brand new

Go West

No, not the catchy 80s pop band but what I'm doing next.

After nearly 6 years building the planning department at Modernista!, I've decided to do something a little different.  I've spent the last few years becoming increasingly interested about digital's transformative effect on culture, and its ensuing impact on business, brands and communications.  And I've been lucky enough to be asked by Goodby Silverstein and Partners to focus on this as their director of digital strategy.  

The opportunity to join the team at GSP and work with some of the nicest, most talented, curious and passionate people in the industry is a dream opportunity for me.  I think they're one of a small handful of agencies who are producing a breadth and diversity of digital work across a range of clients.  It's obviously a little intimidating to be joining the current Cannes and One Show Digital Agency of the Year, as well as one of the most consistently excellent creative companies in the world over the last 25 years.  I'm obviously going to learn a lot and be stretched, but hopefully I can contribute in some way to help make the work even better and keep pushing the agency forward.  I'll share some of this here, as well as perhaps beta testing some thinking.

Excuse some silence as I trek across country.  A perhaps different kind of normal service will be resume shortly.  And if you read this and you're in the Bay Area please ping me.  Need to meet some new people.

Time to stop the fireworks?

I've written another op-ed for Agency Spy that you can read here.  It's some personal thoughts, a bit of a work in progress, on why advertising is, more often than not, failing.  Chief among those is our focus on designing for, and rewarding, spectacle at the cost of everything else.

Built for iPhone?

Some interesting new data from Admob suggests 40% of users of iPhones and iPod Touches claim to be using this device more for internet access than their computers.

This, I think, is pretty revealing.  Although the overall universe for these devices is still small they are probably a good sign of where the world is going, and are already a much desired audience for marketers. Clearly, if this holds, we need to think about what this means for the stuff we create on the internet when people tend to access it from a mobile device with a small screen.  (The next big disruptor of the experience is likely to come if Chrome OS helps drive netbook penetration).  More importantly, given the Apple browser's (deliberate?) limitations, does it really make sense to invest our time in building flash rich experiences that look amazing on a cinema monitor?  Shouldn't we start thinking more about what location can mean for web experiences instead, or what might be useful to someone now as they are on the move?

Half year dopplr report

Yet another reason to love dopplr

Click NYC

On October 1, I'm going to be talking at Creative Review's Click New York event.  Michael Lebowitz, founder of Big Spaceship, kindly invited me to do a talk with Ty Montague followed by a panel with Ty, Michael and Lars Bastholm on whether traditional and digital agencies can ever work together, co-exist and live happily ever after.  

It looks a great day - the agenda is here and you can buy tickets here.

UPDATE:: Due to a work commitment I will no longer be speaking but taking my place is the far more brilliant Mike Geiger, Chief Digital Officer at Goodby, Silverstein and Partners.

Behaving differently?

Cow Digital shared an interesting piece of comscore data today - the top 20 countries in terms of of digital social engagement (the average time spent on social networks by users).

What struck me about this was there seems to be an inverse relationship between the degree of digital sociability vs the historical degree of analog (physical) sociability within that country.  Perhaps it's my (mis)perception but countries like Italy, Australia, New Zealand and France have always struck me as being inherently social cultures, while Russia, Finland, UK, Germany and the USA have always felt far more of a nation of individuals.   (I note that Brazil and Spain seem to be big exceptions; perhaps these are the truly super-social nations?)  

Anyway, just struck me as a little interesting.  Is it that these countries spend more time in virtual social spaces as they are less intimidating, require less effort/investment, etc or could this perhaps be the beginning of the digital culture transforming the physical?

UPDATE:  There may be something in this.  In the comments section, Shinn Chen has kindly shared Hofstede's individualism rankings.  They're subjective but may offer some support of this inverse physical and digital sociability.

The digital turns physical

This is just brilliant stuff from Nike/Team livestrong.  Quite brilliant.  Messages of hope from the internet chalked on to the route of the Tour de France.  Thanks to Ed for spotting.

Isn't it ironic?

I read an interesting and provocative piece by Mark Holden of PHD in Adweek on what the media agency of the future might look like.  Some stuff that I personally think is likely to happen, some stuff I think that has been predicted since I started working in advertising but has yet to happen and some stuff I fundamentally disagree with.

However, what I really stuck out to me was the inherent irony in the argument about consumer understanding and models of communication.  For years, media companies expertise has really come in dealing with mass audiences.  Over the last few years they've begged for forgiveness and set up numerous philosophies, divisions and structures to deal with one to one or one to many communications.  This has bled all the way through to an unhealthy embrace of neuroscience and the individual's reaction (more often than not in the natural surrounding of an isolated lab) to communication and media. 

Yet, isn't their inherent expertise in the very mass and social nature of media and communication something they should be embracing?  The most pervasive evidence (popularized by Mark Earls) shows that we are first and foremost social animals who do stuff because of what other people do.  Perhaps rather than apologizing for their legacy of using and intuitively understanding mass tools they should be embracing and celebrating this expertise?  Perhaps there's some competitive advantage for a media company who moves away from better understanding media's effect on the individual and instead celebrates expertise in understanding the truly social nature of media and how behavior cascades through populations.