One thing you've gotta love about the information revolution is the power it gives people to define brands and products themselves, rather than settling for (usually over-hyped) definitions that they're given. If you think something is good, you can tell your friends. If you think it's crap, you can tell EVERYONE.
Right now on Amazon there are plenty of people doing just that - and if you search for products tagged "crap" this is the rubbish you'll find...
It might seem a little weird but, when you think about it, data's already at the heart of every competitive sport. If no one took score at the footie, cricket or rugby then there wouldn't be any winners - let alone any league tables (though perhaps that's no bad thing if you're a West Brom supporter). And it goes without saying that you'd never be able to break a world record if nothing was recorded in the first place.
With that in mind, my thought for the day is that the explosion of information we're witnessing has the potential to turn all kinds of activities into games - and that brands are perfectly placed to help us play.
Let's take a look at a few brands that are out there doing it already. First up is Nike+, which has turned the solitary pastime of jogging into a social, competitive event, just by letting people collect and compare data about their runs. Suddenly joggers everywhere have a simple way to take on their mates, the rest of the world or just their own personal bests. In 2008 this culminated in Nike's landmark Human Race, which saw close to a million runners around the world compete as one. Imagine applying similar technology to anything from cycling computers to gym equipment, roller skates, punchbags and beyond...
"So far, so sporty" you may say. Well, for something a little different, check out the competition that Fiat are running off the back of their eco:Drive system. By collecting and comparing data about fuel efficiency, to see which test drivers are the most environmentally friendly, Fiat will be soon be crowning London's first eco:Drive Champion.
Whilst I haven't had the chance to see it in practise yet, there are three reasons why I love this idea. Firstly, it's an original, engaging mechanic that allows Fiat to show off the clever kit they've created. Secondly, the social element of comparing information about your driving could add a whole new layer to the experience of owning a car. Think of the value added when a trip to your nan's house becomes a chance to improve your rankings vs the rest of the country? Thirdly, if you can turn environmental friendliness into a game, then the ultimate winner has to be the planet. What if school recycling bins also kept score, so that the kids could compete to win prizes for their schools? And what if we had something similar at home?
Moving on, my last piece of inspiration comes from the world of computer games, where conquering those elusive high-scores has kept many a good man, woman and teenager up all night. Now our consoles are plugged into the net, gamers worldwide can compare their conquests, creating a whole new generation of world record holders - many of them celebrated in Guinness' new Gamer's Edition of their famous Book of Records.
Imagine if other, more prosaic, applications allowed you to compare your data in the same way? Surely Microsoft would seem a little more fun if you could get a world ranking for your typing speed in Word, or the distance travelled by your mouse in Windows? Russell Davies reckons this kind of "Passive Multiplayer Online Gaming" could be a great way for brands to bring a bit of playfulness to people's lives. As he says, "imagine games based on loyalty card points. Or Air Miles. Or Oyster card use. Or frequency of Ocado deliveries." Sounds like fun, huh?
We humans have always been a competitive bunch - and all we need to challenge each other is some information, plus the means to compare it. Now, thanks to a mixture of new data capture devices, plus the world wide web, fresh playgrounds are being unlocked all over the place. In the future, anyone who thinks data dictates dullness had better think again - because the bell just sounded for Information Playtime.
Okay, this is pretty amazing - and a mad sign of things to come. The clever clogs over at MIT have been wowing audiences at the latest TED conference with an incredible piece of technology they call Sixth Sense. The wearable (and highly affordable!) prototype they've developed not only lets you take a hands on approach to interacting with your computer (Minority Report style) but promises breakthrough integration between the real world and the world of data. It's the potential to get instant information on just about anything, just by pointing at it, that gives the technology its name.
I hate to use the word "revolutionary," but there's no doubt that this thing rocks. And it goes without saying that it really could change the way we live, let alone buy stuff (Gartner's Hype Cycle notwithstanding:) and I won't even go into its potential for marketing evaluation...
Take a look:
Looks like Faris' vision of the "Invisible Web" could be closer than we think...
If you wanna keep up to date with stuff, keep up with someone whose up to date. That's what I say.
With that in mind, it's always worth reading Russell Davies' columns in Campaign - and today he mentioned two very tasty data tidbits in his "Totally Made-up and Spurious Awards for Excellence in the Fields of Media and Digitally Type Stuff." One of them, a way of getting your plant to twitter you if it needs watering, I'd heard of before. The other, which won Russell's award for "Delighting with Data", was a new one on me. And that's why my word of the day is "Dopplr".
Dopplr is a social network for regular travellers. You sign up, you tell it what trips you have planned and it gives you handy information about the place you're going and tells you if anyone you know is goingto be nearby (once they're signed up too). I signed up today and it's already given me some interesting info about where to go and where to stay in Paris, for my trip there next week.
Dopplr is a great example of a brand mashing up your personal data with other data out there in the world to provide a useful and interesting service. As I've said before, the future is about brands using data to their customer's advantage, rather than their own. It's also another example of how brands can stoke our interest in analysing ourselves - as proven by Dopplr's annual reports, where you're given an awesome infographic breaking down your yearly travels. Brandon Schauer, of US experiential agency Adaptive Path, describes receiving his report as a "long wow" moment, that's made him more loyal to the brand as a result. Check out the report that Dopplr made for Barrack Obama for an example:
Makes your bank statement, telephone bill and Tesco Clubcard report look kinda dull, doesn't it?! Yep, what all this tells us is that established brands have much to learn about Delighting with Data. At the moment it's the new brands, like Dopplr, who are doing most of the innovating - but surely lastminute.com or BA could have gotten there first, if only they were quicker off the mark? This, of course, is where we come in. If we can make the leap from keeping up with the latest to getting our clients excited about it, then hopefully we won't be stuck reading about the future when we could be out there making it.
This is the first thing I read on my way to work today. Not only has a rather fetching young man/lady just set the record for the youngest ever sex change, but Google is putting a "spy" in my pocket. Bejesus! On the one hand I'm heartened that broader acceptance of gender issues has led to at least one confused young person finding happiness, on the other I'm disappointed in the continued sensationalisation that characterises reporting around personal information. What a morning!
To give you a quick summary of the story, basically Google Latitude is piece of software that allows users to track their friend's whereabouts in 27 countries worldwide once they've installed in on their phone. Users will have to sign up to the service and can agree to give contacts their precise location, their city or no details. Only the most recent information is given and none of the information is stored. Interesting, but not actually new. Yahoo! Fire Eagle has been doing all that stuff for a while now. Followus is a whole service dedicated to offering parents and companies the option to track their kids/workers using their mobile phone data.
What the newspaper reports seem to miss is how useful this kind of information could be to the people. Aside from making meeting up with your mates much easier, once you don't have to tell your phone where you are, then it can quite easily tell you how to get somewhere else, or where the nearest pubs or places of interest are near you. It could also help you with your shopping, find you a nearby cab, or facilitate real world gaming. The reason many people are so worried about sharing information is because they don't realise what the benefits will be. As this chart from the Institute for Insight in the Public Services shows, however, once people know that they'll be getting better service in return then perceptions of data sharing change dramatically.
Data is an unsettling, scary world for a lot of people, but whilst being wary of the issues around supplying personal information we shouldn't forget the benefits that it can bring. For brands, the lesson is to be clear and up front about what kind of information you're gathering, how it will be stored and how people will benefit as a result. Only then will people realise that if Google are putting a spy in your pocket, it's only so he can work for you.
A little while ago, my friend John and I were chatting about the marvels of Last.fm (the social music website that monitors what music you're listening to so it can recommend you new stuff) and John made an interesting observation - that this kind of data doesn't just report on what you do, it tells you who you are.
John's right. Data's not just helping us understand the world, but ourselves. New ways of capturing information about our behaviour are throwing a mirror on our lives like never before; telling us what we like, how we act and what we do, rather than what we think or claim we do (even if why we do some things is still a bit of a mystery!).
In the past, if someone asked me what music I listened to, I might have been biased by what I'd been listening to recently, what was popular or what I thought they liked. Now, Last.fm will tell me what I've really been listening to at the click of a button and how that compares to other people. Naturally, there's a big, long tail, but here's my top artists right now. Maybe they'll help you get to know me a little better?
But why stop at music? Everyone's favourite database, Facebook, has an increasing array of tools to help you analyse the information you put into it. The one I've discovered most recently is TouchGraph, which turns your social network data into a map that lets you see how all your friends are connected. So this is my Facebook life, at a glance. Suddenly, I can tell you that there's about 10 groups of people I mix with online - with my current workmates being the biggest. It'd be interesting to try this again in a few years, to see how much changes!
If friends and relationships are all a bit big for you, why not check out Mycrocosm - a website developed by MIT that helps you share information from the minutiae of daily life, all in the form of simple graphs. Ever feel like analysing where you drink your coffee, how much sleep you get or what you have for dinner? Well this one's for you..!
The quest to understand who we are has been at the cornerstone of enlightenment ever since the Ancient Greeks inscribed the Temple of Apollo with a deceptively simple instruction: "Know Yourself". Now, whether we're keeping track of our listening tastes, our social connections, our little habits, how fast we jog, how safely we drive or how often we have sex, new tools to report on our behaviour are appearing all the time. The question, therefore, is not whether we'll know ourselves better in the future - but how much we'd like to know, whether we'll like what we find and what we'll do about it afterwards.
Personally, I've no idea what I'll learn about me - but I do know it's going to be fun finding out.
Hello there and welcome to my brand spanking new blog. It’s here to expand on the ideas from my thesis “Data is Our Future: Welcome to the Age of Infomagination,” which was recently awarded the President’s Prize in the IPA Excellence Diploma. As the paper’s being published in Campaign in April I’m not allowed to post it online yet - but here’s the abstract, to give you a taste of what’s in store:
“A lot of people find data scary, or just downright dull. Not me. I believe that embracing data is vital for our industry and I’m on a mission to inspire everyone to love it. In this paper I’ll be showing you how the data revolution is changing both the relationship consumers have with brands, the capabilities that clients need and the way agencies must operate. Finally, I’ll be proving that data is alive with creativity and that marketing is destined to take place at the crossroads of information and imagination. Data is our future. Welcome to the Age of Infomagination.”
Whilst I can’t share the full thing just yet, what I can do is expand on some of the themes touched on in my paper, share additional material that didn’t quite make the cut, explore fresh examples of Infomagination in action and suggest some ideas for how brands and agencies can use data more creatively. Should be fun!
The question is, where to start? Well, there’s loads I could talk about but I think I’ll begin by expanding on the part of my paper that explores how people are better placed than ever to collect, analyse and benefit from data in all areas of their lives – and how smart brands are helping them do it.
To kick off, I’d love to share this little clip (from the film Stranger than Fiction), which inspired and amused me whilst I was writing:
Besides proving that Will Ferrell can be relatively sensible from time to time, what the clip reminds us is that data is potentially created with every movement we make – we just lack the means to collect it most of the time. Thanks to advances in technology, however, those means are increasingly within our grasp – and that means great opportunities for brands that can help people collect, analyse and benefit from all that information.
Let’s start with a well established example - Nike+. If you’ve never tried it, Nike+ is one of those pieces of technology that makes you go WOW. Just place a little sensor in your shoe and slot a receiver into your iPod and you can instantly capture, analyse and compare data about your running ability, using the Nike+ website. As a result, Nike and Apple have created the world’s largest running club, connected and powered by their brands - all by giving people the means to collect and compare relevant information; and presenting it in a user friendly, involving and interactive way. If I was a cycling brand, I’d be working on something similar for that community right now. Bike+, anyone…?
Nike+ Equipment, run analysis, comparison against your friends and a mashup with Google Maps that helps you plan your runs (more about mashups in future posts!)
A second example, which I just spotted in the last week or two, is lurking in the ads below. They’re for the Fiat 500’s new eco-drive system, which allows you to collect and analyse data about the way you drive by plugging a USB stick into a socket by the gearstick when you’re driving, then transferring the information to your mac or PC at home – with the promise of up to a 15% reduction in emissions and fuel bills if you follow the personalised tips it gives you. I’m not sure about their ad agency’s decision to lead on the comedy USB sticks, but I certainly admire the underlying technology - and it illustrates the kind of tailored service that data capture allows perfectly.
Past experience proves that drivers aren’t always happy about having their data recorded, however – in June this year, Norwich Union axed its pay as you drive scheme, which would have charged drivers' insurance premiums on the basis of data collected from their vehicle, rewarding those that were less risky drivers. Research showed that fewer than one in ten motorists would be prepared to have a monitoring device fitted even if it reduced their premiums by 30% - with 27% saying they would never install such a device "no matter how much it could save them”. The lesson here is the simplest one in marketing: that the perceived benefit to the customer must outweigh the perceived risk. For most people, the danger of handing over information about where and how fast they’d been driving outweighed the benefits of saving a few quid. At the end of the day, there’s some data that people would rather keep private.
On that note, the final thing I’d like to share with you this time around is Bedpost – a website that helps you track and analyse your sex life. Whilst I’m sure it would be fascinating, it’s not one I’m planning on using myself – though maybe I should forward it on to Belle de Jour?
I could keep going with more serious examples, but I like to keep things concise and to the point - and the point is that we increasingly can and will analyse all sorts of things in our lives, using tools to collect, analyse and compare the information we create; and brands have much to gain by helping people along the way.
This could be by helping us gather data that hasn’t been available to us before, as in the examples above. Alternatively, it could just involve giving people the means to learn from the data that’s collected about them already. For example, in these credit crunched times it would be great to see O2 helping me to analyse my mobile phone bill online to see where I could save, or HSBC giving me basic financial analysis tools on their internet banking, so I could manage my cashflow better. Either way, in the future, brands will learn that that using data to their customers’ advantage is the best way of turning it to their own.
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So that’s it for blog post number one. I’ve still got loads of other things I want to tell you about but I hope you’ve enjoyed this little taster of things to come – and that you’ll be back once I’ve cooked up another piping hot helping of Infomagination.
