Blink vol. 2 by MediaCom

in cooperation with the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies in cooperation with the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies

Published by

Blink #2 2009

Wise businesses listen to wise consumers. Are you listening?

A new strong Nordic brand on the rise. Read the interview Enter the age of dialogue

media, trends & consumer insights

We are still alive! Despite the economic turbulence we are still in a good shape and continue to stay focused on publishing BLINK – hopefully as inspiration to our readers. BLINK is a partnership between MediaCom Nordic and Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies. For this edition, we asked Merete Busk (meretebusk.com) to redesign the BLINK logo and to give us a strong visual concept. The magazine layout has been done in association with whomadeid (whomadeid.com) We are also trying some new paper with better printing qualities and FSC-certification (http://www.fsc.org). We are very excited about this new edition of BLINK and we hope you will be too. Our ambition is to inspire our readers – to become a source of inspiration and knowledge. To give an in-depth look into what’s happening in our world, and explore what will influence consumers, media and communication. This edition is about dialogue, so if you have great ideas, questions, wishes, complaints or just plain comments, please let us know.

Email: Signe Wandler (signe.wandler@mediacom.dk)

Communication

as it should be.

Dear Reader,

The Age of Dialogue “The rise of digital communication has created millions of dialogues between consumers on brands, and in this age of dialogue, people have great power to influence each other.” Our dear colleague, Matt Mee, has a clear, inspiring view of how advertising has changed over the past 60 years – bringing us to the Age of Dialogue. Engaging in dialogue with your customers is an enriching experience – but also challenging. Suddenly, you can monitor what is said about your brands. The tricky question is if and how you should react – and can you do so in a trustworthy way? In a way, we are back to communication as it used to be – personal and with a meaningful message for the receiver. Facebook, Twitter, blogs et cetera are powerful platforms where we all converse with each other – sharing our opinions, pictures, experiences, disappointments – and these platforms are already valuable communication channels for brands. In this edition of BLINK, we want to inspire you to converse with your customers – by showing how others have succeeded and what the unwritten rules of social networking are. We are also very excited that we can bring you the story of Bring. It is rare that we experience the birth of new Nordic Brands. In this issue, Gro Myking from Bring tells the story of transforming Posten Norge and several local brands into one. Enjoy the reading and start the dialogue

Jonas Hemmingsen CEO, MediaCom Nordic Group Jonas.hemmingsen@mediacom.dk http://twitter.com/jwizzart Blink022009

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03 09 18 28 34 38 42 46 48 56 58

Welcome The age of dialogue I Am Here Trend predictions from the Blink panel Creating a new Nordic brand In advertising: Why go local? A new business model? Social media use in the company Facebook: Learn the cardinal virtues and sins Are you missing out on the Pink Dollar? M:files

Content

Trend predictions from the Blink panel By Patrick Damsted

What will the future bring? MediaComâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Nordic CEOs and global Chief Insight Officer has identified five recession trends with a sixmonth perspective, and five general trends with a longer perspective. Be prepared.

The age of dialogue By Matthew Mee, MediaCom EMEA We are entering the Age of Dialogue. Get arguments and tools to re-evaluate the power of people influencing each other - in the light of the new possibilities of communicating. Cases:

A case of creating user value on Facebook By Christian Godske, MediaCom Denmark

A case of listening to dialogue

By Aimar Niedzwiedzki, MediaCom Norway

I Am Here: One Manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Experiment with the Location-Aware Lifestyle By Mathew Honan, Wired One man. Two phones. Dozens of GPS apps. Mathew Honan reports from a three-week experiment living la vida local. Our coordinates have the potential to change all the outputs. It is new territory. Are you coming?

Creating a new Nordic brand By Signe Wandler, MediaCom Denmark

Bring and Posten Norge launched their new identity and name in September 2008. In this interview, Market Director Gro Myking explains the process and how different organizations, brands and countries can unify and operate in a successful manner.

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46 Social media use in the company Social media is not only about Facebook. The number of available social media and the number of people who use them are rapidly growing. Some social media cover a large proportion of the target group or population, some are not yet so widespread in the Nordic countries. Are you present on the relevant ones?

In Advertising: Why go local?

Comment by Lars Pynt Andersen, Associate Professor

In these days where it seems as if the prophesies of economic depression are competing for the deepest levels of black, it would perhaps seem appealing for some advertisers to try to cut costs by not developing separate campaigns for local markets. Or at least consider using the same advertising regionally, for example in Scandinavia or Northern Europe. Is this the way to go?

A new business model? By Patrick Damsted

If there is a market, there is also a challenger to that market. But there is only one basic business model that can change function and role over time. Since consumers are now more in control, wise businesses change to satisfy the wiser consumers.

48 58

Facebook: Learn the cardinal virtues and sins By Nadja Pass, Reflexioner

Get the Facebook expert’s take on personal and organizational virtues and sins on Facebook.

Are you missing out on the Pink Dollar? By Carsten Lind, MediaCom Nordic

In this interview, Thomas Sonberg from ad agency REPUTATION discloses how to run successful campaigns towards the gay and lesbian segment – known as the pink dollar. See the do’s and don’ts and how SAS is successfully targeting the pink dollar.

M:Files

By Signe Wandler MediaCom Denmark

All the smaller things: The Ikea effect, Does shopping makes us happy? What is not in common? How to listen to the dialogue in social media, When and where to engage with customers. Opening up to the real world.

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The age

dialogue

The advertising industry has been through interrupting the consumers, entertaining and engaging them. The next is a plan to get talked about. In the age of dialogue, it’s not what we say, it’s what they say that counts. By Matthew Mee, MediaCom EMEA

Back in the 1930s, in the area of astronomy, the theory of ‘dark matter and dark energy’ rocked the scientific world. It suggested that most of the universe was composed of non-visible matter whose existence could only be detected by the effect it had on shaping galaxies. A massive force that’s invisible to traditional measurements? It is a pretty good metaphor for one of the hot topics of marketing right now (and for some time to come): the power of consumers talking positively about brands. Our intuition and personal experience tells us how important an influence other people are on making decisions in all parts of our lives, but for many years it was not something marketers planned to use strategically. It is easy to ask the question: Why?

From interruption to dialogue Maybe the reason has something to do with the history of marketing communications over the last few decades; a pattern that has been formed over the last four successive ‘Ages’ of marketing communications (see box). And now we find ourselves in the ‘the age of dialogue’

Age of Dialogue by Matthew Mee

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‘Ages’ of marketing communications

THE AGE OF

INTERRUPTION ENTERTAINMENT 1950s–1970s

Formed by the growth

of TV as the predominant mass medium. Where people were

1970–1980s

An age formed by a

massive increase in brands and advertising. The way to cut

still actively seeking the excitement of innovation and the re-

through to consumers was to make short pieces of films

assurance of brand names that advertising delivered to them.

(often with higher budgets than the content that surrounded them). This is the age where there was given rise to the power of the creative agencies.

In the past, we measured what we felt we could control: the direct delivery of crafted communications to a nominal audience - reach and frequency. Now the rise of digital communications has forced us to re-evaluate the millions of dialogues between consumers that shape their opinions of brands and, as a consequence, their actions. It has forced everyone in marketing to re-evaluate the ‘dark energy’ of communications – the power of people to influence each other - and it poses some profound questions about the way that we construct communications. Perhaps, rather than planning to ‘reach’ and hoping that we get talked about, we should be planning to get talked about in the right way, so that ‘reach’ will follow! Also, it’s logical, that in this time of being overloaded with choice and distrust in brands and institutions, we look to our peers for help. The US based PR company Edelman’s authoritative ‘Trust Barometer’ study (source: 2008 Edelman Trust Barometer) shows that the biggest

change from 2003 to 2008 is the rapid rise of ‘A person like myself ’ being far and away the most credible source of information - far more than comparable ‘expert’ sources. It’s a very human response to an increasingly complex world.

The Magic Number One of the most talked-about ways that has been developed to monitor this ‘dark energy’ is the ‘Net Promoter Score’. This measure was the brainchild of Frederick Reichheld, a Bain consultant who was looking for a simple measure that would correlate strongly with growth and which would provide a clear, integrated focus for business strategy. He ended up with a measure based on asking people one question on a 0-10 scale ‘How likely is it that you would recommend this service/company to a friend or colleague’. He split the responses into three groups: Promoters (9-10 rating), Passives (7-8) and Detractors (0-6). Subtract the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of

e d r a

THE AGE OF

ENGAGEMENT 1980s – PRESENT

The prolif-

eration of media channels and fragmentation of audiences

o r h tt

c o t r

h g u

THE AGE OF

DIALOGUE PRESENT–

The rise of digital communica-

tion has created millions of dialogues between consumers on

created a new emphasis on finding the right people at the

brands, and in this age of dialogue, people have great power

right time to ensure that they truly engaged with the brand’s

to influence each other. “A person like myself” is in this age

message. This is the era when media planning and buying

far more credible than an expert source.

became more important strategically.

Promoters and, voila, you have a simple score which is claimed can predict growth. (See box on the next page). Indeed, the study was validated in the UK by the London School of Economics which concluded:

That companies with higher levels of word of mouth advocacy grew faster than competitors in the test period. That a 7% increase in word of mouth advocacy unlocks 1% of additional growth. That a 1% reduction in negative word of mouth for the average company in the survey resulted in £24.84m in additional sales.

Age of Dialogue by Matthew Mee

This simple measure has been controversial amongst some researchers, but it provides a hard business case to support ‘word of mouth’ recommendation as a powerful driver for business. It also provides a basis for thinking in terms of communication planning: if ‘advocates’ are so brilliant for business, how can we then design communications to generate more of them? Advocacy and the ‘Hawthorne Effect’ Another case that has featured in conversations around marketing and advocacy is ‘The Hawthorne Effect’, so called due to a study conducted in the 1920s at the Hawthorne Electrical plant in Illinois. While studying the impact of lighting on productivity, the researchers found that productivity arose regardless of this variable: the simple fact of being involved in the study was the variable that changed performance. The idea that we can generate advocates by creating

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involvement in this way may be the key success factor behind Procter & Gamble’s spin-off company Tremor/Vocalpoint. Large panels of ‘connectors’ (using highly networked consumers) can be used by brands as a flexible research/opinion panel, with the effect that, in the process of the research, thousands will become more actively positive about the brand or service. Based on this psychological bias, just by asking a consumer whether they would prefer a ‘blue’ or ‘green’ pack makes them more likely to advocate for the brand. Indeed, it’s possible to build some of this thinking into campaigns from the start. For example, the Puma ‘Create’ fragrance campaign in Poland opened up the opportunity for consumers to suggest designs for the pack. The campaign drove over 25,000 entries, but also benefited from the impact that the campaign had in terms of involving consumers in the product evolution. Ultimately ‘user generated’ (ie. 1881 in Norway and Libresse in Sweden featured in the last edition of BLINK) and ‘open source’ strategies (like Dell’s idea storm web site) will be measured on their ability to push up levels of advocacy, not simply on the basis of numbers reached.

Galvanizing the right people The logical place to start in trying to harness this ‘dark energy’ is people. What practical steps can we take when thinking about our communications planning? Malcolm Gladwell’s influential book The Tipping Point drew attention to the role of different types of people in facilitating the distribution of ideas and actions in the wider population. Two key groups play a powerful role in the ‘diffusion’ of trends:

Mavens: category specialists who actively gather information about their areas of interest. Because of their focus, they are often the first people to be ‘in the know’. Connectors: the kind of people who maintain a wide network of acquaintances and who will use the insights of a maven as a way to connect with their network. In combination, these two groups are the axis that connects the mass market with categories and brands.

it’s not what we say,it’s what they say that counts Remember; in the age of dialogue,

9 8 7

Net Promoter Score

=Share of Promoters –

5 3 2

Share of Detractors DETRACTORS

extremely likely

PASSIVES

PROMOTERS

Net Promoter Score

Understanding the different needs of mavens and connectors when designing communications can ensure that we give our products the best chance of being talked about in the right way. Are we as marketers giving our category mavens the sneak previews and privileged access to information that gets them excited? Are we also creating assets in advance that we know can be used by connectors as ‘social currency’? Also, from a targeting perspective it is possible to use standard desk top tools to provide a top line way of identifying and quantifying these types: In the local Media Index in each country there are statements relating to ‘being the first to know’ (maven) or ‘coming to me for advice’ (connectors) that makes it possible to see how the target audience changes for different categories.

1 0

Activating loyalists and communities of interest It seems obvious that, if you are seeking to mobilize advocates, you would start by developing a strategy using your loyalists. This is different from a communications plan designed to up-sell them or keep them from leaving your brand

extremely unlikely

Promoters give a 9-10 in rating, Passives a 7-8 in rating and Detractors a rating of 0-6. Subtract the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters and the score will predict growth.

Growth in "Trust in Spokespeople,United States (2003-2008)" “If you heard information about a company from each of these sources, how credible would it be?”

173%

A person like yourself

64%

CEO of a company

54%

Regular employee of a company

51%

Financial/industry analyst Doctor/Health care specialist

43%

Non-profit/NGO representative

43%

Academic

26% 0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

120%

140%

160%

180%

200%

Source: Edelman Trust Barometer 2008

Age of Dialogue by Matthew Mee

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In the past, we would connect with people who lived near us or worked with us. Now we meet in communities of interest: The Metallica Fan Club has over 1 mio members.

(common roles for CRM marketing). The role for communications here is clear: this is about turning them in to active loyalists; people who are not only loyal to the brand in terms of habitual behavior, but who are able to say why they’re loyal to other people. This can be done by reminding people of why they are connected to a brand or giving them additional reasons to stay loyal and keep talking about you.

Although often overlooked in the search for increased penetration, a focus on activating loyalists could be the marketing lever that really delivers lasting growth. There is a challenge in all of these approaches to the old model of targeting: that our ‘target’ is composed of isolated individuals (with impacts measured accordingly). In order to succeed in the age of dialogue we need to change our outlook and see our ‘targets’ as connected to each other by a massive variety of different links. Whereas in the past, we would have most connections with people who lived near to us or worked with us, digital communications facilitate the opportunity to link with anyone who is interested in the same things or shares the same values as us and give such ‘communities of interest’

great scale and accessability. Whether it’s a love of Heavy Metal (Metallica Fan Club – over 1 million members) or the great outdoors (the UK Caravan Club also has 1 million members) networks of like-minded consumers are easy to identify and reach. All brands have to do is think about what they could do to add value to the communities and get them talking positively. Whether it’s a preferential rate, a sample to test or information and expertise, communications planners should always be looking for ways to capitalize on the networks that connect us.

Learning to measure it, learning to manage it The power of people to influence other people has been rediscovered. This massively influential force, although invisible to many of the measurements that have been used in the past, needs to be integrated in to the age of dialogue thinking so that the communication lives up to its full potential. Remember; in the age of dialogue, it’s not what we say, it’s what they say that counts. BIO: Matthew Mee is Head of Strategy and Freshness for MediaCom EMEA. Roughly translated that means a focus on two things: 1. Working together with MediaComs communications planners to create the most insightful, inspiring comms planning community in the world. 2. Working with all colleagues to make MediaCom the best place for curious motivated people to work.

Creating user value on Facebook A CASE OF

Telmore revived their free phoning feature when they incorporated it into their customers’ existing network on Facebook. By Christian Godske, MediaCom Denmark

Telmore is a Danish mobile telephony company that allows unlimited free calls to other Telmore subscribers for a fixed amount. The feature is called Telmore-to-Telmore. The main goal of the Facebook application was to increase the use of Telmore-to-Telmore. A secondary objective was to use this feature as a retention tool. The key insight was to link Telmore closer to the subscriber’s existing social network and highlighting the real user value of the Telmore contract, namely keeping in touch with friends in an inexpensive way. Not just as an opportunity, but by putting real faces and names to the list of people that could be called for free. Giving much more value to the product and also engaging the ‘exploring’ nature of the core audience. In addition to driving the Telmore-to-Telmore business case, this solution also provides a measurable improvement in retention i.e. having easy access to all of your friends in a single place (with us!) is a very good reason to stay!

Facebook is the biggest social media platform in Denmark. And using the unique nature of this platform to combine subscribers’ existing social network (‘friends’) with information about which of the friends who were also Telmore subscribers would result in the tangible Telmoreto-Telmore phonebook. The setup supports a unique and ever growing social phonebook with a list of all friends that can be called for free with Telmore and thereby adding real value to the users. Developing the Telmore Facebook application also lets Telmore screen the users who installed the application, by identifying which telephone operator the users already have. Using this information and the permission given when installing the application, Telmore gains the potential to communicate in a much more relevant and detailed way with both existing customers and non-Telmore user e.g. offering pink phones to girls or special offers to people who have a contract with another operator.

BIO: Christian Godske is Digital Evangelist at MediaCom Denmark with a focus both on business development and on getting the clients of MediaCom closer to their customers. Contact: christian.godske@mediacom.dk Tel: +45 33 76 00 39

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Listening to A CASE OF

It is crucial to all dialogue that you start by listening. And that is what H&M did in this case where they identified the best fashion blogger in Norway. By Aimar Niedzwiedzki, MediaCom Norway

How to succeed with a brand in Social Media? This is a difficult question and one that has no sure answer. But one thing is certain. Corporate campaigns have a tendency to interrupt when they appear in social media. Instead of acting like a bull in Pamplona, you’d better start a bit more gently. Let’s look at blogging. Blogs are in some ways a modern diary. The difference is that we share it gladly (hence your younger brother has lost an area to be mean in). The most basic of blog content can be described as “me and my cat.” Sometimes you can find treasures of interesting cat content, but most of the time this is for the blogger and her friends. I say her since the majority of bloggers are female, especially among those writing about cats. But for some the cat has been thrown overboard and new content has arrived. Like me and my outfit. This has been of great importance for the rise of the phenomenon called

THE

Dialogue fashion blogs. The variety of fashion blogs are bigger than “me and my outfit:” you’ll find outfitters, make-up artists and other professionals sharing stories about their work and DIY tips – and let’s not forget aspiring designers and fashion journalists. What they all share is their passion for fashion. As Matthew Mee describes in the article “the Age of Dialogue,” you’re either talked about positively, negatively – or not at all. Not at all is, of course, the worst scenario. Indifference has never been good in brand-building. And, in the blogosphere, you’re not able to track the nothingness. Negative, yes: and by listening to it, you can adjust your communication or, even better, start a dialogue to improve the relationship and make it positive. The positive ones? Give them a proper amplifier. Today, several companies offer services to give you the chance to become that aforementioned bull in Pamplona. Isn’t it better to figure out the indifference, the negatives and the positives and where you can take your brand further? Here is where the listening makes its remarkable, obvious appearance. And that’s what we explored for H&M when we created Moteblogg 08. In a partnership between H&M, MSN and Costume, we wanted to understand how big the phenomenon of fashion bloggers had become in Norway. Instead of interrupting the many elegant and chic fashion conversations, MediaCom suggested we amplify those voices. Moteblogg08 (Fashion blog 08 – Norway’s best fashion blog) was the solution. MSN dedicated a section page to find the best bloggers on fashion in Norway. We asked the blogosphere to tip us about their favorite fashion blogs. The result was outstanding.

Age of Dialogue Case: Listen Up

More than 500 blogs were nominated for the award and readers of MSN.no/moteblogg08 voted for their favorite after a jury had selected top 10 nominees. More than 70,000 people visited the Moteblogg 08 section on MSN. In addition to nominating blogs for the competition, they could be entertained with films of H&M catwalks, get tips about recommended international fashion blogs and read a “How to create a good blog” article for newbies. The site was a natural extension of both the media partners and H&M in all matters, and through the three months we ran the competition, not one single negative remark appeared in the blogosphere. It was positive enthusiasm all over. By the end of the campaign, we had information about more or less every fashion blog in Norway. So before you start writing that corporate social media strategy, why not start by listening? We believe that figuring out what makes people “tick” will better equip you to start conversations in social media. But hearing what the lovers and haters of your brand say can be important for other reasons as well. What they say can affect your communication strategy. Are you ready to listen?

BIO: Aimar Niedzwiedzki is Creative Producer – Digital Media at MediaCom Norway. He blogs on marketing in english at: http://digdigg.blogspot.com and in norwegian at http://norvegiasyndromet. blogspot.com.Contact : aimar@mediacom.no, Tel:+47 92 80 84 70

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I Am Here One Man’s Experiment with the Location-Aware Lifestyle

I’m baffled by WhosHere. And I’m no newbie. I built my first Web page in 1994, wrote my first blog entry in 1999, and sent my first tweet in October 2006. My user number on Yahoo’s event site, Upcoming.org: 14. I love tinkering with new gadgets and diving into new applications. But WhosHere had me stumped. It’s an iPhone app that knows where you are, shows you other users nearby, and lets you chat with them. Once it was installed and running, I drew a blank. What was I going to do with this thing? By Mathew Honan, Wired

So I asked for some help. I started messaging random people within a mile of my location (37.781641 °N, 122.393835 °W), asking what they used WhosHere for. My first response came from someone named Bridget, who, according to her profile, at least, was a 25 year-old woman with a proclivity for scarves. “To find sex, asshole,” she wrote.

“I’m sorry? You mean it’s for finding people to have sex with?” I zapped back. “Yes, I use it for that,” she wrote. “It’s my birthday,” she added. “Happy birthday,” I offered. “Send me a nude pic for my birthday,” she replied. A friendly offer, but I demurred. Anonymous geoshagging is not what I had in mind when I imagined what the GPS revolution could mean to me.

The location-aware future —good, bad, and sleazy—is here. Thanks to the iPhone 3G and, to a lesser extent, Google’s Android phone, millions of people are now walking around with a gizmo in their pocket that not only knows where they are but also plugs into the Internet to share that info, merge it with online databases, and find out what—and who—is in the immediate vicinity. That old saw about how someday you’ll walk past a Starbucks and your phone will receive a digital coupon for half off on a Frappuccino? Yeah, that can happen now. Simply put, location changes everything. This one input—our coordinates—has the potential to change all the outputs. Where we shop, who we talk to, what we read, what we search for, where we go—they all change once we merge location and the Web.

37.781641 째N, 122.393835 째W

I am here

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I wanted to know more about this new frontier, so I became a geo-guinea pig. My plan: Load every cool and interesting location-aware program I could find onto my iPhone and use them as often as possible. For a few weeks, whenever I arrived at a new place, I would announce it through multiple social geoapps. When going for a run, bike ride, or drive, I would record my trajectory and publish it online. I would let digital applications help me decide where to work, play, and eat. And I would seek out new people based on nothing but their proximity to me at any given moment. I would be totally open, exposing my location to the world just to see where it took me. I even added an Eye-Fi Wi-Fi card to my PowerShot digital camera so that all my photos could be geotagged and uploaded to the Web. I would become the most location-aware person on the Internets! The trouble started right away. While my wife and I were sipping stouts at our neighborhood pub in San Francisco (37.770401 °N, 122.445154 °W), I casually mentioned my plan. Her eyes narrowed. .

“You’re not going to announce to everyone that you’re leaving town without me, are you? A lot of weirdos follow you online.”

Sorry, weirdos—I love you, but she has a point. Because of my work, many people—most of them strangers—track my various Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr, and blog feeds. And it’s true; I was going to be gone for a week on business. Did I really want to tell the world that I was out of town? It wasn’t just leaving my wife home alone that concerned me. Because the card in my camera automatically added location data to my photos, anyone who cared to look at my Flickr page could see my computers, my spendy bicycle, and my large flatscreen TV all pinpointed on an online photo map. Hell, with a few clicks you could get driving directions right to my place—and with a few more you could get black gloves and a lock pick delivered to your home. To test whether I was being paranoid, I ran a little experiment. On a sunny Saturday, I spotted a woman in Golden Gate Park taking a photo with a 3G iPhone. Because iPhones embed geodata into photos that users upload to Flickr or Picasa, iPhone shots can be automatically placed on a map. At home I searched the Flickr map, and score—a shot from today. I clicked through to the user’s photostream and determined it was the woman I had seen earlier. After adjusting the settings so that only her shots appeared on the map, I saw a cluster of images in one

CELL TOWERS

WI-FI

500 meters

GPS WHERE IN THE WORLD IS MY IPHONE? To pinpoint your location, your mobile phone talks to cell towers, GPS satellites, and Wi-Fi nodes. But there’s a trade-off between speed and accuracy. Here’s how Apple’s handset knows where you are. — Patrick Di Justo

location. Clicking on them revealed photos of an apartment interior—a bedroom, a kitchen, a filthy living room. Now I know where she lives. Geo-enthusiasts will assure you that these privacy concerns are overplayed: Your cell phone can be used to pinpoint your location anyway, and a skilled hacker could likely get that data from your mobile carrier. Heck, in the UK, tracking mobile phone users is as simple as entering their number on a Web site (as long as they give permission). But the truth is, there just aren’t that many people who want to prey on your location. Still, I can’t help being a little skittish when I start broadcasting my current position and travel plans. I mean, I used to stop newspaper delivery so people wouldn’t realize I was out of town. Now I’ve told everyone on Dopplr that I’m going to DC for five days. And location info gets around. The first time I saw my home address on Facebook, I jumped—because I never posted it there. Then I realized it was because I had signed up for Whrrl. Like many other geosocial applications, Whrrl lets you cross-post to the microblogging platform Twitter. Twitter, in turn, gets piped to all sorts of other places. So when I updated my location in Whrrl, the message leaped first to Twitter and then to Facebook and FriendFeed before landing on my blog, where Google

indexed it. By updating one small app on my iPhone, I had left a giant geotagged footprint across the Web. A few days later I had another disturbing realization. It’s a Tuesday and I’m blowing off a work meeting in favor of a bike ride through Golden Gate Park (37.771558 °N, 122.454478 °W). Suddenly it hits me—since I would later post my route online with the date and time, I would be just a Google search (“Mat Honan Tuesday noon”) away from getting busted. I’m a freelancer, and these are trying economic times. I can’t afford to have the Internet ratting me out like that. To learn how to deal with this new openness, I met with Tom Coates at Caffe Centro (37.781694 °N, 122.394234 °W). Coates started Fire Eagle, a sort of location clearinghouse: You tell Fire Eagle where you are, and it sends that info to a host of other geoapps, like Outside.in and Bizroof. Not only does Fire Eagle save you from having to update the same information on multiple programs, it also lets you specify the level of detail to give each app— precise location, general neighborhood, or just the city you’re in. The idea is that these options will mitigate privacy concerns. In addition to this, as Coates puts it: “You have to have the ability to lie about your location.” Any good social geoapp will let you type in a fake

GPS

WI-FI

CELL TOWERS Accuracy: varies

Accuracy: 30 meters

Accuracy: 10 meters

(about 500 meters in our test)

The iPhone can also pinpoint its

GPS satellites orbit Earth, con-

You might think that your iPhone

location using Wi-Fi. A company

stantly broadcasting an identifica-

triangulates its location by using

called Skyhook cruises cities to

tion signal, their location in space,

multiple cell towers, but it actually

map the location of Wi-Fi nodes.

and the time on their atomic clock.

needs only one. After identify-

The iPhone sniffs them out, mea-

The iPhone uses assisted GPS,

ing the single nearby tower that

sures their signal strength, and

which means it can tap into an

it’s pinging, the iPhone queries a

reports back to Skyhook’s servers.

assistance server and a reference

database at Google that lists the

Based on its database, Skyhook

network, helping to get a more ac-

location of cell towers. That infor-

computes where you must be to

curate GPS reading more quickly.

mation is sent back to your phone,

have that particular pattern of

telling the device approximately

signal strengths.

Pros: By far the most accurate location system available.

where it is. Pros: Fast. Surprisingly accurate if

Cons: Although A-GPS is much

Pros: Very fast. Works anywhere you

you’re in an area with high network

faster than conventional, it’s

have a cell signal, including inside.

density.

still rather slow. And because

Cons: Accurate enough to find

Cons: Useful only in urban areas

it requires a view of the sky, it

restaurants, but not for directions.

with lots of Wi-Fi networks.

doesn’t work indoors or in built-up urban areas.

I am here

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position manually, Coates says. Great news; I didn’t need to get busted for missing meetings—or deadlines—ever again. I was starting to revel in the benefits of location awareness. By trusting an app (iWant) that showed me nearby dining options, I discovered an Iraqi joint in my neighborhood that I’d somehow neglected. Thanks to an app (GasBag) that displayed gas stations with current prices, I was able to find the cheapest petrol no matter where I drove. In Reno, one program (HeyWhatsThat) even gave me the names and elevation profiles of all the surrounding mountains. And another (WikiMe), which displayed Wikipedia entries about local points of interest, taught me a thing or two about the San Francisco waterfront. (Did you know the Marina District exists largely because a land speculator built a seawall in the 1890s?) These GPS tools were making me smarter. And more social. While working downtown one day, it looked like I was going to have to endure a lonely burrito lunch by myself. So I updated my location and asked for company. My friend Mike saw my post on Twitter and dropped by on his way to the office. Later, I met up with a couple of people I had previously known only online: After learning I would be just around the corner from their office, we agreed to get together for coffee. One of them, it turns out, works in a field I cover and gave me a tip on a story. But then, two weeks into the experiment, I bumped into my friend Mindy at the Dovre Club (37.749008 °N, 122.420547 °W). She mentioned my constant updates, which she’d noticed on Facebook. “It seems sort of odd,” she said with a note of concern. “I’ve been a little worried about you. I thought, ‘Wow, Mat must be really lonely.’”

I explained that I wasn’t actually begging for company; I was just telling people where I was. But it’s an understandable misperception. This is new territory, and there’s no established etiquette or protocol.

This issue came up again while having dinner with a friend at Greens (37.806679 °N, 122.432131 °W), an upscale vegetarian restaurant. Of course, I thought nothing of broadcasting my location. But moments after we were seated, two other friends—Randy and Cameron—showed up, obviously expecting to join us. Randy squatted at the end of the table. Cameron stood. After a while, it became apparent that no more chairs would be coming, so they left awkwardly. I felt bad, but I hadn’t really invited them. Or had I? There were also missed connections—lots of missed connections. Apple doesn’t let applications from outside software makers run in the background on the iPhone— for a third-party app to work, it has to be the one currently on the screen. Apple says it does this to prevent random programs from sucking down your battery and degrading your phone’s performance. As a result, iPhone location apps can’t send out constant updates. This means that people are often showing up where you were, rather than where you are. On a Friday afternoon, for example, I posted an update looking for nearby friends to share a postwork beer downtown (37.787229 °N, 122.387093 °W). A short time later, I heard back from my friend Lisey, who wanted to meet up. But I had already moved on to Zeitgeist (37.770088 °N, 122.422194 °W), a beer garden in San Francisco’s Mission District. I again updated my location. But the place was packed, so I decided to split and headed to Toronado (37.771920 °N, 122.431213 °W), a bar closer

HETWHATSTHAT: HeyWhatsThat will tell you which mountains you see in the distance, providing a 360° panoramic sketch labeled with the names of the peaks you’re looking at.

ECORIO: With ECORIO you can find out what your carbon footprint actually means in context

TWINKLE: Lets you add images to your tweets.

IWANT: Allows you to find gas, restaurants, and shopping centers around you

FIREEEAGLE: Takes your location to the web. GASBAG: Helps you find the cheapest gas around your current location

I am here

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to home. Just after I left, I heard from Lisey again, who was now on her way to the Mission. I had accidentally dodged her twice. I later discovered that two more pals had shown up at Zeitgeist looking for me. One way around such snafus is to use the Google phone, T-Mobile’s G1. Unlike the iPhone, the G1 lets programs run in the background, so you can launch locationaware apps and keep them humming while you do other things—check email, make calls, take pictures—or just drop the phone in your pocket. I borrowed a G1 to see what it could do that the iPhone couldn’t. One of the first apps I set up, Ecorio, tracked my every movement and used that data to generate a report card on my carbon footprint. Since I get around mostly on foot, bike, or mass transit, this program confirmed my suspicion that I personally was saving the earth. Another app, Locale, kicks in when you enter certain zones—you can set your ringer to go silent when you arrive at work, for instance. I used it to send messages to Twitter automatically when I came within a half mile of home or

the Wired office. LifeAware not only tracks your phone, it also allows you to connect with other people running the app on their phones, showing you their current location. You can use it to monitor employees, your children, maybe even a spouse. Sadly, I couldn’t get anyone to connect with me—for some reason, nobody wanted me to track their every movement. These features were nice, but they didn’t completely sell me on the G1. Sure, the iPhone 3G has limitations, but its popularity (6.9 million units sold in its first quarter) means there are more applications available for Apple’s handset. One of my favorites is Twinkle, a Twitter widget that lets you see posts from users in your area, even if you don’t subscribe to their feeds. Twinkle reminded me of what a great geoapp can do: take an existing service and make it more practical by adding location data. When flames shooting into the night sky appeared to be coming from a nearby hilltop, my Twinkle feed, not the local news, informed me that the fire was actually across the water on Angel Island. Apps like Twinkle, of course, are just the beginning.

The next round of location tools will be even more pervasive, pushy, and predictive. You’ll be able to sort through your emails by where you were when you sent them and read blogs written only by writers within your zip code. Everything with an engine is going to be tracked, so you’ll know precisely where your bus, taxi, or airplane is at all times. We’re going to see more data being pushed to devices as we enter and leave certain areas. And information on who’s doing what and where will be crunched for even smarter services. I was coming to love this new definition of self-centeredness. Then my experiment came to a screeching halt on Interstate 80 just east of Sacramento. I was screaming along at 85 miles an hour in my Civic Hybrid (it can too go that fast), cranking Lil Wayne while scanning for cops. Only I wasn’t checking the rearview mirror; I was staring at an app that flags speed traps. Suddenly an object loomed large in my windshield. A jade-colored Prius had slowed almost to a stop in front of me. I stomped the brakes and swer-ved onto the shoulder to avoid a hybrid mashup. My heart raced.

I am here

And that’s when it hit me: I had gained better location awareness but was losing my sense of place. Sure, with the proper social filters, location awareness needn’t be invasive or creepy. But it can be isolating. Even as we gradually digitize our environment, we should remember to look around the old-fashioned way. I took a deep breath, pulled back onto the highway, and drove home—directed by the Google Maps app on my iPhone, of course. And I didn’t get lost once.

Mathew Honan is contributing editor at Wired Originally published in Wired

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CASE:

Location-based services in the Nordics For many years, many have dreamed of being able to market relevantly to prospects based on the prospect’s geographic location. Google Latitude, Nokia MAPS 3.0 and Tjekbenzin are three different initiatives showing it is practically possible to use locationbased services. The examples also show results.

Google Latitude

Location-based services is here to stay. As users and brands, we must learn to use the possibility in a relevant and meaningful way. It is like having an effective bread knife in the kitchen; we must use it sensibly. The same applies to social and location-based services. As long as the service provides clearly-experienced added-value, consumers are ready to use these new and exciting opportunities.

It’s free. It is effective and it is entertaining. In the days of fixed, landline telephony, our conversations often started with “what are you doing?” Mobile telephony brought us to “where are you?” And in the future, we may start by asking “What are you doing on Times Square?” Earlier this year, Google launched an expansion of Google Mobile Maps. Google Maps makes it easy to navigate with your mobile phone. Google Mobile Maps is similar to the features you find on maps.google.com. Maps for the mobile phone is built on a Java platform, which means most phones by far can use the service. In addition to maps and satellite images, Google Maps help users get from A to B. It offers a route map and accompanying text explanation. The great thing is that you need not have built-in GPS to take full advantage of the free functions. Google has built a sophisticated system that reliably determines your current location without the use of built-in GPS in the phone. But it gets better. Google Latitude (which really is Google Maps Mobile, a version 3.0) now makes it possible to share your location with others. In practice, you receive a text message on your phone that lets you see the location of family, friends, colleagues and customers on a map, each represented by a small icon with the person’s picture. Of course, it is permission based. And as Honan points out in his article, Latitude lets you manually update your location or disable the function entirely.

Read more about Mobile Marketing and Advertising.

Try the new Google Latitude. Send MEDACOM GOOGLE to

Send MEDIACOM to +45 24 77 78 00

+45 24 77 78 00 - we will send you a link from which you can download the free application.

Nokia MAPS 3.0

Tjekbenzin

The right place at the right time with a high-potential customer. Little added value is required from McDonalds for me to take the exit when I cross the Great Belt Bridge at Nyborg. In recent years, Nokia has invested heavily in GPS and map services to mobile phone. By installing GPS modules in most phones – based on telephony companies’ unwillingness to allow phone manufacturers and consumers to access information about mobiles location – Nokia may have given the market the possibility to create services on the basis of this information. In 2008, Nokia launched the latest version of the MAPS concept, version 3.0 and has managed to put more and more functionality on the platform. There is not only general map information, but also additional service, such as 3D services. The next step is to use the information around a planned route. For example, if I plan to drive to Jutland to visit my family, my mobile phone knows very well which route I will take and can warn me of traffic problems along the way. If I combine my route with my time of travel, I know my children will start getting hungry at about 1PM, just as we cross the Great Belt Bridge. And here is where MAPS 3.0 starts to get interesting: If I have authorized McDonalds to contact me with special offers, they can use my profile, my itinerary and the time of day to offer me relevant information - or advertising, as others would say. This means that marketing now becomes absolutely contextual.

The results are obvious. Even though click-through rates on mobile banners are six to 10 times higher than on Website banners, Tjekbenzin (“Check Gasoline”) beats even that: we are talking a click-through rate of 15%. This is like comparing a city bus to the space shuttle. To emphasize that the scenario of contextual marketing is not far from reality, Tjekbenzin has already implemented these possibilities for users in Denmark. Tjekbenzin was first developed for iPhones by the company releaze. Like GasBag, described in Honan’s “I Am Here” article, Tjekbenzin offers information about current gasoline prices in Denmark. My phone’s embedded GPS will ensure that I receive relevant information about the stations that are in my area. Most people understand that part of the story. The interesting thing is that Statoil has run a campaign through the service. When I search for cheap gasoline, or punch in price data for others, advertisements pop up at the bottom of my screen. What is ingenious arranged is that when I see ads in the morning, I am offered newlybaked pastries at Statoil. At mid-day, the offer is a hotdog and chocolate milk. Later, I am offered a cup of coffee and a doughnut and, later, chips and a cola. And, finally, in the evening, the ad appears offering me a 3-for-2 carwash deal.

Try the new Maps 3.0. Send MEDIACOM MAPS to +45 24

Try the new Tjekbenzin, which now also works for “reg-

77 78 00 - we will send a link. Requires that your phone

ular” phones. Send MEDIACOM PETROL to +45 24 77 78

has Series60 OS - typically Nokia E and N series.

00 - we will automatically send a link.

I am here Case: Location-based services in the Nordics

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Trend predictions from the BLINK panel The media market is evolving rapidly. It may sound like a cliché, but it is no less true for that. In this article, you can read the Blink panel’s thoughts about the future of the media and advertising market. The Blink panel consists of several Mediacom employees, primarily based in Scandinavia. In this issue, it is the Nordic CEOs and global Chief Insight Officer who offer views about where the pulse is high on the market now and in the long term. The panel has identified two sets of trends: recession trends that have a six-month perspective, and general trends that have a longer perspective. By Patrick Damsted

Ruben Søgaard, CEO MediaCom Norway

Mika Hayrinen, CEO Virta Media Community Finland

Mick Mernagh, Chief Insight Officer, MediaCom Worldwide

Jonas Hemmingsen, CEO MediaCom Nordic

Linus Hjoberg, CEO MediaCom Sweden

Ulrik Thagesen, CEO MediaCom Denmark

Trend predictions from the Blink Panel

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The Five recession trends SMALL, NEW ADVERTISERS ON LARGE, OLD MEDIA

The fact that advertising time and space are being sold at clearance prices means new, small advertisers are now on â&#x20AC;&#x153;majorâ&#x20AC;? media. For example advertisers who previously could not afford television or newspaper advertising. This group can now afford it because of cheap prices due to the overabundance.

FULL POWER DOWN

The overall advertising picture will change even faster during the crisis, not because of, but by virtue of the crisis. Our Blink Panel summarizes that many of the trends that we have all long lived with, such as print losing both readers and advertisers and such as falling television advertising prices, will accelerate during the recession, but the real reason is not the recession. Therefore, during the recession, media who were already in difficulty will decline faster. Generally, however, it is important not to forget how relatively conservative most media users are or underestimate the willingness of consumers to eventually switch to media platforms that better meet their needs.

ABUNDANCE PROMPTS NEW PRICING

Time and space for advertising are abundant in most media. Space is perishable, so it must be sold now. This causes, in the short-term, a fierce focus on price. But as a consequence of these price declines, there may be other, longer-lasting consequences. For example, a golden opportunity that price will become more dynamic and follow supply and demand in the advertising market. A model that is more similar to the stock marketâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dynamic prices than the annual media price negotiation, which in the future could be more about agreeing the size of the annual buy rather than the final price.

IQ STANDSTILL

The crisis, which forces everyone to focus on price, and the relative conservatism of media users, means that many things that could be done in better ways will continue to be done in the old way. Thus, even if better ways to advertise, measure or test are found, they will not be introduced during the recession. Few advertisers, media agencies or media can look beyond the familiar when the focus is on tight margins. So it is important to gather the new knowledge, so it can be used when the economy brightens.

POOR DOCUMENTATION = RETREATING IN HEADWINDS

Advertising investments that are characterized by long-term goals such as branding and value-spillover, and for which it is hard to demonstrate a bottomline effect, such as sponsorships, are unpopular in recessions. Sponsors are already attempting to pull out of long term agreements with sports teams and cultural institutions to reallocate their spend in placements with shorter, documentable goals.

Trend predictions from the Blink Panel

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COMPLEXITY IS BASIC

This is perhaps the most important of all trends, and the one with the longest time perspective. Even though media, advertisers and media agencies deliver a fairly basic product – the “right contact” – the panel agrees that doing so is becoming increasingly complex to do. But not impossible. Complexity has become a fixture for all decisions and solutions, and might as well be accepted from the outset, according to the panel. Over the next two or three years, predicts the panel, we will probably redefine many areas that are now controlled by old habits. For example, how we buy and sell television time, outdoor campaigns and Web insertions. Those who begin to experiment and develop new methods will capture tomorrow’s marketplace for media and advertisers.

The Five trends with longerterm effects: Patrick Bay Damsted is working to establish relevant points of contact between businesses, products and people, as a consultant and facilitator of today’s new opportunities.

CONTROL DOES NOT EXIST

EVERYTHING IS IN BETA

The market of the future will not invent itself. Therefore, there will be an increased urge to experiment. For example, media and advertisers could try sharing revenue from sold products. Perhaps TV advertising can be converted to a payper-click or pay-per-view model. Maybe media can sell some of their content to advertisers, and perhaps advertisers can deliver media content? There are many possibilities and some of these mentioned are pretty drastic, acknowledges the panel. The future is found only through trial and error and by beta testing our new ideas and formats. The Blink Panel believes the current standstill caused by the crisis will be followed by a flood of new ideas and testing.

EVOLUTION IS RELENTLESS

Media users do not live in a channel portfolio. They live in a world where there is also media. This means they determine much of when and how they consume media. It is not possible to legislate, advertise or force your way to a place in their hearts - and it is the heart they use to choose media. It is essential to be in continuous, close dialogue with key influence groups, and to regard the opinion-forming media users as people you are in a constant, robust, learning dialogue with. It will be the only way to maintain appropriate contact, especially with younger media users, in the future.

A year ago, the biggest problem for daily, distributed newspapers was price of oil. Now the biggest problem is the price of printing and distribution. When a system is under pressure on so many fronts, some player will eventually solve the underlying problem and shift the entire market. For example, we can easily imagine an international web-based supplier suddenly owning rights to many hit television series. It could drive a critical mass of traffic to an integrated web and TV channel without national TV stations being able to prevent it, and thus dramatically shift viewers. Trend predictions from the Blink Panel

BUSINESS MODELS WITH NEW FOCUS

As the group of people who mainly use online rather than offline media becomes the largest group, our industry must learn to communicate with them - and have a business model for this communication. This trend will not be driven by hardware and new gadgets. Instead, it will be driven by the mental state and the expectations that arise when people not only interact with online media, but have become accustomed to think and live online. Since digital media users do not consume channels, but live across all information and contact points, it is most important to put the individual media user in focus and see how it is possible to achieve a meaningful contact with him or her.

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Creating a new Nordic brand

Interview with Bring’s Market Director, Gro Myking

Posten Norge (The Norwegian postal service. –ed) has worked for many years to gain more legs to stand on. As mail volume declines, it has become imperative to create valuable, new business. For several years, Posten Norge has acquired postal and logistics companies throughout the Nordic region. These acquisitions have resulted in a mixed portfolio with many different brands of unequal status. “So developing a common name and expression was a wholly natural strategy. At the same time, we decided our path would be based on a specialist approach that maintains the uniqueness of each of the acquired businesses, instead of creating a generalist approach,” says market director Gro Myking from Bring. By Signe Wandler, MediaCom Denmark

Jonas Hemmingsen (JH): Can you talk about how the

process towards a common name and logo worked? Was it managed centrally from Norway or were all the different actors involved? Gro Myking (GM): The process was started by Posten

Norge (The Norwegian postal service. –ed), but all players were involved from an early stage. It was crucial for us that all parts of the concern were involved. It is clear that it requires a special balance, because there is some risk of internal resistance when you involve every unit, because each company is often happy and satisfied with its trademark. There is a natural fear of losing one’s own profile and becoming part of a gray mass, but these fears were proved wrong. All felt strongly about the joint project, and involvement created a high degree of motivation. A further challenge for us was that we wanted a controlled launch, and so we needed to ensure no confidential information leaked out. JH: It’s an unconventional strategy to engage the organiza-

tion widely. We are more accustomed to a far more “topmanaged” development process, but it’s clear that wide involvement will probably create more commitment to the result.

Bring launched as a unified brand in September 2008, after Posten Norge had made large acquisitions over several years within the Nordic postal and logistics industries. Posten Norge is the large, national Norwegian postal operator, delivering mail to individuals, while the acquisitions were generally specialists and market challengers in their areas. How can such a process proceed, and what considerations and experiences has it offered Bring? Read all about it in this conversation between MediaComâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Nordic Director Jonas Hemmingsen and Bringâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Market Director, Gro Myking.

CHOICE OF LOGO It took a year of intense search to find the right logos for Posten Norge and Bring. The challenge was to find symbols that could both convey the story and be future-proof. The result was the two stylized horns in red and green, which give associations such as road, transport and communication. Posten Norge operates under the red color, and the six specialist functions operate under the green color NAMING BRING The name Bring was chosen after a long, methodical process that started out with 3,000 possible names. The right name had to meet these criteria: - Should feel right in all working environments - Pronounceable in all languages - Able to be registered as a trademark, domain, et cetera - Easy to write and pronounce - Offer strength and energy to the whole organization - Not a constructed name Focus groups, linguistic tests and many other tests were used to test names against these criteria.

TIPS FOR A NEW BRAND STRATEGY - All changes must be based on business strategy. - All decisions are made on the basis of analysis. - Use the time to prepare and educate organization, before changes are implemented. - Have respect for the organizationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s different cultures and traditions. - Measure results regularly and work according to the results. - The process is professionally exciting and creates cohesion in the organization, but remember: the finish line is also the starting line to deliver in line with the ambitions. Gro Myking, Market Director at Bring

Creating a New Nordic Brand

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GM: We were aware that we ran a great risk, and we are

pleased that the process was a success. We chose to include the 100 top managers and key personnel nine months before the launch in September, 2008. A rather large group to make part of the process at that time. By involving them in the confidential development work, we showed them the trust that is crucial in collaborative processes. In addition to the 100 key employees, many external partners were also involved at an early stage. Besides the advertising agency, media agency and designers, we needed 20,000 uniforms and 10,000 trucks ready on the day of launch. That meant many were involved at an early stage. We were impressed with the loyalty of our employees and collaborators. The process was professionally handled by all. When we launched, there had been no leaks, and this was with 480 confidentiality statements. We think that’s quite formidable and that it shows we chose a viable option. I do not think we would have achieved the same involvement and ownership, if we had not had so many participating.” JH: How have you experienced the national perspective

when you were determining the branding? GM: I don’t see big differences in the way we think about

branding and marketing in the Nordic region. The biggest difference we saw was between the big governmental actor, Posten Norge, and the smaller actors that are used to being at the forefront. It was in this tension between the large safe organization and innovative new companies that Bring created the new slogan, Finding new ways. So the acquisitions have been doubly fruitful. They achieved a strategic goal by including new areas of business and also contributed inspiration and energy on the cultural side. JH: How do you guarantee a Nordic mooring in your campaigns? Is the goal a central campaign with minor local adaptation? GM: We have chosen both Norwegian and Nordic part-

ners. Our Swedish design bureau, Grow, is very Nordicbased and our contacts were from Sweden, Norway and Finland. Then, we used the Norwegian branch of the McCann advertising agency, which made the local adaptations in cooperation with its Nordic sister agencies.

MediaCom has cooperated tactically throughout Scandinavia. This means local needs were met, while the whole yielded a Nordic solution. The idea has always been that Bring must be a Nordic brand. JH: How do you work with marketing and campaigns and

building relationships? GM: I see the brand’s role as a door opener between compa-

ny and consumer. That means everything we do in marketing must have relevance down to each employee who has customer responsibility. Bring must be relevant all the way down to business. JH: It can be a challenge from a purely marketing point of

view. Do you think primarily Nordic or local when you prepare campaigns? GM: We carry out direct coordination of marketing plans

across specialist functions. So each specialist submits plans that are coordinated across the organization. That means we are present across the year and together can carry out a good total plan. Practically speaking, all divisions and specialists cooperate in submitting a total, coordinated plan in a market forum. JH: We have many clients who face similar challenges. At

MediaCom, we have learned that making locally-adapted communication is required if there is a very local business relations. If you are faced with local challenges, is it then possible to have an overall Nordic communication? It is very interesting. GM: I think coordination is essential for an effective me-

dia plan. There are large local differences in our various markets and specialists, and it is clear this affects the communication we make and the media we include. We have a good sense of the differences and plan accordingly, but it is important that our basis is the same brand that must be built. Our specialist strategy contributes positively to this. Also, we are aware we are still in a learning process after the launch, and that not everything is nailed down. JH: How does the future and 2009 look for Bring? In 2011,

the entire EU postal market will be liberalized, and we are

in the middle of a financial crisis. Does this mean increasing consolidation or more acquisitions?

Signe Wandler, BA (Economics), Msc (IT). She is an Insight and Research consultant at MediaCom Copenhagen. Work areas include consumer insights and trends.

GM: Our goal in 2009 is to raise awareness of Bring and

Contact: signe.wandler@mediacom.dk. Tel: +45 3376 2267

the new slogan Finding new ways. It is our goal to remain a strong Nordic competitive factor. Scandinavia is our home, but Bring, as an international brand, certainly has strong qualities. With regard to acquisition, I think the development will continue in the future. It is clear that the financial crisis sets some limits, but for us it is a long-term strategy.

Creating a New Nordic Brand

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In advertising: Why go local? Maybe you thought globalization would make advertising across borders a much simpler task? For some brands and categories this holds true, but which? Associate professor Lars Pynt Andersens offers his views. By Lars Pynt Andersen, PhD., associate professor

These days, when it seems as if the prophesies of economic depression are competing for gloominess, it would perhaps seem appealing for some advertisers to try to cut costs by not developing separate campaigns for local markets. Or at least consider using the same advertising regionally, such as in Scandinavia or Northern Europe. The first thing the advertiser should consider is what kind of brand he aspires to build. There seems to be some

If you want to be adored from afar, you can talk French; if you want close friendship, you must talk as a neighbor. evidence to support that the ‘middle layer’ of branding is where there are most benefits of going local. This means that if your brands main appeal is price and nothing else, it probably does not pay to use scarce resources on locally-developed advertising. Maybe advertising is even discarded all together. This also seems to hold true if your brand targets low involvement categories such as detergents and other ‘simple’, problem-solving FMCG’s. To put

Whygo local?

Lars Pynt Andersen, associate professor

it bluntly, when Reckitt Benckiser successfully penetrated the Scandinavian markets with their poorly lip-synched ads for Vanish Oxy Action and Cillit Bang detergents, they drove a truck through the notion that an ad must be liked to be effective. Some even believed these ads were ironic in their demonstrative lack of production value, and others just had a good laugh at what they thought to be amateurism. But it was Reckitt Benckiser who had the last laugh.

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In old school marketing, there has always been the mantra that advertising should sell products, not advertising. And the detergent category seems to work well with these ‘I-love-to-hate-them-ads.’

Going local: Do’s and dont’s Why not go local with low involvement FMCG? Well, you do not have to love your detergent, you don’t spend time analyzing and countering its claims, and you do not even care how the brand and claims got into your head in the first place. That’s why we call it ‘low involvement’. But if someone on the other hand had the audacity to dream up a detergent brand that the consumers were genuinely supposed to love, then it would also need advertising worth loving. And in the mid-price range, this could certainly benefit from localized advertising. So discount and low involvement may not need local advertising. What about the other extreme? There is a twist here: if you go for the luxury branding – make globalized claims of authenticity: most often these are based on country of origin symbols. The most solid traditions of truly global advertising come when French fashion, Swiss watches or Italian sports cars roll out their claim to fame, perhaps even utilizing their native language for underlining the code of local heritage. It should be noted however, that there is room for more than ‘haute couture’ brands in this game. Lifestyle with local origins may sometimes be of broader appeal. For example the post-war infatuations with Americana, that lead even European brands to occasionally pose as American. So if the branding is destined to be based on full frontal lifestyle claims, don’t go local, and just remember that those aspirations have risks:

If your claims to fame do not ring true with the consumers, you may end up with a very short lived fling. But what about the brands in-between, the ‘middle layer’? The original idea of branding was about achieving brand preference, social legitimacy, and if not real love, then at least long lasting friendship. This is about premium beers, classic candy brands and mid-range family cars. This is where local cultural codes become crucial.

If you want to be adored from afar you can talk French; if you want close friendship, you must talk as a neighbor. If you are Porsche you do not have to worry about smalltalking with your customers, but if you are Volkswagen, you’ve better bring a cake. In a case of Danish advertising history, it has been well documented how important it was for VW to go from selfaggrandizing global campaigns to local Danish advertising with humorous use of country of origin appeals, featuring a Danish actor/comedian talking a meshed Danish/German gibberish, in effect making the brand more likeable and sociably acceptable. The problem for Toyota was somewhat similar, in the sense that no one would ever argue against this car’s functional benefits or craftsmanship. But who really want to hang out with a boring engineer? Both brands used a localized advertising campaign with (what Danes at least consider to be) ‘Danish humor’. This humor is laced with a touch of self-irony that is very widely used in Danish advertising. Humor is prevalent in many northern European advertising cultures, such as Great Britain, the Netherlands and the rest of Scandinavia, but each country has its own preferred use and flavor of humor. Compare for example the advertising for the national railways in Sweden and Denmark. The Swedish railways (SJ) has a recent history of separate executions with emotional appeals tapping into local feelings of for example the general moral goodness in using public transport in a beautiful lyrical montage praising the passengers as heroes saving the environment (with a little help from David Bowie). Or a more humorous ad where grandma is being run down with fatigue because of all the visits from family because SJ has special offers on fast-train tickets. In Denmark, Danish Railways (DSB) has been winning advertising industry awards for many years as the most liked and most efficient advertising campaign, with a return on advertising investment from 7.5 to 12 (meaning ad spend pays itself up to 12 times). It is a continued narrative universe with the comic duo of Bahnsen (the train enthusiast) and Harry, his carloving friend, which really cannot see the attraction in trains.

Harry is a rather goofy, purple Muppet, and the main hero of the ads that ironically always prefer to drive his old Ford Taunus. This is two very different ways of addressing consumers (and other stakeholders). Could Harry & Bahnsen work in Sweden? DSB actually tried it tentatively in the Øresund region where the two corporations collaborate, but Swedes could not make heads or tales out of the comic duo.

Glocalized communication The question is sometimes neither local nor global, but both. Even one of the most globalized brands in the world, Coca Cola, believes in a glocalized combination of global and local marketing communication. Instead of a country of origin, Americana approach, Coca Cola now belongs to everyone and every country can ‘choose’ advertising that is believed to work well locally. This sometimes means ads produced in Scandinavia are used elsewhere and vice versa. In 2003, marketing guru Martin Lindstrom claimed that the new segment of tweens (the pre-teens aged 8-12) was naturally born, globalised consumers. The tweens of 2003 are now in their late teens. Is it then a question of national cultures gradually ‘dying’ out while being replaced with globalized youth, as the internet generations are taking over? After many years of research in the tweens segment, the present author does not believe in such a notion. The tweens segment, hailed as the first truly global generation, on closer inspection, turns out also to be very much attuned to local culture and appropriate global marketing in a very local mindset. Going local is likely to stay.

Why go local?

BIO: Lars Pynt Andersen is associate professor at Institute of Marketing & Management, University of Southern Denmark. In his PhD from Copenhagen Business School, he analyzed the first 15 years of Danish TV-advertising and proposed a Genre Matrix for the genres of TV advertising. He has recently published research on the subjects of Tweens’ reception of TV-advertising and their use of new media, as well as a study of mothers’ conspicuous consumption of baby-clothing.

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“I do not think there is hope for the corporations whose business models are based on legal fiction. I do think there is hope for corporations that have a sense of mission beyond short-term valuation, and treats people as human beings, not customers,” says Douglas Rushkoff, teacher of media theory at New York University. In reality, he believes there are few new business models, because we either sell, rent or lease our hardware or software. Read about the challenges and opportunities that traditional business models face in these new times. By Patrick Damsted

A new “We were trying to change the world by making people more creative and productive which is very different from ‘introducing a computer,’” says Guy Kawasaki. He is a 54-year-old Hawaiian venture capitalist who is famous for introducing evangelism to the launch of the Mac in 1984. Since then, he has written nine books about aspects of the modern business mindset. The Mac was launched with massive publicity. There was the famous television advertisement in which a minute’s replay of the scenes from Orwell’s gloomy 1984 ended with the words “On January 24, Apple introduces the Macintosh - and then you’ll see why 1984 will not be like 1984.” The scene is followed by a presentation in which Steve Jobs unpacks a Macintosh and, without the help of others, places it on a pedestal from which it runs a 3.5

floppy disk introduction of itself to the music of Vangelis’ Chariots of Fire and the sound of thunderous applause from a hall full of future Apple missionaries. This moment, which is fully documented on Youtube, is not only the birth of a new computing paradigm, but the birth of a new form, or even philosophy, of business. It is infinitely difficult to love an IBM computer and, as the little Macintosh itself says in its presentation, “never trust a computer you cannot lift.” It is so much easier to love this little super-machine with built-in humor and charm, presented by an obviously proud, slightly choked-up, dad. “Evangelism comes from a Greek word which means ‘bringing the good news.’ So we were bringing the good news that there was a better way to interact with computers,” says Guy Kawasaki, who stresses that he believes Apple was a

“The paradigm in the music business has shifted and as an artist and a businesswoman, I have to move with that shift,” said Madonna, when she switched from Warner Music Group for Live Nation Inc.

See the full introduction of Macintosh on YouTube

THE STORY IN BRIEF • If there is a market, there is also a challenger to that market • Business models can change function and role over • •

time, but there is only one basic business model And the world has changed: Consumers are now more in control So wise businesses change their behavior in order to satisfy the demands of wiser consumers

business model? pioneer in using evangelism in a non-religious context. Today, Apple launches products according to this precept: they gather the eyes of the world to reveal what new products have been conceived in the conclave and that will now be released to the waiting masses. Not many companies have managed to build such a robust format for their semi-annual product launches as Steve Jobs and Apple, and not many have managed to build such a strong expectation for product launches. Not many but it is also unnecessary. For while Apple uses revelation to gather its flock, others gather their congregations in other ways. If we have learned anything since 1984, it is that where there is a market there is also a new market, which comes thundering in from offstage when you least expect it.

A new business model?

The holistic brand The music industry has used much of the past 20 years staving off the day when music is no longer distributed on physical CDs, but as digital files. The film industry has also fought the same paradigm, and the newspapers hemorrhage cash because of their love of paper. But even though old markets can deploy organized legal opposition to change, the opportunities of new times suddenly form a combination of Zeitgeist and critical mass. As a result, the underlying rules and unspoken agreements for that market are changed. “The paradigm in the music business has shifted and as an artist and a businesswoman, I have to move with that shift,” said Madonna, when she switched from Warner Music Group for Live Nation Inc. But what is the

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ABOUT KAWASAKI

Guy Kawasaki helped launch the very first Apple computer and legend has it was he who saw the machine’s innate ability to build a non-religious congregation. A strategy that is still practiced by Mac in product launches and brand maintenance. Kawasaki has published nine books, including several best sellers, with titles such as The Art of the Start, Selling the Dream and Rules for Revolutionaries. In addition, he manages Garage Technology Ventures, a venture capital company.

ABOUT RUSHKOFF

Douglas Rushkoff is an American professor, lecturer, consultant and author. In ten books and several major television documentaries, he has documented how the media, businesses and users are colored by each other’s values and communication. Rushkoff’s books have been translated into 30 languages, and he is regarded by some as one of the most realistic observers of how our culture is changing. Rushkoff’s next book, Life Inc, will be published in English in May 2009.

ABOUT NAISBITT

John Naisbitt is perhaps the world’s leading global futurist, after coining the term “megatrends” in 1982, and publishing a book by the same name which stayed on the New York Times bestseller list more than two years. Megatrends has been published in 57 countries and has sold more than eight million copies. In October 2006, he published Mind Set!

big difference? Warner Music makes money selling records; Live Nation makes its money selling concert tickets. The point of entrusting the management of the brand “Madonna” on all platforms, from record label to concert promoter, is simple: records can be copied; concerts can only be experienced. That Live Nation also cultivates the relationship between artist and fan through merchandise sales and other interfaces is just a bonus. But the fundamental shift in the music business is that some actually believe music can almost be given away as long it builds a fan base that is willing to pay in other ways, such as concert tickets and fan gear. Radiohead clearly showed that bands can let fans choose what they want to pay for an album when they released In Rainbows for download on their website in 2007. A third of the downloads were not paid for. But for the rest, fans paid between £3 and £5, bringing in more revenue than the band

would have earned from a typical record company. As one fan said: “I paid £5. 1 for loyalty to my favorite band, 1 for taking a shot at the record companies, 1 for respecting the consumer, 1 for resisting the status quo, and 1 for the splendid music.”

Change around John Naisbitt, a futurist, has often repeatedly put our behavior and perception of the world in focus by noting that our basic behaviors and needs do not vary: we must eat, sleep safely, have a family and belong to a group. We also need a purpose and the chance to realize ourselves. These are the five basic levels of the behavioral psychologist Abraham Maslow’s needs pyramid. But Naisbitt has noted that the way we meet those needs is indeed changing. At some times, we call our children trophy children; at other times we call them project children. At some times, we have considered them field-hands. But through all of the changes, they are the children we raise that we describe with these words. We have children because it is required for our species to survive, but our perception of the role and function of children changes over time. Similarly, we could say that there is only one business model. “There are not many new business models. Either you sell, rent, or lease the hardware or software. Or, you sell advertising, sponsorships, subscriptions, or extra services and capabilities,” says Guy Kawasaki. However, significant and substantial differences exist between past and present, and that is what makes it so difficult for old businesses to operate in a new world. “By far, the consumer is in control. Consumers now have more product choices, more vendor choices, and more information than ever before. The world is changing business from the very core of what people want and will tolerate right to how a business’s products and services are used by its customers. The Internet and personal computers has shifted power from corporations to customers,” says Guy Kawasaki.

So while we might think it is wise companies that are changing the business world, the truth may be that it is the demands of wise consumers that are changing the behavior of the brightest companies.

And it is about time if we are to believe Douglas Rushkoff who, in addition to teaching media theory at New York University, has dealt with Internet culture since its earliest days. His book, Life Inc., to be published soon, looks at why ordinary people increasingly wriggle out of the role of mere consumers to put demands on companies - their ethics, business models and products. “I think we still have trust in real business, and the function of commerce. I think we all understand that a person can make things, create value, and exchange it with someone else. And I think we still understand that people can do this in groups,” says Rushkoff in an erudite and bitingly sharp reply to our question about why consumers have lost so much trust in the market and companies. “People are not consumers. People are human beings. The best thing companies can do is stop looking at human beings as consumers,” and he continues the harsh line: “I do not think there is hope for the corporations whose business models are based on legal fiction. I do think there is hope for corporations that have a sense of mission beyond short-term valuation.”

Earn from free services and ask your customers Whether you ask the critics or the free market itself, there is no doubt: the future’ potential lies in developing valuable solutions to basic human needs. “Companies should find out whether anyone currently in management remembers what it is the company supposedly does. Do they make TV’s? Do they sell dog food? Are they a medical company? They should take some time to find out what the company’s expertise might be. If it’s a computer company, they should look through the entire company roster and find out who has training or experience in computers. Then they have to get those people in a room, and start asking them about the state of that industry, and what needs people who use computers might have,” offers Douglas Ruhskoff as his best advice for businesses that want to be relevant in the future. And they exist - the many good stories that mix needs and new methods into a successful cocktail that pleases owners and customers. 37 Signals is a “software as service business” that offers all a small, free version of their web-based services that can be extended to larger solutions for a monthly subscription. The same applies to Google’s free services such as Gmail, which can be further customized for a relatively small fee. Many others earn their money by giving their basic

A new business model?

product away, letting the few who want more pay for everyone. The usual view is that free is a customer demand, but it is not. It is fine for a company to make money, as long as it feels fair. “What is actually an okay data price relative to our competitors?” asked Frank Rasmussen, CEO of Bibob, a Danish mobile telephony company, on the company’s website discussion forum? A customer quickly asked “What is your cost?” And soon, customers had come up with a consensus on their “pain” threshold. This discussion thread resulted in the launch of a new data package, which was priced in cooperation with customers at a profit and with all the considerations normal price-setting requires. Rasmussen’s open and dialogue-based style is not typical of the mobile telephony industry, but it works for Bibob and produces high loyalty and customer acquisition rates on the Danish market.

The new business model is the oldest In reality, it can be put quite simply, for the business model of many old companies has a major flaw: often, it is mainly for the company’s sake. It creates an ever-stressful, disruptive and life that is poorly insured against the future. It is neither fun nor rewarding. No new business model can change that. As Guy Kawasaki says: “I do not invest in business models. I do not invest in people, either. I invest in products or services that hopefully have an effective business model and effective people behind them. I’d much rather have an innovative product or service with a traditional business model than an innovative business model of a traditional product or service.” In other words, an old company cannot necessarily save itself by adopting a new business model. What creates tomorrow’s order of business is a focus on strong product development and ability to serve its customers - in a new frame, but with old-fashioned commercial thinking at the core: “excellent customer experience always builds loyalty.”

BIO: Patrick Bay Damsted works to establish relevant points of contact between businesses, products and people, as a consultant and facilitator of today’s new opportunities.

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Social media use in the company MARKETING

“

I need channels to place our content, and therefore build traffic. SOLUTIONS Digg Reddit Newsvine StumbleUpon YouTube Facebook

PUBLIC RELATIONS

“

I want to know and respond to what the public is saying about our products and services.

“

SOLUTIONS Technorati Amazon Google Groups Google Blogs

“

Social media is not only about Facebook. The number of available social media and the number of people who use them are rapidly growing. Some social media cover a large proportion of the target group or population, some are not yet so widespread in the Nordic countries. But it is crucial for every company and for every level of the company to be aware of which types of social media are best suited for the different purposes. Here is a stylized snapshot of any company, inspired by Elliance, adapted by MediaCom.

SENIOR LEVEL

“

I am an opinion leader with a robust knowledge base, I want to raise awareness.

“

SOLUTIONS Create a blog Twitter

SALES/HR

“

I want networking tools to create new business and locate new employees.

“

Social media use in the company

SOLUTIONS LinkedIn Facebook Plaxo

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Facebook is ever present these days and has now changed the profile pages for organizations, brands and products so that they closely resemble personal profiles. As a result, organizational profiles read as if they were personal pages. This requires a strong brand personality that bristles, curls, interacts and treats friends like real friends. For an organization accustomed to navigating on entirely different terms, it can be a difficult balance to strike. But it cannot go entirely wrong if you practice the seven cardinal virtues and avoid the seven cardinal sins. By Nadja Pass, Reflexioner

DIVERSITY CARDINAL SIN: SIMPLICITY

CARDINAL VIRTUE:

The common stereotype about Facebook is that its users are hopelessly selfabsorbed and use their profiles only to brand themselves and tell about their lives, while their profiles are chemically rinsed of nuance, accidents and uncertainties. Nothing could be further from the truth. Very often, a Facebook profile reveals a far more complex person than the cousin, colleague or old classmate we think we know. A single person can easily be a hyper-professional me-brander, caring parent, a climate concerned citizen, train-spotter, jellybean aficionado, fast-food loving organic fiend, hobbyist flower arranger and hangover-plagued party animal. And the friendâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s list is composed across demographics, political affiliation and national borders. In contrast, if an individual profile lives up to the stereotype and appears very self-absorbed, it seems almost a little simple to the viewer. Because we all know we all have bad days, and it is naĂŻve to believe you can hide your humanity behind a perfect profile.

What does it mean for the organizational profile? Organizations are complex. Before, the communication and marketing departments boiled it all down to one unique selling point, one story, and one message. On Facebook, the rules are different if the organization wants to appear as a whole brand personality. An organization that dares reveal its self-knowledge, its focus areas and priorities oozes personality, while a toopolished organization not only appears cold and impersonal - it appears simplistic because it believes it can control everything said about it.

Facebook: Learn the cardinal virtues and sins ENGAGEMENT SLOTH

CARDINAL VIRTUE: CARDINAL SIN:

On Facebook, causes, groups and fan pages about political questions and social problems can attract incredibly many supporters and votes in an instant. This gives many people a greater sense of participation in democracy than in the past. It has proved to be a much more efficient path to the attention of mass media and politicians than the traditional route of press releases, correspondence and feature articles. But if you set something in motion, you must follow up and take participation seriously. When it only takes a click and a moment’s attention to support the projects of others, you appear lazy and unengaged if you do not take part in other groups and causes than your own.

What does it mean for the organizational profile? Facebook is an obvious CSR media. Here, users want to hear about a utility company’s views on climate issues, a carmaker’s research into road safety and a candy maker’s attitude to public health. Not least, they want to hear about the actual actions behind the glowing positions announced by the corporate communication department. Facebook offers many opportunities to weigh the public mood, involve users in the conceptual stage and ask them for advice. But woe betide the organization that puts this in motion, then fails to follow up, asks closed questions or is unable to listen to the answers. It requires a continuous and active presence by the organization to maintain an active Facebook profile, group or page. Before, managers could relax once the ads started running. On Facebook, however, the real work begins only after the profile is opened. The whole point is to be constantly present to answer questions, comments and queries. If the company is not, it will appear lazy and distant – and the profile is counterproductive because it signals that the company never really wanted a dialogue. It signals the company used Facebook only as a soapbox from which to harangue the masses.

Facebook: Learn the cardinal virtues and sins

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WISDOM CARDINAL SIN: BANALITY CARDINAL VIRTUE:

In a world where everything can be adjusted if we change our mind, and in which the happy amateur has easier access to prime time television than a professional musician, there is naturally a need for the opposite: someone who dares make definitive statements that all can relate to. Thorough work that oozes quality, expertise and professionalism. When everyone is talking all the time, we increasingly sort out the noise and concentrate on listening to those who really know what they are talking about. So, in many ways, the future is a nerd’s paradise. Banal Facebook updates such as “tired” or “playing with the children” are derided, while updates that teach or inspire friends are praised. Wikipedia is built by the special knowledge of nerds, and the most popular Youtube links are those that demand great time and talent to produce. You have to be fairly geeky to build an exact copy of New York City in LEGO blocks or create fountains by combining Diet Coca-Cola and Mentos. It is time, patience and genuine talent that impress other users.

What does it mean for the organizational profile? At a time when a huge bubble of hot air just burst, people are hungry to listen to those who really know what they are talking about. Expertise, solid data, proud professional traditions and experience are having a renaissance. The geekier the organization dares to be on Facebook, the more likely it is to attract the right friends who share the staff’s passion for trains, flowers, fashion, sweets or ecology. The Facebook profile can be an effective platform for company’s internal experts, scientists, craftsmen and designers to exchange ideas and experiences with all the civilian geeks. Traditionally, we would not dare to communicate so “geekily” with customers for fear of losing something along the way – and often ended up saying a lot of platitudes based on the lowest common denominator. Understandable to all – irrelevant to all. With a Facebook profile, we can let recipients segment themselves, so we can afford to speak to friends who have shown an interest.

CARE CARDINAL SIN: IRRELEVANCE CARDINAL VIRTUE:

Facebook has taken over - and restored - many of the lost social functions that local newspapers and birthday calendars performed for earlier generations. Suddenly, best wishes flood in on birthdays, weddings, anniversaries and hirings. It has become easy to assemble the old high-school class, and everyone helps recall what Michael Bâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s last name was when it comes time to tag the old class photo. At the same time, many friends show their most generous side on Facebook, when they share links and help each other find everything from apartment exchanges, dream jobs, travel companions, short-notice babysitters or someone to lay off a pair of extra concert tickets. This kind of success story abounds, because Facebook has proved to be an extremely effective alternative to the supermarket bulletin board: partly because your Facebook network is so large and tailored that the inquiry is spread far and wide; partly because there is a degree of intimacy between friends. Together, the probability for a successful query is increased.

What does it mean for the organizational profile? Facebookâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s colossal CRM-potential is obvious to anyone who has dreamed of targeting individuals. But precisely because it is so easy for organizations to communicate directly, relevantly, constantly, critically and communicatively with users who have, in addition, signed themselves up under the fan tabs, users are even more critical about the communication from the corporation. Users do not want to be spammed with general messages, but want to be respected as individuals. If they have shown interest in nuanced information, a polished press release will not satisfy them. If they answer or comment, they expect to be listened to, and expect the organization to actively work to develop a vibrant comment thread. The organization is expected to deliver what it promises. If it creates a Facebook profile, it promises to be present and caring of its friends.

Facebook: Learn the cardinal virtues and sins

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“Treat your company’s Facebook friends as if they were your own” HONESTY CARDINAL SIN: DISHONESTY CARDINAL VIRTUE:

People increasingly use status updates to talk about what doesn’t go right: computer crashes, love-life woes, contractors who don’t show up, the financial crisis, impossible children, the death of a favorite aunt, missed deadlines or just feeling blue. We once only shared many of these ups and downs with close friends or those whom we happened to be with when we got bad news. Typically, it can be overwhelming to call around and ask for help in this situation. But a status update immediately attracts much-needed pats on the back, caring calls or offers of help. Recently, it has become normal to use status updates to create small eulogies for beloved friends and family, and to celebrate deceased celebrities with fan pages where users collectively mourn. The vulnerable updates often give unexpected glimpses into our personalities. This not only generates sympathy and commitment from friends - it also prompts further dialogue, because we have something specific to ask and on which to base further conversation.

What does it mean for the organizational profile? Many organizations sometimes end up in media storms: politically or financially. Often, the CEO is on the defensive when he is grilled on television, or the organization sticks its head in the sand, hoping the crisis will pass. On Facebook, however, organizations can show their more vulnerable side, speak out about the situation, offer proper explanations or even apologize when they have been in the wrong. Of course it affects an organization when it is caught in a media storm, but often the good reasons for the crisis are never shown on television. This vulnerability can be shared with loyal customers and bitter critics alike on Facebook, where they have a real chance to ask about the situation in its proper context. Honesty and explanations can go a long way to repair the damage. Likewise, if the organization is found to be lying to its Facebook friends, the loss of trust can be severe. With mass media, we all know the story is shaped and twisted and does not include every nuance. But when the organization has a completely open, direct channel through which to tell its version, it is expected to tell the truth.

GENEROSITY CARDINAL SIN: GREED

CARDINAL VIRTUE:

When working with social media, some of the keywords are sharing, openness and cooperation. While Facebook is not directly part of the open source movement, many of the tools used on Facebook were developed in the open source spirit, in which Creative Commons replaces copyright, and in which all share their knowledge and thoughts so that as many as possible benefit. Everyone helps everyone to further develop each other’s projects. One of the most captivating aspects of Facebook is that this generosity pervades relationships. Most users learn that the more they give and share on Facebook, the more they enjoy inspiration, new perspectives, invitations to exciting events, job offers and claps on the shoulder when they need it.

What does it mean for the organizational profile? Most organizations trying Facebook forget to be generous. Instead, they see Facebook as an El Dorado of free and highly-targeted marketing channels. But explicit sales, promotions and bombastic statements can easily appear as an assault and violation of the friend “contract.” When we meet organizations through traditional communication channels, we know they want to sell us a message. But when an organization suddenly looks like someone who wants to be our friend, we are uncertain of the rules -- and immediately more aware and critical. You do not want to be forced into home parties. You do not want to give something to someone who never gives anything back. And you do not want to be friends with those who too aggressively bid for attention. Self-discovered is well-discovered.

Facebook: Learn the cardinal virtues and sins

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DELICACY CARDINAL SIN: SARCASM

CARDINAL VIRTUE:

Humorous updates, photos and videos often attract the most attention on Facebook. So it is tempting to try to be a virtual standup-comedian. But you should take care. Speaking face-to-face, we can often decode sarcasm through tone, facial expression and context. On Facebook, the statement is naked and easily misinterpreted as hurtful, outrageous or provocative. And you must remember that your Facebook network is so complex that what might be “normal” in one circle of friends can be extremely offensive in another. If you must be funny, self-deprecation is the safest way, because it appears disarming and big-hearted when you can poke fun at yourself, and it avoids targeting others. Otherwise, it is far better to stick to delicate wordplay, quotes citations or philosophical considerations that make friends smile and think about life.

What does it mean for the organizational profile? It is very difficult for an organization to be funny on Facebook. The best humor often rises and falls spontaneously. There is often an unspoken understanding involved because it twists, turns and crystallizes everything that is between friends in a split second. If it misses its target, it can often sound shrill and sarcastic. But with which friends can an organization have unspoken understandings without at the same time ignoring many other stakeholders? And how much can the individual employee say right now without approval from higher up? It is so difficult to hit the right note that one should simply not attempt to be funny on the organization’s behalf. But you can certainly be delicate and interesting through the use of wordplay, associations and thoughtful questions. In press releases and on the website, these “twinkles in the eye” are often edited out during the long slog through the approval system. But on Facebook, it is essential that these twinkles remain so all can see the organization is made up of people – and vibrant personalities.

BIO: NADJA PASS Nadja Pass holds a Master’s degree in rhetoric. She is a communication advisor and founder of Forlaget Reflexioner, a publishing house. She analyzes the rhetoric of popular culture, works with knowledge transfer, constantly experiments with new media opportunities and blogs in Danish at nadjasreflexioner.net.

THE SEVEN CARDINAL SINS

1 SIMPLICITY

- never believe you control what others say about you

2 SLOTH

- never forget to fulfill your part of the contract

3 BANALITY

– say nothing if you have nothing original to say

4 IRRELEVANCE – follow up what you set in motion

THE SEVEN CARDINAL VIRTUES

1 DIVERSITY

- enjoy your nuances and paradoxes

2 ENGAGEMENT

- actively participate in the community around you

3 WISDOM

5 GREED

- never enter into friendships solely for your own gain

6 DISHONESTY – do not lie

7 SARCASM

- do not poke fun of others and laugh only at yourself

– cultivate your geeky side and share your knowledge

4 CARE

- take others into account and offer them a helping hand

5 GENEROSITY

- share your knowledge, your network and your views

6 HONESTY

- be open about your challenges and weaknesses

7 DELICACY

- allow yourself to have a twinkle in your eye

Facebook: Learn the cardinal virtues and sins

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The Pink Dollar segment may be where your company’s next dollars come from, especially in the Nordic countries. For many years, wellknown international brands such as Absolut Vodka, Dell and Diesel have run successful “Pink Dollar” advertising and sponsorship programs towards gays and lesbians. Is the Pink Dollar segment not significant enough to be addressed separately in the Nordic region? Or are advertisers missing the golden Pink Dollar opportunity? By Carsten Lind, MediaCom Nordic

The pink dollar equals the lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgender segment

Are you missing out on the INFO ABOUT WORLD OUTGAMES 2009 IN COPENHAGEN This summer Copenhagen will host the World Outgames 2009 event. The event lasts for more than a week and covers three main areas – sports, culture and human rights. The target audience is gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders. World Outgames is expected to be visited by more than 20,000 people from all over the world embracing diversity within sport, culture and human rights www.copenhagen2009.org

“There is no doubt that the gay and lesbian community exists, with well-established organizations and communities in the Nordic countries. But few advertisers have targeted the Pink Dollar segment in their advertising and media briefs. Maybe because they are afraid to do so. Maybe because they lack data on target size and potential. But more often it is a lack of consumer insight,” says Thomas Sonberg, director of the Copenhagen-based advertising agency Reputation, which is working with the Pink Dollar segment for World Outgames, an upcoming gay and lesbian event (see box). “The basic principle of effectively targeting the Pink Dollar segment is no different from any other segment,” says Thomas Sonberg, and continues “be it women with two kids or elderly men who love to play golf.” The coming out of the closet phenomenon is a common denominator for all subgroups of the Pink Dollar segment that can be a common platform for understanding and building advertising strategies. Everyone in the segment has experienced it: it is characterized by a self-realization experience with feelings of being alone or left out. “In talking to this segment there is a delicate balance between laughing with the Pink Dollar consumer versus

Pink Dollar?

parents return from vacation to find their son in bed with a gay lover. While there may have been many good reasons for this ad, the gay and lesbian view is that the ad speaks to heterosexuals and plays to the parent nightmare – finding out your child is gay or lesbian. “At the same time, Biogesic is laughing at and pointing fingers at the gay and lesbian consumer,” says Thomas Sonberg. In contrast, Skyy Vodka is an example of inclusive advertising where the push on the emergency button clearly indicates that gay contact is being made on the way to the sky bar with subtle sexual connotation. It is inclusive as it underlines Skyy Vodka’s gay and lesbian acceptance.

Open minded advertising But other ways exist to include the Pink Dollar segment in your advertising and communication strategy. Scandinavian Airlines has recently launched an alternative reservation site specifically targeted at gays and lesbians as part of SAS’ marketing towards: the World Outgames 2009 in Copenhagen. “SAS is a great example of a Nordic brand that welcomes the Pink Dollar segment in their worldwide advertising,” says Thomas Sonberg. “In a financial crisis, who isn’t interested in an audience with a trendsetter profile, double income and no kids. And if that trendsetter is gay or lesbian embracing our brand, the Pink Dollar segment is beyond doubt an attractive segment of loyal consumers with higher proportion of available spend than the average consumer. My advice to advertisers would be to give this segment a try and include the gays and lesbians in their next advertising and media brief. It can’t hurt – but it must be well thought through and part of a long term strategy to create true brand bonding,” says Thomas Sonberg.

laughing at them,” continues Sonberg. Your brand can be portrayed as homophobic or homo-friendly. This is also true for any other advertising. However, for gays and lesbians it has a much more profound meaning. What is very important to Pink Dollar advertising is the need to be inclusive and not exclusive,” says Thomas Sonberg.

Inclusive and exclusive advertising An example of an exclusive advertising campaign is the ad for the headache relief-brand Biogesic, where the

Are you missing out on the Pink Dollar?

BIO: Carsten Lind is the Nordic Insight and Research Director for MediaCom Nordic. Contact: carsten.lind@mediacom.dk tel: +45 33 76 00 04 Know more: www.flysas.com/gay

Blink022009 blink.mediacom.com

DOES SHOPPING MAKE US HAPPY?

All scientific studies indicate yes - at least in the short term. And the dose of happiness can be attributed to dopamine, the brain’s rinse for reward, satisfaction and well-being. When we first decide to buy something, our brain cells release dopamine, a stream of well-being, and that dopamine flow strengthens our instinct to keep buying, even when our rational thinking tells us that we have had enough. As Professor David Laibson, an economist at Harvard University, puts it: “Our emotional brain would like to max out our credit cards while our logical brain knows we should save for our retirement.” Two researchers recently developed “The Smiling Study” to examine how happiness or joy affects people who shop. They asked 55 volunteers to imagine they had just entered an imaginary travel agency. When they got inside, they were served by one out of three people: a smiling woman, a woman who seemed confused, and one who seemed completely indifferent. Which volunteers reported the most positive (imaginary) experience? You guessed it: those who had been in contact with the smiling travel consultant. The study revealed that a smiling face “produces more pleasure for the recipient than a non-smiling face,” and that it also leads to a much more positive view of the business. Not only that, the volunteers who imagined interacting with the smiling agent reported they would more likely continue to use the firm. Excerpts from Buyology, by Martin Lindstrom, Børsen Forlag, 2008.

WHAT IS NOT IN COMMON?

When we shop on line, we increasingly meet recommendation features. For example, Amazon helpfully tells us “Customers who bought this item also bought,” followed by a list of books that form a community of interest with the selected book. It is

M:files

a clever way to cross-sell and provides further inspiration. But when it is about being challenged, getting out of the box and thinking in new ways, it can sometimes be more rewarding to be presented with books that are completely outside the community of interest. This feature has now appeared in a beta version and it is called the “Unsuggester.” The Unsuggester has analyzed the 36 million books in the LibraryThing book community, where members indicate which books they have read or own. The Unsuggester then suggests books that have the least likelihood to be on the same shelf with the selected book. If you like this book, you will not like this! http://www.librarything.com/unsuggester

WHEN AND WHERE TO ENGAGE WITH CUSTOMERS

“The rules of communication are changing. In the digital world,

channel contributes to long-term brand relations, we can

the consumer and customers are taking control. Brands have

better support consumer decision making.”

to earn attention rather than rely on interruption. People are

For many years, MediaCom has applied 3D, a proprietary tool,

looking for conversation not monologue. MediaCom Encoun-

for brand loyalty measurements in the Nordic region. In Den-

ters is a multi-channel planning tool designed to navigate this

mark and Norway, 3D has been single source to the local TGI

new and evolving media landscape. It opens up the landscape

systems. This single source principle is now also applied to

to stimulate thinking about where AND how to engage with

MediaCom’s new Encounters channel optimization tool in

target groups - based on their relationship with the category,

Denmark, allowing for cross-over analysis between Encoun-

the brands and contact channels,” states Nordic Insight and

ters, 3D and Index Denmark.

Research Director Carsten Lind.

“The Encounter single source tool is unique in the entire Me-

Beyond analyzing consumer category and brand involvement,

diaCom worldwide network and will function as a best prac-

Encounters surveys consumer interaction with each rele-

tice case for our sister agencies”, says Carsten Lind.

vant channel applied in a communication strategy. Not only

All channel determinants deriving from the Encounters sur-

traditional channels in above-the-line (ATL) such as TV, print

veys are merged into a mathematical algorithm calculating

and radio are researched: weblogs, recommendations from

the channel plan’s total Channel Opportunity Points (COP).

friends and other types of channels beyond ATL are included.

Hence, Encounters allows for scenario planning enabling

Basically Encounters pinpoints “lean forward” and “lean back-

cross-channel optimization.

ward” channels per category illustrating how consumers use

“We are excited that Encounters is now single source to 3D

channels in different situations.

and our local TGI in Denmark and look forward to start work-

“However, not all channels are granted permission by the

ing with Encounters for our clients,” says Carsten Lind.

brand to advertise. For some categories, consumers allow brands to send them SMSs about offers and discounts; in some cases this type of contact would be annoying,” says

For more information, please contact Carsten Lind, Nordic

Carsten Lind. “We need to understand that if there is brand

Insight and Research Director for MediaCom Nordic at

permission to advertise, as well as knowledge of how each

carsten.lind@mediacom.dk

Our collection of tips, trends & tools THE IKEA EFFECT

Do-it-yourself, build-a-bear, shake-and-bake cake mixes. We are increasingly involved in the production of products for our homes - and

it gives us great pleasure. When the first shake-and-bake cake mixes appeared in the 1950s, they were met with resistance. The mixes were too simple. By making it necessary to add more ingredients, thus making the process more difficult, the mix manufacturers made them far more popular. This indicates that we are happy about “doing it sort of ourselves.” In fact, we are so pleased with the things we have produced ourselves that researchers have given the phenomenon a name: the “IKEA effect,” named for the Swedish furniture giant. In one of the studies that helped to uncover the phenomenon, an auction was held of hobbyist and professional origami. Amateur creations were judged to be as valuable as professional work. Hence, labor leads to love. But, on an individual note, it is also important to not let the IKEA effect take the upper hand -- it may be necessary “to kill your darling.” Even when it is home made!. Source: Harvard Business Review, “Breakthrough Ideas for 2009,” February 2009. M:files

Blink022009 blink.mediacom.com

HOW TO LISTEN TO THE DIALOGUE IN SOCIAL MEDIA. Online weblogs, chat forums and other types of communities

where consumers discuss brands and product experiences are now monitored daily by MediaCom, allowing a wholly-new, in-depth understanding of what consumers really care about regarding categories and brands. Are they positive or negative towards your brand? What do they say, with whom do they share their views, and what is the effect? “WordAppeal

M:files

is our new online software that constantly monitors online communities, blogs and social networks in the Nordic re-

WordAppeal is best described as a robot, constantly reading

gion. WordAppeal provides us the fundament for speaking to

consumer correspondence online. To sort out all the moni-

our clients about online social media strategies,” says digital

tored conversation, WordAppeal has a predefined graphic

evangelist Christian Godske

module. A typical graphic module is shown for Coca Cola and

“In a busy world with lots of daily routines, communication

reveals that the level of correspondence (Mentions) for Coca

plans to deliver, budgets to keep and many other impor-

Cola and Pepsi are closely related, the volume to a large ex-

tant marketing challenges to face, it is difficult if not almost

tend being generated by questions posted like “which brand

impossible to keep track of all the conversation going on

do you prefer” – whereas the discussions about Fanta is more

between consumers online about the marketers brand,”

driven by dedicated fans and unique Fanta flavours encoun-

continues Christian Godske. “This is where our WordAppeal

tered in other countries.

comes in handy as it tracks conversation between consum-

“Looking at the Topic Association Report, interestingly Coca

ers on blogs and communities selected for each client and it

Cola is not as widely associated with music as Pepsi is, which

creates tailor made monthly reports, with daily alerts if re-

might be a bit surprising, and something I’m pretty sure will

quired by our clients.”

be different from asking people which of these brands is

more closely associated with music. This however is an illus-

SOFT DRINK TOPIC ASSOCIATION REPORT FOR 03.03.2009-01.04.2009

tration of the number of times each brands comes up when people talk about music or the other way around – and not the result of a survey,” states Christian Godske. “Beyond the WordAppeal reports and alerts, which are of a more quantitative order – and which we use for both assessing the users response to our communication and general feedback on everything from satisfaction with the product or suggestions for improvements, we also use this tool at the

‘Playful’ ‘Music’ ‘Refreshing’

platform to have a dialogue with our clients about how they

Fanta

should address social media. Many clients already have a PR

Pepsi

Coca-Cola

CONVERSATIONS/ARTICLES/MENTIONS

strategy, a Marketing Strategy, but not necessarily a well defined social media or blogging strategy. That is; which online

The figure above shows how the 3 different soft drink brands are associated with the 3 values on the y axis, the size of the bubble illustrating how often each of these 3 ‘value groupings’ (which consist of multiple keywords/phrases themselves) appear in association with the specific brand of soft drink.

communities should be cared about, how often should they be monitored? Who is in charge of reporting unusual consumer conversation to the management? Is it the PR or the Marketing department? Who in the organization is allowed to reply to consumers’ blogs, and if so, who signs off? These are

Pepsi for example, is in social media more closely linked to the value ‘refreshing’ (this being related to various keywords/phrases associated with the taste/drinking experience) than Coke or Fanta is.

the typical questions we address based on our WordAppeal consultancy when defining the best online social media or blogging strategy for our clients,” continues Christian Godske. For more information, please contact Digital Evangelist Christian Godske at christian.godske@mediacom.dk or Nordic Insight and Research Director Carsten Lind at carsten.lind@mediacom.dk

SOFT DRINKS MENTIONS TREND REPORT FOR

70 56

MENTIONS

03.03.2009-01.04.2009

42 28 14

Fanta

Coca-cola

Pepsi

0 03.03

10.03

17.03

24.03

31.03

TOPIC

SOFT DRINKS DISCUSSIONS TREND REPORT FOR

70 56

MENTIONS

03.03.2009-01.04.2009

42 28 14

Fanta

Coca-cola

Pepsi

0 03.03

10.03

17.03

24.03

31.03

TOPIC

M:files

Blink022009 blink.mediacom.com

M:files OPEN UP THE REAL WORLD The Real World is here. You might say that it has always been

about communications and their effectivenessâ&#x20AC;?

here and you would be right. What is new, is that it is here as

The Real World Street has already been applied to the Danish

an accessible tool where you can tap into the everyday lives

safari park Knuthenborg that was interested in talking to fami-

of everyday families. The tool is known as the Real World

lies with young kids about the decision making regarding visits to

Street and is set up as a panel of 11 families that represent a

amusement parks and smaller holidays.

miniature Denmark. The benefit of meeting families on their

The Real World Street can be accessed in all of the

own turf is great. They are comfortable, can emphasize their

Nordic countries.

opinion through objects in their own homes and can take you to where everyday decisions are made. CSO Sue Unerman, MediaCom UK says, â&#x20AC;&#x153;communications that get results in the real world have to begin in the real world.

For more information, please contact Carsten Lind,

With no chance for fake answers or pretence, the Real World

Nordic Insight and Research Director for MediaCom

Street project gives us unprecedented access to the truth

Nordic at carsten.lind@mediacom.dk

COLOPHON: BLINK is published by MediaCom A/S, Antonigade 2, DK-1106 København K., CVR 78422017. Tel. +45 3376 0000, info@mediacom.dk, www.mediacom.dk BLINK is made in cooperation with Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies (CIFS), Nørre Farimagsgade 65, DK-1364 København K., Tel. +45 3311 7176, cifs@cifs.dk, www.cifs.dk and www.foonline.dk Editor in chief : Signe Wandler, MediaCom, signe.wandler@mediacom.dk Editor: Gitte Larsen, CIFS Editorial team : Jonas Hemmingsen (Nordic CEO, MediaCom), Signe Wandler, (Insight, MediaCom) and Gitte Larsen (Futurist and Editor of FO, CIFS). English editor and adaptation: Allan Jenkins, Desirable Roasted Coffee, www.desirableroastedcoffee.com Visual concept and art direction: Merete Busk: www.meretebusk.com Layout: WhomadeID: www.whomadeid.com

Circulation: 2300 ISSN: 1903-5373 The opinions expressed in articles are those of the authors. Minor textual contents may be republished as long as the original author and publication are cited. Printed by: Arco Grafisk A/S Sign up at our website blink.mediacom.com if you would like to receive BLINK in the future

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Consumers have n ever before considered themselves as important or as entitled as they do now Trendwatching.com “ Trendreport 2009”