Goodbye and Good-riddance Angus & Robertson/Borders!

As many of you have probably heard at this point, our own Aussie book retail chain Angus & Robertson has entered administration, merely days after US giant Borders filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

No doubt you'll see a lot of commentary over the next few days about the "future of the publishing industry" who will be the dominant force, what will happen, who will be the big money makers etc... But I'd just like to take a moment to reflect.

There are three major contribution factors to why this has all happened.

Firstly - for over 30 years in this country, the publishing industry has had the Australian consumers by the balls. We've had to pay ludicrous pricing compared to our english-speaking brethren in the US and UK. Our books are not made of some kind of magical paper that has super powers, the ink is not created from crushed unicorn remains nor is it blessed by the pope. Yet again, we pay (sometimes up to 50%) more than everybody else.

Publishers in this country lobby our Federal Government to be able to keep despicable restrictions on retailers importing cheaper stock from overseas, and retailers are stuck selling the only stock available to them at the only price available to them.

Secondly - Amazon.com has now been around 17 years. Think about that for a second, SEVENTEEN years. It's been selling books (with a wider selection and at cheaper prices than most retailers) since the beginning. Angus & Robertson and other Aussie retailers *cough* Dymocks *cough* certainly did look at Amazon's model back in 1997 and go "Hey, you know what, we also have a massive warehouse filled with books, maybe we should let people buy them online!".

In 2003 when music-retailers were starting to feel pressure from iTunes sales and saw plummeting sales, our local book-sellers still didn't say "Hmm... I wonder if this could ever happen to us! Maybe we should start looking into it".

It wasn't until 2006, when Amazon's annual book sales totalled $3.8billion and it had overtaken Borders in Nth American sales for the first time did Dymocks finally decide to launch an online book-selling presence (and for those of you who remember the site will know just how appalling it was from a user experience perspective).

In 2007 Amazon launched it's Kindle e-Reader which allowed for users to download books directly to the device without needing to go to a computer, without having to pay for data, nothing. Just straight on there. It was magical! But did our local retailers go "Hey, they might be onto something?". Again, no. In fact, REDGroup (which owns both Borders and Angus & Robertson here in Aus) only launched their local store for selling electronic books last year! Four years later.

Finally - Back in the "twilight" years of us consumers being recommended a book by our friends, family or colleagues we would have to write it down on a little piece of paper somewhere, and store it in our wallet or pocket and then remember the next time we were in a shopping centre to have a look for it in the local bookstore, if they had it in stock, and it wasn't misplaced or damaged due to the dude handling before you eating a ham sandwich whilst reading the first 20 chapters of the book, then you might look at the price tag, and if you didn't need to re-mortgage your house to buy it, you might just make the purchase.

These days, if somebody is reading a book you like, you can turn it over, pull out your iPhone, open the Amazon app, scan the barcode, and it'll be yours for half the price in a couple of days.

As if a further coffin in the nail of the inevitable death of the local book retailing industry, international retailers such as bookdepository.com not only sell most any book at a cheaper price than locally, but they will also ship for free to Australia. So if you don't need the book this very second, you can just order it for cheap on BookDepository and have it at your doorstep within a week or so. Their customer service is impeccable, their range is vast, and their price is pretty much as low as you can get for a brand new title.

So I for one would like to say: See ya Angus & Robertson! See ya Borders! You both should have seen this coming for nearly two decades. Your board of directors should be banned from ever running a company again. Your failure to respond to changing market conditions, and complete inability to innovate in an industry that was clearly changing was your downfall.

And I hope the Australian publishing industries realises that you can only milk consumers for so long before they just find a cheaper option and the well runs dry.

On Strategy vs Tactics

Lately I've had this same conversation with several people on this same topic, and it continues to interest me exactly where people draw the boundaries between semantics on the subject. Some may say that it is irrelevant, as it's nothing more than use of words, and some people use them one way, and others another, but I think it's vital to have a common concrete agreement on the meaning of these terms, especially in this industry as it is changing, evolving, and in dire need of a common language. Not only for the sake of those who practice, but also for the clients, who no doubt want to see agreement on the matter, by which they can then determine the good ones from the bad ones.

If you don't care to read on, the short version of my opinion on the matter is quite simple.

Strategy, is the "what are we trying to do" of the equation, whereas Tactics are the "How are we going to do it" (with Execution being the actual doing of it").

As the terms strategy and tactic are rooted strongly in the military, I've often tried to use sailing analogies to give a concrete example. The strategy is usually decided upon by the captain, and comes in the form of the what (i.e. We're sailing to find the new world) and the tactic comes in the form of the navigator or first mate (i.e. "We're sailing south-west for 1,000 leagues) and of course responsive tactics also come into play (i.e. We'll avoid that reef by sailing to the north winds for a day, then south again). And finally the execution is all those who make it happen, the deck hands the rowers etc..

The analogy may contain some flaws, but overall, I think it does the job of conveying the concept.

So how does it relate to the digital marketing and advertising industry, and what should you be seeing when you look at a strategy versus a tactic?

Strategies can be constructed at many levels. Yes, you can have an overall brand strategy, and you can have an online strategy, and you could have a content strategy. But they all still need to be distinct from tactics, and there's a good reason for this. You see, a strategy should have the ability to be successfully completed even with a change in the tactics underneath it. You should be able to stick to the strategy of "sailing west to the new world" even if the winds die down and you have to row to get there. Tactics should be interchangeable and elastic in their use. Strategy should not be, this is why a strong strategy is important. This is why having insights (i.e. The world is round, and there is a giant body of water, which should contain land somewhere in the middle of it) is key to developing strategy.

As Mark Pollard puts it in his blog post on getting into strategy (about half way down):

I believe that the guts of a strategy should be explainable in a matter of sentences. If you pictured me pointing to where we need to go, I’d rather tell you where we’re going than explain to you how my body manages to get my index finger into the pointing position.

And I think he is bang on with his summation of strategy. A lot of people feel the need to qualify evidence of industry by producing excruciatingly long documents and powerpoint decks which all try to "explain" the strategy using hundreds of bullet points, multitudes of diagrams and pictures, all detailing what is in fact supposed to be a high-level sentence or two.

If you or your client requires you to "show you working" on how you got to your strategic conclusion, that's fine, do that, but don't waste time by using your working AS the answer.

I recently had the pleasure of reading through Wieden+Kennedy's awesome brand strategy for Old Spice, which lead to the now renowned work in the form of awesome television and digital work. The presentation for the new brand position is amazingly sparse in detail, yet gets it's point across potently. And it all becomes summarised in one simple phrase: "Old Spice is the authentic essence of the male being".

Now, I understand that brand strategy and digital strategy can be very different beasts. But that does not for a moment mean that we need to create a level of complexity when trying to "sell in" our strategy for it to be effective. Digital strategies can be just as potent through simple explanations as brand strategies are, they can take on simple forms which then allow for tactics to be inserted underneath which deliver on that strategy, while being able to be modified if market conditions, technology platforms, or the consumers change.

If my digital strategy for a bank is "educate customers in a simple way using humour", then I should be able to execute that tactically in a number of ways, whether by responding to questions on Twitter, putting videos up on YouTube, or creating games for Facebook. The tactics change, but we know what we're trying to do strategically.

I dearly hope that at least some people agree with me on this distinction, and why it's important to make, but I'm open to hear other people's thoughts on why they think I'm right or wrong.

Let me know in the comments.

Cheers.

You're ripping it off all wrong!

Usually, when I spot a piece of blatantly ripped off advertising, I just spend a good 10 minutes cursing the lack of originality in our industry, and then get back to it. But I really thought I should share this one, as not only is it a circle-jerking abso-friggin-lute ripp off, but it's also a horrendously terrible one.

If you're not going to bother coming up with an original thought, at the very least do the original a little bit of justice by making yours somewhat tolerable. Stuff like this makes our entire Australian ad industry look like douchebags.

And you couldn't just steal the ads themselves? You also had to steal a line, and make it shittier and nonsensical. Sprint's line is the "Now Network", Optus now has the "Open Network" - but I'd like to know exactly what the hell it is that makes your network any more or less open than any of your competitors? Nothing, that's what.

Unoriginal, shitty substituting twats.

The original series by Sprint:





Shitty Optus attempt to do something other than dancing penguins in a convertible:

 

2 Years in Advertising - Part I

Next week officially marks my completion of two whole years in the advertising industry. Before this, I had spent half a decade in the world of corporates, before that small business for a short time, and before that, well, high school.

I've tried to keep a list of little observations I've made in my time working in advertising, and thought it an appropriate time to share them with the world. Rather than make one ludicrously long post about the topic, I'll split it into more digestible parts.

My first disclaimer to all this, is that none of this is meant to be mean-spirited or slander anybody, it's just thoughts and observations, many of which may be incorrect, or based on purely one point of view, so don't get all snarky if you get offended by any of it. So anyway, here goes.

1. Everybody wants to be the Apple of <insert industry name here>

One of the first trends I noticed when entering the exciting world of advertising, is that more or less every single client wants to be (or worse, thinks they are) the Apple of whatever industry they are in. I've now heard this said from a client in more or less every industry you can think of, and I can quite honestly say that I don't believe I've worked on a single company that is the Apple of anything. Sadly, in most cases, clients are unable to articulate exactly what it means to be the Apple of anything, thus it's usually just an analog for "we want to be successful, famous and adored".

Being successful, famous and adored is of course, perfectly fine. But the fact remains, that if you want to achieve those attributes in a manner even remotely resembling that of Apple, you've a lot of work to do before you get there, and chances are that your parity products, resistance to taking risk, and extensively complex and ill-definied product line up, all need work before you even start thinking about how the advertising portion of the problem should be solved.

At the end of the day, the only company I can think of that is "Apple-esque" in it's success would have to be Dyson. Everybody else needs to get into the "wanna be" line, not the "gunna be" line.

2. Everyday people don't know what Agency you work for, nor do they care

In my first week of working in the industry, I was absolutely overwhelmed with the amazing variety of advertising agencies that existed in Sydney alone. Most of them seem to either be initialisations/names of the founders (DDB, BBDO, Ogilvy, Saatchi's...) or some kind of completely random, and often silly sounding name (Three Drunk Monkeys, Host, The Campaign Palace, Tongue...). Regardless, it was amazing the amount of currency those in the industry placed on announcing the agencies they came-from/were going-to and the look on their face when you told them you didn't have the foggiest clue who "Droga5" was, or why it was in anyway relevant to you.

Now, obviously for those of us dedicating our lives to working in this industry and producing good, effective, creative work, those names are essentially badges of creativity, size, ability and achievement to be proud of and wear on our lapel. But what amazes me, is that so many in the industry don't seem to fathom, that the "every-day punter", the "normal guy" the "essentially anybody who doesn't work in advertising/marketing/media" (which, it should be noted, is a heck of a lot of people) don't know who any of these agencies are, and quite frankly, don't give two hoots who made the ad. They just remember whether they liked it, hated it, thought it was funny, or thought it was shit.

I guess it comes down to noticing the level of insularity in the industry. As most people will know, it's quite small (in Australia especially), and most people who don't work in it, don't really understand why we stay back late hours working on some sketches that will eventually become a television commercial, or how it is that staring at a blank page for an hour "thinking" about how you're going to word something is in fact an hour spent very productively. They don't understand that your two paragraphs of text on a website will be read by a million people, so it's vital to craft it just right. On the flip side, we shouldn't expect them to understand, after all, how much do you understand about how core banking infrastructure works?

3. Uhhh... whereabouts is HR?

Some agencies have a HR department, some have an HR Officer, some have neither. Any which way, what is apparent, is the "politically correct" corporate movements of the 90's seem to have entirely bypassed the advertising industry.

Now, I'm not a conservative right-wing nut or anything, but years spent in corporate taught me that somethings are "inappropriate" for office conversation and commentary. Not so much in advertising, more or less anything goes. Yes, there are a few lines here or there that shouldn't be crossed but overall it's an industry where people get away with more in one day than they would in a year of working corporate.

I don't think it's necessarily a bad or negative thing, after all most of it is done in jest and between people who've worked together for quite some time, but then again I'm not female (who seem to bear a lot more of the brunt of political incorrectness than any other specific group) so you'd have to ask them if they find any of it particularly offensive or crass.

4. A lot of people have never stepped foot in a corporate, let alone worked in one

I was amazed at the number of people who started their careers in advertising or marketing. I guess as I'd never considered it for a career myself I simply couldn't relate to beginning your working life inside an agency. But as a result of this, a lot of agency types have never ever worked on the inside of a big company (and by big, I mean a corporate, over 1,000 staff) and couldn't quite understand why "client-side" faces some of the challenges it does.

Agency land is so utterly different to corporate land that it's almost hard to imagine how you could possibly relate to the challenges of those who work in the big glass-and-steel high-rises, with it's seemingly infinite levels of management, it's bureaucracies and complex multi-departmental politics. Most agencies are split more or less in the same way, accounts, creatives, digital, planners, and studio (and/or digital production). To them, the thoughts of multiple teams working in a division of a department within a business unit is just foreign. So many moving parts of which you are just one semi-redundant gear. It's worlds away.

When you're in corporate land, working with 5,000 other people most of whom you will never ever meet, it's often hard for everybody to remember that you're all supposed to be working towards one common goal, especially when you're working in different functions and have differing sets of goals.

So, for all those agency peeps who've not ever worked in a corporate, all I ask is that you cut a bit of slack to your client-side brethren. Whilst you may think it's frustrating that you have to wait an extra day or two for that sign-off, your counterpart has to manage countless stakeholders, pander to inter-departmental politics, and many other hurdles, just to get your medium-rectangle banner signed off before 4pm on a Friday.

Okay, that's it for part one. More to come later in the week, and hopefully I haven't offended anybody in here. Feel free to leave a comment telling me how wrong you think I am, and that I'm a douchebag for making fun of your agencies name.

Cheers.

Don't buy The Australian iPad app

After buying my iPad over in the US, and spending time familiarising myself with the news apps from the likes of the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Financial Times, BBC and others, I'd become somewhat spoilt by all the different ways these so called "dinosaurs" of publishing could get me to read their news stories.

A week after I came home to Sydney, I heard all the hype about The Australian iPad app. The guys over at News Limited were determined to be the first Australian publisher to be out there with an iPad app, and they would only charge $4.99 per month for the privilege of reading their fine publication.

Well, now I've spent a few weeks with the app, I have to say, there is not a person alive I would recommend it to. Not for five bucks, not even if it were free. Allow me to explain why, using a few brief points, some pictures, and even offer you a (MUCH better) alternative.

Why The Australian iPad app is balls.

Reason 1: It's not "text" but rather a series of images"

So far as I can tell, and nobody has been able to indicate to me otherwise, the Oz's app doesn't actually bother to give you text to read like say, a website, or any other application. Instead, it renders everything as still images (PNG's from what I can deduce). Why, you might ask? BECAUSE YOU THIEVING PIECE OF CRAP, YOU MIGHT STEAL THEIR NEWS!

What other possible reason can there be for making a product, which is essentially based around giving you text to read, in a non-text format? God forbid you should be unhappy with the pre-determined text size due to your age, vision impairment, or just because you're sitting on the toilet and want to read the news from slightly afar. Because you know what, you can't. Not because the iPad doesn't let you (in fact, the iPad has a whole bunch of built in features to allow for text manipulation to make it easy for the elderly and those with poor eye-sight to read), but because The Australian is so incredibly paranoid that somebody might "copy and paste" the whole friggin newspaper, and pass it around to their friends, thereby robbing them of precious, precious revenue.

And if you happen to have a serious vision impairment, or perhaps happen to be blind? Well, in that case, the Australian would like to stick up it's middle finger at you, and tell you it doesn't give a shit about your money, because the built-in (and quite good) voice-over and text-to-speech functionality does not work one iota on The Australian's crippled iPad app. Why? Again, because it's all just a bunch of images.

Reason 2: Its interface designers seem to hate people

I've seen a lot of poor interfaces in my time, and I mean a LOT. But attempting to navigate through The Australian's iPad app makes me yearn for the early days of flashing lights and moving GIF's of Geocities. Why exactly there are drop down lists for sections of the newspaper that don't actually have a list for which to require a drop-down is not only stupid, but incredibly annoying. The "articles" panel on the left hand side of the story-mode is a hit-and-miss affair, and there is now way to simply overview all items within the newspaper, or god forbid, search.

Whether the team was rushed, trying to get the app out before the first iPad hit the shelves in Australia, or whether they were developers who'd never designed an interface before, or even if it was outsourced, does not really matter. There are at least 10,000 totally free apps in the App Store marketplace with better interfaces, that have been created with less resources than News Ltd has at it's disposal. Frankly, I feel like The Australian's iPad development team just didn't even bother thinking about how people would actually use the application, but rather just focused on how they could get ad's in there.

Reason 3: Most obnoxious adverts, EVER

Now, I work in advertising, so usually, I'm not actually all that bothered by ads. In fact, ads are good, they keep me employed, and are an integral part of a modern economy (well, that is debatable, but anyway), so when I tell you that these ads are obnoxious, you should take into account that this is coming from a person who sees ads day in, day out, and depends on them for an income.

The Australian doesn't just "show" you an ad like it would on the website, after all, why should it? This isn't the 'interwebs' where you can just get your news from other sources or anything, no, this is an application that you have PAID good money for. So here, whenever you click on a section, how about I put a gigantic ad covering the whole friggin page for you.

In fact, how about, instead of putting any kind of smarts behind the app, I will just put this ad here, in front of this section, EACH and EVERY time you go to that section, completely regardless of how many times you've seen it already.

There are an infinite number of ways a publisher could have integrated advertising into it's news application. This is a new platform, things are different, hey, why don't we try something new? NO! We must use the exact same model that we did for newspapers. Almost bit for bit.

Overall, after forcing myself to use this application for a fortnight, I finally gave up. I have to say, this is beyond a doubt one of the worst, if not THE worst, example of a news reading application in the app store.

What can you do instead? Well, here's what I did.

The antidote:

Reeder

Reeder is a fantastic little RSS Reader that was designed by one guy (or so I'm lead to believe). It is 1 dollar more than The Australian, but it doesn't have recurring fees, so you just pay it once. (download from iTunes here)

Reeder lets you take RSS feeds from any source, it will even sync with your Google Reader account (if you have one) and provides you not only with bucket-loads of functionality, but an interface that will make you want to keep reading.

In my case, I just went to www.theaustralian.com.au/help/rss which will give you a full listing of the available RSS feeds available. Then, add them into either Reeder directly, or to your Google Reader.

Once you've got your feeds sorted and grouped, you can access that "stack" of feeds from within Reeder. It will sort them by the latest news, it will remove items you've already read, and keep it generally clean and tidy.

Once you're in your stack, you should see all the news items in a nice clean list. You can sort multiple ways, including items you've not read yet, or have starred (made a favourite), or chronologically.

The interface is simple, and it feels as though no space has been wasted. Very clean and efficient, yet still pleasant.

When you turn the iPad sideways, you get your navigation, as well as reading element, side by side. Again, it's very clean, feels intuitive to use, and has all the functions you need to "star" and article if you want to refer to it later, or send it to a friend, etc...

Now, due to the fact that The Australian wants you to go to their website, so that it can show you ads, so it can make money (which is fair enough), the RSS feed is truncated, meaning only the first paragraph of the story comes through. When you click on the heading of the article, Reeder opens the link in a built-in web-browser, so you never have to leave the application.

Ironically, when the page opens in the browser, it suddenly has the text-size changing functions, as well as share functions that are notably absent from The Australian's paid application. And yes, now you can select the text, copy, past to your heart's content.

Reeder also includes a whole stack of functions that make the whole experience just awesome. If you use Delicious for bookmarking, want to tweet about what you're reading, want to send it to Instapaper, Email, or a stack of other services, it's all there within one button click.

The experience is really well thought through, and frankly makes The Australian's iPad app look like a complete joke. Reeder's use of standard RSS technology not only means that you can have news from more than one provider bundled into the one app, but also that it downloads a LOT faster than The Australian, and uses a lot less of your bandwidth.

Spending $4.99 per month on The Australian, at least in the current state of their iPad app, is ridiculous. Anybody who is even remotely thinking about it, should seriously reconsider.

As for the guys at News Ltd, you need to have a look at both The Financial Times app (which is phenomenal), and Reeder. Both of these will show you what a good news delivery application should look and feel like.

Cheers.