perspectives and analysis of emerging digital channels
Happy days! We’ve just launched our first Facebook app for SEEK. It’s a playful, social little thing that leverages their “Curious?” campaign. Users can describe what they see in the inky smudge and get an ‘inkling’ or hint as to their personality.
Take a crack: http://apps.facebook.com/seekinkling/
Update: It seems Microsoft has keeping a close eye on our work and are now incorporating inkblots into password generation.
It’s just over a week to go until the election, but it’s felt like an eternity. I’m English, I can’t vote and I’ve never been particularly interested in politics. It is my second election since I arrived in Australia and to be honest the first one passed me by a bit. However, this time around things are different. Sure the policy pledges and themes are all pretty much the same and the party leaders are visiting just as many hospital wards, but this time every move they make is being scrutinized by a growing throng of online political satirists. Move over The Chaser, there’s a new kid on the block. Political humour is alive and well, and living in YouTube.
So in this week’s column I thought I would try and bring you the best (or is it the worst) of what’s out there. I appreciate that this is going to be hard if you’re reading this in print, but isn’t that the point? The medium has evolved from being flat and one dimensional to diverse and multidimensional. So hop online and check out some of these examples on either lab.netx.com.au or the B&T blog.
To make it easier I have categorised these light hearted shenanigans as follows:
The music videos
Sadly, we have not seen anything as in-your-face as Obama Girl –v- Giuliani Girl, but people have nevertheless gone to a lot of effort to mash up the exploits of Kevin and John through the magic of song. One of the best is the Kevin V Howard Rap with lines such as “Call me Kevin, cause I’ll rock you in ‘07. If we fizzle, take a snizzle, I’ll be back in ‘011.â€
For some reason John Howard seems to come in for a lot more stick than Kevin Rudd, but I guess there is a rich seam of material to choose from after twelve years in power; twelve years which are summed up beautifully by the video “Bennelong Time Since I Rock and Rolled.†John Bonham would be turning in his grave.
The Ads
In this election campaign, both parties have exploited the benefits of the internet to deliver their message. They’re fast to market, topical and straight to the point. Who cares if they’re not as polished as they could be? The YouTube generation of today is less concerned about the aesthetic and more interested in the message. But if the political parties can pull these ads together overnight, then you can be confident that they can be parodied just as quickly and easily.
One of the main thrusts of the Coalition’s campaign has been focused on the fact that over 70% of the Labor front bench has been senior union officials. To takeoff such an ad has been the comic equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel and there are any number of great examples out there, but this one took my fancy highlighting the fact that “90% of the Liberal front bench will be rich old white guys.â€
And in one of the strangest examples out there, who would have thought that Bob Dylan would manage to capitalize on the Australian General Election to publicise his new greatest hits album?
The games
Some of the best online campaigns in recent times have, of course, been games. Whether you are tossing penguins or trying to send Freddie flying, there is nothing like a cheeky viral game to beat the boredom in the run up to an election. And sure enough Kevin and John have not escaped the notice of the game developers.
Scumbag07 is probably one of the most popular at the moment. As the blurb that comes with the game says “As a tribute to the days when Aussie political debates were splattered with colourful epithets…choose your side and do what politicians do best ; drown your opponent in meaningless blubber!â€
(http://www.subversivegames.com/portal/games/scumbag07/)
So as the politicians come out of the final corner and into the home straight of Australia’s first ‘online’ election, it is comforting to know that political humour is alive and well. You could even say that it has got a shot in the arm with the advent of YouTube and other social networks. But has all this online activity changed our perceptions of Political Brands? Or is this all just tantamount to less political science and more political satire?
Sadly, next week’s column will be the last in this series. Unless you wait eagerly at the newsagents on a Friday for B&T to arrive hot off the press, then the nation will have already decided and either Kevin or John will have been voted off. So the final edition of “Kissing the Virtual Baby†will be looking back at the campaigns of both parties and asking the question “who won the battle for the online generation?†And perhaps more importantly “was it worth it?â€
Andym
Who’s winning the election so far? Which candidate is actually going to put his policies to practice if he’s elected Prime Minister of Australia? Who knows? I certainly don’t. But I’ll tell you what I do know – Indian is our current PM’s favourite style of cooking, the Shadow Deputy Leader Julia Gillard cannot spell ‘Woolloomooloo’ and I can single-handedly raise a party’s approval rating by digitally whacking the opposition with a wooden sledge hammer to win the 2007 federal election. I never thought politics could be this entertaining!
parts of picture under CC by Ben Harris-Roxas
But there is more to Politics 2.0 than a bit of light comic relief in an otherwise dull election campaign. There is a very real, very serious side to it, that both parties are learning very fast. Online is their new playing field and it’s an open space with little or no boundaries. In previous election campaigns the parties have had to put up with the limitations of traditional media channels. TV schedules and press campaigns were planned produced and locked away well in advance and campaigning could only be adjusted on the fly through hastily organized press conferences which would hopefully be covered by the TV stations in the evening news or in the morning paper. But now all that has changed.
In today’s election all of these long-established tools are still open to each party and they will certainly have their core campaign messages carefully pre-planned. However both Mr Rudd and Mr Howard have recently discovered, just as millions of consumers and brands have, that they don’t have to rely exclusively on the traditional media to get their message across. They can publish themselves. They are the media. The advent of electioneering on their own channel is enough to make any campaigning MP giddy and it’s created two significant election defining differences.
Firstly, it is immediate. No sooner had Peter Garrett burnt his bed by confessing that the Labour party would simply change their “me-too†policies once they were elected, the Coalition had posted a hastily pulled together video aiming to exploit the slip up. Who cares if the clip wasn’t beautifully polished and crafted. The aesthetic is not important. This is YouTube and it was a perfect example of how brands, including political parties, can use the immediacy of the channel to full effect. Kevin07 may have won the Facebook and MySpace fans with its trendy t-shirts and tagging, but Howard has surely caught the attention of YouTube users having already uploaded almost 30 videos whilst Rudd hasn’t even hit the double digits yet.
And secondly, by creating your own media channel you are in far more control of what you can say. Whereas previous election TVCs have often been forced to pull their punches and fall short of really saying what was on their minds, now these restrictions no longer apply. Just as brands use the online channel to post extended, often riskier versions of their adverts, so can the political parties can do the same. Just check out any of the Joe MacDonald or Kevin Reynolds videos on the Liberal’s YouTube site if you need convincing.
It’s fast. It’s furious. It’s politics 2007. The campaigning has evolved. And why are we so interested? Because the more it evolves, the more we’re involved. Behind each party there are teams of advisors, directing us towards propaganda like gossip, and we can’t get enough. It has only been a few weeks since both parties used their new online weapons in anger and it is true that you learn fast in the field of combat. Both parties may have started out a bit unsure of what all the fuss was about, but they are now as addicted as a new user on Facebook.
Cynics of these new channels and the role they play in politics will always point out the worthlessness of knowing that John likes to rustle up a prawn madras for Janette every now and then. But ask Brand Managers if they would like the use of a free media channel through which they could react in a heartbeat and say exactly what they wanted to say and I suspect they would they walk across hot coals to have it.
Other ueful blogs:
http://www.freedomtodiffer.com/onlinepolitics/
http://www.ozpolitics.info/blog/
http://www.pollbludger.com/
Other useful election resources:
http://www.theage.com.au/federal-election-2007/
http://www.abc.net.au/elections/federal/2007/
http://www.google.com.au/election2007/
There is an old saying: “A week is a long time in politicsâ€. As Australia embarks on it’s first “online†election, this is especially true. At the time of the last election in 2004, broadband penetration was in single digits and social networking was confined to the pub. And even though broadband penetration is still woefully behind the rest of the developed world, every move Kevin and John make is examined, torn apart and laid bare by a ruthless online community of eager political satirists…you and I.
Welcome to Politics 2.0
Every brand is currently trying to understand and harness the power of the social networks. The successful brands are having conversations with their customers via community sites, review platforms, forums, video links, bulletin boards, mobile threads and podcasts. Political ‘brands’ can converse in these ways, too. Except they have to achieve success in a campaign that is tantamount to a 6 week sprint. Sure, they can’t drop their online guard once the election is over, but miss this opportunity now and there is no tomorrow. Both Howard and Rudd have taken the admirable and inevitable step of launching an online offensive. In particular the Kevin07 collection of sites has done a good job of trying to pull a lot of the conversation together under one banner. But how do they manage the conversations that are going on in the rest of the blogosphere?
None of these conversations is new. They have been going on for centuries, but the real difference is the accessibility of the information, the speed of comment, and the impact on the brand. You don’t have to wait a week for the Chaser to broadcast its latest stunt, or as it was in my younger days, eagerly staying up on a Sunday night for the UK’s Spitting Image.
The Chaser : Kevin’s facebook friends turn up at his home
It is instant and it rarely holds any prisoners. And it’s ability to influence voters should not be underestimated. And if you think this conversation is confined to political sites, think again. One of the most popular threads on the insightful www.beaututes.com is currently a lengthy debate about whether you hate or like Kevin Rudd.These external influencers can be lumped into three groups:
- The facts
- The fiction
- The fantasy
The facts
Never have we been able to get our hands on the hard nosed facts faster than we can today: from the up-to-the-minute dedicated election sites of any of the mainstream media, through to the clever little Google Trends application that tracks each candidates’ mentions in the media. The ability to stay informed, if you so desire, has never been more widespread.
The fiction
And let’s not forget the ‘fake’ sites. Just a quick scan of Facebook reveals that there were at least five facebook profiles of John Howard and four for Kevin Rudd. And then of course there are the numerous groups ranging from the popular “Kevin Rudd looks like ice-cream†to the more single minded “I hated Howard before it was trendy to do so.†I’m not too sure what we can read into that, but the fact that people have gone to a significant amount of effort surely says something.
The fantasy
Political satire is not new. In fact it is one of the richest seams of raw comedy material there is. And there are plenty of well known online examples such as www.crickey.com.au and www.thechaser.com.au. But for every “official†satirist there are 100 unofficial ones ranging from John Howard’s diary at www.johnhowardpm.blogeasy.com through to the more bizarre www.101usesforajohnhoward.com .
But what influence do these sites have on voters and election outcomes? Are they just a bit of fun or do they have the ability to affect the result. As with most humour there is a serious side to it. Whilst many of the online chats and debates can trivialize politics, they are more often than not based on some fact, or at least a perception of fact. Politics is a serious subject and one’s political tendencies are formed from a complicated mixture of rational facts. The explosion of the citizen journalism has got the potential to sway opinion, particularly amongst a certain demographic, based on a more emotive set of values and they should not be underestimated. In the current US primary elections the video of “I’ve got a crush on Obama†has been viewed over 100 million times around the world. Whether we like it or not that has got to influence some people. What role will the internet play in
Andym
Check out these other blogs on the subject:
http://www.freedomtodiffer.com/onlinepolitics/
http://www.tamaleaver.net/category/politics/
http://www.digitalministry.com.au/component/option,com_myblog/Itemid,142/show,403/
The following is an article appearing in the next issue of CampaignBrief under “Future Watch”:
This is an honest plea for more permanent creative knowledge within an agency. This might not like a sexy thing to work on, after all, a messy creative haircut goes well with a messy creative process, right? But tell me if any of the following emails sound like they were plucked from your own email inbox. If so, your agency might want to change the way it creates and learns in order to retain (or even export) more of their intellectual property. This is not about adding more processes but giving Creatives more headspace for their thinking. After all, advertising isn’t getting any easier.
From: Art Director
To: Studio
Subject: new hero shot for in-flight magazine?
“Guys, just got royally whacked by the CD for using outdated imagery, who knows where the new stuff is on the server? Who worked on it last and is that person still with us? C’mon help me out here…don’t want to look like a dud again.”
Here Mr. Royally-Whacked dreads poking around on the server. His email reflects the first escape route: ask a colleague. So maybe the file will turn up on the server, because it simply got misplaced in an obscure folder structure. But what if it rests on the hard drive or as an attachment in the inbox of a long-departed co-worker? Quite likely, this Art Director will transfer the problem to an account person and waste their time finding the resource.
Research shows that staff source between 50%-75% of information relevant to their work from other people. It also shows that more than 80% of an organisation’s digitised information resides on individual hard drives and inside personal files. This means that individuals - rather than the organisation - control the bulk of essential knowledge within an agency.
From: Creative Director
To: Traffic Manager
Subject: utter waste of time!!!
“Look, next time you dial me into all those reviews, make sure that “Director†and those “Creatives†over in Adelaide are up to speed with all the script changes we put in during our off-site. And what happened to those brilliant ideas for different online edits that I tossed at them last time?”
Our CD produces (naturally!) brilliant ideas in a break out session, on the go or during a telephone call. His creative team unfortunately fails to catch the spark due to their geo-spatial separation. Additionally, nobody bothers to gather all those scribbles and assemble the various threads and ideas in one common place. The pitch work that started so ambitiously scrambles to the finish line with creative directions that only narrowly answer the strategic goals set in the beginning.
From: MD
To: Digital Planner
Subject: facebook app?
“am @ Group Summit, got hit w/ requests for “social networking appsâ€. You got some numbers, haven’t you? Remember some links you sent around ages ago. need to follow up quickly. Pls add more hot trendy stuff and stick into a PPT, get CD in on some high-level creative if possible. Thx!”
Although this subject has been simmering for quite some time, knowledge about it hasn’t grown beyond the individual specialist. Links to benchmark campaigns or valuable data sources are spread widely across individual PCs or lost in those long streams of emails. When our digital planner gets poached by the next hot shop, our agency will be back at square one. Solution: hire the next digital gun for more money and hope he stays a bit longer.
These examples show how email is an unsuitable tool for gathering and retaining ideas and know-how. Emails are interruptive, difficult to keep in context and the older an email gets, the less valuable it becomes. Messages that scroll out of our preview window might as well not be there. Email doesn’t work well in distributed offices nor is it able to integrate outside parties in the collaboration – unless you call sending attachments back and forth an inspiring collaboration.
Imagine cracking a brief with a team in two offices and several outside parties and freelancers, all information and assets are available to all parties, and comments and thoughts stay in context and accumulate continuously. Imagine searching across all projects based on over arching topics such as an industry or a channel and actually finding it quickly.
Digital support tools for this are already available, for example Delicious or Google Notebooks (collecting and commenting bookmarks), ConceptShare and Slideshare (annotating and discussing scribbles and presentations) and Socialtext or OpenTeams (collaboration). All of these tools allow adding meta data (descriptions), linking and attributing different access rights.
Most importantly though, this is a cultural change for how creatives work and has to be adopted and brought to life by the creative leadership first.
The need for better knowledge management in creative processes is evident. Campaigns are becoming more and more sophisticated to succeed in a fragmented media environment. If agencies don’t learn from mistakes and successes, they can never be better than their current workforce allows them to be. And since any key person leaves an organization at some point, they take with them a wide spectrum of extremely valuable knowledge, including industry and target group insights, confidential data and relationships. If the agency’s creative knowledge then only consists of static files on servers, a bunch of emails and the rented brains of the current employees, it isn’t much more than a name with a reputation, a building and a fancy coffee machine.
picture under CC by blmurch (photostream)
(chart from alleyinsider.com)
It seems like just a few years ago that Google was a cute little company with a funny name and logo. “Look! You can type something into the box and it brings back results so fast!. Goooooogle. Even saying it makes me smile”.
Ok - so that was only a few years ago. And while I don’t want to make this an “impending doom” post, there’s a couple of things lining up that are worth keeping an eye on. With AdSense, Google already monetizes a page better than anyone else. They have made scraping a page for context and serving up relevant ads a Web 1.0 cliche. But on November 6, Facebook will announce what many expect to be their ’social ads’ plan (ads based on profile and personal content). This will be the next generation of commercialising online activity, and given Facebook’s cohesive structure, and the trust consumers have shown in offering up their data, it will be extremely compelling. But even despite the site’s astronomical growth (in Australia up to 1.75m UVs) it only accounts a for small percentage of overall web usage. The rest of the web’s out there and still growing too.
Now back to GOOG. Yesterday this press release surfaced on John Battelle’s blog “Google Launches OpenSocial to Spread Social Applications Across the Web. Google has long been rumoured to be making a bigger social play (why not?) and thankfully they’re not simply making the ‘big in Brazil’ Orkut more international. Actually they are, but that’s a small component. Google have announced that they have developed APIs to connect a range of ’social hosts’ with core functions across profile information, friends information and personal content. At launch these hosts will include Linkedin, Hi5, Friendster, Plaxo, Ning and, of course Orkut. With these participating networks, developers can now reach a dispersed audience across a range of sites using common applications and functions. More soon on the kinds of things we can expect from developers when OpenSocial goes live soon.
So a united social profiling play, combined with a vast audience of advertisers in the AdSense platfrom clambering to reach you in a targeted way. That’s big. I wonder if there’s anything that AT&T (#4 above in the ‘biggest companies in the US’ chart) has planned of a similar scale. But to quote a famous keynoter: “there’s one more thing”. Mobile. Whether the Google Mobile OS comes out in two weeks or next year, things are becoming clearer.
Google could soon have another killer app. Search has been um.. reasonably good to them. But social networking digitally is now a mainstream lifestyle activity. For some it’s replacing email, for others it have become their trusted, always-on address book. But the mobile has been the predominant tool for communication, and mobile internet access (supported by unlimited data plans) is quickly becoming an everyday thing. So here’s a formula to ponder:
Google x (social + mobile + profile advertising) = y
Choose from:
a) y = a completely socially integrated location-based mobile address book that is aware when my friends available online or for a call, that knows if they know each other (and whether they like each other) and mutates automatically with their every move. The beginning of the inevitable migration of social networking from the confines of the PC to your pocket.
b) y = cheaper advertising-supported mobile access where flattening carrier revenues are propped up by the first killer mobile ad model that actually works. A defining moment for global carriers.
c) y = too much for consumers. the beginning of the great anti-Google backlash…
Update:
AdAge reports about consumer associations and activists such as the EFF starting to rally for a Do Not Track-List, allowing users to opt out (like a white list) of all behavioural targeting.
