I'm Faris

I had the privilege of being the chairman for the Contact & Content and the Integrated jury for the Clio Awards last year. 

It was awesome.

The Clios have been hosting some cocktails and chats for the industry where previous jurors give some thoughts on what they saw and some tips on how to make better case study videos.

The case study video is a relatively recent advertising form - a function of the increasingly complexity of the media environment and what constitutes advertising or ideas - and it's only really when you sit in a room for 3-5 days and watch hundreds of them that you begin to see the response that different tropes elicit among the award juries and how rapidly some things have become clichés. 

So, hopefully this will be helpful, should you be looking to make one. 

This is very much a companion piece to / built on the shoulders of Rahul Sabnis' awesome talk on the same topic the week before, which you can see here. 

I wrote this thing for a Mediacom magazine called Blink because someone asked me nicely. 

You can read it on the website. 

Download Finding New Magic Faris TIGS for reading with magazine layout.

Or you can read it here> 

FINDING NEW MAGIC

How can brands earn time in consumers’ lives?

Faris Yakob, Chief Innovation Officer at MDC Partners’ kbs+ and co-founder of creative technology shop Spies&Assassins, explains how scale, empowerment and technology can still deliver.

Advertisers are in a bind. Many fear they have too little to say to attract and hold consumer attention.

In the past they could rely on traditional media owners to reach consumers. By advertising in commercial breaks around the edges of content they could take advantage of the audience that shows had aggregated.

Fragmentation has meant consumers are gathering in big numbers less and less and that the cost of taking advantage of the aggregation ability of others has become ever higher.

The Internet is the great disintermediator, connecting everything to everything, but this direct connection comes with a cost. Brands with little to say do not attract any attention in a world where communications are spread by consumer networks rather than broadcast ones. 

However, the challenge isn’t simply about distribution, it’s also about the means of production.

Until very recently, the ability to make something public, to publish, to a mass audience, was a privileged act.

The powers that be historically outlawed the ability to disseminate information - unlicensed printing presses were illegal, as they still are under certain modern regimes, such as in Malaysia under the Printing Presses and Publications Act of 1984.

When the age of mass media arrived, only governments, the media industrial complex and the advertising industry were able to create and distribute culture.

So when you saw these pieces of culture, you couldn’t help but be impressed.

The exponential impact of Moore’s Law means that the computing power of a bespoke Silicon Graphics workstation, such as was used to create the special effects for Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park, can be easily approximated on a consumer laptop. Digital technology has given every consumer the power to create content.

The monetary power of brands no longer buys them uniqueness. 

We can all make films, we can all create web pages and we can all record are own music.

The magic that exclusive access to this technology used to deliver has evaporated.

Content producers – the role traditionally taken by ad agencies in the marketing industry – no longer have exclusive access to the magic that is content creation. That isn’t to say the quality of “consumer generated content” [a tellingly oxymoronic term] is on par with Hollywood production. Rather, the gap between not being able to do something and being able to do it is infinite, but the gap between being bad and excellent is simply one of degree.

It’s hard to be amazed with any technical wizardry on film when you grow up with iMovie at your fingertips.

But all is not doom and gloom for smart brands.

They still have strategic advantages in the eternal quest for consumer attention: technology and scale. 

Technology provides a canvas that is yet to be effectively colonized by the amateur and, as Arthur C Clarke famously pointed out, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Thus, technology provides a medium to amaze and cut through the clutter of content.

Because technology companies often tout their latest tools to brands and media owners to help drive uptake, brands have first user advantages. The Pepsi TEN project is an explicit manifestation of this advantage. The consumer packaged goods giant established a venture fund to support and partner with early stage technology start-ups in order to exclusively leverage the technologies for marketing.

The problem with the blurring of the technology and the communications industries however is that they are divided by a common language. Words that should mean the same thing often mean something completely different to those on either side of the divide.

Take a simple word like platform.

To a communications specialist it means an idea or theme that all messages fit into, but to a technology expert it means an underlying technology that enables other products or services to be built on it. This means that collaboration among disciplines can seem to be aligned when it isn’t.

At the extreme, creative directors trained in writing or graphic design find themselves being asked to review algorithms they can’t understand, as code becomes a creative deliverable.

For brands to take advantage of technology and their first-access rights to new developments, they and their agents need to develop common understanding.

Often it is the role of the strategist to translate business language into creative inspiration. Increasingly additional translations are necessary, evinced by the formation of new agency roles, reverse mentoring, and management training from groups like HyperIsland.

The other area where brands still have an advantage over empowered consumers is their ability to deliver scale.

'Ironically' this is often most powerful when delivered in traditional media environments.

Digital channels may now deliver massive reach but the almost infinite nature of the web means it can lack the cultural impact of TV and the associated media that reports on it. Fragmentation leads to the counter intuitive fact that things can be incredibly popular on the Internet and yet you may never hear about it.

Scale can be delivered in terms of audience.

Doritos Crash the Superbowl campaign is an old example but it classically leverages the consumer’s ability to make films and incentivizes them to participate with the opportunity to see their ad in the biggest TV event of the year.

Scale can be delivered via access.

For all their digital tools, tablets and laptops won’t get you close to the big stars, although Twitter disrupts even this advantage. Brands can leverage their corporate might to provide access to things that an individual’s money can’t buy. Coca Cola experimented with an example of this when they sponsored a live online 24 hour recording session with the band Maroon 5. The band composed and recorded a track, aided by feedback and suggestions from people online in real time.

Scale can also deliver empowerment.

Pepsi Refresh is an unconventional example that allows consumers to get behind their favourite local group. Scale enabled them to gain access to funds that made a real difference to the causes their consumers cared about and as a result the campaign spreads via their networks. 

In the age of the empowered consumer, brands need to identify what they can do that consumers cannot, how they can add something to their lives.

Technology may be part of the answer, if brands and technologists can learn to speak the same language, but it could also be via the appropriate application of scale that gives consumers something that even the latest laptop, tablet or mobile cannot offer.

The scale and complexity of multi-platform content presents an novel twist on the traditional competency - if brands can effective harness transmedia storytelling, we may find a kind of content that consumers once again think of as magical.

@faris

So - what do you think?  

[HT Making Future Magic] 

I wrote this Viewpoint thing for the current issue of the ONECLUB magazine.

You can also see it on their website. 

You Download What Do Advertising Agencies Do? TIGS as a convenient portable document for Kindle viewing, perhaps. 

Or read it here>

VIEWPOINT / FARIS YAKOB

WHAT DO ADVERTISING AGENCIES DO?

Outside of the industry, it is little recognized that advertising agencies do not actually make television commercials—this is outsourced to production companies.

Agencies germinate, direct and manage the processes of advertising production.

However, the question is more fundamental than what do they do, but rather, what are advertising agencies for?

In 1975 Theodore Levitt wrote one of the classic texts of marketing. “Marketing Myopia” is the “quintessential big hit HBR piece”, to quote a later article about it from the self-same Harvard Business Review.

In it, Levitt points out that every industry was once a growth industry but that never seems to last, not because the market is saturated but rather because companies misinterpret the fundamental question:

“What business are you in?”

One of his key examples is the American railroads—once a mighty growth industry, it declined steeply because it failed to recognize the threat presented by the emergence and eventual affordability of cars and what was once described as:

“100 ton tubes of metal moving smoothly through the air 20,000 feet above the earth, loaded with 100 sane and solid citizens casuallydrinking martinis.”

The railroad tycoons thought they were in the business of railroads when they were really in the business of transport—they were myopically product focused instead of being customer focused.

This idea has become an adage of marketing, aphoristically captured by Levitt himself in a later article:

“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!”

It’s the same logic that might have prevented Kodak from its ignominious fall from grace. Kodak wasn’t in the “film” business that digital cameras abruptly decimated, it was in the business of capturing memories—it just didn’t realize until [possibly] too late.

Advertising agencies “make” advertisements and this is a surprisingly healthy business considering how often its demise has been trumpeted.

Indeed, television advertising in the USA grew 9.7% in 2010 according to eMarketer, bouncing back after the recession, and growth is projected to continue.

Despite time-shifting ad-skipping digital video recorders, the death of the 30-second spot has been greatly exaggerated.

That said, it’s important to remember that advertising is a drill, not a hole.

Advertising is a means, not an end, a lever designed to effect consumer behavior leading people to pay price premiums and buy more things and more often, due to the dimly understood interactions of persuasive symbols and human cognitive, social and economic behavior.

Thus, should better, more efficient, more effective solutions to the business problem of marketing products to the masses manifest, companies would be well advised to pursue them.

Advertising agencies then, either make advertising, which is a service that can be displaced, or they help corporations solve business problems with creativity, which will remain an ongoing need as long as there are corporations, but puts “advertising” agencies into a much larger competitive set alongside other business consultants, albeit with a specific competitive advantage of being able to effectively house and manage commercially creative people. Large management consultancies struggle with this for the same reason - the environment isn't usually very palatable to them.

The business of advertising remains robust for now but the business of ideas that drive business growth is evergreen.

The industry is bifurcating along these lines.

It’s a good idea to work out which business you want to be in and act accordingly.

Pure play advertising agencies should defend and leverage their core competencies inside the extant market.

Agencies that want to explore the possibilities outside this definition of the category must be willing to invest in developing new competencies to service emerging needs, increasingly at the intersection of technology and storytelling.

This blurriness is perhaps best evidenced by The One Club awarding Nike+ as one of the Best Campaigns of the Digital Decade despite, or because of the fact that it isn’t a campaign.

A technology driven product/ service extension attracts and earns attention for a brand, solving a problem with something other than “advertising.”

Both strategic routes are sensible to consider, depending on an honest analysis of the business and its strengths and assets, including its key and often overlooked intangible asset, the agency brand.

The danger comes from attempting to be all things to all customers—the essence of strategy is trade-offs, since finite resource requires finite offerings.

Worse than not making decisions is falling symptom to the “Shirky Principle”—an idea established by Clay Shirky in his book, Cognitive Surplus, and elevated to the status of principle by Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired.

Shirky points out that

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”

Rather than solving clients’ problems, agencies that succumb to the principle spend their energies trying to maintain that the world of business and media hasn’t changed, or attempting to stymie symptoms of the change when they encounter it.

As with any corporate strategy, the road ahead for advertising depends on knowing what business you are really in and acting accordingly.

Very useful little deck on free social listenting tools that some of my work family contributed to.

Enjoy.

Leo Burnett "When to take my name off the door" from Lobo on Vimeo.

...off the door.

Lovely. 

My mate Jason runs the excellent and very useful Socialfresh.com and I just wrote this thing for them.

I originally thought I was just going to transcribe The Importance of Being Awesome Mashable talk, but as I wrote it became slightly different, focused more specifically on the nature of awesomeness, in content sharing terms. 

I especially like the line from Dr Berger [the scientist who did the study that showed that awesomeness was the biggest driver of sharing from NYTimes.com] that unpacks awesomeness, partially, as disrupted expectations about the world -

[expectancy violations seem to trigger both attention and memory as our mental model of the world is forced to edit itself - see this post for more on that]

- and highlights the inherent relationship between emotion and communication: 

"Emotion in general leads to transmission"

which is a rather lovely thought to leave you with for the festive season. 

So - [after you've been over to SocialFresh to read the whole piece, of course] go have some emotions and tell people about them.

Ho Ho Ho. 

I tweeted this a week or 2 ago and a bunch of people responded on Twitter saying that it had happened to them.

And then Coca-Cola decided to pull the cans citing consumer confusion and that. 

All well and good in the age of very low latency consumer feedback, especially about iconic packaging. 

But I didn't notice, until my mate Matt pinged it to me, that part of the consumer issue with the cans was not that they were confusing it with Diet Coke but that COKE CLASSIC TASTED DIFFERENT IN WHITE CANS.

This WSJ article mentions it in passing, The Atlantic calls it out a little more: 

consumers "felt that regular Coke tasted different in the white cans". 

Coke officials deny tweaking the taste, and say they only changed the can.

But, see, it's not that consumers are confused in this scenario, rather that the understanding of what 'taste' actually is, is - because when you change the can too much, you change the taste. 

Taste happens in the mind, so it's more complex than just chemicals - it happens at the intersection of lots of different things, including of course the chemicals and your tongue, but also including less obvious things, like expectation [you will love this] and concepts of value [this wine is very expensive] and where you are [anchoring/priming] and memories associated with it and such.

Here's a post I wrote a few years back about this [it was anchored to a stealth focus group ad where consumers claimed taste preference for diamond shape shreddies, as opposed to square ones...]:

I've been reading Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. It illustrates the fact, that we intuitively know but that classical economics refuses to accept, that we aren't rational beings. We make decisions that are seemingly irrational, in the same way over and over again, because of how our brains are hardwired: anchors and priming, emotions and social context all interact to change how we choose.

One of the things he highlights is the power of expectation to alter experience.  He describes a replication of the famous Coke/Pepsi taste tests, done with the subjects in an MRI to record how their brain is processing the experience of tasting the drinks.

We all know how it works - in blind taste tests, Pepsi usually wins, but when the brands are revealed, people prefer The Real Thing [TM].

And, according the experiment, it's because that the experience of consuming branded sugar water is different - the Coke brand activates different associations in the memory and emotional parts of the brain, which contribute to the consumption experience.

Which means that, when you drink a Coke, a part of what you are tasting is the brand.

As Coca-Cola just found out.

And, in there, somewhere, is the magic bit of good branding. 

Or something. 

There are a couple of mega trends that have been forming for some time now.

1. Content aggregation and curation – in a world of infinite content, brands and people need to find ways to become signals in the noise:  see  http://www.percolate.com
2. Making ATOMS from BITS – turning digital things into physical things – like the MAKERBOT http://www.makerbot.com/ 

[UPDATE: Tom sent me a link to this Kickstarter project for a new kind of 3D printer called PrintrBOT.

which reminded me of my two previous posts on 3d printers

New Virtruvians

We, The Makers]

BergLondon have just announced  a new combination of the two: 

[remember – ideas are new combinations - http://farisyakob.typepad.com/blog/2008/07/ideas-are-new-combinations.html among others]

{BergLondon is a charming prototyping and invention shop in London that works with agencies and clients to concept future things.}

It has just announced the Little Printer – an aggregator/ curator that prints you out a personal daily newspaper: 

http://bergcloud.com/littleprinter/

Connected to the Web, Little Printer has wide range of sources available to check on your behalf. We call them “publications”.

Subscribe to your favourites and choose when you’d like them delivered.

Right on time Little Printer gathers everything it needs to prepare a neat little personalised package, printed as soon as you press the button.

You can get deliveries multiple times a day, but we find once or twice works best–like your very own morning or evening newspaper. 

The content can be very personal indeed:

The design is crucial to make content consumable:

Graphic design is at the heart of everything Little Printer delivers, making the most of connectivity and print combined. Rendered in crisp black and white these tactile publications take visual cues from traditional halftone lithography and modern pixel art, whether they’re the latest international news or this week’s gossip from friends.

The fusion of technology, design, content distribution and 3D fabrication is an obvious innovation nexus to keep an eye on. 

Watch the Little Printer video here. 

is the name of the talk I gave at the Mashable Media Summit. 

It's about how important being awesome is and will be, for media products

[although I'm leaning into a specific, slightly archaic use of the word, when it meant something more akin to terrible

which, itself, meant something a bit different].

They've just posted it and said:

In order to capture the audience’s attention after lunch at the Mashable Media Summit, Faris Yakob, chief innovation officer of MDC Partners’ kbs+p and founding partner of Spies & Assassins, had to be awesome. Yakob is trying to do so at the intersection of technology, business, behavior and culture.

The future, according to Yakob, “belongs to the most awesome because we are in a stage of transition, where human interpersonal networks are going to substitute or supplement commercial broadcast networks.” 

From art and copy to arduinos and code, Yakob talks about how and why the most shared and spreadable content in media wins.

[image lovingly lifted from here]