Category: Four pillars

I’ve always imagined advertising to be about a transfer of information, connecting the customer to the product or service. And there’ve been different ways of doing it, some good, some not so good.

In the first age of advertising, recommendations flowed from the product marketers to the customers. Try this. Buy this. Nine out of ten cats this.

In the second age of advertising, recommendations flowed from celebrity product endorsers to the customers. Trust me I’m an expert. So what if I got paid a gazillion to do this, would I lie to you?

In the third age of advertising, recommendations flowed from customers to customers. Unsolicited. Come take a look at this, isn’t it fantastic? Whatever you do, do not repeat not buy that, it’s a load of **(££.

Maybe we’re on the verge of the fourth age, when recommendations flow from the customer to the product. I want something that looks like this, that feels like this, for yea much, by this time.

Maybe none of the ages actually stopped, we’re just discovering better and better ways of having real conversations about customers and products and services.

I don’t really watch ads any more. Yet I found myself watching this video. Maybe advertising will come back via YouTube after all. But with a difference.

We choose what we watch. When we watch it. Where we watch it. We choose to watch the ads because our friends recommend them, because they think we might enjoy watching them. Maybe we even get collaborative filtering going…. people who liked Ad A also liked…..

One way or the other, it’s rare that I enjoy an ad. So see what you think.

Now

I quote from the Economist’s leader on recent events in the UK banking sector:

….This debacle holds lessons for the way Britain regulates its banks. As Mr King pointed out, defending his performance in front of a House of Commons committee on September 20th, the law prevents the Bank either from staging a covert rescue operation or from engineering a swift takeover; and flaws in the protection of depositors mean that, once an overt rescue operation is under way, depositors will flee. Mr King defended the separation of powers between the Treasury, the Bank and the FSA, but he was wrong to. It has exacerbated the system’s flaws; nobody was in charge of the operation.

Nobody was in charge of the operation. 

Somehow, over the last decade or so, this has become true in so many places, in so many ways. Multinational organisations, governments, public sector companies, the private sector, everywhere. The story is the same. Quango-ed and committee-d to a point of gridlock, decisions are often glaringly visible only in their absence. Accountability becomes a word reserved for matrix charts and consultant-speak. And when something actually happens, almost everyone heads for the hills. A few remain to shoulder the blame and to mop up.

Nobody was in charge of the operation.

I saw a recent report in the UK suggesting that there’s been ballistic growth in the number of quangos here since 1997; the cost of such quangos was described at around £188 bn, which is over twice the NHS budget or, for that matter, the Defence budget. I hear that similar things are happening in many other parts of the developed world. [Who knows, maybe it’s time to come up with a new term “artificial employment”.]

Northern Rock. Katrina. Terrorist actions. Enron. Worldcom. Whatever else you want to add to the list. So many committees, so little time.

We need to think hard about what’s happening. We seem to be sprouting whole armies of intermediaries everywhere, lost in the vegetation of modern jurisprudence and legislation, creating something far worse than just the nanny state; a state where it is no longer possible to lead or to “govern”. A domino-effect house of cards where so much effort is made to manage risk that the risks themselves intensify into something new and infinitely more dangerous.

Small print and get-out clauses overshadowing and dominating the space, drowning the valuable, yet vulnerable, voice of professional opinion.

Nobody was in charge of the operation. The natural consequence of our becoming ever more part of a world driven by The Risk Management of Everything. [I definitely need to catch up with Michael Power.]

Some of you may have been surprised to see the Byte Night “advertisement” appear in my sidebar. I haven’t suddenly changed my mind and started allowing ads to be placed on the blog, nothing like that.

It’s something far simpler. Along with four of my colleagues, I’m spending the night “sleeping rough” on the 5th of October, to try and raise funds for a children’s charity; the particular focus is to provide shelter, succour and support for homeless youth, reaching out to them during what is perceived to be a critical time for them. Byte Night is a peculiar UK tradition, focused on the IT community, and this time I felt it was time for me to do my part.

You can read up on them by following the Donate link. Of necessity this type of action is local and regional in context, my apologies to readers farther afield. The blogosphere, as part of the web, remains the most effective way to connect with people and get such messages across. And I’m always keen to find ways to help charities keep their administrative costs as low as possible, so that the funds reach the people and the causes they need to reach.

Here’s how an article I was reading started:

WHAT do a bicycle that goes faster over bumps, a lever that allows car pedals to be operated by hand and a pedal-powered washing machine have in common?

I know, I’m easy that way. I was hooked, so I read on. You can find a stub to the article here, the New Scientist is not yet new enough to let me share the whole thing. [Are you listening, New Scientist?]

The article itself makes a simple and oft-repeated premise, that necessity breeds invention.

For some time now, I’ve tried to express the premise in today’s context. And it goes like this:

Opensource people don’t ask “What’s the business plan?”, “What’s the exit strategy?” “How shall we make money with this?” Opensource people build things to solve problems that they see and understand. Opensource people intuitively get the Because Effect: they don’t expect to make money with the solutions they build, they expect to make money because of those solutions.

Incidentally, there’s a YouTube video showing one of the inventions quoted, so it will give those who are paywall-blocked some idea of what the article is about. Like most other inventions, I am sure it didn’t happen in a vacuum, and that similar ideas sprung up in similar times all over the place. But that’s not the point of this post.

What this post is about is three things:

One, the article was about “deviant research”. And you know something? I took some time thinking about precisely what I would enter into Google as my search term. I took some time to make sure all my filters were DefCon Five. I thought about it, then decided that all I needed to do was to enter “deviant research” with the quotation marks.

Two, I thought about the headline I would associate with the article. Somehow I did not relish the idea that someone else entering the term “deviant research” would be led to my site. So I decided to leave the term out of the headline. Sure, someone may tag it that way and still foil my plans, but that’s what folksonomies are for. And I will live with the outcome.

Three, I thought about ways to expose more of the article. I would normally not do that, but I was spurred by reading another article in the same issue. Can you imagine the irony of someone sticking an article headlined “Information Wants to Be Free” behind a paywall? [As Don Marti said,  Information does want to be $6.95]

Worrying about the search terms you use. Thinking hard about how someone else might index your post. Scurrying around behind paywalls. I wonder what people in the 22nd century will make of all this. Fossil fools, Chris?

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.

I’ve always loved that quote from The Merchant of Venice, I can almost see the face of Godrej Engineer, my form teacher (and English teacher) from way back in 1973, the first time I heard those lines delivered by someone who knew how to.

Talking about marking the music: a reader, commenting on my Victor Wooten bass post, pointed me at yet another incredible Wooten video, a true slap guitar battle; the way Victor redefines the sounds his instrument makes brought something else to my mind: what John Mayall did in Room to Move many many years ago. And, not surprisingly, there’s a video out there of the Mayall session (though not the studio version, which if I remember right was done without any percussion).

These things, like the proverbial London bus, tend to come in threes. And so it came to pass, that while checking out my Facebook news feed, I noticed that Laurel Papworth had posted something that fit right in with Wooten and Mayall, at least insofar as unusual sounds and instruments were concerned. So take a look at Daft Hands to complete the set. [My thanks to Laurel].