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There was a time when data was a passive thing; it took time to look through and by the time you had done the analysis, the world had moved on and it was kind of outdated. With advances in computing power, we are now about to enter a new phase in which data, instead of being a component of dusty old reports, is the new gold of business advantage. The faster and more powerful your computer and servers, the faster it can crunch and analyze the data and therefore the quicker you have real information you can act on.

If you take data from multiple sources, look for correlations and key patterns that takes computing power, but if your computers are fast enough, and they are now, you have something.

Here's John Webster on Cnet talking about IBM's recent acquisition of Netezza.

"But, beyond the short-term tactical aspect of the Netezza acquisition is a longer-term positioning of IBM that is far more significant. Traditional data warehousing--as a relatively slow process that depends on reiterative data extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes--is essentially dead. What customers are now looking for is speed to information. These appliances offer the ability to parse large data sets from multiple sources in a nontraditional ETL way and to produce information in real or near real time.
Posted by Ed Cotton Innovation is often presented as a radical and demanding discipline that requires men in designer glasses to bring the required creativity.

Everyone knows that change on a large scale is often incredibly complex and that the systems through which change happens, are often highly innovative.

In the world of brands, there are few better examples than P&G when it comes to practical innovation. They know their strengths and weaknesses and work their way through them with very smart thinking.

Last week they presented at a Barclay's conference, where they shared some of their thinking about how the corporation plans to move forward. Innovation is at its heart, but there are a few drivers behind it.

1. Power Brands

P&G's massive investment in brands and branding means it's easy for them to innovate around the brand and to take it into new categories and territories. When you see the road-map, it's all based around extending this power brands into new places, like moving Gain from laundry to dish detergent.





2.Real-Time Systems

Technology is changing the way business is done and giving employees the tools to know if things are working. P&G; knows getting this information faster and acting upon it is one way to secure competitive advantage




3. Thinking about the Sum of the Parts

When you have a portfolio of power brands, you can do things on a large scale, like secure space in retail that allows you to dominate. In the case below, a grocery aisle dedicated to men's grooming.



Not every corporation has the attention to brand detail that P&G has and its a shame, while most respect P&G's place in the market and a recruiting ground for brand and marketing experts, most lack the discipline to put P&G; style brand practices into their own companies.




Posted by Ed Cotton Old Spice's advertising has been widely recognized as some of the best stuff out there and generated huge talk value, YouTube video views and the rest. It's been great, but it followed the traditional campaign formula, that 's until now, in the last couple of days, the campaign has made a dramatic turn into a conversation that has begun at such a remarkable pace

It's impossible to know how they can keep it up, unless the agency has a secret is a copywriter cloning program and has these outsourced clones placed in satellite offices around the world, to maintain round-the-clock coverage .

The idea has been to make bring the lead character to life in real-time and get him to respond using Twitter and YouTube. The big point of all this is how quick the content is being created and put out there, but also how relevant the conversation is; the character is responding directly to people and questions.

It's a great example of how a campaign property can be made real-time and conversational. It also forces us to ask some challenging questions:

Should you build a story arc for a campaign that includes conversations?

Is it something you can plan for?

How do you "game" the system without getting caught?

Do we need the talents of reality show writers and producers who can spot developing stories and create for them?

We wait to see what Old Spice has in store for us, will we just get bored of it and the campaign runs out of steam because we are over-exposed to the character or does it take on a new lease of life because of the conversation?


Posted by Ed Cotton The communication world works with development cycles that take multiple weeks/months.

They are the very opposite of real-time, we then insert these efforts into a real-time world hoping they can gain the benefit of real-time buzz. It's a hit and hope approach. We hope that all our insight gathering, intuitive understanding of the moment and perhaps of enduring human truths is relevant and pertinent to the real-time conversation that's happening right now. We hit and hope and then we go look and see what happens. We reverse engineer to prove that our insights and creative execution are "right on".

Brian Solis, one of the smartest minds on the "conversation" out there, makes a great point in a recent blog post.

"In the end however, nothing will help substandard, ordinary, or bland product and services. And the point of all of this is, if you continue to introduce objects into the marketplace that are not based on the readily available real-time information before you, then you deserve the fate you’re dealt. At some point, this becomes less about chance and more about destiny, with a little bit of luck thrown in for good measure. Twitter and other social networks are the crystal balls that present the intelligence as well as the influential voices, who can help us create and participate with purpose and significance."

Brian suggests quite rightly that you've got to get really smart at monitoring the dynamics of the real-time conversation and making sure you at that to your list of resources that you use to help build out your thinking and ideas.

Taking Brian's ideas to the next level, perhaps you need a two-tier strategy.

1. Ensure you get the conversation is heading when you create your initial brief- make sure that's in the mix

2. Find a way to ensure that you can shape and mold your communication around the real-time conversation. This is different from throwing it in and seeing if it floats, this is more about adjusting your narrative to insert your idea correctly into the conversation and finding away to add elements that are relevant to the real-time agenda of the moment.


Posted by Ed Cotton We are fast reaching a point where the old world of communication and the new world of communication are about to collapse into each other.

The new real-time nature of brand communication is going to impact the way PR and advertising responds and reacts.

Controlled and planned campaigns are not likely to go away anytime soon, but it's likely that their role and emphasis will diminish over time. Currently, there's a massive gap between a brand Tweet that took 30 seconds to compose and a $2 million television commercial that was 4 months in development.

The space between those two forms of communication is going to open up significantly as brands seek to develop stories and content that they can share with their consumers on a regular basis.

This is likely to involve work that is faster to produce and way cheaper than current commercial production. It will also increasingly be online, rather than traditional broadcast.

Brands are going to need to have the discipline to bring all their customer facing entities together and build a conversational calendar so they can plan conversations ahead of time. In the future, It's going to be imperative that every piece of big campaign communication has a real-time and a social media component attached to it. In addition, it's also going to need to build some kind of layered story arc, so it is not just a one shot deal.

Brand conversations will be a mix of planned communication with real-time components and spontaneous actions that respond to conversational needs. In the middle of two these two categories will be a new space called real-time campaigns, these will be fast-track campaigns developed in response to the conversation- ideas create brands to garner attention at the right moment.

While commentators are writing the obituary for ad agencies and advertising as a whole, a new world is opening up. The challenge for agencies will be to seize upon this opportunity. It will be hard because it looks so different to everything that's gone before, but they are going to need to be fast because new entrants are going to emerge designed purely to play in this space.



Posted by Ed Cotton