Open House

Knowledge and Ideas

Someone once told me that this industry is "inherently based on people's knowledge and ideas."

That means the output of agencies is going to be directly linked to the knowledge and ideas of the people that work there.

I think this often gets forgotten in what is an incredibly busy and at times demanding industry.

That's why I am so pleased that Omnicom have stepped up to the plate and are running their first and hopefully annual Omnicom Summer School this year in August.

Check out this link for more information http://openhouse.typepad.com/omnicomsummerschool

It is a great way for people who want to get into the industry to get a head start, learn more about the various sectors, meet and network with some of the best agencies in the world and hopefully enjoy themselves as well.

If anyone has any questions, or knows of anyone who might be interested, please pass it on.

Have a good weekend,

Steve

Spot the Bull

OK, something fun for the bank holiday weekend - a lovely game for Orange by Poke where they have slapped a GPS tracker on a bull in a field and you have to pick where that bull will be at 3pm. Winner gets a ticket to Glasto. Check it out here http://spotthebull.orange.co.uk/

It's a digital version of the old classic "Guess Where the Cow is Going To Crap In The Field"....it's an old world country life digital mashup.

A good example of an integrated piece of communications - I'm not convinced that the web is a very good display medium, so it is ideas like this that will increasingly come to the fore as we become better adept at thinking up nice ideas that work on and offline. The more converged the world becomes, the easier this will be. 

Story from Faris over at Talent Imitates, Genius Steals. I rest my case. 

Steve

Volvo - Love it or Hate it...um, neither really...

Volvo have launched their new car the C30 on the back of the line "Love it or Hate it." I'm going to ignore the fact that I have heard that line somewhere before, and carry on with making my point.

My point is that the stereotypical view of Volvo is that they neither inspire love nor hatred; they are the very definition of bland. The great thing about the Marmite campaign was that everyone does either love it or hate it, you get very few sitters on the fence.

Marmite was then founded on a very simple but very perceptive piece of consumer insight.

I'm not sure that Volvo can claim the same for their new campaign though. A great consumer insight about Volvo would be that everyone thinks they are boring, middle of the road, uninspiring (etc).

Instead it seems like they have tried to manufacture a controversy out of nothing.

And if you look at their website which is http://www.volvocars.com/campaigns/MY07/C30/OpenDoors/default.htm

they are practically begging for people to have extreme opinions. Which I'm not sure they will - I can imagine most people will be left fairly ambivalent and maybe a little confused by their latest campaign.

The car brand that for me has shown the best consumer insight of (semi) recent times is Skoda - they directly steered towards the reputation that Skoda's had of being complete heaps of junk and made it integral to their campaign.

If you look at this commercial, and compare it to the frenetic mix of Volvo's new campaign, it's clear which one is based on the purer consumer insight (I actually struggled to find the images I remember from the campaign, but hopefully this one illustrates my point:

 

Anyway I'd prefer clear strategy that comes from a great consumer insight over frenetic, let's try and shoe horn some controversy to drive user engagement in order to tick the web 2.0 box any day.

I hate bitching about something that has had so much time and effort put into it, but I just think Volvo missed a trick by not 'doing a skoda' and addressing the topic that may be most painful for them (i.e. their cars are dull) but may have the most traction with consumers.

Said my piece for today.

Have a nice evening all round.

Steve

Content Creation vs Content Consumption

This is the age of content creation. This is the age of consumers generating their own content, consumers taking control away from companies, brands, broadcasters and the rest.....however:

A new study by Hitwise apparently suggests that the number of generators of user-generated content is even smaller:

"A tiny 0.16 percent of visits to Google's top video-sharing site, YouTube, are by users seeking to upload video for others to watch, according to a study of online surfing data by Bill Tancer, an analyst with Web audience measurement firm Hitwise. Similarly, only two-tenths of one percent of visits to Flickr, a popular photo-editing site owned by Yahoo Inc., are to upload new photos, the Hitwise study found."

What this shows is that although there are now more ways in which to express yourself and create your own content, only a very few number of people actually end up doing it. A chap I work with, Chris Stephenson who writes here points out that the major factors that prevent everyone from being a creator are talent and resources:

this cap on creation was historically down, I suppose, to two factors: firstly ability - not everyone is a Gaudí or Tolkien.  but secondly it was determined by an individuals capacity to create and the resources available to them...creation comes at a cost (be it resources or time), and not everyone can afford

Now I agree with him that the second factor - cost - has been negated to a certain extent by the explosion of web 2.0 - literally everyone can create and dsitribute their own content. If you look at the penetration of mobile phones capable of taking video footage, arguably everyone has the capability to be a film maker - just think of the massacre at Virginia Tech where one of the most broadcast pieces of footage was from a mobile phone.

However, the factor that will not change is that not everyone can physically produce good content, because not everyone has the talent. It's probably an extreme case of the 80:20 rule where 80 percent of the best content is being produced by 20 (or in this case even lower) percent of people.

Now to put a final spin on it, a quote by Ivan at futurelab where this story came from is:

"the bigger force is not consumer-generated content, it's consumer-edited content."

So someone with the talent creates it, and someone with less talent takes it, tinkers with it, maybe improves it?

CHina to overtake Germany as world's no.1 trader

CHINA SET TO TOPPLE GERMANY AS WORLD NO. 2 TRADER THIS YEAR

GUANGZHOU, China: Claiming a projected US$2.1 trillion (€1.54tr; £1.05tr) in foreign trade in 2007, the People's Paradise will this year replace Germany as the globe's second largest trading nation, according to Li Yushi, vp of the Research Institute of International Trade and Economic Cooperation.

If this performance is sustained, says the researcher, China will in 2010 supplant the USA as world numero uno by trading volume. And - some believe - militarily.

Yushi told a seminar on foreign trade prospects: "China maintained a growth rate of more than 20% foreign trade in the first quarter and is likely to maintain the momentum throughout the year.

"Based on these predictions," he said, "we can tell that China will overtake the United States to be the world's largest trader in 2010."

Which in itself is a huge piece of news....but when you combine it with the fact that according to Mckinsey, "85% of Chinese people stop watching TV during the commercials" - All those people, all that money, how do you reach them?