2012: A new (way) foreword

In this month’s blog Faris Yakob, chief innovation officer at MDC Partners, takes a look at the decade of digital so far. 

It’s slap bang in the middle of 2012.

If we were to think of this decade (the…teens? Did we ever decide on that?) as one year, we are at the bit where we still think it’s the beginning of the year, but pretty much spring – a quarter of the way through, sometime around the end of March.

So, when I was asked to update this piece, I had a look and thought: things are pretty much the same as then, because we are just at the beginning. That’s one of the benefits of abstract aphorisms; they tend to last longer than tactics in a world that shimmers and moves, faster and faster, to the beat of Moore’s Law.

But this is also an illusion. Things change faster and more slowly than we expect, and, like watching a child grow, if you are living with them every day you don’t really see the change. It takes a distant aunt who only comes for Christmas to notice and say “ooh, haven’t you grown?”

I was reminded of this when I was watching the video about 2010 you can watch in the cinema. I wrote it in 2006. It’s set in the near future, which was 2010, but is really now. Or soon.

It has lots of partial predictions in it, and I was showing it to an audience in Oslo earlier this year when the final one came true: the Google (G) Drive was launched the day before I spoke, which was wonderful timing.

So, clearly some things have happened.

Mobile suddenly became all-important, as had long been predicted, partially because of the iPad, which launched in April 2010. Suddenly mobile meant lots of people using the web in new, different ways, with a new interface paradigm, and the ultimate death of (mobile) Flash, which was finally announced in 2012.

A third of adults in the USA own tablets, 97 per cent of which are iPads. Apple stock was $247 a share in April 2010, currently trading around $600.

Some things change really fast, it would seem.

Remember iAds? They launched in April 2010 too. What happened there?

Old Spice owned the internet for two days, responding in near-real-time to tweets with hilarious videos posted to YouTube. Such a simple idea, such incredible execution. The rest of the year fell into the Old Spice hole.

That’s how you know something is really good. It creates a new reality, a new grammar that infects other ideas, either through imitation or contradistinction.

2011 had a big Superbowl moment. VW capitalized on the conceptual separation between watching on the web and on TV (watching on the web never feels as public as TV, at least not yet), launching their SuperBowl Star Wars spot online and scooping the day. This is why launching things online first makes sense. The active audiences that share on the web care about primacy and discovery if they are going to share something, the TV audience less so, even during Superbowl, since they know that everyone is watching anyway.

The Jay-Z/Bing Decoded campaign deconstructed a paper book, placed it all over the world, and let people recompile it using Bing maps and clues. One of the most impressive case studies in recent years – although a recent poll showed that people in advertising are far more likely to have heard of it than norms.

Tesco seemed to find a use for QR codes in Korean – turning an underground station into a QR code store – although how this is more useful than just ordering online is not entirely clear to me. Looks cool, though.

Hashtags took over the world, or television at least. Infographics took over the web. Pay with a tweet and the .wwf file format showed us new kinds of creative ideas made from technology – platforms for others to use. Amex’s Small Business Saturday showed us that the oldest ideas can still work if you get the right culture, the right moment, and empower people with the right social tools and motivations.

And now, it’s now. Or 2012 at least. Facebook introduces Timeline, no one really wins the Superbowl, although the focus was all on second screen experiences like Coke’s Polar Bears and Chevy’s Gametime App.

Speaking of Coke, they seem to have cracked the code for YouTube: do nice, surprising things for real people, ideally in interesting global markets (ie. not the USA): Hug Vending Machine, Happiness truck, Happiness machine. Film it. Publish the results.

So. A busy quarter of a decade behind us, are there any new principles we should embrace?

Let’s add in a couple of new ones to the decaplet, one for each year. What should they be? Tell you what – I’ll do one.

1.       Do things for people, then tell the world

The internet bears the costs of distribution, and modern communication theory suggests that being nice to people is a more powerful way to get them to like your brand than telling them how good you are. Extensible solutions in this vein include The Fun Theory, Canon’s Second Shot Project, Gatorade Replay and more. Do things, then tell people.

The second is up to you – dynamic interactions with the content production public are a crucial part of digitally relevant communications. Write your addition in the comments and we’ll include the best in a later post.

And, maybe, I’ll send you something nice.