BrandKnew September 2014

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07 Dear Friends: As we head towards the tail end of what has been an incredibly hot summer in every sense, its time to introspect, look back andshare. As the Ventures classic would have sung ‘Come September‘. This issue has a lot to offer as we evaluate the 10 Marketing Lessons of the 2014 FIFA World Cup. We also look into why marketing to women remains a hugely gray (and unsuccessful) area. There is also a probe into Virtual Reality and whether that is the future of advertising. We deep dive into the body language of creative thinkers and unearth some really exciting insights. Content Marketing has been the flavor of the season for quite a while and we examine how IKEA has mastered that art. We do touch upon the need for advertisers to investigate the need for cookieless technology.

Native advertising has been doing the rounds for a while and serve a caution to advertisers on how they ought to be used, if at all. There is lots more to soak in, so enjoy the issue. Till next time, Best

Suresh Dinakaran

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Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher Country Head, UK: Sagar Patil Country Head, India: Rohit Unni Digital Marketing Strategist: Mark Cijo Associate: Brand Success: Andre Van Helsdingen Web Specialist: Prasanta Kumar Sahu Online Support: Mahendra Kumar Behera

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CONTENTS

10 Marketing Lessons From the World Cup From Kim K to Karl Lagerfeld, Celebrities are Cashing In on Branded Products The social experiment Virtual Reality: Advertising’s Next Big Thing?

4 reasons native advertising is exploiting brands The Body Language Of Creative Thinkers IKEA: A Brand That Knows How to Connect with Content 4 Reasons marketing to women doesn’t work The Science Of Cool Advertisers should see the value in cookieless technology 7 Questions For Logo Design Legend Ivan Chermayeff The opportunities your business and brand are missing Silicon Valley Is Ruining “Sharing” for Everybody Book, Line & Sinker

10 Marketing Lessons From the World Cup

Josh Haynam

More than 2 Billion World Cup-related searches have been made since the event started on June 12. The opening game scored record ratings for ESPN, outpacing every other Cup dating back to 1930. Here are 10 marketing plays that helped the 2014 World Cup become the most watched in history.

1. Use controversy to your advantage In a country where it can be unsafe to take a taxi and ATMs are too often tools for hackers to rob unwitting tourists, one stadium received $900 million in government funds to be built for the World Cup—and 13 other stadiums were also funded by the state.

Riots and protestors occupied building areas until they were forced out by police. Around the world, news of violence surrounding the Cup spread like juicy gossip. The World Cup took the negativity in stride and used it to boost viewership; as the games progressed, the bad press subsided, replaced by vast audiences.

The lesson: controversy, handled well, can be parlayed into increased audiences.

(For example, when the lyrics site Rap Genius was penalized

by Google for spammy SEO practices back in December 2013, it was a PR nightmare. However, the site took the negative news in stride, using all the press about the incident to build up positive SEO—gaining links from The New York Times, Time Magazine, and hundreds of other top news sites.

Today, the site is ranking higher than ever, and it recently closed a $40 million round of funding.)

2. Highlight personal stories James Rodriguez is the kid from Colombia who burst onto the scene in this World Cup; Neymar went down with a vertebra injury, effectively crippling his team; Lionel Messi couldn’t quite do it all and fell short of glory. Each of these stories is its own mini-event inside the World Cup, providing news on a continuous basis.

Personal stories can take a huge event like the World Cup and bring it down to the level of the individual viewer. Though each game is watched by millions, these stories help make the event feel personal. They provide opportunities for people to become sympathetic toward the event and establish a connection that draws them back to watch again and again.

Personal stories humanize your brand and help customers self-identify with your company. By highlighting individual customer stories, you can help create strong bonds with customers and prospects.

3. Categorize/segment your audience The England-Italy rivalry, the Netherlands-Spain finals rematch, the USA-Ghana comeback match... these are the stories that headline the World Cup. For the countries involved, they help reaffirm patriotism while creating an added element of engagement and flare.

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08 The World Cup inherently benefits from the fact that countries are playing each other, but the principle of categorization or segmentation is nothing new. Being banded together with those who are like us creates a feeling of camaraderie with others in our category, boosting morale and creating a sense of belonging.

In short, it helps define and create an audience.

Cup that stick with us. From the official World Cup song to the thousands of memes made for Tim Howard after his masterful performance against Portugal, the World Cup was ubiquitous.

You too can build memorable snippets that represent your brand well, and use them as a way to remain top-of-mind among your audiences. Snippets can be songs, jingles, quizzes, videos... anything that is fun and short.

4. Have a clear goal All World Cup marketing starts and ends with the games.

They have one goal, to get more people watching. Every single piece of marketing that gets created for the World Cup aims to drive more viewership.

Likewise, in your marketing, it’s extremely useful to know what the overarching goal of your efforts is so you can create every marketing item with that goal in mind.

Knowing what your main goal is and sticking to it really helps narrow your focus, and avoid scope-creep (what happens when your marketing is all over the place).

(For example, at Interact we have the goal of getting new customers to create a free account with us because we know that 10% of free users upgrade to a paid plan. Every new article, tutorial, and email is aimed at guiding new users to create a free account.)

5. Understand the public perception of your product The opening act at the World Cup opening ceremony in Brazil was performed by Pitbull and Jennifer Lopez—CubanAmerican and Puerto Rican-American, respectively. The closing act was Shakira, who is from Colombia.

The public may not necessarily know the differences among those countries, and since Pitbull, Jennifer Lopez, and Shakira have international recognition, it made sense for them to perform.

The lesson here is that your audience doesn’t need every single detail to be perfect; referencing things in a way that coincides with your customers’ perceptions is more important than being 100% accurate.

6. Remove barriers, but set boundaries Head to FIFA.com and you’ll find stats on every match, player, and country involved in the Cup. Hundreds of pages of information are available to be referenced in news and review articles around the world.

FIFA makes it easy for writers to create content about the World Cup, also requiring attribution for the source of the information, which further cements the FIFA and World Cup brands.

Be prepared for your brand to get shared, and help your fans to do so. Product reviews and articles drive the best traffic, and having the right assets available will have your brand ready for when those user-generated content is created.

7. Create snippets worth remembering Chants, songs, memes, images—all parts of the World

8. Create content tailored for your audience The promotional video for the United States soccer team features celebrities calling our nation to action, with small clips of soccer shown in between. The promotional video for Germany, on the other hand, is composed entirely of football clips woven together with music.

The marketers responsible for these videos understand their audiences.

In the US, soccer is just beginning to catch on as a popular sport, and very few people know who is on the national team. That’s why they use recognizable public figures to build interest in the sport.

In Germany, football is a way of life, kids train to play the sport from the age of six, and the team members are considered national heroes. Their video focuses on the pure sport and doesn’t need celebrities.

9. Use what you have in various ways Highlights, team profiles, slide shows, and reviews—all ways that the World Cup has effectively re-used its most valuable asset—the games themselves. Each game is sliced and diced and redistributed in various ways to maximize the impact.

Similarly, your best marketing pieces can be cut up, rebuilt, and republished on different platforms to maximize reach.

For example, a great article and be turned into a SlideShare, recorded as a video, and turned into an infographic. Each piece will reach a different segment of the audience. Once you know you’ve got a winner, milk it for all its worth.

10. Partner up with complementary people A list of drinks from each country, comedians mocking the art of flopping, World Cup-inspired Adidas websites—those are just a few of the ways the World Cup has expanded its reach by forging partnerships with different industries.

Every business has complimentary companies (other businesses that reach a similar customer group, but with a different product). Forging partnerships with complementary businesses is great for both parties, because you can share audiences and content.

Josh Haynam is the co-founder of Interact, a place for creating beautiful and engaging quizzes that generate email leads. He writes about new ways to connect with customers and build trust with them.

From Kim K to Karl Lagerfeld, Celebrities are Cashing In on Branded Products Sheila Shayon

It’s not enough to just be a superstar these days, with millions of adoring fans and multitudes of followers on social media.

Instead, celebrities from all walks of life are turning their personal brands into actual businesses with products and services that you never knew you needed.

Kardashian, according to Forbes, will take home around $85 million of that thanks to her near 50 percent stake in the game. While the game “is ridiculous. It’s laughable. It grates on your nerves after awhile,” the Washington Post reports, “it’s nearly impossible to look away.”

Case in point: Kim Kardashian’s blockbuster mobile game “Kim Kardashian: Hollywood.” The Sims-like game is sitting at No. 1 on the iTunes free app chart and reportedly brought in $200 million in the few months that it’s been live.

Reflecting the Kardashian brand, now a multimillion-dollar empire, the app lets users achieve various levels of gameplay on their way to becoming an “A-list” celebrity with Kim as a guide. In-app purchases of Kim Coins drive revenue through the roof for the fairly simple app, which has a 5-star rating.

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While Kim and the rest of the Kardashian clan are no strangers to licensed products, they likely have a little ways to go before they reach Britney Spears’ level of branded products.

From lunchboxes and dolls to an expansive perfume line, Spears’ next move is her own lingerie line, “The Intimate Britney Spears.” Set to launch September 9 in the US and September 26 in Europe, the collection’s priciest item is $79 and includes lingerie sets, vintage-inspired bustiers and kimonos and loungewear.

- World Cup superstar Cristiano Ronaldo just launched a footwear line, CR7. The line, which is made in Ronaldo’s home country, Portugal, will be available in February and features the athlete’s name stamped on the leather and the brand name stamped on the sole. Very coy, Ronaldo. The footwear line follows Ronaldo’s CR7 underwear launch last year, which will get a second collection next week.

- Karl Lagerfeld will be immortalized in doll form with his very own Barbie Lagerfeld, a limited-edition doll being launched this fall by Mattel. Part of the Barbie Collector series, Lagerfeld’s doll is dressed in Lagerfeld’s signature tailored black jacket, a white shirt with a high collar and skinny black jeans. Accessories include a necktie, dark sunglasses and black ankle boots. Très chic!

- Shoe designer Christian Louboutin debuted his $50-a-bottle nail polish line. Rouge, the collection’s redhot signature color modeled after the brand’s signature red soles, debuts August 8 at Saks, Nordstrom, Neimans and other department stores followed by the entire line on August 30.

- Following in the footsteps of Gwyneth Paltrow,

Lively

Blake

launched her own lifestyle site, Preserve, an Americana-inspired online marketplace that sells goods and features blogs, videos and recipes. The site was described by the actress as “part magazine, part e-commerce hub, part philanthropic endeavor and above all, a place to showcase the power of imagination, ingenuity, quality, and above all, people.”

- Kate Bosworth has partnered with Samantha Russ, on the iPhone app Style Thief, which lets users “snap and steal” someone’s clothing by snapping a photo and letting the app search for where to buy it. Bosworth is CMO and will curate special collections for the app and court brand and retail partnerships banking on her previous success with JewelMint and her Cher Coulter in 2010. The app may also lead to branded merchandise down the line.

Sheila Shayon, Social Media Blogger, Exec Producer, Shift Evangelist

The social experiment Brands are learning that social media is not just a free marketing channel, but requires a content plan and nimble processes to take advantage of the constantly changing platforms.

Lucy Fisher amassed 40,000 subscribers since its launch in March, just before Mothers’ Day, and Burch is confident that it will reach its target of 75,000 by the end of the year.

A home manicure tutorial video, for example, had 9,000 views, which had a demonstrable effect on sales for Asda’s George Gel Pro nail polish.

Burch says Asda has been careful to recruit only true fans on social media channels: “It’s better to connect with the right people. If you focus too much on volume, it becomes too transactional.”

He adds that Asda’s video tutorials have real utility and that the impact on sales are a positive side effect of increased engagement.

Ever since the advent of social networks, marketers have been striving for the formula to translate online interest into brand objectives. Today, a social strategy that is embedded in the company is becoming increasingly important, given the extent to which customers expect to engage with brands in social media, as well as the constant changes that social networks make to their user experiences and paid ad formats.

Coffee brand Taylors of Harrogate has also invested in specialist skills to create social video content. Head of brand communications Dom Dwight has been working with online content studio Rubber Republic and says it is important to treat social not as a bolt-on activity but integrated with all marketing channels and has buy-in from the entire business.

Facebook, for example, recently came under fire for manipulating users’ news feeds to test how they respond to posts prompting more positive or negative emotions. It has also been criticised by marketers for reducing the frequency with which posts from brands are shown to users.

Dom Burch, one of Asda’s most experienced social media specialists, claims that the supermarket’s 1.3 million ‘fans’ represent some of its most loyal and valuable customers. But the senior director for marketing innovation and new revenue admits that he has been trying to “work out” YouTube for five years with mixed success, until now.

The supermarket’s current social focus has been developed with Gleam Futures, which Burch describes as a “YouTube talent agency”.

“It’s about working with YouTubers who have huge influence, and harnessing their followings,” he explains. However, they have to trust these individuals’ connection with their audiences.

He describes TV ads as being a huge firework to draw attention, while social media is a slow-burning bonfire, housing content designed to keep momentum going.

“These guys produce regular, lively content. We learnt to editorially let go, to let the brand take a back seat. It’s important not to be too forced or clunky in the content style.”

Dwight agrees with Burch on the importance of telling genuinely interesting stories, in which the brand does not necessarily take centre stage. He points out that, compared to TV, the creation of social video can be more cost-effective.

The resulting videos have helped to kickstart Asda’s Mum’s Eye View channel on YouTube, which houses content such as fashion, cooking and make-up tutorials. The channel has

He says: “Social video has been born out of the entrepreneurial internet. The costs work their way up rather than starting from a high, fixed level.”

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12 As Facebook rolls out new video ad formats and metrics, mobile network Three is working with online video distribution firm Ebuzzing to develop a strategy for social video. Social media manager at Three Daniel Lee says that although a long-term strategy is always needed, it is important to capture the cultural zeitgeist and to be part of current community conversations.

“It’s about everyday moments, life moments and moments of entertainment. Social activity combines campaign work with live and unpredictable elements,” explains Lee. Online takeaway service Just Eat found exactly that during its experiments with social during the World Cup. Rachael Pollard, UK head of digital and CRM, says that Twitter has taken over as the primary social channel for the company, owing to its immediacy and the fact that it allows the brand to play on events.

“Increasingly, [social] is about speed, real-time elements and being in the moment,” she says. The social media team learned how much more valuable it was to tweet during halftime rather than just before a game. “We also had success in promoting early ordering, by warning that it would be busy later,” she adds.

She notes that there are also peak times for takeaway food during entertainment shows on Friday and Saturday nights.

“You have to be online when your customers are,” she warns.

to recent work with social platform Spredfast for its 4Music channel, whereby a ‘Tweet to Beat’ talent contest enabled viewers to vote for their favourite act.

“People really engaged with the interactive format. In pop culture topicality is key. The content almost creates itself, and it sparks off conversation. I think social and TV is going to boom,” she says.

To make the most of the real-time nature of social channels, many businesses have restructured their operations. O2’s head of social Kristian Lorenzon explains that the mobile network has made that move to focus on content creation and to enable it to act “more like a publisher or a newsroom”.

He says: “The number-one reason for this was agility.

Traditional media had the benefit of longer lead times.”

He also notes that O2 serves around 5,000 customers a week on social channels and that this has led to both cost savings and increased customer satisfaction.

However, how much a brand should invest in social will vary.

Colin Lewis, director of marketing at airline BMI Regional, says that agencies used to tell him to do social media but they could not identify BMI’s core customers. He says: “Typically, our customers are business people over 35 and somebody else has paid for their flight. No amount of tweeting or facebooking can help with that.”

He explains that the airline uses social as a tool for communicating information about destinations and for customer service updates. “We have to be realistic,” he says.

“Is my core customer base lying awake at night engaging with the brand on Facebook? Of course not.”

Some companies are fortunate, however, in that they operate in spaces that automatically attract highly engaged followings across social media. Gracia Amico, chief executive at PetsPyjamas, says people with pets are naturally engaged and prolific sharers – especially of photos of dogs and cats.

Amico, the former global ecommerce director for fashion brand Hobbs, says that she also plans to make more of PetsPyjama’s own social network – Social Petwork.

Pollard’s team used Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud to enable real-time listening around the World Cup. Although Just Eat operates in 13 countries, the UK is the dominant market and her team can test strategies and invest in and negotiate deals on tools for their counterparts in other countries.

Laura Cripps, social media manager at Lucozade Energy, also believes that an adaptable and ‘always on’ approach is key for promotional activity on social channels.

She adds: “Some of our best content comes from our fans.

The UGC [user-generated content] we receive is priceless, and our reactive posts have usually been the most popular.”

The brand has been working with Twitter analytical tool SocialBro since April to find the best time to tweet, and to help shape its publishing plan for social content. “To be flexible and reactive, you need to understand your brand compass so when that time comes you’ll know if an opportunity is right for the brand,” she points out.

Melissa Pine, marketing director at Box Television, which is owned by Bauer Media and Channel 4, also agrees that social media is “a grand experiment”. However, she points

Guy Blaskey, founder and director of dog food and treats brand Pooch & Mutt, points out that for a small business, activity on social can be cost-effective. “In terms of return on investment, we did a Valentine’s Day promotion based on the notion of showing love for your dog. It was easy to measure as it was almost entirely on Facebook. It resulted in around 4,000 sales in one day,” he says.

Meanwhile, Krishnan Chatterjee, head of strategic marketing at global IT services company HCL Technologies claims that a community that the brand has created on LinkedIn and YouTube called CIO Straight Talk has demonstrated results to the tune of several million US dollars. “It results in quality leads to our website,” he claims, pointing out that a recent recruitment campaign run on Twitter led to 88,000 applicants for five jobs, with the cost of the campaign equating to less than recruiting one person via traditional means.

HCL is not the only B2B brand to have seen success with social channels. Blake Cahill, global head of digital and social marketing at electronics company Philips, says that operating across both B2B and B2C sectors has helped the healthcare and technology brand to remain focused on the audience in its various forays into social media. “Many companies do social just to be on the platforms,“ he says.

“We try to think in terms of the reason for being there.”

Cahill’s role involves sending a global editorial calendar to local teams, so that the brand can ensure reach and consistency are maintained. “We call it the responsive newsroom,” he says. “It’s about reacting to demand and speeding up when necessary. You want a drumbeat of content with spikes around the editorial calendar. To keep this going, you do need a strategy and a plan.”

Jeremy Brook, global lead for digital strategy at Heineken, agrees. Working with WPP-owned Fabric, the brewer found that high-quality content is more important than maintaining a constant stream.

He adds that while social has “come of age”, with paid, earned and owned elements frequently coming together to produce results, it is a falsehood to view social activity as a type of reactive, ‘on the go’ marketing. “It has to be planned and considered,” he warns.

In terms of whether you can achieve direct sales on social, it links back to mobile. It is still a challenge to get transactions on mobile – there are fears around security and it can be annoying to put in your details. But behaviour will shift.

Econsultancy best practice: Matt Owen Matt Owen Head of social, Econsultancy Companies using social media fall into two main categories: those who sell and those who do not.

Head of media strategy, TBG Digital

On the ‘no selling’ side of the fence, we have brands that fire out messages to promote affinity and engagement, or to act as a customer service portal, with return on investment based on lowering costs. Many brands shy away from mentioning their products, feeling that they must earn the ‘right to sell’ by entertaining customers with pictures of kittens before revealing that they are in fact an industrial spigot manufacturer.

One mistake companies make with social is to use it as a free media channel. It needs to be about building one-to-one engagement at scale. The key is not being afraid to engage the audience in the way they want to be engaged. It’s about ‘adapting to’ rather than ‘speaking at’ the audience. Brands often seek to find engaged communities around a particular topic or define who are the influencers.

Then there are the overt sellers. Selling takes the form of a legion of staff empowered to use social channels for nurturing leads. Unfortunately, there also seems to be an underlying fear that anyone with ‘sales’ in their job title cannot be trusted to use Twitter responsibly. We see cases where content is prewritten for them or guidelines are overly strict and a lot of the joy is sucked away.

Social media is not a place only to house content or ‘free’ marketing. Say you want to talk to a board-level individual as a B2B organisation. What are you going to say in 140 characters on Twitter? A big purchase or a difficult decision will mean there is a need to click through to a content hub.

Often social content needs to be connected to other assets.

Both approaches are process-heavy, requiring staff training, frameworks for escalating problems and content ratification by brand departments. This led to the infamous but not uncommon situation at cheese brand Président, where one tweet allegedly took 48 days to be approved.

Sponsored viewpoint: Louise Neale

Each industry, at a top level, also needs to think about how to avoid approaching social media from a siloed perspective. It’s taking time for this message to get through to organisations, but it is happening. Projects are also more focused around owned, paid and earned media working together. In many cases it is social channels driving this change.

Working out how social impacts the bottom line is a challenge.

There are not many tools that track the user journey across all touch points, but you can tie offline to email and match this to a social media user name or ID, and you can also append this to social conversation data. We have built our own methodology to overcome the challenges around identification and data protection.

However, there is also a lot of noise in social and there are challenges around natural language processing and understanding the volumes of content from users. Such challenges aside, social can offer an in-depth understanding of how you or your industry are being talked about in real time.

Some of our clients are creating short videos for Facebook and Instagram; Facebook recently brought out additional analytics for video posts. It makes it easier to see if people are clicking or viewing, but I have not seen many really good video-based campaigns.

When you are using Facebook, content has more social context than it does on YouTube, and you can add to this the fact that more and more people are spending more minutes of their day on social networks on mobile. The opportunity is there because people do use Facebook on mobile. I think we’ll also see TV becoming more integrated into social.

So, how do we stay up to the minute? The answer is simple but requires deeper thinking about the way social media is used to sell. With a few exceptions, saying ‘buy this now’ is considered bad form, but just because you are not selling openly, it does not mean you are not selling.

Social media is always selling. Look at Oreo’s ‘You can still dunk in the dark’ creative, tweeted during an electrical blackout at the 2013 Super Bowl. It was as effective as a TV spot and probably slightly more measurable. Oreo could have tweeted copy but it had an optimised image, emblazoned with its distinctive logo. How could the team create this so quickly otherwise?

The key here is that agility still requires process. Adidas is a great example of this. Someone wins sportsman of the year – cue image of the winner appearing on Twitter. This trend is increasing, as a flurry of activity around Uruguay footballer Luis Suarez’s biting incident at the World Cup proved.

These companies have two things that make them stand out.

Adidas has hundreds of images of sports stars on standby, so it takes perhaps a minute to put together this kind of content.

The second element is more complex, but important: trust.

Businesses facing up to the realities of life as a digital business talk about transparency and openness, but it is important to remember that this is not only customer-facing.

It needs to be internal, which means trusting social teams to understand brand voice and react to events without having to wade through layers of approval. Agility and personalisation can be built off the back of process and involve a lot of data work to scale appropriately, but a simple, personal touch makes a huge difference.

Virtual Reality:

Advertising’s Next Big Thing?

First Movers Coca-Cola, Nissan, HBO Bet on Tech’s Future for Marketing Cotton Delo

You’re on a wooden plank. Pivoting, you find yourself on the precipice of a deep pit. Taking unsteady steps, you cross with your arms outstretched for balance. You teeter to the end, exhaling in relief—and are told to about-face and plunge in.

None of this is real, a clearly evident fact. Motion sensors are strapped to your ankles and $39,000 black goggles, made by a company called NVIS, whose customers include the U.S. Army and Navy, cover most of your face and sit heavily on your head. But still, you’re terrified.

So you cheat and close your eyes to jump.

It’s a bit like the leap marketers such as Coca-Cola, HBO and Nissan are taking into the nascent world of virtual reality. Well aware of the hurdles agencies, brands and the media must overcome first—not the least of which are the current cost of the technology and the cumbersomeness of the equipment— these first-movers are wagering on a marketing future where goggles can be bought at Walmart for $300 and brands can deliver visceral consumer experiences. Imagine Budweiser

taking you behind the plate at the World Series or Pepsi giving you a virtual front-row seat at a Beyoncé concert.

But since marketers still need to provide the hardware, their efforts are currently confined to experiential marketing at large events, like the South by Southwest interactive festival and the Detroit Auto Show. However, the pace of innovation is likely to accelerate as new uses emerge—if, of course, more eyeballs migrate to VR technologies.

That may start to happen soon. Research firm MarketsandMarkets forecasts that manufacturers of VR and augmented-reality hardware—including smart glasses and head-mounted displays—will generate $1.06 billion in revenue globally by 2018.

“Everyone who does something [in VR] now, for the next five years, is going to be inventing something,” said Aaron Clinger, technical director at Venables Bell & Partners. “That’s really exciting for those of us who have seen the mobile and web revolution.”

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Thanks to Coke Virtual reality could be transformative for the ad industry.

Instead of interrupting people with ads, marketers could sponsor virtual experiences people actually seek out. But first, the ad industry has to understand this new playground.

“The mistake every new medium makes is trying to take what the old medium was. They read books on the radio at the beginning of radio; in the beginning of cinema, they shot plays. There’s a completely new form of storytelling that has to evolve for this new [VR] canvas,” said Chris Milk, a filmmaker and music-video director. Last year he shot a short film of a Beck performance for automaker Lincoln’s rebranding campaign. He also created a rendering of it in 360 degrees with six GoPro cameras.

Consider Coca-Cola’s approach. Last month it staged a VR experience at the World Cup, where participants entered a replica of the locker room at Brazil’s Maracana Stadium; then, after putting on VR Oculus Rift goggles, they moved from the locker room to the pitch and played on the field, all without getting up from their seat.

March. “Today social networks are about sharing moments, but tomorrow it will be about sharing experiences.”

Facebook isn’t the only tech giant in the race. Sony is working toward a commercial release of its VR headset, “Project Morpheus,” and Samsung is also reportedly developing VR goggles that connect to its phones and tablets.

Assuming that VR headsets become less bulky and more available to consumers at an affordable price point in 2015, the zeal among advertisers to test the technology could grow intense.

Currently, higher-end headsets used by academic researchers and institutional laboratories can go for as much as $50,000.

But the Oculus Rift development kit—aimed at developers, not consumers—costs $350 for pre-order, and Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe told PC enthusiast site Ars Technica that Mr. Zuckerberg wants to sell the consumer version for the “lowest cost possible.”

“The ones that are currently on the market haven’t hit that sweet spot between functionality and price yet, but Oculus is getting pretty close,” said Sun Joo (Grace) Ahn, an assistant professor at the University of Georgia who researches VR. The most likely suspects to take the lead on developing VR experiences are brands like General Electric and Audi, which have cultivated reputations as early adopters of technology.

However, the usefulness will be limited for other brands, said David Berkowitz, chief marketing officer of Publicis Groupe’s MRY. JC Penney, for example, can successfully sell products online via jcpenney.com and Pinterest without setting up a virtual store, which, realistically, consumers may not want to spend their time browsing.

There’s an obvious application for movie studios and record labels, which are already in the business of creating content that people seek out, but for more pedestrian categories, it might be harder.

Matt Wolf, Coca-Cola’s head of global gaming, said there’s branding within the experience, but the more valuable aspect is that viewers are getting access to something that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. “It’s about the authenticity of being inside that stadium,” he said. “Yes, thanks to Coke.”

Then there are business-to-business applications. Already one marketer, insurer Travelers, is using VR to train employees in worker safety by virtually showing the consequences of not following the rules. But on a broader scale, market forces are at work to bring VR to the masses. Oculus is probably the most recognizable brand name in VR, due to Facebook’s deal in March to acquire the maker of the eponymous VR goggles for $2 billion.

The Oculus Equation The details of Facebook’s plans for an integration are still unknown, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg has conveyed in no uncertain terms that his vision is to use Oculus’s tech for social networking—and that his company is making a bet on the next emergent computing platform after mobile. (Which would you prefer: hanging out with your faraway friend in a virtual environment or keeping tabs on her via her occasional status updates?)

“Oculus has the potential to be the most-social platform ever,” Mr. Zuckerberg said when announcing the deal in

“If you’re a packaged-goods company, I don’t think people are really going to want to wander the aisles of a virtual grocery store,” said Aaron Richard, innovation strategist at San Francisco agency Heat.

Utility vs. novelty Before brands make big investments in creating experiences, a broad swath of consumers must adopt VR technology and its immersive, 360-degree world. That’s a big if, but numerous startups, filmmakers and production companies are betting they will.

Aiming to prove that VR isn’t just for first-person-shooter gamers, Montreal-based filmmakers Félix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphael have created “Strangers—A Moment with Patrick Watson,” an eight-minute piece showing a pianist in his apartment with his dog, playing music.

After the glowing reception of that effort, the duo decided to dedicate themselves to VR work, developing a 360-degree camera system they may eventually seek to license out.

They’ve had discussions with ad agencies interested in branded experiences, but Mr. Lajeunesse said they’re more focused on the music industry right now.

While it’s bound to be gamers driving the adoption of VR headsets, a larger consumer market might not be far behind— especially as studios and developers churn out different types of content. And brands already honing their VR chops may have a first-mover advantage.

“There’s a learning curve, and it’s different from anything else you’ve done before,” said Dario Raciti, director at OMD’s Zero Code. “Everything is like starting from zero and trying to figure out what is the best experience for the consumer, whether it’s a game, live action, concerts or CGI.”

on the project, rendering the 360-degree scene in CGI. Framestore’s head of digital, Mike Woods, said the company has been flooded by requests for VR work since then, and they’ve accepted some projects under non-disclosure clauses, some of which are with marketers.

Despite the newness of this type of work, the cost is relatively low, according to Mr. Woods. “It would fall comfortably within the budget costs of 90 seconds of any sort of high-quality fully CGI TV spot.” He declined to give a specific figure, but a production executive put the price of a 90-second CGI spot at $1 million to $2 million.

Several agencies Ad Age contacted reported that they’re working on VR projects but aren’t at liberty to discuss details.

Venables Bell, for example, is working on a sports-related project for a client in which putting on Oculus goggles would place the viewer on a playing field in an athlete’s world.

But from another point of view, VR could be another muchhyped flash in the pan. There are strong uses for this sophisticated tech in disciplines ranging from gaming and military training to education and behavioral therapy (for people suffering from PTSD or even arachnophobia). That doesn’t mean there’s a niche for marketing, however.

In Mr. Berkowitz’s view, augmented reality is an example of a technology that has not lived up to its hype, even though brands continue to play with it, and VR could follow the same path. (A recent high-profile example of branded AR work is McDonald’s’ World Cup promotion; it transformed its fry boxes, making them into the entry point for a game on a soccer-themed app.)

He pointed to the buzz around Yelp’s AR feature “Monocle,” which lets its app users see nearby venues in the direction they’re pointing their phones. It debuted with great fanfare in 2009—a Gizmodo post entitled “Augmented Reality Yelp Will Murder All Other iPhone Restaurant Apps, My Health” was in the mix of coverage—and then fell off people’s radar.

“You realized it was so much less effective than just looking at a two-dimensional map and seeing everything in one place,” Mr. Berkowitz said. “It was a fun party trick for a week. Agency folks like me went and showed clients.”

For any new technology, the question is whether the utility will outlive the novelty. “You need a use case for it beyond the PR alone,” he said.

VR and marketing today Entertainment marketers are a natural fit for VR, as HBO has learned. Its 90-second rendering of the 700-foot ice wall from “Game of Thrones”—which has sound effects to reproduce wind and actual shaking from the floor to enhance the experience for viewers as they ascend in a virtual elevator— is on a world tour. As of June, it had been seen by 83,000 people in cities including Oslo, Belfast and Austin, Texas.

Visual-effects studio Framestore worked for three months

Other brand VR work includes an experience developed

by AKQA London that let attendees at last year’s Tokyo Motor Show and January’s Detroit Auto Show configure a Nissan IDx concept car. Visitors donned Oculus goggles and navigated virtual landscapes, where they had to make decisions. Choosing whether they were ninja or samurai, for example, would determine what kind of engines their cars would have.

Seeing is believing When David Sackman first experienced the unnerving virtual pit in which participants walk across that thin plank at Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, he became fascinated by the technology and the sensations it can produce.

“Your rational mind cannot take over,” said Mr. Sackman, CEO of the market research firm Lieberman Research Worldwide. “Your non-conscious is engaged.”

He started visiting the lab about a year and a half ago and tried out some of the lab’s social experiments designed to affect human behavior. For example, cutting down a redwood tree in a virtual forest would cause birds to fly away and the woods to become silent. After that experience, people might use fewer paper towels when cleaning up a spill.

From there, a business idea started to germinate. Mr. Sackman now has an “applied VR” division dedicated to working with brands on VR solutions. It’s already done a project for Travelers Insurance to develop a workers’ safety product. In that experience, rendered by VR software company WorldViz, the viewer flies around a warehouse and saves five co-workers from various injury possibilities, such as getting run over by a forklift. The idea is that workers who go through the experience will be inclined to take more precautions in the real world.

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For now, the projects are constrained to venues where companies can make VR headsets available; they’re not targeting homes.

Obviously in a year or two when Sony and Samsung and Oculus release goggles for home use at $200 to $300 each, and they can be used with the 30 or 40 million home-gaming systems, then it gives you a broader array of applications,” Mr. Sackman said, noting that it’s probably a six-figure commitment to build a VR product with Lieberman right now. “But we’re confining ourselves to things that are doable today.”

already in production.

Marketing and Megadeath Jaunt’s demo reel—seen via Oculus goggles—runs the gamut of uses for live-action VR. A viewer sits in the San Diego backyard of Megadeth guitarist Dave Mustaine and listens to him play; stands on a promontory overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge; and finds herself in the middle of a horror film, below decks on a ship, where she hears screams and catches glimpses of a squid-like creature at the end of a corridor.

The business model is still being worked out. Lieberman is barred from selling the workplace safety product to Travelers’ competitors, but may sell it to companies with manufacturing facilities or factories. In some cases, the intellectual property will be proprietary to the client, but where there’s a broader commercial application, it may be sold to a wider market, with the corporate partner getting a share of the revenue.

Mr. Sackman said Lieberman is having conversations with Silicon Valley venture-capital firms, though the company hadn’t been looking to raise money.

“Our belief is, in a couple of years, we’ll certainly spin it out into a separate company,” he said.

Zombies may lead the way The VR ecosystem—including companies focused on display, like Oculus, and startups developing motion-sensing and content-creation technologies—is growing as venture-capital money flows in that direction. Oculus VR, for example, raised $75 million a few months before Facebook bought it.

Some are already thinking about how marketing could become a part of their business, even if it’s not their core focus.

Take Survios, a Los-Angeles based company with a fullmotion VR prototype that includes a head-mounted display and tracking for the entire body. It recently raised a $4 million round and intends to bring a product to market next year.

While Survios’ focus is on games and the physical dynamics of game play, co-founder James Iliff already sees marketing applications in it—even with a zombie game.

“All that software and design work focused on making your hand look like it naturally wraps around a gun and being able to pick up objects with two hands—that nuance can be applied to a vacation simulator where you’re on a beach and want to pick up a seashell,” he said. One can easily imagine that scenario for Norwegian Cruise Lines’ “The sea is calling” campaign, which shows people in TV ads picking up shells to hear the voice of the sea in them.

Mr. Iliff said brands have approached Survios, but it has declined those contracts because it does not have capacity for short-term projects.

Then there’s Palo Alto-based Jaunt, which is aiming its 360-degree camera and the software that goes with it at content creators in Hollywood and elsewhere. The company recently raised $6.8 million from investors including U.K. media conglomerate British Sky Broadcasting, which Jaunt is

Scott Broock, the company’s VP-content, said he met with various CMOs in Cannes last month and showed them the demo with the idea of seeding their imaginations for future marketing programs. He said he believes the future of VR for marketing will be in thrilling branded experiences—think Ken Block’s “Gymkhana” viral videos where the name of sponsor DC Shoes barely appears—and behind-the-scenes access.

One of Jaunt’s content partners is already thinking about VR as a marketing tool. New Deal Studios is making a feature film scheduled for release next year, and it’s shooting a few extra segments with a Jaunt camera. The idea is to build excitement around the release of the film among tech’s early adopters who are likely to have VR headsets starting next year.

“You have a long production process on a feature film,” said New Deal Studios CEO Shannon Gans. “But when you’re creating virtual reality, you can give people an experience and a community.”

Ultimately, the best applications of VR in entertainment and marketing are probably still to be uncovered. But futurists are already seeing the possibilities.”This is a completely new platform for art, gaming, storytelling and communication,” said Mr. Milk. “I think what it has that’s different than almost any other form of media and art is that it truly is immersive and gives you a sense of presence.”

Cotton Delo is Advertising Age’s San Francisco bureau chief and covers digital media and technology. She reports on social-media companies like Facebook and Twitter. Before coming to Ad Age she was an editor at AOL and had previously worked at Patch. She has a B.A. in English from Yale.

4 reasons native advertising is exploiting brands Jonathan Rose

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As content marketing continues to take over the popular marketing psyche, native advertising in particular is fastbecoming the most popular conception of the practice.

Native advertising has been billed as something of a panacea for brands who are seeing diminishing returns from traditional advertising that is blatant, irrelevant and overtly salesy. The promise of native advertising for brands has been the opportunity to access audiences that can be subtly exposed to branded content that has been published ‘natively’ and are therefore increasingly likely to pay attention. Off the back of this promise, a $44billion industry (source: Custom Content Council) has developed, with publishers, agencies, content creators and technology providers all clamouring to join the goldrush of this new opportunity.

However, whilst the spike in interest around native advertising has led to all kinds of collective back-patting, no one is able to answer the most important question of all – is native advertising making any money for the brands that do it?

Curiously, the very same voices that are quick to trumpet the merits of native advertising’s impressive creative or how it’s ushering in an era of novel agency models go noticeably silent as soon as anyone mentions the tricky issue of ROI.

Why is this?

1) Native advertising measurement is unstandardised Although marketers are just about coming round to the importance of measuring content marketing, native advertising practitioners are still struggling to standardise what to measure and how to measure content that is natively placed.

Attend any marketing conference and you’ll continue to see editors, agency bods and marketers, battle over whether native advertising should be measured with editorial metrics, web metrics or social metrics.

Until native advertising measurement is standardised, brands will struggle to benchmark their efforts in any consistent way.

2) Native advertisers only measure engagement, not conversions As with content marketing, the success of a piece of native advertising is invariably measured in terms of engagement metrics such as dwell rates, visits, shares, retweets, linkbacks, scroll depth, etc.

These are all lovely but they must be tied to actual user

behaviour as it relates to the brand. Engagement metrics need to be linked closely to business metrics (i.e. more conclusive actions that can be ultimately tied to a conversion or retention decision).

3) Publishers are controlling the brand’s purchase funnel In most examples of native advertising, brands have limited explicit messaging beyond a logo where it can’t do little harm to the publisher’s branding.

As such, the unique voice of the brand – the voice that communicates the value proposition that ultimately helps drive the consumer into the conversion path – is completely lost. Without this bridge from the content to something actionable, the consumer may never make it to the sales funnel. (Buzzfeed is a good example of this – there is never any click-through to a Buzzfeed partner’s website).

Native advertising needs to lead consumers to a brand’s owned property so they can track inbound traffic and the customer journey thereafter. As it currently stands, brands largely rely upon whatever metrics a publisher is prepared to relinquish. These are typically quite limited in terms of actionable insights and rarely concord with the brand’s internal (read: commercial) goals.

4) Ethics and aesthetics are privileged over mature conversations about ROI Most serious debate around native advertising centres on either how good it looks or the rights and wrongs of doing it.

This is not good enough.

A brand is a business and businesses exist to make money.

Quite simply, for native advertising to be of any real benefit it has to be either demonstrably generating revenues or saving money for a brand. Until the native advertising industry is prepared to talk openly about this, brands being able to measure native advertising’s effect on either critical business outcome seems unlikely.

The native advertising boom is generating considerable revenue for publishers, content creators, agencies and technology providers.

However, unless native advertising grows up and starts proving its effect on the bottom line, brands are doomed to be paying out a lot with precious little to show for it in return.

Jonny Rose is head of content for Idio

The Body Language Of Creative Thinkers Could your body language during an interview give away the fact that you’re dumb and unimaginative? Stanford scientists think so.

John Brownlee You can tell a lot about a person’s mental state just by looking at their body language. Are they laid back, or fidgety? Are they happy, or sad? Are they confident, or shy? But one thing you can’t detect is whether he or she is smart or dumb, creative or an unimaginative lump. Or can you?

A team at Stanford headed up by Jeremy Balienson, an associate professor in the communication department, has published new research, suggesting that people’s creativity and ability to learn can be gauged by body language.

Using an array of Microsoft Kinect 3-D cameras to record and analyze the movements of subjects, the researchers performed two different tests to study the non-verbal cues of the intelligent and creative. Here’s what they learned.

In the first study, the researchers chose one subject as a “teacher” and primed them on several principles of a subject they knew little about: water efficiency. The teacher was then tasked to impart what he or she had learned to another subject over a five-minute NOW YOU’VE span. After, the student would take a test to show GOT A BASICALLY how much knowledge they INNOVATIVE TEAM had absorbed.

What the Stanford scientists learned was that the more exaggerated a student’s upper-body movements were while they were being taught, the less likely they were to score well on the test afterwards. “For our sample and our task, students with very extreme movements with their upper

DETECTOR.

body tended to learn worse than others,” Bailenson said.

In the second test, researchers recorded the movements of paired subjects who were asked to brainstorm ways to improve water-conservation techniques. The more ideas they came up with, the more creative the duo was judged to be.

In this test, what the researchers discovered is that the more synchronized two subjects were in their body movements, the more ideas they came up with.

While this study isn’t useful for detecting creativity in a lone person, it could afford employers a new method to hire creative teams. “Imagine trying to hire pairs to work on a project,” Balienson said. “Give your dozen candidates a two-minute test to see which pairs synchronize and which ones don’t. So now you’ve got a basically innovative team detector.”

Although Balienson and his team caution that their results may be subject to bias, they do give employers new tools in which to design tests to gauge the intelligence and creativity of potential hires. If you want to hire creative thinkers, interview them in pairs, and beware of the over-eager interviewee nodding, bucking, and jiving when you’re trying to tell him or her about your company. That guy’s probably a little slow.

John Brownlee is a writer who lives in Boston with two irate parakeets and his wife, who has more exquisite plumage. His work has appeared at Wired, Playboy, PopMech, Cult Of Mac, Boing Boing, and Gizmodo.

IKEA: A Brand That Knows How to Connect with Content Tori Miner

At its core, the IKEA brand is all about experience. From showrooms to social media, the brand conveys a deep understanding of how people live and a commitment to helping them better their everyday life. Ever the retail innovator, IKEA brings its creativity to life through original content and branded experiences designed to build stronger connections with their consumers around the world.

Its flagship content effort is available online today—its iconic catalog. The 2015 catalog is available in 32 languages, 67 printed editions, and 46 countries and territories, and its most sustainable publication to date. According to a press release, it’s the largest print production ever to be printed on 100 percent FSC-certified paper, “from forest to printer.”

With the theme of “Where the Everyday Begins and Ends,” the 2015 catalog app for iOS and Android devices includes

extended content such as shareable DIY videos, 360° views of entire rooms, and a “Place in Your Room” feature where users can select from over 300 IKEA products and virtually place them in their own homes.

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creatively in connecting with customers, and continues to deliver on their promise of helping people build better lives at home—whether it’s through finding the right furniture or by welcoming a new furry family member.

Nothing shows IKEA’s understanding of how people live their lives more than the recently-published Life at Home report.

This report translated findings from existing IKEA research and a new survey conducted to explore the global morning habits of individuals in eight cities: Berlin, London, Moscow, Mumbai, New York, Paris, and Shanghai.

The retail giant’s sustainability messaging extends to its recent “Sustainable Life at Home: CoWorker Stories” series.

The premise is simple, but powerful: 18 UK employees each received £450 each to buy IKEA products in an effort to document how they could save water, energy, and/or reduce waste. In each 2:30 video, viewers are welcomed into the employee’s home as they share their personal sustainability goals, the IKEA products they chose to try and meet them, and the outcome.

From one employee’s vision of creating a waste-free home through smart use of waste bins to another’s money-saving 19 percent decrease in water usage by installing a flowreducing faucet tap, viewers see how small changes with IKEA products can create big impact. Smart move on IKEA’s part, as this original content conveys the company’s commitment to employees and highlights real ways their products can propel a more sustainable life for anyone looking to make an everyday change for the better.

And when it comes to cause marketing, IKEA recently showed their support, and savvy, with an innovative partnership to help shelter dogs find new homes.

From wake-up times to shower specifics, breakfast routines to appearance anxiety, this report captures it all. An example of original content that directly links to a brand’s promise and delivers data in an engaging and inspiring way, this report is easy-to-navigate and full of infographics that make insights accessible.

The report even includes a Data Mixing Board, a digital tool that allows viewers to slice and dice the data just the way they want. Wondering what city does the most morning cuddling?

With just a few filter clicks, you’ll find that Moscow is the winner. Or within seconds you can see the bar graph that shows Stockholm as the city that just can’t stop hitting the snooze button.

In a world where content is constantly competing for consumers’ attention, and where brands are scrambling to find ways to connect at every step, Ikea shows they know how to bring their brand to life through rich content that connects with not only how people shop, but how they live.

In Singapore, IKEA helped kickstart the Home for Hope project by partnering with a group of local pet adoption organizations to create cardboard cutouts of actual up-foradoption animals to be showcased throughout the store.

Imagine strolling through showrooms and seeing a pooch stealing a seat at the kitchen table or hanging bedside looking for some company. Each potential pet had a QR code for shoppers to scan for more info about the animal.

Since the launch, other furniture retailers in Singapore have joined in, and IKEA has also extended the program to the US, where it’s being tested in partnership with the Arizona Humane Society. At its Tempe, Arizona, location, all six pets that were first featured have been saved through adoption, and more animals will be photographed and featured at the end of this month. This project is just another way Ikea thinks

Tori Miner is a New York-based verbal branding consultant with a penchant for scotch and Scrabble.

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Reasons marketing to women doesn’t work Jenny Darroch

Many organisations have recognised women as being an important and growing market based on factors such as income, workforce participation and influence in purchase decision-making. In the US, for example, women make more than 85% of the consumer purchases, yet only 9% of women feel that brands are effectively marketed to them. I have four concerns with current approaches to marketing to women:

away from a brand. This is a spillover from the second wave of feminism of the 1970s, which focused on differences between men and women, instead of differences between women (which characterises the third wave of feminism).

1: Multiple and blurring roles:

Against a backdrop of gender washing, blurring of roles, and gender convergence, whenever we focus in on gender, we are forgetting the principles of market segmentation. A market segment is a group of people who have the same need and ‘hire’ a product to do the same task. The unit of analysis, therefore, should be the task the customer wants to get done, not the customers themselves.

Women increasingly take on multiple roles e.g. partner, parent and paid employer, and the boundaries between these roles are both ambiguous and fluid: women move between many roles based on context and time. As a women, this then begs the question of “who am I” when you market to me?

2: Gender convergence, and the blurring of gender boundaries: Not only are women more likely to be found in the nontraditional role of paid employment, but women increasingly take on jobs that were once seen as the sole domain of men, just as men are increasingly undertaking roles that were traditionally seen as the sole domain of women. Furthermore, men want to spend more time with their children and, in a growing number of households, it makes economic sense for men to do more around the home and with the children because many women out-earn men.

3: Gender washing – not all women are the same: Marketers often treat women as if they are the same, and this results in the use of stereotypes that can push customers

4: Do not forget the task she is trying to do:

It is not my intention to dismiss marketing to women outright because women are critically important to marketers. Instead, marketers need to ensure they are focusing on consumer needs before getting side tracked on gender.

I would also encourage marketers to consider masculine and feminine as a continuum rather than male vs female as a binary choice to take into account the blurring boundaries between the multiple roles that men and women undertake.

If an organisation improves the way in which it markets to women then it will also more effectively market to men.

Marketing more effectively to women is simply good practice because it leads to better marketing overall.

Dr Jenny Darroch is the author of Why Marketing to Women Doesn’t Work, and professor of marketing at the Peter F Drucker Graduate School of Management in Claremont, California

The Science Of Cool WHAT MAKES ONE CONSUMER DESIGN COOL AND NOT ANOTHER? Eric Jaffe Take a look at the two water bottles. The one on the left is pretty much your standard water bottle design: tall, clear, probably crinkly. The one on the right feels a bit less conventional, with its sleek aluminum shell shaped like an Erlenmeyer flask. In a survey of which is cooler, the bottle on the right would win right away, though both bottles serve the very same function.

Take a look at the two water bottles below. The one on the left is pretty much your standard water bottle design: tall, clear, probably crinkly. The one on the right feels a bit less conventional, with its sleek aluminum shell shaped like an Erlenmeyer flask. In a survey of which is cooler, the bottle on the right would win right away, though both bottles serve the very same function.

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A lot more, actually. Behavioral scientists have spilled quite a bit of empirical ink on what makes something cool. They’ve basically whittled the phenomenon down to four main traits.

BEING COOL REQUIRES A VERY DELICATE BALANCE OF DOING SOMETHING THAT SHOWS THAT YOU GO YOUR OWN WAY, BUT YOU DO IT IN A WAY THAT IS SOCIALLY ACCEPTABLE.

First, cool is a social perception, not an inherent quality. So, Pabst Blue Ribbon (PBR) has always been PBR, but it wasn’t cool until Portland hipsters embraced it. Second, coolness is relative.

One shirt from Walmart might seem cool compared with another shirt from Walmart, but neither will be as cool as a shirt from H&M (which itself might seem less cool than another H&M shirt). Third, coolness is almost universally positive. And fourth, something that’s cool tends to diverge from the norm.

It’s this fourth trait--the unconventionality of cool--that seems to be the key. But in the past that trait been poorly defined. As shown by our example of the kangaroo water bottle, or even a real life product like a Segway, being unconventional alone is not enough to be cool. And, in fact, designs or brands that diverge from the norm too much run the risk of being not just uncool but strongly disliked.

Recently, marketing scholars Caleb Warren and Margaret C. Campbell tried to understand the connection between conventionality and coolness with a bit more precision. They did so through a series of six experiments comparing consumer products (like the bottles above), coolness ratings (the bottle on the right does rate higher), and participant reactions. In the end, Warren and Campbell concluded that cool designs tend to be “appropriately” unconventional--that is, they challenge unnecessary norms, and aren’t too extreme themselves.

BEING UNCONVENTIONAL ALONE IS NOT ENOUGH TO BE COOL.

“Being cool requires a very delicate balance of doing something that shows that you go your own way and do your own thing, but you do it in a way that is socially desirable or at least acceptable,” Warren tells Co.Design.

In their most telling experiment, the researchers introduced test participants to four fictional fashion brands. Each brand was paired with a description that aligned it with a low, moderate, high, or extreme level of unconventionality. A “low” level of unconventionality was essentially the norm-something that followed the market. A “moderate” brand often conformed to convention, while a “high” brand often defied convention. Extreme brands were controversial.

Warren and Campbell found the highest coolness ratings among the brands in the middle: not too conventional, not too risky. A moderately unconventional brand was cooler than a typical brand; a highly unconventional brand was cooler than an extreme and controversial brand. This pattern

mostly held true whether the raters (i.e., test participants) had countercultural personalities or not. In other words, even people who challenge convention as a lifestyle don’t always think extreme unconventionality is cool.

The researchers use the term “autonomy” instead of “unconventional.”

The lesson for designers is they need to know two things about an audience to make a product cool. First, what does that audience consider normal? (The design can fit slightly outside that mold.) Second, what does that audience consider the limits of abnormality. (The design should not cross it.) In the context of our water bottle designs, then, “Erlenmeyer flask-ish” rests beyond “clear and crinkly” but still within “kangaroo-shaped.” (The unconventional water bottle is actually a Heineken design.)

“Product designers, TOO MUCH COOLNESS CAN the good ones, know a lot of this BE A BAD THING IN THE implicitly,” Warren LONG RUN. says. “I think most of them are trying to be different or create things that are different in a way that’s still accessible, or that people can latch onto.”

The perpetual concern for consumer designers, in particular, is that too much coolness can be a bad thing in the long run. A design that starts off as cool shifts the lines of conventionality, and then gets imitated so much that it becomes conventional, at which point it can’t be cool by definition. It’s the sort of classic mainstream backlash that keeps one-time consumer iconoclasts, such as Apple or Google, searching for ways to remain outliers.

“If you’re really doing something right, the chances are the coolness isn’t going to last,” Warren says. “Because you’re going to shift what is the norm.”

Eric Jaffe writes about cities, history, and behavioral science. His latest book is A Curious Madness: An American Combat Psychiatrist, a Japanese War Crimes Suspect, and an Unsolved Mystery from World War II (Scribner, 2014). He lives in New York.

Advertisers should see the value in cookieless technology Sam Barnett It has been more than 18 months since Safari began blocking third party cookies and it is possible other browsers will follow suit, with continued threats from Mozilla. As the mobile channel and Safari emerge as drivers of conversions, now more than ever advertisers need to concentrate on cookieless technology.

The industry has worked hard to evolve and produce ways of working around the cookie limitation. Using probabilistic and deterministic approaches we are now able to target users across devices, using the history from one device or browser to influence ads on another.

While this technology is primarily used to find users jumping from one device to the next, it also allows advertisers to access a new pocket of buyers: the one using Safari browser. This is important not only because without cookieless browsers and cookieless mobile devices we would not have a holistic view of users but we would also miss out on what is emerging as a premium pool of users.

Safari users drive 20% higher return on advertising spend (ROAS) than the average user.

Looking at data from several Struq US campaigns over the last three months, Safari has emerged as the best performing browser.

• A post click conversion rate (PC CR) 5% higher and; • A post click return on ad spend (PC ROAS) 20% higher.

Even more interesting, Safari is the only browser with a better PC ROAS on mobile than on PC. The norm is for performance to suffer when looking at the mobile channel but this is not the case with Safari, the browser maintains the high CTR expected on mobile while additionally delivering comparable return on ad spend.

Premium users where cookies don’t reach It seems that relying on cookies means that advertisers are missing out on a premium set of users. Safari accounted for nearly 40% of impressions on OSX devices and 95% on iOS devices. Apple users are already considered those users with the highest amount of disposable income and indeed the average order value of Apple users compared to other platforms is 17% higher, additionally the PC ROAS of Apple devices is 22% higher than other platforms but CTR is similar across the board.

There is no question that, due to the prevalence of the multi device user, advertisers need to reach users across devices.

A huge benefit to employing cookieless technologies is the associated access to this highly valuable group of users, a benefit that is hard to ignore in the race for conversions.

Compared to the average across browsers, Safari has: • An average order value (AOV) just over 8% higher; • A click through rate (CTR) 12% higher;

Sam Barnett is the chief executive of Struq

7 Questions For Logo Design Legend Ivan Chermayeff Carey Dunne

The 82-year-old designer of logos for everyone, from nbc to moma, on difficult clients, graphic design’s boom, and his fear of painting

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If you’ve ever watched Showtime or NBC, visited the Museum of Modern Art or the Smithsonian, read National Geographic or a Harper Collins book, or shopped at Barneys or Armani Exchange, you’ve seen the graphic design of Ivan Chermayeff. Since starting his design firm, Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv (then just Chermayeff & Geismar), in 1956, he’s created countless logos that are, to this day, ingrained in western visual culture.

IN THE ‘50S, WHEN A CAB DRIVER ASKED WHAT YOU DID, AND YOU SAID GRAPHIC DESIGN, YOU’D HAVE TO EXPLAIN IT FOR AN HOUR.

Chermayeff is best known for clean, crisp graphics like NBC’s rainbow peacock. But he also has a chaotic, artistic side: his favorite activity is hacking up colored paper with scissors.

Chermayeff’s personal artwork is celebrated in a new exhibit, Cut and Paste, at London’s De La Warr Pavilion. It spans 60 years of work, with 300 collages and posters featuring everything from abstract compositions to brown bears fitted with human noses and fantastical cut-paper elephants.

Design runs in Chermayeff’s family, the show reveals: the pavilion was designed in 1935 by Serge Chermayeff, Ivan’s Russian immigrant architect father, and the exhibition was organized, in part, by his son, Sam, also an architect.

Co.Design caught up with the 82-year-old design legend about his love of tearing and slicing, graphic design as a form of play, how he hates sitting still, and dealing with difficult clients.

How has graphic design changed since your career began?

THERE’S A TREMENDOUS AMOUNT OF DESIGN WORK THAT’S REALLY DAMN GOOD.

Ivan Chermayeff: We started our firm in ‘56. That’s quite a few years ago, and I’d been working away for some years as a student before that, and as a little boy before that. It all adds up to a hell of a long time. It means I’ve done a lot of work because I really like work a lot. When Tom [Geismar] and I started, there was no such expression as ‘graphic design.’

When a cab driver asked what you did, if you said graphic design, you’d have to explain it for an hour. Instead, we’d just say ‘I’m a commercial artist.’ When I went to Yale [School of Art and Architecture], it was only the second year of the graphic design department. Times have changed--there are now hundreds of thousands of graduates in graphic design in the U.S. alone.

Who inspired you early in your career?

I was inspired by some of the great people that pioneered the racket I’m in, especially Paul Rand, who was a teacher of mine and who became a friend despite the difference in years. There weren’t many people I admired as much as I admired him at the time. Some designers in Germany and Switzerland did tremendously good work, but you could count them on a few hands. Now, you need a whole book to be fair to the number of people that actually do very interesting, original work. Times have changed. There’s a tremendous amount that’s really damn good.

Do you often use collaging techniques to make your logo designs?

Oh yeah, I often use collaging--[logo design is] just taking materials in the form of line, color, type, whatever, that you’re using fragments of to counter or play against other forms.

There’s not a real difference [between collage and graphic design] in that sense.

What’s the relationship between your cut and paste work and your logo design? How are the processes different?

Collages are free; graphic design is about solving other people’s problems. When I’m doing collages for myself, I’m the client. I’m just doing something I find interesting, finding visual connections between either images or color or whatever it may be--as opposed to trying to appropriately solve a total image that respects who the client is trying to reach. I have to ask, who’s the audience? An awful lot of design doesn’t seem to have any relationship to the sophistication or lack of sophistication of whom it’s for. And that’s a very important thing if it’s about communication that has a real point.

What are your work habits like?

WHEN I’M DOING COLLAGES FOR MYSELF, I’M THE CLIENT. I’M JUST DOING SOMETHING I FIND INTERESTING, FINDING VISUAL CONNECTIONS BETWEEN EITHER IMAGES OR COLOR OR WHATEVER IT MAY BE.”

I do a tremendous volume of work. The way I work is very fast. I just came back from the show in London, and it has 300 things in it. Some are very old, some are recent.

I throw a tremendous amount away, and say okay, it’s just not going to work. I’ve gotten pretty good at rejecting my stuff when it doesn’t work. I throw things right into the garbage can, as opposed to juggling and finicking and doing those things that painters do. I have a small fear of drawing, and an even bigger fear of painting. That’s why I use scissors, and I have lots: short ones, long ones, heavy ones, so I can cut heavy things. Cutting and tearing has a sort of excitement about it. If you tear things, they have a look of being torn, in contrast to a line which has little emotion.

I can’t sit still no matter where I am. Even if I’m lying on the beach in Cape Cod, I’m arranging pebbles in the sand. It’s always play. Play is a very good word for my attitude, even towards making a symbol that has to stand for a company-arriving at that symbol is still a form of play.

Do you have any favorite pieces in this new show, Cut and Paste?

I HAVE A SMALL FEAR OF DRAWING, AND AN EVEN BIGGER FEAR OF PAINTING.

I like anything that hits you right away, and yet wasn’t that easy to come by. For instance, a poster I did for a play called Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years, about a period of time when Winston Churchill was out of office. In the graphic, his face is hidden in the smoke of a cigar, but nevertheless, most everybody who sees it knows instantaneously that it’s meant to be Winston Churchill. It’s fairly original and convincing without being so complicated--you don’t have to think hard to know what it’s all about.

What are the biggest challenges you face now as an artist and designer?

Technology is something you have to keep up with. There are many more choices that can be made, there are thousands of typefaces. I’ve narrowed it down to a bunch of choices that work for me. It used to be much more straightforward. It’s a little more complicated today.

Sometimes the business side of things--the preparation of getting a client to understand where you’re coming from, and communicating that intelligibly enough so they might agree with you, is often more work than the design work itself.

Carey Dunne is a Brooklyn-based writer covering art and design.

The opportunities your business and brand are missing Emma Sexton It is great to see the subject of women and gender balance has become mainstream in our industry – even The Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity significantly upped its game this year, with the launch of the ‘See it Be It‘ programme, and a commitment to increase numbers of female judges. But in our eyes this still isn’t enough.

The industry has been paying lip service to the problem of late, and appears to see it purely as an issue of equality: “We get more women into senior roles and the job is done.” Right?

Wrong. It is more than this – it is actually good business. We persuaded Cannes Lions to let us host the panel discussion ‘Why 80% of your advertising budget is wasted’.

Our clients are asking ‘where are the women?’

Brands are now one step ahead of the creative industry in their progression of women within their businesses. These senior women are now fast becoming our clients and they are asking their creative agencies: ‘So, where are the women who will be working on my account?’

More and more brands are seeking out female creative teams to help them create, market and advertise their brands in a completely different way to this powerful audience.

If you are reading that thinking, ‘Wow, 80% sounds huge.

Surely that can’t be right,’ then let me explain something you probably don’t want to hear. The way we operate as an industry is broken, and if we don’t fix it soon, we’re in for some big trouble ahead.

We’re not making enough progress

Women are the purchasers

It’s now completely possible to have a mobile, global, 24/7 workplace. Yet even within the creative industries – known for constantly championing the new, the innovative, the visionary – no one has been able to redesign their business to take full advantage of this technology. Where today’s businesses are concerned, work doesn’t work – and it is women who are losing out.

It should be common knowledge by now that women are driving the economy and account for 80% of the purchasing decisions in every consumer category. Now take a look at the advertising and marketing you see around you on a daily basis. How well do you feel it connects to this powerful audience?

Just look at the recent backlash against the gender stereotyping of Clarke’s shoes in-store posters. More than 3,000 people signed a petition set up by Emma Dixon, a lawyer from Islington, who was out shopping with her children. Within days it made the national news.

Just how can marketeers meet the new demands of these powerful, yet largely ignored, consumers, when the norm is still the all-male creative team? With just 3% of creative directors worldwide being female it is no wonder there is such an inherent disconnect.

Where are all these women? The common myth goes that pregnancy is to blame for the lack of senior women.

Apparently, these women leave to have a baby and then don’t want to come back. Wrong again.

But hang on a minute. Why is childcare solely the responsibility of the mother? Men are getting stuck in work and the women are getting stuck out of it. When are we going to redesign business to work for parents and not just mothers? This is a problem that is not just affecting the output of creative work but the culture of business too.

Can you see what I can see? Can you see how ridiculous this all is? Can you help to change it? I really hope so.

Emma Sexton is UK director of SheSays

Silicon Valley Is Ruining “Sharing” for Everybody The marketing lie behind companies like Airbnb and Lyft Noam Scheiber If you’ve used Airbnb or Uber or any other “sharing economy” service lately, you may be surprised to learn that you were not a consumer but a foot-soldier in a movement.

And like any self-respecting movement, this one has a set of core principles that must periodically be affirmed and elaborated—in this case, at a slickly-produced conference called “Share” back in May. So it was that Natalie Foster, the former Obama campaign organizer directing the San Francisco assemblage, enthused that the sharing economy was really one big exercise in community-building. Whenever we crash in a stranger’s guestroom or rent out their car, we aren’t taking advantage of a cheap, convenient service. We’re recreating the virtues of small-town America. “We are rejecting the idea that stuff

makes us happier,” Foster said, “that ownership is better than access, that we should all live in isolation.”

The insistence that the sharing economy has tapped into a deep yearning for social interaction is both the most idealistic and least questioned assumption among its boosters. “People are both hungrier for human contact and more tolerant of easy-come-easy-go fluid relationships,” David Brooks wrote in a recent mash note to Airbnb. In a Wired story this spring, John Zimmer, the co-founder of the Uber competitor Lyft, invoked a stint on the Oglala Sioux reservation to summarize his feelings. “Their sense of community, of connection to each other and to their land, made me feel more happy and alive than I’ve ever felt,” he said. “We now have the opportunity to use technology to help us get there.”

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That’s one way of putting it. Another way to put it: For-profit “sharing” represents by far the fastest-growing source of un- and under-regulated commercial activity in the country.

Calling it the modern equivalent of an ancient tribal custom is a rather ingenious rationale for keeping it that way. After all, if you’re a regulator, it’s easy to crack down on the commercial use of improperly zoned and insured property.

But what kind of knuckle-dragger would crack down on making friends?

Make no mistake—the big sharing-economy companies are flexing an enormous amount of marketing muscle, from dodgy front groups to dodgy numbers. Peers, the organization that sponsored the Share conference (and which Natalie Foster runs), was co-founded by one of Airbnb’s top marketing executives. When I asked a Peers press aide for evidence that the appetite for community-building is what’s driving demand for these services, she directed me to a poll showing that 72 percent of Americans believe “sharing builds friendships and relationships.” But the poll offered no definition of “sharing”—the only context was a previous question about sharing “tools and other household items”— and it made no mention of any companies being involved. If I said my startup was part of the “loving economy,” there’s a good chance I could find a poll showing that people are prolove, but it wouldn’t establish anything about my company.

To figure out the real reason people participate in the sharing economy—as opposed to what the industry’s clever marketers say—it’s helpful to separate the services that more or less existed before the sharing economy from those whose offerings are relatively novel.

In the first category are ridesharing services like Lyft, Uber, and Sidecar, which allow average car owners to become independent cabbies. Some of these companies have marketed themselves as a way to meet new people—most famously, Lyft, whose passengers are greeted with a fist bump and encouraged to ride in front and chat up their drivers.

But it’s unlikely that this is much of a selling point. If it were, it would be hard to explain why Lyft and Uber—which makes no effort to encourage socializing—have been engaging in a brutal price war, since they would effectively be different products. And, in fact, one Washington-area Lyft driver recently confirmed this for me, having asked a number of customers why they take Lyft and not Uber. “They say they take whichever car is closest,” the driver said. “Lyft is slightly cheaper would be another reason.” (The one exception was a rider visiting from San Francisco, who said the city’s ridesharing ethos is that “you want to be in a car that has cool people.”)

The same goes for a variety of other sharing-economy services that are simply cheaper or more convenient versions of services we’re accustomed to using. TaskRabbit is an app that connects people who need household chores done with people willing to do them. Under the best of circumstances, the chances of finding a soul-mate in the person who unclogs your toilet seem exceedingly small. In the worst of circumstances, the service can feel downright exploitative.

(The tendency of some sharing economy companies to undermine worker protections and bid down the value of labor is the phenomenon’s most alarming feature.) One

anonymous TaskRabbit freelancer recently told Business Insider she has “worked 12 and 15 hour days doing really strenuous physical labor and had $80 to show for it.” She once estimated she did 10-15 loads of laundry covered in cat diarrhea.

If this is community, then I think I prefer bowling alone.

The second sharing-economy category consists of companies that offer a familiar service with a twist—say, a more customized product. Take RelayRides, which allows owners to rent out their cars to perfect strangers. The advantage of RelayRides over standard rental-car companies is that it tends to be substantially cheaper, especially during weekends and holidays, and that it offers considerably more variety. The people who prefer to drive a stick, or a Mazda Miata, or a vintage Chevy Malibu with a certain type of interior, typically love RelayRides.

There is also a social dimension. RelayRides’ CEO, Andre Haddad, says renters often enjoy meeting owners, many of whom will recommend restaurants and scenic driving routes.

“I’ve had 100 rentals on my cars,” says Haddad. “I’ve become almost like a friend, or friend of a friend, giving people advice.”

But as pleasant as this kind of interaction may sound, RelayRides’ own numbers suggest that renters can basically take it or leave it. At the end of last year, RelayRides launched a new valet service at the San Francisco International Airport.

In a departure from its usual approach, the renters are greeted by a RelayRides employee and taken to their car. (This turns out to be much easier for the owners, who no longer have to coordinate with an arriving airplane passenger.) According to Haddad, the company has detected no drop-off in user satisfaction.

The same appears true for Airbnb, which offers a vastly larger and more diverse inventory of rooms than the typical hotel chain—whole residential neighborhoods that would otherwise be off-limits. Airbnb goes to great lengths to play up the relationship-building aspect of its service. The company’s origin story, which Chief Technology Officer Nate Blecharczyk cheerily recounted at the Share conference, involves two of its co-founders renting out a bedroom in their San Francisco apartment during a 2007 conference. “Real friendships were formed,” Blecharczyk said. “Something special was created.”

Airbnb doesn’t release data that would indicate how much its users value the social aspect of the service. But, while there is probably a core group who are genuinely out to bond with their hosts, the company’s own moves suggest its users care much more about the authenticity of their surroundings than befriending hosts. Airbnb recently hired a prominent boutique hotel operator named Chip Conley to improve (and generally standardize) its guests’ experiences. When we spoke in July, Conley told me the key insight from his boutique-hotel days is that people want to feel like they’re really getting to know a city or a neighborhood, not staying in some generic or touristy location. (No surprise that Airbnb’s motto until very recently was “live like a local,” something it delivers on exceptionally well.) He told me that a growing number of users are people mulling a move to a new city and want to try it out first.

Unbeknownst to its proprietors, GrubWithUs was essentially an experiment in whether people really value the friend-making part of Feastly or just the food. (Or at least the food combined with other aspects of the experience, like the intimacy of a private home.) If it’s the former, GrubWithUs should probably have succeeded. If it’s the latter, the site should have failed, since users don’t need GrubWithUs to patronize a restaurant they can dine in any time.

Alas, although GrubWithUs raised over $6 million from the likes of Ashton Kutcher and the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, it wasn’t a sustainable business. It turned out that the potential payoff just wasn’t sexy enough to divert people from their daily routines. “It’s so hard to drag someone out. There has to be a compelling reason. Dating is compelling reason,” says co-founder Eddy Lu. Exotic, hard-to-find food served in someone’s private dining room may be another. But a platonic friendship with an urban professional was not. Lu and his team pulled the plug on GrubWithUs late last year and are currently working on their next idea.

There are hospitality companies focused on maximizing guests’ social interactions—the Sydell Group’s upscale hostels, for example. Airbnb just doesn’t appear to be one of them. “The Airbnb model is … isolating in a way. You’re staying in an apartment,” says Sydell CEO Andrew Zobler.

“Substantively, you’re much more immersed if you’re staying with us. You’re meeting people.”

This brings us to the most exotic part of the sharing economy— companies that broker experiences it would otherwise be difficult, if not impossible, to have. Consider the mealsharing service Feastly, which enables amateur chefs to host dinners in their own homes. Adventurous eaters can sample everything from obscure ethnic cooking (a taste of Macao, anyone?) to homemade haute cuisine. They share meals inspired by niche dietary lifestyles, like kosher, macrobiotic, and gluten-free.

For all the concrete benefits of the service—the variety, the authenticity, the thrill of experimentation—founder Noah Karesh is at his most evangelical when rhapsodizing about “connectedness.” “We’re bringing people back to the dining room table,” he says. “There seems to be a sense that more people are feeling disconnected.” And, in fairness, Karesh’s data do suggest that users enjoy the social dimension of their meal, not just the gastronomic. Most people show up in pairs and dine with at least some strangers. Half of all women who use the service show up alone.

But even here, in the most share-y corner of the sharing economy, it’s still unlikely that community and connectedness is the primary motivation. Consider a company called GrubWithUs, which trafficked in a similar group-dinner concept, except that the dinners took place in restaurants.

In December, the Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum suggested an interesting thought experiment: Replace “sharing economy” with “sublet economy,” and see how you feel about it then.

“Subletting,” he wrote, is both a more accurate and complicated term: “It raises questions about the rights of neighbors and of owners not to have their building turned into a hotel—not to mention the ability of the government to tax these transactions.”

Exactly so. There are clearly some desirable side effects of an economy in which people own fewer goods and rent more of them—the environmental footprint is probably a bit lighter.

(Though Big Share engages in a fair amount of propaganda even on this question.) But what we’re talking about here are fundamentally economic transactions.

The financiers grasp this best.

“Airbnb succeeds for the same reason Uber does,” says David Golden, a venture capitalist whose firm has invested in a handful of sharing economy companies. “There are tangible advantages, they’re palpable.”

Brad Burnham, a partner at Union Square Ventures in New York, was one of the few panelists at the recent Share conference to dissent from the airy-fairy rhetoric there. “What we’re talking about is the natural tendency of capitalism to consistently find a more efficient way of delivering something,” he says. “It’s information technology lowering transaction costs and revealing assets that can be utilized.” If only the capitalists who run the companies, as opposed to the ones who finance them, were as clear-headed.

Noam Scheiber Senior editor, The New Republic. Author of The Escape Artists, book on Obama admin & economy

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