With Wired Products, Will Marketing Leave Agencies And Return Home To The Brands?

Marketing guru Russell Davies recently wrote up his notes on his latest presentation on his blog. Russell has been looking at how RFID and similar technology can allow brands to tell stories about their brands. He says that the world is moving to Post Digital and that for any marketer that thought the internet was complicated, they’re going to get a lot more confused. Technology we associate with the web – Twitter tweets, imagery, games and further information – is going to become infused in real products and those products will become their own communication channels. Russell writes:

As objects informationalise communication channels are getting built in. And there are ways of doing this that are mass, cheap and easy. Printing. Paper. Ink. RFID. And cleverer phones will be the perfect things to interact with these clever objects. This is what advertising and marketing and media people really need to get afeared by. All this web stuff is going to look like a picnic compared to the horrors that will be dealt to the agency and media businesses when every product has a communications channel built right in. And I suspect it’s a channel that most brand-owners will feel a lot more comfortable with. Marketing/advertising was always a necessary evil for most businesses. And Something bolted onto the culture. And they’ve never liked ITV. And having to do all this social networking stuff gives most of them the willies. But integrating communication and information into the product is something they can get behind quickly and easily.

I think. I’m not quite sure where I’m going with this but I think it’s interesting. I think there’s a whole model here that integrates the conversation into the stuff, creating a much more natural relationship between people and things, with much less mediation in the middle.

We could take this thinking and blur it with a current marketing agenda: We’ve heard Johnny Vulkan (Anomaly) and Eric Ryan (Method) talk about the idea that everything is media. If you visit the Method offices in San Francisco you see this brought to life – even the elevator seems to be an ad to convey a brand message. Much of their discussion has been about using surfaces to communicate ideas and stories – what happens when you go beyond surfaces and think about the different ways we can interact with a product – by taking a photo of it, by just going near it, by texting it and so on (Obviously, some privacy and urban spam issues may arise).

One of the interesting demonstrations Davies gives is how he added RFID tags to the a copy of the book Cargo Of Eagles (pictured). If you used a reader, they would trigger a specific iTunes playlist as a soundtrack for listening to the book.

Davies goes on to argue later in his presentation that we will grow to value the physical and that objects that have been around for a while – books and newspapers, for example – will continue to remain as they are hyper-efficient in the way they work and rather cheap to make:

Books/paper are proven technologies. Brilliant things. Really good at all sorts of stuff. We’re not in an age where books are about to disappear. But many of the business models associated with them may do. Because we’re getting direct access to book technologies ourselves. And closer to the newspaper world are these three things: MagCloud, Tabbloid and ViaPost…

These aren’t connected things yet. (Though HP are involved in the first two.) They may well never be. But they point at all sorts of interesting infrastructural possibilities. A way that you can make beautiful print objects without any of the legacy business issues. Cheap and easily enough that you don’t have to make money. Or you can find other ways of funding things. These seem like exciting possibilities.

Davies presentation in some ways remains unfinished – but we suppose what he’s hinting at is the possibility that we all will be able to make custom objects that are enabled to ‘connect and socialize’ with other people and other products.

Russell Davies

[As a side note: it will be interesting to see what both Kevin Anderson and Simon Waldman from the Guardian say about their paper's future at Good Ideas Salon London next week]