Digital Hive

Creating ideas, 21st century style

You guys probably already saw this great story in last weekend's NYTimes magazine but if not, check it out. It highlights some of the critical aspects of developing ideas for today's brands and consumers. And during the course of the article they actually come up with some interesting ideas, unprompted and (presumably) without preparation (the Facebook overalls idea is pretty awesome).  

Participants in the roundtable: BENJAMIN PALMER is the C.E.O. of the Barbarian Group, an Internet advertising and marketing firm based in Boston. He helped create the ‘‘Subservient Chicken’’ online campaign for Burger King. LARS BASTHOLM is a chief creative officer at AKQA, where he has worked on campaigns for Xbox, Coca-Cola and Motorola. ROBERT RASMUSSEN is the executive creative director of the Nike account at R/GA, an agency that specializes in digital media. He has created campaigns for ESPN, Sega and Jet.

Loved this quote: Most media, like television, used to be a kind of flow. You’d sit down, you’d turn it on and you’d watch. The reason advertising is completely broken is that the flow doesn’t exist anymore. There’s no prime time. There’s no such thing as must-see TV. Everyone’s composing their own flow. And once you start becoming the composer of your own flow, you can’t go back. You’re like, Why would I have somebody dictate to me what I watch when I’m used to programming for myself? 

Also loved this riff on how to take Katie Couric at CBS and actually make her relevant: 

Palmer: What Katie Couric is not giving us, as a mainstream evening-news anchor, is an invitation to participate. So what if we changed the format of her show? Every day she gives us a sneak preview of whom she will interview over the next week. And you can go online and post your own questions. Maybe two or three user questions end up on the evening news, and you’re like a big star if she uses your question. She says your name: “This is Robert Rasmussen’s question.” You’re totally psyched. You feel awesome. And then on the Internet we post the other 17 user questions and their answers. We put those on the Internet, so there’s actually like an hour of content. A half-hour is on TV, and the other half-hour is on the Internet. You start involving people in the conversation. You start using television as the theatrical component to the Internet. Because what TV offers that the Internet doesn’t offer is a guarantee of fame. You know that millions of people saw that bit of you on television.

Also: 

Bastholm: She also needs to change from being a persona to being a person, and that’s what digital is best at. I’d begin with a Twitter feed where she’s talking about what she’s actually doing during the day. She’d talk about all the behind-the-scenes stuff that you don’t see when she’s interviewing, say, Sarah Palin. Talking very openheartedly about how she experienced that the second after she’s done with the interview. So you kind of start to feel you know the person who’s doing the interviewing versus just the anchor posing the questions. 

And: 

Palmer: There’s a difference. A Super Bowl ad is broadcast and everybody sees the same ad, and it comes from a single source. And so you may have a preference as to whether you liked this ad in comparison to this other ad in the block of ads that you just saw. But when you feel like you’ve discovered something on the Internet, it’s a different relationship to the brand. Say I was one of the first thousand people who saw that Cadbury gorilla ad — where he drums along to Phil Collins — and I send that out to all my friends. There’s a pride that I have in having discovered that, a connection that you actually can’t get with broadcast advertising.

A few key takeaways for me:

• Benjamin Palmer had the best comments; interesting, considering he runs (what I consider to be) the most forward company represented. Would love to see how he'd respond to leading a scale agency. Will his ideas and way of working become mainstream, or will big holding companies resist?
• Ideating at its best is free form - people build on each other, based on insights. It's not arduous, it's fun. But it starts from an understanding of (and empathy with) the consumer and brands' reality in connecting with them
• Yet another reminder that what makes an old school TV-led campaign "go" can be very different from what drives campaign success these days

Good lord what have we come to?

Good lord what have we come to? This is a DRTV response page for for a product (I think at least) targeted at scrapbookers. I always thought of scrapbookers as Little House on the Prairie types - "hey Laura, I just made a scrapbook out of that filthy old potato sack." Relaxing, simple, blissfully uncommercial. But apparently there's just as much marketing targeted at them as the rest of them. There's nowhere to hide.

Uniqlo does it again

Uniqlo has  a fabulous new online piece about bra tops. Don't ask, just go see it.

The music restores my hope in the world.

http://www.uniqlo.com/try/

VivaKi on social media: the news from the top

I've copied below a great AdWeek op-ed piece by VivaKi's 2 leaders, David Kenny and Jack Klues. Lays out VivaKi's POV on social media and some of how we are planning to help the VivaKi and creative agencies approach this burgeoning area.

They reference the VivaKi social media summit that I was proud to be part of leading in September. Was a great opportunity to meet industry luminaries and boldly plot the way forward.

The Art of Friending.How to move from conversation to conversion in social media, the communications platform of the future

Consumers seeking a sense of community, camaraderie and conversation have built platforms where they can talk about anything and everything. Portals dedicated to dog lovers, moms, artichoke or political aficionados, sports fanatics, gossip mongers and any other common and uncommon interest groups abound. Social networks are huge and scalable, and they facilitate emotional brand connections more than anything we've seen so far in digital media. Consumers have set up more than half a million custom social networks. Today, there are 100 million Facebook users and close to 1 million active Twitter users, according to company estimates. Marketers are racing to find unobtrusive ways to enter these conversations.

In September, a group of social-media junkies from across Publicis Groupe convened with leading social-media vendors to answer the most pressing question about consumer conversation: "How can our clients use social media to power the connection of people to each other and to brands, globally and at scale?" We determined that the solution is to create a common marketplace for social insights, experiences, ads and outcomes.

Advertising has historically been an exposure and intrusion practice -- get in someone's face and talk about the attributes of a brand. That approach works less and less effectively all the time, and it is absolutely fatal in the social arena. As in every successful marketing campaign, actionable human insights are critical to social media. Understanding the passions, expectations, needs and desires of the people you want to talk to -- or inspire to talk about you -- is vital. Marketers (and those of us who serve them) need to take a close look at what's going on in the consumer's world. We need to listen. That's no small task when you consider the vast number of conversations going on in the social Web, but the truth is we can get plenty of data about social networking from resources like Converseon, TruCast and BuzzMetrics to help us figure out what's happening in the consumer's intimate sphere. This data well augments the rich insights we have become expert at gleaning from other sources and studies.

Want to reach Millennials? Just observe how these 18- to 24-year-olds behave in social sites. Digitas did just that on behalf of Starburst and its new Gummi Burst candy. When Starburst launched its "Share Something Juicy" campaign, it offered Millennials an opportunity to express themselves through an animated Web series called Nite Fite and a Starburst-branded YouTube channel that hosted short "Starburst Moments" videos. By allowing consumers to express individuality and participate creatively in the campaign, Starburst joined and enhanced consumer conversation.

Still enjoying relative infancy, social media does not have a lot of built-in access points or mechanisms to achieve scalable audiences. This has to change. Perhaps the most beneficial thinking we can bring to social media is to push for platforms that help deliver the scale and access of other mass media while remaining sensitive to the unique qualities of social audiences.

Off-the-shelf social-media programs and platforms are a powerful starting point, although not a complete solution. There are a number of vendors and partners in the online space that are developing tools that make activation in the social space easier and more efficient. Leveraging widget and social-application platforms allows us to focus on the messages and the social experiences that bring them to life.

We also need to source social-media audiences at scale. Agencies and their clients can build platforms around brands, much like we did with Audience on Demand (AOD), a partnership between VivaKi and four major internet networks (Google, Yahoo, MSN and Platform A). We need to aggregate social-media inventory in much the same way, reaching keenly defined communities via influencers and with ads that resonate within the social context.

Finally, we need to more carefully align social and search, which feed each other. Social bookmarking, blogs, review sites and social-network listings increasingly influence search results. Social media has opened up new avenues for pay-per-click ads and has created more opportunity for search to be a vital function for each site (e.g., Twitter search). We must capitalize on this interconnectivity to create more points of entry.

With the right combination of scalable social insights, experiences and ads, a social-media program can go far. However, it will fail to succeed until we put the proper measurement mechanisms in place.

Right now, the systems don't exist. Media planners can't pull comparisons of social media and TV, even though social media is quickly becoming a breeding ground for more consumer conversations and interactions. This is a priority for us and for others who want to find the best way to measure social-media engagement. But what is engagement? It must be something more than page views or downloads in this context. Perhaps the number of fans or the number of pass-alongs to friends? User-submitted content, from photos or comments to reviews or full blog posts to well-produced videos, needs different weighting. We must decide, define and deliver.

We believe the solution lies in the intersection of emotion and performance.  When we can capture and combine emotional outcomes and performance metrics, we will have a more complete understanding of how well a particular effort is working, and what we might do to make it work harder.

Social media is perhaps the most powerful communications platform of the future. Making it viable is more than a VivaKi priority: it is an industry imperative. An open source, collaborative effort is the most effective way forward. In other words, "friending" all partners.

David Kenny and Jack Klues are managing partners at VivaKi, Publicis Groupe's entity overseeing the digital and media assets of Digitas, Starcom MediaVest Group, ZenithOptimedia and Denuo.

My Ad:tech interview with Mike Lazerow, CEO of Buddy Media

Hey sportsfans, check out this interview I did with Mike Lazerow, CEO of leading "appvertising" creator Buddy Media. Interview copied below:

Talking Shop With VivaKi's Jeff Flemings

Michael Lazerow speaks with Jeff Flemings at ad:tech from Buddy Media on Vimeo.

I was fortunate enough to catch up with Jeff Flemings, Senior VP of Renaissance Planning at VivaKi, a new unit of Publicis Group S.A. at this year’s ad:tech New York. Jeff was previously founder and leader of the planning discipline at Digitas, and always impresses me with his forward thinking in regards to digital marketing.

This conversation took place after a panel that I spoke on and Jeff moderated called, “Mobilizing and Leveraging Consumer Insights: Best Practices for the Digital and Social Media Age,” alongside Kay Madati, VP, Audience Experience, CNN Worldwide; Jeff Hunter, Innovation Toolkit Director, Cereal Partners Worldwide, General Mills, Inc.; Marc Ruxin, Chief Innovation Officer, Digital, McCann Worldgroup San Francisco; and Chris Pan, Head of Brand Solutions, Facebook.

You can check out the video of our post panel conversation below, but in the meantime here are some of Jeff’s high level thoughts.

On growth areas:
“One of the big takeaways for me is that the whole interactive and social marketing lane is still very much alive and growing, which is great.”

On social media:
“The most exciting thing for me, hands down, is anything to do with social, because it’s increasingly the way consumers are choosing to spend their time. It provides un-parelleled opportunities for brands to get into a consumer’s life, so from a marketer’s perspective, it’s an incredible opportunity. I think we are only just now scratching the surface of what’s possible.”

On social and search:
“One interesting dimension will be the intersection of social and search…so, taking what we’ve learned from social media interactions and driving that into search strategy.”

On the future:
“I think we will be talking about the further expansion of social. I think all the cool things about social that marketers really need that haven’t quite materialized yet, like sourcing audiences that scale reliably…we have to see progress there if brands are to move significant budgets [in that direction.]”

Insights from search data - finally some progress

Thanks to Read Write Web for this great post about Google's new flu tracker. Google.org has the details.

As you've probably heard by now, the basic idea is to look at Google search data as a leading indicator of key developments in public health. Searches about flu indicate increasing flu activity. Pretty simple stuff.

"So why bother with estimates from aggregated search queries? It turns out that traditional flu surveillance systems take 1-2 weeks to collect and release surveillance data, but Google search queries can be automatically counted very quickly. By making our flu estimates available each day, Google Flu Trends may provide an early-warning system for outbreaks of influenza."

I have no intention of entrusting my information to Google health, but I think this is pretty cool stuff that doesn't quite yet cross the line into violating user privacy (but could pretty easily).

In the meantime, flu activity in Massachusetts is currently low. Whew.

Nice job ConAgra - The Working Lunch

Thanks to AdWeek for a head's up about some great new work from ConAgra. Healthy Choice online experience is here. Quoting from article:

ConAgra vp of marketing Mike Locascio said the campaign's concept came from a recent Omnibus survey of 2,181 U.S. adults, which showed that 60 percent of workers ate lunch at their desks. The respondents also expressed interest in eating healthier meals. A separate Nielsen study found that consumers 25-54 spend 90 percent of their total Web time during working lunch hours: 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.

"What we've really tried to do here is talk to [consumers] when they're most receptive to the message," Locascio said. "They're really craving for entertainment during the few minutes break they get every day."

The Working Lunch, via interactive agency Bridge Worldwide, Cincinnati, features actors from The Second City improv troupe, and picks up where TV spots for Fresh Mixers left off. Through Nov. 25, ConAgra will air live, streaming videos between noon and 4 p.m. on the Fresh Mixers microsite. The episodes take place in an office meeting-type setting, where viewers can vote on the agenda or content they'd like to see. Viewers can also access the sketch comedy series via the MSN home page.

Will be interesting to see how/if social comes into it - couldn't find a FB group for the campaign.