@markcridge \ muck and brass

America twice

I’ve been on the road a bit too much recently and my travels have taken me to America twice in the past month.

Sadly I wasn’t fortunate enough to attend the geek-fest that is SXSW, however I did manage two trips that partly made up for that missed opportunity. The first was to the West Coast to spend a few days visiting Facebook, the second to the East Coast where as part of the trip we visited the MIT Media Lab.
Both organizations use innovation to drive everything that they do. How they go about harnessing this creative spark is quite different in each case.

Facebook surprised me. It’s rare to find a company, especially one with such a high-profile that maintains such a clear and dedicated focus. What they tried to convince us was that the day Facebook starts to hire ad-agency creatives is the day they will have failed in their mission. Instead they harness the collective efforts of just over 2,000 people most of whom are engineers, in a process of iteration, experimentation and just plain trying things out. This effort is channeled towards improving and developing their platform rather than worrying about what ends up on the platform itself. 

Their innovation was focused and purposeful. It has clear direction and well articulated goals.
MIT Media Lab on the other hand is much more freeform. The same level of dedication, intellectualism and culture of experimentation, but comfortable to leave the end result as a ‘what if?’ Experimentation is valued in its own right, as you might expect from an academic environment. Doing and making is valued above all else. Yet there is no embarrassment in talking about the potential for commercialisation of their ideas should that be possible.

Their process of innovation is the point of the exercise. Dispersed and open, used to find out the question rather than just provide an answer.

As agencies we often seek to place innovation on a pedestal. Innovation is the secret-sauce. Innovation is what makes the difference, what makes us stand out from the crowd. All ideas will benefit from a sprinkling of innovation pixie dust. In most cases how agencies harness innovation is in addition to what we do day-to-day.

In the case of Facebook and MIT, innovation is what they actually do. In order to maintain that focus and to ensure the innovation is actually effective they have to choose to not to do the other things. They both recognise that innovation can’t exist as a peripheral activity, its not there to make them look good or make up for banality elsewhere.

Innovation is wasted as a discrete little package, it thrives when baked-in to everything we do.

(A version of this post first appeared in Campaign Magazine.)

To iPad or not Pad

I have a confession to make, I don’t own an iPad and I’m not really in a rush to get one.

Don’t get me wrong I’m well aware of the cosmic significance of the pad as a game-changing world transforming new platform that will finally herald the arrival of mobile computing as a major new source of growth for the marketing industry.

But I’m also equally aware of my propensity to become wholly absorbed in the latest new gadget at the expense of my family, social and work life. The crackberry was bad enough; there probably isn’t space for me to have another personal paradigm shifted.

Not to be outdone, stop that sniggering at the back, I bought an Amazon Kindle with faux plastic leather cover instead. The observant amongst you will know that this is clearly not even in the same category of devices, the Kindle is not an iPad lite in anything other than size. Think of the Kindle instead as mobile methadone as opposed to the more addictive nature of the iPad.

My reading behaviours in the real world have quickly become repeated in the virtual. Already I have 10 or 12 books piled up on the Kindle all in various stages of ‘read-iness’, mirroring the piles of half consumed novels and business bibles that litter my home.

I noticed a similar mirroring of behaviour when I spoke at the IAB Forum last week in Milan, a gathering of around 10,000 people who without exception seemed wholly obsessed about the transformational power of said iPad. This was the breakthough that they’d all been waiting for, the nirvana that would see new sources of revenue quickly flow into their pockets.

Of the demos and early stage experiments on display, the majority seemed to go no deeper than adding a bit of video and slick transitions to existing magazine formats, Chris Anderson’s demo of the Wired app being a prime example. We’re still at the stage of transferring existing approaches on to a new model, reinforced by the fact over 25% of iPad owners have yet to download an app, happy to use it as a fancy web browser instead.

Over the longer term new models and markets will indeed be found, you only need to look at the gorgeous films from BERG and Dentsu to get a glimpse of this. But as is normally the case with any technology we tend to exaggerate the benefits in the short-term and under estimate the benefits in the long-term.

It is still better to understand how to impact consumer behaviour across the full extent of digital over the long-term, rather than get distracted with each and every new platform and gadget as it comes along.

(A version of this post first appeared in Campaign Magazine.)

Google and the Slag Heap (or muck and brass in action)

What does Google and a huge mound of slag in Africa have in common?

Just outside the City of Lubumbashi in the Katanga Province of the Democratic Republic of Congo lies an enormous slagheap, created from the end process of the local copper mining industry. The copper that was initially extracted was valuable in its own right, even though most of that wealth has already been frittered away and forgotten. What’s being discovered now is that the real value lies in what has been built up over time. Of the 14.5m tonnes of waste, almost 2% of it is made up of cobalt, an essential element in everything from jet engines to lithium mobile phone batteries. There are literally billions of dollars of wealth just sitting there waiting to be reclaimed.

Google of course has already created an insane amount of wealth through its core business of search, sucking in billions of dollars of revenue in a process that has transformed the whole business of advertising. The data that has been collected and built up over the past decade or so is sitting there, growing every day, but largely untapped, waiting to be exploited.

Up until now this has largely been the domain of media and search agencies, more comfortable with the grubby business of numbers and statistics. However Google has actively begun to court more directly the creative side of our business, most recently at the Google Jam event in sunny Shoreditch, where they sought to help those delicate creative types take a few baby steps towards getting down and dirty with the data.

We’ll already be familiar with mash-ups of houses for sale or crime data overlaid on to Google Maps, and we’ll all happily quote YouTube views as a pretty good measure of success for our latest TV ad as viral. What’s happening now though is an order of magnitude more ambitious. An active push to encourage a multitude of ways to tunnel into and uncover nuggets of buried insight through historical data, and providing open API’s for every conceivable aspect of Google’s activities. From free language translation that gets better with every use, to powerful tools for planners to back up audience insights and get a better handle on real world behaviours.

Without wanting to be a cheerleader for Google, this is a microcosm of where the digital industry has got itself to today.

The pace of change remains as fast ever, but as technologies have converged and matured we no longer have to build everything from scratch. Less defined by technical novelty, we’re blessed with a wealth of experience and knowledge from which we can draw upon, revisit and build upon. Freer perhaps to let creative talent, ideas and thinking flourish and distinguish themselves, and hopefully uncover some buried treasure along the way.

(A version of this article first appeared in Campaign Magazine.)

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.)