Category: Advertising

The realtime stream

“I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now”

Whether we are referring to your Facebook updates, the endless list of Twitter messages or your updating news from aggregators, Erick Schonfeld on Techcrunch histrionically talks up the “stream”. So, what do we mean by this stream? It is the constant ever-shifting flow of what is happening right ‘now’. There is no hope in ever consuming it all, but it is there to immerse yourself in and feel a part of. Or, as Damien Hirst once said when he was still interesting: “I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now”.

Like many hyped ideas related to the web, streams of realtime information are not wholly new. For example, RSS feeds — arguably the backbone of the realtime web — have been in development since the dawn of the mainstream internet in 1995, but realtime is a metaphor that helps us look at ideas anew, and reminds us that the web is much more than just a set of ‘pages’. Indeed, due to changes in the way the web has been built over the last few years, with AJAX to update pages, and services bringing the web to the desktop and mobile, the concept of the ‘web page’ has become less important. The idea of streams of realtime information makes the page even less relevant.

This shift to a focus away from pages and to streams of content throw up a wide range of challenges for both designers, content creators and businesses — challenges that few web practitioners feel they have worked out yet. Some of the questions we have been discussing at FoxLand include…

• How will advertising work in the realtime stream?
• How will advertisers be able to measure their impact?
• Will the mob rule?
• When there is so much noise, how will good content be found?
• What will be the design conventions for realtime?
• How do companies harness and learn from the stream?
• How will anyone make money? And is that important?
• And most pertinently, how will people not get drowned in all this raw information?
• Oh, and how do you actually spell realtime/real-time/real time?

It will be fascinating over the next few years to see how these issues resolve themselves.

Notes:
1. Photograph of Damien Hirst’s book by ~.~ mypictography.
2. For more thoughts and ideas about realtime, we’re involved with our friends over at The Realtime Project.
3. Due to some personal situations, some of the links and initial inspiration for this piece are now getting on a bit.

by Andrew Fox

30 July, 2009

For the love of brand

The story is now a little bit old, but it is still worth going back to. In early January PepsiCo introduced the new brand identity for Tropicana. It was a huge revamp of a much-loved brand, and while it was bold to make such a move it felt also a little cold and passionless. It had some interesting little details, such as the cute ‘half-an-orange’ caps and the evolutionary use of men in a grocery brand, but to say it fell flat is a huge understatement: sales fell an astonishing 20%. Even with weak rebranding efforts sales tend to increase, if at least temporarily, so this is a truly awful result. Undoubtedly this will have cost PepsiCo tens of millions of dollars.

But it was not just the drop in sales that forced their hand: it was also the reaction out on the internet that made them recognise there was a problem. People genuinely loved the old Tropicana branding, with its straw in the orange and big green friendly typography — it was something they had grown up with, were comfortable with and easily recognised. While it had evolved over the years, it had never been through such a radical change.

Thanks to the internet regular people have gained an enormous amount of power when it comes to shaping the brands they love (or hate). Whether it be via forums, Facebook, Twitter, blogs or plain old email, people can connect with brands in a direct way that they never had before, as well as exert pressure by creating similarly-minded groups. This can be threatening for the brands, but also extremely useful if it is embraced: it’s like free user testing or focus groups. In response companies can tweak their service, campaign or product. Nevertheless, brands need to be confident in what they are doing. Understanding how to listen to customers is an art, and it does not help to lurch around trying to placate everybody, while pleasing no one or failing to move a larger strategy forwards. Sometimes you need to move on despite your existing audience.

The New York Times covered the story, and it is a worthwhile lesson in not only the risks of rebranding, but also the whole branding process as it can sometimes be practiced.

Also worth a read is Newsweek’s interview with Peter Arnell, the man behind the rebrand, as well as DKNY, the new controversial Pepsi identity and many others.

by Andrew Fox

29 July, 2009