8/17/2010Posted by Leo Ryan, Influence Planning Director, Draftfcb London
We received a brief at Draftfcb recently that asked for advice on using all three areas of search; SEO, SEM and “stimulated”. I think this is a really useful distinction and an obvious corollary to the oft quoted “three types of media”; paid, owned and earned which is neatly summarised by Forrester here.
What does it mean? If SEM is paid search and SEO is what you can do to optimise your own web site in search then to my mind stimulated is what you can do to activate both of those. In this interpretation, stimulating SEM would be driving users to a search engine with a specific search in mind, against which you have bought specific terms; Compare the Meerkat comes to mind as an example.
But it is the stimulation of SEO that is really emerging as an area of interest; how to harness the growing tendency of users to link to sites they like (which builds you-in bound links) and to write descriptions of them, which contributes to the meta data that search engines use to understand what your site is about.
I first noticed the impact of inbound links working on the Sony BRAVIA Balls campaign (in 2005 at another agency) when one of the unintended consequences of creating the BRAVIA blog and the associated distribution of blog assets was that lots of high ranking blogs linked to the campaign site bravia-advert.com. The net result of this was that the site was the number one result in Google for the search term “advert”. For two years. Genius. If what Sony sold was adverts…so be careful what you optimse for.
As often seems to be the case whenever you get into the murky world of search there are myriad issues to consider including the follow / nofollow; the practice of marking links as ‘nofollow’ to exclude them from various search engine processes. This varies on different bookmarking sites and so can impact on their contribution to your SEO. With the rise of twitter and other mocroblogging platforms there has also been a huge increase in the use of URL shortening servcies like Bit.ly and TinyURL. Again these vary in the way that hey attributte links, although it seems most of them do fact act as stimulus to your SEO.
Putting these areas of pernickety technical detail aside it seems that overall social media links help browsers find your content and they contribute to your SEO to help serchers find your content. Both good things. So to get a handle on what kinds of social links you’ve got going on go and play with some of the tools that Lee Odden profiles on Social Media Today here. Or simply put your latest blog post into Yahoo’s Site Explorer.
And happy stimulation.
8/10/2010
Posted by Michael Leis, VP, Digital Management Director, Draftfcb Chicago
In the last post, I tried my best to describe the challenge of Overlap10: solving for Wicked Problems. Now, I can tell you the story of scalable solutions (or, How To Solve For Wicked Problems): the basis for the work we did over the weekend.
Everyone who attended was asked to post a short video describing either what they thought a scalable action was, or what his or her idea was for a scalable social action.
Looking back, while a lot of really incredible scalable social concepts were generated, what I’d like to share are the innovative exercises and presentations that helped me understand that we need new ways of generating platforms within which people can create solutions. Here are the highlights:
Bodystorming
The first exercise was to assemble in groups of 7-9 people to grasp the complexity of a Wicked Problem by taking on childhood obesity. To start, everyone in the group took a few minutes to write a series of ideas about the factors they thought were involved in the problem. Each idea has its own sticky note, and we came together as a group for five minutes to arrange all of our ideas into groups that made the web of influences on the problem apparent.
At that point, Dennis Schleicher’s Bodystorming came into play, literally, where we had another 10 minutes to create a short play showing the problem space and varied interests involved in the childhood obesity issue. Then each group had to perform their conclusions in front of the rest of the group. It was an excellent process to iterate through a number of ideas, and because we went through it all together (after the initial five minutes), in two hours the fifty or so people were able to present a depth of understanding this complex problem space that any other method would have failed at producing.
Yes, it felt silly at first. But going through it, and then improvising through the performance only underlined the importance of using this method to create understanding of issues that groups in very typical corporate or government settings would have trouble to produce in conventional meetings.
Kinesthetic Ideation
Did you know that the nerve endings in your hands connect to 80% of your brain’s synapses? The premise of the kinesthetic exercise was to show more specifically how much more effective it is to generate and iterate on really valuable concepts by using your body than it is to be confined to a chair in a meeting room, office or cubicle.
To do this, we were broken into groups of about 10 people at standing tables with a huge box of Legos. In the first five minutes, we were each tasked to build a freestanding Lego tower. The only condition being that it had to stand on its own.
Next, we were given five minutes to work with the person sitting next to us and create a bridge between the two towers. The only conditions here were that you had to be able to pass your hand underneath the bridge, and the bridge had to be able to hold the weight of a post-it note pad.
At that point, we were asked to write down our favorite city and one or two attributes that make that city great. We then got together as we did at the beginning of the bodystorming to assemble these city attributes into like groups.
Here’s the twist: we then had to create opposite groups. So if a city was centrally located and friendly, it became a note of remote and nasty. Then, we had ten minutes to work together to create that awful city.
In contrast to our earlier group strategy of working together through final output, this group decided that we would split apart and work in 2-3 person groups to create our own part of the city we would then integrate to create the larger city. It didn’t work out as well.
Our city reflected the organizational structure: we had a group of neighborhoods instead of one cohesive creation. And when it came time to relate the different awful attributes of our city, we had a much harder time improvising our way through it. We didn’t have that clarity in the roles we were playing, and we couldn’t support each other as fluidly in the presentation.
Everything is a Performance
We also had a few fantastic speakers, one of which was Michael Dila, an Overlap founding member, who talked about performances: that in every scenario, you play a part on a performance.
To start, he described a situation in which he tried to hand an empty milk pitcher to a Starbucks Barista. Instead of saying something like, “Thanks, let me take care of that for you,” the reaction was one where the Barista seemed taken off guard and accosted by the request.
Why would that reaction happen? In a customer service system like Starbucks, there’s a point of scale in training (ostensibly getting people to learn a script for interacting on behalf of the system/brand), that what gets hammered home are the specific scenes in which Baristas interact with Customers. Somewhere along the way, the fact that both of these players are people gets lost and forgotten.
In contrast, Dila then described a newly designed check-in process at a hotel he stayed at. Instead of a long, high check-in desk separating the employees from the customers, the hotel remodeled the area into a few podiums: not unlike what you might find at an airport counter.
As he approached the check-in area, the hotel employee came out from behind the podium and met him about 6 feet in front of the desk. They took his ID / credit card, went behind the podium to check him in, and then came back out to hand him his cards and keys.
Think about what that means. This may be the only interaction with a human that you have during your stay, and they make it special by giving you actual human contact. It’s at least as efficient to the systematic elements, if not more savings across the board in terms of customer service because now you’ve been in direct contact with a person.
So how do we start embarking on solving Wicked Problems in a scalable and effective way?
Two concepts: Frameworks and Questions
Frameworks instead of scripts and single goals
In designing for scale, we have a habit of creating cattle chutes we want people to follow to contribute to a single-goal “replace the light bulb,” kind of solution. But wicked Problems are often too nuanced and dynamic for that.
So what we need to strive for is the creation of frameworks, creating a “place,” whether real or virtual, where the agenda is set, and the participants allowed to break down their own smaller pieces of the problem, and solve for them using their own methods.
This is where the notion of maturing co-creation platforms like Jovoto (who’s president, Bastian Unterberg was in attendance at Overlap) start to become very interesting.
Platforms and questions
All too often, as global brands, corporations, even governments try to create solutions at scale, the discourse is filled with declarative statements about what people need to do.
What’s really needed is to build on the frameworks idea to create platforms where questions can be asked, and discussed. Maybe with no declarative statements or answers. What does a platform like that look like? What kind of potential for solutions exists in a place where you’re only building and iterating on questions?
Thanks for reading all the way down here! Hopefully, this stirred some thoughts and questions of your own. Please, let’s continue the conversation in the comment section, or on Twitter @mleis.
8/9/2010Posted by Michael Leis, VP, Digital Management Director, Draftfcb Chicago
About ten days after Overlap10, I have finally started processing what about 50 of us went through over a hot, humid, and intellectually exhilarating weekend around New York city.
The weekend started with the presentation of our greater challenge: solving for Wicked Problems.
Usually, when we have a problem of the ordinary variety, there’s a clear goal or solution that we can direct ourselves and other people towards. Take a light bulb burning out: we know how to frame that problem; we can quickly design and implement a solution. We can make jokes about how many people it takes.
At the other end of the spectrum are Wicked Problems. Think about how to solve for a problem like cleaning Lake Michigan, childhood obesity, poverty, national health care, or moving from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. Or in the case of our clients: how to design a brand experience across a continent, or many continents; how to design a communications system for a brand that employs tens of thousand of people, and has tens of millions of customers. How to tackle social media.
These are Wicked Problems: problems that are so wide, and so deep, so deeply cultural and systematic that there is no single answer or single goal that you can adequately articulate -- no single end-state that you can really wrap your mind around and call it solved.
I was reminded again of a corporate Wicked Problem when Jared Spool put together this list of airline redesigns. When you look at the Websites as design problems without the organization, the solutions are often self-evident, unfolding before you in a “Why didn’t they think of this?!” way.
But once you put the problems in the context of that global corporation, you see there’s a Wicked Problem that needs solving for the brand first because the Website can only ever truly be a representation of the blend between that culture's operations, communications, and technology. The Website becomes an output from the organization’s machination rather than an attempt to communicate effectively with the people using it. It is the product of people trying to frame something Wickedly large and organic and living into a single-light bulb solution.
So what do we do with these Wicked Problems? How do we solve for them? This was the purpose of the Overlap, and the topic of the next article.
And as always, let’s continue the conversation here in the comments section or on Twitter @mleis. 7/29/2010Posted by Leo Ryan, Influence Planning Director, Draftfcb London
This is a belated post about the digital culture smorgasbord that is SXSW. Earlier this year I was fortunate enough to attend SXSW and have written endless almost-finished-blog-posts and presentations about the amazing things I learnt and saw there. Now I have finally managed to (quickly) check my punctuation and spelling and roughly assemble my notes into an almost intelligible format...enjoy.
Some things that make SXSW cool...
The breadth: There is a very broad range of attendees: Compared to some 1 day conferences in London SXSW is incredibly good value. This low cost means that instead of a few clients from Proctor and Gamble and the creative digital director of BBH talking to themselves at the Grosvenor Hotel you get students, indy agencies, R&D guys from HP, tech and media startups, VCs and angel investors and every level of employee from interactive and marketing agencies including Draftfcb's healthy contribution that included junior creatives teams through to senior bods like Rob Sherlock and a raft of HR recruitment team swooping on any wandering talent.
The depth: There is a Massive Choice: Each session has about 21 different events from lectures to workshops, demonstrations and round-table discussions / debates. On the upside, what would be in itself a very good conference in Europe or indeed anywhere in the world is all on in one 60 minute session. On the downside obviously you can't possibly see everything or even just the things that you are really really keen to see. So completely opposite to TED where you get a single stream and lots of intense conversation around a single topic at SXSW you get lots of different conversations. To deal with the spread of interest the Draftfcb team split up and then shared notes after each session.
The treats: The Goody Bag was so heavy it could only be dragged back to the hotel and dumped on the floor to sift through. Containing all kinds of fun treats, stickers and flyers, some of them useful, most of them rubbish. Best one were the free Sticky Bits which I have only just re-discovered and distributed around the London office...
The BBQ: As a Queenslander born and bred I have strong opinions about BBQ. The Texans do it very differently but they do it very well. As evidenced by the regular damage we inflicted at Stubbs.
The Weather: Spring comes early to Austin. So while my family friends and colleagues were still shivering in London was in short sleeves and even managed a swim at the natural outdoor Barton Spring.
The Headsup: It is the harbinger of Things To Come. The products and projects launched or profiled at SXSW includes;
2006: Wikipedia2007: Twitter2008: Facebook Beacon (I didn't say they were all successful)
2009: Spotify2010: FourSquareSo what did this years SXSW presage?
1. The Internet of Things
The intersection of online and offline worlds. Newspaper Club printed a newspaper for the conference but took all of their content form the speakers and event data, Sticky Bits were handed out randomly and stuck to all manner of things (no, I'm not going there..) and naturally FourSquare and Gowalla were in high demand.
FourSquare added 100K users after SXSW. During the event we used it as a way of keeping track of who was in which talk, bar or party, sometimes with some hilarious results as we discovered a group who we'd invited to dinner had instead decided to meet separately, but only two blocks away...
QR codes on our conference passes meant that (for mobile phones with the software installed) you could just scan someone's pass and get their info into your contacts. No, it's not particularly new but when you see a gadgetally advanced crowd who all have iPhones and who all want to connect in a short period of time then you start to see the future of how this might be used.
2. There's an App For That
The SXSW iPhone app was a bit rubbish but it heralds an interesting thing; special purpose short term apps with very specific functions like a Nivea For Men World Cup App or a Matters *%^ Me Numbers App.
3. New kinds of businesses
There are some very different kinds of business emerging who are not hampered by legacy business thinking or technology who are really thriving in this new environment. Local Motors, Mint, SmartyPig, Vook, Newspaper Club are all very new types of business operating in traditional sectors; automotive, finance and publishing. There is a significant shift underway and we need to help clients to understand and adapt.
All in all an inspiring and invigorating event. MOre posts to come on some of my fave talks including Transmedia, Future of Publishing, Education 2.0. Once I get this pitch out of the way...
6/24/2010
Posted by Soraya Eltomey, Corporate Communications Associate, Draftfcb
There is no denying it. The video content available via television, the web and mobile devices engages, informs and entertains consumers alike. But what does this all mean for advertisers?
To best answer this question, I sat down with Draftfcb New York VP, Group Media Director Bhavana Smith.
Bhavana 6/22/2010
Posted by Andrew Eifler, Media Supervisor, Draftfcb New York
I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately about the financial bubble/bust of 2008. Most authors I’ve read agree that one of the major forces that led to the meltdown was the creation and sale of exotic financial instruments that were very hard, or in some cases, impossible to value. Similarly, reflecting back on the technology bubble of 1998, one of the driving forces for the crash was people buying and selling stock in companies that had little or no cash flow. Citing both these cases, I think it’s safe to say that there are two telltale signs that indicate an industry is headed for some challenging times:
- Everyone foresees unlimited growth potential
- People are buying and selling things (assets/products) without knowing how much they are worth
Now, it’s not my intention to be the person on the street corner heralding the end of the world with a cardboard sign, but I do think it’s important to take a step back every once in a while and see where things are headed. For me – the area of interest is digital advertising.
Advertising, as a category, is tricky – it’s hard to value. Unlike financial instruments, the value of any ad (TV, print, or digital) can vary depending on who buys it and which product is being advertised. There is no underlying “asset” (as there would be with a financial security), but rather, what you pay for is the opportunity for people to see your message with the hope that it will affect their behavior. With a financial security, the discounted value of all future cash flows is the same no matter who owns it, but the intrinsic value of each advertisement can be different for every advertiser.
Additionally, as technology evolves, we now find ourselves in an increasingly fragmented advertising landscape. Advertising opportunities are no longer limited to TV, Print, Radio, and Online Banner Ads, but there are now digital advertising opportunities everywhere. Everyday publishers are thinking up new and untested forms of digital advertising, which they then try to sell to advertisers. Some of the more recent examples are iPhone ads, iPad ads, and social media ads. How could these new advertising products possibly be appraised and accurately priced in alignment with their long term value? It’s nearly impossible! But still, even without knowing how much they are worth, advertisers are buying these new digital ad products and encouraging publishers to continue creating increasingly exotic advertising opportunities.
Looking at the digital ad industry, one could argue that both of the signs are now true – 1) Everyone foresees unlimited growth potential (and publishers are investing heavily to pursue new advertising technology) and 2) people are buying and selling “new media” advertising products with no way of knowing how much they are worth.
I’m not saying that we’re on the precipice of disaster, but I do think it’s important to keep these things in mind – because another thing that all bubbles have in common is that just before the crash, no one sees it coming. 4/13/2010
Posted by Dan Brough, SVP, Director of Search Marketing, Draftfcb New York
After much anticipation, Twitter announced their official entry in advertising with the launch of "Promoted Tweets." This product has many, many similarities to paid search, specifically Google's AdWords program.
First, you may even be wondering if the name sounds familiar. Well it does. Google's YouTube product called "Promoted Videos" is a direct cousin to the uber popular "Sponsored Link," the only difference is video content over text in the ad placement.
Twitter advertisers will buy keywords (just like with paid search) to target users which have typed that keyword or keywords into a tweet stream. The advertiser's ad or "Promoted Tweet" will have top presence (just like with paid search).
Now for the most striking similarity. "Promoted Tweets" will be shown in the stream of twitter posts based on relevancy. Sound familiar? Twitter is calling this "Resonance" which will calculate a number of factors including, percentage of people who saw the ad, forwarded the ad, replied to the ad or clicked on the ad. If the ad does not reach a certain relevance threshold, the ad will be removed. This is almost identical to Google's Quality Score where a number of factors determine a sponsored links cost and rank on the page.
The only difference from the paid search model is the pricing. Twitter will charge advertisers on a cost per thousand (CPM) model initially. (Actually, paid search was on a CPM model back in the day.) It will be only a matter of time before the model shifts to mirror paid search's CPC or possibly even CPA/CPL pricing.
Overall, this product will allow brands into the direct stream of 'real-time' conversation. Just as paid search is used to combat negative results on a search engine results page, major brands will adopt "Promoted Tweets" to get out in front of an issue or simply position their brand at the most relevant time and place.
I feel Twitter is off to a solid start with this product but they will need to be conscious not to oversaturate users tweet steams with irrelevant or obtrusive ads. Just as it took paid search years to evolve and perfect its model, the same will be true for Twitter. 4/7/2010
Posted by Michael Fassnacht, Global Chief Strategy Officer
A lot of cities around the globe would love to become one of the hotbeds of innovation and creativity for the digital world. San Francisco and Silicon Valley have been long established in North America, Bangalore in India has had a strong reputation for the last decade, Shanghai has made huge strides over the last 5 years, now Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires are trying to get some well deserved recognition for digital expertise and innovation.
Good old Europe has been always more fragmented with almost every European capital claiming to be on the forefront of digital brilliance. Realistically there are currently two cities that are thriving for this European lead position: Berlin and Stockholm. It’s less an outright competition than the moderately passionate debate by citizens of both cities over dinner tables and bar stools. Both cities have the advantages of large numbers of educated young people with entrepreneurial drive, Berlin has the advantage of lower living expenses and a significantly larger domestic population, Stockholm had an early start in focusing on digital services and products, and has the advantage of high affinity for anything English and American.
The key hurdle for a true lead position in the digital arena is the emergence of one true global digital company that changes consumer behavior in most countries. It is not a coincidence that Silicon Valley has such dominant role due to the fact that almost any leading digital company has been started there: Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and now we have to count even Apple as part of the digital 800 pound gorilla family. Can Berlin or Stockholm generate a company that is as groundbreaking as these firms or are they going to solely focus on being digital service innovators who work with these large players as their center of universe?
The good thing is that innovation is not a zero sum game. That’s why it’s not Berlin or Stockholm? It’s hopefully Berlin and Stockholm. 4/2/2010
Posted by Josh Dysart, Manager, Corporate Communications
Passing by the Apple Store this morning, I was reminded that tomorrow marks the launch of Apple's latest innovation, the iPad.
I went online to catch up on the news, and I was reminded yet again. And again. And again. It's everywhere.
That got me to thinking. What does the iPad mean for advertisers and agencies?
So before he started his day, I had the chance to sit down with Draftfcb Chicago's Chris Miller, EVP, group management director, digital, to get his thoughts on that very question.
His answer is in the video below, and after watching it, I'd love to hear what you think.
Interview with Chris Miller 3/26/2010Posted by Michael Fassnacht, Global Chief Strategy Officer
Studying literary theory in the eighties or early nineties one could not escape the intellectual brilliance and confusion that the literary theory of “Deconstruction” brought to the discourse at most European and North American Universities. Reading and rereading books by thinkers like Derrida, Lyotard, or Foucault was the challenging main stable of anyone who wanted to participate in a new understanding of old and new texts within the academic discourse. Their claim of the death of authorship, their fight against a (or any) dominant narrative, and their endless dissection of short elements of any texts taught an unique way of reading and thinking.
The mid nineties seem to signal the slow decline of this particular branch of literary theory. But over the last year the sudden and strong critique of many social elements of the Web 2.0 universe (nicely summarized in Sunday’s New York Times article by Michiko Kakutani), could give one the impression that the success of Web 2.0 turned Deconstruction from a literary theory into a way of life of the modern Internet user. This life is defined by:
- The loss of any regards for original authorship: Everything is borrowed, reused, repurpose, rewritten, recreated, sometimes with the clear reference to the original version, more often without any regards to it. The original has died, now everything is just the endless copy without necessary reference to the original and without acknowledging its character as a copy (Philosophers like Derrida called this a “Simulacrum”)
- Any central narrative has been lost: The Internet allows not just the accelerated speed of any news but it empowers an endless stream of smaller and smaller stories (e.g. cat chasing its own tail, Spitzer explaining his affairs, Democrats passing the Health Care bill) without necessary any broader significance or prioritization. Neil Postman meets Jean Baudrillard.
- Any text has the same authoritative value: The article by a Nobel or Pulitzer price winning author has the same authority, reach, frequency, and influence than a blog entry or tweet by a celebrity with a large followership. The quality of one’s craftsmanship seems to be less important than the loudness of someone’s megaphone.
It’s sometimes difficult to realize that one uses the same critical arguments to analyze the negative aspects of Web 2.0 that conservatives have used against Deconstruction 20 years ago. But it seems to me that it’s critically important to be conscious about the positive and negative impact of the Web 2.0 Discourse than just blindly following every dimension of it. Enlightenment was always about being conscious about the supposedly given truths in a particular time. And today, the positive impact of Web 2.0 has become a dogma. But anyone who has truly understood the theory of deconstruction realizes that the deconstructive analysis of the main narrative in any given time (here the Web 2.0 universe in which the literary theory of deconstruction is being transferred into a life philosophy) is part of correctly applying this theory. |
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