Ten Years of

the Web & Us

On their 10th Birthday, Numiko cover ten years of the web
and its effects on brands, society and the media

Over these ten years we’ve grown from working in a humble This is partly self-promotion, but mostly we’re just genuinely
bedroom to become one of England’s premier digital agencies. interested in this kind of stuff. We love thinking about it and
And over those same ten years the web has quietly slipped we love talking about it, so if you’ve found this interesting or
into every part of our lives, from socialising to entertainment illuminating, or you have an opinion you’d like to share, get
to government. The days of waggling your cursor round the in touch – we’d love to hear from you. At the bottom of each
screen while you wait for emails to trickle down your 56k article is a link to a page where you can join the discussion.
phone line are long gone; these days we’re more likely to be
tutting about a few seconds’ wait for a whole film to download And, as this is the year of 3D we’ve even upgraded our web-
so we can watch it on a phone, on a bus, on the way to work. site. You’ll find we’ve included some special glasses for you, so
why not head over to numiko.com/3D and have a look?
The web has become so woven into our lives that we al-
most don’t notice it any more. That’s why our tenth birth- Welcome to the future!
day seems like a good opportunity to stop and have a
look around. So we’ve put down some thoughts on how
things were, how they are now, and how they might be
in the future - and we thought we’d share them with you.

Numiko, 46 The Calls, Leeds, LS2 7EY | (+44)113 202 1400 | hi@numiko.com | www.numiko.com
2
From Eyeballs
to Engagement
How the information age has made branding smart
Last year was a long time coming. In 2009,
for the first time, online advertising spending
outgrew television advertising. For years now,
online spending has been growing hugely –
bar a small dip in growth during the worst of
the recession last year – while spending in tra-
ditional media has been in constant decline.
What’s going on?
Traditional interruption advertising means
deciding how to extol the virtues of your prod-
uct and putting that message in front of your
potential customers, wherever those custom-
ers are most likely to stop what they’re doing
and look at your ad. Whether it’s on television,
in a newspaper or on a billboard at the side
of a road, the purpose of these ads is to jump
in front of people and shout “HEY!” – which
leaves you with three problems.
The first is that you have no way of actually
knowing if anyone is looking at your adverts,
let alone paying them any attention and ulti-
mately making a purchase.
The second is that the advertising mar-
ket has long reached saturation. Modern
consumers are increasingly clever at avoiding,
or just plain ignoring, adverts that disrupt their
lives. Advertising clutter has desensitised con-
sumers so much that the average person has
trouble remembering more than two or three of
the thousands of messages we’re bombarded
with every day.
The third is that it’s hard to effectively target
the right people at the right time. Conven-
tional wisdom says that if you target the right
demographic then you can sell more. So, the
proliferation of niche channels, platforms and
magazines should be an advertiser’s dream –
but modern advertising says that effectiveness
is about targeting your audience not by who
they are, but by what they’re doing, and this is
where the web wins.
That’s why online advertising is doing so well.
When you’re advertising on the web you can
target specific social groups down to the in-
dividual, wherever and whenever you want.
Search marketing means that you can adver-
tise right at the point consumers are looking
for a product. Services like Google’s Double-
Click display advertising based on interests
and browsing history, ideally showing the right
advertising at the right time. Advertisers can
track who’s looking at their adverts, from the
moment the page loads to the last click at the
checkout. This accountability sounds great to
brands because it means they can accurately
and cost-effectively track the relationship be-
tween advertising investment and return.
Unfortunately, the embarrassing result of
all those carefully tracked clicks is that the
average click-through rate for online ads and
banners is less than 0.2%. And that’s the num-
ber of people who spare one measly click – only
a small percentage of even those users will ac-
tually go on to make a purchase. So what does
this mean for online marketing?
Well: the web has democratised advertising,
branding and information to a huge extent.
Advertisers used to be able to manage percep-
tion of their brands and products much more

tightly; now there are thousands of citizen
journalists, reviewers and bloggers all shar-
ing their opinions on products and compa-
nies, not to mention great swathes of sites that
specialise in comparisons, reviews and price-
checking. When you’re buying, for example,
a new television, it’s simple to read through
reviews and recommendations online then
compare the prices of shops and suppliers, all
with just a couple of clicks.
So does this mean that the only things that
sell are the best products, from the cheap-
est suppliers? No, obviously – but the shift in
ownership of information is a powerful thing.
Products, and the brands behind them, are
under huge pressure to do what they say and
live up to their own marketing hype. Flaws in
products are quickly spotted, dissected and
talked about; brands are watched, discussed,
reviewed and reported on.
A recent example is the iPhone 4’s reception
problem: before the internet, unless you knew
someone who was left-handed and held their
phone a particular way, then you’d probably
never have known there was anything wrong.
But the internet has enabled the rapid spread
of users’ stories and experiences, which quick-
ly turned into a big story that has not only
put people off the product, but also damaged
Apple’s brand.
Against this background of exhaustive reviews
and information it can seem like advertising
and branding are evolutionary dead-ends. It’s
true, having a good product is critical – but in
a saturated market, branding is more impor-
tant than ever. The flip side of the huge variety
of reviews and opinions on offer is the danger
of information overload. Successful branding
creates an emotional, sometimes almost irra-
tional connection between brand and audi-
ence that consumers use as shortcuts to navi-
gate the sea of information. But the question
3
is: how best to build a brand amid the clutter?
Forward-thinking brands have turned towards
new aims: engagement, and democratisation
of their own brands. Engagement doesn’t
just mean getting customers to engage with
a brand – it means brands actively engaging
with their audience, moving away from one-
sided interruption advertising towards a more
conversational approach that offers tangible
benefits to the potential customer. Engage-
ment advertising should aim to do something
positive for the audience, something useful,
or funny, or interesting, that has a value other
than promotional.
For example: some brands, like McDonald’s,
have stepped into the arena to tackle and open-
ly discuss negative publicity – their Make Up
Your Own Mind site attempts to answer com-
ments like “I have read in a newspaper that
your McNuggets only consist of fat and chick-
en penis” with a straight face. Brands ranging
from giants like HSBC to local bakers in Lon-
don have benefited from engaging with their
customers in different ways; HSBC restored
interest-free graduate accounts in response to
a Facebook campaign, and Poke’s BakerTweet
notifies Shoreditch’s hungry Twitterati when-
ever a fresh batch of cakes leaves the oven.
One thing’s for sure: branding and advertising
are here to stay, but the same seas of informa-
tion that make strong, effective branding more
essential than ever can also serve to highlight
the gap between brand and reality – and it’s
this dissonance that can do the greatest dam-
age. Brands now share the responsibility for
the creation of their brand with the wider web,
and how they engage with their audiences –
with fairness and generosity, or more of the
same old one-sided – will determine who suc-
ceeds and who fails in this new landscape.
www.numiko.com/blog/newspaper/engage
4
Does Speed Make
Us More Creative?
Worry not - this isn’t some experiment in gonzo web
design on amphetamines!
When we founded Numiko in 2000, the web
was on the cusp of something huge. Back
then, the standard Internet connection was
a 56k modem that bleeped and spluttered its
way along the information superhighway like
an asthmatic robot. Pages loaded slowly and
anything like video, animation, sound – basi-
cally, anything that wasn’t small pictures and
text – took literally tens of minutes to load. As
a result of this, the web was mostly static pages
of text and images.
However, BT were about to roll out some-
thing new and exciting: broadband technol-
ogy was about to give us speeds of up to 512k!
That was 15 times faster than what we had,
and that huge increase enabled a lot of things
to happen.
As a collection of animators, programmers,
sound designers and games designers who
liked to make lovely things for computers,
we were excited by this new possibility for
the web to do the types of things we had
previously needed to use CD-ROMs for. New
tools such as Macromedia’s Flash plugin
allowed us to build sites that were much
more than pages with pictures and text. We
could create games, interactive experienc-
es with animation and interactive sites that
contained ‘rich media’.
It started a paradigm shift of creativity on the
web and enabled people from an interactive
art background to move away from physical
installations. Now their work was accessible to
anyone with an Internet connection. People
like Hi-Res launched projects like soulbath.
com which were playful pieces of interactivity,
a million miles away from the static text and
picture sites that had gone before them.
So bandwidth gave us the opportunity to do
things that literally had not been done before.
But we were still limited by a split: some peo-
ple had fast connections, others had slow con-
nections – and the gap was huge.
A tiny, grainy, 30 second video on a 56k mo-
dem would take a yawn inducing two-and-a-
half minutes. On a broadband connection the
same video would take just 16 seconds. Clients
often wanted two versions, a high-bandwidth
site and low-bandwidth site. An experience
apartheid was exposed: the haves and the have
nots. Producing dual versions of any site effec-
tively doubled the cost and put most people off
doing anything that pushed the creative limits.
As available domestic speeds now average just
over 5Mb, we no longer have to worry too
much about download times. The UK Gov-
ernment now views high speed connections as
a right, so surely we have some amazing op-
portunities to yet again raise the creative bar?
Speed increases are now evolutionary rather
than the revolutionary. Speeds increase stead-
ily, with a 25% average speed increase from
last year. The jump from the fastest dial-up to
standard broadband was a whopping 900%
speed increase in one move. That’s like go-
ing from a standard connection now to some-
thing nearer to 70Mb, which would allow an
entire feature film to be downloaded in little
over a minute. But in response to these evolu-
tionary speed increases, it seems creativity is
evolutionary now too. Current trends are for
more of what we’ve already seen, just bigger
and faster. I wonder if we’ll have to wait for the
next big jump in speed to see the next big jump
in creativity?
www.numiko.com/blog/newspaper/speed
5
6
The Invisible
Party
Why Facebook is about so much more than friends
It’s strange that as a technology gets
really important, we tend not to notice it
any more. I remember in the late ‘90s ask-
ing friends if they ‘had the internet’. What
people talk about now is, “Do you have
Facebook on your phone?”. As delivery
channels become more ubiquitous they
slip into the invisibility cloak of infrastruc-
ture. Rewind a hundred and fifty years
and you can imagine Victorians asking
each other if they had electricity. Now, the
novelty things that people talk about are
the applications within that infrastructure.
The other night whilst I was sitting in the
garden I overheard my neighbours dis-
cussing Facebook privacy settings – and
yes, the irony of being earwigged talking
about privacy settings did occur to me.
The difference here is that this was a group
of retired people in their sixties. When web
stuff makes it within that demographic,
it’s getting toward ubiquity.
Facebook recently registered its 500 mil-
lionth user. The bar of banality clicks up a
notch, and now their platform is just that:
a thing that you do stuff on. As more peo-
ple sign up it becomes more ubiquitous
until it’s no longer a thing in itself, but just
another part of the internet’s plumbing.
Social connections like those enabled by
Facebook are becoming part of the fabric
of the web. And as the web becomes more
social it becomes less like a library, where
you go to retrieve things, and more like
a party, where people share information
and introduce people to each other. This
fundamentally changes not only our rela-
tionship with the web, but ultimately how
the web itself is actually organised.
Increasing numbers of sites are reporting
that more people are finding their content
not through running a search in Google,
but by having it recommended to them by
their friends on Facebook. While worrying
for Google, there’s something very inter-
esting in this because it marks a distinct
change in how we find new information.
There’s an obvious drawback with search
in that it’s difficult to find things you don’t
already know about. The chances of find-
ing something serendipitously amongst
the billions of websites is unlikely. No mat-
ter how good Google’s search technology
is, at the end of the day it’s still a computer
and it can be slightly too fastidious for its
own good.
When the web’s information can be over-
laid with a social layer of people who
can interpret, recommend, share and col-
laborate, surely this is a game changer?
Information and services will be linked
not just by context but also by their social
significance.
Pretty soon, the recipe site you use to pre-
pare for your dinner party will not only tell
you about your guests’ allergies - but also
lets you know that they all really love fish
curry! Or the gig guide site you’re using
to research live music and buy tickets will
show you who of your friends have been
listening to the band, buying their music
and going to their gigs already. Soon, we’ll
take this social layer for granted - we won’t
be able to imagine how we lived with flat,
vanilla content, unmediated by the touch
of our friends and family.
www.numiko.com/blog/newspaper/party
 7

Chumsbook - An installation at Temple Works, produced by Numiko.

As people entered the room they filled out a profile and added a photo of themselves. Each profile was
stuck to the wall. As the night went on people used strings of wool to represent connections to the peo-
ple they knew. Friend requests, using Post-it notes, allowed people to connect with people they didn’t
know but thought were interesting. The result was a tactile web of connections across the room – and
some new friendships!
8
ERROR:
the brand is not
responding.
Why great user experience is an essential part of
online branding
It’s annoying to have to say this, but most
websites are a bit rubbish. They can be frus-
trating in so many ways, and often leave you
wondering how and why did this site launch?
If you ask someone what website they used
recently where they came away thinking “that
was easy” then you’re probably in for a long
pause in the conversation.
Whilst brands often spend lots of money on
creating brand bibles, guidelines and tone of
voice, these rarely translate to the web. Yes, the
logo is in the right place and things are the
right colour, but when something is interac-
tive, it immediately develops an amoeba-like
‘personality’. It’s at this point that the gulf be-
tween traditional brand thinking and interac-
tivity becomes apparent.
Think about the real world equivalent of a
common annoyance on the web: filling in a
form. This takes a long time, then suddenly be-
tween steps one and twelve something happens.
The wheel of death starts spinning, and you
know what that means: “The Server Stopped
Responding” and yes, you’ve lost everything.
Now, imagine going into a bank to open an ac-
count. You’re half way through when suddenly
smiley Sally, the customer enrolment special-
ist, grabs the forms from your hand, rips them
up in your face, throws them on the floor and
then pours what’s left of your coffee on the
“Like any
relationship, it’s
give and take”
shreds, before falling to the floor quivering.
How’s that for a brand ambassador?
OK, it’s an extreme example, but the point
is made. As more of our interaction with
companies is facilitated online, they need to
start thinking how these sites make people feel
whilst they are using them. A positive experi-
ence can go a long way, but wrestling with a
half-broken website, or one that forces people
to do things they don’t really need to do, en-
genders rage – and I’ll bet that isn’t a ‘brand
emotion’ on PowerPoint.
What we’ve found over the years is that most
sites aren’t actually based on what people
want to do. Instead they are based on an ideal,
often unrealistic expectation of what brands
want them to do.
There are obviously things that are com-
mercially beneficial for a website to do, but
if they don’t benefit the customer you’ve got
two choices: either rethink how you achieve
this commercial goal in a way that the
customer doesn’t mind doing, or ignore the
fact it’s annoying and force people to do it
anyway.
Our most valuable work is in exploring the
hinterland between commercial need and cus-
tomer want. There’s a sweet spot in the middle
and if you hit it, you’re in web nirvana. But
it takes understanding, empathy, and trust.
When many brands talk about building rela-
tionships with their customers what they ac-
tually mean is filling records in a database so
that they can send them stuff. But that’s not a
relationship, that’s stalking!
www.numiko.com/blog/newspaper/
branding
9
 10
Thinking Outside
the Box
What the future holds for the telly
In a recent BT advert, smug phone-flogger
Adam is on his stag do. Adam and his friends
are in the middle of their wacky bachelor
party, and as part of their fun they’re gath-
ered around a laptop watching something
hilarious on YouTube. As an advert – well,
make up your own mind. But as an observa-
tion on modern life, it’s spot on.
The television used to be the big screen in the
middle of the living room, the one the fam-
ily gathered around to enjoy together. Many
people today still remember watching the
first moon landing on a brand new television
set. That black-and-white vision of the whole
family watching the TV together, completely
rapt, seems further away than ever.
In modern households, the family TV – or
two, or three – vies with computers, laptops,
mobile devices and games consoles for our
precious time. Computers have come out of
the study and office into the living room. Lap-
tops are near ubiquitous and small-screen
mobile devices are in almost every pocket.
TV is competing for attention with a rapidly
growing number of other media.
The computer games industry has been
cross-pollinated by script writers and direc-
tors. Many of today’s games are fully-fledged
narrative worlds; a quantum leap from the
arbitrary joystick-wagglers of old. Games are
social, in every sense. Massively multiplayer
online games build huge communities, and
consoles like the Wii are re-inventing con-
“TV is compet-
ing for attention
with a rapidly
growing number
of other media”
sole games as fun, social activities: gaming
for people who wouldn’t usually play games.
The explosion of video on the web presents a
flexible competitor to the TV. Missed a pro-
gramme? Wait for the repeat on telly – or just
get it online, download it and watch it on the
train on your laptop, or in the bath on your
iPhone. We used to think of television as a
passive, sit-back platform and computers as
an active one, but now people are as like-
ly to be watching video on their comput-
ers as they are to be doing usual
computing.
TVs audience, once so pas-
sive and reliable, has become
fragmented in time and space.
Appointment viewing is dying
off, killed by the audience’s ap-
petite for on-demand content,
anywhere, anytime. This flex-
ibility is great for the viewers
but troubling for producers of
traditional content – shrinking
audiences mean less advertising
revenue, which means less mon-
ey to spend on quality program-
ming, which leads to more view-
ers moving away. This vicious
circle threatens the entire busi-
ness model behind traditional
television.
These new media have been eating into tra-
ditional television’s area – although not its
audience numbers – while TV hasn’t really
moved on. Early experiments with the web on
TV never really worked. Interactive ‘red but-
ton’ television is popular but this is nearly all
supplementary TV content – video and text
with a few simple games and quizzes.
The rise of all these alternative media can be
seen as a threat to traditional television. But
it’s also a huge opportunity to create amaz-
ing cross-platform or trans-media stories.
What does ‘cross-platform’ really mean?
Traditional media projects focus on the
strengths of one medium – the interactivity
of the web or the native drama of television.
Truly cross-platform concepts create nar-
rative worlds that can be explored through
many different media, giving the audience
the freedom to enjoy them how and when
they want. Cross-platform concepts aren’t
about having the web on television or vid-
eo on the web: they’re about projects that
bridge the gap between media, playing to
the strengths and audiences of each medium
individually while telling a consistent story
across all platforms.
Despite the huge possibilities, cross-platform
is an unfamiliar area, and at a time when ad
revenues are falling and budgets are being
cut, it would be a brave step to set off into
uncharted waters. That said, cross-platform
offers some amazing creative opportunities
– and commercial opportunities are sure to
follow.
So who knows what will happen next?
Maybe the web’s influence will grow un-
til traditional TV dissolves almost en-
tirely into on-demand services. Maybe
cross-platform projects will rejuvenate
appointment-viewing as an essential
part of experiencing the latest programmes,
games and web narratives. Maybe it’ll
be somewhere in between. But whatever
happens, it’s going to be exciting.
www.numiko.com/blog/newspaper/tv

Revolutions Per
Decade
How the internet has changed the way we think about music
The first record was created way back in
1887. It might not have looked like much, but
that thin disc was pure, condensed music – a
precursor to all the recorded music we have
today.
From that point, it was almost 80 years be-
fore the cassette tape burst onto the scene.
Then as well as playing music, you could
record it. You could simply pluck it
from the airwaves to craft mixtapes for
friends and spend hours fretting over
the precise order of tracks on a tape to
be presented to a potential girlfriend.
Despite the warnings, home taping never did
kill music, but it changed our relationship
with it for good. CDs sounded better – argu-
ably – but never quite captured our hearts and
imaginations in the same way.
In the late ‘90s, MP3s spread across the
internet, helped by services like Napster, and
suddenly you could listen to new music with-
out ever turning on the radio. Napster was
shut down after a lengthy legal battle, but its
competitors soon filled the gaps. In 2001
iTunes hit the net; proving that legal music
downloads could be profitable amidst the
rampant piracy.
Spotify, among others, started in 2008 and
the concept of free music streamed over the
internet became the next big thing. Music
fans started to become familiar with ideas
like ‘premium’, ‘freemium’ and ‘ad-funded’
streams. In ‘09 Spotify went mobile, allow-
ing access to its catalogue from smartphones
and devices.
“Maybe someday
soon we’ll be
saying hello to
online 3D gigs
as they happen”
Phew. The change of pace in the music
industry over the last fifteen years has been
astounding. In a fraction of the time it took to
progress from records to tapes, we’ve moved
from physical media into an era where
virtually any music is available anywhere,
at any time, for free. All the music you’ll ever
know and love can fit into a device the size of
a matchbox, and any that doesn’t can be
streamed instantaneously.
This fantastic world of music on tap does
have its downsides: in this era of instant
availability and replayability, music seems to
have lost its value. Music fans – especially
younger people who’ve used computers and
MP3s all their lives – don’t see why they
should pay for digital copies of tracks and al-
bums. The music industry is struggling with
the consequences, while the web makes it
child’s play to download, trade, swap, learn
about and spread new music – legally or il-
legally.
The digital revolution has called into ques-
tion the model of business that has existed
for decades, and while the big industry play-
ers are reeling new models are springing up.
Bands can publicise and distribute their own
music on the web, from a garage band’s first
track to behemoths like Radiohead’s recent
self-distributed album. MySpace pages act
as showcase and fan club; social networking
sites help bands gather fans and feedback.
Nowadays, canny management of your on-
line presence is arguably more important
than actual musical talent.
Another consequence is that live shows are
on the increase. Revenue from live music
overtook that from recorded music
between ‘08 and ‘09 –
proof that
11
against the background of ubiquitous digi-
talism, there’s still a hunger for the unique
shared experiences of a live gig that recorded
music can’t provide.
There are already a few services that sell live
streams of gigs as they happen and for the
price of a ticket, you can watch a gig remote-
ly. With the advent of 3D TV and monitors,
we can expect to see 3D streaming video
content in the near future. Imagine that: live
3D footage from a gig of your choice to a
screen in your own home. How will the
sweaty, intimate, experience of a gig take to
the clean, packaged world of digital abun-
dance that is online music?
Maybe soon we’ll be saying hello to online
3D gigs, with streaming video and integrated
social feeds so you can chat to your mates at
the same time, and wave goodbye to sweaty
people stamping on your feet, annoying tall
people blocking the view and warm beer.
Although no doubt there’ll be an app for that
before you can say, “£7 for a tepid lager!?”
www.numiko.com/blog/newspaper/
music