The Last Post

So, we come to the sad, but noisy end. As you may have read, Big Brother is being resurrected on Channel 5. Only a couple of weeks ago I wrote of the missed opportunity not take Big Brother social – dispensing with a tired TV production constrained format.

But, depressingly, they are merely bringing it back to life as a zombie version of it’s previous self.

It is now without doubt that Endemol in the UK are little more than TV version of a microwave – reheating pre-cooked meals – they have lost the ability to cook for themselves. In Ad agency terms, if a bunch of createives went so long without producing award winning, stand out work, they would be fired. But no, in Endemol, those people take home fat salaries and sit on important panels about the future of TV.

Honestly, hand on heart, when has the UK team produced truly innovative TV of their own devising? Peter Bazelgette revolutionised entertainment formats early on, but since those glory days, it’s been one long list of mis-fires.

Yes, The ever popular and grumpy Charlie Brooker works for them, but in reality, Charlie is their one stand out creative. SuperKaylo and TVGoHome was genius long before he got an office on the 5th floor.

I sound bitter when I read back.I’m not. But I’m disappointed at lost opportunity. They were market leaders, had a huge brand, money to back it. They fucked it. They had the opportunity to shape the industry, get way out in front of everyone else. I’m sad when companies don’t see the strategic opportunity in front of them.  It’s one thing to see the opportunity but not execute, another not to see it all.

Brilliant creative folk like Pasa Mustafa who ran their original digital content arm have bailed out. Already his East London Production company are starting to do the work Endemol should have been begging for.

So back to Big Brother.

Mr Desmond has scored – his red tops get fodder, Channel 5 will score a sponsor and as they have already stated, sell atttactive media deals across the estate.

Meanwhile, Endemol gets content for Holy Moly, exclusive content and access no doubt.

So i’m sure there are many smiles in various offices in Covent Garden and Shepherds Bush.

But the reality, and no-one knows more about reality than Endemol, is they are dead men walking. They just don’t know it.

I can hear the Last Post being played.

Holy Moly, Endemol! OMG WTF?

Irregular readers will know that I have written a few pieces about my former employer Endemol. The first was about the TV demise of Big Brother and how it should have allowed them to explore the format online and socially. It didn’t apparently.

The second was about Manchester City appointing them to exploit their brand. I thought it was a smart move as football is nothing if not an entertainment format with lots of content. But all that was produced was a somewhat boring documentary.

Both opportunities should have been 360, transmedia, leading edge, digital content love-fests. But no. Really very TV solutions to things that could be have been far, far more.

And now, I see why. They haven’t got a Scooby what they are doing when it comes anything outside of their cosy TV commissions.

So, that’s it for Endemol UK. They have finally shown that they simply don’t get the modern, social networked content consumer. They have jumped the shark.

How do we know this?

They just bought Holy Moly. A second rate celeb gossip site that was big for a while back in the celeb mad noughties. The site started by the son of s TV exec. (a comfort blanket for Endemol I’m sure), has been overtaken by Twitter, Facebook and other places where such ‘gossip’ now happens. And that’s not even talking about the dying of that celeb driven market.

I’m sure they see some 360 loveliness, where the old Endemol celebrity machine will turn full circle, both generating and venerating the same people. What i see is another white elephant that will be put in the frozen wastes of the 5th floor of Endemol Towers (where only the hardy Brooker survives). Give it 18 months and it will be quietly taken out back and shot.

Holy Moly indeed.

Why innovation labs worry me

In our industry (extra points for someone who can tell me that that is in less than 2 pints worth of time), often what people say is the cover for what they are struggling to actually do.

A few examples;

Integrated. That’s another one that fits the same rule as ‘innovation lab’. “We’re integrated”. The sub-text is of course “we have no idea how to get these folks to work together, so we really need to focus on being more joined up internally so clients don’t thinks we’re schmucks who have no idea what each other does. But let’s make it a selling point!”

I fear the same for a lab. “it allows us to do thinking outside of client constraints and pass that back to our teams to do cool stuff with clients”. The sub text here is “we don’t really innovate in our client teams and all our teams are knackered just keeping the lights on. We’d better sort this out. Let’s build a lab and make it a selling point!”.

If i was a client i’d be a bit hacked off if the innovation was happening where i wasn’t paying for it.

The next one on from that is the ‘Agile’ (or the “silver bullet that will solve all your development problems, promise”) This is often hand-in-hand with the labs where they promise to work in an agile way to get proofs of concept out – quickly. The sub text on that one is ” Fuck, it takes ages to get anything done round here, let’s call it agile and how we iterate and release stuff quickly. Let’s make it a selling point!”

Now, don’t get me wrong, i like following BBH Labs on Twitter as much as the next guy, and i like a bit of agile delivery (when it is truly Agile and not lots of mini-waterfalls in disguise) and I can be partial to be a bit of integrated.

But please can we stop claiming all those things as something that is in someway a bonus for our clients when in fact they should be business as usual.

Everything Everywhere – just a small promise then

So, Everything Everywhere the new shiny version of  T-Mobile and Orange have finally announced that they are taking the holding company brand mainstream and consumer facing. They will open 4 stores over the next few weeks. They promise the stores will be a ‘fun and interactive environment’. As Marvin the Paranoid Android may say ‘sounds ghastly’.

It goes on to say that it aims to approach the mobile retail space differently from other operators by NOT focusing on aggressive selling, but rather by ‘engaging with the customer’. Lucky customers will be able to  charge their phone , enjoy  free Wi-Fi, app downloading and mobile repairs. Additionally, ‘all handsets and devices will be live, allowing customers to test them in-store’. Or in Eltham, enabling customers to see what they can nick.

So, first off – before my cynical head gets the better of me. At least they are trying. However, i would imagine Apple are simply going ‘huh?, you mean, you don’t do that already?’. So i wait with keen interest to see how they are received.

Let’s hope that the sales staff (who must be called something like Everywhere Evangelists), are incentivised in the right way. Would love to know the metrics of success for the stores if it’s not sales. Number of smiles of small children?

The whole idea points to the ‘Americanisation’ of our shopping experience. ‘How am i today?, well now you ask…’ Apple of course (with BestBuy) are leading the service not selling approach. Which is great. For some brands.

However, I do have a small problem with the Everything Everywhere idea. It is a rather large brand promise. Encompassing as it does all of space and time, dark matter , everything that has been and will ever be. There are not a lot of places for a brand to go after making that statement.

So i find it amusing that they choose as their first foray, not by branding a cloud, rain or kittens, or the international space station, or the Large Hadron Collider, but by opening a shop in Eltham.  Has a touch of the Monty Python about it.

I think being a little bit English, I may have gone for something not so huge. Maybe a little bit Douglas Adams. I’ve got it:

‘Mostly Harmless’

Most consumers will take that everyday of the week from the majority of brands

 

Facebook is the new brand microsite

Maybe I’m getting old. (no maybe about it). Maybe I’m getting cynical.  But every bloody poster I see has ‘find us on Facebook’. The only brand that can really do that is Findus, but i digress.

Digital ad agencies spent years making micro sites for brands. Many still do. Yes, they have got cleverer, but, a microsite is a micro site.

Now that everyone is ‘socialed up’, instead of the trusty microsite we are being asked to hunt brands down on Facebook and be their friend. I ‘Like’ you.

I can only guess at how many campaign metrics have been ‘get us more followers’. Cos, like, Wall Street, really takes note of that number for your stock price.

Yes, we know your consumers will spend more time on Facebook than hunting down your brand site. And yes, if they really love (or hate) your brand they will find you and either profess brand love or tell everyone you suck (more likely the latter, and your NPS dives with it)

I would rather see a poster that says in the small print at the bottom;

‘we spent a bit of cash trying to get our call centres to talk to our stores, who now, both give a shit about digital, because, mr customer, we get it that you don’t give a shit about loving us, you just want a good experience when you are actually about to do something with us and that might, just might, make you come back next time. Or even tell someone its was better than Ok when you dealt with us’

On reflection, it’s easier to have a Facebook page. How many followers do you want again?

Agency.com is laid to rest

And so Agency.com was finally taken out back and had a bullet behind the ear. For years now it has been gradually starved dying slowly in front of our eyes.

For those of us around at the start, Agency.com was there. I remember their first tiny office in Soho. There to serve the BA account. Then the glory years, where it was one of the key agencies that drove the digital agenda. It continued to thrive and be competitive for a long time.  People came and went, clients came and went. Like all other agencies, it had its up’s and down’s.

If you have been doing this long enough, almost all of us have friends who were there for a while. I can think of a few folks who I would work with again in a heartbeat. So it wasn’t from a lack of talent. But the rot set in. Slowly, invisibly at first. Decisions were made (somewhere) that started to suck the life blood out of the place. In the last couple of years they became the new Victoria Real, with people saying ‘where did Agency go, haven’t heard about them for years’.

They fell off the radar. Went under. In our business no-one stops. They were just one less to pitch against.

And where they lay, others build on top. But remember, they did work and forged a path at a time when clients were not asking how much digital but why bother with digital.

So, goodbye Agency.com.  You join other names of the past – Deepend, iXL, Scient, Viant,..and the hundred others we can name.

But let’s not mourn, no minutes silence, but rather the new approach of a minutes standing ovation for services offered in the past.

We know in later years you were not the same as in your prime, but an ovation for some of the great work that was produced.

And from the ashes, a new agency, Being.

And so we go round again.

DoodleJump and the genius of simple

First post in a long time…boy ive been busy and tweets have been a struggle, blog writing impossible. But, a couple of things have prompted a thought.

I downloaded DoodleJump to my iPhone a few days ago. For 59p, if it’s rubbish, what does it matter, right? However, as many of you have already discovered long before me, it’s a work of gaming genius. Like all great games, seconds to understand, ages to master.

But it’s real triumph is what it doesn’t try to do. It doesn’t try to do too much. It has certainly left things out the designers thought of putting in. In interaction terms, it’s very tight. It uses the Accelerometer to best effect, small delicate movement, not waving your phone around like a loon.

But i think this is part of a wider movement towards simple.

Maybe it’s because i work in an industry where everyone has opinions about ‘new’ and get tired very quickly of things, that this shift has been perceptible. One of our Associate Creative Directors stopped me and proudly showed the new simple Nokia he has taken ownership of since his iPhone had blown up.

Now someone else has given up their iPhone to do the same thing. Maybe these people had their iPhone and SmartPhones for ages and have lived through device fatigue and simply wants something that can’t go really too wrong. But maybe not.

For years the aim has been to get out of the way. Whether it was the browser, or the device etc. The aim was to be able to do something that was intuitive and did not require learning.

This is not an iPad post!

So as always, good design, good product is about what you leave out. Even when it’s only 59p.

Online overtakes TV – or does it and does it matter?

Ok, i’m a bit late – but hey, i’m busy!

So news broke this week that Online Ad spend had passed TV ad spend – and a year before it was predicted to do so. The IAB published their latest result and you could barely read it for getting past the self-satisfied grins that most of the digital industry broke into. But then in a daring move, Thinkbox hit back (you can tell they are TV look at the rainbow colour palette) saying that was  a right load of bull**** cos it included Search – which may not be advertising anyway and if you included all the things TV does then it would be worth more anyways. And so TV wins. So there.

And their dad is bigger than IAB’s dad so ner ner ner ner ner!

And i’m thinking – the consumer doesn’t give a shit about any of this.

What the consumer really gives a shit about is this:

When and wherever they see an ad telling them about some snazzy new product, they go to the store and the sales assistant knows little or nothing about the promise the ad made about said snazzy product, they go on the website and that week the web team chose to highlight a different product, they phone customer service and get told its a web only offer. All of this could be in 15 minutes. So their media spend has been pretty much flushed down the toilet.

So, to be blunt, i couldn’t give an arse that Online or TV get the most spent (and don’t get me going on the whole ‘matching luggage’ approach to most TV<>Web advertising), but i do give an arse that brand owners are essentially wasting money. And lots of it.

The problem that i see is that most marketing and advertising starts when the brief is issued when in fact it needs to start up the food chain at the business problem level. Your  common or garden CEO sees this problem – his sales and marketing is not really connected to his commerce in any real coherent way and the analysts keep asking why sales are sliding Quarter on Quarter. And don’t even ask about how his IT department fits into all this.

The consumer just wants it simply joined up and for as long as the marketing and advertising industry is getting its knickers in a twist over who is beating who (Online or TV) for greater media spend then both consumers and brands are losing out.

Oh and this is not some argument to drop all media spend and go ‘crowdsourcing’, far from it. But i’ll leave you with this thought – would £10million be better spent buying space or getting the customer servicing reps joined up with the store staff joined up with the promise of that beautiful ad?

Big Brother – end of an era. Don’t be so daft.

So Channel 4 have decided not to chuck Endemol another £100m+ for another 3 years of Big Brother. The deal was due to end next year anyway and the end was really mooted a couple of years ago, so it’s not really a surprise that C4 have dropped it after 10 years. Endemol have been planning for this for ages.

Even 2 years ago we were discussing Big Brother living without a broadcaster. Afterall, Endemol turn over more money that C4 and it’s a key property – they won’t let it just die. I wouldn’t expect to see it picked up by another broadcaster. It’s a bloody expensive show to make and the house has outlived it’s use. Creatively, they wanted to change it a few years back and looked at alternatives, but the gap between Celebrity and the main show was too short to tear down and rebuild.

Endemol own the format. It has a young audience. That audience don’t really watch too much TV. Most damning of all, C4 had a shit website for the show and did not at all use online/mobile in any innovative ways for the show. I’m surprised that Endemol never gave C4 more crap for their lack of online exploitation of the brand. In the meantime,  Endemol have been experimenting with ‘original digital formats’ for a while, getting people like Bebo to commission them with brands picking up the tab.

My money would either be on Endemol going that route – i can easily see the ‘tasks’ as brand opportunities, a show sponsor and other affiliate deals. Or, Endemol, though more unlikely, could go it alone.

My money would be a license and commission deal with a social network. Afterall, it’s all Endemol know. They know no other way of making money. They are past masters at leveraging their brands – yes, you have been in  pub with a ‘Deal or No Deal’ fruit machine and XBox has produced a ’1 v 100′ game for network play. And if they go it alone, they have no ready made audience like Bebo/MySpace/ MSN/ Yahoo/Whoever.

Online it could be reinvented as a format. And more cheaply than it would to make as TV. It is instantly global and avoids all those nasty territory rights issues.

So, Big Brother is dead, long live Big Brother.

Remember when you read this and in 2011, come back and read it again and be in awe of my predictive text.

Oh, while im here, why have Endemol UK not produced a hit format since Bazelgette had his genius run in the 90′s? Alright, they have couple of popular ones, but the real hits are from other parts of the empire which have been very well adapted in the UK. Just an observation..answers on a postcard, well, blog comment.

SXSW Festival…ooh the pressure mounts – PICK ME!!

OK, so this is more nerve racking than i ever began to think about when i did it. What was a 15 minute idea has turned me into a Big Brother wannabe wanting votes. I feel strangely competitive about the whole thing.

I now have an idea of the extreme thought process that a BB contestant goes through. I mean, i want votes so i can get to the SXSW Interactive Festival next year whereas in BB, you get cash and a shooting star media profile. I have colleagues who have ideas up for votes, but i’m even sneakily hoping i get more than they do.

Luckily SXSW doesn’t have a diary room, a big chair and Davina McCall asking me not to swear – but i keep checking, even though there is nothing to check. I have also realised that i’m the only Sapient entrant with one idea up. I did only do one idea (quite usual for me i hear my colleagues shout), but nonetheless. Did they think of hundreds and get two selected? or more. Should i have done more? inevitably ending up with Inner City Sumo and Monkey Tennis no doubt.

This is terrible.

Even if i get through then i have the actual thing to worry about. My family think South by South West is a festival in Cornwall. Wait till they realise it’s Texas.

Oh, the subject of the panel idea: Performance Pricing and Other Scary Thoughts.

I think it’s timely to be asking how we help our clients through the recession. Those of us in client services should be thinking everyday how we use this period to deepen the relationships with our clients. I think it a fine subject for a panel discussion.

I’d like to get a client on there if possible..that would make it interesting.

Now , let me look in that mirror and pretend i don’t know there’s a camera behind it…

Please note the shy and retiring graphic next this post…