Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

Saw a video by Hubble Innovations, via Florian Geiger today.

The video outlines the well-know problem of traditional media’s slowly but surely failing business models and claims to be able to solve it.

The Future of media brands - Case Study from Hubble Innovations on Vimeo.

The solution isn’t exactly new: it’s a super-aggregator idea that totally personalized to me, my location, my social network and content/event preferences. Even though they claim rights to the idea, it’s preposterous. This idea already exists in partial solutions already in existing synching and SM integrator solutions. In fact, some could argue: “Isn’t this what Facebook is slowly becoming anyway?”

My take on this is: The concept is a fairly logical and tempting conclusion based on the insight that people would like to have everything in one place and like location awareness. Apart from the title of the video being a misnomer (it doesn’t address the future of media brands but rather paints a picture of a desired user behavior), it will still take quite a while to build its proof of concept.

1. First of all, as we have seen with previous aggregator solutions, it takes a while for people to completely disband their existing behaviors of going to single source. For example, even though RockMelt had a pretty good start through social buzz, actual usage after initial sign-up have dropped. People tend to go back to their fragmented user behaviors until the user experience has matured. For complete adoption of an aggregator idea, the individual moving parts AND their respective user behaviors have to be quite mature. I don’t think this is the case just yet for this concept.  But it probably will in the future, after some other ideas have trailblazed these behaviors, failed on the way, and generated learnings that will ultimately benefit some 20-something entrepreneur who will become a billionaire, again.
2. Apart from the fact that the idea remains quite abstract and hidden behind a fancy animation, it also fails to address how exactly this is supposed to save traditional media, or at least revolutionize or evolve the media and publishing space. Who in fact would be a qualified media partner to build and propel this concept?  The concept does mention how people will pay for this experience, but not who gets paid for it and how. Assuming that the concept can repeat an Apple-like success of starting to pay for content (which is lofty enough), I still think this is the key point in terms of business maturity that will make or break this concept. Which content producers (old media or new) will come together how, produce how, and get paid how. In fact, since so much of news, information and entertainment is based on actual people (users) sharing and producing content without getting paid for it, wouldn’t you have to find a way to have them get a share for their content production and dissemination activities (see flattr) as well? So much of their behavior is about sharing (old) media content that the benefit of doing it just in one place might not be enough (ironically, in a way they are actually responsible for keeping those traditional publishers in business through their activities). In fact, this important social sharing aspect would probably have to be addressed as part of the business model, otherwise it will just remain one more aggregator solution. A solution that until now has no user base (such as Facebook) or no real competence in traditional content creation (such as NYT) and no competence in new content creation (such as Gizmodo or Mashable), and which is my point: no real strategy on HOW to pull it together. It’s a user experience vision, not a business idea, is my point. And, unlike other aggregator and synching solutions such as Read It Later, Instapaper, Dropbox and others which very defined user goals they serve, this solution would have to solve for it all. And we know how many attempts it takes for even the big players (think of Google’s long list of abandoned Betas) to pull it off and how many product ideas need to fail before maturity sets in. So keep trucking, but prepare to wait a while.
3. Also, the concepts just assumes people will behave this way. But when you look at those early adopters who are responsible for initial successes of of new web offerings, you can quickly see that they are quite different from those who come in when a certain maturity has set in. In fact, early adopter behavior is (to some extent) one of not managing and aggregating their experiences, but rather seeking new ones, so that those become trends that then lead to being reaggregated in new experiences again. Therefore, the game facebook plays is a type of tug of war of those users that they need to innovate, while maturing an experience for the large mass to keep them happy while also making sure the innovator group doesn’t get bored.  Facebook has, by and large, played the game the best in comparison to for example local market solutions in Germany and other places. The point is, aggregation happens after innovation. And they are different things to different types of users at different maturity levels. The concept fails to address this (at least in the video). There seems to be no go-to-market strategy.

So, in conclusion: thanks for the video, but a) aggregation itself is not an idea, it’s about how you aggregate, with who and when, and b) the big players have been working on it for a quite a while anyhow and c) you can’t pull it off if you don’t have some background at being expert in at least one area that is key to business success: i.e., producing worthwhile content, or making people pay for content, or innovative payment technology, or maturing a user experience for disparate user behavior profiles.

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Recently, I’ve come across some articles about the ad industry having a sort of midlife-crisis. This is an interesting notion, as this would premise that advertising as such has a natural life that has to come to an end at some point. And after so many people already having screamed “Advertising is dead,” I am now confused it isn’t. It’s just a mid-life crisis? Folks, get our vital signs right! Also, to follow the metaphor, what exactly is the proverbial “Porsche” in Advertising’s “mid-life crisis”?

Joking aside, just 2 weeks ago Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung painted a critical picture of the industry and mentioned that ad professionals have hard time reinventing themselves and their business model.

Just like a balding 45 year old in a track-suit with disposable income looking for a souped-up convertible to feel better about himself, advertising lacks purpose.

Today, I read Warren Berger’s take on the Bogusky situation “Maybe the Midlife Crisis Isn’t Bogusky’s?“.  Being American and a bit less cynical that his German counterpart, and using the crisis as an opportunity, Warren states that agency professionals (just like Bogusky, but without the massive payout) have been looking for deeper social meaning and context for their work ever since digital technologies have put public opinion (and advertising itself) in the hands of the people. But more interestingly, Berger also makes some nice observations that in fact remind us what the real story is:

The second part of the story suggests to me that some client companies are perhaps still a bit thin-skinned when it comes to having any kind of candid discussion about serious issues. Which in turn suggests that these companies are living in the past — in a pre-social networking era when they could actually still control the public debate.

Ok. To anyone working in an ad agency, this is a pretty shared (even though somewhat of a subjective) sentiment; still, thanks for saying it on Adweek, Warren! And, by the way, this answers my previous question of what the “Porsche” is in the “advertising mid-life crisis”: Affording yourself the irresponsible, ineffective and inefficient luxury of lolly-gagging around when it comes to changing your business model, dragging your heels on changing your creative product and pretending you still live in a brand era. However, I would say this is still true for clients and agencies alike. Dependency on short-term quarterly planning, lack of deeply thought-out foresight and interupted implementation of long-term vision apparently makes it hard to think about a more efficient, unsexy hybrid car when you can still afford the 911. You won’t be able to afford the gas in a couple of years, but hey, »Après nous le déluge«.

Hence, Warren continues to point out that the ad agency’s deliverables should change: product design, launching community initiatives, revising corporate policies, etc.

Or, as we would tell our clients: We want to help you doing things, instead of just saying things. Things that create value exchange, not messaging.

For that to happen though, the role and creative product of agencies have to change. And right now, it’s a a bit of a chicken or egg problem: a) Agency leaders have to really put their money where their mouth is, and enable their shops to actually deliver a creative product that does things with people and instead of milking a defunct business model of creating messages, while b) clients have to become more confident in matters of understanding true human behavior and consequently need to start paying their agency partners for creating purpose-driven initiatives that create a qualitative difference in people’s lives. Result of this catch-22: if agencies don’t offer it, clients can’t buy it. If clients don’t buy it, agencies can’t build those competencies.

So instead of wondering what’s first, chicken or egg, all parties should focus on the chick everyone has been talking about hatching: people-driven brands that have a human purpose, not a promise. Experiences that are authentic, not tagged-on target-audience sentiments that muddy a brand’s expression more than enable a true value exchange. If both clients and agencies came together on this simple observation, Warren’s finishing paragraph would actually not be that utopian:

It might even allow the ad agency to claim some of the moral high ground as it plays a greater role in guiding companies to do the right thing — not just for themselves, but also for the world at large. Is that an overly ambitious and idealistic vision of the future of ad agencies? Maybe. But hey, when you’re having a midlife crisis, you’re allowed to dream big.

Damn right you are. It’s what you signed up for.

In fact, there are enough examples of behavior-based and purpose-driven brands out there that show it’s not utopian to steer clear of a type of cookie-cutter advertising that is either crass exhibitionsm or bland commercialism or teary-eyed sentimentalism, but rather enable human behavior in a way that works for brands and people alike.

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Google announced its investment in Pixazza, a service that is aiming to be an AdSense for images, meaning that what currently can only be done on search query text or contextual text, could be happening even within images. The idea has been around for a while, but no one apparently has tried to offer it, or previous go-to-markets have failed. Google’s investment could indicate that it is now deemed as mature enough to go to market with it.

Essentially, how it works is that website owners tag products contained in the images of their websites, and link to providers offering these products. Obviously the generated click-throughs then are paid for by e-commerce vendor.

What is particularly smart about the business model is the involvment of “shopper experts”, meaning anyone out there who is a shopaholic. You can sign up to become such an expert and get paid for finding and tagging products on websites and matching them to Pixazza merchants, such as Amazon, Bluefly and others.

The trick is going to be to balance blatant price tagging with maintaining the site’s original user experience.

This is the process description from the Pixazza website:

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