This is real propaganda (or messaging)  from the ministry of information in 1939. George Orwell would have seen this no doubt.

I'm surprised so few advertising people are acknowledging that we're in truly remarkable times. It's been a year of credit crunch with Bear Stearns on 'emergency loans',  Merrill Lynch sold to the Bank of America (convenient) Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae nationalised, that's proper nationalised like my heroes Ernest Bevan, Clement Atlee and Tony Benn would have done long before there was any trouble, Lehman brothers down and AIG about to bite the carpet. There's more to come as well.

I've been rereading my Nassim Nicolas Taleb (Fooled by Randomness, not The Back Swan) and although I can see like Johnnie Moore suggested to me that he's a bit full of himself, he has taught/reminded me that we know so little (the past is relatively short) that we've no idea about the future and so I'm not going to make any predictions except some light water colouring.


We're in for a change, I think monetarism might get a good spanking and selling stuff will still be vital but what is sold and how it is sold will change. (although more slowly) I don't think economic growth is the metric by which we can always measure a country's success. Just one example is that they shut the factories down in China for the Olympics and we had the cleanest air in Beijing for a few weeks.

I'm pretty sure someone somewhere in the oxyacetalyne growth obsessed Chinese Politburo must have said 'hang on what's it all for if we have a better quality of life by doing less'? Well greed is intoxicating isn't it so maybe not, and let's not point the finger because we thought we won something when Communism was beaten by the West. What we lost was the chance to grow slower-quicker but that's another post I guess. I absolutely love thinking and talking about those 'what if's'. One thing is for sure I'm sick to death of the word growth being used as if it's a sign of success. It's a sign of intellectual decay. We absolutely need to go slower in life. A rich man is one who goes slowly and takes their time. You can't buy time, you can only spend it so the wealth aquired usually means expending effort so hard that your life slips by before you can really start to enjoy it. I'll say it again. Rich people go slowly.

So that's enough from me for the time being. I sympathise if you're heavily exposed in mortgage on property that will be in negative equity but there's nothing for it but to adapt lifestyle and sit it out till money starts moving around again. Hopefully in a more intelligent way than the neoliberal economics that played on peoples greed and extended many of us way beyond our capacity to operate in harmony with the planet.

Anyone disagree?

Update Lehman just got propped up for 85 Billion Dollars by the Federal Reserve. Partially renationalised.

I was over at Zeus Jones blog a few days ago, and Adrian’s post on monetization of social media got me thinking about digital again, and whereas I usually fire off a long comment when that happens, I reckon it’s time to write some thoughts down over here.

Firstly I can’t bear that word monetization. It’s the English part of me I guess, but it just feels crass that everything has to be monetized. I’m reminded of this each time I watch Fox News, because all the bullying of any (pinko Commie bastard) liberal guests they bring on to bait is won by their vulgar but implicit idea that if profit is not made then its not of worth. This is the point where I think the United States has gone slowly wrong in the last 50 years because the values it was built on are not about profit to the detriment of all else. OK I got that off my chest. Back to making money! We’ve also all got bills to pay. The environment of course being the biggest!

Yes of course there should be some sort of transactional value exchange model between social media platform providers and the people who frequent them. It does however feel like the old media model of huge profits and mass market broadcasting persuasive powers has disintegrated.

Micro-transactions work very well here in China for the most popular platform QQ using a virtual currency that is paid for in hard cash. (Kind of like a Second Life model) but this is where I like to think social media should embrace a number of revenue streams and think about revenue diversity because it’s obvious (to me) that good old fashioned bread and butter banner advertising works very effectively in Facebook. I generally love the ad to the left of their pages because they are eerily effective and are mainly China location based services making them highly relevant. In short they work. I like them even.

So we’ve got micro-transactions, and then traditional banner advertising. I like to call this distractive (contextual) advertising because if it’s good enough, then it distracts much like print advertising does today, interruptive advertising which is generally disliked but is based on the commercial break and includes pre-roll advertising as well as the hated pop up and even ideas such as “get this digital mobile phone for free as long as we can give you x number of ads a month”

I also think there are more innovative ideas that could be considered such as tiered or rewarded internet activity. Adrian has done a fine post about social media but as he correctly points out most people are hanging out on the net to get away from dull content and patronizing marketing communications. However the tiered subscription or rewarded activity is based on a model that really needs to embrace some ideas that Adam Crowe was, I think, the first to bring my attention to. The notion of data portability. The information accumulated by internet usage should belong to the customer not us.

If we (or Google or the ISPs) do the unthinkable and give our potential customers their own internet usage data to trade with us we then are truly opening up ideas loosely called the free market economy. It’s probably more American/United States than apple pie and fanny packs put together now that I think of it. This then opens up our potential customers to benefit from their data portability in the best way possible. The provider they choose to allow receipt of marketing communications from. It’s a bit like a bazaar. If you don’t like the voice of the trader or the goods they are selling, you can stay clear of them. Imagine a world where in return for premium content we permitted ourselves to exposure of specific marketing models. If the advertising sucks we make a decision about whether we can get by with lower value advertising-free content or not at all.

Either way I think we are moving into a new era of marketing communications because as an advocate of 'the medium is the message' it's clear to me that I never got ‘spammed’ while watching a commercial in a movie theatre, direct mail is lower down the food chain because its so much more cheaper to indiscriminately ‘target’ (using the language of old) with geography or basic demographics acting effectively to the point where a 3% response rate still makes it worthwhile.

But here’s the context. The internet is both a place where I can watch a Cannes winning Youtube clip and also open up my mail to be offered a larger penis or a fake Rolex watch. That never happens on TV or even direct mail and so the value of the internet is diminished by this activity. There are innovative ways around this if advertisers want to raise the perceived value for a short while. Like for example if I was P&G I would buy all the available online advertising space within a specific digital media aperture. Maybe the whole of the NYT or The Guardian for a few days. Just wipe out every ad in the online editions and put one sponsor message on there, advertising some spot removing clean or dandruff clearing shampoo. Something relevant seems appropriate!

There are ways to be creative on the internet, although finding the clients bold enough to do stuff like this is tough. Anyway in principle the point I want to end on is that it's not us who should be targeting the customers, it’s the customers who should be targeting us.

This is after all the 21st century and not the 20th. We had two world wars in that one.

Update: Adam links to this which is just the sort of example I'm talking about with P&G. i.e. buying space that would normally be filled with ads.

I"m not so bothered with George Bush as some. I feel a wave of mild embarrassment each time I see him pretending that what is happening isn't happening. I'm embarrassed for his poor grasp of geography, his shunning of history and lately a reversal on GOP economic theory by advocating 'trickle up economics' with the stimulus package. Now they say it's because poor people are more likely to go spend the cash, and the cynicism this reveals for trickle down economics is only now manifest. Have they been fattening their wallets all this time? Selling cheap loans to people who will spend the next decade paying them off?. Keynesian economics is now evidently being practiced by POTUS and the mantra of free market economics as the unfailing driver of good, is a boil waiting to be lanced.

This doesn't mean I'm not horrified by the grotesque spectacle of Bill Clinton pulling tricks I never thought I'd see in order to gain reentry into the Whitehouse and of course his desperate wife Hillary who looks way past her time and a little ugly like Giuliani with his never ending repetition of what he did for N.Y. But don't let that colour your impression of my politics because my favourite candidate so far has been Ron Paul of the Republican party for his ruthless pursuit of presenting the unpalatable truth to the U.S.

It is however increasingly looking like Barack Obama's time and I see potential in him to lead the country forward in a way that the United States both deserves and desperately needs. It's time to rid the U.S. of that unholy alliance of the fundamentalists and neoconservatives because its just obscene listening to those pro lifers support the war in Iraq.