Neil Perkin

...is that it's not quite good enough. We've all had it. Go to a retailer's site, have a bit of a browse not really intending to buy anything, and then you're followed around the web for the next month by said retailer with (usually) not very enticing banner ads that sometimes contain the products you looked at all those weeks ago on the retailer's site. More recently, my own personal corporate stalkers have been a trainer company and an online retailer.

Such retargeting networks are dependent on tracking technology to identify users that have been defined by their browsing behaviour from large 'cookie pools'. In my case though, what the technology doesn't know is that the only reason I went to the retailers site was in the course of doing some research for a project I was working on. What the technology also doesn't know is that after visiting the trainer company's website, I subsequently bought a pair of trainers elsewhere and am now a satisfied customer who doesn't need another pair of trainers right now.

That's the thing about shiny new technology - we get all excited about the possibilities and then the early execution has a lot of holes in it. That's kind of OK, as long as the technology developes rapidly. The problem in this case with being not quite good enough is that it's been not quite good enough for quite some time and can actually prove quite annoying. I was once followed round the web by another online retailer for six months after I visited their site. I realise that it's dependent on the limitations of the data but I can't help but feel that if more care were taken around the execution (more use of frequency capping, more sophisticated application of the data to close the loop better with subsequent user behavoiur to redefine the context, for example) it would be better for everybody. It's about time we made it a bit better I think.

I had a fascinating breakfast meeting yesterday with Ed Bussey who is the CEO/Founder of Quill. Ed is a longtime digital and mobile exec and entrepreneur. Quill, his latest venture, is a rapidly growing content marketing company that specialises in content strategy, production and increasingly distribution.

There were several things that struck me as interesting about the way they work. They have built a global network of specialist writers, editors and producers (numbering in the tens of thousands) that is supported by a proprietary technology platform which provides the community and input interface. The workflow incorporates some technical quality assurance capabilities, which is then augmented by in-house editors in order to ensure a consistency in quality.

The platform optimises content for the web, and the use of local experts, writers and producers helps to alleviate one of the trickiest issues for global companies - the balance between global consistency and highly relevant localisation that goes beyond simple translation. 

Content strategy and production is informed by brand profiling tools that ensure relevant subject matter and tone. A platform API means it can be linked directly to a client company CMS, enabling content to be pushed direct to client owned media properties, subject to the approval of a brand editor if necessary.

Their vision is to be the leading worldwide platform of this kind but the most interesting thing is that their model of distributed production facilitated through technology potentially solves the extremely tricky balance of doing quality content at cost-efficient scale. It's interesting too that having started with production, they are now moving quickly (facilitated by client demand) into strategy, idea generation, content curation and distribution.

Companies like Quill are benefitting from the rapid growth in demand for tailored digital content which is in turn being powered by the increasing significance of always-on, content hungry owned and earned media channels. They are filling a gap, and it's a potentially significant one. It's kind of interesting that at a time when clients have ever increasing and very real needs for content, companies like this are moving into territory that advertising agencies and media owners have largely not adapted to address. Might this be a big missed opportunity?

Thanks to Rubbishcorp for pointing at this wonderful Oakley site for their new Airbrake MX Google. It's a great piece of merchandising. HTML5 and CSS3 are enabling all kinds of design-rich in-browser experiences using infinite and parallax scrolling (where an illusion of depth is created by background images moving slower than foreground images). One of my absolute favourites is the fabulous Life of Pi site which is quite incredible. 

Here's a few others I really liked. Von Dutch used parallax scrolling to tell the story of its original founder in a rather charming way.

This site makes a great use of it to talk about the dangers of fracking. Peugeot created a rather cool autoplaying comic to promote its hybrid technology. Olympic and World champion cyclist Jason Kenny's site is about as nice a personal site as you'll see, and here's a great ad agency example. It's all rather lovely. There's even a rather nice one from a tatoo business. 

More here and here.

"Instead of adding new flooring and fixtures, they've taken the house down to the foundation"

Reuters are redesigning their site from the ground up and the approach that they're taking with it is fascinating. Most websites (news services included) put a lot of focus on the homepage to draw people into the site in the same way that contents pages of magazines are there to aggregate, highlight, and help people navigate. It's a model that is shackled to a print-based world. Yet whilst a proportion of readers may still enter the site via the home page, an increasing number come in from search queries or content shared on social media which are deep linked into the site ("The days when you could drive a big portion of your audience to any single page? That's pretty much done"). 

So what happens when every page is your homepage? The concept of a continuously updated stream of news is central to Reuter's DNA, so it makes sense that they should adapt this into creating a digital 'river of news' where stories are contextualised within the stream, and moving from one to another is as seamless as possible.

Take a look at the site preview and you see a heads-up display of market data across the top, the roster of Reuter's opinion writers (like the usually excellent Felix Salmon) down the side, and a news stream featuring a rolling feed of news, commentary, video, photography and even editorially curated links to relevant third party articles and content. Articles feature as part of a stream of related information with background pieces, data and commentary, and are positioned in the middle of a larger stream of content ("scroll up or down and you’ll find your story’s text actually lives in a bifurcated version of the Reuters front page"). And if you're interested in following a particular issue, topic streams combine multi-format content along with the latest breaking news around specific subjects.

The whole thing is far more reflective of how content works now on the web: living as streams, dynamic not static, effortlessly multimedia, surrounded by contextually relevant information, flowing seamlessly from one piece to the next, reflective of the increasing atomisation of content. A site where every page is the homepage.

Shifting to a content model such as this isn't easy. It requires a wholly different design approach, different workflows, and an in depth and ongoing understanding of user need and behaviour. The idea of context for example, is multi-dimensional, so serving up relevant associated content requires a sophisticated and intelligent tagging system, and staff with the know-how to use it in the right way.

But this kind of approach is a far more 'digitally-native' approach to news and content that reminded me a lot of the work done by MadeByMany in redesigning the ITV News site a year ago. That too featured a continously updated multimedia feed of news that draws on multiple sources, enables filtering by story, and is largely unshackled from legacy approaches. And it's not lost on me that this approach is fantastically suited not just to social and SEO, but also to mobile and tablet. Small wonder then, that unique views on the ITV news site have risen by over 500% since that resdesign.

Once again the value has come from unshackling approaches to content and design from legacy thinking and rebuilding a modern news service from the ground up. There are one or two similar examples of other media owners following suit (the WSJ's World Stream, and Canada's Global News) but the examples are surprisingly few. It strikes me that not only will we see more news services adopting the approach, but that there are lessons here for all content producers. 

"There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way..."

I remember the first time I read David Foster Wallace's commencement speech, given to a graduating class at Kenyon College, Ohio. This video is an evocative ten minute snippet of that wonderful talk, which is all the more poignant given his suicide three and a half years ago.

Thanks for the nominations. Our vote this month is between:

The Art, Poetry & Music of Data Viz from Tom Uglow

Restructing Britain by Louise Downe

Can Agencies Innovate? from Antony Mayfield

The Lean Analytics Cycle by Avinash Kaushik and Alistair Croll

Introducing the Modern Marketing Manifesto from Ashley Friedlein

On Expectation Of Privacy by Jonathan Zdziarski

And you can vote below:

Time to open up nominations for Post Of The Month. As usual I have a short starting list, which make for some good reading, but do add to these with any April posts that you've read and which you thought were particularly strong by leaving the link in the comments. I've included Antony Mayfield's Firestarters talk in this list but such was the quality I could have included them all. Anyhow, my starting four are:

The Art, Poetry & Music of Data Viz from Tom Uglow

Restructing Britain by Louise Downe

Can Agencies Innovate? from Antony Mayfield

The Lean Analytics Cycle by Avinash Kaushik and Alistair Croll

Introducing the Modern Marketing Manifesto from Ashley Friedlein

And you can add your own nominations below.

One of the interesting aspects emerging around multiplatform approaches to content is the dissemblance in device consumption patterns. Differences occur in not just how people use different devices to access content but when. The Media Briefing had a good round up featuring the graph above showing subscriber access to the FT during the day. Desktop and laptop access (in blue) peaks when subscribers get to their desks before declining steadily during the day, and this type of access is really low at weekends. Mobile access (in orange) is almost the reverse, with a spike as people check the FT on a mobile device when the get up, and into their commute, lower usage during work hours, and then a smaller spike on the evning commute and during the evening at home. At weekends, mobile is by far the most used form of access, with a peak on Saturday and Sunday mornings, and a small one on Sunday evening. It's interesting that the FT have pointed out that much of this consumption is additive and not substitutional - in other words people are using different devices to access the FT at times when they wouldn't have before, and multi-device consumption means that they are reading more and for longer.

This pattern is replicated at the Guardian which shows a variable pattern of platform access across the day:

...and at weekends:

The implications stretch beyond distribution and platform strategy, and into a requirement for media owners to think carefully about changing workflows, and daily working patterns and commissioning processes for journalists and editorial staff.

Twitter recently released the Twitter TV Book, a useful guide to the relationship between Twitter and TV, produced using data from social analytics firm SecondSync. According to SecondSync upto 40% of all UK Twitter traffic at peak TV viewing time is about TV content. One of the interesting aspects to SecondSync data is the ability to construct ‘social profiles’ for programming showing the patterns of tweets that occur as the content is broadcast. These profiles differ by genre, demographic and time slot, and are often driven by storylines, content and on-air integration. It's all rather fascinating. Tweets for entertainment programmes are typically content led and also happen during ad breaks, those for films follow storylines and often incorporate quotes, whilst dramas often see peaks in conversation bookending episodes, and patterns for factual programming peak at key events or revelations, but may have a long-tail of discussion that stretches out beyond the programme itself. 

The granularity of this kind of data leads to some interesting possibilities. In the last series of X-Factor for example, the mentions for the eventual winner James Arthur consistently outstripped those of every other contestant through the series. In the final, the pattern of conversation (below) showed over four times the volume of tweets (and consistently higher tweet-peaks) for James compared to the runner up, Jahmene Douglas, showing how Twitter can act as a barometer for public opinion.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, the research also shows the benefit of integration (hashtags prompt and organise conversation, trends drive discovery, links help spreadability, integrating with content helps talkability) which you get a sense of seeing the profile for the on-screen launch of the #DancePonyDance campaign for Three, across five hours of a Friday night.

The interesting angle to this though, as SecondSync point out, is how the second biggest peak of conversation (in Alan Carr's Chatty Man, with under 2 million viewers) was not that far behind the biggest peak which happened when the ad premiered in Coronation Street (with 8.5 million viewers). Despite the latter having a much larger TV audience, the former had a larger social audience, showing that awareness of a programme's 'social profile' enables advertisers to optimise the positioning of creative designed to stimulate online buzz. 

Conversation is not the same as engagement of-course, but it's easy to see how this kind of data might be used not only to maximise the opportunity to create conversation, but to schedule creative with programme social profiles in mind, and optimise the scheduling of brand tweets and online content sharing to capitalise on dual-screening. A more granular understanding of the specific content within programming that is generating the most conversation also enables the referencing of popular moments or key story-line events to inform content creation. With Twitter's acquisition of Bluefin Labs, SecondSync's integration with BARB data, and with the potential to create a syndicated-standard social TV ratings metric in the form of Nielsen’s Twitter TV Rating, this space is starting to get really interesting.

The point is (again) how both publishers and marketers/agencies will need to adapt working practices and processes in order to deal with a world where content is optimised for delivery using a more three dimensional view of how and when people consume it, and where realtime feedback can inform more adaptive planning, and content adapted on the fly in response to that feedback. That may not feel like a fully formed possibility right now but its intriguing to think of the potential once (instead of traditional linear scheduling) more TV creative is ad served, which we're already starting to see the beginnings of. In that world, conversation patterns and social programming profiles could become another useful data point by which to schedule creative in far more agile and targeted ways. Automation would perhaps play a significant part in dealing with the compexity of optimisation using multi-dimensional data points, but so might smart human intuition and application of that data.

Most publishers are a way off figuring out the kind of working and commissioning processes that enable true platform-neutral creation but which are platform-specific enough to optimise based on more three dimensional consumption and conversation patterns. Brand are too. But for how long?

Longplayer is Jem Finer's intriguing project to write and perform a one thousand year long musical composition: "It began playing at midnight on the 31st of December 1999, and will continue to play without repetition until the last moment of 2999, at which point it will complete its cycle and begin again". As part of it, he has launched Longplayer letters and invited thinkers and writers to engage in an ongoing chain of correspondence on the subject of long-term thinking. The first is a provocative letter from Brian Eno who writes of how, inspite of the fact that our geographical ‘circle of empathy’ is expanding, our view of time, and our future horizon and backwards view, are not:

“In terms of time, however, the picture seems to be narrowing. Public attention is increasingly focused on very near futures: businesses live in terror of the bottom line and the quarterly results, while politicians quake at tomorrow’s opinion polls and formulate policy in terms of them. We’ve heard tales of farmers planting olive trees or vineyards for their grandchildren to harvest, or of foresters cultivating groves of oaks to replace a chapel roof hundreds of years in the future, but by and large, we don’t do that anymore. We have less active engagement with our future than our ancestors did.”

Eno goes on to talk about how our appetite for robust solutions and quantifiable activity ("it’s very natural to think that the best way to defend any system is by hardening it so it becomes unassailable") can reduce our capability to evolve, adapt and improvise to deal with unpredictable events. Fascinating.

Photo Credit: RíPO via Compfight cc

HT @paul_armstrong for the link

I'm a big believer in anything that helps support the young talent in our industry. It's one of the reasons I think Squared is so good.  Set up a bunch of young ad folk for no other reason than to provide an independent, practical resource for graduates and others who want to come into our industry, the Ad Grads blog has been posting useful resources, links and advice for over five years now. It has been looked after by Will Humphrey, who deserves some props for keeping it going. As Will says:

"The blog was originally meant to stand as a counterpoint to the dearth of Advertising advice out there. The IPA had a good fact file on agencies, but there was nothing out there that *really* showcased what life was like when getting in as a graduate."

The good news is that now that the IPA have made graduate recruitment a priority, they have smartly moved to merge AdGrads with the new site they've set up specifically for young people who are interested in working in the ad and media industry, called AdMission. The site has lots of good stuff on it including job profiles, advice on getting a job or securing work experience, interviews with Ad luminaries, details on graduate schemes and entry level jobs. I know there's quite a number of young people either in the industry already or looking to get into it who read this blog, so I urge you to check it out.

"We seem to have evolved into a society of mourned and misplaced creativity... Charles Bukowski, hero of angsty teenagers the world over, instructs us to 'find what you love and let it kill you'. Suicide by creativity is something perhaps to aspire to in an age where more people know Katie Price better than the Emperor concerto."

This piece, from concert pianist James Rhodes, rather stopped me in my tracks. It's rare that I re-read anything but I've already gone back to it twice.

Multi-chapter, multimedia, highly immersive digital features from publishers seem to be becoming quite the thing. The latest is the rather lovely ESPN Grantland story of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, which follows on from their similar feature on The Long, Strange Trip of Dock Ellis. Then there was the beautiful Pitchfork cover story on Natasha Khan which wonderfully integrated text, imagery and audio.

And this example from Outside magazine, which graphically tells the story of an early ascent on Everest, is notable for incorporating third party commercial sponsorship (albeit in a pretty clunky way).

The best known example is the New York Times' Snowfall of-course, which integrated video, images and graphics in a seamless, flowing narrative. And as The Atlantic described it, did it in a way "that makes multimedia feel natural and useful, not just tacked on".

Inevitably some have lauded Snowfall and its ilk as the 'future of journalism', but others have pointed out (mostly on Twitter at the time) just how time and resource intensive such projects can be. How can Snowfall be the future of journalism, they say, when it took six months and the involvement of 16 people to produce?

I think that kind of misses the point. To paraphrase The Atlantic, Snowfall (and others like it) are not the future of journalism, but that's OK. Snowfall recently won the Pulitzer for feature writing. This kind of reader experience where one element flows seamlessly into the next is uniquely suited to longform feature content (and to creating immersive feature experiences on tablet devices), and I'd argue far less suited to punchier, news driven content. Snowfall was produced as as the result of an off-and-on project, and an almost documentary-style approach outside of the realms of that which was possible with the normal CMS.

As the skills of journalists develop, as the shape of the skillset in media organisations expands to encompass new design, video, and graphics skills, as commissioning proceedures change, as integration with third party tools improves, as CMS's develop to enable a greater, more intuitive use of multimedia content, this kind of immersive experience will only get quicker and easier to do.

In the meantime, it's a good time to experiment and learn. Andrew Kueneman, Deputy Director of Digital Design at the NYT said of Snowfall: "In the long term, we also walk away from an effort like this with many valuable lessons in design, development, team collaboration, editing, promotion, etc.—lessons we can apply going forward, and ones we could only learn while working on deadline."

So whilst this kind of thing might not be the future of journalism, it is surely at least part of the future of journalism, and a potentially quite significant one at that. This kind of mixing of traditional writing skills with techniques that are more akin to filmaking enable a far richer pallette for features writers. Given that, I'm really surprised that we haven't seen more magazine publishers experimenting with this type of approach.

HT @Mrjamescarson for the Outside link

I've written a couple of times about Enrico Dini, the Italian who has developed a 3D printing machine that is big enough to print houses. At Next Berlin I saw a talk from architect Janjaap Ruijssenaars (from Universe Architecture) whose vision is to take this technology and 3D print not just a small dwelling, but a large, architecturally innovative building. The Landscape House is designed as a continuous structure that has no beginning or end, and one where the ceiling flows into the floor of the next level and vice versa. It's a design that is enabled by the radical way in which it is to be built, utilising Enrico Dini's huge D-Shape printer that uses ground-up rock or sand which is put into the printer and hardened by adding a binding agent.

What particularly interests me about this is that most of the focus on 3D printing is (understandably I guess) on the distributed manufacture of small, fun, practical or useful objects. But this is totally different. And the end result will be something quite beautiful.

I've been known to be something of a cynic about tech conferences but yesterday at NEXT Berlin was rich in thought provoking ideas and different points of view about the stuff that's challenging norms and is likely to make a difference in the future.

One of the highlights from a day of sessions dense with inspiration came from Harper Reed. Harper was the CTO for the Obama campaign and so is no doubt in high demand on the speaker circuit right now, but his talk was warm, funny, and packed full of fascinating insights into the team that revolutionised the relationship between technology and poltics (read Alex Madrigal's seminal Atlantic piece on When The Nerds Go Marching In).

Harper was the ex-CTO of Threadless, who'd left because he'd acheived all the goals he'd set himself, and was then offered the chance to put Obama's huge campaign contribution budget to use in building a platform that would enable them to concentrate on the one thing that would fulfil the potential of that huge budget, but also the massive task that they faced: execution. There was some good insight into how they built an API that would enable them to execute and ship large numbers of products (over 200) fast, how they spent a month doing nothing else but 'testing failure' (practicing failure plans), and investing in user experience right from the beginning. I loved this: "the difference between functional and usable lies with the users". 

But perhaps the most interesting aspects of his talk were around the challenges of building and running the team that would do the work. Politicians, said Harper, don't hire engineers. They don't hire hackers. The 2008 Obama campaign had four engineers. For the 2012 campaign Harper hired forty. He referenced Steve Jobs' belief that A's hire A's, and B's hire C's, and the importance of founders and team leaders selling the team's mission in order to get the best talent (sounds obvious, but I suspect is often poorly executed). With the size of the task in front of them, and the speed of delivery that was required (think about the comparison to the length of time it takes most coprorates to implement a large-scale IT infrastructure/Digital capability project) the way in which the team worked with other teams, built and shipped product was key.

Politics is hard. There was a piece of advice, given to him by John Maeda (who was quoting from Larry Bacow) which I particularly liked: 'Manage by your outbox, not by your inbox". Meaning that focusing on pro-active communication with stakeholders and members of the campaign team reduced the time spent on reactive communications.

He talked quite a bit about the relationship between tech and digital teams, the importance of establishing trust, but also how everything was guided by metrics in a way that reminded me of that Mark Pincus quote about how not using metrics is like flying a plane in a cloud with no instruments. Few things are that predictable. The team would bet on which email subject lines or content would get the most response - the Obama campaign had some of the best email/CRM brains in the world but even they more often than not couldn't second guess the results, which meant that the numbers were everything ("Groundhog Day is a movie about multivariate testing").

The campaign is renowned for it's use of microtargeting. At one point Tim O'Reilly advised Harper that instead of just using microtargeting, they should focus on microlistening - the idea of using the power of conversation within small groups. So hence their smart use of Facebook (what they called "targeted sharing") to facilitate supporters (600,000 of them) to encourage their friends to get out and vote.

When asked about whether the technologies they built should be open-sourced and made available to others (including the Republicans) to use, he made the point that the platform can only offer a competitive advantage for a relatively short period of time without the right people to develop it, which says a lot for the idea of advantage coming from agility, talent and approaches rather than secrecy and perfection.

The interesting thing about all that is how much it reminded me of the current work of the Government Digital Service, which as Tom Petty says "is defining how a government interacts with its citizens (it just doesn’t know it yet)". In his recent description of the work of GDS, Russell summed it up quite neatly:

1. The Unit of Delivery is The Team

2. The Product Is The Service Is The Marketing

3. Digital is Not Comms, And It's Not IT, It's Your Business