Nowcasting.

Yesterday's Jon Stewart Show did a nice send-up of following the newest trends in trendspotting. They nailed it with the term Nowcasting - the act of presenting as about to happen, something that is already happening.

Trends are important of course, but too many people pay too much attention to the predictions for this year. They may happen, they may not but, even if they do, it's too late for you to catch that particular ship.

Far better to look at what's predicted to happen in five or ten years time and incrementally future-proof your business for all eventualities.

Glanceable Marketing.

Just before Christmas, I was shown some tree decorations. They were the physical representations of the recipients’ use of doppler, last.fm and flickr.

They were lovely and widely appreciated, but I was also very aware that I couldn’t easily decode them. A few weeks later, in Ben’s write-up of them, he mentioned Matt Jones’s assertion that data visualisations need to be “glanceable”, i.e. comprehended at a glance.

That’s a great description and one that deserves further investigation. How does something become glanceable? Three elements immediately spring to mind.

For something to be truly glanceable, the viewer must intuitively have an understanding of:

1) the context (what is being presented)

2) what the data means (how it's being presented), and arguably

3) how it relates to other data (why it's being presented).

The central role of intuitiveness in data visualisation is obvious but, I think, it should also be applied to the design of all your products/services. After all, if time and attention are scarce then it is crucial that your product/service embodies as much glanceability as possible.

Put another way, it should be immediately apparent to your user what it is you offer, how it helps them achieve what they want, and why your version is superior to others on offer.

It’s not enough to be noticed, you have to be understood. At a glance.

Back To Basics: Robert Campbell.

From the sublime to the ridiculous. Next up in the back to basics series, I'm delighted to present the birkenstock-clad Robert Campbell - a man who makes up in original thinking and humanity for what he may lack in urbane dress-sense.

Robert is co-creator of the cynic advertising empire, a provocative irritant to the rest of that industry and runs a new venture called Sunshine in Hong Kong. He swears a lot, has won many awards and, as with Seth, he's someone whom I initially met and shared ideas with online, but came to know in real life too. His terrific answers approach the questions not only from the perspective of someone who runs his own business but also as someone who solves marketing problems for others. Here they are.

How do you get new business?

In my experience, the ad industry tends to lose about 30% of its revenue annually so they need to continually fight for new business just to stand still.

When we started cynic, we thought this was a mad situation to be in so rather than simply chase money, we decided on a strict criteria regarding new business, they must be either [1] run by an entrepreneur [as we are more likely to be attractive to them] [2] be 3rd or 4th in their respective category with ambitions for disproportionate growth and/or [3] trying to understand culture outside of their core category [either for NPD/business development/research purposes]

We also try to deal with people who sit beyond just a marketing role – or at the very least – hold a senior board position. We do this because we believe we can only show our value if we address fundamental business issues rather than simply discuss marketing and advertising – which is why we incorporate a royalty scheme within our remuneration proposals as this helps demonstrate we’re happy to put our money where our mouth is.

Of course there are exceptions to this – but all in all, we have stuck to these rules and it has enabled us to build a fairly solid foundation of business that has allowed us to grow and expand into a variety of areas – often in conjunction with our clients.

How would you advise others to do so?

Don’t fall for the trap of only evaluating a new business prospect by the money, the creative opportunity or the chance to get a bigger slice of their marketing spend down the line. Those elements play a part, but it shouldn’t be the only part.

How has this changed in recent years and why?

Adland loves to go on about how they’ve lost their seat at the ‘big table’ … but that’s because more often than not, they talk about things that the ‘big table’ doesn’t give a flying **** about, ie: ads. {I told you he swears.}

The sad truth is that in a lot of cases, companies don’t value their marketing director nearly as much as they once did – which is why the emphasis is on driving business, not driving advertising – which is why those who can think creatively without the need to link it to an advertising channel [established or new] have great potential for future growth.

How would your advice differ for someone who is just starting up?

Deal with the top and deal with what they are focused on achieving.

Be knowledgeable about their company, their category and society as a whole. [Including how political, economical and social change is affecting the attitudes and approaches of society in relation to their business]

Create interesting, energised and executable ideas that can quantifiably fulfil their commercial [and emotional ambitions]

Remember turnover is vanity, profit is sanity.

How do you balance this with keeping existing customers satisfied and coming back?

We treat all clients like they’re new clients – it’s the lifeblood of our survival.

Back To Basics: Seth Godin.

Back in 2000, I downloaded the two hundred pages that constituted Seth Godin's brilliant Permission Marketing. Since then I've had the pleasure of attending his seminars and talks, and when I started blogging he generously warned his readers of that fact.

He writes shorter books these day and his new one Linchpin is published this month. It's about answering the crucial question of how you make yourself the linchpin of your market and/or your company. That ties in directly with the ethos of my "back to basics" questionnaire and I'm thrilled that he agreed to answer these five questions as well.

How do you get new business?

New business gets me.

This sounded unattainable to me for decades as I scrambled, often one check away from bankruptcy, to build a business, a product, an organization... but then, after a while, I discovered that people would contact me asking for this or that. The hard work isn't getting them to call, the hard work is breaking away from whatever pack I'm in, whatever ice floe I'm on and create an event or a product or an idea that people actually want to be a part of.


How would you advise others to do so?

Find 1,000 true fans. Earn the right to coordinate the actions of 1,000 people in a tribe. Connect and lead. Create ideas that spread, and find a niche small enough to be important in (but big enough to matter).

Do this while you're doing your day job (not easy). But if you do it a little, every day, for years and years, you'll find it. Which is a lot better than doing the hustle, every day, for years and years and not finding it.


How has this changed in recent years and why?

I think it's now clear that the internet makes this sort of connection and leadership significantly easier than it used to be. It brings with it more copycats and more competition, but it's still clearly a win.


How would your advice differ for someone who is just starting up?

I think now you get to skip a lot of steps that others used to have to take. Tickets that had to be punched. Now, you can start out fast, without paying as many dues. There's a big if. The if: you must have great stuff. Great ideas. Amazing art. Connections that work. Insights that people can't help but embrace. That's not easy, but in just about every segment, someone is doing just that.

Don't try to be the "next" of any successful person. That person is already occupying the slot. Be the next you.


How do you balance this with keeping existing customers satisfied and coming back?

People don't come back merely because you met spec. Lots of people meet spec. They come back because they got more than they paid for, more than they bargained for, and they're motivated to get even more of that.

Marketing 2010.

Marketing 2010 will be the same as Marketing 2009.

Media sellers will continue to claim their media is the best vehicle for you.
Advertising agencies will continue to create many bad advertisements.
Prognosticators will continue to declare that we face a new paradigm.

And reality will go on. Unaugmented.

The true role of marketing will continue to be about meeting customer needs and retaining their patronage. So, rather than make wild guesses about future trends that may or may not impact on your business, I'm going to start 2010 by getting some smart people to offer their answers to the basic marketing questions that will.

Thinking From Outside The Box.

Thinking outside the box is a phrase that has always annoyed me because it conflates two very different problem-solving approaches.

If you think the box is the problem, then you should be discarding it completely rather than merely thinking outside it (with the incremental change that implies). On the other hand, if you're happy with the box but need to approach it in a different way, you could quite profitably focus on thinking inside the box rather than engage in flights of fancy outside it. But, as the following example will show, you crucially need to do that thinking from outside of the box.

Rather than assume that technology has destroyed the "box" marked newspaper production, my friends at Newspaper Club have re-thought the box and acknowledged that is has definite customer benefits in terms of design potential, tactility and portability. By combining that insight with the spare capacity of digital printing presses and some new technology, they will soon be able to let anyone create their own small-run "newspaper" for whatever purpose they choose.

Their initial efforts have been things of beauty and people are lining up to create "newspapers" as promotional giveaways, wedding souvenirs and product samplers. But not everybody gets it - as this comment on a tech-site illustrates.

Ok, how much do you pay for something like this? Would having ads in distract you? Would they distract if they cut down on the cost? How often would you buy it?

If you're a writer, what sort of compensation would you want from an ongoing newspaper such as this.

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea and it's great to see how they did it, but am I curious how much cost and how long it took to do. There's a lot of steps between a one off and regularly published newspaper like this.

That's static inside the box thinking - where your product/service/market is defined by WHAT it is and what it has always been. By contrast, you can build in agility, dynamism and a degree of future-proofing - simply by defining the product/service/market in terms of WHY it is. By thinking from outside of the box.

The Media Is The Message.

Having written in my previous post that Eurostar's failure was a communication issue, I noticed a letter in today's Times from one of the passengers who had been trapped for 14 hours.

"The worst part wasn’t the length of the stoppage, nor the unbearable heat and darkness in the train before our painfully slow evacuation in the tunnel, nor even the lack of food and water. It was the deplorable dearth of information that really made it difficult.

I would much rather have been told that it was going to take 20 hours, then at least I could have accepted my fate and relaxed."

It's nice to have my wild blogging assertions proven correct. If you have to disappoint your customers, it's much better to disappoint them sooner rather than later, it's much better to then tell them what you're going to do rectify the situation and it's imperative that you apologise.