Interview with Mark Curtis - Author of Distraction - Page 2

I feel the need to take issue with the word "campaign". Right now I fear that much of the interest in mobile is marketing focused and that the default setting for marketing thinking is "campaign"—suggesting ads, ephemeral items that come and go, and above all a pointer to products but not the product or service itself.

We've been down this road before at the start of the web. Marketing money tends to gravitate towards new media because it can create stand out appeal, new stuff is fun, and often a very appealing audience can be found there.

But with the web the real value was created by building the products and services that suited the medium—in my case Yell.com, RAC's traffic news and route planning, many community plays. More famously Amazon, eBay, etc. These are not campaigns.

But to answer your question more directly: As so much of our work is innovation, it is hard to talk about it (clients, understandably, don't want us to.) However, we played an important role in the development of Lifeblog from Nokia, and it gave us a big lift to see a product we had worked on for so long a) see the light of day and b) be so well reviewed. We think it is a harbinger of things to come (but we're very biased).

Secondly, next month a new service comes to market called Flirtomatic which Fjord has played a key role in developing. I'm spending all my time on this, and it is very, very exciting.

That sounds interesting—let us know when you can tell us more.
If you had to summarise the key messages in your new book, Distraction: Being Human in a Digital Age, what would they be?

In 2000/2001, as the dot-com boom went pop, the doom-sayers emerged gleefully from the forests of doubt where they had been lurking impatiently. They had of course seen this coming all along, and now we could all gratefully forget about this digital nonsense and return to wearing suits. I remember reading an article about the new managing director of the London office of a web services company, where he actually said this. Hurray, the madness was over.

The perception that took hold, and to some extent is still at large, was that this "digital" thing was going away, had never had any real meaning, and that its impact was superficial at best.

This is a very dangerous fallacy.

Article Author: Russell Buckley

Visit Russell Buckley's author page — Russell Buckley's Blog