An excellent slideshow providing an overview of the radical transformation of the media, marketing & communication landscape. These are the trends on which many start-ups have been able to thrive in Europe over the recent years. Now of course, as the game is becoming much more serious and the economic context gets tougher I expect there will be quite a few casualties...
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend" seems to be the rule at Yahoo! even when that means striking a stunning alliance with old-time rival Google. According to French news agency AFP and to CNN Money, the two companies came to an agreement for the US and Canadian markets, whereby Google would be able to sell advertising space on Yahoo's search pages. Aside from being an admission that Yahoo! stands no chance to compete head to head with Google in this space, the agreement is interesting in that it contains a provision saying that should Yahoo!'s ownership status change by way of an acquisition or other operation within the coming two years, the company would have to pay Google 250 million dollars.
That provision could be seen as an attempt to ward off any attempts to acquire Yahoo! for the next 24 months even though when a company like Microsoft is willing to pay over 45 billion USD to acquire Yahoo! I doubt 250 million would make a difference even if paid to archrival Google. I would personally focus my interest much more on the time horizon of the said provision because in my opinion it speaks volumes about the internal expectations of Yahoo! as to the time when its future strategic direction will have matured and started to deliver the first results. Microsoft's takeover bid most certainly was a wake-up call for top execs at Yahoo! Now of course, the question that remains to be sorted out is whether activist investors like Carl Icahn will give Yahoo! two years.
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Writing while in the train getting back to Brussels after a couple of days in Paris for Ad:Tech. Yes while in the train. That is really cool. What's less cool is the amount of over-engineering Thalys seems to have put in designing this service: resources like Gmail, Google documents, Network solutions webmail and Google Apps are simply not usable because some stupid piece of junkware that runs on the Thalys WiFi network considers those to be forbidden resources. Even the sites of Le Monde and CNN are not accessible. So what gives? Is Thalys developing a new concept of a hyperlocal web? Are they trying to revolutionize the web by severly limiting connectivity? Is this a censorship experiment for the Chinese government?
None of these exciting avenues I'm afraid. It only seems that somebody felt it important to implement an extremely stringent security policy, which, in the end, voids of most of its value the great promise of WiFi aboard high-speed trains. I'm sure they'll fix this someday, but what does it say about cost of opportunity in terms of revenue to the company? What untellable stories of wasted service design resources does this case convey? Is there anyone to doubt that product / service design will be a strategic competency for companies in the coming years?
In the end, it all boils down to common sense and a structured albeit flexible approach to product ownership. Something that does seem to be a common thread to methods like scrum, agile development, permanent beta, Toyota's continuous improvement through the kaizen approach or NLP... They all accept a degree of chaos that characterizes the real world. Realism, common sense, perseverance, patience, continuous and relentless improvement, continuous quest for evolution, no nonsense and a thirst for feedback are some of the characteristics of approaches that work.
Now on the positive side of things the idiot design does not prevent Thalys travelers from accessing Wikipedia, Barack Obama's web site or the Business Quests blog :-) as you will see in the screen-shots.
Currently attending a great presentation by P&G's Michel Lambert who is telling us about challenges and achievements in interactive and digital marketing. With an experience of 20 years in marketing 9 of which at pan-European level, a strong background in direct marketing, having gone through the great school called P&G and basically a combination of analytical capability and common sense, he's got a contribution to make.
In fact I was lucky to meet him yesterday and I was impressed with the stuff he told me about how P&G is clearly putting a great emphasis on interactive and digital factors throughout their organization, not only in the field of marketing. He clearly gets the transformative power of information technologies in the field of communication as well as in all the processes of any company that wants to be successful in the coming century. Michel does have a good and no-nonsense grasp of the ways in which organizations need to transforms their structure, practices, approaches, ways of assessing success versus failure, recruiting, building relationships... In fact it's quite impressive. While I prefer to respect a degree of confidentiality, I think the presentation of today reflects very well the state of play at P&G's end and this presentation certainly looked like a call to agencies to finally start offering stuff that make business sense rather than just surfing on the latest online fad and fashion.
Michel has a non nonsense approach: "is my brand prospect and brand customer online? Sure. But what do they actually do there? how can I understand them better?". His take is that the consumer, the person that is potentially a customer, the complex individual should be at the center of every single thought people have about interactive and digital marketing. Platforms, tools, communities, practices, plugins, widgets... will proliferate and they are not really relevant if one does not understand the consumer.
Here are some of the very interesting things Michel shared with the audience today:
Michel also mentioned education of people inside P&G as being a major area of focus today because marketers need to reassess many of the practices they used to consider as world-class. Furthermore the relative differences between markets makes it necessary to have a decentralized approach and in that respect the world is very far from being as flat as Friedman tends to suggest. The world has changed in a major way.
Currently attending a very interesting presentation about the way neurosciences are being exploited for marketing purposes. The presenter is Olivier Oullier, a Professor in neurophysiology in France and also an active partner at a company called neuroeco, that does seem to be very much in stealth mode since its web site redirects to the page of Prof. Oullier.
Today's marketers project their own (mostly rational) thoughts as being the logical behavior of the consumer. However, the fatc is that they are not the consumer and the consumer is not only rational, which may be why the most successful marketers are those individuals who dare to use more than jusrt their rational capabilities. Intuition is important as Steve Jobs, the creators of Cirque du Soleil or people at IDEO would most certainly agree.
Professor Oullier researches brain activity and bodily activity of humans as they are exposed to various stimuli. His quest is to establish models and correlations between activity inside the human brain and the (economic) behavior of a person. To do that they now use large magnetic resonance equipment, and I guess that their goal is to bring their methods to market. I only hope we don't end up with a world like Minority Report since theoretically attributes of people could be used to "predict" their behavior and the temptation will be there for people to try to prevent certain behaviors. The question being how much of those predictions will actually be self-fulfilling prophecies, something that is relevant not only in the field of tomorrow's marketing.
Interestingly all stimuli but smells go through the thalamus and that may actually explain why there is so muc work being done on olfactive marketing,a subset of sensory and environmental marketing. In neurosciences terms, the effect of an ad on someone paying attention is to trigger the production of dopamine in their brain, which makes them feel good and therefore create a positive association between the product and the consumer. At the end of the day, this elaborate scheme shows how Pavlovian animals we humans can be. Today consumer neuroscience is a topic of great interest in the greatest of universities.
Let's add an element. In certain circumstances and for certain stimuli (e.g. in a situation of immediate danger) the message in the brain will not go through the upper layer (neocortex), which is the part of the brain that manages those thought processes of which we are conscious. So I guess that the name of the game is to trigger stimuli that will generate an unconscious positive association with a commercial offering, such as to create strong unconscious motivation to buy a product or a service. Back to Minority Report or to Brave New World.
Just attended a splendid presentation of the way Lego has been actively seeking to and succeeding in involving passionate users in the life of the Mindstorms product line. Lego's people noticed that Mindstorms was generating a lot of passionate contributions and involvement by the community of users, many of whom were absolutely not kids but male adults. The product seems to have been outrageously successful in the Silicon Valley, where the local tech enthusiasts seem to be the typical customers. The product was being hacked and transformed in all sorts of ways... So Lego's people decided to really engage in a very intense interaction with their customers and to let them influence the life of the product to a very large degree. They set a few very simple rules to manage the community of carefully screened engaged users: respect, positive contribution and giving Lego a veto right on how the product would evolve... Today, it's one of the best known examples of how powerful a genuine engagement with customers can be to drive buzz, word of mouth and basically to make it possible for a lovemark to emerge. There's even the case of famous author Chris Anderson who went on to build a drone using a Mindstorms NXT control module...
Here's a nice little video about Mindstorms:
I met Michel Kleindl and discovered Wunderloop at AlwaysOnMedia NYC in 2007. He was kind enough to spend some time with me and to give an interview to this blog. Since then, Wunderloop seems to have been very successful in making its case for behavioral targeting, womething that was not that obvious back when I first heard about them. Some of the trends were clear, but not everyone agreed that behavioral was the way to go or that it would be feasible and accepted by people online. That's a good example of a business quest that is pursued with succcess by someone who gladly calls himself an "fossil" and a "dinosaur" because he's been working in the field of online marketing wince 1994 (Gosh, that does sound like prehistoric times!).
Today, Michael is here to speak about what he calls six megatrends in the industry and his views should be worth listening to. Here are his trends:
Again some very interesting insights by a great insider of the industry, who seems like a very agile dinosaur indeed IMHO.
Got to Ad:Tech this morning. The usual suspects are around, but it's always interesting to keep tabs on how the market is evolving. One interesting surprise though: efficient frontier, an interesting SEM company. It's a company whose founder combined his experience with stock market systems (hence the name derived from modern financial theory) with his knowledge of how search engines work to create a platform helping advertisers optimize their marketing investments online. To them an AdWord is like a stock and the words an advertiser buys are very much like stocks in a portfolio. Thus provided one captures sufficient relevant information from search engines and can put them through an algorithmic process, it is conceivably possible to define the risk / return combination of each word and each possible combination of words, which in turn means that it is possible to define an optimal combination of words to be bought. Extremely interesting in my very humble opinion.
Tad James & David Shephard: Presenting Magically: Transforming Your Stage Presence with NLP
Joseph Campbell: The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Bollingen Series (General))
Richard Tanner Pascale: Surfing the Edge of Chaos: The Laws of Nature and the New Laws of Business
Randy Komisar: The Monk and the Riddle: The Art of Creating a Life While Making a Living
