After much speculation surrounding the Facebook phone, the social networking giant unveiled Home a few weeks ago.  The app installs a new home screen onto your Android phone and more fully integrates Facebook into its functionality; indeed according to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook Home is a step towards designing a phone around people rather than apps. Home’s official site reads, “From the moment you turn it on, you see a steady stream of friends’ posts and photos on your home screen. Upfront notifications and quick access to your essentials mean you’ll never miss a moment. And when you download Facebook Messenger, you can keep chatting with friends when you’re using other apps.”

To date however reviews have been fairly poor. At the time of writing, Facebook Home has an average rating of just 2.3 on Google Play, with 9,261 of  17,742 reviews giving it just 1 star – and given that Facebook has had five weeks since the product launched, improvements have yet to be made to the service to boost its appeal. In fairness to Facebook, if the short lived outrage caused by switching users to Timeline is anything to go by we can probably get a good indication of how opinion could shift on Home once a few tweaks are made.

Thinking in the context of mobile advertising which I wrote about last month, could this be the type of game changer the industry needs? Though nothing was mentioned at the Home launch in relation to advertising, certainly this will add a new dimension to mobile ads. The information Facebook has the potential of accessing through Home is certainly appealing (or worrying depending on which side of the fence you’re sitting) and could provide opportunities for mobile advertising to be more genuinely native than Facebook currently claims it is. Additionally, it provides an opportunity for location-based targeting to appear in a less interfering manner. Thinking of how the chat heads and notifications features on Home work it’s not hard to imagine targeted ads popping up on screens without users having to navigate away from what they are currently doing, and more importantly allowing them to swipe it away if it isn’t of interest.

Obviously this opens up a raft of privacy issues. While a majority of consumers agree that their “definition of privacy is changing due to the internet and social media”, an even higher number say they would like greater control over their personal information and have the power to choose when they exchange it. Presumably Facebook plans to stick to its tried and tested approach, wait until it has achieved the scale needed to ensure users won’t leave before monetising Home. Still, when they do let’s hope they get it right.

What do you think?  Is Facebook Home going to make mobile advertising more relevant and targeted?  Will the move to a dedicated phone prove to be seamless?  Will anyone actually use it?

The future of effective communication has to be about ideas, as it has always been. The best advertising is clever, interesting and creates a new perspective on the human condition relevant to a brand or proposition in some way. In the good old days there were clever creative-types who by dint of sheer genius seemed to do it naturally. Later, planning teams created disciplined approaches to generating effective ideas and processes that mere mortals could use to generate really good ideas. As time went on, and the world got more complex and interconnected, this involved greater degrees of collaboration across disciplines and more focus on really understanding the proposition as well as the way that media were evolving and would affect communication. So far, so adaptive – advertising is chock-full of intelligent, adaptable, problem solving types after all.

Equally, innovation has never been more important to the success of advertising and marketing communications. We live in a modern world where the proliferation of content, channels and media means that most messages will drown in the cacophony of noise and competition that is the saturated, always-on media environment of today. Whilst innovation has been big news for some time in the business world and the wider economy, the human tendency, as always, to define, categorise and control means that for most people the term innovation is about devising new products and services.  But in the growing space that is created by the expanding bubble of personalised digital communication, innovation must be as much about generating a rich seam of new, interesting and different ways to engage with the consumer. This engagement is key to creating the powerful social and cultural construct that is a brand and to effectively changing behaviour - whether for social, philanthropic or commercial purposes.

But now, the field of play, with networked communications and ubiquitous digital channels that reach in into every nook and cranny of the consumer psyche has got so vast and amorphous that agencies are faced with an ever-more intense challenge, perhaps, than ever before. How can they generate powerful, motivating and stand-out ideas that are so good that they can have a life of their own, provide space for consumers to play and pass on and become integrated into the cultural landscape of the day-to-day?  Because in a world where brands become verbs, such as Google, Twitter and Facebook, the prize of effectiveness has to be integration into the consumers rich palette of daily repertoires and activities.  It is worth noting that many social nouns are also becoming verbs - family and community are all about what we do, rather than what we are, which gives a further clue as to the paramount importance of the active consumer in creating social and consumer reality these days.

Ideas are born from many different sources - in fact what seems to distinguish the best and most original ideas nowadays is the ability to combine insights from a range of disciplines and perspectives into a single over-arching and powerful thought or proposition that will corral consumer attention.

From research we have undertaken published in  The Future of Insight and from the workshops we have been running with our Insight Community over the past year,  we have found that the nature and role of insight is rapidly transforming from being a research-process to an idea-formulation to transform the ordinary to the special. Great emphasis is now placed on the experience of getting an insight - the “Aha!” moment as many people call it.

More and more of our clients (both agency and client-side) recognise that such breakthroughs can only come from a genuinely broad-based, open and collaborative process. This requires the right mix of skills - increasingly bringing in people from different disciplines - as well as the willingness to constantly experiment and innovate with approaches, to turning research into inspirational material and working methods to maximise the quality and range of ideas. The most important facet is then being able to capture and communicate the insight in a way that transforms the mind-set of everyone involved and this remains one of the biggest challenges facing our clients. It is almost as if insight professionals have to become marketers of their own ideas to maximise their impact.

This year the Future Foundation is sponsoring the IPA Effectiveness Awards and as part of this year’s judging panel we look forward to witnessing many examples of clever insights, ideas and impressive displays of innovation, which in order to clinch one of these coveted awards will also have had to have been clearly identified, communicated and measured in terms of their effectiveness. In particular we are delighted to be sponsoring a Special Prize at the Awards which will reward the paper where insight was at the heart of thinking and significantly influenced the return on marketing investment. Entering these Awards are no mean feat and require enormous dedication, but for companies keen to prove the power of their marketing communications, winning an IPA Effectiveness Award is the industry equivalent of an Olympic Gold.”

For more information on the IPA Effectiveness Awards or to enter, please visit www.ipaeffectivenessawards.co.uk

f you would like a copy of ‘The Future of Insight’, please email Josiew@futurefoundation.net