>> Amy Draves: Thank you for coming. My name is Amy Draves, and I'm here to welcome Mel Carson
to the Microsoft Research visiting speaker series. Mel is here today to success his book, Pioneers of
Digital: Success Stories from the Leaders in Advertising, Marketing, Search & Social Media. In talking to
fascinating innovators, including our very own Qi Lu, Mel and his coauthor have defined the key
ingredients and disciplines behind inspired digital phenomena. Mel is the founder of Delightful
Communications, is a college lecturer and a Microsoft veteran, working for eight years as a digital
marketing evangelist. Please join me in giving him a very warm welcome. [applause]
>> Mel Carson: Thank you, Amy, and hello everyone. It's great to be back on campus today especially as
I get to bathe in the afterglow of the wonderful announcement yesterday [laughter] by the Xbox team. I
was watching online. As we say in England, I was all over it like a cheap shirt, and I think what the guys
certainly at Microsoft Research have been doing to make that happen has been marvelous. I live in
Seattle. I'm not from Seattle. I'm from London. I've been here for a couple of years, and I wrote a book,
Pioneers of Digital. My background is essentially in the digital marketing industry. I started out in the
year 2000 at a search engine called LookSmart that used to provide the search results to the search
engine AltaVista. This was kind of almost before the Googles of this world were around, and I joined
Microsoft in 2005 to help launch adCenter, which is now Bing ads, so the paid search advertising that
you now see, kind of Google AdWords killer. I was there for seven years, and my job essentially was to
tell the Microsoft advertising story, tell the story about what we were doing in the digital marketing
space out there in places around the world, including interviewing luminaries such as Sir Martin Sorrell,
who heads up WPP, one of the biggest if not the biggest, advertising companies in the world. That was
in Las Vegas just before we went to sea. Steve Ballmer on stage, and that's me and Steve chatting just
after he had got the Media Person of the Year at the Cannes advertising festival. So really my job has
always been around storytelling. Last summer--it's okay, I'm cool with it -- I was laid off as part of the
marketing layoffs and took that as a sign and an opportunity to start my own business which was quite a
few months in the planning called Delightful Communications. And essentially what I do now is play off
strengths that I built up while working at Microsoft around social media strategy, digital PR, and
personal branding.
Now, being a storyteller via social media is one thing, but putting it down on the written word and a lot
more than the 700, 800 words that you'll need for a blog post. I'd met this chap called Springer. Dr.
Paul Springer is my coauthor. He is a professor of advertising marketing communications at
Buckinghamshire College -- Buckinghamshire University, I should say, in the UK, an academic that
randomly had met my brother and his wife the day they got married on Palm Island in the Grenadines
and became friends. I was introduced to him and found a like mind, especially within my family,
because none of my family know or understand anything that I do, so it was nice to meet someone who
did. He interviewed me for this book back in 2005 called Ads to Icons. It was basically -- it was about
200 case studies all about different digital marketing campaigns that he had helped in that previous five
to ten years.
And then I never heard from him again until a couple of years ago when he rung me up and he said, I've
been lurking—Well, he'd been following. Following is what we say in social media—that he was a lurker,
that he'd been following my career for a long while, not engaging but following a career, and he
essentially wanted me to help him write his next book. His idea was to call it Pioneers of Digital
Advertising. I had a little think about that, and I said, well, we're kind of narrowing the scope there
because there's more to digital than just advertising. There's social media. There's search. Advertising
isn't just marketing, so why don't we broaden it to include all these different sorts of disciplines? Which
meant that we'd broaden the audience that the book would be for, but we'd also be able to talk to all
sorts of different people not just in the advertising space. So that's what we did with our publisher
Kogan Page, who are based in the UK, but they have an office in Philadelphia, and think India as well.
And we picked these twenty.
A lot of people ask how we picked the twenty. Well, Paul came with a list of his twenty, and I came up
with mine, all people that we admired, were gagging to speak to, knew that they had great stories but
were kind of unsung heroes out there in the digital space. I didn't know anybody on Paul's list, and he
didn't know any on mine. There was this kind of weird moment where I thought to myself, why don't I
know these people? Why does he think they're so great? They sound really interesting. And he did the
same on mine, so we spent a few weeks backing and forthing—I'd moved over to Seattle by then—via email, placing the different characters into the book to really give it a really good flow between all the
different disciplines, and what we now find, having now been published for a little over six months, is
that many people kind of dip in because they know of Jaron Lanier and maybe Steven Frye, the British
actor, that's why they buy the book, but they can't put it down because when they turn over, they
suddenly see that there's June Cohen from TED and they'd not heard of her and she sounds quite
interesting.
All the chapters are about 3,000 words and they take about 20 minutes to read. We designed it
specifically to make it really snackable content that you can just dip in and dip out as you wish. So what
I'm going to do for the next kind of 35 minutes is just talk through a few of these pioneers and tell a few
of their stories as a little bit of inspiration to you all. And then at the end what we do is we distill down a
lot of the learnings into ten learnings from all these pioneers of how you can get ahead actually, not just
through digital marketing and advertising, but in business in general. I've been asked now to speak at
many conferences and lectures about the findings from the book and how that can translate into all
sorts of areas of business.
So this is Qi Lu. Everybody heard of Qi Lu, president of the Online Services group? Now, you might not
know, but Qi Lu was born in China to a very poor family. He was actually sent away by his parents to live
with his grandfather because they couldn't afford to keep him. He desperately, desperately wanted to
get into shipbuilding. That was the big prestigious career back in those days in the '70s in China, but he
couldn't because he's only 50kg. If you've ever met him, he's a very slight guy, and they had varies
hurdles that you had to get over. He couldn't get over that one. He then thought, Oh, I could go into
chemistry or be a scientist. They said, No, no, no. Your eyesight's too bad. He was told, you can do
computer science and work in a radio factory, or you can do mathematics and you can be a teacher, so
his grandfather and his parents got together and said right. You're going do computer science because
you're going to be working in a radio factory. That was the kind of background he had, but he was
always very studious and actually ended up at the Fudan University in Shanghai as a teacher, and it was
there that a visiting professor from Carnegie Mellon came to give a talk. And she was very, very active
and engaging during the talk and asked him afterwards, she said, You sound like you're the type of guy
that should come over to America and do a scholarship because I think that you'd learn a lot if we flew
you over, and he said, Well, I'd like to apply but I can't. She said, Why, and he said, because the fee for
the scholarship is $35, and I actually only earn about $10 a month as a teacher, so the Carnegie Mellon
professor waived the fee. And kind of the rest is history because he came to Carnegie Mellon, then he
went to Microsoft—sorry, to IBM research where he worked on one of the very first search technologies
called Harvester.
And it was in Brisbane in I think '98, '97, '98, where he saw Sergey and Larry from Google demonstrate
one of the very first iterations of the Google project BackRub. It was back at that time when the demo
keyword that they used was Bill Clinton because every other search engine popped up at the top of the
search results something to do with Monica Lewinsky—which was quite topical when we were talking
about this around the presidential race in November—and with Google, it came up and it was a
government site, so he did a lot with that. Then moved over to Silicon Valley because that's where
everything was happening at that time. I remember saying to him, did you ever think when you were in
that room with Google that they were going to become so all-encompassing and be this huge behemoth
that they are now, and he said no. Because there was a lot going on at the time in Silicon Valley, so it
was even back in those days that this internet thing, no one really thought that it was going to be as big
and massive as it actually was.
He then went to Yahoo! and helped set up Yahoo! shopping. The story goes that he had a couple of
interns or a couple of contractors that helped him with that, and he worked day and night and got
repetitive strain injury in his arm and had to wear a brace because of all his coding, but he sat that out.
He worked there for many, many years, about ten years, and in all sorts of different areas except search.
Then, as history has it, he was going to leave. He left Yahoo! and he got a knock on the door and it was
Steve Ballmer saying wait. You want to come over here and help us out in the old search bit? So that's
where he turned up. The thing about Qi and why he's kind of been so successful or is so inspirational is
because he had a very sort of Zen-like image over at Yahoo! I've met him a couple of times and he
certainly has an aura about him, but people who work very closely with him, like Stefan Weitz, who's the
Bing evangelist, do find that not only does he have the vision of where Bing and what he calls the civics,
the digital civics, is going, but he has also thought about the steps that you need to get there.
So as a leader, he does this really great thing of not just saying, not just being the big-picture guy, but
being able to know where everything else fits, which is really, which is really, from a lot of research that
we've done, quite a rare thing, that a leader like that has actually thought about everything and actually
puts those objections to bed very quickly, and it really does inspire people. I think that the way that he
carries himself with this kind of—we asked everybody at the end, you know, what advice do you give
people about where you think the world should be going when it comes to business? Or when you wake
up in the morning, what advice would you give people that want to get ahead? And he says this very
grand gesture: Can you work having a greater impact, making life greater for other people? Are you
able to work with people so you become a better person every day? If you can answer yes, then that's a
good day. And I put this picture up there because obviously a lot of what Mark Zuckerberg's doing and
the guys at Facebook, and there's obviously, you know, a lot of synergies there which we find
fascinating. So that's Qi.
Who here's seen—who here hasn't seen a TEDTalk? I thought you'd all. So who's seen more than 10?
More than 20? Yep. So TED, as many of you may know, used to be very behind closed doors, fee
paying—well, it still is when you actually show up to go and see the actual talks, but back in 2005, this
lady, June Cohen, who had been going there a lot, she was asked to help open up the TEDTalks to the
world. She had had an editorial background at Stanford Press. She was one of the first people to use
online, video on the internet, just down the road with the guys from Apple. They managed to get a copy
of QuickTime and put these little videos of some of the Stanford University rowers, I think it was, or
runners at one of the Olympic Games back in the early '90s actually up online. She was behind Hotwired
or worked at Hotwired, and she was behind Webmonkey, which was the online resource for HTML
developers and people who are wanting to get into web design. She wrote a book about the internet
and was thinking, you know, I might get into writing, and moved over to New York for a bit and then
decided that, you know what, she would keep going to these TEDTalks where she was going. But she
got a call from Chris Anderson, who ran the talks, and he said—actually the story was that she hadn't
subscribed to the latest one, so he wanted to have a chat with her about that and sat her down and said
I want to open these talks up to the world, and I want you to put them on TV. And she said, really? He
said, Yes, TV's the place to go. And this was back in 2005.
So she got together a plan, and then she went out and all the TV channels and the networks, and they all
slammed the door on her, basically said no, this is too boring. This is too dull. No one is ever going to sit
through 20 minutes of this. We won't be able to sell any advertising on it. And when BBC Four said, I'm
sorry, this is a little bit too dry and dull for us, she knew that she was not onto a winner there, but she
was not to be bowed. She was not to be outdone, so she went back to her roots. She went from 2005
back to 1991, '92. This is just when YouTube was coming to the fore, and the technology of uploading
massive amounts of video and managing to stream it across the internet was doing so well, and when
Google were buying them, so she thought, well, let's try this online video. She met up with a guy called
Vishnu, who she had worked with previously, and they put together a plan for recording those TEDTalks.
Now when you go and see a TEDTalk or you watch it online, you probably don't now, but in the last eight
years they've experimented so much that there are up to eight different cameras recording the action at
any one time. Next time you watch a TEDTalk, see if there's anyone at the beginning saying, yeah, it's
really nice to be here. Oh, yeah, it was a bit raining. Sorry I'm late. They don't have any of that. They
cut straight to the start. There's a little claps and then it's straight to the person talking. There is no
coughs. There is no ifs. There is no buts. There is no stumbles. It's all editeded—editeded?—edited so
tightly that all you can do is lean forward. All you can do is stick there with your eyes stuck and glued to
the screen, and it's those kind of techniques that have made the TEDTalks so successful.
What's been incredible about the book is many of the people in it that maybe own ad agencies, people
like Ajaz Ahmed from AKQA that have done the whole Nike+ Nike fuel band advertising—they've been
bought by WPP—the whole thing is still moving. This is very much a history book, and when I was
talking to June on the phone, I said to her, what’s going to be your greatest achievement? She said
when we hit that one billion mark. And this was kind of last February, so about 15 months ago, 16
months ago. And in November they hit one billion views across YouTube. What she talks about is when
it comes to testing digital is to make sure that you're starting off slowly and that you're planning and
testing and iterating. That's why you suddenly see the podcast on iTunes, and now they've extended
the reach onto Roku and Boxee, and I would not be surprised if there's something going on with the new
Xbox as well. What was incredible to see a couple of weeks ago, or it might have been last week, was
finally they got to TV. I don't know if you saw on PBS, I think Bill Gates was doing a talk as well, so full
circle, full circle eight years later, she finally gets to that goal via a billion views on YouTube, so it's a
great, great story.
Vanessa Fox, very local to here, announced that morning that she's actually sold a startup that she's
been working on for a couple of a years. She started off at Microsoft—not at Microsoft—at Google.
Way back in 2005 she joined them having been a developer and having been into marketing very much
around search engine optimization. When she joined Google, I don't know if any of you guys are up on
your SEO, but she was asked to come up with a plan for basically submitting websites to Google so that
it would be easy for them to crawl them. The plan, ironically was, that Google was tell all webmasters
just upload the details of your website, and when we don't actually have to crawl it so we can save
millions and millions and millions of dollars without ever having to needing to crawl the web, which is
crazy now when you think about it. What was interesting about Vanessa was she didn't live in Mountain
View. She actually lived in Seattle and was out of the Kirkland office, and when she knocked on the
doors down there to all developers saying hey, we're going to do this webmaster community, and we
want to open out Google and really talk to the communities and get their feedback, they were all
computer scientists. She was the first product manager at Google that didn't have a computer science
degree. I think she had an English degree. They were all like, we don't talk to the users and the web
masters. They just want to create all this spam and, if we give them too many secrets, they're going to
create all this stuff and then our users are going to run away and all this kind of stuff. What Shiva, her
boss, said about this particular project was that it was an experiment that will either fail miserably or
succeed beyond her wildest dreams in making the web better for webmasters and users alike. I can't
imagine anyone at Microsoft coming out on a blog post in 2005 saying we're going to do this thing and it
could fail. What was great about what Google did in that time was actually start showing a little bit of
transparency that they had lacked up until that point.
What Vanessa then did was basically start communicating with people internally to get them to use their
impact and influence, which is obviously a Microsoft competency, to basically get these developers to
do what she wanted them to do, which was provide a little bit of transparency for webmasters and
people that owned the websites and wanted to market them efficiently so that those people would
actually do the work for the Google engineers. She went in and said to the people that crawled all the
titles and descriptions, what’s your biggest problem? He said, Well, when we crawl a website and there
are no titles and descriptions, then we have to do this thing, and it costs us this, and we get all these
tickets, and it costs us this amount of money and people calling up on the phone and via the thing. She
said, Well, why don't you have some indication which pops up on an e-mail saying, Hey owner of
pioneersofdigital.com, you have four pages that don't have titles and descriptions, and then they'll go in
and add them because they know they're not being indexed. They said that’s a great idea. So that's
what she did very, very basically.
She spent time with colleagues and partners in different departments, and her advice was to really try
and understand what they do, how do to speak their language. It'll help when it comes to
communicating ideas and having empathy with their thinking. Very, very basic and actually quite a bit of
common sense. What she managed to do was turn the attitude of the Google engineers around to face
one way and the attitude of the webmasters to face in so that they actually started have a dialogue and
she—they smashed their target of getting site maps uploaded. Sergey had had a bet that if they got to
this—they won't tell me the numbers, meanies, but it was many, many, many, many thousands—when
they got to this point, her whole team could go off on a holiday in Bermuda, and they did. Nice if you
can get it. Who had one of these?
>>: A question. Do you mind actually going back and answering a question? I don't want to break your
flow, but in what way did it change? I mean, I'm missing it. I'm not as familiar with the webmaster
tools. In what way did it?
>> Mel Carson: Originally webmaster tools was a list of guidelines that said you must do this, you
mustn't do this, you mustn't do this, you mustn't do this. What she did was grow a community and
actually have a two-way dialogue with forums, with experts from Google. It's kind of like, you know,
what Microsoft does now in the developer community, and actually have experts from within Google
helping people to be better at, you know, better at optimizing their websites so that they were
essentially cleaner and Google was able to rank them more highly.
So Atari computers. I must say a caveat, he had nothing to do with this, but the correlation between
what this gentleman was doing working with that and this, you cannot dispute, but it's Jaron Lanier.
Who's heard of Jaron Lanier from Microsoft Research? He's part of the Extreme Computing group, not
just the Computing group, the Extreme Computing group. He's the father of virtual reality, and he had
done a couple of talks at Microsoft advertising events about his thoughts on advertising and social
media. Absolutely fascinating gentleman for many, many reasons. A couple of the more interesting
ones were—this is actually him—he was the subject of Lawnmower Man, the movie, which came out, I
think it was in the '90s. Pierce Brosnan played him. Can you see the similarity? [laughter] No? Neither
can Jaron. He finds it all a little weird and wonderful, but then he advised Steven Spielberg on many of
those futuristic things that you see in the Majority Report. He lived for many years in New Mexico. His
best friend, or one of his best friends when he used to walk home from school, he used to make
telescopes with the man that discovered Pluto. He was a goat herder and used to make goat cheese and
stuff, and really started get into this whole notion of virtual reality through a few crazy things that
happened with his little village—well, the town where he lived—but also through his work at Atari and
beyond.
A few years ago he wrote this book, and this was kind of the subject of why we wanted to talk to him,
was You Are Not a Gadget, where he calls—he was a founding father of the internet, and he was there
when it was all happening. Now he's starting to call into question some of the algorithms that the
Facebooks of this world and some of the social network sites are doing, creating this kind of big brain
that the whole world should be working off this big algorithm, and it should be all be crowd sourced and
everybody—it should be made out of all this data and whatnot. He's very much against this and calls
these guys cybernetic totalists. His whole mantra is that for the kids of today that are out there—you
know, I have a 20-month-old daughter. In a few years, or many years, I hope, when she wants to set up
her Facebook page, she's going to have to tick a few boxes, and it's going to have to say I like widgets. It
can't say I like widgets on a Thursday, and I like pink widgets on a Saturday. He's essentially saying that
all this profiling and data profiling is actually putting people in boxes and stifling creativity. It's an
absolutely fascinating book. I had to—I couldn't read it. I had to listen to it, and it absolutely made my
brain bleed trying to get to grips with some of the arguments that he came out with, but his whole—his
whole kind of vision on the dangers of what social media and these algorithms are doing is now even
going a lot further. If you do a search for his name and his new book, which is Who Owns the Future,
he's going even a step further actually saying that—and he actually talks about it in the book, that we all
deserve to get a little bit of payment back from Facebook, micropayments for us having seen their ad. It
should all add up, and we should somehow be being paid, and Google should be paying it as well. Nice if
you can get it. But he's been interviewed all over the shop.
What I drew from this as a marketer was very much—Hugh MacLeod talking here. The web 2.0 thing
you built me didn't actually increase sales. With social media and some of these whizzo gadgets and
whatnot, people are kind of jumping on them without actually thinking about the outcome. They're not
actually thinking about what is it that I want people to do? What action do I want them to take? How
do I want them to feel? How is this going to be part of their life and part of their personal brand going
forward? I pull this out at a lot of marketing conferences to say that, you know, you guys all jump on
and you say, Oh, we got this, wouldn't it be cool if? That's one of my pet hates in a brainstorming
meeting, "Wouldn't it be cool if," because it normally means that it wouldn't actually be cool for the end
user. It would just be a cool little project for that team to do, but it would probably be a waste of
money. He's such a visionary.
People were already calling out on Twitter how the Xbox announcement yesterday was starting to make
things like Minority Report come to fruition. This whole notion of—this where the Tom Cruise character
is walking through a store, and he's getting advertised at. This is kind of already happening. Well,
there's a little bit actually in Xbox already, branding and advertising in there, but it's very carefully and
well thought out. Companies like Disney have started doing this as well. This is again another evolution
after the book was published of things that people said in the book were going to happen. At Disney,
RFID bands have kind of taken your profile and what rides you like and what food you've bought and all
this kind of stuff and start building up a kind of profile of who you are, so you can use digital advertising
and marketing in order to provide relevant and useful experiences as opposed to what we all hate, kind
of the pop ups and spam of the old days. This is him talking at the IAB Mixx event a couple of years ago.
He talked about his daughter, who is a little bit—a lot older than mine actually—where he put a
challenge out there. I mean there was Coca-Cola there, there was Facebook, there was GM, everybody,
and he just said. He put out a challenge and he said, there is no such thing as passive perception. Young
people today will remember our media as quaint, cute but you not fully engaged. That's where the
marketing industry and the advertising industry really see the future of this. If you're on Facebook and
you take a look at some of the ads that are supposed to be relevant to you today, you can see that
we've got a long, long way to go.
This chap, he's just turned 30, and he already sold BlueLithium to Yahoo! for I think it was $300 million,
five or six years ago, Gurbaksh Chahal. Paul Springer wrote this chapter, but I happened to meet him
down in Cannes, and my little anecdote was it was about 1:00 in the morning, and we're in the Carlton
hotel. There's all these advertising executives and young things, and they're all drinking these huge,
great big things of rosé. They're all taking photos, all getting uploaded to Facebook and whatnot. This
guy is not yet 30, and he said, The Presidential election in 20 years' time will be decided by social media,
and I thought, He's not very smart, is he? How—we're just about to enter, you know, the next election.
Of course it's about social media. I thought, how did he get $300 million? He said, No, no, no, no, no.
He said all these people taking photos and everything, that's all getting uploaded to the internet, and in
20 years' time when they're running for office, those photos will there somewhere. Someone will have
copied and pasted or downloaded, and someone will have that and they'll be able to look back and say,
you know what, you did this, this and this 20 years ago, and it was all because of social media.
What was interesting is in the UK, a young girl about 14 years old was asked by the government. It was
either the government or a local council to be a social media czar. A young person, they thought, oh,
we'll get this young person in. She knows what she's doing, and she can be role model and an
inspiration. It took about two hours for the process to find racist, defamatory, and sexy comments that
this 14-year-old girl had written on her Facebook and Twitter page, and she got sacked immediately. So
that was just a tiny window of two hours where someone gets into office not thinking about how social
media can affect their future life and their career, and two hours later, she's already out.
He's young and he's always ahead of the curve. He was doing pay-per-click advertising before 2000, so
kind of just before Google. He was doing behavioral targeting before everybody else. Then this is a
social advertising platform that he's built. He's getting a lot of PR out there. He's very, very passionate
about people that just think, Oh, it's the internet, there's different business model out there. One of the
big takeaways for the book though, was around originality. A lot of the pioneers talk about this, but he
was very much about the fact that you don't have to be original to get ahead. You can just pivot around
an existing idea, and if you can be better, quicker, faster, more agile, and more creative, then you can be
really successful. I read the article; I think it was Fortune magazine. Jeff Bezos—I think it was Fortune or
Forbes—became the Fortune Man of the Year last year, and when they were talking to him, he said
exactly the same thing. If you think about a lot of the products and services that Amazon are trotting
out, he says, you know, we don't copy people. We look at something, and we think, that's kind of
interesting. How can we add our own flavor to it? How can we add our own color to it, and how can we
do it quicker, faster, more agile, and more successfully? So that whole idea about being original was
really important and a through line throughout out the entire book as is business is business. Just
because it's online doesn't mean that it's any different than any other business. He sees business failing
all the time, online businesses that have no revenue and yet they're being valued for a billion dollars or
sold for a billion dollars. Instagram, anyone?
Avinash Kaushik. There's just a couple more. Avinash Kaushik, now at Google. My favorite story with
him is how he was taking a photo, stupidly, of a government building in Dubai, and a soldier put a gun to
his head and said, praise Allah. He said, what? He said, say praise Allah, and he said, no, I'm not going
to going to. Because he's obviously Indian, and he said, praise Allah. He looked the guy in the eye, and
he was fearing for his life, and he said, no, I'm not going to. He said now that that experience has been a
part of his life, he has absolutely no problem walking into the CMO office of Fortune 500 companies and
talking as Google's Digital Marketing Evangelist, letting them know that they are missing a massive
opportunity with some of the work that they're doing online.
He calls it, as I said, the magnificent opportunity that online presents businesses and that so many of
them are getting it wrong or at least not starting in the right direction. He has a blog called Occam's
Razor, which he claims has as many subscribers as Google's. Yes, he did say that. Whether that's true or
not doesn't matter. He's got many, many subscribers. He's written Web Analytics: An Hour a Day and a
couple of other books. He gives all the profits away to charity, tens if not hundreds of thousands of
dollars, but he's all about testing. When he started his blog, what he did was he tested it internally with
his team, but also with his wife because he wanted to do these three things: He wanted to produce
something that was incredible, relevant, and of value. It's a bit like any product testing, but certainly
any marketing testing. Nowadays the kind of end goal of any brand is to be delightful, to actually rise
head and shoulders above other brands that are doing similar things online as digital starts taking more
and more of the focus away from real-world media and print, et cetera.
He has just had a very blessed career. He was given the opportunity to speak at a conference and he got
up. He has lots of pictures of his kids on there. If you ever get the chance to see him, he's a very
gregarious, very funny guy. He went to do a talk at Google, and they literally just came up to him and
said, we’ll give you a job. And he said, to do what? And they said, we don't know, but we just want you
to work here, which he still is. He has a couple of other side projects, but he's well in demand all over
the world, but has definitely been a pioneer over trying to take web analytics and the understanding of
what matters on the web and how to get the best out of it, and translating that into words and syllables
that we can all understand and identify with, especially those CMOs who are seeing it from fifty, a
hundred thousand feet.
The last pioneer is Steven Fry. Who's heard of Steven Fry, the British actor? I met him through Twitter,
actually, via the England rugby captain who came to speak at an event of ours, and we got him—Steve
Clayton, who's the Microsoft storyteller here and I—he came to the office, and we sat down. He'd
always been into Apple, but he didn't like that moniker of being an Apple fan boy. He's always into
biodiversity and technology. And Steve and I sat him down in a conference room if London and showed
him a few demos, and he left saying, I'm going to tweet my ass off about this, and said immediately in
his cab on his way home, he was tweeting. He only had 750,000 followers back then. He now has nearly
6 million on Twitter. That was kind of how we met, and he then we persuaded him to turn up at the
opening—or the launch of the Windows phone in London and got masses of press because he was
literally very, very impressed with the Windows phone. He's also bipolar, and how he got onto online
was he had a blog, but he also did a lot of TV shows, and he did a TV show about his being bipolar, and
he got something like five thousand letters a week to his agent. So that's when he went online and was
constantly iterating on how he communicated with his fans and people that wanted a piece of him. But
now because of his whole Twitter foray, he actually gets people—the kind of responsibility that he has is
absolutely huge being that he does get people threatening to commit suicide if he doesn't reply or if he
doesn't give them a virtual pat on the head, as he calls it. He first got into Twitter. When he first got a
Twitter account, this guy here on the right is his business partner who's the kind of driving force behind
what he does in digital. He saw a video where it said, I'm in a cafe, and he thought, oh, this is rubbish.
What he does with technology, he puts it in a virtual drawer until it becomes relevant and of use to him.
He was doing a documentary, Last Chance to See, about nearly extinct animals across the Africa. No WiFi, no internet connection, no nothing, so he had a phone and he'd use Twitter to text tweets and
photos and whatever across. While he was going across Africa, he had 5,000 followers, and then he'd
take off and go to another country, and he'd land and have 10,000 followers and then 40,000 followers,
all because people started following him and watching him talking about these animals and doing some
photos.
That was where it became of use so him, and then he got stuck in a lift on the 26th floor, took this
photo, it went viral. The next day it was front page headlines on many websites, and he really couldn't
understand what all the fuss was, but the New York Times did say that this photo did more for the
profile of Twitter and helped Twitter out more than the photos of Demi Moore's bottom that was
tweeted by her husband about a month ago. So he was very much an earlier adopter of the technology,
and obviously now with nearly 6 million followers, has been doing amazing things. He's the last chapter
in the book because we know that some people wanted to buy the book just to read about his kind of
backstory, and this is kind of the last sentence of all the pioneers where he says, you got to enjoy it, you
know. It's all very well extracting trends and disciplines and key learnings, but at the end of the day, it's
all about enjoying it. You have to love it. You absolutely have to love it. Just enjoy the ride. Enjoy what
creativity it gives you, and what you've got to be driven by is what effing fun it is and how unbelievably
exciting it is. He's very, very up and happy when comes to thinking about the internet and the power
and the opportunities that it provides.
So here are just a few of the kind of pioneering DNA just to go through some of the takeaways. One of
them, don't let technology dictate. It's got to be a great idea. People say, oh, we've got to make this go
viral on Twitter. No. It could go viral on something else if it's a great idea. Don't focus on the
technology. Don't focus on the channel, but actually the idea, the outcome, how you want to try and
make someone feel. What action you want them to take. Challenge creativity. What that kind of
means is when the Burger King subservient chicken advert happened a few years ago, and that was
basically where you'd tap online and you'd say to this chicken jump up and down, and it would do
whatever you wanted it to do. Burger King were like, oh. They nearly tore that campaign down because
somebody didn't think it was particularly creative, but obviously people did because it was hugely
successful. And what we now have with digital is, as Avinash Kaushik talks about, the opportunity to fail
really fast. So you can fail really fast. Okay, great idea, might not work for some people, let's try it.
Testing and actually saying okay, that didn't work. Because you can set up a Bing ads account or a
Google adWords account and within twenty minutes know whether you're ranking number one, how
many click-throughs you've got, and how many sales you're getting. It's really easy nowadays with
digital if you get the infrastructure right to plan stuff, fail fast, learn from it, iterate, move on.
The whole Oreo biscuit picture during the Super Bowl. You all see that when they tweeted this photo?
Everybody's like, oh, that's amazing. To me, yeah, of course they should be there with their creative
team when they're spending millions of dollars on a TV commercial in the most televised sporting event
in the world. They need to have that kind of agility and to think and test and just try something and see
of it works. Make things that satisfy needs. That kind of goes back to the technology. You know, got to
be careful about the "so what" factor. I mean this starts from just writing a simple blog post to then
creating any experience online and through digital is what did it do for me? What segment did you we
go after? What need did we satisfy? Taking decisions in real time. Again, the Oreo answer, I think.
I remember from my Microsoft days that there was always the thing about we've got to try and
capitalize on outside opportunities and that sometimes in businesses, if they're not structured right to
be able to say yes, we can do this really quickly and turn around an idea in a day if not an hour,
sometimes you're competitors will be ahead of you if they've got that kind of communication structure
in place. You don't have to be original, just relevant. Not copying but pivoting, being agile, taking an
existing idea and making it better and taking to it market and being quicker and smarter about it.
Then finally, having fun. I've had an enormous amount of fun writing this book with Paul. It was fairly
interesting going backwards and forwards over Skype over the two or three months that it took to write
once we'd done all the interviews. We've been really thrilled by the reaction that we've had from
people from USA Today. I've highlighted a few key words up there: Compelling, fascinating, contagious,
inspirational, and I particularly like the bit "readers will feel like kids in a digital candy shop.” It's on
Kindle right now, 99 cents. Hello, not much of a profit there. For anyone in the room, I've got those
little takeaways. I was very, very pleased that Harold from the trends council invited me or suggested to
Amy that I come and talk. I appreciate the fact that you've spent your lunch hour over here to me talk
about the book, and all of you online. Thank you very much. And that's me, but I would welcome many
questions. [applause]
>>: What I expect is there's actually some trends you've seen per se, as to how they approach problems
and what they think about as opposed to very individual and somewhat unique and different stories.
How do you—what are the commonalities? What are the trends or what are the things that you've
seen?
>> Mel Carson: There are ten lessons at the end of the book where we distilled the feedback from all
the different pioneers that talk about these different, these different extracts, and those are the trends.
You got to remember these are about individuals. What we didn't want to do was write a book about
Facebook or about Google or about how to do social media or how to do digital. It was about the
people and what were the levers and the triggers within them. When you read, which I hope you will,
you will read the different business problems that they came over, and for each story, there's three or
four that sit in the taking decisions in real time bucket. There's three or four that certainly sit in the
making things that satisfy needs, but also the decisions in real time. John Winsor, who has this crowd
sourcing creative company—
>>: It seemed like 101 and tickets to entry, not like wow, these are?
>> Mel Carson: Yeah and I would love to see Avinash standing up here telling you the names of the
businesses that don't get the 101s right. When I talk to Qi about, you know, where he sees the future of
the internet, he wouldn't be rude enough to say that's a stupid question, but he inferred that we've only
scratched the surface. People still don't really know what they're doing. Many businesses don't when it
comes to really harnessing the power and you can see that certainly when there was some research
yesterday about teenagers now on Facebook. They can't be bothered with all drama and all the news
stories and everything, and that's why they're going off to Vine and Path because it's instant, six-second
gratification. Try translating that to the 56-, 60-year-old CMO, to actually say, we’ve get to stop doing
this now; we've got to do that? Oh, well, I had a six-year plan and all this kind of stuff. It's all changing.
The rules have changed. So yeah, for many people they might be 101 or a little bit simplistic, but you'd
be amazed how many people and how many businesses fail at this first fence. Question on the line.
>>: As we think about our marketing plans for next fiscal year in particular digital marketing and social,
what specification recommendations do you have to win the hearts of BDMs, students, teachers,
governments, and corporate accounts?
>> Mel Carson: I think where Microsoft does a really good job is in that one-to-one kind of engagement.
I think that, I think that for social media, per se, it needs it be integrated into the whole, the overall
messaging, and the overall marketing strategy. Part of the reason for that is traditionally, and it's really
evolved at Microsoft to a really good level, but traditionally it was kind of: Social media, we don't really
understand that. That's over there, and it's kind of over there. We'll get a couple of interns or young
people because they understand that all kind of stuff, but this is the serious marketing over here. What
they—what we're slowly seeing is social media being integrated, but also when people spend these
massive amounts of money on these big branding efforts, it's about thinking about that brand voice and
how that translates down into the essence of that 140-character reply to someone saying, I want to buy
the new Xbox. Can you tell me where to get it? type thing.
And I think that from my experience, sorry—from experience as an evangelist and being the face of
Microsoft advertising, which I wasn't official, but I was just out there doing what I was doing and using
social media to do it, I think having a hybrid approach between the actual brand and individuals really
helps because having that one-to-one communication with a real human being can really endear the
brand to an audience especially on that one-to-one level because we're all social media now. We're
here in this room talking. And I'll pick up a couple of business cards maybe, and we'll follow each other
online, but we've now got a relationship which is social in the real sense. I don't know whether people
have been tweeting online, but I'll be responding when I go back there, and with many people I'll be
saying, hey, come on. Let's meet up. Let's go for coffee. It's just really important to think of social
media and digital as part of the all up, but really start thinking about that brand essence because far too
much social media outreach has been very tactical and not either integrated or really thinking about
that brand voice and how that translates into getting you audience to talk about your brand positively
through word of mouth. Any more?
>> Amy Draves: Thank you so much for joining us.
>>: You were talking about failing fast and it made me wonder if some of these—
>> Mel Carson: You get a book for asking a question. [laughter]
>>: It made me wonder if people studied sort of how long the memory is on social media. If you take a
risk and you try out some sort of ad campaign or social media strategy and it fails, how long do people
remember that and what is the risk of trying something like that?
>> Mel Carson: I think that would be really, really good research to do because when I see British
Airways have done this, or I think it was Epicurious did it around the Boston bombings. They'd—I think I
read this right, that they had auto set up a whole lot of tweets about Boston because it was over that
weekend, and they hadn't canceled them, and then it looked really bad and all this kind of stuff. I think,
I'm not sure that memories are that long as long as people fess up immediately and say, Look, we
screwed up; we're really sorry about that. Because brands have never had the opportunity to be as
transparent as that and actually get people to think, did they just say sorry? You know, this is the—
because in the old days when something went bad, you used to write a letter, you know. You used to go
in and you used to get a couple of vouchers back for whatever it was, and someone would say, We're
terribly sorry that you had this and all that kind of stuff. But now, you get that instant gratification.
Some people hide behind their handles and whatever on the web, but I think as long as people fess up
and just say, All right, we screwed up, and then really start working back to regain that trust, they'll
hopefully never do it again, but it just makings them work harder and more in real time to create that
environment where their brand can be thought of in a positive light online and through digital.
>>: If I could just ask, when you ask that question, are you talking about social media or social
networking memory? Because in your answer, what you're essentially indicating is that the response to
a failure and the apology would remain in the social network for as long as 30 years.
>> Mel Carson: I think what he was saying is let's say a brand, Abercrombie and Fitch, they're in trouble
right now, but they do something bad and then everybody unfollows them. How long is that going to
say in people's memory that they necessarily did a bad thing or they said something that they shouldn't?
I'm not sure.
>>: It actually seems like it's the opposite of, the opposite of the politician situation. So the politicians
you were talking about, if they make a mistake, that might actually haunt them for 15, 20 years,
whereas with the brand it almost seems like it's big news for a week or two and then nobody
remembers that it actually happened. If it's for a brand, nobody actually cares to go back.
>> Mel Carson: Maybe that's because it's a brand and not an individual. I'd have to think about that.
That's one of the best questions I've had. Thank you.
>>: If you think about Yelp and damaging things that have happened years ago, they stay on Yelp. You
read the history of things and include that in the responses that the company has made and just that, in
itself, has made me go away from and choose people based on what's on Yelp and what kind of—
>> Mel Carson: Yeah, yeah. That's a great example about Yelp. I work with a brand right now that
when you type in their brand term a Yelp review comes up or a review where someone has posted
something positive at the end of a negative thread from about nine years ago, and for some reason,
Google has now ranked it number five. They're like, How do I get rid of this? I think that people are
starting to get a little more savvy and be able to read between the lines of some of these reviews and
think, well that was pretty short; they're not an Amazon—they're not a verified purchaser of this
particular product. Let's click on their profile. Oh, what they're doing is they're going and they're going
and slating all the Vietnamese restaurants in Seattle. There's something a bit dodgy there, so I am going
to discount that. I think that people are getting a lot more savvy, which is why digital and social is
meaning that brands need to be more transparent and really think about. I was talking to a lady the
other day who was saying even as recently as three years ago, she was working with a very big brand
who said, We want you to go in and delete all these reviews on all these sites because they can't say
that about our product. She was saying well, it's true. It was a terrible product, that version. Now, it's
better. Why can't you just let that lie, make a really, really great product, and make more people talk
about that product so that those bad reviews get pushed out? That's the ecosystem that we're dealing
with now.
>> Amy Draves: Well, thank you so much for joining us. It was a pleasure.
>> Mel Carson: Thank you for having me. [applause]