by James Clive-Matthews | 21 Aug, 2020 | Systems & Technology
Being a words person it’s unsurprising this piece spoke to me, as it advocates using words as an accessible tool – Google Docs – to improve creative collaboration.
Yes, at its heart, this place is basically saying that a collaborative design/multimedia/dev briefing doc is a good idea – and it’s hard to argue against that.
But it also speaks to a core challenge in the digital creative industries – especially now we’re all working from home and can no longer scribble on whiteboards and move post-it notes around on walls:
What’s the best way to collaborate when developing visual concepts? How can we lower barriers to entry for those with less confidence in their visual thinking skills? How can we encourage more diverse thinking, more originality, while still staying focused on the core objectives?
I’d be fascinated to hear your suggestions / recommendations.
by James Clive-Matthews | 12 Aug, 2020 | Systems & Technology
PDF: Still Unfit for Human Consumption, 20 Years Later
Punchy title and many good points made. But PDFs are an easy target.
It’s also ironic that in attacking PDFs as clunky, hard to read in a browser, and bad for mobile, the authors have created a 2,400-word monster without a single engaging image or design element to break up the wall of text. And they’re so keen to make their point as robustly as possible that a few too many arguments are piled on top of each other – some rather weaker than others.
The point they miss is format needs to be led by function – the medium isn’t the message, but it does shape it. For some functions, a PDF is a better option than HTML, for others a simple email may be best. Your format should depend on your objective, target audience, and what impression you want to leave them with.
Most importantly, *presentation* also needs to be shaped by format, audience, and objective. Sometimes, better a PDF where the design is fixed than responsive HTML that messes up your careful layout when your key client views it on their ancient IE6-running machine. (Bitter experience…)
If you want to persuade, your thinking and presentation always need to be good, no matter the format. Sloppy content structure, sloppy design and sloppy thinking will undermine your objectives far faster than a PDF ever will.
by James Clive-Matthews | 29 Jun, 2020 | Systems & Technology
The most surprising thing with this growing move away from social media advertising is that it has taken this long for brands to realise that they can’t control the context in which their adverts appear – and that context can change perception of their messaging.
The real lesson here is not that social media needs stricter controls (an ethical debate), it’s that in the classic Paid/Earned/Owned model, the *only* part brands can fully control is Owned. Many are only now beginning to wake up to the fact that their social accounts are not Owned platforms.
All this should have been obvious for years – every fresh story about an algorithm change destroying business models that were relying on social audiences has been an alarm bell. But perhaps now brands are finally realising that social isn’t as straightforward as they’ve long seemed to believe.
What does this mean for brands?
1) They need more robust, nuanced social strategies. Chucking money at paid posts and adverts doesn’t cut it. It never has.
2) The quality of their genuinely Owned platforms is becoming more important than ever. These are the only places they have complete control over the context and the message.
And it’s also notable that many brands joining the boycott have solid Owned strategies in place…
by James Clive-Matthews | 7 May, 2020 | Systems & Technology
“I haven’t witnessed an update as widespread as this one since 2003,” says the author of this piece. Some sites are reporting 90% traffic drops, with even the likes of Spotify and LinkedIn apparently impacted. This is big.
What exactly has changed is still unclear – a few days on results are still fluctuating too much for detailed analysis – but one thing does seem certain: “there are multiple reports of thin content losing positions”.
This has been the trend with Google for a while now, with the firm recommending “focusing on ensuring you’re offering the best content you can. That’s what our algorithms seek to reward.”
What *is* good content in this context? After all, “quality” is quite a subjective concept.
Well, algorithms aren’t people, but Google’s long been aiming to make their code more intelligent, and better able to understand context and likely relevance. Keyword stuffing has been penalised for years, as have dodgy link-building efforts. Instead, Google is aiming for near-human levels of appreciation of nuance.
Helpfully, though, Google has also put out a list of questions to help you understand if the content of your site is likely to be seen as quality in the eyes of the all-powerful algorithm:
- Does the content provide original information, reporting, research or analysis?
- Does the content provide a substantial, complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
- Does the content provide insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
- If the content draws on other sources, does it avoid simply copying or rewriting those sources and instead provide substantial additional value and originality?
- Does the headline and/or page title provide a descriptive, helpful summary of the content?
- Does the headline and/or page title avoid being exaggerating or shocking in nature?
All good questions, and all from Google’s own blog.
by James Clive-Matthews | 18 Jan, 2020 | Systems & Technology
More on the death of the cookie. Good (likely accurate) quote here too:
“the next two years will be characterized by ‘madness and transition’ as the [media] industry devises an entirely new infrastructure”
FWIW, I’m pretty sure that, in the long run, this will be a good thing for everyone. Adtech has long promised more than it really delivered, while programmatic ads are really little better than spam – microtargeting claiming sophistication, but really just encouraging lowest-common-denominator, purely transactional digital nagging.
And because hardly anyone *willingly* clicks on those adverts, bounce rates on accidental clicks are mad high, making it harder to spot which things are actually performing well, so hiding potential opportunities to identify trends that could help you boost organic growth.
We’ve long needed more sophistication in digital advertising – this will hopefully be the kick up the backside that sees this start to happen.
by James Clive-Matthews | 15 Jan, 2020 | Systems & Technology
This move will reshape the internet, and change how publishers, advertisers, brands and marketers operate.
“View-through attribution, third-party data, DMP and multitouch attribution will be ‘dead’ under the proposals. We’re now facing a world with significantly less measurement and targeting.”
What does this mean? Initial thoughts:
- Less audience targeting from 3rd party cookies => more need for audience insights from other data sources. Owned web properties will become more important.
- Google’s stranglehold on advertising will tighten, as Chrome will track engagement metrics instead.
- Throwing money at supposedly targeted distribution will stop appealing to advertisers, many of whom are already suspicious of the purported ROI of such campaigns.
- Digital ads we see will become less obviously personalised to us.
- Instead, marketing will need to work on its merits – attracting audiences via sustained campaigns based around creative concepts rather than algorithms.
- Yet another revenue source will be cut off for publishers, making it harder than ever to fund traditional journalism.
- This will in turn either open up more gaps for niche non-profit publishers (and brands) to fill, or lead to a decline in the amount of content produced.
Interesting times…
by James Clive-Matthews | 19 Dec, 2019 | Systems & Technology
Everyone’s going to be sharing this NYT piece on location data – and rightly so. Scary stuff, with some superb journalism backed up with excellent presentation that should make the telecoms, tech and advertising industries (as well as regulators) all take a good hard look at themselves.
But the real challenge (and huge opportunity) is finding ways to enable safe sharing of this kind of data without impeaching on privacy or personal security. Because – even anonymised – this kind of data can lead to insanely useful insight that goes far, far beyond serving up targeted advertising:
“Researchers can use the raw data to provide key insights for transportation studies and government planners. The City Council of Portland, Ore., unanimously approved a deal to study traffic and transit by monitoring millions of cellphones. Unicef announced a plan to use aggregated mobile location data to study epidemics, natural disasters and demographics.”
This isn’t a problem with the concept of location tracking. It’s a problem with the execution.
by James Clive-Matthews | 7 Dec, 2019 | Systems & Technology
“In the future, we can expect computers to produce literature different from anything we could possibly conceive of” – fascinating piece about the still nascent art of AI creativity, this.
There’s nothing to overly worry us human creatives so far, based on the examples on show here – unless you’re a fan of surrealism and the avant garde, that is… Still, there’s a lot of promise. After all, “A machine that can caption images is a machine that can describe or relate to what it sees in a highly intelligent way.” Give this tech time, and it will get more sophisticated, and harder to tell from human creative.
The potential to use AI to reinterpret disparate inputs into new creative forms – poems based on images, an experimental novel based on the inputs of GPS from a road trip – is definitely the kind of thing to get creative directors’ creative juices flowing. AI can already write, paint, compose music and create photo-realistic images. How can we deploy it to boost human creativity?
Most brands know what they look like, what their tone of voice is. If you could programme an interpretative AI with your brand’s key attributes and ask it to reinterpret the world around it, what would the results be?
The answer might be meaningless nonsense, but it sure would be fun to find out.
by James Clive-Matthews | 20 May, 2018 | Systems & Technology
4/5 stars
Impressively prescient, considering it was published five years ago but is about technology – something that’s been moving madly fast during that timeframe. The Facebook / Cambridge Analytica scandal effectively predicted, many of the debates still going on in business and government today about things like the gig economy, autonomous vehicles and more were anticipated and summarised before they’d really started happening. The impression is that Lanier had seen all this coming decades ago – and he probably did.
As such, lots here to spark thought, lots to be impressed with, and it’s hard to disagree with the central thesis that the informational economics of the internet age are fundamentally broken. But at the same time, the only alternative to the current way of doing things – micropayments for data exhange/generation – still seems insanely impractical, even employing a technology like blockchain (something similar to which Lanier kinda proposes here).
So while Lanier ends on an optimistic note, the book left me more pessimistic than ever about our tech-driven future.
by James Clive-Matthews | 9 Sep, 2014 | Systems & Technology
Here it is. The new, multiplatform MSN.
Engadget has a solid overview piece.
The content proposition is fairly straightforward – a customisable mix of useful tools and the best content from many of the world’s biggest publishing brands across a bunch of key topic areas or verticals, curated by teams of in-market editors.
The aim on a technical level is actually the most interesting part of it – we’ve been developing a cloud-hosted CMS that enables single-publish across all devices and platforms, for both web and apps, running across 55 markets in 27 languages, with a coherent look and feel no matter your screen size or operating system. That’s properly ambitious.
Most of my input has been procedural (improving multimarket and multiplatform publishing processes) and hidden in the back end (I was part of the CMS superuser group that’s been working on back-end UX and workflow). I’ve not had as much involvement in the front-end design, architecture, or overall content strategy as I’d like, but still – a most definite improvement on one of the web’s longest-running major publishers (20 years old this year, and still doing a good 22 billion pageviews every month).
