The O2 memory project
May 27, 2008 by Phil · Leave a Comment
About a month ago I was in Southbank to visit the O2 Memory Project, an installation by Jason Bruges Studio. The work explores the temporary nature of our digital memories, drawing on the theme of ‘nothing is lost’. The structure camera-captures panoramic moments in time and stores them within its digital memory bank. Inside, visitors can explore the stored history of the installation and interact with the displayed 360 degree images.
Simultaneously, the Memory Project has a significant online element. All the panoramic images taken are time-coded and instantly uploaded and can be viewed as ‘memory rings’ – unique 360 degree images that can be scrolled through. Lessrain wrote about the development.
“Over the years, physical diaries, photo albums and shoe boxes have kept our personal memories safe. A generation from now, printed matter might not exist. We are already relying on hard drives, websites and mobile phones to store our digital memories. Our lives will be downloaded as a matter of course for future generations to examine, adore or even ignore.”
For more see this great video from the BBC.
Mobile Rules! 2008
May 15, 2008 by Phil · Leave a Comment
With over three billion mobile phones in use globally, the mobile space is three times as large as television and twice as large as PCs and it is the most personal device.
Success in mobile marketing will require that marketers think differently. It is not a web experience that we transfer into a mobile neither another digital channel we push content to.
To be right, we will have to offer useful information, tools and services at the right moment and in the right place to enrich lives, better enable consumers to make decisions and help them to save time and money.
Nokia recently announced the winners in the annual ‘Mobile Rules!‘ competition, the world’s leading awards for innovative mobile business plans and cutting-edge applications, services and technologies from developers and entrepreneurs from around the globe.
For me, a very good overview of the mobile space today. One of my favourite is NiiMee, a package of projects developed in Python that exploits the accelerometer present in some high-end mobile phones.
With NiiMe you can move the mouse, drive a car using the phone as a steering wheel, play drums in the air, play Mario Bros and more games with the phone in the trouser pocket, and soon much more. There are a lot of funny and useful projects under development.
Virtual export
May 13, 2008 by Phil · Leave a Comment
Gold Farmers are young people who earn their living by playing MMORPG games. They acquire (”farm”) items of value within a game, usually by carrying out in-game actions repeatedly to maximize gains, sometimes by using a program such as a bot or automatic clicker.
They sell the artificial gold coins and other virtual goods they’ve harvested to players and/or farming organizations and get “real” money in return. Players from around the world will then use the golden coins to buy better armor, magic spells and other equipments to climb to higher levels or create more powerful characters.
Interesting article about a documentary by Ge Jin about people in developing countries virtually exporting goods to earn some money.
Korean BBQ
May 13, 2008 by Phil · Leave a Comment
I’ve never been to a Korean restaurant as far as I can remember. And every time I see one I think I should try them but it simply never happens. Same for articles about how Korea is leading the troops on the digital and mobile front in many ways. You always read about it but never really do something with it. That needs to change.
The latest about the success of mobile coupons in South Korea here.
(via putting people first)
Experiment with experimentation
May 9, 2008 by Phil · Leave a Comment
The past 10 years of business has proved that in today’s marketplace those businesses that innovate are in a far better position to realise financial gains. They’re not the only businesses that succeed, businesses that are operationally efficient, those that are second to market, sometimes even those that are simply lucky, can also prosper. But generally one of the best ways to ensure your business thrives in an increasingly competitive and global economy is to innovate.
The question then becomes, how do you make your business an innovative business, and the answer is remarkably simple. You need to experiment. Yes, you also need processes which support the realization of ideas, but the fundamental step is developing a process that allows experimentation.
In the digital industry, experimentation is comparatively easy to embrace. Constraints such as investment, iteration in product development and physical development time are largely avoided because of the Internet properties (code as opposed to physical properties). Proof, if it were needed, comes from many of the more famous internet companies started with experimentation to aid personal purposes.
For example, Del.icio.us’s founder wanted to build an application to organize his bookmarks. Youtube’s founders wanted to easily share barbecue party video with there friends.
With a computer, an Internet connection, software to write code, design interfaces, and a good idea, these major businesses grew out of simple experiments.
So, if digital experimentation has such a low barrier to entry my question, and the purpose of this paper, is to ask why does it seem to be missing in so many digital agencies?
We are followers more than innovators
Because we work mainly with major corporations and we are (typically) established businesses ourselves (or at least owned by very established businesses), we will probably never be as innovative and proactive as Internet start-ups. This isn’t a problem. We are in a slightly different industry and don’t need to be first movers or to always be trying to jump to the next innovation or technological advance. Most of our clients are not ready for that anyway.
Where we should focus is on the way we use start-up ideas for our brands and target audiences. For a start so many of these technologies and ideas are provided to us as open source, with a culture of collaboration. It is not about your agency inventing on their own, but rather finding appropriate partnerships and experimenting with others’ ideas.
Kenichi Ohmae, manager at Mckinsey, once said “The best possible solution come only from a combination of a rational analysis based on the nature of things, and imaginative reintegration of all the different items into a new pattern, using non-linear brain power”.
If we look at the three grand prix winners at Cannes this year, which are all great ideas, they all use components from Internet companies to add value to the customer experience. Proof in part that this strategy seems to work.
We fear to fail
This is definitely a big barrier, but I would argue that failure can be good. As Honda’s founder, Soichiro Honda, said, “Success is 99% failure”. Experimentation has been created to find success and innovation through failure. You will try, fail, maybe many times, and then hopefully succeed. Experimentation is for those with the nerve to take the plunge, and with a slightly longer term view of the world. It might not ever be a perfect product and it doesn’t matter… If you don’t succeed, you will, at least, learn from your mistakes and use this to develop further. Above this, it is better to fail in an experimentation phase than when the project is already sold to the client.
From a manager point of view, we have to think about experimentation as venture capitalists do. I remember this keynote from Ben Holmes at Index ventures. When they invest over 3-5 years, about 50% of their investments lose money, 33% break even and 17% make (a lot) of money. Could we adopt such an approach? It might be more difficult to calculate the return on investment as the benefits of experimentation are diverse and it might be difficult to isolate, but surely there is a principle there that we can learn from.
It is not our culture
Let’s divide our culture in staff and organization. From a staff point of view, I think most digital agencies have people who are willing to experiment. The only thing is that, for now, they are doing it at home in their free time… At the moment, they may prefer to work on personal projects at home where they can manage their time and processes as they like it, or is it simply a case that this is the only time and place they are allowed to experiment?
The risk is that they find a better way of working away from your organization… What organizations want is to benefit from that experimentation without having to pay for it – hoping that their employees will bring their learning to work. True, until those employees recognize the value exchange is unbalanced, at which point they leave and either go somewhere else or return as expensive freelance costs. We know that it is a major problem our industry is facing right now, what better way to resolve it.
From an organization point of view, it is definitely not applicable for the whole agency to spend its time experimenting all the time. If we look at other organizations, there are two models we could follow.
The first one, often used in industry, is the creation of an innovation team that exclusively works on research and development projects. This model might be applicable at a holding level as most agency staff levels are too small to create a dedicated innovation team.
From an operational point of view, it might be difficult too. As we are, most of the time, working for short term projects, it could be difficult to mix experiment ideas and real projects with fast turn around times.
That’s why the second model might be more interesting. It comes from some universities where about 20% of working hours is allocated to develop innovative projects. 20% might be too much in an agency environment but the idea is there. Some might be solo experiments; some might mix strategist and a technologist; some a creative and technologist.
By dedicating a proportion of some peoples time to innovation you may need to change your cost model, but again this isn’t the most difficult thing to do.
We don’t see the benefits it brings back
As I said above, you have direct and indirect benefits from spending more time with experimentation. I would divide them in two levels.
The first one doesn’t affect our business model and brings benefits such as attracting and retaining digital talent, creating innovative ways to use start-up ideas or emerging technologies that can be sold to existing clients and lastly increases our potential to attract new clients through reputation and demonstration of being an innovative company.
The second level is the idea that your experimentation team could lead to the next iteration of your client’s business model or take them into new markets by developing new digital products. What if agencies would have developed Flickr for Nikon, Youtube for MTV, Wikipedia for Haper Collins and so forth? It might change your client’s relationship and the way agencies get paid. But this is another topic that would need more thinking.
Experiment with experimentation
Innovation and experimentation are a priority in lots of industries, and our industry is one. We should look at the advantage we have of avoiding major investment, and be prepared to take a few more risks. We should look for ways to change our cost structure so we are not only profitable with high utilization targets for every employee, where we are not afraid to fail, and where we look for partners not fear everyone as competitors…
Only through this can we improve our own and our client’s business. In a time where agencies have difficulty differentiating themselves, it could be the major competitive advantage.
The cognitive surplus
May 3, 2008 by Phil · Leave a Comment
Now here’s a thought. Clay Shirkey argues that sitcoms could be seen as the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels of society would come off. He points out that since WWII society has been faced with a new phenomenon; through social and economic development, society forced a large amount of people to deal with something they never had before - free time. And as society was simply not able to deal with this new phenomenon, we really needed a drug to numb our brains, make that new life a little more bearable - welcome sitcom.
It’s only now we’re starting to wake up from that collective bender and starting to see the cognitive surplus created by having free time as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.
Brands who are able to carve out and leverage on the cognitive surplus of their target audience will be the brands best placed to succeed in our rapidly changing media landscape. It is about involving your target audience through a media strategy that includes consumption (no, it wont go away), production and sharing to unleash the cognitive surplus that exist in our collective brain. Now that’s a thought.
(via PFSK)