The challenges of design

Bad design costs the same as good design, so why oh why do so many people insist on the bad type??  In fact if anything bad design costs more because of the number of revisions often involved in getting from the good type to the horribly compromised approved version.

Many many years ago I took a cheap £3 standard two armed corkscrew and £27 Alessi "Anna" corkscrew to a product development meeting to try and ram into the heads of the dullard American design team I was working with the difference. The material product and tooling cost was slightly greater for the latter of course,  but the retail selling price differential and the product margin was far greater.

I so often see the same issues repeating themselves, people lacking vision, or understanding of design principles, or even just the importance of taking time to get the brief right in the beginning.  Fail to achieve that and you end up with a design dogs dinner or a user experience that sends people clicking elsewhere faster than you can say bad navigation.  Not to mention the designer wanting to shoot themselves over scope creep and client meddling.

All of which was prompted by my friend Fran sending me this link to The Oatmeal (click here to read the entire cartoon story, it'll only take a tick and if you work in anything remotely creative you'll smile and nod knowingly).

Far beyond the looking glass

When Lewis Caroll wrote children's classic Through the Looking Glass, circa 1871, I very much doubt his imagination could stretch anywhere near as far as the possibilities that glass surfaces can take us today and will take us in the future.  There's always lots of talk in thedigital and tech worlds about multi-screen devices and platform agnostic content, Smart-TV's that are web connected, tablet this, touchscreen that (it is the Mobile World Congress this week after all)  but component manufacturers' vital role in the innovation chain often get overlooked.

Fair play therefore to Corning (a glass manufacturer) for publishing this nice (if a tad long) video showcasing the role of glass in our ever increasingly digitally connected future. Can't help but make those shareholder meetings more interesting.



Well worth reading this interesting interview yesterday with the super smart Helge Tenno on the connected future too.

Save the trees one PDF at a time: Digital Treasure

My friend Mark just flagged up this brilliant idea from the World Wild Life Fund.

Download the software to give you the option to save your documents as a WWF rather than a PDF - essentially the same format except the former is nicely branded, giving you an eco-prod into good behaviour every time you see it, AND means the print menu is disabled so you can't waste trees and energy on printing out stuff un-necessarily.

Yes, technically you can enable this setting in Adobe already, yes, there will still always be people that want to print documents, and just occasionally there are documents that really do need reviewing on paper but in a world of e-readers, tablets, netbooks and laptops, the excuses are getting fewer and fewer.

I think this is a brilliant example of someone having a BIG idea and using technology to facilitate it.

Super smart. I hope it catches on.

Elasticity of distance and discounting

The fact that people will shop around and will make a degree of effort if a potential saving is perceived to be significant is hardly surprising. What is interesting though, is this attempt by JiWire (found via Techcrunch) to start to quantify the model  particularly in this era of Groupon type social buying models, Facebook Deals / Foursquare offers and smartphone based price comparison services. Location based services are here to stay and it will be interesting to see how they are developed and exploited.

 

100 years in technology - the IBM way..

100 years of corporate reinvention is pretty damn impressive stuff when you think about it, and this video showcases some pretty amazing leaps in technology.

A lot has changed just in my lifetime alone:

First cassette player. 1980

First camera - with 110 film: 1981

First computer I owned. 1984.
(It was an Amstrad with a new fangled disk drive). Wrong choice by my Dad as it turns out in a VHS v Betamax way but... I could still programme simple ping pong games. Got our first VHS that year too.

First cd playing stereo I owned... 1990

It feels like I've had a mobile phone forever, but I was an early adopter having one in 1993.

APS (wide format) 35mm camera: 1997

First digital camera? Bought that in 2003.

Next... A whopping 252kb USB memory stick - bought in Tokyo in 2004.

First (and only) DVD player: 2005  (I do still have a working if rarely used video!)

First & only TV I  have ever bought was an LCD flatscreen in 2005. Rarely turned on either.

First netbook: EeePC in 2008

First smartphone: 2009

First tablet, yes, the iPad 2010

I wonder what will be next on that list?

To participate or not to participate that is the question

Brands are beginning to realise that shouting at people via advertising is going to be less and less effective (in many cases). Oh dear, dilemma. It hurts to change the habits of a lifetime! For agencies too, hence the link to Amelia's very cool post on the future of advertising.  The smart bunnies out there have realised or been advised that they need to start curating or facilitating culturally or contextually relevant experiences that deliver advocacy and an always-on trail of hopefully positive left-behind user generated content about that experience. Super.In reality that all means that I'm seeing the next client bandwagons rolling towards me at a pace.

Social media? Pah, we did that last year.

If only I could draw.   I can't,  so words will have to do.

Participation. Content production.

It's not new thinking, but they are becoming the new buzzwords as the client requests roll in more and more frequently. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing. BUT before everyone gets over-excited, it's worth taking a step back and thinking about what motivates consumers to participate, what's the value exchange, and where does your brand fit in the grand scheme of a consumer's busy daily life?

If the value exchange is right, they'll take part, if it's not, they won't or will do so to a lesser degree. Take me personally as a case study:  I got involved with the Orange WinterWarmer Twitter fun over the last few days (see earlier posts), - new case study material was enough to make me take part actively. It wasn't because I am a huge brand advocate of Orange. Far from in fact,  based on a previous experience. The effort involved in participating & recording what happened was easily outweighed by the value and benefit of an interesting story to tell my past and future delegates.

I have a much better opinion of Eurostar, who did actually eventually listen & respond to a problem I had with them last year, yet despite being willing to re-post their latest "lamest excuse" participation based initiative on Facebook (which I have), there's no way I have enough motivation or time to actually get involved.  Making a video in the day and half time limit is just an ask too far relative to my perception of the chances of me winning some Eurostar tickets. (Not that I think the idea behind it is necessarily a bad one).

So with that relative scale of involvement levels in mind, before you go rushing off brainstorming content ideas against that just-in brief,  I would urge you to read a great post from the talented gang at Made by Many, because I've been teaching and preaching this stuff for ages and as they've nicely written it up its inefficient to re-invent sliced bread.

Once you've done that go and read this interesting post from BBH labs (that links to another one worth reading too) on the subject of collaborative consumption.

Then, as I'm aggregating useful and interesting things to read, sit down with a cup of tea and read Wired's recent piece on social commerce.

After which, move on from cups of tea to something stronger and put the pieces together in your head before you even start to tackle another comms planning brief.  I bet the output will be different.

Good, stimulating, thinky stuff!

Friday UPDATE: Well it's 4 hours before the competition closes, there's 12 videos contributed. So following the wisdom of an article I read recently about picking the seemingly less attractive options, chances are you stand a higher chance of winning because  there's likely to be fewer entrants you can do pretty well. Had I had the time to make the video and could galvanise all my various networks to vote my chances of winning would actually be reasonable. The most voted for currently has 1.6k votes.  As ever with these things, if you can get someone sociable and influential to enter and then garner their own networks to leverage then your message gets spun out without you as a brand doing much at all. It's a formula I've seen time and time again now, - think Walkers do us a flavour or the best job in the world campaign by Queensland Tourism. It's simple and it works.

Winter warmer Twitter fun with Orange (part ii)

It would have been rude not to have taken advantage of the live case study opportunity presented by the Orange WinterWarmers activity, so with a little willing help from my colleague Richard, we thought we'd play the game and see what happened:

So we did.... and sometime late afternoon they did indeed turn up in their Winter Warmer branded van

 to give Rich his toasty scarf and a hot chocolate

(Picture kindly taken by my mate @somerandomnerd) who we'd tried to hint might also like a hot chocolate via a subsequent tweet at Orange, but they obviously weren't quite set up for making the most of bigger tactical opportunities to surprise and delight, given that we'd made it clear we were all in the same building).  I think this was a missed  trick. Whilst obviously the principle of sharing and referral made sense, and it wasn't a given that the referee and the recipient were in the same place, following the tweet feed as (what felt like a lot of adland offices started playing), there was a clear opportunity to reach a broader audience with (maybe smaller) surprises, and or potentially thank the referee too.  Yes, it's nice to be altruistic, and in my case, I've now got a brand story to tell delegates but it's even nicer to get recognition for it. All these things are about value exchange: If I do this, what do I get back?

Tweets bubbled along & built throughout the morning

 but took a sudden jump mid afternoon  when  OK magazine with it's 98k followers picked the story up (by which time I think the van route was already reasonably established judging by the confirmation tweets and van location broadcast tweets)...

Which pushed #winterwarmer into the trending list for a while...

And saw tweets hit 50+ / hour which feels pretty respectable given the activity was extremely localised to a tight area of central/eastern London.

Rich, being a very polite well mannered chap, sent an appropriate thank you tweet, as did I, both of which were retweeted by the @Orangethefeed (that's what's called user generated content amplification in the trade!). Incidentally, that's something which Facebook announced yesterday they will be offering a paid for model to enhance.

There were still lots of people requesting winterwarmers as I left the office at 7pm, as RTs got picked up and pushed onwards, yet the @Orangethefeed hadn't sent a tweet since 16.52, which seemed like a bit of a shame on the expectations management front. They started again at 0825 this morning and if via RT rather than pro-actively, are at least being clearer about roughly where they will be in Birmingham today...

My take being that actually they could make better use of  @OrangetheFeed as a comms hub.

That said, Rich got a very lovely woolly scarf in exchange for humouring me and a few tweets. Orange now have 2 blog posts from me alone and I spotted a few others being posted in thanks, plus the pictures of happy recipients tweeted and retweeted so that's  the "show and tell the client look this user generated stuff works"  box ticked. As they're in Birmingham today, and Manchester and Brighton later this week there's also time to finesse and improve the activation learning as they go.

I obviously don't know what the objectives were, but brand interaction, tick, generate buzz, tick, cost of a few scarves and some hot chocolate, a hit squad and a rented van with decals, relative to people touched & conversations generated?:  Probably pretty efficient on ROI relative to the cost of a print campaign or similar, and a heck more human and engaging.

Fun stuff. I enjoyed it, and  I am enjoying watching Birmingham playing today.