Tell us about 3M, how it started and about its research and development.
3M actually started in the early 1900s, in 1902 a group of investors...
...decided to invest in a carbarundum mine.
Unfortunately the, the mine didn't have the quality of abrasive mineral they were expecting...
...but rather than just give up, what they did was take the mineral...
...add some technology of adhesives that had been developed by a local company...
...and actually produced sandpaper.
Beyond that, then I think 3M started to recognise that if it was gonna grow...
...they'd have to add new products so instead of you know...
...just basing it on that one abrasive mineral...
...what they did was take the adhesive technology...
...and look for opportunities with that, so we started making adhesive tape...
...we invented masking tape...
So a long history of relying on science and research...
...to reinvent markets or to invent new markets and...
...as the company grew and expanded into different areas...
...one of the key strengths has been able to take a technology from one market area...
...and apply it to another and I think 3M is probably unique now in our diversity.
We have 60,000 different products in what we describe as 44 different markets...
...but quite often we take technology from one market and apply it to a completely different one...
...and that's something that not many companies can do.
So does that allow you to differentiate your products?
Absolutely, yeah, it's an excellent way of stealing a march on competition because very often...
...competitive companies tend to be very focused in their own area...
...and don't have instant access to technologies from other markets.
Why is 3M so well known for being an innovative company?
I think 3M places an awful lot of store on coming up with new ideas...
...and, and we actually encourage everyone within our laboratories...
...to spend a certain amount of their time, actually following their own instincts, their own ideas.
We call it the sort of 15% time - so up to 15% of any scientist's time...
...they can basically follow their dreams, follow their ideas.
Isn't that potentially dangerous, giving employees 15% of their own time to do what they like?
How do you police it?
In our laboratories...
...that 15% doesn't have to be useful...
...and, and you know, that's focused effort but I think it's important that people have...
...the freedom to try and do things, to try out ideas...
...and, and quite often it's those 15% ideas that are the complete market changing ideas.
Tell us about your role, Andrew, and the commercial graphics division.
Yeah, I, I look after commercial graphic division for EMEA, that's Europe, Middle East and Africa...
...and traditionally commercial graphics has supplied materials for advertising graphics -
...when you see posters on the side of buses, when you see sort of vinyl graphics in shops...
...the pavement graphics that they use inside stories on the floor or on pavements...
...that's our traditional business.
But it's been increasingly difficult to sustain that business...
...because more and more of the world is going to digital...
...there aren't that many demands or there are decreasing demands for printed vinyl graphics...
...so the division has recognised that you know, for the longer term...
...we need to be in that digital space as well.
So my role is to look for new opportunities and move the business from that traditional...
...vinyl graphics, into more digital, more 21st Century products.
Can you tell us about the visual attention service produce that you've developed?
...and applying it elsewhere.
For a number of years, we've had some very qualified vision scientists...
...working on how people interact with traffic signs, so you know...
...what makes people notice a traffic sign, how can they read the information clearly...
...how does it stand out from clutter around it...
...so we've been looking at that because you know, we sell traffic sign materials.
But about two and a half years ago...
...people were talking about that sort of area and that research...
...and somebody from the commercial graphics business, who was working on advertising...
...saw an opportunity for using that visual modelling, that...
...that how do things stand out sort of ability, and using it in the world of advertising.
The product, the Visual Attention Service, can you tell us a little bit about what it actually does?
The Visual Attention Service is an online service and allows people...
...who are creating advertisements or who are designing interiors...
...to analyse the the images that they're creating and, and the...
...the system uses predictive algorithms...
...and will tell the creative designer where somebody will look in that image.
So for example, if you upload a street scene with images of a billboard and maybe some...
...advertising on the side of a bus shelter...
...the system analyses that whole image and using what we know and understand about how...
...our primitive visual system works...
...it predicts where viewers' attention is likely to go...
...and what you get is basically a heat map showing bright colours, where attention is likely to go...
...and darker colours where attention isn't likely to go.
That's potentially revolutionary, you could see whether people are actually picking up messages or not.
...companies who research how many people are likely to walk past a billboard...
...what nobody has done before is actually say, "well are they likely to notice it?"...
..."are they likely to actually see that and pay visual attention to it?".
So how does it work? It sounds very complicated, what's the science behind this?
The science is based on our knowledge of how the human vision system works and we have...
...a very, very well developed vision system...
...but we can't possibly process all the information that comes through our eyes...
...it's just way too much.
...and whenever we walk into a room, turn a page, see a new scene...
...we basically do a very, very rapid scan of that scene.
The primitive areas of our brain analyse that scan and they look for...
...differences in contrast, differences in colour, certain shapes...
...and it's our primary brain trying to spot things that could be dangerous, you know...
...is there something that's likely to come and eat us...
...is there something that might be good for us to eat, is there a cliff we're gonna fall off?
It's very sort of primitive stuff.
So we do this scanning, our primitive brain highlights those things which could be important...
...and then our conscious brain is directed to those areas...
...and all that happens within the first half a second or so of us viewing a scene.
Can you take us through the product development process at 3M?
As I said, the, the original research was done in the area of traffic safety so...
...we had some ability to be able to use computer models...
...to reproduce this, this brain scanning and filtering activity.
When someone within the commercial graphics business saw the potential for this within advertising...
...then there was a sort of concept stage we call it...
...where it's a paper exercise to look at where this could go, who might be willing to pay for it...
...an idea of what it might cost for us to develop it further.
If that all looks positive, then we go into a more rigorous sort of feasibility stage...
...where people actually start to research the market, go and talk to designers...
...and also then we start to do some more in-depth look at...
...what it's actually gonna cost us to develop the technology...
...and then beyond that, once we have something we can show people, then it goes out into...
...a development market test and then onto final launch.
How did you support this with the research process? What research did you undertake?
The research was sort of three-fold.
Firstly desk research...
...how much advertising is done, how much is spent on advertising...
...and most of those fixtures were available, you know, online, so you can find that information.
Then actually going and talking to designers to see how they actually worked.
You know, what are the, the stages in their workflow...
...where they could actually use this tool.
And we spoke to about 15 different design agencies in reasonable depth...
...but I think what we understood from that is that we really don't understand enough about their world -
...nobody in 3M is an expert in you know, creative design.
So what we did then is send a couple of people to actually go out and do ethnographic research...
...to actually spend some time working with these people, shadowing them...
...understanding completely how they work from the first client interaction and...
...and the brief through the creative process, through the development of the final graphics...
...and the sign-off, you know, so we had a complete understanding of the process...
...and putting those things together allowed us to...
...make some estimate of what the potential market could be.
In the case insight, you outline how you could sell either a high priced low volume product...
...or a low priced high volume product, how did you go about resolving that dilemma?
Yeah, I guess the dilemma came across because in some applications...
...you know, adverts that go on billboards for national campaigns...
...the billboard space is gonna cost hundreds of thousands of pounds...
...developing the content will cost hundreds of thousands of pounds...
...people would be prepared to spend a lot of money...
...checking that out to make sure it's gonna do the right job.
Whereas you know, adverts that go in the local paper...
...cost next to nothing, cost next to nothing to place...
...but the actual process of analysing the image would be exactly the same.
So we looked at the, the market opportunity for both...
...and, in reality, you know by charging a lot for those high end applications...
...or charging little and, and grabbing everything...
...the revenue we thought would be roughly the same...
...but the difference was in the investment we'd have to make.
To be able to sell that as a high value, high margin product...
...we would need to go in and have a salesman who understood this...
...inside out, was be able to go in and pitch, be able to sell it to the designers...
...to reach that level of income...
...and that would require having experts in every country.
You know, I look after 34 countries.
We could not afford to invest in that high end salesman...
...and the skills didn't exist within 3M at the moment...
...so the decision was, "we'll take this mass market, we'll use online promotional techniques...
...we will deal at arm's length with the customer and promote it that way...
...go for large volume with, with lower investment.
Where did you get the name, the 3M Visual Attention Service, from?
We did a lot of the traditional...
...sort of brand pyramids, you know, trying to understand the features of the product...
...what that meant to our customers, how they would sort of emotionally engage with it...
...and we ended up with a lot of very creative ideas for names.
Fortunately or unfortunately, as a corporation...
...we have a policy of not introducing new trademarks to...
...manage and police trademarks across...
...you know, we're active in 70 countries, it's extremely difficult and expensive so we have a...
...a regime that encourages us to use descriptive names...
...so we ended up with having to have something that was 3M and described the product.
And essentially, it is the, the system...
...decides where visual attention is gonna go, so it's the 3M Visual Attention Service.
Can you tell me a little bit about how successful the product launch has been?
Yeah, the, the product was out in...
...beta test phase, around three or four months ago...
...and we've actually gone through sort of full product launch in the last six weeks.
Beta test went extremely well, we had about 5000 people...
...across the globe sign up and use the service.
We've just gone as I said, fully commercial and that's looking extremely encouraging.
Advertisers are going to become even better advertisers using this service aren't they?
I, I think we'll either end up with a world where all advert is so outstanding and...
...distractive that we see every advert around us...
...I don't know, I think the creative people we talk to...
...a lot of them are just validating that what they're doing is right...
...and a lot of the value they get out of it...
...is by being able to convince their clients that what they've designed is correct.
The creative agencies, they tell us, spend a lot of...
...time back and forth with a client over very subtle changes to the designs...
...that wastes a lot of the design company's time, and so a lot of their money.
Being able to draw that conversation to a close more quickly...
...adds a lot of value for them.
Thanks very much, Andrew.
You're welcome, thank you.