Fresh from the G20, so might be a bit of overclaim. Yet the ‘dodge-it-all’ bandwagon carries on apace, with #digitalbritain trending top on Twitter on Friday. Gordon gets digital, it says on the live feed twitter fail, lampooned so cruelly in the Telegraph.  But the politicians aren’t saying very much really, other than now that the rest of the economy is fucked, it’s down to the digital economy to save the nation. Give or take an embarrassing email or two. Does that sound familiar to anyone in agency land?

I think there’s a problem defining the digital economy. Sly Bailey thinks it is EVIL. And is DESTROYING JOURNALISM, along with local councils whose efforts to publish Redbridge council newsletters should be BANNED. Lord Mandelson thinks it is the infrastructure and investment backbone the nation needs to prepare for the future. The Chinese government thinks it a means to take over the world. Will Hutton says the Long Tail is nonsense and we are slipping relentlessly towards a disturbing world of enormous monopolies. Lord Carter thinks it should spawn new business models. Lord knows how that’s going to happen whilst the majority of the consultative process takes place with the institutional behemoths of telecoms, media and technology.

And poor Stephen Fry – his ‘internet should be like driving’ analogy was rather shot down in flames, apposite given Mandelson’s efforts to bail out the flailing ‘British’ car industry. There is a serious debate to be had about digital skills, which lost its way on the day in the crossfire of opinion about how the education system doesn’t teach critical thinking anyway. Expecting teenagers to apply thoughtful analysis to web browsing habits is ignorant to the point of ridiculous. Note to self – distinguish between the development of creative and technical skills that school the talent that will keep the nation great from the general IT literacy and media literacy content of the national curriculum that will help the nation keep up.

Funnily enough, this digital conference diversity reflects the agency world quite well. Two schools of though are forming. Introducing, in the blue corner, the ‘old’. Without true expertise and effort to create new models of thinking, working and creating, this group will truck along into a state of blissful monopoly and lowest economic denominator of quality and nostalgia, until Google one day does swallow up WPP, Havas or indeed Trinity Mirror. And in the red corner, welcome the ‘new’ challengers who will reshape the way business is done, who seamlessly move between code and creativity in their arguments. What can we learn from the experiences of the digital agencies? There’s a decent body of people out there that really understand the digitisation of media, the democratization of content and on-demand business. Wouldn’t you rather hear from someone with ten years experience of articulating the value of user experience versus brand positioning, at the coalface of digital strategy?

Then there’s the third corner, the purply beige regulator, who looks at the ‘big picture’ of protecting the establishment whilst claiming to encourage innovation. As anyone involved in the start up scene will tell you, you don’t get much help with the latter from this government. Hats off to the founders of Bebo and Lastminute who’ve just set up an angel fund to support innovative businesses, identifying a real gap in the market for the micro-business community of new ideas. I’m an enormous fan of innovation, but short of the occasional social media start up, we aren’t seeing very much of it reported at the moment across Brand Republic. Yes, economic consolidation is a blunt instrument, bashing the experimental with the tried and tested.

Don’t take pioneer status for granted. Get involved in the Digital Britain debate. It’s more important than you think. For a start, you can follow the #unconference we’re putting together by searching #dbuc or @dbuc [ok, so you need to be on twitter for that]. Alternatively, contribute to the Fake Digital Britain report here, and test your digital literacy skills to the full. Beats writing to your MP.

follow me on twitter

The other day Simon Cowell did a touching thing – he publicly announced that he’d take a pay cut from ITV.  At first I thought this was Cowell’s attempt to jump on the credit crunch bandwagon to come across all in-touch-with-reality as a cunning pre-emptive PR tack.  However, watching what’s happened with the Susan “the badger” Boyle phenomenon in the last week, Cowell’s move now all makes a lot of sense.

Cowell needs ITV just as much (if not more) than ITV needs Cowell.  This is because Cowell’s new media model is firmly reliant on ITV.  Cowell has cunningly devised a buzz-generating / fame-making model which relies on the symbiotic relationship of mainstream media (TV and press) and social media.  A relationship where his TV show feeds YouTube / social media which feeds mainstream news media which feeds YouTube / social media which feeds mainstream media etc. etc.

It’s not by luck that 3 of the most highly viewed clips on YouTube are linked to him: Leona Lewis, Paul Potts and Susan Boyle, whose videos (between them) have been viewed over 200 million times.

The big question is – would Cowell be able to generate such levels of buzz if his shows weren’t prime time ITV?  The answer to that is a clear no.  And Cowell knows it – hence how he’s so heart-warmingly offered to take a pay cut from ITV.  The other option is of course to join Richard and Judy and their 6,000 viewers on UKTV . . .

This is supposed to be a blog about digital creative from Bristol. Yet, I’m sitting on a London bound train, about to see one of my design heroes, Jonathan Ive from Apple based in the US of A. Oooh, the ever so slight irony of it!

Hello! I’m Jon Waring

Vital stats: 43, 6ft 2, 11 stone, 1 wife, 3 children, 1 ludicrous mortgage and 2 cats. I’m more of a dog person, but was out voted. Having 3 children IS a mistake, you’re out numbered and end up with cats instead of dogs.

Perhaps a more vital stat: Creative Director at 3Sixty, a digital marketing agency based in Bristol in the UK.

I am planning to showcase some of the great digital work that comes out of this wonderful and diverse city, plus the broader South West. Before I do, I thought I’d set out my stall by defining what I consider to be the criteria for great digital.

Judging creative work can be a subjective affair. I’m no exception. Years of hard earned experience as a traditional graphic designer with a passion for typography have chiselled and etched me into the old git I am today. Luckily, digital work calls for a slightly stricter criteria than some creative disciplines as it blends communication, aesthetics and technology. Here’s just a few:

Information architecture, user research, a great idea, original visual treatment, typography, colour, composition, clean accessible code, to name a few. It strikes me, that one very important consideration is frequently omitted…

‘What’s the point?’

I’m not trying to be existential, just clear. What do we want the user to do or get out of the experience.

It doesn’t take a designer to recognise good design, it feels inevitable, why would it look or function any other way. In fact, we probably only notice bad design. It gets in the way and feels extraneous at best or indulgent at worst.

Let me give you a couple of examples:-

Google

Remember search engines before Google? They called them portals, a litter of seemingly random things, check weather, stocks, shares… all stuff they wanted you to do or see. Then Google came along with a solitary search box. They got it, they understood the point of a search engine. That was as much choice as a person could need.

Apple

Their user interface (UI) design is so intuitive you barely need a manual. The iPhone is not strictly industrial design so much as user interface design. The actual object only has 4 physical buttons. The real beauty of its design lies in the UI.

You might be thinking ‘yeah, but that’s not creativity.’ I disagree. Both these examples have something in common. Simplicity. It seems to me they understood the point of the project, what people wanted from it. Then designed, something innovative, removing anything that didn’t contribute to its primary objective.

Yes, the form follows function to a degree. It’s not that I don’t understand the need for pure play, passive enjoyment of largely aesthetic or entertaining stuff. These things can stir emotions, a powerful marketing tool for sure, but, ultimately they’re transient.

For me, the really creative, hard working and profitable digital work is based on a good idea, simply executed.

So Net-a-Porter’s discount brand, TheOutnet, launched last week and of course I was all over it. My agency has been involved in the launch activity but this e-commerce site is the work of their in-house team.

TheOutnet.com is essentially a designer clearance site that’s aiming for those aspirational shoppers who want designer brands but not pay the full price. I think it’s an interesting concept and it’s definately right for these difficult times, but when all’s said and done, how well does the site function?

Overall, I liked it. I thought the functionality is pretty similar to it’s big sister site (net-a-porter.com) with strong branding site-wide. I’ve always thought that the net-a-porter site is amongst the best for fashion eCommerce so I’m glad they’ve followed on with a similarly well thought out website.

I picked up on 5 things that I really liked about it:

1. The Mini Shopping Basket

When adding products to your basket, the site keeps a visual representation of your items in plain site. Nice feature when buying multiple products.

2. Low Stock Indicators

I’ve seen these before, but I think they’re executed pretty well here. Nice way of closing the deal and encouraging that purchase decision.

3. Big Savings

If a customer is saving BIG on their purchase, then make a big deal about it. TheOutnet.com does just that. I like.

4. Packaging

The beautiful packaging that a lot of the luxury retailers provide with their products is all part of the brand and the service. I know of people who buy from a particular online store over another purely for the packaging. TheOutnet takes advantage of this and although the bag isn’t as glamorous as net-a-porter’s, it is re-usable and they’re displaying it at the point of purchase.

5. Branding

It’s everywhere! Some might say that they’re over-using the circles, but in my opinion, I’d rather they were over branding than not branding at all. Perhaps over time they’ll drop these or at least dilute their usage, but for now i think it makes an impact and certainly stands out from the crowd.

Be great to hear anyone else’s thoughts on this. You know what to do..

For a any campaign, there is rarely a time when search shouldn’t be considered as part of the marketing mix. An exceptional mechanic at capitalising on demand and a worthy investment despite its weakness in terms of stimulating that initial engagement. Some may say that appearing against a generic search result is beneficial and while I give that argument credence it is rarely the motivating factor in investment choices.

So we are all agreed, spend money on search. Now the tricky bit – the  relationship of investment and results between SEO and PPC. Why do clients confidently and happily spend many hundreds of thousands on PPC however balk at the prospect of paying  five figures for an annual SEO retainer ?  Naturally the focus of a search budget will vary for a number of reasons  - vertical, seasonality, competitive set, business objectives your current position and learning, internal resource, I could keep going for some time however what’s really starting to wind me up is the energy and funds going into the source of 15% of the traffic while the remaining 85% is just “assumed”.

More specifically SEO still seems to be falling between the cracks. It still doesn’t have a comfortable home, its not marketing, its not IT. As a result of this I have recently had the following exchange

“We cant do SEO someone, forgot to put a line in a budget”

“don’t panic” was my retort “lets recut the PPC budget and reinvest in SEO”

eery silence with a look that suggested I’d just asked him to give me his first born.

So my question to you, all 15 of my readers is, what have I missed ? Why on earth wouldn’t you reduce reliance on PPC to invest in organic search ?

It’s interesting to see how people are using Twitter – and how it fits into the history of social media. It can’t be more than 3 years ago now that people (including Yahoo) were getting all hot and bothered about a new internet phenomenon called Delicious. Apparently we were all going to turn into a social search engine – where people usurped technology and instead of relying on other Google finding the good stuff, we’d rely on our friends to do it instead.

Well, fast-forward 3 years, and we seem to have a case of history repeating itself. Given that most people now use Twitter as a link sharing platform, Twitter has basically become the son-of-Delicious. The only difference is that instead of the dour geeky feel and positioning of Delicious, we have the cute birdy-based Twitter, with its clever positioning and simple user-experience.

And don’t Google know it – hence why the guys from the Googleplex have become Sylvester-like in their keeness to get their hands on the Tweety-Bird, and turn it into some kind of real-time user-recommended social searchy system . . .

Errr, well this is certainly an interesting way of launching a brand into a new territory.  42Below have a pop at the UK ad industry – with some nice cameo appearances for Hyper, the Tea Building (Home to Glue et al) and uber-planner Faris Yacob.  It’s cheeky – but will it work???? Well, it’s got our office talking . . .

Thanks to Digital Prolixity for the heads up.

It’s about that time, not quite squeaky bum time, because lets face it awards are not as important as football but all the votes for the big awards shows, bar Cannes, will be in. If you were a betting man you could do worse than check out Michael Lebowitz’s top 5 campaigns  of the year that he picked out for Forbes magazine.

I judged the Art Directors Club with Michael this year, he was chairman of the One Show and I’m pretty sure headed up Viral at D&AD so there is nothing out there he wouldn’t have seen. One piece of work that I hadn’t seen on his list was a great banner for Axion a belgian bank. The concept is wonderfully simple, stick a band in a banner. Use the space restriction to your advantage. I really like this. I am on record as saying that banners are dead as a creative medium. This is the only banner campaign I have seen in a year or so that I wish I had done. Maybe there is life in the old dog yet?

What makes it all the more galling is that Flo and I had this idea a few years ago. It was kind of different, it was a mini band that lived in an app that sang the news and stuff like that – but close enough for us to know that we can never resurrect it. Another one bites the dust! And another example of the fact that it’s easy to have ideas – what’s hard is making them happen. Congratulations to the agency in Belgium for doing just that, I’m sure they will be on a podium near you soon. 

Brands that have been opting out of the social networking craze should take notice of the situation Amazon.com found itself in over the Easter holiday weekend, when authors of gay and erotic literature took to Twitter to instantly raise awareness that the online bookseller had dropped titles with “adult” content from the website’s best selling lists.

Angry that their books became de-ranked, with classics like The Well of Loneliness, Tipping the Velvet, Brokeback Mountain and Lady Chatterly’s Lover disappearing, poular writers began alerting thousands of their Twitter follwers of the situation. A campaign to start a Googlebomb was initiated, an online petition gaining more than 15,000 signatures started, and bloggers took up the issue quickly, raising attention even further. The topic is being tagged on Twitter as #amazonfail

Zoe Margolis (@girlonetrack) the author of “Girl With A One Track Mind” began broadcasting her views about Amazon.com Sunday, saying to her Twitter followers that:

“This is a serious f****** issue and anyone that cares about censorship and sexual repression should be boycotting Amazon.”

Within 24 hours the issue had reached mainstream news headlines and Amazon.com responded to the media calling the situation “a glitch in our system.” The well-connected Margolis won her follwers attention, including media and celebrities such as Jonathan Ross who rallied to her cause, and she quickly became a spokesperson for the topic, appearing on Channel 4 news and offered commentary in The Guardian.

“You know what’s great? A few hashtags and tweets result in something far better than a boycott: bad publicity – it always works,” she Twittered.

If there was ever an example of why brands should heed the power of social networking sites, this could be the tipping point. The case shows how consumers can rally quickly to an issue and strongly express their views before a brand may even have a clue what is going on. It proves that brands that don’t pay attention to the new power people have, are open to experiencing instant damage inflicted on reputation if they don’t monitor conversations, and respond quickly.

While Amazon.com offered a short statement to the mainstream media, they have not responded directly to the thousands of people who expressed views on Twitter, with many saying they will boycott the bookseller. The online retailer has several Twitter identities, including @amazon, but has not used this communication tool to date. Many are saying they want more direct attention from the brand, and that the brief statement does not cut it. 

“I think the ‘glitch’ was in human judgement and the right thing to do would be step up and apologize,” commented the Twitter user @yuricon. “What we want: Acknowledge a mistake in policy and in judgement, apologize, then allow us to make our own decisions.”

 Watching this story unfold,

-Lisa

Interestingly I wrote this last week and the debate has now moved on however I felt quite strongly when I read of the recent lobbying by major media companies in the US to force Google to make them appear top of its natural search results for news stories and decided to post anyway.

It is supreme arrogance, ignorance and laziness from newspaper barons who are rightly scared that they are being increasingly marginalised by users finding their content where they want rather than where these old school ‘institutions’ would have them find it. If newspapers want their sites to be top of search engines, and surely they do with 80% of internet journeys starting with a search, then they should take the steps to make sure they get there via ethical SEO techniques; by improving and optimising their architecture and content and improving the quality of their inbound links via digital PR. Asking for special treatment is just, well, cheating. The Guardian for example, has always been one of the lowest selling national UK dailies but it has tapped into a worldwide liberal audience online and its site is now one of the most read newspaper websites in the world, and consistently the most visited in the UK (although traditionally populist Sun did overtake last week according to Nielsen).  Why is this? Mostly breadth of digital content, especially blogs, and, in the case of the Guardian, the identification of a target audience- something that most national newspapers, who have more or less the same centre right agenda, will not be able to differentiate against. Say what you like about it politically, but the Guardian understands digital arguably better than any other traditionally offline media owner, arguably in the English speaking world. If print media brands want to survive in the brave new world, they need to realise that they are no longer people’s first source for news.

The word ‘fragmented’ does not come near to describing the sources from where users get their content from these days. Why should we go to a newspaper website for it? Many print media owners seem to think that users will come to their site because in the pre-digital past if you wanted news you had no choice other than to use their brand. Moreover, many people only read news in the past because it was all that was available for your commute. Now all that content, and more, is on the web and the new generation of mobile phones such as the iPhone are only making it easier to read that content on the move, even if that portability is still embryonic in its development, not to mention other distractions like mp3 players and video games.

Admittedly, when it comes to big international stories, it is the larger and more established media owners that have the resource to send journalists to the front line but then those media owners need to take steps to ensure that their content is then found by search engines spiders. To ask for special treatment flies in the face of the principle of an unregulated, democratic world wide web. It’s an old media solution in a digital world. We all have to face the reality that there are too many newspapers in the post digital world, certainly in the UK. The Trinity Mirror Group has closed 27 titles in the last year alone. The recent realisation that selling ad space alone does not provide enough revenue for newspaper sites to keep their content free only complicates the issue. Digital has been cutting into the sales of national newspapers for years forcing some, such as the near 150 year old US newspaper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, to go online only and reduce their journalist staff from 120 to just 20.  Is subscription for content the answer? That’s a whole different question.  As for the immediate future, newspaper barons can moan as much as they want but although some will have the vision to survive, some are ready for the recycling bin.