The rise of Snapchat...and the decline of civilization

I remember reading an article back in 2008 about how Facebook, which at the time boasted around 100 million active users, was just a passing fad. Once the cool kids realized that everyone, including their own decidedly uncool parents, had signed up to Mark Zuckerberg’s creation, then they would soon cancel their accounts and go looking for their social media kicks elsewhere. In theory, this would happen in much the same way as when some hipper-than-thou teen turns their back on an obscure indie band for having the temerity to start selling records.

But for several years after I came across that dismissive article, Facebook continued on its meteoric rise, and garnered many more millions of users worldwide. It seemed the prediction that the cool kids—or Millennials, as they’re labeled in marketing and sociology circles—would desert Facebook in droves just didn’t hold much water. But then about a year ago, SnapChat appeared on the scene and quickly began stealing away Facebook users.

Snapchat is essentially a social network where users send video and photo messages which quickly disappear after they’re viewed. The concept seems absurd at first. But when you consider that many more images are now uploaded daily to the network than its rival Facebook, and that multi-billion dollar offers to buy the company have been batted away by its ridiculously young founders, then you have to start believing that Snapchat has real appeal.

It’s important to note this appeal lies mostly amongst 13 to 24 year-olds. Though claims of a growth in the 40+ year-old demographic probably alludes to the marketing and social media professionals who want to see what all the fuss is about. There are no official figures on members, but with Facebook reportedly shedding tens of millions of members each month, particularly in the same demographic and mostly in the United States and Europe, it’s not hard to guess where they’re going.

There are two main reasons for this trend.  When nearly everyone can see what you post, and it sits there forever exposed to the world, the chances are you’re being ridiculed by other kids not in your “offline” clique. Not to mention being monitored by your parents who have been on Facebook for three years along with your teachers, strangers, and even perverts who can see a lot more than you think due to Facebook’s complex privacy settings.

Facebook’s founder famously claimed in 2010 that privacy was dead. It seems the tide is turning on him, and the notion that people would willingly give up their private information. Even amongst older demographics, Facebook fatigue seems to be setting in, but still we keep our accounts as we become addicted to the cringe, shock, and simple nosiness that Facebook facilitates. Well, the cool kids are now saying hasta lavista, baby to Facebook, or whatever Millenials say these days.

The other reason for the rise of Snapchat could be related to a generational shift in values. Generation X and Baby boomers placed more value on material things that lasted, commemorated, and could ultimately be bequeathed to the next generation. Think silverware, fine china, properties, mink coats, and masses of photo albums. Today, relative to 20, 30 or 60 years ago, property ownership and the notion of a “job for life” are beyond the reach or imagination of most Millennials in the developed world. As “Selfie” was declared the word of 2013, narcissism and hedonism seem to be the primary values of many. A complete cynicism, and rightly so, towards politicians, corporations, and virtually all institutions has created a “lost” generation of self obsessed techies with the attention span of a gold fish. Global mass consumerism has meant that things and objects lose their value and simply become tools to experience life with, which may not be a bad thing in the long run, but it certainly shakes up some of the previous generations’ value systems.

The ephemeral nature of Snapchat reflects the younger generation’s disillusionment with the crumbling dream that my and the previous generation built and destroyed through greed and self interest. Of course every generation says that about the next, but no generation ever had anything akin to Snapchat

(First appeared in Venture magazine -January 2014) 

Are you really ready for 2014?

Six things you need to have in your 2014 plans

Its December and most marketing folks will have polished off their 2014 plans, earmarked budgets and are about to take a few well-earned days off before their untaken leave allowance expires. But before you head off, and for those who are still thinking about 2014, here are six things you really need to have in your plans in some shape or form. Even if you are not fully executing them next year, these are the six main areas of marketing that are becoming increasingly important and specialized and any self respecting marketer or agency needs to get clued up on and be developing them for their brands.

Mobile: If you haven’t noticed, a paradigm shift has already happened; mobile and tablets have overtaken PC computers in sales and usage, to the point where a recent report in the US highlighted the decline in laptop thefts as they are deemed unworthy items to steal compared to smartphones and tablets. Mobile search is predicted to overtake desktop queries by 2015 in the US, while it may happen even sooner in Jordan with over 50% of all handsets being smart phones and a relatively higher % of mobile users who do not have a desktop.

As smartphones become more ubiquitous and powerful, the expectations are for brands to have a strong mobile optimized presence and provide follow up actions to take customers further on their journey, be it for sharing, comparing, requesting, booking, app downloading or the ever-closer-to-reality, mobile payment. Beyond optimizing your site for mobile, you need to optimize the entire brand experience for those who are seeking content and actions through their mobiles.

Measurable and effective Social Media: Likes, shares, engagements, ‘talking abouts” are all lovely but frankly useless unless you are able to quantify the effect on your bottom line and track users to see how engagements effect your customer journey. Needless to say it’s a lot easier said than done, but that brings us to the glue that binds everything in this article: Data.

Data: The challenge remains how to assemble the vast amounts of data that is fragmented and difficult to reassemble, but with so many free and accessible tools (like Google analytics, Facebook Conversation measurements) and through adopting tracking analytics with enterprise tools like SalesForce Buddy Media and Adobe Social, one can begin to calculate ROI and message awareness on social and digital initiatives. The more touchpoints created to facilitate the customer journey, the more data is exchanged. The more these touchpoints are interconnected (think mobile), the more measurable, segmentable and ultimately more actionable the engagements become. That being said, you’ll also need to develop content that your customer will value throughout the journey.

Content: To develop great content you ironically need data, or at least enough understanding of your audience and customers. The purpose of content is primarily to give relevant value and resonate with the right people, but also to help raise your search result rankings and relevance, which brings us to SEO.

Search Engine Optimization: If you don’t address the above areas, you can’t possibly be doing any meaningful SEO, and it isn’t something you do once or twice a year as it’s a perpetual initiative that runs along everything else you do online.  Each year Google changes its search algorithms 500-600 times, some minor, some major, but that basically means a daily vigilance is needed to optimize your content and its format.

The whole brand experience: Ultimately the above are vital components of a marketing plan that considers the entire customer journey and the overall brand experience. Marketers and agencies need to remove themselves from the trap of thinking within disciplines (digital, PR, sales, ATL, BTL etc..) and design the customer’s experience from the users perspective. Digital is just as important as every other element in the brand experience, but digital is where the engagements can become more meaningful, personal and action oriented and gives marketers a better deal of control and measurability.

So if you’ve included all that in your plans, enjoy your holidays, otherwise happy planning. 

(First appeared in Venture Magazine December 2013)

Insidious Choice

We love to have choice. Choice is at the very heart of freedom and without it we could hardly claim to have any autonomy. Without choice we wouldn’t have capitalism, religion, the need for law, not to mention thousands of ice cream flavours. It is a supposition that the more choices one has the better, and indeed having choice is essential to our sense of well-being and today we have more of it than ever and yet it seems we do not benefit from it psychologically. In fact we seem to suffer from having too much of it.

I frequently find myself frustrated by having to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to choose a toothbrush or toothpaste thinking why can’t each brand simply make me the best product they can instead of offering me multiple variations of features and 4 in 1 benefits all the way upto 12 in 1! Why would I forgo tartar control at the expense of whiter teeth when I can have it all? Its more than simply buyers remorse; it’s a sense of frustration that I have to needlessly choose because of some long-tail marketing strategy.

But you can have too much of a good thing. Studies have shown that though more personal choice is desired and more intrinsically motivational, that wrongly supposes we have an innate ability to manage more choice or feel any satisfaction as a result of making a choice. In a series of studies conducted at Colombia and Stanford measuring response and satisfaction to having extensive vs limited options in class essay topics, ice-cream varieties and jam sampling booths, each concluded somewhat counter intuitively that less choice results in more satisfaction and ultimately more purchases.

The studies concluded that though people were happy with having more choice they become frustrated with the responsibility of making the right choice and invariably less satisfied with the ones they make compared to those who had fewer choices. The phenomenon of choice overload has neurological, sociological and even existential root causes. Also called the “tyranny of choice” in the 2000 Barry Schwartz book “Paradox of Choice”, it plays a part in every aspect of our lives from potato chip flavours to the spouses we choose.

Some brands have used limiting choice to great affect. Apple laptops today come as one great laptop with three variations of size, they don’t even have colour options! But instead of “choice”, you have any even more powerful “ultra-choice”; customization within the ios platform and great selection of apps. Telcos could do wonders for their brands if they adopted a mass customization approach to their marketing rather than compartmentalizing different divisions and appearing to give me choice. Imagine if your data plan was managed across all services (Smart phone, DSL and wifi) and telephony rates suited to your actual usage rather than presumed usage. Even if that meant marginally less returns in the short run for the telco, customer satisfaction, retention and brand loyalty would more than compensate in the long run. It would also help the telcos better manage relationships with their customers and lead to more “share of life” and ultimately more profit.

The future of “choice” in the marketing world, for both brands and consumers, is in harnessing Big Data to serve new purposes and offer innovative value. Brands offering choice through customization that’s truly personalized and consumers outsource decision making to hyper algorithms tapping into meta data of reviews and usage stats. We already outsource much of our decision making to google and as our personal data enters the mainframe we effectively make decisions for others through our actions and opinions.

It’s a fascinating area of consumer behavior that touches upon the illusion of free will and very topically with the Snowden NSA scandal, on privacy and anonymity. How much of what we choose is with our own free will, and how do our choices unwittingly define who we are? With Big Data growing we may find ourselves free of the scourge of choice, but at the mercy of Big Brother.

“There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choice, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that choices, however wonderful, has entailed”

-Alain de Botton, on love.

(First appeared in Venture Magazine- November 2013)

The ad-man's existential angst

For an industry that has witnessed the incredible evolution of media over the past 60 years, as well as the revolution of consumers over the past ten, the structure of the advertising agency has changed very little since the 1950s. At its core the agency has retained the ownership of big ideas and storytelling, but as the marketing and communications industry fragmented into disciplined specializations like PR, branding, social media, digital, direct, mobile, activation and even further into vertical specializations within specific industries, the agency has struggled to retain control of budgets and brand narratives.

Agencies like to see themselves as generalists who retain guardianship of brands and whose primary role is to generate ideas that can then be adapted and infused into a consistent narrative for all the specialists to run with. And while specialists sometimes can’t see the forest from the trees, the generalists are being undermined by the pervasiveness of ideas and innovation that specialists and even consumers are generating. Also the primary objective of advertising, which is to create awareness, is no longer a priority for brands as the most important metrics are geared towards action and measurable lead generations, conversions, sales and long term return on investment.

While consumer reviews and opinions along with a brand’s digital presence and optimized content in organic search is a more powerful tool for raising awareness, agencies have shifted their focus towards project management of all the different specializations. Agencies are sifting through data to evaluate and optimize all initiatives to desperately retain control and influence over all the touch points.

Furthermore, the focus away from acquisition of consumers to retention has made the traditional role of agencies somewhat redundant. As consumers look to other consumers for credible opinions about brands, their services and products, agencies spend increasingly more time creating content and value added experiences that will positively influence the consumer and in turn create better reviews and testimonials as well as a tangible online presence.

Another ongoing battle agencies face is the shift from traditional paid media to the “owned” media that’s becoming increasingly important and specialized, particularly in digital form. Rather than compete for share of voice, brands are dedicating more of their budgets to becoming the one and only voice in a medium that they own and control. When agencies and brands adopt this strategy, the need for even more specialists becomes a further tax on the traditional role of an agency.

And herein lies one of the biggest existential struggles facing agencies: being “digitally capable,” where taking traditional assets of an agency online tends to produce watered down ideas that attempt to engage with audiences who frankly have no interest or time and are experiencing engagement fatigue. Some agencies are very good at overcoming this problem by truly being media neutral and generating consumer centric work that aims to enhance the experience of a brand, while the majority of work tends to be adaptations of above the line campaigns.

As communication becomes more and more direct between brands and consumers, seen clearly across social media, clients are becoming more involved in the actual dialogue, all while agencies keep adding specialists’ offerings to keep up and retain a slice of the ever shrinking marketing budget pie. There comes a point where only giant multinational advertising networks are able to offer truly integrated comprehensive marketing and communication services. But despite their best intentions, there’s a risk of creating uninspiring work that’s not as effective because networks look at disciplines as separate profit and loss entities, rather than a seamless brand narrative and experience that resonates with the consumer at every touch point, every time.

Though the advertising agency is not dead, it’s certainly evolving. Even if many consumers and pundits foresee the death of the advertising agency in the next ten years, and despite mysteriously not changing the internal structure since the 1950s, the industry will continually evolve and adapt to ensure its survival.

(First appeared in Venture Magazine Oct 2013)

Municipal Erectioneering

In the run up to last month’s municipal elections, an intriguing video appeared online featuring a young man who claimed to be running for mayor of Amman. The six-minute video, which was made by Amman101.com, a new group that aims to promote civic-mindedness amongst Ammanis, shows how the hypothetical candidate would go about solving the major issues facing the city using practical and common sense solutions. Both the video and the website had high production values and, more importantly, a clear and comprehensive manifesto. Tragically, this fantasy campaign put to shame its real-world counterparts.

Like all election campaigns in Jordan, candidates use posters as the main tool of communicating with voters. Granted, some municipal election candidates set up election tents at random spots around the city to get their message across. But the one I visited was more akin to an azz’a (funeral) than a political soapbox, with no candidate or information booth that I could see. I promptly left.

As I observed the poster frenzy gradually reach a lethal road-sign-blocking crescendo as the August 27 election day approached, I failed to find any candidate presenting a credible set of reasons for me to vote for them. Their slogans were almost meaningless and vaguely political, which should be completely irrelevant for the purely civil positions they were seeking to fill. There were few, if any, tangible campaign promises, nor a website or Facebook page to provide more detailed information.

I was particularly confused as to why some candidates proudly announced their tribe had nominated them to run. Unless their fellow tribesmen represented more than 51 percent of all the voters living in their district, it hardly makes much strategic sense to play the tribal card because you will likely alienate everyone else who isn’t a member. Moreover, this is about municipal affairs, so a candidate’s message should be an inclusive one directed at all the residents of a particular district.

Even though the Ministry of Municipal Affairs imposed strict guidelines on where campaign material can be placed, there were still some rogue candidates, or at least their hired hands, that slapped stickers and posters on road signs, inconsiderately obstructing intersections. Of course this begged the question as to how much the candidate really cared about the welfare of the electorate.

But for me the most frustrating aspect of these district council elections was how candidates so readily squandered opportunities to get the attention of voters. Candidates are concentrating on a defined geographic area with direct access to each of its residents. Door drops, car window pamphleting, and giveaways aside, a candidate can actively engage the community in a positively disruptive way and demonstrate first hand what they stand for. If they want to address a garbage problem in a given neighborhood, then perhaps they could hire a private cleaning company one particular week to clean up the streets in a section of a district to the level they aim to have when you are in office. Or maybe they could commission artists to paint existing bins on every corner and get residents more active in refuse management, as the problem most neighborhoods face is as much about the frequency and standards of the rubbish collection as the residents themselves, not to mention the “recyclers” in pick-up trucks who rummage through the bins and leave a mess behind.

Each district has its own unique set of problems and it would be wise for a candidate to go around talking to people in the streets and even knocking on their front doors just to hear the pressing issues and get their name out there. Then there’s the dialogue and engagement that can be had on social media. On a similar note, some candidates put their mobile numbers on their posters. But when I called one, it was engaged. After a few more attempts, it just rang out and eventually became out of reach.

Clearly we as a nation are capable of a higher standard of electioneering, as demonstrated by amman101.com. But somehow when it comes to the real thing, we fail to deliver. Money is clearly being spent by the candidates, but in all the wrong areas. Anything that engages the community directly is bound to get a dialogue going and demonstrate there’s a genuine interest in improving their lives. At the end of the day, these elections were meant to increase the participation of citizens in the running of their affairs, but frankly I’m surprised if anyone voted since the candidates themselves have demonstrated so little interest in engagement, let alone telling me what they plan to do.

Wisam Suheimat

(First appeared in Venture Magazine - Jordan, Sept 2013)

Ramadan Brand Experience

Like Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving in the West where commercial interests have long played a big role in defining the occasion and reinforcing only certain aspects of their core meaning and, ultimately evolving the experience of the very occasion, Ramadan is now being subjected to similar branding forces.

Not so long ago Ramadan ads followed a simple formula: “Ramadan Kareem” headline, product shot, twilight backdrop, crescent moon, lantern, a bowl of dates and variations on that theme. Though you still see that today, many brands have taken it a step further and began positioning Ramadan in the context of the product with the statement “bringing us together”, usually centered around food, late night snacking, gatherings and watching TV shows. It’s also true that compared to some 20 odd years ago, when a lavish iftar buffet at Amra Hotel would set you back JD5, people were less social beyond their family and had far fewer options for evening social activities, while today Ramadan has become very much a social affair.

If someone with no knowledge of Ramadan were to reverse engineer commercialized Ramadan ads along with the overall experience of being in Amman during the month, they would be forgiven for concluding the positioning statement as being: “Evening gatherings of mass gluttony with a bit of charity to balance it all out,” as opposed to the essence of the Holy month: patience, empathy and a spiritual connectedness to God.

Ramadan’s core focus is in essence about how you feel and behave before breaking the fast, while almost every aspect of the “brand experience” is about what you do during and after the breakfast. Now there’s nothing wrong with that, but it seems to reinforce the mere technical requirements of fasting, i.e. not drinking, smoking or eating during daylight, because there is little evidence of patience, empathy or any form of spirituality when driving around Amman or engaging in pretty much anything during the day time.

Though Salafists may nod their heads in agreement about the blatant commercialization of Ramadan, my take on the matter is in fact very different to theirs. I spent the first ten days of this year’s Ramadan in Beirut. Even though the opening hours of shops, restaurants, and work places remained largely unchanged, there was still a sense of Ramadan infusing the rhythm of everyday life. This sits in stark contrast to the dry, didactic way Ramadan sometimes seems to be enforced in other parts of the Muslim world which includes jailing non fasters and using the holy month to sanction less productivity, bad manners, and little patience. Reading about a man in Zarqa who was badly beaten by a mob when he tried to sneak a daytime cigarette in public, which is admittedly really bad manners in Ramadan, makes one question people’s understanding of the holy month. Perhaps brands have a part to play in reminding people what Ramadan is really about.

Brands seem to miss a great deal of opportunities to resonate with their audiences while fasting by reinforcing the core purpose of Ramadan. Rather than “Buy one chicken, get a bag of rice” promos, how about “Buy half a chicken and we’ll send the other half to a family in need” or instead of “try all ten varieties of X” how about “experience a day in the life of a Zaatari refugee during Ramadan with our replica tent.” Okay, that last example was extreme, but my point is being relevant while someone is fasting, is bound to be more powerful and ultimately effective than trying to squeeze into the iftar and suhoor table, or encouraging spending more time at a mall; if anything, Ramadan is about reducing consumption of everything…even after iftar.

Ultimately brands and people seem to miss the point of Ramadan and fasting, but digging through some Hadith on the topic, it seems this has been the case for a while since according to Abu Huraira, the Prophet (Peace be upon him) said: Many people who fast get nothing from their fast except hunger and thirst. (Darimi).

(First appeared in Venture Magazine July 2013)

Lost in Transliteration. The Perils of Arabization.

Arabic is a rich and sophisticated language that can evoke vivid imagery and powerful emotions in the reader, but Arabized ads and collateral material like brochures that were originally conceived and created in a different language, typically English for multinational clients, tend to struggle at replicating the same impact, meaning and personality. There are culturally irrelevant reference points, topics, styles and all manner of reasons why pure Arabization is simply a bad practice, but there is an inherent challenge in the Arabic language, particularly when it comes to written copy.

Copywriting for ads in English is often described as “salesmanship in print” where the copy, or at least the good ones are written to sound, in the readers mind, like a person talking to you in real life. Beside persuasiveness and using words and reference points that resonate with the reader, the copy crafts the voice and tone of a brand to give it a human quality.

In the case of Arabic there are unique challenges with the duality of the language; a written (Modern Standard Arabic) and a spoken language.  Though headlines and snappy slogans have more creative license, the body copy and any sentence or paragraph must adhere to Modern Standard Arabic, which is never spoken except in newscasts, official speeches and in courts. And here lies the biggest challenge of writing copy in Arabic that is going to sound as convincing as someone talking to you colloquially and embodying a personality and tone that brings a brand to life.

Humour illustrates the problem quite nicely as most if not all spoken jokes are said in colloquial and any attempts to write them down in Standard Arabic will inevitably result in something being “lost in translation”. This creates additional stress on the Arabic copywriter as humour is one of the more effective advertising strategies.

Though Arabic copywriters do have unique opportunities in using Classical Arabic and beautiful poetry in ads as reference points that other languages would struggle to effectively use (think Chaucer for English), it doesn’t help in creating the brand personality through “Arabization” because if you knew someone who went around ONLY speaking in Classical Arabic you’d think they were a bit odd.

Hebrew had a similar duality over a century ago where an ancient written Hebrew co-existed with a spoken Hebrew with wide variations all over the world that was influenced by many other languages, like in the case of Yiddish in Germany. But the Zionists knew that to form a future state where different Jews could live, work and prosper they would need to modernize and unify the language and so over the course of two to three generations created modern Hebrew; a written and spoken language. There have been many attempts to formalize a colloquial written Arabic with limited success as well as outright hostility to the idea. The most obvious problem is regional dialects and vernacular making it impossible to agree on a standard spoken Arabic. The other obstacle is the sacredness of classical Arabic and the need to preserve its teaching and usage. Brands using Social Media to communicate seem to have broken away from the rigid limitations of printed communication where colloquial is written more frequently to fit in with the lingua franca of the medium.

But I digress. Arabization of foreign concepts is still happening at an alarming rate, particularly in the gulf where a large percentage of foreign Creative heads at ad agencies are simply handing off English concepts to be Arabized. Egypt is the one creative market that has broken free of the Arabization trap and that is in part due to the strong colloquial linguistic identity that exists there, which also happens to be the only form of spoken Arabic that all Arabs can understand and relate to, along with Lebanese but to a lesser extent.  

Great tv, viral and radio ads all over the region are increasingly being conceived in Arabic for multinational clients. Authenticity is key to powerful communications and new creative strategies are coming out of the region that leverage the uniqueness and diversity of the Arabic language away from the rigidity of Modern Standard Arabic in print, and that is perhaps why one rarely finds a lot of body copy in print ads, and when you do, it might just read like a badly Arabized ad.