We don’t often write about products that we didn’t work on, but I came across Path last night and felt it was worth talking about. Path has been around since November of last year. I only vaguely remember looking at it when it first launched, and I don’t even recall what it did – obviously a problem.

The new version, Path 2, is about capturing and sharing moments – they refer to it as a smart journal. It’s not Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram or Facebook (though it does feel like the timeline). It’s a bit more like Evernote in terms of what it does, but is more about what’s going on in your life. What struck me about this app though, and made me want to write about it, was the interaction design.

Native vs Custom

Until recently, I’ve felt most apps fall into one of two camps. They either use core elements of an OS or they’re comprised primarily of custom UI. Neither one of these approaches is wrong, though some argue that breaking conventions is a no-no. I typically argue that it’s okay to diverge from conventions so long as the experience is intuitive and polished. If it improves things, even better. Experiences that start with an overlay teaching people how to use the interface obviously miss the mark. Thankfully, we’re beginning to see UI designers start to find some balance in between these approaches – Path is an excellent example. It feels familiar, but they’ve made some smart decisions that break away from the norm without wandering off into obtuse interactions or under/over-designed visuals. The decisions they’ve made not only make things better, they add personalty and delight – something that is crucial, and often overlooked when designing something functional. There are a number of things I love about the work the team at Path have done but I want to point out a few on iOS.

First impressions matter: first-run & on-boarding

Signing up for a service is typically a painful, or at least, mundane experience. It’s a few fields, some buttons and some useless directional copy. It works though. With the exception of a system error, no one struggles with these experiences. As designers, our tendency is to focus in on the meaty parts of a project and innovate. Something as trivial as a signup flow is considered a commodity and typically little to no effort goes into them. Path chose to improve it. The first-run simply lets you understand the value by looking at a canned ‘Path’. From there, you either create an account or use an existing one. No fields, no useless directional copy, just a few intuitive interactions. I love that form elements and actions are suppressed until I’ve chosen what I want to start with. This non-linear approach is refreshing. Once registered, the app also does a good job of connecting you with other people on Path (albeit without Twitter integration, though I’m told it’s coming soon). The number of screens below make make this appear like a long, drawn out process, but in reality you never notice it.

Best part about this: I don’t have to type in my email or phone number, just pick the appropriate info that’s pulled from my address book.

Navigation: Learned and explicit

There are two things that are noteworthy here. One is how you access the menu. There is an explicit button that slides the current view to the right revealing the menu below (the Facebook app does this too). Additionally, Friends are accessed through a button on the right. What’s nice about this is that there’s what I call UI hinting going here. By animating the panels left and right I’m given a hint that I can likely swipe them to execute the same action. Relying solely on swipe isn’t quite learnable enough, and obviously we don’t want a UI instruction sheet. But only using buttons isn’t the right choice either since a gesture requires far less accuracy and is therefor a more efficient means of performing the same action.

Best part about this: This isn’t a simple swipe then animate action. It’s a pan gesture. There is an enormous difference between these two methods. The former, makes things feel sluggish and disconnected, while the latter feels physical and natural.

Prioritization: Information when needed

One of the things that I love about small screen mobile design is that the physical size constraints force us to make hard decisions. What matters most in a given context is something that I’d love to see designers ask themselves more when working with larger displays. Striking a balance between what navigation and content I need to see at any given moment is what Path does right. The ‘post new’ button suppresses the options into a delightful radial fly-out menu – I’m not inundated with options by default. The best example though, is how they’ve prioritized the content. Because a Path is timeline-based, the common tendency for most designers would be to have a time stamp in some elegant, faint grey text – just visible enough, but not to loud as to cause a distraction. What Path decided to do, and I agree, is to focus on the content of the post and de-prioritize the timestamp by making it appear when you begin scrolling the timeline. This removes clutter from the screen but allows you to see the information when needed.

Best part about this: That Path realized the timestamp isn’t all that important by default. It is after all, a timeline, so you already understand some element of time without the stamp – i.e. the stuff at the top is recent.

Congratulations to the team at Path for re-inventing themselves. It’s an incredibly thoughtful interface and very interesting product – you should try it if you haven’t already.

Most of you likely know that Color is also reinventing themselves. I hope they read this and recognize that they too need a transformation like this. This is the level of care and polish that will become the standard for everyone – startups and established businesses.

You can follow me on on Twitter @gt and us @teehanlax.

A few months back Fast Company’s Co.Design blog published a controversial post that triggered a lot of discussion. In their article provocatively titled User-Led Innovation Can’t Create Breakthroughs; Just Ask Apple and Ikea, Jens Martin Skibsted and Rasmus Bech Hansen wrote:

“[User-centered design] doesn’t work. Here’s the truth: Great brands lead users, not the other way around.”

Skibsted and Hansen cited Apple and IKEA as some of the most innovative brands that don’t follow the user-centric design model. They say that their friends in the Apple design team spoke out against user-centric design because it’s “a waste of time”, and similarly at IKEA because “it doesn’t work.” They argued that brands have to take the lead in innovation with a strong and consistent vision, and outlined several reasons why it’s actually detrimental to listen to your users.

I have to admit, their examples are compelling, but are they correct? How do we reconcile their claims with what we know about the value of design research and user-centered design?

What is innovation anyway?

Let’s first define what we mean when we say innovation. If we go by the textbook definition, innovation in short is a renewal or improvement on something—e.g. a process, system or product—that changes the way people make decisions and do things, outside their norm. In other words, it has to be something new and useful enough for people to adopt en masse, otherwise it’s just another useless invention. Most often, these innovations are small and incremental: cars keep getting faster and more fuel efficient; TVs keep getting bigger and thinner; iPads keep getting faster and sexier—you get the idea. But sometimes they can be radical and lead to revolutionary breakthroughs: automobiles replacing horse-drawn buggies as the primary mode of transportation; televisions replacing radios as the dominant home entertainment medium; iPads replacing netbooks as the best-selling ultra-portable computing device.

So what does this all mean?

Let’s go back to the original question. Can UCD lead to breakthroughs? I want to make the claim that in most cases the short answer is no—that UCD alone is not enough. In a nutshell, UCD is about listening to the users, analyzing their problem, and providing solutions that meet their needs. These methodologies can often lead to incremental innovations—that is, incrementally improving and optimizing pre-existing solutions. But what about radical innovation? I think the answer lies in how the pioneers of innovation did it in the past.

A catalyst for innovation

Let’s take a look at Henry Ford for example. He is famously quoted to have said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses!” However, what most people forget is that Ford was an engineer and an experimental hobbyist. He was experimenting with gasoline engines that he eventually put on four bicycle wheels. He called it the Ford Quadricycle and it predated the first Model T by about 12 years. Nobody knew what a “car” was, let alone find any use for it.

Here’s what I’m trying to get at: the man responsible for one of the greatest innovations of our time had, what I would like to call, a tinkerers’ personality. Someone who was always curious and loved working on things. And it wasn’t just Ford; Thomas Edison, while working on improving the telegraph transmitter, heard noises coming from the paper tape that resembled spoken words. He had a hunch that telephone messages could be recorded in a similar way and, after a lot of tinkering, eventually created the phonograph. I believe this tinkerers’ personality is common among the world’s greatest innovators and was a catalyst for a lot of the radical innovations of the past.

Finding the balance

Adam Richardson, Strategy Director for Marketing at Frog Design, sums up the challenge of innovation this way:

“[ … ] the pendulum has swung so much toward doing user research that we (as a profession) risk losing the magic that comes from conceptual thinking. The seductiveness of evidence and insight that comes from design research can push inspiration, intuition, hypotheses, hunches and non-linear thinking to the sidelines. Analysis overwhelms creativity.”

I’m inclined to agree with this sentiment. I surmise that the pioneers of innovation really did have inspiration, intuition, hypotheses, hunches and non-linear thinking on their side. These are traits I would consider a part of a tinkerers’ personality.

In a recent article Don Norman, one of the pioneers of the UX field, points out that it’s sometimes good to act first, and do the research later. In our search for innovation, it is dangerous to swing the pendulum too far in any one direction. Too far towards research and we get overly deterministic, stifling design; too far towards experimentation and we get arbitrary and open-ended design. If we can strike a balance between creating opportunities that foster tinkerers and deploying the proven processes of UCD in everything that we do, I believe we are at least on the right path to doing more and more innovative work.

We don’t normally cross-post Labs content, but this experiment is so cool we couldn’t resist. If you haven’t already, check out their latest (includes video) on the Touch Vision Interface. Combining Computer Vision and Augmented Reality Techniques, they’ve created a way for users to reach out and interact with their environment through a simple touch interface. We think there are some great possibilities here—let us know what you think!

(Also, don’t for get to follow the Labs Unit on Twitter @tllabs)

Sincerely,
Your best buddies @ T+L

TV: passive to active?

Have our attention spans become so short that we cannot simply watch a TV show without posting our thoughts or looking up info on our phones? It’s clear that advertisers and producers recognize this, as they’ve begun to weave digital campaigns and social media into TV programming. It’s possible that as TV and the digital world become more integrated, content will seamlessly be shared across platforms, and watching TV could become a more active participatory experience. A few brands such as Honda and AXA auto insurance have recently created commercials and implemented the use of mobile apps. The spots are well executed technically as content is transferred via QR code and sound-syncing technology. Despite the innovative approach, the importance of these types of ads is to take the user from viewing to product purchase.

In terms of TV programming, the UFC has begun streaming pay-per-view while simultaneously allowing users to interact on multiple platforms by tweeting, chatting and judging the fights. The service is quality programming and might be a look into what the future holds for TV and the Internet. This appears to work better than regular programming trying to incorporate social media, such as a live twitter stream during events and award shows. It seems that social networks are becoming a legitimate resource. The Stream, a news talk show is actually using social media as a basis; producers will script the broadcast using tweets, Facebook posts, and YouTube videos. Furthermore, major events have called for the use of specialized apps that offer complementary information. For instance, the Oscar Backstage Pass app this season gave an exclusive behind the scenes look into the awards show. The problem is that without proper integration of these apps and social media, viewing all the different screens becomes a challenge. It’s hard to tell if this activity will soon become normalized, or if people will always prefer to relax and enjoy TV.

Rewards can make an impression. Inspiration can ignite a movement.

A great way to make a lasting impression is to deliver immediate gratification or offer some type of tangible reward. For example, GranetaPets, a premium dog food in Germany, had key insight to stop dogs and owners when walking by their billboard. The company concealed actual dog food within the billboard; dogs were therefore attracted to it, as they have a heightened sense of smell. Owners that took notice were encouraged to check-in via Foursquare and once they did, a free bowl of dog food was dispensed.

Many great ideas involve the user and depend on them to participate in the making of a campaign. Coca Cola’s latest crowdsourcing campaign got rock band Maroon 5 on board to create an original song in 24 hours with fans contributing to the song via Twitter. Fans were able to tweet lyrics and ideas as inspiration for the band. Once the track gets 100k downloads, Coke will make a donation on their fan’s behalf to the RAIN Foundation (Replenish Africa Initiative). This is not just a campaign, it’s a part of a bigger movement to help make the world a better place, with the ultimate goal of providing at least 2 million Africans with clean water by 2015. Many companies have made similar moves such as Pepsi with their Refresh the World project, and Maxwell House’s Brew some good initiative. A successful campaign can usually create a movement when it’s inspiring, for the common good, and has a unique idea that is cohesive with the brand.

Depending on your level of involvement in the digital industry, you might not have heard of near field communication (NFC) or you’ve heard so much of it you’re starting to wonder if it’s all hype. NFC relies on an underlying technology that wirelessly identifies objects from a short distance through tags that are inserted into pretty much anything. The benefit of NFC over something you’re probably more familiar with like RFID, which is used in key fobs and current forms of electronic payment like PayPass, is that it can send and receive information two ways, where RFID is limited to sending information just one way.

This is a significant improvement over the existing technology because it’s inexpensive, offers an increased efficiency in configuration and pairing, provides instantaneous connection between devices, and it enables interactive advertising opportunities for merchants.

The challenge for consumers

The challenge for adoption is to make it significantly easier and more convenient to use than the typical way we do things already. To become fully accessible, it must permeate our everyday actions in the same way text messages and emails have done. Marty Beard, president of Sybase, strongly believes that “for mobile commerce to take off, industry stakeholders must harmonize their efforts in the same way that led to proliferation of SMS and MMS technologies.”

For consumers to see the value in using their mobile devices as a primary form of payment, it has to find an anchor in their lives and redefine the rituals of their everyday actions. To do this, the NFC forum has developed the three pillars for near field devices: sharing, pairing and paying. They believe that these modes are where it can have the most impact in people’s lives.

The challenge is finding the incentive for consumers to switch from swiping to waving.

For example sharing, like Bump for iOS currently does, allowing you to exchange contact information on the fly. NFC can enable these interactions offline in a more convenient and instantaneous way. It also has the capacity to improve the pairing process between mobile devices and desktops. Imagine no more passwords, bluetooth pairing or router codes. This can all be stored on an NFC chip embedded in your device, and a single swipe is all it takes to verify your digital identity.

The most signifiant pillar is payment. Take Square for example: it enables merchants to accept payments virtually anywhere through mobile devices. The hardware they use to enable credit card swipes is a stopgap implementation—that’s why they’re actively giving Square dongles away for free. Their strategy is less about the hardware they use and more about the service they provide. I imagine that Square would readily adopt NFC-enabled devices when they become standardized and evolve their current hardware solution.

The challenge for merchants

Isis, a partnership between telecom juggernauts Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile, is actively developing the common standard for mobile payments that they hope will be eventually adopted by merchants. The challenge for merchants is putting faith into the added-value that these new systems can provide their customers, like coupons and loyalty programs.

Google has already integrated NFC support for Android 2.3 and is rumoured to be working with VeriFone to roll out point-of-sale solutions for merchants. Gingerbread users on the Nexus S, can start using Taglet right now and take advantage of contactless information.

The rumour mill is undoubtedly churning around the iPhone 5 and if it will be enabled for mobile payments. Some believe that Apple is concerned about the lack of standards across the industry. Yet others claim they have sources who confirm that Apple is looking at ways of integrating NFC into the next-gen iPhone.

RIM is also working on their own mobile payment solution. “Many, if not most, of BlackBerry devices throughout the year will have NFC in them,” said CEO, Jim Balsillie at a mobile conference last month.

Japan has been using RFID-enabled mobile devices for some time and they’re starting to adopt NFC more rapidly than the west. Mixi, Japan’s biggest social network, will be rolling out new features that enable checking in through near field devices. The advantage of this over something like foursquare, is that it will continue to work in areas where GPS and data signals are weak. But the most interesting implementation are objects embedded with tags that can be shared across their network. Imagine reading a booking or unwrapping a new product you’ve purchased, waving your mobile device over it and sharing it as a status update. This is attractive to merchants because they can embed promotional information into their products which can tie into digital campaigns that run on Mixi.

The merchant perspective is similar to Apples. They aren’t ready to adopt mobile payments and take on the risk of a potentially deprecated infrastructure. They’d prefer to wait for the industry to establish a common standard.

The challenge for designers

How NFC becomes adopted is an exercise for interaction and product designers. The idea that physical objects can talk to each other and exchange our personal information requires designers to have a deep understanding of the spatial dialogue in which they communicate. This is just a fancy way of saying that they need to know how things interact without touching. Timo Arnall and Jack Schulze from BERG, are actively engaged in design research, using prototypes, to experiment with the possibilities of near field devices. They’ve visualized what invisible radio waves look like when an NFC chip and reader are in proximity. They’ve been able to tease apart the nuances in the simple interactions involved in waving your device over a reader.

Possible use cases for the mobile wallet

Source: NFC Forum

These are just some the possible use cases identified by the NFC forum. The designer’s goals is to uncover the pleasurable and motivating factors for consumers to use their mobile devices for payment instead of more familiar and established mechanisms. Consumers are comfortable with swiping their cards and there’s nothing broken about it, so adopting a new technology for them is unnecessary. The challenge is finding the incentive for consumers to switch from swiping to waving. As industry practices and consumer behaviour become adjusted to mobile devices as the primary mode for sharing information and digital identities, we’ll start to see an uptake in adoption. But the question remains as to just how quickly we’ll start to see heavy adoption of the mobile wallet in the near future.

Useful campaigns

Campaigns and apps that are inherently useful make a more impactful UX. Many campaigns have used augmented reality in their approach, but the World Lens app, is one of the most useful implementations that we’ve seen. The app for the iPhone and iPod Touch offers real time translation of text. You simply point your device’s video camera at a sign and the program translates and superimposes the translated text onto the video.

Another useful print ad for Carlsberg, gives a step-by-step process for turning the ad into an actual bottle opener. Although, you might have missed its intention when flipping through a magazine.

Retail marketing

Shopping retail is becoming an increasingly more immersive and interactive experience. Puma has recently implemented iPads for in-store use, and Adidas is using large LCD touch screens to help explore inventory and allow the user to build their own shoes and even checkout.

Kraft has been experimenting with facial recognition technology to hone in on targeted users. They put a kiosk in a grocery store that asked, “what’s for dinner?” The kiosk zooms in on the users face and instantly determines gender and age group to suggest products that might be appealing. It even goes one step further dispensing product samples like a vending machine. This type of marketing is great for point of purchase sales and is highly personalized. On the other hand, it’s possible the kiosk could identify the wrong gender or age altogether; hopefully, it won’t offend and mistake your Justin Bieber hairstyle for a little girl and suggest Teddy Grahams.

Social media

Many social media campaigns have encouraged themes of kindness and generosity, and have elements of planned spontaneity and tangible rewards.

A Dutch airline, KLM Airlines has used Foursquare as a platform and employed a ‘Surprise Team’ to give passengers personal, unexpected gifts at the airport. As soon as someone checked-in at a KLM Foursquare location, the Surprise Team went online to find out personal information about the person, and delivered a unique gift before they traveled. For instance, one traveler tweeted he would miss a PSV soccer game while he was in New York. The Surprise Team gave him a Lonely Planet guidebook of NYC with all the sports bars highlighted in blue.

Similarly, Interflora, a flower delivery service launched a campaign to brighten up the lives of Twitter users. They monitored Twitter looking for users that they believed need cheering up. Once found, the users were sent a bouquet of flowers. Privacy had to be a big concern during the course of these campaigns, since they are largely focused on social monitoring. Hopefully all of the recipients were pleasantly surprised and didn’t become paranoid that Big Brother is always watching.

Converging devices

The most significant trend that we see evolving in the future is the convergence of mobile devices, computers and TV screens. The key is to understand how devices will interact, and how to seamlessly integrate the entire experience from one screen to another.

Through the use of a banner ad, Gol Airlines has turned the mobile phone into a remote control. Users input their mobile number into the banner, and they immediately get a call connecting them to the desktop. The banner then becomes a flying game controlled by the mobile device. The ad comes together in the end, reminding customers that they can conveniently check-in via mobile phone when they fly.

The Shazam app is evolving, as the logo will be ‘embedded’ into programs ready for users to tag TV shows. This entails using a mobile device to listen and recognize the TV episode in question. Shazam will then provide complementary info; links to exclusive video and previews of upcoming episodes, access to playlists from the series and downloads. This will completely integrate the web browsing and TV watching experience.

Check out other notable ideas:

• E-paper
• Twitter, Secret Santa
• Heineken, The Entrance
• Yahoo, Multiplayer Gaming

It might not be obvious at first but as you come up with your top choice think about why it’s your favourite. This type of thought experiment may be banal but you gain a lot of insight about yourself based on the brands you like. One question you should ask is whether that brand has created extraordinary value in your life. Did it blow your socks off?

“The highest level of value you can attain is a meaningful experience.”

— Darrel Rhea

At its core brands are all about experience but experience happens at different levels of value. This was Darrel Rhea‘s view at a recent RGD conference I attended. He believes that you can have five levels of experience with a brand.

Economic experiences live on a monetary level like when you get a really good deal on something. Functional experiences have more to do with utility like when a purchase was useful in helping you better understand something. Emotional value is derived from a visceral experience relating to deep inward feelings rather than intellect. A level above those is an identity experience where you acquire a level of status that signals who you are to your peers.

Rhea believes the highest level of value you can attain is a meaningful experience. Meaning is not about significance but about the stuff that inspires you. A brand that’s meaningful aligns with your outlook in life and in some cases might even define you.

Nathan Shedroff points out that all design is the process of making experiences and meaningful experiences are more powerful than price and performance. As designers our challenge is to elevate the brands we work with beyond novelty so they not only become adopted but have a deep resonance with those who use them.

Last week Forrester released a report advising most marketers wait to use location-based social networks (LBSN) as only 4% of the US population is currently using platforms such as Foursquare (the current market leader), and that the networks skew heavily male. They advise that brands that target young males experiment with the services and other brands adopt a “wait and see” approach.

I couldn’t disagree more. Here are my 5 reasons why it’s smart to start experimenting now.

1. First Movers.

There’s something to be said for getting a head start on your competition in the digital space. Brands like Starbucks, Dell, Pepsi, and Nike have all taken advantage of the emerging channels and reaped the rewards of building a strong early foundation with consumers.

While you should not rush into a new tool without understanding your strategic goals and how it integrates with your business objectives, experimenting with emerging technologies that are opt-in and potentially have a direct customer impact is smart.

When Facebook opened their gates to the general population in 2006 they had a small user base of university students. Four years later they are a behemoth. Twitter adoption rates have been increasing exponentially year over year since their launch in 2007 and the tool is now considered a “must use” for social business. Considering Foursquare launched about a year ago, can we expect to see the same type of growth curve as the early adopters begin to influence the early majority? (see “Crossing the Chasm” adoption curve)

2. Google. Facebook. Oh My.

Location-based services are not limited to the current apps we have been hearing about. Facebook has expressed they will add a location-based offering soon, Twitter has added “Tweet with your location” to their service, and the biggest news is that Google is adding a Places API to their eco-system, as well as adding LB data extensions to their mobile advertising product.

LBSN will become mainstream sooner rather than later, and it will be the big players, not the niche networks that will drive the adoption. Testing and learning now, before it becomes ubiquitous should be something on every marketers radar.

3. Data and utility.

There is an enormous amount of insightful and actionable data that can be gleaned about your customers and prospects from mobile & LBSNs. Eventually this data could be used to inform inventory control, staffing levels, consumer tastes and trends, etc. The data can also be used in loyalty programs, to identify influencers, test new products, and as real-time service focus groups.

Companies already testing the waters include:

Nike with True City; Starbucks with their Foursquare offers; The Pepsi mobile branded app; and the City of Chicago with their Tourism campaign.

4. Sales, Coupons, Offers, and more.

Part of the Forrester analysis identified that mobile couponing is widely successful with the users currently using the services, which is interesting as the base is primarily young males, not the average coupon-consuming demographic. Gone are the days of clipping coupons in the Sunday paper, now you can serve relevant offers and drive foot traffic and purchase directly to a mobile device. These offers are opt-in, and contextually relevant, not SMS spam. Testing offers, tips, and messaging via mobile should be on every retailers plan for the next year.

Of course one size doesn’t fit all and ensuring that your product or service fits within the make-up of the demographic, depending on service (existing or branded), is a must.

5. Mobile usage.

Of course mobile, and specifically smartphone, usage is soaring year over year. Ignoring mobile at this point is like ignoring the Internet in 2002 because broadband wasn’t prevalent yet.

Bottom line for marketers:

Experiment. See what fits, what your customers are looking for, and where you can add value. Don’t wait until it becomes mainstream, because that will be sooner than you think and you’ll be playing catch-up.

photo credit: john weiss via Flickr

It all started with the insight and a deep understanding of the market and the consumer.

The objective, as Leigh rightly points out, was to re-position and re-invigorate the brand.  To do this the team needed to understand the competitive landscape, the perspective consumers had of the brand, and the territory they had to play in. The market was saturated with female unfriendly AXE advertising, and as women are the primary consumers for male scent gifts, turning that into an advantage would have been mandatory for Old Spice.

With that as the starting point the Old Spice team (with a receptive client) decided to do the obvious: appeal to women without alienating men.

Old Spice cast the perfect actor for the new positioning. A former NFL player, a nice guy, and someone who wasn’t so perfect that men would feel threatened. Genius casting. Based on, I imagine, a perfect casting brief.

The next step was to create a seriously funny commercial that turned all the cliche’s of advertising and film on their heads. “Look at your man, now back at me”. “It’s now diamonds”. “I’m on a horse”. They made a commercial that was frankly better than 90% of the TV shows it appeared alongside. I first heard of it because my partner was watching TV and told me I had to see it. So what did I do? I went to YouTube and there it was. Word of mouth at it’s finest, but it would have been dead in the water if the team hadn’t thought to seed it online first.

They let that roll and roll it did. Everyone who saw the commercial started sharing it, and a character was born.

Now what to do with the follow up? The character was a success both online and offline and while they could continue to let it ride as a TV spot, the proof was there that they could take advantage of how much the spot resonated with the folks online.

The plan was to create a new TV spot, let that simmer for a bit and then pounce. The social media marketers did their homework and decided what the right outlets were to start spreading the character. The fact they took on 4Chan and won speaks volumes about how integrated and on the ball they were. While everyone talks about how they took over Twitter in a day, they really started seeding the campaign before that. They laid the groundwork. And it paid off. Big time.

It came on my radar with @jakrose tweeting that he’d received a video reply early Tuesday morning. “Fry it up and eat it down JakRose. Fry it up and eat it down.” The network effect took over and for the next two days it was all I cared about that was happening online. The social team did a brilliant job monitoring responses and working with the creatives to write compelling copy. They didn’t just target celebrities and “influencers” but responded to comments, Diggs, tweets and blog posts that they felt fit with the character as a whole. They were obviously fully immersed in the language and cadence of the social web because their video responses contained references only a geek would love (or get). They respected all the unwritten rules of the culture and tailored their responses to match the brand, and the mediums they were using.

They embraced the mash-ups and promoted them. They let the community roll with it. They poked fun at themselves (Old Spice responding to @isiahmustafa) And they set a time limit. Any longer than 2 days and it would have become tired. Any shorter and it would have been disappointing. The mash-ups continue to roll in, with the most recent being Mel Gibson calling the Old Spice Guy.

It was brilliance that came from the initial insights and work they did a couple of years ago. And deep understanding of how the social web works.

The challenge will be what they do next and if it moves the needle at the top of the purchase funnel (awareness & consideration). But I have faith, and am looking forward to every moment of it!

[Update August 13, 2010] W+K just released their case-study of the campaign: Old Spice is now the #1 brand of body wash for men, with sales increasing 107% in the last month alone.

One of the recurring questions has been around how it works. As one of our LinkedIn forum members said, “If no one is currently doing this, how can an agency possibly integrate the process and make it work?” Great question and one that’s been on our minds a lot lately, too.

As luck would have it, a campaign recently exploded online that I believe illustrates the adaptive approach to marketing. I’m talking about the Old Spice Guy work done by Wieden+Kennedy. It began as a great Super Bowl TV spot but what happened afterward – and they way they worked with their client – is what I find most compelling.

Iain Tait, in a readwriteweb.com post explains it best, “In a way there’s nothing magical that we’ve done here… we just brought a character to life using the social channels we all [social media geeks] use every day. But we’ve also taken a loved character and created new episodic content in real time.” As for the mechanics, he explains, “we’re looking at who’s written those comments, what their influence is and what comments have the most potential for helping us create new content. The social media guys and script writers are collaborating to make that call in real time. We have people shooting and we’re editing it as it happens. Then the social media guys are looking at how to get that back out around the web…in real time.”

My first thought was that to pull off such a responsive program they must have had a tremendously trusting client and collaborative working relationship. Tait said that Proctor & Gamble let his team create on the fly with little supervision, “There is such great trust … They have given us a set of guidelines and if we get close to the edges we contact them.”

In my opinion, Tait’s team has arguably created the most significant program since Subservient Chicken. They put all the right pieces together. But more so, they’ve illustrated exactly how an agency can practically develop and deploy a campaign that actively involves consumers in real time and delivers meaningful experience. Not only that, they completely repositioned the brand and now have an asset they can use in myriad ways.

I’ll probably take some heat for this, but personally, I always felt that Subservient Chicken was one-dimensional. Don’t get me wrong, I loved it and felt it arrived at exactly the right time in our industry. It showed how technology could be used to involve consumers without being ham-handed. But it was really just a playful destination. Somewhere to waste a few minutes online.

The Old Spice Guy concept goes way farther and operates on a much deeper level. It watches consumer activity, pulls it in without asking and feeds it back out as unexpectedly fresh content. On top of that it demonstrates a fundamental change in agency structure and approach. In fact, it’s so extensible that consumers themselves can run with the idea, create their own content and still be in line with the original idea… at no incremental cost to the client! See for yourself, have the Old Spice Guy create your voicemail message.

So What’s It Take To Do Work Like This?

There’s no debate that social media has completely transformed how marketers engage with their customers. And the impact of this change has rippled through agencies as they struggle to catch up to the changing needs of their clients – and consumers. But what hasn’t happened up till this point is agencies figuring out how to bring all the pieces together in one agile approach.

For a time I thought that BURT were onto something with their Agile Advertising approach, but the more I noodle it, the more I feel like what they proposed with their four feedback loops is really more of an optimization phase in a linear model (and something we’ve done at Teehan+Lax for some time). It’s great for tuning individual pieces of creative and improving their effectiveness but it isn’t necessarily about creating a platform for iterative ideas to be rapidly developed, tested and deployed. And an iterative development approach is really what we need.

“Everyone applauds innovation. At least, they love it in retrospect, after it has worked.”*

I believe we need to build teams and create operating environments that allow for responsive marketing that’s always on. Programs that respond to changing market conditions. Programs that naturally integrate the ability to test ideas and embrace failure. Programs that will use data to help inform what is made, how it’s designed, and who will be involved.

Tim Leberecht in his article, “Time for Marketing Innovation 2.0” delivers a stern challenge to all of us searching for new solutions. “As we are entering the new decade, it appears as if the marketing discipline, after undergoing a mesmerizing major transformation in the past two to three years, is facing stagnation. This often occurs when pioneering concepts are fully absorbed by the mainstream: Social marketing is on the way to becoming THE marketing, as social media is becoming THE media (it is always a sign of broad adoption if adjectives are dropped). Authenticity, engagement, meaning, communities, social, conversations, transparency, etc. – they’re all accepted across the industry and widely implemented now. What then is the next frontier for marketers? What will be the next big marketing innovation?”

To me the next big innovation won’t be the products we envision as much as it will be agencies we create that are structured to deliver Adaptive Marketing. And as the team at Wieden & Kennedy have shown us, it’s entirely possible and should now be expected. Silver fish hand catch!

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