Recruiting’s Blunder of Epic Proportions: Ignoring Mobile
by Dr. John Sullivan Oct 10, 2011, 5:51 am ET
by Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett
It’s 5:30 a.m., and Joe McHenry, a 36-year-old international tax manager who works in New York City, wakes up, checks his e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter activity from his smartphone all before getting out of bed. By 6:45 a.m. he’s dressed and walking to the train station for his 40-minute commute into the city. From the moment he grabs a seat to the moment he steps off the train, his eyes are glued to the four-inch screen of his personal onramp to his digital life and the information superhighway. Throughout the day, he’ll spend another 4.25 hours engaging with the world through it.
Now consider this: you’re trying to recruit Joe McHenry. He has blown off your e-mails, your voicemails, and even your InMails. This morning, however, his friend who used to work for your firm retweeted a link to the job you’re recruiting for, and it appeared on Joe’s Facebook wall. While on the train, Joe’s curiosity got the best of him and he clicked the link. The browser on his smartphone opened and started to load a page from your career site. He waited and waited, but the page just wasn’t loading. He figured, “I’ll try the parent domain instead.” He typed in yourcompany.com and up came your company’s WAP site, nicely formatted and clean. He looked for the link to jobs, but couldn’t find it. Frustrated, he abandoned his curiosity and went back to catching up with his friends on Facebook.
Sound like a poor experience? Only eight of the Fortune 100 have a career site that detects mobile browsers, and sadly, few of them optimize content for mobile visitors. Among those companies that have invested in building a mobile website, jobs content is more often than not missing. An infant-sized handful have done something for the mobile audience. They have built a careers app users can install on their phone or built out a mobile careers site. You can check out the progressive few: Raytheon, Starbucks, McDonald’s, PepsiCo, Hyatt, and AT&T.
The New Normal
Joe McHenry’s lifestyle is the new normal.
As of September, 40% of U.S. cell phone users carried a smartphone, and predictions show that by year’s end a majority of thepopulation will have one. Around the world, smartphones are quickly becoming the primary means of engaging via the Internet, with the PC being downgraded to second place. Factor in the lack of IT controls on personal devices and you can see why everything that is personal online will soon be done via mobile. Whether or not your firm blocks Facebook doesn’t matter when you carry Facebook in your pocket. Today, a majority of the traffic to Facebook already comes from mobile devices. According to Richard Cho, Facebook recruiting manager, mobile users are two times more engaged than non-mobile users.
A new Global Mobile Workforce Report from iPass based on input from 3,100 global workers indicated that 91% of those with mobile access to the Internet check in with their digital lives during the unoccupied moments of the day. “Not only were they checking their email first thing in the morning, 38% worked before their commute, 25% during their commute, and 22% worked again on the way home — each and every day. And they didn’t stop when they got home either. For many, work is a never-ending cycle; 37% work each evening — 33% work again when they arrived home, 26% after dinner, and 19% said they work again after they put their children to bed at night.”
A Blunder of Epic Proportions
Think of it. Precisely during the time periods when individuals are the most likely to be free, they don’t have access to mobile-friendly career information. If they find out about an opening from a friend on a social network, in most cases the link provided will bring them back to your ATS, which does nothing to support the mobile user. If they want to watch videos or read blogs, their browser will encounter technical challenge after technical challenge. If they are on an iPhone or Android, they may see your site, but they will be pinching, flicking, scrolling, and getting irritated the entire time. It’s important to realize that mobile-capable candidates aren’t stupid; not providing mobile access is an employer-brand bruiser for most companies, but if you are a tech firm, it’s an employer-brand killer.
“HR’s dirty little secret – you can’t get there from here!”
How Bad Is Your Site?
Among the Fortune 100 mentioned earlier, only one allows you to actually apply from a mobile device. That one is Raytheon. Among tech companies, some of the worst performers include Microsoft, Apple, and RIM, all of whom make mobile operating systems and browsers!
Using the mobiReady testing tool that tests the suitability of site design for mobile devices, you can see just how poorly the recruiting professions effort has been to court the mobile audience. The tool performs numerous tests, but assigns a score of one (horrible) to five (excellent) based on the total experience. Among the Fortune 100 the highest score for the primary career site was achieved by McKesson (AT&T’s site did not redirect the tool to its mobile website or it would have received a 5.0.)
Among the top ten Fortune firms, the scores looked like this (click to enlarge):
Why You Must Embrace Mobile NOW
The dominance of the mobile device has been a trend barreling toward us with considerable speed for some time. I first wrote about it just over three years ago when I proclaimed the mobile phone “The Most Effective Recruiting Communications Platform.” The recruiting profession has had more than ample time to prepare, but the stat’ prove few took action. Some of the reasons you can’t wait any longer to embrace mobile include:
- Mobile communications receive response rates unheard of for other communication channels. Well-designed SMS campaigns can achieve 100%-plus response rates!
- Smartphones provide ubiquitous access to digital communication/engagement tools. Global research by mobile advertisers found that 67% of smartphone users are never more than three feet from their device and NEVER turn it off!
- When people get bored or need a distraction, it’s what they turn to!
- The smartphone does what no other device on your desk can do: it unifies all communications, including voice calls, video calls, text messages, recorded videos, pod asts, social media messaging, email, instant chat/messenger, and Internet content. This range of message options allows you to cater to your prospects’ lifestyle versus forcing them to engage in your administration-centric process.
- The current generation is so hooked on them that messages not accessible from a mobile device may never be seen.
- If you’re targeting innovators and first adopters (both of which prefer Android), and the technology savvy, you have no choice.
- If you’re recruiting for a temporary or contract job, the rapid response rate of mobile makes the mobile platform the ideal choice.
- Personal phones are not subject to idiotic IT policies. The employees of your competitors can engage with while on the job without fear of being snooped on!
- Referral conversations happen in the field. It’s only logical the process should start there!
- As QR codes (quick response) become commonplace, the mobile phone will become critical in driving people to your information.
- If you are successfully messaging or posting jobs on Twitter, you are already aware that your audience is hooked on the mobile platform.
- Nothing shows the candidate quicker that your firm isn’t an innovator or a technology leader than ignoring the mobile phone platform.
- Google has already started to improve the ranking of sites that support mobile in search results over those that do not. Other engines will follow.
- The application capabilities afforded by the smartphone enable a perverse world of opportunity to make the recruiting process personal, local, engagement-centric, media rich, real-time, etc.
A Grander Opportunity
While the vast majority of recruiting professionals are primarily concerned with closing requisitions as quickly as possible, there are a significant portion who also consider the impact of their efforts on the greater productivity of the workforce. If you embrace mobile for no other reason, do it for this one: workers capable of work-shifting — i.e. working while mobile — are more productive, so stuffing your pipeline with candidates who have proven their mobile adeptness will positively impact your firm’s long-term productivity. Don’t take our word for it. Read the iPass Global Mobile Workforce Report and learn that among mobile workers:
- 75 percent worked more hours because of the increased flexibility in when and where they could work
- 55 percent worked at least 10 or more hours each week
- 64 percent felt they were better able to balance their workload with personal commitments
- 54 percent felt their productivity was substantially improved
Final Thoughts
Kat Drum was working as the global employment brand manager at Starbucks (she is now with RIM) when it launched its first mobile e-commerce application which had a tab for Jobs at Starbucks included. While presenting at mRecruitingCamp in September, she indicated that “Starbucks produced hires within a few weeks of launching the app.” While PepsiCo’s efforts are just a few months old, Chris Hoyt, who leads talent Engagement & marketing, presented evidence of mobile’s value at the same conference, juxtaposing PepsiCo’s mobile efforts against more traditional sourcing channels. Hoyt elaborated, saying that the early evidence justifies the initial investment and that mobile will be a considerable part of PepsiCo’s strategy for sometime.
While a few leading-edge firms (check out Verizon, Fidelity, HCA, and the U.S. Army in addition to those already referenced) have tried the mobile platform, most recruiting leaders have delayed the decision to “go mobile.” The lack of action can be attributed to ignorance about what going mobile would require, lack of funding and lack of desire to find it, general apathy, and lack of support from the ATS community. But the time to realize the cost of not going mobile far exceeds the cost of doing so is upon us. The mobile workforce is the future, and the future is what most firms try to dominate!
tags: mobileSubscribe to the ERE Daily for all the latest recruiting news.
This article is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended to offer specific legal advice. You should consult your legal counsel regarding any threatened or pending litigation.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
(This applies to marketing too.) From Ere.net: Recruiting’s Blunder of Epic Proportions: Ignoring Mobile
Thursday, October 06, 2011
Text of Steve Jobs' Commencement Address (Stanford, 2005)
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Outdoor & Mobile are 2 Siblings that Should Work Well Together, Right? Here's Brand Republic's Analysis.
Outdoor and mobile: a match made in heaven
Whisper it quietly, but 2012 could actually be the year of the mobile for media. Five years ago, and perhaps even earlier, high-profile figures in the industry were proclaiming the year of the mobile.
However, it would seem that the out-of-home (OOH) media sector can wait no longer and next year really is going to be the time of mobile, as it begins to provide a number of profitable solutions for agencies and clients.
As the industry is aware, the key to unlocking the potential of mobile is the growth of the smartphone, and a recent report from Ofcom suggested this penetration is taking place at a rapid pace. The report revealed that more than a quarter of all adults (27%) in the UK now own a smartphone, while 28% use their mobiles to access the internet.
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These statistics are backed up by agency Kinetic, whose own research reveals that 50% of consumers would download promotions from posters to their mobile phones, while 75% expect to carry a smartphone or tablet when they leave their homes.
Coupled with the increasingly hectic lifestyles of today’s consumers, this suddenly makes the prospect of accessing content on the move and out of the home an attractive proposition for brands.
Earlier this year, WPP chairman Sir Martin Sorrell said at the Mobile World Congress exhibition that location-based was the holy grail of marketing, and it can be argued that the OOH sector is the original location-based advertising medium.
Rob Atkinson, Clear Channel chief operating officer, says: "Out of home is complemented by mobile technology, which interacts with our digital and traditional formats while people are out and about."
"We have to remember that mobile and outdoor is a marriage made in heaven."
Mike Hemmings, CBS Outdoor's head of marketing, agrees: "Advertisers can add that extra layer of content that provides the consumer with something there and then on the move, whether it is a discount or just a branded game to bide the time while waiting on a train platform."
Taking this further, Atkinson says: "Outdoor media is arguably the only form of advertising that actually entertains the youth market, rather than interrupting their entertainment."
With regards to achieving this, there is a general consensus throughout the outdoor sector that the content can be delivered to the consumer best via four main pieces of technology.
"Technology will not only revalue OOH, but will forge a far closer relationship with other media, mobile marketing and internet-based campaigns, which will open up new revenue streams," adds Atkinson.
The first, which was launched to a huge fanfare just over two years ago, are QR codes. Although they are big in Japan, QR codes – which are read via a mobile camera and allow the consumer to do something like click through to a particular website, or receive a product discount – have not quite taken off to the levels predicted in the UK.
This could be explained by the fact that QR codes lack that immediate aesthetic level of creativity and perhaps give off an unexciting aura, while most smartphones don’t come with the technology to read QR as standard, and consumers are left to download the right software.
However, one piece of technology that is really exciting the outdoor sector is Near Field Communication (NFC). It works in much the same way as an Oyster card, allowing consumers with an NFC-enabled smartphone to make instant purchases, or to download video content.
Mike Baker, Outdoor Media Centre CEO, says: "The NFC technology is certainly the way forward, as it offers so much flexibility. Up until now, outdoor has only just scraped what is possible with mobile, through limited content like games and ringtones. This new technology will allow genuine interactivity and see media owners build more and more of this type of kit into their offerings, which I believe will not be that expensive and instead, create a powerful marriage between mobile and outdoor."
Recent examples of outdoor using NFC was seen with the launch of the latest 'X-Men' movie. Consumers were able to scan the promotional poster for the film in bus stops and receive preview trailers of the movie.
Other innovations include augmented reality, otherwise known as visual recognition, which allows users to point their phone cameras at a poster and, in return, information is decoded and downloaded to the handset.
David McEvoy, JCDecaux marketing director, reveals: "This technology allows clients to bring posters to life, whether it is playing a movie over the top of it, or running an interactive competition. It essentially allows consumers to connect on the go."
Agreeing with this, Hemmings adds: "This functionality can also be enhanced with the phone's inbuilt GPRS, which allows even more location-specific content of layers to be displayed on the users' handsets."
Making these options even more attractive for clients and media agencies to employ is the increase in the level of Wi-Fi that is available out of the home. Sky’s recent purchase of Cloud will enable consumers to download not only more content, but at a pace akin to their own home broadband.
Aligned to this is the fact that the cost for clients and agencies looking to take advantage of outdoor and mobile does not necessarily have to be high.
Hemmings says: "Investment can be minimal. A simple QR code directing users to a Facebook promotional page can be produced and included on artwork for free."
However, this is markedly different when compared to the cost of augmented reality, which can be anything from £2,000 and seriously impact on media budgets. But on the flipside, the penetration of smartphones with nearly 60% of the UK population owning one, means the outdoor market is becoming a more valuable advertising hub.
McAvoy says: "Outdoor and mobile is still an emerging market, but the tipping point is about to happen and this will result in a lot of trial and testing to see what works best for the consumer in this market.
"The balance between in-home and out of home should shift over the medium term and certain environments such as railway stations and malls will play an important role in this."
Crucially what outdoor and mobile means for brands is that one of the oldest mediums is driving one of the newest.
Hemmings adds: "Enabling the consumer to interact with a poster using mobile technology means that you are opening up a world of possibilities to your brand, encouraging a dialogue between brand and consumer."
What this means is that the mobile and outdoor is being seen as a way to migrate consumers from that initial poster engagement and tracking its ability to drive them to purchase goods, watch videos, or visit specific websites.
According to Atkinson: "The next level for outdoor will be to turn this interaction into a transaction and, as mobiles become payment devices, the ability to buy off a poster in a bus shelter or shopping mall is going to be transformative."
The key for the outdoor industry is not just that it embraces this technology to provide creative commercial solutions for clients, but that it also has the stimulus and owns all the keys to ensuring it produces the right results.
However, possibly the biggest challenge is getting the consumers to understand how the technology works and what benefits it will provide.
Nigel Clarkson, sales and marketing director at Primesight, says: "Looking at the big picture for outdoor and mobile, the technology will only kick off if it provides something cheaper or easier for the consumer.
"At the moment, we don’t have clients crying out for billboards with augmented reality. They are a great PR stunt and people like them, but at the moment, they are being used for one thing."
However, Clarkson admits that by its very definition, outdoor is the perfect medium for mobile.
This is backed up by some research carried out by Primesight and Hitwise, which proves that online searches on mobile significantly increase when outdoor campaigns are on.
Clarkson adds: "Once we learn the benefits for the clients and the prices come down, we will start to see more of the technology used. For instance, I don’t think any clients can afford to run an augmented reality campaign nationally at the present moment."
Ultimately, the technology is there and the outdoor industry is poised ready to take full advantage of mobile, which will provide clients with a variety of exciting solutions to interact with their consumers. But until that tipping point is fully realised, the cart will continue to lead the horse.
This article was first published on mediaweek.co.uk
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An FB invasion w various tribes trying to ward it off? Infographic: Asia-Pacific Social Media Statistics | Digital Buzz Blog
Internet usage is sky-rocketing throughout the Asia-Pacific region, obviously making the growth of social media the fastest in the world, as you’ll see, it’s not all about Facebook, but it still leads the way across the region, at least for now. This is a nice collective Infographic from Burson-Marsteller.
The social media statistics cover the most popular social networks in Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam at a top level, but also lists a few basic internet statistics per country, like the total number of people connected to the internet and the top 5 visited websites…
Make sure you save this post for later, I’m sure you’ll need to reference these stats at some stage in the future! (Thanks Alex/Carly)
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Sunday, July 24, 2011
Sharp insights on McLuhan@100. From The Guardian: Thanks, Marshall, I think we've finally got the message...
'A prophet is not without honour", says the Bible, "save in his own country." This was manifestly not true in the case of Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian cultural critic, who was born 100 years ago last Thursday, and was famous not only in his own country, but also abroad. In fact, he's the only public intellectual I can think of who played himself in a Woody Allen movie.
Film buffs will recall the wonderful sequence in Annie Hall, where Woody and Diane Keaton are queuing for a movie when a guy behind them starts opining pompously about McLuhan's description of television as a "high intensity or hot medium". Allen expresses to camera a desire to have a large sock full of horse manure close to hand, whereupon the guy asserts his right to express his opinion on the grounds that he teaches a course at Columbia on "TV, media and culture", a fact that – he asserts – gives his views on McLuhan a great deal of validity.
"That's funny," replies Woody, "because I happen to have Mr McLuhan right here." He goes over to a flipchart and pulls out the great man himself from behind it. "I heard what you were saying," says McLuhan to the Columbia man. "You know nothing of my work... how you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing." The scene closes with Woody saying to camera: "Boy, if life were only like this."
As it happens, there have been many times in the past few years when it would have been useful to have had McLuhan to hand because, in a strange way, his insights into media seem more relevant now than they were in the 1960s when he sprang into prominence. His big idea, encapsulated in the baffling aphorism: "The medium is the message", was that the important thing about media is not the information they carry but what they are doing to us in terms of shaping our behaviour, the way we think and possibly also the way our brains are structured. McLuhan believed that this had been demonstrated by media that had dominated human society up to the 1960s – starting with print and culminating with broadcast television – and added the twist that TV was restoring the "sensory balance" that had been disrupted by print.
I never really understood McLuhan's views about television, preferring the perspective of one of his disciples, Neil Postman, who argued that the essential thing about the medium was that it had an infantilising effect, a view neatly encapsulated in the title of his wonderful book about the medium, Amusing Ourselves to Death. But McLuhan's insight into the significance of dominant media, expressed in another aphorism – "We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us" – always seemed profound and came to seem more and more so as television gave way to the internet and the networked world that we now inhabit.
The past few years, for example, have seen a series of angry and sometimes anguished debates about what a comprehensively networked ecosystem is doing to our children, our politics, our economies and even our brains. We wonder whether social networking might be fuelling political revolution, for example. And we ask if Google is making us stupid – or at any rate whether networked technology is reducing attention spans, devaluing memory and blurring the line between making online connections and forming real relationships. Over all of these contemporary debates looms the shadow of McLuhan, who now seems more insightful than ever.
He retains, however, the capacity to polarise opinion that he always had. Mention his name in polite academic conversation and you invariably see scholarly noses wrinkle in distaste. In part, this is because – although he was an impeccable scholar schooled in a Cambridge English faculty that included FR Leavis, IA Richards and Arthur Quiller-Couch – in his writings on media he affected an aloof, oracular, aphoristic style which enraged conventional academics. He always started his lectures with a joke and invited his students to ponder questions such as the semiotics of an advertisement for aspirin that featured a helmeted, jackbooted, scantily clad drum majorette. This is not the way to win friends and gain influence in academia.
McLuhan's big idea was to spot that the word "medium" has distinctly different meanings. The conventional one is that a medium is a channel for communicating information – which is why much discussion about media up to his time focused on the content that was being conveyed by print, radio and television. But there is another, equally significant, interpretation. To a biologist, a medium is an environment containing the nutrients in which tissue cultures – organisms – grow. Change the medium and you change the organisms. Our communications media likewise constitute the environment which sustains, nurtures – or constrains – our culture. And if the medium changes, then so does the culture. The medium is far more than the message, in other words. In fact, it's all we've got.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Sunday, July 17, 2011
5 Years, 3 Conferences & Hours of Talk Later, My Takeaway: To Promote DOOH, Pitch Projects & Ideas - NOT the Medium.
A few days ago, I stood as the emcee atthe 2nd Philippine Forum on Digital Out-Of-Home (DOOH) Media.
It was a fascinating Friday forum. We saw a lot of amazing executions from around the world and some from the Philippines that seemed to have opened the eyes of most participants. Excellent presentations, Lloyd Tronco, Manolo Almagro, Bob Michaels, Ricky Baizas, Christian Besler, Brian Siy, Carol Sarthou and Myrel De Castro.
Zooming out, the refrain was coming to me loud and clear, if we plan to take this medium forward - as individual businesses and as an industry - we must stop thinking that it is already a veritable medium that is understood and appreciated the way TV, radio and print are; instead, we must allow it to earn its merits a step at a time.
For now, we must pitch projects, campaigns and ideas - NOT the medium itself. We just can't afford to. Not yet, at least.
It seems that thinking of DOOH as a medium pre-supposes a few things: 1) that we know what we are selling; 2) that media-buyers and advertisers know what they are buying; and 3) that there is an agreed-upon currency or valuation system that allows both parties to perceive that they are coming to a fair transaction.
Based on my experience, I'd say these three pre-suppositions are not present at this time - on an industry-wide scale that it.
Which leads us to the recommendation to pitch projects / campaigns. Why? Because they have objectives of their own, and a timefame for achieving them. Projects / Campaigns do not necessarily rely on having industry measures such as Opportunity-To-See (OTS).
Instead, they have defined project / campaign objectives, which at the end of the run, may be judged to either have been met or not.
It was very interesting that several resources recommend that DOOH be tied-in to its more accountable cousins - Web and mobile. These siblings will certainly be able to produce clicks and hits that can make the numeric case for DOOH. Of course, the metric can be as plain as say... a 30% increase in surrenderees from para-military insurgents, as one of the case studies / examples below will show.
DOOH at this stage seems so enamored with technology, that we need to pull back and ask what all these new-found capabilities and facilities are for.
At the end of the day, we may do well to take a cue from the learnings of mobile. It's no longer so much about the phone these days, but the apps.
Let's pitch an idea, then round up the DOOH tools to execute it. Advertising is about the audience - the advertiser or media buyer listening to our pitch. Let's ask them what they need, come up with a plan, then harness DOOH tech to achieve that.
"A carpenter isn't buying a drill, he's buying a hole."
Some of the amazing projects / campaigns that blew our minds:
http://gizmodo.com/5302856/anti+abuse-bus-stop-ad-only-batters-women-when-nob...
http://www.facebook.com/nidofortified.ph
10 Must See Projection Mappings Video Showcase. From Squidoo.com.
Projection Mapping seems to be a hit these days, as it is able to turn an OOH execution into a public spectacle. Here's a showcase of some of the work done in this area.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Great move. Agencies should think sales, not just ads. From AdAge: Yum CEO Challenges Agencies to Help Boost Business
David Novak, the chairman-CEO of Yum Brands, is on a mission to lift sales at the restaurant company -- the parent of KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut -- and is challenging his ad agencies to do their part.
According to multiple people familiar with the matter, Mr. Novak has circulated a memo to the company's lead creative agencies, calling for a "brainstorming session" that will involve its three main ad partners: WPP's Ogilvy & Mather and Interpublic Group of Cos. siblings DraftFCB and the Martin Agency.
-->David Novak
People familiar with the memo said Mr. Novak expressed discontent with the company's U.S. business results compared with its international growth, and asked for agencies to assess the causes and come up with solutions. Solutions may include anything from untapped consumer trends to operations suggestions to innovations in the fast-food category. Mr. Novak is also understood to have inquired about what could be done on Yum's part to help improve the creative work.
DraftFCB works on Taco Bell and KFC; Martin handles Pizza Hut; and Ogilvy & Mather handles pieces of Yum's international business. Just this week Ogilvy won the Taco Bell account in India without a review. (Taco Bell in India had been handled by WPP's JWT.) Ogilvy also works on KFC in India.
Despite Mr. Novak's missive, the company insisted to Ad Age that its agencies are safe and that no review process is in the offing for any of the brands. "We are having a strategy session with our agencies together to discuss our business opportunities," said a company spokesman. "All will be in the same room together and we are not having a creative or agency review."
It is, of course, daunting for agencies to be seeing one another's presentations to Yum executives. People familiar with the matter said Mr. Novak has in the past called on agencies to offer ideas on the business side of things, but the idea that they can view one another's presentations of those ideas is new.
Yum's U.S. unit is not growing at the rate the company's international business is. The company's U.S. division in 2010 had same-store sales growth of 1% -- driven by growth of 8% at Pizza Hut and 2% at Taco Bell, and offset by a dip of 4% at KFC. And while 2010 international same-store sales were flat, same-store sales in China grew 6%.
But first-quarter U.S. same-store sales declined 1%, with an increase of 1% at KFC, flat sales at Taco Bell and a decline of 3% at Pizza Hut. International same-stores sales grew 2% in the first quarter, with China growing 13%.
In Yum's first-quarter earnings release it noted: "Taco Bell began the year with strong sales momentum and grew same-store sales 4% in the first period of the quarter. However, due to false claims made about our food quality that resulted in negative publicity, we saw a significant reversal in sales trends."
Although a lawsuit leveled against Taco Bell for allegedly serving fake beef was withdrawn, franchisees have been vocal about their dissatisfaction with their agency. An April memo from the Taco Bell Franchise Management Advisory Council (Franmac) detailed 14 grievances the franchise council had with the business operation of Taco Bell, including the desire to reassess DraftFCB's work on the account.
At the time of the Franmac memo, Taco Bell CMO David Ovens told Ad Age: "We are very pleased with our longstanding agency partnership and have no plans to make any changes, as we're completely focused on building the business."
Martin's Pizza Hut account appears to be relatively stable as well, given that the marketer recently consolidated digital and social-media marketing, along with the standing creative account, at the Interpublic shop.
Yum in January announced it was selling A&W and Long John Silver's in an effort to focus on aggressively growing overseas as well as growing sales in the U.S. on the three remaining brands.
The company will release its second-quarter earnings at market close today.
Saturday, July 09, 2011
If they can't work WITH you, work ON them. From AdAge: Showtime, OMD Build Foursquare Marketing Promo
Here's how brands can finally breakthrough the bottleneck that is Foursquare's new business department: Build an ad program on the platform itself.
For Showtime, Omnicom's OMD built a check-in program without the help of the hot startup by plugging into its data hose, the Foursquare API.
To promote the July 15 premiere of reality series "The Franchise: A Season With the San Francisco Giants," OMD Ignition Factory group partnered with Major League Baseball to create a billboard display that dispenses baseballs, some signed by Giants, when people check in on Foursquare at the MLB Fan Cave storefront in Manhattan. For those who automatically share their Foursquare posts to either Twitter or Facebook or both -- which accounts for roughly a quarter of people on Foursquare, according to OMD's Trevor Guthrie -- a show ad and tune-in message is automatically sent to those social-media accounts.
While OMD tapped a Foursquare tutorial, the project was built largely independent of the startup, using its publicly available API.
"There have been some independent experiments, working off our API, to do things like this," said Foursquare Director of Business Development Jonathan Crowley. "But for a media company and MLB to create this kind of experience, I've never seen anything like this before. It's an amazing display.
He cited examples of big brands using Foursquare to drive incentives and deals, but programming an action through the Foursquare API is new, aside from a couple of local and international campaigns: Earlier this year, a German dog food company tasked consumers to walk their dogs and check in at billboard ads that were programmed to release treats. Another more local example, he noted, is a recent party in Brooklyn with a door that guests had to unlock by checking in on Foursquare.
"Enabling us to do this with a billboard in New York is actually enabling us to reach out to other people outside of New York with the franchise message," said George DeBolt, senior VP-media, promotions and partnership marketing at Showtime. "When I had to sell it to the CMO -- he doesn't like us to spend a lot of money on small tactics -- I said it may seem like a small tactic but it has a viral element that's really big."
The undisclosed cost was also likely a selling point. MLB, which is as invested in the new show as Showtime, owned the billboard space so placement was free, and use of the Foursquare API was free. The only real cost existed in production of the digital billboard, via the help of vendor Monster Media.
Why aren't more brands using the API in this way and why did it take so long for the first ones to get on board?
Mr. Crowley explained that the concept of location-based platforms is still new for most big brands and it's taken time for Foursquare to make the API more accessible and user-friendly. "Like all new technologies, it takes large brands some time to get comfortable understanding the value of these platforms and how to leverage the user base. Now, there's a ton more exciting stuff they can do with our location data. As Foursquare has become more mainstream, they're excited to start experimenting with our API."
Monday, July 04, 2011
Beyond the billboard: The future of out-of-home advertisements - Holy Kaw. (Thanks @leahbesajimenez)
The traditional billboard is getting a face lift. The advertising game has had to adapt to modern technology in other portals, and now out-of-home advertising isn’t far behind. Digital billboards are just the beginning; be prepared for multisensory and personalized ads whenever you leave the house. We explore what you can expect in the infographic below.
(Click on the infographic below to learn more.)
Via Column Five for BuySellAds
Like infographics? So do we.
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