Adventures In Digital Marketing

sometimes it’s amazing how quickly the internet can work against you as a digital marketer.

Last week it was discovered very quickly indeed that Belkin, provider of electronic bits and bobs such as network cards etc., had allegedly posted to the Amazon Mechanical Turk system (a marketplace for getting work carried out by an army of human workers – the kind of thing computers are good at in scale but not good at in ability) asking for people to write “fake” reviews of it’s products for them – applying a 5/5 rating, and while at it, mark down bad reviews to get them out of the way.  This was, again allegedly, done by Michael Bayard who is a Business Development Representative.

This is bad enough in it’s own right, the someone “might” think this is a good thing to do.  But within a short time it was spotted by someone, and then reported on Engadget.com

OUCH!

Today we see on Belkin’s own website a letter within their press section where they say how disappointed they are for the fact that this “may” have happened by a Belkin employee and that in fact they “support our online user community in discussion and reviews of our products, whether the commentary is good or bad” as of course they should.

Sometimes these lessons have to get learnt the hard way, but i thought this kind of thing had gone extinct a long time ago – but it seems that every now and then someone “might” just get it wrong and think they can influence things in the wrong way.

Belkin’s President, Mark Reynoso, who posted the letter on their own site has got it right when he says “both good and bad” – that’s the benefit to getting feedback about your products, being able to see where you are going wrong and then make them better!

It worked for Palm recently – their new Pre has made them the golden child once more and they used to get a serious kicking from all over the place – even getting an open letter from Engadget.com – to which they responded in an open way!

transparency – it’s the key to this kind of activity.

Don’t make the mistake that Michael Bayard may have made, allegedly, and trust your audience to do the right thing.

Howard

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A lot of buzz going on right now about Yahoo! and it’s several hardware partners (which include heavyweights like Sony and Samsung) moving closer and closer to the launch of the “Yahoo! Connected TV” platform – a combination of HDTV hardware (like you probably have right now in your house) and some extras, seemingly from Intel and Yahoo!, which allow the TV to display widgets, pulling in various snippets of internet content, right on the TV screen itself alongside the usual programming and shows.

Since Yahoo! purchased Konfabulator some years ago, I’ve not really seen them do anything outstanding with the engine that the likes of Microsoft and Google were not doing with their own Widget and Gadget platforms.

This to me seems like the first major step in widget evolution since apple really decided to build it right into the OS with Dashboard, making it common place for all mac users and then windows users as MS followed suit and built it into Vista.

What is exciting about this though is it’s not a PC.  It’s not a Mac.  It’s not some techy “add-on” perceived by the masses to be geeky – it’s built right in there to the TV.  The device most people interact with on a daily basis for several hours.

Because of this, Connected TV is designed to be user friendly by the average Joe consumer from the ground up.

Use your remote to bring up the TV Widget Dock, select all your favorite TV Widgets, and connect to popular Internet services and online media, while you watch your favorite show.

Making it hopefully as easy for users to get access to widgets as it is to switch over to Celebrity Big Brother.

As digital marketers we’ve been trying to capitalise on the wide distribution, easy development, and very focused audience groups that widgets provide for some time – with varying degrees of success – but the big problem has always been that widget use is restricted to a niche audience who are generally highly technical.  It’s never been a mainstream media channel.

Connected TV could just change all of this, and if it becomes a standard, built in to all TVs that the likes of LG, Sony and Samsung create (I don’t think it will be initially – it’ll be an added cost extra for sure) then people will hopefully get as used to using widgets (even forgetting that they are widgets and simply regarding them as part of TV) on a normal daily basis.

If that were to happen, then as digital marketers we would have a huge new environment with which to target consumers.

I also wonder what this connected platform would mean for segmentation and targetted advertising?  Maybe nothing – but I wonder if they’ve thought about pushing ads to people?  Hopefully not – thinking about it it would be amazingly intrusive to get an overlay banner for the new series of Lost popping up during the latest episode of Heroes!  Scratch that – it’d suck

But -widgets are good – they’re user accessed when they want them.

We like that.

Upon launch it looks like the platform will contain content, naturally, from a key selection of Yahoo! properties like Flickr, and some other 3rd party partners like Blockbuster, Ebay and Twitter (how cool is that!).  But, there’s also an API that any developer can tap into to make widgets for the platform – meaning it’s open to all of us – which is just great from the start (So, Apple, missing something with the AppleTV yet??)

Yahoo! – please please deliver the goods on this.

Oh, and Microsoft?  You might want to check out the sweet user interface that this platform has compared to WIndows 7 Media Center (which isn’t being shown AGAIN at CES? We get no love in the Media Center community??)  Yahoo! makes you look stupid in terms of visual design and usability over a TV interface!

Howard

I forgot one final prediction…

The digital sector will continue to grow in 2009, just not as fast as before

As with previous years I think digital will continue to grow, possibly ahead of TV for the first time in it’s history, but certainly a positive move upwards.  It won’t be anywhere near as big in previous years I don’t think (i could be wrong) but the way marketers want to increase accountability and ROI digital has got to be the platform (in all it’s guises) that clients are going to want to maximise.  Like I’ve said before with the likes of Orange and Nike coming out recently with statements along the lines of “it’s all got to be digital” others will start to follow.  And even if they don’t go the whole hog, digital will certainly canibalise other media as budgets are switched around to get cheaper results.

Howard

Well, I had to do it – everyone else was

Here are some predictions from me for what we might see happening in 2009 from a digial marketing POV. (emphasis is heavily on the “might”)…

Display is going to take a big hit
OK – i’ll admit it.  Whilst I do regularly get involved in banner campaigns, and I do even add them into the mix (sometimes) when I am working on stragegy, I feel well and truly that banners are failing us all. Whether we are on the inside of the industry, client-side or consumers clicking along happily on our site of choice, banners really aren’t doing it for anyone any more are they?  And what with recent reports that TV CPM is dropping like a stone, even getting so low as in the £4 CPM region, digital CPM rates are as high as ever.  I am sure they’ll come down as well, but that’s not the problem.  The problem is that in these days of increased ROI and accountability, where every penny counts of that all important ad budget, banners do not deliver the scale per pound that you can get in other forms of digital marketing.  Something like viral, whilst not being so applicable for all audiences I grant you, has a much better bang-for-buck than display ever can.  I know, I know, they do different jobs, but for me, display is simply not cost effective.  To be quite honest, I am amazed at times we still so it!

We’ll all get closer to the price point
So, what I don’t mean by this is that all marketing is going to become point-of-sale and we’re all going to need to learn how to make wobblers if we want to keep our jobs (god I love wobblers! they really are the ultimate expression of marketing genius stuck onto a transparent piece of bouncy plastic – when I come back I want to be the small adhesive patch on the back of a wobbler stuck to a shelf in Happy Shopper!).  What I mean is that I think there will be a greater emphasis as we move further into 2009, and indeed into the credit crunch/recession/global-bank-hell-nightmare-retail-meltdown in which we find our postmodern-selves well and truly trapped, for brands to shift their advertising well and truly below the line, placing more emphasis on value and, dare I say it, price.  it’s already started to some degree although it’s fueled by retail brands desperately trying to grab sales-dollars in the pre and post Xmas period – but I think it will continue to be a prominent feature for some time to come as companies try to maintain consumer spending patterns, grabbing hold of what spend is occuring as much as they can by persuading not so much on lifestyle, or features, but on value for plain old money.

Planning currency woes
So, there’s a new industry body to sort out this issue of a planning currency so the big boys, the likes of Unilever and P&G, can feel more relaxed about spending money on digital and will all of a sudden inject billions of dollars into the business.  And with the likes of Microsoft, and other big “media owners” wading in and taking a seat at the table they might just pull it off this year – and as we all know, they’ve been trying to do it for long enough as it is!  But, the real issue is – do we really care?  Does a planning currency even make sense to us now in this digital world?  How do you make up a planning currency for activity taking place in a social media space?  When it extends beyond the original space which was purchased, or which a campaign was intended to inhabit, how does that affect the measurement?  It couldn’t happen that easily in an oldschool print based world, or even TV for that matter, but we all know now it’s as simple as hitting Apple+4 and sticking it onto Flickr.  So, whilst it might, MIGHT, get sorted out, we’ll probably end up making a rod for our own backs in the process.

Desktop Schmextop
Desktop computers will take a hit as we move more and more away from the “traditional” PC/Mac based interaction with the internet and the web, and transition to a more mobile, and a more converged method of dealing with digital and online spaces.  A good friend of mine, Pete Trainor, told me the other night over a beer (actually I remember it being several beers, some cocktails and some really nice Californian Pinot Noir – but who’s counting!) that during a recent lecture he gave at a University, on the subject of the future of digital marketing, he realised at a certain point that he hardly mentioned a computer based interface at all, and found himself talking about mobile, outdoor, and other ways of getting online.  I found this very apt. The more we get used to dealing with the web in other ways, the less important an actual PC will be to us.  Hardware manufacturers like HP, Dell and Apple (and that’s another thing! What the hell are you doing Apple? You are SO run of the mill now it hurts us!) are seeing this as the shift away from dsktop machines to cheaper, portable laptops – and it won’t stop there.  infact, I think we’ll move away from desktops and laptops substantially over the next year or so and find ourselves using the internet in more bespoke, niche ways with hardware and software specially designed to do small, very focused jobs.  Mainframe -> terminal -> desktop -> laptop -> netbook -> smartphone -> ?  You see where I am going?

X marks the spot
2009 may well be the year that GPS becomes a pocket-based household name and not just something you stick to the windscreen of your car to tell you where you live (seriously people, what is wrong with a map or road atlas?!) – as more and more phones start to add GPS as a key feature into the mix, we’ll see people naturally getting more and more used to it – coming to rely on it, and not regading it as “techy” any more – it’ll just be “the map on my mobile”.  And it’s not just phones.  Cameras are starting to get it more too.  Geotagging your photos will become common place, especially as the online services like Flickr, and consumer facing photo software like the very recently announced iPhoto ‘09 include it as a basic part of their feature set.  GPS is here to stay, and as it becomes more prevalent it’ll make it’s way more and more into the advertising and marketing we use and create.  In the same way that brands are starting to use very focused keywords alongside SEO to drive traffic from offline to on (who hasn’t heard “SEARCH ONLINE FOR XXX” in a campaign recently?  Although obviously searching online for “XXX” might get you some dodgy results!) I believe we’ll start seeing innovative uses of GPS in campaigns for driving people directly to retail locations and the like.

Search online for “adventuresdm”
Like I touched on in the above paragraph, I think the way we use search, and how it drives from off to online, is going to get more related to keywords and rely less and less on URLs.  We all know that a search engine is more often than not the starting point for all user journeys online.  And recently we’ve a seen brands like Orange, and indeed the Government, using “SEARCH ONLINE FOR XYZ” as part of integrated campaigns.  The benefit is clear – a simple, memorable keyword is needed for users to find your site via Google or Yahoo.  Rather than the user having to remember a URL, a microsite URL, or ever a subdomain or folder location – which are increasingly difficult to sort out and often seen as bad for SEO and brand URL consisency – they simply have to remember “orange” or some similarly cachy word, and stick it into google when they get home (hell, if you’re clever you’ll do a mobile version of the site so they can do it on the move!).  I think we’ll see a lot more of this in 2009.  I like it  lot.  I even wrote it down on a bit of paper today in a client meeting!  Woot!

And finally…

Someone will make a tube station outdoor digital campaign featuring people going up or down escalators
I predict that someone, somewhere, in an agency, will think it’s a great idea in 2009, to produce a campaign for the london underground digital screens, that features someone, something, or any combination of, moving up or down the escalators with you.
Fun-un-ny!
There’s one out there now, for the ITV show demons, where the “hero” and some dog-faced hoodies (which are presumably these demons? – although they look like a scary combintion of Churchill the insurance dog and a kid I saw the other night hanging around outside the Spar) move up the escalators with you having a fight with a sword.
Yup – I predict that at some time in 2009 somewhere at some agency will think it’s a good idea to do another one of these detestable executions that are probably the first thing that springs to anyones mind when they think of digital outdoor screens.  Please, I beg you, don’t do it.  It makes my journey to work hell when I see one of these.  First one was good.  Second one was good too.  Now, it’s a cliche. Stop – just stop.

and on that bombshell, I think I’ll get my coat…..

Howard
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Over the holiday break I was in the car coming back from the shops when I overheard a news story on Radio 2 (yes, I am old) where they were reporting that a new study by the Will Page of the PRS in the UK had disproved Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory, and that by stating that the majority of music sales last year were by a small percentage of the total tracks or albums available they had definitive proof that Chris’s theory was false.

Whilst I was listening to this and getting my head around what they were reporting I found myself getting more and more annoyed by what I was hearing.

This article by The Times goes into it in a bit more details, stating…

However, a new study by Will Page, chief economist of the MCPS-PRS Alliance, the not-for-profit royalty collection society, suggests that the niche market is not an untapped goldmine and that online sales success still relies on big hits.

Page is saying that the endless choice offered by unlimited storage and virtual shelfspace online isn’t being used, and that consumers stick to “the hits” within a 52,000 (for single tracks) and 173,00 (for albums) range.

“Hang on” I thought!

52,000 different songs?

173,000 different albums?

Since when were there that many new albums and tracks released in a year. Are they trying to tell us that last year there were 52,000 new songs released and these formed “the hits” of 2008?

and 173,000 albums? were there that many last year? Can someone tell me? because I don’t know, but I suspect that not just “the hits” of 2008.

During the radio interview Jeff Buckley’s song Hallelujah was used as a key example of the Long Tail NOT working and that was representative of a hit (something they say over here as well). But surely, the fact that that song – which has had tiny if not non-existant sales for many years, suddenly shooting up to number 2 in he chart is the perfect example of a Long Tail spike?

it’s just like Touching The Void becoming a best seller due to it being still listed on Amazon.com when a competitors book becomes popular.

It doesn’t disprove the Long Tail – it reinforces it as a theory.

Chris Anderson never said that millions of small and independent artists would make a fortune from Long Tail economics.

He DID say that large retailers, like Amazon or Apple with iTunes and unlimited virtual shelfspace WOULD make lots of money from all of the small and tiny individual sales underneath the tail.

He also said the head would continue to make as much if not more of the sales that the long tail is making. he did not say the head would disappear – but that both would co-exist, a state that can only be allowed and maintained within a digital virtually free storage environment, something which itself allows the long tail priniciple to exist in the first place.

I know Chris has responded now to the article, as the piece in The Times clearly states, but I wanted to blog about this even though it was a few weeks ago now.

This blog also commented on the report, but it tries to reinforce the point that LT is broken – but as Seth Godin correctly points out in his comment, someone, somewhere hasn’t got the point of what the LT is really about.

When you write, “80 percent of sales came from 52,000 tracks” and present this as evidence of disproving the theory, you are making a huge mistake. Chris never said that EVERYTHING would be bought sooner or later. He said that it spreads out over time. (Seth Godin)

It seems to me like Mr Page wanted to get a bit of cheap PR spotlight on him at a pretty quiet time of the year in the media and choose a good time to stick his oar in and savage Long Tail theory with some stats which don’t seem to back up his argument. It’s a rough rule of thumb isn’t it in PR fields that you get great coverage if you are willing to be out on a limb or contentious? Case in point.

As far as I can see Long Tail theory still stands. It may have taken a hit with this from it’s own PR point of view, but this certainly doesn’t disprove it – it does the exact opposite in fact.

Howard
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One of the best conferences of the year, The Future of Web Design, is due to come round again in April at it’s now seemingly usual venue of The Great Hall in Kensington, London.

Well worth a visit to see what’s going on and to sometimes reassure yourself you’re not so far behind the times as maybe you think you might be!

H
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Looks like Microsoft is starting to gear up more for the release later this year of it’s successor to Vista, Windows 7.

Last week they leaked a beta version of the new OS which so far is getting good reviews, apparently being faster than both XP and Vista at general computing tasks (according to CNET).

I personlly am looking forward to some more Media Center features. We’ve been using VMC (Vista Media Center) at home now for quite some time and it’s really pretty good (and stable! It never crashes for us, never!) – it’s much better at PC on TV stuff than the Apple TV I had previously ever was, and it’s replaced Linda’s laptop for web browsing on a day to day basis.

With so much convergence happening now, and the freesat system up and running over here in the UK offering HD channels from BBC and ITV i hope Windows 7 will be a step up for me when it’s released later this year.

Anyway, here’s a video MS have released showing the evolution of Media Center over the years – and it looks like it has a solid future yet – something the members over at The Green Button, the definitive media center blog (recently purchased by MS however, but they seem to be doing a decent job of it so far and not being too heavy handed), will be happy to hear (me included!)

Howard
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Evolution of Windows Media Center