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Following my earlier post from the Mobile World Congress , another gadget update… Philips spun off Polymer Vision in 2006, and February last year the company announced that their first product would be the Readius. At this year’s show, the company demonstrated the final commercial product for the first time. Slated for a “mid-08” launch, it will be very interesting to observe how retail categorises the device, and its rate of uptake. Is it a phone? No. Is it an eBook; well yes I guess, but not in the same vein as Amazon’s Kindle or the Reader Digital Book from Sony . The Readius measures just 75mm x 21mm x 15mm closed, sufficiently compact to slip in a breast pocket or a handbag’s phone pocket with ease. Well, unless you store your phone there of course. But the screen (aka epaper) has to be seen to be believed. It is so un-screen like that I assumed at first I was looking at a mock-up! It’s pretty damn fascinating, and considerably more akin to the pleasure and ease of reading paper than looking at a LCD. ...

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. 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. ...

The evaluation of PR campaign effectiveness is controversial. Forget for a moment the inadequate practitioners that insist all PR must have a benefit so better just get on with it than devote energy to measuring it, and you’re left with an array of evaluation processes as diverse as the number of agencies. Return on investment The most over-used term is ROI. And that applies to all marketing disciplines not just PR. For example, I posted last week about the winners of OnMedia’s Best of Broadband Advertising awards , yet when you read the rationale justifying OnMedia’s selections only three out of ten make an attempt to link the campaign to a fillip to the client’s bottom line. “Creative” and “ROI” are not synonymous. ...

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. ...

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…. ...

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: ...

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. ...

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. 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. ...

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. ...