Gavin points to Adrian Ho's brilliant presentation on the relationship between failure, action and where advertising is headed. Or at least where advertising dollars are headed.
I'm working on some stuff, so I thought I might as well work it through around these parts. This particular post was spurred by Paul, and the quote I stole directly from here.
Tim Smith of Applied Design said that marketers will be not be measured by how well they tell stories to their audience, but rather by how well their audience tells stories about them.
We are in the business of telling stories, but maybe that business is broadening rather than becoming more narrow. Our ability to build narrative isn’t necessarily reliant on the old storyteller model. In the old days, an orator spoke, while the townsmen leaned in to listen.
And we progressed to radio, where the family would gather around the large wooden box in the living room to listen to Amos ‘n’ Andy, Bing Crosby and the original Lone Ranger. Of course, television was no different. An appointment experience where we would take in Lucy or Gilligan or Seinfeld, just with video to add color and nuance to the story.
But those days are mostly just ghosts of an era gone. There are few appointments and rare family gatherings scheduled around program schedules save for the Super Bowl and maybe a game seven here or there.
While we lose what might be a more intimate gathering around programming, we’re gaining something that could be far more rewarding and meaningful, community based on shared experience, shared meaning and multilateral storytelling. A story crafted through participation, not necessarily just dissemination.
We see this bubbling up today in remix culture where thievery is a form of flattery. We see it when television media is augmented not just by those in the room, but those connected digitally in the cause of dissecting a buried clue in Lost or Heroes. We see it when people take interest in contributing to the media around them through not just blogs, but bookmarking, citizen journalism and the simple comment.
To reach this idea of engagement, we must not only say things, we must do things because participation and creation are reactions spurred by actions, not just messaging.
Sean, Gavin and I attack you with an almosot dangerous amount of value in the latest installment of Eat, Sleep, Blog. Surprisingly enough, I wasn't the first one to use the "f word" in this discussion of Facebook Connect, Google Connect, recommendation engines and the semantic web.
Very nicely done. A well run marketing campaign, ended with a simple thank you. Wouldn't have expected less, but nice to see anyway.
I could probably try to make some statement about fan culture or something, but instead I'll just let you laugh at some photos from yesterdays Jonas Brothers mall shopping spree / teen freakout...
You'd hardly expect this folksy, sometimes on the edge of latin, pop to be born of Iceland. But Emiliana Torrini makes her break after a writing a song or two for others and jumping on a few odd soundtracks with Me and Armini.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGbRYf9X5LA&w=425&h=275]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6l-XlG_TjCw&w=425&h=344]
The fantastic Gareth Kay reinforced a few thoughts on the collective agency future with his presentation "Planning needs some planning."
From GK:
"My contention is that if a planners job is to make sure the work works (as I believe it is) then we're in big trouble. All the data suggests advertising, more often than not, does not meet its goals and doesn't change behavior. We've done little to address this. We chase new media channels but we don't challenge how we think communication works..."
Now you could argue a couple minor things, but where there is little disagreement (from me, anyway) is what to do next. We must find our point of view and our social purpose, and get there by being defined not simply by what we say about ourselves, but all the awesome things we do.
A couple posts ago, I made a quick aside on good failure. Basically, I think there are two kinds, often confused when maybe they should be conflated. He struggled with mental tasks normal people find easy. When he read a novel, he would instantly memorize every word by heart, but miss the entire plot. Metaphors and poetry - though they clung to his brain like Velcro - were incomprehensible. He couldn't even use the phone because he found it hard to recognize a person's voice "when it changes its intonation...and it does that 20 or 30 times a day."
1. Shotgun - the "do tons of things and cross your fingers" approach
2. Scientific - the iterative "i made no mistake but learned one more thing not to do" approach.
And as I said, I think the answer is somewhere in the middle. We're not scientific enough to embrace the iterative approach all the way. And the shotgun approach doesn't really satisfy the need for fiscal discipline that most companies have. Either way, failure is difficult, so some level of hedging is probably needed.
A few reasons why:
1. The comfort of reach and frequency - While returns are clearly diminishing on any traditional ad buy, we are pretty good with arriving at a rough rate of return. At least it's more knowable than if you don't have those two metrics. Without reach, we're sort of working without a net.
2. The hand wringing, blinding focus on the avoidance of failure - Jonah Lehrer has a post up today about people that remember everything, as in, can forget nothing. Sounds pretty awesome at first, until you read a little further and find that most of them go nuts, often after having difficulty with simple tasks we are able to complete without thought. It's excruciating.
Which is the way most companies react to failure. They hash and rehash. It paralyzes them for future experimentation, and often causes them to walk away completely after casting the entire thing as something that "just doesn't work." No question we need to do our best to find answers, but we need to be scientific enough to gain the knowledge, while forgetful enough to, as we say in Texas, get back on the saddle.
3. The Luck factor - Frankly, some things were because we just got lucky. We happened to be in the right place at the right time. So for all the picking apart and recap that's possible, it'll never lead us all the way to a replicable solution. In fact, it could keep us chasing after something that's passed. And the inherent luck in some solutions is just unknowable with any level of assuredness.
Bottom line: We are shifting into a culture that favors doing over saying. We know this. And we know doing things creates a situation in which success only comes when we cause a reaction, not simply an impression; reach is unforecastable and frequency matters little. So if you're looking for a pre-destined ROI, you're in the wrong game.
And while scientific failure may be great to help get passed failure avoidance, it may be an obstacle to assessing the luck factor. The shotgun approach is awesome in the name of experimentation, but it sure doesn't make anyone feel all that comfortable. So in that middle ground rests good failure.
