Great Nike Digital ideas

Just a really simple great idea from Nike +

great presentation on digital

Digital Media isn't Mass Media for Cheap

View more presentations from Bud Caddell. (tags: mass fans)

Here is a great presentation from Bud over at undercurrent. I love his view of using the web like a science lab. Check it out and steal away.

They shouldn't be called marketing directors anymore...it should be.....

Tea Cup Ride, originally uploaded by Molly J Online.

..... Experience Directors

I have over the past year or so become a huge fan of the experience designers within digital agencies. People like David Armano over at Logic and Emotion and the guys from Adaptive Path

have great blogs and a huge following. The way that these guys talk about brands from within a digital sense, I believe goes well beyond a website or web experience and is how we should all look all areas of communications and marketing. The way they truly bring the user into the for and address their needs and desires, which leads to greater experiences. If you look at the term marketing in the dictionary it comes up as...

'the total of activities involved in the transfer of goods from the producer or seller to the consumer or buyer, including advertising, shipping, storing, and selling.'

I feel like this is a little old and with the world changing as it is. Marketing will become a more important part of the overall business. But in every area of the industry we talk around the term of the brand experience and its about time that clients started taking this seriously internally.

The Experience Economy is a great book that talks about creating an experience around a product. In a world of product parity creating an emotional experience around your product can allow people to truly identify with you and allows you to stand out from the crowd... or as I prefer to put it... stand out for your crowd. I always ask the question, would Disney be the same without Disneyland.... would iPod be the same without iTunes. This is packaging up an awesome experience around a product and adding services to give a great overall sense of the brand. These companies are run by the question... how good is the customers experience. This can longer be for theme parks and technology companies.

I truly believe that marketing departments should be run by an 'brand experience person' at the heart of the business and their review every single day should be. ' have I made the brands experience better today'. The guys at adaptive path pulled out some interesting research from Bain and Company that showed 92% of marketers believed they had a superior customer experience (this was towards digital or the website) vs the 8% of the audience that believed they have had an awesome customer experience. That is quite a gap.

The truth is that the digital experience role has a number of key specialist skills that I think will be crucial in the future of marketing. They know data. This hasnt even been touched properly yet or its complete role in the process of marketing. Its not for the boring people. It will continue to grow in importance. They have empathy for their audience and in turn have created research techniques to identify and build on this. They understand brands. They understand digital and what little, simple experiences can add to the positive or negative sentiments toward your brand. David's view on Microinteractions... is not just about the web. Its about everything a brand does. They can communicate and collaborate with designers and techies. This may sound weird. But with a move to everything being digital... building software, applications, and other new technology will be crucial to creativity for brands.

These guys are helping what I believe is a bit of a change in the way that companies look at people and brands. It will change the way we research people and hopefully make a much better market for products and services. It will also lead to easier review process for marketing companies who partner with their clients. Have we delivered that simple question.

I will love to watch where this will go next. I have a few thoughts. But I cant give everything away for free.

More internet research

| View | Upload your own

Found this great bit of research from Morgan Stanely over here.

Greatest Job in the World

So everyone has been posting a lot about a guy with the greatest job in the world. Jan Chipchase from Nokias futures department. Here is an interesting rundown of a day or two of his life as a 'digital nomad' from the economist.

Check out his presentations on his website. Awesome

Can you pitch for declining categories as well

by lucias_clay on flickr

After my post on working on declining brands... It seems Blockbuster video is up for pitch in the UK should be interesting. Its amusing after I just read a whole bunch of interesting articles from my favourite 'wired' magazine on the movie market and how film has an opportunity not to stuff up digital like music did.

Have we gone a little far with the digital thing

this is one of the kids shots from NHM

Amusingly, as I write this an ad comes on TV for the new digital screen on a pregnancy test because of some research that states a lot of women read the regular ones wrong.

What I wanted to discuss is my trip to the Natural History Museum on the weekend where the Wildlife Photographer of the Year was on show. Although it was all awesome. I was kind of lost with the use of digital screens.

Automatically I just started to question whether they were in fact real photos or computer generated. I saw some fantastically close shots of animals in the wild. The colours were out of this world. But since everything on screen seems computer generated these days. I have lost my faith in the realism of a real and beautiful photograph. I really want the real photos. Maybe Im not so hightec afterall.

Go and check it out. Small note.... it is scary how awesome the shots from the kids section. Creativity and a eye at such a young age is really cool. Its also cool to see parents spending a lot of money on kit for their kids.

Digital World driving the Real World

I have been doing quite a bit of work around youth and digital for a pitch recently and we have found that the more digital we get with our Facebooks and Second Life's, the more we seek the real world. Simple things like events, time spent together with friends. The digital world is helping to drive them. You can see this in more extreme cases like flashmobbing..... or Londons biggest water fight. All real world events driven by digital uptake. I think this video from Nokia is quite inspirational and shows the next step for this dual usage of digital / real world. I found this over at mediasnackers. Enjoy

I think my first popfly works

check out this mashup of images and facts from lynetter

I love LOGIC + EMOTION

One of the things I love about blogging is reading other peoples blog from different fields. I am obsessed. (no really I am ask my collegeues) with David Armano over at Logic and Emotion. Its just a fantastic way of looking at the digital world from the consumer perspective. He just makes it all seem so easy.

Web 2.0 - A modern recreation of Socialism or is it

I read a really good article over on Organic Frog about the 'Digital Utopia' and how the use of all this technology is driving social change towards a more collective growth of information and intelligence. I dont want to get into a debate over politics. But I have never understood how socialism has such a negative connotation. To spread the wealth evenly to their poor areas made sense to me for some countries. I always thought is was due to the negativity towards the group of individuals that control too much of the money and power. They say Mao refused to have expensive clothes, as it was against everything he was trying to build in his country.
In a world where capitalism is on the up and the elite become more powerful and wealthy. Are we attempting another cycle of this socialist dynamic with the advent of 'collective intelligence' through social technology. I know in the past 3 months or so since I have been getting involved. My knowledge has expanded ten fold. I have also helped a huge amount of people with things they are tackling off the back of that.
Or does this technology do the opposite and actually allow a real and true democracy due to the power of an individual that this technology is starting to allow. I dont know. But im going to get involved and really love watching whats happens.