Numiko, an award winning Leeds based digital creative agency

Over the last ten years we’ve grown from working in a humble bedroom to become one of England’s premier digital agencies. And over those same ten years the web has quietly slipped into every part of our lives, from socialising to entertainment to government. The days of waggling your cursor round the screen while you wait for emails to trickle down your 56k phone line are long gone; these days we’re more likely to be tutting about a few seconds’ wait for a whole film to download so we can watch it on a phone, on a bus, on the way to work.

The web has become so woven into our lives that we almost don’t notice it any more. That’s why our tenth birthday seems like a good opportunity to stop and have a look around. So we’ve put down some thoughts on how things were, how they are now, and how they might be in the future – and we thought we’d share them with you.  Click on the links below to read the articles.  You can even leave your thoughts and comments below each story.



From Eyeballs to Engagement How the information age has made branding smart

Does Speed Make Us More Creative Worry not – this isn’t some experiment in gonzo web design on amphetamines!

The Invisible Party Why facebook is about so much more than friends

ERROR: the brand is not responding Why greater user experience is an essential part of online branding

Thinking Outside the Box What the future holds for the telly

Revolutions Per Decade How the internet has changed the way we think about music

This is partly self-promotion, but mostly we’re just genuinely interested in this kind of stuff. We love thinking about it and we love talking about it, so if you’ve found this interesting or illuminating, or you have an opinion you’d like to share, get in touch – we’d love to hear from you. At the bottom of each article is a link to a page where you can join the discussion.

And, as this is the year of 3D we’ve even upgraded our website. You’ll find we’ve included some special glasses for you, so why not head over to numiko.com/3D and have a look?

Welcome to the future!

Last year was a long time coming. In 2009,for the first time, online advertising spending outgrew television advertising. For years now, online spending has been growing hugely – bar a small dip in growth during the worst of the recession last year – while spending in traditional media has been in constant decline. What’s going on?

Traditional interruption advertising means deciding how to extol the virtues of your product and putting that message in front of your potential customers, wherever those customers are most likely to stop what they’re doing and look at your ad. Whether it’s on television, in a newspaper or on a billboard at the side of a road, the purpose of these ads is to jump in front of people and shout “HEY!” – which leaves you with three problems.

The first is that you have no way of actually knowing if anyone is looking at your adverts, let alone paying them any attention and ultimately making a purchase. The second is that the advertising market has long reached saturation. Modern consumers are increasingly clever at avoiding, or just plain ignoring, adverts that disrupt their lives. Advertising clutter has desensitised consumers so much that the average person has trouble remembering more than two or three of the thousands of messages we’re bombarded with every day.

The third is that it’s hard to effectively target the right people at the right time. Conventional wisdom says that if you target the right demographic then you can sell more. So, the proliferation of niche channels, platforms and magazines should be an advertiser’s dream – but modern advertising says that effectiveness is about targeting your audience not by who they are, but by what they’re doing, and this is where the web wins. That’s why online advertising is doing so well.

When you’re advertising on the web you can target specific social groups down to the individual, wherever and whenever you want. Search marketing means that you can advertise right at the point consumers are looking for a product. Services like Google’s Double- Click display advertising based on interests and browsing history, ideally showing the right advertising at the right time. Advertisers can track who’s looking at their adverts, from the moment the page loads to the last click at the checkout. This accountability sounds great to brands because it means they can accurately and cost-effectively track the relationship between advertising investment and return.

Unfortunately, the embarrassing result of all those carefully tracked clicks is that the average click-through rate for online ads and banners is less than 0.2%. And that’s the number of people who spare one measly click – only a small percentage of even those users will actually go on to make a purchase. So what does this mean for online marketing?

Well: the web has democratised advertising, branding and information to a huge extent. Advertisers used to be able to manage perception of their brands and products much more tightly; now there are thousands of citizen journalists, reviewers and bloggers all sharing their opinions on products and companies, not to mention great swathes of sites that specialise in comparisons, reviews and pricechecking. When you’re buying, for example, a new television, it’s simple to read through reviews and recommendations online then compare the prices of shops and suppliers, all with just a couple of clicks.

So does this mean that the only things that sell are the best products, from the cheapest suppliers? No, obviously – but the shift in ownership of information is a powerful thing. Products, and the brands behind them, are under huge pressure to do what they say and live up to their own marketing hype. Flaws in products are quickly spotted, dissected and talked about; brands are watched, discussed, reviewed and reported on. A recent example is the iPhone 4’s reception problem: before the internet, unless you knew someone who was left-handed and held their phone a particular way, then you’d probably never have known there was anything wrong. But the internet has enabled the rapid spread of users’ stories and experiences, which quickly turned into a big story that has not only put people off the product, but also damaged Apple’s brand.

Against this background of exhaustive reviews and information it can seem like advertising and branding are evolutionary dead-ends. It’s true, having a good product is critical – but in a saturated market, branding is more important than ever. The flip side of the huge variety of reviews and opinions on offer is the danger of information overload. Successful branding creates an emotional, sometimes almost irrational connection between brand and audience that consumers use as shortcuts to navigate the sea of information. But the question is: how best to build a brand amid the clutter?

Forward-thinking brands have turned towards new aims: engagement, and democratisation of their own brands. Engagement doesn’t just mean getting customers to engage with a brand – it means brands actively engaging with their audience, moving away from one sided interruption advertising towards a more conversational approach that offers tangible benefits to the potential customer. Engagement advertising should aim to do something positive for the audience, something useful, or funny, or interesting, that has a value other than promotional.

For example: some brands, like McDonald’s, have stepped into the arena to tackle and openly discuss negative publicity – their Make Up Your Own Mind site attempts to answer comments like “I have read in a newspaper that your McNuggets only consist of fat and chicken penis” with a straight face. Brands ranging from giants like HSBC to local bakers in London have benefited from engaging with their customers in different ways; HSBC restored interest-free graduate accounts in response to a Facebook campaign, and Poke’s Baker Tweet notifies Shoreditch’s hungry Twitterati whenever a fresh batch of cakes leaves the oven.

One thing’s for sure: branding and advertising are here to stay, but the same seas of information that make strong, effective branding more essential than ever can also serve to highlight the gap between brand and reality – and it’s this dissonance that can do the greatest damage. Brands now share the responsibility for the creation of their brand with the wider web, and how they engage with their audiences – with fairness and generosity, or more of the same old one-sided – will determine who succeeds and who fails in this new landscape.

When we founded Numiko in 2000, the web was on the cusp of something huge. Back then, the standard Internet connection was a 56k modem that bleeped and spluttered its way along the information superhighway like an asthmatic robot. Pages loaded slowly and anything like video, animation, sound – basically, anything that wasn’t small pictures and text – took literally tens of minutes to load. As a result of this, the web was mostly static pages of text and images.

However, BT were about to roll out something new and exciting: broadband technology was about to give us speeds of up to 512k! That was 15 times faster than what we had, and that huge increase enabled a lot of things to happen.

As a collection of animators, programmers, sound designers and games designers who liked to make lovely things for computers, we were excited by this new possibility for the web to do the types of things we had previously needed to use CD-ROMs for. New tools such as Macromedia’s Flash plugin allowed us to build sites that were much more than pages with pictures and text. We could create games, interactive experiences with animation and interactive sites that contained ‘rich media’.

It started a paradigm shift of creativity on the web and enabled people from an interactive art background to move away from physical installations. Now their work was accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. People like Hi-Res launched projects like soulbath.com which were playful pieces of interactivity, a million miles away from the static text and picture sites that had gone before them.

So bandwidth gave us the opportunity to do things that literally had not been done before. But we were still limited by a split: some people had fast connections, others had slow connections – and the gap was huge. A tiny, grainy, 30 second video on a 56k modem would take a yawn inducing two-and-ahalf minutes. On a broadband connection the same video would take just 16 seconds. Clients often wanted two versions, a high-bandwidth site and low-bandwidth site. An experience apartheid was exposed: the haves and the have nots. Producing dual versions of any site effectively doubled the cost and put most people off doing anything that pushed the creative limits.

As available domestic speeds now average just over 5Mb, we no longer have to worry too much about download times. The UK Government now views high speed connections as a right, so surely we have some amazing opportunities to yet again raise the creative bar?

Speed increases are now evolutionary rather than the revolutionary. Speeds increase steadily, with a 25% average speed increase from last year. The jump from the fastest dial-up to standard broadband was a whopping 900% speed increase in one move. That’s like going from a standard connection now to something nearer to 70Mb, which would allow an entire feature film to be downloaded in little over a minute. But in response to these evolutionary speed increases, it seems creativity is evolutionary now too. Current trends are for more of what we’ve already seen, just bigger and faster. I wonder if we’ll have to wait for the next big jump in speed to see the next big jump in creativity?

It’s strange that as a technology gets really important, we tend not to notice it any more. I remember in the late ‘90s asking friends if they ‘had the internet’. What people talk about now is, “Do you have Facebook on your phone?”. As delivery channels become more ubiquitous they slip into the invisibility cloak of infrastructure. Rewind a hundred and fifty years and you can imagine Victorians asking each other if they had electricity. Now, the novelty things that people talk about are the applications within that infrastructure.

The other night whilst I was sitting in the garden I overheard my neighbours discussing Facebook privacy settings – and yes, the irony of being earwigged talking about privacy settings did occur to me. The difference here is that this was a group of retired people in their sixties. When web stuff makes it within that demographic, it’s getting toward ubiquity.

Facebook recently registered its 500 millionth user. The bar of banality clicks up a notch, and now their platform is just that: a thing that you do stuff on. As more people sign up it becomes more ubiquitous until it’s no longer a thing in itself, but just another part of the internet’s plumbing.

Social connections like those enabled by Facebook are becoming part of the fabric of the web. And as the web becomes more social it becomes less like a library, where you go to retrieve things, and more like a party, where people share information and introduce people to each other. This fundamentally changes not only our relationship with the web, but ultimately how the web itself is actually organised.

Increasing numbers of sites are reporting that more people are fi nding their content not through running a search in Google, but by having it recommended to them by their friends on Facebook. While worrying for Google, there’s something very interesting in this because it marks a distinct change in how we fi nd new information.

There’s an obvious drawback with search in that it’s diffi cult to fi nd things you don’t already know about. The chances of finding something serendipitously amongst the billions of websites is unlikely. No matter how good Google’s search technology is, at the end of the day it’s still a computer and it can be slightly too fastidious for its own good.

When the web’s information can be overlaid with a social layer of people who can interpret, recommend, share and collaborate, surely this is a game changer? Information and services will be linked not just by context but also by their social significance.

Pretty soon, the recipe site you use to prepare for your dinner party will not only tell you about your guests’ allergies – but also lets you know that they all really love fish curry! Or the gig guide site you’re using to research live music and buy tickets will show you who of your friends have been listening to the band, buying their music and going to their gigs already. Soon, we’ll take this social layer for granted – we won’t be able to imagine how we lived with flat, vanilla content, unmediated by the touch of our friends and family.

Chumsbook – An installation at Temple Works, produced by Numiko.

As people entered the room, they filled out a profile and added a photo of themselves.  Each profile was stuck to the wall.  As the night went on, people used strings of wool to represent connections to the people they knew.  Friends requests using Post-it notes, allowed people to connect with people they didn’t know but thought were interesting.  The result was a tactile web of connections across the room – and some new friendships!

It’s annoying to have to say this, but most websites are a bit rubbish. They can be frustrating in so many ways, and often leave you wondering how and why did this site launch? If you ask someone what website they used recently where they came away thinking “that was easy” then you’re probably in for a long pause in the conversation.

Whilst brands often spend lots of money on creating brand bibles, guidelines and tone of voice, these rarely translate to the web. Yes, the logo is in the right place and things are the right colour, but when something is interactive, it immediately develops an amoeba-like ‘personality’. It’s at this point that the gulf between traditional brand thinking and interactivity becomes apparent.

Think about the real world equivalent of a common annoyance on the web: filling in a form. This takes a long time, then suddenly between steps one and twelve something happens. The wheel of death starts spinning, and you know what that means: “The Server Stopped Responding” and yes, you’ve lost everything.

Now, imagine going into a bank to open an account. You’re half way through when suddenly smiley Sally, the customer enrolment specialist, grabs the forms from your hand, rips them up in your face, throws them on the floor and then pours what’s left of your coffee on the shreds, before falling to the floor quivering. How’s that for a brand ambassador?

OK, it’s an extreme example, but the point is made. As more of our interaction with companies is facilitated online, they need to start thinking how these sites make people feel whilst they are using them. A positive experience can go a long way, but wrestling with a half-broken website, or one that forces people to do things they don’t really need to do, engenders rage – and I’ll bet that isn’t a ‘brand emotion’ on PowerPoint.

What we’ve found over the years is that most sites aren’t actually based on what people want to do. Instead they are based on an ideal, often unrealistic expectation of what brands want them to do.

There are obviously things that are commercially beneficial for a website to do, but if they don’t benefit the customer you’ve got two choices: either rethink how you achieve this commercial goal in a way that the customer doesn’t mind doing, or ignore the fact it’s annoying and force people to do it
anyway.

Our most valuable work is in exploring the hinterland between commercial need and customer want. There’s a sweet spot in the middle and if you hit it, you’re in web nirvana. But it takes understanding, empathy, and trust. When many brands talk about building relationships with their customers what they actually mean is filling records in a database so that they can send them stuff. But that’s not a relationship, that’s stalking!

In a recent BT advert, smug phone-flogger Adam is on his stag do. Adam and his friends are in the middle of their wacky bachelor party, and as part of their fun they’re gathered around a laptop watching something hilarious on YouTube. As an advert – well,make up your own mind. But as an observation on modern life, it’s spot on.

The television used to be the big screen in the middle of the living room, the one the family gathered around to enjoy together. Many people today still remember watching the first moon landing on a brand new television set. That black-and-white vision of the whole family watching the TV together, completely rapt, seems further away than ever.

In modern households, the family TV – or two, or three – vies with computers, laptops, mobile devices and games consoles for our precious time. Computers have come out of the study and offi ce into the living room. Laptops are near ubiquitous and small-screen mobile devices are in almost every pocket. TV is competing for attention with a rapidly growing number of other media.

The computer games industry has been cross-pollinated by script writers and directors. Many of today’s games are fully-fledged narrative worlds; a quantum leap from the arbitrary joystick-wagglers of old. Games are social, in every sense. Massively multiplayer online games build huge communities, and consoles like the Wii are reinventing console games as fun, social activities: gaming for people who wouldn’t usually play games.

The explosion of video on the web presents a flexible competitor to the TV. Missed a programme? Wait for the repeat on telly – or just get it online, download it and watch it on the train on your laptop, or in the bath on your iPhone. We used to think of television as a passive, sit-back platform and computers as an active one, but now people are as likely to be watching video on their computers as they are to be doing usual computing.

TVs audience, once so passive and reliable, has become fragmented in time and space. Appointment viewing is dying off , killed by the audience’s appetite for on-demand content, anywhere, anytime. This flexibility is great for the viewers but troubling for producers of traditional content – shrinking audiences mean less advertising revenue, which means less money to spend on quality programming, which leads to more viewers moving away. This vicious circle threatens the entire business model behind traditional television.

These new media have been eating into traditional television’s area – although not its audience numbers – while TV hasn’t really moved on. Early experiments with the web on TV never really worked. Interactive ‘red button’ television is popular but this is nearly all supplementary TV content – video and text with a few simple games and quizzes.

The rise of all these alternative media can be seen as a threat to traditional television. But it’s also a huge opportunity to create amazing cross-platform or trans-media stories.

What does ‘cross-platform’ really mean? Traditional media projects focus on the strengths of one medium – the interactivity of the web or the native drama of television. Truly cross-platform concepts create narrative worlds that can be explored through many different media, giving the audience the freedom to enjoy them how and when they want. Cross-platform concepts aren’t about having the web on television or video on the web: they’re about projects that bridge the gap between media, playing to
the strengths and audiences of each medium individually while telling a consistent story across all platforms.

Despite the huge possibilities, cross-platform is an unfamiliar area, and at a time when ad revenues are falling and budgets are being cut, it would be a brave step to set off into uncharted waters. That said, cross-platform offers some amazing creative opportunities – and commercial opportunities are sure to follow.

So who knows what will happen next? Maybe the web’s influence will grow until traditional TV dissolves almost entirely into on-demand services. Maybe cross-platform projects will rejuvenate appointment-viewing as an essential part of experiencing the latest programmes, games and web narratives. Maybe it’ll be somewhere in between. But whatever happens, it’s going to be exciting.

The first record was created way back in 1887. It might not have looked like much, but that thin disc was pure, condensed music – aprecursor to all the recorded music we have today.

From that point, it was almost 80 years before the cassette tape burst onto the scene. Then as well as playing music, you could record it. You could simply pluck it from the airwaves to craft mixtapes for friends and spend hours fretting over the precise order of tracks on a tape to be presented to a potential girlfriend. Despite the warnings, home taping never did kill music, but it changed our relationship with it for good. CDs sounded better – arguably – but never quite captured our hearts and imaginations in the same way.

In the late ‘90s, MP3s spread across the internet, helped by services like Napster, and suddenly you could listen to new music without ever turning on the radio. Napster was shut down after a lengthy legal battle, but its competitors soon filled the gaps. In 2001 iTunes hit the net; proving that legal music downloads could be profitable amidst the rampant piracy.

Spotify, among others, started in 2008 and the concept of free music streamed over the internet became the next big thing. Music fans started to become familiar with ideas like ‘premium’, ‘freemium’ and ‘ad-funded’ streams. In ‘09 Spotify went mobile, allowing access to its catalogue from smartphones and devices.

Phew. The change of pace in the music industry over the last fi fteen years has been astounding. In a fraction of the time it took to progress from records to tapes, we’ve moved from physical media into an era where virtually any music is available anywhere, at any time, for free. All the music you’ll ever know and love can fi t into a device the size of a matchbox, and any that doesn’t can be streamed instantaneously.

This fantastic world of music on tap does have its downsides: in this era of instant availability and replayability, music seems to have lost its value. Music fans – especially younger people who’ve used computers and MP3s all their lives – don’t see why they should pay for digital copies of tracks and albums. The music industry is struggling with the consequences, while the web makes it child’s play to download, trade, swap, learn about and spread new music – legally or illegally.

The digital revolution has called into question the model of business that has existed for decades, and while the big industry players are reeling new models are springing up. Bands can publicise and distribute their own music on the web, from a garage band’s first track to behemoths like Radiohead’s recent self-distributed album. MySpace pages act as showcase and fan club; social networking sites help bands gather fans and feedback. Nowadays, canny management of your online presence is arguably more important than actual musical talent.

Another consequence is that live shows are on the increase. Revenue from live music overtook that from recorded music between ‘08 and ‘09 – proof that against the background of ubiquitous digitalism, there’s still a hunger for the unique shared experiences of a live gig that recorded music can’t provide.

There are already a few services that sell live streams of gigs as they happen and for the price of a ticket, you can watch a gig remotely. With the advent of 3D TV and monitors, we can expect to see 3D streaming video content in the near future. Imagine that: live 3D footage from a gig of your choice to a screen in your own home. How will the sweaty, intimate, experience of a gig take to the clean, packaged world of digital abundance that is online music?

Maybe soon we’ll be saying hello to online 3D gigs, with streaming video and integrated social feeds so you can chat to your mates at the same time, and wave goodbye to sweaty people stamping on your feet, annoying tall people blocking the view and warm beer. Although no doubt there’ll be an app for that before you can say, “£7 for a tepid lager!?”