No Man’s Blog

… two weeks ago that a lo-fi horn with a funny name will become such a sensation you’d say I’m talking crazy.

If this doesn’t feel your heart with joy something is obviously wrong with you

What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of the word LIKE?

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?

Couple of months ago two clothing/fashion brands wanted you to look at their new collection. And they both doing it in a very interesting way. One was very innovative but complex, the other was no new-news but very simple and slick.

I thought it’s be nice to compare their performance, mainly from a social media traction point of view.

Diesel one hundred lovers – In case you’ve missed this awesome piece – inspired by Goddard’s “Bande a Part” movie, the video features 100 lucky selected people re-creating the famous dance. Based on special stop-motion technique, the lovers appearing in the video rapidly change, along with their clothes, all while appearing to continue to smoothly follow the choreography of the dance. The video is fully interactive: you can pause it, rolling over individual items to get further product information, buy them online and also find information about the people featured; allowing anyone to link into their activities and interests on their social network personal pages – making it the world’s most awesomely social interactive fashion catalog.

Utweet from Uniqlo, one of the most culturally digital brand out there, known for their simple ideas and slick execution. UTweet simply puts a funky little song and dance to your recent tweets, running them through several animations and as your stream is running so do some beautiful people wearing Uniqlo t-shirts.

There is very little to compare between these two projects, however, going back to the core of their initial objective (get people to see our new and interact with our brand products) both seem to have done well but in a slightly different way.

Note: one big unknown here is any media spend.

From what I was able to gather (using different tools and public data)

Diesel a hundred lovers:

187 blog posts

11 news items

378 related tweets

Over 1 million views of the final video

uTweet

456 blog posts

15 news items

27,947 tweets (!!!)

uTweet plays – ? (this one is key – can anyone help me find this data?)

Conclusions:

1. Be awesome - both brands created slick beautiful executions that once seen is hard not to interact with.

2. Do something with people – when you approach your brief with the question “what can we do with the people we want to reach” (insted of what can we say to people) you are bound to come up with much more interesting, engaging answers that actually bring value to both people and brand.

3. Personal instant gratification is key to spreadability – ‘conversation wise’ (i’m doing my best to avoid using viral here) it looks like uTweet had much more traction on public social platforms (blogosphere and twitterverse). It have reached millions of people by letting people have some fun with their social stream. Nothing innovative but admirable simplicity, playfulness and very slick execution made people happy and they couldn’t help but shouting about it. Simple, slippy ideas win.

4. Being culturally digital pays – as I mentioned earlier there is nothing innovative about uTweet. If you want to be even more critical abuot it you could even say they are taking the piss – making you to look at their clothing through your visually pimped twitter stream. But the fact that it’s Uniqlo and the culture of anticipation they have created over the years with their beautifully crafted digital toys made it one of the most successful campaigns of the year. Very few brands could have managed to pull out something like that and take home millions of mentions/ interactions.

If you’re in a hurry just go and watch this video here

You know I normally don’t shout about own work but this one is important.

At Hyper we’ve recently been working with Pedigree to launch their 2010 Pedigree Adoption Drive – a campaign aimed at reducing the numbers of abandoned dogs on our streets.

There are currently 108,000 abandoned dogs in the UK, many of them in danger of being put down if funds can’t be raised to keep them alive.

That’s why, amongst other activities, we’ve created Charlie’s Story – a film with an ending that can be affected with every 25,000 views.

And while Charlie’s life can be changed just by watching the video, so can the lives of many real dogs as Pedigree will donate £1 for every view Charlie’s Story receives.

All films can be seen here

Thanks for your support etc.

The nice people from Innocent have a new thing with rising comedian Alex Horne:

If Alex or anyone else will make it to 150 years of age, Richard from Innocent has £1 million up for grabs for the first person to live to 150. Here is why Alex has a good chances to succeed:

Apparently I’m the 2,636,388,642 oldest person in the world. You can find your ranking here

Nice 1

Last weekend i decided to switch off. I needed a break from the world of stuff and so exercised my Jewishness and went offline cold turkey for the Sabbath (From Friday eve to Monday morning).

Apart from the much needed break and the (leaned) ability to not be (self) distracted one thing I found really fascinating (again) is how social publishing tools rewrite our social cognition and how when Twitter is becoming integral part of your communicative life, it mediates your experience of things.

You react to and sometimes even process a whole bunch of situations, from the most mundane to the most significant, through the prism of this new self-other relationships. If i had the time i’ll be writing about it in the context of the Dialogical-Self.

On a slightly different note, as an introspective exercise, I took note anytime that I instinctively wanted to tweet. When I looked at all the tweets as notes this morning they looked (un?)surprisingly out of place/time. Some random insignificant snippets of life that when seen outside of their place/time/context they almost become somethimg else altogether – here you go, judge for yourself:

Tayaabs is not the same without @therealshemi

2K morning swim now being offset by having Thalia on my shoulders for 2 hours

Brunching with Thalia at Graceland Kensal Green (4sqr)

OMG Sarkozy sr. portrait of Carla Bruni is so tacky! He should have a stall in Camden market.

Shut your horsey face you loud f**k you’re waking up my baby!

Posh Meryl Streep look-a-like in a convertible Porsche sporting a minicab-driver-like Bluetooth Headset. #seriously?

Principles are meant to be broken? But sometimes you need Cbeebies at 10AM to babysit! #parentingdilemas

Here is something I never thought I (or anyone else) would ever say…

[if you want to skip the words and just join the group]

So Constantine films decided to join the hall of fame of media dinosaurs who simply don’t get contemporary culture and brutally savage the wonderful showcase of recombinant culture that are the hundreds of Downfall spoofs that have been created since the film was launched.

Under anachronistic copyright low, they have now taken down quite a lot of these hilarious videos which are merely a brilliant commentary on contemporary life and became such a brilliant internet meme that made millions of people aware of Downfall some of whom are bound to have bought it. How can these people be so stupid?

Hell, even the Oliver Hirschbiegel, the film’s director said: “Many times the lines are so funny, I laugh out loud, and I’m laughing about the scene that I staged myself! You couldn’t get a better compliment as a director“.

While I’m not really the campaigny type of person, I created, with the help of Ben a facebook group to call Downfall filmmakers, Constantin Film group to abort their campaign to take down all user generated Downfall spoofs from youtube.

Join here.

…and the reactions will come I hope… I just found this brilliant video which says it all:

Hitler, as “Downfall producer” orders a DMCA takedown from Brad Templeton on Vimeo.

So many cleverer people than myself have talked and written about remix culture but the most prominent figure is no doubt professor Laurence Lessig from Harvard Business School. If you haven’t read one of his books or watched him speak you really, really should.

Shit I wanted it to be just seven but another one just entered the door before I got to publish the post…

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?

….in relation to an ongoing conversation with Mr. Whitlock this, for me, is a great kind of ‘obvious’.

anyone knows who did it?