Website/New Media Archives - Page 7 of 7

12 February 2008 / 2 Comments

Mobile World Congress: Tech news and the implications for marketers

There were no female passengers on the plane. I kid you not. It could only mean I was headed for a gadget fest.

The 2008 Mobile World Congress is buzzing. No signs of a recession here. It’s particularly buzzing about, yet without mentioning, a company that's not even here. Apple.

Mobile%20World%20Congress%202008

Whilst official company statements make no comparison between Sony Ericsson's 10 new phones and the iPhone, Samsung's 8 new phones and the iPhone, or Nokia's 4 new phones and the iPhone, the overarching message is clear. The market will not coalesce on one style of phone. Variety is the spice of life. So up yours Apple.

The mobile phone, or “device” more generically, ranks amongst people's most personal possessions. It’s up there with your wallet and keys on leaving your front door, and the variations of mobile device will continue to be as diverse as the variations in everything else we consider personal. Clothes. Cars. Furniture.

Mobile devices will never share the same hardware platform, or the same software platform, but they do universally represent the greatest and most enticing conduit to the end-customer the marketer has ever known. For both B2B and B2C, for advertising, interactive dialogue and customer engagement. Read more

31 January 2008 / 0 Comments

OnMedia Best of Broadband Advertising Awards 2007

The OnMedia event this week in New York included their Best of Broadband Advertising Awards for 2007. I've seen more than half of these videos featured here on MarCom Professional, but I've included my favourite of the bunch below. You can see all the winners here.

Produced by Omnicon's Cutwater (although not going to win a prize soon for accessibility of their own website) and made to look user-generated, the video went viral because, like anything and everything that "goes viral", it's interesting content. This time the interesting comes in the form of "how did they do that?", so you pass it on to ask that questions of your friends.

Combine this with some Google SEO on the phrase "Never hide" scrawled in the dust of the car at the end of the video to point you to Ray-Ban, and you have entertainment combined with self-congratulations that you worked it out :-)

25 January 2008 / 0 Comments

Interesting stuff for a Friday

Three great sites to play with from a professional perspective, and an intriguing game from a non-professional perspective :-)

Daylife

"Daylife is a news site and distribution platform that organizes the world’s news into a rich landscape of related stories and images of every size and perspective.

Designed to enable new ways to present and explore the world of news, Daylife gathers news from thousands of sources worldwide for you to: Read more

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

12 November 2007 / 0 Comments

Graphic engagement

Here at Racepoint we've been thinking about the ramifications of one of my previous posts, "Continuous engagement... the death of market research". A particular area of interest is the way in which we might help companies interact with stakeholders other than via text-based media.

Yes, I know there's the telephone too, but following the tenet that restricting the channel can only restrict the quantity and quality of interaction, how else can we reach out and engage?

We have no definite answers yet, but I thought I'd share some of the visual / graphic tools we have taken a look at. In particular, I'd love to know if anyone out there has any experience of or perspectives on this genre of tools.

Sketchcast

The first up is Sketchcast. A simple but unexpectedly enticing (or is that just me?) concept. Here's a sketch demonstrating my artistic capabilities...

Imagination Cubed

An experiment from GE, Imagination Cubed is a simple and compelling service that permits up to three people to collaborate on a diagram.

Gliffy

Adopting a more formal approach than Sketchcast and Imagination Cubed, Gliffy is more of the ilk of productivity software ported to the Web. In this vein, perhaps we can expect similar innovation from ThinkFree, Zoho and Google Docs in the future?

1 October 2007 / 0 Comments

The first post

Just had a look on the members page and found that the Marketing Director of The First Post, Mario Tilney Bassett, has joined the network. From their website:

The First Post is a free and independent daily online news magazine – a place to find out what the news means, a place to read about the issues of the day in short, sharp, informative articles.

I wanted to post about The First Post simply because I'm a fan. I think it has achieved one of the best online magazine formats I've seen to date.

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.