MisEntropy

The customer is the ad agency

Tripletz.com is an on demand publishing service for user created greeting cards. But that's not all. The designs one creates can also be made available for sale to others too. If a particular design sells 111 times, Tripletz will pay the creator $111.

Threadless is a T-Shirt company that sells designs that are contributed by a community of consumers/t-shirt designers. These designs are voted upon by the community. The winning designs get produced and the winning designer receives a cash reward along with a cut of the profits from the sale of the design.

Distributed co-creation - that's what it's called - is here to stay. And the above two are just some of many such business opportunities being pursued with great gusto all across the world. (Threadless already is a big success story and a poster boy for the phenomenon.)

Which brings me to the heresy in the title of this post.

I don't see why something that works for software, greeting cards, t-shirts, Lego kits and even cosmetics (a brand called Missha in South Korea) can't work for advertising. In fact, I don't just think it could work - I think its a development that's inevitable.

Here's how it could/should work.

A brand or more likely, a group of brands, will build an online social network/community of designers, communicators and non-professionals who will be then provided with the inside dope about a brand - the product, the service, the offer - in effect, the brief. These co-creators will also be provided an 'advertising' kit with the necessary tools to help them put their ideas in shape - these could include photography, video clips, etc.

The advertising submissions generated are then subjected to a vote - both by the community and the consuming audience at large. This will happen under the supervision of the brand custodians - who will weed out profanities and controversial stuff (and who hopefully will go easy on less-than-mainstream messages.)

The submissions that score well will then be placed in the relevant media - and tracked for results. The ones that don't generate responses will be weeded out - and the ones that do will receive more airtime. The success of the later could also convince the co-creator or the brand to seek extensions of executions, which will then again go through the same process.

When a piece turns in a pre-agreed number of responses, the creator gets paid. And the cycle continues.

This will result in two things. A) There's a huge variety of messages and strategies that are generated for each task - all for no cost. B) Advertising that works will be rewarded.

Who can argue with that? Apart from agencies, ie.

Admittedly, distributed co-creation of advertising works better for direct/demand-generation/online messages where the tracking of consumer responses is easier and implicit. But as tracking abilities and models increase in sophistication, there's no reason why it shouldn't work for all kinds of advertising - and across all media.

But what about the brand and its core essence? Won't rampant co-creation destroy the singular positioning a brand has fightingly carved for itself?

You wouldn't worry about that, if you know what happens when the long tail collides with the Victorian world of brand-building.

[Image via Kate A]

IPL: Elongating the tail of Cricketing Celebrity

Much has been written about the just concluded first season of the Indian Premier League. The macro discussion has concentrated on two issues - the tearing down of national barriers within the city-based club teams and the impact T20 is going to have on traditional cricket - Test and ODI cricket.

But what's interested me about the IPL right from the beginning is that it is a wonderful illustration of something quite rare - a long tail phenomenon that doesn't owe its existence to the Internet.

Before T20 and IPL, there was shelf-space only for a handful of cricketing celebrities - as dictated by the constraints of the national team and the limited number of outings the Indian national team had in a calendar year. New celebrities could only arise by taking someone else's place - and that was easier said than done.

What the IPL has done - as is illustrated by the long tail curve below - is increase dramatically the number of cricketing superstars Indian audiences were acquainted with. This it has achieved by re-writing the format of cricket - a shortened game within an all-play-all club league format where local and international stars comepete in city-based teams.

I am not sure if the organisers of the IPL thought about it in Long Tail terms - but many of the innovations introduced into the game follow the very advice Chris Anderson dishes out for a thriving long tail marketplace - 1. Make everything available 2. Help me find it.

Earier, the players in the public eye were carefully selected by an 'expert' committee of national selectors - now, a much wider bunch of players is bypassing this and getting the opportunity to play on the big stage. IPL might not be putting all cricketing players in India on the field - but it definitely has increased the number manifold.

And what sorts all these players? Not some expert who thinks they are good. But their own performances on the field - innovations like the orange cap (worn by the player with the leading runs) and purple cap (worn by the player with the leading wickets) are information devices that communicate to the audience and increase their involvement with the players - and help them find the budding celebrities.

As IPL grows (in teams and size) and matures in the years to come, the effects of this elongating effect will be even more pronounced - providing the strength of numbers to justify the power law graph above.

But until then, we only have to consider the likes of Yusuf Pathan, Swapnil Asnodkar, Shane Watson and others to know that the tail is indeed wagging.

UPDATE [06/06/08]:
On cue (and also off-cue, if you know what I mean), Agencyfaqs has an article today about the newly-minted IPL heroes finding no takers in terms of sponsors. The report concludes that playing for the national team is still mandatory to make it big in the sponsor stakes - and the best that the IPL heroes can hope for are local city-based sponsors. All true, probably - but that's also because the next IPL season is a whole year away. I believe as the IPL season draws nearer, sponsors will show more interest. In the long run, such sponsorship considerations - both for the players and the teams - will undoubtedly end the current isolation of IPL in calendar terms. There will eventually be a spreadout season that runs for a good part of the year, with breaks.

You must download the change you want to see in the world

The Elongtaing Tail of Brand Communication: An approach to brand building incorporating long tail economics - my Atticus-winning whitepaper - is now available as a ChangeThis Manifesto.

[Original pic by r1chardm]

Atticus Award for 'The Elongating Tail of Brand Communication' paper

Open to professionals working in WPP companies around the world, the Atticus Awards "honour original published thinking in communications services."

And this years list of winners features one familiar name - mine! My paper 'The Elongating Tail of Brand Communication: An approach to brand-building incorporating Long Tail economics' has been adjudged a winner in the Branding and Identity category.

Although I have won a few awards back in my days as a creative, this is one I have been working towards for some time. And one that I am absolutely proud of :)

Is 'The Long Tail' a misnomer?

[An excerpt from my recent paper entitled 'The Elongating Tail of Brand Communication: An approach to brand building incorporating Long Tail economics.']

"Misconceptions and misnomers
One of the most common misconceptions about the long tail is that it requires the Internet as a precondition for it to work. It’s true that the Internet has given rise to the most visible and celebrated examples (ironically, the hits) of the long tail phenomenon. But its existence (or involvement) isn’t a necessary condition for the working of a long tail.

In his book, Chris Anderson begins narrating the history of the long tail with Sears and Roebuck and how in 1906 they revolutionized shopping with their mail-order catalog business. From their gigantic warehouses in Chicago they could stock and deliver over 200,000 items, compared to the mere couple of thousand at the nearest general store. And what’s more, their efficiencies meant that people could buy them at as much as 50 per cent lesser, even after shipping.

Mail order catalogs were the long tail of general stores and so were the supermarkets that emerged soon after. Correspondence courses and degrees were the long tail of college education before online education took over. Credit cards are the long tail of the money lending industry.

In fact, as Chris Anderson mentions, “The story of the Long Tail is really about the economics of abundance – what happens when the bottlenecks that stand between supply and demand in our culture start to disappear and everything becomes available to everyone.”

This process of easing of bottlenecks is gradual and wherever supply and demand are making light of the hurdles (with or without the help of the Internet), there’s a long tail blooming.

The second misconception about the long tail is that it’s an absolute term – that in a given market there’s one concrete, well-defined and addressable block that responds to the name of ‘long tail.’

The truth is that the long tail is a relative term – and the long tail is in fact made up of hundreds of long tails, each with heads of their own. And no matter where you are on the curve there’s a long tail waiting to be unearthed further down the tail.

In that sense, time and technological progress are the twin engines that gradually dissolve the barriers to supply and demand until a time when we’ll simply have “culture unfiltered by economic scarcity.”

In my opinion, one reason why these misconceptions exist is because of the name. Chris Anderson picked up the name from statistics – curves with characteristics of these power law distributions are called “longtailed distributions.” Chris merely turned it into a “proper noun” and the Long Tail was born.

I think a better-serving name would have been ‘the elongating tail’ – an adverb + noun pairing capturing not just its present tail state but also suggesting the permanence of movement inherent in it.

With this name, the birth of the internet would have just been an incident (albeit a significant one) in the history of the Elongating Tail. A history that dates back to the times when man first started gathering at marketplaces for barter and trade, instead of settling for whatever his neighbour could offer."

You can download the paper here. And you can read what Chris Anderson says about the paper here.

Where's the long tail of brand communication? [UPDATED]

I have been hard at work the past few months hammering away at extending Chris Anderson's Long Tail theory to the field of brand communication and brand-building. After repeated reading and re-reading of Chris' book and writing and re-writing of my own thoughts, I have finally got myself to hit the 'make pdf' button and have digitally shrink-wrapped copies of the resulting paper for distribution.

In it's 22 pages you'll find the answers all of these questions : What do you get when you apply the first principles of long tail economics to the craft of brand building? Can you create a complex, layered brand image by resorting to simple advertising? What role is user generated content going to play in the future of mainstream advertising? What lessons can space exploration and robotics teach the practitioners of brand-building? What's the evolving science of negative databases and why do we brand custodians need to learn about it? Why is the single-minded brand proposition an anachronism in the contemporary world of marketing?

You can download the paper here : The Elongating Tail of Brand Communication: An approach to brand-building incorporating long tail economics

I would love to hear comments and views.

UPDATE: Chris Anderson has just posted and commented on the paper on his Long Tail blog :)

UPDATE 2: Atticus Award for the 'The Elongating Tail...' paper

UPDATE 3 (20th Aug 2007): A proposal to convert the above paper into a ChangeThis Manifesto is currently up for vote. Please do vote for it by following this link. Voting ends 16th Sept. 2007.