Tom Coates of Yahoo and Matt Jones of Dopplr gave this fascinating presentation about the topic at this years Web 2.0 conference.
The personalization of experiences through this information suggests that no experience should ever be the same.
After years of talk and nothing to show for it, we are truly moving into a one-to-one world.
Posted by Ed Cotton
(1) “Its 28 different postings on YouTube have garnered 10m views. It has been spoofed with a toy gorilla as well as remixed with a 50 Cent and a Bonnie Tyler track. It is simple, bonkers and funny”
Media Guardian-October- 2007
What have we learned?
1.Sales Performance: It worked- Dairy Milk got a 9% bump in sales
2. Some Creatives Get the New World: Creatives liked it and it won big at awards shows including Cannes
3. Some Creatives Don't Get the New World: Creatives didn't like it- it caused some significant debate at awards shows including Cannes
4. There's No Such thing As A Formula: It's hard to repeat success- the second spot, despite it's craziness could not capture in the way Phil and the gorilla did
5. The Planners Worked Hard: Despite the feeling that planners weren't involved in this- they did a ton of work setting the stage for the client to accept a new form of advertising. Things like:
Why being matters more than saying
Being true to yourself, rather than pretending to be something you are not
Being authentic vs. contrived
The idea of brands taking on the role of entertainers.
6. Research Can't Explain Everything: This thing was tested to death- it blew the lid off Millward Brown's ad testing scores, but the company couldn't explain why.
One thing is for certain, it's paved the way for other clients and agencies to take more risks. Not everything is going to work, but they are going to have a lot of fun doing it.
Posted by Ed Cotton
"At the beginning of last year, Ms Oppenheimer poached Helen Dodd, a retail design expert, from Tesco.
Ms Dodd, who has spent 20 years working out how to attract customers to shops and keep them there, trooped 250 Barclays customers and staff through the Northampton warehouse to test the new layout and technology.
Nothing was sacred, not even the good old British queue with the black tape barriers. The new Manchester branch is experimenting with a ying-yang-shaped queue, broken up by waist-height pillars housing computer games. The branch's space-age information desk is pure Apple store, while, according to Ms Dodd: “We're trialling a lot of different queueing methodologies - people do PhDs on this stuff.”
The childrens' play area is inspired by the Science Museum. There is no glass separating tellers from customers, to stop people from raising their voices, something that Ms Dodd believes makes banking more stressful.
Curves are used to make customers feel “warmer”, while the glass frontage will make women more inclined to enter. “At the moment, they don't feel welcomed into branches,” Ms Dodd said. Concierges, dressed in uniforms by the designer Jeff Banks, will issue customers with tickets telling them how long they must wait and even if they would be served more quickly if they went to another branch.
Getting the right doormat was key - customers like dry feet, so Ms Dodd found a mat that dried wet soles within four steps. The Manchester branch operates to the same timetable as other retailers, with late night and weekend opening."
Posted by Ed Cotton
(2) "INNOVATION IS NOT GOOD IN ITSELF - IN FACT, MORE INNOVATION DOES HARM, THAN DOES GOOD.
My evidence for this statement is contained in a breathless announcement from Mintel, the market research company, that a "Record-Breaking Number of New Products Flood Global CPG Shelves" and that (the numbers are for 2006) "close to 182,000 new products were introduced globally, with key booming areas focusing on mind, body, and general good health".
Well over half of these of these innovations - 105,000, to be precise - were food and drink products. This flood of innovations enable us to profit from such trends as "brainpower foods, age-defying treatments, increases in portion control, and "just for you" customised products”.
Now I may have misunderstood something here, but surely the Mintel numbers mean that more than half the innovations that reach the market all over the world - 300 innovations, every single day of the year - decrease the resource efficiency and hence sustainability of global food systems?
Good, so that's Innovation dealt with. Bring on the next killer word!"
However, shouldn't innovators now consider the social and environmental responsibility of their actions?
If they do, innovations shouldn't be product launches for the sake of it, but new products that improve upon the social and environmental footprints of their predecessors and then innovation would be a good thing?
Posted by Ed Cotton
(Grant seems to have all the details and more in his post).
Yahoo was a brand that shone bright at the earliest part of the internet revolution, but it failed to keep pace with the times. However, the recent years have not been without hope. The company made two great acquisitions in Flickr and deli.icio.us- leading edge 2.0 companies with really smart founders, and really nice brands.
Everyone understands the smart thing to do with nascent brands is to let them be, give them space and autonomy as soon as you start screwing around with them all hell breaks loose.
However, in this supposed war for the most talented, shouldn't companies really be paying more attention to the people who created these entities?
For as much as they are buying the power and uniqueness of these new brands, they are also buying the talent of their creators, who's needs also have to be nurtured.
Time after time companies fail to capitalize on the talent they acquire because they can't find a way for it to fit into the culture or the culture itself crushes them.
Yahoo really need Stewart Butterfield, Caternina Fake and Joshua Schacter to spearhead the development and build out of Yahoo 2.0.
Why that really never happened, only the insiders will know, but clearly companies need to plan their acquisitions better and pay closer attention to the talent they are buying, rather than focusing their thinking on scaling through their system or saving costs by eliminating duplication and inefficiency.
Of course, Stewart Butterfield had the last laugh with his zany resignation letter, that tells his boss- he's thankful for his 87 years of service and doesn't need no gold watch.
Reading between the lines, it's clear giant corporate culture crushed his spirit and energy just at the time when Yahoo most needed those qualities.
Posted by Ed Cotton
Since the brand is the web experience everything that happens there is critical to how people use and perceive the brand. It appears that Adaptive Path did tons of work to make MySpace a cleaner, less cluttered experience.
Lots of detailed and complex research and testing with users to make the improvements. However, it's way more than a cosmetic, because such changes impact the organizational culture and how the company functions.
Monkey Bites has a very interesting post discussing the process.
"Ryan Freitas, the project lead for the redesign, spoke with us over the phone Tuesday. Freitas says his team’s focus was to change the old way of thinking that was gunking up the MySpace experience, namely that you don’t need to put everything in front of the user all the time."
"Most importantly, Freitas says, these changes were more about the design process than the usability enhancements............
“You can see the way a team operates internally based on the way their product works when it comes out,” he says. “MySpace is pretty democratic, but they hadn’t ever streamlined their collaboration between tech, content and presentation.”
He says the Adaptive Path team pushed MySpace to become more inclusive as an organization. They brought all of the various stakeholders, from ad sales and technology to visual design, into the process of designing the user experience.
“It’s not just a UI change, it’s an organizational change,” he says. “It was a true ‘teach a man to fish’ situation.”
If some agency group isn't thinking already about investing in Adaptive Path, they soon will be.This company appears to be at the front-end of a new world of positioning and re-positioning brands through experience.
Posted by Ed Cotton