Irreverent Thinking

I’ve never been a huge fan of Flash animations but at the moment they are becoming a real pain. My venerable old Sony seems to be suffering a huge slowdown and this seems, in part, to do with the number of *big* flash adverts running on sites. Urghhh.

I know there is a place for Flash but a quick search on Google revealed a large community of people who really dislike Flash, and a whole segment of the market is appearing which produces applications that remove annoying Flash.

Firefox 3 is going on my computer today (hooray!) and I will be installing the rather natty Flashblock when it’s completed the installation. Bye bye to intrusive flash advertising

The current experiment of running a (YouTube) video on our site has been met with a mixed response. But it has gone rather viral (in a small way). Frames have been grabbed and photo-shopped by a number of people outside of my immediate network. This made me realise that, in a small way, we had created a viral storm - or a viral storm in a tea-cup as I now call it. These storms are quite interesting as it does drum up interest in our company. Which is a “good thing”.

Those that had a negative view came, primarily, from the “old money” agency economy. The gist of this view was that the “production values were too low”, “you must use an autocue”, “look at better post-production”, “it’s all in the editing”… You get the drift. Interestingly the view was not “the content is rubbish and you are spouting poo” but just that the production value (i.e. the video) was not up to the standard used in a 30 second Guinness advert.

And then on Wednesday I watched Manchester United beat Chelsea in the Champions League and saw an advert for Ford Football. What the hell? Are Ford now manufacturing footballs or are they simply copying Nike’s move into vertical markets?! But I digress. The advert was a series of (low production value) videos shown in a (YouTube style) frame. So maybe it’s true, and shock video has taken over the world. Maybe people simply no longer trust over-produced, over-glossy videos. I somehow prefer the real world version and don’t trust the gloss.

The upshot is that we are going to have a crack at recording more videos for our site, based around environmental and personal information. This forces the production values to be non-glossy, immediate and very relevant. No doubt we will see a polarisation of viewpoints. First one goes up today, have a look and pass a comment. I’d love to hear what you think about this experiment!

….as the Beatles sung. This time the temptation is a day-trip to San Francisco for the OMMA Behavioural Conference. I’ve never been to the West Coast, a motorbike trip a few years ago took me as far as Las Vegas but I quite fancy a trip out but still cannot justify 24hrs of travelling for a one-day event

MIT has published a great paper, if a little technical, on using visitor focussed content and how to apply customised content to differing personality types. The authors had tried out this approach with a test on one section of the BT Broadband site and had come up with a “20% increased propensity to purchase” and valued this at $80m for this client alone.

Nice reading and kind of validates that we are doing with VITES.

Before I cover why I think one of the UK’s largest mail order companies is in the dark ages, I thought I would reflect on watching (a dramatatised) documentary-style film on Mary Whitehouse.

Mary Whitehouse campaigned in the late 60’s and 70’s to reduce smut on the TV by writing thousands of letters of complaint to the then Director General. He was forced to deal with the letters personally and eventually quit over it. At the time (I was just a young lad), I remember she was universally hated and vilified for “stopping” free speech.

Bearing mind she started out as a teacher in a Wolverhampton School - some might call her a “nobody” at the time - she came to represent the voice of “decency” in the UK for 20 years, and acted as a conduit to many causes over the decades. Why is this relevant?

Today we don’t (really) need a Mary Whitehouse. We have the “user generated content world” that allows anyone - you, me, your grandma - to climb on their high horse and share their thoughts.

This is consumer empowerment and most organisations are scrabbling to listen to their customers and evolve how they deal with them.

So why is it that Littlewoods doesn’t want to listen?

Here’s a quick story; tell me what I did wrong and what Littlewoods did.

1. I tried to place an order on behalf of my daughter with Littlewoods a month or so ago. I had to abandon the shopping cart because they could only deliver to the cardholders address (home) and I couldn’t take a day off work to accept a delivery timed between 8am and 5pm.

2. I had an opportunity this week (half-term), as Sophie was at home during the day and could accept the package. So I went through the tedious process again. I still couldn’t pay by PayPal and, worse, it had forgotten about me and my shopping cart.

3. I went through the checkout process and paid for £90 worth of stuff. the site confirmed everything and told me the delivery date was 28th of May.

4. 28th of May came and went, but no delivery so I phoned them. 20 minutes on hold and being moving between departments before I was told that I had been “credit declined”. I didn’t ask for credit - I paid on a debit card. A fairly stroppy woman blamed my bank: “It’s not us” she told me.

Apparently if the transaction fails they don’t tell you. “Why should we phone you?” was the response. Surely they could have sent me an email?

I then spent 30 minutes with my bank establishing why it was declined and they assured me they had no record of an attempted transaction.

Result? I will never use Littlewoods again. I cannot be alone experiencing this level of frustration that “users” are forced to go through on many e-commerce platforms.

But we are not “users”. We are real people who try, in vain, to spend money with companies that don’t seem to care. Titling the post “xxxxxxx sucks” is also a neat, corporate terrorist, way of grouping all the complaints in an easy-to-find tag. If you really want to see the problems with companies just do a search for the company name and add “sucks” to the end of the search. It’s a little American but, heck, if it works then let’s all use it.