I had a few people ask me what was up with my quote in the SMH on Friday, and even though Nina Hendy took a very small soundbite from a much longer conversation, I am completely convinced that the best place for day to day social activity is within the client’s brand team.

But that’s a lot different to the monitoring and insights side of things.

And this is where I see the comments on the Mumbrella post that followed the SMH article getting a bit too simplistic. What gets lost in this debate about who’s posting on a Facebook page and replying to tweets, is the immense amount of insight social media can offer a brand. We’ve recently introduced a suite of social products for MediaCom that take the snake-oil out of social, and the key element that gets clients interested is almost always the insights part of the offering. By having an ongoing social monitoring program, and by having people in the agency offering insight and analysis on this data, everyone benefits; TV, print, press, display, and yes even the guys doing the social media engagement (whether they’re inside or outside the agency).

What I’ve realised through this process is that almost everyone overlooks this value that social monitoring brings to the overall marketing picture. And I now watch with even more interest on how specialist social media agencies (or divisions within agencies, as UM announced today) plan on selling and monetising their services. Because the bulk of real value that a social offering brings to clients actually lies outside social media, so having a business dedicated to just social doesn’t seem like the goldmine many still believe it to be.

I hope we’re beyond the era of snake oil salesman in the social arena, and as a result I hope the conversation can move on from ‘who owns social media, agency or the client?’ to ‘how effectively are you integrating what you’re doing in social into every other part of the marketing mix?’.

It’s no great revelation that social Media and the rise of digital communication have completely shifted the media landscape. The speed with which consumers have adapted to technology has outpaced the speed with which many organisations have adapted.

Technology, and importantly communication through technology, has become ubiquitous and transparent in the lives of consumers. And yet the digital world still feels awkward and ill-fitting for many businesses and brands.

And why is this?

Because the 2 billion people using the internet today have changed how they’re behaving.

They’ve started sharing their opinions with the world.

They’ve started making Skype calls to their friends on the other side of the world.

They’ve started using Google as a verb.

They’ve started to expect an instant reply.

They’re uploading 24 hours of video to YouTube every minute.

They’re watching 2 billion YouTube videos a day.

They’ve started to create advertising for the brands they love.

And they’ve started movements against the ones they don’t.

Almost one third of the world’s population is online, and they’re creating stuff. These 2 billion people have become publishers.

And if you think that these 2 billion people aren’t a threat to the way advertisers, agencies and publishers operate, I’d like to introduce you to Apollo.

Apollo helps you discover the best news content from around the web based on your preferences. Apollo gives you all the top news headlines in real-time, aggregated from 1000’s of the world’s top sources and personalised to your preferences. It is an up-to-the minute, mobile newspaper. As you use the application, the Apollo algorithm learns what articles and sources you enjoy and helps you discover new content based on your personal preferences and viewing history.

And importantly, apps like Apollo and social-news aggregator Flipboard aren’t showing users any ads. The users are the new publishers. The editor is now a combination of my social network and complex algorithms.  And there doesn’t seem to be much of a role for advertisers.

Essentially, publishing is the new literacy. Publishing is now abundant. And if we look back 600 years to the birth of the printing industry we find that literacy became abundant at the same time as scribes lost their jobs.

So what of publishers, at the time when everybody becomes a publisher?

Publishers create immense value for agencies and our clients. Newspapers have for more than 150 years given us a place to get our message across to consumers. They have provided us with an audience.

And with the birth of digital, the publishers evolved. They created audiences, and gave us valuable spaces in which we could advertise. In less than 2 decades, digital advertising has gone from a non-existent industry, to one worth $2 billion a year in Australia.

But now, if we look at devices like the iPad and how it’s changing media consumption, it’s seems like we’re back at the starting gate again. Consumers aren’t paying attention to our ads online, and more and more they’re actually behaving in ways that cut us out. To continue to be able to talk to consumers, we need to understand that their behaviour has changed. They have become publishers, and that completely changes the landscape for advertisers.

Clay Shirky brilliantly highlights what happens when we move from a scarcity of publishers to an abundance of them…

…surplus always breaks more things than scarcity. Scarcity means valuable things become more valuable. Surplus, on the other hand, means previously valuable things stop being valuable, which freaks people out.

I think it’s a fair observation to say that, on the whole, many organisations are freaked out by the changes that they are seeing in the digital world.

But the challenge for publishers is relatively simple: Create something that is so compelling, that audiences will seek it out.

Create something that understands the changes in behaviour. That understands that people care about sharing content with their friends, and having content recommended back. Something that uses complex technology to present a simple, enjoyable experience.

It’s possible that in five or ten years, the launch of the iPad will be considered as the beginning of a revolution. We really don’t know what sort of impact these devices will have. But no matter what, experimentation and innovation are key.

The thing about being an innovator however, is that there will be failures. And todays publishers could learn a lot from looking at the people who were the catalysts for the revolution we find ourselves in. These innovators weren’t afraid of failure. In fact, in Silicon Valley failure is seen as a badge of honour.

While I’m sure today we’ll hear all about the success of News innovation with The Australian iPad app, It’s just as valuable to hear about, and learn from the failures. We’re on the bleeding edge here, and I can assure you that in the world of technology and innovation, nobody is getting everything right, all of the time.

The winners of the digital era will not simply be those that outthink, but those that outfail.

Communication has changed more in the last decade than it did during the first three hundred years of the printing press.

And this is not a change that can be resisted. This is behaviour, and it can only be embraced.

For advertisers, this change means being brave and stepping outside of your comfort zone sometimes. Devices like the iPad are giving us so many new ways to talk to and talk with consumers. These new opportunities won’t always look and feel like advertising as we know it, but to remain relevant in consumers lives we have to talk to them on their terms.

For media and creative agencies, it means we have to keep exploring and examining. It’s never been so important to understand the intricacies of consumers lives, how and why they’re doing what they’re doing. And this exploration informs our entire business, from the initial planning phase all the way through to the execution of an idea.

And finally for publishers, this massive change means they have to understand how and why people are consuming content. They have to innovate, and create something that people choose. Something that they seek out.

A few people today linked me to this video on Flipboard. It’s the next big thing, the ‘reason I finally want an iPad’.

But I’ve got a problem with it. And actually, I have a problem with almost all of these 3rd generation social apps.*

For the guy in the video, I’m sure that’s a totally rad app. It pulls in all the interesting content from his super interesting friends. And when he runs out of super interesting content from his super interesting friends, he can start browsing the broader app content, like finding out all the news about what amazing thing Apple is doing next. He can even share content back out to his amazing friends!

But I don’t know anyone like that guy in the video. People have boring friends, and exciting friends. They have different social circles, and stuff is shared differently in those social circles. Every person that I’m connected to on any social network participates at a different rate, in a different way. But I know who, and what, is important to me.

Social networks online are just like social networks offline. They’re utterly chaotic, unpredictable, disorganised, and constantly changing shape. And much of the innovation that’s happening in social media at the moment seems to be around attempting to control that chaos. This control comes from creating code that apparently analyses and optimises my connections and their shared content, presenting me with the sterilised, iPad-friendly view of my world.

Admittedly, I’ll be giving Flipboard a go. But the next awesome thing in social media for me, won’t be about streamlining, simplifying or automating. I’m not sure what it will be, but lately I’ve been feeling that perhaps, deep down, I’d prefer a little bit of oldschool chaos.

* I just made that term up, admittedly. But if you think about it, the simple act of connecting online was the 1st generation social apps (email, IRC, IM). 2nd generation apps then, were platforms that utilised the social graph to make connections and share content (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter). 3rd generation social apps then, are the layers that are being built to sit over the top of the 2nd generation. There’s a general concensus that no one wants to re-build their social network connections, so all 3rd generation social apps are simply layering on top. Most are trying to simplify, or somehow automate discovery.

The thing is, Titanium is meant to be the best idea in the world of advertising, marketing, and brands from the past year. And this year, Twelpforce won it.

The best way I’ve heard to judge ‘the best’ was that while gold might be an idea that makes you jealous because it wasn’t yours, Titanium is an idea that makes you humble. I like that, and I really believe it’s true (and not just for creative awards).

Nike+ does that. The Unicef Tap project does that. The Million Project does that. Obama for America does that.

So does Twelpforce make me humble? To be honest, it doesn’t. But it does makes me excited. I don’t have a problem with Twelpforce winning Titanium. The thing is, the discussion shouldn’t be around whether the judges were right to award it Titanium. The discussion should be around what this means. It’s a signifier that the advertising landscape has changed. And if we’re to believe the best minds in the idustry that are assembled into the judging panel, this is the idea that truly humbles them.

What an ace time to be in this job.

Because Twelpforce has nothing to do with a big idea. There’s no helicopters, no world-renowned director, no multi-million dollar budget. There’s simply a bunch of guys in an agency that saw what was happening on twitter, and sold it to their client.

So this year’s Cannes Titanium was a signal to the advertising world. The true talent and genius in your agency is not the awkward aspiring filmmaker who turns up at the agency at 11am, half an hour after getting out of bed. The talent is now found in the guys that can see opportunity in how people are communicating, and how to leverage it. And crucially, they can then sell that opportunity to clients. Make them comfortable, make them believe it, and execute it without backing down on anything.

Since starting at MediaCom two weeks ago, I’ve been buried in two big pieces of business that have traditionally focused on two clear areas of marketing: brand awareness and driving response. This approach was once fine, especially as it was pretty much dictated by the tools that marketers had at their disposal. But now, brands need to be so much more in order to define themselves. There is a mountain of information and data and entertainment and content available to people today. And instead of continuing to do their best to be scarce when it comes to these things, brands should be abundant.

Where does all of this leave us? Instead of thinking like the little Goldilocks who wants “just right” amount of information to simplify things, we should in fact embrace complexity full-force and turn to exploring the ways we gather, organize, and present the crazy amount of information that we encounter every day. In other words, when we talk about choice today, let’s talk now about defaults, social clues, product categories, and a design of our decision-making contexts.

People indeed do have cognitive limitations that skew their choices in certain ways that we are not aware of - that’s a fact - but now they also have this powerful digital tools that can act like our decision-making scaffolds and that can make us aware of all our mental illusions that we could not see before. And our ability to see all those factors that influence how we choose may reduce our need to invent explanations for our behaviors.

These two paragraphs spell out clearly a view I’ve come to believe in more and more lately. Brands (and I’m not just talking corporations here, I’m talking governments, movements, and even ‘personal’ brands) need to do a couple simple things to remain relevant. Be abundant, and be yourself. If you create as much as you can, while remaining true to yourself, your role in peoples lives will be much simpler for them to quantify.

In a world of complex mobile app wireframes and social media strategies and response curves and reach and frequency, that seems like a pretty compelling strategy to me.

Being the disagreeable type, I answered with “no”. I never actually saw it in the mag (our subscription didn’t seem to turn up that week), so I’m not entirely sure what the other respondents said. But i thought I’d post it up here to hear any comments, and also because I’ve got another post half done that follows somewhat logically on from this.

Most major Australian brands are at least on their way to spending enough in digital media. But this is just media spend, not investment, and the list of big brands investing sufficiently in digital and social is very short.

In social media, this lack of investment is almost understandable. From a client point of view there is still a lack of real measurement in social. Without proven and established metrics, it is hard to justify investment. I see this as a challenge to agencies (creative, media and PR) to create real, measureable effectiveness in this space.

In the broader digital sense, investment is lacking fundamentally because of campaign-based thinking. Short-term business objectives from clients result in short-term ideas from agencies. The real opportunity in digital is to create long-term platforms and an engaged audience that seek out your brand. But this requires investment.

It’s not a surprising situation to be in. We have clients and agencies climbing out of a GFC, with structures and processes designed for another world. And therein lies the opportunity to really stand out. Now is the time to be taking the lead, by thinking differently and investing in innovation.

I just finished up my session at Ad:Tech. It was a great session with Dale Cohen from Bigpond, Julian Peterson of TimeOut, and moderated by Tony Palmer of C4. Our topic was “Your Campaign is Irrelevant”, and we framed the discussion around five key questions. We didn’t want this to be a bunch of guys sitting around agreeing with each other, so we all purposely took a fairly radical stance to flare up a bit of debate. I put together a few notes before the session, so thought I’d post them up here for a bit of discussion. Obviously they’re not fully formed ideas, so apologies for not fleshing them out a bit more.

1. Do marketers take advantage of publishers deep knowledge of their audience to ensure their campaign is relevant?

Where once the broadcasters, media and creative didn’t need to share the same insights (because they really didn’t need to), we now should. And as a creative agency, it usually feels a long way between us and the publishers.

We’re getting better at leveraging the knowledge about audiences. Either through closer relationships with our media agencies, or just by sidestepping them altogether and working closely with publishers.

I want to be wary of accepting that publishers actually have such deep knowledge as well. Yes they have audience data, but that doesn’t mean it’s accurate. Without the feedback mechanisms inherent in social technology, publishers need to push forward on getting better and better at knowing their audience.

The onus should not on creative agencies to be pushing publishers (and media) to help us leverage this knowledge. Publishers should be fighting to stay relevant, as digital progresses we have more and more options for how to answer a client’s brief that don’t involve traditional paid media.

2. Are you wasting your money by driving irrelevant traffic to crap websites?

The days of cookie cutter digital strategy are well and truly over. Most digital marketers now are clear about their goals, which has helped overcome the days of tumbleweed microsites.

Platforms are now a key outcome of a campaign, and the reason ‘campaign thinking’ needs to die. Long term platforms are about building an audience for engagement. On this point I’m not sure the value that publisher partnerships really provide. We can build our own platforms or utilise existing ones that aren’t campaign-timed, but I’m yet to see a publisher offer a great solution for ongoing engagement post-campaign.

It’s about moving from interruption based to interaction based. Campaigns running through traditional online models just don’t do this. Publishers offer the same old display formats, and they’re interruption based. Even the innovation evident in the past 12 months has simply increased interuption.

3. So what happens when your campaign is over?

If it’s a publisher partnership, you’ve got nothing. We shouldn’t be ending campaigns, simply changing the frequency or type of communication. Every brand needs to be always on, because the consumer is always there. This is as much a client issue as anything else, but it’s the role of all stakeholders to make this happen.

At this point of the conversation I gave the example of Best Job in The World being a failure in this respect. As I said it I could just picture the comments being taken utterly out of context, but thought it was a point worth making.

With the benefit of hindsight, Tourism Queensland didn’t leverage the huge audience they had anywhere near as well as they could have. They didn’t create a platform to utilise once the campaign was over. The idea could have expanded into other markets (Best Job in Brazil), or more likely just get more granular (Best Pub in the World, Best Beach in the World, Best View in the World).

4. Will brands become publishers and will publishers become irrelevant?

The consumer doesn’t care who the publisher is. So why would I waste money putting my brand on your website when I can just build my own destination? The one answer to that is that brands aren’t willing to outfail each other. Platforms like the ones P&G and Disney own were most often acquired once they had reached a critical mass. For every BabyCentre that gets acquired by a multinational, there’s a hundred similar sites that have failed.

Again, publishers need to be fighting to stay relevant, providing real and useful data about their audience, and offering real value.

The description of a publisher needs to change. Publishers as they stand will become irrelevant, and in their place creative agencies will be leveraging Foursquare or Hulu or other location/social based services. As long as publishers think they are simply competing with other large content providers, they aren’t playing in the right field.

Publishers have their audience because of content. That content is enabled because advertisers put  ads on there. If the publishers can’t move with technology, they will become irrelevant.

5. Is technology the answer to the next big idea?

Technology isn’t the answer, but it is crucial for any big idea to succeed.

You can get caught up in technology, otherwise you will end up creating a great idea that is only relevant and works for 5% of the country. Technology shouldn’t be used until it has reached the level of habit within the audience. Not even ubiquity, but habit.

As a creative agency, we’ve stopped making ads and started solving problems. Technology is often at the heart of this, and this is the reason that everyone involved in this process (creative and media agencies, publishers and clients) all need to be working together better and innovating together.

Last week Guvera started their limited beta. I gave it a shot, then I gave it a bit of a hosing on Twitter.

Within minutes, @Guvera replied with a somewhat unconvincing 140 character regurgitation of their business model. Within an hour I had a voicemail message from Josh at Guvera, wanting to have a chat about my experience.

It always impresses me when people are willing to track me down to find out more about my 140 character rants. It’s happened a couple times before, most notably with @RichardSlatter of Wotnews, who I’ve now caught up with quite a few times on their offering.

So I gave Josh a call back yesterday and had a chat about Guvera. I promised him I’d have another go of the site, and offer some feedback.

While I don’t normally write about specific sites or campaigns, I’m writing down my thoughts here. Not to publicly slam Guvera, but rather in the hope that the clever people who read this blog will be able to add even more value and help a startup out. And also because I think there’s lessons to be learned at a broader level by really pulling apart what ticks and what doesn’t in a new idea such as this.

A couple things before I start. I read this wonderful thought on Noah Brier’s blog yesterday: “…critique is about identifying the germs of ideas worth development despite the current holes and mistakes”.  I’m hoping that the following is completely in the spirit of that thought. Also I’m going to use Joe Crump’s seven ‘Digital DNA‘ elements to try to keep this brief and succinct (and because I think these seven attributes are still completely relevant and slightly brilliant).

The Guvera experience, to my cynical mind, just doesn’t feel that genuine. It’s not like I feel like I’m selling my soul to the devil (or McDonalds in this case) in order to get my music, it’s just that I don’t feel like the brand presence is a truly authentic one. Nor do I really feel like I’m supporting artists by using the service.

I’ll make two concessions here. Firstly, I don’t think a younger and more mainstream audience would find the advertising as inauthentic as I do. And secondly, I see this as a challenge for the brands who are involved in Guvera to make it feel more authentic. This is still early days, but the quicker we can move away from visually intrusive billboard communication with a slightly related playlist, and to a truly personalised music experience enabled by the brand, the better. I just can’t see the service getting traction until that happens.

Adaptiveness is an absolute must have for me in any music site or app. If it’s not learning about me, and making recommendations, I don’t have much use for it. This is a hard thing. Last.FM gets it pretty much right, Pandora does an alright job, but outside of those two I have very rarely seen music recommendation done well enough that I seek it out. For this, I still stick to analog computing (an email list with about 40 friends who are music nuts, and Facebook), which is social behaviour which could be replicated within a service like Guvera (I’ll come back to that later).

But Guvera is still falling well short of the benchmark in adaptiveness regardless of cutting edge recommendation engines. I can log in to a WhatCD or Waffles account, search for an artist I like, and within a couple clicks be discovering other artists I’ve never heard, but might like. This is all done through fairly simple algorithms.

On the advertising side of things, I thing it’s tough to criticise the service for lack of adaptiveness at this point. (I also think it’s rather moot to focus too much on the advertising platform at the moment anyway, if Guvera can’t get the music service right, there will be no user base to advertise too). But this is somewhere I really do see potential. The way Guvera can be successful (and unique) is to create truly useful, authentic brand experiences. A truly adaptive platform will achieve this, and even in the cutthroat world of music services, I believe will succeed.

Which brings me on to relevance. Guvera doesn’t feel useful to me as a music fan. It’s existing core offers (free music & altruistic consumption) are available to me elsewhere, and even though it is only through separate channels (torrents & iTunes), the ease of both of those channels still makes them far more appealing.

But I can’t help but think these two core offers are not what is going to draw users in anyway. What will draw users in is a new experience, the challenge is that in almost every arena there is already stiff competition. Discovery (Last.FM, Pandora), socialness (Blip.FM, Facebook), endless choice (Spotify), all these things have been done, and done well. Which doesn’t mean they can’t be done better, and I actually believe the brand experience side of things is a real strength here. We know people are happy to brand themselves, so if Guvera can create social music discovery with a seemingly endless  selection, curated in part by brands I love, then they will have created something truly transformative.

And I guess the lack of a transformative experience was the root of my disappointed tweet. After what was no small amount of hype, Guvera just didn’t raise my expectations of what music could be (and yes I realise that they will eventually branch out into video and other media, but if the music isn’t right, I don’t think the rest will follow). I think some of this is because it is actually quite a complicated offering. I’m sure a lot of people were like me when they first used Spotify or Pandora or Blip.fm or even MySpace and thought “Damn, I had this idea, why didn’t I ever get around to making it happen?”. Guvera though, I certainly didn’t have this idea. Which is not to say it’s destined for failure (I certainly never had the idea for Twitter of Foursquare), but rather highlights two clear things for me.

Firstly, the unique story of Guvera needs to be communicated to the average user. If the value of brand interactions, the altruism of artists getting paid, and what I hope will become the social and discovery aspects of the music are all communicated as a whole, Guvera is a truly unique and interesting experience. What telling that story does is gives people the desire to spend an extra couple of minutes trying it out, a vital extra couple minutes to work out just how stuff works and why it’s valuable to them. At the moment, users are just dumped in to a search box.

Secondly, they need to listen to their users. Complex user experiences like Guvera can succeed, but invariably do not follow the path that their creators intended. People will find value in areas that the developers didn’t expect, and may ignore the features that those close to the project think make the site brilliant. Twitter is a great example of this (hashtags, replies, retweets, lists are all a result of user evolution of the service), and already we’re seeing signs of FourSquare taking a similar path. Both are services which superficially offer little immediate value to me, it’s only through continued exposure and exploration that they become must-haves. I think startups like Guvera can learn a lot from that.

Overall my Guvera experience wasn’t immersive. I didn’t loose track of time. In actual fact, I found myself pushing through to try and spend a bit more time on the site, just in case I wasn’t ‘getting it’. I think there’s a few factors to this, in terms of the user story and experience as I mentioned above, but also the interface, usability and design side of the site. But all of these things are improved post-beta in any service, and I actually don’t believe they are as crucial as many believe in the success of a startup.

What is critically missing at this stage to make Guvera a truly immersive experience is the socialness. And this means both the digital socialness (using data) and analog socialness (using my friends). I’ll briefly go over the key areas I think could be improved upon here, because they’re pretty obvious and I can only hope that they’re already in a roadmap.

When I signed up, to get credits to actually listen to any music I had to fill in a survey of my likes and dislikes. I get this, it’s to build a profile for potential advertisers, but it’s a massive barrier and I think completely unnecessary. It can be overcome in two ways. Firstly, pull all the data you can from my Facebook or Twitter or Shelfari or Last.FM or Flickr or Dopplr profiles. Seamless and painless. Then give me a bunch of credits and let me get on with using the site. Then, over time use data to build my profile up. But please don’t ask me to build up a profile of myself, it causes severe existential crises.

Once I was using Guvera, I felt very much like I was in a room on my own. I was favouriting channels and (trying to) download tracks, but this activity was very much in a vacuum. Why could I not tell my friends on Twitter or Facebook that I’d just become a fan of DJ Hero playlist? And why could I not see (and interact with) other users currently on that channel? And if this whole system is going to work on a credits basis, why are you not utilising me to tell my friends (who no doubt have similar musical tastes to me) about a channel, then reward me if I get them on board as well?

Finally in terms of socialness in the real world, there’s still a long way to go. When we talk about ideas spreading via social networks, it’s easy to fall in to the trap of thinking that means a ‘Share on Facebook’ button. It doesn’t. The way I share things like Guvera with my social network is by telling them about it over a beer, showing them on my iPhone. Guvera needs to get out of the browser and become a service that people can make their own, carry with them, and truly become a social platform.

Before I finish, I’d like to say absolutely nothing about the Guvera model of artist payment. I don’t actually believe it’s right. I don’t believe it’s sustainable. And I don’t think that it matters one bit to the success of the site.

I’ll finish up with a thought on the advertising side of things. The reason I’m writing this, the reason I’m willing to give Guvera a go, is because I’m really interested in the brand side of the service. I actually don’t know how I want to use it, but I know it could be really exciting. We didn’t believe that people wanted to be friends with brands on social networks. We were wrong. My instinct tells me that I don’t want brands encroaching on the single largest and most personal part of my life, my music. But I know, deep down, somehow, I’m wrong.

I really like George Dyson’s response to Frank Schirrmacher’s “Age of the Informavore” talk, published in Edge #303.

“Google, Facebook, Twitter, not to mention the Web as a whole — are effectively operating as large analog computers, although there remains a digital substrate underneath”.

It’s worth contemplating that the next time you think you work in digital. Because the really good work is no longer digital. Yes it uses digital as a platform, as a method for delivery. But the experience inherent in the idea, is truly analog. It’s foundation is always in an emotional response, a human interaction.

And then Dyson finishes…

“When you are an informavore drowning in digital data, analog looks good.”

Which gave me a glimmer of hope for advertising and marketing. Display advertising as we know it, all that  intrusive and usually poorly targetted noise that we are bombarded with daily, is very much ‘digital’ advertising. Calculated through complex algorithms by cold computers who don’t understand me despite their 8-core processors.

But the work that I really admired last year was actually very much analog.

Analog rather than digital is the difference between going to the Volkswagen website to look at brochureware about the newest Golf, and downloading an iPhone game allowing you to race (essentially test drive) the same car. It’s the difference between putting your views on being the leader of the free world on your campaign site, and actively recruiting people to form communities and spread your word. It’s the difference between creating an online stats database for high-school footballers, and allowing you to visualise and compare your stats to your heroes and peers.

I think if we can start our work with the mindset of “What behaviour do we want to create that people will want and need?” rather than “How do we do this thing that we’ve alway done, but do it better digitally?”, we could more easily be creating these analog interactions in a digital world.

The more of these experiences that we create, the more experiences that people will actually seek out and want to be part of, the less interruptive and irrelevant noise we will need to create. And that can only be a good thing.

Postscript: Re-reading this post, I realise that what I’ve said is blindingly obvious to those of you that inhabit the echo chamber that is digital advertising blogging. But I’m going to post it anyway, partially because I wrote it, so I may as well, but also because I don’t think I’ve quite done justice to Dyson’s thoughts. So go check out his response  (and the many other briliant responses)  to Schirrmacher at Edge.

A post on Advertising Lab got my attention today. It’s a recently de-classified ‘rumour manual’ from 1943. And it’s directives and ideas seem to eerily echo (or perhaps just be interestingly relevant) to the modus operandi of today’s social media strategies.

Go check it out, it’s worth a read.

This military connection to what I do isn’t entirely new to me though. As I read through John Robb’s ‘Brave New War’ I was constantly drawn to the parallels between modern warfare and marketing (to the point that in some ways, you can see the future of marketing in war). I briefly mentioned this a while back in ‘Dark Blue Swans‘, but there’s a couple key paragraphs from the book that I thought were worth putting up here. I’ve always planned on putting together some form of thinking around them and making a nice cohesive point, but figure I’ll never get around to it. So here they are, with minimal commentary…

“The promise is the central connection between all the members in the community. Each member can have specific motivations that are substantially different from any of the others. In the case of warfare, these alternative motivations can be patriotism, hatred of occupation, ethnic bigotry, religious fervor, tribal loyalty, or what have you. It doesn’t matter as long as they agree with the plausible promise.”

I love this idea of a plausible promise. And I can’t help but think it’s an idea that’s somewhat foreign to marketing and advertising. Throughout warfare there’s always been a plausible promise. For a Trojan army of 30,000 it was a singular belief that they all understood and believed, and now for guerilla movements it’s a singular belief that can be fragmented into many different exegeses.

When it comes to marketing, I’m not sure that the promise (or single minded proposition or point of difference or whatever you need to call it) was ever that plausible. But it didn’t seem to matter. You shouted at people telling them your detergent gave the whitest whites, or your razor gave the closest shave, and the consumer bought it.

Now the market is fragmented and connected. Your plausible promise needs to not only be true, but it needs to be applicable to a  range of market fragments. If it’s not true, the connected consumer will soon find out. And if it’s not applicable to diverse fragments, you won’t get the critical mass of communication that you need.

“A critical mass of participation is necessary. A certain minimum number of participants, either individuals or component groups, are necessary for microaction to translate into macroaction. It also means that without a minimum number of interactions between these participants, the statistical nature of macrointelligence won’t emerge. The simple catchphrase for this is more is different.”

This understanding of critical mass is hugely important, and up to now usually ignored. We’re guilty of creating niche campaigns that are designed to spread through social networks, but are only targetting a thin slice of a total market while completely ignoring the rest of the relevant slices.

If you can create a plausible promise that is applicable to a mass of fragments, you can gain a critical mass that will amplify your communication massively. It doesn’t matter if the interperatation of the promise varies slightly, if you have ten groups all spreading the same core promise in their own way, you will have something that is far greater than the sum of its parts.

In the case of warfare you’re talking macrointelligence, but in the case of advertising you’re talking macroawareness. And even though the digital marketing landscape might be about focusing on a more and more fragmented audience, it’s hard to ignore the power that this type of macroawareness could have.