Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

'Openness Is Fuel For New Economies'

I really liked Matt McAlister's take on the nuances in development of the semantic web, open data and Sir Tim Berner-Lee's new mission:  "The semantic web folks, including Sir Tim Berners-Lee, have been saying for years that the Internet could become significantly more compelling by cooking more intelligence into the way things link around the network.  The movement is getting some legs to it these days, but the solution doesn’t look quite like what the visionaries expected it to look like. It’s starting to look more human.  The more obvious journey toward a linked data world starts with releasing data publicly on the Internet.  Many startups have proven that opening data creates opportunity. And now the trend has turned into a movement within government in the US, the UK and many other countries.  Sir Tim Berners-Lee drove home this message at his 2009 TED talk where he got the audience to shout “Raw data now!”: “Before you make a beautiful web site, first give us the unadulterated data. You have no idea the number excuses people come up with to hang on to their data and not give it to you even though you’ve paid for it as a taxpayer.”  Openness makes you more relevant. It creates opportunity. It’s a way into people’s hearts and minds. It’s empowering. It’s not hard to do. And once it starts happening it becomes apparent that it mustn’t and often can’t stop happening.  The forward-thinking investors and politicians even understand that openness is fuel for new economies in the future...'.

The Mobile Industry’s ‘Galapagos’ & Murdoch’s Big Bet

Japan can be a kind of a glimpse into the future to see what we’ll will be doing in about five years time.  And this is certainly the case with regards to the mobile industry.  Some go as far as calling Japan, ‘the Galapagos Islands of the cell phone world.'  A reference to the Pacific islands where many unique species have developed in the benign isolated conditions.  Take for instance i-mode, the open mobile service that was launched, complete with developers’ platform, in 1999 whilst we were all scratching our heads at WAP – and a full nine years before Apple’s App Store.  Today, the service has about fifty million users who pay for a whole range of different content including games, fortune telling, ringtones, wallpapers and other virtual goods.  Initially, NTT Docomo, i-mode’s parent, didn’t believe that anyone would pay for such mobile trinkets, and that voice was their only purpose.  However, data now provides more than one third of the industry’s vast revenues.  As a result, when the iPhone arrived in Japan people didn’t quite know what to make of it.  It seemed to lack so many features that Japanese consumers were used to, including mobile TV.  However, sales have since taken off with i-mode’s creator himself, Takeshi Natsuno, summing up the product’s popularity from a Japanese perspective: 'The iPhone is not a good phone. It’s terrible, but it’s a great internet computer'.  He also believes that Steve Jobs’ baby and other smart phones will take over from his own creation due to their use of the TCP/IP global web standard.  One key aspect of i-mode, and the copycat platforms that followed, was the baked-in, easy-to-use micropayment systems that allowed people to snack on virtual goods and gifts.  All without the bother of subscription services, whilst also letting content producers easily pick up a fee for their work.  And it is this habit of paying for mobile content that has created the...

Advertising’s Omerta Begins To Crack

A Grand Fromage from a big agency network broke the advertising omerta with me over coffee the other day.  ‘Of course, we’ve never really been able to link campaigns to sales or ROI’, he whispered.  Let me tell you, I nearly choked on my almond croissant.  It’s the unwritten law among GF advertising executives that no one mentions how random the effect of brand advertising is.  When under scrutiny from client procurement executives the Big Ad industry has ensured success by rounding the wagons and sticking to the BARB-Nielsen script, or pointing to the latest Thinkbox research.  However, just as I was getting over this blatant breach of the rules another industry GF broke the code!  Writing on his blog Steve Henry blurted out that: 'I'm getting sick of saying this, but 90% of advertising goes out there and does nothing at all. (I heard a figure the other day for what the average ROI is for marketing in this country. I can't tell you the figure because I've been sworn to secrecy for now - but it's diabolically low)'.  What’s going on?  Maybe it’s just a case of a few loose tongues.  They’ll probably disappear next week as the Farm St lawyers hand out the super-injunctions.  However, maybe, just maybe, it’s because a few brave souls have noticed that technology is slowly making the mass marketing argument impossible to maintain.  For forever and a day, any ad executive worth their salt could deliver - with feeling - some variation on: ‘Maximum reach-and-frequency is the only way to build brand awareness thus creating equity that drives sales.’  Which paved the way for vast media spends that in turn justified chunky production budgets and maybe even an exotic location or two.  However, as all media, including TV, is slowly sucked onto one IP platform or another, thereby becoming highly measurable, the black box that the marketing industry used to keep its metrics in has been exposed to the digital sunlight.  The battering ram of reach-and-frequency is being replaced by granular laser targeting.  First there was Google and its ‘database of intentions’ where only people who were searching for something were targeted with related commercial messages.  Then came the rise of applications where people could choose content to run on their social networks, iPhones, iTouches and now Droids.  More recently, we’ve had Facebook and its ‘people not pages’ approach, where advertisers can target individuals who have expressed a particular interest through their profile.  Even the impregnable metrics maze that has driven TV’s vast global revenues has begun to open up.  Social networks make it all too easy to see what people are actually watching – and what they are not.  And finally, the promise of behavioural advertising looms large, where commercial messages are targeted according to the digital data trails that people leave behind them – not thrown over the nation like a blanket.  Now these developments do of course bring their own Big Brother issues.  But that can all all wait.  The Grand Fromage of advertising are finally taking notes.  And a few are talking outside of the old school too...

'You Can’t Step Into The Same Market Twice'

David Weinberger captures the complexity of networked markets:  "Traditional markets consist of  demographic slices, i.e., “social groups” of people who have never met one another. We choose particular demographics because we think they are susceptible to the same message. Thus, traditional markets are not real things to which we send messages. Rather, messages make markets.  Now, markets are networks…networks of people who converse and interact, spread out across the Internet. For example, at any one moment there are some number of parents with sick children who are on the Net talking and posting, on blogs, discussion boards, social networking sites, Twitter, etc. etc. etc. But that networked market is substantially different in 12 hours because their kids are getting better. And of course 12 hours is an extremely long periodicity for these networked markets. They change constantly. Think of how ideas ripple through Twitter. Furthermore, not everyone in the market of parents with sick kids are in it the same way. The illnesses vary, the seriousness of the illnesses vary, the relationships vary. Think about the gay network in this regard: I’m sometimes in this network because I blog about gay marriage. But if you, as marketer, fail to recognize the complexity of the interests in this group, then you’ll be sending gay dating solicitations to people who don’t want them, including some who are in this network because they’re posting homophobic comments. Networked markets are rippling, ever-changing, hugely complex, inherently unstable, and thus thoroughly unlike traditional markets. In short: You can’t step into the same market twice."

Fanning, Cohen And Now Kan

One of the remarkable, recurring themes of our times is how an individual can take an idea onto the web and, often through the power of naïve enthusiasm, accidentally force a billion-dollar media industry to rethink everything it does - whoops!.  This, of course, is what happened when Shawn Fanning unleashed his college dorm project – Napster - onto the world.  Devastating the music business wasn’t Fanning's goal.  He just wanted to help his friends find their favourite tracks more easily.  But the Big Labels never recovered and even though Napster wasn’t the only P2P service offering music downloads, Fanning became the unfortunate public enemy number one of the powerful RIAA and its crazed legal battles.  Then came Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, a P2P protocol that allowed people to share large software files online more easily, by breaking them up across networks of participants’ computers then making them easy to find and reassemble.  Rather than relying on one machine to sit at the centre of a network and do all of the hard work.  Such was the success of Cohen’s brainchild that at one point BitTorrent was thought to account for one third of all internet traffic.  The result was the disembowelment of the movie industry’s distribution model and the eternal wrath of the MPAA.  However, like Fanning, profits didn’t seem to be Cohen’s motivating factor.  The only visible source of income from the BitTorrent project has been the T-shirts he has sold to its fans, emblazoned with the slogan, ‘Give And Ye Shall Receive’.  And now we have Justin Kan, creator of Justin.tv.  Kan’s original experiment in 2007 involved wiring himself up to a mobile camcorder that streamed live onto the web.  His motivation was to let people create their own ‘livestreams’, with the undercurrent ideal that CCTV shouldn’t be available only to the authorities.  However, Justin.tv has quickly developed into a service that allows anyone to create a live TV channel.  Today the site attracts more than 41 million visitors per month and has 428,000 'channels'.  Some of which are dull feeds of people sitting at their desk working, others are vibrant niche channels of hobbyists.  However, a few are feeds of live sports events that individuals are uploading from their paid subscription services, complete with community tools such as chat.  Sound familiar?  The difference may be that Shawn Fanning and Bram Cohen were the pioneers who taught the legal profession that the world has actually changed.  And Kan’s service is already joining a burgeoning, web TV ecosystem.  For instance, Fanning financed his project with the help of his uncle while Cohen had no commercial aspirations at all.  However, Kan’s project is supported by Silicon Valley’s respected technologist Paul Graham and his fund Y-Combinator.  The fly-in-the-p2p-ointment is that live events, particularly sports, are meant to be one of the last bastions of broadcast TV’s superiority.  So it seems unlikely the industry will just sit on the sidelines.  However, the trend of passionate individuals unknowingly wreaking havoc on global industries continues.  And Justin Kan looks like he might just be the next innovator to keep media executives' heads spinning.

Marketing Is No Longer A Game

The $500bn global marketing industry is driven by metrics.  TVRs, GRs, OTS, TGI, ABC, BARB, CPC, CPA, PI, CPM, frequency, benchmarking, response, reach, hits – the range of measurement systems has exploded as the complexity of marketing continues to increase.  Which has led to a gaming mentality among some parts of the industry, where almost any activity can be shown to be successful.  If it looks like a campaign isn’t working it doesn’t mean it’s ineffective.  It means you're standing in the wrong spot.  However, in the share-and-compare world of personal media, social networks and communities, it’s simply not possible to game the system.  If you’ve created a Facebook page, or an online forum, or an all singing-and-dancing app fest with mobile bells and whistles simply begging to be API’d and distributed around the widget world, no level of metric analysis will demonstrate success if no one joins in the fun.  Any figures you try and flaunt to justify the activity will be drowned out by the sound of silence as the wind whistles through your Twitter feed, swinging the doors on the hinges of your silent social experience.  No level of metrics will disguise the fact that No One Is In There.  And should you try and lay a little Astroturf or sock up a few puppets, you are likely to discover that your conversational marketing takes on all the allure of a bowl of plastic fruit.  Now whether this is of any significance depends upon your viewpoint of where the marketing world is headed.  I chaired a little social gathering down at the IPA a couple of weeks ago where Mark Earls put the case for a connected, networked world being a sea change for every part of the communications industry.  While others declared social to be a welcome new ingredient to the already murky marketing soup – but no more than that.  Just DM and WOM for a new era.  So if you’re with the Herdmeister then the fact that the game is up...

Learn To Earn

Freddie Laker (no not that one) gets to the nub of the matter: "Sometimes I like to talk about the "paradox of marketing.” As marketers we feel obligated to get our clients/brands where the eyeballs are. We then descend on that thing like vultures and in most cases we destroy that thing we originally loved and saw as an opportunity to reach consumers. (Think George from “Of Mice and Men” with the rabbit.) We’re currently in the process of killing Twitter as well.  The next great mobile revolution will be focused on the culmination of social networks, geo-location services, content creation/sharing, augmented reality and the functions that come with rapidly increased bandwidth, such as live streaming video. My fear is that marketers will be irresponsible and will use these technologies to pound consumers with horrible interruptive ads that make consumers revolt against mobile marketing. We’ve already had epic failures with some marketers’ mass SMS broadcasting and then the totally idiotic idea of connecting to discoverable Bluetooth phones when they’re in proximity of a broadcast point.  There’s so much new technology that has the potential to redefine interaction between brands and consumers, but unfortunately too many of us are still using advertising techniques that we’ve used for the last century — and they are primarily disruptive in nature.  The “techies” have done a great job of continuing to innovate and evolve the medium. Now it’s time for marketers to show the same passion for innovation and evolve with the medium, rethink our approaches and be respectful of the most intimate of digital touch points. We’re marching into holy ground with mobile marketing and if we’re not careful a select few of us will ruin it for the rest of us and this time, I don’t think consumers will be as forgiving."  (Via Heavyset).

Web TV - Game On

This weekend England play a World Cup qualifying game in the Ukraine.  One notable aspect of the match will be that people in the UK will only be able to watch it via the web, on a pay-per-play basis.  It’s yet another example of the trends that are morphing TV as we know it into a new modern web-based format.  The most significant force behind this change is economic.  The match was originally planned to be shown on satellite TV by Setanta.  However, after the Irish company was credit crunched by super-high gearing and a collapse in the advertising market, the rights were picked up by Kentaro which will stream the game to one million football fans this weekend for a modest one-off fee.  It’s snack TV as opposed to the mega-banquet offered by Sky.  Just like Apple’s iTunes is for people who wish to consume their music tapas-style.  The most notable point about this new commercial offering is that it’s not new.  Football fans who can’t afford premium TV packages or Premier League tickets have long been following their beloved teams via illegal web streams.  Often putting up with terrible quality, inconsistent transmissions, tiny pop-up screens and Chinese commentary.  I'm sure many of these fans will be happy to pay a little this weekend.  As Arseblog, the popular Arsenal FC blogger puts it: 'If I could pay a couple of quid and watch the game via a stream that wasn't up and down and freezing and jumping and refreshing I'd happily do it. The same goes for league games.'  Expect plenty more such innovation in TV.  Just don’t expect the TV industry to be involved.  Incredibly, the traditional business is mirroring the plight of its musical cousin by ignoring clear signals from customers about what they want.  Just like the Big Record Labels, the Big TV Networks are falling on the wrong side of the Innovator’s Dilemma.  The plight whereby companies desperately attempt to prop up their existing revenues and fail to engage with exciting new technologies that people love.  Despite the fact that if they did embrace new kit and behaviour their tired old businesses would get a shot in the arm, instilling some faith among jaded shareholders.  But they aren't.  So a gap appears in the market and and new innovators pile in, building products in line with public demand.  And the new Web TV ecosystem begins to take shape.  All built on the fast-growing popularity of watching TV on a laptop or PC.  A distinction that will soon be redundant as devices merge.  But don't make the mistake of thinking that it will then be back to business as usual.  That's just where the fun begins as TV content becomes another web application upon which other tools can be built.  And then it's game on.

Will It Be Facebook Wot Won It?

The Sun’s decision to support the UK Conservative party instead of Gordon Brown’s New Labour is creating plenty of interesting discussion.  Spinmeister Alastair Campbell says The Sun isn’t as important as it once was.  Well, he would say that wouldn’t he?  However, whatever his motivation, he’s right.  Now, there’s nothing I like more than putting my feet up with a bacon sandwich, cup of char and The Currant Bun, but it surely isn’t the massive social and cultural force it was in the eighties.  In 1992, the paper had huge sway and cruelly lampooned Neil Kinnock with this classic front page.  Then followed it up with the famous headline – ‘It Was The Sun Wot Won It!’.  Powered by the vast yet always entertaining ego of Kelvin McKenzie, The Nation’s Favourite reached its highest average sale in the week ending 16 July, 1994, when the daily figure was 4,305,957.  Today, along with all other nationals, The Sun's circulation is greatly diminished.  Although at more than 3 million is still very substantial.  However, in the nineties we weren't all connected up to each other.  There weren't 10-20m Brits active on Facebook (depending on who you believe).  The share-and-compare economy was still restricted to chats over the garden fence.  I’ve long given up on the idea that one media will usurp another.  But I really believe the soup is getting thicker and more interesting.  In 1990, newspapers were opinion and opinion were newspapers.  Today, the mainstream media shrieks out its sensational opinion often highlighting the darkest most gruesome aspects of our generally splendid country.  However, that is then filleted, dissected and reduced down to a more reflective – frequently more positive view – by individuals who comment, link, curate, challenge and question the views of Murdoch & Co.  Far from being the echo chamber that mainstream media often characterizes social and other networked media as, the web is now the way the majority of people filter what’s good and bad.  They listen to their friends and see what they are paying attention to.  So will it be The Sun wot win it for Cameron?  Or will it be up to Facebook to give him the thumbs-up?

The Moment I Knew Facebook Was Here For Good

The moment I knew Facebook was here for good and was also going to be massively influential was during a conversation last year with my friend Mark.  Now Mark is a very successful builder from Bolton who couldn't care less about the blogosphere, the plannersphere or any other web-o-sphere and despite my efforts to explain over many lively pints of ale, he has no idea what I do for a living.  So when Mark briefly mentioned that he was on Facebook because, 'all my mates are,'  I knew Zuckerberg's vision was no longer a dream - whatever you think of the man or his inexplicable love of shower shoes.  However, possibly because of the very reason that Mark has signed up - ie ubiquity - Facebook is viewed with suspicion by geeks and the digerati in a way that Google is not.  But FB is just powering on regardless.  In this article, Wired magazine's Fred Vogelstein reported on the ambitions that Zuckerberg holds and the genuine challenge it represents for Messrs Brin and Page.  Which can be summarised as, 'searching people, not pages'.  Do you sometimes scratch your head at Google results and wish you could just ask your friends what they think?  That's what Facebook is looking to do.  And now it's making real cash and plenty of it, exploding the notion that there's no money in the social web.  Largely thanks to its souped-up...

The Need For Speed

I’ve recently found myself perusing the day-to-day differences between the marketing industry when I started my career in 1992 and today.  And I think it boils down to one word – speed.  As a college newbie I remember coming to terms with the fact that much of my account executive job was managing paperwork between the agency team and the client.  From months before the campaign, through the launch, during the programme and at the end of the activity.  Proposals, updates, status reports and analysis documents were constantly ping-ponged backwards and forwards.  Sometime quickly, sometimes very slowly.  But back then quickly meant on a weekly basis.  These papertrails underwrote the activity of the marketing industry.  Activity that was gathered, prepared, nurtured, planned – often in excruciating detail – before being launched into the market.   However, today’s markets are faster.  Which means marketing needs to be faster.  Including the systems and processes that keep the wheels turning.  So what’s driving this need for speed?  A while back Johnnie pointed out to me that customers now have the technological advantage over companies. Anyone who boots up their corporate laptop and then goes to make a cup of tea while the processor sorts through a million security patches and firewall protocols, will understand this.  Compared to the ease with which individuals can draw upon free web power or download new applications, corporations are technically hamstrung.  Which can lead to a disconnection with customers.  ‘We no longer feel we are immersed in our customers’ world,’ a manager from a mega FMCG company told me, frustrated by his IT department's refusal to let his PC access social networking sites.  But turbo-charging the speed at which the marketing industry works isn’t a trivial fix.  Go-faster stripes aren’t enough.  Corporations and brands still...

Conversational Marketing (And Why It's Good To Hate)

In recent discussions I have described the stuff that happens where the world of networked media and marketing collide as, ‘conversational marketing’. Now, I am aware that this is hardly a breakthrough term. The c-word is now firmly lodged into the boilerplate of every marketing proposal to hit the pitch desk in 2009.  And it drives some people to distraction as it suggests some type of creepy word-of-mouth practice where ‘friends’ start dropping brand names into conversations in the pub.  Particularly those that they have spontaneously found to deliver amazing value or excellent customer service.  However, I think it does work when the companies in question realise that there are some conversations in which they can take part with credibility - and others that they shouldn’t touch with a conversational bargepole.  Identifying which those conversations are isn’t entirely straightforward.  That’s because brands instinctively want to go and hang out with the cool kids.  An example would be a massive brand trying to follow someone on Twitter.  Or a product trying to join a blog chat. Both of which can result in cringe-making disaster.  However, there are, unsurprisingly, conversations that brands can have and join with credibility.  The trick, in my experience, is to start with working out what the company or brand in question is passionate about.  Now this question may result in much eye-rolling from cycnical execs who equate the health of the corporate balance sheet with pain not passion.  Or alternatively, lip service to some corporate mission statement or, worse still brand bible, which has all the passion of a Stepford Wife.  However, I have found that by digging beneath the corporate facade you can almost always find something of genuine interest, even if it at first sight it seems weird or dumb.  One way into the subject is to find out what people in the company or organisation hate.  Answers I've had to that line of enquiry have included the way their company is portrayed in the press.  Or an irritation about a damaging urban myth that won't go away.  Something similar, I believe, is what set Robert Scoble off on his bleeding-edge blogging mission at Microsoft.  Staff at the software giant who felt they were doing good work in the areas of healthcare or innovative engineering were fed up with being seen as the Evil Empire.  By talking about the good stuff on Channel 9, they were able to engage in a genuine conversation that went beyond the brand.  The other good thing about the term conversational marketing, that I have taken to pointing out, is that people instinctively know a good conversation from a bad one.  There’s no need to analyse or measure it.  Everyone already knows.