The Digital Customer exposes the need for value in all interactions

We already have digital versions of ourselves populating our increasingly digital world: Your Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter profiles, your Amazon and Google footprints are all examples.
For the most part they are not yet autonomous. But it cannot be long before the 'MeBot' - an autonomous and intelligent you - becomes a ubiquitous part of our daily interaction with people, things and data.
All of which strongly suggests that brands and organisations must start developing strategies that place the digital customer at their heart.
Let me be clear, that digital version of you will always be informed by and learning from the real you. But increasingly it will be the digital rather than analogue version of you who will be making the transactions (tilting, as these thing are, to online more heavily by the day).
And if Digital You has got the spends - Digital You is going to be the target.
So what does advertising/targeting/relationship-building/comms/PR/you-name-it look like when it is aimed at our MeBot?
Well - I suspect MeBot's will rapidly learn which lies to ignore, which content sources to trust, which deals are for-real. They may even be less swayed by the Herd mentality humans find it so hard to resist (think of the impact on the Stock Markets...).
This is likely to starkly expose some of the realities and truths of relationships of trust - such as...

1. Customers are not inhabitants of your omnichannels waiting to be managed from one to the next. They live in a 4D world with limitless touchpoints. The analogue digital combination will evidence that by the truck-load. Map that!
2. Customers are not waiting to be engaged, made your friend, or have anything else 'done' to them. They need a reason to interact with you... which leads us to point 3.
3. Customers are not loyal. Forget loyalty - focus on proof of value. Unless you are offering a good enough value proposition your wheels will just keep on spinning.

Manipulated virtual reality - the terrifying future of advertising

Image via techdayhq.com

The Minority Report nightmare, of personally-targeted ads no matter where you turn, has already been superseded. It's become product placement on digital TV.
Those products can be digitally airbrushed in to respond to who is watching, where and when. And with so much of TV consumed via digital means today, that's easy to know down to the individual.

God help us as we take our first wobbling steps into an always-on world of virtual reality through such devices as google glasses.

When the virtual layer is applied in response to who we are, where we are (whether in your head or via 3D narrowcast to instances where-ever we turn) we won't know whether the product we are looking at, picking up, drinking from, is what we thought it was, or a product 'placed' by a rival. Think you've picked up a Coke can and opened it? It's actually a Pepsi you are drinking. Ha! Made you take the challenge. Aaaargh!

The reason this is so scary is because it is both so do-able and so predictable given how the marketing industry has remained so wedded to old models of interruptive advertising.

The radical digitisation of product placement as seen in the BBC example linked to here is a response to the fact that they've noticed we don't like to be interrupted by ads. Digital TV allows us to effectively adblock - by zipping past each ad break because we aren't watching live.

Instead of learning the lesson that we don't want interruptive ads, they move the ads into the bit we want to watch uninterrupted (the shows) in the form of placements.

I'm wondering what it will take for some of these guys to let go and refocus their smarts and their tech on a model that both their clients AND their clients' customers, would actually welcome.

I fear some will be painting the sky while we stare pointedly at each other before they get the point.

How much will you pay for twitter?

How much will you pay for twitter? It's something all twitter users will have to consider because, like it or not, subscription is in the business plan. So is a (they hope) subtle form of advertising.

These details were included in the pitches they made in the recent round of funding. Even those of us who weren't privy to those pitches have been able to work this much out for ourselves.

Recently set limits on the numbers of followers/followed hints at a TwitterPro kind of model in the Flickr vein. By the way, Flickr refuses to disclose how many people have taken up their pro option. LinkedIn isn't exactly raddled with pro users either, for that matter.

The 140 characters allowed in each tweet, rather than the standard 160 characters of an sms message indicate, perhaps, a place to carry a word from our sponsors...

Yes Twitter got its funding. But funnily enough, the model didn't float the boat of every VC that Twitter pitched. Particularly when those VCs considered the numbers of truly active users (still something of a guarded secret).

For all this Twitter is extremely useful. It is one of a handful of elements of social media I would willingly pay money for.

But I had to use it first to discover how valuable it was to me. Same, I guess, is true of blogger.

So I'm guessing the entry level on twitter will remain free. Perhaps for anyone with up to 2000 followers. This will be ad supported. Perhaps there will be an option to pay NOT to be interrupted by advertising.

I hope not, because that would indicate twitter isn't thinking very cleverly about what advertising can become within its communities of purpose (there are fantastic opportunities for real-time human interaction at the point of intent, recommendations from within your network of trust, etc).

What is for certain is that without a revenue stream Twitter is just another feature when viewed from the VC end of the telescope. A nice to have. Ecosystem et al.

And,.as Facebook is discovering, features without revenue streams point in only one direction when it comes to valuation.

17 lessons for the new marketing

There's a question I ask publishing teams planning on building websites or digital services:

What do you do if you don't have any content?

It's a question aimed at editorial peeps, generally. People who have a pile of 'content' they see as assets. As publishers, when we go digital our first response is to consider how we should re-use/re-deploy that asset.

To do without it takes your thinking to interesting places. It's the kind of thinking that results in Google, YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, networked solutions playing to the power of networks and the nodes and connections (that's us folks) who create those networks.

Bill Drummond's 17 project (picture by grewlike via flickr) is, I think, asking the same question; about music.

To paraphrase Bill, now that you can access pretty much all of recorded music ever it's lost its magic for us.

Recording music (particulary the hits) was and is part of the mass production/mass media culture that the broadcast world nurtured and sustained. But the emerging networked world has less need for it and places less value on it (Why Hits Must Have Less Value in a Networked World).

His 17 project gathers choirs of 17 people. Their creations, their output, their performances are never recorded. They don't even have an audience. They are a unique, relevent experience for those who take part. And this delivers a far richer experience than listening to a long-since recorded (and therefore closed and finished) piece of music.

The networked world wants unfinished symphonies. Participatory culture is leading us to 'us' as the eighth mass media.

Think of this in the context of social networks and how messages are spread, in which we compare how communities of purpose gather to share in the co-creation of messages, to the old broadcast notions of audience and static, controlled messages.

What Bill is doing is taking us to a place where music exists but isn't recorded. Music without content. Music of course, before the broadcast/industrial age was made by the people listening to it, or at best, experienced in a unique (one off) form by small groups for whom it was relevant (carnival dancers, wedding banquets, village feasts).

The grand orchestral pieces for whom an audience was required to sit listening politely (the precurser of electronic mass broadcast) coincided with the arrival of the industrial age. The first stirrings coincided with the printing press and accelerated as the age of mass production began to pick up steam (literally).

In the networked world we are wise to ask:

• How do we publish if we don't have content?
• What is music without recordings?

So, if advertising is to marketing as content is to publishing then we should also ask:

• How do we market without advertising?
  

If you want to change behaviour but can't run a traditional ad campaign, can't come up with your 'on brand' message and broadcast and control it, what then?

Perhaps one clue to successful connection, successful relationships in the networked world is in offering/hosting/participating in unique, relevant experiences. Co-created experiences, shared with those we think will think its cool, too.

I don't suggest publishers shouldn't make use of the content they have. Nor should marketeers completely ditch their use of advertising. Advertising (even broadcast) has a place.

I do say publishers/marketers will make better use of content/advertising when they start from the premise that they should use neither. Use the idea as a tool to unleash your networked thinking.


The conversation on this one had already started, via twitter. But please join in by posting your comments below. When I floated an idea or two about this blogpost...

Richard Marshall asked: "Do you think it's important that the reader/consumer knows it's marketing or not? Advertorial versus content+ads?"

It's an interesting question because it reveals our distrust of marketing/advertising. We expect that the message from the centre is lieing to us (at the very least spinning the facts) and so we insist on warnings that we may be being played (eg we insist on transparency).

The new marketing should be less like traditional advertising in this way. If the message can be taken and adapted in order to be adopted it is being done so by people you trust - not by some distant third party (the brand?). If you can't trust your friends to be transparent with you - well that's perhaps down to your own choices - you can't blame the centre for that.

In the new marketing therefore the question of transparency, the need to know whether you are being marketed to or not is less relevant. Your friends (your social graph) are distributing their version of the message to you - and only if they think you will think it's cool, too.

David Bausola remarked: "Marketing is listening. Advertising is talking. Can't have one without the other. Did I just imply advertising will never die?"
Richard asked: "What do you call conversation between consumer and brand then?
And David came back with: Brands are deities not entities, so have to pray for help. Brands need to be nihilists so that people can prey on them
Seriously,people talk to each other. Brand has to inspire their conversation. How can Brand have dialogue when it's not an entity."

Looking forward to the discussion continuing... please add your thoughts below! Let's make this a shared, unique and relevant experience for those who wish to participate! Pass it on to anyone who you think will think it's cool, too!

Paint the whole sky, we'll still ignore you

Have added a new post on /message about the arms race of interruptive advertising.