Out With A Bang

In times gone by, we used to use the Shilbottle Coal Co as our prime example of a local tradesperson who ‘got’ what Addiply offered the local advertiser.

The chance to place a simple, text ad himself.

For a fiver a week in the case of TrinityMirror’s JournalLive site in Alnwick.

Or, in the case of Josh Halliday’s http://sr2blog.com/ and the little text ad that appeared thereon for a Sunderland tiler, http://www.tilingservicesne.co.uk/ a couple of quid per month.

To put his Sunderland tiler ‘brand’ in front of the good people of SR2.

Himself.

I might be wrong; I don’t think tiler and student are mates. The former simply recognises that the latter has a spot of digital ad space for sale in front of his target audience and – with a little help from his Mrs’ PayPal account – so he was able to place an ad himself.

As he might have placed a postcard in the window of a Hendon PostOffice; his business card tacked to the wall in the local chippie.

He didn’t need an ad agency to tell him where to place his ‘brand’; nor did he need a digital marketing guru. Somehow he worked it all out for himself… because it’s not rocket science.

He wanted to place his ad… just there. Where? There… in front of his potential punters in SR2.

Oh, there… OK, fine… Go on then. It’s a couple of quid. For a month. Do it in three clicks.

Simple.

Three clicks later and there it is. In front of his eyes. Placed. Tacked to the wall of Josh’s digital chip shop.

What said Sunderland tiler didn’t need to do, of course, was to go via a big black box and a magical algorithm in sunny California.

He cut that ‘complexity’ out of his life – the complexity that comes with one end optimising his campaign brightly enough to ensure that he will end up on http://sr2blog.com/ ; the complexity that comes with an algorithm recognising that the same little text ad wants to be in SR2 and the back-streets of Sunderland; the complexity that comes with Josh ensuring that his ad space is open to the likes of local tradespeople – and not B&Bs and Hotels In Sunderland.

Or, if you’re Patrick Smith and his journalism blog, Used Car Sales In Rochdale… http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2010/03/27/if-any-of-us-are-ever-going-to-get-to-that-ledge-marked-not-for-loss-we-have-to-do-better-than-selling-used-car-ads-in-rochdale/

I would hesitate to say that in the last four years I’ve found myself walking hand-in-hand with Mr Clay Shirky.

A bit like Sir Tim Berners-Lee, me, MyFootballWriter and Addiply walk firmly in their shadow.

Perhaps we try and walk the walk that they actually talk… for example, trying to make certain visions of an entrepreneurial and web-empowered Africa flesh.

http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2010/03/21/an-open-letter-to-sir-tim-and-his-new-best-pals-at-vodafone-one-way-in-which-we-might-empower-africa-to-pay-their-own-way-web-wise/

Mr Shirky’s latest tome was fascinating.

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/04/the-collapse-of-complex-business-models/

Once again – in my humble opinion – we could get certain of our pieces to ‘fit’ within this new, societal jigsaw he was drawing; one in which ‘complexity’ was starting to get the cold shoulder from a populace enabled to view the world in a different light.

To re-invent ways that they organised themselves – both commercially and philosophically – and all from the bottom up as they tired of the ever-growing complexities that were delivered from the top down.

All of which takes us right back to Christopher Hill; and the world that he saw starting to turn upside down in 1649 as the Diggers, Levellers and Co looked to create ‘a common treasury for all… ‘

Writing his introduction, Hill wrote: ‘Popular revolt was for many centuries an essential feature of the English tradition and the middle decades of the seventeenth century saw the greatest upheaval that has yet occurred in Britain.

‘… This book deals with what, from one point of view, are subsidiary episodes… the attempts of various groups of the common people to impose their own solutions to the problems of their time, in opposition to the wishes of their betters…’

The only word that is, alas, missing is ’simple’.

That we were – in 1649 – witnessing various groups of common people trying ‘to impose their own simple solutions to the problems of their time…’

Read Shirky’s tome and the point is clear; the simplest way to deliver me media in 2010 is into the palm of my hand; two touches of a screen I have the weather, the sports results, a home made video to chuckle at…

… all in the same way that, in three clicks, a Sunderland tiler can place a text ad in front of a Sunderland audience. It doesn’t need to go via Mountain View. Thataway lies ‘complexity‘.

‘In such systems,’ writes Shirky, ‘there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change…’

So what if someone asked Google to change AdSense? ‘Can we not do our advertising on a tenancy basis, Eric? I can’t get anyone to click…’ might be an example, I guess.

Just a little tweak? Even that, it seems, can pose a fundamental challenge to the established order.

‘Furthermore, even when moderate adjustments could be made, they tend to be resisted, because any simplification discomfits elites…’

Further on, Shirky notes: ‘It’s tempting, at least for the people benefitting from the old complexity, to imagine that if things used to be complex, and they’re going to be complex, then everything can just stay complex in the meantime.

‘That’s not how it works, however.’

No, it’s not. Because people want simple; they value simple – particularly in times of economic strife when ‘complexity’ comes with at least two other partners in societal crime, obscurity and cost.

‘I don’t have time to get this to work… nor do I have the cash to pay someone else to get this to work…’

That, I strongly suspect, will be the refrain from SMEs the world over as they try to figure out how on earth they ever market their digital wares.

‘It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old,’ Shirky concludes. 

‘But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future…‘

If Shirky is right, then there’s a bright future in store for at least one Sunderland media student and, likewise, his local tiler.