 Hi, I'm Noah. I'm in from New York. I started a company called Percolate about a year and a half ago and Percolate helps brands create content on the web. And so really my focus today is gonna be to talk about interest graphs as they relate to brands and sort of how I've thought about it throughout my career, which has been in and around the advertising and marketing space. So first I'm gonna start out with this story. I built a I built a little tool. It was sort of an experiment called brand tags. I built it about three years ago. And so what it was is it flashed up a random logo and then people typed in the first thing that popped into their head and it made a tag cloud out of the results. So we collected about 10 million tags and it became this sort of amazing look at brand perception and it was, you know, you could look across UPS or AT&T or Nike or any of the companies I think there were about 1200 companies on there and it just had this snapshot of who they really were and what people really felt about them, which if you work in marketing or have worked around brands, you will immediately spot that there's often a large delta between what people actually say and what the brand thinks they stand for. So the question I kept getting over and over again though when I when I built brand tags was what was the most interesting insight from the tool? What was the like thing you really learned about brands or about people and the answer was that there really wasn't one. I mean there were sort of funny things in the data like turns out a lot of people think of the Olympics when they see an Audi logo I think because the rings, which I don't know, but I don't think there's much to work off there And the real insight was actually just that brands are multifaceted, right? So no brand just had one giant word and everything else was small. All these brands had like, you know, five or six big sort of clusters, right? And they tended to map to these different areas that that people thought of the brand in so, you know, it could have been if it's a communications company, it could be about calling and it could be about technology It could be a couple of these other clusters. If you're a brand that idea is really really foreign to you, right? Sort of like the whole idea of how marketing works, how branding works since the days of like David Ogilvy has been about a unique selling proposition. What is your sort of one thing that you do that makes you different in the entire world? If you're a person though, that's just totally natural, right? Like if I asked any of you what you were into you'd probably give me four or five things and you wouldn't really worry about it. I'm into the Chicago Bears and I like food and I'm a big fan of the Internet and it doesn't really bother me to sort of weave throughout the day, consuming stuff like that, talking about all these different things. None of us like worry about whether we're staying on our unique selling proposition as people, right? We're sort of, we're cool with it. We're pretty comfortable with it. So sort of fast forward a little bit and I have a reason for telling that story, I swear. I kept getting this question, so I ran the strategy department for a digital agency called the Barbarian Group in New York and we've worked with like big brands, we worked with Red Bull and G and Kellogg's and sort of companies like that, like the biggest side. And I kept getting asked by like CMOs, what should I tweet about? And I thought that was a really funny question to get because like, I don't know about you guys but I don't wake up in the morning like sort of really nervous about what I'm going to tweet about that day. That's not really top of mind for me, I managed to find things to tweet about, it's never really a challenge. And in thinking about that, it really was a real question and this is sort of eventually why I started Percolate. But I kept coming back to this idea, a friend of mine who works at MIT wrote something probably five years ago just as Twitter was sort of coming up and he was talking about Twitter and he called Twitter exhaust data. And I just really liked that as a sort of thought for what we were looking at, that Twitter was just these sort of like digital breadcrumbs that we were all leaving behind us in our lives, right? None of no single tweet is really that meaningful, it mostly just tells people that you're alive. People call it fatic communication as well, it's like, you know, when we start a conversation and I say how are you doing and you're like, oh, I'm good, how are you doing? And none of it means anything, right? It's just the sort of lead up to the real conversation. But it lets us know that we both exist and we're both here together and having the conversation. So, you know, thinking about social as exhaust data, I kept sort of coming back to, in the early days of Twitter, I don't know if you remember, but everybody was trying to figure out what Twitter was, right? And there were lots of articles about how Twitter was like a bunch of people talking about what they had for breakfast. And the folks at Twitter fought it, like they had their sort of communications people out there when they had communications people fighting, fighting that it was a much more serious platform than that. And now we all buy it, right? Like it's, we all believe, I think, that it has a use beyond just what we had for breakfast. But in thinking about it, that's sort of all it is, right? Like Twitter is actually what we had for breakfast. It's just, instead of talking about food, it's what we're consuming in our lives. So, Twitter is what I ate for breakfast on TheNewYorkTimes.com and it's what I had for lunch on YouTube and what side I had for dinner on The Huffington Post and sorry for using American examples of websites. I should have sort of done some more Swedish research. But you get the point, right? It's what we're consuming on a daily basis. This is what we're sharing, something like 50 or 60% of tweets have a link in them. So, all we're doing is we're taking this communication, we're taking what we consume and we're turning it into new communication, which of course isn't anything new at all. We've always done this. It's always been when people talk about the water cooler at work and people sort of standing around and talking about what was on television the night before or who won in the football match, whatever it is, that's all just taking whatever we've been consuming and turning it into new communication, into new content. For us, that's easy, right? Like I was saying before, we all go out, we have our interests, we pay attention to them. I'm sure you guys all have five websites that you can name off the top of your head that you visit on a near daily basis. You check Twitter, you check Facebook, whatever you check, right? You consume things. We all consume things all the time. We have eyes, we have ears, we listen. The weather is the thing we all talk about most and it's literally like we feel it. We feel how warm it is or how cold it is or if it's raining and then we talk about it. We're just consuming constantly and brands don't ever. This, I think, came back to that big challenge with that question of what should I tweet about? How can you tweet if you don't ever consume? And again, when we consume, we consume off this interest graph that we've built. So we pay attention to the people we follow on Twitter, the websites we read, the newspapers and magazines we buy, the TV shows we watch, this is all sort of the interest that we have. And brands are just sort of this blank slate. Any of you have worked with brands? If you think about what brands consume, they consume people talking about the brand, right? They consume like when one of you mentions that the person next to you on the airplane smells on Twitter. That's what the brand pays attention to and then they say, sorry, and they give you a coupon. So what do they do, right? How do they fix this? How do they get more comfortable? Because big sort of challenge that we're seeing for brands right now that I've been seeing for brands over the last five years is shift to social. And when you get down to the sort of brass tacks on what the shift to social means, it's really a shift from this world where brands used to create communication messages in 21 week cycles, right? Like the sort of typical television commercial has a 21 week cycle from start to finish. And then they run it for like three months. 21 weeks between tweets is not a sustainable model for any of us, right? And it's clearly not a sustainable model for brands. And same with Facebook, there's too many people there. It's too important of a platform for them. They need to just completely sort of rework the way they communicate. And to rework the way they communicate, they need to be able to do it in real time. And to do it in real time, they need to be able to consume in real time. So it's just a big sort of shift in the way they think. So to pause it again for a second, I know I'm sort of like jumping around in my pauses. But I want to sort of talk about content, because I think this has helped me think about how this all works. This is a quote from a friend of mine who used to work at Twitter, actually used to run the media department there. And he just wrote about this on his blog. And he talked about this idea of stock and flow. So these were the metaphors he was using for the web. And this is how he described flow. So flow is the feed. It's the posts and the tweets. It's the stream of daily and subdaily updates that remind people you exist, right? Flow is the exhaust data. Stock, on the other hand, is the durable assets, right? So stock is what media companies are used to producing. It's content that's going to mean something in a month, in a year. Television commercial is a piece of stock content. A movie is a piece of stock content. Anything that has, it's less ephemeral, right? It's going to mean something down the line. And ultimately, the success happens when you combine those two things. But the big challenge for brands is really in that first, because they're set up to work like this. So when you think about, again, any of you have worked with brands, if you really think about sort of how a brand operates, how a brand creates content, again, thinking about stock content, the sort of classic model, creating a television commercial, a print ad, something, even a website, a microsite. This is what they do, right? They have an agency. The agency consumes culture. I used to run a strategy department, so this was literally my job, right? If you think about what a strategist does a planner within an agency, their job is to consume the world to sort of boil it down. They have their insights and their brief, and they connect it to the brand. So the brand has all these things. When a brand, if you ask a brand what they're about, they're going to tell you all these externalities that they have, right? So they're about this is how they look, this is how they talk, this is how they act, they're very, very specific. They combine those two things together, right? So they take these sort of insights from culture they've consumed, they combine it with what the brand stands for, looks like, acts like, and they make a new piece of communication. That process works fine, except it's really slow. So again, if you're thinking about how culture is consumed, the joke here is if you think about the average male-facing brand, especially if you think about a brand, do you guys have Axe body spray here? Yeah, so think about Axe body spray, right? Axe body spray is literally working off an insight that is evolutionary. It's dudes like boobs. And so that's still where they're working from. They haven't gotten past that. It's a very sort of slow-moving process, just it doesn't work when you need to go into sort of creating content in real time, creating content every 20 minutes. And the only way to do that is to start to build out the interest graph for the brand to start to actually think about, okay, a brand is made up of more than just that front side, right? It's made up of more than just, here are the sort of five ways we represented ourselves. Here's our tagline, here's our color set. It's actually made up of this other half of the circle, which is about what do we consume in the world? What do we pay attention to as a brand? What are the things and the topics and the people that we actually listen to that inform what we talk about? Because again, if you think about how all of us do it, that's it. I mean, we like to think we have very original thoughts, but at the end of the day, like we sort of combine all these different things that we're paying attention to when we make it into something new and unique and it would be really hard for any of us to talk about anything if none of us had ever read a book or watched television or walked outside. So that's sort of what I just said. So I was just going to leave you with just sort of three things that I was trying to sort of finish this off in a way that would actually make it slightly actionable for any of you working with brands or for any of you who have companies that are sort of thinking in this space, thinking about how do you create communication in real time? How do you build a brand in the age where social is sort of how you build a brand? And these are things that I talk to our clients about and when we're bringing clients on, this is a process that we take them through. So the first one's really obvious, right? Like what are the topic areas? And I spelled the wrong. So what are the key topic areas? What are the areas that the brand wants to explore? What are the areas? If the brand was a person, what would they want to talk about? So where do they want to be a leader? Where do they want people to listen to them? The big thing about social is that at the end of the day, brands are just like people on these platforms. They don't get special spots, right? Brands used to get a 728x90 banner at the top of the page that differentiated them from the content. On Twitter, you just follow the brand or you follow your friend and then the two tweets show up in line and you decide which one you're going to pay attention to. At the end of the day, the brands are competing with your friends for your attention and so they've got to get a lot better at figuring out how to communicate. So what are those topic areas that you want to explore as a brand? What are those topic areas you want to be a leader in? What are those topic areas you want to be interesting in? The second one, we talk about mirror versus magnet at Percolate. And so the idea there is sort of, it's simple, like the first thing brands thought about when they saw social, when they saw Twitter was that it made it really easy for them to go out and look at all the people that were paying attention to them and then just reflect back exactly what they were talking about. That that would be the thing that would make them interesting. That if they sounded just like me, that I would sort of appreciate that. The problem is it doesn't work, right? Like you can't, you're already two hours behind, you don't sound like me, you sound like a two-hour-old version of me. And classically, that's just not how brands are built. Like brands are built in an aspirational manner. What you do is you target the person the consumer wants to be, not the person that they are, because they're buying to become someone. So sort of slightly theoretical marketing, but it's generally how it works. It's very much how it works in fashion where you'll never see the person in the ad who is actually going to buy the clothes. So magnet is the idea of actually sort of being something that is going to attract their attention, right? So sort of mirror is down here where your audience is currently. Magnet is up here where you want to bring your audience to. And when you made communications in traditional media, you had to sort of set the bar a little lower, right? You wanted to be a magnet, you wanted to be aspirational, but you didn't really have a lot of room to wiggle because once something lives in the world, once a television commercial is out, you can't change it. And so what makes social exciting is you can set this magnet bar up high, and then you can actually just adapt it in real time, right? You can see, okay, well, it turns out that maybe we said we were a little too aspirational and people are just not there. And so we're going to sort of move it down. And it turns out that we're actually our sort of three-quarter spot is a more reasonable way for us to communicate. It's a better place for us to be. It matches what we want to be as a brand with sort of where our audience seems to engage and seems to be most interested. And then the last one is just like a simple question. We ask brands, we usually finish the session we do with them with this question. Some of them can't answer it. Some of them can't, but basically what we ask is, like, if you could take a magazine or a website and you could just rip the name off. And it would be yours. It would become brandex.com. What would it be? And, you know, I'd say maybe one out of three brands, one out of four brands actually has a very, very specific answer to this question. We work with a beer brand, and they immediately said GQ. I was like, that was it. They wanted it to be like GQ. And if you have an answer to that, it just is sort of interesting because it informs how you build out that interest graph in just a much easier way, right? Like, if your answer to that question is GQ, then clearly you're going to sort of follow Ben's lifestyle, clothing, technology, gadgets, stuff, tips on how to address things. You know, I mean, there's a very sort of specific set of interests that you can define if you're associated with a, if you think of yourself as a publisher like that. So, hopefully those are relatively useful in sort of thinking about this stuff, and hopefully that was relatively interesting. Thank you.