Motherboard.tv the new face of Dell

In what seems like a blatant appeal to boost its street-cred and cool factor, home computer company Dell has enlisted lifestyle magazine-come-advertising agency Vice, they of Do’s and Don’ts, to create a new news site/user-created blog/cool injection called Motherboard.tv.

Although Dell still holds a top marketshare of 26.2% in the US, it’s growth has dropped in the last year by -8.9% and, overall, it has fallen to third position worldwide with 12.8%, behind Hewlitt-Packard and Acer. Dell’s brand perception however, is lacking much of the competition than it’s once high market share may suggest. At their marketable height in the US, Dell’s adverts featured a slacker-type character known as The Dell Dude, who would persuade the parents of his friends to get a Dell for their kids. The character’s university-based slacker attitude came into real-life fruition as the actor playing The Dell Dude was arrested for criminal possession of marijuana in 2003. The company has since lost any cool credibility, as this spell happened to coincide with the period when Apple began branding their iPod and associated laptops with a natural sense of cool, through their seeming simplicity and portability.

Apple’s coolness has risen to such an extent that the iPhone and Apple itself were named as 1^st and 3^rd Coolbrands of 2009/2010, while Apple CEO Steve Jobs was recently voted as young people’s favourite entrepreneur according to a recent survey. Dell did not even appear in the top 20 of Coolbrands, and their CEO is not even vaguely a household name at this point.

As a result of this discrepancy in cool, Dell have recently decided to have hipster magazine Vice, design them a user-generated blog and news site in Motherboard.tv. The format of the site follows a mergence of a community and a blog where users can upload articles and videos, through a lens of editorial curation, which users can then comment on, save and/or rate posts. Dell knows the low-end market well, and perhaps in order to capture a more plugged-in aspirational crowd. Although Vice’s offering provides Dell, a little street-cred, plenty of branding opportunities and access to thought leaders, the website is quite clunky at the moment, and many of the posts are made by a small amount of users and not very often.

There is a human and coherent feel to the site however, as each user has their profile filled out and everyone is commenting on each other’s posts. Motherboard.tv is only just a month old, and its real success (much like whether or not Dell are able to not wander away from their cross-marketing experience with Vice, without being confused) will be seen in time.

For Vice however, this represents a major step forward as a media-owner rather than just an influential, hipster magazine. The company as a whole matches this step, as Vice now has its in-house advertising agency, Virtue, which will be able to use Vice’s global network of writers, photographers, designers and artists to be available to clients, giving them an unrivalled and achingly hip editorial network with which to connect. Andrew Creighton, MD of Vice Europe and chief executive of Virtue, acknowledges Vice’s youthful, technological embracement, as well as it’s desire to push brake boundaries of what agencies can do as he said to the Guardian,”technology makes huge changes possible, cheap desk-top publishing software allowed us to launch the mag in the 90s, the internet allowed us to stream live TV to millions around the world. Essentially, when something becomes cheap and simple enough for idiots like us to use, that’s when the barriers to entry disappear.” He goes onto to state that Vice had been “helping brands with projects almost since we launched” and that Virtue was “just formalizing that relationship”.

Can Vice's reputation help Dell?

Employees at Vice and Virtue, and their clients will see a “very rigid wall between agency and mag/website, even though many of the same people will be working on both”. This sense of boundaries blurring, heralds an important trend in advertising agencies spreading out their services and becoming one-stop-shops to some extent, as new media and the trendsetters at the margins become ever more important to branding.

BBH, the ad agency for example, recently launched Zag, a product development subsidiary headed by Neil Munn, a former client of BBH. The young people currently working and innovating for and eventually founding them, will define the new emerging employers.

Many of the people who are working within these emerging boundary-blurring agencies are able to do so because of ever-increasingly broad understanding and skills. This breadth almost symbolizes the younger generation of worker. As Face’s own TechTribe report shows, 36% of 19-25 year olds ‘agree’ and a further 13% ‘agree strongly’ that they ‘want more than one career in their lives’ – showing a strong desire to develop new skills and take a wide slice of life.

Further evidence that the young want to control their own employment and define the employees themselves is shown again by TechTribe results that 51% of 19-25 year olds have a keen interest in being their own bosses. The importance of boundary-blurring work environments that are not afraid to take on-board the innovations of the cool margins will become more apparent as digital technology becomes more integrated into daily life. Those who have grown up with this technology and the broad-sphere of attention it naturally gives them will be able to lean towards professionalizing in more than one skill-set. This will lead to further acceptance of new methodologies and philosophies, which will eventually bring clients closer to their audiences, as Dell will hopefully become closer to their users through Motherboard.tv.