Mind the reality gap

I haven’t written in a while – I’ve been combining busy-ness with laziness for a few months.  But the article ‘Majority Report: Looking through the digital hype‘ by BBH’s Strategy Director Ed Booty, has jolted me into writing action.

It’s a good, thought-provoking piece on whether the so-called ‘digital revolution’ has really changed the way we live now.  Ed, a former St Luke’s colleague of mine, argues that although it’s very exciting witnessing the massive changes taking place in technology, people’s lives and needs aren’t really changing all that much.

While essentially this is true, I think the article misses out a lot of the subtleties that the ‘digital revolution’ in general and improvements in internet possibilities have brought us. I think that needs are being met by new technologies. They’re things that people adopt and take for granted.

Less than 10% of people may be using Twitter but there are a hell of a lot more people using technology to do ordinary stuff online like shopping, that they didn’t do before. As many as 80% of readers purchase books from Amazon for example.

Working as I do on both user experience and campaign strategy, the latter hasn’t really changed – you still frequently need a ‘big idea’, in effect you just have more channels to choose from.  However, a lot has changed.  When we talk about what’s possible now we can talk about creating wholly personalised online experiences for individuals.  The potential for tools for purchasing, selecting, comparing and understanding has improved so unbelievably radically in the last few years, the last couple of years…

People of ten years ago would not recognise the way we do retail or account management online.  They would be blown away by being able to browse Amazon on a touch-screen mobile or by the sheer number of applications that are now available, cheaply. They would be stunned that a mobile instant messaging service was being accused of bringing rioters together in real time. They would not believe that e-book readers were one of the biggest hits of Christmas 2011. I’ve gone from thinking iPads are a bit posey and not as good as laptops to thinking my life really won’t be complete until I have one.

So while we still watch the same shite on TV and drive the same stupid cars, we are doing quite a lot of things differently. The commenter on Ed’s article was correct when he said brands need to get about it now, understand how it works, occupy the space. Fail fast and become experts in everything. You have to keep up or you’ll not know what’s become so normal we take it for granted.

I hope I haven’t missed the point here. I’d be interested to know what people think about this.

Persona land

I haven’t written for ages, and this is because I have been in ‘persona-land’ as someone put it the other day.

Persona land is a beautiful place with many meaty challenges to get your teeth into. I love planning big websites (I wrote about doing the planning for Highlands and Islands Enterprise here) and I am currently working on a really big, exciting, challenging project that involves lots of personas, user journeys and lots of questions about where things go, what functionality is needed, and what approach should be taken with content.

Persona land is a bit more than personas but they are absolutely crucial to it – what is a country without its inhabitants?  I like to create draft personas of pretty much every major type of user, think about their needs and goals, and think about the client’s needs and goals for them. Then it’s a case of grouping them and understanding which user journeys are to be taken and drawing some sketchy sitemaps and sometimes wireframes.

Making up personas is a strange business. You are creating works of fiction about reality. You are trying to put yourself in the shoes of lots of different kinds of people, and then thinking about what they have and don’t have in common.

Sometimes I spend quite a long time thinking about what their name should be or finding a picture of them, but I think this is a form of procrastination to do whilst some other part of my brain is processing all the information. It’s also due to the fact that it is sometimes very difficult to find photos – I pretty much leave stock photography alone and use google, but now that searches all the stock photos on your behalf, which is not what I want at all!

When I create personas I then have to share them with the team and with stakeholders. This is sometimes a bit like standing up in front of class to read a creative writing exercise.  However, it’s essential to do this to get feedback – often there are needs and goals you have missed, or you become aware of the need for an additional persona type.

The main thing to do in this process is to not forget about the business problem that you are trying to solve.  It’s not all about meeting user needs.  You must ask why a new website is required, what the objectives are in terms of communications and commerce. It’s a case of balancing all this and doing the thinking up front and then testing, testing, testing as you go…

via

I have to go but here are a few articles on user experience and planning which I thought were quite useful.

Why is user experience getting a bad rap?

Bringing user centred design to the agile environment

5 principles of user centred design

Are propositions still important for digital strategy?

Preparing a training session on creative briefs, I came across this ancient piece of wisdom from 1993.  It’s a document about propositions.  Propositions are the single most important thing you want to say in a communications activity, and also known as the thing that will be carried into the ad (because we were always told that it was the only thing the creative would bother looking at.)

When I was learning to be a planner propositions were absolutely the most important thing we had to be good at.  Propositions are the distillation of the strategy, and should be based on an amazing insight.  (Insights are also apparently out of fashion these days.  That’s a topic for another blog post.)  When I was learning to be a planner a good proposition was a sexy, beautiful thing.  They’re really hard to do well.

Because a lot of digital stuff needs to say more than one thing (and perhaps because propositions are hard to write well) the proposition has dropped off the radar a bit.  Creative briefs have become less tied to insights and propositions and are often about the medium, and the creative discussion is more about the potential for technology.

This is good in some ways because it’s freed up the creative process, made it more fluid and collaborative and exciting.  The strategy is all about the objective, what we want from the activity, rather than the steps taken to get there.

It’s not so good because I feel like we’re moving away from thinking really hard about who we’re designing and creating for.  We need to think about what motivates our consumers, ensure we’re not creating for technology and creativity’s sake. Insights do bring us closer to our consumers’ needs, wants and goals, and help us to connect them to our clients.

It might be that the nature of insights and propositions have to change for the digital age, but I think we can learn from the past in terms of ensuring we keep thinking hard about what we are doing and why, be lateral and creative with insights, and work with our creatives to produce briefs that motivate them.

Strategy is what works for you

Ooh, Tom Donald posted an article on Twitter today which I really liked.

It’s by John Kay, and the opening line drew me in, hook, line and sinker.

There is more vacuity about strategy than about any other topic in business today…

And then I saw that Mr Kay wrote it in 1998.  Which feels like an absolute era ago.  Just goes to show that while the backdrop changes, the big issues don’t.

Read the article.  Let me know what you think.

New event: Engagement – the battle for your time

Ooh, I am very excited because we just put booking live for the next She Says event: ‘Engagement, the battle for your time.‘  It’s on Thursday 17th November.  Go and book your ticket now!

We chose this topic because engagement is a word we all use, but do we all use it properly.  Do we know how to measure it?  It’s so useful and at the same time useless…

So we have speakers from all kinds of disciplines lined up and about to be lined up, all of whom will have a very different view on what ‘engagement’ entails in online marketing and digital design.

It’s also going to be at the swanky SocietyM, and there will be time to have drinks, chats, and enjoy the surroundings.

A quarter of the tickets have been taken already – don’t miss out, make sure you book soon!

There is no illusion of strategy, you just have to be prepared to iterate

I’ve just read Graham Oakes’ article ‘The Illusion of Strategy’ with interest.

There is a lot of stuff out there right now about what the role of strategy in digital is, with new terms such as ‘agile planning’ (which I wrote about here) and ‘lean planning‘ coming to the fore.

Oakes argues that there are 2 types of projects out there: one where you know what you’re doing and one where you don’t.  He says most digital initiatives fall into the second category, because you have to iterate.

But if you look at the thinking behind agile and lean, iteration and experimentation doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t have a strategy.

A well defined objective and a basic idea (or set of ideas) about how you will achieve that objective can be described as a strategy, can’t it?

Reporting back, you might miss out all the experiments or wrong turns you took, to make it sound more clear-cut.  But you still knew where you wanted to go and had a rough idea of how to get there.

There is no illusion of strategy.  It’s either there or it’s not.

Why I am tired of the big idea debate

You’ve heard it before.  ‘The big idea is dead.’  ‘It’s all about lots of little ideas now.’

I just read yet another article about it and felt that it was time to say something again.

I am of the impression that we work from ‘brand platforms’ – sets of values and messages which they use to connect with their audiences, and that we can use these platforms as means of creating work based around ideas of all different sizes.  (Whatever ‘size’ means.  I think it means that a big idea can do lots of things, whereas a smaller one doesn’t go as far.)

However, the debate about the big idea still goes on.  I believe that this is because there is a wee backlash going on.  This is based on traditional planning vs the new planning.  People like me who have made the transition from making above the line campaigns in agencies where TV was the pinnacle, to digitally led agencies where we can do whatever is best for our clients because we have every channel at our disposal.

Because planning in digital seems so different, we feel the need to redefine what we do.  However, after doing this myself for a while, I now feel it is a complete waste of time.  What I do now is essentially the same as it has always been:

• understand the audience
• identify insights
• agree what we want people to understand about the brand
• agree what we want people to do with the brand
• come up with good ideas about how we can make that happen

I’ve been criticised on the blog for this in the past.  And that criticism was fair, so I had a go at trying to explain why I wasn’t totally old school about it.

Big ideas are sexy.  They take ages to come up with.  Wouldn’t we all like to come up with one now and again?  On the other hand, lots of little ideas can be greater than the sum of its parts.  Horses for courses.  It’s up to us to work with our clients to do what is best for their brand.

I’d really like if the big idea debate could just die, rather than the big idea.

Rather than go on about it any more I’d suggest reading the following articles and making up your own mind.  (And then let me know what you think. Or don’t bother.  If you don’t reply I will assume you are getting on with having good ideas.)

 

The big idea is dead:

Think small

Why small matters

The big idea is dead

Rethinking the big idea

The elusive big idea

Simple ideas, well executed

Why it’s time to move away from the big idea

 

The big idea isn’t dead:

The big idea isn’t dead, it’s just smashed up into millions of pieces

Why size matters, big ideas aren’t dead, and ‘think small’ is dangerous advice

The big idea is alive and well

The big idea ain’t dead

Are big ideas dead?  Here’s one to watch out for

 

What is a weavr?

Yesterday I got retweeted by a weavr.

(I’m actually quite amused by this sentence.  Four years or so ago that would have been nonsense.)

‘My’ weavr, SpectatorLDN, seems human at first, but a bit weird. She’s ‘anxious’ and blogs about things she ‘sees’ in London. But weavrs aren’t human, they’re robots with ‘human personalities’.

Weavrs explore the web and document what they find. As they interact, they become more and more like real personas, becoming difficult to distinguish from a human.  Using the vast amount of public data available, they blog about ‘themselves’: how they feel, where they go and what they experience, sharing ‘slippy’ content from around social media.

According to Canvas8, by 2015, 10% of our online ‘friends’ will be non-human.  We will follow entities like weavrs because they will offer us a targeted, personal seeming stream of relevant information.  They will provide us with useful stuff, without going on about their pets or their kids or what they’re having for lunch.

The implications for online marketing are quite large.  Remember Ananova?  This is the real deal.  If people like dealing with online robots like weavrs because they become useful informers – and even regular companions, they they will be an enormous success.

Chemical Brothers mix for the 50/50 project

The Chemical Brothers and director Flat Nose George have made a new mix to raise money for East Africa.

It has been donated to Good for Nothing’s 50/50 Make or Break campaign, which aims to raise £1m for East Africa Crisis by running 50 projects in 50 days.

Check it out.

Before you use the word ‘engagement’ again, read this

‘Engagement’ is a totally mis-used, over-used, generally abused word in our business.

Thankfully Martin Weigel has written a lengthy, comprehensive, and at times funny article about it.  Everyone who works in digital or communications or advertising should read it.

I’m as guilty as anyone else for falling into some of the bad habits he describes, whilst at the same time flinching when others commit the crimes…

I don’t really have anything to add just now, except – read it!