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LBi opens Cannes Lions 2010

Posted by Imogen Thacker June 21st, 2010

On Sunday 20th June, LBi’s Chief Creative Officer, Chris Clarke and Lorenzo Wood, Chief Technology Officer, kicked off the 2010 Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, Seminar programme.

“Newfound Powers: The Privatisation Of Social Engineering”

“Digital” is dying faster than anyone predicted. It’s been absorbed into the world at large as people’s behaviour changes en masse.

And given that most people have jobs to get on with, companies and brands are flooding the new marketplace with ways for people to share information and direct collective action.

This isn’t just tokenism. Research is already revealing how this new pervasiveness amplifies and reinforces prejudices and social divides. And what that means is that brands and their agencies are moving into the unregulated territory of privatised social engineering.

What are brands actually doing in all of this? Do they have a higher responsibility to shape society? This session presents LBi’s manifesto for leadership in the post-digital world.

Watch a brief clip of the seminar here

A post show interview can be also be watched here where Chris and Lorenzo discuss the idea behind their seminar and how they keep up with the fast pace of changing technology.

Laurent Ezekiel, LBi’s, Worldwide Client Services Director, will be chairing a workshop on Thursday 24th June in Cannes at 3pm on “The Quest for the Perfect Storm”. Also on the panel with Laurent, will be well known brands P&G and O2.

Tags: brands, Cannes, Cannes Lions 2010, Chris Clarke, LBi, LBi London, LBi UK, Lorenzo Wood, Social Media, Technology

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iPhone OS 4 — raising the bar again

Posted by Lorenzo Wood April 8th, 2010

Steve Jobs today announced the next generation of iPhone software. In the quality of execution — not just the length of its feature list — it keeps its lead in user experience. Apple would like you to believe that it’s the only game in town. It isn’t, but it does raise the bar again in many areas — increasingly not just in mobile. Advertising, in particular, gets a shot in the arm.

Steve Jobs did his customary keynote to launch the next generation of iPhone software — iPhone OS 4.0 — as a developer preview ahead of its end-user launch in the summer on the iPhone/iPod Touch and in the autumn on the iPad. There is a complete video on Apple’s Web site and, naturally, lots of coverage and analysis elsewhere on the Web (Engadget’s is geekily thorough).

It’s nice to see changes that address LBi’s key criteria for mobile usability:

• Discoverability — the ability for users to discover that something is possible (as distinct from the also important ability to figure out how to do something once you know that you can);
• Interruptibility — the ability to handle interruptions and changes of context with minimum disruption and overhead for the user; and
• Demonstrability— the ability for users to show (off to) others what they can do, in particular with little or no risk of failure and consequent embarrassment.

Discoverability has improved with new ways to make apps available. Allowing enterprises to send apps directly to iPhones they manage and allowing end users to gift apps to others removes barriers to awareness and trial, particularly for those less familiar or confident with buying and installing apps. The Game Center feature that provides some standardised underpinnings for social features in games (many of which are already provided in existing games by the developers themselves) also helps by introducing pop-up invitations.

Demonstrability and interruptibility are both improved by “multitasking”. The lack of multitasking has been high on the list of criticisms of the iPhone by fans of other platforms. In my view, it is also a major reason for the iPhone’s success — it’s so much easier to use that the (mostly slight) trade-off is worth it. The iPad (at launch) kept this simple idea and it certainly doesn’t detract from the seductive properties of the product in practice. As we predicted, therefore, Apple’s “multitasking” is an extension of its careful approach to the problem, the first step towards which was the introduction of push notifications. What iPhone OS 4.0 really offers for the majority of apps is very fast task switching — reducing the time and perceived effort of switching between apps by avoiding the need to go to the home screen first, and by encouraging developers to preserve complete state when not in focus. To this, they add some more specific services on top of push notifications — backgrounding for music (and a happy 13 million Pandora users); backgrounding for VoIP (happy Skype; less happy operators); location notifications. These changes allow multitasking while retaining good battery management and good foreground performance. They also keep extra load on the user to a minimum, so it looks to me like Steve’s claim that Apple has “nailed it” is pretty fair.

Interruptibility is also improved by the most important feature, iAds — Apple’s own in-app advertising mechanism. Mobile advertising isn’t new; nor is Steve’s claim that (on the iPhone, at least) that “search isn’t where it’s at… apps [are]”. What is new is the quality of the experience, which is arguably the best advertising experience on any device, mobile or not. Consider:

• If I touch an ad, I’m instantly immersed in it but my current state is visibly preserved. The whole app I was in slides quickly off the screen and the ad takes it over. Alarming? Not when you’ve experienced it a couple of times, because it’s consistent and robust and you’ll quickly gain confidence that it’s not going to disrupt what you’re doing.
• Dismissing an ad is trivial and instant. All I do is touch the top left corner and it’s gone — no hunting for a close box. Again, builds confidence to try ads. (1)
• Ads are rich — with full-screen video — and interactive. Built in HTML5, ads can include plenty of basic functionality — the demo included a simple game and a feature that exploited the accelerometer. And if ads have “taster” functionality built in…
• Ads can leave rich functionality on the device for later. This is a brilliant way to address interruptibility. I may spend a little time engaging with an ad, but sooner or later I’ll want to get back to what I was doing. By exploiting the new mechanism for delivering apps directly, ads can allow me painlessly and without interruption to leave an app on my device — all ready for me to use later on.

If you haven’t got a spare hour to watch the whole keynote, jump forward 44 minutes and watch for about 10.

A rising tide floats all boats — and drowns everyone who doesn’t have a boat

When the iPhone was launched, we said that it raised the bar for mobile user experience. This has been borne out by its success and by the way it has driven the mobile market as a whole (2). The new iPhone OS, and particularly iAds, push the bar up higher. This time though, the iPad has revealed Apple’s ambition to displace the 1970s interfaces of today’s Macs and PCs, so benchmarks are being set for experience on all digital channels.

In his keynote, Steve painted a picture of Apple dominance. He casually chose a “pretty good proxy” for market share in the form of mobile Web usage — where the iPhone dominates. This is a testament to the quality of the experience rather than evidence of penetration in most brands’ customer bases. For all the size of the opportunity in the Apple universe — which has grown bigger and more quickly than most expected — Apple is not the only game in town. Everyone is running to catch up. Handset makers, PC makers and operators all have multitouch and “apps” and some sort of “app store”. Microsoft and Google are pushing their own visions hard (look out for Microsoft’s announcement this Monday). (3)

How these experiences will be delivered to end users and who will be responsible is not clear. That they will come is a certainty, and today the iPad and iPhone OS 4.0 are the most tangible prototypes of what that future will be.

Notes:

(1) It wasn’t clear whether this feature is part of the iAd platform or whether the mocked-up ads shown in the demo are simply done this way by convention. If it’s the latter, it will serve Apple well to enforce the convention.

(2) People with every kind of phone are increasingly using the language of “apps”. Apps have effectively become the dominant concept for describing functionality on a mobile device, not least because the the computer-centric “site” has been so unimpressive for those that have tried it. We have seen expectations of the (largely not iPhone-owning) public for their mobile phones rise, particularly since Apple began its “there’s an app for that” TV campaign. For most people today, the way available to them to explore those possibilities is the mobile Web, which is why we see traffic to Web sites we monitor from all kinds of mobile devices is on the rise and why we say that 2010 is the year that many people will get their first impressions of brands on the mobile Web. Apps as experiences are here to stay, regardless of the technology used to deliver them — users don’t care.

(3) There is even an Android-powered television.

Tags: advertising, apple, ipad, iPhone, iphoneos, Lorenzo Wood, mobile, touch

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Say “hello” to the Third Device

Posted by Lorenzo Wood January 28th, 2010

Apple claims its iPad, launched yesterday, is a “third category of device.” Is its confidence justified?

I’d say it is. Particularly at home, there has been a jostling for position for the Third Device to connect you to the Internet — the device that isn’t a laptop (big, complicated, often shared) or a phone (private, intimate, tiny). Games consoles, networked music and video players, digital photo frames, and even purpose-designed devices like the Chumby and Joggler all let you connect. Up to now, none has been inspiring enough to create widespread desire.

Apple has form here: there were MP3 players before the iPod, but the iPod is what people remember because of the design, the marketing and the ecosystem of services around it. Likewise, there were many phones that could access the Internet, but the iPhone raised public expectations: first to access the “real” Internet on a phone (although sites that work best from an iPhone are optimised for it); and then, a bit later, introducing the idea of apps.

Nokia has clearly decided that lack of multi-tasking is the iPhone's weak spot.

It worked because of the shrewd combination of beauty, fun and constraints. Fans of other mobile phone operating systems point to the iPhone’s lack of multitasking (now available if you really want it). Yet the single-tasking approach — click an icon to start something, use it, then press the one physical button to get back home — is a major contributor to the success of the iPhone. It reduces demands on you, so you feel more at ease, and you don’t begrudge the time you might save with multitasking because it’s so attractive and fun to use.

The iPad looks set to do the same again, fixing in the public’s mind its expectations for this Third Device and creating a lust for one. And other manufacturers will pile in behind it. There is already hardware in the market that, while not as nice, is comparable. The Lenovo IdeaPad S10-3t is a netbook (or “netvertible”) with a capacitive touch screen that can be flipped over into tablet mode, but which also sports things missing from the iPad like a camera, big storage and USB ports. Something more like the iPad is entirely within the grasp of Lenovo, HTC, Sony, Samsung, LG and many others.

Moreover, the combination of price point and Apple’s choice of capabilities pitches the iPad in such a way that it competes for attention largely in areas that are not yet “proper” digital channels. The video support (which really is like having “an HDTV inches from your face”) means that even in a room with a TV in it you might plausibly curl up on the sofa and watch TV on your iPad, particularly when there are interactive benefits to doing so. And the iBook reader, with its eye-candy animations, is both a poke in the eye for the current generation of e-ink readers like the Kindle with their slow, mono displays (although this won’t be true for long) and a way of making reading on a device instead of paper even more widely accepted. So, the iPad is pitched to turn attention that you now give to television or to physical reading (particularly newspapers and magazines) into a digital channel.

For now, marketers need to consider:

• Production issues. The iPad (and, soon, its clones) creates another format for using the Web. Although the size of its screen means Web sites will generally work fine, learn from the iPhone experience and make sure that your site doesn’t have anything obviously confusing or limiting on the iPad (in particular, be very careful to deal with the lack of Flash support).
• New contexts of use. Because the iPad and its ilk will be used in different places (a crude example: many more iPad-type devices will be taken into toilets than are laptops today) users will be in different frames of mind. This presents many opportunities to engage people in different ways.
• Opportunities for apps. The iPhone has the lion’s share of the app market, and if people are going to develop just for one platform it’s probably going to be the iPhone. The iPad market will be tougher, not least because other iPad devices will certainly run Windows and Linux — which makes Adobe Air (absent from the iPad, of course) a highly credible alternative platform for competing apps.

Goodbye to windows (with a small “w”)

Taking a longer view, the iPad is a step on a (welcome) path that will finally change — over the next five or ten years — what we think of as a “computer”.

The way we use our laptops today — with windows, a mouse or similar pointing device, files and folders — was first popularised by Apple with the original Macintosh in 1984 and invented in the 1970s. That it has survived largely unchanged ever since is testament both to its flexibility and to its success: the world-wide explosion of computer use in the late 1990s means that when the average person in the world thinks of a “computer” she’s thinking of a PC running Windows 95 or 98. The latest incarnations of Windows 7 and MacOS Snow Leopard are still just tinkering with this basic model. It’s stuck because it’s familiar.

The iPhone was really a new kind of computer disguised as an iPod (for those who like iPods) and as a phone (for those who use phones). At launch (without the App Store, remember) it was easily a killer in both categories — and although it’s still not brilliant as just a phone, the combination of its capabilities makes it powerful, fun and an object of desire.

The App Store was introduced with the idea of you adding features to your phone or iPod touch. Early apps were simple, but there are now some amazingly powerful apps that work very well in spite of the limited power and tiny screen. And they all fit into this really simple framework: buy from App Store; one icon to launch; one physical button to quit. No files, installers, uninstallers or other nasties.

The App Store wasn’t possible without the iPhone, itself built on the success of the iPod and the popularity of mobile phones in general. The iPad would not have been viable without the iPhone and the App Store. To me, the single biggest signpost is the availability of iWork — Keynote, Pages and Words — on the iPad. What, now, is left for which you need your “traditional” laptop?

The progression seems straightforward. Just as people have become used to apps on their iPhones they will become used to more and more powerful apps on their iPads — and then iPads will become a bit bigger and a bit faster. And then they’ll be much bigger (ie, TVs). And they might come with a keyboard accessory (already a feature of the iPad Keyboard Dock) or in a clamshell form with two displays, one of which is frequently a keyboard.

In any case, the paradigm of the iPhone OS — the way apps are delivered, single tasking (or, at least, single task attention), the lack of users needing to do window management and the lack of a “separate” file system — may finally be what replaces the 40-year-old system we use today.

What a welcome change that will be. And, in case you needed one, another good reason to pay serious attention to these devices now.

Tags: apple, ipad, iPhone, Lorenzo Wood, mobile, new devices

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LBi opens Cannes

Posted by Laura JB March 27th, 2009

LBi’s Chief Creative Chris Clarke will kick off the Cannes Lions International Festival Seminar programme this year. ‘The Death of the Creative Director’ is scheduled for 10am on Sunday 21st June in the Debussy Theatre in Cannes. He will be speaking about how social marketing changes the creative skill set, and kills old notions of the role of Creative Director.

Clarke feels that marketing has changed forever.

It has moved from locally focused broadcast to global conversations, bringing with a need for more complex multilayered forms of marketing. When shouting is replaced with listening, the old egos don’t seem to make sense anymore. The consumer has taken control and now agencies must reach those consumers through their networks with clever tools, content and services which make a difference and improve people’s lives. Doing this effectively calls for collaboration, open-mindedness and a feel for technology. The traditional Creative Director is ill at ease in this new environment and we see many of them retreating into a deeply conservative mindset and a position of denial.

In his speech, Chris will explore some of these issues hoping to goad the industry into a more meaningful response to the new realities of marketing than we currently see in the advertising industry.

LBi is also proud to announce that Jonas Linell from LBi Denmark is on the Cyber Lions jury and that Laura Jordan-Bambach from LBi UK will be speaking at 10am on Thursday 25th at the Creative Social event.

Tags: Cannes, Chris Clarke, Creative Director, event, LBi Group, Lorenzo Wood, UK

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