Technological Determinism

What some chips that don't exist and some people we can't identify tell us about how to communicate with our customers.

What some chips that don't exist and some people we can't identify tell us about how to communicate with our customers.Thomas Scovell

Today I'm going to talk about,

What some chips that don't exist and some people we can't identify tell us about how to communicate with our customers.

So I'd like to talk about one of the biggest things in the New Zealand digital landscape the past few weeks. A TVC that almost didn't make it onto Youtube.

And how, despite that, we went from zero to a million views in two weeks. But how I think those big numbers don't matter at all. Even if that ad hadn't made it onto Youtube, the real success is how we got from zero to this...

I'm going to take us on a journey through the world of Anonymous, note the capital A, and look at how technology influences how we talk and what we talk about - and how people really spread ideas and messages online. Which isn't the way typical "viral" strategies are deployed.

And I'll round it out by talking about those nonexistent chips, what they tell us about how kiwis communicate online, and finally talk about a technique for gaining insights into target audiences.

Let's start by looking at a graph. This graph could be any number of similar graphs. Like so many it shows that people trust the recommendations of their friends, increasingly through social media, over that of traditional advertising.

Undoubtedly in some form this is true. Except...

The number of people who view their friends and peers as credible sources of information about a company dropped by almost half, from 45% to 25%, since 2008.Edelman Trust Barometer

"The number of people who view their friends and peers as credible sources of information about a company dropped by almost half, from 45% to 25%, since 2008".

This, and similar statistics have started to crop up over the past couple of years - coinciding with the rise of social media marketing. Not social media full-stop mind you - people have been engaging socially online for decades, the stats don't show people trust their friends less in general, but that they trust them less as a source of information about a company. Ever since advertisers jumped on the social media bandwagon.

We're driving our customers to trust less with every Like

We're driving our customers to trust less with every Like.

It is inconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service, for news, for entertainment, for education, to be drowned in advertising chatter

We should have heeded this warning:

"It is inconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service, for news, for entertainment, for education, to be drowned in advertising chatter"

It is inconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service, for news, for entertainment, for education, to be drowned in advertising chatterHerbert Hoover, USA Secretary of Commerce 1922

Which wasn't said by any of the recent internet alarmists like Nicholar Carr but by Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover in 1922 talking about the new fangled medium of Radio.

Of course many of us work in advertising don't we. So rather than turn off our faucets, we just need to stop playing a short term game.

If you passed a friend on the street and he stopped you to just tell you about a new flavour icrecream from brand X that you, "really have to try" you'd feel quite keen to have a taste wouldn't you? That's a relatively compelling experience - a friend going out of his way to recommend you something novel. If you later found out that your friend hadn't even tried the icecream in question - and in fact had mentioned it to you only to secure a free icecream for himself - you'd be more than a little peeved right?

At this point you'd have every reason to doubt both the voracity of your friend's claim about the icecream - he wouldn't know what it tasted like, not having tried it - and to question the quality of your friendship with him. Luckily this isn't the kind of thing that happens often offline. But online a lot of people are treating their families, friends and peers like this.

Promotions that ask (potential) customers to talk about brands to their friends (whether tweets, status updates or likewise), often generate inconsiderate and ultimately worthless behaviours.

We need to stop turning our audience into preference prostitutes

We need to stop turning our audience into preference prostitutes. We need to stop playing a short term game.

I'm going to mention Facebook a few times today, its pretty hard not to when nearly 2 million kiwis are members. But don't let my singling out them as an example mean the problem is just with that social network - the same applies for anything, from Twitter through to the growing Google+.

There's often chat in social media circles about Facebook's conditions around running competitions and what you can and can't ask people to do as part of a campaign. Part of these are about people taking social actions for a chance at winning - liking, tagging, sharing...

Facebook don't have an issue with these activities because they gain a business attention without them spending money on their advertising platform. They have an issue because having customers Like a page for a business that they potentially don't really like, or tag themselves in a photo they're not actually in - degrades the quality of information on the site.

Facebook doesn't monetise off throwing any old advert against any old pageview - it relies on users creating a vaguely recognisable simulacrum of themselves via their profile that can be targeted with specific adverts which are likely to get positive attention. If users are Liking or posting about things they don't really like and grouping themselves (whether by adding them as friends, being tagged in the same photos as, or joining the same groups) with those they aren't actually like then Facebook's ability to deliver quality leads to advertisers begins to diminish.

And users don't benefit from exchanging a one in a thousand chance of a free ipad for recommending their friends something that they don't genuinely like, or that doesn't genuinely represent who they are.

Facebook recently did some internal research and found that users, especially younger ones, were afraid to Like because of the implied endorsement.

Which is one of the reasons why Facebook company have opened up the system to allow more than Liking, to safer verbs like "listening, "watching" and "reading" to keep people sharing, but without the weight of implication.

!= sales

There is no point our collecting Fans, Followers, Likes if they're just our friends for freebies. And if in doing so we're eroding the quality of their connections to each other and to us. We may have a strong communication connection, we can reach them, but how well received the actual message is varies greatly. Actually, a 156 week survey across multiple brands by BBDO in the states showed anything from a -5% to a 40% correlation between brand-consumer friendship online and sales, compared with a 90% correlation between active engagement and sales.

But it isn't just weak connections that make accumulating Fans, Followers, Like, the least important aspect of social media marketing.

Its not who s

you, its how people use you to talk

It isnt how many Likes you have, how many people are talking about you, or any number of buzz monitor metrics you can find these days. The real gold is in "how people are using you to talk".

Which raises the question people often don't ask when planning a campaign, "how DO people talk online?"

I've been online since 1993 and how people have talked has certainly changed. From purely text based chat rooms, emails that took a couple of days to get around the world and waiting 20 minutes for a single image to download line by line... to group video chat rooms and email attachments that would have taken a day to download not more than a decade ago.

Despite those differences, there are a lot of things that haven't changed - like WHAT people are talking about.

My girlfriend sent me a link to a new blog she was enjoying recently, as she does. That blog was Postmodernish, published through Tumblr, which is a platform popular with millions of highschool, varsity students and arty types.

As you do I lost a good half hour to browsing back through the blog - which was mostly a curation of clever pop-culture jokes and insights. The author seemed to share any number of reference points with me.

It wasn't until I was tearing myself away from the LOLs and adding it to my feedreader to follow in future that I noticed that the blog owner was Sophie, a 21 year old varsity student from Texas.

How people talk is defined by psychographics, by interests, and less by demographics

Which, given how many reference points she seemed to share with me, might be confusing if this wasn't something I've increasingly encountered the past few years. It seems that shared references are not increasingly less defined by age, sex and location and more by psychographics - by interest and ways of life.

How people talk is defined by psychographics, by interests and less by demographics.

1980s

As an example, what was it that linked Sophie to me? Here's 4 key reference points we shared and that cropped up as theme in her posts:

The Breakfast Club - a movie from the 1980s.

1990s

My So Called Life - a TV series from the 1990s.

2000s

Freaks and Geeks - a TV series from the 2000s.

2010s

Glee - a TV series from the 2010s

For a certain type of youth, these stories, based around the theme of "the outsider" resonate strongly. What's different today, is rather than people simply having the one reference - the version of that same story that aired during THEIR childhood, youth are digging back through pop-culture history and unearthing everything, from every time, that resonates with who they are.

How? YouTube. Netflix on demand. Instant access to an an online archive of culture in a way that has never existed before.

And of course people share what they find with friends, but not whole. If you look at your average Tumblr you see a lot of these:

An image with text laid haphazerdly on top - they're called "image macros" collectively. Sometimes theres a few frames of rough animation, an animated GIF. Even though today they could share a full video clip, the entire TV show in fact, they don't.

Why? Because image macros don't just share the content of a TV show say, they isolate a piece of it that is relevant to a poster, to the discussion, and it becomes part of the conversation.

Of course many of the popular types of image macros aren't from TV shows or movies. You might be familiar with LOLCats - pictures of cats with poor, but amusing, english captions. These days they're as likely to be passed around by your mother as anyone else.

But LOLcats, and a number of similar popular internet pastimes come from the same point of origin.

Like this guy:

duckroll!

Ok so you might not have been tricked into viewing an image of a duck with wheels before. But have you been subjected to:

RickRoll

Rick Astley's, "never gonna give you up". Over 100 million people have viewed different versions of this 80s "classic" on Youtube. Most didn't do so voluntarily. In the mid 2000s "rickrolling" - getting someone to click on a "cool link" that turned out to be this video was the height of funny. To some.

LOLcats, RickRolls, and plenty else all come from one place:

4Chan. A message board for millions of youths that has been around since 2003. Or more accurately, an "image board". Itself modeled after a very popular Japanese image board.

2Chan

Culturally and technically there are reasons why image boards are popular in japan - the symbolic nature of the written language, difficulty of inputting Kanji...

American youths who were fans of Japanese popculture and found themselves on Japanese boards like 2Chan bought the idea across the Pacific and 4Chan was born.

From the disenchanted youth on 4Chan an amazing variety of creative, sometimes creatively destructive, things have sprung - Why?

The way technology is implemented, effects how we talk and even what we talk about

Technological determinism - the way technology is implemented, effects how we talk and even what we talk about.

4Chan and other image boards are uniquely set up as creative hothouses. There are a few key features:

1) Anonymity: You don't have to sign-up, use your real name or be the same person from one second to the next.2) Posts focus on a single highlight image, with room for only a small amount of text. Replies to a post are hidden behind a link - the image has to be really interesting, and explain within it the thread, to get board users to engage3) Messages expire: Each topic area on the board has 15 pages. Each new post pushes older ones further back. Once a post hits the end of page 15 it disappears for ever.

Which is for the best given what some youth post on message boards. But all of this, means that in order to get their ideas noticed, and for amusing or good ideas to continue on - they must post impactful images, and then re-post them regularly. Of course in this process, an evolution happens - bad ideas don't get re-posted. Good ideas grow and evolve over time, are refined and made contextual to whatever else is happening around them.

From this process came LOLcats, came Rickrollings.

Came Anonymous. Who, despite being anonymous, and an umbrella term for the more mischievous and resourceful users of boards like 4Chan rather than a formal organisation - have made their mark in the media a number of times over recent years.

Anonymous - recognised by their Guy Fawkes masks - popularised in the movie V for Vendetta. You might see them pop up at the various Occupy protests around the world. Whether they're taking down major corporation's websites, exposing pedophile rings, or rigging polls.

Moot, or Chris Poole, is the 21 year old College student who started 4Chan from his bedroom as a 14 year old. Moot was also Time Magazine's "Most Influential Person in the World" winner in 2009. Because, without his asking, Anonymous appointed him so.

Time Magazine claim they managed to block the fraudulent voting that Anonymous used to vote Moot in with. And maybe, given the size of Moot's cult following on 4chan, that might be accepted. Except Anonymous didn't just vote Moot the winner, the also chose who came 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th... all the way down.

Look at the final results.

Take the first letter of the name of each person... and it spells "Marble Cake also the game".

Anonymous rigged the heck out of that poll.

Anonymous are a product of the times, but also the technology. They're an extreme example. But the prevalence and popularity of things like LOLcats and image macro conversations in general are important to understand, in terms of how people are talking.

Most of us won't visit 4chan, at least not regularly, the first visit scares most people off for life. Unless you can triforce, 4chan is not for you.

But most of us do visit Facebook daily. And don't think for a minute that the way Facebook is built has any less influence of how and what we talk about. In 4Chan's case this was incidental. In Facebook's it may be deliberate.

In the 2000s, companies like Facebook create the space for new modes of dissent and new ways to form communities not bounded by historical nation-states.

By starting a new Internet business, an entrepreneur may create a new world. The hope of the Internet is that these new worlds will impact and force change on the existing social and political order.Peter Thiel, Founder of PayPal

Peter Thiel isn't the public face of Facebook, the younger founder, Mark Zuckerberg is. Thiel, who made billions founding PayPal, rated only a few minutes in the Social Network movie despite owning a large stake and having substantial behind the scenes influence. Thiel, a staunch libertarian, isn't coy in his belief that technology itself, not just the messages it communicates, effect behaviours.

"In the 2000s, companies like Facebook create the space for new modes of dissent and new ways to form communities not bounded by historical nation-states.

By starting a new Internet business, an entrepreneur may create a new world. the hope of the Internet is that these new worlds will impact and force change on the existing social and political order"

It is memes that pass our messages on, not the whole advertisement

So, technology itself influences how and what we speak, people are more similar based on interests than demographics, we're eroding the value of our relationship to customers and they to their friends and family.

What does that mean for how we communicate with our customers? It means we need to worry more about memes and less about so called "virals".

It is memes that pass our messages on, not the whole advertisement.

A meme is an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures and rituals.Richard Dawkins, Evolutionary Biologist

What exactly is a meme? It's an offline concept coined by biologist Richard Dawkins,

"A meme is an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures and rituals."

Memes aren't catchphrases. Catchphrases wear out. Memes evolve and are repurposed. Memes can be anything from a pure idea to an image, phrase or pattern

Online the same applies.

If you visit Knowyourmeme.com you can browse through a meme archive that documents a meme's origin and evolution. One thing you notice with memes is that they are often patterns. Memes aren't catchphrases. Catchphrases wear out. Memes evolve and are repurposed in any variety of conversations. Memes can be anything from a pure idea to an image, phrase or pattern.

We have a bad habit of calling something a viral before it actually is, it is named for our hopes and dreams - that millions of people will love our content so much they'll pass it around for free - not for what it is - an online video advert.

We desperately need to re-think our approach if anyone is to actually see, or pass long our messages. Our audience are ever more inundated with online content, particularly video.

More video is uploaded to YouTube in one month than the 3 major US networks created in 60 years. How do you stand out amongst that? A funny or shocking video isn't enough.

Geoff Ross, Founder of 42 Below

We interviewed Geoff Ross at 42 Below last year, as part of a history of the kiwi Internet project. Their pre-Youtube virals were instrumental in their success.

We were really fortunate. Our timing was at a point where the Internet was just starting to really build and it was pre-YouTube and so a lot of the crazy little videos that we created travelled quickly to a huge number of people... I think if we were trying to do that today, with the plethora of cool, crazy stuff you can see on YouTube, that task would have been a bit harder. So we were lucky.

We have to realise that time is over, we need to do more.

Nobody wants to tell our stories, they want to tell their stories

We have to recognise that nobody wants to tell our stories, they want to tell their stories.

People dont want...To tell brand's stories to their friendsTo makes brand's famous

We must contend with other realities - People don't want:

To tell brand's stories to their friendsTo makes brand's famous

People want...To tell their own stories To be famous to their 15 closest friends

People want:

To tell their own storiesTo be famous to their 15 closest friends.

We need to become part of our customers language. By leaving our messages unfinished, open, repurposable and remixable

We need to become part of our customers language. By leaving our messages unfinished, open, repurposable and remixable

Luckily, as brands, it isn't how many people like you. Or even how much you are talked about.

It is how many people are using you brands and products to talk. Not as products, but as similes, metaphors, points of reference. You need to become part of your customers language.

Think of cultural products, or the people who use them even, as being unfinished. Permanently unfinished. We come from a cultural heritage that says things have a "nature," and that this nature is fixed and describable. But the "nature" of something is not by any means singular, and depends on where and when you find it. The functional identity of things is a product of our interaction with them. And our own identities are products of our interaction with everything else.Brian Eno, Music Producer

Our brand and communications need to allow people to say something about themselves. To do so we need to create content that isn't "finished".

Music producer, Brian Eno, describes what that means,

" Think of cultural products, or art works, or the people who use them even, as being unfinished. Permanently unfinished. We come from a cultural heritage that says things have a "nature," and that this nature is fixed and describable. We find more and more that this idea is insupportable - the "nature" of something is not by any means singular, and depends on where and when you find it, and what you want it for. The functional identity of things is a product of our interaction with them. And our own identities are products of our interaction with everything else."

Unfinished contentAvailable in piecesReleased in high fidelityLiberally licensed (e.g. Creative Commons)

Unfinished content can be quoted from, remixed, passed on whole or in parts.

It can become part of the audience's language, how they talk about their life experiences. To do this we need to invest our content with memes - pre-existing ones that our audience relate to. And potential ones. Takeaway nuggets, iconic images and scenes that can be retransmitted and contextualised.

Outside of the content itself this also means that content is ideally not just thrown at Youtube. Dont underestimate the audiences ingenuity, but to kick-start meme-ification content should be made available:

Available in pieces - images, separate sound tracks etcReleased in high fidelityLiberally licensed (e.g. Creative Commons) so the audience have permission

fun toys are fun!

Here's a meme, "X Y is X"... not exactly the kind of hilarious thing you expect to be passed around online. But it's a pattern. There's any number of examples of this on the knowyourmeme page. People use it all the time for various purposes. Where did it come from?

This guy... Ralph Wiggum.

Who famously said in a Simpson's episode "fun toys are fun." ...X Y is X.

So can commercial messages achieve this? Well how about those non-existent chips.

NZTA's Legends. Currently sitting at 1.2 million views on Youtube with dozens of user generated Facebook pages with hundreds of thousands of Likes across them.

The online journey for Legends, or Ghost Chips as most people call it, started pretty simply:

A single image macro representing the ad and a direct quote from it.

Then people started photoshopping some of the references in the advert into life.

Before long people jumped in to use the advert as part of their own promotions ... or to make money.

It turned up on other brand's pages - in their campaigns. In asking what the best part of their new Hilux advert was, the fourth most popular response on Toyota's poll was "Ghost Chips!". Actually another response that was popular was, "hoping that the new NZTA advert is coming on after it".

Then the advert entered the political arena...

It made it overseas, with this great headline, "Drink Driving PSA proves everyone in New Zealand is funnier than you."

It even reached back in time and had a positive influence on older public service adverts - here someone comments on an earlier piece that featured stupid drunken behaviour with, "bro, monique says your dumb."

You cant grab my X bro!

But the standout from the advert, memetically, was Ghost Chips.

Because it has become a pattern. "You can't grab my X bro". There's plenty of examples of image macros, but even more of its use in social network messages and everyday speech.

Which is great - the ad is popular, we can see how it is helping the audience talk to each other, about all sorts. But is it effective?

Let's take closer look at one of the many Fan pages, "you know I can't grab your ghost chips". The owner of the page is posting all sorts of related items to keep the page's audience entertained. But not only that, he is constantly bringing it back around to the message. Try this:

"what's everyone up to for the weekend and please no drinking and driving the only ghost chips we wanna look at are the ones on the LEGEND ad..oh and on the page of course much love to everyone for the likes..o for or sum lol"

I had a chat with the page owner, he's a 29 year old Maori chap from Waikato.This was the first time he'd created a Facebook page. He was compelled to because he felt the message really resonated with his community, and young people like them, and wanted to see that it reached them as well as possible.

In his own words he wanted to, "portray a positive message while using the advert and it's quotations to help people on the page realize the importance of drink driving".

He appears to have no formal training in marketing or digital but has been using the Facebook page tools well, including using the analytics tool to determine what type of posts his page's followers respond to. He posted publicly his goal was to create the highest quality page (the most relevant and entertaining to the target audience) rather than gain the most fans.

He natively understands the use of memes to carry messages.

He seems like he'd be the big brother of the advert's audience, looking out for them.

Looking at another page, "i've been internalising a really complicated situation in my head." Off their own bat, the owner of that page ran a poll, "does the humour of the ad distract from the message". 90% agreed it didn't.

In an answer to the poll a fan described how a meme can both be used by the audience in their life, and still carry a businesses message,

"How many guys are going to pull up there mate and be all 'Bruce, I'm concerned you're going to drive drunk.' But they may go 'Bruce - you drive tonight and you better not give me your ghost chips!'. It starts the 'don't drive drunk' convo."

Or another way. If one of the advert's target audience are at a party. certainly the TVC's message will be in their head somewhere, but it is when someone makes a crack about ghost chips, or they reach into a packet of chips, that the message is triggered.

The advert has given the audience a way to talk about not drinking and driving that is comfortable, and has given trigger moments that make these conversations and thoughts happen. The way people speak and spread memes in digital spaces has helped to reinforce these trigger moments.

Memes need to be fostered not simply seeded.

But not all the activity around the NZTA Legends ad was equal. Memes need to be fostered not simply seeded. Encourage those that carry on the brand message at the same time as making it a part of their own conversations.

Halloween 2011

A week after the advert launched, a friend encountered a trigger point at a party...

Ghost chips.

A few days later on Halloween

Digital diaries for research

We can't always create memes, but we can always understand those our specific audience recognize and relate to.

How do we understand our audience's memes?

Digital Ethnography

There are any number of ways of peeking into the minds of our audiences online, we have message board analysis, search volume tools, site analytics, surveys. But increasingly people's lives are locked up behind Facebook Lists and Google+ Circles of privacy.

One technique I'm particularly fond of for unlocking the insights behind these are Digital Diaries.

Which brings us back to Tumblr. Tumblr is great for digital diaries because you can post to it from the web, via web clipping, email, mobile web, TXTing and PXTing.

Recruiting members of your target audience and getting them to keep a digital diary of their online and offline life - whether in general or in regards to particular product or activity categories allows you to capture not just what they do, but how they do it and importantly, how they talk about it with their friends.

http://visionsofstudents.org/

Of course not every advert or piece of digital content, can aim to become a meme. But it can recognise the existence of them and an understanding of the audience's specific meme.

Rather than continuing to try and replicate the success of their original "The Man Your Man Could Smell like" Old Spice adverts with a new advert the company chose to make 30 new adverts - over 3 days, responding to questions and insights from their audience. Using the specific memes of that audience. None would be seen as much as the original adverts individually, but each would be more relevant to specific communities and capture more people - in a more focused fashioned - overall.

Like this one for, who else but Anonymous.

Thank you.

Thank you.