The Heavy Chef Project

Read these paragraphs from an article in Wired:

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The great terror in the PC industry is that it’s created a $300 device so good, most people will simply no longer feel a need to shell out $1,000 for a portable computer. They pray that netbooks remain a “secondary buy” the little mobile thingy you get after you already own a normal-size laptop. But it’s also possible that the next time you’re replacing an aging laptop, you’ll walk into the store and wonder, “Why exactly am I paying so much for a machine that I use for nothing but email and the Web?” And Microsoft and Intel and Dell and HP and Lenovo will die a little bit inside that day.

The decision is probably out of American hands. Indeed, living in the US where netbooks are only just taking off it can be hard to grasp just how popular the devices have become in Europe and Asia and the degree to which they’re already altering the landscape. As Shih told me, “I was talking to the chair of one of the major Taiwanese notebook manufacturers, and he said, ‘This is where my next billion customers comes from.’ And he was not referring to the US.” He meant the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) where billions of very price-conscious customers have yet to buy their first computer. And the decisions they make Windows or Linux? Microsoft wares or free cloud apps? will have enormous influence on how computing evolves in the next few years.
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As we witness the rise of the cheap netbook, shall we see the rise of operating systems like Ubuntu and Open Source software applications?

I feel a tingle coming on…

Thanks Travis for the [link]

I read this today: “In your face disruptive ads could ease inventory, creative woes”

A snippet:

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Web publishers have always treated their users as a sacred flock. But last week at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s annual meeting in Orlando, Fla., Payne, the CEO of ShortTail Media and former senior vp & general manager at CNN.com, issued a daring challenge for the industry: stop worshiping, and start interrupting the almighty user.

“Gone are the days that we should be guided solely by our user experience,” said Payne. He cited the birth of two-minute ad pods and 30-second spots back in the 1950s–two highly successful, interruptive standards that might never have happened if TV execs had asked viewers their preference.

Payne believes that some version of the :30 is exactly what online advertising needs; he called for mass adoption of a standard, home-page-takeover-type unit that will appeal to brand advertisers. That proposal was aimed at remedying several industry ills, including an overabundance of supply, deflated pricing, schlocky creative and a lingering reputation as being a direct-response-only medium, all of which were hot topics at last week’s IAB.

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Wow.

That’s staggering.

So, let’s get this straight. Contrary to what we digital marketers have been saying, the user is wrong. We were all wrong. The advertiser is right, and, hey, let’s make the web crap again.

”Payne believes that some version of the :30 is exactly what online advertising needs.“ This is like saying: “PVR or TiVo is wrong”, and we must find a way to go back to enforcing 5 mins of advertising every 10 mins during TV shows.

It sounds too much like someone devoid of ideas and stuck in the past.

We need to be more creative about how advertising can still be relevant in today’s world. 

Surely that’s not too much to ask. My prediction: there’s no WAY that Payne’s call to ”bring back the 30 second” will happen. If it does, the sites that try it out, will crash and burn.

I think there’s going to be more product placement, endorsement and in-content purchasing opportunities.

What do YOU think…?

This is the time of the year that we collate all the pearls collected during the various Heavy Chef Sessions we hosted in 2009 - as well as from our team that is working on various high-profile online projects in the United Kingdom and South Africa.  Looking back allows us to learn the lessons, apply the wisdom from conversations with some of the smartest people in the industry, and look forward with confidence. 

Here are our top 12 predictions for 2009

Digital Strategy: 

1. The Return of the Creatives

2008 was very much about trial and error. Small companies and big corps were all dipping their toes in digital waters, from blogs to Facebook Profiles to crowdsourcing to lifestreaming. “If you build it, maybe they’ll come” was the mantra - and by and large, they didn’t come. The fallout has been considerable, and the smoke and mirrors quickly removed. The best ideas proved to be most resonant, not the best built site structures. We predict the most creative agencies will see their stars rise in 2009; with their funny / moving / controversial ideas cutting through the clutter.  

2. The Dying Gasps of the Last Remaining Traditional Advertising Agencies

Sure, large tracts of the Amazon rain forest will continue to be cleared, but more mainstream print titles will close this year, radio will sag and television splutter. The reason: mainstream media placement will decline more and more rapidly in 2009 (especially if those smart programmers get point 8 right). Marketing managers worldwide are increasingly seeing their online presence (including mobile) as the pivotal communication point in their strat. Digital will become the destination, with radio, print and TV becoming satelite channels feeding through it into a sale transaction. Clients will ask ‘where’s my digital?’ before they ask ‘where’s my 30 second ad’. The traditional agency model of coming up with a formulaic idea - with legs - then booking 12 months of media placement is dead. Nowadays, companies look for progressive agencies who understand a combination of traditional & digital and all the nuances that go with it.  

3. Mobile gets Smart

This is ‘Captain Obvious’ territory, but there is a twist. Mobile will start employing more personalised methods, more copywriting expertise and more funky tech to break through the backlash that occurred in 2008. A case in point was the December Heavy Chef Session where the mobile representative got 20 mins of flack from an audience tired of getting mobile spam.

We reckon there will be some crazy tech apps coming up that make mobile advertising way, way smarter. 

Digital Design & Creativity:

4. The Great Web 2.0 Design Backlash

No more logo reflections. No more shiny vignettes. No more clip-art-styley bubble-icons. We’ll see a return to good ole fashioned crunchy mash-ups. All hail illustration. Textures. Art Direction. Typography. Tactile Backround Patterns. The creative vaccuum that was ‘the Web 2.0′ style is so 1 month ago. It will be great to see concepts and compositional thought return to the design galleries en masse. It started in the latter part of 2008, and we’ll see a charge throughout 2009. It will be crunchy, tangible and thought-provoking. User-centred design will still be prevalent, but it’s a case of formand function. 

5. The Return of Custom Photography

Probably one of the most profitable businesses sparked by the whole digital marketing movement was the online stock library. Talk about The Long Tail in action: you could get that picture of the mouse sitting on a clown’s nose and you didn’t even have to brief it out! A quick search through SXC, iStock or Getty will get you that image in a few clicks. And so, old-school photographers have been sitting by their phones and hearing crickets. We reckon we’ll see a return to the busy booking schedules of camera-wielding practitioners creating the beautiful panoramas dreamed up by web designers everywhere. 

6. The Rise of the ‘Digital Story’

We believe 2009 will see a huge number of ‘digital stories’ appear. Instead of a punch-line with various executions, a creative campaign will start with a basic premise, and then initiate an online journey where that premise can be fleshed out in a story format. Campaigns will be focused, engaging and personalised. 

Digital Development: 

7. The Convergence of Social Networking and Mainstream Web Development

We’ve seen Facebook Connect being introduced last year. We reckon this is the forebearer of much more to come. We reckon marketers will slap a social networking application on to every website they can muster. We’ll see small restaurant chains create networking groups; large consultancies crowdsourcing; bloggers feeding into big corporation sites; social travel apps on agency sites; your friends’ comments filtered through to e-commerce product pages; and Twitter updates on lawyers’ home pages. E-commerce will go social, and so will most services. Hell, even a luxury hotel client of ours just placed TripAdvisor logos all over their website. 

8. Mindblowing Development of Personalised Online Advertising

OK, so this is maybe a little obvious to some of you, since ‘overcoming banner blindness‘ has become the de facto standard for starting an online media brainstorm. The fact is, big media players (now more than ever) need to convince anxious marketing managers whose budgets have been slashed. 0.3% click-through rates won’t cut it anymore no matter how slick the sales pitch about ‘the growth of online advertising’ is. Big money is being spent now on developing targeted and personalised ad placement systems. These ’smart systems’ will allow creative teams to be able to forego the usual stumbling blocks and strategise with the confidence that their audience is engaged and ready to interact with their communication. We predict some pretty mindblowing developments in this sphere. 

9. Adobe Flash, Master of the Universe

A mate of World Wide Creative’s, Chris Beech, a Flash / Flex / Air Ninja, has been blowing this trumpet for years. Chris tells us that big brands like Samsung and Sony are backing behind Flash. We think, as Flash cements its position as the leading carrier of animated content, 2009 will see some big developments in the way websites are built. With data speeds becoming faster and more accessible, media is going mobile, and Flash is the messenger. Flash will also open up and become fully SEO-friendly, and digital marketers who’ve shunned it in the past will have to free up their after hours for evening classes. 

Digital Overall:

10. Digital Integration with Traditional Media

Despite what certain traditional media salespeople have to say, we believe that the words ‘integrated digital campaign’ will be standard vernacular of marketing strategists, and will become the expectation of clients worldwide. 

11. Crowdsourcing goes Mainstream

Crowdsourcing is possibly the handiest of social media’s outcomes. It means to utilise your community to come up with a beneficial outcome. We’ve seen this trend bubble under over the past 12 months, but now with Google joining the ranks, everyone’s going to jump on the bandwagon. Cool tools (like Rypple) will be the talk of business breakfasts worldwide. 

12. The ‘Open Movement’ goes Mainstream

This was a tough call and could really go either way. We hope we’re right, and we see the likes of Microsoft opening up Office (or at least going online), Facebook hooking up with OpenSocial and Ubuntu actually becoming usable. This latter one would be great, since Ubuntu is really a mystery to anyone outside of the circle of breathless supporters that Shuttleworth and co. have attracted. The flipside to this prediction is that the whole open movement could be exposed as a profitless sham that bleeds most companies dry.

After all, the evil Microsoft is still making more money than anyone else, so why change anything?