Recent blog entries for ade

If your site has a Google+ sharing feature that uses this URL: https://plusone.google.com/_/+1/confirm?url= then you're doing it wrong. You're using unsupported and undocumented functionality. Don't.

Reading Grouped and Creative Mischief at the same time made me realise that there are two main strands of thought about the future of advertising, marketing and media. They see the same phenomena but explain them with different stories.

Tyler Cowen would be proud of the sets of stories that these books tell as they project the world-views of their authors. The stories are too neat, too unambiguous and too polished to be true. However they're still educational. The difference in these two books is in the set of lessons they wish to teach us.

One book wants us to believe that the web is being rebuilt around people. Unfortunately its examples all come from one source so after a while you start to suspect he means the web is being rebuilt around Facebook. Grouped is about the benefits of homophily (being with people like you), about websites that use social proof to show their value and websites that use data from your friends to provide better services to you.

The other book wants you to believe that success in advertising (or anything else) is about your willingness to do the things that other people won't or can't. That may mean thinking thoughts others are afraid to think, seeking inspiration away from your peers and giving someone "the right answer even though you know he doesn't want it."

In Creative Mischief Dave Trott tries to teach the reader that "to be noticed, we need to do something different. To be different, we need to break the rules. To get away with breaking the rules, we need to be clever." In Trott's world "what seemed to be facts were only true if I subscribed to it being that way" and "the rules are meant to be a spring board, not a straitjacket."

His short book walks the reader through the last 4 decades of his escapades and his experiences in the advertising industry. It's fun and cheeky and insightful. It's also lacking in empirical data or research to back up his anecdotes. Adams, on the other hand, has all the data and the citations you could want.

The dichotomy between these differing viewpoints was summarised as Mad Men versus Math Men in a recent article. I think it captures something important about the gulf between researchers and storytellers. Storytellers believe it's more important to be inspiring than to be right. Most researchers disagree. Paul Adams is one of the few that sees the value of the storyteller's mode of communication. At the same time I think there's a dichotomy between a homophilous and a heterophilous view of the world.

In Adams's view we want to be nudged into making the same decisions as our close friends and families. He rejects the conventional marketer's search for influencers and tastemakers who can move the masses because

"even when there are influential people and specific situations where they can wield great influence over many others, finding them is so expensive that it becomes a poor investment compared to other available strategies."

This is a world where 'social proof' is the most important thing. This is a world where "we’re only connected to people like us" so "it’s hard for ideas to pass between groups who are separated by dimensions like race, income, and education."



In Trott's view we want to be guided into making decisions that separate us from the herd. This is a world where every appeal to the wisdom of the crowd is countered by citing the danger of pluralistic ignorance.

I much prefer Trott's world because I believe the most valuable relationships are created by the differences between us rather than our similarities. In fact I've been maintaining a Tumblr devoted to the idea of heterophily for a while. I believe heterophily is one of the key ingredients in creating groups that are creative, fulfilling and productive. Despite this I still have to acknowledge that Adams's book is the one you should read if you're interested in improving the performance of your marketing campaigns or understanding the incipient social web. However Trott's book is the one you should read if you want to dream of a better and more interesting world.

 

At last night's OSJam I gave a lightning talk about the implications of being post-PC.

Those implications were:
Identity: a post-PC device needs to know its owner's identity since it can't rely on obtaining that information from a PC. At the moment all the devices are building their own identity platforms but eventually they'll start to take advantage of existing identity systems like Webfinger and PGP.

Personalisation: a post-PC device can be uniquely personalised because it's not predicated on the idea that it will be a shared device. The classic example is the experience when you buy a Kindle from Amazon. It will be preconfigured with your name and the books you've already bought. It's a small step from there to a future where the moment I bought a device in a shop it would automatically know that it belonged to me.



Cloud: post-PC devices tend to be heavily dependent on the cloud in order to store persistent state and to perform sophisticated processing. The definition of the cloud that this implies comes from Simon Meacham. He says that the cloud means treating the union of all those servers/networks/services as if they were one machine available to be used by everybody. In this vision the physical devices we own are merely portals to and caches for this metaphorical "one machine."

Mobility: if our data and services live in this cloud then all the devices I can log in to are equivalent. At this point the ability to take a device to the place I wish to use it (for instance the Kindle screen is supremely legible in bright sunlight unlike the screens of most mobile phones) and the fact a given device is ready-to-hand will trump all other considerations. Photographers have long had a saying "the best camera is the one you have with you" and the rest of the world will soon experience something similar.

Devices: new kinds of devices become possible, if not inevitable, in a post-PC future. Technology will migrate to the most convenient form and place in your life. That means computers, cameras and music players will start becoming features of watches, jewelry and clothing. That's partly because people actually like their watches, jewelry and clothing whilst they mostly tolerate their computers. The early examples of this are Nike+ and the increasing variety of smart watches. In fact several of the people attending OSJam were wearing the precursors of the smart watches of the future. Furthermore once people stop expecting technology to be delivered to them in a beige box it opens the doors to new innovators such as Arduino enthusiasts and the open source hardware community.

From OSJam 19 - Post-PC: gadgets of the now

Personal Area Networks: The logical culmination of this is the personal cloud or personal area network. This is not merely a network of devices that are physically close to one person. Instead it is a network of devices that are geographically distributed but which can connect to each other (via a variety of networks and protocols including Tthe internet, wifi and bluetooth) and prove that they belong to the same person. The devices are tied together by the fact that they belong to a single person and therefore they can seamlessly share each other's functionality.

These are merely my guesses about what's likely to happen as a consequence of these post-PC devices. Ultimately Alan Kay is right: the only way to predict the future is to invent it.