A search on the Aeroplan site revealed that while my points would easily be enough for the flight and there are seats available, I’d still have to pay about $650 CAD in fees. I had been prepared to pay around $250 – $350 but having to shell out over $600 AND points doesn’t sound like a deal at all.

Well, it isn’t. Because when I did another search on Expedia for regular fares I found out Jet Airways has direct flights from Toronto to Heathrow for $669 incl. all taxes and fees on the same dates. The conclusion is that for this trip, my pile of Aeroplan points is completely useless. But the real irony of the story? The Jet Airways flights are actually operated by Air Canada, in fact they’re the very same flights that AC would charge me 60,000 points + $650 for, or $1030 in cash if I booked the trip through them. The reason why Air Canada is so expensive isn’t in official airport or government fees. It’s because they include a $350 “fuel surcharge” of their own under the “taxes and fees” section of the bill.

Those of us who are frequent air travelers are used to such anomalies in flight fares. But in this case it makes me doubt if there’s any sense in flying Air Canada to Europe, or even in me collecting Aeroplan points. Frequent flyer programs hardly give customers a really awesome deal ever, and for the most part I can understand it, but for flights to Europe I better start pulling my OneWorld card out more often, as Air Canada’s competitors seem to beat them by hundreds of dollars on flights to Germany and Finland as well.

For Air Canada, putting their own fuel surcharge under taxes and fees is a way to make the initial price of the flight seem eye poppingly low: $199 one way direct to London. But for the customer it’s extremely frustrating and doesn’t lower the real price in the end. In the European Union, regulations have been in place since 2008 to force airlines to always show the full price after all taxes and additional charges in their advertising. In the US, a similar law is going to take effect this year. Luckily, the federal government of Canada says the same will now happen here soon.

Karri Ojanen

In this market, companies often compete with each other by adding more and more features into their offerings. This kind of “continuous enhancement” leads to products and services with more capabilities than most customers need. It’s what happened to Nokia, who kept adding new features to the mobile phone concept until Apple seized the opportunity to develop a simplified version of existing offerings and focus on improving the user interface instead of sheer technical capabilities.

In some industries it’s common that the process of adding new features to an existing product is a result of an acquisition – i.e. when company A bought its competitor B, it added some of B’s features to its own product – leading to layers and layers of complexity that don’t connect in the average customer’s mind while the company’s stakeholders who oversaw the process may think of them as logical business decisions. While more and more new features may initially help the company to sell more of their product, the hidden cost of the product’s increasing complexity is in reduced customer satisfaction and, thus, loyalty. Increasing complexity also increases the customers’ need for information, which leads to higher costs in providing adequate customer support.

When companies then market these complex products to consumers they often make the attempt to sell falsehoods with clever word-play. Broken links and barely functioning features are hidden behind superlatives about the product’s value and the real price of using the product is mentioned only in small print or not at all, if the company can legally get away with it. The subprime lending scandal in the global financial crisis is perhaps one of the most significant events of companies trying to compete for more revenue and market share in the midst of market saturation by false promises and fraudulent activity, but there is evidence of this happening every day in other areas of business. We live in a world where we already have everything offered a dozen times by a hundred different providers, and our perception of it appears to be that it’s made things more difficult. Or, everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy, as Louis CK puts it.

Companies would do much better by embracing two simple values – sincerity and simplicity. Strip away features to better meet the needs of customers. People are attracted to larger assortments, because everyone likes a little variety, but they’re happier with their purchases when they buy from smaller selections. Less is more. Truly great and innovative products do one thing really well instead of doing a million different things poorly. Customers don’t like paying for extra features they don’t ever end up using.

Marketing should stay away from false promises, unnecessary complexity and word-play. In this age of skepticism, increased connectivity and education, the attempt to fool consumers doesn’t get anyone far. People will not buy at all if they don’t believe the ads, and if they do and they are disappointed, they will blog, tweet and talk about their bad experiences, spreading their message to millions of others, sometimes causing entire brands to be rejected.

While earlier in this post I salute Apple for their vision in the mobile space, it has started to seem like the terms “magical” and “revolutionary” have become slightly overused in their advertising and product launches. And I despise the way how some companies try to hide the simpler, cheaper option that they legally or otherwise have to provide under several layers of disinformation about the more complex and pricier alternative. Savvy consumers will go the extra mile to get the service they need and in the process end up hating the company for its marketing tactics. The key to getting people to believe in your product is in believing in it yourself. If you think your message truly is sincere, chances are much better that the people who see and hear it think so too.

Karri Ojanen

I find Marc’s text connecting very closely with the message in my post from two years ago, which then turned into a couple of follow-ups. Work in interactive channels demands leadership just as any work needs leadership, and the most accurate, efficient kind of leadership comes from people who understand the importance of the functional side of design, the interactivity, the user experience, and know how to research it, define, design, and present it. It takes a whole team of engineers, writers, designers and others to create digital advertising, products, and services, but user experience and interaction designers are the ones who should be the closest to being the new creative directors.

Karri Ojanen

Although Twitter co-founder Biz Stone calls it “non-traditional” in his blog post, the model sounds very similar to Google. Tying ads to only searches will help to avoid upsetting the user base: you won’t see the ads unless you use Twitter to search for something. And at the same time, the advertisers will have at least a vague idea of what you’re interested in.

After having taken such a long time to think of a revenue model that “puts users first, amplifies existing value, and generates profit“, I expected Twitter to come up with something way different than this. I anticipated them not to resort to an advertising model for revenue, and instead go for something that would’ve involved the users in paying for the service.

That kind of system shouldn’t be created by suddenly forcing users to pay for the basic functionality they now get for free, but by carefully investigating what sort of new premium features the most active Twitter users would be willing to pay for, and combining that with a system that would allow users to earn and give credit for the things they do on Twitter. I myself, as an example of a pretty active Twitter user, wouldn’t be excited to pay for the tweets I send, but if I could get new and effective tools for finding more like-minded people to follow me, I could be willing to pay for that. I could also pay for the ability of setting up custom groups for tweeters, and I could see some media companies and journalists, reportedly using Twitter more and more often as a source, be willing to pay for special features tailored to their needs.

With a credit-earning system in place, the average Twitter user who wants to use a premium feature wouldn’t necessarily need to flash out his credit card every time he wants access to premium features. Instead, he could use credits that he’s earned by doing things like favoriting tweets and recommending users to others. Such a system would help drive the further growth of Twitter as well as support the existing ecosystem, where many additional features have already been introduced through 3rd party apps, mashups and community-driven innovation.

Of course, building such a system and then growing its value would take time. It seems evident that some investors and monitors have grown frustrated to wait for Twitter to find a way to start making money for all the publicity and millions of users the service has attracted. It feels like Twitter’s had to press the panic button and come up with a solution that will appease the investors for the time being.

But that seems incredibly short-sighted. More and more clearly, the biggest challenge that people are facing in the digital age is that it will, if it hasn’t already, disrupt the traditional business models of so many industries from advertising to entertainment to communications to all media in general. People are forced to look for entirely new models to nurture both business and usefulness online, and in the long term, only those who embrace this current time of uncertainty as a real opportunity and dream up something bigger than just a slightly modified copy of the old will truly succeed.

In the music business, record labels all complain about how illegal file sharing and new digital distros are killing their business. But this graph shows that while labels are seeing their profits diminish, artists and promoters are experiencing growth in the amount of money they make from live performances. Digital distribution has opened the door for thousands of small, independent artists who in the past didn’t have that much chance to get discovered.

I’m not saying that the future of the music industry is entirely in free file sharing or that it would be easy for Twitter, or any other service, to build a complex system that manages to both credit users for their actions and make real money at the same time. But I’m saying that look left or right, up or down, it’s evident that there is a big change taking place, and that change will require us to completely rethink our approach to a lot of the business we do now. Twitter’s advertising model doesn’t look like rethinking to me. Instead, it looks like reusing and slightly repurposing something that’s already been used. And they’re doing it at a time when the world calls for something much bigger than that.

Karri Ojanen

His tweet made me think of a number of things I think should be common sense, knowledge and understanding in this industry by now. I made a list of some of those. Besides Matt’s tweet, my list is inspired by the Incomplete Manifesto for Growth by Bruce Mau, and if you end up reading through my list, I encourage you to continue by reading through Bruce’s.

Most of what we think we discover now as “new” was in fact already discovered before
Recently, I watched the documentary “Objectified“, directed by Gary Hustwit who also did “Helvetica“. Listening to people like Bill Moggridge talk in the film, I had several moments where I thought that many of the fundamental insights, thoughts and even methodology that people now feel like they’re discovering as “new” in the context of software, interactive media and interaction design where actually already discovered earlier, but in a different context. What’s hard for people is to take that knowledge and to apply it to a different context. That’s why, even if the things we think we are discovering now aren’t genuinely “new”, there’s tremendous value in rediscovering those things and applying them to the current context.

Clients don’t envision the future, they inform the present
It’s way too easy to blame almost every challenge in this industry on the client. Henry Ford said, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said “a faster horse.”" If we’re the experts in this business, we need to be the ones who envision the future of it.

Interactive media works best when it’s… interactive
TV and video still work, books still work, great stories are definitely still great stories. Banner ads may have a purpose and some of the content on YouTube gets hugely popular. But the one thing about interactive, online media that is different to traditional TV, radio and print is that it’s two-way communication, it allows instant interaction. The best solutions online are those that encourage and use interactivity to the max.

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
That’s a quote from Steve Jobs. But I wish that it wouldn’t need to be – I wish that everybody who develops solutions for interactive media would understand that visual design, technical design and user experience design shouldn’t be separated. Form and function aren’t to be divided into separate processes – they are one.

Great design isn’t based on research alone, it’s research + intuition
The great “big ideas” of the digital age won’t come from academic research alone, they’ll come from intuition, from a real “design sense”, from the designers’ and developers’ understanding of today’s world and the people who consume media.

Separate the problems and you’ll mess up the solution
We are all strategic thinkers, developers, designers and writers, on some level. Of course, we all have our titles and own specific areas of expertise, and so it should be, but when we brainstorm, discuss great ideas and seek for solutions, the technologists, the strategists and the experienceists should all be around the same table. And never mind who ends up leading that process, or who the greatest ideas end up coming from – arguing about who should lead will only distract us from getting to our common goal: finding the best answer.

From Bruce Mau: “Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.”

Keep up your connection to the work at ground level
Without a hands on approach to its business on all levels of management, the company will lose its touch with the reality. Those at the top level of management should be as connected to the everyday reality of the business as those on the lowest levels – as much as possible.

If you talk about Twitter to your clients and discuss it with your peers, make sure you have tried it yourself. If you’re asked to develop the design for a new blog, make sure you’ve blogged. I find a surprising amount of people in this industry who haven’t actually used the things they talk about.

Think of not just the media you can buy, but also the media you can earn
Learn to think of ‘media’ in new ways. Don’t think of just the media you can buy, but also the media you can earn from your audience, if you get them engaged. And then how that media goes back, and gets redeveloped by both you and the audience again. When you’re thinking of designing an effective interactive solution, think of building an engine, not a billboard.

The effort to control will more often lead to loss of control
An effort to control what is being said about you will most often lead to even more things being said about you. Instead of trying to control the conversation and trying to stop it, see what you can make out of it. When there is a problem, the only way to fix it is to fix it. Stopping people from bringing the problem up will only make it worse.

You need vision first before you can develop passion
“Social media”, “user experience design”, “platform solutions” – all of those (and many more) are just buzzwords until you come up with a plan.

Too many companies have not decided whether they want to conserve the past, define the future, or just turn to others for leadership. They lack vision, but they keep asking their workers for passion.

Karri Ojanen

And that idea of what advertising is about also matched the communication technologies that were at hand through the 50′s, 60′s, 70′s, 80′s and on to the 90′s. Print, TV and radio are all one-way communication, mass media that can deliver a message to the masses, but doesn’t expect or allow the masses to easily interact with the advertising there and then, at least not by immediately “talking back” to the message.

Now, as we all know (but often still have difficulty utilizing), interaction with online devices has changed what mass media can do. And the audience has changed, too: we live in a post-industrial economy where people, through decades of exposure to it, have learned a great deal about advertising. People have learned to ignore and avoid a lot of it.

Interactive media should, indeed, be interactive – it should allow people to work with the content they receive. If you give people a service or a tool, a platform for expressing ideas, a way of working with the product or service you are trying to sell, people can get involved in your message, and once that happens, it’s so much easier for them to understand your offering than if you were just telling and showing something, expecting the audience to listen. Once your audience gets involved in what you do, you become part of their story, and they become part of yours.

That’s why services is the new advertising. Instead of just pushing out the message, you now need to build a service or a tool first and give it to people to interact with it in order to get them convinced to buy the bigger product, service or tool from you.  That’s the new way to “sell the dream”. One-way messaging and display advertising will still have its role in creating some awareness, reaching audience in places where it’s not possible to offer complex interaction, but it’s not the way of advertising that creates significant brand loyalty or deepens customer relationships anymore (if it ever really did?).

Many people with any kind of history in the advertising industry of the past will argue that developing services and tools and promoting utility isn’t advertising – it’s product design and service development instead. And they’re right – what we have got used to perceiving as advertising hasn’t got to do with complex interactive platforms. But because the old model of advertising isn’t efficient anymore, and because, in the meanwhile, technology offers us great new opportunities, isn’t it time to change the old models without worrying about breaking the definition of advertising?

Karri Ojanen

Traditionally, such a sign would probably read something like “shopping carts here”, “please find carts here” or perhaps simply “shopping carts”. Or no text at all, but a symbol, like a traffic sign. Ikea, perceived as a company selling simple yet stylish design at affordable prices, has chosen to use conversational language in its communication, incl. store signage, instead of the authoritative, rather impersonal language typically used in traffic signs, public as well as commercial spaces (think of “no smoking” and “please wait behind this line” instead of something like “you can put that cigarette away here” and “hold on tight, we’ll be right with you”).

Online, I remember Feedburner has always featured quite clever, “chatty” language throughout the experience on its site (nowadays under Google). “Burn a feed right this instant” and “Sometimes your feed just wants to look good. Spruce it up in the following ways:”  for instance. Or Firefox after it crashes and can’t recover the tabs you had open before the crash, says “Well this is embarrassing. Firefox is having trouble recovering your…” It makes it sound like the software (company) is admitting ownership of the problem, instead of implicating the user as the source of the problem, like so many error messages do.

It’s important to recognize when it’s most efficient to use conversational vs. more formal language. In an online form, for example, it may be best to switch the language to give directions like “please make sure to give at least one phone number”, while the headline of the form can still be written in a more conversational, casual style: “This’ll only take you a minute. But it’ll save you an hour later.*

You can argue that not all companies, brands, or services should use casual, conversational language. And of course, it depends on your target audience, too. But when you look at the world we live in, how our societies and culture have evolved, choosing a conversational style seems to make more sense than ever. In the online world in particular, because it’s two-way communication, and it’s all about conversations. It makes sense to talk to your audience like you’re having a conversation with them, not like you’re giving them orders or begging them to do something so that the system you’ve built can work.

Karri Ojanen

More about this in the blogosphere:
Conversational Writing vs. Formal Writing
Creating Conversation

The advertising industry has been rooted in the idea of the campaign – that is what agencies, by and large, do. And campaigns come and go, while a few overarching themes in them are constantly refreshed with new pieces of creative.

Now, even as ad agencies have been migrating into the digital space, most of them have continued to approach what they do through the idea of a campaign. And the idea of a campaign is the idea of ups and downs. For when the campaign is running, there’s media in the market, and the audience grows. But as soon as the media is pulled off, or as soon as all the people have seen the campaign, the audience breaks up and drives off. And then the agency and the client are on to the next campaign again. That’s what the entire advertising business has been about.

But those who see the future of this business in the digital age are starting to see the rise of platforms. Platforms that are built to last. Platforms don’t necessarily go into the market with a bang, with lots of media buy, but they grow over time. Platforms are rooted in utility, and they provide something that the customer, the audience, will feel like using, and using again and again. The best and most pervasive platforms become a part of the audience’s lives. They’re more like services and tools than a 30-second spot or a clever billboard ad.

And the platform, when it encourages the audience to create and distribute their own content, and aggregates it from various sources, then becomes a media engine for the advertiser: the content, the comments, and overall enthusiasm from the audience feeds back into the platform, which can then churn out the content back to the audience again. And that content is much more real, much more authentic than traditional advertising material, because it comes from the audience itself. That content is what is called earned media.

Some examples of great platform ideas are, of course, the Nike+, and, in Europe, the Seppälä Supermodel Search, which I myself was lucky to get to help create back in 2006, and the way that HSL, the Helsinki Region Transit Commission, has sourced both utility and marketing material out of its Journey Planner and Transit Cost Calculator.

The problem with these platforms to many in the advertising and media buy+sell industry is that they don’t match the idea that we’ve had for so long of what is advertising. To envision, design and develop these platforms, it takes a different kind of a team, a different set of talent than what’s been used in traditional advertising. And it takes a different mindset. The way that people consume media, the way that they connect, is now driven much more by technology than it was before. To develop platforms, a new breed of creative technologists need to get a real seat at the creative ideation table. And, perhaps even more importantly, to make sense of all the different connections, links and experiences across different technologies and devices, agencies need Experience Leads to replace the old definition of Creative Directors. It’s an opportunity, rather than a threat, for all of us to grow and explore new things.

Sure, old style campaigns will most likely still be made for a good while, as this giant industry slowly changes, just like VHS tapes were sold for a time after the coming of the DVD, but forward thinking individuals and agencies have started to realize the change that is taking place. And this change is driven by the consumer, the audience, who, ultimately, is our real source of income. If we lose the attention of that group, we lose our business.

Change is often scary, but think about it: wouldn’t it be nice to get away from the ups and downs of the campaign era, and enter a new era of sustainable growth?

Karri Ojanen

I believe that the introduction of every new device and UI just increases the need for scalable solutions, ideas and executions that can be applied across multiple “channels”, devices, and screen sizes.

Over the next few years, we will move from the idea of millions of computers connected by the Internet, to the reality of one huge computer that is the Internet. Every device will be a window into it. Banners and microsites have been an attempt to continue the traditional advertising era idea of standardized spaces into the digital age, but in the new era, the channel-based thinking of the past just won’t be the winning strategy anymore. What matters now is platform ideas, bigger concepts that, on the idea level, are device agnostic, and can then be scaled and executed on different screen sizes etc to convey the same overall idea and functionality across the board.

It won’t be easy, as there will be no ‘one size fits all’ solutions, but hey, when was this business ever easy? And, more importantly, should it be?

Successful agencies will realize that, going forward, this business will be (and it is already) much more about creating utility, producing services and tools than just pushing out effective messaging. And, unlike Josh Bernoff, I don’t think this means that the Internet is getting splintered. I think it means the opposite: we are getting more connected and realizing that the Internet is the highway we all share, we are just looking at it through different windows at different times.

I don’t think that the past 15 years was “the golden age” of the unified Internet, either, and further on in his article Bernoff points it out as well that the new era is not cause for panic. There’s no point in trying to undo the changes.

I think for the past 15 years we’ve been merely learning the basics of what the Internet can bring us, and, for large part, creating interim solutions that have been based on a combination of the past, the “what we know and understand”, and the new. Now, moving forward, we are starting to see the real shift, the shift that will change the advertising industry as we know it, as well as many other industries. To me, that’s not Splinternet – that’s the Digital Age, and for those who are already living it, it comes very natural, despite the challenges we face and the speed at which the changes are happening. So instead of trying to force new standards to replace the old ones, jump in and be flexible, modular, fast, and humble – willing to look at your work with new eyes.

Karri Ojanen

The announcement quickly created discussion about whether doing away with campaign sites and focusing presence on existing social media platforms is wise, risky, or threatens ad agencies.

Campaign microsites, like banner ads, are a form of online advertising that, for advertisers and agencies coming from traditional advertising, have been easier to define, plan, control, and measure. It’s reminiscent of the old order, and therefore easier to grasp.

However, it doesn’t mean that’s where the online audience is going. Generating awareness and driving people to the microsite takes effort, and has no guaranteed outcome. People get annoyed when a brand tries to interrupt their online activity with “incoming messages”. So it makes sense, then, to go where the people already are: existing, and hugely popular social media platforms.

Coca-Cola and Unilever will undoubtedly benefit from moving away from the old model of buying traffic for short-term experiences, but there is still something here that smacks of old channel-based thinking. People I heard talk about this during the week seemed to think of it as an either-or question: it’s either sites, or Facebook. From the news article, it’s difficult to tell whether that’s how Coke and Unilever themselves see it.

In the old, channel-based thinking, there’s a box for everything. “Social media” is one box, and television, banner ad and billboard are others. But in the digital age, that’s not how things work. The whole of the Internet is social – people are social. The boxes, i.e. the channels, are connected, linked to each other, and instead of choosing just one, smart marketers need to see how to connect them in a way that interests the audience. If Coke, Unilever, and other brands really get it, they won’t just do away with campaign sites completely and switch to another channel, “social media”, but learn how to best connect them and look at the digital experience holistically.

Karri Ojanen