aspire to enquire

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?

Social media shepherds

As more and more campaigns and movements conceive themselves online, the kinds of patterns that people like David Armano have been talking about for some time are starting to be widely accepted. The peer-to-peer and bottom-up 'influence ripples' communication methods are starting to openly challenge the top-down institutional channels that many campaigners are still relying on.

This week, a prime example was the #welovethenhs twitter campaign, born out of an emotional and patriotic response to traditional American right-wingism. Becoming one of the highest trending topics over the course of Tuesday and Wednesday, the media added to the commotion by picking it up at the end of the week, causing more people to add their voices.

I'm pretty sure that no one at COI or the NHS (or the White House) thought up this campaign. It shows the power of twitter to allow individuals to rally their causes in real time and respond to issues that they feel passionate about. The media and societal response was a campaigner's dream.

But there are real challenges for traditional campaigners now.

On Friday morning we unpacked a typical campaign process, through the planning, implementation and post-campaign stages. Building online presences, taking on fundraisers, analysing data and all manner of other logistical feats that would take a campaign months to gestate.

What do those people do, now that a campaign can take off and die down in the space of a week? In our Friday discussion the idea of campaigners as 'shepherds' was mooted. We shouldn't try so hard any more to hold people in our field - We need to follow the flock, wherever it wants to graze, but we need to be there to keep it together, keep it safe, and keep the momentum. We need to respond whenever something comes up, and hope that the groundswell of support around the issues draws people to particular behaviours or organisations.

To be fair to the Labour Party, that's exactly what they've done this week with their response to #welovethenhs . But in their response there are lessons to be learned for future shepherds.

Did they act to quickly to bring it round to another attack on the tories? Were they right to imply that all these tweeters were suddenly Labour supporters?

I think "yes" and "no" - but we'll see how it turns out. What do you think?

This is what it looks like

Since starting at Public Zone a lot of my thought has turned a lot more to websites and their role within a company's overall communication strategy, more specifically how a web 'site' should behave now that so much online activity is two-way and conducted through social network platforms.

I've always been a little dubious of 'social media experts' and those who just want to get 'on twitter' or get a fan page on facebook for their company, but they are right to recognise that organisations need to exist in those spaces to maintain relevance. But I'm sticking with my 'what are you actually going to do with it?' line that I laid out a few months ago.

Anyway. Websites. Today we looked at most of the big websites and placed them on this axis:

It was a really interesting excercise, one that I think every design student should do before starting a new project. It was fascinating to notice how web 'categories' seemed to bunch together - ugly e-commerce sites like ebay and tesco and gumtree (sort of) occupied similar areas which curved round to sites like wikipedia and more information based sites, and so on. 

When we placed public zone sites, it was quite reassuring to see them all in the top right quarter, which seems to be the good segment in these kinds of exercises. But what was really interesting in this exploration was to see the spread, and the kinds of sites that ended up in the different areas. In many ways, no axis was necessarily bad, as long as being in that position was what was required of the organisation and their overall societal positioning.

State of the Uni, part 1.

A team of happy Sabbatical Officers at Sussex in June 2005. Thanks to Jo for reminding me about this photo.

I don't know if other people do this, but I think I have an unhealthy obsession with the place I used to work. Basing my dissertation on it didn't help, but I think I've probably been back to the USSU website at least once every 2 months or so since I left in 2006. 

It's interesting seeing what's staying the same and where improvements are being made.

One definite improvement is the development of what seems, from a distance, to be a functioning and populated website for the student paper, The Badger. It's an article that I found there a few weeks ago, that has started today's thinking.

Incidentally, seeing thebadgeronline makes me wonder if they need a central USSU website at all. Potentially, the up-to-date news content could be used to drive a lot more people out to other union activities like advice and activities. Anyway...

So, the article in question is "university prospectuses fail to inform students". It refers to a report in the Times Higher Education supplement published by the National Student Forum.

If you're a current student reading this, you're probably thinking this is quite obvious, and not news at all. I have mixed feelings on the issue.

I didn't look at a prospectus before coming to UWIC, my application was based on having no money in Brighton and visiting a college that was round the corner from my parents house in Cardiff. When I visited, I found the tutor to be awesome and the work that third years were producing at the time to be of a standard that I would have liked to be at myself.

Looking at a UWIC prospectus now, I don't think it lies about the student experience here at all. It relies completely on being in quite a vibrant city, and the design and photography are as incoherent as the course descriptions and student profiles. You are left asking what the heck is going on, and what relevance that has to anything else. So it's exactly like UWIC. Well done UWIC.

But not all prospectuses can be so cleverly conceived.

Sussex, for example, used a beautiful re-positioning by Blast in 2004 to increase student applications quite significantly, but it's taking a bit longer to fully realise some of the aspirations made by the new identity. However, the main feeling conveyed in Sussex prospectuses is that it's a beautiful campus in a beautiful and vibrant city full of lots of very creative and intelligent people. So in that sense, I don't think it's far off.

I made a little promise to myself a few months ago that blog posts would only be 300 words. I realise now I've failed nearly every time. Sorry.

So back to UWIC. As part of our 'professional practice' module, we're building a prospectus CD for our course. We're working, generally in teams of six (count them!), to produce an interactive flash CD thing to be sent out to feeder colleges and prospective applicants.

Let me get my reservations out of the way first. Why are we working in the largest groups ever on a project that is around 10% of our degree. Why are we being asked to specifically use flash when all we've been taught up till now is how to tween. Why are we even using flash at all. Doesn't the fact that you're asking for a flash CD show where you are in terms of on-the-button-ness? Why is this the first time we've even done group work seriously. Why are you asking the most disenfranchised, uninspired, unmotivated and bored year group in history to produce what in many of their eyes will be pure lies. 

And so on.

So here's what the group I'm in has put together so far:

Fun isn't it! The idea is that the viewer will only see a quarter of that image at a time, and it will rotate around, with different parts of the landscape acting as portals to course information, past work, and so on.

But I've had an idea.

Thanks again to Jo Walters, who reminded me about that first photo in a spate of facebook action this week, I'm aware of a website called The Student Room. In internet terms, this website is ancient - she was using it to help Sussex freshers with their concerns and worries as long ago as summer 2005. And it's still thriving. You may not have heard about it, but a lot of future HE students somehow have - have a look and see how populated the forums are.

Every University has its own wiki information page, with a forum, chat, local links, etc. There is also advice on personal statements, clearing,all kinds of stuff.

This is the UWIC page.

As you can see, hundreds of excited current students have rushed to the site to let people know what it's really like studying here. The University has also added more in-depth information about accommodation and pastoral services. Not.

UWIC does have a twitter profile though.

It's just press releases about research. No engagement, no following current students. Perhaps when they did UWIC twitter search they decided it safest to stay away (you have to scroll through because Plaid Cymru have their conference there. They're diluting all the fail messages this week).

SO, here's my idea:

Considering how much online research future students must be doing these days, wouldn't it be great if the general online noise about a university was so positive, so empowered, and so wide-reaching, that there would be very little need to lie in prospectuses. 

What if students like myself could come away from every lecture with a tweet or a blog about how inspiring their last lecture was, how excited they were about their current project, or what amazing thing the student union was organising for them. I appreciate that social media hasn't quite permeated through to everyone, so what I'm really asking for, I imagine, is a culture shift.

What if the culture of a university wasn't 'can we afford that' and therefore 'let's not bother' but 'wouldn't it be amazing if..' and 'off you go'.

Universities are in a mess financially. I get that. I don't know where to point the blame in the whole 'students as customers' debate. 

But amazing things can be done with very few resources, as long as people are passionate enough to try and achieve them.

I guess my point in this post is to say why don't we change our short and mid-term focus.

It shouldn't be how can universities maximise recruitment and efficiency, but

how can universities make people passionate? 

Once that's being answered, the first question answers itself. The recruitment part is pointless anyway, when the retention rate is so low.

Perhaps some more green spaces? A few more visiting speakers? More scrutiny and development of the students union? More challenging projects? Computer systems that work? email addresses you're proud to use? A business world that has heard of your university? There are all kinds of ways. Ways that think about a University 'brand' as more than a logo and a colour.

Ultimately it is an equal responsibility of students and staff, but something needs to start it.

phew.

Part 2 later in the week I think.

Smells like teen advertising

Adverts aimed at teenagers are some of my favourites. There are some beautiful ones, but the real reason I like them is just that they're so shameless in their technique.

What I mean by that is that they all seem to position their product as a chance to get closer to the person of their desires. Got spots? Well, you can't go to the party. Used Lynx? Then obviously, the girls of Nuts Magazine will soon be chasing you down the beach.

Pic borrowed from The Inspiration Room

I'm not saying that the rest of ad land is devoid of sexual positioning, but I can't recall a teenage ad (maybe with the exception of Frank) that hasn't used it. And in older-positioned ads it's sometimes a little more subtle. I'm totally ready to be proved wrong on this, but I can't think of any right now.

So anyway. Recently,Chewing Gum adverts are the ones that are getting to me.

That's the latest advert for Wrigley's extra.

The irrelevance of this ad is stifling my ability to write cohesively about it, but suffice to say I don't think it's very good. If they're saying that you can 'get closer' and live some sort of West Side Story dream, then the previous ads were probably better, no?

A similar thing was going on in New York last Summer. 

Again, fail. It's a neat idea (is it?), something about giving and receiving, link to kissing, or something, young people, email, text messaging, youf, but there's no connect with Dentyne chewing gum. And what's with that font? 

I had a better pic of this campaign which focussed on that panel at the back with all the copy on it, but I've lost it. It was some sort of Howies-esque 'log off and spend more time together' kind of message.

[edit - here it is!]

What these brands are really selling is confidence. The teenage market being as transient as it is, it's probably been ok for marketers to repackage the same ad as new generations come through.

I'm really torn between wanting to give young people a little credit for being a bit more sophisticated than these ads make out, and between giving a lot of well-paid marketers and advertisers a little respect for deciding that these were the best responses to the briefs.

I'm wondering, though, if someone could benefit from doing 'a Dove'. It may not sell product in the short term, but it must be in everyone's best interests for a brand to just encourage everyone to chill out a bit? 

Perhaps, after that, we could start to see some really inventive work.

State your order!

I watched the first part of Garden State last night. I love the little details in it that seem to come together to build the characters and plot really quickly. I guess that's the same with a bunch of films. You probably have to enjoy a film enough to watch it again, which is when you pick most of these things up.

Anyway another thing that's always interested me is branded spirits. I get that some spirits are nicer than others (for the record, my favourites are Havana Club 7 Year, Tanqueray, Macallan, and Sailor Jerry), but it's the ordering part that bugs me. Like, ordering by name. Whenever I'm behind the bar I usually try to offer a choice, bit of an up or down-sell, but all the customer has to do is ask for 'dark rum' or whatever. If I'm honest, people who ask directly for a brand, unless it has it's own specific qualities (Sailor Jerry), I usually think nasty things about them.

Which is why for the first time I really liked the characterisations in one of the first scenes of Garden State.

They're more about brands in the States, sure, and more direct, but I don't think these guys would be nearly as annoying if they didn't order 'Ketel Redbulls' and a 'Ketel Cosmo'. It's like those adverts for 'SoCo' that completely failed. Especially the cosmo one, the taste is going to be so much more dependent on the barman's skills than on the minute intricacies of the vodka.

It's such a small part of the film, and they're really minor characters, but they really wound me up. Good writing.

The soundtrack's good too.

Riffing on Woolworths

I had the pleasure this week of visiting Clwb Ifor Bach to support a friend's first foray into live music promotion. 

Clwb was one of the first clubs I became a regular visitor of, and also where I played my first gig, which, writing this, I've just realised was nearly 10 years ago. I also was pretty privileged to be asked to play with Ozomatli at the venue a few times. After coming off stage with them on one occasion, I was asked to join Shootin' Goon, and the rest was (pre-myspace website-building) history. Sort of.

Shootin' Goon, me on right. pic © Andrew James 2003

I still love our music, but The Goon were notoriously ropey during live sets. We all had our moments of string snapping, part-forgetting glory.

If you have ever been to see a band where there's been a local support, you'll probably know the kind of thing (mp3 link): A song finishes, and the singer announces awkwardly that there are 'a few technical problems' before breaking into some kind of jam session with the drummer while the offending player repairs their kit.

Please do stick with me, I will make a point soon…

It's classic local support behaviour. The problem comes when you play away and become tour support. In my own experience, Shootin' Goon were given pretty much the best start to a career we could have been offered when we secured 10 UK dates with Reel Big Fish.

They blew us away. No string breaks, no set lists, all completely professional, rehearsed, funny, and a pleasure to watch. At the time we called it "SLICK" and aspired to do a similar act from then on, with limited success.

I was reminded of all this the other night. Headliners Romeo Must Die really acted like the headline band and played a blinding (and deafening) set. They worked the small and bored crowd as if they were playing to Wembley but in such a humble way as to get even the likes of me bopping my head by the end of their set. The same could not be said for their support bands.

It's kind of the same for brands, isn't it?

I was thinking about all this talk about brands focussing on their core activities. Staying on message. All that is fine, but what about between songs? A band's core activities are obviously their songs, but if they mess up the inbetween bits, it totally falls apart. 

By the way, if the earnings model for music is going to move to Live, then those bits are going to become even more important. Keeping the energy going, maintaining the atmosphere, offering up more than what the download could.

For a brand, exactly the same. All those car manufacturers with rubbish local dealers. 'Classy' nightclubs with shoddy POS. Commercials that offer no resemblance to the actual christmas shopping experience. 

So my point is, at a live gig, people don't give as much attention to the supports. They automatically expect the standard to be lower and it's not really what they came for anyway. They're like Woolworths. No one bought into it because it was a bit rubbish. 

Picture from Russell's site, sorry. hope that's ok.

If only they'd made that their brand. It could have been kind of like the Great British Seaside, but for shops.

I know tons of bands that have huge gaps between songs, where they talk, joke, whatever. In a kooky kind of way, unprofessionalism is kind of what makes conversational brands like Innocent so endearing. Even though Innocent obviously have pretty slick supply chain management gubbins to get fresh products out so regularly, and their drinks are amazing, I bet people would be totally cool with it if once in a while their favourite wasn't available because the factory had run out of oranges or something. At Woolworths, if you'd visited at all, it would have just qualified for a 'tut' and then walking out wondering why you'd thought to bother in the first place.

Little Chef should take note.

Innocent Prize

I sent a picture to @innocentdrinks the other week which resulted in my getting a small prize. It was a picture of the Age Concern Hats which had just started going out in Sainsburys Central on Queen Street. 

I've started getting into a bit more of this kind of thing - it's fun, and also interesting seeing how these kinds of things run. Hopefully it will give me more idea of digital campaign stuff without me really noticing. I'm going to have a go at Live Guy on Tuesday too.

My picture was rubbish though, definitely not up to Innocent standards.

And it got featured on the Innocent Blog, which is always fun times.

And look what (I'm presuming) Mr Dan Germain sent in return! ...

Thanks Innocent! The brand book will actually be really useful for my dissertation, which WILL be at first draft stage by the end of this week, so muchly appreciated.

I'll try harder on the picture next time.

take all the magazines, put them in a 'zine museum

I've been getting a few letters like this recently, I get them every year.

I usually duly fill them in and send them back. I've sent my one for Grafik back already.

But then I looked at my shelf of i-D magazines from the past year (actually, it's the past 2 years - the 4 years before are in boxes now) and noticed that three out of the past 6 month's magazines still have their wrappers on. I didn't read them. They just landed on my doorstep, and now they're on my shelf. While May, September and October are in plastic, August and June are looking pretty crisp as well. I don't remember reading much from those either.

The most recent one, I bought while I was out one day, because it didn't land on my doorstep. Maybe I've been holding on to this subscription form a little longer than I thought. I've read every page of November. Not just because I overheard the Alasdair McLellan telling my employers in New York that he was shooting the whole magazine and there was lots of our labels in there, and not just because it's full of Lara Stone, but because I had time and a need for a magazine, so I went and bought it.

There must be some kind of name for this kind of behaviour - the "blindly assuming things will always be there" principle or something. I love the magazine, so why did I let it go unnoticed for 3 whole months? Was it because I knew it would always be there?

If I'm not the only person who behaves like this, that presents massive problems for newspapers as they try to move people to subscription models. Sure, they might have a guaranteed revenue stream, but maybe not an attention stream. Will that matter? If advertising revenue is less important, does it matter that they can't guarantee eyeballs anymore? 

Maybe their daily nature will encourage people more.

I don't think I'll be re-subscribing to i-D. It might mean I read it more often.

Two becomes One

Living, as I do, in Wales, it's become quite easy to take bilingualism for granted. Nearly everything here is available in both English and Welsh. 

Which is why I found the use of Spanish so interesting when I was in New York this summer. 

I'm hoping this post won't become an exploration of the use of language as signifier of cultural identity, because that's something I know very little about. 

But as a Welsh Graphic Communications student, there are a parts of bilinguality that we are invited to explore. 

For starters, it's a huge challenge: In a lot of professional Welsh graphic design jobs, not only are you required to produce a beautiful and effective poster, website or brochure, but it has to come in two languages, without losing any of its effect. There are whole design companies who specialise in it.

Moreover, you need someone in your company who can speak the language. But they also need a firm enough grasp of it to be able to translate not just the words but also the meaning. In a country whose language is based upon convergence of centuries old local and regional dialect, that's not going to be easy. This is hard enough when being done by a Welsh company - what about the companies advertising in Wales but based externally?

All of which makes it a little easier to understand little oops moments like this:

© BBC. The Welsh translation to this sign reads something like "I'm not in the office at the moment, please send my work for translation"

Despite those setbacks, I still see the use of Welsh as a challenge, not a constraint.

I also think that there should be more reasons to use both languages than just that it's the law. 

Admittedly, most sane people have probably thought at least once in their life that seeing as the whole population speaks English, what's the point of using Welsh at all (there was an interesting Rob Brydon documentary on this subject the other week actually). But I think they're missing some of the point.

A well-designed bilingual poster will not just reach the demographic that English one would have done; DIY enthusiasts, benefit claimers, or whoever, it will also reach a Welsh Person. It's a self-identifying demographic. 

It could encourage more of a sense of empathy, or community, or inclusiveness. It could draw on Welsh colloquialisms to give more local impact. It could do all sorts of things by speaking exclusively to Welsh People, whether English or Welsh speaking. As aspiring designers and advertisers we should be relishing this opportunity.

As an aside, I was just listening the new Seth Godin audio book ("Tribes"), and he quotes someone who says we should stop using the word "opportunity" and replace it with "obligation". So there you go.

In New York, I found it all a bit confusing.

This billboard is in north Brooklyn bordering on an area called Greenpoint which has a long history of being colonised primarily by Polish emigrants.

This kind of advertising is everywhere in New York. If you call any big phone number, you're given the opportunity to speak in Spanish, much like in Wales with Welsh. 

I don't have a problem with advertising or communicating in a country's second language, as I said above. But I think there's an opportunity being missed. If not for value-building reasons, at least for money-saving ones.

Unsurprisingly for me, being one myself, it's the smug Europeans who are already starting to do it a bit better:

And reassuringly, there's instances where I'm reminded all to fondly of some Welsh signs.

I guess my point is this: Wouldn't it be great if the idea of being a New Yorker included the idea of multilingualism?

Of course, if you ask anyone, it already does. 

So why don't we see that in the graphic design there? Why do Bank of America have to have separate posters? Is the Spanish-speaking 2009 Toyota Corolla different to the English-speaking one? Are native English-speaking Americans to stupid to decode more than one language in a poster? Is there a problem with showing America as one, multicultural nation?