Insight show slides final june 2011 text

‘Semiotics in the age of digital’ Thursday 30th June, 2011, 2pm 1

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011 CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD. TABLE OF CONTENTS 01. WHAT IS SEMIOTICS? 02. SEMIOTICS & WEB 1.0 03. SEMIOTICS & WEB 2.0 04. SEMIOTICS & WEB 3.0 05. CONCLUSIONS 2

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011 CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD. Semiotics is the study of commercial signs… and the meanings they convey within culture Semiotics interprets the implicit messages that are embedded in graphic design, advertising, logos etc 4

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011 CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD. But sometimes, there are complex such as paintings, packaging or ads Complex texts communicate multiple meanings through the use of colour and typography and other elements 5

CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD. PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011 Semiotics and qualitative research come from separate traditions using different techniques QUALITATIVE RESEARCH SEMIOTICS RESEARCH PSYCHOLOGY CRITICAL THEORY CONSUMER GROUPS CLOSE READINGS INSTINCTS AND FEELINGS DECODING PACKS, ADS REPORTED OPINION INTERPRETATIVE PRACTICE CATEGORY MICROCOSM CULTURAL MACROCOSM Semiotics is particularly useful upstream in any consumer insight programme in order to provide foundational category knowledge 6

CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD. PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011 Commercial semiotics is the study of the meaning management in brands and design A STRONGER GRASP OF YOUR CATEGORY AND MARKETPLACE BREAKTHROUGH INSIGHTS FOR LONG-STANDING QUANDARIES Understanding what consumers won’t tell you – gaining a sense of how categories are structured symbolically. This helps brand owners obtain ground rules for creative strategy that can be leveraged throughout their brand communications. Semiotics invariably gets to the nub of the matter when research reports often repeat the same outcomes. Semiotics reframes business problems by placing them in a cultural macrocosm. It brings to light influences that challenge assumptions THE ‘EDGE’ IN HIGHLY CROWDED HIGHLY COMPETITIVE CATEGORIES ADVICE ON HOW TO SCALE BRANDS ACROSS BORDERS Semiotics enquires into how cultural difference alters customer interpretation of branded material – working equally confidently across brands and cultures. Semiotics helps managers to flex ideas globally and how to tailor them optimally. Semiotics provides extra provocation and the injection of magic that supplements qualitative research findings, providing critical revelations that lead to fruitful category disruption. In a competitive world semiotics is a critical advantage. 7

CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD. PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011 One key semiotic principle is that of DENOTATION and CONNOTATION DENOTATION 1st layer, obvious meaning Literal and informational CONNOTATION 2nd layer, obvious meaning Suggestive and metaphorical At the level of DENOTATION a rose is a flower but at the level of CONNOTATION it could signify love, England or left centre politics 8

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011 CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD. Skoda cake ad struck a chord was a successful ad, but what did it signify? This ad fell into the grouping of REGRESSION codes that signify a yearning to return drivers to a state of innocence and to return the fun to motoring 9

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011 CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD. This makes more sense when you consider what happening to the car industry: overcapacity, government regulatory and tax pressure, hyper competition, high buyer bargaining power, pressure on margins, peak oil & fuel system uncertainty The power of the car to move us is dwindling: status of the car in society is waning. These endemic concerns have percolated into UK advertising 10

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011 CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD. ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM codes are an attempt to transform the idea of freedom from previous portrayal of acceleration and fun handling road, now looking increasingly unrealistic into the twitchy impulses of modern art. These semiotic codes all signify the desire to jump start conventional cars into a new paradigm, one which the industry is desperate to reach 11

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011 CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD. Semiotics views brands as consumable signs and the age of digital has allowed these signs to de-materialize and to become more diffuse MIT Media Labs have created a modular logo involving 3 intersecting spotlights to represent diverse employees a dynamic media environment - An extreme example as it boasts 40,000 permutations and 12 colours 13

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011 CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD. The two fundamental properties of brands online are immersion and inter-textuality – brands can plunge users into their worlds in a way that fundamentally changes the conventional idea of the sign and sign user More immersive browsers such ROME will create scenarios where the website is set to become more like virtual worlds such as Second Life where avatars wander through various spatial domains. 14

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011 CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD. For example, English language news channels that compete in a global market seeking to build their brands by breaking news stories, transmitting their editorial authority through graphics and offering multi platform access CCTV – red lucky colour in PRC France 24 – blue = French intellect NHK – diffuse and Japanese Black – Russian depth, mystery What is apparent is the extent to which they superficially resemble BBC and CNN whilst retaining their national character through livery etc 15

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011 CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD. RT is the news brands that best demonstrates the power of immersion and of inter-textuality by using a grey black penumbrous murkiness in line with its positioning of “Question More” Russia Today’s successful media strategy, with millions of page views, is a sign of an emerging multi-polar world. It is interesting how channels outer signs of globalized news whilst promoting their own agendas 16

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011 CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD. Semiotics has a number of useful potential applications when engaging with the social media space SOCIAL CONTENT INTERPRETATION CO-CREATION SORTING UNDERSTANDING DIGITAL MEMES A number of pilot projects are in progress in each of these areas but cannot be discussed due to confidentiality limitations 18

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011 CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD. The semantic web is the original vision of Tim Berners Lee who came up with the protocol for the internet in 1989 The semantic web works via a tagging protocol called RDF which allows the underlying structure or meaning of data to be readable by machines 20

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011 CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD. A map of the progression of the internet by Nova Spivak.Xaxis denotes growing connectivity, and y-axis increasing knowledge. According to many, if Web 1.0 was about linking pages, Web 2.0 has been about linking people and Web 3.0 will be about linking data 21

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011 CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD. The way that all this data is linked together allows logical inferences to be made. For example, if Paul works for Frank and Frank works for Judy then the machine knows that Paul works for Judy and a similar principle can be applied to a geographical hierarchy too JUDY JUDY FRANK PAUL PAUL This allows querying machines on the web to reason rather than just by keyword matching. If it knows that Arial is a non-serifedfont and that the word ‘noir’ is a film genre not just a colour, this has major implications 22

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011 CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD. The way that all this data is linked together allows logical inferences to be made. For example, if Paul works for Frank and Frank works The ability to detect patterns across vast swathes of dispersed data could be very exciting and potentially revolutionary for semiotics. I believe that semantic web&semiotics can be mutually enriching. The semantic web helps semiotics to happen on a mass scale by recruiting semiotic technicians and by pulling data from the web. creating a more efficient, streamlined and standardized process. 23

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011 CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD. At the moment, the semiotics process is 100% human operated: interpretation happens through solo working with occasional data mergers between analysts to whom tasks have been parceled out DATA MERGER 3. OBSERVATION & INTERPRETATION 2. OBSERVATION & INTERPRETATION 1. OBSERVATION & INTERPRETATION This process puts a big strain on individual human brain power and collating texts, the semantic web could radically configure this process 24

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011 CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD. The process would work as shown below, firstly tagging the data, then sorting through it by inferencing engines and finally analysis. Semiotic analysis findings could be shared over a wiki and if complex moving imagery and multimedia, via using multi modal dashboards 25

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011 CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD. Agreat example of a precursor to this is happening right now. BBC New Paintings site is an initiative allowing open source tagging of > 60,000 national paintings in order to make them more searchable This has been enthusiastically taken up by a community of art lovers from around the UK who are zealously placing tags on multiple items 26

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011 CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD. As more people add tags, more pinpoint and accurate tagging supersedes rougher tags and incorrect tags are weeded out So for example, the words ‘striations’ or ‘tessellations’ are more precisedescriptors than diagonals or oblongs for defining this painting and help it link it more closely to other works, for example Islamic decorative art. 27

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011 CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD. As more people add tags, more pinpoint and accurate tagging In the case of new mass scale semiotics a folksonomy of more advanced taggers could be formed for cleaning up data received from basic taggers to ‘tidy up’ and cull anomalous interpretations. Folksonomyis a combination of the words folks and taxonomy and is a socially propagated, collaboratively generated, open ended user driven categorization. These taggers would also devise apposite ontologies. 28

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011 CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD. So, for example if a beer client wants to create a new brand of international beer designed to work and they want to use a semiotic analysis to generate a graphic identity based on a mythical animal Beer Brands Animal Characters If they needed to firstly find out which brands currently used animals, this would involve commissioning local analyststo audit beer and spirits brands in their marketplaceand then look at brands with animal icons 29

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011 CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD. With the new system, once a critical mass of data has been tagged and annotated it would enable advanced querying of a dispersed database of beer labels and animal iconography worldwide Beer Brands Animal Icons This helps bounded rationality and would not only dredge up harder more niche, obscure brands (e.g. micro breweries) it would also make gathering texts much faster and more thorough and bring new information to light 30

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011 CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD. At the Sem Tech conference this year, a paper by a Professor of Radiology at Stanford University showed how visual pattern recognition of shapes and semantics helps in diagnosis of tumors through matching fresh cases to globally archived data on lesions. This got me thinking about how this could be applied to the world of branded and commercial imagery on the internet through pixel sensitive machine learning and could be combined with tag folksonomy cited above 31

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011 CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD. One possible benefit of this process would be a commonly agreed sort of protocol for semiotic investment in a brand. This would be enabled through real time monitoring of content published in RDF linked data by every brand. This helps bounded rationality and would not only dredge up harder more Analogous to Interbrand’sBrand index, an equivalent Symbolic Brand Index would measure connotations identified with each brand, feeding in metrics of coherence, consistency and discounting negative associations 32

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011 CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD. As an example of how semiotics is changing, in 2010 I founded the Semiotic Thinking Group on Linked In it is now close to 600 members – an excellent forum for debate on all topics for finding overseas partners to getting ideas. I recently crowd-sourced views for a conference paper and this sort of dispersed network could provide a valid prototype for both the tagging folksonomies and the semiotics wikis that we discussed devising above 34

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011 CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD. IMPLICATIONS OF THIS PRESENTATION FOR INSIGHT PROFESSIONALS ,[object Object]

Semiotics is relevant not only to traditional forms of media such as TV advertising, packaging and magazine advertising but is also applicable to online forms and can bring insight to how brands are communicating in that arena too through looking at brand’s use of immersion & inter-textuality

Insight show slides final june 2011 text

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