Ads Gone Mobile

The core of advertising in the media age is, that someone has to benefit in order for information to be free.  So I would like to separate advertising and mobility and then bring them together where they count most – the end user.  I then need to go back a decade or so and wheel back in the Cluetrain Manifesto

Cluetrain Manifesto
http://www.cluetrain.com

If one peels away the rebel talk and the breaking down the corporate wall talk, there is a foundational layer of the Cluetrain Manifesto which is still prescient to our age.  If markets are conversations (which of course they should be if they are not already) then as a consumer I should be a part of the marketing conversation.  That means that another old brew called “One-to-One” marketing has to be hauled out from the thought storage room also.   Finally a third conception of personalization can be down and dusted again and looked at anew.

I never liked the word targeting because as a fundamental part of the one-to-one marketing relationship, I don’t want to be considered a target.  There are plenty of people who do utilize media for “targeting” and today we normally refer to them as terrorists.  That is why the Cluetrain Manifesto is important because it isn’t about targeting but about having a conversation.  Now the question once was, how do you have a conversation with analog couch potatoes.  Today the question is how to have a conversation with the digital happy place.

OK, I must admit, when I begin to riff things online I too am in my digital happy place, but conversation itself is full bodied process, not a virtual connection.  The difference between the two is that the conversation does not dissipate because the message has been sent, instead it forms a part of our individual life path – advertising simply being a stream of value that enters our river of life.  That pathway requires long-term thinking, modern day digital communication however favors a short-term pulse.

We can only create long-term thinking when the advertiser becomes our servant rather than the creative authority.  Even the word “creative” needs to be examined very thoroughly.  Am I not being creative now as I write this?   How then do the words “creative” and “targeting” jive with my own existence?  I am creative, we all are – but we need a life path view and not a consumer path view to see or realize it.

In any case, when it comes to the traditional idea of “creative” as an advertising term (instead of a term that is a euphemism for the imagination), here I dust down the prior ideas of Sergio Zyman, and in particular that the job of marketing isn’t to win creative awards, but to sell.  Then the missing evolutionary link is that which was thought up in the Cluetrain Manifesto, viz: I also exist and I (the buyer) am a fundamental part of the selling relationship.  Moreover if I think in terms of life path creativity instead of consumer marketing, then I must also understood how I am influenced and sold – and as a result what my bias potential really is, and how reactive I really am. Dig out Robert Cialdini’s work on influence here as an intro point to this self-awareness.

Then we are putting advertising in the realm of awareness rather than attention.  Marketing itself is in a conundrum in the increasing war for attention.   Awareness on the other hand is a much more peaceful thing, it is driven by the person who advertisers need to reach.  Instead of working out how advertising works on our mobile device, I therefore submit that we should we looking at who we are (as the advertisee and advertised) and mobility as decision rather than device.  Then what we are holding is technology that we are most fundamentally alive to and a relationship which rises above the sea of spam.   Today we actually spam each other with messages and yet we call it instant messaging, tomorrow we might cut through this oceanic clutter and realize what most needs to be realized, our very life is this realized conversation-awareness mix.

M.

It is interesting – I’m on the project vrm list, and I have read Cialdini (though I should reread).  Sometimes I have to ask them the following question – how do you identify what I want if 
1) said product never existed yet – think ATMS, they failed massively when people started to ask if they were a good idea, and once in market, they were a huge sucess.
2) a lot of my communication is non-verbal (something Cialdini doesn’t discuss very directly, if I remember correctly).  Much of my intent is hidden in what I do, not what i say (in fact, sometimes I will say the opposite)

What I like about Cialdini is that he opens me open to suspectability and vulnerability in the realm of MY conditioning.  That is what I appreciate most about his research, that one can make it intensely personal – the only lens I can read Cialdini is the one of self-awareness.  How can I possibly understand the human condition if I don’t understand my own conditioning – not just how I am influenced.

One of my conditioning’s is marketing and the branded self.  If marketers should implicitly know what I want, then I must surely believe that the world revolves around me and the downside of living that kind of belief is living in a state of convulsive paranoia.  Think about it, at its logical end, the servile “what I want” question puts me in the center of the world.  That is exactly the kind of conditioning I am most trying to be free of   The examination of the relationship between influence and its conditioning effects is a freedom to explore life at the most personal level.

I don’t naturally think in terms of points but in terms of examples.  Your first example fits far more in the realm of innovation realities than how we influence innovation.  Here is the ugly news about innovation, it comes with a bag load of failure and most people are well and truly afraid of innovative things and people.  Here the idea of crossing the chasm that Geoffrey Moore put forth is far more instructive.  Early adopters have a different mindset, I am not saying that it is less conditioned but it is far more venturesome and henceforth a whole lot less paranoid (think of the term “buyers remorse”).  The way I look at it, the ATM, as an idea, is the second best cash dispensing system in the world.  The best cash dispensing system in the world are our parents.

In the second example of hidden intent and doing the opposite etc etc – I tend to explore social conditioning through the thought process of Jiddu Krishnamurti.  (I am not even close to thinking about things the way he does – but his approach the most factual way).  Cialdini opens me to the awareness of my social conditioning, but it is Krishnamurti who highlights the very difficult challenge of our very thoughts that come closest way to Socrates “know thyself”.

Take a quick dip into Krishnamurti Seattle talk linked below :

Jiddu Krishnamurti – Seattle 5th Talk (1950)
http://www.jiddu-krishnamurti.net/en/1950/1950-08-13-jiddu-krishnamurti-5th-public-talk

The bottom line or crux of the matter here is that we have to discover these things ourselves or we can settle for the conditioned response.   Cialdini has shown me (or at least opened the doorway) that I have been doing more than my fair share of settling for less – after all it’s the lazier, easier and more convenient approach – the kind of approach that really does makes me a right royal consumer rather than a humble and joyful human being

M.

Stanley Fish – Does Philosophy Matter . . .
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/01/does-philosophy-matter/

I will never be the guy for a philosophical discussion, but as Stanley Fish points out, I don’t need to be.

“But  philosophy is not the name of, or the site of, thought  generally; it is a special, insular form of thought and  its propositions have weight and value only in the precincts of its game .

This is where Fisk’s essay is brilliant, that it all depends on what we are looking at, life is or isn’t is a great philosophical question – it is a philosophical application.  When he says “Believing or disbelieving in moral absolutes is a philosophical position, not a recipe for living.” I am delighted to think that I what I write has no philosophical basis, for it is an app.  App means application doesn’t it?

Before I seek awesome search capabilities on my technological applications, I must keep on working on my life application.  That is fo rme the way technology keeps pace with life.

M.

Is it an either/or propostion when it comes to discovering versus the conditioned response? Is there a third way?

Is there a third way? Yes providing “ways” are limitless . . . but if there is a third way, then it is “know thyself”.  How many people really know themselves? I understand that I don’t know myself because otherwise I would be automatically making really brilliant life calculations rather than imperfect decisions.  Just as waste is a natural phenomena of any system, imperfection saves us, for I see the perfect system as an artificial intelligence, or the singularity. 

We human beings IMHO should be thankful of our conditioning, for it is something, during one life time we can learn to untangle and free ourselves from.  The perfect human being does not exist and as yet neither does the perfect machine.  Right now I know I am thinking, but I also know that I am entering thought data into a machine.  As long as I don’t mistake where I end and where the machine, material or market begins – I am fully capable of changing my human condition.  Of course being ONE self is the challenge, when I think about me, I am still me, not an external being.

Of course I can greatly expand my wisdom about the human condition, if I were to be free of my condition, but Übermensch I am not

Regards
[Em]

“Emeri Gent” @thoughtspaces:twitter

BTW I do now tweet and accept followers only at thoughtspaces albeit still in protected mode, you are free and most welcome to choose to be my second observer [follower]

I will follow you back via “Emeri Gent” (you took a social media hiatus for a while, so I need to check you back in). My four twitter profiles viz. “emerigent” “ovurmind” “markzorro” & “rupyyuan” are followed only by thoughtspaces.
These four thoughtspaces are the web of relationships related to each respective grouping and not the one-to-one follow-follower relationships which head office at Twitter created.  Man do I make such simple things so complicated, but it works for me [as my thoughtspaces]