as NPR, BBC, and other public services provide first-hand news coverage for free, chances are that the blogo-and Twittersphere will self-aggregate and hyper-distribute news without the mediation of commercial hyper-distributors. For them, innovating their distribution formats to catch up with social media may not be enough – they may want to innovate the very meaning of news. Rather than trying to generate incremental value against over-supply, they could generate disruptive value by creating a new kind of demand – pursuing a “reconstructionist” approach and yielding the type of “value innovation” that is commonly labeled under the sticky metaphor Blue Ocean Strategy.

And yet, two of the venerable US news weeklies, Time and, recently, Newsweek, are pursuing a third way out of the industry misery. They are neither adapting to the new rules of competition in a ‘red ocean’ nor are they creating a ‘blue ocean’ – instead, they are carving out a blue ocean within the red ocean, so to speak, by increasing their publications’ exclusivity. Both are deliberately reducing circulation to create a more loyal and targeted readership, and shifting their positioning from mere news engine to high-end background reportage and political commentary; and both are diametrically opposed to Jarvis’ hyper-distribution paradigm. Newsweek, 76 years old, is determined to shrink its circulation from 2.7 million to little more than half of that. Time’s circulation, which 20 years ago was close to five million, is now at 3.4 million.

Interestingly, it is another renowned weekly that presents the exception from this trend, and boasts surging circulation and ad revenue numbers: The Economist. According to the Publishers Information Bureau, the magazine’s revenues increased last year by a whopping 25 percent, whereas Newsweek’s and Time’s dropped 27 percent and 14 percent, respectively. With its US circulation nearing 800,000, The Economist may ultimately even overtake Newsweek in the States. Given that this growth trajectory has been consistent in the past few years, what is it that makes The Economist thrive while others are drowning in red ink? Michael Hirschorn, in a recent article in The Atlantic, opines that “The real value of The Economist lies in its smart analysis of everything it deems worth knowing – and smart packaging, which may be the last truly unique attribute in the digital age.”

Smart packaging of course means smart branding. The Economist has successfully branded itself as the de-facto print magazine for the global elite. “The secret to The Economist’s success is not its brilliance, or its hauteur, or its typeface,” Hirschorn contends, “The writing in Time and Newsweek may be every bit as smart, as assured, as the writing in The Economist. But neither one feels like the only magazine you need to read. You may like the new Time and Newsweek. But you must – or at least, brilliant marketing has convinced you that you must – subscribe to The Economist.”

Similar value is associated with Tyler Brule’s Monocle, a “briefing on world affairs,” as the monthly describes itself, delightfully packaged and suavely combined with fashion features, frequent traveler tips, and stylish gizmos – plus, online, a truly earnest old school radio podcast. The Economist and Monocle are both examples of the power of niche positioning, as Michael Hirschorn points out: “In the digital age, razor-sharp clarity and definition are the keys to success. Knowing what and who you are, and conveying that idea to an audience, is the only way to break through to readers ADD’ed out on an infinitude of choices. General-interest is out; niche is in. The irony, as restaurateurs and club-owners and sneaker companies and Facebook and Martha Stewart know – and as The Economist demonstrates, week in and week out – is that niche is sometimes the smartest way to take over the world.”

“News doesn’t build a brand anymore,” says serial German Web entrepreneur Alexander Görlach, who is poised to fill a niche with his new online magazine The European, which will launch at the end of September. Görlach believes that “To date, online formats have been designed as extensions of print outlet. But [in Germany], there is no autonomous online news brand that focuses exclusively on commentary and opinion.” The European will give experts and authors a voice, and cherish a culture of debate without violating the principles of the web by offering text-heavy articles. “Strong opinions. Journalism for the Web. No perks,” the tagline provides cues for what to expect. For US audiences, this formula may sound familiar: When Görlach promises rich multimedia programming and a departure from conventional section structures, one can’t help think that the Huffington Post is coming to Germany. In any event, The European, targeting 25-60 year old web users who earn more than 2,500 Euro per month, is one to watch, especially with a classy title like this that indicates that the publisher seems to have a good hand with branding and a confident, somewhat ironic grasp on history: "The European" was also the name of a British weekly newspaper in the 90s, billed as “Europe’s first national newspaper,” as well as that of a privately circulated cultural and political magazine that was published in the 50s. Obviously, neither lasted long.

The main lesson to be learned from the success of The Economist and Monocle and (quite possibly) The European: Culture beats economies of scale. Hyper-distribution (and hyper-localization) might be a (controversial) option for newspapers; it is certainly not an option at all for distinct magazine titles. For them, creating artificial scarcity in a sea of abundance – the essence of branding – remains the main imperative. I’m not saying that all outlets in the high-end category – The Economist, Monocle, Vogue, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, and others – can survive simply because of their strong brands, but they stand much better chances of maintaining loyal audiences because of it. Access to information is important, sure, and innovative distribution models are to be explored, too, but it all comes down to the power of branding, the power of your voice. Distinction saves you from extinction. What do you stand for? What do you know? What do you have to offer as a handle on the world, a firm point of view in a world that is increasingly complex and full of ambiguity?

If brand is so important, then why is BusinessWeek up for sale, a supposedly strong name? Well, maybe precisely because its brand has suffered. By pioneering a compelling, state-of-the-art web presence – one of the best among business publications – BusinessWeek may not have done itself a favor; rather, it inadvertently over-extended its brand and diluted its editorial voice. It has experimented a lot but not really carved out a new identity: Is it a business magazine, a news portal, a blog network, or a social network?

While BusinessWeek expanded into digital formats and gradually blurred the boundaries between its print and online offerings, The Economist succeeded by sticking to it guns. It was very late to the web game and in fact never really caught up to the latest trends (and fads) of online journalism. It did not embrace the principles of the “link economy” as BusinessWeek did so fervently, and if you ask anyone about The Economist, you will certainly hear that it’s a weekly print publication. That’s all. Similarly, German business monthly Brand Eins, an award-winning collection of philosophical essays and reportages on the people behind the numbers, has never really hidden its disdain for the web – and its print circulation keeps growing. Both Brand Eins and The Economist have never compromised their print brands, never open-sourced their content to anyone, and are now in the most enviable position to defy Jarvis’ calls for “hyper-distribution.”

Perhaps, the most innovative thing you can do if you’re a publisher these days is to ignore the action bias – and not innovate.