Horsemen of London’s Apocalypse?

I don’t think the thugs who broke and burnt down parts of London saw Woody Allen’s Manhattan where he says “a satirical piece in the (New York) Times is one thing, but bricks get right to the point”. In the two weeks since London burned, enough has been written and said about the causes and ramifications in Indian newspapers and on TV studios. What is yet to be discussed, but has the most serious ramifications, is the part technology played in these riots, and the stupid conclusions that Luddite politicians like British Prime Minister David Cameron are coming to.

The rioters were organising, using the BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service available on their BlackBerries. Blackberries, for all the talk of poverty and depravation, being the most favored smartphones of British teenagers, allowed the rioters to text each other to organise themselves and spread information about where the next hit was going to be. If they did this on a public-access social network like Twitter or Facebook, the police would have been able to track and stop them. But BBM is personal, and police in the UK don’t have rights to track them real-time. After the riots though, there are rumors that Research in Motion (RIM), the maker of Blackberry, is giving police access to private messages of its users, so that they can track and arrest the looters. The Indian Home Ministry, which held RIM to ransom last year to get access to it’s servers, must be having the last laugh.

The British police are also using technology to catch the rioters. They are using facial recognition technologies, tracking BBM messages, and are trawling social networks and thousands of hours of CCTV footage to bring the looters to book. Even people who (probably jokingly) incited violence on Facebook are being prosecuted. Police are actually using Twitter very judiciously. During the riots, they used it to dispel rumours, and after the riots they are posting photos and details of looters to get information through crowd-sourcing.

Even the layman on the street put technology to good use. During the rioting, people used social networking to stop rumours. Sitting in India, as someone who lived for a time in those parts, I was able to lead people to safety away from looting, through Twitter. Groups have been organised on social networking sites to organise clean-ups and show people that the British spirit is still alive. Whip rounds have been organised online to help victims who got famous through YouTube videos. And normal people are trawling online videos and social sites to help the police identify the rioters.

The only people who seem to be out of touch with the man on the street and the technologies they use, are sadly, as in India, the politicians. The British Prime Minister wants to cut off social networking sites during such incidents. This is one of the worst ideas to have come out of a politician in the Western hemisphere in a long time. Cutting them off would be akin to cutting off water for a whole city because some people are misusing their supply. And the result would simply be this: the rioters will just find new ways to communicate, and the general population will be deprived of genuine means to communicate. If the Prime Minister of a developed country comes up with such schemes, we can only imagine what our famously tech-illiterate politicos could come up with. It is time everyone understood that technology is neutral. Don’t blame it.

The writer is a tech geek

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Facebook has got it all wrong, says Tories’ favourite ad man David Jones

“My model for how Facebook should make money isn’t actually through
advertising,” continues Jones. “I would do it through retail.

“You would say to Starbucks: ‘If everybody who checks in at Facebook
whilst at Starbucks and buys a coffee, would you give us 0.1pc of a dollar
for that purchase?

“Then you would say to consumers: ‘If 20,000 of you buy a coffee in
Starbucks today, you’ll get a 15pc discount’.

“You accumulate that across not just Starbucks, but Burger King and
McDonald’s and every retail outlet, and all of a sudden you start seeing
enormous potential for major revenue opportunities which are nothing to do
with advertising because I’m not sure that the intrusive advertising model
is one that people want in a medium like Facebook.”

Controversial stuff, then, from an adland executive who critics might counter
has no direct technology experience.

But then Facebook is arguably not a technology business any more, while Jones
says Havas is no longer an advertising and communications group but “a
company that connects brands with consumers using technology”.

He’s less bearish on Twitter, which he thinks could make money from paid
Tweets, just as Google charges for paid search listings.

“It’s easier for Twitter to over-deliver on its potential,” he says, “because
Facebook has been so hyped up because of its 750m people and the revenue
expectations are now pretty dramatic.

“A lot of people on Twitter are looking for something, so if the content
you place before them is interesting or relevant, people are not going to
find advertising that annoying, whereas you basically go on to Facebook to
interact socially and look at your friend’s wedding pictures and you don’t
necessarily want to be interrupted.”

What he calls “collaborative consumption” is much more interesting
to social media customers than mere advertising, he says, because it is
where “the sexy exciting digital world meets the cold hard cash of
retail”.

Buying something by comparing prices on the internet and then clicking to make
a purchase will be old hat, replaced by consumers’ ability to tap into the
mobile internet when they are standing in the high street and declare: “I
want to buy this”.

The idea is that all the vendors in the vicinity who sell what customers are
looking for can then bid for people’s custom as well as make offers that
apply only if other people are roped in too.

“I think you’re going to see an enormous revolution in that space,”
Jones concludes.

Jones’s career has all been in advertising, working for an usual collection
from adland’s alphabet soup, from BDH to JWT to Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO,
before joining Havas subsidiary Euro RSCG and running its business in
Australia.

He launched the firm’s digital agency in 1998 from inside the overall
advertising firm – much to the bewilderment of observers who questioned why
an ad company was getting into software.

But it worked, with Jones trebling the agency’s size in four years. He then
ran the Reckitt Benckiser’s advertising account as president of global
brands for Euro RSCG Worldwide before becoming chief executive of the firm’s
New York operations and then global CEO in 2005.

Havas’s businesses now serve as digital agencies to the likes of IBM and
Unilever, while a subsidiary has just won Sony’s worldwide social media
business.

Jones reckons digital now accounts for 15pc of companies’ total external media
spending and 15pc to 25pc of most advertising groups’ revenue.

How much further can that proportion grow? “It depends on how our
industry defines itself,” he says. “Some of the biggest
revolutions that are going to happen over the coming years are actually not
in what you would call advertising.

“So if our industry remains just the advertising and communications
industry, I think it will miss out on an enormous amount of growth that’s
going to happen.”

He wants location-based technology to provide a major revenue stream for
Havas. “If we confine ourselves to thinking we’re a traditional
advertising business, we’ll miss out on that,” he adds. “I
certainly don’t intend to miss out on that.”

So far it seems to be working, with Havas claiming 9.7pc growth in turnover to
€361m (£325m) in the first quarter of this year.

Its companies now work with 72 of the world’s top 100 advertisers, including
Tesco, Barclays, Peugeot, Santander and Reckitt Benckiser. Havas also came
up with Citroen’s dancing robots and Evian’s rollerbabies, as well as
advising David Cameron on last year’s general election campaign.

Jones, who in his younger days played first division rugby in France and was a
professional tennis coach, is also an enthusiastic advocate of corporate and
social responsibility.

He devised the Tck Tck Tck climate justice campaign with Kofi Annan that he
calls the “most successful cause campaign in history” and
co-founded One Young World, the Davos for under-25s, that’s holding its
summit in Zurich next month to give the next generation “a platform to
make positive change”.

Jones also has a book about social responsibility coming out in December.

“The last century was about non-governmental organisations having good
intentions but poor execution and business sometimes having poor intentions
but great execution,” he says. “This century will be all about
great intentions and great execution.

“Because of what social media has done in driving transparency and
empowering people, if you behave as a good corporation people will support
and reward you and if you don’t people will take you down.”

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