Gilbey, Rodrigues and Marshall

Trust

Over the last week we have experienced not just a massive hit on our financial wealth. More than that we have seen an even greater fracturing of trust.

It appears that it is not money that makes the world go round, but trust. Even with the most phenomenal injection of liquidity into the market by central banks in the US, the UK, Germany, and a host of other countries there has still been one primary problem: the banks don’t trust each others’ balance sheets and consequently won’t led to each other.

But it isn’t just a problem of banks.

The whole issue of trust, or the lack thereof, is something that is taking place society wide, and why not?

We are experiencing massive growth in Internet scams so we are starting to learn that we shouldn’t trust the Internet.

We see the continuing clamouring of engineers and intelligent people about the collapse of the buildings on 9/11. The message seems to be clear: jet fuel doesn’t burn at the temperature required to melt reinforced steel, so something other than the planes themselves caused the collapse. So we clearly shouldn’t trust the government inquiry into the collapse of the buildings.

Indeed the governments of Australia, the US, and UK are proven to have lied about WMD in Iraq as a rationale for going to war. Strike two for reasons to trust government.

On another front we are now seeing the decline of journalism in the media, replaced with news by press release as companies, government and bureaucracies all shape their messages with broadcast ready electronic press kits at a time when advertising revenues for traditional media are in sharp decline. So there is now little reason to trust established media in the way that we once used to.

On the other hand there is the Internet. There is no shortage of opinion out there, that’s for sure. There is also a plethora of crackpot and conspiracy theorists together with a large dollop of media counter espionage put out by the powerful to ensure that fringe views are treated with the contempt that conspiracy theorists have come to be treated with by the rational sane people in society. So how can we trust anything we find in that space either?

It’s a serious problem for our society and it can only get worse before it gets better.

It occurs to me that the primary reason that we have this massive depletion of our reserves of trust is precisely for the same reasons that we have had the massive increase in wealth and productivity – digital technology.

Digital technology has enabled some brilliant things to take place. But the problem is that it has also allowed those who seek profitability above all other things to introduce management systems and processes that ensure that people don’t make decisions based on their own judgement and their personal relationships.

Banks don’t allow the local bank manager to make a decision based on the relationship that he has with a customer any more. Now the decisions are made according to strict rules of engagement. The customer has to submit a statement of position to make sure that he or she has the capacity to repay a loan. And that is what led to the whole subprime mess. People will always tend to tell someone who is asking a question the answer that they think the questioner will want to hear to ensure that that there is a reward.

Banks have lost the art of understanding that they are only as good as their understanding of their communities.

Governments meanwhile have learned that if they move some of the key information that they put into economic data into the footnotes, they can make inflation look better than it is, even as the everyday punter finds that the weekly grocery bill is eating up more and more of the weekly budget. In doing this governments continue to drive a wedge between themselves and the people who vote them in and out of power and continue to erode trust.

It is not just the global economy that is in meltdown at the moment. It is society itself.

To change the picture we are going to have to rebuild relationships within our communities in a way that we haven’t had to address for two thousand years.

Back then there were few religions competing for our souls and the local priest’s role was pretty much as the centre of morality of the community. Of course that was substantially corrupted as soon as the money started rolling in to Rome and some of the priestly class realized that they were onto a good thing, promising eternal life, as long as the down payment was made prior to death. Somehow they managed to maintain trust – up until the last few years when the outing of paedophiles in the church became de rigeur.

So we can’t even rely on the church to act as an anchor of trust in the community any more.

The gold bugs have a view that the only currency that we can believe in is that which is backed by bullion reserves. It may get to that too.

This is going to be a time that in future years people will look back on and realize that they were shaped by.
The first thing that we have to do is to find ways to rebuild communities of trust.

Unilever, the makers of Dove, have an ad campaign in place developed by Ogilvy in which a young girl gets blasted with rapid fire media messages about beauty. It is called “Onslaught”. Here it is:

In response to the ad Greenpeace developed an anti-ad which attacks Unilever as a primary cause of deforestation in Indonesia, where palm oil is grown for use in beauty products such as Dove. Here is the Greenpeace ad:

Which campaign is likely to be more successful? There are of course multiple occurrences of both videos on YouTube making it quite difficult to get a comprehensive view count of the real quantum of views for each respective video. I would hazard a guess from reviewing the viewer comments on YouTube that the Greenpeace video has a more vocal and passionate support network.How do major brands develop strategies that put them on the moral high ground? And is it necessary to do so? We believe that one of the problems that faces large organizations with substantial legacy media strategies is that they believe that they can keep on doing what they have been doing successfully in the past and it will be successful in the future. As more sophisticated aggregation tools become more prevalent we think that memes such as the one that Greenpeace has produced will ensure that there is a heightened risk for enterprises that don’t think carefully about the consequences of the media campaigns that they initiate.One of the areas of research that we have started to undertake with clients is to research management attitudes to markets and market attitudes to products in order to determine where there are biases that are dissonant. From analysis of the data that is generated it is possible to map quite specifically the point at which customers will become emotionally involved against a brand or product instead of for it. We think that this work can be very valuable in developing insights into how markets are moving.

Markets are conversations. And now the conversations that we have online have become more disparate as more social networking options avail themselves. So the markets are changing as the marketplace becomes more spread out.

Here is an article about some of the proposed solutions -”Consolidating Your Web Banter”.

There is no doubt - it is hard to keep track - the personal blog, the business blog, the Facebook page… and then the aggregation site.

Here is something from a book I was given a few weeks ago by David Marshall, from the University of Wollongon. It is called “Convergence Culture” by Henry Jenkins:

Jenkins writes about the late MIT political scientist, Ithiel de Sola Pool, who is considered to be the prophet of Media Convergence. He wrote a book predicting this in 1983 apparently…

“Much writing about the so-called digital revolution presumed that the outcome of technological change was more or less inevitable. Pool, on the other hand, predicted a period of prolonged transition, during which the various media systems competed and collaborated, searching for the stability that would always elude them” “convergence does not mean ultimate stability or unity. It operates as a constant force for unification but always in dynamic tension with change… There is no immutable law of growing convergence; the process of change is more complicated than that.””

One of the things that interests me is what the impacts are of the various social networks on the general thought processes of the community. How much influence do they have on what people are thinking?

For instance, how much influence does Get Up have on what is being thought/discussed in Canberra? My sense is that its influence is much bigger than a lot of people suspect, but one that is realized the influence will be corrupted by special interest groups flooding the membership in order to create their own pressure on the system.

As a result of a US$55,000,000 gift from Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, a new project to map the human brain has been launched.

“The Human Genome Project was the ‘what’, and our project is the ‘where’,” says Allan Jones, the institute’s chief scientific officer.

I recently discovered a fascinating 4 part documentary made for BBC 4 in the UK. It is called The Century Of The Self.

It deals very specifically with the influence of the teachings of Sigmund Freud on society - particularly the creation of the modern consumer society that we live in. It is fascinating watching for anyone who is interested in society and what motivates it.

With the advent of the social web - or Web 2.0 - whatever you want to call it, I wonder how much of the programming that has taken place is going to be a problem for the current and next generation. If you take a lateral view, you might consider that the whole subprime mess is in some respects a result of consumerism taken to its logical conclusion. Or perhaps that is the penultimate step.

If you read this blog there is a sense of what may come next. It deals with the hypothesis of collapsing cities and provides a rationale for what will happen and why.

Is it possible that the deprogramming of people will lead to a great unravelling of society?

I attended the first day of the conference on Social Networking yesterday - in Sydney.

There were a couple of interesting things that came out of it. Unfortunately some of the presenters essentially did sales pitches for their organizations without providing any useful insights into the what and why of their businesses. Maybe they just don’t know?

Patrick Crane, VP Marketing at Linked In, talked about the “access to activatable intelligence” that is provided by Linked In. Later at lunch a recruiter sat near me and was telling some colleagues about how he was now in the Top 30 connected people in Linked In. This was pretty interesting stuff. His whole raison d’etre was about promoting himself to the point where he had reached a tipping point. At the time that he had been listed as a power user, he found that people wanting to be in his first degree of separation contacts took off.

So clearly for those who really focus on building ‘friends’ in Linked In can win big time, just like those bands who built massive networks in MySpace in order to build visibility with record labels.

The presentation from Mark Charkin from Bebo was certainly interesting. I wasn’t aware of the importance of Bebo before yesterday. It appears that it is the #1 social networking player in the UK, and also in NZ.

The MySpace presentation was just about how much ad inventory they have and how good it would be if people bought it. Nothing particularly useful there, and no reference to the opening up of the platform, which was disappointing.

There was a Google presentation about the value of YouTube as an advertising platform which was singularly uninformative.

Then came the presentation from Nielsen/Net Ratings. The presentation from Allan Dib, who is MD of the company for the Pacific region, was metrics rich as you would expect. The one big idea from this wa that there are some emergent Big Trends.. They key one of these is that trust is eroding. And with that comes the need for defensive branding.

This is of course one of the key areas of interest for Karl, Bruce and myself at GRMP. The key to the growth of brand attacks is the ease with which people can shoot video or still photos with their phones and post that material to the web. Companies are starting to watch for occurrences of negative comments online and are moving to respond rapidly in some cases - but normally only when that same material goes mainstream, and hits regular media.

So the growing risk for corporations is to reputation/brand risk. And it can come from just one video that happens to hit the right spot.