Talking Digital: Walking Digital - Bo Hellberg, Creative Director, Ogilvyone

Posted by: Gemma McGreal | 04 November 2008

Last month Gemma and I visited London to attend a workshop to learn about the future of digital technology. The buzz last year was all about Web 2.0 and this year will be remembered as the year of the mobile phone, social media and gaming technology. There has also been a large increase in the number of Sky Plus and BT Vision installations making it much easier for consumers to select the content they wish to watch at a time most convenient to them. With this growing flexibility in consumer choice and interaction how can we continue to entice consumers to engage with our products?

According to Bo Hellberg offering “valuable content and functionality is the new digital creativity. This can be summed up as:

DADA. DATA. ALPHA. BETA”

Dada is all about turning things on its head, through today’s cut and paste culture. This allows users to collaborate, share their ideas and discard old conventions through lateral thinking for example http://www.youtube.com 

Data refers to the ‘big brain’ allowing us to share our ideas, feelings and perceptions with one another through the use of daily blogs, to include Delicious and Twitter. However, I was unaware of brandtags.com this consolidates key words used in tag clouds across the internet to display user perceptions on how they feel about a particular brand. http://www.brandtags.net/browse.php

Current trends show blogs are now overtaking traditional media and becoming more trusted. The success and variation of blog topics can be demonstrated on http://popurls.com/ this gives a summary of the main topics being talked about in today’s most popular blog websites.

Alpha relies on marketing your product to the ‘in crowd’, who will go out there and talk about your products because they are cool and reliable. For example Trip Advisor is a website used based on recommendation by friends and family.

Beta allows users to contribute and engage by adding new content, graphics or code to improve the media content and appearance.

In summary we need to make our audiences a pro-tag-o-nist by encouraging them to engage and talk about our products on the web or over the water cooler. This can be achieved through letting people think for themselves, by not telling them everything! Instead, prompting them to go looking for and discover the information, that is available and share their experiences with one another.

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