Adventures In Digital Marketing

• Groundswell (Incorporating Charlene Li’s Blog):
  the blog of Charlene Li, as well as a blog for her book Groundswell,
  (tags: digital advertising forrester marketing research blog book web2.0 business)
• top 100 agencies 2008
  (tags: agency advertising interactive business charts)
• Interactivity Is Not Just for the Internet - Advertising Age - Digital
  Uses a lot of words to basically highlight that a lot of offline people seem to think digital isn’t all we crack it up to be. No surprises there then! What he should really be saying is that advertising is broken - not digital advertising
  (tags: interactive advertising digital clow tbwa)
• Spot the Bull
  The excellent online promotion Spot The Bull is back for a second year. I loved this last year, and I love it again now. Excellent work.
  (tags: digital tickets promotion competition glastonbury orange poke)

Über High Street retailer of CDs, Kid’s clothing and the mighty pick-n-mix, Woolworths, have launched a new website to sell downloads and the like to those people who used to buy 7″ singles before CD singles and now only buy downloads - although presumably some of them are a lot older now so it’s not the same people we’re talking about - but you never know!

Anyway, the new site is live now it would seem, but there’s one problem…

Are you a Mac user? (Yes!) Are you on Safari? (Never!) well, if you are, you’re out of luck because they don’t like those platforms.

They also seem to want Windows Media Player - which again could be a problem.

Presumably this is all DRM based in some way.

Whatever, if you’ve got a hankering for the latest Girls Aloud best try elsewhere if you’re an Apple Fan Boy

I’m doing some snooping into games consoles at the moment - I just got a PS3 the other month and I was wondering how many of the others, XBOX360 and Wii I guess in the “next gen” category, were out there to see how it compared. I know PS3 lags behind them all, but by how much? Because didn’t Sony get a real boost when they won the BlueRay vs. HD-DVD war? Oh, and dropped the price - that always works!

Anyway, I was looking, and it turns out there are about half as many PS3 in the world as there are XBox360s. And there are about 80% the XBox360s as there are Nintendo Wii.

This didn’t shock me - what I was expecting.

But what did shock me was this.

There are more Wii in the world than there are Apple Macs running OSX.

from what I read there are about 22,000,000 macs

and there are about 25,000,000 Wii

Now - that is impressive! No wonder there’s never any Nintendo consoles in my local Game shop.

Well done Nintendo. You may get knocked back a lot for being a gimmick, and not a “serious” games platform, but hell! You’d made good at it.

At my place of work, which I very rarely blog about here - I don’t know why not, I know a lot of bloggers who do talk directly about their work but for me it feels wrong some how.  I know if it were an actual company blog then that would be different, but this is my own professional opinion blog and I like to keep it seperate from my work as much as I can - except this time.  Anyway, we’re rebuilding our agency website.

Anyone who has ever been involved in rebuilding their own company website will, I should think, immediately empathise with me and the whole team involved.  They’re often interesting projects, to say the least.  But fun, of course.  Honest guys.

We’ve been asked to answer three simple questions to show us what we’re like as real people.  These aren’t new questions - you’ll have seen them or very similar ones to them, before.  But we’re not reinventing the wheel here.

So, here’s my answers:

Q1
“The reason I come to work every morning is…”
I come to work because I love digital.  OK, that’s a cop out?  Maybe, but I know one thing.  I am a geek marketer.  And I’m proud of it.  I realise I have been ever since I got over my fear of building stupidly complex JavaScript websites to sell people trainers that cost them two weeks wages (I still blame you Raj Chavda for that lost weekend with the All Blacks!) .  I don’t know how many times a day you hear something along the lines of “the future of marketing is digital” but it’s something I truly believe, and I spend as much time as I can getting away with telling anyone and everyone.  So, I guess I come to work so I can tell some more people; co-workers, clients or consumers - I’m not fussy.  I’ll tell you all.

Q2
“The best idea I’ve seen recently is…”
The Age of Conversation - a single book on a single topic, conversation, written by over 100 different people.  In this age of blogging, many established (and some not so) authors are placing extacts of their upcoming or new books online, increasingly to tap into the collective review process of a thousand devoted digitally enabled fans.  This book, edited by Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan, moves the wiki style working process into a new gear by creating a single work that’s made up of 100+ different pieces.  All proceeds go to charity, and edition two (topic: Why don’t people get it?) is just kicking off.

Q3
“If I were a client tomorrow I’d…”
Stop buying newspapers, turn off the TV and walk to work blindfolded so I don’t see any billboards (although that could prove to be a bit of a challenge).  That way, I’d get a deeper understanding into the way consumers are starting to treat so called traditional ad formats - i.e. they’re ignoring them - so that I have to look at new ways to reach my target audience.  I’d also stop speaking on my mobile (& snd txt msgz insted), stop sending emails (and switch to IM) and only read facebook on my iPhone (63% of mobile web traffic goes to social networks).  Not only is the traditional marketing world changing, the new one is changing with it.  If you don’t stop and look around, you might miss it.

So, that’s me.  What I want to know is, what are your answers?

Q1 - the reason I come to work every morning is…
Q2 - the best idea i’ve seen recently is…
Q3 - if i were a client tomorrow I’d…

Comments, or emails to howard DOT scott AT gmail DOT com, really appreciated.  And, if you could pass it on to two of your bestest mates that’d be swell - just tag anything you post with “3simplequestions”.

Thanks

I know this isn’t digital, but has anyone else seen the really short, perhaps 15 second, un-branded ads on TV?  There was one on last night, and this one said something like “live TV ad in 7 days”.

I’ve got a feeling I read somewhere that this is a Honda campaign.  It’s about doing things only being worth doing if their difficult, or something like that.

Anyway, I guess they’re doing a live TV ad in 7 days time.

Should be interesting.

• brand tags
  a brand is what you say a brand is
  (tags: brands tags taglines advertising marketing branding brand)
• Pixish: We bring visual artists and publishers together
• Alltop

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Some truly great points in this presentation by Paul Isakson.  It’s well worth your while taking five mins to watch it.

I’ve seen the phrase “Geek marketers” a few places online recently - Steve Rubel’s a big fan of it (did you come up with it even Steve?) and thinks that it’s a big trend for the future of digital. Jim Kukral likes it as a title as well.

I like it too.

I think I am it probably.

I think a lot of people I know are it as well.

I’m proud of that.

Howard

It seems that digital outsourcing of production continues to be the conversation on everyone’s lips right now in London. I see Iain Tait blogging about it over on crackunit. I’ve also seen more and more articles in the print press about it. Obviously something is going on - not quite sure what it is and why it’s so in focus right now, but it surely is.

Would love to hear peoples ideas on why this is such a hot topic right now - are we all deciding to outsource our development? all of it? part of it? none of it?

And don’t lie - I KNOW for a fact a lot of you out there in both “integrated” and “pure play” worlds are doing it already - so who’s doing it and why?

Howard

ps - yes, I know I just used an under construction logo - been so long I couldn’t resist

Just a quick update to say that, as you can no doubt see, we’ve made a few changes to Adventures In Digital.

First, we’ve switched from Typepad to Wordpress.  Rightly or wrongly, and there are advocates for both, we decided to switch from a hosted platform on Typepad, where we had been for the past two years, into an open source and effectively free environment of Wordpress.  This was for more than just the monthly fee - we also have more control over what we do on WP as we’ve got hold of the actual server.  Now there are some changes between TP and WP, and they mainly revolve around permlinks - so there is a chance some of the old ones are now broken - hopefully this isn’t the case as we updated the link format in WP to be the same as TP but you never know.  The other thing is images - Typepad make it practically impossible to export your images out of their system en-masse, meaning that for us to migrate all of the images we’ve used on adventuresdm.com for the past two years would have taken days and days of manual graft - so we decided not to do this.  Instead, we’re going to keep the TP account live for about six months in an hope that old images and articles by that point aren’t visited as much (longtail be damned!) - after that we’ll turn off the typepad account and, with it, all those images will probably break.  can’t be helped I am afraid unless Typepad get real and give users a bulk export tool for images (they have a bulk import tool already!).

Secondly, domain name.  In order to smoothly (well, smooth-ish) manage the migration to Wordpress we setup adventuresdm.co.uk and are now pointing the .com address at the .co.uk address.  Everything should work fine and you shouldn’t notice any change, but again, with this internet thang you never know.

Third and finally, we updated the design to be something a bit more contemporary and interesting.  It’s based on an open source Wordpress theme we found on a themes site, and we adjusted it slightly.  For those of you interested in what it is the link is in the ABOUT US section.

So, hopefully it’s all good and you like?  well, if not, let us know either way and we’ll ignore your comments :)  just kidding, but, hopefully it’s been a smooth transition over to a more open source, friendly and flexible (bulk image export typepad come on!) transition.

Howard