Predicting The Creative Product of The Future

The story of Chicken Little (sometimes known as Chicken Licken) is better known in the US than in the UK. The gist of the tale is that Chicken Little rushes around convinced that disaster is imminent and that the sky is about to fall on his head.  Apologies for giving away the end of the story, but you will be pleased to know that it doesn't. 

Working in the communications industry it can sometimes feel that there are rather a lot of Chicken Littles running around squawking. Media fragmentation, consumer empowerment, societal cynicism and declining trust  - it all adds up to a lot of questions about what business we are in and what exactly is our creative product.

Steve and I spoke at the IPA recently about what we think the "Creative Product of The Future" is. It's a huge issue for our industry. I'd like to share some of our thinking and get any thoughts:

Go back over 100 years ago to Paris: Two newspapers were locked in a vicious circulation battle, L'Auto and Le Velo. In an attempt to create buzz and excitement and to drive sales, the team at L'Auto came up with the idea of a cycling race around France of which they would be the official sponsor. And so the Tour De France was born. Did it work? Well, circulation of the paper went up from 24k copies to 854k copies a day at its peak in 1933 by which time its rival Le Velo had gone out of business.

Still in France at about the same time, Andre Michelin looked around him at the changing habits of the French and saw that they were taking weekend trips and driving holidays. Michelin thought to himself, how can my tyre company provide something of use to these people over and above tyres. And so the Michelin Guide was born, Interestingly it took about 20 years for Michelin to start charging for the Guide as he said that when people got something for free in his opinion they did not value it as much as something that they paid for .  Sound like an example of Brand Utility to anyone?

In the 1950s in England the Starbucks of their day were the Lyons Corner Houses - started up by the Lyons Coffee Company, this chain of coffee houses (some where even 24 hours) were a place for people of all ages to meet, relax, drink coffee and listen to music. The British Big Band scene was huge at that time and some of the UK's most famous Big Bands would perform live. The music and coffee combo proved so successful that Lyons had their own record label so if you liked the music you could go and buy the record. Sounds like a lo-tech version of the current  Starbucks-iPod initiative.

To my mind, Ford's Where Are The Jonses is a Web 2.0 version of P&G's 1957 collaboration with CBS, the soap opera As The World Turns, which in turn was simply an updating of P&G's 1933 radio soap Ma Perkins. Soap operas being a platform for advertising...soap.

During this time when channels of mass media were not yet fully formed, brands needed to think differently about how they connected with consumers, not just where.  It has come full circle. For all the reasons listed at the start of the post (media fragmentation, consumer  empowerement etc) we are now in a period when once again brands have to think diferently about those genuine points of creative connection. 

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Comments

[John Dodds]

Absolutely - the key is that you are not pursuing a demographic or a market but a collection of people and while (physically or virtually) people have changed location, people, in and of themselves are inherently the same as ever.

This is why Where Are The Joneses puzzles me. It may be that it's the vanguard of a new medium but it seems to me to have generated a lot of interest within the industry while making virtually no impact whatsover in the real world - very few people are aware of it.

Well that's my sense anyway and If I'm correct I would suggest it is because that where the soap operas went to where people were already gathered i.e. around the radio and latterly the TV (both with limited output), Where Are The Joneses has gone to the internet where people clearly are - but they're there in a much more amorphous way and they gather where they gain some value not automatically where you stick your content for their delectation.

I expect to be told I'm being a thick Luddite but it seems almost equivalent to saying we'll create a TV spot and then not worry where and when it plays. Just because media is fragmenting, it doesn't mean you need to focus on fragments.

[David Bausola]

Hi John and Amelia.

It's interesting to read your thought on the Joneses project - the soap opera connection has been raised a lot recently - verbally in meetings and socially with other planners.

But it's not a useful correlation towards understanding the dynamics of WRTJ. Mainly because the of the licence model - Creative Commons BY-SA - which has broader implications which will be revealed next year.

Part of the 'fragmentation' of an 'audience' involves time shifting - the Tivoisation of TV as an example. Mostly time shifting is acknowledged as a weekly or perhaps monthly operation. WRTJ persists as a 'media cloud' and thus viewers will discover the project in their own time over the forthcoming years. Think how Minder or Fools and Horses maintains it's attraction over the decades - soaps don't. Where are the long tails of Soaps? (Lost in copyright?!)

The trade press (Marketing/Broadcasting) covered the project as if it was a campaign - but there was no product placement - the use of the car (The S MAX) was not pivotal to the plot, but instrumental to the ability of the project's logistics. As a brand centric production, we opened up the interpretation of Ford (of Europe) without a public attack on the brand (re: Tahoe remix campaign). This is because one of the aims of the project is to bring more depth to Ford by participating in culture instead of marketing. The mutuality between brand and society is perhaps the key factor when working within culture. Marketing tends to glamorises the client, and glamour is always fleeting - like a soap opera.

To which it's worth mentioning Kate Modern, which is a soap, with product placement, based inside a controlled media channel - Bebo. The 2 projects are very different but the TV 2.0 nonsense has bracketed the 2 projects together. It's a keen indicator that planners and trade press, on the whole, do not understand the media rights businesses and thus fail to develop client work that does anything more than work within the existing media models. How many planners, including digital specialists really understand the OFCOM 2003 Communications Act or the Digital Millennium Copyright Act enough to be creative with the parameters? KM, as John says, goes to the audience, but also waves product to an unsuspecting audience. Is this cultural? Is this marketing? Is this opportunistic? Is this of value to an audience?

What may be worth considering is "role": software design starts with the user; actually, via UML we refer to a user in the system as an 'actor'. Fromms 'Escape from Freedom' is useful in comprehending participation within society and the needs of a leader - such you find in any open source project including the WRTJ. Throw in some Nicolas Bourriaud (Relational Aesthetics) and you'll see that 2.0ness is as old as the hills. I'm not sure that WRTJ is the 'vanguard of a new medium' because it's a blend of media - or as Faris call it - TransMedia. Actually, it's more like a hack of the TV format business, which I see as the most under used mechanisms in marketing. It's worth looking at GameKillers by Uniliver/BBH/MTV for the Viacom network on that note,

I'll be writing up a post or two this/next month on the'zero influence' blog, explaining some of the insights & strategy behind WRTJ.

[David Brain]

Great examples . . . I had no idea that was how the Tour de France came about. One difference that means thing cannot in my view "stay the same" is that people can now talk back. In terms of creative product this is a new dimension in that great ideas of the past mostly did not have to continue in dialogue form. Not right for every campaign or every product I concede, but the mechanics to help people talk and share their views have to be part of the idea now.

[Charles Frith]

But yes. Plus ca change 'n all that

[Andy]

Elegantly put, Amelia. Splendid's Andy Bellass once described marketing 2.0 as marketing 0.1 for similar reasons.
I think it's amusing how easily people can convince themselves that means are actually ends. In one way it's all very simple: Do whatever works. Tough selling that philosophy to clients and using it to run a large agency though.

[Katie Streten]

Nicely put, great examples too.