Adventures In Digital Marketing

Later than planned, but here is part 2 of my write up for the last Chinwag event, Tomorrow’s Ad Formats

Please note that the below post is a bit like a stream of consciousness, as i’ve not really edited it down into a solid article - but it gives you (I hope) a good impression of how the discussion went).

Howard
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Discussion time, and the first topic raised by the Chair is the subject of video formats…

It is stated that in the land of online video ads, it’s all too easy for creatives to take an existing 30 second TVC and compress it for the web and stick it online, but all too often people forget that whilst the two formats (TV and online) have similarities in that they can play video, they are not and never will be the same, certainly not in terms of audience and how it is consumed.  If a typical YouTube clip is 3 mins in length, then a 30 second ad at the beginning simply isn’t relevant for the user.

Web video is often a rational or logical choice by the user, whereas the TV is an emotive choice - this is a good rule of thumb for all creating content in these areas and should be taken into consideration when working with them.  Creatives and clients alike need to consider the basic fact that video content on the web is consumed in small bite-sized chunks and video ads therefore need to be created with this in mind.

The panel went on to discuss the new video formats that The BBC are introducing and thought that these were starting to stimulate the market in a good way.  The fact as well that BBC iPlayer (disclaimer - I love iPlayer!) received 70,000,000 users in the first month says a lot about how people are beginning to adapt to video online (comment: but does it say anything about ad formats in particular? possibly not). 

Mat commented now that if we’re talking about video formats, then we possibly need to talk about seeding and that often, particularly in relation to viral video formats, it’s as much a part of the campaign as the creative itself.

Chair: is the internet going towards video and hi-def video in particular?

most terrestrial video content is delivered over the internet already apparently, so for the TV companies it’s not a huge leap to adopt the Internet as a consumer delivery mechanism (Note: I am still personally convinced that so called Digital TV - as in freeview - is a waste for us and we’re very close to just jumping straight into pure IPTV delivery like iPlayer and so forth).  Some on the panel think that TV hardware itself will become a lot more like an Internet application (in the physical sense) with users choosing what they want to watch when they want to watch it in an IPTV way (note: I couldn’t agree more but check this post of mine from some time ago…).

The panel also pointed out however that if the ad model is going to support free content online it’ll need to grow by approx. 9 times in order to support itself and so we shouldn’t think we’re home and dry just yet.

Chair: moves us onto the topic of social media - how do we see ad formats evolving in this space?…

Some on the panel see social media as being a balance between time and effort to address users within the space.  To take on content within the social space is often something brands don’t wish to invest in a great deal, but it’s essential to make sure it does it’s job well.  It’s not a fire and forget medium - it needs a lot of care and attention to deliver good solid results.

Comment from Mat in relation to the social PR space - he thinks that often social spaces are better for PR firms to listen to, rather than try and talk through.  It’s like the reversal of the traditional PR space.  In this way he thinks that actually the traditional media, both on and offline, are better for traditional PR - much more so than social spaces at the moment.

David comments that he is amazed that Facebook is as popular as it is and that for advertisers and marketers it’s a terribly hard environment in which to push products and services.  He doesn’t think we’ve cracked the surface at all with them and thinks understanding how to really use them is still some way off.

Priya comments that actually companies may not even be set up to correctly handle the conversations they get exposed to in social spaces and as such they fail when trying to work in or with them.

It’s a contradiction between "command" and "control".  Marketing departments natively try to control their messages, and social spaces naturally remove that control for them.

Chair: so what about mobile platforms? Hard to discuss ad formats of the future without discussion ad formats…

NOTE: I didn’t write much down in this part of the discussion, mainly because it turned into a Apple iPhone fanboy session with the panel discussing how cool a mobile device it is.

Chair: FInally…  what about digital outdoor?

Panel sees huge opportunity for agencies and clients within the rapidly emerging digital outdoor space - not just outdoor but the whole interaction and joining of the real and virtual worlds.  It begins to provide customers with extremely rich experiences both on and offline. 

One thing whole panels seems to agree upon in relation to digital outdoor is that bluecasting sucks!

FOr some reason at this point we moved back towards mobile formats and the whole panel seemed to agree that mobile simply isn’t being used as it should be from an ad point of view - small mobile banners are NOT the future.

Note: not much of a mention of branded applications or the like, which suprised me.

David from Phorm at this point goes on to discuss their product and services for a few minutes, to explain how and what it is and why it’s causing so much controversy for a whole load of different parties and interest groups.

I hope to sit down some time in the future to discuss Phorm with David in more detail, so I will wrap up this post here….

Thanks to all the panel and chinwag for hosting the event.

Sorry for the rambling post, but hopefully it was helpful in some way

Howard
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Earlier this week I attended another of the Chinwag Live events in Soho.  The topic this week was "Tomorrow’s Ad Formats" and the panel of guests chosen to kick off the debate and impart their expert opinion was comprised of five people:

Priya Prakash - Creative Director, Hachette Filipacchi
Rhys Williams - Co-founder, agenda21
Steven Hess - Managing Partner, weapon7
David Burrows - Ad Operations Director, Phorm UK
Mat Morrison - Digital Planning Director, Porter Novelli

and the whole event was chaired by Guy Phillipson - CEO, Internet Advertising Bureau.

In this first post I’ll try to summarise each of the panel member’s introductions and the key points they set out when making their opening statements…

Priya
Priya is a proponent of user centered design and believes that it will play a key role in the future of marketing.  Agencies are limited by their briefs to some degree, in what they receive as instruction from the client, and the client’s own vision of what they think the future of marketing is going to be. Agencies need to be able to separate themselves from this to help stretch the true boundaries of future marketing.

Quoting The Cluetrain Manifesto as a key influencer (there’s a lot of that in this Chinwag -  maybe everyone rediscovered their copy of it sitting on a dusty shelf somewhere) she stated that in her opinion marketing has to start adding serious value to the customer and their experience in order to be valid, otherwise ads will serve as nothing but an interruption (a Disruption?) to what users are doing and they will ignore it.  In this way she thinks brands themselves are too narcissistic, thinking only of their own needs and ignoring the needs of the customer, and this is what really needs to change in order for them to stop getting in the way and increase relevancy.

Rhys
Rhys sees there being three things in the industry right now which are driving us towards more and more complex media spaces and format choices.

Stating in his first sentence that the problem with digital advertising right now is that everything is driven by jargon, Rhys thinks the media landscape is becoming more and more complicated all the time driven primarily by clients (advertisers), media owners, and lastly by the users themselves.

For a start, some clients, and often some agencies, always want to try and get some advertising Kudos by having a "media first", to appear to be the cutting edge and are always asking during a lot of briefings "what’s the next big thing?"  This mentality, of associating new formats with cutting edge creative, is part of the problem with why the media landscape is getting so diverse and complex.  But it shouldn’t be. He questioned why new format opportunities are so important to some clients, why do they see everything in that way as a first being so important?

Rhys then gave an example in Facebook at this very moment which goes for a media first but results in a run of the mill campaign - referring to the rash of experian search ads which have started to appear inside everyone’s profile pages whenever they log on (yeah! Why are they SO annoying?)  He believes that advertisers who do this are actually being lazy, going for the cheap clicks through a misguided sense that being first will lend their (annoying, interrupting and unimaginative - my words) campaign some extra legs.

Secondly, another problem he sees is that media owners try to push new formats on their space in hope of getting increased CPM, as is the case right now for video formats which can often top £25 CPM as opposed to around £1-ish CPM for a banner placement.  Clients then see these formats as an answer to the problem of getting stand out in a crowded environment (certainly though there is some evidence to suggest this works I guess seeing as the CTR on video formats is way higher than on static formats?)

FInally, Rhys said that he thinks often creative agencies want to push the boundaries themselves in terms of formats available to get a creative edge, often resulting in nothing more than a larger amount of real estate with which to play, and that media planners often get pressured by creatives to create plans full of new, larger, more invasive formats. 

Steven
Steven said he finds new formats very confusing.  He thinks that often lots of things emerge into the spaces available which are simply nothing but technical innovations which are built for no other reason than because they can be - and certainly bear nothing in relation to them being useful for campaigns of customers.  He strongly believes that formats don’t fuel the creative brief, and never will.

He raised the question that in this climate, how do we, the people working inside the digital industry right now, express creative ideas for a client that users and customers will be able to understand?

Technology in his opinion should be used as an enabler to meet a client’s problems, and not as a stick to beat problems with until they fit into a technical shaped box.  In the past ten years or so, the digital industry has had a sense of entrepreneurism that’s helped us all drive towards more innovative and creative solutions with what tools we had available to us at the time.  He fears that this mindset will disappear if we continue down this current path.  We must resist the urge to continually give names to all new shapes, formats, ideas and inventions that we all come up with in an attempt to commoditise them and sell them on to others for more and more profit. 

He thinks we need to demonstrate solid returns for clients for all of the ideas we give to a client, regardless of the format or what it is, rather than continually trying to turn new spaces we discover into extra formats.

David
Dave thinks that customers right now are fed up being bombarded by endless streams of junk and irrelevant advertising, and that the problem with advertising on the internet is that the signal-to-noise ratio is far too high.  For every good ad there are a hundred bad ones for IM smileys or a free iPod. (Oh come on Dave! If it weren’t for those ads we would never have been blessed with "Smack The Monkey" banners).

Phorm, for who Dave now works having left Yahoo! for them recently, aim to help users strip down the junk and address the signal-to-noise problem.  Because 50% of ads don’t work, but no one right now knows which 50% of the ads it is, phorm think they can start to target in a much more effective way than has been previously achieved.

Dave also believes that in the past there has been "an arms race" in terms of banner real estate sizes, for which he holds his hands up to some degree during his time at Yahoo!, and that all media owners, by behaving in this way, have been causing a lot of the problems.

He thinks that Phorm again have the key to this, and through their OIX targetting platform, they can help customers receive the ads which are most relevant to them, in turn helping the agencies and clients as well. 

All this with a very anonymous system in which privacy is apparently a key issue which Phorm have taken very seriously.

NOTE: At this point Dave was heckled by a member of the audience who shouted out "You’re an advert!" (or something similar, it was hard to hear) basically making the point that Dave was here to talk about Tomorrow’s Ad Formats and not just plug Phorm as the cure for cancer.

Mat
Mat claims he really doesn’t have much to say about Tomorrow’s Ad Formats as he has only worked in PR for about 6 months (perhaps he meant in relation to PR?  Because surely if he is ex-AKQA he would have something to say? To be honest I didn’t quite understand what he meant here).

What he does think though is that the current climate feels a bit like the late 90’s and that worries him.  He went on to quote from a press release circa 1997 from the IAB claiming that the 468×60 banner was the future of advertising and better than TV ads.

He wanted us to consider this ten years down the road and be careful of what claims we all make incase they come back to bite us in another ten years.

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That’s it for now.  Tomorrow (well, hopefully but it is a bank holiday!)  I’ll post details from the discussion part of the evening where the panel went on to discuss some format specifics in more detail.

Howard
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Grabbing hold of current trends in both music sales/distribution and digital advertising/marketing, Trent Reznor’s band the Nine Inch Nails (disclaimer: I am and always have been a very big fan) have launched their new instrumental album, Ghosts I-IV, online in a variety of both digital and physical formats with prices ranging from free for the 9-track DRM-Free sampler album to $300 for the Ultra deluxe package.

With a nod towards Radiohead’s recent launch of In Rainbows, which they offered online for the price the user felt they wanted to pay and was covered alongside the future of the music business as a whole in great detail in an article by David Byrne for Wired Magazine, Reznor has changed tack slightly by providing a large range of options to suit all pockets.

Free music being what it is recently, with a lot of artists testing the water one way or another, such as Prince with his Daily Mail (gah! must clean mouth out after saying that paper’s name) free CD, there are lots of discussions ongoing as to whether this is a solid new approach or simply something already established artists with a loyal fan base are able to exploit at this time.

What really interests me in this instance is what Reznor has done alongside the variable pricing structure for his latest work - which is providing a whole host of other formats to the usual MP3, as well as material specifically designed to act in a marketing context.

When you download the album (I got the $0 version for now, although I will be getting the full thing on pay day!), you get a couple of folders full of wallpaper, the cover art for the album as a JPG, a PDF document which acts like the insert in a CD (some lovely photography contained within) and, most interesting in some ways for us digital marketing types, a whole host of pre-made banner, button and blog header images.

Reznor is doing something very intelligent and interesting here.  Not only is he experimenting with the free music approach, something which in itself will generate a load of PR one way or the other, but he’s giving the music itself away in multi-track formats to encourage people to play with and remix his work (something he did previously on other albums, giving it away in Apple Garage band format at least), and by providing the ready made blog and banner formats, he’s giving people a way to show their loyalty to the band, and in turn generate a viral style effect for the album which he couldn’t possibly hope to achieve on his own or through an agency with a media plan.

By giving away so much stuff, stuff which fans will firstly think is way cool and want to put all over the internet, Reznor’s actually giving the fans control over his marketing campaign, truly putting it right into the hands of the people who know and love the most about the band in the first place.

User generated advertising was a buzz word a short time ago, and perhaps still is in certain bars around Soho on a good night, but handing over the control of the campaign, utilising free media space in highly targetted areas with an applicable audience, is IMHO a master stroke and a perfect example of where marketing is possibly going in terms of control and transparency.

Undoubtedly the freedom NIN and the like are now experiencing in terms of no-label is also extending itself into their thinking for no-agency marketing and no-control PR.

In more ways than just my musical taste alone I have to say right now Trent, I am a big fan.

Howard

Thiago de Moraes, digital creative director at CHI & Partners has notched up a very impressive four gongs at last night’s 2008 Revolution Awards from five nominations. The awards include the grand prix creative award for the Carphone Warehouse X Factor Challenge. The Carphone Warehouse site is no longer live but you can read all about it here.

You can also check out Thiago’s blog for more examples of his creative genius. Congratulations Thiago!

Jonathan

Absolut vodka have worked on an arty project called Absolut Machines that tries to explore the boundaries of artificial intelligence, music, technology and creativity. It all seems to be an interesting mix of robots or mechanical machines and computer generated music. The real world locations are in Stockholm and NY and online users can interact with the installation.

There are lots more great pics of the robots being installed on this Flickr set.

Jonathan

I noticed an interesting post over on the Advertising 2.0 blog today (I believe by the way that we have a mutual friend in Vincent Thome who has mumbled something about combined bloggy drinks?) commenting on a BrandRepublic article about an IAB survey which states that 72% of purchasers of luxury goods did so as a result of seeing an Internet ad, whilst only 70% named magazines and 62% television.

I’m both surprised and not surprised by this.

My own strangely offline gutt instinct is to assume that magazines rule the roost in terms of recall for luxury goods purchasers (classed by the IAB as individuals with an income of £40k+).  The sheer number of magazine titles which contain nearly nothing but full page and double page ads for the sector is astronomical - lifestyle and beauty titles for both men and women are filled with them.  I have no problem with TV being last - the fact that luxury goods really aren’t the domain of most prime time viewing ad slots tells me it’s not going to be the top of pile.  But Internet beating mags is a surprise to me I must admit.

But, I am also unsurprised by it, and this is perhaps because I cut my digital teeth on luxury goods and I have a lot of fond memories for them and indeed I think I harbour a probably not so secret desire to return to that side of things in some way or other in the future.  Luxury goods, and the style of photography and creative often used in advertising them, works particularly well IMHO when translated from print to digital.  I’ve done handbags, watches, cosmetics, cars and travel, all in the luxury sectors, and all of them worked well in a kind of brand awareness ATL glossy static late 1990’s kind of way.

I remember very clearly from the spring of 2001, post dot-com bubble, discussing some sites I’d worked on with the MD of now very successful web startup that the creative I was showing him looked like magazine ads, and I had to really persuade him I wasn’t trying to pull a fast one by just showing him a DPS. I believe his phrase was along the lines of "I didn’t know websites could look that good" which was a phrase I loved relaying back to the creative director who did them!

The article goes on to say that according to the IAB luxury consumers spend more time online than they do with any other media, spending a lot of it during the research phase before they go and execute their actual purchase in the real world - where’s that changing funnel-to-tumbler research Yahoo!?

I really think that luxury goods helped to pave the way for the massive uptake over the years in Internet advertising, certainly being one of those product sectors along with cars and travel (of which some also fall in the luxury category of course) which really translated naturally into the online space and helped to make digital marketing & advertising the industry it is today.

I’d love to see a similar report on all product categories to see what the percentages associated with recall are across the board but some how I suspect it might not match the scale of the luxury sector, certainly not right now.

Howard

Just a quick plug for the new venture of a boss I had once for about four days (ok, a month, but she’ll know what I mean by four days!)

Deirdre McGlashan, with whom I worked for a short period at Carat, before it became the Isobar Network, has moved onto pastures new it would seem to become a founding partner in Analogfolk, a new agency based in Clerkenwell, London.

With the interesting strapline running in the titlebar of "We make communications products" the agency’s website, which has a very interesting navigation structure I have to say, but not sure how practical it is on a day-to-day basis, explains that they strive to create work which lives in the intersection between digital technology and rich analog experiences.

It’s certainly an interesting position for a new agency and it’ll be equally interesting to see how it progresses.  Certainly though it’s got a great start with the talent involved (one of the other founding partners is Vincent’s old boss from Tribal as well!).

Good luck all - we here at adventures will be watching!

Howard
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Leading web guru Guy Kawasaki has launched a new site, alltop.com, to join his already large portfolio of web products.

Alltop is typically simple but excellent in it’s execution, taking the top stories from a whole host of different feeds and bringing them all into one place. 

With topics for most tastes ranging from food to tech to moms it’s poised to become a key destination especially as the twitterati will no doubt jump onto it like hot cakes and with Guy’s so called golden touch no doubt make him a few quid as well.

Check it out at alltop.com

Howard
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Chris Anderson has a great article available for free here "Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business". There are some great examples of "free content" that makes money including Gmail, Ryanair (almost free or very cheap tickets) and Prince’s last CD.

Much like he did with The Long Tail (which also began as an
article), this latest piece cleverly
cross-promotes Anderson’s upcoming book, FREE, which won’t be available until 2009.

The article comes complete with a How-to wiki, How to make money using free content.

Jonathan

Thiago de Moraes has started a fantastic illustration blog to capture his oodles of doodles. There are lots of wonderful characters and I look forward to seeing many more.

Keep up the good work!

Jonathan