How dramatic?

1. Client Demand: In the past 2 weeks I have had 3 clients request iOS (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch) apps and even more request mobile versions of web and micro-sites. That’s right, request, not something we were pitching. We’ve pitched iOS apps before, but a client has never specifically requested one (keep in mind we are not primarily a business-to-consumer agency). To be clear, they’re not just requesting simple HTML5 based apps, but true gesture driven, direct manipulation-designed, Objective-C apps. Previously iOS projects came up maybe once a month, and even then rarely became a reality in StudioNorth’s B-to-B client sphere. Here’s a graph showing the approximate growth curve.



2. Driver Shift: As I mentioned in my earlier post, the entire technology industry has shifted due to mobile. To understand this point go back and read the last part of my post, here’s an excerpt:
   

   The entire technology industry has already shifted right under our very noses. How? The enterprise used to drive the technology industry. People used what IT gave them. IT locked things down to keep the company, and the employees, safe and secure. Now things are different. The consumer is driving technology, not the enterprise. Now the market share swap between AAPL and MSFT makes all the sense in the world.

3. Advanced Software: Autodesk Inc. recently announced that it’s bring AutoCAD® WS to iOS. While this is impressive, even more impressive is what’s going on with 3D and gaming. Epic Games Inc. just released an iOS version if their Unreal 3 Engine. This is, no pun intended, epic. The Unreal Engine is a fully baked real-time 3D engine that can, and will, be used for massive multiplayer online gaming systems. Epic has already released tools for developer to create environments. This is a testament to what’s possible now, and a predictor of what is to come. These devices are personal, intimate, windows into new, uncharted, even uncreated lands. Literally. You can read more about it on Epic’s site, but here’s an except to give you an idea:
   

   “This is a testament to the sheer power of iOS devices as up until now, Unreal Engine 3 has typically been used to create high-end gaming experiences on game consoles and computers,” said Epic Games President Dr. Michael Capps. “And we’re not just keeping it to ourselves. We’re putting Unreal Engine 3 technology into the hands of game developers all over the world, and we can’t wait to see the apps they make next.”

   A small team of Epic’s programmers, artists and testers created “Epic Citadel” in just eight weeks of development time. Unreal Engine 3 is scalable yet packed with the same tools hundreds of thousands of users work with to create games, simulations and animated content.

4. Seven Mass Media: Mobile has the potential to reach anybody through ANY MEDIUM. Mobile can, and is, doing everything that all forms of earlier mass media can do. The previous six are, in order of inception: Print, Recording, Cinema, Radio, Television, and the Internet. In addition to the abilities of these six, mobile has its own unique attributes:
   

   Mobile is the first personal mass media
   Mobile is permanently carried
   Mobile is always-on
   Mobile has a built-in payment mechanism
   Mobile is available at the point of creative inspiration
   Mobile has the most accurate audience measurement
   Mobile captures the social context of media consumption
   Mobile allows augmented reality to be used in media

   Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_mass_media

So, forget about clinging to the past, things are changing more now than ever before. Forget what you knew about what was possible before and start thinking about hyper-local, social, interaction design, and the cloud all in a mobile framework. Don’t say there’s nothing new under the sun, because this is all new. It’s everything that’s old…plus. In my book, that spells new.

Andy leads the interactive offerings and staff engineers at StudioNorth. He consults with clients on strategic technology direction and personally oversees the key phases of the iterative development cycle for many large technology projects. Whether for public web sites, private extranets, or custom applications, Andy uses his rich experience to provide results-driven solutions to our clients. He’s known for being a visionary and for coining the phrase, “conservative wow” in reference to StudioNorth’s ability to create high-impact projects for some of our more conventional audiences. If you want to bring your brand beyond “2.0″, Andy is your connection.

Want to track Andy a little closer? You can follow him on Twitter.

Impacting Markets

You might be aware of this but the iPad has already begun to disrupt many markets. Some big like the netbook market which has already been relegated to “niche”, and some small like the comic book market. The device is a game changer so if you’re not paying attention it’s time to start. As I mentioned before it’s impacting smallish markets in a big way, like the digital comic industry as posted in CNN under iPad boosts appeal of digital comics.

Industry observers say the iPad’s size, portability and color screen make it a good fit for reading comics. Before the tablet computer launched in April, fans could read digital comics in several ways, neither of which were ideal: on a desktop or laptop computer, or via a smartphone’s tiny screen, panel by panel. As for e-readers, which are primarily made for black-and-white text — forget it.

“The iPad is much better suited for comics, and on that platform, comics are expanding very rapidly,” said Milton Griepp, president and publisher of the trend-watching magazine, ICv2, which reported sales of between $500,000 and $1 million in digital comic sales on mobile apps in 2009.

It’s also impacting the way we consume our social networks. I’m a pretty avid social network user and the iPad apps Flipboard and Pulse have radically changed the way I consume the information. Flipboard goes so far as to allow me to read Twitter like I would read a magazine. It loads my followers as “contributors”, and pull the links they tweet into articles ready to read right inside the app. Innovation to the extreme. (See First look at “revolutionary” social news iPad app: Flipboard for more)

There are countless other examples of this ranging from casual gaming to keeping track of daily tasks. So with that being said, let’s get to why any of this really matters anyway.

Business Impact

Recently I had a CIO I know email me asking for help. His boss had purchased an iPad and he was so enamored by it that he wanted to do away with his laptop all together. The CIO was asking for my insight on how to convince his boss otherwise. You see an iPad is really great for content consumption, and OK for light content creation, but for heavy content creation it takes a laptop. Business leaders, as it turns out, tend to create a lot of content.

We had lunch and I shared some insights and he listened while he ate. He’s a smart guy whom I respect a lot so I was feeling kind of self-conscience about how much I was talking and that my plate was still untouched when his meal was already finished. When I had exhausted most of my knowledge I asked him a question. I said, “So what do you think IT needs to do about all these new devices and social networks that employees are bringing to the workplace? How will IT control company information and employee productivity?” and I began to eat furiously. This was my “give me some time to eat” question. This was a question I had heard in countless IT leadership round tables on which I’ve participated over the past few years. It seemed every IT Director and CIO in Chicagoland was trying to figure out what to do about the rogue iPhone employees and the “all throughout the day” Facebook users. They always ended with the same solution, create a company policy against usage…which we all know is like trying to tell a millennial to cut their hands off. What this CIO sitting across from me said next rocked my mind. He was so it was so right on – he said,

“You know Andy, in 3-5 years I don’t think IT will provision any devices to employees. None at all. Employees will be responsible for purchasing their own phones, devices, laptops, tablets, etc. They will bring them to IT and IT will enable their access levels appropriately. My responsibility, he said, will be to keep the information safe on the company side of the firewall. That’s it.”

And there it was. Plain as day. The proverbial “Ah-Ha” moment. The entire technology industry has already shifted right under our very noses. How? The enterprise used to drive the technology industry. People used what IT gave them. IT locked things down to keep the company, and the employees, safe and secure. Now things are different. The consumer is driving technology, not the enterprise. Now the market cap swap between AAPL and MSFT makes all the sense in the world.

Andy leads the interactive offerings and staff engineers at StudioNorth. He consults with clients on strategic technology direction and personally oversees the key phases of the iterative development cycle for many large technology projects. Whether for public web sites, private extranets, or custom applications, Andy uses his rich experience to provide results-driven solutions to our clients. He’s known for being a visionary and for coining the phrase, “conservative wow” in reference to StudioNorth’s ability to create high-impact projects for some of our more conventional audiences. If you want to bring your brand beyond “2.0″, Andy is your connection.

Want to track Andy a little closer? You can follow him on Twitter.

There’s only difference between me and the pros—they know how to do all of that consistently, and I don’t.

This seems like a great analogy to illustrate one of the more common trends in video production. Without exaggeration, in the last two weeks I have met four people who claim to be “independent filmmakers”…and these are not people I work with in my industry. It seems that today, everyone is a filmmaker, and with the affordability of a Mac laptop and Final Cut, you will soon be hard pressed to take a ride on the train and not sit next to someone who believes themselves to be the next Scorsese.

Recently, a school teacher friend of mine proudly showed me a video he had made. He had managed to use every single transition and stock visual effect that came with his editing system. I couldn’t help but laugh at the randomness of it all. It resembled what I can only imagine Dr. Frankenstein would have created had he been a video editor. Ironically, some of the effects really did work well with the footage he had. But the others…not so much. And therein lies the difference between the Pros and the Joes.

What is truly surprising is that this do-it-yourself video approach is not only being produced in homes all over the world, but in businesses as well. What I am finding more and more is that businesses are deciding to give the “pro-sumer” platforms—and “expertise”—a chance. Of course you shouldn’t expect to see the next Super Bowl spot created with Premier Elements, but you are beginning to see a great number of companies buying a camera and software and assigning an intern the task of creating videos for internal use. While certainly economical, this is, often as not, a recipe for inadequate and ineffective video (and a frustrated intern).

Please understand, this is not a critique of any “creative services” department your company may have. Some of the most impressive work I have ever seen has been produced internally at certain corporations. To be fair, your internal department often has a better understanding of what might work for your internal audience than an outside agency. There are many times, however, that it makes more sense for your message, your medium, and your brand identity to allow an outside agency to create professional video to support your brand.

A few short years ago it was quite common, particularly in the larger corporations, for companies to invest heavily in professionally-produced, high-end internal video. This might include an internally streamed message from the CEO, an online training series or even a keepsake DVD of the company holiday party. You still often see high-end, professional video for some brand and product launches, and many company-wide initiatives. But in these days of smaller wallets and tighter belts, individual departments are becoming more likely to go the more cost-effective route of in-house video production.

So what has triggered this? Beyond economic concerns, a big factor is probably the popularity of online video services like YouTube. I heard a client recently use the term “YouTube-like” when referring to a style of video. It took a little while for what he meant to sink in. The “style” he was referring to was grainy, poorly lit video, and weak audio …but with highly creative content. I totally get the content side of it, but it was quite surprising to discover this new acceptability for lower production/post-production quality. Professionals in the television industry have been saying for years that “content is king.” And maybe the shifting economy and newer distribution structures are finally validating that.

It’s also really easy to become captivated by the prospect of millions of people watching the video you created on a shoestring budget, loving it, and sharing it with others. Still, how much audio and visual quality are businesses really willing to sacrifice? After all, all you’re usually going to get from a shoestring budget is…well, shoestrings.

To me, the decision of which direction to take and how much to invest in video solutions centers on how closely your brand is attached to the video you are creating. For instance, filming your own video of the company’s Oktoberfest celebration is probably a perfect opportunity to cut some financial corners. However, when it comes to your brand identity, quality should never be jeopardized. Whether it is a video used for training or recruitment, or an internal announcement for a new product launch, it’s essential to make the investment in acquiring the best footage…and creating a high quality video worthy of your brand.

Just think about how important this difference can be in an application like a training video series, where information retention is critical. This is certainly not the time for bland content and less-than-impressive audio and visuals. Working with an agency will certainly give you access to professional audio and visuals. But more than that, an agency can give you a professional, objective and strategic assessment of your content, messaging and visual cohesion. Finally, an agency can also help you develop processes for measuring results to gauge the effectiveness of your video.

I do believe there is a place for the “YouTube-like” videos in businesses. You are already seeing many businesses looking to this format to market themselves. Understand that creating effective viral video and using it in your marketing plan is still not a job for the inexperienced. Agencies around the world are becoming masters at how to do this effectively, and unless you have this kind of experience in-house, you will likely be much more pleased with the results by allowing an agency the opportunity to elevate your brand. Besides, I’m sure the interns you were going to use to create your video will be more than happy to carry your golf bag for you and shave strokes off your scorecard. Hit ‘em straight.

Eric Pound

As an Executive Producer, Eric is responsible for the direction and development of StudioNorth’s audio and video solutions. With experience ranging from news broadcasting to national advertising, Eric brings the ability to deliver high-end media experiences with the urgency and attention to detail that clients demand. In addition to broadcast work, Eric also has credits in several documentaries and award-winning short films. Since joining the StudioNorth team in 2005, Eric has played a leading role in understanding current and developing trends in viral marketing, social networking and user-created content, and how they impact B2B marketing initiatives.

Web distribution of video is certainly nothing new. For as long as I’ve had an email account, people have been forwarding me videos that I, in turn, share with others. The creation of sites like YouTube didn’t introduce us to web video, it simply relocated it. Now almost anybody — from major studios looking to repurpose their content, amateur filmmakers looking to be discovered, or teenagers with a camera phone recording their friend playing Guitar Hero — has the opportunity to not only distribute their content, but to receive feedback through metrics, user ratings and viewer comments. But even access that’s this easy to come by hasn’t drastically altered viewer behavior and media consumption. People have always talked about television shows, commercials, and movies around the office water cooler, only now they sit at their desks and post their thoughts in the comments section under the video they just watched online.

So why “snacking”? Snacking is a term that is being used to refer to the consumption of media in small snippets. Instead of people sitting down for an hour or two at a time to watch television, they are turning on their computers and watching 4 minutes of online video, jumping over to read a different blog, watching another 5 minutes of online video, finding a link to a similar 3-minute video and watching that one as well. Thus, the snack session goes throughout the day. People still sit down at the media dinner table to enjoy the latest episode of Lost, but the trend is beginning to show that people are becoming much more likely to dip into the cookie jar instead.

A recent survey from IDC found that people spend an average of 33 hours each week online — roughly twice as much time as they spend watching TV (about 16 ½ hours). ComScore recently found that about half of all online video is being viewed between 7 am and 5 pm on weekdays. So, how would the average person have time to spend 33 hours each week online and account for half of their online video consumption? That’s right — at the office.

This is where content creators and B2B marketing have the opportunity to join forces. The advertising and consumer sides of marketing have been setting out an online video buffet for a couple of years now, either in branding user-generated content (Stride gum) or creating their own form of branded entertainment (Anheuser-Busch). With so many people logging on looking for “safe for work” content, and marketing firms looking to reach an audience at work with their messages, the table may have been set for a new menu of B2B marketing initiatives.

Eric Pound

As an Executive Producer, Eric is responsible for the direction and development of StudioNorth’s audio and video solutions. With experience ranging from news broadcasting to national advertising, Eric brings the ability to deliver high-end media experiences with the urgency and attention to detail that clients demand. In addition to broadcast work, Eric also has credits in several documentaries and award-winning short films. Since joining the StudioNorth team in 2005, Eric has played a leading role in understanding current and developing trends in viral marketing, social networking and user-created content, and how they impact B2B marketing initiatives.

“Cloud Computing”

More and more services online are competing for our lives. They are asking us to invite our friends, store our documents, entertain us, and streamline our lives. What’s more they aren’t just asking to do it, they’re actually making our lives better, providing a return on our “investment of information.” I can say without a doubt that online services make my life easier and more convenient. On the flip side, they also add clutter. However, once you figure out how you work best online it becomes somewhat easy to cut out the clutter and actually simplify things.

Think about these services for a moment… How many of them have you had to install on your computer? How many of them are available offline? Hardly any. They only exist or make themselves available when you are connected to the Internet and because of this you are drawn into the Internet more and more.

The future of marketing, software, services, and products

This is where it gets interesting. Many of the leaders of these services are developing vast data centers using cheap hardware on cheap or free operating systems. Companies like Google, Yahoo!, IBM and Microsoft are moving very quickly to create the facilities to enable and store the services and data that allow people to function in the cloud. Because of this, the ability to find computing power and data storage online is becoming extremely cheap and ubiquitous. It’s actually becoming very much like a utility for companies that take advantage of these data centers in the cloud. Amazon, for instance, has two offerings in particular that they call the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3). These can be used by software engineers and .com start-ups to host virtually unlimited amounts of data and virtual computing power. They can turn them off and on as needed and only pay for what is used…and it literally costs just pennies.

As these services become better and more available people are flocking to use them. Companies like MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube have attracted people in droves, and keep them engaged. That means that more marketing and advertising dollars must follow. We are only beginning to see what context-based and pay-per-transaction advertising will become. The media game is changing and it will be interesting to see how media buying and selling changes with it. There is tremendous opportunity within this transformation to change the old crusty advertising industry.

How StudioNorth is taking advantage of “The Cloud”

At StudioNorth we are very highly aware of how to use the cloud to help our clients. We use it to host high traffic/high bandwidth “components” of websites. Components like videos that are attached to direct marketing campaigns. We are also using the cloud to create the future of our agency service offerings. It’s very cost effective for us and highly scalable. We’ve always been a custom online software application agency, but now we are able to offer much more. Automating and moving some of our core processes into the cloud to achieve usage and reach audience we’ve never thought possible before is very exciting and rewarding.

So…

As Sun Microsystems used to say back in the 1990′s, “The Network is the Computer.” It wasn’t then, but it is fast becoming true today (too bad Google and Adobe are eating Sun’s lunch). Only the future will show for sure how far the cloud boundary will permeate our lives. And once it has, what’s next?

-Andy

Some references for more info.
Wikipedia: Cloud Computing
Advertising Age: What Cloud Means to Marketing Forecast
O’Reilly: The Network REALLY is The Computer

Andy leads the interactive offerings and staff engineers at StudioNorth. He consults with clients on strategic technology direction and personally oversees the key phases of the iterative development cycle for many large technology projects. Whether for public web sites, private extranets, or custom applications, Andy uses his rich experience to provide results-driven solutions to our clients. He’s known for being a visionary and for coining the phrase, “conservative wow” in reference to StudioNorth’s ability to create high-impact projects for some of our more conventional audiences. If you want to bring your brand beyond “2.0″, Andy is your connection.

Want to track Andy a little closer? You can follow him on Twitter.