And no, I’m not obsessed:

Via: Online MBA

From those early days of Usenet and Compuserve, it’s first words “hello world”, the Internet developed quickly in size and speed.

It went through the kind of teenage years so many experience; self doubt, porn and piracy (so just me then?).

Those rebellious teenage years of mix tapes mass-produced on Sanyo Tape-to-tape machines, illicit magazines, trying to work out who you are and what you want to be when you grow-up. The Internet has been through it all.

But things suddenly seem to be getting very serious and grown-up.

The Digital Economy Act is riding to the rescue of copyright holders, the first of the major paywalls has arrived at News International, Facebook keeps getting banned over pictures of religious characters and in South Africa they are even looking at banning all adult content online.

Even the carefree days of handing over data for “free” services seems to be coming to and end with  “quit Facebook” days and far too much emotional energy invested in arguing about privacy settings.

Now each of these events is worthy of the thousands of serious editorial comment and blog posts covering every angle in forensic detail, exploring in depth the fundamental affect they may or may not have on the way consumers, businesses and brands use the Internet and how business models will evolve. But to me something much more fundamental is happening. The grown-ups are taking over.

When I first started working online no one had a clue what I did. Back in the last century people in expensive suits nodded sincerely as I wondered why they were taking a twenty-something who clearly knew nothing so seriously. Then I realised, it was because they knew even less.

But time has moved on. Now everyone claims to be a “social media guru” (what happened to all those viral marketing gurus?). Those people in suits are now the same age as me. They have leaned the lessons of 2001 and they have started to try and tame the Internet, to control it, to monetise it, to bend it to their will.

So is this the beginning of the end? Not a chance. If there’s one thing I have learned, the Internet is like a Hydra. Cut off its head and two more will grow, each brimming full of new, innovative and independent ideas.

So those rebellious teenage years might be over, but the midlife crisis is just around the corner and it’s bound to be fun.

For those of you not aware, Skittles new site has gone all “social media”. That’s to say their homepage is a twitter feed showing all mentions of Skittles, their product pages are links to Wikipedia, their photos are links to Flickr etc. etc. Do you see what they’ve done there? How very web 2.0.

So what annoys me most about this campaign? Surely as an advocate of digital marketing I should applaud anything new, innovative and unusual that creates such a buzz.

Well that’s the problem. Firstly it’s not original or innovative, Boston agency Modernista did this with their own site some time ago.

Secondly, outside of the goldfish bowl that is marketing/advertising/media is anyone really talking about it? Amongst marketers it’s created a fair amount of debate and from what I can see, most of it is pretty negative. But we are a minority, we’re a tiny insignificant subset of the potential Skittle consuming world.

So how will it fair beyond our insular world? Well what I love about social media is that it provides tools that allow people to maintain a wider circle of friends than ever before and talk to those friends more often and instantaneously than ever before.

So will they be talking about Skittles?

Well unless my cynicism is blinding me to some subtle subtext in this campaign it doesn’t appear to be useful in anyway, it’s not entertaining in any way and I can’t see how it’s relevant in any way.

So, no, I’m taking and educated guess here that they won’t be talking about it.

Frankly it is missing that key ingredient. All that relevance, entertainment or usefulness add up to one thing, “give-a-shitability” (a term coined by our much missed former Planner @chungaiz). Or in this case they don’t.

Other than a fleeting, momentary “Oh look what Skittles have done?” how can this campaign create any lasting impact?

Answers on a postcard.

We’ve moaned and groaned and generally got upset that we’re misunderstood and downtrodden. Online “amplification” of above-the-line thinking is like working with a straight-jacket on. You have to take an idea made for two-dimensional TV and make it work in a 3D environment.

However, over the last few years as digital agencies have started to be taken more seriously there also seems to have been a shift in the power balance between traditional advertising agencies and media agencies.

Increasingly it is the media agencies with their research and reams of data that have the ear of the advertisers. The media schedule is everything. The creative seems to follow.

So what’s my issue? Well, this scenario may sound constricting for advertising agencies but it is even more so for digital agencies.

There are still too many brands who don’t question the fact that their media agency suggests a whole ream of paid-for digital media (on which they make their commission) rather than looking at the options.

When your digital brief includes banner ad formats it starts to get worrying.

We spend a lot of time coming up against this thinking and challenging it with thoughts around providing catalysts for conversation amongst communities by providing entertainment, utility and relevance. And that often leads to creative ideas that require more from seeding and blog marketing than from paid media.

So with all this whirling around my tiny head I was quite delighted when I watched this presentation on Slide Share from John Willshire at PHD.

There’s some really sound thinking, nothing revolutionary, Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky and others have all had their influence. I love most of what he says, and it’s so refreshing to hear this coming from a media agency.

But for me, about half of the way through it all starts to fall apart, not completely, but the cracks start to appear. The way the Cadbury’s eyebrow campaign is used as an example seems to me to be about reversing good old fashioned media spend into a campaign.

The approach appears to be that the thought is still led by TV. The media agency says TV is the main channel, the traditional advertising agencies go to work on a 30 second feature film and then us digital folk are asked to think about that two dimensional idea and make it work on the interweb… again.

So for the Cadbury’s eyebrows ad you get ideas like the ability to make your own mug on Photobox with your photo and make your eyebrows bigger. Really.

Relevant? No.

Useful? Not really.

Entertaining? Answer that one yourself.

Will that aspect of the campaign deliver good ROI? I’d be amazed.

Clearly this is an incredibly successful campaign in many ways. But does starting any campaign development with the thought that TV will play the central role really take advantage of the (and I quote John Willshire here) revolution that the Internet has delivered?

No.

Sometimes the “developed for TV” Creative idea will lend itself beautifully to digital environments and more importantly online communities. But more often than not we’ll end up with round pegs and square holes.

Over the last month or so I’ve finally given in to Twitter. I’d written it off 18 months ago because I saw it as being home to wannabe digital evangelists and above the line advertising planners who wanted to show they ‘got’ digital. And there’s still plenty there, along with other egos requiring an audience, but now Twitter appears to be reaching a tipping point.

As a digital marketeer Twitter has become another potential channel to engage audiences through. It’s all very exciting jumping on each and every digital band wagon as it appears over the horizon but the reality in my role is that we need these channels to reach a critical mass before we can talk honestly to clients about how they might gain any value through their use.

Twitter has now got the ability to offer that value, not necessarily just through the people you can reach directly (while inside the M25 it may seem massive, the numbers are still fairly small in reality) but in the buzz and PR that can also be gained through clever use of the channel.

The moment @stephenfry and @wossy discussed their use of Twitter on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross the writing was on the wall. Follow Mr Fry and you’ll see comments about how all journalists want to talk to him about is Twitter. Use it in a clever or unusual way and there’s still PR mileage to be had.

So, from a professional point of view Twitter now makes sense. But what has surprised my slightly cynical self is how it has changed the way I think and behave on a personal level.

As you can see from the huge gap between this post and my last, blogging had disappeared from my agenda for some time. Now though I’m finding myself reinvigorated for two reasons. Firstly, thanks to following some interesting people who I don’t get to see or often enough or spend enough time with Twitter is allowing me to be exposed to more interesting trends and technologies more quickly than ever before. Secondly those 140 characters have got me back into sharing my own thoughts which is a catalysts for posts like this.

Last time I stopped blogging it was simply because I ran out of time. The last post I wrote was shortly before DC Interact became a part of Altogether, enough said! Time is still an incredibly precious commodity, but with Twitter I can maintain a thread of thoughts while occasionally diving in to longer blog posts. Perfect, and possibly why Twitter uptake is fastest with 30-40 year olds.

It has successfully tapped into the way people are behaving online and made use of the sites and tools that people are familiar with to find a ready made audience and a platform for an innovative bit of entertainment .

For those of you that haven’t seen the most viewed list on YouTube in the last 6 months, Lonleygirl15 is the screen name of a girl called Bree who started posting a number of video diaries to YouTube at the end of May. The entries got pretty strange fairly quickly and led you to believe this girl was part of a cult ‘The Order’, who was about to go through an initiation ritual.

The ‘story’ developed as other characters appeared with their own video messages to Bree, who decided to run rather than face the ritual. There was the boyfriend Daniel and friend Gemma all posting videos and using chat-rooms and forums.

For quite a while there was huge debate about whether this was fictional or not. It got people talking, got them exchanging ‘robust’ views in an environment they are entirely comfortable in, online. The conspiracy theories just increased interest further.

Eventually the story got out that Bree was actually an actress, Jessica Lee Rose, and the creators of Lonelygirl15 came forwards and admitted it was all ruse. But not before it made participants out of ‘viewers’ who, because of the media, could try and influence the story, offering their advice, debating whether it was real or not and looking for the next snippet of information.

It makes use of YouTube, has spawned a wiki, a number of dedicated chat-rooms and forums and still generates plenty of opinion, good and bad. It was an idea generated for the media, rather than an effort to reverse engineer something online, and that is the secret of its amazing exposure.

It’s a simple idea but provides yet another stark warning to media owners.

While not as wealthy as many of the family, by 21 Peggy was in the money and into art. Time in Paris, london and New york in the first half of the last century saw her mixing with a new wave of artists and she started to collect all the surrealist and abstract art she could lay her hands on.

Opened in 1951 in her incedible Venitian home, the collection is the permanent home of all the work she collected from artists including Dali, Man Ray, Magritte and many more.

I’m no art connoisseur but the collection was definately a highlight of our trip to Venice and probably challenged a few peoples ideas. Personally I’d written off Jackson Pollock as an artist. Maybe because of the bad prints of his work or the way he is lampooned by much of the media, his work seen as infantile and, rather handily, his name rhyming with… well, do i need to spell it out!

Maybe it was the setting, maybe the fact it was surrounded by work from the likes of Kandinsky, Picasso and Giacometti but I really found myself in awe of Pollocks work.
So, should you happen to be wondering about Venice, as you do, it is well worth seeking out this collection.

Not the best look-a-likes I’ve ever seen but highly entertaining anyway! I’m just glad I photograph so well?!?… Full effect can be found here.

We’ve all seen the research, but it becomes really stark when even my wife spends evenings that were once dedicated to TV online instead.

Where the eyeballs are the brands will follow…