Fascinating incursion of technology choices in the UK riots. With RIM‘s handsets massively popular with the UK youth (#1 brand for 12-15 year olds with 37% of the market to 17% for the iPhone, #1 brand for 16-24 year olds also with 37%, to 25% for the iPhone, which is #1 overall with 32% of the total UK smartphone market), the unrest have been hailed as the BlackBerry riots.

The Guardian does a nice analysis of the 25-year shift from community organizers and open-air meetings to social media, and it’s of course quite interesting to see that the “good citizens” are organizing cleanup on Twitter.

BlackBerry says it is cooperating with the police, but I am quite curious to know what exactly that entails: “firehose” access to BlackBerry Messenger messages (which aren’t public) would be a start. It could help intelligence work and ensure the police know what’s coming (similar to having “ears on the ground” or monitoring Twitter or Facebook). Legal or not, the police have always used such means to be at the right place at the right time.

But will individuals then get identified and prosecuted, based on the messages they’ve sent and received? That’s a trickier question: I’m not sure how UK law works with telecommunications evidence. In The Wire, much is made of how the police ensures the evidence they gather is admissible in court (going through fairly stringent steps to obtain wiretap warrants). However, tighter public-order and terror legislation (much of it fairly recent) now affords the police quite flexible powers.

What’s more, merely having received (or sent) a message calling for riots is in no way conclusive of actual participation. To ascertain that, the police could use mast information (geographical location of that phone’s user based on which antenna the phone was connecting to) and the vast number of surveillance cameras installed on British territory, now getting nearer Enemy of the State.

PS. A huge tip of the hat to UK telecom regulation and research agency Ofcom: their web site is extremely well made and in particular, linking to information is easy. Nice!

As I asked my friends and former colleagues if they knew anyone to replace me, a few of them, currently working in advertising or digital agencies, wondered what it felt like to step over to the “client side”.

Having made the switch myself 3.5 years ago, here are my own observations.

First, I found it immensely rewarding to be actually working on brand strategy, rather than merely applying it in various projects. It’s not a question of control: I don’t own the brand and I am but a simple contributor. But the brand is a living asset and as an employee, I have a personal stake in the debate. Because I work here, the ASICS and Onitsuka Tiger brands are different, however microscopically — an influence no vendor can claim to have, however large and valuable their contribution.

Another benefit comes from the longer-term involvement: I get to work on projects all the way from the moment they’re first conceived, through their development and actual implementation, all the way until the activity stops. I feel this gives more opportunities to learn, and it brings the satisfaction of being proven right (or wrong!) by the reality of operations.

Next, a bitter-sweet pleasure: we are primarily answerable to consumers. Of course I have a boss, who has one too, who answers to the company’s board, who pays the salaries. But in the end, each in our role, we are all evaluated by consumers, who are the ultimate judges of our success, and actually foot the bill. Working for intermediaries is not a problem, but I truly appreciate the proximity and brutal honesty of this relation to the people.

At times, I’ve found it frustrating to be kept out of the agencies’ creative process and to be exposed to work only at identified checkpoints. In my previous job as account manager I always felt attracted to the creative team for the exact same reason, but once on the client side it got worse. It’s bearable when presentations kick ass and clear progress is made on a regular basis, but it’s an agony when the agencies struggle a bit.

For me, the least attractive part of the job is having to scavenge budgets. In every project, one of my main roles is to ensure it’s funded appropriately. There actually is significant creativity to this task: accounting rules are fairly sophisticated and rather interesting, and the political aspects can make it a fun game to play, honestly. However, it quickly feels repetitive, and the day-to-day practice is tedious. (Also, I am terrible at negotiating and do not enjoy it at all.)

Job perks are smaller, or at least less aligned with my own aspirations. I really miss the funky, well-appointed, city-center office, and I definitely have way more bureaucracy in my life. On the other hand, my previous employers didn’t fly me in business class either, and with ASICS I’ve been granted the rare honor to run amazing races. Mileage will vary wildly there, just make sure you negotiate your terms properly!

Finally, the people: you meet great and not-so-great people in every job. In agencies, there is perhaps a higher proportion of extraordinary people, because extraordinary is a good advertisement for what the agency sells. But there can also be a higher proportion of ego and short-term mentality, of which I have seen less on the client side. Also, I’ve seen a bit more variety of backgrounds and attitudes here. Win some, lose some, for me it’s a toss-up on this point.

Overall, I feel the switch was overwhelmingly positive. But of course it may very well have to do with the particular “client” I joined… Want a job at ASICS?

Something funny happened to one of the pages of the ASICS UK web site: it became really, really popular overnight.

By “really popular”, I mean that over the past week, two days of traffic of this page represent over 25% of the total page views of the overall European sites, or a whopping 90% of our UK traffic over the two days it really made the rounds, with 215,071 view on Thursday, vs. 5 views on Monday:

I only became aware of the situation today because of a tweet that was kind enough to notify us: the product image on this page describing our Running Backpack Mini is very small. The “zoom” image is no larger. And people have been poking fun at that.

We got a bunch of tongue-in-the-cheek product reviews, where people talk about how the backpack fits their pets…

So: what do we do? This is really funny, and drove traffic to the site. How do we recover gracefully from this?

This week, the United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention (“your online source for credible health information”) posted a notice on preparing for a zombie apocalypse.

Such a piece will spread online wonderfully, because of the discrepancy between the host (a government agency) and the topic (a fictitious thread of popular culture). I read about it through a tweet by Maître Éolas, a French lawyer who sports over 35,000 followers, because of his witty tone and informative choice of topics. In the context of heightened anti-American sentiment in France (always present, but exacerbated because of the DSK episode), Éolas’s pointer is hugely topical. No French ministry would condone such a fun approach.

The CDC’s web traffic probably jumped. A quick look at Bit.ly’s aggregate stats for the page show nearly 43,000 clicks through Bit.ly’s own links, 15,600 tweets, nearly 134,000 shares, 82,000 “likes” and 123,000 comments on Facebook — not bad at all for a piece of content that’s been up for just a week. And of course it’s done PR wonders (906 news articles picked up by Google news, and both positive and negative video reports).

Does it work? I would think so: the standards of government reliability are upheld, as the copy is tongue-in-the-cheek, and quotes Wikipedia and movies as sources of inspiration. But the payload is there: a compact version of the CDC’s emergency preparedness kit. This is a nice example of dual-purpose content: one layer to attract people and get them to talk and share, one layer of serious stuff that piggybacks on the controversial or humorous topic. All news stories dutifully pick up on the actual message.

I’m less convinced by the social media campaign where people are asked to create videos or to use badges. It’s a bit too complicated, the call to action is not very decisive and the instructions are confused — I think that part will not work. A quick look at Twitter mentions lists only buzz about the article, no video contribution. Same over at YouTube.

An issue that comes back regularly in people’s comments: the Rapture. Whoever planned this zombie campaign at the CDC either didn’t think of, or didn’t have the guts to ride on this actual existing topic. It could have been much more powerful because it’s topical, and even a Doonesbury cartoon would then have echoed the CDC’s message. It could also have drowned out the message in the mass of other humorous takes on the issue. And of course it could have totally back-fired if religious nuts had taken offense: zombies were perhaps the safer choice!

Talking with Ian and Marxy over at Néojaponisme about the heritage of Onitsuka Tiger, around work they’re doing with us this year. What is the point for a brand like ours to promote a certain idea of Japan? What message are we trying to bring across?

Ultimately, I’d like people to think of deep cultural traits that are bigger than any brand, and that defy a little bit the traditional image of Japan. Everyone curates their own private Japan in their heads, lumping together some subset of geishas and tamagochi and Shinkansen and kamikaze and earthquakes and sushi and the 80s and Hokusai and whale fishing and death by overwork and Hiroshima and in general a sentiment of completion and perfection, but excluding or ignoring the porous quality of Japanese culture and its ability to assimilate ideas and recontextualize them (golf, technology, ivy league fashion, the 50s), its store of less prominent pillars of existence (craftsmanship, seasonal traditions, shogi, deference to a diffuse authority and the power of peer pressure, the 70s) and the thirst for external influences that will be chewed up and integrated. I’d like to nudge the western world’s understanding of Japan, make it a tad more complex and more interesting.

And I feel Onitsuka Tiger was then a spectator as well as a participant, as a brand and as a company. Let’s pursue the same motivation.

Today, I was reminded of how much I dislike advertising: having depleted my supply of fancy soap, I’m currently using a bar of Dove I picked up at the supermarket (no choice).

Dove is often talked about with awe or envy in marketing departments, for the bold departure it marks from Unilever’s other statements about beauty, photoshopped into a constant alienation of real people. The colorful back story has family members of senior brand executives enrolled in a boardroom coup, a dramatic climax in the internal battle for the campaign, before it was shown to the public. How daring, how genuine, such amazing trailblazers! Activists at the heart of the machine! And obviously, everybody loves business success.

But for all its high-brow (and well-executed) advertising, Dove is a range of medium-quality industrial detergents: it washes poorly and feels unclean, and makes me smell funny. And this simple fact matters very little in the marketing scheme of things.