Recommended Reading – 14th May 2010

Some thought-provoking writing to welcome in the weekend:

• David C. Edelman has written a fascinating article in McKinsey Quarterly on how to get more value from digital marketing

• Paul Isakson has published a series of thoughts on Facebook, and how he perceives its evolution to be lacking in direction

• On the Made by Many blog, Isaac Pinnock shows how user-unfriendly self-service checkouts are. He makes some great points, and it also got me thinking about pre-prepared meals which, when transferred from the packaging to the plate, end up upside down. Which is just wrong.

• Michael Arrington believes Digg is failing because it is crowdsourcing its business ideals. He argues it would be better off if run as a dictatorship.

• Jason Fry thinks Twitter more closely resembles traditional news media than social media, due to the asymmetric broadcasting of its power users.

• And finally, John Griffiths is putting together a fantastic resource on his Cloud of Knowing site, collecting documents and papers on the future of content analytics and online research. I wasn’t able to attend the most recent get-together, but look forward to attending a future event

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Links – 17th January 2009

Aside from links, this blog probably won’t be updated for a week or so. I’m trying to stick to my quality over quantity aim, and my schedule is pretty full at the moment.

Marketing

Paul Isakson posits that weird and wonderful advertising works because of the prompt that our brain receives, irrespective of what the actual message is

Advertising has been about persuading people to purchase things they don’t need. So, with overconsumption being scaled back, Brian Morrissey wonders how the industry will react

Demanding a read/write city – why interactions such as graffiti should be encouraged (Anti-Advertising Agency)

The best and worst logo redesigns of 2008 (Brand New)

Fred Wilson predicts that display advertising will become so cheap that it will outperform search. I somewhat disagree – prices may fall, and effectiveness may improve but publishers can justify premiums due to the surrounding content and context. Network display is more likely to be filtered out. However, the piece is worth reading

Technology

The Feltron 2008 Annual Report – Nicholas Felton has collated a huge amount of data about his life, and published it.Are the benefits of this self-analysis worth the expended effort? I’m not convinced but the report is fascinating, and his interest has led to the development of daytum

CJR has a fascinating two part interview with Clay Shirky

Russell Davies has some excellent ideas in his new schtick

Graeme Wood’s post on the future of television and TV advertising dovetails nicely with my post on targeted TV ads

Business

Umair Haque has a brilliant guide to 21st century economics – he argues that we have to reinvent the global economy

The mistakes that are made in the hiring of NFL coaches (via Ben)

Music

Do the BBC’s Sound of 2009 and other such polls encourage a narrow and homogenised outlook on upcoming music? (Sweeping the Nation)

Interesting look at the remuneration (or lack of) with perceived promotions e.g. I didn’t know that US radio didn’t pay royalties as it claims it is free marketing

Websites

Stack – a great idea for magazine subscriptions – a pick and mix from leading independent titles

I Wear Your Shirt – another social media get-sort-of-rich quick scheme. Pay (fee rises at $1 per transaction) for a guy to wear your t-shirt and promote it online

For the time-pressed, particular recommendation goes to Clay, Russell, Umair and Graeme

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What’s next?

Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/cdm/

A couple of great presentations here – both in terms of content and design

The first is “What’s next in Marketing & Advertising” by Paul Isakson (I included it in a link post last month but it is definitely worth re-iterating its quality)

“Build the marketing into the product” (Slide 30) is a fantastic mantra.

The second is “What’s next in Media” by Neil Perkin

For me, slides 37 and 51 are key and these themes run across both sets. Content marketing is increasingly crucial. If a brand or a platform isn’t useful, why stay with it when more utility can be derived elsewhere? Monopolies may still exist in the areas where critical mass creates synergies, but this is the age of consumer choice and this has to be both accepted and respected.

Of course, to do this, the “old media” corporations need to fundamentally alter their images and the public perceptions of them. I don’t think we will ever see the BBC on an even footing with a youtube channel (and nor should we), but that doesn’t prevent the big media companies from incorporating some of the benefits of the grassroots into their business models.

Could there be a “What’s next in Research” deck? Certainly, but I suspect it wouldn’t be as insightful as the two presentations above. Content marketing is of course attainable, but the business to business market has a fundamentally different dynamic. Instead, a different theme may be required. For instance, there are specific examples of research moving from “what people say” to “what people do”. But saying that, extending interesting ad-hoc studies to some form of universal currency still seems too prohibitive.

SIDENOTE: Slideshare is a completely awesome tool, but what on earth is the business model?? The only (presumably) advertising I can see is “Featured groups and events”…

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