Adventures In Digital Marketing

Osmo Wiio is a Finnish researcher of human communication. His laws of communication, Wiio’s laws, are funny and insightful.

• If communication can fail, it will.
• If a message can be understood in different ways, it will be understood in just that way which does the most harm.
• There is always somebody who knows better than you what you meant by your message.
• The more communication there is, the more difficult it is for communication to succeed.

And I particularly like his observation that any time there are two people conversing, there are actually six people in the conversation:

1. Who you think you are
2. Who you think the other person is
3. Who you think the other person thinks you are
4. Who the other person thinks he/she is
5. Who the other person thinks you are
6. Who the other person thinks you think he/she is

If you find this interesting, you can read more about Osmo and his theories on communication.

Wiios 7 laws of communication:

1 Communication usually fails, except by accident.
1.1 If communication can fail, it will
1.2 If communication cannot fail, it still most usually fails
1.3 If communication seems to succeed in the intended way, there’s a misunderstanding
1.4 If you are content with your message, communication certainly fails
2 If a message can be interpreted in several ways, it will be interpreted in a manner that maximizes the damage
3 There is always someone who knows better than you what you meant with your message
4 The more we communicate, the worse communication succeeds
4.1 The more we communicate, the faster misunderstandings propagate
5 In mass communication, the important thing is not how things are but how they seem to be
6 The importance of a news item is inversely proportional to the square of the distance
7 The more important the situation is, the more probably you forget an essential thing that you remembered a moment ago

Korpela’s First Corollary: If nobody barks at you, your message did not get through
Korpela’s Second Corollary: Search for information fails, except by accident
The Pedagogic Corollary: Give the student a chance to realize he misunderstood it all

Professor Osmo A. Wiio (born 1928) is a famous Finnish researcher of human communication. He has studied, among other things, readability of texts, organizations and communication within them, and the general theory of communication. In addition to his academic career, he has authored books, articles, and radio and TV programs on technology, the future, society, and politics. He formulated “Wiio’s laws” when he was a member of parliament (1975–79) and published them in Wiion lait - ja vähän muidenkin (Wiio’s laws - and some others’; in Finnish). (Weilin+Göös, 1978, Espoo; ISBN 951-35-1657-1).

Jonathan

• Groundswell (Incorporating Charlene Li’s Blog):
  the blog of Charlene Li, as well as a blog for her book Groundswell,
  (tags: digital advertising forrester marketing research blog book web2.0 business)
• top 100 agencies 2008
  (tags: agency advertising interactive business charts)
• Interactivity Is Not Just for the Internet - Advertising Age - Digital
  Uses a lot of words to basically highlight that a lot of offline people seem to think digital isn’t all we crack it up to be. No surprises there then! What he should really be saying is that advertising is broken - not digital advertising
  (tags: interactive advertising digital clow tbwa)
• Spot the Bull
  The excellent online promotion Spot The Bull is back for a second year. I loved this last year, and I love it again now. Excellent work.
  (tags: digital tickets promotion competition glastonbury orange poke)

Über High Street retailer of CDs, Kid’s clothing and the mighty pick-n-mix, Woolworths, have launched a new website to sell downloads and the like to those people who used to buy 7″ singles before CD singles and now only buy downloads - although presumably some of them are a lot older now so it’s not the same people we’re talking about - but you never know!

Anyway, the new site is live now it would seem, but there’s one problem…

Are you a Mac user? (Yes!) Are you on Safari? (Never!) well, if you are, you’re out of luck because they don’t like those platforms.

They also seem to want Windows Media Player - which again could be a problem.

Presumably this is all DRM based in some way.

Whatever, if you’ve got a hankering for the latest Girls Aloud best try elsewhere if you’re an Apple Fan Boy

I’m doing some snooping into games consoles at the moment - I just got a PS3 the other month and I was wondering how many of the others, XBOX360 and Wii I guess in the “next gen” category, were out there to see how it compared. I know PS3 lags behind them all, but by how much? Because didn’t Sony get a real boost when they won the BlueRay vs. HD-DVD war? Oh, and dropped the price - that always works!

Anyway, I was looking, and it turns out there are about half as many PS3 in the world as there are XBox360s. And there are about 80% the XBox360s as there are Nintendo Wii.

This didn’t shock me - what I was expecting.

But what did shock me was this.

There are more Wii in the world than there are Apple Macs running OSX.

from what I read there are about 22,000,000 macs

and there are about 25,000,000 Wii

Now - that is impressive! No wonder there’s never any Nintendo consoles in my local Game shop.

Well done Nintendo. You may get knocked back a lot for being a gimmick, and not a “serious” games platform, but hell! You’d made good at it.

• brand tags
  a brand is what you say a brand is
  (tags: brands tags taglines advertising marketing branding brand)
• Pixish: We bring visual artists and publishers together
• Alltop

Chris Anderson has a great article available for free here "Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business". There are some great examples of "free content" that makes money including Gmail, Ryanair (almost free or very cheap tickets) and Prince’s last CD.

Much like he did with The Long Tail (which also began as an
article), this latest piece cleverly
cross-promotes Anderson’s upcoming book, FREE, which won’t be available until 2009.

The article comes complete with a How-to wiki, How to make money using free content.

Jonathan

Thanks to Wongo at Goodby Silverstein

A long time ago, pre-dotcom bubble burst (*sniff*) I won an award during an agency summer party.

It was an odd award.  It made me appear geeky (geekier?) than I possibly would have wanted to in front of an all agency audience, not just a digital audience, at a time when TV, Radio and Print types thought the internet was a passing fad that would never take off (not much has changed! *kidding*)

It was “The Bluetooth Award for The Excessive Use of Technology” and I won it for my ability to keep my then-boss aware of my late arrival in to work by emailing her from the train - a feat I achieved through a combination of a Palm V and Nokia “Matrix Phone” (you know, the combat green one with the WAP-wheel and “big” screen) handset linked up via infra-red.

I had to stand up, in front of a whole agency, and basically admit to being a complete geek.  I am sure most of the people there had no idea what it was even for and just thought something along the lines of “those crazy digital guys” or words to that effect. Bluetooth? Crazyness.

Still, I got a bottle of champagne out of it (and the good stuff too! not like we get nowadays!)

Many years on, and the person who created that award for me, bless her, had a conversation with me today on IM where she said I should get another one award.

Why? Well, I happened to mention to her that if she wanted to IM me at almost any time, she could get Google Talk, as I now had it on my blackberry, which, because of the wonder that is unlimited data, I leave on all the time. 

Doesn’t strike me as such a geeky thing to do any more, but there we go.

What’s the difference betwen having a blackberry and having a blackberry with 24/7 IM.  The devices give you 24/7 email - which is what I won the award for in the first instance.  What’s the big difference between that and IM?

Not a lot as far as I can tell.

Howard
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Blogged with Flock

Tags: geekaward blackberry mobile email google talk gmail gtalk

Over on Steve Rubel’s blog last week he posted about his 25 year love affair with computers and he’s asked for others to join in the story telling by posting and tagging lists with "myfirstcomputer".

I can’t remember everything perfectly, probably because some are a long long time ago, and others are a blur (i.e. college) so this is to the best of my knowledge.

I think it’s interesting that almost at all times in my life, since I got my first Atari 2600 (I think it might even have been the VCS version) I’ve hardly been without a computer (ok, so that’s a console but I class that as pretty much the same thing especially when you’re a little kid) although there was a long period in around 1989 to 1993 when I was much more interested in skateboarding and surfing, but they were still present (in fact I was inspired to get back into it after I played Doom and Quake on my mates machine and got hooked back in).

I think it was this interest in computers which led me into cyberpunk books, and it was that in turn which got me interested in The Internet whilst at college, and from there it’s a short hop to today and digital marketing which, in a funny way, is moving away from computers into other devices which may not appear related to the untrained eye.

I remember well sitting in the lounge typing line after line of sinclair basic into that Speccy’s rubber keyboard only for it to all crash at the end, probably because of a missing comma or something (something that would continue to bug me later in life whilst coding clientside javascript!)

Another thing I really remember is writing essays at high school on my Atari ST using Word Perfect (a great wordprocessor for the time) and having a hell of a time trying to get teachers to accept the print outs (from my dotmatrix on paper with holes at the side) as opposed to me writing it by hand.  It seems ludicrous to think it now, but they seemed to think that I was some how cheating by typing them essays as opposed to writing them by hand.  And just think, wikipedia wasn’t even running back in 1988!

I also had a mouse for my spectrum (in fact still have it somewhere), which came with a very basic paint app, although it’s probably still more advanced than MS word, which was black and orange and had two buttons.

As well as what we would all class as computers I’ve slipped the very few consoles that I’ve had into the list as well.  I’ve never been big into consoles, even when I was a games designer for a few years, which is probably why I switched over to digital, but the few I have used I have fond memories of.  In fact, I’m probably more of a console man now that I have a 2hr train ride each day, fly on a semi-regular basis and own a PSP - it’s perfect for getting rid of a few hours here and there.

I’ve decided to map these out on a timeline and whilst I was doing that I realised it’s a hefty old one!  In fact, there’s even a few machines that I used over and over again but i never actually owned as they were a mates - the BBC B in wilson’s house springs to mind straight away, but I also seem to recall playing on a Dragon micro (perhaps the only welsh computer?) and a ZX81 at mates from primary and high school.

Since i discovered Apple in the mid-to-late 90’s (a late start perhaps, but I really wasn’t exposed to them until that point) I’ve never been without one and I would ditch PCs all together were it not for the fact that I am a sucker for RTS and first-person-shooters, and they really don’t gel well with the kit from Cuptertino, so there is always a PC stuck away in the house somewhere.  My rough rule of thumb is, and always will be I think, Apple for laptops (because they look great and you can plug almost anything into them and it just works!) and PC for desktop (because, as Charlie Brooker said once, they’re like the big boys mechano and you can plug in all sorts of cool things with nothing but a screwdriver and brute force).

I think a bit of me likes Apple because of the history of using standalone machines like the Speccy and Atari ST, which came as a package with one OS and worked out of the box.  Apple still has that for me, and it’s brings out nostalgia in me.

In my professional life, I honestly don’t see that much of a difference between the operating systems now or the experience of working on the, but I still choose to work and live with a Macbook Pro as my machine of choice - much to the mickey-taking from my boss.

Anyway, Steve, here’s my attempt at the topic of myfirstcomputer for what it’s worth.  Crikey - turned into a big post after all.

Howard
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