Philip Sheldrake

Archives (page 40 of 43)

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 :-)

30 January 2008 / 0 Comments

FT writes about "Gated Communities in Cyberspace"

The word Cyberspace always makes me chuckle for some reason. Not sure why. Anyway, I noticed an article recently in the FT - "Business urged to woo social network figures" - about a report from Experian and Hitwise saying, well, that business should make sure they look after influential people online. Cool. My headline would be "Influential people are influential people, online or off".

But it was the box-out in the article that I wanted to highlight here, particularly as it relates to this MarCom Professional network. Not sure about the examples though.  I quote.... Read more

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

15 January 2008 / 0 Comments

Foggy communications

As a director of a consultancy helping clients communicate more effectively, I'm used to analysing the difference between "winners" and "qualifiers", between Seabiscuit and the also-rans. Maybe marketing communications has evolved so much in recent years, or maybe we just work with good people to start with, but I'd forgotten about the donkeys.

Air%20Maroc%20logo

I was rudely reminded of this reality over the Christmas season courtesy of Royal Air Maroc’s Atlas Blue subsidiary. Crappy, very crappy customer communication. Oh so very crap indeed.

Nevertheless, I've been able to wend the story of dealing with Air Maroc into my presentations to customers and prospects on good digital marketing relations, as a counter-example, even though I didn't interact with Air Maroc digitally at all. Read more

11 December 2007 / 0 Comments

Industry thought leaders… video series

Hi,

I thought I'd post up the occasional video from some of our industry's thought leaders, particularly ones that have influenced me over the years.

It's also an opportunity for me to use MarCom Professional's new feature... private social networks.

What better chap to start with than Seth Godin. Here he is on form at TED in 2003. Yes, I know that's relatively old, but it's only now that we're seeing the realisation of his vision, and it still looks very new to many people.

Cheers.

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

26 November 2007 / 0 Comments

Social Network Levelling

"If Facebook is the Cathedral, who owns the bazaar?"

This evening's Mashup Event, hosted this time at Merrill Lynch's London HQ, focused on Social Networks. It was the busiest of the series to date; at over 200 attendees it was twice the size of the one I chaired earlier this year. So congratulations to Simon and Tony on making it happen.

Social networking has arrived. I can say this on the sole basis that we were in less-than-5-star hotel venues not long ago, and now we're hosted by one of the world's biggest investment banks! Moreover, the breadth of attendees is growing as more and more employers and leaders become interested in how Mashups affect their business, affect their markets, affect their lives. Read more

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