It’s not often one can say that an app has profoundly affected their way of seeing the world, but I think Instagram has done just that. It changes the way you study your surroundings – always keeping a keen eye out for something interesting to shoot. But it also changes your view of the world because you can see it through the eyes of Instagramers from Oslo to Tokyo to Waikiki. I share my vision of Toronto. And in return I get to see life through the talented eyes of those I follow around the world. Cool.

The list of photographers I follow has changed from when I started. At first, I connected to as many friends as I could find. But through living with the app, I’ve found I’ve stopped following those who post family shots or snaps of last night’s dinner in favour of avid photographers whose next post is even better than their last. These people feel the Instagram pressure to deliver, and they do every single day. It garners them thousands of Likes per shot and tens of thousands of followers. One day, like the social clout of having tens of thousands of Twitter followers, that kind of Instagram following might actually mean something! What it means to me is that I can look forward to a very inspiring feed of amazing photographs every single day. And that’s just another kind of pressure: the pressure to compete with the best shooters on Instagram.

So, with the pressure of wanting to upload only great shots, impress your followers daily, and compete against the best shooters, you’d think this app is more trouble than it’s worth. But I’d say creativity flourishes under pressure. The app was never positioned as a way to make people better photographers, but I believe that’s really what’s happening. So, to me, all that pressure is a good thing.

By the way, don’t ask to be followed. Lame.

Upload something amazing today.
stefan

The CASSIES – short for the Canadian Advertising Success Stories – is the only award show in Canada that recognizes campaigns on the basis of the business results they generate. This year TAXI picked up 6 awards.

McCain won not one but two Gold awards for the It’s All Good campaign. We won in the Packaged Goods category, and in the Best Launch category. This campaign, which tells the story of McCain’s switch to using only real ingredients in their food, is the biggest communication effort in the company’s 50 year corporate history.

Boston Pizza also won two awards – a Silver in the Events, Short Term and Seasonal category for Flatties and Drummies, and a Bronze for Finger Cooking campaign for take-out and delivery in Off To A Good Start. Both of these efforts fall under the “Here to Make You Happy” brand campaign TAXI developed for Boston Pizza after winning the business a little more than a year ago.

TELUS garnered a Bronze for the Go Pink campaign in Events, Short Term and Seasonal. It’s nice to see that a great cause and great results can be connected.

TAXI 2 rounded things out with a Bronze for Yellow Pages, also in the Events, Short Term and Seasonal category.

So congratulations to everyone involved in the work – this kind of success is something we really care about. And special congratulations to all our winning clients. Thanks for sharing our commitment to great and effective work.

Fan-Gating is the now common practice to present a Pre-Like page when users first visit a brand’s site — a page that exists for no other reason than to tell new users they have to Like the brand before the real content is unlocked and they’re able to experience what they’ve already been forced to tell their entire network they’re a fan of.  This is the Fan-Gate — a barrier either demanding or pleading for a Like before it’ll allow the user to pass.  And because agencies often have a mandate to increase Likes and broaden the fanbase, and because everyone else is doing it, most agencies see nothing wrong with it.  

I don’t understand how we let things got this far.  Clients are devoting time and money to the content being created.  They’re investing in prizes and actors and community managers to keep the conversation going.   There should be as few barriers as possible between content and consumer (a Facebook account is itself a barrier, but that’s a rant for another day).  People who are forced to Like a brand before they’re allowed to interact with it aren’t Liking it because they actually Like it.  They’re Liking it because they have to.  It’s a toll.  A temporary roadblock that’s easily detoured and can easily be reversed as soon as they’ve done whatever it was they came for, if they don’t just turn around and leave in the first place.  These Likes haven’t been earned  – they’ve been coerced.  

If this trend continues, the Like itself will be completely devalued.  It’ll be just another button we mindlessly click because we have to.  The Facebook equivalent of an “I agree to the Terms and Conditions” checkbox.  Our industry should be striving to create the kinds of experiences that our users enjoy and seek out and Like because they want to know when the next one is going to happen.  The Like should be akin to applause or a tip — a thank you for a job well done and encouragement to continue.  

It’s not to say we can’t ask people to like us, or include giant flaming arrows pointing to the Like button, we just can’t make it a requirement.

We take pains to make our digital experiences as easy and frustration-free as possible.  If we’re successful, consumers will choose to Like our clients, which opens up the possibility of dialogue and interaction and the development of an ongoing affinity. Then it’s even easier to keep them coming back for more.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Explosive projections on the water. The result is spectacular. The projection features a three-story-tall dribbling, dunking and walking on water Melo, Jordan-branded helicopter and ultimately a live appearance of Melo himself.
This is one of the best projections i have seen – really well done.

Beyond the launch of Timeline, Facebook developed ways to make the overall site more engaging and social for brands. They have made subtle changes to Facebook Pages, and more importantly, Page Insights. The number of Likes a page had was the be all and end all of a brand on Facebook. The more Likes a particular campaign received during its duration, the more successful the campaign was perceived.

Endless studies have been conducted in an attempt to understand the value of a Like, but these numbers may not matter much moving forward (e.g. 15 Stats Behind the True Value of the Facebook Like | Business 2 Community). One of the most important things for brands to notice about their updated Page is the number right below the number of likes, People talking about this. This number shows how many people are actively engaged with the brand’s page, posts, photos and applications.

The people actually talking and engaging with a brand are much more valuable to it than someone who clicked Like a year ago. This number will be the one that determines what campaigns are successful and what brands are really the powerhouses on Facebook. The importance of this number inevitably reduces that of the Like and therefore means marketers must change the way they think about Facebook marketing.

Many brands use some sort of Like-gating to entice users to Like their page. They may offer alternate content, a coupon or maybe the chance to win something only after a user Likes their page. This technique is used to pad the number of users that actually like a brand with those that simply want to download a coupon or watch a video. People talking about this is a number that accurately represents those engaged with the brand.

Facebook Insights also improved to show per-post reach, engagement, virality and more. Total number of Likes, general engagement and number of fan friends reached are also clearly listed and represented in a visual graph for page administrators. All of these analytics push brands to create content worth sharing and interacting with.

Updates to Pages and Insights hint at the slow demise of the Like button, while Timeline Actions demonstrate a revised way of sharing all together. Currently users can share a story to their wall through a status update, send it in a message to a friend, or click Like and have it appear on their wall. Actions allow updates to be posted to the user’s Timeline from an application or website after an action is taken. Applications become part of the user’s identity and integrate seamlessly with their Timeline.

These actions are customizable and unique to your application or brand. Instead of seeing, ‘User likes Brand’ after clicking the Like button, you can create numerous unique actions. For example, ‘User cooked Recipe’ (see above), ‘User ran a marathon,’ or ‘User watched Titanic.’ Each action and object can have a specific image and description associated with it that gets featured on the user’s Timeline. Read more about how Actions are used in the Facebook Documentation.

Facebook marketing is evolving to a new level – a level where the Like button is losing importance while social interaction and personalization are taking over. Marketers and developers alike need to take this into account and begin to demonstrate a better understanding of how to communicate with their users.

“For some reason it’s traditional that the planning director is the one that gets to talk at the EFFIEs. But so many people had their way with these campaigns. In fact I’ve been thinking about what we’ve learned and if there’s one common theme across our most effective campaigns it’s that they’re the ones we had the biggest arguments about. Planning arguing with creative. Arguments with media. And perhaps slightly more diplomatic debates with our clients. So here’s to really healthy arguing!”

He makes a great point –that the effectiveness of a campaign (or, indeed, an agency) is the responsibility of everyone, not just the planners.

I like this. A lot.

The days of a planner spending weeks ensconced in an ivory tower before deigning to descend with stone tablets graven with a single beautifully crafted, internally cohesive strategy are over.

I’m firmly of the belief that an agency needs to work more like a rugby team and less like a relay race. Each player has a clearly defined role but the team can only succeed if everyone is working together, passing the ball when required and being prepared to step outside one’s position if the situation dictates it. Fluidity and collaboration are as important as the set plays.

A great brief (and, more importantly, a great briefing) is but the starting point of a great campaign. It is the game plan which should absolutely guide the work, but it must also stimulate and provoke the teams, opening doors to new places, new patterns of thought. It should be a document that creatives can write from, rather than write to. And it can’t ever be set in stone.

My good friend Richard Huntington (CSO, Saatchi & Saatchi London) is fond of the axiom that it is better to be interesting than right –after all, one can always check the veracity or appropriateness of something interesting, whereas it is much harder to add interestingness once you’ve convinced yourself that you have already landed on the “right” answer.

Once you move away from a didactic view of what is right, there is more room for collaboration across disciplines. Now, real collaboration is rarely frictionless, especially in an industry such as ours, filled with opinionated Type-A personalities. And friction creates heat –a culture where everything gets challenged and tempered will get us to better work than one in which a creative brief is simply passed like a baton from suit to planner to creative to production. I once worked at an agency where the work was consistently good, but was rarely great. The agency was full of terribly nice, polite English people who were always terribly nice and polite to each other while servicing terribly nice, polite English clients. It was all very “Keep Calm & Carry On” – there was no culture of challenging and pushing and shouting and fighting for better, and it showed in the work (which was invariably nice and polite).

Here at TAXI, we strive to create a culture where our work is open and up for debate. So we are in the process of putting all of our planners into one big office, working around one big desk, so that strategies and briefs can be thrashed around within the department. And we are creating a large comfortable lounge where briefings can take place and strategies can be collectively debated and refined, away from everyone’s individual distractions.

Yesterday, IT asked me what we were going to call that lounge. I’m thinking of dubbing it “The Argument Room”.

Apple probably wants the data for less evil purposes like developing a database of WiFi hotspot coordinates. Google first came up with the idea for this years ago when they were mapping streetview. They had the foresight to arm their vehicles with WiFi detectors that generated a database of the locations of discovered WiFi routers as they drove down every street in the world. This was a brilliant idea. It meant that smartphones would be able to triangulate their positions simply by sniffing for hotspots and sending the results to Google who would return their probable location. With this rough fix a smartphone could feed the data to the phone’s GPS receiver to speed up the GPS fix by an order of magnitude. This was an amazingly creative use of WiFi signals that Google promptly got into hot water for. It turns out that Google was careless and accidentally collected data fragments that might have been transmitted on unsecured WiFi networks as they drove past. Some claimed that this turned Google’s streetview operation into an army of wardriving vehicles–a term used in the early WiFi days to describe the nefarious search for unsecured networks.  This accusation was a red herring, but in October it was enough to make Google promise to stop sniffing WiFi hotspots with their streetview vehicles. Their promise was an empty one; Google had much bigger plans.

Distributed Wardriving

As part of the Android operating system, Google has been building and refining a robust database of the precise geographical location of WiFi routers. They have effectively turned every Android phone into a wardriving device. When an Android handset detects a wireless network, it beams its MAC address, signal strength, GPS coordinates, and the handset’s unique ID to Google servers. The result is a very complete and very up-to-date dataset of global WiFi router locations. Google has made this database freely accessible to the public and has said that it will only collect data from Android users who have explicitly given their consent.

The chances are that your home or work WiFi router is in the database, mine was (see image right). Hacker Samy Kamkar (author of the Samy Worm) has developed a site that demonstrates just how comprehensive Google’s catalog is. Simply type in your WiFi router’s MAC address and there’s a good chance that it will return its location. This data is theoretically still anonymous since it’s simply a MAC address and not a person’s name.

If we start the thought process from this point, one quickly realizes that we no longer need a GPS in order to determine someone’s location. Wireless providers have been applying this principal for years. By analysing the signal strength between cell towers and Non-GPS-enabled handsets, wireless providers keep a rough position fix on their consumers. They aggregate this data and sell it for things like traffic congestion analysis and driving route planning. This might perk up the ears of privacy watchdogs, but at least this is a matter that is directly affected by law. This is a company selling data to another company, and it’s not in the wireless company’s interest to provide unique identifiers if the data is only to be used in aggregate. WiFi router tracking has no such limitations or restrictions. Chinese citizens living in Beijing are offered no such reassurances as their government has begun using WiFi trangulation to track its citizens under the guise of easing traffic congestion.

Online Behavioural Tracking

Another form of tracking is the more widely known techniques of cookie and IP-based tracking. This doesn’t have to do with physical location, but it has to do with uniquely identifying a computer and sometimes a unique individual and applying that data to better target that person for advertising and promotions. In mid-maturity, this kind of marketing is only getting better and more precise as marketers warm to it and become more comfortable with the granularity of the data available. For example, if I login to online banking at a major bank, that bank now knows that my site cookie is really me (since I just authenticated with the bank) and can draw on a number of techniques to further learn about my habits in detail. What if this could be mixed with location-based information? Could my bank’s new iPhone app (that innocently asks to use my geolocation to help me find the nearest bank machine) start matching mobile location with the same behaviour analysis information? The bank has my home address on file to match against my geolocation. It could easily build out a profile of movement and habit to better understand whether I was a home-body or a socialite. Another example of what can be done with such data is Skyhook. Skyhook is a company currently suing Google for patent infringement that offers a plethora of services based on massive geolocation and online activity data. From their website:

SpotRank predicts the density of people in predefined urban square-block areas worldwide at any hour, any day of the week. Developers and advertisers can use this groundbreaking behavioral intelligence data to serve location-based content and ads in cool new ways never envisioned before.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Apple and Google could go much further with the data at their disposal.

Putting it All Together

Let’s look at the data that Apple and Google each have at their disposal:

• Precise information on the when and where of the movement of  their customers.
• A database of  the location of WiFi routers by MAC address that is being constantly updated that they can use to connect wireless and wired behaviour.
• Network access data. Google knows what everyone searches for by IP and by cookie.
• Credit card data. As of March 2011, Apple has over 200 million active credit card numbers on file each attached to an apple ID, which you have to have associated with your iPhone in order to use the app store.
• Search history data (even via so-called Private Browsing).
• IP and geolocation account login data (either through Gmail or me.com in Apple’s case).

What could one do with all of this information if it was used together? A lot.

With the ability to track the movement of non-GPS devices the concern spreads to the profiling and tracking of laptops and other WiFi enabled devices. If I connect my Apple Macintosh or WiFi-only iPad to my home WiFi router, Apple is immediately able to match my router locale with my iTunes Apple ID which contains my credit card information including my mailing address. They instantly know that I’m at home. Using basic data analysis they could easily determine my likely place of employment. For example, if iPhone connects to my secure office WiFi router every day during business hours it’s probably a good guess that I’m at work. A better way would be to reverse this data analysis: get the AppleIDs of all users who connect to the same secure office WiFi router, analyse those Apple accounts and look for things in common. Using such methods Apple could learn about their customers down to the punch-clock detail of their work habits and the routines of their entire life profile.

Apple is already doing this and the public has agreed to it. The Apple iOS4 End User License Agreement (EULA) contains the following passage:

When you interact with Apple, we may collect personal information relevant to the situation, such as your name, mailing address, phone number, email address, and contact preferences; your credit card information and information about the Apple products you own, such as their serial numbers and date of purchase; and information relating to a support or service issue.

And

Apple may provide certain services through your iPhone that rely upon location information. To provide these services, Apple and its partners may collect, maintain, process and use your location data, including the real-time geographic location of your iPhone. By using or activating any location-based services on your iPhone, you agree and consent to Apple’s and its partners’ collection, maintenance, processing and use of your location data to provide you with such services.

Google could do the same and more using Gmail accounts configured on iPhones, IPs and Android phones scanning at the network level. In Google’s case they wouldn’t only know where I was but they would be able to draw on the contents of my mail and by search history to get a better idea of who I was and what I was interested in. It only took one Android phone to geotag my home WiFi hotspot leaving every device that connects to it from now on susceptible to geotagging. Browsers like Safari and Chrome that have options to determine my location for better search results are able to report back additional data on web browsing activity including every google search, every Gmail login etc.

Now don’t get me wrong, I have very little faith that either Apple or Google are organized enough to use this data efficiently to create a digital Big Brother state. I joked at work that there should be an Onion article written: Foursquare Addict Outraged to Discover iPhone Tracking their Location. I’ve pointed out in previous articles that the public freely gives up more information about themselves now than ever before. The public would do well to stop and consider the creative ways that minds at Apple and Google can reassemble that data to reverse engineer their lives.

“Don’t be evil” is Google’s informal company mantra. Some may see their Android data collection policy as evil, but the public’s definition of evil is changing rapidly. Apple has no such mantra.

@benfeist on twitter

One of the highlights of this year’s South by Southwest (SxSW) Interactive festival was a talk given by Phil Zimmermann about the current frontiers of identity theft and internet privacy. Personally it was amazing to get to hear Zimmermann speak in person. For those who are not familiar with him, Phil Zimmerman was one of the first famous online freedom fighters. He became the subject of much media attention in the early 90′s when he released PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), the first freely available military-grade email encryption program. As he explained in his talk, when PGP was released it was intended to help NGO’s in their fight against Big Brother. Coming out of the 80s there was a very strong government vs freedom clash happening and as a programmer he sought to even the playing field by protecting email communication from prying eyes. The US Federal Government reacted by opening a three year long criminal investigation of Phil Zimmermann with the intention of charging him for exporting munitions, a federal offense, because cryptography was considered a type of munition under federal law. They claimed the export was done by allowing PGP to be download by users in other countries. The government’s attack on Zimmermann was seen by many as a type of admission by the government that they were in fact eves dropping on public email traffic and didn’t take kindly to people protecting their privacy. Eventually the investigation was dropped, but only after Zimmermann had incurred hundreds of thousands in legal fees.

Zimmermann pointed out in his talk that this June will be the 20th anniversary of PGP–this immediately made me feel old (because I am). Zimmermann went on to explain that the world has changed and the public worry of eves dropping has changed drastically in the past twenty years. The threat of big brother isn’t as much a public issue,  instead the new adversary is organized crime. Zimmermann went into great detail on how organized crime is involved in identity theft on an industrial scale. Worse, the public, especially the young public, is more open about themselves than any previous generation in history. People are putting on Facebook details about themselves that only 20 years ago people were going out of their way to encrypt in order to protect. When asked about Facebook, Zimmermann said directly “I don’t understand why anyone uses Facebook. I just don’t get it.” This admission in any other context could be written off as another example of the older generation rejecting new ideas. But there at SxSW in a talk about identity theft, I didn’t get Facebook either (and I’m not that old).

Zimmermann’s latest project is a protocol to encrypt VOIP traffic with peer to peer encryption that doesn’t require a Chain of Trust. The Chain of Trust problem is part of every encryption scheme and is always difficult to solve. It refers to the problem of how you tell that the person you’re talking to is really that person, and how you tell that the line between you isn’t being intercepted. In cryptography circles, interception/impersonation is called a “man in the middle attack”. It’s done like this: if Alice wants to talk to Bob , she first has to ask him for his public key, Bob sends his public key back to Alice and she uses it to encrypt all remaining traffic to Bob. The problem is that Charlie could have intercepted the key request and impersonated Bob during the key exchange, sending back his public key instead. Alice would think that she’s encrypting for Bob, but really she’s encrypting for Charlie. But, if Bob’s key had a fingerprint that another trusted mutual friend of Alice’s and Bob’s had available, Alice could check the key received against the fingerprint. She would then notice that it’s really Charlie’s key and would know that the session shouldn’t be trusted. Anyone who has had to generate an SSL certificate for a web server has had to jump through Chain of Trust hoops by getting their certificate registered with a trust agent such as Thawt in order to avoid the “this web server has the wrong certificate” message that we’ve all seen occasionally.

Zimmermann has solved this problem in his VOIP protocol in an ingenious way: There is no Chain of Trust, instead, when the keys are exchanged on the very first call, Alice and Bob verify some simple key fingerprints verbally over the call. Alice knows Bob’s voice and vice versa, and the numbers verify that no man in the middle forged a key response. Once this is done, Alice and Bob know for sure that all of their conversation is being encrypted with the strongest encryption available anywhere, and any eves dropper will get nothing but unintelligible garble. This idea of leaning on the analog world of verbal communication to establish trust is an ingenious mix of technical solution and practicality.

It was obviously inspiring to hear Phil Zimmermann talk. It was a stark reminder to me that computer programming is not only academically interesting, but when done with a greater vision, it can change society and even help foster the overthrow of corrupt governments as was seen in Egypt.

At a recent meeting of the WPP Digital Advisory Committee, I had the pleasure of hearing a presentation from Lee Brown, SVP Sales from Groupon, in which he talked about the company’s meteoric growth and shared some interesting stats about the company:

• Groupon is adding 1 million new users every week
• Groupon is adding 3-5 cities per week
• 25% of transactions are mobile (up dramatically from only 3% in November)
• 70% of users are female
• Groupon holds an 82% share of the daily deals category
• A recent program with the Gap, the Groupon list performed 10x better than the Gap’s in-house list, with half of the transactions coming from new customers
• It is estimated there are approximately 600 similar companies

Clearly the concept of combining the power of a good deal and a social platform is winner, a fact not lost on Facebook, as they beta test their Facebook Deals program in Canada. TAXI currently has two Clients participating in the Canadian beta program.

Now that these services have become a viable marketing tactic, the challenge becomes defining an effective strategy to maximize the effectiveness and the targeting opportunities these platforms afford. We see five strategies for Clients to consider:

Launch support: New store openings, new brand or product launches all depend on building awareness and trial and more and more the strategy is to reach the right people, not just anyone. Leveraging the Groupon profile data, you can target your launch offer to a very specific segment of their user base to ensure you maximize impact and minimize waste.

Competitive strike: Is a competitor making inroads in a particular market, or with a particular segment of your customer base? Use that intelligence to target a direct counter offer that will get your customers back. New capabilities Groupon is working on for national brands, will extend the possibilities here to include targeted brand offers to specific retailers – think 50% off Bauer skates only at Canadian Tire.

Shift the basket mix: Another strategy for a Groupon type offer is to target current customers with an offer to broaden their purchase behaviour and get them to try a new product or version of your product they may never considered before. For retailers, this strategy is an effective way to introduce customers to another department of your store.

Customer value based deals: For existing valuable customers, or members of an affinity or loyalty program, the strategy is to use these deals to reward their value and loyalty to your brand.  To grow your customer base, a targeted offer is an effective way to introduce your product or service to a new segment of consumers and drive trial.

Time Based Deals & Dayparting: Expiry dates are so passé. How about expiry times? Groupon offers are a great way to drive increased sales at specific times of day, or even deep discounts for limited time-frames (50% off between 2 and 4pm only).

As the capabilities and the available consumer data from Groupon and other similar services expands and improves the power of these strategies will intensify and social deals will become an important part of local and national marketing plans. The key will be to understand how to effectively use the data and link your social deal strategy to your broader social marketing program.

Move marks a return to integrated communications roots.

(Tuesday January 18, 2011) MONTREAL – Christian Quenneville, currently Vice-President, Executive Director at Nurun in Montreal, joins TAXI Montreal as General Manager early February. Quenneville will report to TAXI Canada President Jeremy Gayton and share leadership responsibility for the agency with Dominique Trudeau, Executive Creative Director and former colleague. The news was announced today by Jane Hope, TAXI Co-Founder and Interim GM, TAXI Montreal.

Quenneville, whose career path has taken him from roles as a producer, account manager, strategic planner and ultimately business leader managing digital integration within full service agencies including McCann, Ogilvy, and Cossette before joining the dedicated digital business Nurun in 2008. This move marks a return to integrated communications. “TAXI has always been at the forefront of reaching the consumer wherever, whenever, and has an unrivaled arsenal of skill and talent to get it done,” remarked Quenneville “I see my role as making sure that TAXI Montreal is firing on all cylinders.”

A Franco Quebecker schooled in Ontario, Quenneville began his career in Toronto in ’97 came to Montreal in ’02 and spent ’07 in New York before returning to Montreal in ’08. “Christian’s openness to collaboration not only across disciplines but across the TAXI network in markets that he is familiar with makes him a tremendous asset.” stated TAXI Canada President, Jeremy Gayton.

Quenneville has a proven track record of affecting change and leading teams to generate innovative communication solutions that have consistently exceeded business objectives for brands such as Amex, Bell Canada, Coca Cola, Dairy Farmers of Canada, General Motors of Canada and the U.S. Coast Guard. He is a frequent public speaker including Journee Infopresse and Intracom, and his work has been recognized by the Boomerangs, Digital Marketing Awards and the New York Festival among others.

TAXI, recently acquired by WPP, has been engaged in a series of planned staff changes aimed at revitalizing the TAXI offer in Montreal where the company was founded in 1992. “I sincerely thank our clients who have shown such patience and support for these changes.” stated Jane Hope.