Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

I just read an interesting article from Augustine Fou over at ClickZ about Digital being at the root of modern advertising, and it seemed to resonate with some discussions we had been having in the Frankfurt office over the last few years.

The point is not that everything begins and ends with a website/banner/facebook page, but rather the cultural impact made by the rise of all our digital options for living.  And it’s not that people live their lives online, but rather that people use digital ‘properties’ to do so much STUFF in their lives, even when they don’t think they’re ‘online’.  You use digital technology when you pay for gas with a card.  You use digital when you check the movie times on your phone.  You use digital when you Google the actors in a TV program you’re watching. You use digital when you watch a screen in a store while you wait to check out.  Your TV is as digital as most computers are.  It’s kind of everywhere, and you relate to it and use it, even if you’re not actively searching for information about a product or service.  Ultimately, there is more and more human behavior that is linked, or tracked, or enabled by digital properties. And due to the Request/Receive nature of digital properties, this behavior can be leveraged to understand needs and desires.

The value of this information about behavior (digital breadcrumbs left in our modern world) can’t be overemphasized.  Integrating digital at the core of marketing activities allows for unprecedented analysis of data related to how people interact with digital properties, making the case for more efficient and effective work, especially when it is designed from the beginning to take advantage of human insights and behavior.

I’m not sure I buy that Digital is the center, but I prefer to think of it as a key element of the modern human landscape, rather than a channel, for sure.

Via: Stephane Grunenwald @sgrunenwald on Twitter

Tweet This Post

A colleague just forwarded me a great online tool from Dr. BJ Fogg from Stanford about the different ways that behavior can change - expressing the subtle but important ways that change is approached - whether it is new behavior, the duration of a familiar behavior or the cessation of a behavior.

Interesting stuff, and useful for building strategies that can affect behavior through the understanding of exactly what you’re trying to accomplish.  We typically include lots of information about the behaviors we are trying to impact, but this grid assists in clarifying the comparison of the change in context of other behaviors.

Via Kristin A. Hayward

Tweet This Post

So, thanks to our colleague Karen Green in Chicago, we received an iPad today in the office mail.

After finding a workaround for the fact the the German Appstore doesn’t work for the iPad yet, we started playing around a bit. Apart of noticing how crappy iPhone apps look on the iPad, there are some first observations.

First off, the device is pretty amazing and we can see how it has the power to alter a lot of human behavior. But in the first moments, it’s not changing behaviors radically, it’s augmenting them. Funnily, when you use it to read magazines and newspaper apps, you revert to analog user behavior. The interesting thing is that it becomes a combination of your analog user behavior with digital interaction expectations. What this means is that User Experience professional are designing for both kinds of worlds when it comes to magazine apps. Seems pretty obvious, but when you start playing around with it you also notice a lot of gaps between those two different ways of usage. So it will be a matter of how well XPs and Designers fill that gap. You no longer do print layout or interaction design. You will have to know how to both without compromises for the print type medium and the weblike medium.

Case in point: we feel the NYT App works with much more expectation conformity than the Popular Science App. It works like a newspaper except it has some interactive elements. Even the contained advertising isn’t at all surprising or weird to the user. It’s what you would expect from a newspaper with the cachet of NYT. Like any good user experience, you don’t notice how great the usability is. It however needs a little more interactive stuff at the right place.

The popular science application however, doesn’t really quite seem what it is yet. It looks amazing, but it has an odd usage paradigm that is neither analog nor interactive nor an easy to use amalgam of both. From navigating to flipping pages and a lack of real interactivity to not being able to differentiate the advertising, it just doesn’t feel there yet.

So, I am sure web User Experience heuristics will apply for the iPad as well, but they will also radically alter. Maybe heuristics will be created for types of magazines in similar ways that different heuristics have been developed for differing types of sites, i.e. e-commerce sites vs news portals vs social networks. Finding that right user experience will probably go a long way in terms of really working for a unique brand experience that helps position the brand.

Second, apart from the obvious changes need to develop applications for private end users, when you look at this through the lens of the brand or marketing person, you get tons of ideas instantly on how to make brands relevant in this context. The long touted “brand user experience” can really happen here with the best of all media channel worlds. Also an interesting thought might be on whether the user experience paradigm of whatever eMagazine you advertise in influences your ad experience. Since ads can be interactive, their interactivity might have to embedded into the magazine’s usage paradigm to really work. Spinning cars in automobile ads are nice, but there’s probably more. Or, of course it will need to be so special that you want to interact with it regardless. The potential of print ads with stopping power: it might be back.

Third, not just that, while we believe private end users will probably keep the iPad at home (because, let’s be honest: it is NOT a working tool for the types of thing we need to do at the office, barring some exceptions), the possibilities for specific industries literally lie in your hand. Really anyone who could directly profit from bridging a analog-digital gap or augmenting existing processes and information flows will have a field day with this: car dealers, retailers, logistics, restaurants, you name it. Not just for marketing, but also internal processes. And, of course marketing departments of all types of industries will not pass this up to do their name generation, promos, etc with it.

So, while it might take some time to become mainstream, it looks like exciting times for everyone. Designers get to design in a new way, marketers to market in a new way and newspapers can survive with a new type of advertising again. Almost to good to be true.

We will do some user testing on it and report back.

Tweet This Post

A cool initiative from VW around fun theory. “…the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to get people to change their behavior for the better.”

Tweet This Post

Here comes a great product idea. Obviously based on people’s observed behavior
Thanks for sharing Imke!

Tweet This Post

I’ve seen a lot of young men wearing bags these days. And I’ve been told men’s bags are finally popular. Well, I seem to have missed a fashion trend. Once again.

Men used to wear bags in the 80s, too. But then, their bags were handbags which tended to be smaller and the clip was around men’s wrists.

Women and men were more equal in the 80s, at least as far as bag size is concerned: women’s bags tended to be smaller, too. While men wore it as practical extension of their pant pockets, women used it as decoration, going well with the teased out hair and generally they were made to be worn rather than carried.

Today this is different. Women’s bags have gotten bigger. Maybe it’s just that there is more stuff to carry, including all the new electronic gizmos women now tend to carry around.

Here’s a tongue-in-cheek interpretation of these gender-specific changes in wearing a bag:

1) Female Empowerment: Today’s women not only have the ability to easily carry everything with them wherever they go. They tend to do so by carrying the bags in their elbows, which makes them look like they are flexing their muscles, a true visual cue for men that they are emancipated and powerful (see photo above).

2) Masculinity shift: Men, put under pressure by emancipated women, now have to take a step forward, or actually backward to cowboy times: their bags look like gun holsters – just to avoid being emasculated …

Tweet This Post

Today, the Wall Street Journal reports about the latest efforts of the marketers to tailor ads to specific consumers in the store. The approach is mostly that the marketers install new digital screens that are appearing next to cash registers and in store aisles. Because cameras are embedded in many of these digital screens displaying the ads, marketers are hoping to serve up ads based on the consumer’s appearance. In detail WSJ describes two cases of Dunkin’ Donuts in USA and of Procter & Gamble in Germany:

Dunkin’ Donuts is among the first marketers in the U.S. to begin testing the technologies, at two locations in Buffalo, N.Y. People ordering a coffee in the morning can see ads at the cash register promoting the chain’s hash browns or breakfast sandwiches. At the pick-up counter, customers see ads prompting them to return for a coffee break in the afternoon and try an oven-toasted pizza.

In a separate test, Procter & Gamble is placing radio-frequency identification tags on products at a Metro Extra retail store in Germany so that when a customer pulls the product off the shelf, a digital screen at eye level changes its message. When a consumer picks out a shampoo for a particular type of hair, for instance, the screen recommends the most appropriate conditioner or other hair products, says John Paulson, president of G2 Interactive, a digital-marketing arm of WPP Group’s G2 Network.

Furthermore they write that all of these “instore targeted advertising” options are still in their infancy and much research still needs to be done to evaluate the best types of ads to display and the way consumers respond to messages.

“I’m a skeptic on technology in the shopping environment,” says Andy Murray, chief executive of Saatchi & Saatchi X, the Publicis Groupe agency that focuses on in-store marketing. “Screens need to be useful to get people to pay attention, and if stores are just using them to sell products, shoppers won’t be receptive,” he says.

Press article WSJ August 21, 2008

Tweet This Post

One of the core differences of Leo Burnett’s HumanKind approach is that we should observe human behavior rather than just inferring knowledge by asking people things. This way, a brand can create acts that play into and enable people better than pure ads that bombard them with irrelavtn messages.

Experience Planning has used this type of insight generation for a long time, but now that we’ve mixed methodologies with traditional methods, I asked myself, who outside of advertising or marketing or academia already observes human behavior in their daily line of work?

It’s pretty obvious: it’s comedians. Like no other group do they make their living of being able to spot trends, behavior, knacks, idiosyncrasies people or groups and serve them up as “funny insights.”

In a way, the better and uncommon the insight, the louder the audience’s applause. It is a very human thing to be able laugh at some fundamental truths being unearthed in front of you. You see youself, and groups around mirrored before you, which can be an inspiring act. As planners, this is what we should aim for. We shouldn’t necessarily make creatives laugh (they are used to making the jokes themselves), but whether we are planners or creatives, we should aim to inspire others in that way.

Here is one of my favorite comedian insights, in this case about men and women fighting (warning: liberal use of expletives!)

Tweet This Post