MIT may be inventing future technology, but it’s up to us to decide how we use it

Once again I’m indebted to the print edition of Wired UK for news of a couple of things which will be a real boon to people in the world of marketing.
The November issue (sorry, no link as its content isn’t online to avoid cannibalizing sales of the print edition) is entirely devoted to the work of the MIT Media Lab, which the cover headline rather grandly describes as “inventing the future”. Hyperbole aside, it’s come up with some cool stuff over the years — from e-ink (think Kindle) and Lego Mindstorms to the XO Laptop.
Among the latest things its team of world-leading researchers have developed are two pieces of technology of particular interest to marketers.
The first, Video Response codes, are basically like the QR codes we’ve seen in print for a number of years, but are instead embedded invisibly in video displayed on screens.
The idea is that you use your smartphone to take a photo of the screen and the software grabs the VR code, decodes it and links you to text, images, coupons, whatever, to be downloaded to your phone. Presumably, as the codes are imperceptible to anyone watching the screen, the video will have to have some kind of ‘snap this for cool stuff’ message included so you know there’s a VR code there to be captured.
Straight off the top of my head I can imagine this being used to create interactive cinema and TV adverts (QR codes have already been tried on TV, but there’s been a mixed reaction to them from consumers for various reasons). Or embedded in YouTube videos to link to other Web-based content.
As with so many technologies, their use is limited only by your imagination.
The second technology is Affdex. Originally developed in the Media Lab, it’s been spun off into its own company, Affectiva.
Put simply, the software tells you what the emotional state is of the person your camera is looking at by measuring key parameters on their face.
The original algorithm was built on autism research to help sufferers read the emotions of other people, It was first used to create “Mindreader” spectacles which told the wearer, via a tiny LCD screen, whether the person in front of them was happy, sad or whatever.
Rosalind Picard and her team took it further by training it recognize the emotions of more people from around the world by showing it videos. The goal — so a computer could recognize their emotional states.
It’s now so successful that marketing research giant Millward Brown has partnered with Affectiva to use it to get accurate real-time feedback from consumers and research subjects on TV adverts. The result is more accurate data where subjects may feel socially constrained from saying how they feel — not everyone’s comfortable telling someone their ad sucks.
But, as with almost any technology, the other possible uses are huge. Imagine having it for when you Skype a key journalist about whether they’re going to use a story you’ve pitched (think lie detector!) or are following up a business pitch with a potential customer (are they really as interested as they say?)
Unsurprisingly, pollsters are already excited about Affdex’s potential for more accurately judging voters’ reactions to candidates’ TV ads and debates. And the US National Security Agency has already expressed interest in using it for obvious reasons, although Affectiva aren’t keen to licence it for military use.
As much as we may legitimately want to know what others really feel in certain work circumstances, we also sometimes want to keep our own emotions private.
The article quotes other possible uses including allowing Facebook or YouTube to read your emotion (via your laptop webcam) as you watch a video (e.g. of a friend’s baby) and post your reaction online automatically. But what if you’re secretly jealous of your friend’s joyful event but don’t want to upset her? What if you don’t really think your friend’s new outfit is lovely?
Do you really want Facebook and YouTube, or your government if you live in a repressive country, to know how you truly feel about certain articles or videos online?
Clearly this technology has great potential for ethical uses, but given its claimed ability to get behind social barriers in the communication of feelings it has to be used within a strict set of opt-in guidelines and licenced carefully.
MIT may be inventing technologies of the future, but it’s up to us to decide how they’re used.

We can all learn from how guerilla marketing was used to disarm real guerillas

This month’s print edition of Wired UK has a great piece in the Ideas Bank section about how marketer Jose Miguel Sokoloff and his team at Lowe-SSP3 in Colombia helped the struggle against the FARC guerilla movement there by using clever marketing techniques.
Careful research involving demobbed guerillas revealed that while hiding in the jungles many felt as much a prisoner of the revolutionary movement as their hostages. Most followed football passionately, so TV and radio advertising during games was used to target them with messages from former guerillas about how they too had become disenchanted with the movement and how comrades had suffered badly in their personal lives while fighting for FARC. Most were told personally but had limited success.
Then, as Christmas neared, they found inspiration from the story of a foot soldier who missed his mother so much at Christmas that he deserted to be with her. So they installed Christmas trees near where they knew FARC moved soldiers and supplies and got locals to make gifts and messages for the homesick soldiers, which they floated down the river to where they knew they were.
The result was a bigger wave of desertions.
Listening, understanding and connecting with their covert emotions engaged with them powerfully.
We all need to do that with our target customers.

What’s killing the High Street and how to revive it.

I read with interest Rob Brown’s piece for the Huffington Post about how the social features of mobile phones have helped kill of the British High Street. Earlier the same week retail sales figures had shown how shops had been hit by the Olympics — with shoppers choosing to stay at home to watch the Games instead of going out to buy stuff. Even online sales had taken a hit.
While mobile and events may be the latest things to hit the High Street, they’re far from the only or decisive factors, though they do remind us of one which has emerged over the last 40 years — non-food shopping is increasingly competing with other activities in the attention economy: fighting for our time as we have so many other alternatives.
Other factors which contributed to the decline of the High Street include:

• The rise in working mums since the 1960s — reducing the daily, part-social shopping Rob refers to.
• Sunday trading, mainly by another factor — supermarkets, which have increased their non-food offerings massively partly through using their massive marketing power, partly gained from loyalty card data.
• The emergence of out-of-town retail parks and shopping centres.
• E-commerce and m-commerce.
• The disappearance of the RRP and NET book agreement, which opened up price competition.
• Rising town centre parking restrictions and costs.
• The ‘Clone Town’ factor created by High Streets dominated by chains.
• Complacency.

So how can the High Street fight back?
Using the power of social is part of the answer — like the music industry fight against piracy, the High Street needs to create sustainable competitive advantage by creating things that can’t be copied or pirated and which you can enjoy with your friends.
Music’s answer was to change its business model to making music sales the taster or loss leader for unpirateable live tours, for which fans will pay way more than for a CD.
The High Street’s answer will partly be about live exclusive events with an X-factor, like the launch of a new product with one-night-only discounts and incentives to bring friends.
Another fightback factor has to be customer service. As much as websites can get you stuff quickly and cheapest, there’s room for the High Street to outcompete on personal service. It’s one of the things John Lewis and Apple have used to keep their High Street stores.
That’s part of a final fightback factor — proper CRM. We all know the power of the shop owner who not only remembers you, but remembers your previous purchases and taste. And is prepared to go the extra mile when necessary.
Things like that will be core to reviving the High Street.

What’s the biggest office waste of time? This survey.

It started with the headline every Gen Y or Net Generation office worker wanted to read – “Why your employer shouldn’t ban Facebook”.
That really set the tone. Basically ‘Why your boss is an out-of-touch old meanie who doesn’t understand how important it is to be in touch with your friends 24/7, even in the time they’re paying you for.’
So what was the good news? Well, an internet company had done a survey of 300 office workers to find out what they felt wasted their time most. And the good news was that it wasn’t social media. Hallelujah!
The real culprit, it turned out, was water cooler chats with colleagues. And meetings.
Then the next bit of good news — social media actually increase your productivity by give you some downtime at work. Wow! Amazeballs! Get this to the fuddy duddy old boss now!
It would be pretty amazing if it were true. But it most likely isn’t.
How do I know this? Because a cursory look at the methodology of this “survey” shows that it’s the biggest waste of time. Why?

1.     This is all self-reported data — no independent observation or data from qualified survey workers. So it’s all opinion and very little, if any, fact.

2.     That water cooler time that the kids clearly hate so much has been shown by multiple rigorous surveys over decades to be a useful way for ideas to cross-fertilise between co-workers and departments in organisations. So much so that some companies have designed their office spaces to encourage such meetings in order to promote innovation. It’s also a useful social lubricant, helping build teams, which in turn enhances productivity.

The biggest lesson here? As all good journalists have been told for a number of years, treat all survey results with scepticism and hold back on reporting their findings until you’ve checked out the methodology and the interpretation of the data.
P.S. Am I arguing for a Facebook ban? No - some break time on Facebook should be allowed, but allowing it subsume the normal, human face-to-face relationships in offices is unhealthy for the workplace and the people in it.

The typeface is part of the message, so choose wisely

I was interested to read Suzanne Labarre’s Fast Company piece about filmmaker Errol Morris’s covert experiment with nytimes.com readers into the subconscious effect on believability that the use of certain typefaces made to a statement.
Essentially, different readers saw the same words but in different typefaces. The result was that Baskerville (a serif font not dissimilar to the classic Times) convinced readers more than four others, three of which were sans serif. Not by much, but it worked.
Labarre pronounces herself surprised, but to anyone used to working with fonts, as I did for more than 13 years as a newspaper sub-editor, it’s no surprise at all — some fonts have more authority than others.
Serif fonts, through their use by authoritative organisations and media in countries using Western script are associated with those bodies and the formality, reliability and authority of their messages. So their mood is formal, official, starchy.
Conversely, fonts like Helvetica, Arial and Trebuchet (without the formal serifs) look more relaxed, informal and approachable. So they’ve predominantly been used for less formal communications and stories.
Over time then, by association, we have come to associate each face with a degree of formality.
So how can you use this in your marcomms?
Simple – abandon the notion of having a standard font your company uses in all marcomms like press releases and choose one for each client which matches the level of formality in their brand essence, factoring in the need for a greater or lesser degree of believability based on its existing level of credibility with its target audience or the media through which the message/s will be communicated.
So for a bank you’ll want the solidity of a serif font, but for a fun, challenger, lifestyle brand like a theme park, a more relaxed sans serif font should be right, unless the message is formal, as with crisis comms.
But not Comic Sans. Except perhaps in a fun heading relating to children, or something childlike. No release will ever be readable, let alone taken seriously, in that font.