Gigantic™

10 Web Trends for 2010 and our new venture: BrandFlux

Mashable's Pete Cashmore recently published a weekly column for CNN showcasing ten trends he thinks will be big in 2010. Here are highlights from three trends that we are particularly excited about:

Real-Time

Sparked by Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed, the real-time trend has been to the latter part of 2009 what "Web 2.0" was to 2007. The term represents the growing demand for immediacy in our interactions. Immediacy is compelling, engaging, highly addictive ... it's a sense of living in the now.

Content Curation

The Web's biggest challenge of recent years is that content creation is outpacing our ability to consume it: "Information overload" has become an increasingly common complaint.

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing was very much a buzzword of 2009, but there's no doubt this transition will continue. The trend, in which data and applications cease to reside on our desktops and instead exist on servers elsewhere ("the cloud"), makes our data accessible from anywhere and enables collaboration with distributed teams.

So why are we so excited about these three? They all align with our latest spin-off: BrandFlux. Part real-time brand monitor, part content curator and collaboration platform, it is a cloud-based solution that gives brands the ability to monitor and understand the internal and external conversation that shapes it. Needless to say, we can't wait for 2010.

Just be yourself.

Last week I was having a conversation with a colleague about how the business of advertising looked so much clearer and direct as it is portrayed on “Mad Men”. We both agreed that dramatic license played a big part in the illusion. Who wants to watch Don work all weekend coming up with snappy jingles for a client? Doesn’t sound like great TV. And certainly, the business is amazingly more complex than it was back then. 

But I also pointed out that back then, brands were smaller and more nimble. Also, in most meetings, agencies were often dealing directly with the only decision makers necessary to get an approach approved— in many cases, directly with the founder or owner of the company. In short, brands were more connected to their roots. They were truer to themselves.

Which reminded me of the best advice ever offered to me in the business: “Just be yourself” —given to me right before a big pitch I was participating in. I recently shared this advice to a nervous friend who had an upcoming interview at CP+B. I told him, that if he tried to be anything different, he’d set a precedent that he couldn’t live up (or down) to. (I'd like think it helped, he’s freelancing there now.)

To me this is a big part of what’s missing today from the business of marketing. We’ve lost ourselves in the shadows of aspiration. Teams on client and agency rosters have ballooned to paralyzing levels. And brands continue to stray from what makes them great in search of quick revenue fixes, while agencies face deep crises of identity as they try to reinvent themselves for whatever is next.

Case in point: Starbucks Via. In my mind, it’s 180 degrees in the wrong direction from the core brand promise: a coffee house that’s a gathering place and social hub for a community. I worked on the global Nescafe account and appreciate what a big deal instant coffee is on an international scale. But I just don’t see Via coming close to having an impact on picking up share in that market.

Sure in the US, instant coffee was once part of the consumer mindset and it may still be in some social/demographic sets, but for a company that put the words “Grande skinny vanilla latte” into the vernacular, a foray into instant seems, well, insincere. What’s next? Starbucks frozen dinners?

I'm not saying brands and agencies shouldn't change and evolve. But to do so without regard or understanding for came before seems desperate and fleeting. You may agree or vehemently disagree, but either way, I hope in doing so, that you’ll just be yourself.

—Bernard Urban

ASMP: Copyright Awareness Campaign

We just launched a campaign for ASMPNY to raise awareness about copyright and photographer's rights.

Watch the video here:

And be sure to visit the site.

Branded Content: Sheraton

We've been busy over the last year flying around the country shooting hotels and doing interviews with staff, guests and business partners for Sheraton Hotels. Here's a compilation of some the places we've been.

Context. It means more.

Webster defines context as: “the parts of a discourse that surround a word or passage and can throw light on its meaning.”

We like to think of context in relation to the parable of the blind men and the elephant. They all encountered different parts of the beast, but had dramatically different experiences. They were all correct in their assessment, yet somehow all wrong at the same time. And truth could only be divined when their collective experiences were aggregated and then contextualized.

You might be wondering about what this means to brands marketing themselves in today’s fragmented landscape? Here at Gigantic, we use context as a touchstone that is part of how we connect brands to users in meaningful ways.

Here are few questions to consider:

• Is your brand creating marketing utility that helps users understand how your product fits into their life at the time when the user needs that utility the most?
  
• Is your brand accessible and participating in the conversations taking place around your brand?
  
• Is your brand monitoring the real-time conversations taking place around it and using that information to refine current strategy and positioning?

 Photo: Adam Foster | Codefor via Flickr

The Social Media Revolution Is Here.

2009 will most likely go down in history as the year that social media went mainstream. Time will tell exactly how this is all going to play out—most likely less time than you think—but one thing is abundantly clear: it's time for brands to have a working strategy for social media.

Lost in the social media supermarket.

We see a lot of brands rapidly embracing social media. And that’s a great and powerful thing. However, we also see a lack of strategy in planning their approach. Making for some interesting brand presence and confusing mixed messages.

Ultimately, being there is not enough. A brand’s presence needs to be managed around the expectation of the users it comes in contact with and we think in many cases, those expectations follow some traditional marketing definitions.

Awareness—Social media is a great way to build awareness for a new online initiative, increase traffic and build on the effectiveness of existing assets. Do your legacy websites point to your Twitter account and Facebook page? Does your Facebook page push users to other online experiences?

Acquisition—Special offers can be tailored to each medium making for real ROI. It takes a smart approach and a realistic definition of goals. Both Dell and United Airlines are having success in this arena. Crafting an offer and an authentic reason to exist are paramount here.

Loyalty—Education, Utility, Empowerment are all players here. Simply tweeting about your brand’s Rewards Program is not enough. This is an opportunity to build relationships in a true one to one conversation. The first step is listening.

Customer Service—An obvious place to play in social media, it also can be loaded with the most risk. Brands must be prepared to beyond listening and become engaged, truly care and have an arsenal of tools available to assist in correcting issues. Simply bringing a call center script to Twitter is not going to work.

In considering which of these roles, your brand is taking on, you should carefully consider how your brands, online persona is constructed and managed. Is the brand voice of awareness the same one for customer service? For the sake of your users, we hope not.

Social Media and Luxury Hotels. The Conversation Matters.

A recent article on Hotels Now reports that almost 80 percent of luxury hotel travelers have read a user generated online review and one in three has posted one. This leads to obvious questions for luxury hotel brands about the need to embrace, monitor and participate in social media.

Also of note, "Luxury travelers are demanding less pampering, more entertainment. Intercultural pursuits and opportunities for personal growth, such as shopping at village green markets, practicing foreign language skills and receiving a local gift at turn-down, now surpass the desire to be pampered."

Seems the definition of luxury is changing to reflect the desire to make connections and share experiences, which aligns nicely with the idea of using social media for luxury hotel brands.

BrandFlux: The Innovation Conversation

I have gotten a lot of feedback and have had some amazing conversations about the post a few weeks ago introducing BrandFlux as a model for sustainable innovation in advertising. BrandFlux is a proprietary way of identifying high-value market intelligence in real-time. Below are a few questions that have come up in the conversations and some brief answers to help add insight to the conversation. By the way, we are officially spinning off this into a new company.

Is this a CMO dashboard?

Yes. But it’s more than that. It’s a way to encourage collaboration and conversation across an ad agency (or a network) with the clients that it is aligned with and to identify a stream of high-value ideas that will allow a CMO to manage a brand in real-time.

Who “owns” it?

Our model is subscription based, following a bespoke build of the software, with components residing client side, agency side and other resources made available from our new company as deemed necessary from both sides.

Is this really something that ad agencies should be thinking about?

We have seen the execution of ideas become commoditized. And now it seems that ideas themselves are being commoditized—while the demand for faster more affordable advertising is increasing at an exponential rate. What is valuable and will become more valuable in the future is the ability quickly to create intellectual property out of fast moving information. This is the perfect way for an agency to own that intellectual property and become perpetually relevant.

Thanks to everyone who has become interested in this, looking forward to the continued conversation.  —Bernard Urban, President + Creative Director, Gigantic

Where does innovation come from?

I have been working on an agency business model based on real-time brand intelligence since 2004 — way back when these things were still called webblogs. Beginning in early 2005, I conducted countless interviews with software companies, algorithm authors and wiki publishers to build a model and validate the concept.

Today, with the onslaught of the age of social media and the real-time conversations taking place on Twitter, the proof of concept is in the early stages of occurring organically. It is clear to me that the future role of the modern “advertising” agency is to act as an arbiter of innovation in real-time.

Begin with the simple idea of a trend identified through aggregated information. Build contextual value through a real-time conversation of peers. Edit that conversation using proven thinkers who are the keepers of the brand. Innovate in real-time through an always on model that creates bespoke solutions to highly-qualified needs.

This is a model for a sustainable relationship that, over time, creates a stronger bond and becomes more valuable and does away with the notion of agencies as expendable executors of a commodity.

Below is BrandFlux, an outline on how to create the infrastructure to deploy this model between an agency and a brand.

—Bernard Urban, President + Creative Director, Gigantic

BrandFlux - Real-Time Market Intelligence

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Business & Economics Research marketing advertising