Archive for January, 2007

Jan 24

HotHouse Article

Perpetual beta: continuous improvement or never finished?

By Simon van Wyk

Releasing your new initiatives before they’re actually finished could provide you with a significant competitive advantage -as long as you’re doing it for the right reasons, as Simon van Wyk writes

When you talk about the giants of technology and the Internet, Tim O’Reilly isn’t a name that rolls off the tongue. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos from Amazon and Jim Clark from Silicon Graphics and Netscape come to mind before O’Reilly. But he has been a key figure in the industry since before the World Wide Web existed.

If you walk past your company’s IT department, you will no doubt see some of O’Reilly’s work on their desks. His company, O’Reilly Media, is revered by the computer crowd as the publisher of the most practical technical manuals, easily recognised by their use of lithographic drawings of animals on the cover.

O’Reilly has been a strong supporter of the free software and open source movement, which has meant that although he has helped shape technology over the past 20 years, he hasn’t made a fortune from his genius like some of his contemporaries.

Web 2.0

However, the Irish-American has enjoyed an increased profile in the past couple of years since he coined the term Web 2.0 to describe the transformation of the World Wide Web to a user-driven, continually-updated model of development.

O’Reilly defined Web 2.0 as online applications that offer:

  • Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
  • Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
  • Trusting users as co-developers
  • The ability to harness collective intelligence
  • The ability to leverage the long tail through customer self-service
  • Software above the level of a single device
  • Lightweight user interfaces, development models, and business models.

    • Perpetual Beta

    One of the key concepts to come from O’Reilly’s work is “perpetual beta”. Wikipedia (which is itself a Web 2.0 application) defines perpetual beta as “a term used to describe a software or system which is always in a testing phase”. Perpetual beta has come to be associated with the development and release of a service in which constant updates are the foundation for the habitability/usability of a service.”

    What this means is that for services that you can receive over the Internet, such as software and ecommerce transactions, new features are added constantly, as opposed to the old model of huge software releases every few years.

    Instead of the Microsoft model, where the company brings out a new version of Windows every three or five years that has a host of new features and has been thoroughly bug-tested, perpetual beta is exemplified by products such as Gmail or Google Maps, where new features are introduced on almost a daily basis.

    As O’Reilly describes it: “When devices and programs are connected to the internet, applications are no longer software artifacts, they’re ongoing services.”

    Jim Morris, on his Software Product Management blog, writes, “When software delivers its service over the web, we can do business differently. The ability to fix the software without distributing updates is helpful. Since interactions between users and servers go over the net, they can be recorded and replayed. All of these things can be exploited to support much better bug analysis and performance monitoring. Software just got easier!

    “An application should evolve to better serve its purpose. So, aside from providing a service that attracts users, it should be gathering information about what else the users might want or need. Thus, the tough decisions that product managers make about which features to include in the next release can be made in a more informed way”. features can be tried on small subsets of users until they prove dependable and popular.”

    Practical application

    That’s fine for technology giants such as Google, Amazon and eBay, but how does this apply to ordinary businesses?

    It means changing the way you think about your customers and how you do business. If there is any service you can provide to your customers online - even in the form of information - you can get it out there straight away. You can also gather feedback easily and immediately, in order to make changes to your products. This could offer a huge competitive advantage.

    However, you have to resist the temptation to just throw something out to your customers because you haven’t put enough thought into it and you want your users to tell you how to finish it.

    In his Signal vs. Noise blog, Web designer Jason Fried writes that the problem with forever keeping products in beta is that it fosters fear among developers that their work will never be good enough to be “final.”

    “I think it’s kind of ridiculous,” said Fried. “I think that people are maybe ashamed of their products and are worried about releasing something that’s not perfect. It feels like it’s almost an excuse. They’re putting something out there and saying, ‘Use this, but if it’s not perfect, it’s not our fault.’”

    Lane Halley, a member of several social-networking services, told Wired that such free services have the prerogative to do whatever they want. But she also argues that companies must be careful with what they make available to the public.

    “The thresholds of calling something a beta have dropped through the floor,” said Halley. “As soon as a company has something they’re ready to show, they’ll put (it) out there…. I think that’s a very dangerous tendency because you end up with products that are not clearly defined.”

    Francesco Mapelli writes in his www.mapelli.info blog: “What scares me is that the use of the term ‘beta’ seems to have misled some companies… giving the impression that they can build buggy services, put a colorful beta logo and think they are cool and ’so Web 2.0′.

    “The architecture of a service can be in perpetual beta, because users can provide important feedbacks and feature requests, and companies should add and remove tools and services depending on the feedback and their interests. What can (and should) be in perpetual beta is the way small pieces link together, not the small pieces itself.

    “Web 2.0 is like LEGO. You have small, simple and colorful pieces, and you build platforms and services with this pieces. You can build something that changes every day, but the small pieces you use must be solid.”

    Jan 18

    HotHouse Article

    Brands embrace viral video

    By Simon van Wyk

    In 2006 we literally couldn’t get enough of online video. With fast growing broadband adoption, the proliferation of digital video recording devices and video sharing sites popping up like mushrooms – the real online video revolution finally arrived providing endless entertainment.

    Strangely fixating

    Since it was posted on YouTube back in April the “Evolution of Dance” video has racked up a staggering 37.7 million views and counting and made its creator, Judson Laipply, a star in the process. It is strangely fixating because whilst its premise is mildly amusing there’s no way you think you’ll sit through the full six minutes, but before you know it you’ve been rapt and have viewed the whole thing.

    Curiously entertaining

    American Band OK Go’s video for “Here It Goes Again” was viewed by over 1 million people within 6 days of it being posted on YouTube. It’s a low budget production which features the band members in a cleverly choreographed dance routine on treadmills which is curiously entertaining. The film has now been viewed over 9.4 million times.

    Eclectic, low budget video content

    With this explosion of eclectic and low budget video content it’s particularly interesting to see brands underwriting huge production budgets to create viral videos in an attempt to break through. No doubt attracted by potentially reaching millions of avid consumers without spending millions of media dollars, brands have learned that viral rules are very different from the rules of conventional advertising. Simply putting an existing TV spot up on a video sharing site just doesn’t work. YouTube alone shows about 100 million videos daily which means of course amid the diverse clutter of online video, brands need to find ways to stand out. And this means marketers need to produce highly entertaining videos.

    Branded viral video comes of age

    Of the most memorable agency-produced viral ads that did the rounds last year, my particular favourites are Smirnoff’s Raw Tea “Tea Partay” and Unilever’s “Dove Evolution”.

    The highly entertaining “Tea Partay” proved that people will watch unadulterated advertising and pass it on - as long as it’s entertaining. People expect entertainment value. Don’t deliver and they certainly won’t pass it on.

    Created for the web by advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty, “Tea Partay” runs for over two indulgent minutes and features actors as a trio of rich preppy gangsta rappers, rapping about their New England lifestyle and Smirnoff Raw Tea. The video is beautifully produced and serves up something like 50 references to the brand. Who said blatant advertising could never go viral? So far the clip has clocked up over 1.8 million views.

    Importantly, the clip has fuelled much discussion in the blogosphere which in turn has helped drive its widespread dispersion.

    Playing by the rules of entertainment

    I think Kevin Roddy, executive creative director of Bartle Bogle Hegarty sums it up nicely when he says, “I believe if you want to be successful in the world of viral, you need to play by the rules of entertainment, not the rules of selling. A lot of brands might have difficulty with that.”

    Of course the production budget of the “Tea Partay” video would have been considerable and more akin to the budget required to produce a quality TV spot. The idea behind “Tea Partay” is a killer, but do brands really need to spend a fortune on production for online video?

    For many marketers the idea of underwriting a significant production budget without a guaranteed number of impressions is an extremely hard proposition to swallow and a big influence on not doing viral campaigns.

    The beauty of viral videos is they are produced for the web and not for TV. It’s all about the idea and not the production budget. And let’s face it, viral videos work best if they look a little rough around the edges with that consumer generated content feel.

    As an aside, whilst I personally love the “Tea Partay” ad, I was a little disappointed to see that Smirnoff failed to sync up other channels (in particular the teapartay.com website) and so when the video first took off, viewers who clicked through to the site found nothing useful related to Raw Tea, and certainly Smirnoff wasted an important opportunity to continue to engage with these consumers and capitalise on the video’s success.

    Big traffic spikes

    Of course, the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty and its influence on body image has been generating much discussion in the blogosphere and commentary in newspapers, talk shows on television since it was launched.

    But the campaign truly went viral in October last year with the launch of “Dove Evolution” and like almost everyone it seems, I’ve been completely mesmerised by it. In 75 seconds, the video shows an ordinary-looking woman being transformed (with the help of lighting, makeup, and photoshopping) into stunning model perfection. Like “Tea Partay” the ad has created a huge impact and generated lots of interest in the blogosphere which in turn fuelled its viral proliferation. According to blog-tracking service Technorati, the video has become one of the most-linked-to videos among bloggers.

    The spot was deftly created by Ogilvy & Mather, Toronto and while the number of people viewing the viral “Dove Evolution” video is remarkable - with over 2.3 million views in its first ten days - what’s really impressive is that it has helped generate a huge increase in visitors to Unilever websites.

    AdAge reported that the video generated the biggest-ever traffic spike to CampaignForRealBeauty.com which was three times more than the traffic generated from Dove’s Super Bowl ad last year for which Dove paid a whopping US$2.4 million dollars for 30 seconds of commercial time.

    Of course the spin-off spoofs, created by mere amateurs have been just as absorbing, and really amusing too. My particular favourite is “Slob Evolution” which has racked up over 278,000 views in its first month on YouTube. The proliferation of the user generated spin-offs also keeps the buzz around the original ad alive and driving traffic to the Dove Real Beauty campaign.

    Not bad for a zero media spend.

    Like the “Tea Partay” spot, the “Dove Evolution” video runs far longer than a conventional TV ad and demonstrates that keeping the consumer’s attention is simply a matter of how well the content entertains us.

    So have advertising agencies really found their groove in this digital world? The success of these two viral videos along with countless others would certainly suggest that agencies are clawing back creative leadership and asserting themselves in the digital space. After all, online video does draw on much of the traditional agency’s core competency. But with Ad Age naming The Consumer as the agency of the year, hot on the heels of Time Magazine honouring web 2.0 and “You” as their “Person of the Year”, it will be interesting to see if brands will be happy to fund huge production budgets on an ongoing basis.

    As brand marketers continue to experiment in this space no doubt many will start to invest in amateur but highly creative video creators in the rich new world of consumer generated marketing.

    What is clear is that viral marketing has quickly become a potent marketing device and one which has brought about the evolution of a new form of advertising - one that people actually want to watch. No doubt we’ll see a major chunk of marketing budgets shifting to online video.

    Simon van Wyk is founding partner of HotHouse Interactive - the company that builds businesses online.

    Branded viral video campaigns discussed in this article:

  • Smirnoff Tea Partay video clip
  • Dove Evolution clip
  • Slob Evolution clip