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.

Recent reports of a tie-up between Adidas and Intel to enhance the shopping experience with technology are leaving me cold.

I think this is largely irrelevant, and a waste of money.

The best shopping experiences deal with store setup (merchandizing, architecture, fixtures design, lighting, soundscape, etc.), and with service (knowledgeable and personable staff in particular).

In business terms, this translates in a store’s sales per square meter, and sales per staff.

If the technology doesn’t increase those two metrics, it’s useless. From a brand’s perspective, you can add other metrics (such as future sales, for example to buyers who create an account and can later be touched by further marketing efforts). But retail has specific strengths which should be used by any in-store initiative.

The best retail experiences out there have no technology at all whatsoever (Ikea, Apple, Molton Brown, or fashion boutiques in city centers).

Technology is a glittering lure, tempting and very satisfying in marketing or boardroom presentations, but I’ve yet to see an example that has genuine impact on consumers and actually improves their shopping experience.

I’m a bit of a grumpy old man, but I firmly believe that knowing the right place of technology is very important.

That right place is backstage. A few examples:

• awesome stock management (I can get what I want from this store, now or tomorrow at the latest)
• a decent loyalty card system to ensure staff knows relevant information about the most valuable shoppers, enhancing the conversation
• in-store shopper behavior analysis to optimize merchandizing and store organization
• order online and pick up in store
• strong training tools to ensure staff are totally fluent in the features and benefits of each product on offer
• and obviously on suggesting and preparing the visit before it actually takes place (promotion, information)

All of this requires massive investment in infrastructure as well as people to run it, and that’s where the value is.

But don’t mess with the relationship between the shopper and the products, don’t mediate it with screens and gizmos, you’ll just degrade it. Picking up the product from a shelf and holding it in your hands, talking about it with a sales clerk, actually trying it on, this is the impregnable pinnacle of the shopping experience, an intense, personal and meaningful moment, and we are gravely mistaken if we think we can enhance it with consumer-facing information technology, which is a substitute.

A few days ago, Harald Neidhardt of MLOVE invited me to speak at the Sportswear International E-Fashion summit, in the mobile breakout session. The topic of my presentation was “The Authentic and the Effective”, and aimed at covering brand heritage in the age of mobile marketing. (This blog post is loosely based on my presentation.)

Harald’s passion is contagious: he’s obsessed with mobile devices and the changes they are bringing to society. He made the point that 2010 (for mobile) has a whiff of 1999 (for the web): we’re not there at all, but this side of the information and media industries is attracting colossal amounts of energy, talent and capital. The result is an amazingly vivid ecosystem, much of which is represented at MLOVE.

All attendants of the session believed in the tremendous marketing potential of these awesome little devices connected to data and voice networks. Not “phones”, as Jerome Nadel of Sagem Wireless rightfully pointed out, but mobile devices, in the broadest sense of the word.

They’re everywhere, and their hardware has become increasingly attractive. My own phone has a truly stunning screen, which makes it a daily pleasure to look at, and enhances my ability to consume information. It gives me access to plenty of content, in just a few taps.

Between the screen and the network, mobile devices are offering capabilities that we have just barely begun to explore.

Competition

However, the competition around this screen is stiff. When handled at a reasonable distance of the user’s face, the device’s screen shares attention with a hugely demanding environment. It’s only just a few degrees of my field of vision, the rest being crowded with events of a varying degree of intensity. The visual competition is intense.

But there’s also an interesting conversation you were just having with a neighbor, a budget meeting coming up that you really ought to prepare for, that’s mental competition. Mobile devices don’t monopolize your attention, because they’re visually underwhelming, and therefore are particularly prone to being one of many tasks being carried out in parallel — more so than computer use or a face-to-face conversation.

Augmented reality

Amidst this challenging environment, we’re proposing to add further layers of information: “augmented reality” is a tremendous buzz word that people around marketing departments worldwide are toying with. Implementation is underwhelming, and I have yet to come across a genuinely useful case, but it’s undoubtedly hot.

We’re going to solve all the technical problems and there will be, someday soon (any day now right?!), a way for users to whip out our device, and get an extra layer of information about our immediate environment: people, places, things.

But if we proceed along the lines of some current experiments, we will end up with a remarkably complex system, crowded with advertising, that expect us to behave awkwardly, and deliver questionable information, painstakingly reformatted and perpetually out of date.

Mobile devices aren’t immersive

We need to recognize that mobile devices are not easily immersive. Nagging is their strongest trait. And because they are always on, and don’t really know what the user is doing at any given time, they can be quite invasive. On the balance, mobile devices actually offer a weak experience.

Weak is a characteristic, not a value judgement, and can be positive. Mobile experience is not overwhelming, and lends itself to “snacking” or casual involvement.

A mobile device poorly integrated as a channel for marketing messages can damage the brand it is supposed to serve. For example, a mobile experience designed without taking into account the reality of the network speed will irritate and taint the brand with negative emotions.

But network availability, speed and latency, coverage, costs to the users, battery life, accuracy of geolocalization — those are all complicated infrastructural problems that are being tackled. They are huge roadblocks, but we’ve seen consistent and dramatic improvements over the past 10 years, and I trust we’ll see solutions progressively being offered.

Qualities

But what we will do with this infrastructure, what will it allow us to do? The obvious answer is: useful. Make actually helpful tools, and enable users to achieve tasks they want to perform. Low-tech applications such as SMS are quite relevant to enable this.

But the most important quality of mobile devices is the intimate experience afforded to the user. Touch interfaces have profoundly changed the nature of the interaction with mobile devices:

• the basic gesture is a caress, performed by the fingertips, rather than the more mechanical keystroke, encouraging a gentler, less functional interaction
• the device’s response is taking place in the same location as the finger’s touch, strongly reinforcing the anthropomorphism and emotional involvement
• direct manipulation of information and features, rather than symbolic access with the mouse or conceptual devices such as scroll bars, reduces the computer’s presence

For me, this intimate character of mobile devices is extremely powerful. No matter how crude the underlying technology, the interaction is still taking place at your fingertips, a delicate, sensitive, subtle part of the body. Increasingly literal interfaces further reinforce the intimacy.

Emotions

Strong emotions can be conveyed at the fingertips, and this really was the point of my presentation: weak yet intimate, mobile devices are conducive to emotion, and therefore offer a strong potential to carry brand messages, which need emotion to have any impact on people.

This will certainly prove to be a challenge, because so far, brands have usually just turned up the volume, to try and cope with an increasingly noisy environment. Buildings wrapped in advertising, blanketing of all media channels, “below-the-line” advertising that ensures messages are seen and heard outside of the usual avenues of brand communication, recruitment and grooming of celebrities and widespread sponsoring of causes and events, user profiling and ad targeting — nothing is too expensive to reach consumers.

Mobile is definitely a new channel, something brands and advertisers aren’t very good at yet. I contend that brand truth, the genuine behavior of a group of people who are brought together by a brand, will be the factor that unlocks the power of mobile devices.