LifeDeluxe

Pass it on

Following on from the previous 'Times Square' as a platform post, I stumbled across these notes from the Futures of Entertainment conference held in November, and reported on by the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium.

Todd Cunningham from MTV Networks spoke, and I was struck by this: "MTV Networks obviously wants to make money, but moreso they want to connect with their users. Before, it was the quality of their performance, but now it's the clarity of that performance that's critical. Customers are all too happy to move on to the next thing that's clearer. "Our relationship has previously been about ROI, but now it's about resonance - not just quantitative, but qualitative results."

In the ad world it's all about engagement; MTV Networks is researching the transformation engagement transference. Does the "halo effect" exist? That's transference.

MTV Networks' new internal mantra is "Engagement time alone doesn't matter. It's people's propepensity to pass it along. Taking it in is how we used to measure, but people putting it back in is our new metric."

Again, planning for what you do, rather than what you receive is the key challenge, but nice to see some real big companies committed to pushing the debate on.

God, Galileo and Google

Interesting article in an accenture sponsorsed supplement in Campaign mag from Will Collin of Naked. Getting into evaluting 21st century communications he quotes Thomas Kuhn and the term paradigm shift ("old orthodoxies are only replaced after a period of crisis triggered when the sheer accumulation of facts that won't fit becomes intolerable") and gets into some of the problems of the old paradigm of communications. "Target audiences aren't a collection of isolated individuals but a community of interconnected people within which brand perceptions are shaped by multiple influences - of whihc brand comms is just one...factors such as word of mouth, user imagery (cool urbanites being first to wear ipods) and observed behaviours (like putting ice in your Magners cider) can be considered alongside advertising."

Little wonder that our standard 'diditwork' toolkit is creaking a bit! Evaluation just got interesting..