“Space-Time Based Services” (I said it first)

So I’m thinking about mobile today, since I’m doing a speech on the subject tomorrow and next week. Just wanted to datestamp the coining of STBS (Space-Time Based Services), an evolution of the somewhat worn out LBS (Location Based Services) meme. Just seems that adding Time (since mobile provides almost ubiquitous access to users thruout the day/week/year) make sense, since so much of what we do depend on that dimension, almost more than the spatial one. And combined, they make an extremely powerful team for advertisers, inventory creators (publishers, bloggers whatever) and above all, users.

So, there I said it first. Keeping my fingers crossed for a Wikipedia entry real soon.

iGoogle artist themes for Google and Our Song for Telia Music Store

So we’ve launched a couple of long time projects for two of our clients which I’m pretty proud of. Last week we released the nordic contribution of Artist Theme for iGoogle, which has gotten pretty sweet coverage in the blogosphere. I’m currently using fashion designer Ivana Helsinki’s interesting theme, though I really like the fashion brand Dagmar’s idea about documenting the process of creating their collection.

Also, we released the Facebook App, “Our Song” for Telia music store, which allows you to send a song to a friend and then creates a slideshow using the song as background music with pretty cheezy transitions based on the pictures in which you are both on. We’re currently adding more songs - soon there will over 4 million songs to choose from. Still a bit rough around the edges, and we’ll make it a bit more spam friendly so we can hit a viral coefficient of +1 But it’s pretty sweet eh?

Me 2.0

So I’m sitting in South Park, the self-proclaimed “lunch room of the web”, eating my oversized, plutonium density burrito. I like San Francisco. People are nice here and talk about interesting stuff, and everyone seems to be working on some neat project with extreme goals.

It’s impossible not to get impressed, affected, inspired, humble etc etc. Best part of Web 2.0 so far has probably been Max Levchin, the well-deserved poster boy for the social app sphere. Slide has impressive numbers, and very interesting opportunities for revenue, that I hadn’t really thought about before. Max seemed scary clever, surprisingly funny and all-in-all nice guy. Tim Oreilly was also solid in his “Are we done yet?” presentation, but couldn’t mask the fact that we probably are until the financial crisis (or “coming nuclear winter”, in the words of Marc Andreesen).

Most refreshing/interesting app I’ve come in contact with is Thermo, from Adobe, and Fireeagle, from Yahoo Brickhouse (which office I visited yesterday). I was a member earlier, but (I hate to say it) hadn’t really “got it” earlier. It’s awesome. But I doubt that they’ll be the platform they’re hoping for. My guess is that you must embed that kind of service into the actual operating system, or at least the browser (or what ever means you access the information). Wouldn’t be surprised if Android includes something like it right in the box.

By accident I had lunch with Odie Fernandez, of Rails way-fame. Didn’t really talk much tech stuff, but after meeting him I’m glad to have supported his side track-career as a writer

I’m surprised of the number of me-too-apps, that all seem to scream out that “our platform creates liquidity in the social network/display advertising/enterprise mashup/etc space like AdWords did for search”. Not very convincing. I never like people sticking to close to a metaphor from previous successful player from their own industry when claiming to push the industry envelope.

Off to watch the Launch pad. I wonder what kind of aggregating social networking spin they’ll give me?

Another speech, Reactive by Burt and Web 2.0 Expo

So this week I did a somewhat modded version of my “tour-speech” (heh) for one of our regular clients, focusing more on how the “be really, really good or don’t bother”-paradigm of online publishing applies to paid advertising.

To some extent, paid advertising is less exposed to logic I outline for content creators (google, digg, techmeme etc. helps us find the best stuff, the rest gets ignored) since we as advertisers can pay people to get their attention. However, the fact that online audiences aren’t “captive” in the same sense as TV- and print-audiences forces us to deliver higher quality (more relevant, intelligent, funny etc.) messages and “earn” their respect/attention.

This is right along the lines with what we’re doing with our Reactive by Burt-project, that aims to give advertising creatives the tools to leverage dimensions not accessible in other media. We’re still running in low-profile mode but have managed to run campaigns for SAS, Google and Telia despite the fact we’re doing it part time. I’ve submitted an application to deliver a presentation on the New York Web 2.0 Expo.

Speaking of which… I finally got around to booking my tickets to the SFO Web 2.0 Expo next week. Leaving on monday, attending both workshops and the presentation tracks. Should be awesome. Look me up if you’re there!

The difference between Oslo and Helsinki…

…is that when your order a ham/cheese-sandwich+coffee for breakfast in Helsinki, you get a loaf of bread, thick layer of melted cheese and more steak than ham and rocket-fuel-coffee, whereas in Oslo you get parma and mozzarella. And a perfect Moccha Wierd as it may sound, I kind of like the finnish macho thing.

I’m now in Copenhagen to deliver my final presentation, which is sad because I finally feel that it’s getting pretty tight. I’m going to polish it some more and deliver another in Gothenburg next week, and I’ll put up those slides on Slideshare or whatever. Some pretty good stuff in there, although visuals are pretty Paul Arden-esk, so I’m interested in what reactions I’ll get.

Good night!

Breakfast in finnish

I’m in Helsinki, Oslo and Copehagen this week to lecture on why being average on online doesn’t matter anymore and the importance of doing really awesome stuff.

I haven’t been blogging for a while new due to severe CTS (for real) but I’m getting around. Jogging, stretching and massage is the way to go. And I got an excuse to buy and Aeron chair after ten years of yearning.

About the creative brief mentioned below: skip it. Make the debrief a creative document instead setting out a direction for the project. No need to überrationalize and miss a perfectly good chance to calibrate your ideas early on with the client.

Now, off to Copenhagen. Dejligt.

Wanted: new architecture for writing creative briefs

So I’ve been experimenting with a couple of different models for writing creative briefs lately. Last time someone did something good in the area, was when Jon Steel released his to-be-bible of Account Planning in the mid-late nineties.

However, the conditions for creating advertising (even the definition of advertising) have shifted drastically in the last ten years. We now have one billion more options in terms of media, technology and consumer habits to take into account. Consumers are blocking out ads like never before, and with the rise WOM-hyping, virals and social networks, agencies even consider them to be a plausible channel for distributing a message. Also, clients have started doing their own planning, make changes later in projects and are demanding accountability. There’s also the issue of cross-agency collaboration, since media fragmentization and finite consumer attention, has boosted the relevance of niche agencies, that use their target audience and/or media specific knowledge increase cut thru and impact.

Planning has always been pretty unglamorous, but now it seems like the major bottleneck for creating effective advertising so maybe it’s time to get our act together Sadly, it seems like Jon’s elegant and simple template to writing creative briefs simply doesn’t hold up anymore. Unless the planner is beyond awesome, that is. And the client has to provide the resources and business insights to leverage the planner’s awesomeness. But the bulk planners and clients are, by definition, average.

One could argue that the creative brief is a possible competitive advantage for agencies, but I think hogging a format would be counter-productive since creative briefs will need to be distributed and adapted across agencies and clients. Also, the learning curve for new clients and creatives, account directors, project managers etc. should be quick and easy. And, as I’ve learned, it needs to be enforced on a agency-wide scale… and for that to happen it needs to be compatible with the current Porter-Levitt-Steel-Mintzberg-Ries-Aaker-influenced-model. Meaning the use of abstractions no-one really agrees on, like “positioning”, “strategy”, “target audience” (mostly because most people haven’t bothered to actually read Positioning, Marketing Imagination, Building Strong Brands, Truth lies and advertising, Rise and fall of strategic planning etc.).

Basically, we need to establish some rough default structure that everyone get the hang on to increase the average quality of what creatives have to act on when trying to win the next grand-prix in Cannes. As for me, I’ll be posting a suggestion here in the next week or so.

Any suggestions?

Online advertising: now what?

So 2007 was the year that Internet made it to the big league as an ad medium. In Sweden, it’s suppposedly the second largest paid ad media, after print.

But what happens now when Internet needs to pull it’s own weight? No TV or radio to help us drive awareness of our fabulous campaigns. Or at least less of both, and less print as well.

Banners? Widgets? Gadgets? Facebook apps? OpenSocial apps? Text ads? Advertorials? My guess is that 2008 is the year we find out.

Why context is killing me

If you’re a GTD-disciple, you usually have a task description, project, due date and context. The first three are rather self-explanatory, but context deserves a little explanation. Context is the physical pre-conditions needed for you to complete a certain task. The original purpose for this was to enable to “put away” stuff you couldn’t complete right now (due to lack of contextual ability). The “putting away” is the fundamental principle of GTD, a context is it’s “big idea”.

Main problem with using context is that most people end up just a couple of contexts such as “computer”, “word”, “excel”, “email” and “phone”. Interesting thing about this is that all but the phone a “virtual contexts” (inside the computer)… and come to think of it, counting Skype or other VOIP-clients, so is the phone So many tasks have converged into being digital tasks, even shopping and going to the library have become redundant contexts in some cases. And with the laptop-computer you can really do all these things anywhere. When context was linked to physical spacetime, organizing by context made sense and was pretty easy… but with so many contexts converging digitally it’s not only affluent, it’s also confusing.

There is however, another benefit to using contexts (or tags in Things) in your support structure: it sharpens the focus of your “batches”. Batches are chunks of similar tasks which are done in sequence, based on the scientifically supported notion that executing many similar tasks at the same time is more efficient.

Working with batches allows you to stay focused. But you can do just fine without using context: “Project” and “Due date” is more than enough for creating batches.

For example: ideally, you have tasks broken down to fewer than twenty minutes. Filling 75 percent of you 8-day, that means you have about 20 tasks to complete in one day, plus another 5 for home. First of all, most people simply don’t have the discipline to actually break down their tasks to this level, which sort of leaves the whole context methodology a bit redundant. AND if you’re one of those able to break tasks down this good, you certainly have the mind to leave the batch adjustments to common sense. Also, creating focused batches assumes you won’t get disturbed when executing, which is a bit utopic in my view.

So here’s what you should do: start organizing by the “getting the right things done”. Start by making a list of stuff, project and when they should be done, “this week”, “next week” or “someday”. Right after dinner, make a list of the three things that your must get done tomorrow, adding their subtasks if necessary. Lable this list as “today”; no more than 10 tasks in total, preferably 5-6. The trick is to convert as many tasks as possible into actionable items, making you feel the “tick off” pleasure all the time. It’s addictive

First thing you wake up, start getting these things done, using projects as support structure and let context emerge naturally from a combination of device access, location and project. Focus on getting these things done, and fix emergency tasks if it’s really necessary. When you’re done, look at your watch. Can you go home? If yes, go home. If no, you move another task from the “this week” list to “today”. Look at your watch. Time to go home? Etc. Before leaving work, organize your tasks, shifting new things to be done to the “today” list.

Rinse, repeat.

Interesting Things

So this new task-management software, Things (great name!) , has started to create some stir. Looking at the screencast on their website it’s easy to see why, since it actually brings some novel concepts to the “productivity scene”.

Like my Todude-project, they have chosen due-date as their main structure for organizing tasks, rather than OmniFocus and GTD, which uses context as their main structure. However, Cultured Code (the authors of Things) couldn’t resist including the context structure, which they have in the shape of a pseudo-tag system. Sorting by tags is said to be of a more emergent nature than using context in a GTD-way, although it seems to me that you usually end up with writing more characters for your various tags than for the task itself…

A bit clunky interface, they haven’t really solved the depth yet… my guess is that the software is a bit more feature packed than when they started off scetching their UI But it’s alpha, so I bet they’ll iron these things out. Another interesting part is the “area” feature. An area is something which doesn’t have a definitive end, it’s a “perpetual project” so to speak. I’m not sure that it deserves to be separated from regular projects, but an interesting distinction none the less.

Back to finishing work, so I can continue code Todude tonight!