Why does everyone feel they are owed a job?

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As individuals, we are completely unpredictable. One person making one decision means that I couldn’t possibly tell you what you’re going to do. But according to the law of large numbers if a million people do a million things, then that is completely predictable.

You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.

In 2022 there were more books written about Marketing than Mental Health and more conferences about building Brands than curing Cancer. A fact I think I probably read.

There’s been a lack of meaningful disruption and an oversupply of marketing literature and the result has been that the distance between brands and what they stand has shrunk.

The literature itself isn’t the problem. Seth Godin’s This is Marketing, Rory’s Sutherlands The Dark Art of Creating Magic in Brands and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick are all worth a read.

But because we are all have access to the same great information we end up going through life in a kind of trance state, and part of me is:

“Hey! wake up. There’s something happening in front of you right here, right now. Interpret it yourself, rather than have someone else do it for you!”

A race to the middle.

And so it happened. We became the one in four of us who owns a car in grey – the most popular car colour for the fifth successive year. The one in three of us who paint our rooms in one of the three hundred or so different shades of white there are. The one in 1.4 billion of us who owns an iPhone.

I don’t think our subconscious wants us to blend in, but perhaps there is something deeply reassuring about not standing out. To Zig when others Zig and Zag when they Zag. The risk of getting on the wrong side of the debate, of sticking your neck out and standing for something, has never made “being in the middle” more attractive. 

“If I want to put all $7,945,400 into a hot tub, get naked and play Scrooge McDuck, that is 100% my business” Marty Byrde

Just ask Michel Doukeris. He was in charge when his company lost close to $16B of its value overnight. Seems as though no one in Bud’s marketing dept could explain why they chose to put Dylan Mulvaney in a hot tub, drinking cans of Bud Lite with her face on them.

A mea culpa of corporate wokeism… surely someone there had the very good reason? Perhaps rather than saying nothing, they should have just quoted Marty Byrde.

Perhaps there should be more books on using ones common sense and less about how “I’ve cracked this marketing thing”.

Necessity really focuses the mind.

When I joined Pret A Manger, close to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I signed up for two years in perpetual survival mode. This existential threat seemed, at least for that period, gave us a superhuman-like focus.

It took just 3 months for me to set up a multi-disciplinary team from scratch. After 6 months we’d launched a coffee subscription, a click-and-collect business, a digital loyalty scheme, consolidated home delivery, launched 2 new apps and FMCG and dinners range. What worked, we scaled fast and what didn’t, we killed quickly.

A 5 year plan conceived and delivered in under 12 months.

Get uncomfortable and learn some new things.

Those two years at Pret reminded me why I got into Marketing and why I chose to move from FMCG into Technology; to retrain and reinvent myself.

Leaving Mars as I did, to join eBay in 2015, I landed right in the middle of a digital media bubble where every channel had data proving its supremacy over the others and debates about the merits of different delivery channels. Media, it seemed, mattered more than creativity, and analysts, data scientists and growth marketers were in high demand.

The 2015 me: Sitting suspended 80 ft above La Croisette on Snapchats big wheel, staring out over Google’s Beach and YouTube’s Island, gave me a whole new perspective on the industry that until that point, I thought I had all figured out.

The 2023 me: Older, wiser and somewhat saddle sore from a 6 year rodeo of VC and PE backed businesses, trying to recombobulate the world through a letterbox size slither of screen real estate that’s on offer to those of us who don’t pay a subscription to The Marketing Week or know someone who does. 

The relentless, zen-like, pursuit of the perfect “PE” unit economics makes the thought of subscribing to an overpriced industry magazine as exotic as jetting off to the South of France to a Festival devoted to Creativity.

Thankfully, everyone who still does go to the Cannes wastes zero time telling those who don’t go, what they are missing out on.

Isn’t AI supposed to be revolutionising everything?

65% of brands and agencies cite AI as the most important tech trend this year. State of Creativity Study 2023, Cannes Lions

At year’s Film Festival, AI was the talk of Cannes. It was being used for voice acting, analysing scripts, coming up with budgets and creating mock-ups of scenes before crews even have picked up a camera.

Every thing from celebrities having their voices cloned so they can speak fluently in dozens of different languages, to them having their faces de-aged by deepfake, face swapping GAN technology. Check out this live demo with Harrison Ford that was streamed live via TikTok from the red carpet.

Surprisingly at the Creative Festival, just one week later, the big AI companies kept a low profile and the first days headlines, were dominated by the marketing chiefs at P&G and Unilever. Listening in I could only assume they kept their best material for the after parties.

“It’s all about growing markets to make the pie bigger… and giving people things that meet their unique needs…“

“Engaging with consumers in homes, stores, e-commerce, websites, games and apps…“

“Success will come from having a good value proposition and getting the right product at the right price”. 

The heads of the biggest FMCGs Cannes 2023.

Mind blown. Really!

Still, there was Brad Lightcap, the COO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI. No prizes for guessing why GAN isn’t needed to make him look 30. 

Thankfully he wasn’t talking about bigger pies or better value propositions, rather AI and the future of creativity. He was unsurprisingly bullish about the “profound impact” AI was about to have on the industry although his talk was light on detail when it came to specific use cases. 

It was however fascinating to see what got covered in the marketing press. Whilst their focus was on the threat of new “unknown” technologies, the speakers at Cannes busily shooed the spectre of job losses into the corner, to keep the spotlight firmly trained on creativity and productivity.

Helpfully one of the Google executives reminded us all that when photography first arrived, many worried it signalled the end of art.

“Many people worried photography would be the end of art because it threatened to disrupt significant areas of work, like landscape painting and portraiture. However painters went to new places leading to the rise of impressionism, modernism, and so much more. At the same time, photography became an art form of its own, intertwined with and powered by technology”.

So we’re all ok. Worst case we can retrain as impressionist painters.

Back in the UK with its cost-of-living crisis and rapidly rising inflation, Octopus Energy was announcing that they had been experimenting with ChatGPT in their systems since December 2022.

In the first few weeks, they had AI reply to customers’ emails under staff supervision and the emails written by ChatGPT satisfied 80% of their clients, which is 65% higher than that when they receive responses from skilled and well-trained workers. 

As a result AI now responds to a third of all their customers’ emails which it had previously employed nearly 250 staff to do. Now their CEO Greg Jackson, is talking of large-scale layoffs coming more quickly.

This tied in with a recent Goldman Sachs study which showed that generative AI could expose the equivalent of 300 million jobs globally to automation over the next decade.

Focusing on the positives, it was great to already see AI and creativity coming together to scoop some of the awards in Cannes.

Dentsu “Scrolling Therapy” won a Pharma Grand Prix award, demonstrating how it was using AI to help people with Parkinson’s disease. And FCB’s “Dreamcaster” initiative won a Sport Grand Prix award for its use of generative AI and haptic technology that allowed a blind sports pundit commentate on a live basketball game he couldn’t actually see.

There was also a nice entry from a US radio broadcaster which used AI to produce ads for smaller companies, offering them choices of AI-generated pitches, and then getting their pick read by an AI voice, rather than by expensive voice talent. All to showcase how AI can democratise content generation.

AI. As deadly as pandemics and nuclear weapons.

Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war. 2023 open letter signed by more than 350 executives, researchers and engineers working in AI.

I think it’s probably the unpredictability of what will happen that makes AI so exciting and is why I disagree with the naysayers who think that like the Metaverse and Augmented Reality, AI will be next year’s second hand news.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Generative AI will be a disruptive jolt, and hopefully stop us all heading towards the middle. Just like the jolt Digital media gave us 15 years ago. AI will probably dominate innovation in our sector over the next decade. For example:

Customer Experience. AI powered advanced chatbots and virtual assistants that understand natural language, answer inquiries, provide product recommendations, and even answer complex customer issues in a human-like way. Customer Profiling. Analysing vast amounts of data, including demographics, browsing behaviour, and purchase history, AI can already generate insights about individual preferences and provide customised product recommendations, tailored advertisements, and personalised communication. Both of these are already happening and will continue to do so at an exponential rate.

Ad & Content Generation and Optimisation. Assisting in creating engaging and personalised content at scale using generative models to automate content creation (text, images, videos and interactive experiences), streamline workflows, and deliver the most relevant messages to consumers. Generating and testing multiple ad variations, analysing performance metrics to identify the most effective combinations of visuals, copy, and layout to increase ad relevance, engagement, and conversion rates, improving overall marketing campaign effectiveness. Google, Meta and Microsoft were all at Cannes demoing new tools to help advertisers make more effective ads.

Research and Insights. Gathering, consuming and analysing research data, from various sources, such as social media, surveys, and customer feedback, AI models can identify patterns, preferences, and emerging market trends, to generate insights, and predict trends to develop more effective marketing strategies. Revenue Optimisation. Analysing factors like supply and demand, competitor pricing, and consumer behaviour, AI will be able to generate more sophisticated pricing recommendations to maximise revenue, improve profit margins, and deliver personalised pricing offers to individual customers. AI will increasingly democratise insight.

Influencer Marketing. Analysing social media profiles, content engagement, audience demographics and possible reactions, AI will help to identify and match the most relevant influencers for a given marketing campaign. As of today, it’s not illegal for example for AI to impersonate a human digitally without their permission and several influencers have already leveraged AI likenesses of themselves. Not to mention a lot of influencers at Cannes squirming in their seats at the prospect of AI influencers taking over #LOL

Are we saying there’s a chance that when we push that button we destroy the world?

Chances are close to zero. What is sure if that AI will create opportunities for new disciplines within marketing teams to thrive and it will provide businesses with real opportunities to save money through efficiency gains that can be reinvested in what truly sets brands and publishers apart.

Of course we need books and literature to codify and democratise the “best practices” of the moment but it’s also very healthy for us to have these “Oppenheimer moments”. These get us looking up, over the horizon, feeling some existential angst.

In doing so it forces us; the incumbents, the protagonists and practitioners, to reinvent themselves to stay relevant. And in doing so it pushes the industry forward. Because no one owes anyone a job.

Some new s**t has come to light

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I had managed to avoid it for some weeks, it somehow felt like work, and I preferred to escape to a nature documentary or a book, but the Netflix algorithm is, Kaa-in-Jungle-Book-like-persuasive, and so it was that I found myself last week watching “The Social Dilemma”. 

What I saw in The Social Dilemma wasn’t inconsistent with my own experiences working in tech, although as a parent of an 11 year old, Netflix’s storytelling made it next-level panic inducing, leading me to place all manner of social monitoring technology on my son’s phone.

“I gotta get paid!, well hey, but that’s the way it is”. Tupac

The fact that “big tech” has been consuming our data for years isn’t new and Mark Zuckerberg seems to be giving his half-apologies to some subcommittee or another, every other week.

So it’s the same s**t just with new light, courtesy of some clever narrative and interestingly candid, insider testimonial. Of course, the marketing press loves a story, so I figured someone would at least cover the ethics of it.

Surprisingly it barely got a mention and instead I found myself eye-rolling my way through an article by Helen Edwards in Marketing Week about how marketers are actually underestimating these signs of customer behaviour. 

Wait!

Didn’t the ex heads of the biggest social networks just tell me they are in the business of manipulating behaviour and that they’d be happier if their kids got addicted to crack than social media? (or something to that effect)

Now I’m going to tread carefully as Helen is a regular in Marketing Week, a published author, regular speaker and “branding expert”. She even has a PHD in marketing. So with a degree in architecture, some industry experience and a tenuous claim of co-authorship of a book about marketing, I feel ill qualified, but still compelled, to comment.

Our lunch breaks, I’m told, have gotten shorter too

Having leapt from the relative safety of Consumer Goods into the ruthlessly Darwinistic world of Technology some five years ago (one of the best decisions I made honestly), it still amazes me to see how the role of the marketer has changed. 

The once revered agency planner and creative duo have made way for the data scientist, analyst and engineer. Day long strategy meetings have been replaced by agile stand-ups and sprints. Focus groups (the ones with those one way mirrors) in my head have made way for AI powered algorithms that help us hack the unconscious mind of our customers. 

It’s no wonder that sometimes I feel cognitively closer to my salad than my coworkers when the lunch conversation turns to Bayesian models, Markov chain analysis and Monte-Carlo simulations. Thankfully the lunch breaks I’m told have gotten shorter too.

Don’t put your faith in research involving T-shirts and slogans

It’s through these eyes that I now read Helen’s article which sets out just how marketers are “underestimating the significance of the small signs and clues coming back to them from their consumers” and why “human behaviour is too fluid, too individual to be linked with the word ‘science’” so it follows that “behavioural science is not really science at all”.

The suggestion that human behavior is too random and unpredictable, to be called a science, is to me, a little myopic. After all, the world’s biggest companies have invested billions believing the exact opposite: that the human mind responds predictably to specific stimulus and can be manipulated to influence how we think and behave. 

If you’ve ever worked in a big technology company, you’d be hard pressed to see how behaviour and science are not inextricably linked. How by mining these very “small signs and clues” from the unconscious “system 1” mind, human behaviour is being altered by the very existence of this technology.

Far from behavioural science (as Helen’s article claims) being “heavily dependent on single famous experiments that fail to be replicated” the reality is that behavioral science has never been more studied. Huge teams of people and the world’s most sophisticated neural networks are conducting billions of experiments every single day – and you have to assume if their profits are a good proxy – they have gotten rather good at it too.

But I read on, determined to find the substantive proof to Helen’s perspective. And there it is: a “global” ethnographic study of 1000 people asked to choose between a bunch of different t-shirts with slogans on them. Dare I say, using a “system 2” research tool to understand a “system 1” behavior and basing the result on 0.00001% of the world’s population, feels a touch unrobust.

To quote Scott Galloway: “The majority of companies that have added dramatic shareholder value all have one thing in common – they spend almost no money on traditional advertising”.

Of course the other thing they also have in common is that none of them put much faith in traditional research involving t-shirts.

Better to be relevant than different

Part of me worries for the future generations of consumers, who will grow up in a world where their thoughts somehow get manipulated by machines, and the other part that future generations of marketers, will read these articles and think this is how the industry still sees itself. 

When I hear Helen say: “Global marketers must do everything in their power to differentiate their brand through innovation on the product, service, customer experience, packaging, the business model and delivery mechanism” I ask myself: what happened to relevance?

Can’t global brands not just make themselves more relevant by understanding what their customers think and need and then design their products and services in ways that meet that need best? Whether that product or service is different is surely much less important than whether it is just better.

History has proven that the world’s most successful companies are not more successful because they are more differentiated, but because they satisfy the needs of their customers better than anyone else.

The pursuit of differentiation and relevance are two very different paths

When I think back to my time at Mars, working on Snickers, in 2013 we established a link between people’s emotional need state and snacking behaviours and then managed to find patterns in these consumers’ digital fingerprints, that meant, with a degree of certainty you knew someone’s mood. With biometric data and facial recognition software, we could bypass traditional “system 2” research that relied on what consumers told you they thought or would do (and rarely mapped to actual behaviour) and peer straight into the fast, unconscious, system 1 mind, of our customers.

Within a year we’d figured a way to accurately measure attention, engagement, distraction and emotional peaks and by combining these with metrics like view-through rate and sales data we could evaluate how good a piece of content was at delivering one desirable outcome over another. By working with the big technology platforms it was easy to place the right type of content, in front of audiences predisposed in some way to the action we’d hoped they take, to sell record numbers of Snickers products. 

We’d done nothing to differentiate Snickers, we’d just found a way to make the same product more relevant.

Let’s face it. Good brands all solve problems. It can be self esteem, anxiety, work life balance, productivity, delivery, connectivity, wonderlust or something else. Great brands just solve them in a more relevant way than anyone else. These technology companies aren’t missing anything. They are embedded so deeply into our lives they see everything and know us better than we know ourselves and they blur the lines between marketing and manipulation. 

That was really what the Social Dilemma was all about and where Helen’s article missed the mark. How these companies can now manipulate ‘free will’ is the new s**t that came to light and I think as an industry we should be talking about it.

The unimpeded freedom to choose and decide, is after all, what really ties the room together.

Social Media Currency: The money that can’t buy you Love.

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Money

I recently read an article in Brand Republic entitled “Social Media Currency – the new cash in your pocket” suggesting that brands can build and alter their brand perception in a matter of days, or even hours by harnessing the power of social media as a form of currency.

As a marketer I get that the idea of offering consumers an incentive to Tweet nice things about your brand is a very seductive as we’ve become obsessed with linking Social Media investment to product sales.

Kellogg’s #Tweetshop, Topshop’s #TrickorTweet and AMEX’s partnership with Foursquare are all great examples of how brands can leverage Social Media for the purposes of driving trial or launching new products – but they are unlikely to shift peoples perceptions long term.

Advocacy isn’t something you can simply buy. 

Flowers

Facebook Graph is just the latest example of just how influential peer-to-peer endorsement has become – it’s for many of us the way we now make the choices between the brands we buy and the services we use.

It therefore makes perfect sense to me to have a long-term strategy built around building genuine social advocacy – after all people should want to say nice things about your brand without expecting some immediate reward.

Since its inception in 1987 Red Bull has built a €4.3B global business around word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing and an ethos of bringing the people to the product – not the product to the people.

Red Bull

By systematically investing in Sports and Culture and tapping into specific communities it’s been able to build credibility and brand advocacy from within.

The success of this activity for Red Bull is measured in terms of the new consumers they are able to attract and not the number of cans they’re able to sell.

Proof of principal, if it was needed, came in October 2012 when over 3M Tweets, 10k Comments, 30k Facebook Shares and 220k Likes followed Felix as he plummeted 39km towards the Earth.

Playing The Modern Marketing Game

Unfortunately there are still too many Marketing Directors and CMO’s who see Social Media as just another opportunity to sell more products to more people.

Modern Game

A survey as recently as last week said that whilst 90% of adults use social media regularly only 22% of businesses have a dedicated social media manager – suggesting that many businesses still see Social Media as a one-way street.

The same survey also said that the average company only responds to 1 in every 3 fans comments on Facebook – which perhaps explains why less than 0.5% of Facebook fans engage with brands that they are fans of.

All the anecdotal evidence I’ve seen points to consumers wanting more than ever to engage with brands – the only difference being they want to do it on their terms and when it suits them.

Connection vs. Communication thinking

The brands that are engaging successfully with their consumers have made the switch from a Communication to a Connection mindset. They all understand that to connect with their consumers their marketing ideas need to be HIGH PITCH™

PITCH

Their simple rule of thumb is: if you find that your consumers don’t want to talk about you, without you having to reward them every time they do, then it’s probably because your ideas don’t have PITCH™.

In this way it’s clear that Red Bull Stratos had PITCH™ and Kellogg’s TweetShop did not.

If Brand Republic are right and Social Media is a form of currency the real question business leaders and marketers should be asking is how should I use it….

Like a fast buck that I give away cheaply for another Facebook Like or a nice Tweet… Or like a nest egg that I invest in, to build credibility and advocacy for my brand over time?

I’m sure the temptation will be the former but as Frank Leahy said: There are no shortcuts in life only those we imagine.

Source: http://goo.gl/d3bO3

Embedding a Culture of Execution

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(And a few thoughts about the little things that make a big difference)

As far back as I can remember I’ve always had a fascination with execution – although I never used to called it that of course. I just remember spending hours as a kid with a big bucket of LEGO bricks on the floor of my parents house building endless creations without the need for plans or strategies – just “doing” LEGO.

Today I believe that execution is one of the most important collective sets of activities in which marketers must engage because consumers don’t and will never buy a brand or a product for its strategies. Great Ideas, brilliantly executed, is what sells products.

In fact Execution is Strategic. No strategy can be successful without taking into account how to execute it. No strategy delivers results unless it’s converted into specific activities that are superbly executed.

The brands that get this tend to reward I DO over IQ – and these are the ones that will win. These companies tend to be more ideas led, more nimble and more willing to take risks, to make mistakes and to learn from them. Most of all, they are not ruled by their strategy, but guided by it, able to evolve their ideas and plans based on market forces and consumer feedback.

There’s of course no empirical evidence to support this, but who cares, that’s what we are taking about – it just seems to make good sense.

So if you want to foster and executional culture you must first focus upon changing the beliefs within the company that influence specific behaviours, since behaviours are what ultimately deliver results.

These beliefs should prompt us every day to look ourselves in the eye and ask:

  1. IS EVERY ASPECT OF OUR BRAND PLANS PLAN BRILLIANTLY EXECUTED?
  2. AM I SPENDING MY TIME ON THE THINGS THAT WILL MAKE THE BIGGEST DIFFERENCE?
  3. HAVE I GOT INTIMATE WITH MY CONSUMER, POKED AROUND IN THE MARKET OR SPOKE TO A CUSTOMER IN THE PAST WEEK?

Too many of us, me included, would have answered no to at least one of those questions, because it’s too easy in life to talk about the abstract (strategy) and harder to get into the detail (execution).

So here are a few concrete things that I think are important when trying to embedding a Culture of Execution into any organisation – big or small. 

[YOUR CHOICES] You need to focus on winning with the markets or consumers who will make the biggest difference – he who tries to please everybody pleases nobody (Aesop)

[YOUR TEAMS] You cannot be the best unless you work with the best – you should ensure that you are working with the very best partners and people. Being able and willing to work collaboratively is key – without it your execution is only as good as you are, so you better hope your pretty bloody good.

[YOUR TIME] Every touch counts. Execution should be where you invest your time and energy. From now on you should agree to spend 80% of your time on execution because that is what will make the biggest difference. Brands that succeed have been able to tun their execution into a competitive advantage – relying only on product superiority makes for lazy marketing.

[PURPOSE] “You don’t need journeymen, nor intellectuals, nor people who unquestioningly execute process. You need doers. People who want to make a difference, people who are constantly on the lookout for where things can be better, people who want to win 5-0 not just 1-0, people who think: “if you’re not moving forwards, you’re moving backwards”

[ALLOW FOR FREEDOM IN THE FRAMEWORK] Strategy is important but you should not be a slave to it. Always look for opportunities to “steal with pride” and be as passionate about repurposing existing ideas and to grow your business, as you are about inventing new toys. There are many ways of describing it, Coke talk about ‘Freedom in the Framework’, Unilever about ‘Adopt & Adapt’, Proctor about ‘Think Global act Local’ but they all mean the same thing – you need to find ways to tell your story in a way that consumers will relate to. And you have to be ready to listen and react.

[THE CONSUMER EXPERIENCE] As Marketers we talk about how the brand experience is supposed to feel like and then we try and sum it up in a page of PowerPoint. That’s bollocks. Experiences are full of emotional nuance that connect, entertain and move you. After all when was the last time you left a movie and said “I loved that film it really made sense?” Brilliant Brand Experiences should go beyond ideas, logic, strategy and process; they should be about the stuff you can’t write down.

[YOUR BEHAVIOUR] You cannot talk about doing you can only do by doing. Behaviour is contagious so we must set an example that we would want others want to follow.

[YOUR GOALS & PRIORITIES] They must be clearly defined and remain consistent. They should be shared by all but owned by individuals. They must be tracked, measured and followed through so people feel accountable for their delivery. As Soichiro Honda said: “Each individual should work for himself. People will not sacrifice themselves for the company. They come to work at the company to enjoy themselves”

Hopefully there was something in there that made you think.

If there was just remember: Thoughts aren’t exclusive, they are to be shared, added to and stretched. So if something did inspire you to do something differently, feel free to share it with someone else. You might just inspire them too. That’s when things really get exciting.

My what big data you have

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Big data.

We’re all used to data – the sample sized stuff you get from media agencies, consumer polls, sales data and market research panels – but it’s the “big data” that we’ll soon have at our fingertips that is going to revolutionise the marketing industry.

This “big data” is different – not just because it comes in vast quantities but also because it arrives constantly, in real time and in a variety of formats: text, audio, video, click streams, log files and more.

But to describe it as “big” is a bit like saying that the surface of the sun is “hot” or that the earth is “heavy”.

To give it come perspective 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone and this data comes from everywhere: from sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos posted online, transaction records of online purchases, and from cell phone GPS signals to name a few.

When the Sloan Digital Sky Survey started work in 2000, its telescope in New Mexico collected more data in its first few weeks than had been amassed in the entire history of astronomy. Now, a decade later, its archive contains a whopping 140 terabytes of information. When its successor, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, comes on stream in 2016, it will acquire that quantity of data every five days.

As powerful computers become ever more adept at spotting patterns in this data pile the potential for it to be used to sell us more stuff is huge.

Big data now means big knowledge and companies with big knowledge can earn big money. In 2010 Apple poured $1B into a big data ‘cloud’ storage center in Maiden, North Carolina and in last five years alone IBM has invested more than $14B in firms that offer big data analytics tools.

Big Knowledge.

Armed with this “big knowledge” companies like IBM will be able to make decisions with a whole new level of accuracy and specificity. They will no longer be based on best guesses about the customer but rather by real behaviours of the customer.

The days of marketing via web, mobile and social by “gut feel” is over. It’s not a matter of what you think your customer might like, it has to be what your customer is telling you they want, individually.

And clever quantitative analysis is being applied to many aspects of life, not just missile trajectories or financial hedging strategies, as in the past. From Amazon’s “you might also want …” recommendations that are based on information available about your buying patterns and the buying patterns of those purchasing the same item. To Bing advising us whether to buy an airline ticket now or wait for the price to come down by examining 225 billion flight and price records.

It’s hard to think about these things in the abstract, so I thought a couple of examples might be helpful.

First example: EcoFactor, based in California, is using big data to help tens of thousands of US homeowners to reduce their energy bills and improve their energy efficiency. EcoFactor collects thousands of data points — from weather to regional building codes to home value — that give clues about how an individual home might use energy more efficiently and respond in a way that promotes energy saving. After EcoFactor is installed, all homeowners have to do is adjust their thermostats as usual for several days. The software remembers what they like, in relation to seasons, weather conditions and size of the property, so that they never have to worry about it again. By making over 1,000 micro adjustments per month to the thermostat – bumping it up and down ever so slightly, they are able to optimize energy usage, without the user even noticing the temperature change – and shave energy demand to reduce its customers’ monthly energy bills. Whilst it’s still early days for the service, by calculating each home’s individual “dynamic signature,” EcoFactor learns how much energy is required to heat and cool the home to reduce average energy bills by 17%.

Second example: MIT-spinoff Bluefin uses publicly available social media commentary from Twitter, Facebook and blogs to measure viewer engagement with television shows and ads. Each month, the company collects more than 3 billion posts on Twitter and Facebook that it maps to a growing bank of over 200k TV shows and commercials. By looking at the context of words expressed by individuals, clever algorithms “ground” the meaning of these comments in the larger content and then connect these back to the events, people, products, brands, and viewing contexts. All this means marketers and brands can understand where and when a brand’s TV ad creative triggers high social media commentary; agencies can optimise social media conversations to guide the planning and buying process to targeting networks or shows with high response levels; and TV Networks can see in real time how audience react to shows and then how they trend over time. You can imagine the stuff advertising-data scientists are working on: connecting insights about types of ads that will be successful with certain programs, advising brands on how to tailor their message to their audience or forecasting with near 100% accuracy whether something is going to be successful or not. Powerful stuff.

Big responsibility.

There can be a lot of personal information in the big data pile and there are big questions being asked about who actually owns this information, most of which is collected, without your knowledge.

A recent Technology Review piece introduced readers to “I Can Stalk You”, a website set up by two researchers to warn consumers that they are unwittingly providing too much information about themselves. At a recent conference the founders showed the audience how your cell phone can be used to disclose too much personal information. They started with cell phone pictures posted on an anonymous Twitter account. Since each snapshot was encoded with location metadata, they were able to use a variety of sources to find the person’s home address, name, place of work, wife’s name, and information about his kids.

The big ask. 

Some of the ways we measure things right now are going to be overtaken very quickly and to stay competitive, Marketers need to begin to adapt their marketing systems and their departments to include marketing analytics across every aspect. Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, predicts that the job of statistician will become the “sexiest” around. Whilst I very much doubt that data can ever be sexy I do believe that the companies that can extract wisdom from these data piles will succeed and those that don’t will fail.

Is that scary or exciting?

The power of Social Media

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Tube rant image

I’m fascinated by the power of social media and its ability to reach out to a network of people and connect with them.

I was reading a blog post by Jonathan MacDonald yesterday where he was talking about something he had witnessed in an underground station – a guard being verbally abusive to a traveller who eventually suggesting to “sling him under a train”.

Jonathan’s video became front-page news thanks to in part to the explosive nature of his story and the social network that enables it to travel far and wide seemingly under its own steam.

In his blog Jonathan singles out the 8 things that he says enabled him to unlock the power of social media:

  1. As I always carry either a camera or camera phone, when I saw the guard’s behaviour I pressed record – this is because I try and record things that may be of value to citizens as that is my favourite subject
  2. As I have a blog, I wrote a blog post, uploaded the video to YouTube, embedded the video in my blog and published it
  3. As I am on Twitter, I sent out a few Tweets about the post (asking people to ‘RT’ which means Re-Tweet), including some directly to the very powerful Twitterers. I did the same on Facebook too.
  4. As some large press organisations are on Twitter or online, I ensured that they would find the story too by directing them to my blog post
  5. I then waited overnight for people to start talking – which they did. I re-joined the conversation that was now vibrant across the web
  6. As I have a contact page on my site, anyone who wanted to get in touch with me could – so by mid-morning Friday (16th Oct), many journalists used my contact page to ask whether they could speak with me about the story
  7. I made myself available to be interviewed – meaning trekking all over London from studio to studio – showing willing makes it easier for the press to write and film more
  8. I wrote this follow up post as an account of the events and hopefully as guidance and encouragement for others to do what I did – then repeat from point 2

In other words: all Jonathan did was see something that shouldn’t be tolerated and use the ammunition he had in his hands – video/blogs/network – to give it a broader audience.

As a marketer understanding how to help brands make the best use of social media is an ever evolving (and perhaps never ending journey) and at The BSG we’re lucky enough to be on this journey with some of the best brands in the world.

Finding powerful stories that connect with consumers is key – too often brands fail to take on-board the basic premise that people love to get behind a good cause and are less willing to really engage when they think they are being sold to.

“Britain has become a world leader in Litter” – Bill Bryson

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To think that the cost of scraping chewing gum from our pavements could have paid for increased policing (and maybe even prevented some of the rioting) is a sobering thought and when you break it all down £1B could have paid for:It’s a shame that Britain once famous for it’s iconic brands like Rolls-Royce, Aston Martin, Harrods, Typhoo tea and HP Sauce is now on its way to being the leaders in Litter.

If you haven’t noticed it so far, just take a look next time you leave your office or your home… have a glance at the filthy motorway verges, the plastic bags fluttering in the trees, the fast food wrappers lying in the gutter, plastic bottles scattered all over our parks and gum on our pavements.

Clean Up Britain (or CLUB as they like to be called) is group of individuals who’ve got together with one shared ambition – to rid this country of its rising tide of litter.

We need to make dropping litter as socially unacceptable as drink driving” – David Cameron

The cost of picking up litter every year is estimated to be in the region of £1B and at a time when economies are struggling it’s ridiculous to think we can afford to throw money down the drain – but that’s exactly what is happening.

  • Picking up litter cost Local Authorities nearly £1 billion in 2010 (CLUB national campaign)
  • The amount of litter dropped in Britain has increased by 500% since the 1960s (KBT)
  • An estimated 1.3m pieces of litter are dropped on Britain’s roads every weekend (KBT)
  • On average, men drop 3times as much litter as women (Symphony Environmental survey)
  • McDonald’s is the most littered fast food brand in England (KBT 2009)
  • Coca Cola accounts for nearly 5% of all litter (Litter Heroes survey)
  • 300,000 pieces of chewing gum were recently peeled off Oxford Street in London (KBT)
  • Removing chewing gum costs London £10m a year (KBT)

To think that the cost of scraping chewing gum from our pavements could have paid for increased policing (and maybe even prevented some of the rioting) is a sobering thought and when you break it all down £1B could have paid for:

  • 42,500 new police constables (starting salary £23,500)
  • 60,000 new nurses (starting salary £17,000)
  • 2,500,000 hospital beds (at £400 a day)
  • 5,000 libraries (£200,000 a year)
  • Nearly 300 million meals on wheels for pensioners (285,714,286 at £3.50)
  • Tuition fees for 111,111 students (tuition fees at £9,000)
  • 40 new secondary schools (£25 million to build)

So why am I blogging about Clean Up Britain you may ask?

The first reason is potential. It is both highly visible and totally preventable so it staggers me that the government funded ‘Keep Britain Tidy’ campaign has been so ineffectual.

The second reason is it is something I feel very passionate about. It’s not often these days one feels national pride, but as an adopted ‘Londoner’ I too often feel ashamed by the state of our capital city with it’s littered sidewalks and parks.

And the third is because I believe CLUB are in a great position to really make this campaign count. That’s why The BSG have decided to get involve and offer CLUB our professional expertise to help them find corporate partners to actively support the campaign and in turn help CLUB make a difference to people’s lives in Britain.

To help CLUB change the attitudes and behaviours of the 48% of the British population who admit to dropping litter is a huge challenge and one the BSG is proud to be involved with” – Rod Connors.

As an ex-Marketing Director at Nike, Rod Connors and CLUB Founder-Director John Read, have embarked upon a mission to find corporate partners who are willing support a sustained and high profile campaign, to change the behaviour and attitudes of the many millions of men and women in Britain who drop litter.

To do this CLUB has to be able to mobilise grass-roots activists who are both passionate about spreading and prepared (like Jonathan) to go the extra mile to help clean up Britain.

During the London riots we saw how social media could be a powerful force for both good and bad – used to coordinate the looting and then to mobilise an army of civilians who came out in force the following morning to clean the streets.

What CLUB believe it that when communities of people are galvanised behind a powerful common goal, social media can be hugely powerful way of mobilising large sections of the population – and then anything is possible.

I’d love to hear how YOU think that CLUB really can make their Clean Up Britain message stick and how it can change people’s attitudes and behaviours towards litter:

  • What do you think of the campaign? Do you think that Clean Up Britain is something that people will really get behind? If not why not?
  • Do you have any thoughts about how we could unlock the power of social media? Do you have any examples of good causes who’ve used social media to brilliant effect to inspire us?
  • Are you’re interested in finding out more about opportunities to come on board as a CLUB partner? How can you help?

Please tweet me your thoughts @thebsg_danb or alternatively is you want to get involved then you can really help by:

  • Signing the People’s Pledge at http://www.cleanupbritain.org/
  • Sending john.read@cleanupbritain.org your photos of litter ‘blackspots’
  • Following @cleanupbritain on Twitter and tell whether you think it is fair to ask companies whose brands are constantly littered, to make a contribution to the costs of cleaning up litter?
  • Taking action yourself and set up or join a local ‘litter pick’ group. If you already belong to a local organisation, please tell them on Twitter, so they can put people in touch with you.

Thanks to @thebsg_rodc for the input and @jmacdonald for the blog that got me thinking.

Anything simple always interests me

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Funny thing you notice about children is how simple life is. I was at the park the other day with my Godson and noticed how he started playing with some kids he didn’t know. I watched him stroll up to the group of kids, size them up then sit down and begin playing. When we left he proudly told me he’d been playing with his friends. I bet if my Godson had a Facebook page he’d have no problem making friends if the performance in the park was anything to go by.

So how come marketers find it so hard to keep things simple?

I’m convinced most of the time it’s because they don’t understand social media – after all the majority of marketeers in senior positions haven’t grown up with social media – and I include myself in that. The rest of the time it’s because they accept bad advice – when in fact the best thing they could be do is rolling up their sleeves and getting stuck in, rather than trying to learn social media from a text book.

Bring on the world awash with Whopper Sacrifice’s and Skittles update-the-rainbows because we don’t want to see geniuses like Hugh Laurie deflowered in advertising monologues that don’t seek to engage the consumer.

So when ENO posed the question: ever thought how odd your online life is? It connected. I watched their charming video and I reflected on how social media has made the world a more complicated place and wished I could have gone and watched their opera.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did 🙂