There was an interesting piece at the end of last month on DiGiDay calling out the need to rethink advertising creativity in the era of APIs. We’ve been entrenching ourselves in APIs and datasets as a means to express tangible creativity ourselves here at Media Logic both in our business development process (as with our Retail Social Juice Index) and through work for our clients. Perhaps one of the most deft examples of information mash-ups and digital data connections I’ve seen to date comes from two programmers drinking beer in New York City and Los Angeles (Santa Monica to be exact).
Here’s a brief history: Untappd is a mobile application (though you can access the service via desktop, too). Launched in October 2010, it’s a means to “socially share and explore the world of beer.” Untappd got creative by being a mash-up of the primary functionality of Facebook (connecting with friends), Twitter (sharing quick short form status updates) and Foursquare (checking into both various beers and locations). The service began as a mobile-first designed website, as opposed to the native applications that now exist for Android and iOS, but all along its premise has been essentially the same until last month. That’s when Untappd made the clever leap from consumer fun house for beer drinking friends and acquaintances to a connection engine between breweries and customers.
For well over a year, people shared their beer of the moment, expressed approval or disapproval in short reviews, and amassed badges to celebrate their personal journeys through the beer world. That’s great! But what does this have to do with marketing and media you say? Well, all that sharing, commenting and discovering was creating a rich community … and lots and lots of data.
Generally, the problem with data is how it can become relevant and useful on more than one level. It is helpful for me to get suggestions and recommendations on beer from friends near and far, but that is only one piece of the puzzle. What if the actual businesses behind that beer could see that data flow and understand what is really moving among their products and what is not? What if they could react in real time or address issues they find a consumer is experiencing? What if they could do this without the intermediary of Facebook, Twitter or websites? That is the essence of Untappd for Business.
Untappd for Business becomes the digital customer management platform/interface to every brewery on the planet. It only became logical over time, after enthusiasts helped create the database, for each brewery to have the opportunity to claim, edit and manage entire portfolios of products; next, to see and analyze information on how business is trending based on locations, products and even seasonality; and finally, to have the ability to interact very directly on a one-to-one basis with each consumer, versus one to many (as with traditional advertising). The current business side of things at Untappd is just the tip of the iceberg for them and other retailers/industries who should be taking note.
I predict that these types of vertical digital social platforms are going to be more critical than the all-encompassing networks like Facebook, Twitter and the aspiring Google+. Why? Because over time I believe we will find people more interested in basic core interests as opposed to everything on the planet. The latter is mentally fatiguing to keep up with, and the algorithm mentality of sorting that out is designed more so on what the huge platform wants versus what the individual user seeks. There was an interesting POV that Gary Vaynerchuk gave in similar regard when discussing PATH and Dunbar’s Number. You should check out those links to understand both PATH and Dunbar if you are not familiar, but the gist of it is that our connections must be finite for us to really make sense of them.
All of this got me thinking: what other prime categories have the scale, passion and built-in data for the kind of opportunity Untappd developed? GetGlue comes to mind as a model for personal entertainment, and Spotify, more specifically for music, is heading in a similar direction. What other areas of business do you see as ripe for this type of creative business-to-consumer connection?