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I’m worried about gamification. I’m worried that it’s going to be the next fall guy (or girl) in the marketing space as people begin to decide, “no one wants badges”.
Granted, the truth is that, yeah, no one wants badges. But that’s because it’s not the badge they want but the recognition of achievement, either from a game or from their friends. Since none of the badge-based games do particularly well, people don’t want badges, branded or otherwise.
So what’s the deal? Gaming touches on a set of core human functionality. A good game presents itself as an achievable challenge. Something we can do, that’s outside of our day-to-day life, which provides instant feedback to our actions and a place for us to try something over and over again. Physiologically, a good game create dopamine bursts in the brain that look a lot like what happens when we are happy, learning, or addicted (depending on which study you read). For any company, the idea of a hyper-committed audience is enticing. Burger King created and sold a series of games in 2006, none of which were particularly popular because they felt like an advertiser trying to make you play a video game. But there are deeper implications for more simple game mechanics to be introduced into our daily lives.
Heather Chaplin, in an article she wrote for Slate takes the perspective that gamification could eventually become a threat to employees. She sees the dangers of gamification as a means of paying lower wages while increasing performance for employees by providing “points” and “rewards” instead of pay.
“Indeed, gamification is an allegedly populist idea that actually benefits corporate interests over those of ordinary people. It’s strange that its advocates don’t seem to understand there’s a difference. In his talk at South by Southwest, Seth Priebatsch of the gamification startup SCVNGR said there were five problems we could solve if we built a game layer over the world. These nettlesome issues, he explained, included both ‘customer acquisition’ and ‘global warming.’”
She’s got a point. But that point will become antiquated over time. Look at Khan Academy’s new Practice section of their website which turns learning into a game with points and ranking. This site focuses squaring on transforming the way learning happens and it seems to be working.
If you were a student growing up within this system of encouragement, would you be offended if your employer or an advertiser created a game to incentivize your participation? What if there was real incentive and not simply “points” associated with achievement? We know that many workers in the finance industry operate on a bonus system that nets them compensation based on performance. There’s also the ever-present, though rarely committed to, trend that advertising agencies will begin billing based on measured effects on sales. These are both a form of gamification both with their positives and negatives. Our challenge is to define how brand and game mechanics can work together. This is not a binary debate about whether or not gamification should become ubiquitous. This is a debate about a range of features that can be added in layers, it’s also far from being figured out but I’m certain that someday it will be and the positives will win out over the negatives.
(Jacob Cohen @jstackhouse)
Our mobile phones are a personalized space; the apps we choose can be added to and removed from our lives as our tastes change. It’s almost like a favorite restaurant or bar. One place may be your “favorite” for week or a year or a couple years but eventually, more places open and you begin trying new ones. We don’t just pick a restaurant for the food, it’s a matter of the experience within the place. The equation looks something like: food+service+ambiance+crowd=great place. In other words, we navigate towards places and experiences that fit our “type” or, more accurately, our social segment.
If this is how we treat our physical experiences, why should we expect that our digital experiences be made up of homogenous applications that “everyone” uses? Just as with restaurants and bars, this is not the trend present in business either. In the business space, we see unique companies within similar sectors succeeding for years and decades while keeping their differences firmly intact, even as they grow and diversify their offer. It is the role of brand to identify and share the uniqueness of a business with the world in a way that’s congruent with our lives. In the digital space, as more and more people join into a state of persistent connection we should see the role of brand increase, along with diversifying audience demand. This is really a process of specialization; small markets split and target specific groups, thereby growing the digital market as a whole and generating more specialized submarkets. This trend towards specialization is native to the advancement of technology. While today the “digital” market may feel saturated, in the future we’ll see specializations like “digital fashion”, “digital technology news”, or “digital restaurants” become more mainstream and diverse. Eventually the “digital” moniker will be dropped altogether as our experiences integrate fully with data.
Of course, this specialization is already beginning to happen. For example, the “hit” app at SXSW wasn’t one app, but a sector of apps, ostensibly called “Group Chat apps”. The functionality was virtually the same between GroupMe, Beluga, Fast Society, Kik and the other group chat applications that were presented at SXSW. The only real differentiator was the experience of using the app, otherwise known as “brand”. The look, feel and functionality of interacting with the app defined the audience and drove who used which application. The general assumption is that one of these apps will “win”, but in reality there’s room for multiple applications offering the similar service. As long as those products are brand-led their uniqueness and usefulness can drive the creation of a targeted audience.
In the future we could see one social app for frat boys, another for nerds and, of course, an ironic one for hipsters.
(Jacob Cohen @jstackhouse)
Photo Courtesy of http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lbtymvJB3L1qa0nd6o1_500.jpg
At SXSW this year, I had the unique opportunity to understand “brand” from the perspective of a startup. I spent much of SXSW with two unique startups, Giftopera.com and Voyurl.com. Both of these are distinct products with quite different founders. Giftopera was founded by a developer I’ve known for years named Vineet Choudhary and his business partner Simon Tiemtore. It’s a group gifting application that, once built, will allow people to pool their money to buy a gift for a friend. Voyurl is founded by Adam Liebsohn who has seemingly scraped every dollar he has into the creation of Voyurl while maintaining a full-time job at an award-winning ad agency. Voyurl allows users to elect to be tracked as they move around the Internet with the trade off that they can then see their own stats and compare them with their friends’. The idea is to even the playing field against Google, Facebook and others who are tracking our online activity with every click.
Vineet, Simon and I rented a house from HomeAway for the week of SXSWi. They have been working on GiftOpera for a couple months now but the product isn’t online yet. Vineet, the quietly-social father of two, is able to build much of the framework for the product on his own, but has chosen to bring in some outside resources from India and Sweden to work on the development and design of the app. Simon, a magnanimous finance guy originally from Burkina Faso, heads the business thinking and sales side of the company. Over the course of 6 days, I watched them give out over 500 business cards, with Simon chatting up everyone he met while casually explaining the product to a captive sidewalk audience. Their goal for SXSW was simply to raise awareness about their infant brand and sign up users for a future launch. Both of them worked hard exploring and learning everything from the SXSW panels to talking with venture capital managers to make sure they were at enough events to make their presence known. This meant building brand awareness through fairly traditional means; shaking hands, passing cards and sitting with influential decision makers. Their brand is about bringing groups together who want to achieve a common goal, it is as personal a brand as the relationships they are looking to build.
On the contrary, Adam texted to tell me he’d be coming down the day before SXSW. Adam’s Voyurl.com application has been in private beta for over a month and has built up a solid following that’s garnered him several high-profile interviews with publications like the New York Times. (Private beta is where friends and friends of friends are invited to test the product while the dev team releases new updates. For the user it usually involves a lot of patience balanced with the trade off that they were “first”). At the conference, I first ran into him outside the convention center with his messenger bag pulled around over his military jacket. He was handing out printed tags and preparing to give out a couple thousand stickers in a traditional, but effective, guerilla marketing tactic. Like Vineet and Simon, Adam’s goal was also to raise awareness, but he had to go about this in a different way. His stickers, with the tagline “prove you weren’t looking at porn” found their way into nearly every available space at SXSW. His brand isn’t about shaking hands and handing out business cards, it’s about building buzz. It’s the kind of non-traditional product that wants to be promoted as something secret so new users want to have an invite.
These two startups say a lot to me about where the Internet has led us as branding professionals. We can’t assume all websites are the same. We can’t decide that just because someone talks “tech” that they fit into a single category. We can’t assume that simply because startups aren’t treating “brand” with marketing directors and brand managers that they don’t have just as much of a need for it. Brand in the startup space begins with the founders’ vision and then grows and defines the experience of using the product. The logo is both placeholder and promise that must encapsulate both experience and future growth. Voyurl and GiftOpera are different in their brand because the people behind them are different. Yet as each company evolves, their challenges will center around the traditional pressure points of any company; how to create growth and how to ensure the company doesn’t lose what made them succeed in the first place.
Our challenge, as brand leaders, is to understand this offer and redefine how we help these future companies achieve the growth they aspire to.
(Jacob Cohen @jstackhouse)
Photo Courtesy of lgblog.co.uk
The internet’s ability to democratize our everyday interactions has transformed the way companies create loyalty by lowering the cost of transaction and increasing the frequency of interaction. But this increase in frequency means customers are enabled to try new options or purchase products based on a personalized set of needs. They’re able to discuss a brand among an online community, often trusting unknown users more than a brand they’ve used for years without issue. The conversations themselves accelerate as bloggers and news media, through competition for eyeballs, push to get more information out faster. The consumption of all this content means that most consumers spend a large portion of their time researching potential purchases. It’s said that many purchasers of airline tickets spend more time searching for deals than they do in the air.
Brands are then competing for smaller and smaller increments of people’s time (how many seconds did you give the email promotion you received this morning?). Yet, with access to this data, these increments of attention can become transactions in their own right. We see simple clicks becoming micro-purchases where the transaction is merely consumer attention. As brands begin to understand how to read and analyze this data they can begin to see patterns that translate into, and create an image of, individual users. There are an increasing number of companies who are designing services around this analysis.
When you convert data about a transaction into information about a person, a brand begins to understand how to better create a sense of loyalty.
The music industry is the most challenged with understanding how their data leads to creating a better level of loyalty. Music’s availability online means that there is no financial incentive for a fan to purchase the music. Whatever they are looking for is available to them for free. Electing to pay for something that is available for free clearly requires high levels of brand loyalty. As a response to this, the music business is now refocused on telling the story of an artist. The artists become the vehicle for the promotion of their own mythology. The selection of which artist to highlight is based on the analysis of available user data. This is exemplified in the correlation between Justin Bieber’s immense Twitter popularity and the high volume of his sales. People aren’t paying for the music itself, they are paying for the value of participating in Bieber’s life. His fans are choosing to pay for product that is otherwise free and thereby adding greater value to that product. Their purchase is a vote to other consumers saying that the product is “popular”. This encourages other consumers to elect to pay for the product and gather the added-value to the overall experience. This conversation loop represents a new form of brand loyalty online. Taking advantage of both the power of storytelling (which, unlike product isn’t democratizable) and the effects of internet word-of-mouth.
So while our world is one where the increased frequency of interaction and the lowered cost of transaction seems to create consumer fickleness, we now know that these same tools can be used to generate greater amounts of loyalty. Because a single transaction is cheap, we have come to understand that cheap transactions can combine with a story and thereby generate more valuable transactions. We’ve learned that what story to tell can be understood through available user data patterns. And we’ve learned that by the connection between loyalty, story and transaction, brands are able to build long-term, revenue-generating connections around an experience.
(Jacob Cohen @jstackhouse)
Image courtesy of http://savingslifestyle.com/
For the last month I have been staring at khakis. It seems like every website I visit is showing me display ads for Bonobo’s brand of pants. Thing is, I’ve never bought a pair of khakis in my life. I visited the Bonobo website as part of a research project and now am the target of their “targeted ads”. Granted, the site has some innovative ways of purchasing pants and if I were even close to fitting into their demographic, I would buy pants from them.
Then there’s the GE ecomagination text ads. Any and every site that has Google text ads is giving me 100% ecomagination all day, everyday. This one I can’t complain much about. It’s my fault. Five years ago at my previous agency, Syrup, the CTO and I pushed to have our email and collaborative systems switched over to Google Hosted. And since I was a lucky member of the brilliant team that created the ecomagination campaign, I’ve got five years of emails containing the word “ecomagination” in them. What other ad would Google want to serve me? I’m cleary totally and completely obsessed with GE and their “green” initiative.
This got me thinking about what it means to live in a world of targeted ads. With the Super Bowl coming up, we as a nation are about to have a whole bunch of ads to talk about together. The best ads will be viewed millions of times on YouTube and be posted to various Facebook walls with comments like “ROFL”, “OMG” and probably a random troll fight or two. But while good ads ingrain themselves in our culture, great ads are works of art that do more than make us want to buy the product. I don’t think I’m exaggerating here. We use them as cultural and generational identifiers (I guess here Google wants me to write something like “remember ‘We Bring Good Things to Life’? or ‘Gee…no, GE’”).
But what happens in a world where we don’t share the same ads? What do we possibly have to talk about? Ok, ok, we’d have lots and lots of things to talk about. But what do advertisers think will happen if their ads are distributed only to those who expressed interest in their brand? Or what will happen if an ad has to pass through hundreds of targeting bots to be seen by an entire country? I’m sure that there will always be a channel for national distribution but imagine a future where “targeting” has won. If targeting became the primary distribution of ads then it would drive advertisers to focus on their known consumers. In the worst case scenario, targeted ads could remove the great ad for our cultural canon, to be replaced with socially targeted (read: fragmented) ads. In the best case, consumers alight on only their known desires, leaving friends and bloggers to fill in the socially iconic blanks.
All exaggeration aside, my point is, in the marketing world we create bandwagons that our industry jumps upon as the “next best thing”. But what sounds great on paper doesn’t always translate into real-world effective advertising. When thinking about targeted ads, we should remember that, like social media and SEO, they’re just one piece of a bigger plan.
(Jacob Cohen)
Image courtesy of toothpastefordinner.com
Dopamine is a chemical associated with reward. In it’s worst form, it results in addiction. However, one of its many beneficial outcomes of its release is that the brain becomes primed for a perfect state of learning. But I suspect, without any hard evidence to back me up, that even the feelings of novelty and newness are related to it. Sociologists describe this experience as flow, which is best understood as those points in time when work flies by, when productivity is best and when we stop looking at the clock wondering when’s lunch.
Games have proven to be very good at initiating flow. The result that follows is accompanied by that desired sense of learning. Even in the most entertaining game franchises there is proof that gamers are learning certain skills. The coming proliferation of gaming will be born from the targeting of skills to be learnt and defining which types of games can deliver the desired information or skill to be communicated to the learner.
The role of game mechanics in our everyday lives is growing along with the Millenial demographic. For many of us, growing up with video games may seem to be the integration of pastime into real life. When I look back on my own moments playing games, I realize that many of these were ones of intense concentration where time stood still. Fun, play and learning come together at these moments and make for memorable experiences and connection.
Over the past ten years the role of brand has transformed. It’s no longer simply a logo or a tagline, but has become a position from which we deliver experiences that connect and inspire. Gaming has a role to play in how brands build these connections through unique and useful experiences. Our challenge is to determine how gaming can best create these connections.
(Photo courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons user: Futurilla)
With the 2nd-annual Wiki-Conference happening in New York on August 28th and 29th, I’ve pondered a series of questions about the functions of this open-platform culture.
Primarily, I am wondering how roles are generated within wiki-culture, and more explicitly how authority is defined in an open-platform society. Does the 1:9:90 rule translate to Wikipedia? The BBH Labs-defined concept that 1% of a social media group is generating content, 9% is adding to or commenting on that content and 90% are pure consumers. Do groups of content generators divide further into those who contribute and those who validate? In an ideal world, 10% of the Wikipedia audience would be generating and validating content.
What is the role that traditional authorities could play within Wikipedia? For example, our global society has defined a museum as a place where knowledge is preserved. We have also established universities as places that create experts with validated degrees. But how does an expert become defined within an open-platform and do existing experts deserve greater status? (Is their content then the most valid?) Is Wikipedia a meritocracy of fact generators? Meritocracies can have a hard time self-actuating when facts are the singular means of defining status. A single fact can have multiple points of view but often a source can be wrong, creating confusion built upon confusion.
When it comes to the diffusion of facts, Wikipedia exists as both the pinnacle of open-platform culture and a force for de-validation. The consumer audience cannot be certain that the information they are reading is accurate. Schools rarely permit students to cite Wikipedia as a source, with the aim of promoting better research and fact-based writing skills. However the chase for validation is oft-times faulty because it begins from Wikipedia. The source’s mere existence isn’t enough to validate the content.
Yet I believe the debate about whether Wikipedia is or isn’t accurate is a bottomless pit. A better option would be to pursue greater levels of personal accountability for those who post on Wikipedia. The development of the Wikipedia Ambassador program and Wikipedia student clubs are a step in the right direction. But I also think educators and experts should play a brighter role. They can be validated and given a tiered login level making them identifiable to users. This would allow an acclaimed historian to be identified when they edit an entry, ensuring a level of approval and validation for that edit, while providing a reliable source.
(Jacob)
@jstackhouse
In a move surprising to many, Google and Verizon have announced they are near a deal that will add a pay tier to Verizon’s Internet service. The service, which they have been planning for last 10 months, will give preferential bandwidth to paid content over the Verizon network.
What’s surprising is that the move is in conflict with a core tenant of the Internet; that network traffic, websites, email, videos, music, photos of your new baby, etc., is inherently neutral. Net neutrality, as it’s called, states that no single piece of data is more important than another.
There’s are many perspectives on net neutrality both for and against. The debates are extensive and come with variations of what a future will look like with and without it. But how they affect brands, their ability to innovate and their connection with their consumers is not as transparent.
The case against net neutrality rests with the providers of the infrastructure. Currently your Internet service provider receives monthly revenue from it’s customers looking to access the Internet. The goal is for them to create new channels of revenue by charging brands for access to a larger piece of their bandwidth pie. This will create more revenue that can be used for improving network speeds and business models built on-top of a tiered service plan for those willing to pay to be further up the queue of access. For these companies net neutrality is standing in the way of innovations in business.
In contrast, the case for net neutrality is focused on total network value. The value perspective focuses on the fact that networks become more valuable as the amount of information shared (transferred) increases. By adding barriers to the transfer of information the total value of the Internet suffers. For brands looking to create conversations with their customers, promote real interaction and ensure the data pipe is always open, this deal poses a challenge.
The success of this deal could lead to more and more deals of this kind. For an international brand this could evolve to be a cost requiring a new line item in annual budgets. Paying each Internet service provider around the globe to ensure their customers will always have access to their product, services, and content at reasonable speeds on a regional level.
A big player in the debate is the US FCC which has, by Congressional mandate, been tasks with creating a National Broadband plan to improve access to the Internet for everyone in the US. However the FCC’s ability to regulate the Internet was hindered by a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in April. (Though the FTC may be able to regulate the Internet instead.)
Personally, I see equal access to information as a core measure of social and economic success. Net neutrality plays an important role in ensuring this equality.
Here’s links to a couple sources:
Google & Verizon Near Deal on Web Pay Tiers
Wikipedia page: Net neutrality
FCC US National Broadband Plan
Cyberlaw expert Lawrence Lessig on Net Neutrality (video)
NYTimes Op-Ed from a fellow Portlander
(who’s far more eloquent about the issue than I)
(Jacob)
An article in the latest Wired Magazine makes some good points on the challenge posed by the late-adopter. In the search for new markets and new consumers, the late-adopter market is a seductive one. Imagine a large cross section of society that refuses to buy the latest device or change to the newest technology. From the point of view of the marketer this demographic represents a massive challenge to growth. Yet the decision to leapfrog isn’t something that can be forecast and projected. It’s affected by lifestyle, by broken devices that can’t be fixed and by external forces like Santa Claus showing up with your first iPod (you’re welcome Dad.)
However I think there is one consistent element in the buyer’s decision of when to leapfrog, usability.
I think it’s fair to say that the more complex a technology is to use, the slower the adoption rate is for it. For example, as computers became less and less complex through the 90s, the adoption rate became exponential in the consumer market. Yet I was in a taxi recently with a cabbie who had just gotten the latest Android phone because his wife suggested it. He was baffled by it. Couldn’t figure out how to do the things that his old phone did and didn’t know why he would want “apps”. In this case, the usability of the device didn’t facilitate the leapfrog for the late adopter.
In contrast, Apple’s products (and advertising) center around usability. Devices that just do what you want them too. It makes for a powerful message. Harmon Kardon is another example of product and marketing that is centered around usability (only the buttons you need) and not overwhelming the consumer. It may sound like a lowest-common-denominator method of development but both of these examples are of products that still provide advanced features to the “super user” while simplifying the interface for the late-adopter.
What we, as innovators, should keep in mind is that this isn’t just about devices, usability affects the adoption of any new technology. Because as users we have to be able to figure out a service, product, or offer before we can want it. We have to know, or imaging we can know, where we’ll land when we make that leap.
You can read the article here.
[Jacob]