Much whooping and suchlike at Crowd HQ, as we picked up the prize for best paper at ESOMAR's global conference in Paris, for our exploration of music fandom with Twitter...

The judges recognised ‘Future Fan’ as a piece of work that is as intelligent as it is colourful, combining cultural analysis with interviews (experts and consumers), case study evaluation, ethnography, quant and a fast paced What If session (wherein creatives and strategists were tasked with imagining how big events in music’s history would have played out differently had social media existed then).

We identified three ages of fandom, looking at the commonalities and differences in each, including in how the media has reported them and interest shown by brands. We highlighted how community dynamics have become more complex and how the relationship between fan and fan object (ie the band or artist) has changed. Next to a broadcast-quality documentary film and punchy headline findings (‘the tweet is the new autograph’) the work also offers brands a set of strategic and tactical guidelines for how to engage with fans.

Particularly massive well dones to all involved! And huge thanks, of course, to Twitter!

Jobs, journeys and browsing - a few notes on the recent ESOMAR Congress event in Dublin from Crowd DNA’s Andy Crysell…

As part of a media session which also featured interesting work from Channel 4 and Viacom, we headed to Dublin with Facebook to share some of the findings from the Coming Of Age On Screens study (no surprise that the FOBO premise captured plenty of attention again). It was fun and the work seemed to be really well received. I didn’t have as much spare time as hoped to check out other talks and presentations, but here’s a few things I took in.

Jobs

There was a really interesting session on the theme of careers in insight, featuring various people client-side, agency-side, mentoring-side and indeed from assorted other sides. The general gist of this was that the sector continues to do a pretty terrible job of promoting its strengths to potential new starters, with the telling stat being that 64% of people (higher still in the US) fall into the industry rather than get there by design. There was talk of new forms of apprenticeships, increasing awareness among graduates/school leavers and the need for all employed in insight to do their bit but, mostly, there was talk of how we need to significantly revamp how we communicate the work we do.

The challenges we’re set by clients are fascinating, highly absorbing and always future facing (at Crowd DNA, at least!) and exactly the type of stuff (NDAs permitting!) you’d want to share/brag about with you mates down the pub, safe in the knowledge that you’re most likely doing way more interesting work than they are. Yet somehow the industry as a whole manages to make what it does sound pedestrian, mired in process over progress and just generally a little peripheral. It’s massively infuriating and small wonder that so many forward looking agencies are seeking to term themselves as something other than market research…

Journeys

Purchase journeys, and the challenges faced in mapping them authentically, have been a hot topic at Crowd DNA recently. Hence our interest in Dr Stephen Needel’s witty debunking of many of the myths around the models that have been created, from the original McKinsey ‘straight line ones’ to funnels and increasingly circuitous ones. Needel contends that as seductive as it is to believe that there is something akin to a path/journey at play, we must question the validity of this; including if such things are really test-able; thus positing that a bad model is worse than no model at all.

He points out that models, even if test-able, are rarely sufficiently descriptive or prescriptive in how to actually bring about change. Behavioural economists tell us purchase decisions are irrational – and you can’t model irrationality. To get somewhere, he contends we need to chunk things down to considering distal stimulus (advertising, social input, existing experience with the product etc) and proximal stimulus (packaging, pricing, store layouts etc).

He summarises the challenges neatly through detailing two purchases that involve hugely different journeys: buying a new TV and buying toilet paper.

Browsing

Which brings us to the headline stat from AOL’s piece on online browsing trends: that 51% of millennials have apparently shopped while on the toilet. This work brought to life the complexities of the contemporary online shopping experience, uncovering no less than seven browsing typologies: deal browsing, problems and solutions browsing, boredom browsing, expertise browsing, dopamine browsing, me-time browsing and rabbit hole browsing. Really interesting stuff.

They noted that, these days, we’re all shopping even when we’re not supposed to be shopping, or when we don’t even realise we’re shopping. As for those seven typologies, no doubt we’ll be adding more to that list with every passing year.

A few hastily assembled notes on the predictions offered at shesaid.so's very interesting roundtable on the future of streaming (sorry, it was early, didn’t catch the name of all of the roundtable guests)…

– It’s not a battle. It’s time to stop thinking of physical product and digital/streaming in conflict with each other; the way forward will see more interesting ways of blending the two, and a greater understanding of how they can co-exist in a broader eco-system.

– Playlists – they’re a big deal. Getting included on a Spotify ‘Your Morning Coffee’ playlist (or similar!) can have a previously unknown artist racking up plays at a supersonic rate. Playlists sustain track plays better than almost anything else. Bands, platforms and brands all need to be looking at new, increasingly innovative ways to make playlists stand out.

– Niche services. Lots of predictions that people will be willing to pay, say, a fiver on top in future for more specialised streaming offerings – one dedicated to classical music, for instance – alongside their more standard monthly subscription.

– Higher quality streams. While the offerings may not succeed (hello, Mr N Young) at the very least they spark new debate and keep the big players on their toes – as such, we need the outliers, those who can disrupt and challenge.

– Direct from artist streaming services. It’s getting easier to do and the price of the tech is coming down. Expect to see some artists considering what they can do on their own.

– Brands and streaming. Automobile and sports/fitness companies predicted to lead the way in terms of brands innovating in streaming-centric music partnerships.

– Big challenge! Getting to a mindset where we cherish our playlists and saved tracks on streaming platforms in the way we once/still do cherish our record collections. Rather hard to picture but there’s people working on it…

Amsterdam scores high among millennials as a place to live, play and - even! - work. But what makes it so attractive to them? How do they socialise? Where do they go out? Crowd DNA exec Joey Zeelen shares a bit of first hand knowledge...

Living in Amsterdam

‘Venice of the west’ is what they call it, and everyone that visits Amsterdam agrees – it’s a city to fall in love with. Amsterdam – or A’dam for locals – the city of 17^th century architecture, with canals that make your heart skip a beat, and as many bars and restaurants as there are places to park your bike. But what is it like to actually live in the tourist capital of the Netherlands?

The Dam’s stunning appearance and village feel give it a really pleasant combination of big city allure and small city comfort. ‘Gezelligheid,’ a word that only seems to exist in continental Europe is perfect for grasping the day-to-day city vibe of Amsterdam. Gezelligheid means a convivial, cosy, fun, quaint, or nice atmosphere, but can also connote time spent with loved ones; the act of seeing a friend after a long absence, or general togetherness that gives a warm feeling. All of which emphasises the vibe of living in Amsterdam and what makes it so attractive to millennials.

Rent

However, as Johan Cruyff, Amsterdam’s most famous citizen, would say ‘elk voordeel heb zn nadeel’ – for every up there is a down. Over the last seven years, since the economic crisis, the rent in the Netherlands has remained very stable, an average square meter in Holland costing €12.49 a month. In Amsterdam, though, rent prices have seen a massive increase since 2008, with the average square meter costing €20.18 a month in 2014. In the third quarter of 2014, a 100m2 apartment in Amsterdam cost on average €1,931 a month, while one quarter later this same apartment would cost €2,018. Everyone can imagine what this means for millennials that want to buy property… they don’t.

But houses that were impossible for us to buy are now also impossible to rent. Extraordinary rent prices attract fast moving millennials that don’t have children, people that are not interested in a long-term responsibility with the city. Take that together with a relatively high amount of expats and you see why Amsterdam can be an expensive place for most of generation Y.

Gentrification

Gentrification is rife and, though it normally gets criticised, in Amsterdam it gives birth to a lot of life in the city. In the last decade it’s turned into a heaven for hipsters, yups, and yucs (young urban creatives). A’dam’s characteristic centre is complemented with artesian coffee, smoked meat and barbershops. Amsterdam is turning into a city that satisfies every basic need of a self-respecting yup or hipster. But is that a bad thing? Not really. It’s found a way to make styled boutiques and food markets work particularly well with working class fundamentals. Amsterdam seems to have hit the spot in combining what young and old want into a pleasant yet sometimes dodgy environment. Dubious coffeeshops go hand in hand with craft beer popups and they operate next to each other without compromising the city’s integrity… and millennials love it. It is this new ‘dodgy hipster mix’ that makes the city so interesting to my generation. This is also what makes more and more young parents stay in the city instead of moving to child-friendly cities like Haarlem or Amstelveen. It is safe to say that Amsterdam has become a safe haven for middle/upper class generation Ys to do/buy/experience what they crave for the most.

Going out

The influx of wealthy generation Ys has made the city the most vibrant it’s been in years. Going out, eating and drinking have become more diverse than ever. Brooklynese-raw, Berlin-hip, and Copenhagen-clean rule the scene and bring style into the traditionally uniform hospitality establishments. Organic and fair-trade food is bigger than ever. Trendy wining and dining, gin-tonics… a lot of gin-tonics, is what makes the millennial clock tick.

In the last decade A’dam’s music scene has risen to an absolute height, with electronics as a front-runner. There probably isn’t a city in the world that has so many music festivals in and around its centre (many even speak of a festival overload). Fuelled by millennials, organisations like Dekmantel and Digital, clubs like Studio80 and Trouw, have given Amsterdam’s contemporary electronic music scene serious international allure. Not since the Roxy and iT in the early nineties has Amsterdam competed so decisively with the likes of London and Berlin.

A’dam’s gentrification has pushed some millennials to Holland’s IT city, Rotterdam, where the rent is cheap and where people ride a car instead of a ‘bakfiets’ (carrier cycle, the ultimate A’dam yup symbol). However, Rotterdam will never compete with the consistency of Amsterdam’s music and arts scene, and the cultural richness that most millennials live for. A’dam can be financially tough and seem like a hipster Valhalla, but at heart it’s a city shaped by generation Ys, where ‘gezelligheid’ rules the day and the night is more exciting than ever.

Meet the generation who'll become teenagers from 2023 onwards; who'll be living into the 22nd Century; and who'll be forming their identities in ways unknown to ourselves...

We’ve been exploring what the lives of so called Generation Alpha will be like of late. We can gas on about this topic for ages (and indeed we did here) but, if your time is short, here’s a nifty little video that explains plenty.

Crowd DNA creative delivery consultant Eric Shapiro turns off the lights, exploring what we know (and what we need to find out) about off-grid sharing...

All data is useful. It’s a common mantra in analytics and a good justification for basing some thoughts on dark social on a quick poll around the office. While conducting my (very limited) study, I noticed the first part of the conversation was consistent. 

Me: “You read an article online that you enjoy and want to send on to others. How do you share it?” 

Almost everyone: “Well, I don’t really like sharing to loads of people so I’ll probably send it in a Facebook message.” 

Me: “I mean the bit before that. You’ve just finished reading the article, so it’s still on the screen. Now what do you do to share it?” 

While the Crowd DNA office might not think too much about link sharing processes, it’s huge business for domain owners looking to see how traffic is being directed to their site. We might imagine large publishers would know how much of their traffic was coming from, say Facebook or Twitter or email – and to some extent they do – but a whopping 69% of traffic comes from sources that content owners aren’t able to track. Since 2012, this has been termed ‘Dark Social’ and site traffic analysts have been trying to work out where and why this traffic exists, and more importantly, what do about it. Most of the share statistics we see from social media are ‘light social’, which record people clicking on the sort of share buttons you see on websites like this one – which brings me to the next part of my not-so-scientific study. 

Almost everyone: “I’d click the bar at the top of the browser, copy the link, and paste it into the chat box.”

Me: “So you wouldn’t click the share buttons on the site?”

Almost everyone: “No.”

Oh dear. We (and I include myself in this), are engaging in the dark arts – the 69% – sharing our content in an untraceable, informal way and often avoiding the easiest route to share – surely it’s more convienient to click the big button at the bottom of the page?

And it gets worse for the publishers. As soon as various technical workarounds were able to convert dark social to light, along came mobile sharing. In the rush to make everything mobile first, developers forgot to include the various handshaking processes that let domain owners know when their traffic is being shared on, say, the Facebook or Twitter apps. This has both complicated and further dimmed our understanding of sharing.

This raises a few important questions for content creators – will converting dark mobile social to light tell us what we need to know about how people access our content? Why are sharers bypassing the easiest routes in the first place? And what can brands do about it – is it even a bad thing? 

At this stage it’s hard to tell without doing some serious research. Nevertheless, our experience of word of mouth, sharing and cultural context puts us in a good place to offer a few key hypotheses. 

• Facebook is the favoured method of sharing content, even among younger millennials and Gen Z. Dark or light, it’s the sharers platform of choice as it offers sharing to many, few, or just one, and has a handy built-in method to measure the success of the share in the ‘like’ button.

• Distrust of older generations and ‘the traditional’ mean that millennials and Gen Z prefer to circumvent any formal methods of sharing. It’s entirely possible, consciously or subconsciously, that young people – the vast majority of sharers – are choosing to avoid becoming a metric, even if it means using more difficult routes to share.

• As we increasingly fragment our online activities, becoming different versions of ourselves depending on our audience, we want to tightly control who can and can’t see our posts, meaning ‘share alls’ won’t cut it. This might be a good thing because a lot of dark social shares are targeted to people that get the most value out of the content. Sharing a buzzfeed quiz on ‘What type of Harry Potter character would you date?’ will be much more effective when aimed at fanboys and fangirls in a group/forum/email than someone’s whole newsfeed (and a lot less embarrassing!).

• Content creators might obsess about platforms, but their audience certainly don’t. If there’s any preference for dark sharing, it will be carried across devices.

There will always be an appetite for ‘off-grid’ sharing, especially in Europe, where privacy matters for cultural reasons in countries such as Germany.

Content that’s worth sharing gets shared, dark or light. The best way of ensuring good engagement is to produce good content.

Unfortunately, the one thing that is clear about dark social is that our current metrics for understanding sharing are in serious need of an update. We can optimise our content for sharing via whatever channels we want, but it will always be difficult to dictate sharing behaviours when there are so many factors involved. Improving our metrics will go some way to uncovering behaviour, but we need qualitative understanding to dive into the cultural, social, and future-facing factors at play. Until better research is carried out, sharing will remain in the dark.

The next instalment of our #TwitterMusic coverage discusses the changing relationship between brands and the music industry...

Our recent work for Twitter unearthed a treasure trove of insights about the changing nature of fandom and online interaction. Therefore it’s great to see Marketing pick up on one of the more exciting pieces of news for advertisers – that brand-band relationships have become accepted and even valued among music fans.

“… 89% of fans on Twitter like to see brands get involved with music. This is a notable shift from the days when credible musicians aligning themselves with corporations were treated with derision by many music aficionados, who would immediately cry “sellout” at the faintest whiff of brand/band collaboration”

Despite this positive news for marketers, the piece continues to outline that this relationship is governed by strict rules around the fit between the artists and the brands.

“…this doesn’t mean that brands can get trigger-happy by targeting any hot pop star of the moment. It still has to make sense: artist, brand and fan values must align to ensure a solid strategic move… This desire for brand involvement, but not to the detriment of authenticity, is also borne out in the research: 80% of fans think it’s highly important for brands to share the values of the event or artist with which they partner.” 

Marketing cite an ill-judged partnership between Microsoft and Clean Bandit as evidence that it’s still very easy to get it wrong. Nevertheless, it’s an exciting development for the music industry, which has enjoyed a bumper 2015 with the streaming service race hotting up, and artists creating more news than ever (meme warfare, anyone?).

So how should brands ride this wave of positivity? Marketing argue -and we’d agree – that it’s first about targeting the right tribes of fans. Appeal to the right groups and you’ll have “a ready-made group of marketers tweeting on [your] behalf”. Second, it’s about tapping into fan altruism. Brands seen to be genuinely supportive of music will reap the rewards in the long run.

Back at Crowd DNA, we’re looking forward to more insights being shared from the work.

Crowd DNA's insight and innovation director, Chris Haydon, revisits 78 high energy hours in Hamburg, in which we explored the strengths of an immersive, sprint-based approach to creative testing...

The team here are just back from running an intensive week in Germany. We were looking to deepen our understanding of the German consumer’s use of social media – to develop a sensible ‘jumping off’ point for creative development.

We approached the project with a strong sense of what it means to be German in 2015. We planned for influence factors ranging from the structure of formal education (a system which encourages each argument to be viewed from both sides), through the closeness with which the media links US ‘spying’ on Chancellor Merkel with US social media to the broad disregard people have for anything trivial or ‘me me me’.

We went armed with lots of ideas, questions and stimulus. Much more importantly we went as a multi-discipline team – researchers, client brand owners, designers, planners, copywriters from four counties – each with their own objectives but with a common plan, to learn ⇒ test ⇒ refine ⇒ learn … as much as we could over three-and-a-half days.

As researchers we want to feel we’re enabling people (participants/consumers) to understand and reflect their true selves; to stick as close to what they ‘mean’ as they can. Creatively, the team want to understand why people respond to stimulus the way they do. Execution-level responses can be useful but what they really want are clear creative guidelines (which allow them to do what they’re good at – crafting a compelling narrative). From a client’s perspective, it’s the need to see (and believe) all of this within the bigger business/product/market picture that’s key.

We each committed the week to this project. We aimed to only think about the questions at hand and the people/country/culture/context we were immersed in. We ate, drank and lived it through eight consumer workshops glued together with instant debriefs and live stimulus development. A broad schedule with a commitment to flex anything that we thought would push us forward.

It sounds like a big commitment of time but when you see the value that this level of immersion brings to ideas and understanding – and getting from a standing start to a set of creative guidelines, fully agreed on by all parties, in 78 hours – it’s pretty amazing.