Innovation | Face, The Co-Creation Planning Agency

Archive for the ‘Innovation’ Category

NOW conference – Participation, Storytelling & Experiences

Tuesday, August 17th, 2010

We want to explore what cross media is and how to link content producers and brands with their audiences in new and valuable ways. Also, we want to give the participants a glimpse of new business models and ways to make money in this (wild) digital reality.

The other speakers are:

- Monique de Haas from Holland who has been consulting large companies on cross media productions and strategies for a long time (http://www.dondersteen.net/blog/)

- Asta Wellejus who has been working with cross media and digital storytelling for many years. She started out with a consultancy at the Zentropa film studio (you might know the famous director Lars von Trier, who owns it) and now has her own company at Die Asta Experience (dieastaexperience.dk/).

- Martin Buck, who is the cofounder and CEO of Bandbase.com – one of the largest communities in Scandinavia for upcoming musicians. A lot of famous artists have broken through via that site, and he will share some of his thoughts on how to make products (and money) by utilizing your users knowledge and creativity.

- Jacob Møller, the CEO of one of Denmark’s oldest mobile app development companies (10 yrs anniversary). They have bought a lot of IP rights from Hollywood productions and toy brands like Megablocks, on which they build mobile apps. He knows a lot about the mobile development and how to make it happen in this chaotic business field.

In a couple of weeks time we’ll be in Denmark for NOW, a conference about cross media and how content producers and brands can collaborate with their audiences in new and valuable ways.

I will be speaking of co-creation, crowdsourcing and open models for the media industry. If you are around come and say hello!

more info at http://seismonaut.dk/konference-now-is-digital/

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Cello Associate Conference: The Research Industry’s Ticking Timebomb

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010

I was invited to speak to the Cello Associate Conference last week at Somerset House – the first of what will be an annual gathering of Cello’s potential future stars. The main focus of my presentation was that as an industry we are sitting on a time bomb. I brought some drama to my session by asking 3 volunteers to diffuse three dummy time bombs (by cutting one of three wires) that were boxed and wrapped while the remaining audience counted them down in just ten seconds. Of course people realised they were not real but that the message behind them very much was.

Part of the reason we are sitting on a time bomb is the consumer landscape we operate in on behalf of our clients is changing very fast. We all know that Web 2.0 has given consumers the confidence and the ability to take more control of the relationship they have with brands. Or put another way, Simon Clift the ex CMO of Unilever said recently in an FT article “we (Unilever) are behind our customer and that is a very uncomfortable place for us to be”

Many of today’s brands and companies are struggling to keep up with their consumers. One of the main reasons for this is because of fast changing technology and what this allows consumers to do in terms of their interactions with each other, the brands, products, services they consume and the speed with which they are able to do so. A good example is the launch of the recent Xbox Kinect where the screen becomes the interface and the impact this has on TV participation is limitless. Similarly the introduction of flexible screen displays that are so supple, so thin and light you can carry them where ever you go while consuming almost zero power could only be a few years away. So, the big question from all of this, and the one we are constantly asking ourselves at Face, is what does this mean for the research industry, and what do we have to do to help our clients get and stay ahead of their consumers.

The answer to this question in its broadest sense is “Plus ca change c’est plus la meme chose” – or “the more things change the more they stay the same”. Change is the only constant and these are the five things we need to do in order to deliver on this mantra:-

1. Must be fast, agile and deliver insight in a continuous way
For the first time there are huge amounts of qualitative data about our customers that we can access in real time, on the web for free. Using our proprietary tool Pulsar we are able to observe and to listen to what consumers and customers are saying on the web about a particular brand/product/service. It is not just being able to see what is being said where, when and by whom but also being able to measure which conversations (and so who of your consumers) are having the most influence. This also helps us to identify your 1%ers.

2. Must adapt skills
The second is that as researchers we need to adapt our skills to meet the new demands… netnography – our ability to combine ethnographic research with the tools available on the web is a good example. As a business it also means we need to recruit different types of people with the skills that meet these new demands as well as train our current employees with these new skills.

3. Use technology to lead
We need to lead in the use of technology to help us become quicker and more responsive in the ways we gather insight about our clients’ consumers. And this does not mean replacing human analysis – to the contrary, the role of the researcher has become even more important than before because of the need to find real quality from the huge quantities of data that are out there – it is the combination of both on-line and off-line approaches that deliver deeper, richer and more meaningful insight.

4. Introduce new tools and methodologies
This means we have to keep challenging the way things are being done now and look to new and different methodologies that make the most of technology to help meet the challenges of the fast changing consumer landscape. At Face we have inverted the traditional research approach of starting with qualitative research and then going to quant by starting first with large numbers of consumers and then honing things down in a more qualitative way. To do this well it is vital to integrate on-line and off-line methodologies within that process because it produces more ideas of higher quality.

And this means changing the role of the consumer – treating them as active equals in this process; giving them as much responsibility with direct involvement throughout the entire process separates Co-creation apart from more traditional research/marketing methods. As a result it is proving a more robust process than other approaches clients have been using.

5. We must keep innovating
Face’s journey started with the launch of Headbox, a year later we launched Mindbubble, six months after that we launched Pulsar and later this year there is more to come…

If we do all of the above then we will ensure that we continue to help our clients stay ahead of their consumers and we won’t be caught with the proverbial time bomb going off in our hands.

Check out the presentation that I gave at the Cello Annual Conference:

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New Rules of Consumer Engagement: Co-creation

Friday, June 25th, 2010

There was almost unanimous agreement at the FS Forum in St Paul De Vence over the challenges facing the Financial Services Industry. They were described in four words: trust, reputation, transparency and engagement. There was also serious acknowledgement that the consumer has a vital role in helping the major brands from the industry to meet these challenges. There was a sense too amongst some of the delegates that in the words of Simon Clift the recent CMO of Unilever they felt “behind the consumer” and that this is a very uncomfortable place for a brand or organisation to be.

Changing Consumer Landscape

This is to be expected as the consumer landscape is changing fast. It is common knowledge that the advent of Web 2.0 has given consumers the confidence and the ability to take more control of the relationship they have with brands. It has given rise to the term “empowered consumers”, a new breed of customer who have a strong belief not just in their own voice but also in their own creativity, ideas and self-expression. It is no longer about what your brand does to the consumer but what consumers are doing to and with your brand.

Impact on Financial Services Industry

This trend manifests itself in the Financial Services Sector in a number of ways. The first is that the empowered consumer of today sees openness as key to building trust and accountability with the brands they engage with. This is critical for banking brands where events from the last two years have seen trust and fairness eroded. This has been picked up by the FSA’s ‘fairness’ objectives where banks are now being tasked to provide fair products and deal with customers in a fair way. Secondly there is a drive to streamline consumer interactions and make customers lives easier by combining products. The social web will have a big impact on financial services marketing, sales and business communication processes with demand from consumers for new service designs and interfaces. This will enable consumers to draw upon a wider base of advice from places such as twitter, opinion aggregators and financial forums and will lead to real time customer service becoming a top differentiator. And finally customers are moving away from conventional advice channels (IFAs, banks) and moving more towards peer advice because social media has made this possible in ways that were not there before.

New Rules of Consumer Engagement

All of this calls for a new set of rules for consumer engagement and requires the industry to look outside its own category to the world of FMCG and Technology to find better ways of involving consumers in the research and innovation process. And they won’t have to look too far or too hard as the idea of co-creation – doing things with people not at people – has been embraced by the likes of Unilever and Nokia for a while. Co-creation takes consumer involvement to another level by bringing brands and consumers together on the same level and involves consumers at the beginning of the process rather than at midway or at the end. This can take place in on-line communities or offline in workshops or both. It is through our co-creation communities for young people namely Headbox and for women aged 25-50, namely Mindbubble that we have been helping Unilever to co-create a range of new products. The most exciting example has been our co-creation of Axe/Lynx’s 2010 variant in terms of both the product and also the fragrance – something that has never been done before – which was launched globally earlier this year.

Some important guiding principles

As with all new approaches though there are some significant lessons that we have learned along the way. The first is that when you are bringing leading edge consumers together with brands it is vital to have a coherent and well structured process that gets the best out of your combined creativity so that it delivers better outputs. The second is that within this structure it is important to have a mix of online and offline methodologies because they produce more ideas of better quality and are able to involve consumers more quickly in what you do. It is why we have inverted the traditional research approach, starting the process by gathering quality insight from thousands of consumers rather than just a few. Our proprietary tool Pulsar has allowed us to listen and to observe to what consumers are saying in real time on the web as well as measure the influence these conversations are having. Being able to combine qualitative and quantitative research in this way means we are able to help brands respond much more quickly to the speed, volume and quality of consumer interactions that are taking place with their brand, product or service. And finally the role of the consumer is critical; treating them as active participants in this process and giving them as much responsibility with direct involvement throughout the entire process. If the Finance Industry wants to stay ahead of their consumers and the fast changing landscape they occupy then they would be wise to adopt the principles and philosophy of co-creation.

Face @ Financial Services Forum 2010

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What Is Co-creation & Why Do It?

Monday, June 21st, 2010

Earlier this month Face Research Director Saul attended The Market Insight Forum where he led a workshop session on Co-creation with 50 senior researchers. Take a look at his keynote presentation What Is Co-creation & Why Do It?

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How to write a great innovation brief

Friday, May 28th, 2010

Having been on the receiving end of lots of briefs good and bad over the years I have pulled together 5 tips for writing a great innovation brief:

1: What is the opportunity

The most important place to start is to consider whether your innovation brief is driven by consumer insight, consumer/market trends or a new piece of technology, or a combination of the 3. Context is king in successful innovation; your brief should outline the sources that point to an opportunity for innovation. This part of the brief should include detailed information on the brand, key market trends, target audience, and any new ‘technology’ that might be being involved.

It may be that you are not at the stage when you truly know what the opportunity is, in which case the brief should highlight the need for further primary or secondary research to identify and articulate the opportunities for innovation.
2: What is the scope?

With a clear area of opportunity in mind it is then important to outline the scope of the project. Be clear what type of project this is, for example, is this incremental innovation where you need to tweak an existing product to widen appeal or breakthrough innovation where you are aiming to launch a completely new product or service. This is usually closely related to the time period involved, so are you looking to fill a long-term pipeline, generate short-term wins, or a combination of the two?

The scope should also include details of key internal and external milestones that need to be hit, any internal or external constraints on the nature of the innovation and the final outputs. Importantly your expectations on the number of final innovation ideas you are looking for need to be added.

3: Outputs & Screening Process?

Having articulated the scope it is crucial to communicate the specific screening process that ideas will need to go through and the format of outputs required. If like many large companies there is a quantitative benchmarking and screening process for innovation concepts outputs will need to be written and visualized in a specific format. If there is no formal screening process in place then highlight the need in the brief for the agency to specify KPI’s and a process that will evaluate innovation outputs.

4: Who is in the Stakeholder Team?

Clients play a huge role in the innovation process as the marketing professionals and brand guardians. You have to understand what performance the business needs from its portfolio of brands and products, the problems that those products face in delivering this and the way marketing communications can be applied (alongside the other weapons in the mix) to get the results needed. To get the most out of an innovation brief, the process requires a diverse mix of stakeholders. Be sure to give senior stakeholders a role in the project so they can move the final ideas through the business, while on an operational level specify the role research, product, marketing technical and outside agency teams can play on the project.

5: Practicalities

To finish with there are a few guidelines that will help give your brief real impact. Trying to keep your brief to a maximum of 2 sides of A4 is incredibly useful. Images and visual stimulus helps to get across key points across and avoiding too much internal jargon wherever possible really helps to avoid confusion about what the brief really is.

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Research Communities 101 #3: Risk, Creativity and Improvisation

Thursday, May 27th, 2010

Recently I was having an interesting conversation with a friend who had travelled a lot. By travelling, I mean a 4-month road trip across 2 continents. He was telling me how he was held at the Kenyan border; not allowed to cross until the daily armed-convoy arrived. Bandits regularly attack people in the area so no one is able to cross unassisted.

The convoy was scheduled every day at 10am. And every day at 10am bandits attacked it. So, with this in mind, my friend paid the local authority $10 to get a convoy on the spot for his car and cross the border straight away. No bandits attacked him but his 4×4 broke down in the middle of the journey!

The point is that danger is not always where we think it is – and that’s why it is sometimes worth taking a risk.

Far from Kenya, in the world of online creativity, what kind of risk can be taken? How can it be managed?

In my last community blog I explained how creativity flirts with chaos. It is important to leave some unanswered questions in order to give users the freedom to tell their own story, either with the actual web application or within the co-creation task plan, to get the most of their creativity.

This uncertain space leaves two interesting areas to watch out for:

Managing the risk induced by creative tasks/environment

It’s perfectly fine to use your live community to test pilot ideas. However, it’s a massive source of uncertainty and risk, as you cannot plan for how long your pilot idea will need in the test environment.

For example, a new type of task to be performed online, across different cultures, may need lots of time in order to fully understand its strengths and weaknesses.

You can foresee the risk but, at the same time, you can manage it: it’s very important to keep a log of issues and document the lessons learnt.

The community and its users may teach you much more than any theory as each project and group of people will have different behaviours, especially if your work is cross-cultural. For instance, we noticed that Brazilian users were using the commenting feature on blogging tasks much more than our UK community usually does.

Miles Davis - Helping Us Be More Creative Online

Enhancing creativity through risk and facilitate improvisation

On the other hand, there are interesting components when opening the door to risk and leaving some space for users’ creativity.

As explained by Liz Danzico during her lecture at UX London 2010, in the situation of a co-creation session, there is an overlap between the creator’s actions and the consumers. This overlap is the place where improvisation happens.

Illustrating improvisation with the example of Miles Davis’ Modal Jazz, Danzico explains that the improvisation performed by the jazzman isn’t exactly what one would compare to a boundary-free space where anything is possible.

She explains that improvisation must have a proper frame that she defines by the following elements:

Improvisation is in the present – as a real-time co-creation with the audience that must be involved all the time

Improvisation is detectable – it requires no pre-knowledge (think about Davis jazz versus Chopin’s work)

Improvisation is responsive – it defines its own parameters

Improvisation is additive – all offers are accepted

Having set this frame, the major challenge that is left is to break with the traditional focus on design (as web app interface design) and turn your attention to the users.

As No Pants Day proves people are ready to improvise.

Because, in the light of the social movements or happenings (for example No Pants Day – see above) people are ready for improvisation and it’s our mission, or even duty, to facilitate it and allow them to release their creativity.

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New Things Are Afoot At Face!

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

Well I’ve been a bit quiet of late on the blogging front. But its been for all the right reasons!

We’ve been really busy in the last month or so doing lots of new things, having lots of new experiences and extending our methodology to increasingly diverse briefs and markets.

In last month we’ve done two really exciting projects that I feel are worth sharing and demonstrate our fervent belief in our methodology.

First we’ve been off to India and Australia to work on a ground breaking global brand re-positioning project, for which we pioneered a co-creative approach, delivering a new brand footprint and equity creative brief.

While most traditional agencies and clients would employ a safe, traditional focus group methodology or appoint a big, corporate consultancy, we stayed true to what makes Face Face – intimate, direct and equal interaction between clients and consumers, running workshops in Delhi and Sydney.

We spent 2 days in each market working through a series of co-creative exercises designed to explode and explore 2 potential positionings and allow the consumers to really show us what they want to see and how they want to interact and relate with the brand concerned.

The result is a final brand positioning that is completely consumer centred, exploded, explored and refined, already validated and ratified, and a creative brief that is significantly tighter and more informed than ever before. Less testing required, less risk and uncertainty, and a fuller, earlier understanding of the parameters and possibilities inherent in it.

Secondly, on a similar brief for another client, we have further adapted our methodology to create a more mobile option for co-creation, extending it out of the tried and tested workshop environment and into a more modular, in home environment.

By developing and tailoring our co-creative exercises to work in a more traditional focus group sample structure and setting we can better accommodate problems where regional difference and range is a core consideration for answering the strategic problem at hand. It is also a great option for audiences or subjects where working in a large group may be inappropriate or uncomfortable.

Co-creation is increasingly becoming one of those marketing buzzwords that any old agency is bolting on to their “offering” and saying they can offer, but it takes the years of experience Face has working directly with clients and consumers to be able to truly stretch the methodology and exploit the incredible potential in it.

Here’s to another year of projects that allow us to push the boundaries…. it’s so much more interesting that way!

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Journey To The Centre Of The Crowd …And Back Again – Crowdsourcing for New Product Development

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

Crowdsouring is a buzzword that has been knocking around for a while now. There is a lot of thought, theory and ongoing conversation about it, and we’re starting to see brands begin to use it in various different formats.

But how does it work in the research & innovation world?

‘Journey To The Centre Of The Crowd… And Back Again’ explores crowdsourcing from it’s definition and gives hints, tips and strategy advice on how you can implement crowsourcing for innovation.

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Digital Innovation for the Arts

Monday, April 26th, 2010

This morning we took part in the latest Digital Salon and Surgery at Farringdon’s Free Word Centre to talk about digital innovation for arts brands and organizations, discussing how they are innovating to meet contemporary digital challenges.

It was a very interesting session with a packed panel of six speakers discussing the topic from various angles and presenting some great case studies like the upcoming Chromaroma Oyster Card game (below) and the recent RSC Twitter production “Such Tweet Sorrow” supported by the 4iP fund or ‘NT Live’, a new initiative from the National Theatre which enables live performances to be broadcast onto cinema screens across the UK and worldwide, as well as the NMC Music Map and the cutting-edge ‘PureDyne’ project, an Open Source Linux operating system and multimedia toolbox maintained by the Goto10 Collective.

We talked about our open innovation approach and adaptive brand planning model, how Arts organizations could benefit from real-time research, crowd-sourcing and co-creation and what this all means from a broader cultural perspective. I guess one of the most fascinating implications of taking this approach to the arts space is that it makes the progressive switch from creation to emergence models quite blatant. Understanding the radical change in the role of experts/curators and artists into the cultural ecosystem and understanding what open processes mean in terms of cultural innovation (leading/reacting, educating the audience/learning from the audience, creating new markets/feeding into existing ones) are key questions for the Arts but are totally relevant for the FMCG brands and the technology innovation ecosystem too. So I guess a Creation vs Emergence post is on its way!

For now, thanks again to Arts Council England, IT4Arts, Open Mute and Digital Salon for having us today, it was fun!

Chromaroma Visualisations from Mudlark on Vimeo.

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Understanding the Challenges of Online Creativity

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

In her paper about the World of Warcraft and Co-Creation Myriam Davidovici-Nora explains that Blizzard’s success lays in the combination of never-ending game-play, a high level of competition and the hyper-personalisation accessed through online add-ons.

However, Blizzard’s unique model is hardly suitable for other businesses– Can you imagine EA distributing “zombie kits” for Left 4 Dead?

This conundrum leaves us with a burning question: what is the best practice to handle / entice a group’s creativity in the online environment?

The Tool is the Tip of the Iceberg
Liz Sanders, a pioneer in the use of participatory research methods for the design of products, systems, services and spaces, addressed this topic when speaking at the Copenhagen Co’Creation 2010 Summit and Seminar. She explained that tools are the tip of the iceberg: they only become effective if applied with the right mindset and the right methods/methodologies.

“In co-creation, you need to be working with the mindset that all people are creative and that they are able to produce creative things when given the tools and the stage on which to practice or perform”

Sanders: It's not what you have, it's how you use it.

Everyone is Creative
Sanders believes that we’re all inundated with many ways to satisfy our consumptive needs while our creative needs are usually ignored.

Ultimately, we express our creativity, either in DIY, craft and hobbies, or online with all the user-generated content platforms available to us on the Web.

“One of the key values of value co-creation is that it satisfies the need for creative activity while addressing the need for social interaction.”

Sanders 4 levels of creativity:

1. Doing
2. Adapting
3. Making
4. Creating

New trends in technology have helped to democratize creativity and support broad audiences who participate in creative activities.

But…

Is the web the right place for creativity and therefore for co-creation?

In his article The Web’s Third Frontier Patrice Lamothe makes a really interesting point. Reminding the reader of 3 founding principles of the Web, as stated in Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Caillau’s initial proposal for their World Wide Web hypertext project:

- It allows anyone to access any type of document
- It allows everyone to disseminate their own documents
- It allows everyone to organize the entire collection of documents

Lamothe explains that the first statement has been accomplished with the good old web of online’s early days, and the second statement was completed with the introduction of Web 2.0.

The third and last fundamental idea is actually rolling out now:

“Among users, social networks are now making instantaneous exchange of content possible. Almost 20% of tweets sent contain URLs. Facebook puts sharing links at the top of its hierarchy of functions. […] On the technological front, collaborative systems and the “real time web” allow everyone to coordinate their views with various communities, organizing data as it is received [and, thus] broadening both the web’s basic organizational structure and the means of accessing it”

Can you be truly creative in the confines of a computer?

Understand the challenges of online creativity
Going further, Rafik Letaief, Marc Favier and Françoise Coat explain in their study Creativity and the Creation Process in Global Virtual Teams: Case Study of the Intercultural Virtual Project why the web is a perfect tool for creativity and what its limits are.

This research measures the level of creativity in global virtual teams: during 8 weeks, students from 26 different universities have been working on tasks, communicating and sharing tasks through online forums.

According to this research, the lack of focus is the first obstacle to a virtual team’s creativity: avoid multi-tasking user by launching tasks one by one.

The second barrier is the lack of participation and the missed deadlines that cripple the team with tensions. Conflict avoidance and communication blackout on the internet is more likely to happen online than in a face-to-face workshop and it’s also a blockage to creativity. The fourth obstacle to creativity is the lack of clear IP and ownership management that de-motivates users. Finally technical problems and technological insufficiency can inhibit creativity.

On the other hand, to enhance creativity, the first thing is obviously to avoid all the negative factors mentioned above.

The other factors identified are the presence of stimulating members who initiate relevant debate and help rising and solving issues. Another important factor revolves around how online members manage there time and participation levels when taking part in several projects simultaneously. Technology appropriation and the manner in which team members choose, combine, and utilize available tools is an enhancing factor for creativity.

Conclusion
Interestingly, this research emphases on the fact that the spirit of technology (democracy, freedom of expression and generation of idea) is a factor of creativity – as long as it’s used in the right conditions and context. Ultimately, the internet may be a great for co-creation as long as you keep this motto in mind: “Build the Camera Whilst Shooting the Film”.

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Co-Creating Co-Creation @ the MRS Conference 2010!

Friday, March 26th, 2010

On Wednesday this week I had the great opportunity of co-presenting with Beth from Coca-Cola and a handful of other agencies operating in the co-creation space at the MRS conference in a shared session called Big Brand Co-Creation. Sharing the stage with us were Hyve & Nivea and Sense Worldwide & Discovery. It was a great session that we all saw as a chance to collectively raise the profile of Co-Creation as a discipline and show the extent to which it has come of age as a discipline within the industry. Each of us was charged with showing a slightly different dimension of co-creation, highlighting the scope and variety of the ways it could be used to achieve great things with big brands.

The emphasis of our paper was on taking co-creative principles of collaboration, real time, speed & open-ended thinking into a traditional insight focused brief, highlighting how co-creation was not just about bringing new ideas into a business, or a party trick for something fun and low risk, but could actually be applied at the heart of the insight function, aimed at building a complete foundation of insight. You can see the paper here….

Co-Creating Insights – Face/Coca-Cola Mrs Conference Annual Conference 2010

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As part of that session we were all charged with coming up with our own definitions of co-creation, and to tell our own story about the roots of co-creation, and to start to talk about its future, and to imagine its future together. This got me thinking about the best way to visualise the story of co-creation, and I came up with idea of a tree, where the roots were some of the drivers & trends behind the disciples, the trunk was the core principles and practices and the branches all of the potential different applications.

So over the next few months, I am going to start building the tree, piece by piece with a series of pieces aimed at showing first the roots, then the trunk and finally the branches, hopefully with a view to creating a complete picture of my take on co-creation.

Watch this space for more…

Finally just to say thanks to all at MRS for organizing the session, and great to see co-creation continuing to rise up the agenda. Long may it continue!

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Technology in 2015: 4 Future Tech Trends

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

Technology’s relentless charge into depths unknown shows no signs of slowing up, the huge advancements we have made in 2010 will start to look prehistoric in the very near future. So with that in mind I thought I would let you get ahead of the technology beast and give you a few trends that will be making the iPad look like a calculator in 5 years time!

Ubiquitous pillar providers
Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook will continue to dominate, the crucial difference in 2015 is that they will all start to become more alike in terms of what the services they offer. In 5 years time each will structure themselves around some easily comparable pillar services:

real time search
rich media content in the form of music and video (with free and subscription models simultaneously)
internet browsing
data manipulation tools (office and media applications)

As a result of this convergence in terms of offer, each of the pillar providers will try to differentiate around hardware (where Apple will tend to lead), relevance (a Google stronghold), access to content (an Apple and Microsoft battleground), quality of product (again an Apple and Microsoft fight) and prevalence/ubiquity (a Facebook trait).

We will see a Facebook web browser and web search, Google begin syndication of media content, as well as Facebook office applications in the next couple of years.

Everything IP
The internet of things will continue to grow apace, and increasingly everything will have an IP address, internet capabilities will be built into electronic devices at the point of manufacture. Remote control and monitoring of household appliances is set to become commonplace in the next few years. We’re already setting our Sky+ boxes via our iPhones, by 2015 we’ll be controlling our heating, washing machines and ovens remotely.

Cloud living
By 2015 hard data storage will be a rarity. Using mobile devices, and fixed in-home and public portals we will plug into the cloud from anywhere to access our media content, personal data, finances and communications.

Ultimately we will have something resembling our own roving IP address, that we can use to plug into the system and access cloud data wherever we go. Financial connections will increasingly take the form of electronic transfer within the cloud between people or institutions along the lines of PayPal. This will see traditional banks will finding their role in everyday transactions severely reduced.

Netbooks are the harbinger of this age of cloud living, and ultra high speed mobile internet through the 4G network will make this experience a tangible reality.

Haptic navigation and manipulation
The trend for visual navigation systems as evidenced in devices like the iPhone and iPad, and browsing applications like Cool Iris, will continue to grow in significance. Cloud living is a key driver for the relevance of this trend – as our data becomes increasingly remote in the physical sense, tactile data manipulation helps us to retain a sense of connectedness, giving us a physical sense of interaction with our ‘stuff’.

Microsoft are poised to gain huge traction in this space with Project Natal for Xbox 360, a gestural hands-free gaming environment launching at the end of 2010, and the same 3D camera tracking technology that powers it will form the basis of browsing applications to access all manner of data, from searching the internet to surveying images.

The continued evolution of tablet technology is relevant here, as iPad style devices will become a convergent middle ground that will take over from both iPod-size and netbook-size devices, offering a combination of multi media player (audio, video, text), browsing and creativity.

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Face: A Co-Created History – Part 3

Friday, March 5th, 2010

In the later stages of 2009 it was becoming clearer and clearer that research, innovation and planning should and could work together in a tighter environment. A continuous process needed to be adopted, as opposed to one based on silos; and consumers should sit in the heart of this process.

This idea was the seed for our hugely popular and controversial presentation, Do Brands Really Need Agencies. Within a packed room at London’s Groucho Club, brand managers and agency people ascended to listen to what this new adaptive approach could do for the industry. One of the agencies taking part in the conversation at the Groucho Club was our office mates and advertising gurus, Farm!

Farm agreed that the industry needed a shake up and that for brands and agencies to really understand the needs and wants of their consumers they would need to work with them, not at them.

Do Brands Need Agencies? | Face Forum, Nov 09

In November 2009 we worked closely with Farm to help Skinny Cow develop ideas and create their latest advertising campaign – ‘Oh Yes You Can’. The collaboration took place online within Mindbubble and face-to-face with members of the brand team, Farm creatives and Mindbubble ladies all under the guidance of our robust methodology.

After the experience of collaborating and co-creating with Farm, we started to talk about how this partnership could become a permanent yet agile business model. Here the idea for the Co-Creation Hub was born and a new way of doing things began to take shape.

After hours of meetings, arguments, laughter and much deliberation The Co-Creation Hub London was brought to life. The Hub is a collective of organisations, academics and individuals who passionately believe in doing things ‘with’ people rather than ‘at’ people.

The Founding Members of The Co-Creation Hub, London

Alongside Face the other founding members of the Co-Creation Hub London are Farm, the advertising agency, which has co-created communications for Nestle’s Skinny Cow; Opticomm, the media planning agency; Touch of Mojo, the brand design agency; and thrudigital, the social media development agency. And, they are actively looking for organisations and individuals from different fields that share their way of thinking, to get involved and help develop the co-creation movement.

Andrew Needham, founding partner of Face, as well as group managing partner of Tangible Group London, a core division of Cello Group Plc, is one of the key instigators of The Hub:

“The Co-creation Hub – London recognises that social media isn’t simply another channel; it has fundamentally changed the way consumers interact with brands. We need a more collaborative, adaptive and continuous model of marketing – one that is based on the core co-creation principle of doing things with people not at them. We call it Adaptive Brand Planning. It is a model that will ultimately be better placed in helping our clients deal with the advent of social brands”

The Hub’s belief that great ideas can come from anywhere means there are huge untapped resources out there that can flourish in a co-creative environment. The Hub is looking for organisations and individuals from as diverse a field as possible who share the same co-creation driven way of thinking, whether that’s a manufacturer, an artist, a school or even a government.

The launch of the Hub coincides with the release of Axe Twist, the first 100% co-created product. In July 2008 we co-created with 16 core Axe consumers from the US & the UK to create a new fragrance based around ‘freshness’. The workshop, which took place in New York, was a huge success and saw the idea behind the product (a fragrance that changes from day to night), the name and the actual fragrance itself co-created. Twist hit the shelves in late 2009 and early signs are that it is performing well in the market.

The Co-Creation Hub is the next chapter in Face’s collaborative history and is set to be as innovative, fresh, open and disruptive as the last one.

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Face: A Co-Created History – Part 2

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

Mindbubble was launched in 2008

At the beginning of 2008 Face’s online qualitative research communities began to gather pace. First, net giant Google teamed up with us to create a three-month immersive research community with teenagers. The community focused on the future & relevance of internet search and produced some amazing insights that are still thought highly of within Google. Following on from this Doritos commissioned us to create a community steering group with the intention of helping the brand open up their communication and develop a clear social media strategy for their ‘You Make It, We Play It’ crowd-sourcing campaign.

In the Summer of 2008 we worked alongside Tango in a combined online and face-to-face co-creation project. The aim was to define the planning and positioning of Tango for their 2009 re-launch. The project was successful and led to the release of ‘Tango With Added Tango’ in May 2009 and provided the backbone for the overall Save Tango campaign.

Tango With Added Tango - A Co-Created Product

By this time social media had spread across many demographics, and it was quickly learnt that co-creation could be applied to any audience, anywhere, at any time.

With this revelation firmly at the front of our mind we started to explore the relationship between women, technology and the internet. This exciting new space was already being asked about by clients who were interested in how they could use Face’s approach to get closer to women, the gatekeepers of family life. The result of our interrogation into this subject was the original Women & the Web 2.0 Report.

The results of this were astounding, much like youth in previous years, women were creating a niche for themselves, finding their own space on the web. The knock-on effect of the report saw Face engage a group of women both online and face-to-face to build the first co-creation community for women, Mindbubble!

It was an instant hit. Boots were the first brand to work alongside the Mindbubble ladies, co-creating new products for their make-up lines. Following in the footsteps of Boots came Surf, Knorr, Dove, Comfort and Air Wick, all wanting to harness the power of the opinionated and creative Mindbubble ladies.

Moving into 2009 and we did not rest on our laurels, the natural restlessness within the company lead to the development and launch of Face Wired. Designed to develop the potential of co-creation in the planning sphere, Wired immediately teamed up with The Carphone Warehouse to help develop their social media strategy. The Carphone project included the use of Pulsar, Face’s brand new real time research tool.

Pulsar is Face's Social Media Immersion Platform and Methodology

Pulsar enabled Carphone to get even closer to their consumers and listen to what people were saying online. The speed and accuracy of Pulsar meant that the results could immediately be plugged into innovation and planning movements.

By this time, the floodgates were open; the size of the team had quadrupled and Midford Place, Face’s headquarters, had become the epicentre of everything co-creation. Community, Social Media and Co-Creation projects were coming in thick and fast and as our ambitious goals were beginning to be reached, another organic step was taken, adapting the co-creation process for advertising.

Next up… Part 3: Say Hello to The Hub

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The Future Planning

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

“The ad industry establishment can no longer simply tweak its offering around the edges if it is to cope. 2010 must be the year to begin a head on overhaul of the way the (advertising) business is organized” Claire Beale Editor of Campaign Magazine, January 2010

The global marketing landscape has changed more in the last 5 years than in the last 50 but that the leading agencies in terms of the way they are organized, structured and the service they offer, haven’t.

The main driver for this change has been the rise of empowered consumers. They have exposed the traditional advertising agency model as one that is out of date and struggling to help clients deal with the current consumer landscape.

“The fact is: consumers now control brands. They play with them, reshape them and even imbue them with new meaning. In the next decade, we will see a shift away from the traditional branding model of agencies and clients” Owen Lee, Creative Chairman Farm

The big question on everyone’s lips is how should the advertising and planning industry respond? What is the new model of marketing that will ensure as an industry we can help brands to navigate their way through the new consumer landscape? These questions apply as much to the brands as to the agencies that serve them. If we wanted to be sensationalist we would say that “brands and agencies must adapt or die” or putting it in a more positive way that the brand and agency leaders of the future will need to be fleet-of-foot and structure their businesses to function in a highly fluid way.

As research, brand and communications people we always felt we wanted to get closer to consumers, but for practical reasons were not able to no matter how creative we were. But now that’s all changing. Social media allows us to listen to consumers and monitor the conversations they are having around brands in real time. This offers valuable insight and understanding, but more importantly identifies opportunities to establish a completely new way for brands to engage with their audiences. The challenge for the industry is not to view social media as a channel, but to use it to facilitate collaborations between brands and consumers to innovate and co-create communications more effectively. It has heralded:

The Advent of Social Brands
New social media tools will help brands to be on 24/7: this is part of what we call “the socialisation of brands” where campaign and channel marketing gives way to “continuous brand engagement marketing”. The environment the brand lives and breathes in is always on and is always changing so brands need to be listening to and observing their consumers not just in communities but also on the web as well as involving them on a continuous basis in everything they do.

The Need for Big Social Ideas
“Big ideas” need to be a big SOCIAL ideas – one that has the power to live and breathe through what consumers do with it in their interactions with each other and the brand. A big social idea has to be able to evolve, adapt and gain new meaning through those consumer interactions. Ultimately this requires agencies and brands to embrace a more open creative approach based on the philosophy that ideas can come from anywhere: a new model which combines the creativity of experts with the creativity of consumers so that more big social ideas of better quality can be produced. This means experts have an even bigger role to play than ever before. Our recent case study with Nestle’s Skinny Cow where we co-created the advertising with Mindbubble women is a good one – in three months there are already 41,000 fans on Facebook.

The Need to be Fast, Adaptive and Continuous
The process needs to change as well; the annual planning cycle making way for real-time planning which allows brands to remain relevant and interesting to changing consumer needs, overall a more fluid, highly responsive and iterative way of planning, which we call Adaptive Brand Planning. The new imperative will be to maintain a dialogue with your consumers to harness their opinions and ideas to fine-tune your product and communications. One of the main benefits of this approach is the speed with which you can develop concepts and communications as shown by our recent work with Unilever and Axe/Lynx Twist.

Consumer Communities Will Reign
The focus on the 30 second TV spot will give way to the content and conversations that are being generated by consumers and between consumers around the brand. This will in turn produce different segmentation models where brands see consumers not just as potential customers who want to buy something from them but as people who want to have a relationship with them. Engaging and managing brand fan bases will be key: developing creative ways for engaging and managing fan bases will be critical.

A New Planning Mindset
The planner of the future will be more interested in how people interact, and how to stimulate those interactions. The sage-like planners will be replaced by people who are comfortable working in tightly knit teams of agency planners, each with their area of specialism such as social media or building and harnessing the power of communities. The line between planner and researcher will become blurred because there will be a constant dialogue with consumers that will offer insight, understanding and ideas in real time. A key part of the task will be to observe and spot these insights and ideas and use them to inspire creative experts to build upon them.

Conclusion
Consumers will be treated in a fundamentally different way. They will be given more responsibility and will be more involved throughout the brand marketing process. Co-creating with consumers as direct and active equals to deliver a range of marketing outputs will be a major part of the marketing model. Also the new generation of planners will treat consumers in a fundamentally different way. The gaming generation of young planners will be comfortable in this fast changing environment, where remaining in constant contact with your audience is more important than one-off research interventions. These planners will be the architects of a new contract between brand and consumer, founded on listening, understanding, adapting and co-creating.

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