State of media: time to transcend conventions to productively lose control

It is time for media companies to start the journey of innovation, to DO things again, not just evade things. The story of the frog getting used to the water which is slowly getting boiled is a great metaphor for the state of media companies today.

We can only blame ourselves. Over the last 20 years the Marketing Eco System has gotten more complex, and has gotten more liquid. And we, the 'classical media companies', are cowards. So, as we have faced accountability and liability, we have stepped back and back, and unfortunately, where there is accountability and liability, guess what there is. Power. So, eventually we have found ourselves in a marginalized position in the emerging Marketing Eco System.

So, what do we, the classical media companies, need to do? Using our unique competences, we need to start authoring processes again, instead of authoring products. We need to go back to three key points at the beginning of the process.

The first is, account managers of media companies take core positions with your accounts (marketeers, formerly known as advertisers).

The second position is actually, take positions. Take joint positions with your account. This is the moment in which you as account manager (architect of media-, marketing & business-solutions), and your account (marketeer, formerly known as advertiser) can begin to inject the brandkey and the brand vision, combined with the sales targets. In other words, can begin to inject driving sales, while building brands. But it has to be done together.

And then only after this is done, are you allowed to do this, begin to put forward transmedia concepts (manifestations of the brandkey, 24/7 conversation proof), that manifest those positions.

And both marketeer (formerly known as advertiser) and the accountmanager of the media company alike are empowered to critique those manifestations based on the positions that you've taken.

If you do this, the media company will reach the state of 'productively losing control'. You do not know what the end result is. But, with enough brain power and enough passion and enough commitment, you will arrive at concepts and conclusions that will transcend conventions, and will simply be something that you could not have initially or individually conceived of.

Getting >>gamification<< right

More:
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_mechanics
* http://gamification.org/wiki/Game_Mechanics
* http://lithosphere.lithium.com/t5/Building-Community-the-Platform/Gamification-from-a-Company-of-Pro-Gamers/ba-p/19258
* http://lithosphere.lithium.com/t5/Building-Community-the-Platform/The-Magic-Potion-of-Game-Dynamics/ba-p/19260* http://gsummit.com/
* http://captology.stanford.edu/

How to manage brand conversations? Gatorade's 'brand stewardship' center

Brand Management (control, scripted dialogue, periodic feedback) transforms into Brand Stewardship (open, 'branded content' conversations, 24/7 feedback).

The beverage brand has made significant investments in brand stewardship tools. Gatorade maintains a 'brand stewardship' center in its Chicago headquarters, featuring a panel of screens. Gatorade tracks a wide variety of conversations through blogs and Twitter conversations, online media performance, sport trends, and social media performance.

The 'brand stewardship' center allows Gatorade to identify conversations in progress and proactively engage in dialogue with consumers.

Learn from Twitter how to be relevant in the real-time era

Figuring out the most optimal real-time relevance algorythm is becoming the main focus of winning media companies. How to give people, real-time, the most valuable information for them, wherever they are? How to optimize for Return on Attention? How to help people pay only attention to stuff that really matters to them, without generating a feeling of missing some important stuff.

There is a lot of iteration around the 'relevance algorythm' by Twitter's scientists and math people, who are figuring out relevance in real-time. The team of Twitter has made impressive progress in figuring out, which of the 100 million tweets per day matter the most for each specific individual.

Twitter aims to generate $100 million from advertising in 2011. Watch this confidential video to learn how Twitter currently is trying to do that; a webinar which walks through everything from pricing to dealing with angry users.



(Source: All Things Digital)

An update of Mary Meeker's mobile trend slides (feb 2011)

Mary Meeker - now working for Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers - presented yesterday (feb,10,2011) an update of her mobile trend slides at Google’s thinkmobile conference.

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What is going to increase:
1. Ubiquitous cloud computing: Real-time connectivity / 24/7 / in palm of hand
2. Affordable: Device & databundle pricing falling
3. Speed: Faster networks and devices (Moore's Law)
4. NFC: Near field communication for payment / offfers / loyalty
5. Real-time personal relevance: Converging local & social / preferences / rewarding behavior
6. Gamification: Social / reward-driven
7. mCommerce: Measurable activation, driving traffic to (physical) stores real-time
8. Apps (vs. HTML5) and monetization: More apps, making more money per app
9. Empowerment: impact of empowering billions of people with real-time connected devices has just begun...

Another interesting presentation give at Google’s thinkmobile conference.

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Case Deloitte using LinkedIn API

Opportunities through increased volume of 'good enough' data and realtime analysis

Mobile populations are increasingly acting as human sensor networks, passively sharing location-related data.
The winning companies of tomorrow transform these data into relevant products/services and connect the 5 webs (social, realtime, programmable, psychic, semantic).

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How to emerge to a sustainable and durable Marketing Eco System? What matters?

In our current Marketing Eco System product sustainability is inverse to economic growth, due to the 'instrinsic obsolescence rule': Nothing produced can be allowed to maintain a lifespan longer than what can be endured in order to continue cyclical consumption.

This rule causes mindless consumption and 'planned obsolescence'; the underlying backbone of most marketing strategies. But isn't the meaning of efficiency "absence of waste"?



“This idea called debt, doesn’t exist in the physical reality. Its only part of a game we have invented.”

Key message of this documentary: A transition is needed from our current 'socioeconomic monetary' paradigm, into a new - sustainable - paradigm called a 'Resource-Based-Economy'.

The docu transcends issues of cultural relativism and traditional ideology and moves to relate the core, empirical “life ground” attributes of human and social survival.



John Lock and Adam Smith caused a system disorder: confusing Money sequences of value and Life sequences of value.
Life sequences of value -> Measures which have to do with the progress of people's life-quality: Fysical well being, trust, state of happyness, or social stability.
Money sequences of value -> Measures which have to do with the money sequence: GDP, Consumer price index, Value of the stock market, rates of inflation.

* and check this

Visualizing the medical data explosion

Medical scans produce thousands of images and terabytes of data for a single patient in mere seconds. How do doctors parse this information and determine what's useful?

Visualization expert Anders Ynnerman shows us sophisticated new tools for analyzing this myriad data, and a glimpse at some sci-fi-sounding medical technologies in development.

Win by the competence of processing growing, flowing 'big data'

Around 1.200 exabytes of data will be generated in 2011, compared to 287 exabytes in 2009. Data, generated by companies, exponentially grows (estimated 60% per annum) because it's increasingly being gathered by ubiquitous information-sensing mobile devices, software logs, RFID readers, wireless sensor networks and large scale e-commerce.

This growing, flowing data (hundreds of petabytes of data in a single data set) allows companies to spot business trends in an early stage; to generate data-driven actionable insights and pro-actively act upon these insights (creating innovative 'offerings', new revenue streams or saving millions of euros).

Managed well, the data can be used to unlock new sources of economic value. To benefit from this exponential growth of data, being able to make sense of this structured and unstructured stream of data is a must. Data is meaningless without intelligence and interpretation. Once you have figured out how to capture and store your data, you need to extract meaning in a way that allows you to act upon it.

The ability to efficiently process (capture, store, search, analyze and visualize) and transform - real-time - the growing, flowing stream of 'big data' into individually relevant, valuable 'offerings' will become a key competence for the winning companies of tomorrow.

Only the companies that 'earn' the best data engineers, enterprise architects, developers, analysts, data mining talents and business intelligence professionals, by respecting our 'electronic soul', are equipped to compete on analytics .... and have a chance to become winning data-driven organizations.

Three key-themes:
1. Respecting ownership of our 'electronic soul': the collection of our individual electronic data.
The 'electronic soul' is an asset with value attached to it. Hans Peter Brøndmo argues that designing systems to address privacy issues needs an asset model for both depositing and withdrawing personal information.

Such an asset model for depositing (grant access to electronic soul in return for special offers, or access to a service) and withdrawing (revoke access to electronic soul if you find that data is being misused) personal information would need appropriate controls, as well as transparency.

To ensure your 'electronic soul' is not used against your best interests a framework is needed for every individual giving this individual transparancy about where your data is 'deposited', for what purpose, who has access and is allowed to retrieve personal data when that matters. Yet the framework for doing so does not exist.

2. Figuring out the relevance algorythm: Relevance in real-time
Figuring out the most optimal real-time relevance algorythm is the main focus of the winning Media Companies. How to give people, real-time, the most valuable information for them, wherever they are? How to optimize for Return on Attention? How to help people pay only attention to stuff that really matters to them, without generating a feeling of missing some important stuff. There is a lot of iteration around the 'relevance algorythm' by Twitter's scientists and math people, figuring out relevance in real-time. Figuring out, which of the 100 million tweets per day matter the most for each specific individual.



3. Visualization & Understanding.
People feel overwhelmed with data. But the problem is not with the amount of data. The problem is that data is not presented in a form that people can understand and use. Be prepared to be able to present data in enjoyable and rewarding ways.

Innovations at the intersection of TV, digital platforms and gaming

When improving effective marketing with a smart second screen strategy, figuring out relevance in real-time will become a key-science.

Central question: How to improve, for each individual, his (or her) Return on Attention?

Innovations at the intersection of physics, biology and nanotechnology

In nanotechnology tiny building blocks (atoms and molecules) are edited and/or manipulated. By shifting atoms and molecules scientists create new material.

Worldwide there are experiments with nanotechnology to create new medicines that improve quality of life and human life. For instance, Nanotechnology enables Philips to produce a lab-on-a-chip.

At the intersection of Nanotechnology, Biology and Physics a new science mash-up is emerging: Nano-bio-physics.



In the Netherlands, Cees Dekker (TU Delft) and Dave Blanc (TU Twente) specialize in nano-science.

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)