Bottles, Blogs and Bergerac

This is Dan Germain's (of Innocent drinks) perspective on new media. I love his writing style and how simply he gets to the fundamental point about Web 2.0+ and the social revolution it has engendered - New media is not a thing. It's just a nice place to keep having (polite) conversations in which brands are useful and interesting.

What do I think about new media?
I like new media. Messing about on the internet, reluctantly checking facebook every fortnight, retweeting other people's retweets, watching Wallander of an evening (I consider Wallander to be new media - it's the new Bergerac, and it's media, therefore it's new media).
So it's really good, this new media. It's great how it eats up all of your time, creates new spaces to noodle in, prevents you from completely focusing on people's faces while you're having a conversation with them, because you're waiting for them to shut up so you can check your twitter. It's a real boon. It makes life wonderfully rich and hollow.
And now I reveal that I don't know what I think of new media. Because I think I like it, but I know that some of it is tearing nice moments of life away from me. I'm looking at things that happen to me and working out how they would play as a piece of text measuring 140 characters, or as a chunk of text with a photo at the top. I think it might be stopping me from just being.
There is a proviso. New media, if we are defining new media to be the web, the digital places and the apps, has really helped the business that I work in. I think I extol its virtues most days, speaking positively about how it allows us to connect with our drinkers, about how we can find out what they're thinking before they've told us, and about how we can have lots of little conversations with them. These conversations are important, because they're the conversations that we can't have in a 30 second TV advert, where we shout politely at people for a while.
So that's a good thing. And the fact that this business (innocent) exists now and was founded in 1999 means that it has grown up with new media. All we had back in the early days was email and some stuff on our labels. They were our new media - the words we wrote on our labels were our blog before it was invented; before Typepad or Wordpress or whatever made it easy for any old whoever to paste their thoughts onto the web. Our blog was hidden on the back of the bottle.
Gradually, people started phoning and emailing us, wanting to continue the conversation we'd started on our labels. And we'd continue it via email (one of my very first jobs was sitting and answering those emails every day. It was a great great job.). Then we realised that we could just email them our news every week, rather than them have to come to our site or wait for us to send them an email. We sent out our first email newsletter to 11 people in late 1999. And so the conversation continued. We still send that email, to 25,000 people each week, same old stories about nothing in particular, endeavouring to have a chat. We still talk on the labels too, in the hope of starting a conversation. And we have blogs and twitter in order to help keep the conversations going.
So you can see where this is headed. The fact that the word conversation keeps coming up...
New media isn't a thing. It's just a nice place to keep having the conversation. Businesses don't need a new media strategy. They don't need a person thinking about how all of those places and spaces merge and warp and weft together. Businesses just need a conversation strategy. They need excellent people who like having conversations to do the talking and the writing. They need to resource their words department, and listen real hard. Then they should just go and spend some time where people are having those conversations, and join in politely, always making sure that they're being useful and interesting.
I'm not sure if that all made perfect sense. But that's fine. Most conversations don't.
Dan is Head of Creative at innocent.

How can you lose Tesco?

The latest press ad for the iPhone features the "Tesco Finder". Judging by the twitter traffic it is proving quite popular. The description in the press ad says you can use it to find your local Tesco store, and in (some) stores us it to locate product on shelves. Now call me a grumpy old man but what happened to asking someone for directions, you know having a conversation. It's not as if there is a shortage of Tesco's or Metros; isn't the general consensus that there are too many and that they are strangling local retail businesses. And anyway, if you are in a strange (or should that be unfamiliar) town, how many people would be absolutely desperate to find a Tesco, over any other supermarket?
Once inside the store, do Tesco want to move us to a world where we use our phones to find all we want, and then use a self-service checkout! That way we won't have to speak to anyone.
Don't get me wrong, I believe that part of the future of marketing is for brands to deliver more on being useful and enhancing our lives, but please God don't let widgets be the only solution.
This reminds me of a short talk given at TED early last year by Renny Gleeson, where he very humorously demonstrated the impact mobile phones have on our humanity.


One of my favourite TV ads of the last decade makes a very similar point.

First (challenging) thoughts

Following on from the theme of conversation starters here are more examples, from FreedomLab's "Penny-for your-Thoughts" programmme, where they ask opinion leaders around the world to share some unfinished thoughts with them.

First up is Pakistani-born political scientist and futurist Sohail Inayatullah, sharing some possible futures for a world that is being transformed by the global financial crisis. He sees the key transformation as a sign of the end of the industrial era. And believes each of us needs to help in creating the transition.


Alan Moore sees the challenge of the future as being a better understanding of the interrelationships between people,society, technology,commerce and communications, which isn't something you can sit down and solve before your first cappuccino of the day. But as he indicates falling revenues and profits are likely to give a lot of brands a big incentive.

More from Alan's colleague Gerd on Alan's blog here. technolgy revolution

Baby Steps

My first rule for a blog. As with most things digital, everything is "forever beta" so we'll make improvements along the way. So lets just dive right in and see where we get to. Despite (or because of) the fact that I have worked in advertising almost 30 years (with time off for being a tad disillusioned, and doing my own thing for a few years in the '90's) I've found the last couple of years the most exciting and interesting. It could be that I've been walking around with my eyes closed before then or that my memory is not what it was, but I prefer to think that with the advent of all things Web 2.0+ and the "social" revolution, the world of advertising and marketing has got a whole lot more interesting and stimulating, whatever age you are!

There's so much great stuff to be devoured, so many opinions, ideas, theories and innovation to get you thinking, and its changing so quickly. And probably the best thing is that there are few if any definitive answers or solutions. We seem to be living in a time when much of what is written and practiced (in both senses) is almost a (collaborative) "work in progress"; We are developing new ways of doing things, but before these are committed to marketing textbooks and theory the speed of technological development is challenging us to re-think and adapt.
A good illustration of this is the recent work done through the IPA on Social Media. (I do hate that term. As has been pointed out by many, it makes some just think in terms of media channels - Facebook, Twitter etc. I'll call it "Social" from hereon - unless of course I'm referring to Facebook and other applications). October last year saw the publishing of 10 points of view, each by an individual planner, on what they had jointly agreed as 10 of the key principles around (so called) Social Media. As Neil Perkin indicates in his summary presentation, these are not meant to be the 10 commandments, but rather the beginnings of ongoing conversations and idea development. You can join the conversation on Facebook.
For those of us that also need to have a practical view on Social Media, this cheat sheet from Drew McLellan looks like a good reference.

And finally, just because I love it and so want one, here's the ad for the iPad - do you think they are targeting current Apple Passionistas?

Well alright, finally finally, I aspire to write a blog as entertaining as this. I wonder if Elika started with baby steps or just hob nobs?