Guerrilla thinking

If you consider your daily experience, dividing your actions between analogues and digital is pretty hard.
First of all there’s no real definition for analogue anymore.
What analogue actions do you take? Is driving a car analogue?
Is listening to the radio analogue?
That’s why in a previous post in this blog we have invited agencies to banish the world “digital”. Digital makes sense when counterposed to its natural opposite.
But being unable to find any analogue daily experience, talking about digital one is totally pointless.

But there’s even more than that.
In every single presentation we read (and we can assure we read many of them) there’s always a recurring term: “channel”.
In most presentations, media guys show endless power point charts full of numbers and ideas on how to exploit “channels”, pretending to able to predict where and how people use them.
To us Guerrilla thinkers, this is absolutely pointless.

And here’s why.

1) COMMUNICATIONS FLOODED OUT

When this word hit the road of marketing, communication was mainly one-way. People watching tv, reading newspapers and magazines were given ads and communication they could not interact with.
In this “channel” communication flowed from point A (brand) to point (B).
Just like water in a… channel. And that’s where the name comes from.
But once the storm of the web has hit the land of communication, water started flooding outside to go all over.

2) IF COMMUNICATION IS WATER, EXPERIENCE IS THE ISLAND

Thanks to the proliferation of means of communication, the water of communication stopped being channelled in one direction.
Brands now daily flows in it in many ways that reach us from different directions.
In this context we are moving targets, ourself also floating in the water and going our own sweet way. When brands meet us in the water, the experience takes place.
The brands shaking hands with us give birth to the island of experience, where the brand and people meet each other, share, and then board their own ships to go somewhere else. Richer, smarter, more aware one of the other.

3) THE WATER IS VASTE AND ITS MOVING IS NON-PREDICTABLE

In this scenario, it would be pointless to try to govern our ships to go to a specific stream. As a brand, our goal must be that of reaching the most popolous islands to meet as many people as possible
But that can’t be done if we focus on channels. There are many, too many ones streaming to those islands.
We must keep our head up high and constantly watch where people gather together and try to reach that island before the hands shaking is over and everybody is gone.

Monitoring and following people and their path to the islands of experience is what we have to do. Rather than concentrating on pure figures and abstract predictions we should dip our toes in the water and start floating.
That’s the only way to start understanding the flowing of waters.

Ask your media folks whether they could predict Facebook or Twitter success.
They could not.
And they did not tell you to start spending some money there before others did.
And that’s because they are NOT swimming in the water. They watch it from the shore and try to understand it. Failing.

FINAL CONSIDERATION

In a flooded world, you must swim to survive.
You can’t stay on the shore and send paper boats hoping those will reach your target sooner or later.
Dive in, follow people and swim behind them to get to the islands where they share.
Shake hands with them and then dive in again.
That’s the only way to succeed. And this is just something your media agency will not tell you.

Because if they do, you would not need them anymore.