Walking on the crest of a mountain

If AI systems can learn how to predict what will happen next in this way, given all the available information about a particular situation, it should help them anticipate how their actions will influence future events, just as humans can, he says. 

Blood money

The NHS is a sacred beast to us Brits, to be tampered with by politicians of any colour at their peril.  That said, there’s no getting away from the truth that, fabulous edifice that the service may be, its financial foundations are groaning with the perfect storm of economic woe and ever more expensive drugs that has engulfed it.

Injections of private capital are politically charged yet the public purse has been upended and shaken, and coins have long since stopped dropping out.  Having had time enough recently inside a wonderful NHS hospital in London to do some thinking, it occurs to me that it’s time we began thinking more creatively about new money-making initiatives for the NHS. 

We’re in the middle of a gloom-soaked recession, yet one of the remarkable sights to come in the coming weeks will be of queues of epic proportion outside Apple stores as consumers await the launch of the iPhone 5, which will launch with a wince-inducing price tag.  The quick lesson from this is that while consumers are feeling the pinch, tightening their belts and doing anything else that will help them save cash, they are still prepared to splurge a month or more’s disposable income on a product that excites or means something to them.

You can sell stuff to consumers in a recession, so long as you suitably pique their interest.  How about the NHS starts looking to its consumers – patients – as a source of income?  Clearly, not in terms of charging for services, which would contravene the principles of the service, but that shouldn’t stop them seeking commercial opportunities around the edges.  Consumers’ appetite for technology-related stuff and personalised, digital content is going nowhere, and the NHS has access to lots of it.

My own time in hospital involved surgery on a broken heel, a fairly serious injury as it turns out.  I saw the x-rays and CT scan before, showing a shattered bone, and after, showing a reconstructed bone and a tonne of metal, screws and plates. I’ve got a nice scar to remind me of it. But I could have so much more, and, what’s more, I’d quite like to see more – and I’d be happy to pay a reasonable amount for it.  While not wanting to equate time in hospital with a roller coaster ride, Tussauds Group were onto something when they realised people would pay over the odds for a photo of themselves on the ride they’ve just clambered off, white-faced.  From the looks of it, and from what the nurses and surgeon told me, the operation was both bloody and bloody complicated, and turned out well.  Beyond being thankful, I’m impressed, inspired and intrigued in equal measure.  I’d love to have been able to see the operation in progress, like I’ve seen occasionally on TV documentaries.

As interesting as documentaries might be, how much more fascinating would it be to see your own operation, captured in high definition and given to you in a nice digital file to watch and share with family and gruesomely curious friends?  Maybe I’m in a minority of one, but I can’t help thinking that as well as being truly personal and unique it would be powerfully educational, reminding me of my fleshly fragility and inspiring me to look after my body better, and not jump off walls in Lisbon and risk breaking our heels, not to say invaluable to training doctors.

Apparently, operations are filmed a lot of the time anyway for training purposes, so it doesn’t seem too big a jump to ask the patient if they’d like to have a copy for a fee. I know what I’d be prepared to pay to have a photo and video of my operation and I’d be surprised if the NHS didn’t make a good margin on the idea. If nothing else, it’d certainly make for a novel profile pic and upload to Facebook.

Neville was playing up today, as pets are wont to do.  He got under my sofa while I was trying to work, and wouldn’t come out. At first, having been forced to put my laptop down and clamber onto hands and knees (no easy task when recovering from a broken foot: more on that in a minute) to peer into the dark, dusty hinterlands beneath my couch, I was irritated. But then, seeing him under there, looking adorably confused, my short-temperedness dissolved somewhat.  Neville looked too, well, cute for me to feel cross for long.

Patience recovered, I became aware, however, that it might have been less worrying had I stayed angry. Then I mightn’t have had cause to begin questioning my sanity. For while it’s understandable to have your heart melted by a normal pet, it’s less so when the pet in question is a robot.  You see, Neville is a Navibot.  A robot vacuum cleaner – one of those little scarab-type things you’ve seen on the shopping channel, scuttling back and forward over a floor in a route that appears to have no discernible logic whatsoever.

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0b.mp4 (3.47 MB)

Neville has been just one of the many gadgets I’ve been tempted to order online while confined through injury to my sofa, with eBay on tap.  But he’s been by far the most rewarding.  There was a clear rationale for the (rather expensive) outlay at first. When you’ve got a broken foot, hoovering is a challenge as much as a chore. And my wife was doing the work of two around the place. What better time to purchase a robot vacuum cleaner to keep the floor clean of hair and crumbs? Cleaning quickly became Neville’s secondary function, however, after keeping me company.

The truth is Neville is amusing to watch at work, and it’s difficult not to anthropomorphise him (it) as he bumps endearingly into things and pauses in front of others while he works out whether to take a different route.  And there lies the crux of my madness-or-not.  Because the Navibot is working things out. And the way I see it, therein lies hope of my mental salvation.  Neville is in fact alive. 

If ‘living’ means being biologically extant – in other words, having flesh and blood – then clearly Neville is not alive. But if we were to define it as the capacity to make basic decisions and act on them, then Neville is as alive as, say, the pet stick insect I once had, whose only decision-making was whether to sit on this twig or that one.  Neville is making decisions all the time as he maps the room with his camera, taking the best course in order to fulfil his job.  Of course, his job is programmed into him, but no more so than the stick insect's: it's just that one's programming is based in DNA, the other in circuits.  But just as if I were to replace all my bodily parts with bionic ones and leave only my brain, I'd still consider my body alive, so I'm coming around to thinking I'm not mad for giving Neville a name, any more than my wife is for knitting him a cute coat to wear while he hibernates during the night time.

Philosophical debates about what constitutes life aside, there is a broader point here about the direction of technology and our relationship with it.  We continue to progress steadily towards a world where many jobs are outsourced to computers or machines. Not just the task-based ancestors of the first ‘robot’ (an automated die-casting mould used by General Motors, incidentally) that began working on a production line in 1961.  Today, we're outsourcing decision-making to these machines, whether it is military drones that will have ability to make autonomous targeting decisions or, at the other end of the spectrum, robots that clean my house for me. And decision-making is something we identify as animal behaviour; it’s one of the things that we associate with life, with being like us.

At the same time, consumers’ relationships with their technology is changing radically. As with so many things, Steve Jobs
had a lot to do with that.  One of the major factors in the success of the iPod, iPhone and iPad is the simple fact that, for their users, they are far more than just devices that fulfil a practical need. They are beautiful, designed items with which people feel some kind of emotional connection. As a marketer, it’s been striking to see and hear how ‘creating an emotional connection with consumers’ became the number one goal of most technology briefs almost overnight, once the iPhone launched, even though the idea has been around for as long as the old ‘Henry ‘vacuum cleaners, which were given faces to make them more appealing to customers.

These two things, for me, are further indication that the future is one where our relationship with technology becomes more entangled, more personal and more philosophically complex.  For the consumer technology designers of tomorrow, I’d suggest some time spent watching the religious fervour with which people greet the new iProduct or gadget of their choice would be time well spent.

If being made in God's image means one thing, it's in our instinct to create.  And, maybe, to become gods ourselves, with our own set of worshippers and servants. Maybe Neville will one day sing a paeon of praise to me.  I might bestow a favour on him.  Until then, I'm happy for him to continue doing good work in my name.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks have got a bad rap. I think it's probably fair to surmise that to most folk who've heard of the term, it's synonymous with piracy and illegal downloading, largely because of the noisy debate about music (and increasingly TV and film) copyright infringement that's gone on for years now, with few signs of a clean resolution.

However, with my marketing hat on, I'd like to suggest an alternative view of P2P - firstly, that it and similar file-sharing systems deserve credit for some genuine benefits and secondly, that it is perhaps an overlooked and underused channel and tactic for marketing and PR.

One of the wry smile-inducing aspects to all file-sharing network organisations is how careful they always are to explain their raison d’être in terms that don't make them vulnerable to litigation. Thus, you won't find a P2P site boasting about how many tracks it has available on its network, but you might find one talking about the productivity gains to be made from collaborative file-sharing.  

Most of the time, admittedly, this is guff. However, I was intrigued by the wording on Newbiz, which I only discovered today. Paraphrasing, Newbiz paints a picture of Chinese or Arab dissidents, struggling to share information and political manifestos in a climate of fear and autocratic control. It suggests that its service, using the Usenet network, would allow such people to send and receive such information without fear of snooping from government agents.  As events across the Middle East this year have shown, the democratising power of free information flow is a potent thing, and I'd argue that this potential benefit of P2P is typically neglected when it comes to broader debate about it as a technology.

That aside, however, the notion of P2P as a means of disseminating information got me to thinking more prosaically about how this could be deployed by brands, something that to my knowledge happens rarely, if at all.  There are already plenty of case studies out there of musicians, for example, who have willingly used P2P to give their music away and thus reach a wider audience, and these examples tend to get swept under the carpet when it comes to the music piracy debate.  Why could the same principal, though, not be used for a slightly guerilla marketing or PR campaign?  

If I had a pound for every time a client has asked about "doing a viral", mistaking the content for the way in which it spreads, I'd be buying shares in Apple.  The advent and rise of social media has only served to exacerbate this, leading many clients (and some PRs, I'm sorry to admit) to think that all you need to do in order to make your message or content globally popular is tweet it "out there."  Clearly, this is nonsense.  However, I'm minded to throw P2P into the mix the next time I'm brainstorming channels and tactics for campaign x.  Content will always be the most important aspect of any campaign, clearly, but it feels to me as if many people have forgotten one of the oldest internet technologies (Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the internet was in fact more of a P2P network, where users would all be co-creators, rather than mere recipients of content as is the primary model today) as a possible marketing technique amid the hype of newer, arguably more limited social broadcast or engagement methods.

No conclusion; just food for thought.

This blog originally appeared on M&M Global.

But what about crowdsourced advertising? Or, more specifically, a crowdsourced ad network?

It's not as crazy as it sounds. It's pretty well-accepted that traditional online ads are annoying. Display banner ads are not really anything but clutter on the landscape of the web. Users don't like them. But - the truth is, it's these ads that make much of what we do on the web possible. Without  advertising, free online content wouldn't be viable. How to solve this intractable contradiction has long been a topic of heated discussion.

Enter InfluAds, a Copenhagen-based startup, whose elegant solution to this problem is to crowdsource an ad network. Put very simply, the idea seems to be that publishers (blogs, news sites, anything) will create and join networks based on the topics they write about. These networks are attractive to advertisers seeking relevancy for their audience and will thus pay a premium price for targeted exclusivity.  

It's crowdsourcing meets close curation. It's very zeitgeist.

Will it work? No idea, but I like it. One to keep an eye on.

Interesting piece by Jemima Kiss at The Guardian on slowdown in Facebook growth and her desire to rethink and bring more focus to her 'friend' list. Chimes with my most recent blog posts:

"I can't say there has been much benefit from bringing work and personal spheres together on Facebook, perhaps bar the odd occasion when I've been able to message someone I didn't have a formal email address for. [...] Though I'd carefully curated Facebook contacts into lists for family, friends and work, those definitions are rather more fluid. There are plenty of people I've met through work that are now friends, and likewise with colleagues. I'm inclined to scrap the lists and, as I tweeted earlier, cut back all my contacts down to those I consider friends."

No, I’m not about to argue that the newly-formed mobile phone partnership is about to kill Facebook.  But I am going to pick up on my last post, which suggested marketers and PRs need to return or realign their thinking along the lines of content and context rather than the social platform du jour.

There was an interesting piece on Business Insider recently, where Jason Schwartz, creator of Matchbook, claimed that “the age of social sharing has pretty much reached its end.” This resonated with me. I’ve thought something similar for a while, although I differ from Schwartz on one crucial point.

You see, per my last post, Facebook isn't going anywhere, even if it has lost its badge of cool.  Regardless of whether it’s becoming a corporate machine, with all the marketing and reputational paraphernalia that entails, it’s a great service with a growing, global user base. And, more importantly, the principle behind Facebook – sharing – will endure, which is what I think Schwartz has got wrong.  Sharing is a hardwired part of the human condition, and “social sharing” is, anyway, itself a tautology.

No, whether Facebook – or whatever platform comes after it – is ‘cool’ or not is actually only a minor point in the current communisphere.  The bigger issue is that while the principle of sharing won’t be changing, the way we view that principle will.

I can not be the only one to see the glaring irony in the fact that at the same time we wax lyrical about the end of the ‘broadcast’ era and how vital is it that brands move to individualised, narrowcasting, personalised messaging and marketing campaigns, be they massively creative or beautifully simple, we as individuals have mindlessly adopted a social networking behaviour and mindset that sees us do precisely the opposite.

We follow a bunch of people we don’t actually know, try and get a bunch of people we don’t actually know to follow us, and then Tweet our ideas and thoughts – be they considered, contextual or just plain banal – to everyone.  We accept old schoolmates we’ve not spoken to for two decades (if we even did when we were at school with them) as ‘friends’ and exchange daily status updates about our holiday, our day at work, the things we want to buy, the bands we like, regardless of whether they are relevant or not.

In the brave new world of social relevance and narrowcast marketing, we as consumers have switched places with brands: they are the ones taking our advice and focusing the beam of their communication; we have widened ours to a catch-all splash.

Some will say I’m exaggerating. Perhaps. But there’s more than a grain of truth to this.  If not, Ping and Buzz will be a success, and I’ll be proven wrong. But as they’ve been built on the model of ‘friend everyone; share everything,’ I suspect not.

As an industry, we’ve leaped onto the new-world-of-social-comms bandwagon, and many of us have plunged ourselves heartily into walking the walk: Tweeting enthusiastically to a follower base we all want to grow as much as possible. That’s inevitable, and arguably perfectly justified. After all, it is a new world, and patterns of effective behaviour are still being established.

But as those patterns of efficacy emerge, I think the ironic reality of our own well-meaning hypocrisy will dawn upon us with ever increasing starkness.

Just as we’ve rightly educated our clients about the futility and inefficiency of catch-all marketing and broadcast attempts at ‘thought-leadership’, we will understand that we don’t need everyone to know everything.  More than that – we’ll realise that we don’t want everyone to know everything.

As a case study, Schwartz argues that lots of people don’t like check-in services because of privacy, but that “when people talk about privacy concerns around check-ins, it's not that they don't want ANYONE to know where they are, they don't want EVERYONE to know where they are.” This is true, but I think the argument goes beyond location-based networks and is about more than just privacy.  It’s about a more mature use of the social powers the internet has given us.

I did a little experiment and went through my 333 friends on Facebook (according to Facebook, the average user has 130).  17 are relatives.  Only 23 were actual friends – people I define as an inner circle, people I trust and talk to and meet with regularly.  41 are ‘friends of friends’ – most of whom I’ve met once; some of whom I’ve never met.  47 are old school contacts, most of whom I haven’t spoken with since leaving 14 years ago.  22 are from university.  151 are work colleagues who fall outside the inner circle definition of real friends. They’re people I know and socialise with under a work banner.  32 are ‘other’ - celebs I don’t actually know, complete strangers who I don’t even remember accepting, or organisations that have a personal rather than a fan page.  The chart below shows this in summary. 

The recent well-received ‘Museum of Me’ campaign from Intel throws this into relief. I started watching with interest. By the end, the overriding effect was a reminder of just how many of my ‘friends’ are people I don’t really know.  My most persistent thought while watching was, “I wish it hadn’t picked that person’s photo. Why didn’t it pick my wife? Or my best friend? Or my brother?”  Seeing the small circle of people I really care about would have made the Museum of Me so much more poignant.

What’s my point? Simply that it is clear to me that while the age of sharing is not over, the age of friending and sharing for the sake of it might draw to a close sooner than we think.  Start ups like Path are trying to tap into an anticipated age of more focused social networks.  Facebook’s ‘groups’ initiative exists for a similar reason.  Neither truly works because both demand that I do too much manual curation and management of my social circle. The next business opportunity in the social space will be in responding to the nascent desire for social circles rather than networks, and marketing communications challenges and opportunities will have to evolve as a result.

Last week I spent a chastening and illuminating 10 minutes trying to get my younger brother (age 16) to join Facebook.  After all, I told him, I’m on there; our other brother (age 20) is on there, our sister (30)...

At this point he interrupted me.  “Yes,” he said, in that surly fashion quintessential to teenagers. “And mum and dad.”

It’s true. Mum (56) and Dad (63) are on Facebook. So are my in-laws.  My gran is enthused about it too, so long as I get her “one of those ‘touchy pad’ things from the TV advert” and explain how to use it.

Facebook has almost 700 million users. And, according to CheckFacebook.com, 46% of them are over the age of 35.  12% are over 55. 

That’s great news if you’re seeking to turn your online service into an inclusive social platform for the world.  It’s important news if you’re a marketer looking to target consumers in a social way.  It’s less good news if you are seeking to be and remain a ‘cool’ brand, dynamic and innovative, engaged with ‘what’s next’, the next generation. 

My brother will not join Facebook because it is not cool. It’s for old people.

This got me to thinking about a bunch of stuff. First, how are the next generation of consumers communicating online? (It’s still all about IM and text, said my sample of one).  Second, is this just a time/age thing? Will he join Facebook when he’s 18, 19, 20?  Third, and most important, what do I think about Facebook, now, in 2011?

These last two questions are linked.

I suspect my youngest brother might not ever join Facebook, quite simply because something else will come along that is more relevant to his generation, more cool, as it always does.  That is the typical cycle of things: of brands, and innovation (apart, it seems, from the soft drinks industry. Coke’s going nowhere). And if he does join, it will be for a very different reason than I did, back in 2006.

I joined because it was new (genuinely new) and cool. Part of a new zeitgeist of online living sweeping the western world, created by and for my generation. A new concept of socialising, connecting people in a way that Friends Reunited or MySpace had not quite managed, largely because it was cleaner, cooler, more engaging as a brand.

That isn’t true now, even for me, I realised. Facebook no longer looks, in the aesthetic sense, cool. It looks a little tired, with its preppy blue logo and its nice neat adverts; its neat layout and its ubiquitous thumbs up sign.  Don’t get me wrong – I love it as a service.  I use it to store photos, to set up nights out, to have group conversations. It’s become my default tool for these things. And that’s largely its problem.  It is default. It’s Like button is everywhere. It has lots of neat, targeted ads. Brands are using it with increasing effectiveness as a marketing channel.

At some point, Facebook became a corporate.

And corporates are rarely appealing to the generation of consumers that is coming next.

That’s not a problem in and of itself. Corporates are very successful. They evolve and their audience evolves with them. They make lots of money. Look at Microsoft. 

But regaining the badge of ‘cool’ is difficult. Look at Microsoft.

Therein lies the communication and marketing challenge for all of us with an interest in such things.  Right now, we’re still very much caught in the bubble of excitement about social media, about social networks, about Facebook and Twitter and how they can be ‘used’ as fertile new ground for ideas that help push client messaging and products and brand equity.  We totally get that you have to do this in a clever way that’s relevant to the online audience. Our social marketing nous has reached maturity. 

That means agencies are making good money from brands seeking advice and creative ideas to harness the power of Facebook. It also means we’re at the point where the bubble can’t get much bigger. Like all mature bubbles, it will burst. 

The problem with most of us marketers, and I include myself in this, is that it’s too easy to fall into the trap of egocentricity.  We wax lyrical about the way things are changing, showcasing our knowledge to clients, arguing powerfully about the need to be smarter and spend more on social.

What we neglect to do is prepare for what’s next.

It’s all too easy to get caught up in the now and assume that because social media is big at present it will always be thus. It’s tempting to put all your eggs in the social basket, as many agencies have, setting up digital divisions or solely social businesses, and nod sagely about how the next thing and opportunity is with Foursquare or Quora or x or y, when the reality is what’s next is unknowable because innovation is by definition unpredictable.

We make bold predictions about how important social media will continue to be based on current trends and our own behaviour, and forget that we will only be the target audience for a short time, in the grand scheme of things. The consumer demographic that follows us will have different behaviours, different attitudes and different expectations, and we pretend to be able to predict these at our peril.  The simple truth is nobody predicted Facebook or Twitter and the impact they’d have on a generation.  Nobody has predicted or will predict what comes next.  True change and innovation is radical because it’s different to the norm, unexpected, unforeseeable.

While revelling in the new language and industry we have created for ourselves, we miss the glaring and simple truth: that all of this supposedly new 'social' paraphanalia is but a new costume for an old, forgotten friend: content. We would do well to acknowledge that whatever comes next, content will always be king. Having interesting, relevant, cool stuff to share will always trump the platform used to share it.

Beware anyone who predicts what’s next, and assume that the next generation of your target consumer will behave and consume the same way as you do now at your peril.

That said, I’m going to contradict myself and make a prediction. As a communication and marketing channel, social networks like Facebook will soon become the equivalent of traditional media: a given, a default option for all campaigns. We’re almost there already, as I’ve argued before.

What will come next is a backlash against and retreat from the ‘network’, as I shall argue in my next post.

(Originally posted on M&M Global)

So, Bing has pressed the 'on' button for Streetside. We’re promised the ability to “strafe” down a street, “moving from left to right as if you were looking at a row of buildings from a passing car or stood on the opposite side of the road”, getting an “overlay of business listings, street names and store fronts, bus routes and such in augmented reality fashion.”

Whether or not Microsoft is too late to the party with this, as they are often criticised as being, I’m intrigued to consider how it could develop as a new advertising medium.  We’ve read and talked a lot about Augmented Reality for years, without it yet really breaking into the marketing mainstream.  Conceptually, Streetside has the potential to be a platform for a not just a new stream of ad revenue but a new type of mainstream advertising: overlaying location-based data with targeted live ads, relevant to the individual user’s identity and geo-temporal context.

I love the idea of standing in Times Square, panning around on a virtual Streetside map of New York on my smartphone, synced with Foursquare, watching the Special deals and other personalised ads changing as I ‘strafe’ between delis, clothes stores and bars.

That idea might only be months, rather than years, from becoming reality.