People feel this is a bit of an intrusive thing, but then again 2011 saw a number of companies lose precious customer data to all sorts of events (Sony, looking at you). You wouldn’t be mistaken in having a nagging feeling that your data is being shared, but you just don’t know how or where exactly. There’s a really interesting Eurobarometer that asks people which types of information and data (relating to them) they deem ‘personal’. Top 5 most ‘personal’ things in Britain:

Click to biggify.

1. Financial information (salary, bank details, credit record)
2. Medical information (patient record, health info)
3. Passport number
4. Fingerprints
5. Home address
6. (bonus) Mobile phone number

So next time you see people tagging their homes on foursquare or other places, it’s unlikely to be representative of the vast majority. It seems like a lot, but it’s not.

Found this on the interwebs, but it was worth sharing here. Jobs apparently hated some of the old apple stuff but this is nice.

When I said I was learning a new programming language in my post about leaving JWT, I wasn’t kidding. People have asked me if it’s not hard and the answer is the learning it isn’t hard, there’s a very logical and neat structure to it – it’s what you can to do with it that’s harder to figure out: if you want to build things, what will you build? And the answer, often enough, is that you build something that you need yourself or stuff you’re frustrated with.

• Are you frustrated with a repetitive task? I was, adding items one by one into a website CMS. Can this not be scripted? 200 items is bad enough, what if we had 2,000 to add? Would we still input them manually? What else can we be doing with that time?
• Are you using an app that doesn’t do something you want it to do? Or has too many features and you only want one? For instance, I want to have an app that I can use to schedule posts to Facebook without having to sign up to something like hootsuite so it doesn’t publish a ‘Posted via Hootsuite’ thing in at the bottom. I could build one myself, if given enough time or for lack of a viable alternative. Most places have their own publishing apps that probably use a custom interface and make the running of things easier:

Same goes for school maths: it was hard because you thought of it as “something you will never use again” given now there’s an app to calculate a tip or split the bill. Most people will say “I tip 20%” but not really know how to calculate it, as I discovered when I started working. Some have also asked me which way is the ‘correct’ way to peel a banana. How do you function as an adult?!

School maths was hard to understand because it wasn’t teaching you maths, it was teaching you abstract thinking. Applying abstract thinking to solve problems, much like you’d have to think how a programming language’s variables interact with one another to create a whole. The reason why most of us hated it was because it was either improperly explained or improperly understood: when you have people hitting you on the head with advanced chemistry, then advanced maths, then philosophy, then literature, then PE and you had to wake up at 6 AM or something and your day feels like it was put through a blender, you can’t even begin to understand these abstract concepts, nevermind their importance. Those ‘mathematically inclined’ weren’t necessarily hardwired for maths, I realised later on: they were more eager and quick to understand these abstract notions for a whole host of reasons. It’s much easier for me now as well when I can focus on one thing.

As a sidenote, you come to realise people who are good at this stuff and combine it with other skills are paid a lot of money: data analysts in particular. There’s a deluge of data, I feel like in previous agencies people didn’t quite understand how much free stuff you can get and analyse.

Problem: those who know how to get it might not know what it means. Those who do know what it means aren’t technically equipped to find it and extract it. No one says you need to get into SPSS, know what SQL is and does or be able to say what .csv file is, but it certainly does help to be aware at least. I incline to think people will have to work a bit harder at developing these skills if they’re going to be useful or valuable to whoever employs them. How to find, clean, analyse and create stuff with data: I’ve seen planners who don’t know how to use excel to generate powerpoint charts. How do you function? There’s a reason why some infographics can be horrible and you can call me a pessimist: they’re online lava lamps. Beautiful to look at but useless more often than not. However, they can be scary powerful and worrying tools if put in the wrong hands (e.g. infographics + politics). What’s worse, you could be in a place where people don’t know what infographics are.

So why care so much about data and what in the world has this got to do with advertising and brands? After all, this is a planner blog. So Jeff Jarvis made a very eloquent point when he talked about journalism & media:

That is how Facebook , Google , Twitter and company see content – as a signal generator. That is how they extract value from it, by using those signals to serve more relevant content, services, and advertising. But they are not in the content business. They are in the relationship business. We [journalists] think content is that which we make because we are content people – we see content as a scarcity we produce and control. Facebook & Google see content everywhere – in the allegedly useless creations, chatter and links made by people in the course of their lives. They see content as an abundant resource to learn from, value and exploit.

What Media can Learn from Facebook

The best part about this is that most of it is free – yet no one’s using it enough! The worst part about this: it’s free and there’ll be even more data. Like RFID in supermarket clothing – something to think about. What was that saying like? “Do you know where your data is?”

I am not a fan of infographics generally (unless there’s some really interesting stuff hidden away that no one looks at) because…look at this chart. This is very badly designed – in the US, about 11m iPads were sold (or something among the lines of). This is meant to be showing market share and if you look at the Apple slider alone, you look at the most distant dot: 82%. It’s not 82%, that’s 2010. Oh. Ohhh. And then you realise the legend is actually saying 2012 share of market is 55%.

Pay close attention and yes, it does say that market share is evening out between Apple, Samsung, Amazon, Asus and other manufacturers. But what a stupid way of showing it.

“The search industry was valued at almost £3bn in the UK at the end of last year, and spend continues to increase. However, the fact marketers are not fully grasping how search can integrate with their wider media plans shows it is still not high enough on the agenda at board level. [...] It shows brands are not keeping pace with how search is evolving as new platforms, including smartphone, tablet and connected TVs, gain more traction. “How to integrate search with social media is by no means understood either.“”

IAB Concerned at marketers’ lack of digital understanding - NMA [£/sub]

+ bonus Two-thirds of businesses have low confidence in their long-term digital strategy – NMA [£/sub]

This is going to sound pompous from now on perhaps, but the reason why it’s not understood is because of the endless question of: “This is all very nice, but how will it make me money?”

Trying to answer the money question, you’d have to think of a few things that probably shouldn’t be disconnected in the communications process, but often are. In one random scenario (let’s say Mothercare), there may well be a few establishments involved that need to align themselves to make things happen:

• A PR (or a digital agency) running a twitter feed and a facebook page. They won because the client doesn’t have an in-house customer service team and they have shown an understanding of digital.
• A traditional integrated agency running the ATL creative: brochures, press, TV, etc.
• The digital agency or 3rd party contractors that the ATL agency (or client themselves) hired to build the website hold the analytics and control the platform it’s built on and ecommerce solution and probably have subcontractors of their own (or maybe employees) looking after the search engine optimisation business and gatekeeping any kind of PPC activity that might require something like a custom landing page – should the platform the website was built on be flexible enough to even allow that.

Excuse me, but this is nuts. No wonder integration is ‘by no means understood’.

Sure, there are other reasons too, but I don’t want to be the person trying to juggle that whilst also trying to run my business. There’s an argument that we’ll all have to work a little bit harder to learn and cope with this, but not now.

In trying to get something going, instead of one person being able to give a bird’s eye view of how this (the mix) will make money, even the most confident people can end up sounding like it’s one big ‘if’ when they only control one tiny fraction of the big picture: If we can create a PPC campaign, if we can design a landing page to match, if we can create a facebook tab to let people subscribe to a newsletter, if we can actually get the data from said database, if we can push a message through twitter, if we can include the Facebook call to action in the copy, if we can see who the users are, if we can check what they spend time doing on the website, if we can find out how much traffic facebook drives…if we can find out how many access from a mobile device to see if we’re losing money by not having a mobile website etc. (random examples at the top of my head). And just you try to get them all in the same room. Skip the biscuits, pass the gin and tonic.

It’s not new to say a stand-alone thing (e.g. microsite) can be hard, but not impossible to measure – closed systems make measurement easy, linking web traffic data to sales data can (sometimes but not always) show causality. This is an older presentation and I may get kicked for linking to it but some points still stand for me. But like the joke goes, people use research the way a drunk uses a lamp post: for support, rather than illumination. You can prove or disprove many things with research but there’s a limit: let the bad results teach you things and be amazed. It’s my job to look at it so I see things I’m sure clients would be interested in hearing about.

It’s also hard to reconcile the fact that new ‘things’ that people suddenly flock to (and clients often want to follow) are hard to digest. The people are there, so we must be able to make money from them being there and doing things. But the websites themselves haven’t figured that out yet. We can be clever, and it feels a bit like a new Wild West at times, so not everyone likes that. Being something very new for many, I can see this confusion when you talk them through stuff and they just seem lost (“Why must I know? Why must I care? Can’t it be easy?” – anyone would want a 2nd gin and tonic now). You could go on about your selling stuff in the old world, but there’s the itch of being able to sell more and change who you are as a result of joining the rest in the online space.

So let’s say something new comes out. Pinterest, for example. I’m sure everyone in the industry has heard that word enough lately and more intelligent or verbose people have said stuff about it. What’s Pinterest? It’s organised digital image hoarding*

Where images on pinterest come from

I hoard images for work and all sorts of projects I’ve had and it sounds like one of Pinterest’s co-founders had the same idea in mind. Rather than saving them to the desktop, you can keep them on Pinterest. But then you have ffffound, lookwork, baubauhaus, etc. (if you’re in the creative industries); weheartit, imgfave, tumblr, etc. (if you’re a teenager) and svpply, thefancy, nuji, etc. (if you’re into shopping and buying things)

It’s quite clear that the only places that create and upload original content on that chart are Etsy, Flickr, the home sites (Martha Stewart, Better Homes & Gardens, Houzz, Apartment Therapy) and fashion sites: Polyvore (user-generated outfits) and StyleMePretty (wedding blog). The rest is just a means of circulating the same images over and over again. Although some people do post original content to tumblr (e.g. photos, illustrations)**.

But why this website and not the other? Because of all above, it generates a lot of traffic, or at least it’s spiked for now. If you hoard images and they fall into a very small number of big categories (weddings, animals, products, food & recipes etc.), you’re likely to generate interest in what can be done with all this traffic for that audience. Investors in Pinterest agree:

“At a 100,000-foot level, anytime consumers are talking about products, there’s inevitably some subset of those products they might buy and anytime consumers are playing around with or exploring or touching products they might buy, the people who sell those products would love to be in on the conversation in some form, and will pay for that.”

Bessemer Ventures – Why we Invested in Pinterest

So by now the client hears about it or you decide to tell them because it’s getting a lot of attention and after an intro presentation, the main questions and clarifications that might arise are:

1. Who is on it: if 56% of the UK users are female (as opposed to over 80% in the US), and they are important to us, how are they using it and how can we use that?
2. What it does: If it’s a website that’s useful for people with 1-2 goals in mind (e.g. redecorating project, recipes, daydreaming weddings), why should we post on it?
3. If we do post, what might we pin? What can we expect to happen?

So the answers might be …

1. Well, we can try to find out what other brands are doing and what people seem to be pinning. Follow them for a week and report back. We discover that most of them repin things, so a very small minority actually post original content. It’s got stock photography websites in a huff and gathered weird copyright problems because of that. If we’re Mothercare, we might think that it’s likelier someone will repin some beautiful baby photography or create a board that helps them manage life with baby than an image of a pram. But if it’s a cool pram that happens to solve their problems, why not?

2. The agency might suggest, “let’s put our existing products on there (price tag enabled) so we can get some of that traffic. People will see us on Pinterest and think we’re looking into their needs and hobbies.”

3. Uh oh, oops. Maybe we start posting things (to no extra charge for the client, these are new territories) and notice it works, but not quite the stupendous stuff we’re hoping for. People don’t just repin products, they’re interested in the lifestyle – shock, horror. Do we need to invest in nice photography and styling just for Pinterest?  Is it worth it to the detriment of other things we put money into? How will we know if that works and people click through and actually buy something from us?

Thank goodness for stuff like goals for events (and ecommerce goals) in Analytics for instance. Yes, there could be a way.

The bad news? The agency’s just told you something that might require you change your ecommerce platform or your website or both by a little or by a whole damn lot. So essentially one new thing comes along, stirs things up and  before you can decide whether you should or want to use it for your brand, you realise what a nightmare it all is and admit defeat or pour yourself a gin and tonic and plough on and hope it all happens while you’re still with the company. And you know what the worst thing is? The companies who make the stuff often aren’t sure how they’ll make money either, but you should pay for being in on the action:

“They subscribe to the Facebook theory on how to build a really valuable business: You don’t worry about [monetization] for a while. You focus on one and only one thing, which is building a product or a platform that consumers love to use over and over again. If you have a rabid fan base among consumers, eventually you’ll have so many ways of monetizing it that you just don’t worry about that.”

“You don’t worry about monetization for a while? And you want me to tell THAT to my CEO?” I hear people say. That’s why it’s the wild west. A cowboy’s work is never done.

*my opinion

** Jeff Jarvis – Be in the Relationship Business just like Facebook

Everything is a Remix Part 1 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Everything is a Remix Part 2 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Everything is a Remix Part 3 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Everything is a Remix Part 4 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

(I’m very unimaginative with titles today. It’s either good news, great news and fantastic news or horrible news, worse news and disastrous news depending how you read)

There’s a funny thing about planning in the North of England when you tell someone you work in an integrated agency outside of London. There aren’t many of us and I was surprised to hear that the headcount is about 15 in total, although part of me suspects it may be a little bit higher, but not higher than 20. That would include a bunch of agencies in Manchester, Leeds and in between. So to know there are roughly 15 planners, of which around three quarters are men, it was nice to have a girly kind of afternoon & evening out.

I don’t like news websites and gossip-type comments much, they all eventually descend into personal beefs and ego issues that the protagonists need to address a little bit better. So I steer clear of them, which is why I don’t know much about other agencies and people, particularly not in Leeds. In my volunteered naiveté, if it ever comes down to working or partnering with others, any important news will eventually get to me if it’s that important. Most claims of ‘don’t like them, they’re rubbish’ become unsubstantiated when you realise it was someone’s ego being bruised and an unwillingness to acknowledge a fault in themselves. When I tell people about places I’ve been too, not one of them escapes untainted and that bothers me: let me make my own mind up, please. To paraphrase Tolstoy, every unhappy agency is unhappy in its own way.

With that in mind, lady account planners are truly nice to talk to, and things have worked out pretty well for them as far as the Leeds scene goes and possible work permutations. It could be better, it can always be so much better, but there was a general sense of relief that at least it’s not any worse and the feeling I got was that we’re not doing too bad for ourselves. Gemma sounds like she’s having a great time freelancing and to be fair, I’m very happy it’s all worked out for her and hope it carries on like that. I did leave with a nagging feeling that I didn’t do as much research/interesting stuff as I’d have liked to for some of our clients, but that’s something for my next place.

One really interesting thing we spoke about was that we (and by that I mean the four of us at least) can think back to a time when things were rosey, whereas people getting into uni now, coming out of it and hoping or expecting to find work are going to have to put up with a lot of disappointment and repeated failure that might seriously undermine their confidence, and not build character necessarily. It’ll breed an interesting new type of person who doesn’t know how good things can get; possibly a bit too risk averse – they’ve never known any better, so how do you define ‘realistic’ or explain it? – but on the other hand, they could equally be much riskier than us: what’s there to lose? It can’t get much worse. As long as you don’t lose the faith that you’re not awful because three hundred places have rejected you. Gemma’s dad and his ‘keep batting’ cricket analogy were good.

We talked about Heather (LeFevre) and her really ambitious project after leaving StrawberryFrog. If you don’t know about it, she’s taking The Planning Survey and turning it into a book. Have a read of her ‘Trying something new‘ post. Email her, get in touch and get involved.

We spoke about other stuff too, but these are the things that stuck with me most. For people who keep in touch via twitter and blogs, it certainly felt like we’ve known each other for ages, which makes it that much nicer. And fabulously so, planning for real life was as easy as ‘let’s make it happen’ and magically we all turned up on the day, at the place, at the right time and things just flowed from there.

So with that in mind, thank you to Sarah, Gemma & Lucy for a really nice time. And if you are an account planner in the North and indeed of the female gender, get in touch with us, we’d be very happy to talk to you and share a drink.

I don’t see many interesting tube ads and I think that’s probably because of a lack of imagination and voice behind the brands advertising there. Egypt’s Tourist Board for instance? There must be better ways to build consumer confidence in your resorts following recent political turmoil than kids splashing about like you could just take the name off and assume it’s Greece, Cyprus or Turkey really. Films? Promotional offers? Co-branded stuff?

The only three brands I can remember are Emirates (for jobs), Jack Daniels and The Economist (largely because they took advantage of stuff like Social Media Week to highlight some of the issues they talk about). Not all Jack Daniels ones were amazing but this one is just what it is. Good old-fashioned art direction and not pretending to be anything else. Maybe it lacks imagination but it would be hard for it to try to pretend to be anything else more gimmicky given Lynchburg’s status, so there you go. It’s just nice for what it is. You can almost hear someone say it in some deep south accent. For all we know, they might be using it as mouth wash too. And that would be okay.