Google's ill

I just googled something and every single search result told me that if I proceeded to the site then my computer would be at risk. In fact it didn't even LET me progress to a search result - I had to cut and paste the result into the URL bar.

It was a bizarre sense: Google broken? No, surely not. They're infallible. They rule the world. They're pioneers. 

And it was bloody ANNOYING that I couldn't get my information fix in the nanoseconds I'm used to.

Is it a virus? Has Google been infected and, if so, how safe are all the things I trust it to keep on my behalf? My emails, addresses, search history, my blog ... the list goes on.

The effect this has just had on me is disproportionate to the minor inconvenience that actually occurred. Perhaps we should try to wean ourselves off Google.

This much we don't know

Yesterday while writing a brief for a new anti-epilepsy drug I posted a few status updates on Facebook stating that I was finding it rather difficult to come up with a proposition. I was astounded at how many people commented on the update and how many - admittedly in a humorous way - felt that the answer should be quite simple.

Along the lines of 'this drug stops epilepsy and all the shit that goes with it'.

That would indeed have been an ideal proposition if it weren't for the facts that:

- epilepsy is the tendency of the brain to produce sudden bursts of electrical energy - but this can be caused by many different things including tumours, accidents, birth defects and infections;

- there are dozens of enti-epilepsy drugs out on the market, yet around 30% of people with epilepsy are yet to find a treatment that stops their seizures;

- some of the drugs on the market seem to work, but no-one's quite sure why or how;

- even the 'best' drugs on the market can't really claim to be efficacious in more than about 50% of patients.

I was amazed at how little we still don't know, and how that in turn makes it very difficult to come up with something useful and interesting to say that actually holds up to scrutiny.

United by devices

A few years back, when working at Whitewater in the In Memoriam fundraising department, we used to receive copies of journals as bizarrely titled as Funeral Directors Monthly and The Embalmer.

So I'm quite used to seeing niche publications and enjoy discovering those that somehow embrace a new (to me) and unknown corner of interest, industry or, quite possibly, obsession.

At my new job in healthcare marketing I'm exposed to all kinds of dark recesses of the pharmaceutical world, but I really didn't expect an old school friend - one Guy Furness - to be owner/publisher of a journal called On Drug Delivery. Yup, there's a title devoted to needles, syringes and the like - all the myriad ways in which you can stick drugs into yourself.

I like to think the Pete Doherty has a regular column.

In all seriousness, Guy and his team (comprising himself and a girl called Nicki Macadam, with whom we were also at school) write about the science of delivering pharmaceutically active ingredients to the required site in the body, in the right quantities, at the correct time and in the most effective and convenient manner.

And the coincidence is that this Wednesday I'm going to Zurich to present creative concepts to a client whose sole raison d'etre is to promote insulin and growth hormone delivery devices.

I'm looking forward to seeing Guy again. There should be loads to talk about...

Up the brand ladder and into the clouds

It's possible to do this in any field of marketing, but it's a particular danger in healthcare: taking the facts about a product, identifying their key features, deriving patient or physician benefits from these, finding a universal truth ... and ending up, before you know it, with a pivotal thought that reads something like:

'Product X gives you a better quality of life' ... or 'Product X is both effective and safe' ... or ... 'Therapy X is the simplest yet'.

And how very uninspiring these thoughts or 'propositions' are. Reductio absurdum at its very best.

This morning I had to reject a proposition that read 'simply the best'. And another one that read 'freedom to get on with life'.

Frankly, instead of being on the topic of anti-retroviral treatment, it could have been a piece of chewing gum or a tampon. And you don't want to confuse those.

So the trick when you're messing around with a 'brand ladder' or whatever species of wanky marketing tool you happen to be using, I reckon, is to stop short of the clouds and give people real sight of what the damn thing is that you're talking about.

Medicine time

Dear all

With effect from some time quite soon, the theme of this blog will change.

With any luck, this change will be A Good Thing.

Thing is, now that I'm working in the fascinating world of all things medical, the stuff I notice is necessarily to do with drugs, bodily functions, weird and wonderful apparatus and some really rather clever science.

But my job as a planner remains unchanged: to simplify things.

So my hobby as a blogger will be to put various medical observations in the glass flask of the blogosphere, place it above the hot blue flame of conciseness (and occasionally the flappy yellow flame of digression) - and boil it down to its witty (or otherwise) essence.

Watch this space...

M

America Bless God

Yewande Odusote's comment on the wall of the Facebook Group dedicated to watching the inauguration live on CNN and Facebook was one of over 121,000 comments.

She is one of over 1.2m people who have joined this group - and this group is just dedicated to this particular means of watching the event.

Whilst this is astounding, leading on from my following post - together with the slew of articles dedicated to analysing the world problems Obama will have to tackle when he gets into the White House - I'm interested in the role that theistic obedience will play.

Yewande invites 'God' to bless the new President and to direct him down the right road.

Abraham Lincoln said: 'I know that the Lord is always on the side of the right, but it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and his nation may be on the Lord's side'.

Both of these are in stark contrast to Bush's egotistical insistence that what he is doing is happily what God would have wanted.

And Obama, in his inaugural speech just now, pledged to 'restore science to its rightful place' - a thinly-veiled attacked on the rise of Creationism I feel sure - takes a more rational take still. He spoke of 'interest and mutual respect' for the Muslim world.

He showed that America does not have a right to be right, that the Christian God is not always on its side, and is suggestive of the fact that science should not be subserviant to science.

From a religious point of view - let alone all the other points of view that can and will be taken on this address - this marks a step back down the road of humility, lined with green shoots of humanism.

No god bus

I'm a bit behind the times on this one as apparently this bus-side advertising campaign kicked off last October, but I love it.

And so does evangelical atheist Richard Dawkins.

The beginning of the antidote to centuries of mind control by the abusive clerics of Abrahamic religions.

You can read more about it here, but can you imagine driving a bus with this message through Israel or Gaza (or indeed Gazza if you're a Sun reader) right now?

Storytellers, designers and technologists

In the late '90s this book created a stir by suggesting that the Internet was more like an old-fashioned Middle East bazaar than it was the subserviant tool of big business - where people would swap stories, buy bizarre items and behave in ways that took their fancy rather than adhere to any convenient and logical norms.

How damn right they were. A quick squizz at Google's Insights for Search in 2007 shows that the most popular search terms in the UK were 'BBC', 'games' and 'eBay'. In France it's 'games', 'video' and 'yellow pages'. In Sweden it's 'lyrics', 'download' and 'youtube'.

Who could have predicted this type of randomness (unless you're predicting 'randomness' to begin with)?

Regardless of what the reasons for the national differences might be, it does suggest the need for a less conventional, straight-laced and Victorian way in which brands should conduct themsleves online.

And digital agencies, as the frequent producers of brands' digital presences, might want to order themselves in a way that reflects what people want from digital media. One suggestion I stumbled across today (which I quite like) was that there should be three main functions within such agencies: storytellers, designers and technologists.

What would this change? Well, planning and copy tasks could be conflated. Designers are sort of there already, but in the absence of data and IA functions they'd need to get to grips with visitor pathways and heatmaps. Technologists: well, if they could share their views of the future in non-binary forms of communication that would be splendid.

Just a thought...

Primary shapes, journalism, and a bloke called Wilf

I love primary shapes when it comes to expressing a thought. They make everything simple - and even complex ideas about the role of traditional journalism vs. blogging can be summed up succinctly.

I was debating what the rise of 'consumer journalism' is doing to the profession - and, in turn, how it impacts the trust we place in comment from different sources - last night. Not the sort of chat you'd normally entertain on a second date, but to my mind this augers well.

Anyway, we were discussing whether bloggers would ever displace professional journalists. If you follow the line of thinking that goes: 'people trust each other more than brands' then it would hold that, with news channels and papers being brands themselves, they would have to make way for the new blood.

But this doesn't feel right. People DO trust their news brands - for differing reasons - but, as the diagram above shows, these brands currently only play in the 'sphere of legitimate controversy.

Understandably there's little merit in playing in the core, but what bloggers are doing - unfettered by the need to toe the party line - is expanding the sphere of legitimacy by exploring the sphere of deviance (stuff the Daily Mail et al would never dare discuss e.g. the merits of immigration) in their droves.

So I don't reckon the old school model of journalism is about to be scuppered, but - thanks to the theory expressed in primary shapes - I reckon they're going to have to adopt the role of 'guide'.

Why? Well, I stumbled across this diagram by linking from Craig the Creative Director's blog to a Guardian article; from that I went to the 'feedback' section and read various comments, and from one of those I linked back to a blog (OK, a Guardian journalist blog) and serendipitously found this article - which was a link within that blog.

French Michel calls it the act of WWILFing - 'What Was I Looking For?' - when you start with one article and are led onto a raft of different topics and thoughts such that you forget what you went online to find out in the first place.

So I WILFed my way far beyond the confines of the Guardian brand - and the stuff I'm talking about now, the stuff that caught my eye was on a complete unknown's blog site.

The Guardian has probably got the most digitally savvy website of any newspaper brand, but even they're only just starting to realise the roles that their profession and their brand will have to play if they're to remain relevant as we opt to explore more and more spheres of deviance...

Bacon numbers

I'm liking the professional networking site 'Linked-In' more and more. For some I'm sure it's a useful way of tapping people for jobs, but I just like the nosiness that it affords. Unlike Facebook, you don't have to be friends with people to see what they're up to, and there are more and more people on it - and so I'm becoming nosier and nosier.

Way back when I was at university I heard about the phenomenon of 'Bacon numbers' and found it bizarre that anyone should have spent the time working out how different celebs are connected to people - least of all Kevin Bacon. Beyond the idle curiosity that underpins the 'Six Degrees of Separation', it seemed a piece of trivia that would be looked back on fondly - but have no real use.

But today as I was looking at various profiles on Linked-In, I saw that even Kevin Bacon now has his own profile. And I'm only removed from him by 3 degrees. He's even posted his Hotmail address on the site should I wish to drop him a line.

Suddenly, thanks to the power of the network, I can contact Kevin - or Kev as I now feel I can call him. He's using the same tools that we do to promote ourselves professionally. Social networking is absolutely perfect for him.

Not sure what I'll say to him yet, but it's nice to know he's not far away.

Media v. channels

Geeky subject alert!

I used to be a media planner when I was fresh out of university. I worked out whether people would be more likely to buy the shit we were peddling if we annoyed them on TV, in a magazine, or on the radio - or littering the roadside with big pictures of our stuff.

When I was at DraftFCB I found that they employed channel planners.

Oh, thought I, wonder how that differs?

I was told that channels were things like email, the internet, 'digital channels' that you could make your own rather than advertise on.

But people do advertise on the internet. So does that make it a medium?

And if direct mail is a medium, how come you don't advertise on it - thus making it a channel?

I was also told that digital was 'just another channel', which is now clearly bullshit as it encompasses so many things (digital outdoor media, iPhones, email, SMS, etc.).

And Channel 4 is also, in many ways, a medium - especially if you're an advertiser.

So many people I know now call them 'media channels'. Which I hate. It's imprecise and lazy.

AND now even the 'Media Channel' (see above) just about exists as an industry ranting forum.

I don't have a definitive answer yet, so any thoughts would be welcome.

A better mobile life

A quick look down the list of status updates on Facebook a few moments ago and I noticed that 1 in 3 people had updated themselves via a mobile device.

Sure, if you're a Facebooker then you're probably fairly digi-literate anyway, plus the added skew that many of my chums are slaves to various marketing agencies and so you'd hope they'd be dicking around in their iPhones in any case, but it made me think: 2009 will be the year we go truly mobile.

Every marketing strategy I come up with will, I resolve here and now, factor in to it the fact that more people are looking at stuff while out and about. Static-thinking just won't cut it any more.

What will they want to know? How concise will it need to be? How can we actually be of use to them? How can we build in location-based opportunities? How can we tie it into the multifarious ways that people want to broadcast to the world what they're up to on a minute-by-minute basis? 

How can we think more mobile?