@markcridge \ muck and brass

I want my toys!

It’s exhausting stuff keeping up with this digital lark. Just when you think you’ve got to grips with the latest technological media revolution, along comes a hugely disruptive new demand for social understanding and sharing or the need to tap into some exciting new cultural meme.

Things aren’t going to slow down. We’re not going to enter a period of relative calm where we can take stock, get to grips with the changes that have already happened and work out how best to exploit them. Faster, faster is all we can expect.

You only need to look at the wave of new technologies on the horizon; ubiquitous computing, augmented reality, GPS and the long overdue blossoming of mobile to see we’ll have plenty of new toys to play with.

However even as the relentless march of technology seems pre-ordained, we can’t and shouldn’t take all of this for granted. Adam Greenfield at the beginning of his visionary book ‘Everyware’ caveats this whole enterprise with;

“Every argument in this book is, at root, predicated on the continuing existence and vitality of our highly energy-intensive technological civilization. This book should not be construed as a statement of belief that our current way of life is in fact sustainable.”

Its this blunt reality that we’ve yet to come to terms with. Just as we place more and more demands on infrastructure and society, with new gadgets, systems and fashions every year, the likelihood that we’ll be able to support this profusion of new toys becomes less and less likely. Ever increasing energy demands just can't go on unabated.

The recent ‘Prosperity Without Growth’ report from the Sustainable Development Commission made it clear, that technical fixes alone will not see us through, as any improvements in the efficiencies of our technology are currently swamped by the much more rapid growth in uptake. Demand so far always outstrips supply.

So looking to the next few years, and considering where I think we should be focusing more of our creative endeavors; clearly we're not just going to walk away from our modern way of life (we’re not going to go back to living in yurts anytime soon), so if we want to keep our toys we're going to need to devote just as much creative energy to finding low-carbon ways of living, as we currently do to making our wonderfully immersive and integrated digital future a reality. In doing so each of us also will have to radically reappraise our individual and collective role and impact within our hugely productive and consumptive economy.

One of the impacts of a broader adoption of social technologies and indeed the long-term impact of digital technology as a whole is that it makes the entire process of production and consumption much more transparent.

Social media was able to take off for a number of reasons, not least the realisation that we could make money out of this, secondly the ubiquity of tools developed to enable listening made it impossible to ignore the conversations going on.

Just as a vast ecosystem of social listening and tracking technologies and agencies has sprung up over the past couple of years; the same now needs to happen for sustainability.

This may be from specialist agencies like our sister agency in Aegis, Clownfish who have been knee deep in this stuff for the past 5 years. Equally just as we've seen with Social, more fundamental shifts will come when each of us finds how we can play our own role.

How do we measure the carbon impact within our communications planning process, what role does search and social play in tapping into the right conversations, how do we shift our creative and strategic minds from hiding the bad bits towards informing the product development process?

We can’t implement change if we don’t first know what is going on. Rather than just advertising our green credentials as is the current norm, we need to first listen and learn what’s really happening; to understand the real direct impact of our communications, and the much wider impact through the purchasing decisions of individual customers.

The ways that we've learned how to appropriately communicate and get involved in the conversation through social and digital don’t provide all the answers, but they could provide models for how we can do the same for changing attitudes and behaviours around sustainability.

(A version of this post originally appeared in New Media Age.)

Leveling the playing field

The problem with being a specialist is that when everyone can do what your good at, it ceases to be particularly special. That certainly seems to rapidly becoming the case for many of those self-styled social media gurus out there.

It’s barely six months since the future looked set to be defined by your local common or garden social media influencer listening strategy agency, and now instead everyone seems to be doin’ it for themselves.

So is it over for social media specialists before it even got going?

It all seems a bit unfair of course. At least with the original wave of digital we at least had a good run of about 10 years before most people worked out what we were talking about; at this rate social media agencies will be lucky if they get a clear 10 months!

I mentioned recently that many digital agencies have been perhaps blindsided by the rise of social media; in essence it has leveled the playing field for agencies of all creeds, giving everyone the chance to develop new credentials free from whatever baggage they may have carried before. Just being digital doesn’t mean you’ll be any better placed to deliver socially.

What’s becoming clear though is that the field of play is not just open to all agencies, but every client business and corporation out there as well.

Now that the UK Government has seen fit to issue an informative, useful and practical guide on how to use Twitter, we’re clearly going to be hearing a lot more from all manner of civil servants and ministers alike. No doubt we’ll also see a subsequent surge in uptake from all shapes and sizes of commercial business as well.

Everywhere you look businesses are getting on with the business of getting social all by themselves.

Of course Twitter is just the current most high-profile face of social, but with its low barriers to entry it’s a clear first step for any organisation to find its feet in social with or without 20 pages of best practice guidelines; made all the easier no doubt by Twitter’s active moves to help businesses get signed up and tweeting.

Pete Blackshaw of Nielsen said in AdAge;

“It's hard to turn over a rock in social media, dip your toe into Twitter or comment on someone's blog without rethinking the fundamentals of a firm's organization or product development. Such firsthand experience begets inspiration. Inspiration powers change. And change is needed now more than ever before.”

Just as increased listening and participation may help a traumatized political system regain some of its respect and understanding, there’s nothing like being part of the conversation to force reappraisal of how, why and where we do what we do as clients and agencies.

Rather than exploit social simply to make up for short falls in current ad budgets, it demands we take a longer term view, reconsidering how we use media together, the role and expectations we have of creative work, and our definitions of success.

Whilst we might lose out on a few opportunities to knock out a quick blog or a couple of widgets in the short-term, we’ll more than make up for this with richer, broader, more genuine and frankly more entertaining client and agency partnerships, which has got be a better prospect.

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

We all love a good lie, and let’s be honest as an industry we’re pretty effective liars.  You could say we’ve built our profession on lies.

The myths that people could be lumped together as mass markets or simple demographies. The fibs we’ve squeezed in around effectiveness to sell in an idea. The lie of the big idea as the be all and end all to each and every creative problem. The lies we’ve told consumers to get them to buy our shiny new products. We’ve perfected them all.

But these aren’t the lies I want to focus on. You’ll be familiar with the three kinds of lies described by Benjamin Disraeli, ‘Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics’. Statistics in this case being the persuasive use of numbers and data to bolster weak arguments, or to disparage results that do not agree with a particular desired outcome.

It is just this pernicious use of statistics and data that was highlighted in a recent New York Times article, ‘Data, Not Design, Is King in the Age of Google’. In it Douglas Bowman, ex Head of Design at Google (now Head of Design at Twitter) raged against the engineering-driven culture there, where data trumped everything else.

When he would come up with a design decision, no matter how minute, he was asked to back it up with data. Every pixel change required different test pages, different groups, with the page that resulted in the highest click or dwell time being proclaimed the winner.

“Data”, he said “eventually became a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.”

Now this is perhaps an extreme case, and you’ve got to ask yourself did he not take a look at Google.com before asking himself if he’d have much freedom as a Head of Design at that particular organisation!

Regardless, this highlights the angst you might feel as the fun, passion and intuition is squeezed out of any design process; the ‘I know the blue looks better, but the red got a 0.003% higher click-thru rate’ effect. Fortunately it doesn’t have to be this way.

It is possible to push back against the creeping desire to use statistics as the ultimate arbiter of what is and is not ‘creative’; instead all effort should be made to seek out and find the beauty and creativity within the data itself.

You only need to look at the stunning data visualisation work of the likes of Stamen, Dopplr the social network built on data or much of Aaron Koblin’s work for the likes of Radiohead, to see how visually powerful and creative the careful and considered use of data and information can be. True artisans, able to blend, technology, design and creativity together in one act.

The fact are that these skills are becoming increasingly essential, just at the same time as the need for our standard output of high-end content, graphics and visuals is called into question by the more lo-fi, tactical, quick and dirty approach often demanded by social media.

This is where the throwaway phrase ‘that a good idea can come from anywhere’ actually takes on some substance; every role in the design, creative and development process has the opportunity and requirement to find the inherent beauty and creativity in each aspect of its output.

So perhaps it is time to find some space in your life for the statistician after all.

(A version of this post appeared in New Media Age.)

Is good enough, now good enough?

Jay Chiat famously said 'good enough is not enough', however as an industry we've often been guilty of using this to justify big-budget production to cover up for a lack of actual substance.

I posted recently on how employing the correct etiquette for each media is going to change the requirements of agencies and Creative Directors alike. Pressure on budgets in the midst of recession, but also the rise of social media which may inadvertently be turning the focus of the work back on to what really matters. Getting back to the 'substance' of genuine connection and involvement first, rather than relying on the 'style' of big-budget indulgent and over-wrought production.

The practical impact of this can be found in a couple of posts which highlight the changing expectations and demands of digital work.

BBH Labs posed this question recently asking is this leading to a dearth of great interactive work, and followed it up with a summary of their 10 reasons why.

One comment in particular noted that microsites tend to deliver most creative awards. I'm not sure if this is completely true, but it wouldn't really be any surprise, that the key generator of awards comes from work that allows creative agencies to flex their creative muscles, free to use all the tools at their disposal in an owned media space they control completely.

Microsites don't need to fight for attention in the same way, as you see it you’ve already made the choice to visit, but in many cases we're probably kidding ourselves on that this stuff actually makes much of an impact.

Brian Morrissey in Ad Age also picked up on how the awards circuit has driven this trend;

"Of course, the industry will probably still reward flashier executions. A Wordpress blog, even backed with a smart strategy, is unlikely to do well on the awards circuit.
Those concerns still matter in an industry where creatives are frequently judged based on the awards their work has won."

The main thrust of his article however concentrates on how agencies are adopting a more lo-fi approach to creating work. High-profile production agencies such as Big Spaceship and Barbarian are all increasingly turning their hands to work that satisfies the desire to get people talking and involved first, rather than having movie style production values as their primary concern.

Ensuring we choose the right tool for the job is a much more sensible place to begin. Not only is a more practical and realistic approach more appropriate for such difficult financial times, but it should also increase the likelihood that genuine innovation will take place.

Quicker, faster, dirtier experimentation that has always gone on in the background can become the norm. We'll do the Russell Davies maxim justice if we 'start by assuming a media budget of zero, then put money behind what works', rather than falling back on bling as a short cut.

Creative Director or Curator?

Picture courtesy of striatic

By definition the job of any Creative Director involves creating stuff, and for all the recent hype around social media, the vast bulk of digital creative endeavour is still focused on spending money on buying media and then filling it up with something. So far, so traditional.

This approach is even more apparent within owned media. Free from many of the restrictions of the campaign, Creative Directors are able to unleash all the digital tools at their disposal, how else to explain the proliferation of over-wrought convoluted ‘microsites’ as the defining model of digital creativity today.

In principle we talk about how different digital is to traditional media, but in practice in most cases Creative Directors are simply adopting a fairly traditional broadcast approach, often repeating the same mistakes, convincing ourselves that this is what consumers respond to rather than tackling the much more complicated and challenging requirement of actually finding ways to deliver genuinely engaging communications.

How else to explain the paucity of great digital creative examples. Great work is just as rare within digital as it is in traditional, which is ironic considering the emphasis we put upon digital work being relevant, targeted and more meaningful to exactly those we wish to reach.

What the rise in importance of earned media has made apparent is that just creating more stuff is not the answer. What you don’t do is often as important if not more so than what you do in fact do. Clearly knowing when to shut up is a skill we could all do with a bit more of!

Thinking on how to work with earned media forces a reappraisal of the role of the Creative Director, no longer required or able to be in control of every message and aspect of every campaign

Joseph Jaffe in ‘Join The Conversation’ suggested that rather than fight against what appears to be a disenfranchisement of the role of the Creative Director, instead who is better placed to act as ‘curator’ of the idea as it transcends the constraints of bought and owned media.

In a recent post he tore into both digital and PR agencies as being unprepared and incapable of properly delivering great work in social media.

However, Creative Directors of all stripes with their experience in recognising great ideas, who better in a post-campaign world to recognise what's most interesting and most valuable. To know what to nurture, what to play down, what to tweak, what to move on. To know how best to keep the story going, to introduce new elements and ensure the ideas are picked up, passed on, take on a life of their own.

So if these are the skills that are going to be important from here on in, which type of Creative Director would you rather work with? A big-budget brand storyteller obsessed with control, or one more comfortable with the ebb and flow of the interactive world.

(A version of this post appears in my New Media Age column.)