technogoggles

WOMMA

WOMMA is interesting - The Word of Mouth Marketing Association.  Word of Mouth advertising - the kind of marketing as conversation thing that's been doing the rounds for what seems like ages now and fits in neatly with the move to Long Tail blah blah, web as platform and even the Architecture of Participation - and just seems plain common sense to anyone plugged into www: honesty, trasparency, good products and engagement with the customer.   WOMMA have a seminar coming up in NYC on the 28th at which Seth God [like] in is speaking, and should be good.  Anyone want to spot me the airfare?  Please?

Anywhows, I like their image, above and the whole sentiment behind it.  But has anyone thought that people, me included, actually like to be treated as brainless and gullible sometimes?  The image on the left looks a bit intense doesn't it?  Whereas the image on the right...

more:

The Difference is Why [1]

The Difference is Why [2] 

The Difference is Why [3]

Mother

Link: Mother

Just the most fun, irreverent and damn beautiful online thing.  Been waiting a while for mother to do something worthy of their reputation as one of the most creative agencies in the er, the world or just EC1, ever [well depends who you speak to] and this certainly lives up to expectations.

The level of detail is brilliant - and the ability to see into the business and the people behind it using quicktime shananigans provides a really rich experience.  And it's funny [and sexist]: "Kimmy, aka legs akimbo, aka the bitch [only to her grandma]." lol

Have a gander at it.

Google takes the P.. rint with online model for offline advertising

Link: Google takes ad sales to print | CNET News.com.

via Gary Stein

I've been a bit slow on the uptake about this one and hadn't realised the potential of Google's move into offline activity in terms of revenue generation.  As Stein says:

Satellite maps are cool and all, but this is where you should pay attention, when thinking about Google. This is development around the way they make all their money.

Google makes 99% of its revenue from online advertising - $3billion last year [2004].  So what's the deal?  Even though online ad revenue is growing at a phenomenal rate it still only accounts for around 10% of all advertising.  So Google is moving into print, trying to eek some of the huge potential revenue open to it and in the process pushing out the media agencies/buyers that make a living from deciding on appropriate advertising and planning ad campaigns. 

How is it moving into print?  One experiment with PC World saw it buy a page of advertising and then cut this up and in effect sub-let it to others:

The issue has a full page of Google-facilitated ads with the URL of an online version of the page at the top. Fine text also appears at the top saying "Ads by Google," and "Google advertisers offer these products and services" at the bottom. However, there is no Google logo.

So Google  is leveraging the fact that product search online is key to advertising.  People want to check out a product, compare it and get the best price online, yet awareness is often gained offline through the myriad of niche [and mainstream] publications.  Why is this so important?  Because people using the URL in the print advert can be measured - the "offline" URLs are redirected through Google servers.  This is important.  It allows Google to take their online business model into the offline world of brand advertising a move which is upsetting traditional media buyers.

The result is that publishing partners such as PC World would only get paid according to how many people "clicked through" no matter what "brand value" the advert had in raising awareness.  It's a model which is high in risk especially for publishing partners who would lose some of the ability to plan around revenue streams - as spots are often booked up 3-6+ months in advance.  It could also change the nature of creative work to more product focused rather than brand focused benefits and values.

It's potentially a major shake-up for the ad industry and marketing in general.

OfCom: Sponsoring TV Channels

As of today OfCom will now consider the sponsorship of TV channels.  What sort of brand would be willing to sponsor a TV channel?  More to the point what channel would be willing to have their 'brand' usurped by another, especially one that could up and leave after 12 months?  Of the terrstrial channels I would guess only Channel 5 is  really  open to  this kind of sponsorpship but there must be shed loads desperate for cash in the outer reaches of the EPG where actually sponsorship could raise the profile of the channel... 

TV Ad Evolution

Link: Influx.

Influx point to a new broadcast advertising initiative by Nissan which builds on the longer form narratives [and more filmic qualities] of Volvo, BMW and VW[5mb wmv singing in the rain ad]. 

This film is going to be broken up into 24 one-minute segments and shown as ads on programs like Fox's 24. It's a smart idea, that's buzzworthy, and if done well, is likely to engage the viewer and help both advertiser and broadcaster and perhaps if the content is so good, shouldn't Fox be paying Nissan or at least discount the airtime?

This is a good point.  The rigid sructures of broadcast mean that everything comes in one size: 30 seconds [or thereabouts]. Some variety would be good especially in an increasingly PVR [or DVR] enabled world where people can fast forward through ads. I've written on the PVR/advertising issue before stating that marketers need engage the audience far more rather than treat them as captives.  More flexible TV media buying would help or at least an investment on the part of the broadcaster in making 'watchable', engaging TV - after all they'd be saving on the cost of programming.   

One of the major precedents to the Nissan project was Volvo.  The success of the Volvo ads from last year including it's 'mockumentary' and the "life on board" project is illuminating.  The 'mockumentary' concerned a town in Sweden where the same 32 people got the same car on the same day [the S40].  Volvo set up a scam site puporting to be that of the filmmaker.  You just didn't know whether it was by Volvo or not i.e. whether it was 'real' or not:

"We decided we were going to be very confronting and very, very, provocative," he said. "We were going to go away from anything we would think could be considered vanilla marketing. "The whole idea was to blur the lines between reality and fiction. The company saw this as a huge risk and a lot of people in our company were not willing to take that risk. We could have been seen as telling people we were liars. It absolutely could have gone either way."

Ultimately it was because the bosses at Volvo and Ford's Premier Auto Group, which owns Volvo, supported the approach that the idea got up. And the results?

"The big answer is: we sold out... Our biggest problem is we don't have any cars." From  the Sydney Morning Herald

They were brave with what was a truly 360 degree, multi-platform campaign.  Clearly Volvo consider off and on-line marketing as symbiotic - they complement each other in above and below-the-line engagement with the audience.  A £7 million investment in the "life on Board" project - a film based campaign on CD-ROM and web featuring ordinary people talking about overcoming difficulties in their lives - testifies to Volvo's belief in the Internet [New Media Age sub req'd]. 

See also:  Volvo campaign at ad-land

 

 

Death is Mediocrity

Link: Creating Passionate Users: Be brave or go home.

Creating Passionate Users quotes the NYT and a study undertaken by a Professor who looked at Amazon's ratings system and found that those with 'mediocre' reviews did not sell nearly as well as those with extereme reviews - good [5 stars] or bad [1 star] or good and bad:   

"But the most telling variable is the one star rating. Professor Gronas found that books high on what he called the "controversiality index" are given almost as many one-star as five-star ratings, creating a horseshoe-shaped curve. As it turns out, these books also tend to have high sales."

As they argue on Creating Passionate Users:

"Creating passionate users is NOT about finding ways to make everyone like you. It's about finding ways to use your own passion to inspire passion in others, and anything with that much power is bound to piss off plenty of status-quo/who-moved-my-cheese people. Bring it on."

In the glut of visual spam in the form of advertising on different mediums you have to know your market even better and take risks.  Benetton come to mind as a company who take this riskier approach to marketing and it works to differentiate them despite their average products.  But to be really successful their products would have to reflect their approach to marketing.  Perhaps this can explain the demise of Marks and Spencer - they've tried to improve their products and take risks but ultimately the institutional pull is toward the middle ground - in to trying to please everyone.  Now what about the BBC....

The motto: be brave.

On the subject of taking risks Influx mention that Best Buy [the US chain] are taking some risks and opening a series of concept stores.  The one that I found particularly interesting is Studio D, a video lounge:

This store is aimed at males in their late 20s and early 30s. This is a "third place" concept that allows you to drop in to play video games on Plasma TVs. It also has rooms that can be rented out for parties.

I think this is a good idea.  Basically an up market 'arcade' - those scruffy holes I remember frequenting as a lad with space invaders and pac-man and a pool table on one side.  Though whether this "3rd Space" translates the social nature of gaming into a more public space remains to be seen. 

It's also worth noting that Influx [which is such a good resource] believe traditional research is not helpful in testing concepts like this. 

These concepts that are incredibly difficult to test via traditional research, so the only way to understand the potential, is to build them.

That's skunkworks on a BIG scale. 

[via the ever excellent Rootburn] 

NB: Apologies for the draft publication of early version of this.  I tend to write these things in short 30 second bursts when time allows and they often get published to live instead of draft by mistake.  This of course wouldn't be an issue pre-RSS.  My child makes a fool of me!

Planet Jupiter

Link: Gary Stein: Jupiter Research Advertising Coverage: Focuses for 2005.

I've only recently come across the blogs at Jupiter, who I've always valued as producers of strong research.  But the blogs allow the researchers themselves to give some flavour of where their thoughts are.  Gary Stein, one of the marketing analysts, posts his views on where his focus will be in 2005 and I reckon he knows more than most where technology and business will be headed.  Two of the main areas he mentions are particularly interesting, if not exactly new:

Communal-Creation of Brand Equity Centered two strong forces: blogs and affiliates, will form the core of a new way of talking about managing your brand. The notion of managing your brand monolithically is truly giving way to a stakeholder-created, dynamic environment of ideas-about-products.

The Search Marketplace
As search goes mainstream, the collection of agencies and consultants who provide SEM/O services are going to be better integrated with the Marketing Mothership.

Of course "communal creation of brand equity" is very much underway now, not least in the Jupiter blogs -they practice what they preach, yeah!

One of his other points is that 'digital marketing' will be more closely integrated into organisations as they become integral to managing brands and products.  This is well overdue and in line with the move toward media convergence.  Anyway,  I look forward to hearing more of these plans and seeing the research. 

update: I suppose I should also mention Forrester's blog by Charlene Li.   It offers some good insights too, search especially seems well covered.

Faster Marketing

Link: Influx.

Influx give a timely reminder about the need for faster marketing to keep up with the acceleration in changes around consumption, especially in FMCG - they are called Fast for a reason:

Marketing needs to be more like a SWAT team than a Senate Committee. Marketing executives should be allowed to fail and learn from their failures. Their marketing communication partners need to be true partners at their side; showing how they can get the messages out faster, cheaper and highlight trends that their clients can exploit. The days of 8-week production turnaround times are well and truly over. It will mean placing more and more emphasis on the web, where things can be done faster and cheaper. That's everything from research, testing, communication launch and even trend analysis.

Failing fast is a sure way to learn quickly. 

How you actually go about being quicker at Marketing is another question but one possibility is in incorporating more guerrilla style research techniques to compliment existing longer term research work [and having a client that can implement those changes quickly would help too!].  Zara, the clothes  retailer, is one example cited by the authors of a company basing their business on speed to market, which in fashion is critical.  Other FMCGs include consumer electronics [hardware, less so software where there are more barriers to moving such as learning] and media.  All need to be speedier in their marketing if they are not to miss the moment that could be the potential 'tipping point'. 
Think about the ways in which Josh Rubin and Matt Jones inform a wide community about material goods and new tech / software respectively.  They are the modern day ethnographers.  Added to their nous, the ability to see what people are looking at [usage stats], linking too [in and outward bound links], talking about [blogdex, technorati] downloading [via bitTorrent, PIs] etc. in real time and the ability to correlate and group this information using basic stats techniques makes the Internet a fundamental research tool.   

Later:

On the subject of getting savvier and faster Thingsmagazine make an excellent contribution about Gladwell's new thesis, Blink, which is about rapid cognition as "thin slicing" - "the ability to find patterns in situations and people based on very narrow 'slices' of experience" [Gladwell, Blink].  Our ability to make rapid decisions subconciously could be used by those evil men in suits...

The danger is that manufacturers, marketers and all those other nebulous professions that oversee cultural production will ensnare the secrets of rapid cognition and use it to sell stuff, an even more covert means of subliminal advertising (which seemed like a great idea at the time to some, but has proved to be more myth than reality in the long run).

To a certain extent, consumer culture has always worked on the thin-slice principle; the way supermarkets set out their freshest goods first, setting up an aroma and expectation that follows you into the packaged stuff, or the psychology of sales and discounting. The twenty-first century is beginning with a political and commercial battle for the consumer's subconscious impulses, and "beautiful complexity" will be increasingly distilled into simplicity.

Not sure I share their bleak prognosis but faster marketing definitely just needed to get faster still.  Matchsticks to keep those eyes open anyone...?   

A Nation of Shopkeepers: Sell Side Advertising

John Batelle's post on Sell Side Advertising, re-written as Publisher Driven  Advertising for the Technology Review, is a fab thought piece for those wanting to clear the  Christmas fog from their heads [and haven't already engaged with this discussion].   In essence what John is proposing [drawing on the ideas of  Ross Mayfield] is customer driven advertising.  Not ad-sense, not affiliates, though there are similarities with both, but a truly transparent means through which, for instance, bloggers could choose to advertise what they want and be rewarded according to the size and strength of their 'network' [which roughly translates to the links inbound and feeds out a blog gets - a reasonable indication of the  relationship they have with their readers].   Technically it is doable: Technorati can do much of this measurement now. Socially, the concept makes sense with a huge rise in the numbers of personal publishers or bloggers targeting often niche audiences.  Business-wise it's a goer with pay-per-click a $5 billion industry [from Batelle's article] it's only limit is in finding a more efficient mechanism to target consumers - an expensive business with the fragmentation of demand in many sectors.   But why spend millions finding what your customers like, building profiles and buying space in their media of choice when your customers will dothe hard work for you! 

While there are a heap load of  comments on the technical possibilities and similar precedents on the concept [which you should check out - they are very good] few people seem concerned about exploiting the relationship they have with their readers for financial gain.  I think this itself is significant - people seem happy to embrace personal advertising.  And following on from the ebay phenomenon and the rise and rise of associates / affiliates it is not hard to see a day when we are are all shopkeepers, competing against each other to sell things [Thatcher would love it!].  But while there are benefits to choosing what you adertise and endorse there are also problems...

Sell side advertising certainly adds complexity to the notion of identity [who you are, what kind of shop is this?] and how you manage your identity [if you choose what you endorse then that says a whole lot about you - do you know your readers that well?] and the way in which others perceive you [is your reputation going to go the same way as that brand of hoodies that are soooo last year?].  You can't hide behind the adsense /affiliate badge now.   How that plays out will be interesting to see. 

Are there any ethical problems with this concept? I thought initially that there may be parallels with buzz marketing  and the ethical dilemma's there [via rootburn].   But in sell side advertising you are being transparent about what you are endorsing and [potentially] making money from.   And if your readers don't like it they'll walk, or click or do something to stop endorsing you.   

Amazon soft sell

Link: Fast Company Now.

Fast Company have spotted the latest marketing wheeze by Amazon [the dot com version - none of the regional versions seem to be offering the same thing, yet] following up on similar ideas using films by Volvo and BMW.  An advert for a new film called 'Portrait' [directed by Jordan Scott, daughter of Ridley I believe] shows Minnie Driver in the main role of a fashionista.  That's nice of Amazon to show quality trailors of new films isn't it... so what's the sell?  Here's the sell:

Indeed, even though I was looking hard, it was tough to figure out what all this was designed to sell... unless you wait for the credits, at which point you learn that all the make-up was provided by Sephora and the handbags by Nordstrom, etc. Interested in buying? How handy, then, that Amazon has thoughtfully provided pictures and links to all the products featured in the film on the movie's home page.

Quite neat, no?  I'm not sure whether these short films are commissioned specifically by Amazon and funded by the companies owning the products - be good to know what the background is.  What we do know is that this form of advertising is designed to seduce people in to buying things they had not actually come to Amazon for.  I suspect most items bought on Amazon are targeted buys - things people know of and want beforehand.  So this new technique helps to broaden and increase their sales into sponteneous and seredipitous purchases.  I used to be wary of these inciduous marketing techniques but I figure that if it offers up more creative approaches to selling things then that's positive even if some of these products are materialistic pap.  More fool the consumer.

Be interesting to see if the films produced for the regional audiences are commissioned seperately or whether they try to shoehorn the US aesthetic [and their products] into other markets.