Google Street View in Germany

I was driving home from work today when I saw the google street view camera car, opened my window and waved. So looks like I will be on the street view when you look for Bockenheimer Warte.

Streetview is coming to 3 German cities: Frankfurt, Munich and Berlin, and this has gotten some weird press. Germans are very privacy-sensitive, more so than other nationalities, anyway. But some of the arguments against Street View, while possible, or even true, seem petty, paranoid and irrelevant. Basically, it seems like an exercise in neo-luddite nay-saying in the name of the people.

For example, sure thieves can stake out neighborhoods and look for nice cars to steal, but you would still have to know where to look, and you would still need to go there to stake it out. Or the fact that some people don’t like other people looking at their house. Hello? What about all those people walking by your house? Wanna blind-fold them? And people who don’t like being in the pictures (even though their faces are blurred out)? Going by this standard, you couldnt send a TV camera crew to film anything in the city, either. Those arguments seem contrived and designed to make people paranoid.

In a Tagesschau Poll, people here seem pretty muchdivided on the issue and the press is trying to make it look a bit negative.

I for one think street view rocks and I am happy it is coming to my town.

Target Audiences of the future

This article on new target audiences in the future appeared today in W&V (German). Our unit was quoted twice, so check it out.

http://www.wuv.de/news/unternehmen/meldungen/2007/07/66624/index.php

Kid prosumers

Generations of consumers have been conditioned to passively receive information and passively consume products until the participative medium Internet came along. While the age group of now 28-35 year old early adopters was just at the beginning of this development, an example of how actively the next generation of consumers will produce their own content and messaging can be found in the video below: A bunch of 11 year olds produced a spoof on “Ocean’s Eleven”. Granted, the content idea isn’t super-fly, but still executed very professionally and goes to show that once this generation enters the age of disposable income, things will pick up and change even more.

Take that, iPhone!

While people are fainting over the launch of the iPhone, the competition isn’t twiddling thumbs. Check out this photoseries of futuristic phone designs. While some of these designs seem ludicrous (e.g. the smell-emitting phone), some trends definitely seem visible.

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/06/magazine_future_of_mobile/html/5.stm

My Diatribe on “Digital” vs “Traditional” Agencies

Just found a video which was presented in Cannes about “Digital Creativity” with some good quotes from senior creatives with some opinions such as:

• the Internet as Medium isn’t just one channel it is as many channels as you make of it
• that it hasn’t just changed the requirements for how to communicate, but that it has changed the landscape completely
• that traditional agency tools do not cover these new developments, in fact that they never had to do as good of a job in tradtional media as they would have to do online
• that all big ideas will come from the Internet because it is the most relevant medium today, just like TV used to be in times past
• that everything keeps changing rapidly, and there is no one approach or methodology to predict anything with

Apart from not understanding what they mean by “digital” creativity (in comparison to “analog”creativity??), I agree with most of the statements themselves. In fact, I am surprised that some say that people don’t know of the importance of the internet or believe otherwise or refute its validity. Over the years, most of the people I have worked with have been making statements like that for, what, 12 years now. And now people who previously were unsure about the digital space suddenly go tooting the digital horn?

Like, hello? Welcome to the “interweb”. Glad you could make it.

So yeah, within the argument of the video, it is an easy point to make that certain traditional agencies (as well as certain of their clients) have been missing the boat on like, errr…, 12 years of stuff going on, demanding to keep making their money with a 12% cut off the media budget, due to their business model (built on the TV network and media structure of the 1960s-80s), their antiquated consumer and market research methods, out-of-touch view of the “consumer”, their philosophy of creative as an end to a means (as opposed to a means to an end).

Obviously then, it is equally as easy to point out the results of this: Increasingly irrelevant communication concepts, back-slapping award shows, dipping sales and the fact that consumers themselves now create more compelling messaging for brands than the companies and agencies actually tasked with it.

And yes, more and more touchpoints will become digital. More and more awareness, consideration and retention processes will be influenced by the increasing digital lifestyle, and as a result, more ideas will come from creative solution processes for this digital lifestyle. Even offline touchpoints and communications as well as underlying business processes have already changed and will change even more.

However, the perspective some digital creative agencies have adopted suggests to me that they are bound to make the same mistakes as the so-called “Traditional Agency”. They use their medium-specific creative and technological development capabilities and equate them with “being the most creative” or “the most relevant”. If they don’t adjust their capabilities and retain a flexible innovation architecture in order to be able to generate more than digital insight, digital strategy and digital communications, they will be overwhelmed by the next big thing, just as traditional agencies were. My guess is, the next big thing isn’t gonna be webx.0, but rather “Marketing 5.0″.

In the end, the weakness inherent to the 100% digital proposition isn’t that you can’t make money with it now, or that it won’t remain a really important factor of how communications will be played. The weakness is that building a services structure that doesn’t consider all touchpoints and examines all types of consumer experiences and brand experiences will ultimately only be able to be sold as a specialized solution, not a provider of encompassing big ideas. Because, the last time I checked, we don’t live as disembodied avatars enjoying our Burger & Coke digitally, bringing our kids to school digitally, getting a high from corporal excercise digitally, falling in love digitally, etc.

So, while the digital space is a driving force behind a lot of factors for consumer expectations and brand communications, to me, the most interesting task in all of this is: How do we generate better insights about this changed landscape, and come up with new types of developing strategies and ideas and then apply them regardless of a “channel”? After all, ideas are ideas. The factors of what I call the Four Rs: reach, relevance, resonance, and response of communications cannot be owned because you know how develop for a particular medium du jour. Creating powerful communications has always been owned by the most relevant insight, the most strategic idea and the most compelling creative, whether it is the radio of the 30s or the TV of the 50s or the latest version number of the web today.
To the consumer of today, the channel is irrelevant anyway until he doesn’t get the experience he expected from it. He adopts technology in search of this experience, doesn’t give a fetid donkey’s kidney on how a company and marketer produces content, services or products. He wants interactions with brands his way, when and where he wants it.

“Convergence”, “Channel-agnostics” and “Through the line” aren’t just cool things to do, it is what people expect anyway. In fact, it’s not just brands who are in the position to create new things to then convince the consumer of. It is actually the consumer now who is convincing brands to finally deliver what he has been expecting anyway.

To end this diatribe, the Internet as integrator of all channels is key in making articifical differentiation between “lines” (ATL/BTL) go away to enable more relevant “brand experience delivery”. But what really sets the boundaries for the competitive playing field of communication agencies isn’t which medium they develop for. It is how well agencies will be able to help companies deliver the delayed fulfillment of brand experiences regardless of medium, based on the understanding that, weirdly enough, the medium is indeed the message, but only because, today, the medium is the individual consumer himself.

It’s off to the races, no training wheels on.

Fora.tv: Online Personas

This is a bit of a lengthy discussion from back in November 2006, including

• Mark Zuckerberg Founder and CEO, Facebook
• Reid Hoffman Founder & Chief Executive Officer, LinkedIn
• Robin Harper Vice President, Community and Support, Second Life
• Shawn Gold Vice President of Content and Marketing, MySpace
• David Ewing Duncan Bestselling Author

but nevertheless, it’s maybe a good way to get into the topic of online personas. Of course, it just scratches the surface.

Btw, for those who don’t know fora.tv yet, it is great learning tool in general.

http://fora.tv/fora/showthread.php?t=496

Visualization Idea: Statistics via Rollercoasters

I dunno where I found this, maybe the Freakonomics blog. This in an excellent idea on how to make dull statistics come to life.

 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2757699799528285056

The thing about futuristic visions

With our industry being all nutty about trend-reporting, it is always fun when futurists take current trends and scale them into the future. Whether it is the personal helicopters we were to supposed to have by 1990 (according to some guy in the 50s) or the end of capitalism according to Marx, it rarely ends up happening, because trends are just trends. The future isn’t scaled by recognizable trends but by all the variables we cannot see, and the unchangable human condition itself.

(Although, come to think of it, Nostradamus was right about the village idiot ruling the earth after the death of the pope after the 2nd millenium). But anyway futurists make us think about the core currents and our motivations in them, and sometimes it can alert us to what could happen if we just scaled what we were doing now, no new variables added.

The following is such a futuristic vision: