I have to admit that I was in a state of giddy anticipation when I
got home to find that the courier had delivered a shiny new Nokia N97:
It came in a under-stated black box which resembled a treat from a
Regent Street boutique. It was a pleasure to unbox, as I appreciated
the way it feels comfortable in my hands.

The N97 is a radical new design, somewhere between a classic
touch-screen like the iPhone and a keyboard-phone like the Blackberry.
The whole device slides open with a very satisfying swing that just
exudes quality engineering revealing an easy to use QUERTY thumb-pad
and a joystick for people who do not enjoy using touch-screens. Other
bloggers have complained about the angle of the slide: The screen is at
approximately thirty degrees to the key-pad, and it’s impossible to
push it flat. I never found that to be a problem because the shape of
the phone when opened out makes it very easy to hold securely while
typing and walking.

I agree with Susy Weaser when
she says that the test of a good gadget is that you should not need to
read the manual. It does not take me long to download the Facebook and
Twitter application.

However, it takes me ages to find out how to change the basics: date
and time, profiles, personalisation. I found the structure of the
configuration application very confusing: It took half an hour to
connect to one of the many WiFi access points in the house and even
more time to download the Google Apps.

Nokia are pushing their “Ovi Store”
as the one-stop shop for all applications, however I found that I
couldn’t find the applications I wanted. The search did not seem to
work at all.

In all I think I must have spent about twelve hours customising and
tweaking the phone’s apps and settings before I had something which
seemed vaguely right.

Speaking of customisations – the phone seemed to want to do it’s own
thing: For example even though I set up my own Google Mail application
and then the “Mail for Exchange” client (which can be used to connect
to Google’s calendar and tasks) it still insisted on forcing me to set
up Nokia’s own mail software each time I powered on the phone. Even
after I relented and signed up for “Ovi Mail” it still wanted me to set
up the mail service every time I switched the phone on, which happened
rather a lot given the phone’s tendency to crash in the middle of
whatever I happened to be doing.

And on the subject of reliability: The Symbian platform is known for
it’s dependable full-featured phones. I’ve been using Nokia’s S60
phones for more than three years. Unfortunately somebody in Nokia’s
testing department must have been on holiday when they were preparing
this for release: Even after upgrading all the software to the latest
version this phone crashed two or three times per day. It usually
happened at the least appropriate time, such as when I was talking on
the phone.

The most annoying bug was a quirk on the key-lock: If left un-used
for a minute the device automatically locks it’s keyboard to prevent
accidental dialling. You are supposed to be able to unlock it by simply
flicking the keylock switch on the side, however from time to time it
would decide to ignore this. Other than removing the battery to
hard-reset the phone I could find no way to get back in control of the
device. Given that this happened two or three times a week I’m
astonished that Nokia’s quality-control people did not spot this
problem.

Finally, my biggest gripe is the screen itself: It looks just like
any other mobile phone touch-screen however unless you push it quite
hard nothing happens. I found it required quite a bit of pressure to
make it work, and then given the force you have to use it becomes very
imprecise so I often found myself pressing the wrong button by mistake.
The N97′s touch-screen is really quite clumsy. It’s got no
multi-touch and Nokia cheekily bundle a little stylus with the phone -
suggesting that Nokia are well aware that this touch-screen is not
intended for touching.

The iPhone has already set the standard for a touch-screen.
 Everybody knows how well the iPhone works – you can touch it with one
or two fingers. You can manipulate images on screen with easy to learn
gestures. You do not need a stylus or any special accessory to use it.
Like most modern touch-screens the iPhone, HTC Magic, Palm Pre and
pretty much everybody else uses a “capacitive” screen which can sense
the presence of your fingertips without the need to push. The N97 uses
an older generation of screen known as “Resistive” – it’s the same kind
of screen that you find on a Nintendo DS. This cheaper sort of screen
relies on actual pressure in order to register input.

Please do not mistake me for an Apple fan, it’s just that I
recognise that they got it right whereas Nokia got it wrong. And that’s
a real shame because the screen was supposed to be the biggest selling
point of this new machine. I cannot think why Nokia decided to go 2nd
best for the phone’s main feature.

The N97 is packed with features, cool things like a built in FM transmitter, the best mobile-camera on the market, and an email application that easily rival’s Blackberry’s flagship.
On paper this looks like the best phone ever made however silly design
mistakes frequent annoying bugs makes me reluctant to recommend this
product. Other than the screen (which a great many people will not find
a problem), all of the phone’s problems are to do with it’s software so
in theory Nokia could release an update which corrects all of the
phone’s faults. Rumor has it that they will be releasing a refreshed
version of the N97 with an improved screen (but without the joypad) – I
hope that Nokia can pull it off second time around.

Finally, it’s been said that the N97 is one of the most eccentric
products that Nokia have ever made: The week before I had to give it
back they sent me an even more bizarre product to review. It’s supposed
to be an “anti-theft” device for the N97. You clip your state of the
art Nokia into what looks like an early 1980′s phone and then run an
application which is intended to make the N97′s screen look exactly
like an old-fashion phone keypad.

The end result is that your N97 is made to look like something that
Cybill Shepherd in Moonlighting might have used.  My kids love it.  It
shows that even if they did not get the N97 completely right, Nokia has
a sense of humour.

I am loving the evolution of the I am a PC campaign. Its warm, personal and positions Microsoft as a champion of humanity rather than a cold, distant high functional technology brand which mainly appeals to men. Women use technology as a means to creativity and to provide meaningful human interaction in their life.

http://www.youtube.com/v/DtilWL4mnhI

One of the ads features a 4 and a half year old Kylie (too cute for words) who uses Windows Live Photo Gallery to send a picture of her fish to her parents.

The strategy is simple: technology so simple that a 4 and a half year old could do it. Another features a small boy has a large construction ranged all around the kitchen, and demonstrates taking lots of pictures of different parts of it, transferring those from the camera to a laptop, and then stitching them all together to make one.

Its a thankful departure from Microsoft’s unsuccessful retort to the Apple ads which was the wrong strategy for a myriad of reasons I have discussed before. This is about what Microsoft stands for and gives them a narrative that goes beyond their product.

Its not about the piece of kit. Its about how you use technology to enhance your home. Its not about the spec. Its about what that spec enables you to do. Its not about the photo. But the memory and signal you are sending to those who you send it to.

It starts to take Microsoft from being part of ‘my office life’ to being at the ‘centre of my home. ‘

Not a bad place to start.

Sitting in my inbox is an email from the organizers asking, “How can we make Cannes Lions even better?”

My answer: Change your name and focus from “Advertising Festival” to “Marketing Festival”.

If you followed what won in June, it was all about: Interactive. Integrated. Influencer (code for PR). To hammer home that point, Tourism Queensland’s “Best Job in the World” campaign won the Grand Prix for Cyber. And DR. And PR. (Strangely, nothing for Integrated, but that is another post…) Significantly, this is a campaign where the only paid media ads were of the typically lowly “help wanted” kind.

The PR Lions, which were new for 2009, only had 431 entries. The “Film” Lions (aka TV ads and/or digital video) in contrast had 3,453 entries — which was a whopping 25% less than last year. Clearly the organizers hope to boost entries from the “newbie” PR, Design, and other earned or owned media categories. (Hummm…Social Media or WOM in 2010 perhaps?)

So when pretty much everybody agrees that keeping the marketing disciplines in silos is so 1999, now might be the right time to rename and rebrand Cannes Lions as the champion of creative in all aspects of marketing. What do you think? If you were an expert in the Ballet, would you enter a Ballroom competition? Call it a Dance Lion, though, and you just might give it a whirl.

Shall we follow each other on Twitter?

Rupert Murdoch seems to think that you will.

After the huge financial losses just announced by News Corp, Murdoch has decreed that, possibly from as soon as next year, he will charge for all his newspaper websites including The Times and The Sun. It isn’t clear whether this will extend to broadcast news websites such as Sky News.

It has been obvious for some time that the newspaper industry is at a crossroads. The old-new-model of drawing in as much traffic as possible to gain revenue from display advertising has been found to be unsustainable – I say old-new because, well, we’ve been here before haven’t we: back when paid for content was deemed to be a broken model and the pay-walls tumbled down the first time. In addition to News Corp, the Telegraph, Guardian and Mirror Groups have all mooted charging for content but as Michael Beecroft, head of digital trading at Mediaedge:cia Global, concedes: “In many ways the horse has already bolted, and trying to close the door on it now will be very tricky indeed.”

This model may work for some specialist content, such as the FT or the Media section of The Guardian, but in general why would anyone pay for content they can get for free elsewhere?

Murdoch, Sly Bailey and others speak about how quality journalism is not cheap but what exacly denotes “quality” and who is the judge of that other than the audience? In a world where the media landscape is increasingly fragmenting, why would you pay for frontline heavyweight news items when the BBC continue to provide that for (what is perceived to be) free? And when it comes to the so called celebrity ‘news’ that the tabloids pedal so well, why would you pay for The Sun when you can go to Perez Hilton? Why go to newspapers for sport news when you can go to Cricinfo, Football 365 or Planet Rugby?

Even most of the content from the Guardian’s Media section can also be found with a subscription to the NMA or Media Week.

Just last week, Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired said in an interview to German news website Spiegel:

“In the past, the media was a full-time job. But maybe the media is going to be a part time job. Maybe media won’t be a job at all, but will instead be a hobby. There is no law that says that industries have to remain at any given size. Once there were blacksmiths and there were steel workers, but things change. The question is not should journalists have jobs. The question is can people get the information they want, the way they want it? The marketplace will sort this out. If we continue to add value to the Internet we’ll find a way to make money. But not everything we do has to make money.”

The UK has always had more national newspapers than any other country, and the arrival of digital has just exacerbated the situation to the point where the market is unbearably crowded.

The Independent, with the lowest readership of any national, has been under threat for some time following huge losses, with the Daily Mail & General Trust rumoured to be interested in rescuing it. The failure for such a move to materialize to date probably says more about The Independent that anything else.

Moreover, The Observer, the oldest Sunday newspaper in the UK, published since 1791, is facing the threat of either closure by the Guardian Media Group or being re formatted into a weekly magazine following the same heavy losses suffered by the other papers (The Observor actually being one of the papers that is holding its weight better than others). I would find this extremely sad, no other Sunday paper quite caters for the same readership (though this may yet be its saving grace- Guardian Media Group is owned by a not-quite-for-profit organisation for a reason) but we all should come to the realization that in the next ten years a lot of household newspaper names will either change beyond recognition or disappear completely.

Ultimately we have been here before. People may be questioning the business model for free content but it is worth remembering that the model for paid content turned out to be just as unprofitable back at the turn of the decade.  The fundamental problem is that there is no longer a scarcity of content and without scarcity economics doesn’t really work. One thing is for sure though – in the words of Dylan, These Times They Are A-Changin’.

Recession indicates retention. The solution (as everyone knows, even if few practice it) to the problems brought about by a severe downturn is first concentrate on what you have, not what you might have. Marketers must – must – get retention right, for a variety of reasons.

- It’s where your current revenue is
- It’s where the lowest hanging fruit for additional revenue is
   (all you have to do is not screw up, then ask for more business)
- It’s where your biggest advocates lie
- It’s where your data sits
- It’s the biggest source of prospective customers for your competitors

and so on. Reducing churn protects your customer base against better offers or a better story from your competitors, and yes, they’ll try anything. But customers have a certain amount of inertia. Once they’ve started a relationship with a brand they’ll only move through lack of appropriate attention or if you don’t deliver on what’s been promised, so retention starts with not offending customers. ECRM creates stories that will keep customers engaged, and great eCRM creates stories that massively increase engagement and not only reduce churn to near-zero but increase purchase frequency, average transaction value, and active advocacy.

The customer relationship management bit of eCRM isn’t the whole story.

Buried in the above list though is a gem. “It’s where your data sits”. Your best source of information – not just for segmentation strategy – about who’s likely to spend more is your existing customer base. The data you already own can tell you how to run extraordinarily efficient acquisition campaigns.

(By the way, many people in digital have long thought that acquisition campaigns are a load of rubbish because generally they’re about feeding huge numbers of people into a funnel in the hope of converting the few people who, more or less by accident, have been hit at the right time to buy.)

By combining the segmentation that’s been created for eCRM programmes that focus on retention with the data that gets collected on how those segments behave over time in reaction, we suddenly have a potential gold mine. Great eCRM doesn’t just retain, enhance, increase – it tells you how to acquire. The new, richer data tells you which types of people are most likely to be movable from low-value to high-value. And this in turn tells you what kinds of people you want more of. And that, put simply, tells you where to spend your money to increase your feed into the improvable segments. ECRM suddenly becomes not just about retention marketing, but about all marketing.

In our recent guide, How to Moderate Teens and Tweens, we examined the psychology of teenagers when they use online or on mobile platforms, and the perceived anonymity that gives rise to bolder behaviour.

Let’s face it, all of us have made choices as a teenager that we want to forget about, but what if we never had the option of forgetting? Yesterday’s research by Beatbullying highlighted the issues of ‘sexting’ and bullying by children and teenagers using mobile and social media.

At an age when these children are developing and learning about their own views, opinions, sexuality and personality – as well as dealing with emotional and peer pressure issues – the boldness and risk-taking that teenagers engage in these days can have lasting and sometimes extremely damaging consequences.

The Beatbullying survey showed that one in three teens have received offensive or distressing sexual images electronically. It also revealed that 23 per cent of these “sexts” came from a boyfriend or girlfriend.

One in three of these images were sent via an instant messenger service.

The immediacy of this technology, combined with the ability to capture the content, and the viral nature of the pictures involved, have a high potential for being spread from person-to-person until a decision to share something private with a trusted friend becomes the talking point of the classroom.

If you asked most of these teenagers if they would expose themselves to people in the school playground, they’d probably be appalled. The fact is, the teens involved are taking part in this activity in the privacy of their homes, and sending the results to a person they think they can trust via a technology that also makes them feel safe.

The only way we can tackle this issue is by engaging with teens in the environment that they feel confident in, which means that parents and teachers need to understand what they are dealing with. They need to realise what teens can do with computers and mobile phones, beyond sending text messages or researching their school homework, to enable them to communicate on the same level as the teens they are trying to protect.

There are a growing number of excellent resources in this area (and I’ll list just a few) where parents, teachers and carers can find help and advice.  Aside from Beatbullying (a charity which provides mentorship to deal with on and offline bullying), good resources are Digizen, which promotes responsible digital citizenship, itself with a very useful resource hub on cyberbullying, and a useful new guide by McAfee, aimed at educating parents.

The biggest criticism laid at the door of the big awards events is that they are a money spinner for events companies and celebrate only the most selfish or the most sophisticated self promoters. Sir John Hegarty and Steve Henry tell us that more than 90% of the work out there is rubbish. Obviously all of you are trying to do something about that. On the awards front, this year’s BIMA awards have had a rethink, for the better.

I declare an interest here, as I’m on the committee. And we’ve made a few changes that are relevant and useful to entrants. We’ve made it a criteria for judging to give feedback to every single entry. No other creative award does this. We’ve also made the cost of entry accessible. Not just to entering work, but also to attending the event, which will be a big party bash rather than an expensive sit down do. We’ve gathered a list of luminaries that might be worth putting work in front of. Best of all, we’ve made the judging criteria simple – equally weighted across strategy, creativity, interactivity and effectiveness. And awards will be made for craft skills as well where the work is particularly cleverly executed.

Need proof? Here are some of the judges. Paul Hammersley (The Red Brick Road), Robert Campbell (Campbell Lace
Beta), Will King (King of Shaves),
Gareth Jones (Revolution), Kelly Wright (Warner Bros.), Jody Smith
(Channel 4), Adam Powers (BBC), Alex Smith (Microsoft). Need to enter? Click here.

See you in November.

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An interesting report by Transpera (via Marketing Charts)
conducted in the US shows: Once someone starts graduating onto mobile
video with their phone, they are hooked and use it as the main way to
go online.

Enter now people. This year the Best Blog awards will be decided via a public vote in two rounds. In the first round BIMA will take nominations for your favourite blogs and in the second BIMA will shortlist the nominations and publish a poll to allow the community to vote for their favourites. Entry is open to any blog as long as the content is not offensive in any way. Industry bloggers, are of course a jolly polite bunch, and will no doubt vote for others rather than for themselves!

go here to have a go http://www.bimaawards.com/categories/best_blog/

PS you don’t have to vote for me. I’m on the awards committee already