Category: Digital Media Marketing (page 5 of 5)

24 January 2008 / 0 Comments

Local Content For Local People

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... Read more

18 January 2008 / 0 Comments

You're in IT

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. Read more

5 December 2007 / 0 Comments

2007 – The Year of Social Networking

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. Read more

14 October 2007 / 0 Comments

NLA, Agency or Anachronism?

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.

But whilst we have been a NLA license holder for many years, it was only from reading a recent email sent by the NLA to a client that I was shocked to see the NLA want their cake and eat it.

Here's the scenario.

Agency X collects the opinions expressed by others about client Y; as any self-respecting PR consultancy would. They scan them for display on an extranet; as any self-respecting PR consultancy would. The client reads them on the extranet; as any self-respecting client would.

Now to many people, this is not a copyright issue. This is not copying original work for the sake of republishing it to the republisher's profit... this is simply logging a public voice contributing to an organisation's public reputation. However, I feel this point is too far removed from the accepted norm to spur support, so you should know this is not the point I'm making. I'm feeling only sufficiently brave to question the NLA's desire to tax us twice. Here's how...

The process described above requires both the agency and the client to have a license.

Now there may be associated activity for which this dual licensing could be justified, but my assertion here is that it appears dual licenses are required for the restricted practice described above alone. Can this be right? Isn't it all just slightly anachronistic? Or, more simply, just a bit nutty!

8 October 2007 / 2 Comments

MMS – the perfect storm

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.

The clumsiness of early camera phones is history, and user interfaces (with the potential exception of Microsoft's) have evolved to make MMS a joy. Coupled with improved optics and resolution, the modern mobile phone simply teases marketers.

And then there's the cost. As operators seek to monetise MMS indirectly, via us marketers no doubt, and as they get more efficient at shifting data round their infrastructure, flat rate data tarrifs are accompanied by flat rate messaging.

Lastly, the applications. Web 2.0 has spawned new opportunities and new applications of MMS. Moblogging, photo websites, social networking, all tempt the mobile phone customer to keep in touch; and a picture paints a thousand words. And marketers aren't hanging back. My favourite stories of recent weeks capitalise on similar technology.

Universal ran a promotion for the launch of "The Bourne Ultimatum" in August tempting fans to take a photo of the ad and send it in, receiving free mobile content in return. And Craze Production, the urban music specialist, is inviting consumers to send in pictures of a CD or gig poster which, with the magic of image recognition, rewards the consumer with relevant links to ringtones, video clips, concert tickets and other information.

If MMS features in your marketing programme, I'd love to hear what you're doing.

20 September 2007 / 0 Comments

Mashup events

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.

Coincidentally, I also met Giles Palmer for the first time, of Magpie Brandwatch fame that I posted about yesterday.

And lastly, here's a diary date for you. Mashup is running an event 26th November on Social Networking.

20 September 2007 / 2 Comments

Magpie Brandwatch

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?

And if anyone has tried Magpie Brandwatch, it'd be good to hear what it's like.

18 September 2007 / 1 Comment

The new mobile revenue split

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]

iPhone

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.

6 April 2005 / 3 Comments

myChannel

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.

This article isn’t just some futuristic dreamscape – there are innovative and concrete services today that don’t just hint at the future, they belie it with an uncanny accuracy. They work. Adoption is widespread and fast. They change the rules.

As communication consultants, we anticipate these developments and adapt our methods and consultancy to our clients accordingly. If Fuse adapts faster than our competitors then our clients prosper, and so do we.

Let’s look at some of the characteristics of the latest communication innovations. It turns out, there are some common threads.

RSS

A recent report from Jupiter Research (“Addressing Market Opportunities with an Innovative News Medium”, 11th March 2005) quantifies RSS penetration by consumers at home at 12%. The primary advantages RSS delivers the users are:

Choice – the user can pick and choose specific newsfeeds one at a time, and subscription to lists of feeds with a common theme (eg, technology news, health, education) is increasingly popular. With the advent of endeavours such as attention.xml, consumers may associate themselves with peers whose opinion they value to allow news of potentially higher interest bubble to the top
Collation – multiple sources are centralised for the user’s convenience
In your own time – the sources can be examined at any time
Filtering – the sources can be examined in any way.

Pod-casting

As with all successful mass-market electronic devices, the ways in which the Apple iPod is put to use has extended beyond the original vision of its creators. Pod-casting is one such application of the iPod.

Quite simply, pod-casting is the downloading of often transient audio material from the Internet and transferral to the iPod for listening to later. The material can be specifically sought, or a regular source can be downloaded and transferred automatically as it becomes available – general news, specialist news, and audio magazines. Of course, pod-casting can be defined as “audio RSS”, and this will develop to “audio-visual RSS” as more mobile devices permit video storage and play.

The primary advantages to the user:

Choice – the user chooses what to listen to and when, rather than being dictated to by broadcast schedules and reception (London Underground doesn’t offer ideal radio reception, nor is Radio 4’s Today programme easily picked up in New York)
Collation – multiple sources are centralised for the user’s convenience
In your own time – the sources can be listened to at any time
Filtering – only download what you want, and skip through that too (watch out for audio-visual search technologies such as Blinkx)

On-demand digital radio

Digital radio is offering greater choice and clearer reception, and innovative services enabled by companies such as Otodio will soon tempt listeners with a diverse selection of on-demand programming. Listeners have choice in their own time.

On-demand platform-agnostic video

A new era of video distribution is being chimed in with the increasing success of super-fast consumer broadband, such as the 8Mb service from UK Online, the Personal Video Recorder (PVR) as pioneered by TiVo, and Video on Demand (VoD) services, such as from Video Networks. The term IPTV is being bandied around (TV over IP) to describe what would otherwise be labelled television on demand.

The primary advantages to the user: choice, in your own time with filtering.

myThis and myThat

Websites are becoming increasingly flexible in enabling visitors to customise their content preferences and in anticipating user needs intelligently (see Touch Clarity). This trend is compounded as users’ expectations grow to the extent where mass personalisation has become a ‘qualifying’ rather than ‘winning’ criteria. The advantages to the user include choice (of the most apt personalisation), collation, and access in their own time and filtering.

One channel, or infinite?

So there’s a common theme here. The user, the recipient of news and information, the listener, the viewer, the inter-actor, has been empowered to set the schedule. It’s what they want, when they want it and how they want it. They have one channel (at least they will have when future technology converges the channels described here) and they own it. It is myChannel.

But what are the ramifications for those trying to get their news or their clients’ news on to myChannel? The impacts will be manifold and include:

Considerably more fragmentation of the target audience of communications campaigns
Less precise timing of delivery
Increased opportunity to provide niche information
Less certainty of how each recipient is receiving the information
Greater opportunity for innovation in inviting and securing interaction
The need for new mechanisms for gauging campaign success.

The word “broadcast” is being resigned to history – there just won’t be a communication medium that has the breadth to be described as “broad”. Intelligent and insightful PR consultancy has never been so critical to organisations striving to communicate effectively to a mass audience seeking to exert selectivity in the face of too much information, too much choice!