Iplayer, Hulu, Vimeo and Youtube have made it manifestly evident that TV is facing a huge challenge from the web, not just for revenues and mindshare but also as an alternative channel to market. But it’s not just a quantitative ‘cheap and many’ channels issue; there’s likely to be a profound qualitative change in how we watch television that threatens the value of things that conventional TV people hold as given: things like scheduling, channel brands and the primacy of television commissioning.

I’ve noticed that when TV execs talk about ipTV they focus on the pipe and the device and assume that the content and the viewing experience will stay much the same (a mass media experience). I came away from The Guardian’s Changing Broadcast summit at the Mayfair Hotel last week with the strong impression that they believe that by pushing event-based TV and ‘combining the creative skills of UK TV production with the ubiquity of the UK digital market’ they can confront the multiple threats they face from digital. 

I think it would be interesting to mull over these questions first:

• How can the value of scheduling and channel brands remain intact when we make decisions about what to watch (whatever, whenever) by what our friends and other people we trust are watching?
• What happens when national barriers fall down (and I can watch Hulu in the UK and BBC iplayer in France)?
• How will a long tail of television (with geographic spread, not just historic) change what I watch and how I decide what to watch and the habits I fall into?
• What will be the impact of more access to shortform have on TV viewing behaviour (just check out five.tv/fwd). 
• When I can respond instantly to what I’m seeing, in lots of different ways to different people or just everybody watching with me, over an interface that’s easy to use, how might my viewing habits and - just as interestingly - TV formats change? (And has the failure of red button created a false sense of security?).

My guess is that across diverse viewing contexts and audience segments some very wide differences in behaviour, formats, channel branding and tv discovery will emerge.

It’s easy for the hangover of a lifetime of past perceptions to shroud us from future reality. It’s interesting that most of the people adopting the comforting approach that nothing will fundamentally change were over the age of 40.  At the end of the day there was a panel of thirtysomethings representing Endemol Digital, RDF Digital, Channel 4, BBC3 and Bebo with a completely different mindset because they started their careers at a time when the old models were already looking tired. Here are some refreshing snippets: 

“Everything done on television is done online simultaneously - commissioning is multiplatform” (BBC3)

“What success is like is really hard to get at” (BBC3)

“We are experimenting to try to find out which models work” (Bebo)

“The web allows us to challenge the old model where we got paid by the cost of what we made, rather than by its value” (RDF)

and most intelligently of all:

“We’re having to learn very fast to keep up with the audience” 

Joe Heath at BBH just sent me this link to a deck by Paul Isakson at Space150: 

http://www.slideshare.net/paulisakson/modern-brand-building-presentation/

It’s a very good slide presentation that says, “The product really is the marketing: make better products first”. IE. planners may have finally got it. It reminded me of the piece below which I wrote a very very long time ago as a result of experiences working with Orange, when at Metadesign. It’s about merging product and brand and service development and the importance of defining narratives in enabling a product or service to realise its true value; apologies for the academic tone - it’s called ‘The communication is the product…’ and it goes like this:

The idea that communication is the product (and vice versa) has its root in three conditions: the dematerialisation of products and services; the inclusion of networked communications within products and services; the personalisation of services.

Where products have partial or no material reality we can objectify them in any way that might be desirable. Effectively, we ‘write’ the product’s story upon it. The way in which we communicate what the product does, who it is for, the context in which it belongs and how it is used can determine how valuable that product will be.

And furthermore, when a product incorporates a system of communication – especially when it is bi-directional - a primary route for marketing communications becomes the point of use and the building of customer relationships becomes intrinsic to the product or service itself.  

When a service is personalized there is an implicit requirement for bi-directional communication. The customer becomes a co-creator, and must be able to 1) understand the scope and value of personalisation, and 2) use the communication tools provided by the vendor to create their personalized service.  Again, this is a means of building relationship capital.

From the user’s point of view the product of networked digital services is almost always information, access to information or a means of control, communication or exchange. The material reality of these services – back end systems, fulfilment systems, cable networks etc. - is entirely hidden from the customer unless it incorporates some form of physical delivery (and that is in itself only a partial manifestation of the customer experience). These services are in many cases entirely novel or subject to rapid adaptations and evolution, and so how their narrative is written and presented at point of use and in marketing communications may contribute substantially to their success or failure.

The idea is not limited to pure information services, but extends to services added to products. Defining narratives are just as important to physical objects and especially those that are mutable, sensitive and communicative. Digital electronic products are a hybrid of physical and logical systems. They are increasingly dematerialised and unconstrained by physical limitations. The designers’ role is becoming the creation of new object languages that define the things they make, and the establishment of mechanisms for building and sustaining a relationship with the customer. A digital radio interface might be a set of cards with station idents printed on them - throw a different card on the deck to change the station; an answerphone might be a tray of glass phials filled with messages waiting to be poured out (thank you Durrell); a car still has four wheels and an engine and a boot, but the definitive value propositions are shifting from speed, status and performance to comfort, lifetime cost and intelligence – services added to the product that provide real value and differentiation. In the future, we will buy cars more for the information they provide about our destination and the road ahead than for their speed in getting there, and more for the relationship we have with the information provider than for the body, chassis and engine configuration.

The conclusion drawn is that brand communication and service delivery often reside at the same interface and that the quality of communication determines the quality of the product. This is what is meant by ‘the communication is the product’. The line between brand development and service development and design is becoming increasingly blurred, and the suggestion is that, as brand strategists, we need to involve ourselves in the creation of value itself rather than simply communicating what that value might be through some physically separate medium. This means being involved at the genesis of product development, not after the event.  

A client reported yesterday that members of the Europe-wide internet group of his parent company had reported that UGC (ooh, that ugly term) had crested the wave and was crashing. The evidence given was that a user generated video site in Germany had bombed. 

“Would I like to comment?” He asked. “Well”, I replied, thinking quickly, “For the last hundred years we’ve had mass media - and that was it: now the world’s turning to social media. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing in between. Last year people said editorial was dead; this year people say UGC is dead: neither is true: it’s the pendulum swinging.

Naturally, anyone threatened by social media will search for signs that it’s just a fad (I don’t mean my client, I mean his partner companies). In a way, UGC as we’ve known it is a fad, in that flickr and youtube are phenomena that are unlikely to be repeated in the same way  because, unlike the German video site, they flourished without serious competition.  

JPG is a good example of something in between. The photography magazine sets assignments online and people compete to appear in the glossy print publication (for no payment!) by uploading submissions online. This is editor-as-curator, Read the rest of this entry

Lots of friends, colleagues and clients have expressed bafflement at the lead story on the front page of New Media Age last week. NMA suggested very explicitly (but inaccurately) that Hearst is retreating from its web strategy. We’ve been working with Hearst on strategy and design for over a year now and we knew this wasn’t the case. As planned, Hearst is simply going to be folding some old print title websites into the women’s 35+ digital brand Allaboutyou.com, soon to go onto a new platform with complete redesign.

(And, by the way, we’re currently helping Hearst Digital implement the UK’s second manifestation of social media software Pluck - and it might be the first if we can get in ahead of The Guardian).

Meanwhile, we’ll leave Natmags/Hearst CEO Duncan Edwards to put the record straight. This is his letter to NMA, published this week:

“Your front page story ‘Hearst to shut down four websites in digital u-turn’ (NMA 28.02.08) is inaccurate and confused…
Read the rest of this entry

We use the traffic ranking tool Alexa to keep an eye on what’s happening on the web; it’s a good measure of the speed with which social media is transforming web habits and economics. But most of its users know that Alexa’s a relative measure, so if a chart’s showing downward movement it doesn’t necessarily mean that traffic is falling.

Alexa measures traffic by encouraging people to download its tracking tool to their browser, and then monitors their usage. Most Alexa users know that it indicates a site’s share of reach, rank and page views by revealing what proportion of the Alexa sample has visited the site, and that there’s no clear indication of absolute numbers. Also, Alexa clients tend to be skewed towards techies and other early adopters so it doesn’t necessarily give an accurate view of market share across internet users as a whole.

To test Alexa accuracy and find out what its results might indicate in absolute terms, I decided to do a quick and dirty experiment with a sample of one.

I took a fairly big site for which I know absolute results (no names) and plotted it against the Alexa graph. Here’s the result for the last six months:
I could match the charts for the first three months or the last three months but not for both. There seems to be a step change between them.

This is the first chart, showing a nice correlation for the first three months…

Read the rest of this entry

It’s hard to think of the New York Taxi & Limousine Commission as a champion for design thinking. But I bumped into my old friend Rachel Abrams the other day, and she was brandishing a copy of Taxi 07 - Roads Forward, a policy document she helped produce for the TLC (ha!). Taxi 07 is an object lesson in using design thinking and great storytelling to change public policy.

We’ve been using storyboards, cartoons, diagrams and collage for many years to explain to clients what we’ve learned about their businesses, to analyse the complex interdependencies between services and products, processes, brand, customers and marketplace and to show what future alternatives might look like. Rachel and her co-editors, working for the Design Trust for Public Space and the TLC, have now applied this kind of system view and powerful visual explanations to changing a vital part of the New York transport system.

Taxi 07 gets right to the guts of the Medallion Taxi Fleet in grainy photos of New Jersey ‘hack’ garages where they hack production Crown Victorias into cabs, cartoon narratives illustrating passenger problems and driver issues and diagrams of typical journeys, but it also tells the story from the customer’s point of view and this, said the TLC (worryingly!) was a first.

The book also explodes some urban myths, like the scarcity of cabs being down to shift changes, and also shows that some myths are true, for almost no trips originate north of Central Park - you just can’t get a cab up there.

The document ends with a call for a comprehensive taxi service design process that looks at the entire system of activities and relationships involved in service delivery: the cab, communications with customers, owning and operating taxis and regulation. If you want to know simply everything there is to know about the public and private world of the New York taxi cab, or just want to see a really good way to tell a multi-faceted story, download your copy here.