It’s pretty clear that engaging an audience via mobile advertising requires a different approach than through many other media. Simply sending an interruptive text straight to the device in somebody’s pocket isn’t likely to be received well; it’s likely to be seen as spam. Connecting with a mobile audience requires marketers to understand that they’re not sending users simple advertising, they’re sending them content.
Take, for instance, the SMS sent to Blyk members back in January from the UK government youth agency Connexions. The campaign didn’t just send users texts with a call to action, rather it sought to engage them by asking them to respond to a number of introductory questions as a lead-in to a conversation. Accordingly, the campaign got a 36% response rate — far higher than most standard, interruptive campaigns.
The campaign offered users something of value in exchange for their response, and that’s a key point. That in exchange for users’ attention, in exchange for access to their mobile phone, the most personal of devices, advertisers need to give users something in return. That something can take many different forms: a discount coupon, a piece of useful information, some entertaining video content, and so on. In some sense, the marketing aspect of the message needs to take a back seat. The initial focus needs to be on delighting the recipient in some way — and then you can get the marketing message across.
Marketers need to see themselves as content providers. A movie trailer isn’t an ad; it’s a piece of mobile content with the potential to engage and entertain the viewer. If it delights the recipient, it doesn’t simply make them want to go see the film, there’s a possibility they’ll pass it along. Do people pass advertisements along? Not really. They pass along content. Sometimes that content happens to be an advertisement.
Forget blurring the line between content and advertising. In reality, that line doesn’t exist.
Carlo Longino is a Las Vegas-based writer, analyst and consultant in the mobile industry. His past experience includes work for Nokia, Nortel, and a number of other mobile companies, and he blogs at MobHappy.
Lots of folks are unaware that multiple brands are owned by the same company (e.g., the same company owns Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy). Consumer activists often complain that this practice is deceptive because it tricks consumers into believing that there are big distinctions between brands when, often, the differences are minimal. Personally, while I’d love to see more consumer brand awareness, but I think that brand distinctions play an important role. I just wish that the tech industry would figure this out.
I’m a relatively educated consumer and I’m also one of the most brand-loyal customers out there. When it comes to food and personal care products, many of my brand decisions come down to smell and taste, even when these are completely manufactured in a lab in New Jersey to differentiate soaps, toothpastes, and other products that are chemically identical. I buy All laundry detergent and not other Unilever brands (Surf, Wisk) or P&G brands (Tide, Gain, Cheer) simply because it smells better. When it comes to clothes, fit trumps everything.
In other words, my purchasing decisions are heavily affected by “interface.” (Politics and convenience too…) When a company changes the interface, I get cranky. I’m still cranky with my favorite pretzel brand for eliminating the air bubbles in their pretzels that allowed for more salt to build up. The reason that I’m committed to most consumer brands is not because I love the company. For many products, I’m not even influenced by the lifestyle being sold. I simply love the interface. Luckily, most retail companies get that their interface matters and when they futz with it, they create a separate brand or segment the primary brand into “Original” and “New with XYZ.” In the world of retail, a brand represents its interface. There are interfaces I like, those that I don’t, and those that I’m completely ambivalent about. But the interface often matters a whole lot more than the “features.”
Why do technology companies often fail to understand branding the way retail folks do? Many think that they can change the interface at whim to spice-up their product. They approach user retention as user lock-in, rather than user satisfaction and commitment. They try to shove everyone into the same interface in a one-size-fits-all paradigm that tends to fit few. Why??
Unfortunately, I don’t think that many companies are aware of the limitations of their brands. When they’re flying high, their brands are invincible and extending it to a wide array of products seems natural. Yet, over time, tech companies’ brands get entrenched. Certain users identify with it; others don’t. New products using that brand enter into the market with both cachet and baggage. Yet, tech companies tend to hold onto their brands for dear life and assume users will forget. Foolish.
We all know that youth talk about certain products as “sooo last year.” This tends to cover a genre rather than a brand. Yet, teens also have plenty to say about the brands themselves. Yahoo! and AOL, for example, are for old people. When I asked why they use Yahoo! Mail and AOL Instant Messaging if they’re for old people, they responded by telling me that their parents made those accounts for them. Furthermore, email is for communicating with old people and AIM is “so middle school” and both are losing ground to SNS and SMS. While Microsoft is viewed in equally lame light amongst youth I spoke with, it’s at least valued as a brand for doing work. Yet, even youth who use MSN messenger think that msn.com is for old people. Why shouldn’t they? When I logged in just now, the main visual was a woman with white hair sitting on a hospital bed with the caption “10 Vital Questions to Ask Your Doctor.”
Take a look at all of the major portals attempting to reach universal audiences. Now imagine yourself as a teen. Why would you even visit them? Even if you were the rare teen who cared about Autos, Careers & Jobs, Dating & Personals, Finance & Money, Health & Fitness, or Real Estate, one click in and you know that this content is not targeted at you. Even the sites that allow you to “personalize” your modules rarely let you get rid of these or make them relevant to you. To make matters worse, now that these companies are heading towards mobile, they are taking these one-size-fits-all interfaces and cluttering up the phones. Ugg! Why?
I would like to offer two bits of advice to all of the major tech companies out there: 1) Start sub-branding; and 2) Start doing real personalization.
If you’re creating a new product, launch it with a new brand. Put your flagship brand on the bottom of the page, letting people know that this is backed by you - this is not about deception. Advertise it alongside your flagship brand if you think that’ll gain you traction. But let the new product develop a life of its own and not get flattened by a universal brand. Some products should be niche, especially those targeted at youth; while youth are happy to use well-established tools, they also like to distinguish their practices from those of adults and mature into new brands. In other words, they aren’t going to fall to your lock-in for very long. If you’re buying a well-established brand, don’t flatten it, especially if it’s loved by youth. Kudos to Google wrt YouTube; boo to Yahoo! wrt Launch. Even at the coarse demographic level, people are different; don’t treat them as a universal bunch, even if your back-end serves up the same thing to different interfaces.
Personalization is more than skinning and moving modules around. Give me a blank slate and let me add modules that might be relevant to me. Alternatively, make some good initial guesses based on what you know about me and let me modify them from the getgo. Help me find the modules that are most likely to appeal to me - you already have a lot of data on what it is that I do; use it for something that helps me. This is particularly important if there are going to be a bazillion Apps or Gadgets or Widgets out there because I don’t want to comb through the crud. A targeted interface is just as important as a targeted ad.
Above all, understand that no brand is universally loved and one size does not fit all. Most of us look like idiots in XXL shirts and we don’t want our technology interfaces to be XXL. People like brands that fit them like a glove. The tech industry serves up ads this way; why doesn’t it get this when it comes to their own brand? Technology is well positioned to create sub-brands and personalize those brands from there. It’s high time for the tech industry to grow up and start doing so.
CBS Mobile have announced the first US trial of location-based advertising to mobiles, in partnership with Loopt, the friend tracking and networking site. The service will be opt-in and the ads will arrive at CBS web sites on subscribers’ phones. Having worked on ‘future concepts’ of this kind some years ago (with the luxury of not having to join up the underlying technology, nor worry about the protection of individuals’ privacy) it will be interesting to see the service develop. (In fact the concept I worked on was peer-to-peer, rather than advertiser-to-consumer: a sort of location based Gumtree, where individuals could advertise rooms to let, yoga classes, lost cats etc. And I’m sure such a mobile service will emerge sooner or later.)
I wonder how many people will opt in to the CBS Mobile service and, once in, will use their web sites often enough to get the benefits of the advertising. It will, of course, depend on what the deal is and whether the content is enticing. With the delivery format as described, it’s likely to be a service people with conventional cell phones use when they have some down-time ‘let’s see if there’s anything interesting near here’ rather than always on. How many times would you go through the process of accessing a web site and finding nothing relevant to you before you stopped altogether? Still it’s early days and I’m sure this is nothing CBS Mobile and Loopt haven’t thought of.
If the location-based element is combined with personal profiling the service could be powerful, e.g. just as I’m going into a bookshop to buy a birthday present for someone, I’m notified that there’s a sale on all SciFi (having previously listed SciFi in a profile of my reading). Anecdotally it seems there might be broadly two sorts of response to this kind of prompt: some would welcome it (just as they welcome Amazon recommendations ‘those who bought this, also bought…’); and some would dislike the intrusion (and probably wouldn’t sign up to the service anyway). In any case, the combination of location and personalisation might be too ‘micro-personalised’ for advertisers who may want to prompt more serendipitous buying. And (although it’s hard to tell from the available information) that sort of personalisation may not be possible with the current CBS Mobile plan, where advertising is to be delivered anonymously.
Now that mobile advertising is up and running in several different implementations it will take some time before effective delivery formats bed down i.e. until users vote with their feet about what is acceptable and what isn’t. And my suspicion is that it might be quicker on mobiles than on traditional internet (i.e. via computers), where many companies continue to use advertising practices that frustrate users (despite the admonishments of usability guru, Jacob Nielsen). With mobile phones, however, there’s less space and, in most, less processing power to play with, plus a sensitivity to cost that is largely absent from computer use. Indeed the whole context for use differs dramatically from the computer. So people’s acceptance of formats that don’t suit their actual use of the phone may be limited.
So much of acceptance depends on the right implementation for the device being used and the context of use, as a quote from John Strand, attending this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, highlights
“One thing is to come out with an announcement. The next is to deliver. At the end of the day, the user decides who is the winner and who is the loser. The winner is the one who can give the best experience.”
Thanks to Richard Linington for pointing out the CBS Mobile/Loopt announcement.
The design blog, Core77, has published an interview with Don Norman, author of a series of books on user-centred design (the best known of which, The Design of Everyday Things, was the first, and possibly only, book on user experience to become a bestseller).
Norman always makes interesting listening. I loved his recommendation to his interviewer, Bruce Tharp, that he should ‘question authority, even if that authority is me’ so was frustrated that Bruce didn’t go off-script a little more to pick Norman up on some of what he said. So I’ll do so here on his behalf.
The ‘question authority’ comment came about a third-way through the interview where Norman criticises the techniques used by companies who are committed to user-centred design. His comments focus particularly on ethnographic research and the creation of personas. Norman complains that, interesting as these processes are, they fail to connect to the engineers and designers creating products and services and so are, in effect, a waste of time. What Norman wants, he says, is processes that focus on the task, rather than on people. I know what he means, but worry that he’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
So let’s take a short step back from Norman’s comments and remember what preceded the typical user-centred processes many companies now use. Often, nothing. Or, if you were lucky, focus group research on a product that was in the final stages of development, when it was too late to have any impact on its fundamental design. Products were shaped by engineering dictat and the styling of the designer (think back to VCR controls of the 1980s). As Norman mentions, a typical company reaction to problems users encountered with their products was that the users were stupid. It’s certainly true that people feel stupid when dealing with products they can’t work. And that has implications for the company selling the product. Would you buy again from a company that had made you feel stupid? Probably not.
So how do companies take that step from thinking ‘right product, wrong customer’ to thinking that their customers have a right to products and services that meet their needs and are genuinely easy to use? I think it’s through empathy with the user (so does Norman). And how do you get that empathy? By meeting your users and seeing how they use products and services and by hearing what their concerns and preoccupations are; that is, through observing people in context, precisely the ethnographic research that Norman dismisses. Then you need to find ways to keep those end-users in mind so that, even when you’re not talking with them, something of their attitudes and concerns remains with you while you design. Not an easy task, but one in which the personas Norman writes off can be a useful tool.
These research tools rarely answer detailed design questions. That’s what iterative prototyping and user feedback cycles do. But they help focus design thinking on what people want, they support understanding of gaps in the market and decisions about what to design, and sometimes, yes, give insights into design detail too.
What I think Norman is criticising is the unthinking application of research techniques, and the failure to connect them to design process. That isn’t a problem with the techniques themselves, but inflexibility in some organisations in how they are used. There was a similar rigidity about 15 years ago when many companies established ‘usability labs’ to test products during development. Over-scientised in their approach, over-staffed and unwieldy, they couldn’t provide nimble enough input to be useful. In most cases they were abandoned in favour of a leaner approach, often involving designers directly in testing their own products.
As with usability testing you need to understand ‘ethnographic research’ as a portfolio of techniques to get close to users; for example, shadowing them as they go about their daily tasks, talking with them in context, asking them to create diaries, to take part in workshops with designers, finding out what they’re saying in their blogs or on forums (no, this isn’t ethnography, in its academic sense, which is why I prefer to call these techniques observational research). There’s no single true way. And since many real-life interactions are private and it’s hard to predict when or where’ll they’ll take place, finding a good way to research them requires some creativity.
Norman comments that the best design is often found in gardening, farm and workshop tools. But these have evolved over scores, sometimes hundreds, of years into the familiar implements used today. Not so for new technology tools, where there are no long-standing traditions for what they do and how they do it, where there often isn’t a readable relationship between form and function, and where, as I’ve commented before, the people designing the tools may not be those who will use them. That’s where understanding the people as well as the task is so important.
A rhetorical (I assume) question in a review by Alan Cane of improvements to text entry for mobile phones (FT, 24 November) highlights the importance of understanding both people and task. Cane questions whether developing better text entry techniques than we have presently is worthwhile: ‘…surely inputting text through keys is simply a passing phase before voice input takes over?’. I suspect not, and think Cane would be convinced too if he were to observe the detail of how text is being used. Voice input may take over some tasks, or even facilitate new forms of messaging, but text is so embedded in people’s lives, I’ve no doubt it’s here to stay. Take a look at the many contexts where text is used because talking wouldn’t be practical or acceptable; look how text allows editing in a way voice input might not. Text is not just a cheap substitute for talking, it’s a channel with a role of its own. By looking at the task alone, you might miss that. But you’ll know that it’s worth the effort of developing more usable text entry systems, if you look at the people as well as the task.
Blyk is an invite-only free mobile network. Once you’re on the network you can invite your friends to join. To seed the network we have street teams working at colleges, universities and gigs, talking with people about Blyk and signing them up. We have also put keywords at the end of several videos that are making the rounds on the Internet, like this one by Elin Svensson (you can text WHISPER to 82595 to get your code to join Blyk):
Many people have asked me about these videos and about the design of the Blyk brand identity. Here’s some background on what we’re doing and why.
When we started designing the Blyk brand we took a deliberately “open code” approach. By “open code” I mean, much like in open source software, that there is an initial hard core - the kernel of the operating system if you like - and that we allow and even encourage variation, iteration and interpretation of the brand identity. Our goal is to create the Blyk brand together with our members, to invite them to take part. I believe this is the best way for us to compete with the traditional “pay-for” mobile networks and to build a real emotional tie with our audience. This idea is carried into the illustrative style used in our launch visuals.
The first step was the logo. This consists of an abstract mobile screen containing a typographical symbol called a caret. You’ll see this above the 6 on your keyboard, it means “insert here”, symbolising the fact that Blyk relies on its members’ willingness to participate. Because on Blyk, in terms of relevance, you get out what you put in. The name “Blyk” itself is deliberately recessive; you’ll usually see it somewhere near the logo in a web address, or as part of an illustration, but we won’t be too uptight about it.
With the logo in place we had to generate a visual identity for the brand. Blyk is an “open code” brand, not a “control brand.” I believe that most important brands these days are built on conversation rather than control. Rather than trying to create a brand that was representative of the youth market, the idea was to allow members to represent themselves. It was time for us to hand the brand over to the audience. Our dozen launch brand visuals were created by young artists, chosen through a competition from the London College of Communications, interpreting the logo in their own way.
Since, at this stage, the business model was still a secret, entrants in the competition were given a brief consisting of the logo, the words “play”, “mobile” and “free”. The response was excellent, with enough work to fill a gallery space in Soho. The Blyk team then judged the work democratically and a dozen winners were chosen. This is not a brand identity that will be ever be finished, but one that was designed to evolve and develop over time. So, as well as a cash prize, all the winners began what was to be an ongoing relationship with the brand.
The animations are just the most recent fruits of these relationships, which Blyk sees as integral to its youth credentials. They were produced by the illustrators, with our extended team providing whatever level of assistance was needed to take their concepts to finished animations.
To summarize, the Blyk brand has a few necessarily fixed parts, the logo and the tone of voice for instance. Beyond that, it has a loose recognisable aesthetic. You could describe it as optimistic. You don’t get this by holding three-day long marketing team meetings and having a hundred people policing the brand. What you do have to do is get young creatives together, share with them the hard core and the brand values, give them proper resources and pay them properly, and let them go.
