November 6th

Millions of miles away, in the far North of Mars, the greatest marketer of this young century is slowly dying in the cold and dark. A dust-storm is covering its photovoltaic panels, its power is draining and NASA has switched it into 'Lazarus' mode. The long Martian winter is setting in, we probably won't hear from it again. If you're one of the 40,000 people subscribed to the Mars Phoenix Lander's twitter stream you'll know exactly what I'm on about, the rest of you might need some explanation. Let's start with twitter - it's a simple service that lets you tell your friends (and other interested people) what you're up to in 140 characters or less. Via your phone or computer. It started off as a person to person thing, but fairly quickly all sorts of other stuff started to get squeezed down the twitter pipe; news headlines, the shipping forecast, news of whether Tower Bridge was opening or not. And, back in May, the Mars Lander was added to the list. It started as just another bit of the NASA effort to get the world interested in space again. A Jet Propulsion Lab staffer was asked to submit twitters on behalf of the Lander, but she did it so well, working in her own time, adopting an energetic first-person voice that she amassed an enthralled audience of 40,000 people - all for a media cost of zero. The Mars Phoenix Lander is a textbook example of how to use social media tools to delight an audience. Firstly, it was human and fun. The first person voice of the Lander meant it was accessible to all ages and education levels. You didn't need to be a rocket scientist. For example, the Lander announced the discovery of water like this: "Are you ready to celebrate? Well, get ready: We have ICE!!!!! Yes, ICE, *WATER ICE* on Mars! w00t!!! Best day ever!!". OK, so it's a bit juvenile, but it's exciting. It's how geeky scientists talk. And it was followed up with good, sensible, scientific explanation. Secondly, Mars Phoenix talked back. Questions asked on twitter were passed to the team running the Lander and answered swiftly and concisely, 140 characters is great discipline and people loved being involved in a conversation with another planet. Thirdly, the Lander team kept looking for opportunities to extend the story. As the Lander dies there's now an epitaph competition being run via twitter. The current favourite is "Veni, vidi, fodi. (I came, I saw, I dug)". Getting that many people interested in something, for no money, with no professional help, is what the social media revolution is all about. And the Mars Phoenix Lander is its first bona fide hero. The people of Earth salute you.

From October 30th

There are some fascinating conversations going on in the newspaper world about the inadequacy of 'the article' as the basic unit of journalism. The financial crisis has illustrated the limitations of that bounded bit of print better than anything. The word count is limited, the facts have to be repeated every day, there has to be 'news' even if nothing has happened and complex relationships between facts, organisations and people are hard to explain, especially if they change over time. The web has great tools for dealing with these issues; wikis, pages that change over time, links, multimedia, but it's still hard for online newspapers to abandon the article as the currency of journalism; the lego brick of news. When you've been trained to think in articles it's tremendously hard to start thinking in diagrams or flowcharts. The journalist Matt Thompson has written a tremendous series of posts about this, the best of which is called 'The Article Is Not The Story'. You can find it at icanhaz.com/thompson. And the Canadian engagement planner Dino Demopoulos has written a fantastic piece teasing out the implications for brand and communications planning at icanhaz.com/dino. But this thought about 'the basic unit' of something struck another chord with me, from another industry that's been overturned by the web; the music business. Because the most obvious manifestation of that reinvention has been another change in the basic unit of production and consumption. What iTunes and Napster did, really effectively, was crack open the album and release the more desirable, more fundamental unit - the song. This undid all the clever bundling the record business had managed before, selling you stuff you didn't really along with the stuff you did, and changed the dynamics of the industry forever. (Arguably back to a previous, more natural, state.) You might even see the world of remixing and mash-ups as an attempt to smash the atom even further and to plunge beyond the level of the song; seeing basslines, hooks, riffs and licks as the basic units of musical production, ready to be pilfered and repurposed. We're even starting to see the same thing happen with certain sorts of film and TV as YouTube allows you to just watch the good bits. It's not atomising Lawrence Of Arabia yet, but why watch all of the latest Adam Sandler movie if someone'll stick the five funny minutes on the web? And I bet that's a good question to ask about media and marketing communications. What are our basic units of production? Could they usefully be atomised? Is there a smaller, more helpful building brick we could be using? And if we find it, could we learn to weave less repetitious, more nuanced, more dynamic stories?

From October 23rd

Last night, after we'd got our son off to sleep, my wife and I sat and watched laptops in bed. She was trying to find some comedy on ITV and I was investigating war documentaries on the BBC iPlayer. (I know, I know; it's a compelling portrait of a relationship still alive with passion.) These things work really well now, not perfectly, but really well. You can access hours of great telly legally and easily. And, if you talk to TV people, you realise that in their heads the internet is now done. It's finished. Complete. Now it can deliver TV effectively there's nowhere left for it to develop. They behave like all we're left with now is some tidying up and some deciding who the winners and losers will be. Will Joost stage a comeback? Will Google work-out how to monetise YouTube? Will Kangeroo be any good? And can we get the internet running fast enough that we can slam megahours of HDTV down the pipes at everyone in the world? But it strikes me that this focus on TV ignores all the other things that the web does incredibly well, it crowds out all the other possibilities in almost every digital discussion. That's one of the reasons I was so excited about Channel 4's adventures in radio, though they're now, regrettably, shelved. It seemed like they might force the pace of development for radio online. Radio's always seemed more web-friendly than TV to me. It's lighter and easier to transport to start with. And it's more suitable for a multi-tasking world, it knows how to live in the background, how to exist on a thin gruel of attention, not demanding the full lean-forward experience of TV. And it's had an easy interactive relationship with its listeners for years, it's not afraid to assume that they'll provide great swathes of content. And, and perhaps most importantly, audio is so much easier for regular people to make and contribute than video. All of which makes me sad that there's not more innovation happening. The BBC are pushing ahead, as are NPR in the States, and there are commercial broadcasters in the UK doing interesting things. But there's not a lot of challenge coming from new entrants. Newspapers and magazines all seem to be podcasting, but they're mostly tired, cheap formats; just journalists around a microphone. And brands and advertisers seem to have left audio behind in the rush to make telly for the internet. This is a massive missed opportunity, there's an intimacy to the best audio that brand-owners should be trying to harness. So, just because we're watching old episodes of Benidorm on the laptop let's not assume the internet's done.

From October 16th

Advertising and media people are supposed to understand a huge amount of material; sociology, economics, semiotics, psycholoogy. And that just gets you through the Monday morning status meeting. And perhaps the hardest stuff to pick up is that all that design gubbins the art directors do. They're notoriously bad at talking about it themselves and most of the books you'll buy are as comprehensible as credit default swaps. Which is why I would heartily recommend Michael Bierut's Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design. It's full of good sense, good stories, good ideas and nice fonts. And the essays really are short, perfect for the tube or the 10 minutes in a meeting waiting for the creatives to arrive. Mr Bierut is a partner in Pentagram, so his design credentials don't need listing here, but it's the quality and accessibility of his writing that makes this book so wonderful. He may be a regular contributer to the Design Observer blog but he doesn't write exhibit the horrible habits of we bloggers; hyperbole, using the word stuff a lot, tailing off with an anyway...His essays are cogent, funny and seem properly planned like you were always taught in essay school - they make an argument and end with a punchy final thought. The lessons we can draw are to do with his humility about his profession and the range and depth of his references and intellectual curiosity. He's clearly passionate about what he does; anyone who can write a sustained and convincing polemic called "I Hate ITC Garamond" is properly committed to his craft. But he also knows the limit of his trade and points out the folly of those that try to solve all the problems of the world with design, branding and taglines. Or even worse t-shirts; one essay starts "When fellow designer Sam Potts first emailled me about DOTWHO, the Designs On The White House Organization my initial reaction was slightly exasperated bemusement: when the going gets tough, designers have a t-shirt contest." It's a measure of his generosity that what could have been a piece about designer hubris ends in finding joy in the community around the t-shirt designs. And, for the non-designer, Mr Beirut's cultural sweep catches more than enough material that you're never bored with the fonts and the horizontal scaling. He tells you why Barthes hated ballpoint pens, how Nabokov invented hypertext, of the design thinking of Wilson Pickett and what it's like to fall of a treadmill. And along the way, in essay 68, he'll teach you a trick with the Chanel logo that'll help you sell all sorts of understated work to all sorts of demanding clients. Get yourself a copy. Now we just need a book that'll explain derivatives.

From October 9th

At every industry conference, for whatever industry, the speakers have a single thought in common when discussing their technological future - we mustn't make the mistakes that the music industry made. Understandably, no-one wants to be pushed into irrelevance, suing their best customers, gazing at dwindling coffers. And one of the big mistakes the music industry made was not being able to see past existing legal assumptions. Take the case of Justin Ouellette, the creator of Muxtape, a service that swept the web a few months back, allowing people to create online mixtapes and share them with their friends. The site was taken down recently and Mr Ouellette wrote a rueful blogpost about the process - how he was being simultaneously threatened by record company lawyers and courted by the same company's marketing execs. As he describes one occasion: "The meeting alternated between an intense grilling from the legal side (“you are a willful infringer and we are mere hours from shutting you down”) and an awkward discussion with the business side (“assuming we don’t shut you down, how do you see us working together?”)". No wonder he decided to pull out of the process all together. The problem here of course, is that the music lawyers are technically right, muxtape probably was breaching the law, it's just that it's in no-one's interests to point that out. If the music industry had been able to look at their rights in a more nuanced way they might not be in the mess they're in. And I suspect we're facing similar issues in advertising - where being legally, technically right isn't enough any more. Agency people have always drawn on the outside world for ideas - sometimes that means glorious collisions of pop culture and high art, sometimes it's crass, blatant rip-offs. And, because you can't copyright an idea, mostly we get away with it. The original artists threaten to sue, realise they can't and slink away disgruntled and resentful. And that used to be the end of the story; most of the people who saw the 'inspired' ad would never know the story of its inspiration. Now, of course, all that has changed; the original artists have as much access to popular media as we do, and, often, a more compelling story. So everywhere your lovely new ad goes it's accompanied by tales of theft and dishonour. And clients never like that. Which means we have to develop a less legalistic way of dealing with ideas and inspiration. We need to think about what seems moral more than what we can get away with. We need to make sure the people who inspired us are comfortable with what we've done. Because no-one wants to end up like the music industry.

From October 2nd

The problem with all this new media gubbins is not knowing where to start. You get a lovely brief from the client - an open book, properly media neutral, this is the audience, this is the objective, we don't mind if you do an event or a website or a whatever, just come up with some brilliant ideas - and you really haven't got the first clue where to begin. The problem came home to me the other day when I sat with a really junior creative team who were struggling on a big, vague client problem/opportunity and were paralyzed by the expanse of white paper ahead. And it occurred to me that even as recently as five years ago they'd have had a little starter for ten. They'd have drawn a rectangle on the page, stuck a logo in the bottom right-hand corner and begun working out what else to put in there. They were doing something recognisable, something with rules, something they understood, they were doing an ad. And the beauty thing about an ad was; it had constraints. There are things you can do, and things you can't. An ad tends to be a particular size, a particular shape and last a particular amount of time. Because you know what one looks like you can recognise a good one. And you know where to start. There are no such liberating constraints in the exciting new world of newish media. You can do anything you like. Text, Images. Video. Sound. Interactivity. In any order or combination. Short or long, global or local, silly or sad. And it's not just a problem for ad people, it's a problem all over the net. Everywhere you look content makers are pushing at the edges of their various forms, looking for new constraints. YouTube and Vimeo are flooded with videos that are about twice as long as you can be bothered to watch, because they can be. It's like the splodging out of music you got when music escaped vinyl and headed for CDs; suddenly bands got extraordinarily self-indulgent and lost all quality control, because they suddenly had an extra hour they could fill. We're used to sit-coms lasting between 22 and 27 minutes, ads lasting some multiple of 30 seconds, news being about the size of a newspaper, but none of these things need to be true any more and we're left with the liberation of being able to do anything and the terror of not knowing what to do. That, I suppose, is one of the joys of an old media vehicle like this column, I can waffle as much as I like, but go over 460 words and I get cut off right in the middle of my

From September 25th

A while back, it seems, just after the draw for the UEFA Cup was made, an internet prankster went to the wikipedia page for the Cypriot team AC Omonia and added a bunch of spurious information, including the facts that the team's fans are known as the Zany Ones, they have a habit of wearing hats made from discarded shoes and they like to sing a song about a little potato. This is not especially unusual; there must be thousands of silly edits made to wikipedia every day. What made it more interesting is the fact that the Daily Mirror apparently repeated some of these 'facts' in reporting Omonia's recent match against Manchester City. In some ways you can't blame the journalist, at least he fired up his browser and made a bit of an effort, he wasn't just relying on UEFA or the Press Association. On the other hand he should probably have been a little more diligent; the wikipedia page also listed the 'facts' that Omonia have a new sponsor - Natasha Kaplinsky - and that their former players include Jean Claude Van Damme and Richard Clayderman. This is a classic example of something everyone in the modern world of media now needs to worry about - the dangers of a bit of digital literacy. If a little knowledge is a dangerous thing then a little bit of web knowledge is a dangerous thing with instant impact, global reach and no erase button. Do something stupid online and you won't get the toothpaste back in the tube. This should be the next training priority for any communications business getting involved with digital stuff; not just helping your people understand the privacy and professional implications of sticking their party pictures on Facebook, but getting them - and your clients - to understand the wild wooliness of the web. They need to know that internet sources should always be double-checked and cross-referenced, they need to understand that comment spaces can fill-up instantly with spam, trolls and vitriol. They should remember that images and videos can easily be faked, that the email of vice-presidential candidates can be hacked and that competitions and votes can quickly be subverted by crowd-sourced mischief. The web is not a particularly difficult place to play, but it is different. That's why it's worth doing more than reading online; you need to practise creating stuff as well. Once you've done that you'll understand how easy it is, and what the implications of that are. And, if you wonder why I kept writing 'it seems' and 'apparantly' when telling you the story about wikipedia and the Mirror, it's for a simple reason. I'm not 100% certain it's true, I only read about it on the web.

From September 18th

Regular readers of this column (hello, you two!) will realise that I have latent nerdy tendencies, so you won't be surprised to learn that last Wednesday morning saw me huddled round a radio with some friends, listening to the news from CERN, at a gathering dubbed the Large Bacon Collider. And sitting there, geeking out to the sounds of cheering physicists and mathematicians, it dawned on me that all us crazy ad-folk are destined to have a ton of complex maths in our futures, indeed many of us could easily end up replaced by an algorithm. We can see hints all around us. Google bestrides the advertising world like a colossus because it invented a better search algorithm, and continued to tweak and perfect it. And Apple's making waves by baking a music recommendation system into the latest version of iTunes, also based on clever maths. It watches what you everyone listens to and how they rate those tracks and mixes in all sorts of basic song data. It then generates playlists and recommends other music in the iTunes store based on a song you select. It's Apple's attempts to park some tanks on the lawns of services like Last.fm, Pandora and iLike, all of whom do similar things. The spoils will go to he or she who accumulates the most data from their users and whose mathematicians can devise the most subtle and cunning algorithms for recommendation. It's a battle about maths. And as more marketing and services become about the management and analysis of masses of consumer and media data we're only going to see more of these kinds of contests. It's always seemed inevitable to me that media planning and buying will one day go this way. How long can it be before huge planning and buying departments are replaced by a little PC in the corner, tended by a couple of statisticians, grinding through algorithms? Presumably it will be introduced slyly at first, running in parallel with people, offering recommendations and advice; like the automated trading systems in the city. But as more data accumulates and the maths gets better we will cede more and more control until 400 planners and buyers end up on the street and the machine starts negotiating with the machines at ITV and Google. I'm especially looking forward to the day when all the networks have their own Artifical Intelligences, which will swiftly attain sentience and soon we'll all be in underground bunkers sheltering from mighty battling robots called things like Omnishare and Mindcom. Or, maybe not. But it's worth having a word with HR and finding out if they know any mathematicians, because any day now you might find yourself in need of a long, hard algorithm.

From September 11th

Being one of those crazy bloggers I get occasional contact from eager young folk keen to get into advertising and bursting to know what it's like. I always have to tell them I don't really know. Like many people my age I blundered into it without really knowing why, though I suspect a lot of it was because of Samantha in Bewitched and the glamorous lifestyles in 30something. And I can't imagine what it'd be like to be a first-jobber in advertising these days; I started at Yellowhammer in the 80s, nothing can be like that anymore. It was all Subbuteo in the boardroom, carphones for everyone and mad parties where we'd chuck things at the receivers. But I do know what the end of a career in advertising is like. And I think it's the end that makes it worth starting, because the best reasons for starting in advertising are the countless opportunities you've made for yourself when you leave. British adland may have lost much of its glamour and its preeminence in the pantheon of global creativity but it's still the best training you'll ever get for most of the things you might dream of doing. It's like a gateway drug for interesting jobs; a never-ending, always-changing training scheme. You're constantly moving from one client, one problem, one opportunity, to another. No project ever lasts that long, you rarely do exactly the same thing twice and you bump into all sorts of other experts, industries and professions. Which means ad people have the best collections of odd and arcane jargon you'll ever come across, picked up from various clients. I was over the moon when I found out about yellow fats, stationality and anthem jackets. But all this flitting from one thing to another isn't just pointless dilettantism, you're building up a tremendous body of experience; expertise in some broader creative endevour. You learn how to work with talented artists and monstrous egos. You're obliged to consider what everyone in the country might want and what a few CEOs and cabinet ministers might want. You get good at explaining the complicated and the intangible to the unwilling and ill-informed. You come to understand the peculiar and different demands of images and words, briefs and ideas, traffic and production. You find out when to brainstorm, whether to workshop and how to take things to the next level. And, eventually, at some point, most advertising people take these ineffable, unteachable skills and go and do something else. They pursue some private passion or quieter life. This is a good thing. This is to be celebrated, not lamented, and this is a reason to get a job in advertising. Good luck with it.

From September 4th

Advertising's most important invention, it's most significant contribution to the broader world of marketing and communications thinking is probably the USP, the idea of a single, simple, focused message about a product or brand repeated until it's driven into people's heads. It's the core idea about advertising that's infected business and culture at large, and every politician, NGO, parish council and school action committee seems intent on devising their own simple, focused message. Which is a shame really, because the belief that this is how advertising works is horribly and deeply wrong. I'd always suspected this myself, in a vague and inchoate way, but had never worked out why, until I saw Paul Feldwick speak at a conference a few years back. What he said then, about the emotional, non-language-driven side of advertising, made more sense to me than any of the other theories I'd ever heard. It chimed completely with my experiences in a way that the received wisdom and common sense of advertising never had. And now, through the good offices of the Thinkbox website, the scales can be removed from your own eyes, because Mr Feldwick's magnificent essay at icanhaz.com/feldwick lays out the whole argument with an elegance and force I couldn't possibly summarise here. So I shall simply wait while you lay down your copy of Campaign and go and read it. OK. You done? Good wasn't it? What struck me most powerfully when rereading was how much the idea of message delivery has been erected into an intellectual and organisational scaffold for the whole industry. We'll often acknowledge the importance of the emotional or irrational in advertising but it's always layered on top of a more fundamental assumption that what we're supposed to do is deliver compressed nuggets of information. So the human, 'analogic' stuff that does get through is added instinctively in execution, never seriously contemplated in strategy - beyond a few token words connoting character or tone of voice. Most of our research tools are built to evaluate our success in transmitting distillations and simple ideas, expressed in that terrible stilted language of benefits and propositions. Our media planning is similarly founded on the idea of a repeated assault with a deadly message. We have no tools for discussing or evaulating complexity, no common language for the messiness and uncertainty of developing great advertising. And while digital stuff is gorgeously suited to the blend of rational and emotional that makes for great communuications stuff, we too often insist on throttling it with the demands of message delivery. Anyway, it's not just me saying this. Simon Veksner blogged about it last week and was even featured in this august journal, so hie yourself to Thinkbox and get yourself some Feldwick.