Everything is becoming more complicated.

It’s a given that consumers are spending less time on more tasks, giving everything less attention, and generally skipping around loads of subjects at any one time on Twitter, Facebook, TV, email, text and a thousand other digital touchpoints.

Now, the challenge of the digital marketer to gain entry into the consciousness of the time-and-touchpoint-squeezed consumer is greater than ever.

So it struck me as interesting when I read a quote in an essay by Lera Boroditsky, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, that ‘consciousness is not unlike Twitter – millions of mundane messages bouncing around, all shouting over one another, with only a few rising as trending topics’.

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Meme: ‘A self-propagating unit of social imitation; something that people repeat and pass along’. Or, ‘Memes replicate data. And just as genes replicate genetic data, memes replicate cultural ideas’. Or, ‘lolcats’.

However you describe them, everyone loves a good meme. And, since the term was popularised by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book ‘The selfish gene’, advertising has been responsible for generating many well-known examples. (Here’s one, oops sorry…no, two examples (in one): ‘Will it blend?’ for Blendtec.) And with the connectedness and social media channels offered by the web for brands to spread and share content, you would have thought that conditions were perfect for many more… Read more »

It’s an interesting contradiction that the further technology advances, the simpler and more instinctive it becomes to use.

Take the addictive interface functionality of an iPad or iPhone, for example. Watching people using it with simple, intuitive finger movements and hand gestures, it makes me wonder just how instinctive digital interactivity can become. (I mean, even cats are using it for Chrissakes. Such as these two cool customers, chillaxing with fish on an iPad, licking each other’s ears lazily and listening to rude music.) Read more »

If Sherlock Holmes were around today, he’d often be found chillaxing around the cafes of Baker Street, necking cups of espresso by the bucketload, muttering under his breath about the price of Madame Tussauds tickets, tinkering with his iPad – and, despite himself, instinctively sensing which brands felt ‘right’.

Being Sherlock Holmes, and therefore the authority on everything, he’d know that tone of voice and personality used to be qualities mainly associated with copy and art direction, but now they could be attributed to the way a brand ‘feels’ using digital touchpoints too.

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I was chatting with our Innovation Director, Rob Meldrum, the other day about what might happen if Google decides to officially make a play for developing a brain implant. As I tore an almond croissant into miniature chunks to enjoy with my yummington hot beverage, I began to wonder what the implications would be for digital advertising and permission-based marketing.

The Google brain implant is something that Eric Schmidt has spoken about before (or, at least, been asked about, to which he replied: ‘there’s what I call the creepy line. And the Google policy about a lot of these things is to get right up to the creepy line, but not cross it. I would argue that implanting things in your brain is beyond the creepy line…at least for the moment, until the technology gets better’.  He has to say that, doesn’t he, especially with things around such as H+, a new web series on a similar theme, produced by Brian Singer). Have a gander at the trailer here.
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Do you have the attention span of a spider monkey that’s drunk five cappuccinos?

I was delving into the issue of shortening attention spans recently, and one essay in particular caught my eye. Written by Douglas Rushkoff , media analyst and documentary writer, it was entitled ‘The internet makes me think in the present tense.’

Rushkoff argues that ‘the internet pushes us all towards the immediate. The now. Every inquiry is to be answered right away’. Then he states: ‘Once the internet changed from a resource at my desk into an appendage chirping from my pocket… the value of depth was replaced by that of immediacy masquerading as relevancy’. Read more »

According to the UN’s telecommunications agency, The ITU, the number of worldwide internet users has reached over two billion people. Just imagine how many slices of cheese on Ryvita that lot gets through.

Add the two-billion internet users statistic to a quote from science writer Matt Ridley that ‘The internet is the latest and best expression of the collective nature of human intelligence’, and it would seem to hold exciting possibilities for digital marketing that uses ‘collective brain’-based insight. Read more »

Chatting to my good friend Jo recently, who is a primary school teacher, about methods of learning, it struck me that there are some clear parallels between classroom teaching methods and digital marketing.

As I took another gazzolop of sweet tea, I considered the fact that as education continues to gravitate towards increasingly stimulatory learning techniques, so digital advertising – whether it be online ads, social media campaigns or mobile marketing – also calls for similar measures to cut through and resonate. After all, success in both professions is essentially determined by how well you have inspired your audience to engage with the points you are trying to get across. Read more »

Everyone loves a good story. Some people read them in linear form, on pages constructed of actual paper (hey! old school!), occasionally raising a mug filled with tea towards their mouths, and making deep, guttural satisfied noises in the back of their throats.

Others consume the narrative piece-by-piece, in mini-snack form, as delicious nuggets of a character-driven plot, each bite-sized chunk squirreled away somewhere inside their phone, laptop, iPad or other carriers of media, until appetite comes calling once again. Read more »

Don’t you just love mad scientists? They used to be people you only saw on the telly. You know, blokes with lots of wispy, backcombed hair and eyes that looked like they were propped open with matchsticks. They had a perpetual look of wonderment and terror as if they had accidentally attached electric wires not to a Van de Graaf generator, but to their own genitalia instead.

But now every good agency has a mad inventor. Except they’re more clever than mad. And they’re not called mad scientists any more, either, but Creative Technologists (although they’re mad scientists at heart.) Read more »