Royal Conoe & Usonia - Triple Rock - 5.14.12
Amidst the growing popularity and unrelenting growth of under-talented lo-fi acts and overproduced indie electronica, they are carving a niche that is often attempted and rarely achieved. Good songwriting, solid arrangements, appropriate electronic embellishments. All the right art, all the right energy. Cheers to Royal Canoe! I expect big things from these guys in the coming years.
With a new album on the horizon, Usonia appears to be evolving quickly. In the shadow of a freshman effort that was honed, melodic, quirky and extremely likable, the new material is sounding more upbeat, danceable, inspired but still happily complex. New members, new grooves and a continued evolution are apparent. Their live energy literally blew me away. They played a nearly flawless set to a tiny crowd. These guys love what they are doing and it shows.
What Are We Carving Out Of The Cognitive Surplus?
I recently discovered Clay Shirky via my colleague pjbfcp. Clay puts the new media quagmire in a God Damned strangle-hold for the rest of us dummies. Numbers. Allegory. Fact. He's even bald - which further supports my theory that all bald dudes are just plain more awesome than I am. In the clips below he talks about the power of our collective Cognitive Surplus.
Wait, collective what? Okay, so people watch a crap-ton of TV in the United States. We spend basically all of our free time - our "Cognitive Surplus" - in front of the tube. It's been this way since the 50s. But this is changing fast. And as media becomes more interactive, larger and larger parts of our collective Cognitive Surplus is spent doing instead of watching. What's really staggering are Shirky's numbers. Specifically, the ratio of human hours using various media to cultural change.In one example, he compares TV watching hours and wikipedia-ing hours. Shirky and a colleague from IBM calculate that wikipedia amounts for roughly 100 million hours of human thought, worldwide. Which, is a lot of thinking: Just enough thought hours to produce an online crowd-based knowledge engine that has nearly replaced the age-old dictionary. In a handful of years. And TV?According to Shirky, TV viewing in the United States amounts to nearly 200 BILLION hours, PER YEAR. 100 Million is 0.5% of 200 Billion: Half of 1 percent. So, .5% of the collective US annual television watching hours spent doing instead of watching was enough - in the case of Wikipedia - to change humanity's take on the dictionary. As we embark on a new era of interactive media usage and knowledge sharing, I can't begin to imagine what sort of things will happen when 1%, 2%, 5% or 10% of the population breaks away from passive consumption.
Adwords Madness
Last friday the Hello Viking team endured a 14 hour Google Adwords training with Rod Stockebrand (an Adwords wizard of sorts). It was intense. Anyone who has dabbled in search marketing knows that micromanaging a single PPC campaign without proper guidance can prove endless, and create some severe dark circles under the eyes. So what did we learn ? That there’s a lot to learn, and the rules are changing fast.
Running effective search marketing and Adwords campaigns takes hours of swimming through competitor keywords, bidding, adjusting pricing, tweaking, launching, optimizing a quality score and of course, brewing a really big pot of coffee. Having run Adwords campaigns before the training, we had a lot of questions for Rod. Questions like, how can an Adwords campaign support an existing product line or marketing initiative ? Why do some weak web pages rank so high in search ? Why do some users pay so little per click for high volume search terms when others pay next to nothing ?His answers were thorough, and fascinating. It seems the art of running Adwords is in the details. Integrating a search campaign with a website, brand strategy and landing page means balancing targeted ads, keyword strategy and pricing to create clicks. It was a long, but fun day. Armed with new knowledge, we’re looking forward to further incorporating Adwords campaigns for all of our clients.
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E-mail: knutes[at]helloviking [dot] com
Conversation is not the new advertising.
Being a conduit for conversation is the new advertising.
Rapidly increasing consumer empowerment has created new rules in all of the spaces advertisers and marketers traditionally dominated. If advertising will succeed in the age of increasing consumer voice, it has to stop trying to talk to people, and start getting people to talk amongst themselves. As Freddie Laker of Sapient points out, successful campaigns create conversation which, “would exist with or without the brand.”
How we got here: From a few touch points to countless
Michael Lebowitz of Big Spaceship defines traditional advertising as “gaining customers, building more relationships… At its core growing business.” Lebowitz explains that in the television era, the limited number of consumer touch points allowed big players to control the messages consumers received through massive media purchasing. Most often, this meant brands could be confident their messaging strategy created profit.
The scarcity of touch points in the television era exploded into an overwhelming abundance of communication channels over the last ten years. This gives consumers simple tools to compare products and escape from any form of advertising, making them harder to track down. So if consumers can, and will run screaming from advertising, is advertising useless?
Being a conversation channel and community advocate
As consumer-to-brand engagement continues to adapt and is increasingly hard to capture, brands are struggling to cope. Brand messaging is up against a plethora of rich media alternatives, most of which are online. The success of interactive online media (YouTube for example) have ignited a micro-evolution of interactive web design manifested most successfully through online social platforms.
What does this mean for marketers? More ad dollars are spent developing high-end websites and applications to make brands relevant in these new digital communities. In his blog Logic + Emotion, David Armano describes the engagement evolution in web development as one spanning from “Traditional, to Tradigital to Social engagement.” In the Tradigital phase, websites acted as a destination, where people could access information. Although they employ rich user experience or interactive features, consumers can’t own and customize tradigital sites. As interactive websites like Facebook, MySpace or Twitter have gained popularity (considered the “social engagement” phase in Armano’s evolution), consumers increasingly have sought the unmatched personalization offered in these communities.
Most companies know they have to succeed in these spaces but fail to recognize the rules of engagement. Treating them like traditional channels for their products, their messaging falls on deaf, and irritated ears. Lee Odden of TopRank writes, “There’s a tendency to want to treat social media participation like advertising where the ability to control messaging is the norm.”
The solution is seemingly obvious. The most effective brand and advertising strategies in social spaces have provided a spillway for conversation as opposed to gushing to a target audience. The key isn’t starting conversation about a brand, it’s helping a target community develop and talk amongst themselves. Odden points out the importance of community saying, “Developing community on the web can facilitate buy in, provide invaluable feedback and crowdsourcing opportunities.”
The new rules of engagement hold true not just online, but in print, television and event marketing. Take Mediacom’s 2008 ‘To Shave or Not’ mixed media campaign for Gillette as an example. To convince young national Indians shaving was important, Mediacom commissioned a public Nielsen survey out of Mumbai about shaving. The survey explored whether women prefer a clean shaven versus scruffy man, hinging on the premonition that Indians love to debate.
The survey generated buzz in all the key news services, and was comprehensively adopted as a national argument. When the dust settled and the results fell decidedly on the clean side, Mach3 sales were up 38%, trial increased 400% and market share had increased by 35% in India. The conversation wasn’t about Gillette, but the brand ultimately was the conduit for the debate and sat readily positioned to sell when it was over. Procter & Gamble and the Gillette brand created a conversation that was worth everyone’s time. It was a conversation that easily could have existed without the brand.
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by Knute Sands :: knutes [at] helloviking [dot] com
