BBH Labs

Interview With Smithery Founder Mr John V Willshire: Part II

Mel Exon — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 07:46:58 +0000

After Part I last Friday, which foraged largely outside the parameters of brands and marketing, this post – the final and second part of our interview with John Willshire (@willsh), founder of Smithery – comes back closer to home to discuss the future of advertising, what’s stopping brands universally adopting better marketing practices and ‘Real Marketing’ … along the way taking in cargo cults, starting fires and Doctor Who.

BBH Labs: In the past you’ve used a bonfires and fireworks analogy to describe the difference between advertising and social, and more recently we’ve debated what we at BBH call “Super Bowl, Super Social” on your blog. We can’t help but think (great) advertising will have a role in people’s lives for a good while yet, for the simple reason that good marketing acts as a persuasive shorthand for choice and news in a world increasingly flooded with terabytes of irrelevant information. And we’ve had the likes of Eric Schmidt speaking recently about advertising becoming super-relevant and connected in future. What’s your view on the future of advertising? Is there one?

JW: I think your point about the persuasive shorthand matters, and redefining the story that advertising is going to tell. When I was thinking more about the media planning side of advertising, it was useful to simplify it to two things, activity & phasing; what we should do, when we should do it.

So Bonfires & Fireworks is the what – never really an either/or choice, as companies still need to do social bonfires and advertising fireworks together to make each work.

The when of doing both together, the phasing, is crucial.

What the social bonfire piece allows you to do is, as a company, do noteworthy things that are amazing for your customers, for your employees, with your products, whatever… let the real human stories and triumphs emerge.

Then, after that, you can then tell the story of that. And if you want to tell that story with scale and immediacy, there is no better way to tell that story than in advertising.

The crucial difference is that advertising is no longer the thing you do, it’s the story of the things you’ve done.

BBH Labs: Brands ‘becoming more human’ is a common theme at Smithery, reminding us of The Clue Train Manifesto (we’re fans). Nonetheless, will there come a point in time when we’re sick to death of brands trying to be “just like us”?

I think if we were going to become sick to death of people, we’d have all died in solitude about 5000 years ago.

But perhaps brands should be aspiring to be known as a collective. ‘The people who…’, the folk at…’, ‘the guys that made…’.

It’s increasingly how people talk about brands anyway, and it’s the theme of my favourite thesis from Cluetrain, number 84 -

“We know some people from your company. They’re pretty cool online. Do you have any more like that you’re hiding? Can they come out and play?”

On a slight tangent, it’s strange to think that Cluetrain is now, what, 12 years old? 13? Everyone thought it’d change the world in five years. And yet here we still are, slowly plodding along.

It’s Amara’s Law, I suppose: “…overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run…”

*KLAXON SOUNDS… predictable technology quote bingo alert*

BBH Labs: Yet all too often ‘human’ gets interpreted by organisations and their agencies as ‘universally approachable FB-speak’ (I just made that up). What’s your advice for brands here?

That’s what we might tire of, going back to your previous point.

The overfriendly mateyness of social network conversation, where some poor marketing junior is told to be the ‘voice of the brand’ (within strict parameters) which essentially adds to typing thousands of words whilst avoiding saying anything.

That’s not ‘being human’. That’s live, largely unskilled copywriting.

And yes, you can hire agencies to do that for you, and it’ll be better. But it’s not making the most of the connections you could be creating.

If all you want people to bother doing is to come along and give you a little pat on the back for doing what you’ve done as a company for the last fifty years, then Facebook’s perfect for that.

Oh, I like that. It’s fine. OK. Satisfactory.

I do wonder if Facebook got rid of fans because weren’t enough great companies, products and services out there worthy of fandom?

You wouldn’t be a fan of a shitty generic lager, for instance, but you might like something they did. The like lets the whole world damn you with faint praise… you can like a page, leave, and never have to look it again.

Which is what happens on the majority of Facebook pages. The numbers vary, but the last thing I saw suggested that Facebook pages only reach 17% of people who’ve liked those pages.

And yet far too often, likes and friends pop up as things to actively measure success or failure by. Just because the numbers exist, suddenly they’re something to judge entire marketing efforts by. It’s causing way more problems for clients & agencies than it is offering solutions.

Its this climate that might’ve prompted Richard to write this the other day:

“The involvement of most brands and in the social media lives of the public remains clumsy, inept and disrespectful. Driven, it seems, by a profound misunderstanding of our place in this world, our importance in people’s lives and the basic question that we should have learned a long time ago ‘why would anyone give a fuck?’ As my girlfriend incredulously remarked over the Christmas break, ‘how sad do you have to be to ‘like’ a brand on Facebook?’

BBH Labs: Yep. It strikes us that too many brands look at the social web as another “channel” to broadcast in. They adopt cargo cult behaviour: “Let’s have a conversation!” Versus let’s listen and then add value. The worst examples are just creating white noise 24/7, 365 days of the year. How do you reckon this is all going to end?

It’s fascinating how many “Facebook is too polluted” posts and articles seem to be around. And a lot of that pollution is caused by brands, who’re also the main source of revenue for Facebook.

The source of the cash is detrimental to the product; it was claimed last year that 89% of Facebook’s revenue is from advertising.

There’s two pieces worth reading. There’s something in the Uncrunched post “Nobody goes to Facebook anymore. It’s too crowded” that rings true.

Facebook have got a marvellous platform there. But they should let people have a fresh go at starting again. Or make it very easy to defriend lots of people at once, so you can easily refocus it to be as useful to YOU as possible, not as useful to Facebook in how many links you might click on.

The joy of using Path at the moment is in making fresh tracks in the untouched powder of a new social network. Which in that slightly haphazard snowboarding analogy, makes Facebook the bottom of lifts where you can’t move for bloody skiers…

Source: New York Times

The second interesting piece is this one on Colony Collapse, which looks at the parallels of bee colonies to what happens in social networks…

“When a power user departs a social network, the hundreds of thousands of ties, however weak, collapse, and so at scale the whole infrastructure begins to collapse, and the social network begins to die. This is directly what happened with MySpace, which remains a desperate shell, an empty husk of what it once was.”

So, if you have less ‘power users’ and more ‘white noise’ from brands as you put it, it’s a less desirable place to be, and the energy disappears.

And with increased pressure post-IPO to make money for Facebook shareholders… well, there’s a chance that Facebook could go exactly the same way as Myspace, Friendster, Friends Reunited… the list goes on.

BBH Labs: So what should brands do about it?

If your social strategy disappears because Facebook disappears, then you probably never had a proper social strategy in the first place.

The temptation with a lot of brand social projects to date has been to write one big, central narrative – let’s crack THE THING that EVERYONE will want to PARTICIPATE in, and throw all energy and resource behind it in our marketing campaign.

When really, it shouldn’t be one thing, it should be LOTS of things (“Light many Fires”, as my good friend Mark Earls says).

And they should be from all around the company, not just concocted by the Marketing Department and their agencies. Think about this:

“Real Marketing cannot be thought of as a department activity. It is a matter of harnessing all of the company’s resources to satisfy customers, and of linking what the customer wants with what the company is (or can become).”

That’s not new thinking. It’s from Stephen King’s 1985 paper “Has Marketing Failed, or was it Never Really Tried” (I found it through Simon Clemmow’s Admap piece).

If you think about the connections it’s possible to make between people internally and customers externally now, well, King would have a field day.

Interestingly, of the four essential aspects of Real Marketing that King proposed, the second one was ‘Working Over Time’. The whole point of proper marketing was to make it “a little easier to be successful in the future than at present”.

I think maybe Stephen King wouldn’t have had any truck with the notion of “social bonfires”. He’d have probably just called it “Real Marketing”.

BBH Labs: Looking into 2012, what are you excited about?

Well, we’re expecting a second child in June. So THAT, for one.

Work wise, it’s continuing to debate and discuss things like this, for one. Where does brand meet community, are they at some level the same thing, and therefore how do we create definitions that help companies get better at marketing. I’m sure that’ll be solved by May…

Then there’s a ferociously bright and talented bunch going through the IPA Excellence Diploma (created by BBH’s Nick Kendall, of course). They’ll be writing their 7,000 word dissertations through the summer, which will no doubt serve up enough inspiration for a lifetime.

Interestingly, a lot of my in-house projects and current client work is about exploring the links between pixels and bits, where things becomes digital services, and digital services become actual things.

And as always, I’m excited about the project that appears over the horizon and completely contradicts everything we’ve talked about…

…but that’s half the fun, isn’t it? To quote Doctor Who – “do what I do; hold tight and pretend it’s a plan…”

John is @willsh on twitter, and blogs at http://smithery.co/blog. You can read Part I of our interview with John here.

Interview with Mr John V Willshire, founder of Smithery

Mel Exon — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:56:00 +0000

Every now and again, we like to interview someone doing something interesting. It’s a pleasure to say that this time we’re featuring a good friend of Labs, John V Willshire, (or @willsh, as he’s known to the Twitterverse). John broke free from agency life last year to set up his own business. In this, the first of a two-part interview, we asked John to tell us a bit about it – along the way sharing his thoughts on a bunch of things from The Smiths, social connectivity, the economic viability of social production today and, er, rocks vs water..

Social Winter, Oslo, 2011

BBH Labs: Tell us a bit about why you founded Smithery.

JW: The idea powering Smithery is Make Things People Want beats Make People Want Things. The former doesn’t replace the latter, as companies still do both, but what’s interesting is the switch in emphasis.

Over time, the advertising industry became very, very good at making people want things. It didn’t matter if those things weren’t all that good, because nobody could tell each other with any meaningful scale at a meaningful volume. Advertising was louder than bombs, to inappropriately hijack The Smiths (hey, if it’s good enough for John Lewis…).

Obviously we don’t need to go into the details here of how the internet has changed how companies can connect with people, but the advertising instinct is to use social connectivity to make people want things. That’s why I think the majority of social activity we see is poor.

As time passes, companies and agencies will work harder and think better about how to use social connectivity to make things people want, whether that’s changing established goods and services, or creating new ones.

So I founded Smithery to help do that; whether it’s working together in better ways, making better things, or helping telling better stories about those things.BBH Labs: We know why you chose the name, but what is it about Smithery that’s valuable and different, do you think?

JW: All the excellent BBH Labs posts on t-shaped people and teams over the last eighteen months kept setting off this little voice in my head… “so what IS my deep rooted skill?”.

Being honest, for years I’ve been forcibly resistant to idea of specialising in anything, and just doing what needed to be done, like the rocks & water idea – fit in all the gaps where nobody’s doing what needs to be done…

I found that the Creative Generalist guidelines (read “what specifically do generalists do”) served as a decent compass.

And I was lucky, really, to be at PHD where it wasn’t just tolerated, but encouraged. My job description was “the creation and cultivation of ideas through the study of technological, social and cultural trends”. Which, when you pick it apart, means absolutely anything is fair game.

I thought of generalism itself as my specialism. Which in hindsight wasn’t true.

Lately I’ve been thinking that if I do have a core, a long leg of the T, it’s economics. I accidentally did economics at university (a long story), but I ran swiftly away from being an economist after going on a two day graduate course at the Bank of England.

But economics has proved really, really useful in and around advertising and marketing. Simplifying it, microeconomics is thinking about how individuals react to changes, macroeconomics is thinking about how groups, companies and organisations react to changes. It teaches you how to quickly model and explain these changes, and design and define a strategy.

What’s caught me attention lately on that economics angle this paper by Gilboa, Postlewaite, Samuelson & Schiedler.

It proposes that economists develop and use economic models not as strict definitions of how the world is (“rule based”), but as analogies to help us understand the relationship between different real-world cases and the models themselves (“case based”).

Which I think plays out in an analogy like Bonfires & Fireworks – it’s not the creation of a rule-based structure, but a helpful way to think about what you’re setting out to do.

BBH Labs: are co-creation and social production viable economic models yet?

I was thinking recently about revisting the Social Production stuff, in relation to coffee service eightpointnine.com. I wrote some thoughts on it here, but the long on the short of it is that economic models aren’t as fit for purpose as they might be.

For a hundred or so years, there was no point supposing that your product could be infinitely variable by each customer who came along. Production methods might have allowed it, but there was no way to connect to people quickly enough to manage the process.

So, instead, economics focused on things you could change, like price. ‘Price discrimination’, for instance, is where you set different prices discretely to different groups in order to maximise revenue for a constant product.

But with a coffee service that lets you blend their own perfect brew, and share it with whomever, all at a constant price… that’s not something that’s been factored into standard economic or business thinking.

Technology helps you organise precise, personalised orders from your customers, and technology will increasingly be used to help fulfil – the 3D printed chocolate cupcake could be personalised for every order, the drink you create and design on uFlavour can be bought by the crate for a party you’re having.

But is it viable to be looking at this now?

Well, viable and profitable are two very different things. It’s definitely viable. And in the short term, it’ll give you more interesting stories to tell around your people and your business. There’s value created on the journey. You’ll learn new things too. And take turns you never expected to into new territories.

But you’d be kidding yourself if you thought it’s going to be a short three month journey into profit.

I think what we may well see is a lot of interesting startups around personalised food and products, but in the same way interesting tech startups get rolled up and disappear into existing companies, the same will happen in the product space; except, of course, you can replace Nokia or Google with Unilever or Kraft.

BBH Labs: Is there a danger all this audience involvement actually asks too much of people?

JW: Yes, of course. Perhaps the real trick will be making product personalisation passive for the things you don’t care enough about. For instance; I love coffee, so I will spend five minutes a week tweaking the blend.

However, say I don’t care nearly as much about tea. But my supermarket and other shopping habits can be used to create a ‘tasting’ profile (always buys: rich, dark, liquoricey tasting things), which is used to guess what I’d like in a tea, I’d probably pay more for it.

For the things you buy that aren’t important enough to micromanage, that type of customisation becomes important.

Of course, you have to also consider what is it that’s actually interesting for people here? Is it that the product is clever and passive, and you can show off to your friends? Or was it the fact that you actually made a selection and judgement on things the story, so the passive model isn’t important?

It becomes important for clients and agencies to think about the story space created around products, so people can tell their own version. To some extent, the stories of products and services are becoming about the buyers, not the sellers.

John is @willsh on twitter, and blogs at http://smithery.co/blog. Look out for part 2 of this interview on Monday, when we’ll come back closer to home with a perspective on modern marketing: where it’s going wrong and some thoughts on what to do about it.

Majority report: looking through the digital hype

Mel Exon — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:13:31 +0000

This post originally appeared as an article in Viewpoint at the end of 2011. Briefed to one of BBH London’s smartest strategists, Ed Booty, as a deliberate polemic, it’s a provocative argument designed to question our assumptions about the constant pace of change. We like being challenged (we enjoyed Matt Edgar’s post last year along similar lines) – please let us know what you think in the comments.

Author: Ed Booty, Strategy Director, BBH London

Image: Seattle Space Needle, by Patricia Kranenberg (via Flickr under a Creative Commons licence)

It is commonly accepted that a digital revolution is afoot. We have entered a brave new networked world. Individuals are empowered, social movements cannot remain contained and knowledge is free to all. Data is making our world more intuitive, bespoke and rewarding. We are mobile, always on, always entertained and hyper-social.

Things appear to be going swimmingly and never has the future been so clearly mapped out for us. It’s sexy, creative, inclusive and exciting. It’s one big SXSW festival.

Nothing new so far, and it does all sound rather good.

Maybe it’s too good to be true?

Unfortunately it is.

Advance apologies to neophytes, digital evangelists and west coast entrepreneurs. It’s time for a reality check. The speed, scale and depth of the so-called digital revolution has been wildly exaggerated.

What has caused this mirage of revolution?

Behind the hype, what might a more realistic vision of a digital world be?This isn’t a luddite’s defence of an endangered way of life, but instead an attempt to rationalise and reconsider some big digital assumptions. Only by realistically appraising the present can we begin to discern what the future might look like.

Digital media is undoubtedly the defining technology of our age. It has already reshaped entire industries, created empires and billionaires. There is little to debate over its reach and integration. Everything is now digital, from TVs and books to shopping. The important question is therefore not ‘How digital is the world?’, but ‘How different is life in this digital world?’.

For me personally, there has never been a more exciting time to be in the business of creative communication. Digital media offers us massive opportunities; new ways of interacting with content, of bringing to life ideas, and of making brands relevant and useful, far beyond traditional advertising.

It’s so new and exciting that it’s easy to confuse its potential with reality. As we’ve explored and embraced the bewildering possibilities, we’ve increasingly convinced ourselves that a revolution is here. Meanwhile real peoples’ lives and needs simply aren’t changing at the same pace. What is possible is growing at an exponential rate, but how people actually live and use technologies has changed very little. This gap between the myth and reality is ever-widening.

20 years ago the average Brit watched 4 hours of TV a day [1 - see footnotes]. Their favorite show was a soap. The most popular news source was The Sun[2]. The number one brand was Coca Cola[3]. The best selling car was a Ford Fiesta[4]. The two biggest issues in people’s lives were the economy and the NHS[5]. 20% of people enjoyed a night at the pub. 27% were always improving their home. 11% rarely had a family meal. 23% enjoyed clothes shopping. 17% hated housework[6].

This is all also true in 2011. Life is fundamentally much the same.

Of course there have been changes. Mobile phones are ubiquitous, the internet is in 3/4 of homes[7], digital TV in 93%[8]. Facebook has 31m monthly users[9]-numbers regularly cited as irrefutable evidence for the radical shift in how we live. Despite their scale, their actual impact has been overstated.

Purchase is too often confused with adoption. People do often buy and subscribe to new technologies. They then infrequently (if ever) use them. Only 20% of the average smartphone’s capacity is ever used.[10] Of the 20% people willing to pay for TVs with internet connectivity[11], under half of them even connect it[12], let alone find it useful.

Even where a new medium is being used, it is primarily facilitating old behaviours. Despite the breadth of user-generated content, 98% of the UK’s viewing is of professionally produced film content[13]. The UK’s most popular news website is the BBC. The vast majority of people remain passive recipients of the same content they have always liked. Only 2% of web users actively create and contribute[14]. Even within Twitter subscribers, 83% have not sent a tweet in the last month[15]. However, the illusion of revolution is so convincing that it affects how people perceive their own behaviour. On average PVR owners believe they watch over 70% of their TV on demand. The real figure is 14%. 86% of their viewing is traditional real-time broadcast. This ratio is not changing.

Despite having it at their fingertips, people are just not making use of the richness of the technology that is available to them. They aren’t living the digital lives they should be. What’s going on? Surely they should be as excited as we are? Are they just laggards who will eventually embrace the glistening and inevitable digital future? Or, perhaps it’s us who’ve missed the point?

We have bought our own hype. So desirable is the digital dream that we have mistaken its potential for reality. This delusion has been driven by an unprecedented bubble of hype, driven by the media, digital advocates and technology brands. They have created, believe and propagate the myth that life has changed irrevocably.

Journalists, whose own industry has been heavily affected by digital media, give it disproportionate coverage and importance; seamlessly suggesting causal relationships between the advent of technologies and real life events. Twitter caused the Arab spring. Blackberrys were the London rioter’s secret weapon. Elections are now won and lost on Facebook. No story is complete without an unquantified reference to the impact of digital media.

Under 8% of Britons have ever used twitter, 1.9% use it regularly[16]. It’s only the UK’s 27^th most popular site[17], but is the most mentioned- with an average of 1,446 times per month in the national press alone.

The cult of technology has also been passionately advocated from within; by a minority with disproportionate influence. The web is an ‘echo-chamber’ where digital enthusiasts have their beliefs reinforced and re-tweeted. This creates a self-referential cycle of self importance. The web’s favourite subject is unsurprisingly ‘computers and the web’. It accounts for over 34% of site visits (versus just 12% for social media and forums)[18]. These self-proclaimed ‘early adopters’’ assumption is that the rest of society is simply yet to catch up[19]. This is rarely the case. Real people more often than not, have better things to do, like watch Eastenders.

The myth of radical change is furthered by technology brands. They are a powerful influence, representing over 10% of all bought advertising[20] (ironically, the majority of it in traditional media[21]). With ambitious sales targets and consumers that have literally got more technology than they know what to do with, communicating marginal innovations will not suffice. Every new technology or product is promoted as revolutionary; a life-changing breakthrough.

Who wouldn’t want to get involved?

In this era of economic uncertainty, in contrast to the zeitgeist, technology has become a beacon of hope. It’s cool, synonymous with success and promises to enhance life. Like alchemy in the Renaissance, technology brands offer a potent combination of wonderment, distraction and optimism. Their CEOs are evangelistic figures; revered and admired. They promise a brighter future on a rainy day and we believe it because we want it to be true. They show us what is possible. Herein however, is the crux of the problem. Technology is tech-centric. There is the assumption that because something can be done, it will be popular, important and useful. However, ‘We are now able to…’ is not the same as ‘People now want to…’. Possibility is mistaken for demand.

The dotcom crash of the late 1990s was driven by the same misunderstanding. Price/earnings ratios were overlooked and belief placed in technological advancements. A decade later mobile networks paid over inflated prices for 3G licenses to facilitate video calling. Not because there was demand, but because it became possible.

Too little attention is given to what will be required and what will actually be useful.

Rather than thinking about the future in terms of what technology that will be available, a better method may be to ask what will people want in the future; what will actually improve how they live?

While a minority excite themselves and propagate the belief that the future is here, it is real ‘consumers’ that will dictate the pace of change and ultimately have the final say in what the future really looks like.

That’s why there is no Digital Revolution. Cultural revolutions are not created in R&D labs.

They represent radical changes in how people live and society operates. The agricultural and industrial revolutions changed the fundamental shape of society. Digital media has barely scratched the surface. As Steve Jobs was visionary enough to acknowledge:

“This stuff doesn’t change the world. It really doesn’t… it’s a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light — that it’s going to change everything.”

The early impact of digital media has then been wildly overemphasised.

This does then beg the question famously voiced by Roy Amara: What are the long-term impacts we simultaneously under-estimate? That’s a topic for another day. But its an important one, because they’re going to be fundamental, dare I say ‘revolutionary’…

[1] BARB
[2] NRS
[3] Marketing Magazine/Grocer: Britain’s Biggest Brands
[4] SMMT 2011
[5] source: Ipsos Mori)
[6] Source: TGI
[7] ONS
[8] ONS
[9] Facebook
[10] Source WDS Global.
[11] Quarterly TV Design and Features Report, 2011
[12] Gartner/ Wired Magazine, September 2011
[13] BBH research
[14] eg Wikipedia
[15] RJMetrics
[16] Gaining accurate numbers is difficult. These are the assumptions in the calculation:17% of Twitter accounts have sent a single tweet over the past month, 4.9m people have accounts, UK population 61,838,154
[17] Source: Comscore
[18] source: Experian Hitwise, actal web usage data, UK, August 2011
[19] Anyone remember SecondLife?
[20] Nielsen
[21] Nielsen

CES 2012: Why marketers should be relieved

Saneel Radia — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 15:10:30 +0000

Image source: http://www.rickycadden.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/cessign.jpg

Authors: Saneel Radia, Head of BBH Labs NYC & Tim Harris, EVP/Managing Director of Innovation at McCann Erickson*

Last week was the Consumer Electronics Show, an event more widely attended by brand marketers than ever before. Although the show resembled last year’s a bit too closely for our liking, we’ve resisted simply republishing our 2011 recap. What was unique however, is the sense of relief we feel upon our return. Instead of feeling intimidated by the speed of innovation, or anxious from the ever-fragmenting tech landscape, we’ve come home with our industry angst alleviated. Let us elaborate on the trends keeping us relaxed.

No one actually knows how to design for “laplets”
As the world of consumer electronics bounces between convergence and divergence, we were a bit surprised to walk through booths full of laptop + tablet hybrids that seem to be a unique device offering in and of themselves. Then there were phone + tablet hybrids like the Samsung Note. There was even a t ablet + gaming rig hybrid. On top of those converging devices, we were struck by the number of input peripherals accompanying them. Peripherals are nothing new, but this onslaught of converged devices with inputs beyond touchscreens is really interesting. It seems touch interface isn’t the panacea we all wanted it to be. When the iPhone and iPad changed the way we did stuff, we figured that was it.

However, one look at how game developers and electronics manufacturers are interacting demonstrates just how difficult it is for content creators to stick immersive content into a touch environment. Ever played a mobile game with dual-virtual-stick control? It sucks. But game developers are still designing games that require it. As anyone that works at an agency has seen, designing irrespective of context happens daily. Sure, we all have our different remedies for this (see BBH’s media design practice), but almost no marketers truly craft ideas from environments. The best simply craft to them, closing the gap as best they can, but not truly letting the context or medium play as fundamental a role as it deserves.

Seeing some of the world’s best content creators struggle with familiar issues, we couldn’t help but let guilty smiles cross our faces. We can take solace it isn’t just us marketers.

TVs being “smart” means we may not have to be
Last year, virtually every booth had the word “smart” displayed on it, obliquely referencing the fact that their TVs were internet-enabled. Although the idea of apps on TVs isn’t going away (especially with gesture-based engagement on the horizon), we saw a more conservative- dare we say even practical- approach to TV apps this year. Instead of highlighting obscure developers they had worked with to make apps, this year the manufacturers were presenting the familiar logos of Netflix, Hulu and Fios. We’d argue such familiarity is welcome to both consumers and marketers. It means less subscriptions for people, and a less fragmented media landscape for marketers.

As TV manufacturers came to the welcome realization that the revenue from app sales simply wasn’t going to change the face of their business, content providers with app-driven models like Netflix have been emboldened (it’s no coincidence Hulu announced its first unique scripted series on the heels of CES). This media-agency-friendly revenue model will make it easier for brands to get onto TV screens without having to partner with developers. Instead, they’ll work through content and distribution companies they already know how to engage. If we had to guess, that means subscription-services like HBO and FiOS will experiment with ad presence of varying levels, depending on the platform (e.g., Xbox 360 vs Panasonic Viera Connect). It’s certainly a lot easier as a brand to think about how to work with Hulu than it is to sort out unique offerings across Sony and LG devices. No one should be more relieved about this consolidation than marketers, a group notoriously bad at partnering with developers and quantifying value in new ways.

Perhaps most importantly, media deal-making lunches have been preserved. Phew.

We put a big bet on Apple and we seem to be winning
Apple is famously absent from every CES, yet it’s clear to any attendee that they are present, if not formally as an exhibitor. Last year was a show of iPad alternatives. The year before was an exhibition of iPhone derivatives. This year was the “hey we have a MacBook Air too” show. Apple certainly didn’t invent the ultra-thin laptop, but any analysis of the design and feature-set selected across various manufacturer’s devices (see Samsung’s new Series 9, Dell’s XPS 13 or any device featured by Intel as an Ultrabook) reveals a very Apple-like device.

Once again, a comforting thought donned on us as we walked the Convention Center floor. Few industries have adopted Apple products as early and as deeply than the ad industry. As creative teams relentlessly pitch tech ideas born from an Apple-centric view of the universe, they may just start to see more nodding heads and fewer rolling eyes. Agencies are notorious for their dogmatic approach to ideas. In this case, Apple’s vast grip on consumer electronics may justify our utterly biased view of tech experiences.

It seems creatives have yet another thing to thank Steve for.

The home is connecting to retail (and we had nothing to do with it)
We’ve all been hearing about the refrigerator that tells you when you’re low on milk since before there were computers (fine, not quite that long, but still). This year’s CES brought all of the “smart” into context for the truly connected home. An LG refrigerator not only speaks to your phone or tablet to tell you all about its contents or encourage you to fill it up again– it also helps you manage a diet via personal profiles and nutritional information. Smart vacuums and ovens do their duties when you’re not even home, and some appliances talk to each other to save on power usage. We’re used to hearing about appliances that talk to retail (or an online grocer), but this year, the retail environment talks back. Walking through the stores of the near future, we’ll get notifications about relevant offers, loyalty plus-ups and even recipe analysis based on what’s at home in your fridge. We’ll no longer have 58 heads of garlic at home or 9 jars of cayenne pepper. What a pleasant surprise– we’ve been trying to solve for the gap between home/planning and shopping/buying forever in marketing. Promotions, brand extensions and partnerships will have much more clarity, because they’ll be based on consumer need rather than marketing guesswork. LG, Alcatel-Lucent and others have given us a palette from which to create truly integrated designs for the makers, sellers and buyers of everyday products. In other words, marketers’ inability to close the gap between retail and brand experiences may soon be a non-issue. The tech industry is sorting it out for us.

Now maybe we can help them figure out how to make their biggest event fresh again.

*Saneel & Tim were two of the co-founders of Denuo, and this was the 10th CES they’ve attended together. They’ve come home broke, and in a fight, after each.

The Barn Returns: BBH NY’s 2012 Winter Term Internship Applications Are Open

Saneel Radia — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 16:51:51 +0000

The Barn is BBH's global internship program

Author: Eric Fernandez, Strategist, BBH New York

The Barn is back in New York, and we’re looking for a special new team of genius interns to fill our ranks. This isn’t your run of the mill ad internship, so we’re not looking for typical marketing resumes. We’re looking for resourceful MacGyver types who are curious about everything, comfortable doing stuff every day that they haven’t done before, and are natural wizards at technology. We want the kind of folks that can grasp a program like Final Cut Pro after watching a few how-to videos and a couple of hours of trial and error. Or, faced with the task of creating a web site, will google PHP programming, find some open source scripts and at least try to hack something together. When we say resourceful, we mean it. We’re looking for people that really geek out over their projects.

The Barn is designed to empower people like this. We aren’t going to stick you under a rug doing nothing but grunt work. We are going to put you on teams and give you the chance to do your own projects. Last year, Barn Interns won two Cannes Lions with a project that was featured on major news outlets across the country– and even made Twitter’s ten most remarkable tweets of the year. That type of success continues to be our ambition in this now global internship program.

Our brief is three words: “Do Good, Famously” and we’ll give you the funding and support you need to create a kick ass project that will change lives. We’ll also make sure you get the credit for it. We want our program to be a spring board for your career.

If selected, you will be one of six interns, split into two teams of three people. These teams will be set off against their 3-word brief with full access to BBH talent along the way. They’ll also be working on client business throughout, so it will be a very busy 10 weeks. Our goal is to make this an internship like no other in marketing. It’s more about you than about us. We just like having your energy and passion around the agency. And if it’s anything like previous sessions, we’ll probably learn a thing or two ourselves.

If you’d like to apply or know some who would, check out the application site at http://www.bbhbarn.com/, or follow @bbhbarn. The application deadline ends January 20th, 2012.

I Feel For You

Mel Exon — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 15:07:46 +0000

Jules et Jim (1962, Francois Truffaut)

Author: Jim Carroll, Chairman, BBH London

I was watching the splendid Truffault film, Jules et Jim. There’s a scene in which Jules, courting the mercurial Catherine, endeavours to impress her.

‘Catherine, I understand you’, he says.

Catherine replies,’ But I don’t want to be understood.’

I paused for thought. Don’t we spend our lives trying to understand consumers? What if, like Catherine, they don’t want to be understood? Understanding implies explanation, logic, rationality. And, critically, it suggests control. Which is precisely, I suspect, why Catherine didn’t want to be understood.

As a young Planner I’m not sure I completely understood the behaviour, ethics and attitudes of British consumers. But I did feel a strong sense of empathy with them. I felt for them in a way. I wonder now whether I’ve lost some of that natural, instinctive judgement. I wonder whether, in a data fuelled world, we have a diminished regard for feelings in our engagement with consumers.

A friend of mine occasionally dismisses films she did not enjoy with the simple assertion that she ‘did not feel it’. As an Anglo Saxon I was originally somewhat nonplussed. Surely a fuller explanation would help? Similarly we were always taught to grill Clients on their responses to work, to demand that they account for their instinctive immediate reactions. Now I wonder whether I have been wrong on both counts: in the way I expect my friends to assess movies and my Clients to judge work.

Shouldn’t feelings always trump understanding? Shouldn’t feelings suffice?

Do you ever find it a little sinister when modern marketers promise to translate data into knowledge, and knowledge into sales? I do. I confess ‘hidden persuasion’ has never been my bag. I don’t aspire to that level of control.Of course we all want the web to be all-knowing, but should I want it to know all about me? Personally I don’t want the web to know me; I want it to feel me. And I find the prospect of an empathetic, all-feeling web increasingly attractive.

Who am I to talk? I’m generally uncomfortable with unfiltered emotional expression. I shudder at the prospect of corporate hugs. Nonetheless, I return to work with a modest resolution: in 2012 I want to base more of my judgements on empathy and feeling, rather than on logic and understanding. And I’d like the web to do the same please.

Chaka was, as ever, right all along. ‘I feel for you’…

Marching Backwards into 2012

Jeremy Ettinghausen — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 15:05:46 +0000

“The past went that-a-way … We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.” – Marshall McLuhan

Click here to view the embedded video.

Predictions are a mug’s game. In these uncertain times you won’t find us sticking our heads above the futurology parapet and making some rash pronouncements on the coming this or the tomorrow of that. Instead, at this time of the year, we like to approach the future with a longing gaze in the rear view mirror and a look back at the last 12 months of postings on this blog – 81 of them in all from 35 contributors.

As in previous years, below you’ll find ten of our favourite posts from 2011 – the ones that have provoked us in the learning and writing and our generous readers in the comments. But our self-analysis has also uncovered buried themes, some revisited, others newer, which marked our 2011 and perhaps set a tone for the year to come.

Storytelling and new forms of narrative have always been of interest to us in Labs, but this year we’ve added the growing attention paid to, er, attention to the mix with a couple of guest posts on connected TV and further exploration into storytelling with our Fray Cafe-esque TaleTorrent event for Internet Week. For many, all around the world, 2011 has been a year of grassroot activism and whilst occupying Kingly Street and 32 Avenue of the Americas is our day job, sustainable marketing and creativity for good have also bubbled up as pervasive themes in a number of posts this year. And given the tumultus changes happening within our industry, you won’t be surprised to see industry innovation and reinvention well represented as another theme below. Perhaps more than any other year since Labs was founded in 2008, this has been a year of rolling up sleeves and putting theory into practice.

It might seem that 2011 has not been a stellar year in terms of innovation in the broader technology industry. While our Facebook experience has been timelined, our Googling plussed and our questions quora-ed, the space shuttle programme has come to a close, the Higgs Boson remains elusive and so perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised that this year also saw a number of more reflective rather than reactive posts. BBH London Chairman Jim Carroll set the tone for a theme we’re calling ‘Think While you Make’, with a lovely series of elegiac posts on sleep, ennui and nocturnally abnormal wildlife.

So while we recover over the holidays we look forward to much more thinking and making, talking and doing in 2012. As always we are are astonished by the generosity of everyone who writes for, reads, shares or comments on the blog. It’s been an amazing year. Thanks for taking part, thanks for letting us in and thank you for everything you’ve taught us this year.

We’re already looking forward to the start of the Spring term – see you back at school in the new year.

Mel, Jeremy & Saneel

*****************

So, finally, Labs top 10 for ‘11, in mostly chronological order.

1. Think While You Make, Make While You Think

Some setting out of the stall in this post which encouraged us to find a balance between action and reflection, to not have too many tabs open at once, and occassionally to leave things alone for a while to let them ripen at their own pace.

2. Collaborative Consumption & Customer Co-creation

It might be a small cheat to bundle these two great posts together in a top ten, but as a pair they make a strong argument for more evolved thinking when it comes to creativity, collaboration and consumption. When audiences are willing to participate in branded activities and business see the benefit of a more transparent and collaborative model, co-creation and collaborative consumption are surely pivotal to the ongoing success of any forward facing brand.

3. The Human OS

A fascinating guest post from Google’s David Bryant on the convergence of computer and human operating systems and the increasing adoption of intuitive physical interactions that provoke a more instinctive than reasoned response.

4. Exploring the Edges

Provoked by a couple of posts on the need (or not) for agencies to employ Chief Innovation Officers this post looks at how to be an innovation unit and what the wider agency can and should demand of those it employs to push the envelope and live on the edge.

5. Creative Direction Vs Creative Selection

‘No one works for a Creative Director. Everyone works for the idea. The idea hires us and we go to work.’ The most popular post of the year from BBH LA’s ECD Pelle Sjoenell on the role of the Creative Director as politician, farmer and assassin.

6. No Tangible Limits

For Labs, meeting Amber Case and learning about Geoloqi, the location sharing startup she is developing with Aaron Parecki, was one of the highlights of SXSW. We’re already looking forward to seeing her keynote in 2012 and catching up with the great concentration of smart people that SXSW attracts. Come and say hello if you’re there.

7. Turning Intelligence into Magic

To mark the launch of Sir John Hegarty’s book, we asked him a series of questions which he answered with a series of sketches, an appropriately witty, incisive and ‘different’ interview celebrating an iconic advertising career.

8. Don’t Forget the I in T

At Labs we celebrate the hybrid, but in this post recognize that a team of hybrids might lack the depth in specific disciplines, might spend too much time agreeing with each other and might only be appropriate to crack certain tasks. As Ben points out in the comments, it’s important for a jack of all trades to be a master of some!

9. Building a New Agency OS

A consideration for a new thinking about what an agency can be, should be and could do as we approach ‘marketing singularity’, the moment the message becomes indistinguishable from the product or service it promotes. Instead of codifying an agency operating system around functions and outputs, we suggest that an agency of the future needs an OS rooted in a culture of collaboration, experimentation and transparency.

10. Keep Aaron Cutting

Lastly, in a year when social media has been both blamed for fuelling the London riots and praised for fuelling the Arab Spring, we can’t have a top ten list without acknowledging the Keep Aaron Cutting project. Thanks to the generosity (there’s that word again) of all the BBH blog and twitter stream readers who used social media to spread the word about an 89-year-old barber from North London who might have lost everything, Aaron’s shop is well on the way to being rebuilt and a nice old guy has had his faith in young people and in technology restored.

More of this next year, please.

Supplying Monsters, Telling Stories

Mel Exon — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 07:21:40 +0000

Hoxton Street Monster Supply Store interior (photo: www.monstersupplies.org)

At Labs we like nothing more that creativity put to good use (reference our love for ichainsaws, gloves, design-led activism and fightwear with a social mission). Chuck in some Mortal Terror and we’re yours.

With the recent launch of their online shop, www.monstersupplies.org, our friends at Hoxton Street Monster Supplies have extended what is essentially an imaginative, immaculately designed fund-raising platform. It’s all in aid of Ministry of Stories, a creative writing non-profit which is supported by all proceeds from the shop.

If you need to stock up on Zombie Fresh Mints or my personal favourite, a tin of “A Vague Sense of Unease”, Hoxton Street Monster Supplies is the site for you.

A Vague Sense Of Unease, available at http://www.ministryofstories.org/

And, hey, the holidays are upon us, so satisfy the buying-spree beast within with a little monster-based goodness – just make sure you get your order in by this Friday 1pm (GMT), if you want to make last orders before Christmas.

Behind the shop at 159 Hoxton Street, through a hidden door, the Ministry of Stories exists to help young people in East London learn how to be storytellers. Which, as @jeremyet always likes to say, is where the magic happens.

Ministry of Stories Writer (photo: http://www.ministryofstories.org/)

You can shop online here or volunteer to help at the Ministry of Stories here.

Credits:

The website was created “by a small group of unpaid humans in their spare time”: design by Gavin and Jason Fox, build by Simon Pearson, project management by Chris Meachin, user experience by Mike Towber; and art direction by We Made This.

monstersupplies.org

We Told Tales (at Internet Week)

Jeremy Ettinghausen — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 15:50:54 +0000

Author: James Mitchell, Strategist, BBH Labs

Back in November, Internet Week Europe happened – many of you might better know it as #iwe11. Last year, we challenged London’s digital elite to get their hands dirty and code up a storm in an afternoon. This year, we did something altogether more warm and fuzzy.

This November, we asked people to step forward and bare their souls for TaleTorrent – a night of true stories about the internet. And step forward they did! We had a truly fantastic lineup of speakers telling stories from the funny to the sad, the professional to the personal, but all extremely entertaining. Thank you guys, again.

It was very much a night run on volunteer goodwill – not least from the guys at Kinura, who approached us a full three days before the event and said “hey, d’you want us to stream it online?”

We said an emphatic yes. And so, for anybody that missed it, grab some port and enjoy after dinner.

TALETORRENT – PART ONE

Featuring @BetaRish and @mndtrythnkng‘s ultimate answer to Facebook’s “What’s on your mind?”,@katylindemann‘s True Confessions Of A Teenage Weblogger, @documentally‘s 999-style car crash reenactment, and @claireburge‘s paean to the gods of Serendipity.

TALETORRENT – PART TWO

Featuring @jnicholasgeist‘s Zombie apocalypse night-on-the-tiles (a transatlantic special!), @simonsanders‘ pen-pal to PM saga, @mananatomorrow‘s cyberphilic daughter, and my experiences of chartroom romance, of a sort.

…and if you enjoyed that, know now that there are plans for TaleTorrentTwo, to land sometime in March. A little less rushed this time around. Details will come when they exist, but if you’re inspired by what you’ve seen and you want to have a go, drop me an email at james.mitchell@bbh-labs.com. We’d love to have you.

#WaterRun: For The Win-Win

Mel Exon — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 16:58:00 +0000

Author: Mareka Carter, @marekacarter, Creative, BBH London

What’s #WaterRun?

Many people living in villages in Sub-Saharan Africa have to walk c. 5 km every day just to collect clean water.

#WaterRun is about running (or walking, if that’s more your thing) the same distance, our aim to raise enough money to build 30 new wells in the region.

5 km takes about an hour’s walk a day; for many of us it’s the equivalent of walking or running into work, instead of taking public transport – see what we did there?

Log your runs and donate here: waterrunproject.com. If you’re a Water Runner, you could donate the money you’ve saved not using public transport, if you’re a Supporter you can donate, well, as much as you feel able.

It’s something for everyone, not just the creative and tech community: we’d love everyone’s Mum and Dad, Mom and Pop, Mama and Papa to get involved too.

Think of it as a win-win, ‘pre-tox’ cleanse before the debauchery of the holiday season kicks in - or, if you’re in the States, a quick post-Thanksgiving fitness drive – a chance to do some good towards others and yourself in the process.

Why are we doing this?

You will have seen news coverage of the widespread famine in East Africa and very possibly heard about the 50/50 project launched in response by our friends at Made by Many, hatched with Good for Nothing. If you haven’t: each project on the collaborative platform combines fund-raising with digital goodness, aiming to engage a network of supporters to help spread the word and generate as much money for as possible for UNICEF famine aid. Like our brothers and sisters at BBH NY, we knew we wanted in the moment we heard about it.

Those links again:

Log your runs and make a donation here: www.waterrunproject.com.

Find us on Facebook here.

And check out the raft of other amazing initiatives for 50/50 here: 5050.gd

#WaterRun starts now, but you can join in whenever you want. Do it once, or you can do it every day for the next few weeks – it’s up to you. The main thing is to keep logging your distances on the super simple website and telling the world about it, so together we can send the total raised sky high.

Thank you. Happy Water Running!