Digital-Media-Marketing

There are degrees of ’local-ness’; after all, Paris is local to London relative to San Francisco. But if, as Graham Jones asserts , the Internet will have an equal if not greater impact ’locally’ than globally, what are the ramifications for content? ‘Local’ is a hot topic,and last week’s Mashup Event was dedicated to the topic. IT enables personalisation of applications and services, and one’s locality must rank up there with all things personal. Now marry this with the increasing availability of high quality video content, and I’ve become fascinated by the opportunities and benefits of repurposing video content on the fly to match the viewer’s needs precisely. I’m compelled to make this post having watched last night’s first show of the new series of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares . Always a f***ing entertaining show, I was gobsmacked by the revised editing style. I know. This series is Ramsay’s first in the US and comes out of Fox. I know. I’ve been to the US and witnessed US TV many times, although Fox is ’exceptional’. Acknowledging that I’m making a sweeping generality, US editing is simply unpleasant viewing for a Norfolk boy with traditional British expectations and sensibilities… ...

Marketing communications has arrived at its complexity inflexion, and that complexity needs IT. Period. From now on, when you say “I’m a marketing communications consultant”, you’ll also be saying “I’m in IT”. Computers ‘do’ numbers, and they can ‘do’ numbers pretty well. Accounting is about numbers, and so is much of science and engineering, so computers were rapidly deployed in these disciplines in their early days. They helped crunch complexity, and this same capability drove complexity. IT advances have driven today’s advanced stock trading platforms and other financial systems. It has underpinned our analysis and knowledge of genetics. It has driven finite element analysis, fluid dynamics and other engineering modelling technologies. These are just a few examples, but however you cut it, modern accounting, science and engineering is entirely reliant on IT. In the 70s, manufacturing was about turning out millions of identical products repetitively, cheaply. Retail was about piling them high. By the 90s, mass production had become mass customisation, as IT enabled complex yet efficient supply chains. Each and every car gliding through production can now be any one of a thousand permutations. The number of Zara ’s annual product lines exceeds the volume made of each; all at affordable prices. Retail analytics informs every decision we make in retail design. However you cut it, modern manufacturing and retail is entirely reliant on IT. These professions, and others, reached their complexity inflexion. You could say that IT was both a cause and the saviour, and now it’s time for marketing communications. Let’s look at some numbers. ...

It’s December. Time for pseudo-snow to uphold the pretence of a white Christmas. Time for Christmas pop songs to replenish the coffers of faded pop idols. And, of course, time for reflections on the year. The biggest trends in marketing communications in 2007 were without a doubt the rise and rise of social networks, and the associated dominance of video content – professional and user-generated. Not a theme ignored on MarCom Professional I can see. This has been a subject close to our hearts since we ran the first blog training course for our clients in 2001 and introduced them to conversational PR not long after. That was the term we used then, but now we talk about the brand as the sum of the quality of its dialogue with its stakeholders, and our Chairman Larry Weber decided, rightly, that 2007 was the year the mass market wanted to read more about it. ...

I have always admired the UK’s Newspaper Licensing Agency for its self-assured composure in freshly applying last century’s rules to this one. Now I know rules don’t just expire, but equally, they don’t just stay relevant untouched, and the legal underpin for the NLA’s stance surely demands review. If 2007 marks the year music companies reviewed their attitude toward digital rights management, then it’s time the NLA got real too. ...

According to Mark Imrie, formerly Head of Products for O2 and now Head of CRM and online capability, “MMS was a technology-led service that was rushed to market”. Quoted in Billing World last month, Mark succinctly explains the lacklustre performance of MMS to date. But where next? What’s required for MMS to take off in 2008? I’d say it boils down to phone design, pricing and applications, and these three are coming together nicely to form the perfect storm next year. ...

I’ve just stumbled upon this service, Magpie Brandwatch . As an engineer by training, nothing quite appeals to me more than a good looking chart, but I’d like to ask a question of anyone who knows more about these things than me… How do they disambiguate brand names? In other words, when looking for commentary about Apple, how do they differentiate between Apple and the type you eat? What if you were trying to track where people are talking about Creative. Great brandname; very very difficult to disambiguate. Virgin? Next? Palm? Shell? Gap? ...

Attended the Mashup* event last night on “media and advertising agencies in a digital world”. It was a wide ranging discussion, featuring Rod Banner from Banner Corporation, a presentation from AKQA’s head of mobile, and moderated by Hamish Pringle, DG of the IPA. Unfortunately, the questions from the audience were so diverse that there wasn’t quite the usual cohesion found at a Mashup event, but nevertheless there were some real gems in there. Tony Fish’s question on the attention economy put most people on the back foot, and I learned about Openads for the first time. Very interesting. ...

So O2 has won the exclusive right to iPhone in the UK; but what a price! With the battle heating up between operators, device manufacturers and content providers to divide the spoils of user revenue, this seems to be a massive concession for a UK operator. [gratuitous picture of an iPhone… in case you can’t recall how attractive it is] Capitulating 40% of iPhone associated revenues can’t make sense to anyone vaguely familiar with thin operator margins. Vodafone definitely wasn’t having any of it. But maybe this is just a big step along the ultimately inevitable path to complete commoditisation of mobile operations. The time has come for the rise of the device and equally the content now reachable following the relatively recent collapse of the walled gardens. This shift in the landscape also represents exciting opportunities to the marketing communicator looking to extend brand presence into consumers’ mobile life. ...

It started with the town crier. Then the daily newspaper. It broadened with radio and then television. Communication now comes at you from all angles – via papers, magazines, journals, radio, digital radio, satellite radio, terrestrial TV, TV text services, digital TV, satellite TV, cable TV, mobile portals, push alerts on mobile devices, newsgroups, websites, RSS newsfeeds, streaming media services and pod-casting. The choice has become so complex for consumers that there is even a choice of magazines and websites dedicated to helping us make a choice. The selection and diversity will continue to grow but the act of “choosing” is about to change significantly. We are returning to just one channel – myChannel. ...