Responsive Design, Responsive Content

There’s a real robust conversation happening in the UX and web designer space around design for the plethora of devices and platforms that a modern website needs to support.

You’ve probably heard of Mobile First. Defined by Luke Wroblewski in 2009, Mobile First is a call to action to design first for the mobile experience, and then the web. Mobile is (still) exploding and provides new capabilities like location and motion to leverage to deliver richer experiences. It also drives you to focus on what’s essential for the user, and be more ruthless in paring down unnecessary, unusable, or un-useful features and content you may have on your site “because you can”. It’s a framework to help you focus more strongly on user utility.

Responsive Design is a way to respond to the challenge of designing and developing sites for the growing set of form factors. It’s been brewing for a while in the design and development community, but hit a critical mass with Ethan Marcotte’s recent book on the topic, and Boston Globe’s recent redesign using responsive design techniques. There’s still robust discussion and disagreement in the community, but from the work my agency and others have done, it’s proven to be a great set of techniques to help make digital properties work well across devices, and maximize our clients’ return on code.

More recently, Responsive Content thinking has started to look at how to tailor what goes into those responsive designs so that the views make sense, all the content still hangs together, and your site’s information architecture is still useful and usable across the form factors.

From an IT perspective, this is all heady stuff – first do less, then do more with less overall effort – but probably a little too heady, a little too cutting edge for it to have fully been absorbed by corporate staff. And I’m betting a little too cutting edge for the big IT outsourcing vendors, who are more invested in scalable commodity skills. It’s also easy for IT staff to be a bit cynical – if it sounds like unicorns, it probably is, and we know where the horn goes. Agencies are probably a bit more up on it, focused as they are on what’s happening next.

To me, there are two interesting points behind all of these ideas. First, is to point towards simplifying your web presence, and really focusing on the essential, customer-valued features and content. By doing so, you end up with less to manage, more value for money, and more focus for your agency on making awesome fun and useful features for your customers.

The second is that these techniques also position you for future flexibility. Mobile first generally gives you more clarity and a smaller codebase. Responsive design and responsive content makes supporting new devices using your existing codebase less costly. All three together lower the cost of useful change, both in development and your energy.

But how responsive to change is the rest of your marketing technology?

How Responsive is Your Platform?

Now – no front-end magic will eliminate the cost of large changes to your underlying marketing technology platform.  A new campaign strategy, a new digital product, a new CRM platform – these take unavoidable chunks of cash, time and energy that no buzzword has yet successfully eliminated. But what you can do is make the cost of these functional or system changes lower, by consciously optimizing for them. That’s an agile or nimble architecture.

An agile marketing architecture – one that embraces change, or at the very least, accommodates change – is the backbone for making all this work at scale and with a cost efficiency that makes your IT reasonably happy (face it, we’re never completely happy). Quite often, however, IT is still focused on cost containment, rather than agility, because agility is tough to measure.

A lot has been written about measuring business agility, or architecture agility, and defining metrics to measure agility are an ongoing saga. Your IT group may have something big wrapped around their IT governance processes already.

Nick Malik of MS has a simple one based on speed, Forrester has one more aligned to IT Enterprise Architecture practices and even academia is involved. However, as Forrester notes, it has not been widely moved from a talking point to a business capability. The key, naturally, is agreeing on what “agility” means, and putting measures around it.  There’s no single formula for it, but the basic concept is pretty straightforward. I like looking at costs – from that viewpoint, you want to look at:

Agility = (how complex the change is) / (how much effort it took)

Put another way, simple stuff should be simple – updating content should be cheap. Complex stuff, however, should be achievable: adding a new device profile should be incremental, reusing some other product manager’s store finder should be simple.

I’m guessing more than a few of you are muttering “oh, I already know what that number is, and it’s a rather low number indeed”. IT is naturally adverse to change until the situation is intolerable and well-understood. It costs a lot of money, and forces us to do even more stuff, and at the end, a CMS is a CMS, right, and it seems to work for everyone else…

So, what to do, you with your big bulky “common platform” marketing system, random 3^rd party software platforms, and shrinking IT budget? You’re probably already doing a lot of this in your planning exercises with IT, but it’s time to raise the bar, and instead of seeing how little IT you can get away with, seeing how you can begin maximizing the capacity for change your investments are buying. The metrics are the hard part with the biggest impact, but you can start on the others independently.

-          Define Your Terms: First, work with your agency or IT staff to jointly define and build agility into their success metrics. Focus on your data about how much time and effort you’re putting into making change on your digital properties. There’ll be resistance, but there’s a natural alignment with continual process improvement efforts already underway – it’s more that you need to be in those conversations, and the conversation needs to be about more than “efficiency” or cost reduction, and more about building speed into your organization. Realize this is probably going to take some sharp elbows and push. But the more you shift thinking towards your definitions of speed and utility, the better your organization will start believing it’s valuable, and the more you’ll be on your IT roadmaps.

-          Pare Back, Have A Content Strategy: Start thinking from a “Mobile First, Web Second” stance, and check your analytics: what features or content with limited utility can you drop? Do you really need all that content? What’s the most useful things you can provide your customers? Are you really getting value from doing anything else? Do you know enough about your users to tell? What devices or form factors are on the rise, or you want to support, like in-store or TV?

A content strategy fuels a responsive web design. Make sure your design staff and your content providers are aligned around building for meaning on multiple form factors.

-          Plan For Change: First, work with your agency or IT staff to build agility into their success metrics. There’ll be resistance, but the more you shift thinking towards speed and utility, the better your organization will start believing, and the more you’ll be on your IT roadmaps. Think hard about your plans for this year – are you adding commerce? More videos? Beefing up your Google+ presence? Also think about the likely ways your plans change – new devices, new content partners, syndication. Finally, look around at what other brand managers are doing, and see if there’s anything you’d really wish you could steal from, um, “produce synergies with”. Work with your developers to identify and categorize all that change into buckets of impact to your marketing platform. See if other brand managers are in the same boat. Pool your funding.

-          Services, Isolation, Components: Get your developers – either your agency or IT – thinking in components, if they aren’t already. You can componentize at the presentation layer (call them widgets, if you must), at the services level, and at the content level. You should have a strategy at all three levels. If you don’t have a services layer, have a sit down with your IT staff, and break the news to them. More devices are coming, more change on the horizon.

-          Build Responsively: If your developers haven’t heard about responsive design and responsive content, ask yourself if they are the ones who are going to help maximize the utility of your campaigns and content. The more resilient and responsive to change you can make your codebase, the more change you can make.

Mobile First, Responsive Design, Responsive Content – current topics that are going to help you support more devices, use more context, and provide a better, more focused user experience to your customers. It’s time your marketing technology platform was as responsive to change as well.

Todd Drake is Vice President of Technology at Organic

How To Do TestFlight Enterprise Distribution of iOS Apps Created in FlashBuilder (mouthful, whew!)

Say you’ve got a FlashBuilder 4.6 Mobile Project (for iOS) and want to use your Apple Enterprise Development Account to distribute your application too 100+ users via TestFlight. Just follow the yellow brick road…

(1) Login to the iOS Provisioning Portal > Certificates > Distribution. Make one if you don’t have one, download if you do.

(2) Import the certificate on your development machine and generate the necessary .p12 file. If you are the solitary team leader on the Enterprise account, you can do this yourself. If you’re not, the team leader will have to perform some of the following:

Launch the Keychain Access app and select your usual Keychain. Drag the .cer or .p12 file into the table on the right to import the credentials. I’ve found dragging in to be more specific than double clicking on the .cer or .p12, which can put it in a keychain you’re not expecting.

If the team leader had provided you with the .p12 and password, you’re done with this step. If you’re the team leader, right click on the certificate you just  imported and select Export > File Format: Personal Information Exchange (.p12) > Save > Enter a password (generate a new one) > OK. Give the .p12 and password you used to your teammate.

(3) Back to the iOS Provisioning Portal > App IDs. Download the App ID if it exists, otherwise click New App ID > Description: Whatever App Name > Bundle Seed ID: Use Team ID > Bundle Identifier > com.yourcompany.appname (has to match the id node in your -app.xml) > Submit

(4) Still in the iOS Provisioning Portal > Provisioning > Distribution > Download the profile if it exists. Otherwise New Profile > Distribution Method: In House > Profile Name: Whatever App Enterprise Distribution > Distribution Certificate: check the one from step 2 > App ID: select the one from step 3 > Submit. Then go back and download it.

(5) Launch FlashBuilder > Select your project in the Package Explorer > Project > Export Release Build… > Target platforms: uncheck all but Apple iOS > Next > Digital Signature tab > Certificate: p12 from step 2 > Provisioning file: mobileProvision from step 4 > Pacakge Type: Final Release package for Apple App Store > Finish. This will take a minute or two.

(6) Browse to testflightapp.com, sign up if you haven’t already, hit Upload Build. Upload the IPA generated in step 5, add some Release notes and hit Next. You’ll be taken to the Confirm Tester’s page and from there you can share the manual notification link with your testing group. SUCCESS!

You’re bound to get an unexpected error message or two along the way. Read up on whatever you can, ask (http://stackoverflow.com/faq) if you still can’t figure it out, and don’t be afraid to delete your certificate and start all over.

Jordan Gray is a Rich Media Architect at Organic

Enabled by the multi-faceted capabilities of the tablet, mobile is poised to revolutionize the classroom in the near term. But with its new skill sets and hyper-personalization, it’s not just the classroom that will change, but teen expectations for marketing and our ability to deliver personalized and relevant experiences.

Tablets are rapidly becoming game-changers for mobile in the classroom. The large touch screen and flat design make it the ideal form factor for students to maintain eye contact with their teachers while still easily leveraging interaction with the device. Cost consciousness and social consciousness are also in alignment with the use of tablets because of the money that can be saved in the long run by reducing printing and textbook costs. Generating fewer printed materials is also beneficial to the environment.

As schools embrace tablets (usually the iPad or the Kindle for now) they open a whole new world for the devices to:

• Replace textbooks (which are often outdated before they are printed) with personalized set of books or excerpts tailored to class schedule

• Allow students to highlight passages and notes (often forbidden on shared or school property books)

• Aid with comprehension and research with built-in dictionaries and instantaneous Internet access

• Bolster reading skills and comprehension with text-to-speech capabilities that can read text aloud

• Study more efficiently for finals with custom test modules recommended based on individual student performance

The promise is of a completely custom experience, tailored to meet the particular student’s needs. And beyond just study aids, these digital devices support the process of learning by enabling direct correspondence with teachers, allowing students to digitally turn in papers and homework assignments, and permitting teachers to monitor and track student progress. Students can also preserve a record of their work in a digital portfolio rather than the box mom kept in the attic.

Pushing this concept even further is the crop of tablet-only courses. For example, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has an iPad-only Algebra course that includes video of the author solving equations, individualized assignments based on student performance and recommendations for practice problems. The approach allows a student to progress at his or her own pace, focus on the more difficult areas and digest concepts more quickly.

This customized experience is the edge of what we can expect more of in the future. Teens will expect marketing experiences to have this same level of flexibility.

While teen expectations may be higher, demands on them will be as well. In the information age, students will need a whole new set to be considered “literate.” Today’s kids and teens are confronted with more information than their parents were at the same age and will need the tools to efficiently process and use this information in order to be successful.

Tablets can be key teaching tools, helping students learn how to successfully cope and even thrive in the information age. According to The Reading Teacher by W. Sutherland-Smith, the survivors of the information era will master:

Screen literacy regarding graphics and symbols. Even younger students will have the ability to quickly determine which graphics are critical to the information or message and which are just decorative. For designers and marketers, this means increased thought will need to go into the use and value of graphics on conveying meaning within content.

Navigation literacy. Being able to navigate the Web to find key information within an environment is second nature already. What will be come critical is the ability to comprehend and weave a story out of information presented in a non-linear or non-sequential manner. Teens who master this skill will be even more critical of content or materials that do a sub-par job of delivering an easily accessible, streamlined message.

How to create content and build knowledge. The ability to create meaningful stories combining a variety of media formats combining text, sound, images and video has both positive and negative implications. It raises the bar on expectations for high quality multimedia content, but it also activates an audience that can do some of the content creation for marketers. In the past we thought of UGC as generally “junk,” or filler content, but increasing sophistication allows users to be viable and valuable sources of rich and desirable content that inspires advocates.

Search literacy. The ability to set clear purpose statements for search and then focus keywords or questions before searching. This includes breaking topics into manageable “chunks” for easier research.

Connections and context literacy. Connecting disparate pieces of information to derive meaning from not just text, but also context of content, is key to quickly filtering information to determine if it is relevant and should be digested more thoroughly or should be passed over.

Skepticism and critical evaluation. As many as 39% of kids today think all information on the Web is true. As information age literacy increases, teens will be better skilled at evaluating the credibility of sources and content. Raising the bar on these critical thinking skills will force marketers to apply more rigor to the crafting of marketing messages.

Personal information literacy. Teens often have wide filters for sharing personal information, but increasingly will set boundaries for themselves shaped around their own views of privacy, safety and decency related to their personal information. Marketers will need to adjust for new expectations to deliver value in exchange for precious personal information.

Ethical behavior in a new world. Teens will become more adept at translating “real world” ethics into understandable guidelines for digital behavior. Marketers will need to understand and adhere to this new set of norms, even though they may not wind up documented anywhere.

Our consumers of the future will have increased expectations for personalization and a critical eye to the form, function and format of the messages we place before them. We need to start honing our skills in creating marketing experiences that have an increased sophistication, that add value through personalization and leverage multiple forms, formats and functions to communicate.

Anna Banks is Executive Director of Strategy at Organic

This article was originally posted on Mediapost here.

Part 5 of 5 in Todd’s CES Tech Report coverage.

So, really, what did CES 2012 mean? Besides awful food, huge lines, and four days of extreme product overload and talks?

Game Changers. Maybe 2 or 3.

Out of the entire show, I thought there were perhaps three game-changers, for large values of game.  And one confused game that’s changing.

There were two consumer-targeted 3d printers. Their booths were always crowded, and you can see the incredulous wonder on everyone’s faces, wonder that was missing from even the geekiest gadgetry. Makerbot had the hacky hipster flair, and Cubism had the slick Braun-like design, but they both turn plastic wire into 3d objects based on plans you can download or develop yourself with Google Sketchup.

Cube/Cubify was a bit more commercial focused – they are pursuing license deals with, say, Pixar. Pay 5 bucks, download the control file for Lightnin’ McQueen, print one out. Makerbot was more into free plans from the community, but could easily add licensed content as well.

But imagine a 3d printer in your kids school. Imagine printing out parts for a stop-motion film your kids can make. Print out your own building bricks. Lost a chess piece – make a new one. Design a new tread for your Lego Mindstorm kit. The tech is in its infancy, but the possibilities are wide open, and kids can focus on learning design strategies and skills, rather than, say, whittlin’. Dream a shape – hold it in your hands.

Imagine a quality 3d printer in a Home Depot. How would that change inventory management on its head for a retailer?

And imagine a 3d printer in a village in India, with a channel full of plans curated by some NGO. Need a water pump? Print one out. Found an improvement to it? Upload new plans so everyone can update their water pump, whereever they are. And with microloans, you can be the family in the village with the printer to make gears and machines for people.

Digital distribution of physical objects. Game-changing. Still in it’s infancy, but rapidly improving.

The second was tucked up into a small booth in the Emerging Technology section. Modular Robotics, from Boulder CO has built small building blocks – kinda like BugLabs for computers – for robots called Cubelets. Each cube has a function, actuator or a sensor, and you don’t have to wire anything – just clip them together, they figure out what their job is, and off they go. Their point is that kids learn best through play and experimentation. To quote the site:

“You can build robots that drive around on a tabletop, respond to light, sound, and temperature, and have surprisingly lifelike behavior. But instead of programming that behavior, you snap the cubelets together and watch the behavior emerge like with a flock of birds or a swarm of bees.”

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but the amount of smart people on the team and board, the press (wired, Times, etc) – I think they will have a big impact on education. The simple plugging together of sensors, actuators and logic is a powerful concept for rapid prototyping. And having played with similar educational toolkits, this is dead simple and actually works [looking at you, Lego].

The third, to me, was the YouTube keynote. They are pushing, with not a lot of effort,  YouTube from a social video repository of crazy, goofy stuff to a real publishing and distribution platform for video content, open to everyone – a true content entrepreneurship infrastructure. It’s going to change the current advertising, marketing, and broadcast markets in unknown but dramatic ways. It’s pretty quietly audacious.

The Changing Game

It’s clear everyone with a hand in the consumer consumption of media is focused on convergence, whether through the end device or through owning the cloud. It’s where the next battle of media companies, creators, curators and distributors will be fought, and where advertising is going to be in a crazy state for a couple of years. Will the cable companies drag their heels? Will the studios and broadcasters fight back and keep relevant? Will the internet win (again)? Business models are in rapid and somewhat chaotic shift, and as < points out >, a $300B industry will not go quietly into that blissful night of all Internet, all the time.

The game is changing rapidly, but given the wide variety of approaches and proprietary clouds (all labeled “Smart” of course, and all with apps), there’s no real clear vision on how it’s all going to turn out. Stay nimble, people, experiment, and watch the data.

Take Aways

First, the media landscape is rapidly converging at the right place – at the user experience. Everything was connected, and the promotion of internet content to first-class citizens on cable boxes means a tremendous opportunity to grab attention and create your own channel. The nature of the ad serving, targeting and measurement infrastructure is merging broadcast and the internet. It’s going to be interesting. I mean, when everyone upgrades their TVs or the cable company updates your STB.

Secondly, the user experience of your product is critical. We all know that intellectually, but when you see 10 heartrate monitors (say) side by side, and only two are joyful to work with and look at, you really feel it. This played out all over the millions of products on the shelf.

Third, it’s the story, and the user experience. CES is now about Marketing as much as gadgetry. If you’re not clear on your “why”, or you can’t tell a human-driven story about why your products are great, you’ll lose to someone who can. No amount of specs or booth babe will beat a simple, inspirational, meaningful story well told.

And finally, all the devices are getting connected, are running apps and (mostly, probably) ads, and increasingly have gestural UIs. This has important implications on your overall user experience of your brand, across devices, across user contexts. Discrete, channels are outdated as a concept, and no longer fits the fluid, always-accessible Internet experience.

Instead of targeting the device context, it’s more important than ever to target the user context, and be prepared to render that on various devices. It’s quite likely your website is now your mobile site. Very soon, the “fixed” site will be the TV experience, and ultrabooks and tablets used on the go. How are they working together, and how are you tuning the experience to the user context? How are you using customer data and providing value at each point?

Personally Speaking

As I sat at the airport sucking down the free wifi (finally!) and dropping AT&T calls (WTF?), there was one other thought I wanted to put down before I can attempt to get on with my life.

It was geeky heaven (lots of stuff!) and hell (oi, too much stuff), but I came away vaguely depressed. 16 acres of products, and at best two or three things that really have the potential to change the human condition. Most things were incremental improvements or slightly different specs of other things [or, mostly, of Apple things]. There was literally an entire wing worth of iPhone case vendors.

I couldn’t help thinking what amazing things, big human problem things, could be solved with all that energy and creation. Instead we get a dancing robot MP3 player and an acre of iPad wall mounts.

Me, I’m just the tech guy. But the things that produced the most palpable delight and joy on the faces of attendees were deep products, with well-told stories that touched humanity.

What are you doing with your products? Are you just playing spec-games with your competitors? Are you chasing someone who keeps creating new markets? Is your marketing a great, human-centered story? And are you occasionally stepping back from the marketing and striving to make the product truly great?

Or are you making yet another dancing robot MP3 player?

Todd Drake is VP of Technology at Organic

Part 4 of 5 in Todd’s CES Tech Report coverage.

CES was overwhelming and exhausting. I kept finding new hallways packed with booths, or stumbling upon interesting vendors squirreled away in hotel rooms at Las Vegas Hilton.  It truly is too big, and they need to split it up, either by category or having two a year so product announcement schedules get a bit more relaxed rather than everyone trying to cram them in.

Outside the big themes I saw (described previously), there was a grab-bag of other things I noticed that are worth mentioning now.

Odds and Ends

Let’s get this over with. In the big conglomerate race, Samsung and LG were huge winners, based on breadth of vision and design chops, with LG edging out based on getting user experience.  Although points to Samsung for trying to make the stylus sexy again with the Galaxy Note.

Motorola’s message and vision were well articulated, and they had a lovely booth full of shiny objects. The problem was that their floor was thick carpet on a raised platform about 4 inches high. People were staring up into the shiny lights and shiny phones like moths, and many would end up tripping on the way in. As a result, everyone stumbled into Motorola’s future.

Sony…well…despite their past of closed products and formats, I have to say they looked good, their message was sharp and clear, all the products seemed to be aligned to the message, and their staff were not too geeky. Though their industrial design is still lousy. (rounded clamshell notepad? What happened there?)

Nikon went a bit old-school with strangely, futuristic(?) dressed women, standing  on a raised platform, posing with their cameras. They seemed to be having fun striking odd poses for people to take photos of them. Unfortunately for Nikon, most of those photos were taken with phones.

Intel had this clever Artificial Life kiosk, where your handprint would generate a weird sea creature that would go off and cavort with other handprint creatures. Fun, although their booth was ultra packed most of the time – nice location, by main doors. All techy floor staff, couldn’t talk about vision, just release dates and specs.

In fact, most of the camera vendors are in trouble – I can get an 18 megapixel camera on an HTC phone and upload photos to the cloud, but I can’t get a connected camera. In a world of rapid publication and sharing, you need to bring connection to market, or you are going to end up as niche, high-end products.

Kudos to Polaroid for reinventing their iconic SX-70 using digital sensors and printer tech. End result looked like old polaroids, white boundary and all but much higher resolution and color. Neat, but…not sure I really need the paper, thanks.

For the winner of a Best in Show award, the Nokia Lumia was surprisingly low-key. Some in the Microsoft booth, and Nokia’s was some small booth tucked into the South Hall, which as everyone knows is like the Bermuda Triangle, impossible to navigate or find anything. I don’t even remember seeing them.

Huawei: one to watch. The phones were all spec-y and everything, but wafer, wafer thin with nice screens. Tucked away in South Hall (aaiiieee!!!), look for them at MWC.

ESPNs 3D network rollout was an actual boxing match. It might be the sweet science, but it’s unpleasant to watch on the floor of an electronics show, and you gotta imagine the surrounding booths were not terribly pleased at the sweat spraying about.

Sony had a live stage with someone called Karmin playing in front of a huge logo. For the longest time, I thought Harmon Kardon had rebranded and grabbed the old RCA logo.

Finally, Alan Parsons is still cool, I don’t care what you think. Thank you, DTS, for putting him up there to talk about your product.

Next Time

Next time, I’m going to wrap up the whole of CES in one nutshell, point out the game-changers, and tell you why CES was, for me, oddly depressing.

Todd Drake is VP of Technology at Organic

Part 3 of 5 in Todd’s CES Tech Report coverage.

Even with the NAIS going on in Detroit, several global auto manufacturers were on hand at CES 2012 to show off, well, “connected” cars and “smart” infotainment.  I mean, if we’re busy stovetops as “connected” and “smart”, why not cars.

Ford, Kia, Mercedes and BMW were showing on the main floor – Chrysler in a trailer in front – and they were surrounded by all the usual suspects of automotive entertainment systems – JVC, Harmon Kardon, Sony, Audiovox, etc. And everywhere you looked, it was apps, apps, apps.

Systems

Mostly, the craziness was apps on the dashboard, and most (non aftermarket) systems provided in-car WiFi. Ford Sync has “brought-in” apps, which allow you to control your paired phone using voice controls through Sync.

Everyone generally assumes that you’ll get reasonable Internet access while zooming across America (Ford, for example, uses Sprint Mobile Broadband).

The platform itself ranges from Microsoft Auto [ie:, the venerable WinCE] to, inevitably, Android. There is definitely no app mobility, in that your Kia app ain’t gonna run on your Ford car, which is why each brand has it’s own, controlled app store.

Most control is moving to voice: inTELEMATICS Today has a little behind the scenes look at how the voice control works, and how all that navigation and routing data gets to your Ford Sync system. A generalized browser on the device is usually included – in Ford, you have to be in Park to use it, which kinda makes sense, and kinda doesn’t if you expect passengers to find movie times on the go.

The WiFi is WPA2 protected in car router. Most of the sets also include USB ports, audio ports, etc. Interestingly, you can use NFC or Bluetooth to identify yourself to your car, and load up your preferences.  You have to join the manufacturers development program, which is, for most, rather closed at the moment. Ford, for example, wants to keep tight control on what’s loaded and available on their system, so you’ll need to petition them with your app idea first.

So, what kind of apps are there?

Kinda What You’d Expect

The obvious play is the upcoming set of content  creators and curators. Pandora, Rdio, TuneIn all had apps that either come installed or must be downloaded, or where you can pair with your smartphone.  A generalized browser on the device is usually included – in Ford, you have to be in Park to use it, which kinda makes sense, and kinda doesn’t if you expect passengers to find movie times.

The marquee app that Ford was talking about was the NPR app, updated to work with AppLink. AppLink allows you to control your smartphone app from the voice control system, so you can call up “recent Studio 360”, and get it started playing through your entertainment system.

The other obvious play are navigational aids. Closest cheap gas, avoiding tolls, etc. Everything you kinda currently get with your other devices.

My favorite had to be the Facebook icon shown on the Kia in-dash device. Really? I’ll be updating my status while driving? Or my passenger just had to know what’s going on?

Does this Make Sense?

And this points to the whole issue. What apps actually make sense? And should they be on the dash or the second screen? Basically, if you’re going to enhance the experience of driving – music, directions, weather, and early auto telemetry warnings [“your tires are low”], then I’m sure it probably belongs on the dashboard.  If its shopping, or urgent Twitter updates, probably not.

Actually, this points to a nagging doubt of mine: are apps the right metaphor here? If something bad is happening to the weather, I want to know without running an app. Also, I’d personally like media to show up regardless of what service is bringing it. As it is, I have to start Pandora, flummox around for a while, decide I want something else, navigate out and into IHeartRadio, and flail around for a bit…

The navigation – even with voice – is extremely limited to certain vocal gestures, or suffers from a limited attention span due to the primary user context which is, you know, hurtling down busy roads at high speed.

Interesting Directions

Two companies showed demos that pointed in interesting directions. First, Ford Labs showed the evolution of their predictive car optimization demo.  The app used Google’s Prediction API to guess that, if you’re getting in the car at 5p, you’re probably going home. It would then plot the optimal course through traffic for you to arrive with optimal efficiency, and can optimize the powertrain before you take off. The idea of using car telemetry – individual and aggregate – and cloud calculation services opens up a whole world of possible car hacking.

Second, Ubivolex, an embedded systems manufacturer, had a very slick booth showing an LTE connected car with connectivity to a tablet. All very standard, but they also showed telemetry from the car – fuel consumption, torque, etc – being made available to an app on the tablet. Great for your F1 junkie. Also, it showed an interesting point about opening up the car data feeds for the enthusiast, or for early problem detection. Add a write API to that for real-time tweaking of the system, and…well, you could blow the tranny in new and interesting ways, but what fun!

Take Aways

Cars are becoming interesting platforms for media companies, and it’s worth exploring how to integrate your existing iOS app (you do have one, right?) with manufacturers systems. It’s not going to result in a huge uptick of subscribers, but with people spending an inordinate time in the car, you will be front and center.

Otherwise, for other brands – not so much. If you can’t enhance the driving experience, it’s probably not worth the expense.

Todd Drake is VP of Technology at Organic

Part 2 of 5 in Todd’s CES Tech Report coverage.

Often, keynotes are just not worth attending if you don’t actually work for the company doing the keynoting. In those cases, they are usually required viewing, and you usually get the best middle row seats anyway. Kinda like they know you have to be seen by the boss. Products might be announced, but you’ve already read about them in the blogs from the pre-show.

YouTube’s keynote was something different. Robert Kyncl set the stage with a brief engaging talk, and the discussion afterwards – including big Hollywood in the creator of CSI, heads of GroupM, CMO of T-mobile, and smaller channels that are being successful like Machinima – was lively, funny, pointed, and informative.

However, the assumptions behind the discussion must have made the blood of any cable or broadcast network attendee run a bit cold, as the sharp stick seemed to me to be casually – almost offhandedly – directed right at the heart of their business model. Especially after seeing all the cloud connected TVs and media servers, where everyone was falling all over themselves to pull all the juicy video from non-network sources, and where the talked about content was not coming from the cable headend.

Let A [Very Many] Thousand Channels Bloom

Cable companies sit on a limited inventory of always-on channels. YouTube, by contrast, has an unlimited inventory of on-demand channels. Combine that with ever cheaper, ever better means of production, and you have an explosion of content entrepreneurs who skip pitching the nets and go direct to consumer.

YouTube becomes the enabling infrastructure for a broad, open content ecosystem.

Kelcny told a story about Michelle Phan, who started a makeup channel on YouTube, got millions of views because it was engaging and good quality, and ended up with a contract with Lancome.

However, it’s not just pro-am circuit – there are a growing number of well-known celebs [Rainn Wilson’s “Soul Pancake” channel was featured, as was BlackBoxTV from the creator of CSI], and professional startup channels like Kick.TV, a channel devoted to the glorious game of footy.

Brands can take advantage of this shift in economics in several ways. First, most everyone is doing something on YouTube these days, but you should look for ways to produce valuable content that enhances your customers life, just like your product does. Second, it’s increasingly clear that posting ads – and better still, valuable content – on YouTube can attract deeper engagement and commentary than a TV ad. You’ll know quickly if it’s working – like an instant focus group. Leverage your social networks and your fans to drive viewership of your video content.

Finally, realize your video channel on YouTube is not a dead-end, and find ways to use the content or concepts elsewhere – in a mobile app, on your website, etc – to tie it to richer content than Google will allow there.

Given a growing digital viewership, easy discovery, and viral ability of hosted videos, it’s going to be easier to justify spending more budget on YouTube and spending less with broadcast.

But there’s another big advantage they talked about.

Highly Measured

Video ads and branded content are going to be highly measured, even within video segments, which is something the networks don’t quite have. In fact, you can post ideas on YouTube, observe how they are watched – Are they stopped early? Do people watch to the end? How many comments? – and make adjustments on your way to the Super Bowl.

Second, you can target your ad buys to a degree that the cable companies – despite vast improvements in targeting infrastructure – can’t. And, of course, your ads can be interactive.

And you get data from Google

Most importantly, Google is going to start selling and delivering most of those ads, and will own most of that data – not the networks.

Actually, no one mentioned the economics of those ads – the split of the cost across Google and the content creator. As many content entrepreneurs are not generally, say, NBC, I’m guessing Google wins here. Your deal may naturally differ.

This fragmentation poses problems, of course, for brands. Data is going to be increasingly spread across YouTube, cable companies, and measurement vendors. Tying it all together into a meaningful picture of your brand will get increasingly difficult.

A Few Minor Difficulties

There was precious little talk about who’s going to provide this magic bandwidth. Between Netflix and YouTube, we’re already chewing a huge amount of the internet up with video. Massively scaling is less a problem of storage than migration to IPv6, better compression, and, well, lots of money. Ericsson’s earlier keynote mentioned that they’d be working on the problem, but there was precious little solutions offered.

Say, how’s Hulu doing these days? Google TV? You mean, it’s not quite “content everywhere users are” yet? Content rights are, shall we say, tricky, and not squared yet. I’m not expecting to see 30 Rock on YouTube anytime soon, but Google is betting there will be 30 digital native shows on YouTube that are just as funny.

As Always, So What?

• Marketers should take a serious look at building channels on YouTube if you haven’t already. The reach and engagement – and measurement – you can generate is going to continue to be enhanced, and Google is on your side.
• Consider it as a testbed for ads and content you want to bring to high-impact broadcast events
• Learn about the ad inventory available, and how best to target and work it.
• Keep an eye out for talent in your category – or discussion about your product – like Michelle Phan, and work with them.
• Actually, the new content creators are a new (and probably hungry) source of product placement opportunities.
• Finally, you should seriously start thinking about how to integrate your video measurement data, from your site, YouTube, and to broadcast and other digital avenues.

Todd Drake is VP of Technology at Organic

By Chantal Tode

January 19, 2012

Without a strong mobile strategy, agencies could begin to lose relevancy

Many agencies failed to integrate mobile in a meaningful way in 2011, missing an important opportunity to organically build mobile practices. As a result, this year many will be scrambling to react to the growing demand for mobile services from brands which have seen a significant increase in mobile traffic.

The growth in mobile penetration and use means agencies and brands can reach more consumers than ever before via mobile and use mobile to marketer an ever-growing array of products and services. As mobile continues to become more pervasive in consumers’ lives, it is imperative that agencies jump in or risk losing relevancy.

“There are both agencies and brands that sit in very different places across the mobile and multi-channel maturity curve,” said David Hewitt, vice president and global mobile practice lead for SapientNitro, Boston.

“Those that don’t have good tooth in the [mobile] space this coming year, will really start to show their wear and declining relevancy to today’s consumer that is eagerly waiting for a fully integrated and next generation mobile experience,” he said.

Keeping pace

Part of the problem is that agencies and brands have not kept pace with consumers, who are embracing mobile devices for a growing array of activities.

Brands and agencies have often been the ones pushing new ways of doing things that have not caught on in the marketplace, but that is not the case with mobile in many instances.

“With mobile and multi-channel, it is more often the brand and their incumbent agencies that need to catch up with the emerging role that mobile is playing — especially with retailers and CPG companies,” Mr. Hewitt said.

“Many agencies struggle when mobile becomes an opportunity to bring connected experiences to bear, and extend beyond the mobile channel and display ad mindset,” he said.

Another issue is that, as agencies look to bring mobile to more consumers and products, they will need to master a wide array of new capabilities and issues including compatibility, mcommerce, messaging, location-based services, tablet optimized experiences, being adept at integrating mobile with CRM programs and creating experiences for in-store, at home and on-the-go consumers.

“Daunting for most traditional agencies, these multi-channel initiatives involve deep commerce, complex system integration, and specialty creative chops that make things like a shared shopping experience across multiple devices come to life for the consumer and marketer,” Mr. Hewitt said.

Despite the hurdles involved in mobile, agencies need to jump in, making sure store operations and information technology departments are involved with strategy development as mobile becomes more integrated with other touch points, per Mr. Hewitt.

It is also important that agencies not focus so hard on serving every device because this can lead to a mobile experience that does not engage anyone effectively.

Mobile commitment

In a sign of its commitment to integrating mobile into everything the agency does, Omnicom digital shop Organic, San Francisco, recently hired former iCrossing executive Rachel Pasqua as the executive director of its mobile marketing practice

While mobile has been a part of Organic’s strategy for 10 years, Ms. Pasqua will focus on producing more mobile-specific campaigns around augmented reality, near-field communications and other mobile technology as well as increasingly making mobile an integral part of holistic campaigns.

This means integrating mobile into search marketing, search engine optimization and how it creates the digital strategy for clients.

Putting a senior strategic mobile lead in place is important for agencies to help insure forward-looking employees are hired and internal staff is educated about mobile.

“The role of the mobile lead is increasingly common and in demand,” Ms. Pasqua said.

“Clients are increasingly interested in how do they plan effectively for mobile as part of an overall digital strategy while last year the focus was more on a mobile strategy alone,” she said.

A fundamental shift

Unlike Organic, many agencies are taking a reactive approach to mobile instead of having a strategy for how to build it organically, per Ms. Pasqua. They also struggle with figuring out what to focus on first in the fragmented mobile space.

“Some agencies are scrambling, trying to figure out how to integrate mobile into what they do,” Ms. Pasqua said.

“They are realizing that this is not a trend but a fundamental shift in how we consume media,” she said. “There is a mobile component to everything your audience does and you need to plan accordingly.”

Many of the initial steps into mobile taken by agencies in 2011 will be built on this year.

Those agencies with a deep understanding of mobile and how it can be used to drive brand awareness and sales will could see significant growth this year while those who do not have the right mobile capabilities will continue to miss out on important business.

“I think many agencies integrated mobile last year,” said Paran Johar, chief marketing officer at mobile ad network Jumptap, Cambridge, MA

“For example, every agency holding company had or created a mobile division,” he said.

“The first goal of these divisions was to teach best practices to the rest of the agency. We’ve also seen the integration through the diversity of our client RFP’s and verticals across the board.”

“We’ll continue to see astronomical growth in 2012, as agencies run multiple mobile campaigns and understand the unique offerings of mobile. Agencies will also continue to use data to drive relevancy and consumer engagement.”

Associate Editor Chantal Tode covers advertising, messaging, legal/privacy and database/CRM. Reach her at chantal@mobilemarketer.com.

 
This article was originally posted on Mobile Marketer here.

Rachel Pasqua is Executive Director, Mobile at Organic

Part 1 of 5 in Todd’s CES Tech Report coverage.

We all agree CES is massive, huge. It’s also, I contend, beyond individual comprehension. You really need to take digital notes all the time to remember the unbelievable amount of content you’re absorbing, or a full team of dopplegangers.

Besides all the bloggy hoopla about ultrabooks, tablets, 3D (again!) and OLED TVs, a couple of deeper themes have started to suggest themselves from the maelstrom of product announcements, brochures, booth demos, slot machines, and shocking lack of decent food. I’m going to cover a couple, starting with the most prevalent item at the show.

Home Media Aggregator. It wasn’t a proper booth without a media aggregation platform. Everyone had one, from the obvious choices (Microsoft, Motorola, Intel) to the not-so-obvious (Panasonic? Hisense?) to – well, everyone (LG? Technicolor?).

However, I struggle to really, really get the huge user problem everyone is racing to solve. The stated base use cases for these things are, to me, not so compelling as to be differentiating.

All the vendors’ solutions…

1. Grab content from all connected devices on your network
2. Provide integrated search to that content and NetFlix, YouTube and other – usually proprietary – network providers
3. Allow you to use the content from any connected device on another
4. Stop watching on one device, and pick up on another
5. And have social networking sprinkled on top, either for recommendations or real-time check-in/tweeting, joint watching.

I mean, it might be clever to start watching on my iPad and pick it up on the TV, but it’s not going to change my life.  It’s solving a problem I’m not sure I really cared about. I’m not even sure if I’m annoyed by it.

In fact, the first four you could almost consider to be commodity user features – there’s only so many ways to search content – except that is not standardized at all at the networking level. Everyone is connecting to content differently; some use DLNA, some use their own proprietary network (VieraConnect, say). As a result, the networking connections, tweaking and device compatibility is right up in users faces, and they have to really think if one device will work with another one – or give in, and buy them all from the same vendor, which is the unspoken, assumed, and fervent hope of said vendor.

The second problem is that, increasingly, all this video content is up in the cloud – usually someone else’s cloud. For example, YouTube is channelizing itself and encouraging studios and brands to build channels. The infrastructure, production, and distribution costs are tremendously cheaper. YouTube’s projection is that in 2020 – not that far away now – 75% of  video content will be digital native. That’s a tremendous shift. If I’m streaming most of my stuff from the cloud, what is the experience on the STB about?

Eventually some networking standard – DLNA, say – will probably win in the home, and the network and the rest of the twiddly bits will recede to the background where it belongs, and all the content will be streaming: and then where will all the different vendors be? Competing on a pretty common set of user needs, but, in a very important way, separately from their own hardware.  As a result, I’d look for independent people already working on the problem, and already focused on the user experience – like Frequency, Twonky, etc, – to be the long-term winners. There is a chance, based on their control of the cable STB market, that Moto or Intel could be very well placed if they really got the user experience story down.

The third problem I saw is that everyone wants to control the content that you create, like photos and the like. Everyone – Sony, Samsung, etc – have their own cloud service that you can upload all your content to, so you can solve that deadly sharing across devices problem you have. Except I’m already storing my photos in the cloud – Flickr, Facebook, Apple, Google. Actually, if they checked it out, a lot of people are doing the same, he notes drily. So what value am I getting by downloading it from one cloud, and putting it in another cloud? So I can share it across Sony devices? Aren’t I doing that already?

There was a little bit of wheel re-inventing too, where Samsung created its own social network – Family Share – that looked remarkably like the system I already use to share stuff with my distributed family – Facebook. Except with less features and probably less noise, to be sure.

Truths for marketers

Video is growing rapidly, with huge reach and engagement. One great ad on YouTube will get a large number of engaged viewers as compared with another ad-blocked banner.  Secondly, your channels are blurring on output devices. Your short-form video on YouTube is showing up right next to your product placements in CSI, and increasingly that device is mobile. You need a clear, consistent content strategy.

In following posts, I’ll talk about cars as connected platforms, connected health devices, and how user experience, problem understanding, and usability are still and again the biggest and lasting differentiator a product developer can focus on.

Todd Drake is the VP of Technology at Organic