Tag: Advertising

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General Thinking

What would our grand children consider classics?

It is safe to say that; content is in a state of 911.

I find very few sources where I can get content, where a great deal of though and analysis has been put in. Interestingly, I find many more sources where I can get cat videos and snarky two liners. Truth be told, not too many people are reading thoughtfully written stuff.

Why?

Quantity is opposed to Quality

The advent of digital mediums has meant that it is possible for everyone to create content. If you wanted to write a piece like the one I am writing and distribute it in 1900, you needed a newspaper editor to feel that your article was going to be interesting to the readers. With blogs, today pretty much anyone is able to put out their thought for public consumption. But the problem is much worse that anyone being able to write a blog.

This is statistics that the IBM Watson team put out; In 1900 the content available to mankind was doubling roughly every 100 years. By 2020 it will double every 11 hours. This is insane. The amount of content that would be at our disposal is being estimated at 44 Zetabytes. All of us have limited time available to us and the amount of content at our disposal is fast accelerating.

The consequence of limited time at our disposal is limited attention span. We want content that can be consumed quickly and without extending too much effort. Reading a well thought out piece forces us to think and understand; this is not primed for fast consumption.

How many of us have read the Iliad or Plato? How many of us have seen the latest trending video?

When you think of content that can be consumed without much effort, video ends up on top of the charts. Youtube is making money hand over fist, not by accident. Over the next 20 years, ‘text’ is going to move to the lowest rungs as far as content format go. Video is already moving up and this trend will gather pace in the coming years with formats such as Vine finding more and more traction.

Read the responses to this one… People know.

 

Advertising – A Boon or a Bane?

The other thing that is simultaneously destroying content is the fact that most of the income for content comes out of advertising. This implies – firstly, you need to make sure people arrive at the content (click-bait headline); secondly, you need to make the content super easy to consume (so they keep coming back and/or spend the next century clicking though the rest of the stuff). The more time they spend on the site, higher are the odds that they will click on an ad, at least by mistake. Most of what qualifies for this in entertainment and not analysis.

Given a choice between an 8000 word essay on a subject which would take 20 minutes to consumer; and a sequence of 15 videos of guys getting hit in their nuts; which would garner me more clicks and therefore more advertising revenue? The choice for the content creators is clear.

Advertising as a business model has done everything to destroy the quality of content. Thanks Google. Thanks Facebook.

 

Thanks to all this Music has gone to dogs

Songs have been a means though which emotions and stories were communicated. What makes a song beautiful is the poetry and the metaphors, which make several interpretations possible. It automatically implies that you must give it time to grow on you, for the interpretations to set in and for the songs to get internalised.

With the lack of time and attention, musicians are forced to produce music that is catchy and will hook you up soon. This also means that most songs do not have a soul. Most songs use a particular word repeatedly to get you to like the song.

Count the number of time the word ‘Hello’ is used by Adele in her song ‘Hello’.

Taylor Swift is popular not because a lot of college girls sit around listening to her, although that may be true. She is popular because she makes an attempt to tell a story. At the end of the day a song will stay with you if it connects with your soul. The issue with most of the songs written today is that they have no shelf-life, they are meant to grab attention.

Often I go back and listen to some of the songs I had been listening to a couple of years back because of their popularity and I am genuinely ashamed that I had considered them good. If you do not understand what I am talking about, check this link.

The low shelf life means nobody wants to own any music. Hence Streaming.

Take a great song from 20 years ago, you can still enjoy it. Not the same with a song which is 3 years old.

 

Everything is about Entertainment

The proliferation of content and the ad economy has resulted in what can be best described as the attention economy. In fact this article beautifully lays out, how scarcity has evolved from food, to land, to labor, to information, and now to attention.

Consequentially, the only thing anybody is vying for is attention. News reporting is going down the drain. The world has a lot of real problems to deal with, inequality, poverty, terrorism, climate change, etc. but all the news is about things that will be entertaining.

Why?

Ads.

The news has been a part of the entertainment industry for a fairly long time now. Look at what praying at the alter of entertainment has brought us – Donald Trump might be nominated to fight for presidency.

 

If this trend were to persist, and I have no reason to believe it would not, 100 years from now the classics that our great grand children will be reading would be some shit Kim Kardashian wrote (Or worse shot in her bedroom)!

Categories
General Thinking

Trolling – Who Benefits?

Flipkart Vs Snapdeal

There is a lot of discussion currently about the BigBillionDay campaign which Flipkart had run. Flipkart decided to make a splash about certain sale/discount/offers being available on their website on the day in order to generate shopper interest and therefore sales. Given the numbers that the company has ben publishing, we can only conclude that the campaign was a glorious success. They seem to have pulled of a $100 Million worth of sales in 10 hours, which translates to Rs. 1 Crores worth of goods sold each minute. I am not sure what you think, but I think its a big deal!

On the day of this sale, Snapdeal and Amazon were quick to jump on Flipkart’s heels to effectively try and piss on their parade. Both companies by the looks of it seem to have effectively trolled Flipkart, but who got the mileage at the end of the day?

We live in a world where marketing is about eye-balls. It does not matter how those eye-balls arrive. Look at Buzzfeed; crap journalism, but who cares?

Trolling is all about poking fun at your competitors weakness and exaggerating it. Its more like an ambush; wherever you seem to go, you come up against the same jokes. The trolls forget the basic human instinct. When somebody is getting beaten everyone likes to stand around and watch.

Have you ever been in a situation where some team is giving another a drubbing; even if you have no particular interest in the sport, you just tune in to see how the drubbing is taking place? (I have watched a lot of 8-0 football matches and almost none which ended 0-0) How many of you watched or talked about the Germany Vs Brazil match in the World Cup while not having watched all of the WC matches? Same psychology at play.

When you start trolling and poking fun, people want to see the action first hand.

We live in a digital world where every business has a web presence; 50 years ago trolling might have been useful since it was hard to check the veracity. In the digital world we live in today, any such story results in a hit to the website of the company being trolled.

It gives the trolled an additional opportunity to convert the skeptic into a follower. In the world where eye-balls are all that matter, any publicity is good publicity. Trolls are also part of the publicity.

The problem is not when people talk bad of you, but when people stop talking about you.

I, for certain believe that Snapdeal put in considerable resources to make sure that the Flipkart #BigBillionDay was a raging success.

Even Internationally in a similar vein, Samsung keeps trolling Apple all the time. Things have come to a point where I feel Samsung cannot make an ad without mentioned Apple. In fact, when the bendgate broke out; Samsung, LG and others could not hold themselves back from trolling Apple, the moment the whiff of the story came out. iPhone 6 Plus seems to be selling like gangbusters. (4 Weeks+ wait list)

iPhone6

Apple cannot seem to produce enough iDevices to meet the demand; Samsung published their expectation for last quarter yesterday; 60% down on profits does not look very pretty.

So we arrives at the question, who is helped by all of the trolling. I think if we are to go by numbers, the end results are clear.

May the Trolls rest in peace.

Categories
General Thinking

Advertising and Cultural Context

Apple released an ad called Misunderstood, to make their final push for this holiday season.

I was just reading up Apple blogs as I normally do and found references to the fact that the ad was really touching. I was left confused because I did not find the advertisement touching. For those who know me, I defend Apple even when they are wrong, so when I say this, you can be certain it did not impress upon me in the manner in which the bloggers seemed to think. 

Google had posted a very India specific ad a few months back, which played on the partition of India and friends who lost touch with one another. While I really do not think you would find things the way Google seems to project, the advertisement struck a chord with me. It may not amount to anything if I showed it to someone who was, say from USA. But to someone who belongs to the Indian sub-continent, it would create an instant connect. 

I realised, how important context is to the effectiveness of an ad. In the absence of it, even a masterpiece would seem dull; and in the presence of it, the communication can become extremely effective. Understanding the context of the viewer is tremendously important before setting out to put together any communication.