I’m not a geek. I rarely get a kick out of technology per se. It has always been the possibilities for human social experiences that made me tick.

And cleverly awesome marketing.

The Conan Blimp, just launched onto the skies of the east cost in the USA is the best thing I’ve seen this year. The idea is so brilliant and the execution is so slick, the social media integration is so timely and natural, it’s worth all the millions of words that will be said, twitted, blogged or sang about it very soon. It’s gonna go straight into the hall of fame of a transmedia, post-digital, ___________________ (insert your wanky term here) and the internet of things – blimp that’s gonna be our best friend this October.

Well done Breakfast people. Read this interview if you want to know a little bit more about the brain (and soul) behind the technology.

As they described on the Breakfast site:

“Can you create a trackable experience for Conan O’Brien’s blimp?”

“Sure.”

“Can you have it concepted, designed, wired-up and live by next week?”

“Uhhhh, sure.”

Conan went and got himself a blimp, and decided to joyride it across the eastern seaboard throughout the month of October. To add to the adventure for Mr. Blimp, we’ve wired him up to auto-check-in on Foursquare to his favorite locations as gazes down from above. He’s also the first-ever auto-updating location on Foursquare – meaning if you see him flying high above you, you can check into the floating beast.

Follow all the fun over here.

BUT this is still a very clever idea that should be further explored.

They’ve done some modern subservient chicken there, and yes, I did write ‘shags’ in there (as well as loves and hugs).

Go on, you know you want to watch it

5.5 million views and counting.

The revolution of the social web is nearly completed.

From a brand and marketing comms perspective, soon enough a presence on social platforms (predominantly a facebook page, considering the fact that facebook is about to become dominant in social as much as google is the single player in search) will become hygiene in a similar way that every brand now has a website.

And then what?

Then we’ll see a magnificent display of Sturgeon’s law (oh wait we’re seeing it already!). The novelty of social, humanised brands will fade out and people will get pretty bored with the whole chattiness thing. I wholeheartedly believe that the vast majority of people don’t want any ‘extra’ layer of relationship with the vast majority of brands (“I had a bad commute after an average weekend thanks you very f**ing much”). And in as much as personal profile pages fast becoming irrelevant so do branded social spaces.

The legendary Ted of innocent wrote earlier this week that

when, and if, social media reaches tipping point there could quite easily be a divide in those that got in early and have (reach/ market share/ and lessons under their belts), and those that didn’t and have-not”. It’s a very interesting observation from someone who got there early, done some great stuff and keep learning.

My prediction is that similarly to the evolution of the (personal) blogosphere brands and social spaces will go in three possible directions:

1. The big Haves

These are the very few brands that both have what you can call “the social mojo” and who got there early and reached a scale (whatever scale means for them) and some understanding of what is the value for their audience as well as for the brand (read ROI). These are the Starbucks of the world who not only reached a scale but cleverly integrated/adapted their business and culture to the social mode.

2. The small, sophisticated Haves

Sometimes scale is not the main thing and some brands will realise / learn that getting closer to your core few is much better than talking to uninterested masses. These brands will find the value in doing great stuff to a small but valuable group of people and maintain a healthy, sustainable relationships with them. These are the brands that will find their voice, purpose and value proposition whether that means doing real-time customer service, brand’s storytelling or open-innovation.

For both types of Haves it will be (it already is) much more about the other stuff that happens outside the owned social spaces that will drive growth of audiences and interaction. It’s the great products, services and marketing that will keep people’s interest and love and get them back to the social space. Put differently, it’s only your business, brand and marketing strategies that will increase your social mojo.

3. The have-not’s

This is going to be the fate of most brands on facebook (or Twitter). Look around you and you can already see thousands of branded pages or twitter acounts that are so lame, screaming lack of purpose, so me-too without minimum understanding of the space and a strategic direction. Unsurprisingly these brands fiddling around with few hundreds or few thousands of Likes/Followers. Soon enough they will get bored and frustrated from the no return and will simply ditch their spaces (or facebook will become a massive graveyard for deserted branded pages). Unlike your website which is absolute hygiene and can be fairly static a branded social space needs constant TLC and that means time and money. The days that brands will pay someone external to sit and do that chit chat banter on their behalf without proving real value are numbered.

Discuss etc.

Nooooooo!

The focus on the ‘channel’ is dafter than daft. What the old spice success has proved IMHO is entirely different:

It proved, yet again, that great ideas, well, they work! I find it a great reminder of the art and science of advertising. The success of the man your man can smell like was down to that rare stroke(s) of genius: first and foremost the quality of copywriting. Comic writing is arguably the most difficult form and the W+K team nailed it with immortal phrases (“Silver fish hand catch!”) that will forever remain in our popular culture. Then of course the combination of genius writing with the perfect casting and acting. Can’t imagine anyone could have done it better than Isaiah. That was the Art.

All the rest was ‘just’ the science, from the initial media planning and buying all the way to the ultra clever extension to real-time production as a live dialouge with loads of people from Twitter, facebook and youtube. Piggybacking or simply milking the success of the original ad was not least brilliant but something which has been achieved through great outreach strategy and admirable understanding of the culture we live by.

‘naff said.

PS: The ever too clever Graeme talked about cause and effect from a slightly different angle (read it here it’s good)

Don’t know if you feel or experience the same and I’d be surprised if people haven’t wrote about it something already but it seems like the industry is in a massive state of contraction (as the the opposite of expansion) at the moment. There is a sense that there are no specialists any more and everyone is trying to get a piece of the same cake.

Up until few years ago ‘digital’ was still a new territory done by digital specialists, DM was the blacksheep of the industry, POS was the territory of BTL peeps, media agencies simply planned and bought, well, media and the idea of a PR stunt was something that mainly PR people talked about.

Etc.

But recently, more often than not I see a response to a client brief coming from different agencies and they all seem to play in the same playground. I’m sitting in an all agency initial respond meeting and apart from few ‘crafts’ that remain within their natural territories it seems like the idea of a specialist (ATL, BTL, Digital) is a thing of the past. Media agencies develop and execute ideas, PR agencies doing ‘digital’, the best ad agency in the world is doing social media powered customer service and everyone’s doing the social media thing (little drops of puke in my mouth as I type, excuse me).

And unsurprisingly, the hottest shop in town is a cross channel, media neutral ideas factory kind of agency – just a bunch of very clever peeps solving business problems.

Some clever peeps talk about the death of siloed channels:

We wondered what would happen if we banned people from talking about “digital”, “social”, “viral”, “mobile”, “ATL”, “BTL” and “TTL”. As an exercise, it’s revealing. What do you sell to clients? What do they buy? What do you “make”? What do planners talk about all day? We believe it’s the end of the road for talking about “digital” and all talk of channel-based silos. Thinking and making in silos prevents us from joining the dots between a business’ activities and the audiences it seeks. Both client side and agency side, silos are the enemy. But what’s the alternative?

So what’s gonna be? Everyone’s going to turn into an idea shop and the best ideas will win the business? Is that a good thing? And more importantly, can clients handle that?

I don’t know, you tell me.

2008 Tiger walks on water

EA grabs our attention with a very quick, clever and wit response to a youtube video posted by a user of a game who allegedly discovers a ‘glitch’ in the game. It took EA 2-4 weeks to produce and launch this video:

2009 Meerkat rides on twitter waves

The campaign of the year. A stroke of genius peppered with herd and luck makes a surprising talking animal a social media hero. The brand and VCCP were fantastic at responding to the popularity of the meerkat with lots of banter, fun dialouge that extended the character’s personality, most notably their hall-of-fame response to @stephenfry twit-pic of a powercut ordeal. Credit were deserves etc. The meerkat pave the way for what we saw last week.

2010 @oldspice man owns the internet

Unless you were on the moon last week you couldn’t avoid LOLing at the absolute-fuckin-awesomeness of @oldspice. One blogger quite rightly said that for 24hours @oldspice man ‘owned the internet’. I can’t think of a better complement for a marketing activity.

Niiiiice.

I’m feel really fortunate to do what I do at these super exciting times.

Until very recently, LIKE, for me, was the lukewarm, shy cousin of LOVE.

“I like you” was merely a regulator, a milestone on the path to saying “I love you”. Of course it also means to favour something (not just someone) but personally, I find that there is something quite vanilla-ish in the word Like, some reservedness or lack of passion, almost banal.

And then almost overnight LIKE took a massive turn. From linguistic mundane LIKE has evolved to be a currency, a clickable human gesture, a mass behavior (I wonder how many global LIKEs are clicked every day).

Of the many things and stuff we LIKE everyday now, naturally, one very interesting area to research this new behaviour is the relationships between people and brands. Who would have thought two years ago that LIKE will evolve to be a desired behaviour featured as comms target on clients’ briefs.

It might seems like just as a semantic turn but to me it feels as if something in the (symbolic) power relations between people and brands has slightly changed in the shift from “Become a Fan” to “Like”. ‘Like’, until recently, was a gesture kept to our friends’ status or a photo etc. Today, brands overtly want people to like them. Turns out it’s good for business

Don’t you find it a bit ingratiating and even forced? I can’t help seeing something approval-seeking in ‘Like’ in this context.

With Become a Fan it was different. Become a fan is like an invite to a membership of a club or a community. Now I just have to LIKE you. A bit of a downgrade if you see what I mean?

This is exactly the point where the whole “brands are like people” becomes a bit odd. This is why I’m a bit ambiguous with the culture of “Like-bribing” – Like as a condition, requirement we have to fulfill in order to get into your world.

No LIKE – no in!

So when everyone gone crazy about how Nike made it big in ‘digital’ (and social!) by hiding the new World Cup ad behind the Like button, like Andy, I really found it quite cheeky. We’ll let you see our new (a-may-zing BTW) ad only if you’ll like us (AND of course, not only that, you will have to tell all your friends that you LIKE us.)

Brands are like people, they say. But Nike you’d all agree is like the coolest boy (or girl) in the class. People like him anyway for who he is and what it does. Surely if he throws a party he won’t ask people to like him in order to get in? No, that’s totally uncool. He will let everyone in first and only after everyone had a good time he will quietly enjoy seeing his popularity rates go even higher.

There are very few brands that can get away with that (that’s true to all ‘forced -into-newsfeed’ interactions, e.g Massive Attack’s Tweather. If your content is good I’ll talk about it but it’s quite rude to ask people to help you with your marketing before you even showed them what you’ve got. Nike should have had more confidence in the quality of the content (hell, it’s the best ad of the year so far) for it to earn them Likes without making it a condition for viewing. My verdict: not on-brand.

On the other hand there are other equations, other Like practices which I find far more appealing. The best example is Hyper’s recent campaign for Pedigree adoption drive. The value proposition was totally different – here we asked people to Like Pedigree and for every Like, pedigree donated 50p to dogs’ rescue centres around the country. People’s Likes were a symbolic invitation to do good on people’s behalf. (Of course Zizek would argue that this is just as manipulative as the Nike behaviour but hey, I’m not a new-communist cultural theorist, and I like good, clever or awesome marketing)

So to conclude the ramblings everyone and everything around us want you to like them today. The meaning and value of ‘Like’ will keep evolving in interesting ways. I wonder if it will stick. Or perhaps it will quickly loose it’s novelty and become so ubiquitous and banal it will eventually be meaningless.

What do you think?

Here it goes, eight sins of nu-marketing (bloggers/gurus/evangelists etc.), which, BTW, guilty as charged, I too, have committed some of these sins at some point in the past.

1. Sensationalism.

“The death of the TV!” “Twitter is killing the blogosphere!” “Facebook is killing email!”… it might be the sometimes staggering speed of the rise and adoption of emerging platforms (can you remember life without Twitter??) but time and again we seem to be living in our own over-dramatised world, making self-righteous sensationalist headlines that have no real hold in reality. New stuff don’t just kill old stuff it adds up to it. Everything changes, nothing is changing.

2. Dogmatism & sweeping generalisations

A by-product of sensationalism is dogmatism (or is it the other way around?). Time and again we fail to grasp the complexity of the new landscape. It’s easier to shout “it’s all about this!” (‘this’ being the buzz-word of the day: engagement, relationships, co-creation) than to scrutinise the context face the uncertainty, and admit the complexity. It’s exactly because ‘it’s NOT all about this’ that doing interesting, effective marketing is so damn difficult these days – life was just so much easier if it were all about this…

3. Falling in love with our own cliches and making them strategies

There is a vicious cycle of seductive analogies and catchy phrases becoming the headline of our strategies. “Starting little fires”, “actions not words” and “always in beta” are good examples. As Uri once told me these are not strategies, they are exactly the lack of one. Look around, there are more.

4. False Causality Assumptions (based on anecdotal evidence)

There is an odd assumption that if you only start doing (social media, digital, engagement marketing etc) you will start kicking ass. Example: If you have a company blog, you will have an ongoing dialouge with customers (see the false causality here?). These false assumption are, of course, based on / backed by anecdotal evidence. DellOutlet as an evidence that brands should be on Twitter. WhopperSacrifice as a proof that facebook apps are the way to do marketing (before these – X-Men 3 garnered 3.2 million friends on myspace as a proof that brands should have a myspace page – remember?). Meerkat as a proof that social media is the future of marketing. These are all great examples of great ideas that led to successful marketing NOT a proof that these platforms work. Moreover, they are usually too specific and context based to be anything more than merely a good story that is just too specific to be applicable to you.

5. Using staggering stats to make a case for nu-marketing

Strongly related to he previous sin. “450 million people on facebook!, 56 million tweets every day! Billion videos on youtube!, Million iPhone apps downloads every day!”. These are indeed fascinating numbers but what do they actually tell us? That Facebook is fast becoming hygiene social tool, just like email, that people are into each other more than anything else, that Twitter is the tool of choice for verbal diarrhea, and that the App store is about to become a massive graveyard for apps just as facebook did. What are the real, direct, aplicable implications for marketing? How does million of tweets can actually change the way I do brand and marketing communications is a much more complex story.

6. Ownership of ‘engagement’:

Directly related to sins #2 & #4 – since ‘it’s all about engagement’ and since ‘you have to use social platforms to engage with your consumers’ somehow along the way people forgot the fundamental difference between interactive and engaging and therefore took ownership of engagement. Just because it’s digital, social or interactive doesn’t make it engaging, oh no.

7. Taking learnings from digital brands and making them best practice for consumer brands:

This is one of my favourites. People using internet brands as best practice for marketing for consumer brands. Case in point: “The Widget Economy” – a very hollow marketing bloggers meme from 4 years ago that goes something like this: “it’s all about making it easy for people to take your content and put it on their personal social spaces. Look how many Flickr widgets are out there! you should create a widget that people can embed on their blogs!”. Other examples – ” gogle don’t do advertising – you too, should let the product do the marketing for you! ” or “it’s all about open-source these days, you have to let people build your product and market it for you! see how wordpress and google are doing it”.

8. Over chatter, under-doing.
Well, that’s not a sin as such, just the fact that it’s so damn easier to blog about the seismic change than to implement it in real business. How easy it is to write about “Agile Planning” or about “The future of advertising is great products that have marketing embedded in them” and how oh so difficult it is to implement it. There are probably 10,000 think-tanks for every single do-tank.

C’mon there must be more – what are yours?

anyone knows who did it?