I’m listening to Kayne West on hypem.com’s Music Blog Zeitgiest, which is a great way to blog. But that’s not what this post is about.
What it’s about is the new Trek-Livestrong U-23 Team Jersey, which I took off of TwitPic.
Check it out and ask yourself if you think of it as an ad for Mellow Johnny’s Bike Shop and Trek or do you just interact with it as content in your own particular way?
Now, that could be sharing it to Tumblr or Facebook like I did or leaving a comment like the two people who want to know when they can get one.
On the Web, this is the best kind of advertising, the only kind. Advertising should just be content, media that people want to touch, incorporate, and pass around. And, of course, get and gift.
Why is this worth bringing up? It’s not hard to do. Nope, it’s hard to see.
You can smell a real, for-the-customer ad campaign, can’t you? BMW did it with their short films. And that’s always been part of Honda’s DNA.
Today, Honda is putting out a series of mini docs under the theme “Dream the Impossible” (http://dreams.honda.com/).
The most effective advertising is becoming content . . . both authentic and with a purpose. And that’s what these shorts appear to be. (Oh, and the ads for these mini docs serve as trailers – more content.)
“It’s not advertising optimism,” Mr. Carey [Todd Carey, VP of ad firm RPA] said. “It’s authentic documentary-film optimism.” Link.
Honda is doing this campaign not in spite of the economy, but because of the economy. They’re thinking long term.
This is what advertising and digital marketing companies, big and small, old and new, need to be doing.
That is, getting together in a room and developing standards for areas in which everyone is already getting business traction. Innovating together on how the Web can support new technologies and business models is crucial.
Steve Ronson, EVP at A&E, says getting premium TV content to the Web sans the “millions of dollars worth of TV ads” is a “troubling issue.”
Yep.
Two things are interesting about this. First, it’s an acknowledgement that this is happening and it has to happen: TV is going to the Web (in its many forms) because that’s where people want it. The networks have been downplaying the strength of this trend, but they’re going to have to embrace it.
Second, the way to figure out the new value exchange between producer and viewer is not to start with the notion that you have to maintain the same amount of revenue from advertisers. It might be 50 percent less or the single stream might separate into three or four seemingly unrelated streams.
But you can’t worry about that right away or it’ll be like working with your hands tied behind your back. It’s a startup – in an environment with a lot of unknown and fuzzy rules.
The trick is going to be making a commitment to doing it right. Then, hey, maybe you make 2x or 10.
No real value, means no true wealth. And our ability to create value has been hammered by this financial meltdown, but, in truth, has been eroding for years. That can’t go on forever, though.
New business models for media require entirely new exchanges of value — it’s not about finding new ways to balance the old equation. – Scott Karp, Publishing 2.0
Print, as I’ve been saying since the days of Wired, will continue in the digital age, but it will have to pass new tests of value before it can survive. - John Battelle, Searchblog
The value of present real wealth is no longer sufficient to serve as a lien to guarantee the exploding debt. Consequently the debt is being devalued in terms of existing wealth. – Herman Daly, quoted by Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Radar
(emphasis mine)
This break in the value equation is (one reason) why Silicon Valley has gone relatively silent.
WHAT an opportunity to create change and do well, yes?
Time to get our wattz on.
We’re thinking about energy efficiency. Is it going to power sustainable new businesses? – that’s the question.
I walked up Telegraph in Berkeley, CA past the empty Cody’s bookstore last weekend. I’ve seen it empty before, but it really struck me this time, maybe because I wasn’t in such a rush.
Cody’s. Empty. Gone.
I’m one of those people who believes that books saved my life by transporting me to other fictional and non-fictional worlds. The Web has extended those travels in a way that I never expected and for which I’m eternally grateful. But, I’ll always be a reader, always love books.
Cody’s, in particular, is in my bones because I grew up in Berkeley and went to UC Berkeley just up the street from that Telegraph store. Cody’s was always there, as an institution, for aimless browsing, gifts, doing assigments, and, best of all, inspiration.
If you’ve been in that Cody’s store, you’ll remember that upstairs was a sort of wall of fame with pictures signed by many of the great authors who had passed through there. And often, they guided your choice on what to read next. You wanted to know what they knew – to save yourself at least some time cultivating the secrets of life – and then add to it.
A day later I was reading this piece in the NYTimes about bargain hunting for books, which is really about how the Internet has disintermediated the book business. And. serendipitiously, they had talked to Andy Ross, the former owner of Cody’s:
Mr. Ross said he realized that Cody’s was doomed when he noticed that in the last year he hadn’t sold a single copy of that old-reliable for undergraduates, Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason.” Students presumably were buying it online. Sales of classics and other backlist titles used to be the financial engine of publishers and bookstores as well, allowing them to take chances on new authors. Clearly that model is breaking. Simon & Schuster, which laid off staffers this month, cited backlist sales as a particularly troubled area.
Obviously, what has happened to Cody’s isn’t just about it or the book business in general. There are bits of destruction in every crook and cranny of our economic and social life. Let’s be sure to take that reality in. It’s a fucking big change.
The Internet has pushed us into a transactional/sharing world with an entirely different structure and set of rules, and 2008 has strongly punctuated that change for those who were a little unsure.
Here’s a pause, then, at the end of 2008 for Cody’s and the broader creative destruction that Cody’s demise represents. We have lost something, are losing something . . . at lightning speed.
However, that’s not the pause of this post. The final pause is for what the Internet has borrowed from the book readers and bookstores of the world – in a word, progress and hope – and (with a bit of help from you and me) has started to remix and remake how we live our lives.
Obama’s campaign has offered the latest and greatest example of what can be achieved with the “new.” Much more to come.
As we enter 2009, those authors on the wall upstairs at Cody’s are, no doubt, cheering us on. They know what we’re up to.
Sure, TV retains its advertising dollars in this recession, but what’s really going on?
The piece tells us that while the money continues to come in ratings are down and so the broadcast networks, who guaranteed a certain number of viewers at the beginning of the season for upfront money, are having to give advertisers free placements to “make good” on that commitment.
So this is really nowhere land: Fewer viewers in broadcast but greater uncertainty about how to reach them online. Where would you put your money?
You bet I’d still put a bunch of it in broadcast, but I’d also put at least 25% of it online and be learning, learning, learning . . . if, in fact, that’s where my customer is going.
Tim O’Reilly wrote a post today about Wendell Berry’s “In Distrust of Movements,” about the need to think holistically about our problems, and it inspired a comment, which I thought I’d share here, too. I started it with a line from Tim’s post.
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“. . . that just maybe, we are getting the first signs that our society as a whole (and not just our financial system) is a kind of gigantic Ponzi scheme that will one day run out of room for growth, with disastrous consequences.”
This is a real concern. We’ve been treating the environment as badly as our financial system – indeed, in the end, they ARE one and the same – and so why would we think that the result would be any different?
Yesterday, I read “Cod” (http://snipurl.com/978rf), a little history of “the fish that changed the world.” Cod was so abundant for centuries that you could “scoop them up in baskets.”
It last made a big comeback during WWII because countries were focused on that fight.
But WWII also brought technology – i.e., processing done right on the ship decks, sonar, and “ground fishing” (large nets that pick up everything that lives on the bottom of the ocean) – that, after the war over a few decades, caused the collapse of huge Atlantic cod schools from New England and Canada to Iceland and the UK.
So that’s an example of how new technology put to use for our economy in the pursuit of food didn’t work out so well for the natural environment.
But we could take our pick, couldn’t we?
And now, of course, the fisherman of Gloucester, and their families, and their communities, suffer right along with the Cod, a pretty good proof, I’d say, that when you don’t think holistically you still get holistic results.
It’s just more obvious now, as we hit limits to growth, than it ever has been.
I do believe that current and coming technology will be a big part of the solution, but a big enough crowd of us are going to have to wake-up in order to use that technology to match the need.
And the need is off the charts, so we have a lot of waking-up to do.
This jumped out at me from John Battelle’s end-of-the-year predictions for 2008:
Google will continue to struggle with its display advertising business, at least as it is traditionally understood, in part due to a culture conflict between its engineering-based roots and the thousands of media-saavy sales and marketing folks the company has hired in the past two years.
I really want to know how display advertising is going to take root on the Web, and Google is either going to show us how to do it or show us how not do it, if you know what I mean.
And somewhere in there, something novel is going to happen.
BTW, what is the conflict John refers to between engineering and marketing? Why does it exist? What’s the third way?
My short answer is that you can’t leverage the network without technology and you can’t leverage the community without communication.
Display advertising – that breaks out – is going to draw from the power of both the network and the community (and also elements of search). It’s the new DNA.
Did you realize that when you use Google Maps to get driving directions that you can click on any step in those directions and get a visual (top pane) with your point on the map (bottom pane)?
“Walking through” your route in this manner makes the actual trip much easier because, in a sense, you’ve been there before.
I point this out to say that, on the Web, little upgrades in an app can make a huge difference in the usefulness of that app. Often, it’s not necessary to add that heroic next feature. Instead the leverage is in what you can combine or bring together.
John Hagel has talked about a type of strategy that embraces a network of networks to bring about something entirely new. He calls this a “shaping strategy.” Link.
This type of strategy, he says, uses positive incentives to “mobilize and focus thousands of participants in shaping specific markets or industries.”
Salesforce.com has reshaped and revitalized CRM with a shaping strategy, for example.
When you come into contact with Better Place, don’t you get the strong feeling that they’re casting a shaping strategy on the car industry?
I do.
Chas points to an Ad Age estimate that GM, Chrysler, and Ford spend $7.3B on marketing and the fact that the “car czar” will have a major role in how it gets spent.
Car Czar Will Control $7.3 Billion Ad Budget
What this czar should really be doing, though, is cut that spend by half and double its effectiveness, which is entirely impossible with today’s social media. Think: change.gov.
Ad agencies like Publicis are working hard to redefine advertising and marketing, but one can bet that innovation that really changes the game is going to pop-up at some smart, little company in an unexpected way.
Maybe that’s what Tim Hanlon at VivaKi, the investment unit of Publicis, is thinking, too, when he says:
I think it’s clear that the traditional process of agencies is clearly not going to survive the digital era without significant changes to our approaches.
Twitter? That could be. Because what changes the game is advertising that is consistently worth my time, your time.
Nick Bilton, who is working on this sort of thing at NYTimes, points out that when you use Twitter a stream of tweets follow you that give very specific information about what you care about (e.g., coconut milk-based ice cream).
And as importantly, the people around you (your followers, people using the same keywords, close geographically, etc) have a tweet stream that is relevant to yours (e.g., they like mint chip coconut milk-based ice cream).
Nick gives an example:
If I send a tweet saying “I’m looking for a new car does anyone have any recommendations”, I would be more than happy to see ‘smart’ user generated advertising recommendations based on my past tweets, mine the data of other people living Brooklyn who have tweeted about their car and deliver a tweet/ad based on those result leaving spammers lost in the noise. I’d also expect when I send a tweet saying ‘I got a new car and love it!’ that those car ads stop appearing and something else, relevant to only me, takes it’s place.
In other words, if Twitter could surface these “likes” and the related and relevant “likes” from those in your Twitterverse, then they could give you what are really more suggestions, and even the occassional full-blown recommendation, in your stream of @replies.
It wouldn’t feel like advertising as we know it now, these type of ambient suggestions, and that’s exactly why it would be a significant change.