Here lay the Wave

So, I’ve spent a week or two experimenting with Google Wave. I’ve had some correspondence with some journalists I know, a Vistage colleague in the US, other people who run digital agencies. And it’s been a frustrating experience.

I think partly the way they’ve done the beta release is to blame. It seems that very few large communities of people that already correspond have been given a pool of invitations. So conversation has been very fragmented. The beauty of Wave, which is a kind of rolling discussion incorporating instant messaging, social media, productive wiki and email, can’t show itself clearly when there are six of you but not all on the same wavelength at the same time.

One of the features I found quite interesting is that you can incorporate a Wave into a webpage. In my case I hosted a Wave in my blog for a week, and people who were logged in to Wave could view the embedded Wave and people in the conversation could interact with it. My coding’s not up to much, so it didn’t look particularly elegant, but it’s a far cry from the basic comment field.

So I think that one day Wave could be awesome. While some of my colleagues didn’t see the attraction, I think it might become quite a revolutionary step. For example, imagine constructing a collaboratively-generated screenplay or feature article, where several people can be involved in different time zones, editing previous contributions and suggesting new, constantly honing and refining, fact-checking, editing and clarifying as you go along, until the final polished artefact is ready. On the other hand, I can see all sorts of mischief, and the experience of wiki, where attribution and defacement become important, may have to be reworked.

It’s not in itself particularly original - it is after all an agglomeration and blurring of the borders between a whole host of technologies that have been around for between 15 and 30 years - but it may take discussion itself to a whole new level.

Bob, The Ad Contrarian

I had a bit of an argument with some guy called Bob, who blogs as The Ad Contrarian. He appears to have some kind of following in the oldschool advertising world. And he doesn't like the new-fangled stuff like the internet. So I had a bit of a pop at him in the comments on his blog (about a post he wrote in April).

Anyway, it was all very entertaining, and I don't think either of us came out of it well really – both of us have very different viewpoints and the world takes all sorts. It's a long set of posts and you can, if you like, read the whole thing on his blog. Be warned, he ends up doing quite a lot of swearing ;)

The interesting thing for me was that he then decided he was so right he'd paste the whole thing as a new blog post right on his home page, inviting people to side with him using the comments field. Which some of them have, along with the expected number of insults (pompous Brit etc.) However, many of them haven't, and I've decided to close the door quietly and back away. Anyway, here I am writing about it. I wish I'd been more articulate (though I enjoyed the wordplay), and that I'd used more stats to nail the argument down, but ultimately it's his blog, his followers, and his industry he caters to. Me, I'm just an interloper in his universe, though I still think my universe is taking over :)

The Ad Contrarian, A Response

(In response to this post)

Hmm, do you know what, although I mistook the original post by Dave as directing readers to *his* blog (sorry TAC - and Dave - I'm a TAC newbie), I can't recant my reaction.

So, firstly: Dave I apologise, I'm sorry I took your name in vain, but to be honest I thought your 'read this' Tweet was in itself provocative, and when I read the TAC post I mistook it as an extension. My bad.

Secondly, TAC, I'm sure you're lovely too. I'm sure you've got a trillion years of understanding consumer behaviour, and I'm sure you're right about how venal, faddish and self-important the marketers you work with are.

But here's the thing. The internet did change everything, utterly and without mercy. We have a globally distributed notion of justice. We have a globally distributed set of cultural norms. We (finally) have a near-universal language. We have a US President accepted as a good replacement for the universally reviled previous global leader who everyone in the world knows intimately, and who has been elected based on a third of the world's cultural norms. We have a world of consumers who elect and buy, taken over from a locale of consumers you used to sell to.

Consumer behaviour may not have changed. But expectation, motivation, influence and conversion to buy have changed forever. The consumer, finally, is king. And TV, though still a powerful medium, hasn't caught up despite 12 years of interactive TV. The day TV advertising can be segmented not by programme but by the individual consumer's implicit or explicit at-that-moment requirements will be the day TV gets back on its feet. And yes, when we started an interactive TV agency for Lowe in 1998 it was arguably way too early. The fact it produced interactive TV ads for Tesco and Unilver, two of the most far-sighted marketers, doesn't take away from the fact that it couldn't make money - but it was necessary to help get the ball that may one day save the TV advertising industry's arse rolling.

My own view about what people might remember is that it takes two types of people for progress to happen - the innovators and visionaries who come at things too early but set up the parameters of the experiment, and the reactionaries that temper the enthusiasm but enforce rigour. I'm quite happy to be in one of the groups, and I'm glad of the existence of the other, because your maturity means I can borrow, say, the discipline of data planning and prove that what we do works better for the new world's consumers than what you used to do when it was the only way.

Glad this social media thing is here though, because previously the only way we could have an argument was down the pub or in the letters pages, so thanks Twitterverse and blogosphere, at least you've revolutionised how fast one man can flourish his own reactionary views, another can highlight them, a third can get it all wrong before correcting his mistake, and how fast presumably this will turn into pixels in the wind. Personally I'd much prefer to do this over a pint than in public, but hey, you know that when even the Iranians are using Twitter to complain about injustice, the world's all gone and changed while you were busy watching television ;)