#IPASocial Principle 9: Change will never be this slow again

(Photo courtesy)

So I've written a few things about the #IPASocial project over the last few months, about how it got started, and how I've had the chance to chat through loads of ideas about the future of advertising and communications with some awesome folks. And now comes the important bit - the time to chat about it with everyone else who is interested. We're going to have a go at doing that in person next week on October 6th when the IPA are running an event to have a chat around what social really means for our industry. We’ve worked up ten principles to start this off, and this introduction (written by Amelia) gives the proper context:

Social Media is a conversation. That seems to be one thing that we can all agree on.

But given that Social Media is a rather noisy and opinionated conversation, what value do we think we will have by adding our voices to it?

We are not Social Media gurus. In fact we are rather sceptical of people who claim they are. We are simply 10 people from across a wide range of communications disciplines in the UK and the US who would like to share some thoughts. Thoughts that have either been bugging us or inspiring us, thoughts that we believe could form some of the building blocks for succesful Social campaigns. We came together to respond to and add our voices to some work that the IPA had done earlier in the year.

We have each defined a Principle which we feel is important in this Social world. You will find each principle up here but they are also on our individual blogs where we will be curating the conversation which we hope they will generate. Please do get involved, maybe you think these principles don't apply, are there better ones? Are there changes that you would like to make? Are there examples that you could add to help illustrate them? The only thing that we ask is that as part of the advertising and communications community that you become part of the conversation. After all the more opinions that are being shared and built on, the more interesting and stronger the outcome. At least that's what we are hoping.

Thank you in advance.

The IPA have created a hub for all ten principles, along with an overall summary of twhy this is important, written by Mark Earls. This can be found here. Everyone who has joined in so far is also hosting a principle on their blogs, so please join in the discussion there too.

1. People not consumers – Mark Earls

2. Social agenda not business agenda – Le’Nise Brothers

3. Continuous conversation not campaigning – John V Willshire

4. Long term impacts not quick fixes – Faris Yakob

5. Marketing with people not to people – Katy Lindemann

6. Being authentic not persuasive – Neil Perkin

7. Perpetual beta – Jamie Coomber

8. Technology changes, people don’t – Amelia Torode

9. Change will never be this slow again – Graeme Wood

10. Measurement – Asi Sharabi

So my thoughts are all around the underlying changes in how people communicate, and particuarly what this means for agencies

IPA Social: Principle 9 - Change will never be this slow again

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

Change has never happened this fast before, and it will never be this slow again. This shouldn't come as a surprise; Intel founder Gordon Moore observed in 1965 that since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958 that processing power had doubled every 18 months, and predicted that this trend would continue unchecked. So far he has been proved right, and the future of advertising is too closely linked to that of technology to escape the effects of Moore’s Law.

That isn't to say that people are changing. Without paraphrasing too much from Clay Shirky and Mark Earls, all the things we are evolutionarily disposed to do and have a cultural requirement for are simply quicker, easier and further reaching than previously possible. Most of those things are to do with other people, not technology. To get hung up on technology risks missing the point: as Henry Jenkins says,

“Our focus should not be on emerging technologies but on emerging cultural practices"

As an industry we have faced change before; early radio ads were print ads read out. Early TV ads were radio ads in which you could see the face of the person reading. In each case the rise of a new medium provoked a step change in the advertising industry, but one that didn't happen immediately. But each of those media worked in the same way, and the one-to-many assumptions of the 20thcentury about how brands communicate are fast becoming a casualty of the power laws of 21st century networks. While it is fun to speculate on how technology will change behaviour, most examples follow Bill Gates' suggestion that

“We overestimate the change that will happen in the next two years, and underestimate the change that will happen in the next ten”

Interruptive advertising won’t disappear overnight, but each change towards a more networked world will make it less relevant. We can’t predict the impact of new technologies on cultural practice, only prepare our businesses to embrace and foster change rather than reacting to it. Things are happening quicker, including irrelevance. In the words of AG Lafley, former CEO of P&G,

"..our company's success rate runs between 50 and 60 percent. About half of our new products succeed. That's as high as we want the success rate to be. If we try to make it any higher, we'll be tempted to err on the side of caution”

So the real step change for agencies is about not keeping control or making things perfect, it is about embracing business models that constantly evolve and communications that are designed to exist in beta, making the move from what Gerd Leonhard calls “protecting brands to projecting brands’. Charles Darwin said

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

We know that species of animal can remain unchanged for millennia, and then suddenly evolve in a few generations as their environment changes. The increasing speed of communications is eroding the 19th and 20th century assumptions that our businesses are built upon. Leading change rather than being lead by it demands that we don't err on the side of caution.

Dixons: the last place you want to go...

I'm loving this new Dixons campaign, but I don't know i'm loving it in a healthy way. It's the sort of 'summarise the brand challenge' insight that turns into a whole strategy - sort of like Pot Noodle being the Slag of Snacks. I like buying tech toys as much as the next geek, on the few times I've had to go into Dixons I can safely say that it really is the last place you want to go for them. It doesn't feel properly dirty like Argos, so feels worse for pretending to have customer service but offering insultingly thick people who can't operate a camera trying hard sell features and benefits of cameras.

What it is doing though is getting people talking about Dixons, and evaluating their consideration list into 'research' (which Dixons would never have been on) and 'purchase' (which they may well stand a good chance of getting onto simply by gaining attention through humour and/or conversation). Selfridges and John Lewis make up the tension & the humour in this work, while the real target is Amazon, Pixmania, etc - everyone else on the 'purchase' side of the market.

So how is it working so far? It doesn't seem to be shifting huge volumes of searches, but Harrods are helping out with some free publicity by threatening to sue. And there's a love hate debate going on between people who see the ad - I tweeted about it when I first saw it, as did lots of other people. And the verdict is pretty positive so far - 66% positive on Twitter in London over the last few days
And the number of positive or negative (ie actually care) tweets currently outweighs the neutral ones - suggesting that if the strategy here is all about being talked about more than other cheap places amongst techie London Twitter type people, who might re-evaluate Dixons, then that positive sentiment is well deserved.

(you still wouldn't catch me in there though)

#IPASocial

So I went to an event back in January about Social Media and the Future of Agencies. Sounded like interesting stuff, but it turned out to be an opportunity for the IPA to try to sell us some research which looked like a bit of a snapshot of stuff that was happening while missing a lot of the important stuff, the reasons why it is happening. Well it looked like that from the presentation, but it was hard to tell because none of it was shared and there were no opportunities for dialogue about it. Except of course there are always opportunities for dialogue in the interwebs, and lots of people including me were fairly critical about the whole idea. It could have just finished there, as another missed opportunity, but then Nigel Gwilliam from the IPA got in touch with everyone who had commented on the event to how the IPA could make the things they are doing more relevant, more like a conversation.

And over the course of a few months this developed into a few of us putting our heads together to work out what we think are the most important principles for brands and agencies to understand when navigating the new ways in which people relate to each other online. We've also added initial thoughts about what each of the principles means, kind of conversation starters so that hopefully lots of other people can add their thoughts. And then there's going to be an event, which might hopefully be some of the things that the last one wasn't. So there's some speakers to get the conversation going, and then there's some conversation.

And these are the subjects that we think people might want to talk about. Everyone who has written the thought starter piece will be blogging it over the next week, and we're suggesting tagging it all #IPASocial. Keep a look out and please join in.

There's apparently a plumber of Yahoo Pipes somewhere in the IPA who might even be able to aggregate this tag on their site soon too, so we can really live out the perpetual beta principle.....

1. People not consumers – Mark Earls

2. Social agenda not business agenda – Le’Nise Brothers

3. Continuous conversation not campaigning – John V Willshire

4. Long term impacts not quick fixes – Faris Yakob

5. Marketing with people not to people – Katy Lindemann

6. Being authentic not persuasive – Neil Perkin

7. Perpetual beta – Jamie Coomber

8. Technology changes, people don’t – Amelia Torode

9. Change will never be this slow again – Graeme Wood

10. Measurement – Asi Sharabi

Finding and using your net promoter score

I was buying mobile phones again last week. Not to feed my tech habit this time, just cos my son threw one in the paddling pool. All very straightforward, courtesy of the Carphone Warehouse, but I wasn't expecting a text an hour later asking me One Question about my experience in buying the phone: on a scale of one to ten, how likely would I be to recommend Carphone Warehouse to a friend?
Now I've had a pretty good grip of net promoter scores for most of the brands I've worked with in the last couple of years, so I've commissioned people to ask this question a few times, but I've never been on the other end of it. It does make you think about your experiences of the brand (all pretty favourable in this case). And that led my cynical side to wonder whether brands that have an automated NPS tracking system in place for every transaction make more effort to deliver recommendable experience, or if it is more likely that it is only those that understand the importance of creating advocacy amongst their customers that bother to monitor NPS. Either way, it really impressed me. I meant to post about it last week, but to be honest forgot about it until I saw this ad on the tube today (you'd think with a new phone I could learn to take photos with it......)
Another Telecoms company, Plusnet, proudly letting me know that 8 out of 10 of their customers would recommend them to their friends.... which sounds like distilling the output of an NPS study down into an easily digestible headline as well. This category, traditionally one of the worst culprits for abominable customer service, seems to be paying more attention to brand experience....which can only be a good thing for people who keep having to replace their phones....

Geek Venn Diagram

Love this.....
From here

Spotify for iPhone - owning or renting?

Ok here it is: Spotify the iPhone/Android app:Which is in itself a bit of a surprise - Apple not really having a reputation for approving iPhone apps that duplicate the phone's core functionality. And let's face it, regardless of where the music is stored, Spotify wipes the floor with iTunes for user experience. But where the music is stored is the importnant bit. Spotify can cache up to 3,300 tunes in offline mode: ie it stores them on your phone... in much the same way that iTunes does. As long as there is enough memory on your phone, as from my sums 3,300 tunes would take up about 23 Gb. Which even on the biggest iPhone would not leave much space for iTunes!

The obvious flaw in the system for most people is the requirement to pay £9.99 per month to continue to rent your music from Spotify in this way. The beauty of Spotify's streaming music service wasn't just the user experience; it was the freemium mix of ad-supported 95% and subscription-paid 5%. People who have the disposable income to justify £120 per year on music rental, as well as an iPhone in the first place, are also likely to own a lot of music already. Like me, they might also be quite attached to the idea of owning music. To be honest, in the UK this is unlikely to change as Gen Y grows up: we are a nation of wannabe owners, as our housing market will testify. So, while this app is potentially exciting, the potential for most people is more because of what it might mean for future app approvals - the Grooveshark or We7 app for instance. If the pricing can be sorted out (not to mention actually being able to operate in the US at launch), then Spotify Mobile may just have broken down the barriers for someone else to rush through.

Things are happening quicker....

(NB. This is part of some work that the IPA are doing on the impact of social media on the ad industry. When I say 'part', it's more like a big pile of ideas that would need sorting into some sort of order before they became part....)
The changes going on in the advertising industry are doing so faster than ever before. It is probably fair to say that they will also never be this slow again. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone; Intel founder Gordon Moore observed in 1965 that since the invention of the integrated circuit 8 years previously the number of transistors that could be placed on a circuit board had doubled every 18 months, and predicted that this trend would continue unchecked. So far he has been proved right, and the increases in computing power that Moore's Law describes are the reason that we are coming to talk about technology and advertising interchangeably.

That isn't to say that people are changing. Without paraphrasing Clay Shirky or Mark Earls too far here, all the things we are evolutionarily disposed to do, and that we have cultural requirements for, are simply quicker, easier and further reaching than previously. This is not a different challenge to those faced by our 20th century predecessors:
Early radio ads were print ads read out. Early TV ads were radio ads in which you could see the face of the person reading. In each case the rise of a new medium provoked a step change in the advertising industry, but one that didn't happen immediately. So if we have survived and adapted in the past, is the challenge really as great as it appears?

Well, not unless you believe that the set of assumptions that underpins how we help brands communicate might also be a casualty of the power of Moore's Law. It is fun to speculate on how technology will improve, but most examples follow Bill Gates' suggestion that

“We overestimate the change that will happen in the next two years, and underestimate the change that will happen in the next ten”

Our ability as individuals to control access to our attention is likely to be amongst these. Since the internet was invented, it has slowly grown to a point where it has roughly the same number of computers connected as there are cells in the human brain, and about the same number of links as there are connections. The number of synapses, or connections, in our brains is taken as a proxy for intelligence – it is basically processing power. So in the 18 years since the public birth of the worldwide web in 1991, the internet has developed the intelligence of one person. Moore’s Law means that all the processors, and all the storage, and all the other capacity will each be doubling in power every 18 months. According to Kevin Kelly’s calculations, by 2040 the internet will have the brainpower of 4 billion people. According to Kelly, in the medium term future we will move from computers connected BY the internet, to one single computer that IS the internet. Our devices will simply be views into it, our networks always on.

Advertising tends to be seen as a necessary evil, as a transaction in return for content, which means that the challenge that has historically faced those who work in advertising has been to disrupt, interrupt, gain attention. Increased demands on peoples’ attention has made this job more difficult in recent years, but it has still been fundamentally the same challenge. What will alter it dramatically is the shift from gaining our attention to gaining the attention of our digital gatekeepers, the devices that will increasingly filter our access to entertainment and information. If I trust my applications’ recommendations, why should I look myself? They know more about what I like than I could ever have time to. Technology simply amplifies and speeds up underlying human behaviour and interaction. Brands that are asking themselves why people would want to be friends with them should think about what the alternatives may become.

And going back to the earlier question, is the challenge really as small as it appears? If I knew the answer, I'd start the agency that solved the problem. What we do know is that it is time to test. We have been wedded to the big idea of the Big Idea for generations, but big ideas that are rigorously researched and pretested will struggle in a world of ever increasing change. Things are happening quicker, including irrelevance. The idea of lots of little ideas seems more suited to this quicker world. In the words of AG Lafley, the former CEO of P&G,

"..our company's success rate runs between 50 and 60 percent. About half of our new products succeed. That's as high as we want the success rate to be. If we try to make it any higher, we'll be tempted to err on the side of caution”

Lots of little ideas acknowledge that all we as an industry can do is to make things as mimetic as possible. It is down to the other 99.9% of the population as to whether they happen. In Sketching User Experience, Bill Buxton talks about an art college ceramics professor who comes in on the first day of class and divides the students into two sections. He tells one half of the class that their final grade will be based exclusively on the volume of their production; the more they make, the better their grade. The professor tells the other half of the class that they will be graded more traditionally, based solely on the quality of their best piece. At the end of the semester, the professor discovered that the students who were focused on making as many pots as possible also ended up creating the best pots, much better than the pots made by the students who spent all semester trying to create that one perfect pot.

So the real step change for agencies is about not trying to build that perfect pot – it’s about not worrying about the bad ones. Charles Darwin said “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” We know that species of animal can remain unchanged for millennia, and then suddenly evolve in a few generations as their environment changes. As the increasing speed of communications erodes the 19th and 20th century assumptions that our businesses are built upon, our role is to avoid erring on the side of caution.

Back to work, armed with new questions...

Hello again. I've been away for a week doing things that don't involve teh internets. Perhaps it is only when you spend a week away from the technobabble that you remember how simple most of the questions and answers are. (BTW this is liberally nicked from DigiDay Daily, but the article frames it as answers that clients give agencies, rather than answers to questions agencies [should] ask themselves)

• Challenge: I am not tech savvy!
  • Response: It is not about technology—it is about people and culture.
• Challenge: There is not enough time, I am too busy!
  • Response: Continue to ignore the world around you and you will have plenty of time, but no job.
• Challenge: My company blocks all social networks!
  • Response: Get a new job, seriously! If you are a communications company that cannot participate in new ways of communicating, there is a good chance your company will soon be gone. Get out of there!
• Challenge: I am lazy!
  • Response: Perfect, that is the only real excuse :)