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Twitter Grows Up In the Aftermath of Haiti Earthquake

In the wake of the devastating 7.0 earthquake in Haiti, Twitter has been serving as a main hub of information, the Nielsen Company reports. Nielsen refers to preliminary analysis of data indicating that Twitter posts are the leading source of discussion about the quake, followed by online video, blogs, and other social media.

Although most online consumers still rely on traditional media for coverage of the quake, they are apparently turning to Twitter to share information, react to the situation, and rally support. Sysomos, an analytics firm in Toronto, estimated that nearly 150,000 posts containing both “Haiti” and “Red Cross” were sent through Twitter since the quake. The Twitter account for the Red Cross, which on average had been adding roughly 50-100 followers a day before the Haiti quake, has gained more than 10,000 followers since.

Combined with tapping into the large mobile universe of text messages (136.6 million subscribers sent and received text messages in Q3 2009), many aid and relief organizations have begun utilizing Twitter to spread the word and gather donations, augmenting their other channels. As online conversations around the Red Cross’s 90999 text campaign ("Text HAITI to 90999 to donate $10 to @RedCross relief") efforts grew, the Red Cross tweeted Friday morning that donations exceeded $8 million.

But Twitter’s growing power comes with new responsibilities. In the aftermath of the disaster, some people used the micro-blogging service to spread rumors and falsehoods, i.e. that UPS would be willing to ship any package under 50 lbs. to Haiti (UPS debunked that myth). Twitter was also aflutter with news that several airlines would take medical personnel to Haiti free of charge to help with earthquake relief (American Airlines and JetBlue said this was not the case). The FBI warns Internet users who receive requests for charitable donations on behalf of earthquake victims to "apply a critical eye and do their due diligence" before responding. "Past tragedies and natural disasters have prompted individuals with criminal intent to solicit contributions purportedly for a charitable organization and/or a good cause."

What all this shows is that Twitter is not like Facebook (as much as Facebook is trying hard to be more like Twitter). Relationships are not reciprocal, and they’re not based on trust but on authority - a currency that is easier to fake. Twitter is much more like a 21st century CNN, a broadcasting network cum narrowcasting option, and as such prone to propaganda and misinformation.

In Search of the People Formerly Known as The Audience

Our friends from the Norman Lear Center in L.A. have put together a comprehensive primer on the "Business and Culture of Social Media." If you're intrigued by social media as entertainment and want to learn more about the notion of "mass self-communication," take a look at the presentation that Lear Center deputy director Johanna Blakley and director Marty Kaplan gave at the Barcelona Media Center. As brands are in hot pursuit of the ever more fragmented group of content generators formerly known as "the audience," the authors pinpoint an interplay of business economy, gift economy, and attention economy.

Download the pdf

Lift10: Connected People

Describing itself as "a series of events built around a community of doers and thinkers who get together in Europe and Asia to explore the social consequences of new technologies," Lift is definitely one of the best conference networks out there. Laurent Haug, Lift founder and curator, is a wonderful host and has managed to maintain a strong sense of community despite continued growth. In addition to numerous satellite events with partners, Lift organizes conferences in France and Korea, as well as the annual Lift conference in Switzerland as its main hub.

Lift10 will take place from May 5-7, 2010 in Geneva and welcome 1,000 participants from 40 countries to "explore the most overlooked aspect of innovation: people. Known in the techno-parlance as users, consumers, clients, participants, prosumers, citizens or activists, people ultimately define the success of all technological and entrepreneurial projects. They adopt or refute, promote or demote; embrace, reject, or re-purpose. Their approaches are unique, influenced by cultural and generational diversity. A decade after the rebirth of user-centered design and innovation, it's time to explore the myths and uncover the reality behind the 'connected people.'"

Check out some of the Lift10 speakers that have already been confirmed.

The early-bird deadline just got extended to January 31 – you can register here.

Time for Marketing Innovation 2.0

(video from Rory Sutherland's TEDGlobal talk)

For the first time in 23 years, Pepsi Co. has decided to not run any advertisements during the Super Bowl in 2010. Instead, the nation’s second-biggest soft drink maker is plowing marketing dollars into its "Pepsi Refresh Project," an online community that allows Pepsi fans to list their public service projects, which could range from helping to feed people to teaching children to read. Visitors to the site can vote to determine which projects receive money. The program will pay at least $20 million for projects people create to "refresh" communities. Last year, Pepsi Co. spent $33 million advertising products such as Pepsi, Gatorade, and Cheetos during the Super Bowl, according to TNS Media Intelligence, $15 million of it on Pepsi alone. Ad time last year for the NFL championship game cost about $3 million for 30 seconds, on average. Pepsi Co. spokeswoman Nicole Bradley said Super Bowl ads don’t work with the company's goals next year: "In 2010, each of our beverage brands has a strategy and marketing platform that will be less about a singular event and more about a movement." Pepsi's remarkable decision epitomizes the new paradigms of marketing: Online instead of TV; many-too-many instead of one-too-many; engagement instead of advertising; sharing instead of broadcasting; movements instead of events; communities instead of campaigns.

While one of the world's foremost consumer brands has acknowledged the signs of the times and is making the transition away from one-to-many mass-marketing to social marketing with meaning, marketing theory is struggling to catch up and grasp the new realities. An article on "Rethinking Marketing" (by Roland T. Rust, Christine Moorman, and Gaurav Bhalla) in the January issue of the Harvard Business Review (HBR) is the latest example. HBR deserves credit for recognizing the need to reinvent marketing, but the piece turns out to be far less radical than its title would suggest. The authors are putting the onus on the customer, demanding that marketers focus on the customer as the sole parameter of their efforts. In their eyes, this requires a shift from "pushing individual products to many customers" through the means of one way mass-marketing to "engaging individual customers in two-way communications,” building "long-term customer relationships" that provide value beyond one-off product promotions. Consequently, the authors argue, the marketing department needs to be reinvented as a "customer department," with the Chief Customer Officer replacing the Chief Marketing Officer, and "product and brand managers subservient to customer managers."

What a depressing read! First of all, the article rehashes existing concepts but doesn’t really offer any kind of "rethinking." To engage customers in two-way, personalized communications rather than marketing individual products to broad audiences is a no-brainer, and after hundreds of books and thousands of best practices it has already become so commonplace in the field that it is hard to believe HBR considers this to be an original concept. It's like social media never happened. On which analog planet did the authors live in the past three years? The concept of radical customer focus is not entirely new either and has been well-articulated before (i.e. in the book Chief Customer Officer by Jeanne Bliss in 2006, and most recently, with a more anthropological spin, in Chief Culture Officer by Grant McCracken).

But aside from the lack of originality, I also substantively object to the concept itself. While the authors' emphasis on "customer profitability" rather than product profitability and a long-term view on value creation are in theory good intentions (and a response to the demise of the concept of shareholder value, as Roger Martin lays out in his essay on "The Age of Customer Capitalism," also in the HBR January issue), I don't agree with the conclusion to turn the marketing department into the "customer department." Embracing a naive belief in customer-centrism, the HBR authors downgrade marketing to a discipline of tactical execution when in fact this time of disruptive digital technologies and changing consumer behavior presents a tremendous opportunity for marketing to reassert itself as a key strategic function in the enterprise. An extreme customer orientation, as propagated by the authors, ill-conceives the legitimate and important customer perspective. Of course it is paramount to understand customers' needs, of course companies need to ensure customer satisfaction, and of course CEOs always score when they tout the customer as their company’s raison d'etre. But that doesn’t mean the customer is the measure of all things.

The truth is less simplistic than a "customer happy, all good" approach would suggest. In addition to their customers, businesses have other stakeholders to serve: investors, employees, the community, and the broader public, as well as future generations and other constituents that are indirectly affected by the externalization of a company’s business. In fact, one could argue that the customer's demand is mostly short-term, not to say short-sighted, whereas the corporation can and should pursue a long-term perspective on value-creation that combines individual and social value, even if the latter may at times actually conflict with what customers want. Reducing the role of the company to just responding to customer needs drastically limits the critical role businesses can play in society, and it hampers companies' ability to drive real change. When it comes to innovation and marketing (according to the venerable Peter Drucker, these are the only two basic functions of an enterprise, and – if I may add – in good marketing organizations they are one and the same), companies should be empathetic to customers (that is, "Wired to Care," as Dev Patnaik put it in his book) but not reactive. Innovation – truly disruptive innovation that moves entire industries forward and gives our lives new meaning – never happens by just meeting existing customer needs, nor by anticipating unmet customer desires, as the apostles of customer research would like us to believe.

Don Norman, author of The Design of Future Things, among other books, and a long-time advocate of the business value of design, recently shocked his peers by coming to a similar conclusion. In an outburst of self-criticism, he belittles the impact of observational design research (or "ethnographic research") on innovation. In his eyes, design research may propel incremental innovation, but the only true driver of game-changing disruptive innovation remains technology: "Design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs." Design research studies how people live, seeking to unearth unmet needs but Norman insists "Major innovation comes from technologists who have little understanding of all this research stuff: they invent because they are inventors." To support his point he refers to a list of inventions that all occurred without customer research: the airplane, the automobile, the telephone, the radio, the television, the computer, the personal computer, the Internet, text messaging, the cell phone." You might add the iPod and the iPhone, both creations of a company that famously refuses to conduct any customer research. The old Henry Ford line comes to mind ("If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses") and along with it the provocative question: Can customers look beyond their individual needs? Can we rely on them to recognize what's good for society? Can we expect customers to dream up future products and services? Can we even expect them to know (or to show, as design researchers would say) what’s good for them now? Unlike Norman, Roberto Verganti would not categorically say no. A skeptical design thinker, Verganti, in his book Design-driven Innovation, emphasizes the need for "interpreters" (who can be designers but also any other species with an interdisciplinary mind- and skill set) to "radically change the meaning of things."

Both Norman and Verganti herald marketing as a creative discipline. If marketing lives up to its mission – creating innovative products and services and finding meaningful ways to make them valuable for customers and society at large – it needs to be a step ahead of customers. Customer research can inspire and validate but it can never replace the inventiveness and ingenuity of excellent marketing. Only mediocre marketers – those who lack fresh ideas and/or the guts to put them into action – rely heavily on research to back up their decisions. They end up as me-too's and yield good enough results with good enough tools. That's fine. But if you set out to "rethink" marketing, you must shoot a little higher.

The rest of the marketing thinkers do not do much better. In a way, the HBR article is indicative of a lack of vision across the industry. Since Malcom Gladwell's Tipping Point, there has not been one single book exerting comparable influence on the profession. CMOs' by-lined articles in industry trades usually play it safe and state the obvious. The myriad social media consultants who have popped up over the past few years, as well as marketing expert bloggers, boutique agencies, and industry outsiders are all preaching the social marketing gospel to the choir (or to those few remaining on the other side of the "new digital divide") in their publications. Even at conferences such as SXSW, next, the Conversational Marketing Summit, or Marketing 2.0, which are usually ahead of the digital curve, marketing thinkers have been beating a dead horse this year, more or less citing the same set of principles, practices, and case studies. At next09 in Hamburg, Get Satisfaction's Lane Becker, who spoke before me, and I were cracking up when we realized that we were referring to the same case studies in our presentations, the usual marketing 2.0 suspects: Zappos, Skittles, Best Buy, Starbuck's My Idea, Threadless, and so on.

As we are entering the new decade, it appears as if the marketing discipline, after undergoing a mesmerizing major transformation in the past two to three years, is facing stagnation. This often occurs when pioneering concepts are fully absorbed by the mainstream: Social marketing is on the way to becoming THE marketing, as social media is becoming THE media (it is always a sign of broad adoption if adjectives are dropped). Authenticity, engagement, meaning, communities, social, conversations, transparency, etc. – they're all accepted across the industry and widely implemented now. What then is the next frontier for marketers? What will be the next big marketing innovation?

Going Human with Shy-Tech

I attended the Trendforum in Munich last week (frog was a sponsor), a two-day conference that gathered European innovation, marketing, and R&D executives to explore emerging technologies, social trends, and innovative business models. The program was eclectic and the content mostly of high quality. I was particularly intrigued by the opening session that intersected macro-economic forecasting with geeky trend evangelism as well as a humanistic pledge for meaning-driven business (in fact, the other sessions didn’t even come close, including special guest Ray Kurzweil, whose remote keynote, given by way of 3D-holographic projection, remained utterly flat).

As the first speaker, Dr. Markku Wilenius, Senior Vice President, Economic Research and Corporate Development with Allianz SE, set the framework by introducing overarching future themes, key challenges facing mankind, from climate change to water scarcity to demographic developments. Forecasting the economic development over the next two decades, he predicted redefined notions and metrics of both societal progress and individual success, and heralded “true value accounting” that would ultimately “decouple consumption from growth.” In ten years, he argued, easy and seamless sustainable choices would have become the norm, as would have “smarter systems.” Wilenius identified four key consumer trends, all to be filed under Consumer Empowerment: Downshifting (simplicity -> value for money, price sensitivity, discounts); Transparency (clarity -> open communicatons, clear essence); Selfness (control -> self-governance, tangibility); and Age of Less (substance -> long-term thinking, lightness). Despite the daunting challenges in these times of crisis, his outlook remained optimistic: “Material scarcity always creates an abundance of ideas.” If that is true, we can look forward to innovative times in which creativity will not only become a crucial skill but an existential means of survival.

Dr. Christine Woesler de Panafieu, founder of CoSight, an international trend research and marketing consulting firm in Paris, picked up the ball and described how the macro-trends Wilenius had pinpointed would alter the lives of consumers. She argued that we were moving from "post- to ultra-modernity," resulting in a renaissance of the renaissance: “the man as measure of all things.” This neo-humanistic mindset would bear a new spiritual quest – “an individual, open path seeking direct resonance with the sacred,” as she put it. The number of pilgrimages is indeed on the rise, as is the number of new religions (and meta-religions such as the recent Charter of Compassion or the portal Beliefnet). “The 21st century will be spiritual or it won’t be at all,” Dr. Woesler de Panafieu quoted a French philosopher. Morality is in high demand, but doing good is shifting from convention to conviction, from a humanitarian to an empowerment approach. For brands, this means they need to become the “right thing to do.” And one only has to look as far as Foursquare to see that converting social currency into real value will the business model of the future.

Nils Müller, founder and CEO of TrendONE, a trend research firm, finally took the audience on a riveting tour de force through much buzzed-about emerging tech trends, envisioning the future in 2020 as a seamless blend between the real and virtual worlds, dominated by location-based, real-time, and social computing applications that turn the Internet into an "Outernet" and “every interface into a surface” – from printed electronics to face recognition to augmented social shopping. He depicted an evolution from “lean back” to “move forward” to “jump in” to “always-on” to “plug in” media. And he showed tons of videos: the "Siftables" - see picture above; the inevitable Microsoft Natal clip; a demo of brainwave-based voiceless communications (theaudeo.com), and a clip on augmented vision enabled by eye chips (tat.se). Their common thread: Technology in disguise, with front-ends that are becoming touchable, intuitive, and human-centric. Mueller coined the term “Shytech” for this phenomenon: technology that can afford to be non-intrusive because it is fully immersive.

In the concluding panel discussion, Dr. Woesler de Panafieu was asked what’s left to do for designers when everything was immersive and one great computing cloud. “Designers’ task will be to make the invisible visible,” she said, “creating the new interaction codes of our societies.” That again alluded to the big mega-trend of Good Computing – without Computers. Designers are the ones who can translate data (and meta-data) into meaning and make morality tangible amidst a flood of information. As they visualize the dematerialization of products and services, how long will it take before the dematerialized world becomes the ideal one?

Apple and Bloomberg: Old Champions in the New Economy

Reading the business section of the New York Times today, you can’t help but notice the juxtaposition of two seemingly different companies, which, at second glance, have more in common that you might think. One is Bloomberg, the financial data juggernaut that has enough cash to aspire to become “the world’s most influential news organization.” The company has placed its bets on the acquisition of the venerable BusinessWeek, trusting that it will broaden its reach into a mainstream business audience. A few pages later, Digital Domain columnist Randall Stross reveals Apple’s pending patent application for a new advertising pop-up technology that forces users of devices and web sites to acknowledge the reception of the commercial message.

What Apple calls “enforcement routine” is basically a radical ad-based model that offers consumers to use Apple’s products and services for free or at a discount if they “watch ads they may not want to watch.” Stross writes: “Its distinctive feature is a design that doesn’t simply invite a user to pay attention to an ad – it also compels attention. The technology can freeze the device until the user clicks a button or answers a test question to demonstrate that he or she has dutifully noticed the commercial message. Because this technology would be embedded in the innermost core of the device, the ads could appear on the screen at any time, no matter what one is doing.” As Stross points out, other brands went down this path before and utterly failed, and he is stunned that Apple, if it is serious about this technology, seems to be willing to risk its  reputation of consumer-friendly “cool.”

One story can be read in the context of the other: Bloomberg and Apple not only share a zealously rigid culture and a “walled garden” business model based on selling high-grade packages at a premium price; they are also both media companies. Both have strong communities driven by the Three C’s of Communities – connectivity, content, and context – and both are wondering which of these parameters they can exploit more aggressively without jeopardizing the integrity of the community that is the foundation of their business. Both Apple and Blooomberg create value by heavily relying on network effects within an ecosystem that they tightly control. Both are distributing content to raise demand for their products. And both have a strong brand to extend – and to lose.

With the acquisition of BusinessWeek, Bloomberg’s strategic trajectory is clear: Owning a proprietary technology platform (it sold 300,000 terminals to date), the company is looking for ways to reach more potential buyers (and sell premium services). Apple’s “terminals,” on the other hand, are its iTunes store and its user interfaces, and the recent patent application indicates that the company might explore the exploitation of attention generated through these properties. Bloomberg is buying attention to open up new sources of revenue, Apple might be selling it.

The two brands have one last trait in common: They are not really embracing social media, to put it mildly. Apple, as a company, does not engage, and Bloomberg even discourages its employees to engage. Apple and Bloomberg, in some ways, are the antidotes to a marketplace that – propelled by the forces of the Social Web – is becoming increasingly atomized, hyper-distributed, open, and transparent. Secrecy, compliance, top-down hierarchies, rigid communication policies, and walled gardens are characteristics that may be somewhat outdated in this era, and yet they seem to be the very cornerstones of Apple’s and Bloomberg’s success as the two firms thrive as the surprise champions of their respective categories. Both came to save ailing industries, ripe for innovation: Apple reinvented the music industry and dominates the Smart Phone market. Bloomberg is determined to reinvent the news business. But in the long term, can Apple sustain its community of users without becoming a more transparent organization? And can Bloomberg really emerge as “the world’s most influential news organization” without going social?

NPR and frog design Host Digital Think-In to Explore Future of Public Radio

"NPR is a brand to die for," as a colleague of mine said. Enjoying the authority of a well-established public media vanguard with a broad and extremely loyal listenership, it has also managed to become an agile innovator that is embracing (and even pioneering) the new rules of the digital era of broadcasting. NPR's social media footprint is constantly widening, its API much acclaimed, and its recent iPhone app has already surpassed that of the New York Times and other news outlets in terms of popularity.

It is thus not surprising (but still absolutely commendable) that NPR is experimenting with further opening its brand and in fact holding a full-blown digital strategy session in the public limelight, as it did this Friday with the NPR Digital Think In in San Francisco. I was priviliged to be involved in the planning and organization of the event, on behalf of my employer, frog design, which co-hosted the event. We facilitated the workshop sessions, provided our studio facilities, and also helped NPR connect with key thought leaders from the Bay Area tech and design communities.

The Digital Think In brought together 60 thought leaders at the intersection of media and technology to explore new approaches to content creation, distribution, and funding for NPR and NPR member stations. Hosted by NPR CEO and President Vivian Schiller and Digital Media SVP and General Manager Kinsey Wilson, the Think In harnessed the collective expertise and creativity of an exceptional group of entrepreneurs, executives, and innovators. Participants included leaders at the leading edge of technology and media innovation from academia, venture capital, internet design, public media, social media, and research. Notable participants contributing to the day-long brainstorm included: Craig Newmark, Founder of craigslist; Reid Hoffman, Chairman and co-Founder of LinkedIn; Roger McNamee, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Elevation Partners; Chris Beard, Chief Innovation Officer of Mozilla; Krishna Bharat, Principal Scientist and creator of Google News; and Sue Gardner, Executive Director of Wikimedia Foundation, among many others.

Here's how NPR's Kinsey Wilson framed their mission:

"Historic changes in technology and the rapid growth in digital media have had a profoundly disruptive effect on journalism, calling into question the news media's ability to fulfill its time-honored function as civic watchdog. Hardly a week goes by that we don’t hear of yet another major news organization cutting staff, curtailing coverage or closing its doors. As traditional news organizations struggle to adapt, new, non-traditional outlets are beginning to take their place. As a not-for-profit with a distinct business model, National Public Radio has benefited from the disruption and seen its audience grow. Americans now spend more time with NPR than any other news source. But it's hardly immune from the technological challenges of the era. And it's clear that the rise of digital media will ultimately disrupt NPR's business model as well. NPR has responded by recruiting digital leaders to serve the top of the organization, embarking on an unprecedented staff training program and overhauling its digital media strategy. It is poised to take further steps to ensure it remains a vital source of news on every platform."

The Digital Think In explored five main topics that are significant to NPR's ecosystem and its future: social media and connection to the audience, the organization's national network of more than 800 stations, the potential of its open API, expansion of platforms, and its diversified revenue model. After an NPR overview and an opening session, participants broke out into small groups to develop concepts that NPR can incorporate into its organizational road map.

Closing out the day, NPR's Vivian Schiller suggested to call the next gathering "Open-mic Night," given the stand-up performances of the presenters. She said she was overwhelmed by the ideas that came out of the event and that some of them could be implemented soon. Kinsey Wilson assured everyone that their efforts will not end up tossed in a dusty drawer and forgotten. So be it!

The event was live-blogged on the Think In micro-site which also featured live video streams of the opening and closing sessions. In addition, attendees were tweeting the event throughout the day using the hashtag #nprthinkin (and there was a lively conversation going on between on-site and remote participants; also check out the NPR Facebook page for comments).

You can view pictures of the event on Flickr.

Are Writers Selling Out to Marketers? Alain de Botton’s “Heathrow Diary”

For one week, Swiss author Alain de Botton was living the life I’ve always wanted to live. As the first-ever writer-in-residence of London’s Heathrow Airport, he was working on his new book on site, observing, documenting, and philosophically charging the emotions and motions of the two arguably most interesting things in life – people and planes – in transit, in situ.

My own fascination with airports started at an early age thanks to the location of my parents' house. I grew up with planes taking off and landing at the nearby airport, and as a student I spent one summer vacation working as a baggage handler on the tarmac. Ever since, aircraft noise makes me feel at ease, and if I could, I would become a permanent tenant of Narita’s Star Alliance lounge, where I would watch planes all day.

Airports have also long piqued the interest of artists of course – from Brian Eno’s "Music for Airports," to Steven Spielberg’s "The Terminal," to 747-turned-designer hotels. Exhibiting equally the technical routines and the emotional excesses of 21st century civilization, airports serve as mundane settings for the dramatic and dramatic settings for the mundane – de Botton, as Heathrow’s writer-in-residence, set out to capture both.

The assignment was simple: De Botton was commissioned by the British Airports Authority (BAA) to spend a week in the middle of Heathrow’s bustling Terminal 5 and write about life at the airport. He got his own desk, was awakened by Air Canada every morning, and immersed himself into the airport logistics while living his usual ascetic life (judging from all photos, he wore his signature blue shirt all week). Most of the time he observed and conducted what design researchers would call ethnographic research – knowing that you can best study human behavior, on any given scale, when you’re close enough to the action but not part of the commotion. The personal union of researcher and writer raises some interesting questions: Where exactly do you draw the line between observation and interpretation? Where does research end and authorship start? Is research even possible without storytelling?

But these are technicalities. Of bigger concern for reviewers appears to be the “precarious line between creative independence and commerce,” as the Guardian calls it. Blog site Gawker, among others, was fast in chastising the unconventional book deal as a shameless and rather desperate PR stunt, but the alleged cynicism reflects more poorly on the critics themselves: Isn’t the greatest cynicism of all to look for the cynical in all things? For the record, de Botton insists that BAA gave him complete editorial freedom and that his writing was thoroughly subjective and as unbiased as it can possibly be. He is not the first writer to experiment with commercial book mandates (bestselling author Fay Weldon shocked the arts world in 2001 when it emerged that her latest novel had been sponsored by Bulgari) and smart enough to know that his "Heathrow Diary" project might stir up a controversy. It would have been much safer, from his PR point-of-view, to not pursue it.

Yet de Botton's interest in airports seems genuine: “There are many places in the modern world that we do not understand because we cannot get inside them," he told the Guardian. Moreover, he believes the project is philosophically sound and in fact truly innovative as it revives an old tradition of underwriting: “That one of the largest organizations in the UK should take an interest in a book is almost quaint, like sponsoring a poet,” he said. “On behalf of my fellow beleaguered writers, it’s nice that writers seem to matter.”De Botton already has plans for the next underwritten project: “I’d like to be a writer in residence at a nuclear power station.”

And sure – why not? I think we have to overcome the notion that a distinction between marketing and publishing is still possible. Herman Miller’s See magazine was one of the most artful and best-curated print magazines out there, Strategy + Business by Booz is one of the sharpest business publications, and there are countless other examples of high-quality corporate publishing. What is wrong with the idea that not only marketers need to be good writers, but writers can be good marketers, too – for the common good of public life? Brands, advertisers, and PR agencies shape the cultural fabric of our societies as much as museums, galleries, artists, and writers do – if the mechanics of their complex interactions are more exposed these days, this can only be a good thing. As long as the involved parties’ agendas are transparent – as they were in De Botton’s airport project – readers can judge for themselves how valuable they find the products of such collaborations: there is no free lunch, there is no free content, after all.

Aside from that, it is naïve to assume that PR agencies and brand marketers are all evil and unconditionally push for a lopsided, overwhelmingly positive expression of their brands. By now, most of them are happy to tune into the choir of conversational marketing evangelists who understand that authenticity trumps news which may be good but lacks credibility. In this vein, Dan Glover, creative director at Mischief, BAA’s PR agency, told the NY Times that “If we funded a brochure that said how wonderful the airport was, people would switch off because they’d think they’re being marketed to.” Instead, he added, the Heathrow Diary campaign sought to stimulate “branded conversations” among travelers “through the experience of seeing a top literary figure at the airport — and potentially being a character in the book — and by receiving an exclusive copy to read on your travels. The overarching objective is to make a passenger’s time at Heathrow the best memory of the trip.”

It all goes back to the pillars of "meaningful marketing": Add value, create a (social) event, be a change agent, engage the audience, don’t market products, produce! Clients turning to artists and storytellers to create “meaning” for their brands intend that the return-on-meaning transcends the original assignment – the wealth spreads and generates a “meaning surplus.”

In this case, De Botton wasn’t hired to write an image brochure for an airport whose bad reputation is well known. The “Art of Travel” author took advantage of the opportunity to study one of his favorite subjects first-hand, and rather than just bitching and moaning about the notoriously inhumane experience of having to spend time at Heathrow, he and his client actually did something to make the experience better for travelers. The result of his work, "A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary," was published on September 24, and BAA is distributing 10,000 free copies of the book to Heathrow passengers (it is not devoid of irony to create artificial scarcity by limiting the book’s free distribution to one of the world’s most frequented travel hubs). Afterwards the book will be available for sale through Amazon’s British Web site and traditional bookstores. De Botton’s "Heathrow Diary" benefits the publisher, the writer, BAA, and travelers – a win-win-win-win and a story with a happy landing.

Read excerpts from “Heathrow Diary”

[Image credit: LA Times]

Marketing Links 09.15

This week's collection of remarkable marketing links, curated by the frog marketing team.

Is Obesity Viral? Clive Thompson on Social Contagion Theory in the NYT Magazine (fantastic cover above)

Is Your Marketing Too Nice? Yes - No

A Sibling for "Project Runaway": "Design for Life" – hosted by Philippe Starck – started on BBC this week.

Starbucks "Localwashing": Change.org's Nathaniel Whittemore on "The Difference Between Localism and Nativism"

Facebook Tries a New Ad Format: Free Samples

T-Shirts - Really? MJ, the new Obama and "Design a T-shirt for a CEO"

Android Catching Up: Android app downloads aren’t that far behind iPhone apps downloads – and, in some cases, the iPod Touch beats both.

The Future of News: Hyper-Distribution or Hyper-Branding?

Jeff Jarvis, who’s admirably trying to prevent the news industry from becoming the next music industry, recently wrote an interesting blog post in which he heralded “hyper-distribution” as a valuable new business model for news organizations. Responding to some industry pundits who propose embracing shrinking audiences as an effective means of consolidation and audience loyalty, Jarvis argued:

“Since when did it become OK for media people to shrink their audiences? Since they gave up on the ad model, that’s when. But I am not ready to surrender to the idea that advertising, which has supported mass media since its creation, is over. Yes, ad rates are lower; welcome to competition. That’s all the more reason why publishers must attract larger audiences publics – make it up on volume – as well as more targeted and valuable communities.”

To grow audiences through hyper-distribution, Jarvis proposes that news outlets utilize readers as distributors and embrace the very hyper-fragmented forces of the social web that might pose the most existential threat to them: reverse-syndication, “embeddable paper” formats, APIs, specialization, and engagement on social networks.

These are viable concepts (and some of them are already used, i.e. by the New York Times, the Silicon Insider, and others) but, if you were to be cynical, you could also view them as belated means of catching up to a new media reality in which the traditional notion of an advertising- funded news market is no longer valid. While hyper-distribution may provide formats for the post-article era, it still clings to the idealistic assumption that the world needs professional news organizations. But what if it doesn’t? What if the student who famously told the New York Times a year ago, “If the news is that important, it will find me,” doesn’t really consider news media to be trusted sources of news anymore, no matter how good they are in deploying social distribution channels to push them to him? What, in fact, if news brands don’t really matter anymore to Gen Y – as sources of news, trusted or not?

Arguably, CNN has lost some cachet through its #CNNfail debacle during the Iranian election (and similar defining news moments that seem to have shifted the intertwined powers of authority and attention to Twitter, i.e. the Hudson River plane crash and so on), and already, individual experts manage to establish themselves as the nimbler news aggregators on Twitter, cultivating individual audiences (of followers). What if the new news brand is @name? Or newsrooms, dispersed online, that converge amateurs, professionals, and experts? Google’s Marissa Mayer has hinted at what this scenario might look like: "hyperpersonal news streams," in which stories break like (Google) “Waves” and become the publication of collaborative processes rather than finished articles – constant iterations instead of interpretations.

Hyper-distribution may indeed overestimate the demand for trusted commercial news providers. As long as NPR, BBC, and other public services provide first-hand news coverage for free, chances are that the blogo-and Twittersphere will self-aggregate and hyper-distribute news without the mediation of commercial hyper-distributors. For them, innovating their distribution formats to catch up with social media may not be enough – they may want to innovate the very meaning of news. Rather than trying to generate incremental value against over-supply, they could generate disruptive value by creating a new kind of demand – pursuing a “reconstructionist” approach and yielding the type of “value innovation” that is commonly labeled under the sticky metaphor Blue Ocean Strategy.

And yet, two of the venerable US news weeklies, Time and, recently, Newsweek, are pursuing a third way out of the industry misery. They are neither adapting to the new rules of competition in a ‘red ocean’ nor are they creating a ‘blue ocean’ – instead, they are carving out a blue ocean within the red ocean, so to speak, by increasing their publications’ exclusivity. Both are deliberately reducing circulation to create a more loyal and targeted readership, and shifting their positioning from mere news engine to high-end background reportage and political commentary; and both are diametrically opposed to Jarvis’ hyper-distribution paradigm. Newsweek, 76 years old, is determined to shrink its circulation from 2.7 million to little more than half of that. Time’s circulation, which 20 years ago was close to five million, is now at 3.4 million.

Interestingly, it is another renowned weekly that presents the exception from this trend, and boasts surging circulation and ad revenue numbers: The Economist. According to the Publishers Information Bureau, the magazine’s revenues increased last year by a whopping 25 percent, whereas Newsweek’s and Time’s dropped 27 percent and 14 percent, respectively. With its US circulation nearing 800,000, The Economist may ultimately even overtake Newsweek in the States. Given that this growth trajectory has been consistent in the past few years, what is it that makes The Economist thrive while others are drowning in red ink? Michael Hirschorn, in a recent article in The Atlantic, opines that “The real value of The Economist lies in its smart analysis of everything it deems worth knowing – and smart packaging, which may be the last truly unique attribute in the digital age.”

Smart packaging of course means smart branding. The Economist has successfully branded itself as the de-facto print magazine for the global elite. “The secret to The Economist’s success is not its brilliance, or its hauteur, or its typeface,” Hirschorn contends, “The writing in Time and Newsweek may be every bit as smart, as assured, as the writing in The Economist. But neither one feels like the only magazine you need to read. You may like the new Time and Newsweek. But you must – or at least, brilliant marketing has convinced you that you must – subscribe to The Economist.”

Similar value is associated with Tyler Brule’s Monocle, a “briefing on world affairs,” as the monthly describes itself, delightfully packaged and suavely combined with fashion features, frequent traveler tips, and stylish gizmos – plus, online, a truly earnest old school radio podcast. The Economist and Monocle are both examples of the power of niche positioning, as Michael Hirschorn points out: “In the digital age, razor-sharp clarity and definition are the keys to success. Knowing what and who you are, and conveying that idea to an audience, is the only way to break through to readers ADD’ed out on an infinitude of choices. General-interest is out; niche is in. The irony, as restaurateurs and club-owners and sneaker companies and Facebook and Martha Stewart know – and as The Economist demonstrates, week in and week out – is that niche is sometimes the smartest way to take over the world.”

“News doesn’t build a brand anymore,” says serial German Web entrepreneur Alexander Görlach, who is poised to fill a niche with his new online magazine The European, which will launch at the end of September. Görlach believes that “To date, online formats have been designed as extensions of print outlet. But [in Germany], there is no autonomous online news brand that focuses exclusively on commentary and opinion.” The European will give experts and authors a voice, and cherish a culture of debate without violating the principles of the web by offering text-heavy articles. “Strong opinions. Journalism for the Web. No perks,” the tagline provides cues for what to expect. For US audiences, this formula may sound familiar: When Görlach promises rich multimedia programming and a departure from conventional section structures, one can’t help think that the Huffington Post is coming to Germany. In any event, The European, targeting 25-60 year old web users who earn more than 2,500 Euro per month, is one to watch, especially with a classy title like this that indicates that the publisher seems to have a good hand with branding and a confident, somewhat ironic grasp on history: "The European" was also the name of a British weekly newspaper in the 90s, billed as “Europe’s first national newspaper,” as well as that of a privately circulated cultural and political magazine that was published in the 50s. Obviously, neither lasted long.

The main lesson to be learned from the success of The Economist and Monocle and (quite possibly) The European: Culture beats economies of scale. Hyper-distribution (and hyper-localization) might be a (controversial) option for newspapers; it is certainly not an option at all for distinct magazine titles. For them, creating artificial scarcity in a sea of abundance – the essence of branding – remains the main imperative. I’m not saying that all outlets in the high-end category – The Economist, Monocle, Vogue, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, and others – can survive simply because of their strong brands, but they stand much better chances of maintaining loyal audiences because of it. Access to information is important, sure, and innovative distribution models are to be explored, too, but it all comes down to the power of branding, the power of your voice. Distinction saves you from extinction. What do you stand for? What do you know? What do you have to offer as a handle on the world, a firm point of view in a world that is increasingly complex and full of ambiguity?

If brand is so important, then why is BusinessWeek up for sale, a supposedly strong name? Well, maybe precisely because its brand has suffered. By pioneering a compelling, state-of-the-art web presence – one of the best among business publications – BusinessWeek may not have done itself a favor; rather, it inadvertently over-extended its brand and diluted its editorial voice. It has experimented a lot but not really carved out a new identity: Is it a business magazine, a news portal, a blog network, or a social network?

While BusinessWeek expanded into digital formats and gradually blurred the boundaries between its print and online offerings, The Economist succeeded by sticking to it guns. It was very late to the web game and in fact never really caught up to the latest trends (and fads) of online journalism. It did not embrace the principles of the “link economy” as BusinessWeek did so fervently, and if you ask anyone about The Economist, you will certainly hear that it’s a weekly print publication. That’s all. Similarly, German business monthly Brand Eins, an award-winning collection of philosophical essays and reportages on the people behind the numbers, has never really hidden its disdain for the web – and its print circulation keeps growing. Both Brand Eins and The Economist have never compromised their print brands, never open-sourced their content to anyone, and are now in the most enviable position to defy Jarvis’ calls for “hyper-distribution.”

Perhaps, the most innovative thing you can do if you’re a publisher these days is to ignore the action bias – and not innovate.

[image credit: AdSoftWorld]