I accepted to be one of the 5 speakers for the annual congress of the “Fondation Marketing” annual students event of November 6th 2007 in the Bozar (probably Brussels most beautiful location). The theme will be Consumer centric Marketing (defined in the event desciption as user generated, participative marketing and targeted advertising)
I just received the briefing. I am totally free to define the approach and the content of my presentation and I’m expected to talk during approximatively 40 minutes. The briefing mail states that the audience is demanding (gasp!). 700 attendees are expected (gasp again).
I didn’t determined the details of my presentation but I’m currently reading blogs posts like “The dumbness of the crowds” or “Are you a giver?”nfor inspiration
If you had to propose me a link on your blog to inspire me for this future presentation, which one would it be?
Oh my! I haven’t blogged for a while… but I’m back.
Besides 2 wonderful holiday weeks in Egypt, I’ve been busy with a side-project (the title of the post is related to this project) that took me a lot of time lately. I stay sneaky about it but I’ll publish it on this blog in the coming weeks.
I’m very happy to announce that I’m not a smoker anymore thanks to the Allen Carr’s method
I’ll be back with a real post in the next few hours. In the meantime, I’ll browse my favourite blogs and read everything about the Blogger Social event.
I had the chance today to hear a brilliant presentation by Charles Leadbeater. I wrote down a few key messages:
- Give people tools, see how they us them and only then, build your business model
- If you treat users as (just) consumers, you won’t be able to make them help you to innovate
- The most innovative organisations (based on free collaboration) today have no headquarters and no hierarchy, they are much quicker in innovation than any big fixed rigid organisation
- Succes may lead to conservatism. If you have a history of succes, you may tend to repeat what led you to succes.
- If you want to see your way into the future, act as you were a new entrant with low budgets
I’m in Lisbon today for the Microsoft Digital Advertising Solution sales kick off 2008. After the usual loud R’n'B music, the “Wow, look at this”, the “Make some noise to show how much fun you’ll have”, the “give yourself a big round of applaus” and a few “that’s a FANTASTIC achievement”, we had a short opening by Marc Bresseel and a 45 minutes speech by Chris Dobson, our sales VP. I won’t (and I guess, I may not) go into the details of what have been said this morning but on statement of Chris Dobson’s presentation caught my attention: “Internet doesn’t change people behaviour (…) technology change, not behaviours“
This is an interesting statement but I still haven’t figure out if I agree with that. We may tend to exagerate the impact of internet on what we are but I think that some of our behaviours are the result of our internet experience. We have friends we have never seen, we are expecting brands to listen, we want to consume media on demand, we don’t perceive advertising as we used to do, we participate, we contribute, we share, we aggregate, we syndicate and we engage. Is that enough to call that a major behaviour change? And what kind of users are impacted?
Toby tagged me for the 8 random things game (thanks Toby): The idea is to list eight random facts/habits about myself. I don’t know what kind of curse is waiting for me if I break the chain.
Ryan K (Iowa) : “I tagged 8 people and was hired THE SAME day by a big company”
Christina K (New York): “A few hours after tagging 8 people, I met the real coke light delivery man in the lift of my office. Believe me…this really works!!!”
Luc D (Brussels): “A few days after tagging 8 people, I won the lottery of $ 50″
The web 2.0-power-to-the-people cliché made me realize that we could summarize the social media phenomenon by using 3 major concepts of Marxism.
Proletariat: Joel de Rosnay renamed it ProNetariat and opposed it to “infocapitalism”. The pronetariat is basically us… all the people that are (trying to) own the means of (information) production. In marxist theory, the goal of the proletariat (aka the working class) is to displace the capitalist system and change the social relationship through a period called the “dictatorship of Proletariat”. The social media era resembles somehow this marxist concept: the working class became the networking class but basically there is a class struggle between Pronetariat and infocapitalists who both seek the mastering of the means of information production.
But the comparison has 2 major limits: The first discrepency is that in the networked world, information is not a scarce resource at all, the second is that the control of the means of production is not linked to the profit (for the moment)
Class consciousness: “Class consciousness refers to the self-awareness of a social class and its capacity to act in its own rational interests”. We, bloggers, start to be aware of our influence power (and if I may say, we often overestimate it), more as a group than as individuals. We come from a society were physical power was replaced by economical power. Here comes the time of informational power…
Infrastructure and superstructure: The infrastructure is the sum of the means that allow production and the superstructure is the sum of subjective elements meeting the infrastructure. It’s funny to look at the evolution from that perspective. The infrastructure of social media (forums, broadband connections, XML,…) is there for a long time but the subjective elements were not there yet. Our subjectivity gave a new sense to the infrastructure.
Those comparisons may seem a little far stretched… and they are. We could also find analogies between the web and the very opposite of marxism like, for instance, the libertarian deregulation philosophers and their spontaneous order theory.
Even if this might seem trivial and useless, I think it’s interesting to use that kind of filters to think about our media from a different angle.
PS: I have groucho marxist tendencies. Here is one of my favourite quotes: “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and then misapplying the wrong remedies.”
As usual, I spent my evening thinking about the weakest aspects of my presentation and how I’ve could done better. I’m a little disappointed by my explanations on scale-free networks and I make plans on how I will rebuild the speech with more subtleties next time.
But overall, I’m happy about last night. I think (I hope) I wasn’t ridiculous in front of all the beautiful minds and brains of the audience and that my presentation had a few thought-provoking moments.
To illustrate Microsoft belief in real life-networks, I used a quote of Francis Bacon (I initially believed it was the painter but it’s the philosopher) who once wrote “Friends are thieves of time”. I wish I had spent more time with my fellow bloggers last night: Luc, Pascal, Caroline,… and I regret I hardly or didn’t had the opportunity to chat with Maarten, Dominique (who posted a great piece of feedback), Valérie, Steven, Pieter, Tanguy, Bert, and many others. I also realized we just forgot to invite some major bloggers like for instance, Robin (our blogger database needs serious improvements). Hopefully, we’ll have new conversation opportunities real soon.
I just created my account on slideshare. In around 30 minutes, I will present the slideshow below at the second Microsoft Belgium circle of media where we gathered journalists and key Belgian bloggers. Most of the slides aren’t self-explanatory but I trust your interpreation and imagination power
As told previously, it’s my first presentation to an audience made of experts. I’ll tell you in my next post how it went.
I decided to call my new presentation “the permanent revolution”. It’s probably already a cliché and it’s something we’re all very excited about. It’s even a condition for our marketing blogs to survive. We need change and innovation to feed our blogs. I’m not sure that advertisers are always as excited as we are. Our message often remains: Incredible things are happening now but you ain’t seen nothing yet! Some advertisers tend to wait the next big thing, maybe thinking that after that, the innovation pace will slow down a little… but it won’t.
Where will the permanent revolution lead us? IMHO, the web is a matter of virtuous circles. The major trend is more and more integration of the services and the gadget mashups we see poping up everywhere today are the biggest sign of what the web will become. I already mentionned photosynth that could lead to the first real-virtual world (a giant mashup of flickr and second life). Like Marc Bresseel explained at the IAB Interact forum, Photosynth is the result of a virtuous circle made of Simplified authoring, improved search and improved metadata. If this product is marketed properly, it simply could change the way we are experiencing the web.
The “première” of my presentation will be tuesday at the “circle of media”, where Microsoft invited a lot of journalists and a bunch a very bright Belgian bloggers. It’s the first time I will talk about our media to a very informed audience… Wish me luck.
“A website grade of 75 for badideaindeed.wordpress.commeans that of the thousands of websites that have previously been submitted to the tool, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 75% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness. The algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over a dozen different variables, including search engine data, website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others.”
It’s better than my college results. My parents will be proud.
Measurement? Certainly not! Our medium is much more measurable than any other.
Reach? Not any more
Creative possibilities? Ha! I don’t feel I have to argue on this one
Standardization? No big deal. There are a few standards even if sky is the limit for the creative people
Price? Impact? According to many case studies, the web offers the best return on investment (of course, this will depend on the sanity of the media mix)
So, what else?
Well, one annoying detail actually: when you book an online campaign you’re not totally sure that you and especially your distribution network people will actually see it. We usually sell with a “share of voice” principle (most campaigns on msn Belgium have 15 to 30% SOV) and that really bothers the advertisers. They want to be able to show their ad not only on a screenshot or by using the page refresh function untill they see their product. It’s not rational but that’s the reason why a lot of media buyers buy space in the advertisers’ favorite magazine (even if it’s not selective on the target group) or an outdoor advertising near the advertisers’ home, on top of the normal plan.
Of course, discounts and commissioning is another problem that will only be solved with the growth of investments.
I sent a mail about 10 days ago to Lewis Green and Bob Glaza about a mysterious band based in Belgium called Bang Lassi. Last friday, Lewis wrote, in his fantastic “Fridays and weekends rock”-series, a great post about Bang Lassi, echoed in a very creative way by Bob Glaza. Here’s a line from Lewis’ post
Mostly we will look into Classic Rock Bands. But today I feature a band that a few weeks ago was introduced to me by Philippe Deltenre, a Belgium friend. The band, Bang Lassi, blew me away.
I also left a link to a Bang Lassi song on Tim Brunelle’s blog who replied
I’m hearing Thin White Duke-era Bowie, the Beach Boys, some Queen, some early Yes, a little King Crimson and some Dresden Dolls. Fun track. Really nice harmonies and orchestration!
I have a profound respect for the musical opinions of Lewis, Bob and Tim since those guys have a very broad musical culture.
Bang Lassi is clearly in an end sixties-early seventies tradition: the music is complex and rich, far away of the usual mainstream airplay routine. Their approach of music can be regarded as radical and without compromission and I wonder: What can web 2.0 and social media do for them? How can we identify the influencers that will spread the Lassimen work? Which “marketing strategy” would you advise?
Wednesday evening was the momentum of the festival with the cyberlions awards. The creative works of the winners is totally amazing and they show the power of rich media and interactive formats. My favorites weren’t always the grand prix winners. Here’s my selection:
No, I didn’t received a gold lion at the Cannes advertising Festival but I was surprized and honored by Mark Goren’s post, who mentionned me in his thinking blogger award shortlist along with excellent bloggers like Matt Dickman, Valeria Maltoni, Andy Nulman and Kris Hoet. I think that most of my favorite blogs were already awarded. I’ll try to bring new blogs in this big link-love fest.
My awards are going to:
Chaos scenario: I feel very different from Cam Beck but his posts are very smart and provoking. That’s why I read him very often. Cam is taking me out of my comfort zone and I’m thankful for that.
Bob Garfield: I am passionated about Bob’s chaos 2.0 scenario. I think this is one of the most important things written about advertising in the last years.
I’m suffering at Cannes since the network of hotel Martinez is saturated for a few days. I’m writing from the Microsoft cyberlounge. For the rest, I’m having a great time, I’m sunburned and I’ll come back with a lot of blog material
Yesterday, during the Microsoft conference, we saw a corporate clip about connection technology. The video started with 2 buddhist monks somewhere near Lhassa, surfing the web and sending photos through mobile devices. This reminded me a beautiful encounter I had with Matthieu Ricard, one of the most famous and wisest european buddhist monks. One of the key principles of buddhism is that you have to renounce anger. I asked Matthieu Ricard if he had succeeded in this renouncement and he confessed that in the last years, he lost his temper once: when another monk spilled tea on his laptop. In his monastry, he lives without running water, without sewer, with very frugal food but with a high speed internet connection.
I guess that when you’re a geek and that you manage to live without the web, you might reach the state of Buddha. After 2 days, I feel that I’m not ready.
Last Post before Cannes. As from monday, it will be an overdose of advertising. I’m looking at the program (workshops and conferences, meetings with fine colleagues, wild parties, an award ceremony, a Microsoft party, 2 boat trips and many discussions with our customers) and wonder when I’ll find time to blog. But when there is a will, there is a way. Hopefully, Cannes will be, as it was last year, a big source of inspiration, a close encounter of the advertisers and will provide interesting blog material.
Kris sent me a link to Lefreaque, a nice initiative of Adweek where members of the jury and guest bloggers are posting about the 2007 Cannes Ad Festival. So far, it’s an hors d’oeuvre since the festival hasn’t started yet but I hope to read some great lines in the days to come.
Next week, I’ll be flying to Cannes for the Cannes Lions week, one of the worldwide biggest advertising awards. I can’t wait to be there.
What’s an advertising award? Basically, it’s an award for the best talker. Correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think there’s somewhere an award for the best listener and that’s a shame. So… Let’s launch this initiative from the blogosphere!
Here’s, in a nutshell, what I have in mind:
- Collect all your stories about brands that demonstrated an ability to listen and be responsive
- Create a separated blog to present the cases
- Make a little noise around the award (the concept is only viable if we receive a lot of cases)
- Make a monthly survey to present the listener of the month. In 12 months as from now, present the cases to a large audience (bloggers but also some non-bloggers) and elect the listener of the year.
Dear bloggers and friends, I would really like to read your feedback on this. What do you think about the idea? If you like it, what would be the best way to promote it? Do you already have cases in mind?
France is a very conservative country as far as music is concerned. There are plenty of amazing and innovative artists but there’s no much room for them in the narrow french media landscape.
I watched yesterday evening the finale of “La nouvelle star”, the french version of American Idol. Here’s the winner
The other candidates of the show were very classical (Barbara Streisand and Elton John clones). I was very pleased to see this alien, tattood with the name of Marcel Duchamp, win a mainstream song contest. Beyond the fact that he was my favourite candidate, I was glad to see that disruption works. I hope that marketers will take good note of that.
Yesterday evening, I stumbled upon a report on wikipedia and I realized that the rules are the same: like links beget links in the blogosphere, edits beget edits on wikipedia. And the number edits obviously impact quality: there is a strong correlation for a wikipedia article between number of edits (and number of contributors) and probability to be featured (sign that the article is qualitative).
You won’t be surprised but it appears that the distribution of edits on wikipedia follows a long tail model. The long tail is maybe the T.O.E. after all
Based on the wikipedia correlation between quality and number of edits/contributors, I was wondering if wiki models could be succesfully used in marketing (to create an advertising or to gather business intelligence). I asked Clo what she was thinking about it and she sent me this great Kathy Sierra post.
Frankendog may be ugly, but he has some personnality
:
introduced to me by Philippe Deltenre, a Belgium friend. The band, Bang Lassi, blew me away.
