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.
Check out this neat video to see how the guys over at Mozilla (the rebel alliance behind the Firefox browser) are developing the tools to help us ordinary folk play with all the data out there in the web, mashing it up into tools we can create and share. The launch video's below - and you can play with version 0.1 for yourself, over at Mozilla Labs...
If you fancy looking even deeper into the crystal ball - and are a fan of badly acted, yet thought provoking stop frame videos - then give this baby a whirl:
In the future, new interfaces will allow us to play with information like plasticine in our hands - freeing us to get stuck in and mould it into whatever shape we like; helping us to answer questions about the world, each other and ourselves; saving us time, money and effort. As this happens, our browsers, the gateways to those stores of information, will increasingly become our oracles and advisors - knowing us better than we do ourselves. Will the future see brand communications aimed not just at us, but them..?
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.
* * *
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.
