Olympic Winners and Losers – Empty Seats and Byzantine Ticketing

What a fantastic ad from Channel 4 advertising their showcasing of the Paralympic Games, beginning soon. Meanwhile, what of the Olympics? Though there have been tales of Tube and travel chaos, Zeitgeist has not personally experienced problems with public transport, either for commuting or for travelling to the Games themselves. And while our mayor may have been left dangling like a pinata the other day, he certainly seems not to have left London in the lurch in its preparedness for the Games.

LOCOG, however, have had to face two severe lines of questioning since the Games opened last Friday. The first, which became immediately apparent to anyone watching the first few days of events, was that thousands of seats were unoccupied, including for events LOCOG had deemed sold out. The fault, it seemed, lay mainly with the Olympic Family, who weren’t turning up to events. Seb Coe tried to shrug off the incident, saying it was normal for the few first events of an Olympic Games. It must be particularly galling for him though after the same thing happened in the 2008 Games in Beijing and he pledged to avoid such an occurrence in London. It is unfortunate then for all concerned then that, despite releasing more tickets, the problem is still not resolved as of today.

Moreover, this brings us to the second big problem. The selling of tickets. The whole balloting system originally set up was pretty arcane and inefficient to begin with. But now with tickets being released on a rolling basis throughout the day, the chaos is all the more apparent. Yesterday, eConsultancy published an excellent article with a blow-by-blow account of just why “the Olympic ticketing website is so bad”. Worst, for Zeitgeist, was firstly not having a mobile version / mobile-optimised site. Secondly it was not having anything informing users of when certain tickets became available. Thankfully, as in any well-functioning democratic society, where there is a market failure, substitute products or competitors will come in to correct the situation. Such was the case at the weekend, when the completely unofficial @2012TicketAlert account was launched on Twitter, which used automated tweets to alert followers when any Olympic tickets became available. It was a fantastic idea, and seemed much in keeping with the ‘hack’ trend we see nowadays, when companies like Microsoft and Transport for London open up their APIs for users to develop their own programs. Such examples clearly had not occurred to LOCOG though, and earlier this evening, after amassing over 8,000 followers, LOCOG denied the @2012TicketAlert account further access. As the administrator of the account, Adam, wrote,

“[I]t seems someone at LOCOG has taken exception to our idea (or the publicity it is getting) and instead of reaching out to us or addressing the lack of a notification system, they have simply blocked our access to their server. This means we are unable to check or post any new ticket alerts… we would point out that the alert was not against the Terms of Use of the http://www.london2012.com website, nor have these terms been updated to make it so.”

It seems a poor PR move on LOCOG’s part, and more importantly a poor operational move because it makes it that much harder again to check for newly available tickets. Taking into account the immense budget that must have been allocated to the ticketing website, the result is severely lacking, and many thousands of people have been put off the Olympic experience because of it. Ticketmaster, which has branding on the website, has also come under fire. These acts, as we predicted in an earlier article, may well be the undoing of those involved, for, once lost, a good reputation is hard to recover.

Technology & Geopolitics

You may have recently read news that Iran is quitening down a bit, hampered as it is with stringent economic sanctions. Or you have noticed things seemed to have quitened down merely by the absence of bombastic headlines foretelling a nuclear Iran.

Nukes are just one of myriad subjects that the power centre of Iran – namely, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad – seeks provocation over. Another is a dispute over three small islands that the UAE also lay claim to.

Mashable picked up the story from where this week’s The Economist left off, saying that Iran is taking umbrage to Google’s proclomation of said area as the Arabian, rather than the Persian, Gulf. The Deputy Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance Bahman Dorri said such “lies” would cause Google’s users to lose faith in the company.

Maps have always been an intensely political construct. And this isn’t the first time the maps service has run into trouble. Google probably wasn’t intending to step on any toes here, or stir any controversies in an area of the world where there is already enough ire to go around. What is curious is that until a few days ago the map apparently did indeed note the area as the Persian Gulf. Rather than dithering, Google should commit to one as soon as possible and give a good reason for doing so.

Marketing M2M Services

While the Mobile World Congress cools down – TechCrunch has some interesting thoughts – we wanted to touch on another tech issue, that of M2M.

Machine-to-machine communication is nothing especially new, but it is expected to see an explosion in use in the next 5-10 years. It is often referred to as ‘The Internet of Things’. Consultancy firm Analysys Mason recently held an interesting webinar on the subject, focussing on the B2B applications. The graph above is taken from one their webinar, and illustrates the expected rise in M2M device connections worldwide through 2020, according to device. Notably, the auto industry will see some expansion (think cars talking to each other to avoid colliding, staying in the right lane, basically driving themselves, a burgeoning trend recently picked up in The Economist).

Significant take-up will come from the home, with your dishwasher telling you when it’s time to put it on and your fridge telling you you’re out of milk and taking the trouble to order some more from Ocado without you lifting a finger. Zeitgeist asked one of the speakers, Steve Hilton, about how such devices could be promoted in the B2C world. One of the first things Mr. Hilton said needed to be done was to stop calling it M2M, instead communicating in a way that “isn’t all tech-y speech”. It would require focussing on the “fun”, “great” things you can do. Entertainment and security products using M2M will be of particular interest.

Currently though in the consumer sector this is a little-known technological movement that marketers will need to think carefully about how to communicate to their consumers, without making them worry about Skynet.

UPDATE (15/3/12): Not one to allay fears of any Skynet-like worries, CIA director David Petraeus last week commented on the rise of M2M devices and how much easier it will be to snoop on unsuspecting citizens, saying it would “change our notions of secrecy”. Wired elaborated,

“All those new online devices are a treasure trove of data if you’re a ‘person of interest’ to the spy community. Once upon a time, spies had to place a bug in your chandelier to hear your conversation. With the rise of the ‘smart home’, you’d be sending tagged, geolocated data that a spy agency can intercept in real time.”

The magazine gave the article the level-headed headline ‘We’ll spy on you through your dishwasher’.

Sustaining the Green Push for Brands

Zeitgeist was recently asked to write an article on sustainability trends for the coming year. The following is an altered excerpt of the original article…

There is a hotel in Italy, nestling in the heart of the Tuscan countryside. It literally blends in to the surrounding hills; they form part of the architecture of the building. The Klima Hotel is not just an aesthetic triumph, however, for the soil that forms the roof of also helps keep the building insulated, saving on both cost as well as emissions that would otherwise be generated from artificial heating.

Today, sustainability issues are more prevalent than ever, as organisations and corporations desperately try to set themselves apart from their peers, creating a manifesto for their brand. Often though these efforts can amount to little more than lip service, a practice in danger of becoming as saturated in use as the phrase ‘lip service’. So many brands are exploiting these issues that it no longer suffices merely to say x amount of the paper used in the office is being recycled. There has to be a point, a purpose to the policy that goes beyond cosmetic dalliance. It’s not just about having a solar panel here or a wind turbine there, though these are important things. It’s about recognising changing shopper habits; since the recession, people want to be able to keep items for longer, reuse them, pass them on or put them to a different use entirely.

Pepsi’s Refresh Project has been an earnest attempt at promoting issues of sustainability, and not just environmental. Several supermarkets are currently making an impressive effort in this area too… Sainsbury’s take their sustainability credentials out of store, with beehives to help sustain the bee population, and even treehouses for, well, who wouldn’t want a treehouse? The Sainsbury’s in Gloucester Quay has employed an impressive array of sustainable initiatives, one of the most interesting being a device that takes the kinetic energy of cars as they pass into the car park and uses it to help power the store. It’s technology like this that can be taken a step further; can these touch-sensitive pads be used to monitor where free spaces exist, to direct shoppers using digital signage? 7-Eleven in Japan are planning to use LED lighting and solar panels on 1,000 of their stores, but the key point is their desire for charging points for the Prius. It illustrates that sustainability is not just relegated to specific areas, it is a way of life, a lifestyle that encourages responsibility as well as innovation. So far we’re lacking the impetus for that innovation…

What constitutes the next step? One trend is that of upcycling, that of not just dumping your goods into a big box with a swirly arrow on it, rather actually stretching the efficiency of your products once their initial purpose has expired and reconstituting them for entirely different purposes. At a recent LS:N trends briefing, London designer James Gilpin’s latest work was mentioned; it involves using urine from diabetics (therefore with a heavy sugar content) and turning it into a premium, single malt ‘Gilpin Family Whisky’. In this instance, the material is such that it is already labeled as ‘waste’, but actually still has the potential to be something else. While shopper habits might preclude a desire to see old urine sitting on supermarket shelves any time in the near future, as consumers get more thrifty, such a philosophy would go down well in homeware.

There is more than enough room then for aesthetic beauty and sustainability to co-exist. Fashion brand Hermès recently launched a line of accessories created from upcycled materials. The copy for a brand of upcycled wooden watches is beautiful in of itself; “Completely absent of artificial and toxic materials, the WEWOOD Timepiece is as natural as your wrist. It respects your skin as you respect nature by choosing it… the perfect natural mate, whose story also becomes yours”. Selfridge’s recently unveiled its Project Ocean, “aiming to raise awareness of the dangers of over-fishing”, Contagious reports. One very whimsical example recently highlighted by PSFK was the creation of furniture from old parts of the fair on New York’s Coney Island. Not only is this sustainable production, but it also imbues these “new” items with an in-built past, a piece of history that people can continue to live with (and eat off of, too, I suppose). And we all know how things get better with age.