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New Cardiff City Logo is way off target

Every now and again I stray back in to a bit of 'graphics', and one of those occasions has recently been for The Barry Horns, who I've talked about before. So it is from that point of view that I write today.

Rebrands are always controversial, and a polar shift such as the one we've just seen at Cardiff City was never going to get through without a bit of friction from the huge and passionate supporter base. Personally, whilst I'm a firm believer in being proud of one's heritage, I can see the arguments for the switch. Ultimately, the club's future is a little bit brighter for the time being.

But Jesus - couldn't they have come up with a better new logo? I appreciate this is from the people who brought us the Cardiff City Stadium, but if you're going to throw out over 100 years of heritage for the sake of £100 million you could at least spend a bit more on a replacement?

A lot of football clubs have awful logos/crests, but that is because they were made in the old days. Keeping a tatty relic of a bygone age reinforces a club's working-class, flat cap rattle-enthused heritage, which is nice to remember in the days of mega clubs and oligarchs.

But now, the Club has re-branded to broaden its appeal in The East, and all we're sending over is this garish piece of clip art that looks like it was designed with the art director (if there was one) at the other end of a 2 minute phone call from the artworker.

When I think of a City like Manchester I think of a strong, forward-thinking 21st Century City founded on a rich and diverse heritage, and this for me is visually personified in the two football clubs' different approaches. Football spreads a city's name and image worldwide. When people see CCFC's new look, what will they understand about the City?

It doesn't suprise me that things have gone this way, but it's another example of a massive wasted opportunity for the City of Cardiff. Of course 'Cardiff' had nothing to do with the decision, but that just goes to reinforce the opinion of many of the fans that the club has very little regard for its tens of thousands of passionate ticket-buyers, who also need a prosperous place to live and work in the global 21st century.

Welsh cultures are flourishing from all angles at a grassroots level, but some of the institutions tasked with promoting and harnessing these progressions seem like they're stuck in smoky 1970s working men's clubs. Nothing sums this up better for me right now than the new Cardiff City Football Club logo.

Mis-interpreting Pinterest facts

There's a nice article on Mashable today featuring a little infographic about the rise of Pinterest, made by a company called Tamba.

Whilst some people are starting to question the continuing rise of the platform, my real issue with the infographic was the potential mis-interpretation of some of the stats, especially this one:

I would hazard a guess that a pin's likelyhood of being shared is nothing to do with whether it has a visible price tag or not. My experience of using Pinterest has been that pictures are shared much more because of their overall lifestyle connotations than because of the specific product they represent. For example:

It's more about this:	Than this:

Which one is more likely to have a price tag, and which are you more likely to add to your own board?

My own advice would be that Pinterest could still be a highly useful way of generating new fans and traffic, but it will be way more effective if you place your brand within the context of your target audience. Like, how does what you do fit into the rest of their lives, how do you add to it?

It's a bit like when you see my dad just mooching round B&Q looking at drill bits and wood. It takes someone like my dad to dream about what the components could one day be, but most people would rather look at the picture of the shed. Maybe.

Why we should move towards location services

There is buzz all over the place at the moment about location services. The initial excitement that came from early adopters with foursquare, gowalla etc has died down, but there's still a bubbling anticipation that campaigning or service provision based on user location is going to tip into the mainstream any day now. I wanted to take a minute to have a think about how this might play out and how one might get involved if one worked with a campaigning organisation.

Even with facebook joining in, I think it's fair to say there hasn't been mass take-up of any location based apps or services (ok, maybe maps). It's probably because many phone owners either don't have gps/apps yet, but I'd be interested to compare the penetration level of smart phones to the take up of location services. I'm guessing, but they probably don't correlate.

I think we're at the start of something similar to the transition that 'photos' made between MySpace and Facebook. If you remember, in the old days, us young people were busy creating our myspace poses and being individuals. Here's a tame example of what I mean, one of my own attempts from 2004:

Becuase of the storage limitations of the myspace service at the time, and the cultural 'emo' thing (which wasn't really emo) that internet music marketing encouraged, users were very careful about the kind of picture they posted. Each shot was carefully constructed and posed to communicate some sort of expressively nonchalant transitional moment - you can see I'm failing at it here by looking at the camera. 

Flash forward to to 2006 and all of a sudden a very different kind of picture is being enthusiastically pasted all over facebook. There's much less posing, no storage limitation, and no quality control. Pictures on nights out are taken and uploaded without any real thought, and albums of 60-100 very similar shots started filling people's feeds. It seemed that everyone was at it. Privacy is an underlying concern, but it's controlled by choosing who you are friends with, and who you allow to access your different data.

So I think this is going to happen with location. Right now, we're at a stage where we're carefully choosing where to check in, based on our small networks of fellow users, the 'coolness' of the location or event, and whether we're going for the whole game thing. Before not too long, I predict many people will be closer to the "let's take hundreds and post every picture from tonight" model, with much less regard for quality or in interesting peers. Of course, the bell curve will mellow out a bit once it has peaked, and we'll start to see more useful applications throughout our everyday lives. But we're not anywhere near there yet.

Why do I think that's coming soon? Well the way apps like foursquare have spread seems to be generally at the point of use; the "what's that" moment that is sparked when someone opens up their phone in a pub to check in. It's then down to users to sum up the plus points of the app to their peers. In my case this has usually been along the lines of "you get to be mayor", to which many people have responded "I'm not that bothered about being mayor" and so they haven't bothered signing up themselves. It's not fun, as TechCrunch say, and not ideal.

The much more persuasive promise, for me at least, was always that "You'll be able to see if any of your friends are nearby to meet up". But the network of users was so small that this was never really possible. Facebook getting in on the game means that all of a sudden my entire list of friends is potentially a part of this network. That's quite exciting for me, and it's obviously quite exciting for brands, who are starting to make use of the 'deals' functionality.

If the deals and the networks available start to appear fulfilling enough, I anticipate we'll see a much closer correlation between take-up of services and smartphone use.

It should be really exciting for charities. As Rob Dyson writes, the opportunity to communicate with people based on their physical location is perfect for some organisations. Action for Children, Red Cross, and Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research have already got started and are doing some great work, and things like CauseWorld have had huge success. If future, imagine a homeless charity able to appeal to people near problem areas, or a road safety campaign asking people to be aware of dangers of certain roads nearby. An outdoors organisation like YHA or the Ramblers could start offering tips on great locations and walks.

American Red Cross's foursquare badge, earned by checking in when giving blood.

And organisations shouldn't just think in terms of new activities for new audiences. We're presented with an opportunity here to enrich services we already offer, to re-package our existing communications in ways that may be more effective or more what we had in mind in the first place - If you're the sort of group that relies on distributing pamphlets in key places, or getting flyers to key audiences, perhaps there are ways you can add to that, using what you know about those spaces and people. 

It's going to be a long time before there are enough people plugged into location aware devices for them to be the only medium we can use, but that also offers an opportunity to create more advocates in the meantime. Giving existing supporters a new way to connect should bring them closer to you, and surprising non-supporters with innovative messages will catch their attention in a much more lasting way than perhaps might have been if you were using more conventional media.

My encouragement would be to think about your target audiences - where are they, what are they doing, and how can you position your organisation and work to be relevant at those points. There may be things you're already doing that aren't as effective as you'd like, or there might be new possibilities you're thinking of - either way it might be time to start thinking about location-aware media as a new tool in your arsenal of communication methods.

See you when we get there!

 

 

Authenticity in service design

Federation Coffee is brilliant. It's a great place to go on a Saturday, have a sit, have a beautiful americano or two, take a notepad and scribble out whatever it is that's on your mind at the time.

It's a young and very genuine addition to these almost gourmet coffee houses that one isn't really prepared for coming from Cardiff. Last week I spent a bit of time thinking about the new coffee shop look; a sort of 'railway sleeper chic'.

I love how these places look. It seems to tie in with a fascination with fixed-gear bikes, beards and chrome that I picked up a few weeks ago on the Convoy blog. Musically, the aesthetic stretches to Grizzly Bear, Fleet Foxes and Seattle: a rainy, authentic tartan-shirted affair where you 'just know' what quality is, without really needing to be told. The standard and style of service and product are implicit in their presentation.

That, of course, is nothing new, it's a basic question of creating a unified brand to deliver meaning and drive take-up. People develop their own affinities based on the visual cues around them. But over the last few decades there's usually been a fair bit of signage or labelling to explicitly point out a product's key selling points. At the turn of the 80s/90s we had 'as seen on TV'; 10 years later we had the importance of a product story. And now it seems we're moving towards objects whose entire heritage is visible in the product themselves, or the environment in which they are served. You don't need to see little pots of coffee beans in various stages of roasting any more, or see extended menus outlining every single variety, ingredient and size. You just know.

I'm quite into this, but I'm worried that it's become the established look du-jour of the niche back street place that middle class twentysomethings show off to their friends about. Not for my own sake, but because I'm worried about what happens when the trend filters out to mass adoption.

Starbucks have already started removing their branding from some of their US neighbourhood stores, in an effort to appear 'more authentic'. In the UK, there was a bit of a humph a few years ago when McDonald's adopted a tasteful green façade on some of their shops. But in McDonald's case the neon counters and chip fryers at the back of the store stayed the same. As we move forward though I can see bigger chains adopting the distressed counters and coffee-crate looks that I love in small, independent outlets right now. What will happen then?

If more people feel comfortable in those environments, will they stay the same? What will happen when people apply their own ideals and heritage stories to things, that are different from those intended by their creators? Is that cool? And how will we differentiate, and will differentiation matter? 

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Mark Hadfield inspired me to use 'authentic photography' for this post, but it's only the ideas here that will degrade over time, not the pictures. 

 
 

Effective Online Campaigning

I finished my second piece of print work for Public Zone last week, designing a booklet for a document the company's been working on about effective online campaigning for non-profit organisations.

It's got some really helpful tips inside, which are actually really informing the way I think about positioning and tone as well as user journeys and wireframing.

If you click through to the Public Zone blog page, you can download a pdf there. 

The launch was quite special as well, held at Quintessentially Soho

Not better to share?

Remember that amazing wrigley's advert with the greyhound bus? I don't really know what was so great about it, but it's one of the few I can remember from being 8. I've wanted to mention it in blog form for a long time now.

Sadly it's not really related to this little online app I found a few months ago. Called Sex Degrees of Separation, it's a calculation tool you can use to work out how many sexual partners you have had on aggregate. The idea being that even if you've only had one or two partners, the number you're left with after adding their other partners to your aggregate list becomes quite large quite quickly. So you should be careful.

I expected to see quite a lot of mentioning of this app around the twittersphere. It's quite clever, quite a shocking message, and as far as I know it's not been done before for this kind of campaign. But things have been strangely quiet.

It seems to me that the functionality is all there, but the positioning is all wrong. Even bearing in mind everything I said after IPAsocial, this page doesn't look like something you can share, or something you'd want to share. Something as taboo as this really needs to find a way of making the subject matter funny, or at least risqué. Maybe no one wants to make their result public - but maybe there's a way of working the copy so that it's something you would want to share, or something you'd want to compete on.

It's sad, because unlike the subject they're trying to tackle, campaigns like this really should be things people want to share.

Some examples of ideas I think have been more successful:

Durex Balloon animals
BHF Love Note   
MTV Staying Alive / Spotify collaboration

for technorati: G5BJGEVDSRDK

 

What does social look like?

I attended IPAsocial last week.

As a recent graduate, and someone who doesn't even work in advertising I should probably have known better than to tweet a suggestion for a break-out talk during the second half of the evening.

But listening to the other subjects that came up, I do think there's some space in the debate for a consideration of the aesthetics of what we're all doing at the moment, whether we're working in straight up advertising or in a more productiony / content kind of place like public zone. The title I suggested was "what does social look like?"

I didn't really manage to talk about this much, but elsewhere there was a discussion on how clients could be convinced, and why they might be sceptical about using social media. There was also a lot of discussion on the more anthropological aspects of behaviour and imitation. You can read a lot more on the IPAsocial page

From my experiences so far, I'm not sure there are many sceptical clients. For me, it's been quite the opposite - nearly every project I've seen recently has had social media and engagement as part of the brief. They're all public service and voluntary projects, which might offer some rationale, but my feeling is that it's probably the same in commercial-land too. At least at the beginning of campaign discussions, people seem to be rushing to 'use' social media right now. I do feel it's widely accepted that it is changing the way brands and organisations need to operate, even though Will has raised some concerns that ultimately I do agree with.

My own concern is the speed that the transition to conversational marketing is taking place. The way that it's occurred within the lifespan of one visual trend; the Web 2.0 world of glossy rounded corners, big search bars and clean lines.

There's nothing wrong with these things, but I think it's going to put half-baked social media campaigns in a precarious position over the coming months and years. 

What I mean by that is that right now it's kind of ok to have a website screaming "share this!"... "add this!"... "tweet this!"... "facebook!", but this won't last for ever — It's always been the case that it's the ideas being conveyed that need to be social themselves to gain momentum and spread. So I'm worried that as clients come to the end of their transitions to adopting these new techniques, or at least thinking they have, their audiences will be on the way to turning off from the generic iconography and aesthetic that's been shouted at them for so long. People get bored.

Of course this transition won't be a one off thing, it will need to continually re-invent itself as new platforms and trends emerge. But there will be no point if people have got fed up with listening. And I think that for that to happen, we need to be very careful in the short term not to push 'social' into people's eyes. People know they can share, they have the tools to do it. Let's spend our time worrying about giving them things to talk about rather than whether they should or not.

Which kind of ties quite nicely back into Will's notion of brands just being good at what they do. As well as the 'technology changes, people don't' principle that Amelia wrote about a few weeks ago.

Yes.

Times to wake up

I quite like these adverts, really fun use of logo and image - there's another with a helicopter which is also good. All the different executions are visually inviting and fresh whilst still relevant to the target audience and suitably austere.

But I have a little question about this particular version - they've found a statistic that says the average Londoner gets up at 6.04 am. So why can you only get your paper before 7am? Wouldn't it be easier to get it before 6am? It seems strange to show off that they know what time you're going to get up and then not let you read your paper for potentially another 55 minutes. 

Not just laundry

I've had such a wonderful weekend - friends, music and plenty of interesting. I'm sure to bring up some parts of it in posts this week, but I thought I'd just quickly share this little quote from a book I'm reading at the moment:

"If we are in the laundry detergent business, our competition is not the other appalling commercials our competitors deploy for laundry detergents, but the other commercials our target are engaged by, and respond to, across every category: pizza, batteries, cola, beer. A competitive advertising review must be all the competitive advertising the target sees"

Adam Morgan, Eating the Big Fish p23

Seems kind of relevant to how I'm thinking about non-profit communications at the moment, so it's nice to think I may only be 10 years late on it.

The challenge of freeconomics to charities

Whenever societies or sports clubs would try to procure things at USSU they would always try to get a discount under the ‘we’re a charity’ philosophy; a ‘10% off at Topshop’ strategy that works very rarely in the real world, but apparently works often enough to be written down in folklore as the ‘done thing’ when trying to get something for free for your organisation. 

The problem was that offering something straight up for free wasn’t going to bring enough back to the supplying company – an obvious Western paradox, but one that seems to need to be re-explored whenever a new instance of the debate comes up.  

Recently, it’s been the Spotify debate, but I think Spotify is probably just the manifestation of an answer to a question that’s been being posed since the Napster era, essentially the question of how free, low-distribution-overhead, digital music can be monetised (see more here). Yesterday it reached new highs when the internet was a-twitter with complaints about the lack of a ‘free trial’ period on the new apps for iPhone and Android. 

With Mr. Murdoch about to tell us more about how he’s planning to implement pay-walls in front of his many UK news outlets, and with Jonathan from Spotify reaching more and more people, it seems like the real debate about free is starting to enter the public sphere. Namely ‘what are we prepared to offer in return for this ‘free’ service?’ 

I have been beginning to wonder if my ears are worth £120 a year to an advertiser, and whether, actually, £9.99 really represents good monthly value, regardless of how many CD purchases it ‘saves’ me. 

Lots of people have covered that area before, but what I’m waking up to recently is what it could mean for charities. 

Charities are clearly having to work a lot harder for their own money, now that blue chip companies are retreating to their core activity of squeezing as much profit as possible. Those companies are leaving behind their generous sponsorship initiatives that would have kept many charities afloat, putting more pressure on the commercial services (and fundraising) of the able charities to deliver higher margins, in order that they can be reinvested in the charity. For the less able charities, a fairly tight and grim situation has become even worse during the financial crisis. 

If an organisation’s stakeholders consider themselves to be worthy of charitable treatment, as in the case of student discounts, or thrift stores, how is a charity meant to offer meaningful service and deliver its objectives whilst at the same time earning enough revenue to be able to continue to offer that same level of service? 

Hopefully, the charities’ collective lobby (is there one?) will get involved in the imminent public debate about free. It doesn’t just apply to the services that they are offering, but also to the services that they offer each other, to stakeholders, and to specialist commercial operations like those of Public Zone. It’s a crucial debate; one that I hope will focus on outcomes and value, rather than inputs and cost. 

When ‘vintage’ t-shirts can sell for £30 but a second-hand store can charge no more than a nominal £2 or £3 for the same item, it becomes a question of branding, perception, and of management – we don’t just need a public debate on what free means in our everyday lives, we need charities that are really awake to the economic challenges that face them. Furthermore, they need to be in a position to address those challenges through organisational change and re-evaluation. 

Maybe, like it always used to be, there will be a re-ignition of value creation through collective action and volunteering. But I'm worried that charities need to behave like corporations now in order to reach their audiences.

Do any of your favourite shops offer student discount?