Picnic06: trends & videos

Day two of Picnic06/Crossmediaweek in Amsterdam.

I've been reading Reinier Evers' Trendwatching briefings (free monthly newsletters) for a couple of years now, and he is as a speaker the way he is as a trend analyst: fast, witty, insightful and a bit overwhelming at times. Trendwatching has a network of 9000 people around the world sending in bits and info and pictures. They don't get paid: if the ideas are picked up in the newsletter, they get points that they can then redeem. Rainier starts by showing three idea spotted recently and asking what trends these companies are capitalizing on:

• HappyShrimp is farming tropical shrimp in the harbor of Rotterdam, using the excess hot water from a plant and selling them to restaurants. This is riding several trends: taste for fresh products (fresh tropical shrimp in Rotterdam?), for local products (that don't need to be shipped around the world - less environmental impact).
• TribeWanted is a British group that bought an island on Fiji, signing up people to become a tribe - paying members get to live periods in the island and build it together (mix of holidays and connecting with people). Parts of the island are under camera lenses, and Internet users can see what happens there (the reality-TV trend).
• Igglo has taken pictures of every home in Helsinki. If they're for sale, you can buy them; if they're not, you can still annotate the site saying that you're interested in buying/renting them, and can even make a bid. Dangers: pressure on market prices. Trend: transparency, and pushing the real estate market towards demand-driven rather than supply-driven. (Suggestion: think about extending this model to cars - or to dating?)

What is a trend actually? "A manifestation of something that has been 'unlocked' or newly services an existing consumer needs, desire, want, value". No trend is general: "nothing is applicable to all consumers: holidays for some people are great, for others are hell". But trends are important: not only they can dictate behavior - and they can be fun. They are also a way to get inspired, they are starting point to innovate.
And then he started an excursion through trends: "Who feels that the current consumption arena is going to continue the way it is now for the next 10-15 years". The audience whispers yes. "But are we having fun in the current consumer arena? Do we have enough stuff?" (US families have more TVs than people; AnyJunk gets rid for a fee of the excess stuff you have; self-storage is becoming a global trend). We are looking at a mature, experienced, critical consumer; everything is getting transparent (prices, reviews, unhappy employees like this Starbucks barista, opinionated consumers like those who dislike the Hummer2, etc)
You can excite people if you do something remarkable, create an memorable experience (dining in the sky in Belgium - picture right) but: is NikeTown the future of storytelling, of experience, or is it the past? Is vanity still a consumption engine? (Yes, from Jessica Simpson's "her song, your name" - your name inserted into the lyrics of her song - to personalized luggage tags at KLM). Status. We will see continuous flaunting of wealth. But we will also see increasingly a ceiling on luxury. There is status dispair: if you're rich it is becoming increasingly difficult to stand out. So you get rental designer bags, books sold in installments so you're the first one to read it and no one knows the story before you do, exclusive clubs or private invitation-only networks, The obsession with real estate is one of the few areas where if you're rich you can still purchase things that are really not available to others (that's why Curbed talks without blushing of "floor plan porn").
Is there a global culture? "We don't think so". Is there a global consumer culture? "Yes" (which he examplifies with Hooters in China). And there is a global brain.
What's happening online? "Online is becoming like oxygen. If your access is cut off, you can't connect to people anymore, you can't work". "Web surfing at work: as crucial as coffee", writes a magazine. Chase bank is sponsoring power outlets in airports in the US with the slogan "You and your laptop may sigh with relief now". Context is the content - other people. Too many people? Is MySpace getting too popular? Focused social networks may be the next thing, from business (KLM Club China: frequent travelers to China sharing tips experiences etc) to sneaker addicts and illicit encounters (a site that connects married people for sex - with someone who's not their spouse). 
The newest gadgets are all about chat and community. The younger generation is obsessed with knowing where their closest friends are at any time. And are carrying devices that have created another trend: docking (iPodMyCar; in some Hilton hotels the alarm clocks have a plug for the iPod so that you can listen to your music on their loudspeakers; "Fuel for travel" at Schiphol airport where you can plug in your laptop; etc). Next: wi-fi city wireless networks and cell phones. Online oxygen will be everywhere (see the recent news from Singapore and Moscow)
What about participation? People are becoming more participant. Content generation (YouTube, lulu.com, blogs) that translates sometimes into value creation (money). Increasingly, consumers who create good stuff will want to get paid. But we're not there yet. In a participation economy things are not only about money - people will keep doing things as a hobby, for status or recognition (see Wikipedia, Instructables). How are most brands dealing with this? When we have discussions about the future of marketing, it is not about placement of advertising on the cheek of a giraffe or printed on an egg or on other impossible surfaces and interstices of life. Everything is pointing towards working with the consumers. Why would they work with you? Maybe they can make money, maybe they like the fame/status, maybe they just want to tell you what you should improve so that they get better products. The magazine Business2.0 put it this way: in the list of the 50 people that matter now in the economy, the first name reads "you". Lots is going on in co-creation (GM/Chevy asking students to design a commercial, with the winning one be shown in the Superbowl - pretty cool motivation), in design (Peugeot design contest; Lego Factory), in product development (Innovate with Kraft - but read the fine print). People are doing this also without being asked. (iTalk apple cell phone video).
Unofficial sites showing real brands how they should improve their gadgets or their services. (an Apple Computers cell phone? Hotel reviews).
"The conservation has started, but often it is still among consumers - most brands are not yet really engaging".
Reinier ended with an unusual note - putting up names and URLs of his trendspotting competitors such as Trendcentral, PSFK, InfluxInsights and others. He's more interested in trendwatching than Trendwatching. Applause.

Wouter Van de Bunt, a consultant with KPMG, presented the results of a recent survey on convergence (in his definition, that's the Internet going mobile). Key findings: digitized consumers want multiple services over a single device; they're still using the Internet mostly through computers but are mobile-ready; there is no limit to the types of services that may attract consumers ("content is key"); and they want a single bill - all from one provider.
I really disagree with most of this, which may be the result of a big survey in a dozen countries (but then, surveys really are about how you formulate the questions) but 1) contradicts evidence and 2) sounds so much like what telecom operators (the consultants' customers) want to hear. And since when the single bill is a powerful differenciator?

Stefana Broadbent, my favorite telecom ethnographer (she works at Swisscom) updates a speech that she gave earlier this year at LIFT in Geneva, which I blogged then and used later as material for a BusinessWeek column. She speaks about the way people relate to and use communication technology. In the previous speech she stressed that people are somehow "specializing" their communication channels (fix phone as "collective channel", mobile as "micro-coordination channel", SMS as the "intimate channel", e-mail as the "administrative channel", IM as the "continuous channel" - see details on each, and more, in the BW column).

Stefana updates her observations with new data about instant messaging: "it is a flow of chit-chat often totally contextual to ongoing online and offline activities" - IM is the typical multitasking, or continuous partial attention, channel. "The average length of an IM session is 30 times longer than a phone call" (most fix and mobile voice calls are less than 5 minutes long, while IM sessions last often from 30 minutes to 2 hours - and many people carry on several conversations at a time).
And she adds an analysis of social networking sites - which she defines as "the channel for weak ties": "it's 'one-to-many' in the sense that one communication action can reach many contacts at once. It's used to enrich communication with close friends,  to maintain 'light' contacts with more remote acquaintances, and to extend the network. It allows to control the level of commitment: it's an easy way to keep in touch and let others know what's happening without having to negotiate strong engagements as one-to-one channels do". Social networking sites allow to extend the number of communication partners - to keep in touch with 4 times more people (average number of contacts in a 'one-to-one' setting: 20 people; average number of an SNS user: 75).

Follows a series of presentations about the explosion of video online. Iolo Jones of Narrowstep gives the five "to-dos": "pintpoint a valuable audience; develop a mixed revenue model; engage existing online communities; make it look like TV, not video on a website, to maximize the potential; distribute and syndicate to multiple outlets". Julian Kniest of Fabchannel, a Dutch site that broadcast live and on-demand music shows recorded in Amsterdam clubs, says that the next step is to find ways to access and explore big archives of video without using text descriptions or menus, but using video-browsing, so that you can search videos in an intuitive way, exploring for cool bands that you may like but don't know are there (there are two basic ways of doing this: either through videotagging, or through video recognition algorithms). Gabe McIntyre of xolo.tv (I blogged about him already from DLD in January) gives examples of user-generated TV, of how "ordinary people have started documenting their surroundings and create their own 'TV' programs". "The democratization of media starts with cheap production - cameras - and cheap post-production - software. But the free worldwide distribution was until now missing. Now it's here, and it's not one-way: it's two-ways, I can take a video, forward it, embed it in my blog, annotate it, remix it". He shows examples from a very funny video podcast from Amsterdam comedy club BoomChicago; he talks about Josh Wolf, a videoblogger who's currently in prison in San Francisco for refusing to give to the police the unedited footage he took of a demonstration rally; about FourEyedMonsters, two students who're using a videoblog to promote a feature film they made, and use Google Maps to have people sign up for a screening - where they get to 300 people that want to see the movie in a city, they find a place and show it. And he talks about InvisibleChildren, a website that started with a video podcast by three young people going to Northern Uganda and seeing the ravages of civil war and using video and blogs to raise awareness - and get 10'000 people to demonstrate all around the US. "There is alot of consumer-generated media that is more than jokes, and people are causing real social change", he said. Mary Hodder then showed what they're doing at Dabble, a search and remix video site, while Gabriele Gresta brought his experience from Digital Magics in Italy.

Other examples of the online video-boom have been brought by Lorraine Twohill, the European marketing director of Google. But first she spoke about the innovation approach at Google (which turned 8 this week, by the way). "We believe that innovation comes from everywhere across the company", she said. Google maintains internally a "Top100" list - "the top 100 projects we're currently working on" - and encourages all employees to dedicate 20% of their work time to their own ideas. If an idea is good, they throw a few engineers at it, and then release it to see if it sticks. Google News came out of that, Gmail too. "Broadband has made possible the whole Web2, video, user-generated trend", and "the current digital divide is between households that have broadband and those that don't". Among the themes driving tomorrow's world, ubiquitous access 24/7 is key. "For young people, access is the new cigarette" - instead of smoking, they IM and SMS and take pictures and upload them to the Web. "There is a pent-up demand for self-expression, and the Internet is the new creative playground, it represents a unique opportunity to test your creativity". She mentions the Ford KA commercials, where the campaign was extended online; the many hundreds of videos created by individuals or agencies around the concept of the "bouncing balls" used by Sony for its Bravia ads (including a messier one using fruits instead of plastic balls); and some very popular teen videos such as the lip-synch performances of the "Chinese Backstreet Boys" (after their video was seen millions of times, they were signed up by Motorola for a campaign to launch a new phone in China). "The Internet levels the playing field".

A statement that John Thackara, the Dutch designer and author, reinforced during the final panel: "This notion of a creative class as a small group of professionals - designers, communication people, filmmakers, etc - doing things in a 'creative way' is madness".

Comments

[Marco]

Wow, very impressive report bruno!

[rj]

That was definitely a pretty impressive wrap up. There's a lot of things going on in our ever shrinking world.

I especially have to agree with you on the point that focused social networks are the next 'small' thing ;)

[tamberg]

"http://www.happyshrimp.nl/" (not .com)

[BG]

URL corrected. Thank you for spotting the mistake. BG

[Nik-Trendscout]

I got u an other great trend for this season... the jacket for the iPod!

Check out my trend-page and find about more.
www.nik-trendscout.ch