Last week I wrote about how Forsman & Bodenfors don’t understand how the internet works. In absolute terms, the description was fair, but in relative terms, they are not worse than most of the advertising business. Yesterday we got another painfull piece of evidence to that effect.
I’m talking about the brand new website of Lowe Brindfors. But to discuss the site we need to separate two things: Design and communications efficiency.
Design
It’s a matter of taste of course, but I think this page is very well designed from a print designers point of view. It’s excellent print design, but awful interactive design. Because it is not interactive. It’s like designing a very pretty car with only passenger seats. And just like such a beautiful but useless car, this site belongs in a museum. Which leads me into point 2:
Communications Efficiency
This thing is a very pretty printed catalogue in digital format. It’s what websites were in the late 90’s. The entire thing is a big Flash-page, with text that you cannot copy, films you cannot share, posters that you can download as PDFs (!) but not share with anyone, and invisible coworkers that you can only reach via email or telephone. No wonder they have this disclaimer on the site:
Apparently they think that the elusive internet out there is about technology and gadgets, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Because really, these new technologies are VEHICLES of ideas. Nothing else. But the ideas have to be made for a world of transparency, not to fill expensive media plans. And for you to come up with such ideas, you have to know how this transparent world functions.
Search and SEO is ONE important aspect to understand in order to get people “to spend time with the brand” (to use Lowe Brindfors’ own terminology), and this is what the brand new Lowe Brindfors site looks like to Google:
According to Google, what’s most interesting about the new Lowe Brindfors site seems to be their webmail (!), followed by pages from their old site, and a PDF press-release from August 2008.
Disclaiming your way out of obvious lack of knowledge about the psychology and behavior on the internet with something general like a “Hey, boy slow it down”-disclaimer becomes embarrassing when confronted with clients who know the internet – something that becomes more and more common every day thanks to knowledgeable rebels and speakers on the topic like Johan Ronnestam, Simon Sundén, and Björn Alberts, just to name a few. [Edit: + Jesper Åström]
“Resume.se thankfully notes that the trend is the same as in other digital communication: simpler, faster, and more head on”.
This statement is very general, and also wrong. The site isn’t fast. It’s a heavy Flash film with a loader from hell. The trend of the internet is not “simpler, faster, and more head on”. The trend, or rather the permanent shift, is to social participation in dynamically coordinated institution-less groups, which means that a site needs to support that behavior. You need to love people, not just say you love them. The new thing about the internet is not that people can now talk back to you, it is that everybody can talk to everybody and coordinate discussions and topics without necessarily involving you. If anything, this is more complex, not simpler. Grasping the entire strategy for this more complex system requires a more diverse skill set ranging from behavioral psychology to technology.
The bottom line is that you can have the prettiest house in the world, but to make friends, you have to meet them. Or else you’ll end up being very lonely.
A very intelligent person figured out that it’s hard to use laws like IPRED to attack file sharers if you can’t prove that the person responsible for the internet connection is the person responsible for, say, the shared MP3. The same intelligent person thus opened up her WIFI-base station for anyone to use. And she gave it a name: IPREDIA.
The same thing can be done by anybody as a statement against the internet repressionists, and as this spreads incredible value is created since they are in fact creating an open nation of internet connections as they go, a nation called IPREDIA.
So the effect is threefold:
1. They protect themselves from the IPRED-law.
2. They provide value for other people.
3. They spread the word.
Wow.
This is in fact a perfect recipe for the type of communication that I am so in love with. I want to hire this little genious. No resumé needed. And we’ll pay the fee to send it off to Cannes.
In about an hour we will know the verdict in the Pirate Bay-trials. Let’s hope that people are being smart about this. Because a guilty verdict would not be good for anyone. Especially not for art and artists.
A guilty verdict would do little to boost sales. I believe we’ll see the opposite result. Darknets and stealth services (like Pirate Bay’s own would evolve quickly. Innovation incentives in the legal realm would be smaller. We would do little but slowing down inevitable change. From a wider perspective, it is just not intelligent.
If they are found not guilty however, it will be considered a future oriented statement. One that would benefit artists, culture, our country, and eventually the world. The music industry will have to come up with something better and more useful than Pirate Bay, and to be honest, they already have. Though Spotify would perhaps need some healthy competition. Spotify is just one small step, but it is a step in the right direction. This type of evolution is where we are going. A guilty verdict would just make us look dumb. Especially in the history books.
From the angle of the artist, nobody has put it better than Paulo Coelho: “I didn’t start writing to get rich, I started writing to get read”.
Susan Blackmore’s talk at TED is one of the more insightful I’ve heard on what drives social media. And it’s not even about social media.
I love it. I love her. I love TED.
At a deli in Sandhamn I stumbled upon this bottle of water. My initial impression was that this product must be expensive, but it turns out it isn’t.
Emotionally, it feels wasteful to indulge in such expensive water, but rationally I know it isn’t expensive at all. So what is going on here?
I think that this is a good example of pricing as part of the design. And it feels like there is confusion in the product strategy. I would love to get my hands on the strategy document for this product, and especially the positioning statement. What are they trying to be? If they want to be high end, the price should reflect that strategy, just as the design does. If they want to be mid price, the design should reflect that.
Lou Reed plays “Berlin” in Stockholm tonight. Can’t miss that now can I?
He also says in an interview that “if he hadn’t been a musician, he would have been an ad man”. Sure, there is obvious and somewhat loathsome irony in his statement, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it is true. So many of us are failed and/or frustrated artists (I personally don’t believe in failure, so I’m frustrated).
Me, I was absolutely certain I was going to be a rock star up until I was about 18. Secretly, I still think I will at some point. I’m addicted to photography and have a tendency to buy overly expensive equipment. I’ve started writing at least five books, none of which will ever be finished. But the dream lives on. I wonder if this is not true for most of you. Lou Reed sings “men of poor beginings often can do anything”, so there is still hope.
The Wunderman talk, featuring Nick Moore was one of the better ones this far. Clearly one of the not so many who has really put thought into digital communications (or simply 2008 situation for communicators). Interesting company as well. I’ll keep a closer eye on them.
Nick’s statement of “don’t make big campaigns, create ongoing conversations” is one that we’ve been talking about for a while on this blog and elsewhere, but it’s a good (though simple) premise for creating good brand relationships.
Industry design consultants Transformator made it into Dagens Media yesterday with a statement that they’re better than the advertising agencies.
I’m sure they ARE better. At product design, design of the user experience, the brand in it’s physical product appearance. But that is not what advertising agencies do.
What Daniel Ewerman (CEO of Tranformator) is saying is that the product is a superior carrier of the brand, and I think that can be true a lot of times (though not always). Apple is a good example of what he’s talking about, what I usually refer to as communicative design. Other products are examples of the opposite. I guess Coke Zero vs Coke Light is a good example. Same product, completely different brand experience (unless you count the packaging as the product).
I don’t think Daniel is wrong, but matching up industrial design and advertising as mutually exclusive opponents is strange (I’m not sure that he meant it so drastically, but it sounded that way in the article). There are several expressions of brands. You have the product, you have the packaging, you have the advertising, you have the storytelling, you have the brand alignments with other brands, you have brand aligning services, CSR, etc etc. Is Transformator aiming at doing all of these? Of course not. Are they trying to get more focus on their particular area of expertise? Of course. And they did got an article for their efforts.
So in conclusion – kudos do Daniel for bringing focus to the issue och product development and product design. I think it deserves more focus. But at the same time, I think it’s way oversimplified in the DM-article. And I don’t think you can learn to make EFFECTIVE advertising in 6 months as Daniel suggests in the article. Try 6 years. Or 60. Or 600. We’re not even there yet.
There is not much left in the world that is not green, organic, and sustainable. If I want to be evil and don’t care for mother Earth, I’m really stuck with a pitiful selection of Earth-abusing stuff. When I was in New York the other week the apple was really greener then big. Everybody wants to be green.
But when things sound a little too good to be true, they usually are.
Let’s back things up a little: What’s the point of being green? Well, that depends on who you ask. The original intent is of course to save the Earth, stop global warming and so on. From the brand builders perspective, it’s about charging your brand with a dose of caring and responsibility so that the consumer can buy shares in your brand (that is, your products), thus appending the same caring and responsible aroma to his or her own personal brand (let’s face it, saving the world is just not incentive enough). This COULD be a really powerful synergy between brand and Earth, but as it turns out a lot of the green-branded eco friendly products are just not green. Fortune magazine just wrote a small but nicely put together little piece on this phenomena called greenwashing. Google that term for a little while if you feel like getting depressed.
The problem with greenwashing is that we’re really watering down the brand of green. When things REALLY are green and good for the Earth, we just won’t be able to tell because they look just like the greenwashed products. And when we won’t be able to tell, we can’t make choices that are good for the environment, and BOOM – we’re back where we started.
But I don’t believe that all is lost. Sure, green will turn out to be just a fad (that’s a promise), but that’s really not so strange. Green is not owned by anybody, and when it’s not owned, people don’t care if it get’s scratched more than they do about a rental car. Instead we’ll start seeing a lot more proprietary brands attaching themselves to believable statements that they will have to prove on an ongoing basis. Whole Foods is an early example of this where only products that are NON-organic are marked as such. Organic is the default. And if Whole Foods turn out to be greenwashers, they really have something to loose. Such as their entire brand value. The key for them will be to take real action that is hard to copy. They need to DO things, not just say them. Marketing as a service (MAAS) and/or marketing as a product (MAAP) is the way to go here. Let your actions speak. I guess that’s true for all of us.
So I read that the Finnish agency 358 are drafting players from agencies like KesselsKramer, CPB and 180 (was with all these number names?). I also read that they’re going to work with ideas rather than advertising. Hmm… ideas rather than advertising…
It sound ridiculous, but you know – I think they’re right in wording it that way. Many agencies don’t really work with ideas, but rather with execution. Many of the “ideas” we’ve seen have been done before or are just plain unimaginative (look at some of the Guldägget work and you’ll see). 358 are saying that a solution can just as well be a product development, a new sport, or a clothing line as long as it makes people like the brand more (sounds like Anomaly or Naked doesn’t it?). I like that statement. Of course that’s how you should work. That’s our job. The fact that you even have to say this is disturbing.
I think a lot of people get into this business for the wrong reasons. They get in here for the lattes, the cool parties, the people, and slick offices (all of which I love, but that’s not the point). Very few are even interested in psychology or business development. Not all have to be, but the concept developers certainly do. And they don’t.
We bring in planners from Stockholm School of Economics to legitimize the business side of the quirky ideas we bring in from Berghs, when we should really bring in people who can call up concepts built on business development, psychology, and innovation. At the end of the day, if we don’t get people to like the brand more and buy the f*#%! product we are merely painters and poets (btw, I also love painters and poets). I hope that 358 will deliver. I think they might.
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