Adventures In Digital Marketing

HP have a campaign running to bring the personal human element back into PCs and perhaps steal a bit of ground back from the white plastic gang over at Apple.

Using celebrities like Jay-Z, Pharrell Williams and Mark Cuban to endorse their new range of PCs such as the snazzily named nc2400 Business Notebook and the m7680y Media Centre PC they’re trying to get some credibility back into the beige box world.

The TV Ads have a distinctly apple feel but are, in and of themselves, pretty good to watch and visually pleasing.

There’s also a microsite to backup the offline campaign featuring some flash XP desktop things but, more interestingly, a personalised element to create your own “celebrity” video, where you can upload a photo of yourself and play about with it. 

I’d like to say this was great, but unfortunately, the technology seems to let it down and I can’t get it to work in either Firefox or IE on my PC.  It’s provided by Personiva who seem to be quite a small company based in San Francisco, CA, and their only client to date would appear to be HP and this campaign.  Hopefully they can sort out the technology soon so that it works, because it caught my interest but quickly lost it when I couldn’t get it to kick in.

Which is a shame

Howard

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technorati tags:HP, jay-z, pharrell, mark+cuban, apple, personiva

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Business 2.0 is one of the famous magazines for start-up in the world. The August release is out with a main topic: The 31 best business ideas in the world. Well sure you gonna read it.

More over, you have a nice map with lot of 2.0 companies around the globe.

And guess what, the best is that this entire magazine is available on line for free. You can navigate as in the print one.    

Whilst I was looking for the recent eMarketer report on Social Networking I came across an interesting post by Debra Aho Williamson about WPP and Interpublic’s recent investments into the Social Networking field. This is very interesting news indeed.

People have been going on and on about blogging and social networks within the agency space for some time now (myself included!) with little support really IMHO from people outside of the digital environment (and not necessarily much support from people within it either!). It’s almost as if people had heard the words but not understood what any of it was, prefering instead to stick their heads in the sand and ignore it because, hell!, most of them had only just understood how to send email marketing.

As Debra points out:

By gaining a stake in an Internetproperty or service, agencies can offer their clients easier access tocutting-edge technologies. The risk, of course, is whether the choiceis a good one. And at this early stage of understanding how socialnetworks can also serve as marketing vehicles, there are no clearwinners.

Decision makers in these organisation are taking a real interest in blogs and social networking as well as other related technologies and trends. Whilst they may still not understand it fully, as I think recent pieces on News Corp have also pointed out, they obviously know that change is indeed afoot, and it’s better to be involved and learnas you go along than to be left behind and not be able to get a look in later on.

Howard

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technorati tags:wpp, interpublic, liveworld, facebook, social+networks, emarketer, investment

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Both Clickz and SearchRank (amongst others at technorati and the BBC) are talking at the moment about the recent passing in the USA last week of the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) H. R. 5319 and the fact that with it they have taken a step towards trying to control and protect kids from the growing number of online predators who use unfortunately frequent social networking sites such as Bebo and MySpace.

I’ve not fully attempted to digest the contents of this bill yet, and to be honest I doubt I will except from a potential marketing point of view, but I wanted to comment not on the bill mainly, but on something I experienced over the weekend which made me feel like a complete amateur in terms of using the web and a PC/Mac.

That thing was sitting in front of the computer on Saturday night with several of my neices and nephews at a family party.  With ages ranging from between 12 and 16 they were prime MySpace/Bebo users and it was only a matter of time before they loaded up firefox and logged into their account and MSN messenger.

The way these kids were using technology was in many ways completely and utterly alien to me.  In terms of MSN messenger the main things I noticed were:

Long User Names

These kids have MASSIVE names on MSN.  Not necessarily their login names, i guess that’s not possible, but the name that you can choose to display (which in my case is normally Howard Scott).  The names choosen were absolutely huge, containing not just a name, or even words, but multiple emoticons, slang and “txt spk” style phrases. The names were so long in places that even in a screen res of 1024×768 with the MSN window maximised, the names were wider than the screen.  For me this would make it impossible to tell who was who, and easily scan the display to find the person I want, but they seemed to have no problem doing that.

So Many WIndows!

Another thing that I noticed was the sheer volume of windows that they had open at any one time.  Not just three or four different chat windows, but easily six or seven of them at once.  Quite how they concentrate on what exactly is going on is beyond me.

Picture very important

Obviously the picture displayed on the MSN window is very important to these kids.  So much so that the default one that MSN put in for them (the horses for those familiar) was greeted with sheer disgust and forced them to go off in search of their own Bebo home page and download an image which could then be uploaded back to MSN.  The speed with which the kids did the whole “right click, save as, etc.etc.” technique was astounding and I don’t think i could have done it any faster.

My other thoughts are to do with the way they were using Bebo:

Page Content

Page content was very important.  All of the kids (five in all) had at least one YouTube style video linked into their page, such as Angry Kid, and when I asked them why they choose that video I got the default answer of “because it’s cool”.  Other things were images, lot of flickr style thumbnail galleries, and blog style comment boards.  Lots of comments too!

“Adult” Themed names

So what I mean by this is that the names that were choosen to represent themselves online seemed to mainly revolve around an adolescent sense of what is “adult” and, by association, “sexy”.  All of the names, particularly the girls in the group, were of the theme “XXx_SEXY_SARAH_xXX” and so on.  I guess this is in a way just normal kids behaviour, making themselves appear more “in the know” and experienced than their peers. It’s quite worrying in a way though, especially when you take DOPA into account!

Photos

As mentioned, photos are a big part of this as well, and almost all of them were done in the “angles” way, that is to make the user look as cool and “sexy” (I use that with great caution) as possible.  Again, if you think about DOPA it’s a worrying thing.  It’s fine for kids to do this to show off and look cool in front of their mates, but it’s so easy for people with dangerous interests to get online and find these youngsters that it becomes very worrying. In some ways you can see why Schools in the US are going so far as banning the use of social network sites to stop this.

Quite simply I found the whole experience of watching them use the PC and MSN/Bebo in this way completely alien - i just didn’t understand what on earth they were doing half of the time (I guess that (a) I am getting old! and (b) maybe that is how people my own age feel when i am using a PC in front of them?) but it was an interesting way to pass five mins.

I was hoping to get some insight into how marketing might use this audience in the Bebo type environment, but to be honest I didn’t have a chance to even this about that and the above “observations” were all I could gather.

Certainly I think something does need to be done to help protect kids like these from being abused on social networking sites, but whether this needs to be government, or a private organisation like MySpace/News Corp. I guess remains to be seen.  So far though it looks like the USA and Australia isn’t going to wait for that decision to be made for them and are putting their own measures in place already.

Howard

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technorati tags:bebo, myspace, dopa, 5319, online+safety, MSN+Messenger, kids, protection, social+networking

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It’s late on Sunday night but I just had to stick these videos up.  Topical video of the moment for us all is probably the 1st, and the 2nd is a hot link from Vincent over MSN to a behind the scenes look at the new Sony Bravia ad being filmed in Glasgow.

Both well worth a look.

And goodnight!

Howard

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technorati tags:sony, bravia, glasgow, video, long+tail, advert, you+tube

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Most people are just too overwhelmed with electronic input and filter out everything that is not urgent or from a trusted source. So it’s a wonder we can find anything any more. With the increasing number of messages we have a decreasing ratio of signal-to-noise. This seems particularly the case for marketing and communications messages, where advertisers are struggling to reach their intended audience.

Am reading Ambient Findability right now and am interested in how busy people find anything at all. So on going to the blog of the book I was happy to see a post on the Long Tail.

Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Chris:

In the book, I go all the way back to 1896 and the Sears, Roebuck catalog. The radical technology then was the railroad, which was supposed to bring Amazon-size variety to the Kansas prairie. Which must have seemed amazing back then. Cable TV, digital TV — that brought an explosion of choice to television. A key one clearly was Amazon.com, where they offer practically everything. And it’s not just about a massive increase in variety; it’s also about a massive increase in findability. In a physical store, it’s often hard to find obscure products, if they’re even there. The ability to search on the Web lets us find the variety.

Will post more about Ambient Findability itself later. It seems the whole blogosphere is laking about the long tail now.

Jonathan

Now I quite like the buch of web 2.0 logos that have appeared like a rash over the past few years. Apart from the annoying beta they look fresh to me with their rounded corners and over large fonts. However it’s funny how quickly a defined style was established.

Now there’s a great thread that redesigns famous old logos to make them web 2.0. Some of the are amazing. I love FedEx 2.0.

Jonathan

I am about 60% through The Long Tail now and, whilst I have doubts about writing a post on a book before I’ve finished it, I just wanted to start a place for my thoughts on something which is coming into mind more as I progress through the pages.

So, apologies if Chris does go into this more later on (past page 138) but I keep thinking back to the stuff we discussed during my college years regarding postmodernism in a societal context.

The big issue was always, at the time, how postmodernism as a cultural movement was bringing about a collapse of boundaries between everything we experienced.  One of the ways I used to think of this was how things like television, radio, film, music, etc. would eventually be regarded as a single item, moving closer and closer to each other at all times.  12yrs on since Uni and it’s pretty obvious to see how that’s definitely happened, and whether you argue that we’re still postmodern, or post-postmodern, it’s hard not to see that a collapse on so many levels has and is occuring all the time.  (I seem to remember this being something to do with Verfemdung, but a google just now throws up a lot of Brecht references, so perhaps I have my courses mixed up?) but the notion of distance between objects, audience, and all elements in between is effectively disappearing.

Now, if you think of this in terms of a key point of The Long Tail, that of the tail part being empowered through the easy availability of technology tools to enable user generated content and lower the boundaries between production and consumption, then that distance, the gap between us being one side and not the other, is falling down all the time.  Yet I don’t see any mention of this on the blog circuit of in his book (so far) - and there may be a good reason for that, in that it’s far too obvious?

The other thing that keeps “bothering” me (might not be the right word, but it’ll do) is that on one hand, post modernism is helping to bring everything closer together, to create this enviornment in which we can consume and create all at the same time, whilst at the exact same moment, the long tail effect is making us a more disparate as a consuming body - non-hits and the opposite of the head - we don’t all like the same thing.

Postmodernism brought us all together and collapsed all the boundaries - and at the same time throws us all apart and destroys the collapse, bringing us back to a world of infinite choice and distance from one another.

Howard

technorati tags:postmodernism, collapse, disparate, long, tail, verfremdung

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Yesterday, I was reading an article on Businessweek as often you had banner in the article. But this time I was interested. Actually, the banner invite me to take part to a live chat with Charles Giancarlo, SVP, CDO, Cisco Systems about "technology innovation:  what’s next?".

The banner wasn’t intrusive as the sound is off by default. So then, you active the sound if you’re interested, you can submit your name and email and submit questions for the chat. The main advantage is that you don’t have to go to an other website. Moreover, for the same media space you can be used to announce the chat before, spread the chat live and give feedbacks after. You can check here the full livecast demo.

I think that’s a nice idea about how to use rich media banners. Now, with the high bandwidth, VoIP and video solutions, imagine that you can apply this kind of banner in ecommerce, or commerce guide.

For example I’m on an ecommerce page, which list cameras from different brands. A brand, let say Sony, add a banner that allows you to chat with the call center and ask details about different camera models.

It make me think also about a demo I saw with Flex that allow people to ask questions to the call center on a Bank website. I think that is what Skype and Google gonna try to manage with their Pay per call and Pay per lead audio model.

Vincent