Do you want to talk to someone right now? Well, you probably can. Call their mobile number, send them a text message, leave a voice-mail, write an email, contact them on Facebook, Skype them, send them a tweet, call their land-line, send a letter, release a carrier pigeon, send a smoke signal. It’s easy. There are more ways to talk than ever before.

But I’ve noticed something. Despite the strides in technology, there are a few areas where you are completely unreachable. I’d like to talk about them below.

The friend zone

Have you ever asked someone out, and not heard back for a week? That person was not thinking it over in their head like you thought they were. They had already made up their mind before you even asked. And reception is notoriously unreliable in the ‘Friend Zone’.

The unemployment zone

If you send off your C.V. to apply for an advertised job, your email might not be considered worthy of a response. Even if you’ve spent hours massaging your experience, painting over the cracks in your work history, inflating your skills, and lying about your mountains of ambition, you could still get nothing back. This is because indifference is the default setting for humans.

The artist zone

What is an artist? It is someone who says, “Hey, I made this. Look at it.”

After a while, an aspiring artist will be familiar with that glazed look in the eye of the beholder. Check out my band! Look at my designs! Read my blog! See my photo! The answer will always be a silent “meh”.

The Facebook zone

So you’ve posted a great link, a hysterical photograph, an awesome video, a cool website, a hilarious comment, or a selfy that no one asked for. Don’t be surprised if the response will be absolutely nothing. How many ‘friends’ do you have? The average is 229. That’s 229 people who have let your post sail by without a single comment. Not even one single ‘like’.

The wallpaper zone

And just like people, brands too can suffer from these waves of indifference. Too many decide to keep doing the same old “tried and true” things and successfully blend into the advertising wallpaper. Now brands have to work so much harder and find new and entertaining ways to communicate, especially in social media. Here are some great examples of brands really cutting through and speaking with their audience with a bold unique voice: Skittles, Kit Kat, and, of course, Old Spice. And Lion’s new Tap Kingdom Facebook page (featuring the voice of Charles the Firth) is one to watch.

So it seems there are more ways to reach people than ever before. But at the same time, most of us have a whole lot less to say. To illustrate this point, take a look at the comment section below, and try not to snigger at the tumbleweeds rolling by.

Indeed, some people seemingly explode into our consciousness with a creative output that feels nothing short of transcendent, with work so dazzling it leaves you breathless and in awe. Whether a musician, artist, director or poet, it appears to an outsider that they have a bottomless cache of creativity that they effortlessly draw on when the mood strikes.

It may be the case that some of these people were lucky enough to be born with their creative voice fully formed, while everyone else labours away for years searching for that elusive diamond among the stones, but somehow I doubt it. Although I don’t know this for certain, I’m guessing even Picasso started out finger painting as a three year old, and Jimi Hendrix’s first guitar solo was an ear-piercing noise only an indulgent mother could love.

Finding your creative voice

There’s no shortage of advice online for finding your creative voice. A quick Google search returns 122,000,000 results. However, there is one piece of advice that I first saw on the STW Group’s excellent blog Nextness in 2011 and came across again recently. It’s called the Helsinki Bus Station Theory and I think it’s worth sharing.

A bus station might not seem like the most inspiring metaphor when it comes to finding your own unique vision, what with the homeless people, the pungent smell, the vending machine with stale snacks and so forth, however I imagine the real life Helsinki Bus Station is a cut above your average depot.

Nevertheless, this theory, which has circulated among photographers for years, was outlined by Finnish-American photographer Arno Minkkinen in a 2004 commencement speech delivered at the New England School of Photography.

Minkkinen describes some two dozen platforms laid out in a square in the heart of town, with the buses at each platform taking the same route out of the city and making identical stops along the way. Each stop represents one year in the life of a photographer. So, for example, the third bus stop would represent three years of photographic activity. If you had been working for those three years making platinum studies of nudes and then taken them to a gallery, the curator might ask you if you are familiar with the nudes of Irving Penn. Penn’s bus, you see, was on the same route.

Disappointed and annoyed that the work you have been sweating over someone else has already produced, “you hop off the bus, grab a cab (because life is short) and head straight back to the bus station looking for another platform”.

This time you pursue an entirely different direction, spend three years producing your work and receive a similarly disheartening response: “Haven’t you seen the work of Richard Misrach?”

So you take the same course of action, get off the bus and race back to the bus station to find another platform. This continues throughout your creative life, always producing new work and always being compared to someone else.

How can you overcome this frustrating dilemma? Minkkinen’s answer is simple:

Stay on the bus.

Because if you stay on the bus, over time you will see a difference. After a while, Helsinki’s bus routes diverge, heading off in completely different directions with very different destinations, and it is this separation where the alchemy occurs. You will start to notice the differences in your work from the work that has inspired you and will pursue this new direction. In time your vision will take off. Your creative voice will start to emerge.

At the end of the line, Minkkinen says, is when your work is done. “It could be the end of your career as an artist or the end of your life for that matter, but your total output is now all there before you, the early (so-called) imitations, the breakthroughs, the peaks and valleys, the closing masterpieces, all with the stamp of your unique vision.

“Why, because you stayed on the bus.”

Read Arno Minkkinen’s commencement speech

By building this, Facebook was going to create a very happy place for billions of people to gather and share their likes, thoughts, expressions and photos of their lunch. And according to Carolyn Everson, vice-president of global marketing solutions at Facebook, “We have a saying [at Facebook] that we are one per cent done with our journey. I wholeheartedly believe that.”

Now it would be harsh (nay mean) to question their sincerity but it might be fair to question some of the tactics they have deployed recently to help them get further along the journey. Because it would now appear that they are looking through the other end of the telescope, which is the money lens.

They talk about the social graph and putting people first but it is becoming clear(er) that they have renegotiated their position to money first, people second. You see, the lofty ambition of the social graph doesn’t make shareholders happy. What does make them happy is innovation that drives monetisation, which is what Facebook has been doing lots of in the last few months.

Changes like the ones they have made to EdgeRank – making it much more difficult for brands to push up posts that demand you ‘Like’ them – and the FBX advertising exchange, which serves targeted advertising related to other websites consumers have visited, have made brands think harder about the quality of what they post as they now have more of a monetary cost that can be attributed to them.

Now these changes may mean everyone has more skin in the content game and lead to advertising revenues increasing (by up to 49% according to the Pivotal Research Group) and they may even deliver on Mr. Zuckerberg’s wish that “I want the content from marketers to be as good as that from your best friend.”

But, more relevant advertising-like content is not what consumers are calling out for as they are decreasing in their actual numbers. In the last month Facebook has lost 6m US visitors, a 4% fall, according to analysis firm SocialBakers, and the amount of time they spend on the site has declined. According to comScore the average in the US was 121 minutes in December 2012, but that fell to 115 minutes in February 2013.

Why are they leaving? One word, two reasons: mobile. Firstly, Facebook has yet to crack mobile. Yes, they have launched Home, but their main mobile experience does not encourage stickiness, it actively encourages you to dip in and out. Secondly, new social networks like Path (by ex-Facebook employee Dave Morin), Whatsapp, SnapChat and Instagram are all vertical so far less broadcast, and were all designed for mobile first.

So the warning for Facebook (not that it’s likely to go the way of MySpace) should be that while it’s fiscally sensible to get your revenue streams in order, it might be more prudent to spice up your experience first. After all, familiarity can cause contempt in any social relationship.

But let’s lay our eyes on innovation, from meaningless gadgets to pure revolutionary brilliance, to understand how it is shaping the marketing industry and look at the reasons why we talk so much about it as well as why we place so much trust on innovation being the driver for a new creative era.

Shifting focus

 In the past few years we’ve seen companies like Twitter and Instagram creating fortunes with innovative social services. This led to money and effort being poured into the already crowded space of social apps. New apps with different features come onto the market every week and it seems like there will be no new ‘Twitters’ out there. And so the market for social apps will continue, with rapid fragmentation, until the point where we’ve got apps for making apps.

So, it looks like the focus is now shifting from software innovation to hardware. There is an emerging trend of building physical things connected to the internet to drive marketing objectives for brands. When successfully executed, these can really change people’s behaviour, but too often they are still merely stunts orchestrated for advertising purposes.

Have a look at this unfortunate example of another uselessly hi-tech advertising innovation for RedTomato Dubai that lets you order a pizza with the ‘single push of a button’.

On face value, it seems like a great idea. Dig a little deeper and you quickly uncover a 10 minute registration process and the limitation of only being able to order a single, pre-selected pizza. What business impact can this really have?

On the other hand, stunts like the Red Bull Stratos can work for brands when they are well executed.

What’s important is for marketers to think deeply about the story they are telling through innovation, how they can amplify it and what the true impact to their business will be over time.

Stepping forwards

So what’s going to happen to marketing as we know it? Already we see a shift from delivering a product to building holistic experiences that deliver real customer benefits. This will also mean moving from yearly marketing plans into real time marketing and sales. All of this will take more time than we now predict and some other buzzword will replace ‘innovation’ as the next great white hope. On top of my list are: convergence, gamification and big data.

How the eDM was supposed to appear (top) and how most people first saw it (bottom).

When I saw this, I felt the urge to take screenshots and send it to my mates, but alas I was too late, this image was already doing the rounds in the blogosphere. It was an impressive demonstration on behalf of the marketing team because of the simple combination of creative, technical and audience insights that were necessary in order to get such a simple feature to work; it was a pleasantly unexpected message.

It was a creative insight because it made use of one of the iconic Autobots logos, it was a technical insight because the marketers were aware that image load errors could be manipulated, and finally an audience insight because clearly there was research done on email client usage.

For a long time, we have seen great use of unexpected messages in the form of creative 404 error screens on websites that use the same tone-of-voice and persona of the brand, and when I stumble on these pages, I don’t feel dejected, I feel like I’ve discovered something that enriches my experience on the site.

The 404 error page for comedy site HomeStarRunner.com

My third example of a pleasantly unexpected message comes from the Australian Air Force job ad for an IT expert. Instead of the usual spiel that comes with most job advertisements, the ad is actually a challenge to find the message hidden in the web page’s source code. Traditional ideas on snappy, concise or eye-catching messaging go out the window in favour of filtering just the technically savvy audience and people who are most likely to fill the job advertisement’s requirements.

A job ad for the Australian Air Force

Communication goes two ways

I think that it is important to design content that feels like the audience can engage and are contributing to your content. For pleasantly unexpected messages, the content creator has already thought several steps ahead of the audience, and has laid out a trail of content that is not displayed in the site map.

User experience and user-centric design is important in identifying these opportunities that would not normally be apparent in traditional design and development. The ‘discovery’ of these messages rewards the audience by making them feel like they have found something that was not meant to be revealed, and it enriches their experience of an otherwise traditional reader-author relationship.

Enough of that. Here are three things that I foresee as being seminal to building the future-friendly digital platforms of days to come…

It’s all about the context

39% of people admitted (and that is the key word here) to using their mobile device in the bathroom…Or, as Brad Frost eloquently put it: “poopin’”. But why should we care about where and when people are accessing our websites?

As digital experts we must embrace and champion mobile context in our mobile strategies. Mobile is unique in that it’s always with us, always on. That alone means that we constantly have no less than a broadband internet connection to a vast pool of information at any given moment (reception or Wi-Fi notwithstanding). Mobile is changing user behaviour at a rapid pace and sparking a revolution in retail shopping known as ‘showrooming*’. We must create bomb-proof strategies and useful experiences that embrace the fact that our sites’ content will be accessed quite literally from anywhere. Let’s help people find what they want, when they want, where they want.

*Hint: Don’t start charging people $5 for browsing and not purchasing anything—it’s not the answer. Consider looking internally at your business model and customer service before diving into the short-term solution.

It’s all about the consumer

Let me share the wisdom of early 90s German pop band, Snap! for a moment:

I’ve got the power hey yeah heh
I’ve got the power
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh yeah-eah-eah-eah-eah-eah
It’s gettin’ it’s gettin’ it’s gettin’ kinda hectic

Yes, it is “gettin’ kinda hectic”, Snap!. Social media has been the people’s champion, giving consumers the power in a ubiquitous public forum which allows them to voice their concerns, their praise, their recommendations or their queries with the brands they choose to connect with. And they expect a response. Right now.

Brands have needed to swiftly adopt social media as a primary comms channel and adapt just as quickly to the influx of consumer participation whether it is positive or negative. In the future, businesses will need to embrace greater accountability and transparency in their operation practices as their consumers demand it. Brands no longer own the conversation and the consumer is very much empowered and in control.

How should we go about bringing this transparency to life? Look no further than McDonald’s Canada and their “Our Food. Your Questions.” BAU campaign as an example of best practice business–consumer transparency. My personal favourite is the behind the scenes look at a McDonald’s photo shoot.

It’s all about the experience
Of late I’ve been banging on about this non-stop, however I feel as though it warrants more attention so bear with me. As proponents of digital evolution we need to look to place more emphasis on building useful experiences in place of the campaign. Don’t get me wrong, the campaign has its place (driving awareness) but it’s not the be-all and end-all of how we can market to consumers through digital. Look to the technologies of tomorrow—wearable computing, NFC, augmented reality and the internet of things. These platforms, technologies and devices will be ripe for building useful tools that enrich the consumer experience in their day-to-day lives, rather than just using these channels to market to them. We should focus on experiences that they can’t live without because it makes their day-to-day lives easier and more fulfilled.

But guess what? We don’t need to wait for mainstream adoption of the promised land of tomorrow’s technology. We can start right now by looking towards the how and why we build our current digital platforms. Let’s focus on creating experiences that meet real consumer needs whether it’s through social or the desktop and laptop or on mobile. Use the tools at your disposal:

• Masses of multi-channel consumer behaviour data
• Feedback from real consumers in social channels
• Recognising your consumers’ goals
• Building experiences with a user-centred design focus
• Being agile enough to adapt and update accordingly to changing consumer behaviours
• Championing your brand value through providing a useful platform
• Unifying your customer experiences across multiple channels

It won’t be an easy process, but it is necessary to ensure future success.

Follow Nick Salter on Twitter (he could use the boost in followers).

We battled against six other agencies, proving our mettle across data and digital strategy, in order to drive Momentum’s growth trajectory.

From our braves in the account service, strategy and UX teams who brought words of wisdom and a ‘never say die’ approach to getting things done quickly, to our creative and wordsmith warriors for giving us beautiful weapons of design, right through to our courageous technologists who built a great site and our MD, Sandy Park, who led the troops forward, we were formidable!

So it’s with great pleasure that we can now announce that we WON!

Momentum Energy managing director Nigel Clark said: “White stood out in their understanding of how to create value for customers, which is a key strength of Momentum Energy’s, and one we’ll now be able to grow together.”

In the words of our Group Account Director, Sue Meehan, who helped lead the pitch, “The time spent working on the Momentum Energy pitch was challenging, inspiring, learned and fun! The spirit of White really shone through in our collective effort to make this submission the best it could be!”

And finally to borrow from Annie Lennox, “When you’re successful, things have a momentum, and at a certain point you can’t really tell whether you have created the momentum or it’s creating you.”

Here’s to Momentum and to White!

In line with our goal to make White as fun and enjoyable as possible, staff were given the opportunity to embrace these truths via a photo competition. To enter, people needed to submit photos that they thought best reflected one of the truths.

Below are the winning photos that will be printed and displayed in the White offices for everyone to enjoy.

People’s Choice Awards

Why? by Sarah Salkild, Director of People & Culture

Hi by Garry Law, Tech Lead

I by Nick Salter, Junior Strategist

Try by Philip Taylor, Designer

Eye by Eve Medvedeva, Accountant

Jury Award

Eye by Philip Taylor, Designer

Well done to the winners and thanks to everyone who submitted photos and voted in the competition. You can view all the submissions on our #whitefilter Facebook album.

 So what’s new?

Bigger, brighter, cleaner

All stories have been reimagined to spotlight what your friends are sharing. These stories are bigger, brighter and cleaner and you can see what multiple friends are saying about the same content all in one place.

Your own personalised newspaper

Imagine Facebook as your own personalised  newspaper with different sections. View what content you like and when, whether that’s a steady stream of all your friends’ photos or the Following Feed for all the latest news from the pages and people you follow.

Seamless user experience

Now you’ll see the same clean look wherever you use Facebook – on mobile, tablet and web. The best parts of Facebook for mobile are on the web too – including a new navigation sidebar with bookmarks and chat contacts that is available everywhere on Facebook.

What does this mean for marketers?

A more visual experience

Images have been at the core of the redesign, so photos should be at the core of your content strategy. Where possible, use high definition compelling images to convey your brand message. Although a variety of updates keep your content interesting, think about how you can turn text-based only updates into image updates, as you’ll receive additional distribution in the Photos Only Feed, thus increasing your reach.

More distribution

Thanks to the Following Feed, people will be able to discover more content from the pages and people they follow. Users can now see page messages in at least three places: the default News Feed, the Following Feed and the brands Timeline. Add in image updates, and brands can also appear in the Photos Feed. Paid opportunities in the Following Feed will roll out later in the year.

More context to establish your brand tone

Page Like Stories (both paid and organic) that appear in the News Feed will now display the page’s cover photo to provide more context about the page. This is extremely important in fan acquisition, as Facebook has now changed the Cover Photo guidelines allowing brands to include direct calls to action and pricing information, and reference Facebook features such as ‘Like this’ and ‘Share’.

Is this change for the better? 

Although the recent changes to Facebook’s redesign aren’t game changing, it has made the Facebook experience stickier. By giving users richer content, greater control, a cleaner experience and cross platform consistency, users will stay around for longer, thus increasing engagement.

Want to be one of the first to try out the new News Feed design? Sign up for the waiting list here: http://www.facebook.com/about/newsfeed

I think about some of the apps that have caught my attention, and many of them are utility based – from Nike+ to Shazam to Dominos Pizza to mTaxi. I use these apps because they are helpful, and make my life easier. The people who have built them have thought hard about what people would like to know/do, and have then designed the experiences around these user needs. I like to think of this as customer focused innovation.

I see two major types of utility apps – those that are an extension to a brand’s products and services, and those that are a core part of a brand’s product and services.

The CommBank Property Guide (disclaimer: white worked on this app) is an example of a utility based app that is an extension of CommBank’s products. It is based on the insight that people want a home, not a home loan, and is designed to help people find a house to buy. It is very relevant to its target audience and doesn’t push CommBank’s products– instead it builds a relationship with users via their need to find a house and subtly positions CommBank as the obvious place to go when they require a mortgage.

To me this style of app is a form of ‘always on’ content or functionality – it provides a reason for people to come back to one of CommBank’s assets repeatedly without the hard sell, and helps to keep CommBank in the person’s mind.

Nike+ and similar running and cycling apps are other apps that fit in this space. They are designed to help people who go running/cycling/training to achieve their fitness goals, rather than to directly sell shoes and clothing. In doing this they build relationships with people that position Nike/the brand that made the app favourably.

In some cases these types of apps have become a revenue stream for the business that built them, as they have become a product in their own right.

The second type of utility app is more directly linked to the company’s core offering.

My current favourite app, Touchnote, fits into this category. Touchnote is a digital printing company that enables you to turn any photo into a postcard or greeting card. Rather than buy a postcard when you’re next on holiday, write on it, find somewhere to buy a stamp and then eventually post it (possibly once you’ve returned home!), why not take a photo on your mobile and have it sent as a postcard?  The whole process takes a few minutes, the postcard is printed on thick, high quality card, and is printed and posted within a day. Touchnote prints in Australia, the UK, the US and Germany, so delivery to these countries only takes a couple of days.

It’s also a really nice way of keeping in touch with family and friends overseas when you’re not on holiday.

TripIt is another utility app for travellers and is a really nice example of this type of app. The app makes it easy for you to save all of your travel plans into a single itinerary that is accessible from your mobile – no more needing to print out lots of confirmation emails! You just email your flight, hotel, car hire etc. confirmations into TripIt and the app turns it into an itinerary for you.

If you allow it to, TripIt will also make relevant offers to you based on your itinerary and previous travelling history. For example, if it can see that you don’t have a hotel planned for a certain trip, and you often stay at a certain hotel brand, then it may make you an offer for that hotel brand for the dates in which you will be in the city you are travelling to. By using the data you have provided wisely, TripIt can add value to you through these targeted offers, rather than pester you with random offers.

Core services utility apps can be relevant in almost any industry. For example, CommBank’s Kaching is a banking example (again white worked on this app). In addition to performing key mobile banking tasks such as checking your balance or transferring money between accounts, Kaching also lets you pay your friends using your mobile, email or Facebook contacts, and you can make contactless payments. It is these customer-focused innovations that differentiate it from other banking apps.

When done well utility apps are a great way of engaging consumers with your brand. They can make people want to proactively interact with your brand – and which brand doesn’t want that?!? Their success lies in making people’s lives easier, and giving them something they can’t get elsewhere.

When considering building a utility app, there are some important considerations, including:

• Why is it useful to people and why would they use it?
• How is it different to anything else that already exists?
• What is innovative about it?
• How does it make people’s lives easier?
• Can you use it to collect data and if so how will you use this data to improve customers’ interactions with you?
• What do your customers/prospects think about it?
• What will constitute success and how will you measure it? And very importantly,
• How does it fit into your overall value proposition? What is its purpose and how does it fit with your other assets?

It is important to understand that you can’t necessarily expect a utility app to achieve all of your short term acquisition goals. While some utility apps will contribute directly to sales, others are designed to build relationships rather than to make short term sales. These apps will often contribute to sales over time through the enhanced customer relationships they have helped to build, and therefore add value in multiple ways. This is why it is important to understand how any app fits into your overall value proposition and how it works with your other assets.

I like to think that there are always opportunities for customer-focused innovation and utility apps. It’s up to all of us to come up with the ideas and be committed to trying to take them forward.