Exploring links between physics and information theory

Just as physics builds on an elementary, indivisible entity (the quantum: which is defined by the act of observation), so does information theory. Its quantum is the binary unit (the bit). While exploring links between physics and information theory, John Archibald Wheeler became convinced of the importance of information. Reality might not be wholly physical, but a participatory phenomenon, requiring the act of observation, and thus consciousness itself.

Beginning in the 1950s, Wheeler had grown increasingly intrigued by the philosophical implications of quantum physics. The most widely accepted interpretation of quantum mechanics was the orthodox interpretation - also called the Copenhagen interpretation. It held that subatomic entities such as electrons have no real existence; they exist in a probabilistic limbo of many possible super imposed states until forced into a single state by the act of observation. The electrons or photons may act like waves or like particles, depending on how they are experimentally observed.

In the 1960s Wheeler helped to popularize the notorius anthropic principle. It held that the universe must be as it is, because, if it were otherwise, we might not be here to observe it.
While exploring links between physics and information theory, Wheeler became convinced of the importance of information after concocting a thought experiment that exposed the strangeness of the quantum world for all to see.

Wheeler's delayed-choice experiment is avariation on the classic (but not classical) two-slit experiment, which demonstrates the schizophrenic nature of quantum phenomena. When electrons are aimed at a barrier containing two slits, the electrons act like waves; they go through both slits at once and form what is called an interference pattern, created by the overlapping of the waves, when they strike a detector on the far side of the barrier. If the physicist closes off one slit at a time, however, the electrons pass through the open slitlike simple particles and the interference pattern disappears. In the delayed-choice experiment, the experimenter decides whether to leave bothslits open or to close one off _after the electrons have already passed through the barrier, with the same results. The electrons seem to know in advance how the physicist will choose to observe them. This experiment was carried out in the early 1990s and confirmed Wheeler's prediction. Wheeler accounted for this conundrum with yet another analogy. He likened the job of a physicist to that of someone playing 20 questions in its surprise version. In this variant of the old game, one person leaves the room while the rest of the group, or so the excluded person thinks, selects some person, place, or thing. The single player then reenters the room and tries to guess what the others have in mind by asking a series of questions that can only be answered yes or no. Unbeknownst to the guesser, the group has decided to play a trick. The first person to be queried will think of an object (only after the questioner asks the question). Each person will do the same, giving a response that is consistent not only with the immediate question but also with all previous questions. "The word wasn't in the room when I came in even though I thought it was," Wheeler explained. In some ways, the electron, before the physicist chooses to observe it, is neither a wave nor a particle. It is in somesense unreal; it exists in an indeterminate limbo. "Not until you start asking a question, do you get something," Wheeler said. "The situation cannot declare itself until you've asked your question. But the asking of one question precludes the asking of another."

Wheeler has condensed these ideas into The it from bit:

Every it, every particle, every field of force, even the spacetime continuum itself, derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely, even if in some contexts indirectly, from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits."

According to the it from bit, we create not only 'truth', but even reality (the "it") itself, with the questions we ask.

The irony is that Wheeler's own ideas suggest that - along the search for the ultimate theory of phycics - a final theory will always be a mirage. The 'truth' is imagined rather than objectively apprehended. This view comes close to relativism. The world is a figment of the imagination.

Wheeler offers us a paradox: at the heart of everything is a question, not an answer. When we peer down into the deepest recesses of matter or at the farthest edge of the universe, we see, finally, our own puzzled faces looking back at us.

From conversation to conversion

How to get efficiently and effectively from conversation to conversion?

To answer this question, marketeers need answers on many issues including optimizing spending, budgeting, organizing and navigating agencies.

In the meantime, the balance of investment is shifting as companies spend less on media purchases and more on labor-intensive tasks such as managing digital content.

Marketeers share sincere ambivalence about the optimal organizational 'home' for digital activities, but some patterns are emerging that suggest how companies could build their digital capabilities.

Instead of trying to guess the perfect marketing model in a fluid Marketing Eco System, companies need to think about how to maintain maximum flexibility and adapability. A more dynamic approach to strategy - one that emphasizes interative experimentation in order to keep pace with incessant change - improves the 'adaptive advantage'.

Generating sales, while building brands, in an emerging science-ified Marketing Eco System

Below the surface of current events, buried amid the latest headlines and competitive moves, we are beginning to see the outlines of a new business landscape: a Marketing Eco System in which next level data analytics and real-time consumer insight will improve the ROI of building brands, while generating sales.

Performance pressures are mounting. Old ways of doing business are generating diminishing returns. Companies are having harder time making money, their very survival is challenged. We must learn ways not only to do our jobs differently, but also to do them better. That, in part, requires understanding the broader changes to the operating environment. Next level data analytics is needed to be able to 'float' to a Smart & Sustainable Sweet Spot in the fluid Marketing Eco System.

A. Improve efficiency of BRAND BUILDING with BRAIN ANALYTICS - Successful brands will be the ones that understand offline behavior by a multi mode research approach

Consumer behavior and (buying) decisions are poorly predicted by what people say about it in advance. Not because the person is lying, but simply because people are unaware of what they really think of your product or service. For instance: Neurensics - Europe's first neuro-economic research agency concludes by means of fMRI scans that readers process ads in mags much better than viewers do with TV ads. Consumer behavior is 95 percent driven by unconscious motives and preferences. The part of the brain that controls decision-making, doesn't control language. Just using an interview or a survey (verbal measures) is not reliable enough to stay connected with the consumer. There are several methods to stay connected with the consumer. A multi mode research approach, a combination of methods of verbal (interview/survey) and non-verbal measures (eye-tracking/EEG/fMRI/Web-analytics/store level analytics), will provide the deepest insight.

B. Improve efficiency of GENERATING SALES with WEB ANALYTICS - Successful brands will be the ones that understand online behavior

1. To optimize behavioral (re)targeting and improve the personal relevance (timing, location, tone-of-voice, context, content) of, and engagement with, experiences and 'offerings'
2. To improve second screen experience based on realtime sync with first screen

C. Improve the combination of BRAND BUILDING + GENERATING SALES with GAME ANALYTICS - Successful brands will be the ones that understand how to use game dynamics

1. To optimize the reward schedule2. To improve participation and extend transmedia experiences
A (media)brand at the Smartest Sweet Spot generates a continuous pleasing-variety-within-unity-experience, exponentially improving the ROI of successfully building its own & other brands, while effectively generating sales (causing a collapse of the purchase funnel).

David de Boer, Manager Marketing Intelligence Sales, Sanoma

(source: Deloitte/Spencer Stuart, Ed Shedd & Grant Duncan, "Why agility must follow austerity in the new digital age", june 2010)

Driving behavior with game dynamics

Ga*mi*fi*ca*tion = integrating game dynamics into a digital platform, service, community, content or campaign, in order to engage individuals while simultaneously driving meaningful value for doing business (read: monetization).

Every individual is hungry for reward, status, achievement, competition and self-expression. Gamification uses proven techniques to satisfy each individual's needs & desires and to engage each individual with personal relevant transmedia experiences (content, communities, brands, services or other valued solutions).

Each individual has fundamental needs & desires: for reward, status, achievement, self-expression, competition, and altruism. These needs & desires are universal (cross generations, demographics, cultures and genders).

Is the transmedia experience you are trying to built doing anything to address these universal needs & desires?

Game designers have known for years how to address these needs & desires. In the table above, green is the sweet spot for a particular mechanics, while blue is other needs that it hits. So LEVELS (f.i. belts in Karate, job titles, levels in a Frequent Flyer program), are primarily about status in a community, but also hit on individual achievement because it feels good to get to the next level, and competition because it feels good to be a higher level than all your friends (source: Bunchball.com).

Successful brands will be the ones that:

1. Curate a context to self organize and learn how to master the reward schedule for driving participation and building continuous transmedia experiences
2. Capture statistics about individual experiences and persist them (competition, comparison, status, achievement).

As the list of cognitive biases shows, mastering the reward schedule isn't easy to learn.

Watch these videos to learn:
1. What is the business value of gamification?
2. How and why motivates gamification user behavior?
3. What are the building blocks of gamification?





The neurotransmitter associated with learning is called dopamine. We are beginning to be able to model mathematically dopamine levels in the brain.

This means that:
A. We can predict learning
B. We can predict enhanced engagement
C. We can identify the windows of time in which the learning is taking place at an enhanced level.

The biggest neurological 'engagement turn-on' for people is other people. It's not money, it's not being given cash, it's doing stuff with our peers, watching us, collaborating with us.

Individual engagement can be transformed to collective engagement, by applying the five psychological and neurological lessons learnt from measuring & observing people that play online games:
1. Allow people to set targets by setting calibrated targets, by using elements of uncertainty, by using these multiple targets, by using a grand, underlying reward and incentive system, by setting people up to collaborate in terms of groups, in terms of streets to collaborate and compete, to use these very sophisticated group and motivational mechanics we see.
2.Offer people the grand continuity of experience and personal investment.
3. Break things down into highly-calibrated small tasks. Use calculated randomness.
4. Reward effort consistently as everything fields together. Rewards could be calibrated precisely. Use the vast expertise of gaming systems.
5. Use the kind of group behaviors that evolve when people are at play together, these really quite unprecedentedly complex cooperative mechanisms.

Conslusion: Media companies that will survive are the ones that create and facilitate arenas for brands to connect with their customers on; companies that curate a context to self-organize and master the reward schedule by using their observations of millions of human hours and plowing that feedback into increasing engagement.

.

Future organisations are not about control & compliance, they're about engagement

From 'one off perfect campaigns' to 'good enough, always in beta, partnerships'

5D Conference : New Television Pt 4 - Kevin Slavin from Dave Blass on Vimeo.

The World After Advertising

Advertising is
* making new things familiar and familiar things new
* never about selling alone, it should always begin with connecting brands to audiences


If you talk to people the way advertising talks to people, they would punch you in the face!


Ken Doctor - Transforming the company's DNA



Phillip Riederle - Digital natives



Oliver Schiffers - Multichannel-analyse and digital intelligence



Amir Kassaei - New role models for the future of advertising



Panel - Debate advertising on TV in the future




Panel - Debate roadmap 2015



Uwe Lubberman - Premium cola



A review of 'The World After Advertising'day.

Collaboration is the new competition

Trends & Technologies bleeping on the 2010/2011 radar

Every year CONTAGIOUS shares a review of the trends and technologies that have provided the loudest bleep on their radar.

My thanks to CONTAGIOUS for this yearly present. Get your iPad, click on the slideshare, and enjoy Most Contagious 2010.

More 2011 Trends:
1. Adage: 10 Trends that are shaping global media consumption
2. Marian Salzman: 11 trends for 2011
3. Trendwatching: 11 crucial consumer trends for 2011

INFLUENCERS FULL VERSION from R+I creative on Vimeo.

4. Semantic in 2011
5. Wireless predictions for 2011

An interview is not enough to stay connected with the consumer

Consumer behavior and (buying) decisions are poorly predicted by what people say about it in advance. Not because the person is lying, but simply because people are unaware of what they really think of your product or service.

Consumer behavior is 95 percent driven by unconscious motives and preferences. The part of the brain that controls decision-making, doesn't control language. Just using an interview or a survey (verbal measures) is not reliable enough to stay connected with the consumer.

There are several methods to stay connected with the consumer. A multi mode research approach, a combination of methods of verbal (interview/survey) and non-verbal measures (eye-tracking/EEG/fMRI/Google-analytics/store level analytics), will provide the deepest insight.

Apple's mobility solution

Last year, when I visited TEDxAmsterdam 2010, Alef Arendsen's TEDtalk triggered me to reflect on the mission statement of Apple. Alef Arendsen is co-founder of The New Motion, which offers mobility solutions powered by renewable energy.

How far will Apple stretch its mission statement? Will Apple launch a disruptive, 'think different' mobility concept; beautifully designed, simple to use, cool, fun, fast and powered by renewable energy?

Apple's mission statement:
Apple is committed to protecting the environment, health and safety of our employees, customers and the global communities where we operate. We recognise that by integrating sound environmental, health and safety management practices into all aspects of our business, we can offer technologically innovative products and services while conserving and enhancing resources for future generations. Apple strives for continuous improvement in our environmental, health and safety management systems and in the environmental quality of our products, processes and services.

Here's how Apple actually communicates:
"Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo. We believe in thinking differently. The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. We just happen to make great products and services."

Will Apple challenge the status quo in mobility concepts? When?
Food for thought.

2019: A Future Imagined from Flat-12 on Vimeo.

Competing on brain-, game-, Google-, and checkout-analytics

Data are becoming the new raw material of business: an economic input almost on par with capital and labour. Today's low cost sensors - capturing 24/7 what millions of people have done - are generating a lot of data. The ability to master the 'big data' is crucial to become tomorrow's marketleader

How to translate the 'big data' into actionable insights? By dynamic visualization of the 'big data'. Hans Rosling has taken it to the next level....again.



The market leading media companies of tomorrow will be the ones that find innovative ways to harness their vast amounts of 'big data' to gain competitive advantages.

By mastering the exponential growth of 'big data', companies can improve:
1. The efficiency of their marketing dollars
2. The personal relevance of their 'offerings'
3. The level of engagement of people with their 'offerings'

Stewardship: Curate a context to self-organize and master the reward schedule

Marketeers don't like to squander marketing dollars on people who have no intention of ever buying their product. That means marketeers want to know more and more about what makes each of us 'tick', our motivations, behavior, attitudes, and buying habits.

With the exponential increase of 'big data', companies can improve:
1. The efficiency of their marketing dollars
2. The personal relevance of their 'offerings'
3. The level of engagement of people with their 'offerings'

How? Use sensors and capture 24/7 what millions of people have done and carefully calibrate the rate, the nature, the type, the intensity of rewards.

The neurotransmitter associated with learning is called dopamine. We are beginning to be able to model mathematically dopamine levels in the brain.

This means that:
A. We can predict learning
B. We can predict enhanced engagement
C. We can identify the windows of time in which the learning is taking place at an enhanced level.

The biggest neurological 'engagement turn-on' for people is other people. It's not money, it's not being given cash, it's doing stuff with our peers, watching us, collaborating with us.

Individual engagement can be transformed to collective engagement, by applying the five psychological and neurological lessons learnt from measuring & observing people that play online games:
1. Allow people to set targets by setting calibrated targets, by using elements of uncertainty, by using these multiple targets, by using a grand, underlying reward and incentive system, by setting people up to collaborate in terms of groups, in terms of streets to collaborate and compete, to use these very sophisticated group and motivational mechanics we see.
2.Offer people the grand continuity of experience and personal investment.
3. Break things down into highly-calibrated small tasks. Use calculated randomness.
4. Reward effort consistently as everything fields together. Rewards could be calibrated precisely. Use the vast expertise of gaming systems.
5. Use the kind of group behaviors that evolve when people are at play together, these really quite unprecedentedly complex cooperative mechanisms.

Conslusion: Media companies that will survive are the ones that create and facilitate arenas for brands to connect with their customers on; companies that curate a context to self-organize and master the reward schedule by using their observations of millions of human hours and plowing that feedback into increasing engagement.

Transmedia: Collaborative gaming + Open source + Cloud computing

We are in the middle of a very profound, long-term shift in how we do business. But we can't quantify it. We'd expect that markets would be able to come up with innovation to handle this shift in business practice, but it isn't happening.

Open Source in the Cloud Computing Era

Product Mutation '10

Web 2.0 summit 2010

Web 2.0 summit 2010 highlights:

Brain analytics will be revolutionary for marketing and (commercial) conversation

The latest scanning techniques allow us get to know more about the brain and abstract notions such as sense, belief and emotion. Neurotechnology - new tools for both understanding and influencing our brains - is now also being applied to marketing.

In the same way that Copernicus, Darwin, Freud and DNA changed the way we see the world, so will neurotechnology be disruptive for marketing. The latest scanning techniques allow us to find out which elements of advertising are most efficient for durable branding.

Information about the brain is the holy grail for marketing. We will ‘be able to look inside the brain and predict what consumers want’ and then ‘start selling consumer goods that are aimed directly at our receptive nervous system’. Research already showed that products that are highly appreciated activate the part of the brain that is also involved in self-identification. That alone could be used to influence consumer behavior.

Our conscience, our subjective perception of the world is the result of billions of neurons giving each other tiny electric shocks. Our brains are plastic masses that are continually moving and thus ever-changing. All our emotions are made up out of chemical processes.

People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. The goal is not to do business with everybody who needs what you have. The goal is to do business with people who believe what you believe.



It's all grounded in the tenets of biology. If you look at a cross-section of the human brain, looking from the top down, What you see is the human brain is actually broken into three major components.

1. Our newest brain, our homo sapien brain, our neocortex, corresponds with the "what" level. The neocortex is responsible for all of our rational and analytical thought and language.

2. The middle two sections make up our limbic brains. And our limbic brains are responsible for all of our feelings, like trust and loyalty. It's also responsible for all human behavior, all decision-making, and it has no capacity for language.

When we communicate from the outside in, people can understand vast amounts of complicated information like features and benefits and facts and figures. It just doesn't drive behavior. When we can communicate from the inside out, we're talking directly to the part of the brain that controls behavior, and then we allow people to rationalize it with the tangible things we say and do. This is where gut decisions come from. You know, sometimes you can give somebody all the facts and figures, and they say, "I know what all the facts and details say, but it just doesn't feel right." Why would we use that verb, it doesn't "feel" right? Because the part of the brain that controls decision-making, doesn't control language. And the best we can muster up is, "I don't know. It just doesn't feel right." Or sometimes you say you're leading with your heart, or you're leading with your soul. Well, I hate to break it to you, those aren't other body parts controlling your behavior. It's all happening here in you limbic brain, the part of the brain that controls decision-making and not language.

But if you don't know why you do what you do, and people respond to why you do what you do, then how you ever get people to buy something from you? The goal is not just to sell to people who need what you have; the goal is to sell to people who believe what you believe.

People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. And if you talk about what you believe, you will attract those who believe what you believe. But why is it important to attract those who believe what you believe? Something called the law of diffusion of innovation. The first two and a half percent of our population are our innovators. The next 13 and a half percent of our population are our early adopters. The next 34 percent are your early majority, your late majority and your laggards. The only reason these people buy touch tone phones is because you can't buy rotary phones anymore.

We all sit at various places at various times on this scale, but what the law of diffusion of innovation tells us is that if you want mass-market success or mass-market acceptance of an idea, you cannot have it until you achieve this tipping point between 15 and 18 percent market penetration. And then the system tips. And I love asking businesses, "What's your conversion on new business?" And they love to tell you, "Oh, it's about 10 percent," proudly. Well, you can trip over 10 percent of the customers. We all have about 10 percent who just "get it." That's how we describe them, right. That's like that gut feeling, "Oh, they just get it." The problem is: How do you find the ones that get it before you're doing business with them versus the ones who don't get it? So it's this here, this little gap, that you have to close, as Jeffrey Moore calls it, "crossing the chasm." Because, you see, the early majority will not try something until someone else has tried it first. And these guys, the innovators and the early adopters, they're comfortable making those gut decisions. They're more comfortable making those intuitive decisions that are driven by what they believe about the world and not just what product is available.



Belief is the natural state of things. It is the default option. We just believe. We believe all sorts of things. Belief is natural. Disbelief, skepticism, science, is not natural. It's more difficult. It's uncomfortable to not believe things. So like Fox Mulder on "X-Files," who wants to believe in UFOs? Well, we all do. And the reason for that is because we have a belief engine in our brains. Essentially, we are pattern-seeking primates. We connect the dots: A is connected to B; B is connected to C. And sometimes A really is connected to B. And that's called association learning.



We have the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise. When we do this process, we make two types of errors. A Type I error, or false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it's not. Our second type of error is a false negative. A Type II error is not believing a pattern is real when it is.

Now the problem here is that 'patternicities' will occur whenever the cost of making a Type I error is less than the cost of making a Type II error. We have a pattern detection problem that is assessing the difference between a type one and a type two error is highly problematic, especially in split-second, life-and-death situations.

So the default position is just "believe all patterns are real. There was a natural selection for the propensity for our belief engines, our pattern-seeking brain processes, to always find meaningful patterns.

The propensity to find the patterns goes up when there's a lack of control.

Significantly more meaningful patterns were perceived on the right hemisphere, via the left visual field, than the left hemisphere. So if you present subjects the images such that it's going to end up on the right hemisphere instead of the left, then they're more likely to see patterns than if you put it on the left hemisphere. Our right hemisphere appears to be where a lot of this patternicity takes place.




Watch Gero Miesenboeck's FROM: 'If we record the activity of all neurons, we would understand the brain' TO 'If we control the activity of some neurons, we would learn much about the brain'.

Finding an enduring SmartSweetSpot in the unfolding Marketing Eco System

For every media company, the digital future is not a destination...but a journey. A journey of finding the right answers to the right questions.

Some questions:
1. Which players in the (digital) Marketing Eco System do what you do better than you do?
2. Is your media media company leading of lagging in the ability to adapt?
3. How to anticipate on the moves of the 'big five' (Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft)
4. How will your media company turn 'the end of advertising as we know it' into an opportunity?

5. Is the learning-loop of your media company keeping pace with the needed 'improvement' speed?
6. What does the rapid growth rate in on-demand video usage mean for your business?
7. Is your media company prepared for the next half decade of change?
8. What is your media company's 'secret sauce' to avoid commodization?
9. When do consumers/enterprises & incumbents/attackers need you?
10. Will these trends continue?

Some answers:
A. Look for opportunities to open up your business model to exploit the assets and capabilities of people outside your media company
B. Decide how your digital services can grow beyond just having a presence of the internet to being an active platform in the (mobile) digital Marketing Eco System
C. Perform a deep structural analysis of how to respond, and be pro-active in responding to changes of the magnitude that follow. Tactical responses and/or "Wait and see" approaches will be insufficient
D. Consider how the increasing amount of information and consumerization of technology fits with your mission; don't just follow the crowd.
E. Do not prevent risk but to build capacity to recover quickly from failures. Fail often. fail early. Learn from it.

Next Generation Analytics

Increasing compute capabilities of computers - including mobile devices - along with improving connectivity are 'connecting the world of atoms and bits' and enabling a shift in how businesses support operational decisions.

What is happening, at this moment:
A. Extending built-in sensors
B. Improving the reliability of embedded sensors
C. Improving methods and techniques to read sensor data over long distances
D. Improving computer programs that interpret the sensor data well and quickly and turn the data into useful information for the carriers of the sensors

Meanwhile, the intelligence departments of media companies increasingly get the possibility:
1. To generate, store, analyse and make connections between billions of statistical data and the causes of human behavior. Due to this convergence, more is becoming known about the mechanisms of media-, orientation- and buying-behavior.
2. Of using functional MRI scanners, to explore what happens in the living brain. Neurotechnology - new tools for both understanding and influencing our brains including brain imaging - is now also becoming applied to advertising and marketing.
3. To run simulations or models to predict the future outcome, rather than to simply provide backward looking data about past interactions, and
4. To do these predictions in real-time to support each individual business action.

The market leading media companies of tomorrow will be the ones that find innovative ways to harness their vast amounts of data to gain competitive advantages; companies that use statistical analysis to map patterns of consumer activity, rather than intuiting it from what they think customers are doing. These media companies conduct trend analysis by forecasting and extrapolating, based on varied assumptions, allowing them to anticipate needed business model, inventory, financing and capacity, so they can provide better, more relevant (mobile digital) services at lower costs.

While this may require significant changes to existing operational and business intelligence infrastructure, the potential exists to unlock significant improvements in experienced value for people (providers of the data), improvements in personal relevance (right service, at the right time and place), in business results and other success rates.

In the unfolding Marketing Eco System, Next Generation Analytics will transform how humans live, work and play.


David de Boer, Manager Marketing Intelligence Sales

Transmedia: The art of unbundled (commercial) conversations

The 'advertising' and 'branded content' of tomorrow will contain distributed links of those who pay to be there. Technology will work on our behalf to bring those 'offerings' our way, because we've asked for them.

Doc Searls' Project VRM, where consumers signal businesses about wants and needs instead of the other way around, will be a form of distributed media with links.

With classifieds like Marktplaats, each item has a link, and those could be aggregated elsewhere and passed around, depending on the need specified in a user's 'signal.' Whoever pays the most gets first in line. The money will be made for matching consumer needs/signals with 'offerings' (business goods and services). This real-time match-making is something the digital Marketing Eco System can handle very efficiently.




Commerce-generating applications will make it all happen, whether it's via a closed system like Twitter or an API at the application layer of the digital Marketing Eco System itself.

That's just one possibility of moving 'commercial conversation' into the digital Marketing Eco System and the stream. Other commercial formats will certainly be developed, but the possibilities of unbundled 'advertising' are limitless, all made possible by the portable link.

Media companies framing their added value for 'companies, formerly known as advertisers' into bundled advertising concepts limit their range of possible solutions. And, thus, limit their potential added value while exploring new business models.

Shape matters more than size

Due to fundamental long-term changes in consumer (media consumption & purchase) behavior, media companies are no longer content providers...they are in the conversation business.

Media companies - staffed and structured to be content providers in a classical Media Value Chain - need to come to terms with what they are becoming. In order to succeed:

1. Doing nothing is not an option
Media companies need to find a new Smart (a new mash-up of capabilities and business model innovation across their network) & Sustainable Sweet Spot within the unfolding Marketing Eco System.

2. Resizing is not enough, shape matters more than size
The cost reduction initiatives to keep traditional media companies commercially viable will remain important (shareholders focus on stripping out cost to maintain earnings per share), but will not suffice. Slimmed-down media companies will have to evolve further than they have done to date and need to change shape (long-term focus) as well as size (short-term focus). Key will be the ability to reshape traditional business models and organisational structures to best exploit the opportunities that ongoing technological development and digital transformation offers. A strategic approach, taking account of structure, governance and culture, identifies a more sustainable model for operating in the unfolding Marketing Eco System.

Deeply embedded ways of working need to be changed. Data analytics and real-time consumer insight have not traditionally been core competencies of media companies, while data analytics will become fundamental to any content-based organisation.

Conclusion: Traditional media companies need a very different kind of skill set to generate the new revenue streams that are going to be very important going forward. The most succesfull status-quo-challenger, the most agile skill-set-winner of tomorrow, takes it all.

Do you want to know more about Sanoma's beliefs on the future playing field of media companies? Watch this!

David de Boer, Manager Marketing Intelligence Sales, Sanoma

(source: Deloitte/Spencer Stuart, Ed Shedd & Grant Duncan, "Why agility must follow austerity in the new digital age", june 2010)

10 strategic technologies to address business challenges and improve operational efficiency

Gartner highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2011.

A strategic technology

• Is one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.
• May be an existing technology that has matured and/or become suitable for a wider range of uses. It may also be an emerging technology that offers an opportunity for strategic business advantage for early adopters or with potential for significant market disruption in the next five years. As such, these technologies impact the organization's long-term plans, programs and initiatives.

The top 10 strategic technologies for 2011 are:

1. Cloud Computing. Cloud computing services exist along a spectrum from open public to closed private. The next three years will see the delivery of a range of cloud service approaches that fall between these two extremes. Vendors will offer packaged private cloud implementations that deliver the vendor's public cloud service technologies (software and/or hardware) and methodologies (i.e., best practices to build and run the service) in a form that can be implemented inside the consumer's enterprise. Many will also offer management services to remotely manage the cloud service implementation. Gartner expects large enterprises to have a dynamic sourcing team in place by 2012 that is responsible for ongoing cloudsourcing decisions and management.
2. Mobile Applications and Media Tablets. Gartner estimates that by the end of 2010, 1.2 billion people will carry handsets capable of rich, mobile commerce providing an ideal environment for the convergence of mobility and the Web. Mobile devices are becoming computers in their own right, with an astounding amount of processing ability and bandwidth. There are already hundreds of thousands of applications for platforms like the Apple iPhone, in spite of the limited market (only for the one platform) and need for unique coding. The quality of the experience of applications on these devices, which can apply location, motion and other context in their behavior, is leading customers to interact with companies preferentially through mobile devices. This has lead to a race to push out applications as a competitive tool to improve relationships and gain advantage over competitors whose interfaces are purely browser-based.
3. Social Communications and Collaboration. Social media can be divided into: (1) Social networking —social profile management products, such as MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and Friendster as well as social networking analysis (SNA) technologies that employ algorithms to understand and utilize human relationships for the discovery of people and expertise. (2) Social collaboration —technologies, such as wikis, blogs, instant messaging, collaborative office, and crowdsourcing. (3)Social publishing —technologies that assist communities in pooling individual content into a usable and community accessible content repository such as YouTube and flickr. (4) Social feedback - gaining feedback and opinion from the community on specific items as witnessed on YouTube, flickr, Digg, Del.icio.us, and Amazon. Gartner predicts that by 2016, social technologies will be integrated with most business applications. Companies should bring together their social CRM, internal communications and collaboration, and public social site initiatives into a coordinated strategy.
4. Video. Video is not a new media form, but its use as a standard media type used in non-media companies is expanding rapidly. Technology trends in digital photography, consumer electronics, the web, social software, unified communications, digital and Internet-based television and mobile computing are all reaching critical tipping points that bring video into the mainstream. Over the next three years Gartner believes that video will become a commonplace content type and interaction model for most users, and by 2013, more than 25 percent of the content that workers see in a day will be dominated by pictures, video or audio.
5. Next Generation Analytics. Increasing compute capabilities of computers including mobile devices along with improving connectivity are enabling a shift in how businesses support operational decisions. It is becoming possible to run simulations or models to predict the future outcome, rather than to simply provide backward looking data about past interactions, and to do these predictions in real-time to support each individual business action. While this may require significant changes to existing operational and business intelligence infrastructure, the potential exists to unlock significant improvements in business results and other success rates.
6. Social Analytics. Social analytics describes the process of measuring, analyzing and nterpreting the results of interactions and associations among people, topics and ideas. These interactions may occur on social software applications used in the workplace, in internally or externally facing communities or on the social web. Social analytics is an umbrella term that includes a number of specialized analysis techniques such as social filtering, social-network analysis, sentiment analysis and social-media analytics. Social network analysis tools are useful for examining social structure and interdependencies as well as the work patterns of individuals, groups or organizations. Social network analysis involves collecting data from multiple sources, identifying relationships, and evaluating the impact, quality or effectiveness of a relationship.
7. Context-Aware Computing. Context-aware computing centers on the concept of using information about an end user or object’s environment, activities connections and preferences to improve the quality of interaction with that end user. The end user may be a customer, business partner or employee. A contextually aware system anticipates the user's needs and proactively serves up the most appropriate and customized content, product or service. Gartner predicts that by 2013, more than half of Fortune 500 companies will have context-aware computing initiatives and by 2016, one-third of worldwide mobile consumer marketing will be context-awareness-based.
8. Storage Class Memory. Gartner sees huge use of flash memory in consumer devices, entertainment equipment and other embedded IT systems. It also offers a new layer of the storage hierarchy in servers and client computers that has key advantages — space, heat, performance and ruggedness among them. Unlike RAM, the main memory in servers and PCs, flash memory is persistent even when power is removed. In that way, it looks more like disk drives where information is placed and must survive power-downs and reboots. Given the cost premium, simply building solid state disk drives from flash will tie up that valuable space on all the data in a file or entire volume, while a new explicitly addressed layer, not part of the file system, permits targeted placement of only the high-leverage items of information that need to experience the mix of performance and persistence available with flash memory.
9. Ubiquitous Computing. The work of Mark Weiser and other researchers at Xerox's PARC paints a picture of the coming third wave of computing where computers are invisibly embedded into the world. As computers proliferate and as everyday objects are given the ability to communicate with RFID tags and their successors, networks will approach and surpass the scale that can be managed in traditional centralized ways. This leads to the important trend of imbuing computing systems into operational technology, whether done as calming technology or explicitly managed and integrated with IT. In addition, it gives us important guidance on what to expect with proliferating personal devices, the effect of consumerization on IT decisions, and the necessary capabilities that will be driven by the pressure of rapid inflation in the number of computers for each person.
10. Fabric-Based Infrastructure and Computers. A fabric-based computer is a modular form of computing where a system can be aggregated from separate building-block modules connected over a fabric or switched backplane. In its basic form, a fabric-based computer comprises a separate processor, memory, I/O, and offload modules (GPU, NPU, etc.) that are connected to a switched interconnect and, importantly, the software required to configure and manage the resulting system(s). The fabric-based infrastructure (FBI) model abstracts physical resources — processor cores, network bandwidth and links and storage — into pools of resources that are managed by the Fabric Resource Pool Manager (FRPM), software functionality. The FRPM in turn is driven by the Real Time Infrastructure (RTI) Service Governor software component. An FBI can be supplied by a single vendor or by a group of vendors working closely together, or by an integrator — internal or external.

Compared to a touch, clicking is boring

A keynote of Joris van Heukelom at Immovator, sharing Sanoma Digital's first 9 iPad learnings:

1. Compared to a touch, clicking is boring;
2. A magazine is not a book;
3. Do not repack the old medium;
4. A 'magazine' on a tablet is more than a private journey;
5. Provide plenty of starting points;
6. Sound is an option, never default;
7. As in magazines, the rule of the inverted pyramid...start with the conclusion;
8. Don't overestimate current mediabrands;
9. Succes doesn't equal 'read all' spend time does...

Interested in more iPad learnings of Sanoma Digital? Click here and here

David de Boer, Manager Marketing Intelligence Sales, Sanoma

The new Brand Management: Transmedia (branded content) storymaking in combination with 'game dynamics'

After finishing building a social layer, a next layer - the game layar - is unfolding: a pervasive net of behavior-steering game dynamics that will reshape commerce.

By now, we are used to letting Facebook and Twitter capture our social lives on the web; building a 'social layer' on top of the real world. At TEDxBoston, Seth Priebatsch looks at the next layer in progress: the 'game layer', a pervasive net of behavior-steering game dynamics that will reshape the marketing eco system (marketing, communication and commerce).




At TEDxTransmedia, Dan Hon - a senior member of the Wieden + Kennedy London creative department, specialized in games, play and new ways of storytelling - gives more insight into 'game dynamics'.




We are bringing 'game dymanics' into more aspects of our lives, spending countless hours - and real money - exploring virtual worlds for imaginary treasures. Why? Because games are perfectly tuned to dole out rewards that engage the brain and keep us questing for more.









We are entering the Transmedia era (I define transmedia as "a mashup of 'reality'+'social layer'+ 'game dynamics'") in which:

1. The unfolding Marketing Eco System brings us new formats and business models of commerce;
2. Brand Management (control, scripted dialogue, periodic feedback) transforms into Brand Stewardship (open, transmedia conversation, 24/7 feedback);
3. Brand Stewardship is in perpetual beta. Companies that shorten the learning loop c.q. the feedback loop, that iterate faster, will do better.
   
   
   
   
   
   Culture Mapping, managing brands in a social economy

   View more presentations from Tim Stock.
   
   
   David de Boer, Manager Marketing Intelligence Sales, Sanoma

Customer orientation is a choice one makes over the course of a lifetime (part 1)

Customer orientation: of the 462 goals that Amazon has set for itself in 2010, 360 of them will directly effect the customer experience, while the word revenue is only used in 8 occasions.

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos spoke in may 2010 at Princeton University about the difference between choices and gifts. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy -- they're given after all. Choices can be hard.

One's character, he suggested, is reflected not in the gifts one is endowed with at birth but rather by the choices one makes over the course of a lifetime. "It's harder to be kind than clever"

• How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make?
• Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?
• Will you follow dogma, or will you be original?
• Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure?
• Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?
• Will you bluff it out when you're wrong, or will you apologize?
• Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love?
• Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?
• When it's tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?
• Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?
• Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?
  

When you are 80 years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story. Good luck!

The value of online video versus TV to improve your marketing ROI

Gian Fulgoni posted an article on Comscore with an important lesson for online advertising:

"in a branding world, advertising creative is critical. As Internet advertising seeks to increase its currently meager 6% share of marketers’ spending for branding advertising and to move beyond a reliance on direct response marketing, using the right creative will become critical. This will be compounded by the move to the use of more expensive ad formats such as rich media and video. The cost of being wrong becomes substantial. It will be vital for the Internet to take a page out of television’s playbook and focus more of its research dollars on getting the online ad message right."

It is an interesting article (but - in my opinion - not the complete story), triggering some related questions:

Trend: The end of advertising as we know it

• -> What about the impact of the growing importance of branded content on the value of online video versus TV to improve the marketing ROI ?

Trend: Changing consumer purchase behaviour

• -> What about the impact of the changing consumer purchase behavior on the value of online video versus TV to improve the marketing ROI ?

Trend: 'moment of purchase'-shift from bricks to clicks

• -> What about the impact of growing popularity of multi touch tablets - in combination with the impuls-buying-strength-of-online-video - on the value of online video versus TV to improve the marketing ROI ?

In the unfolding marketing eco system, what will become the value of online video versus TV to improve your marketing ROI? What will be the complete story? Time will tell.

David de Boer, Manager Marketing Intelligence Sales, Sanoma