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:

1. real time search
2. rich media content in the form of music and video (with free and subscription models simultaneously)
3. internet browsing
4. 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.

Right. So, where do we start? Well I guess I should have sent updates from the front earlier, but I got sucked into the carnival of geekdom and couldn’t help but just enjoy it. Three days into South By South West Interactive and the first thing I feel I should mention is that I’m tired. I’m knackered infact, as if I had been working on 6 debriefs, 5 pitches and had run the New York marathon all over the same weekend. The good news is the weekend is over. The bad news is, it has gone by far too quickly.

SXSWi is the most intense conference/festival ever. And it’s not  just because of the ridiculous number of panels, talks and workshops, or the mental number of parties kicking off as soon as the last speaker of the day drops the mic. I think it has more to do with the immersive nature of the experience as a whole. SXSW is basically a massive social experiment a la Zimbardo about a world, a few years out, where every single human being has totally embraced the real-time social web and is always logged on, life-streaming and constantly connected to his own tribe.

There’s no in or out of SXSW, once you are here you can only be IN: in the conference centre, on the streets, in the virtual space. It’s a total experience, a world that Tim from @madebymany yesterday described as the “Kingdom of Awesome, a metaphorical ‘State’ of hive-mind” where for one single week you’re intensely sharing and life-sharing with hundreds of people on Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere collapses into a physical space, a few blocks weird town in Texas. No wonder that the two apps that are rocking this year’s edition, Foursquare and Gowalla, only do one thing: connecting virtual characters to physical spaces.

Foursquare experienced an extraordinary day yesterday, recording a record-breaking 347,000 check-ins in one day (as in people checking in a conference room, a venue or a bar when they get there, to let their connections know that they are there). I’ve been using Foursquare for a while in London but using it here in Austin has a completely different meaning. In a context where only a few people are using it, the engagement leans towards the gaming elements, while in situations like SXSWAustin the app serves a solid social purpose.

Foursquare’s location-based sharing meets a need that couldn’t be met by any other media: facilitating face-to-face connections between people who build and manage their networks through social media, i.e. people with ahigher number of active social connections. Imagine if you were to phone, txt or generally engage, 1-2-1, with the hundreds of people you’re constantly in touch with on Twitter… One week wouldn’t be enough just to get hold of half of them.

I had the same feeling last year, when I came to SXSW for the first time and realized how different it was to use Twitter in a place where 12 thousand other festival peoploids were doing exactly the same at the same time. In a situation like this Twitter is simply  way more efficient than any other available media. And it’s not just a question of scale, it’s a completely different way of existing in a social space, building knowledge, relationships and ultimately societies. You know all this. But being immersed in it is a completely different story.

So, even if every panel had been useless, every party boring, and even if it had been pouring rain for a week (as opposed to the amazingly warm summer that welcomed us), it would still be all very worthwhile. Because SXSW is not so much about SXSW but more about the community around it. It’s not about emergent technology in itself but about bringing together in one place, people who use fairly common social technologies just to see what happens. It’s about taking part in this weird laboratory of the future, where you can really start grasping what social technology is all about, what are the opportunities, what are the challenges and the dangers ahead.

Note to self: next SXSW posts, a lot shorter and with actual content/no random rumblings

Your weekly round up of all the stuff the Face team loves from the Interwebnetplace:

Francesco: ASLSP
The longest, slowest piece of music in the world, it started in 2000 and will go on for the next 639 years.

Lucy: What’sapp
The future of texting…. it’s free (well only for people with iPhones or blackberries, at the moment)

Nathan: Incredibox
Simple, fun and melodious!

Marion: I Am Un Chien – Hologram
A French rock band giving us a great example of how to use Chatroulette.

Esther: Being And Tim
Philosophical cartooning, what’s not to like?

Saul: Selleck Waterfall Sandwich
Images of Tom Selleck superimposed over beautiful waterfalls with different sorts of sandwiches. Not big, not clever, but only on the internet…

Nick: Google Liquid Galaxy
A stunning new toy from google, baiscally it’s a multiscreen google earth controlled by a six axis mouse!!

Matt: Stussy J. Dilla Documentary
A 3 part documentary focussing on the life and times of hip-hop producer J. Dilla, really well done.

Listen to the crowd, but do not lose control!

Let’s be clear I don’t believe the crowd (without being very selective 
about your crowd) alone can give you fully formed insights, npd ideas 
and creative executions. I do believe however that the crowd and the 
web should play an instrumental role in research, planning and 
innovation. So here are 3 ways that the crowd should be used to help 
you crack these types of briefs:

Listen to the crowd

The web hosts conversations on pretty much every subject a researcher 
or planner could ever want to know about. In fact it is the biggest 
research resource we have access to so start using it. There are a 
number of tools including our own pulsar social media monitoring and 
analysis platform that allow us to listen to the crowd. When you start 
listening you will quickly find consumer problems that need solving, 
what brands are hot and not and lots of opportunities to engage with 
Pro-am consumers. Listening in real time to what consumers are 
discussing is addictive and very powerful if it feeds into an adaptive 
planning process.

Ask the crowd

Crowdsourcing is best used in the early stages of a project. Again 
there are lots of platforms you can use – we have developed our own 
platform that we are currently using for www.cocreatelondon.com. The 
process starts by giving consumers a clear question or challenge to 
respond to. What you will get back is a diverse mass of topline ideas, 
thoughts and some fully rounded responses. The role of the planner/
researcher with the help of clever filtering software is to look at 
the patterns from this data. What lays behind the ideas – in short what 
are the insights. Insights that can be used by planners to build 
platforms for innovation or communication.

Crowd wisdom

By opening up ideas in a crowdsourcing community for comment and 
rating you can see clearly user-generated clusters. This engagement 
amongst the community can highlight the strong ideas or themes; but 
just as importantly it can start the process of collaboration and 
co-creation to make ideas better and more appealing.

Teenager dancing to bad hip-hop…middle-aged man staring aimlessly at his webcam…faceless man doing, erm, things they probably shouldn’t be doing on the internet. Yes, these are the joys of Chatroulette and anyone can join in.

I had heard quite a lot of murmurings about Chatroulette, a site where you push start and are instantly in a video chat with a random stranger. Created by 17-year old Russian high school student, Andrey Ternovskiy, Chatroulette was created just for fun, but word has already spread fast.

My first thoughts about the site were definitely in the “why bother?” camp. However, part of me just had to a take a peek, and this is obviously where its popularity stems from. Chatroulette effectively allows you to peep through the net curtains and into the lives of random strangers. However, this is a peep through the net curtains that has the added frisson of the random button. Just by pressing next, you are in a video chat with another random stranger. The fact of the matter is, you don’t quite know what that next person may be doing in front of their webcam.

Many articles have already emerged asserting that Chatroulette is just another platform for titillation online. Having played Chatroulette at Face towers, we can safely say this is most definitely not for children. However, support for the site has already emerged, with Wired giving its five reasons why Chatroulette is addictive and worth a try. One element of Chatroulette that definitely feels different is the scope it provides to dip out of conversations easily, with the veil of anonymity meaning you are not hurting anyone’s feelings. For many, this anonymity also allows them to be as outlandish as they want, knowing full well they are probably only on screen for a very short space of time. Wired’s main reason for buying into Chatroulette though, is that it’s fun.

So, is it fun? I have to admit I had my doubts. However, I also don’t think I have seen the Face team laugh and scream as much as they did when we took a quick look at the world of Chatroulette. Chats veered from the funny (teens dancing badly and holding up stupid signs), to the odd (the man who didn’t seem to understand how it all worked), to the downright perverse (it must be a rule of the internet that at any given moment in time, somewhere, there will be a naked man enjoying his company too much in front of his webcam). Maybe it’s the future of online chat, or maybe it’s just a phase. However, having played it, I can at least safely say that Chatroulette is most definitely a laugh.

Here is a great video explaining Chatroulette and using it for a social experiment:

chat roulette from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.

via http://www.flowtown.com/blog/

We thought we would let you know what’s been going on over at CoCreateLondon.com, starting with the Top 10 ideas on the site so far as voted for by Co-Create London users.

1) Free Wi-Fi hotspots in public spaces across town – 127 votes
Free WiFi access seems to be something that Londoners want to see in the city. However there has been some backlash to this with other users asking – how would WiFi make London a better place?

2) Open library-style book kiosks/ book swap system in Tube stations so Londoners are never without reading material on the underground! – 63 votes
Bringing some culture & entertainment to the transport system is something that has been a running theme on the site. This idea has been the pick of the bunch with a strong backing from Co-Create London users.

3) Oyster Card becomes Oyster London card – pay for anything in London up to the value of 20GBP – 58 votes
A few users have been quick to say that this idea has already been explored by TFL but didn’t go ahead due to financial regulation complications. However, making it only for small payments adds in a new angle and would encourage spending.

Could it be used for other purchases beside travel?

4) Tube Tunnels as giant immersive flipbooks. We all travel miles & miles underground everyday through black tunnels. The Tube carriages have all got amazing windows to look outside of the train at… well, nothing. Wouldn’t it be nice if the walls of the tunnels were covered in series of pictures that vary gradually from one to the next, so that when the trains goes through the tunnel they get animated? – 56 votes
A new model for artists, creative types, brands and advertisers to get involved with. Would brighten up millions of Londoners journey to work but is it feasible?

5) Simply by putting air conditioning on the tubes would improve life in London during the Summer 100% – 56 votes
Boris has introduced air conditioning on the circle line and, as some Co-Creators have noted, there have been cut backs on energy use in stations to reduce heat but is it even possible for there to be a totally cool tube?

6) Annual Open Labs Day…Similar to Open House Weekend, but celebrates our city’s vast and under-appreciated science culture. The public get to question real scientists in working labs, and explore London’s scientific history (Darwin, Newton, Hooke, Faraday, Franklin, Jenner, Davy, Maxwell…) through open days at places like the Royal Society, Royal Institution etc. – 54 Votes
Exposing and helping the public understand the great scientific significance and heritage London has is a great idea! Could be amazing with the right marketing behind it, but will it get backing from Boris?

Boris has unveiled air-conditioned tubes on the circle line but can he do this for the whole of the tube system??

7) A swimming lane system on Oxford Street, people who want to walk slowly and browse you walk on the inside of the pavement (nearest the shops), people who have got to go places and are in a hurry walk on the outside (nearest the road). This would stop all the pushing, shoving, barging, dodging, frustration, pain etc that walking on Oxford Street causes!! – 49 votes
The human congestion on Oxford Street causes frustration for thousands. The new crossing at Oxford Circus has been a success so why not go one step further and create a manageable, easy and beneficial system for the rest of the street?

8 ) Turn Empty Shops in to spaces for performance, places to learn a new skill and mini-markets for creative local residents to sell their wares. – 46 votes
It is no secret that there are lots of empty retail spaces in London, especially after the recession. Why not do something positive with this free space? Giving it back to the community could help regenerate areas and encourage potential buyers.

9) Instead of the Oyster machines making the same beeping noise when you go through, each one has a different musical note, such as a piano key.  – 45 votes
Would a series of these small, fun and quirky ideas cheer up commuters and make travelling in the city more fun? The users on the Co-Create London site seem to think so!

Outdoor dancing, big in China, could it be introduced in London???

10) Encourage more frequent outdoor dancing – 412votes
China and Japan have been doing it for years, it is hard to imagine Londoners getting involved though. Would be amazing if the right scheme was set up!

Throughout this week we will be running through some of our favourite ideas and releasing more information about the journey Co-Create London is about to go on!

What Would You Do To Make London A Better Place?

In the spirit of co-creation and the core value of openness that comes with it I welcome wholeheartedly Lucian Camp’s thoughts regarding The Co-creation Hub. However I would like to counter some of them as well as try to enlighten him on the benefits co-creation brings to creativity and to the marketing process as a whole so that he will bring his experience and talent to bear on what we are trying to achieve.

He is right to highlight some of the very real concerns many people in the creative community have regarding co-creation. Indeed it is easy to look upon it as a process that makes creative people redundant and worse, fails to recognise the high esteem with which clients hold creativity and creative departments. But this is to misunderstand the nature of co-creativity. It’s not about dinosaurs versus trailblazers, it’s about a new way to find truly innovative and compelling creative solutions to clients’ problems and by the very nature of creative people we should all be open to new processes and approaches.

The good news is that as a Hub we have been engaging in this debate for a while and generally speaking we have been able to carry both people internally and externally with us on our journey. And there are three important reasons for this.

The first is simply when people whether they are consumers or experts engage in co-creation they quickly realize there is plenty of space and time for individual creativity. We have stressed through a number of our blogs (and also at the Face Forum Event where we presented “Do brands need agencies”) over the past year or so the importance that experts (including creative experts) play in the co-creation process. The role they play has grown with co-creation not lessened. They are as important in the co-creation flow as consumers. It is why we don’t believe in crowdsourcing on its own, as handing things over to the crowd is a means to an end rather than the end in itself. Lucian like some people before him muddles co-creation with crowdsourcing.

Secondly there are plenty of people including creatives who believe that creativity can be both collaborative and “solo”. They have cited many examples to me of collaborative creativity beyond co-creation. I have also seen it first hand in the co-creation sessions we have delivered for our clients where the process at different stages allows for individual and group thinking. It also allows for stimulus from a multitude of different areas, something creativity has always thrived on. I recommend that Lucian attend one so that he can also learn from this. Even from a quick straw poll of some of our brilliant creative minds in London and Edinburgh it is clear he does not have close to the unanimous following for the “solo” and “at” way of doing things as he may think.

The final and undisputed fact to be considered is the reaction of clients. Our blue chip client base of Unilever, Coca-Cola, Reckitt Benckiser, Nokia – the list goes on – has been backing us and our co-creation approach for a while because they share our view that doing things with people is better than doing things at people. Clients have recognized the resounding benefits this approach brings to their marketing process as a whole  – it delivers better outputs whether they are research, innovation or communication based, more quickly and more cost effectively than other processes. And you don’t need to have a big budget – we are working with clients big and small across the board.

What is encouraging about all of this is the debate about co-creation is very much alive and kicking both within and outside the Hub. This is vital because we want to lead the debate on finding a better marketing model for the future, one that more appropriately suits the consumer landscape our brands now find themselves inhabiting. Thank goodness Lucian has decided to engage, for the London Co-creation Hub will be a better place for it.

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.

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.

The Original Microsoft Team, born socialites

The latest big brand to announce a social network collaboration is Microsoft. The Windows giant are looking to incorporate Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn features with the hugely popular Outlook e-mail client. The Personal Information Manager feature will grant access to user pages, contacts, messaging systems, events and meetings on all three social networks.

By making this a reality Microsoft will go head-to-head with competitor products that currently allow users to work remotely on their multiple social networks from a single application or website (e.g. FriendFeed).

On their official blog Microsoft announced that all Office 2010 users will be able to connect their LinkedIn account with the new Outlook Social Connector tool. Microsoft have also announced a collaboration with Facebook which will see the integration of more social functions in the near future.

The LinkedIn features are currently in Beta and users can test status updates, photo upload and contact messaging. More features will arrive with the final version.

The big question that remains unanswered regards access. Microsoft Outlook, including Exchange, powers around 65% of enterprise email accounts and a lot of those companies have restricted social network access to their employees to avoid them to wasting time. What will happen when we are to update our profile status or chat in real time with our Facebook contacts directly from our corporate e-mail software? Only time will tell…

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

“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.

In 2004 participating in social media was not a widespread activity, early adopters and young people were the groups pushing the format forward and exploring its possibilities. In its early days we were helping brands stay close to young people and therefore close to the ensuing high paced changes in on-line behaviour they were leading.

Skip forward three years and in May 2007 we proudly launched the first ever co-creation community, Headbox.com. Headbox was the result of spending loads of time with young people, researching their habits and ultimately understanding the way they interact with each other and with brands.

At the time there were no on-line qualitative research platforms for any category, let alone youth, the driving force behind the internet. In 2007 social media was beginning to reach its massive potential and the world of research needed to react. By offering clients a way into the minds of young people it opened up a more collaborative and mutual relationship between consumers and brands.

Headbox in 2007!

This was an extremely exciting time for us; working in a more concerted and creative way was being adopted as a philosophy. It was the beginning of the co-creation driven approach that would define the company, although the term co-creation was not being used just yet!

It was whilst presenting our second annual TechTribe report at the 2007 MRS Youth Conference when the real turning point came. The Axe team had seen our presentation and were interested in the approach. Axe wanted to engage with their consumers more closely and involve them in every step of the marketing process.

It was here at the 2007 MRS Youth Conference that co-creation was first put forward to a client brave and willing enough to try something new.

A few months later in the heat of Alicante, Spain, 16 young, creative Axe consumers from Headbox took part in Face’s first big co-creation project. Working alongside the Face and Axe team their task was to co-create an Axe Summer Variant.

Our first Co-Creation Project with Lynx was a great success

The co-creation workshop and co-creative approach was an instant success. By the end of 2007 we had co-created with Axe again on the infamous Dark Temptation ‘Chocolate Man’ variant as well as completing a co-creation project with Rexona, developing a new variant with their female consumers.

Next up… Part 2: 2008 and the birth of Mindbubble

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo. (via Mashable)

Co-Create London is a new website aiming to address London’s main issues and annoyances by listening to the people who know the city best – the general public.

Whether you have lived in London for your whole life or just passed through Co-Create London would like you to answer a very simple question ‘What Would You Do To Make London a Better Place?’ By gathering ideas, solutions and fresh thinking about the city the site hopes to address issues that are important to people of London and give citizens the platform to make positive changes.

Over the next few weeks the site will be collecting ideas and encouraging users to vote on their favourites. The ideas that receive the most votes will be taken forward into a co-creation workshop. The workshop will see Londoners who contributed to the cocreatelondon.com website come together with London experts to turn the ideas into positive and real solutions.

These solutions will then be marched to Town Hall and presented in front of London Mayor Boris Johnson. The hope is that Bojo will listen to Co-Create London and the ideas taken from the website will become a reality, making London a better place to visit and live.

To let Boris know exactly what you would do to make London a better place – or just read & vote on some great ideas, head over to www.cocreatelondon.com

Check out the Co-Create London video below!

It’s with great pride that the Face team would like to announce that Axe’s latest deodorant, Twist, is an entirely co-created product! Using our online communities and co-creation process, Axe worked alongside consumers at every step of the marketing journey.

The Twist project began in early 2008, the initial steps of the process involved around 50 members of Headbox taking part in an online community. A smaller crack team of Headboxers from the US, the UK and South America were then selected to take part in a co-creation workshop. The agenda for the workshop, which took place in the Summer of 2008 in a very sunny New York City, was to co-create a new Axe variant that had ‘freshness’ as the key characteristic. The Headbox consumers worked for alongside members of the Axe team, the fragrance house, perfumers, Axe’s creative agencies and Face on various different concepts.

At the end of the 2 days the outcome was Twist – a fragrance that changes throughout the day.

Consumers Co-Creating in NYC

David Cousino, Unilever Consumer Marketing Insight (CMI) director, explains, “The Twist concept was born from the insight provided by our consumers that girls get bored easily and the real challenge is to keep them interested, or ‘hooked’. Using co-creation at such an early stage enabled us to engage with our target audience in a meaningful way, and deliver a new product suited to their needs and wishes.”

“In addition to invaluable consumer insight, this methodology gave us the added benefit of a much more efficient development process. By engaging key functions all at once, we were able to develop within only ten weeks a concept that had collaborative input from the fragrance experts, marketing team and creative agency,” adds Cousino

The Twist concept was then taken back online and fed into Headbox for testing and refinement. The completely collaborative approach meant that Unilever knew it would be well-received by consumers – something borne out by exceptional test scores and good initial response in its first launch market. The product has been launched in the UK and is being rolled out to the US, other European countries and Latin America.

Twist in the press:

• Marketing Week
• MAD
• Research Live
• NMA
• Advertising Age

More information on Axe Twist:

• Axe Website (UK)
• Facebook Group
• See the UK TV ad

Video Case Study:

Client View – Why Co-Creation Delivers Better Results from Face Group on Vimeo.

To celebrate the launch of the Co-Creation Hub London, Face, alongside the other members of The Hub, will be hosting the inaugural members open evening.

The Co-Creation Hub – London is the first place to bring the principles of co-creation to all stages of the marketing process, and is founded on three key tenets:

1. Constant consumer involvement throughout the entire marketing planning and brand communications process – maintaining a continuous dialogue with consumers; harnessing their ideas and opinions to develop better products and communications and adapting to their changing needs and tastes in real-time.

2. A continuous process, with no end points as the communication is constantly building and evolving. A fluid way of working with a tightly knit team of agency specialists, seamlessly pulsing in and out of the process, as and when required.

3. Creating communities and fan-bases, and constantly communicating with them, online and offline.

Taking place on the 18th March at the Design Council in Convent Garden the event is your chance to find out more about The Hub and meet us all in person.

As it is an open invite anyone can attend, there is a maximum capacity though, so if you would like to reserve your place on the guest-list please Click Here

It promises to be a great night and we look forward to seeing you there!!

To find out more about The Co-Creation Hub London, Click Here

The Co-creation Hub is a collective of organisations, academics and individuals who believe in doing things ‘with’ people rather than ‘at’ people.

We currently work in the research, branding and communications industry, but we think our approach can be applied to any number of industries and organisations in order to solve almost any problem.

We believe great ideas can come from anywhere and anyone. And that means there is a huge untapped resource of creativity out there that co-creation can allow to flourish.

We have already co-created new products for Unilever, advertising campaigns for Nestle and communications strategies for Carphone Warehouse and seen startling results.

Consumers now control brands. They play with them, re-shape them and even imbue them with new meaning. And the successful brands and businesses of the future will put co-creation at the heart of everything they do and treat people as active equals rather than passive respondents.

At its core, the Co-creation Hub is about collaboration. We believe in involving people at every stage of everything we do. We find out what people think, what they like to talk about, what products they actually want to buy and how they would like to be spoken to. And then we co-create our work with them rather than ‘target’ them. That way, the work we produce engages more people, resonates more deeply and actively encourages people to play with our ideas.

Whether manufacturers, artists, writers, designers or government organisations, The Co-Creation Hub – London is looking to collaborate with people from around the world involved in co-creation, whatever their discipline, to stimulate the co-creation approach.

The London Co-Creation Hub website

Myriam Davidovici-Nora is a researcher at Telecom Paristech engineer school in Paris. She studies online consumption, production and new business models to supply digital contents. In her latest paper The Dynamics of Co-Creation in the Video Game Industry: The Case of World of Warcraft she explores the dynamics of co-creation in the construction of video games, using World of Warcraft as a case study.

For the neophytes, World of Warcraft is a Mass Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMPORG) created by Blizzard in 2004. Currently it has 11.5 million subscribers, and owns 62% of the MMORPG market. The great innovation Blizzard introduced when releasing World of Warcraft (WoW) was the ability for its users to improve the game.

WoW In a nutshell: When players subscribe (and agree to pay a monthly fee) they create a character and join an entirely online world. They then evolve in this environment by either, completing quests and killing computer-controlled monsters (Player versus Environment or PvE), or they can fight against each other (Player versus Player or PvP). They gain experience, money and objects (looted from the kills’ drops) and they can improve their character, trading and gearing up. Players can also join groups; these groups are composed of a very precise set of players with different skills and roles (tank, healer or Damage per seconds).

Christmas is Celebrated in the Game

WoW’s main point of difference and strength is the large after-game life with the community on and offline, the adaptability of the game allows players to constantly adapt the interface with third-party built add-ons.

Blizzard’s strategy involved players from the very beginning of the WoW adventure, inviting users to test the game on closed Beta. They also outsourced specific design and innovation tasks to consumers: they provide players with toolkits to build and test their add-ons directly in the game, thus enhancing user experience and loyalty to the game.

This innovation process has a dual benefit: it helps WoW to ascertain a great understanding of its consumers and plan the right upgrades, as well as offering a very segmented gaming experience that meets every gamers’ need, from casual to hardcore.

To facilitate the innovation process, WoW is built on a double-layered organisation mixing private and collective incentives. The first layer is a community of add-on developers, under an open source software (OSS) development model, and the second layer is the private firm, Blizzard, that privately develops the gameplay under copyright terms.

Why do player develop add-ons for WoW?

The motivation is collective-centred: killing the final boss (that ugly big monster at the end of a mission) requires in-game information management (life, mana, aggressiveness or aggro, hit rate etc..) both at individual and group level, and the use of adequate and common tools, provided by add-ons… developed by the users themselves.

Two major communities are sharing the add-on market: Curse and WowAce. These communities help developers and users to share add-ons, information, feedback and screenshot in a virtuous circle of innovation. To increase the network, the two sites are sharing a common library of commands. These add-ons are downloaded for free from the community website, thus by peer-to-peer (P2P) which considerably increase both downloading efficiency and awareness of the brand (word of mouth).

Some Potential Co-Creators at Blizzcon

Blizzard’s model is based on a constant innovation of  gameplay to maintain the attractiveness for WoW’s high-level players. Across the last upgrades and patches, Blizzard deployed several bug fixes, added new festivities (special days such as Halloween or Christmas are celebrated in WoW), or new features like the Achievement System (“horizontal” rewarding system across all the “vertical” activities such as missons). Another important leverage tool to keep high-level players engaged is the opening of new realms. These types of changes are implemented according to the players’ feedback, either through the online community directly linked to the Blizzard offices or during the Blizzcon – a massive annual convention for the fans.

However, Blizzard actively controls actions and monitors the site with Game Moderators and employees involved in the game. The company focuses on any artificial increase in the economy of the game, server instability and access of a third party player to one’s account. Add-ons like bots (automated programs) or script like one-click actions are forbidden. The transaction of WoW content for real money via eBay or a personal website is prohibited (even though common practice unfortunately) and Blizzard reserves the rights to close account of unscrupulous players with no warning.

In her paper, Myriam Davidovici-Nora gives an incredible insight into this new hybrid innovation model that developed the world most famous video game. It’s not only a great read for any WoW lover who wants to understand the conception of the game, but also an amazing case-study of the innovation and co-creation process.

cardboard heads simulating a packed room at Minibar, London

Over the next few weeks Face Wired , Face social media planning sister agency, will be speaking at a couple of workshops and seminars in London and Milan. If you are around and want to catch up, here’s the low-down.

The first one is a two-day workshop at Multimedia Management series hosted by Mediaset and IULM University in Milan, where we will be talking about Social Media Monitoring, Data Visualization and Social Media Planning. Access to this series is unfortunately closed but if you are in Milan and want to talk to us give us a shout or DM me on twitter @abc3d

The second one is Open Business “Web Business Toolbox” in London, where the focus will be more on Social Media Strategy for web companies and startups in general. This series is open but the organizers told me it’s already sold out. However there’s time (apr 14) and someone might drop out so if you are interested do sign up to the waiting list.

Also, this coming Friday is Minibar time again, the monthly face to face for internet professionals in Shoreditch. The coming one is all about Augmented Reality. We will be there enjoying presentations from Micazook, Worksnug, Augmented Planet, Ambient Industries. And having a few friday beers. If you are planning to make it, make sure you RSVP on meetup. See you there.

End of Face wanders bullettin.