Adventures In Digital Marketing

I’ve been meaning to blog about outdoor digital advertising for some time now. It’s something I find very interesting, and over the past year or so as I’ve been walking to and from work here in London I’ve seen more and more screens popping up in public places.

I’ve been inspired to finally put some words down in a post from an article in the NYTimes which talks about a new form of digital billboard that’s popping up which features a built in camera for facial recognition. Apparently two companies are actively playing in this space, which they refer to as audience measurement systems, Quividi, a French company, and TruMedia, based in Israel and Holland. By placing small cameras into digital billboards (quite small ones judging by the image I saw about the size of a 32″ TV embedded into a larger billboard area) they both claim to be able to view the faces of people directly looking at the ad itself, and then using facial recognition, work out the sex, age and so forth of the audience. They don’t take a photo, apparently, just using it in real-time to work out what they want and then ditching the image.

It doesn’t take much to work out that this has got a lot of privacy people worked up, and in these cases I often sit very firmly on the fence as I am obviously both a professional in the digital space and a normal run of the mill consumer.

That aside, digital screens are beginning to pop up all over the place in London - and I can’t believe it’s not the same in other large urban spaces around the UK, Europe and the World.

The tube is the best example so far of digital advertising screens - there are simply hundreds of them appearing all the time (TFL claim they are in the process of installing 2000). Large runs of screens on escalators, to large poster sized screens at pretty much platform level. These screens feature animation, video and still images - often with multiple screens working together in some way.

But there are much larger screens appearing outside. Right by the London IMAX there is a really good example. A huge billboard is situated on the left of the Waterloo Bridge as you approach the IMAX. Unlike the tube screens, these large format outdoor screens are still image only. This is apparently because there still isn’t any research to prove that you won’t crash your car when an ad comes on.

There are even screens appearing on the stands that the Evening Standard newspaper sellers use - with what look like 32″ TV screens positioned clearly on the top of the stand.

Not to mention the sheer volume already of in-store digital screens that exist in the captive retail environment.

In the US there’s already an industry/trade body setup to work alongside providers of this new and rapidly growing area of digital marketing. I’m not yet aware of one in the UK, perhaps it falls under the domain of someone like BIMA or the IAB?

Often a concern about these screens is that they take energy where a poster would not - but I wonder what the comparison is between digital distributing a poster/video/animation to 2000 screens over the internet, versus printing off 2000 large format posters, driving them around london and then pasting them up in place?  Aside from the saving for advertisers themselves, and the benefit of being able to digital and centrally manage campaigns on huge scales, there’s got to be something in not having to cut down any more trees?

Like I said above, I’m not sure about the audience tracking part being right or wrong, but it’s obvious that digital is gradually starting to take over all of the areas that traditional marketing has had it’s foot on for all this time.  TV’s slowly going to the dark side, the likes of iPlayer and the soon to arrive “project Kangaroo” are making sure of that, and now posters and outdoor begin to make the move as well.  Is nothing safe from our grubby binary hands?

Howard

image by James Cridland and found on Flickr

As much as I love the MS Surface - even though they claim to be too busy with more important people than me to let me see it and work on a project for it - this video also makes me laugh.

Take that Apple!

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

A recent Campaign article which asked the question "Should agencies outsource digital?", in which Kate Nettleton discussed the differing points-of-view within the industry regarding the outsourcing of the so called “techy” end of digital creativity, has promoted me to put down a few thoughts of my own on the subject.

I’ve actually discussed the outsourcing of production with quite a few people over the years and in fact it’s a model I’ve worked with in varying degrees for quite some time now, from right back in the late 90’s at TDPL/Leagas Delaney through to the present day.

We all know that agencies employ freelancers – it’s so common place it’s never questioned as a business practice – but for agencies of a digital slant to completely outsource a whole chunk of what is often perceived as being a key business function is quite a recent phenomenon.  In the past, and particularly in the pure-play world, having a dedicated production (and by that we’re really saying programmers right?) team in-house was taken for granted.  But I don’t think it has to be that way personally, and I can see it becoming less common as we continue to understand how Digital Marketing and Advertising has to function as a business over time.

Kate points out in her article that a “new breed” of agencies are taking a note from the traditional world and outsourcing skills which don’t necessarily fit in with the overall creative business of an agency.  And if you think about it, it makes perfect sense – in fact I completely subscribe to it myself.  I love Martin Brooks’s comment that “digital agencies can’t take the strategic high ground if their business model relies on building banners in-house”.  It’s completely right.  How often do we hear the buzz-phrase of “we sell ideas” and yet never see it delivered because people are tied into a particular back-end system or delivery method?

In an ATL agency for example, where the majority of business may be focused on TV commercials – it’d be extremely unlikely that they’d have a load of directors, editors, sound experts and the like sitting around as permanent members of staff.  Those people, with highly technical and creative skills are brought in on a case-by-case basis as and when required – because it allows everyone else to focus on what they need to do – come up with great creative ideas. 

Why, then, do we (and I include myself in this to some degree) think that to do digital creative work in marketing and advertising we need to have programmers and other technical experts sitting around on the books full time, rather than get them in on a similar case-by-case basis.

The outsourcing of digital production makes perfect sense.

However, what I can’t stress strongly enough is that outsourcing your digital production or development does not, in any way, mean that as an agency you can forget about the technical side of the business, regarding it as “not your job” or unimportant.  When you remove technology from one side of the equation it has to be replaced elsewhere – and invariably what that means is that the people who you do have on a permanent basis in your agency need to pick up some of the knowledge to make your ideas work.  What that means is that it is essential that the creative teams, strategists, planners and account managers are more technically minded than perhaps you would normally have, and are able to understand what is and isn’t possible.  They wouldn’t normally be like that in an environment where programmers are sitting next to them. 

Allowing them to believe they don’t need to know that stuff because “they’re not technical” is not an option. Technology doesn’t disappear from your business because you’re outsourcing it – it just moves around a bit – but it is still present and is as important to the overall creative process and end deliverables that you provide as ever.

Bill Brock’s comment that by outsourcing digital you allow the agency to “be free to go for best-of-breed ideas, not end up selling website ideas because we had a website designer(s) free” is completely on the money and if you look at the other founding members you can see that together they can all help to provide that essential in-house technical knowledge that must be present.

Creative ideas should never be shoehorned into the technical solutions that your agency is capable of delivering in-house – they should be free to come from anywhere and delivered in any way you can think of that’s applicable.

Outsourcing production, to different 3rd-party partners who are expert in their specific fields allows agencies to mix-and-match what they need to answer a client’s brief and deliver on their objectives – and at the end of the day that’s what we are all trying to do.

It has made perfect sense in the offline and traditional world for the past few decades – are we not big enough now to admit that it makes perfect sense in our decade as well?

Howard

OKA Direct, the last site I produced whilst at TEQUILA\ London, just got reviewed in the NMA this week.  It scored a pretty healthy 88% overall.  Congratulations to all the team still at TEQUILA\ as well as those moved on to different strokes.

OKA was actually three sites produced at once, RAPT direct and Cath Collins (although CC appears to be down at the moment for some reason) being the other two, all based on a common architecture. 

NMA particularly liked the idea of being able to buy a whole room at once, rather than selecting items individually.  Good - that was my idea
Well done OKA and TEQUILA\

Howard
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Tags: nma, oka, ecommerce, web site, rapt, cath collins, tequila

How many times have you heard a creative director, MD or other senior manager say in an all agency pep-rally meeting “We’re all creatives in this agency - no idea is a bad idea”?

Quite a few times I’ll guess.

Well, I want to add to that.  Expand on it if you will…

We’re all planners in this agency. No strategy is a bad strategy.

Now, I don’t mean literally we all sit around blogging all day waffling on about the planosphere (vincent! )- no, what I mean is that in some ways, planning is as much a group activity within a healthy agency environment as is creative thinking.  As is good client relations.  As is wanting to make a profit.  The list goes on….

I was chatting with a planning colleague of mine, and we were talking about the relationship between different departments, and how, to borrow from Logic+Emotion a bit, we all need to overlap, not be silos.  Planning and digital, for example, can work amazingly well together, and insight into the ways people use digital in their daily lives really is something both “departments” can add to.  There’s a lot going on right now about combining creative and planning.  Everyone is merging them together again in some way or another. 

For me, the best results on any project happen when you get excited, passionate and informed people together from the start and they all input into the big idea. 

Something I’ve mentioned a couple of times recently is that, for me, digital strategy in terms of planning a campaign falls into two distinct phases.  The first is the more traditional channel planning phase, overall marketing strategy - what is it we’re trying to do, who are we talking to, what’s going to fire them up, all that stuff.  The stuff that helps good planners and good account teams write creative briefs that really help creative teams come to life.  The kind of brief that creative teams so often complain they don’t get. It’s during this phase that it’s driven by planners but with others adding value.

The second phase, is the one where we look at digital itself and the whole host of different channels and executions it can contain (see the previous digital ecosystem chart I made which is, quite probably, already out of date!).  This is where digital teams, planners and creatives can all add value, working out what specifically it is in the digital field that is going to best address the requirements identified in phase 1 - the part where we already worked out we want to use digital, but were not sure how exactly.  It’s in this phase that it’s driven by digital specialists with others adding value.  See the subtle difference?  Both (digital?) strategy phases, but with slightly different drivers.

Phase 1 - what are we doing and, by association, do we want to do it in digital?

Phase 2 - what bits of digital do we want?

To many people these stages can appear to be one and the same - often, when I talk to people about marketing strategy in relation to digital, the distinction isn’t clear for them to make.  But make it I believe we must.  They do two different tasks. Both of them essential to good creative output.

We’re all planners in this agency.  No strategy is a bad strategy.

Doesn’t mean we’ll use yours though…

Howard
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Tags: digitalmarketing advertising planning planners planosphere silos overlap skill sharing communication

Someone I know recently moved into a new role split across two agencies.  Once of the agencies is below the line, the other well above the line and they are going to be working with both. 

What interested me in this move was that one of the big reasons why it was so interesting to them was that they wanted to get solid industry experience in an ATL environment, something this person had not had before, and they were very keen to take this up.

ATL is an interesting thing for me, as I’ve often chatted to people about how those in the TV side of the ATL world have not really been exposed to the benefits and features that we in the digital world have taken for granted for some time now - and yet this is going to change for them almost overnight at some time in the very near future.

A big thing for me, and something I’ve been talking about for a fair few years, certainly since 1999 (I distinctly remember a heated debate at an agency bash in Covent Garden when the digital team were speaking with some of the TV creatives and it almost got out of hand), is that when TV starts to get delivered over an IP network, TV people are going to be suddenly thrust into the world we now inhabit and will have a massive learning curve to grab hold of. 

I know of many large integrated agencies around London who are, at this very moment, cross training a lot of their staff in all aspects of marketing, digital and not digital, to make sure everyone knows and understands how to work together.

I don’t think any of us, back in the day, imagined that IPTV would mean anything like P2P and Joost, or the BBC iPlayer (NO MAC VERSION!!! ARGHHH!) but even so, the way TV advertising is going to change, and therefore the TV people change with it, is a massive leap forwards.  I know it’s not mainstream yet and we’re still glued to our Sky+ and Freeview boxes, but it can’t be too far off now.

I personally think TV is going to be a very exciting place to be in the next few years as those people grab hold of the space we inhabit.  I mean, let’s not beat around, TV still takes a whopping great percentage of the ad spend in most client’s budgets, and it’s still seen as a very effective medium by many a marketing director.  We should not ignore this, and the fact that they will soon be playing in the same space as us is something we all have to think seriously about.

This kind of leads me on to a point I also discussed with some people recently - the fact that in agencies we still have specialist people in relation to digital - Head of Digital, Director of Digital, Digital Strategist etc..  The list goes on.

How long do we see this happening?  Surely we’re all going to end up as just marketing experts in the long run?  We don’t split creative teams up into PRINT CREATIVE or TV CREATIVE etc., but for some reason we still specialise in digital. I know a lot of this has to do with the current level of skills and experience but this surely won’t always be the case.

I firmly believe that ten years from now the role of Director of Digital will cease to exist and that separate digital teams within integrated agencies will have disappeared.

“New media” isn’t new any more.  “Digital marketing” will become just plain old marketing.

Howard
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Tags: digital-marketing, digital marketing, digital, marketing, above-the-line, above the line, atl, tv, advertising, iptv, future

I’ve noticed a couple of things recently that made me think about the whole relationship that digital types have in an integrated agency environment, and which in turn reminded me of my theory (probably too grand a title!) about what this intrinsic “difference” often is.

A post the other day over on one of the Brand Republic blogs commented on a recent survey about the leisure time habits of young people, and the general theme for it was that kids are not interested in tech, and would rather do real world things.  What was interesting for me was that whilst the majority of them said they used the internet as a means to setup face-to-face meetings and so forth, and for generally keeping in touch, only around 2% of them said that they “preferred” the web as a way to spend their time, and that in general the top interests of kids is listening to music and watching TV or DVDs.

I find this interesting for two reasons.  Firstly, whilst it’s not their preferred activity, almost all of the kids were at least using the web/internet in some kind of social network/software fashion - be it IM, Bebo or whatever - so as a contact method it’s pretty much universally accepted.

Secondly, the clear distinction that was made between activities such as listening to music, or DVD watching, versus (terrible phrase coming up) “surfing the web”.  Whilst at the moment it’s still pretty obvious that sitting in front of a computer versus sitting in front of a tv are very seperate activities, how long do we all think that’s going to last as?  Whilst I still don’t believe we’ll all be switching to watching TV on a 19″ LCT as opposed to a 42″ LCD with a beer in hand, the fact of the matter is that TV itself is going to be delivered on an IP network within a matter of a few years or so (regardless of the soon-to-be obsolete path to digital broadcast that freeview and the government have us all set out on) - joost and others are proof that this transition is happening without waiting for labour to switch off the analogue signal in 2012!  Other hardware items such as the Apple TV, BT’s offering or even Tivo and it’s on-demand movie service in the USA will keep blurring the boundaries more and more.

As for music, the meer fact that earlier this week I read and article in The Guardian which asked the question whether CD singles were a dead medium, with sales of them down by 47% at the start of 2007, as opposed to “downloads” going from strength to strength reinforces the non-tech side image of actually highly tech activities (it was only a few years ago that if you’d said MP3 to the man on the street they’d have thought you a looney).

OK, so this isn’t news, and certainly i’ve blogged about this trend before. But what it reminded me of, is something which happens in my day to day life as a digital evangelist trying to grow a business inside an integrated, predominantly offline environment, and that is that people of a certain generation (and it’s younger than mine of mid-thirties grunge reminiscing years!) still see computers, and anything to do with them, i.e. the web/internet, as a “techy” or even geeky pass time.  The countless times that I’ve heard people refer to digital marketing, digital marketing types, or even a plain old banner add as “ok, this is the techy bit where I step aside” infuriates me each time - and reminds me that the age old “us and them” gap still exists between the trendy kids and the kids (yes, like me) who had a spectrum/C64 and loved nothing more than inserting hundreds of lines of basic into the machine, without saving, only for it to not work at the end of a fruitless two hours typing on a rubber keyboard.

“That’s why we have the digital guys” the offline types will say.  “I don’t get all this techy stuff”.  There’s many more, and I am sure that if you work on the same side of the fence as me you’ve heard them all.  Let’s not get into the fact that offline types have just as much geeky techy knowledge which I have no idea about as I do digital terms. SLP? PDP? they’ve got more TLAs than we do - swings and roundabouts.

I had a conversation with the creative director the other day and a few others, where I tried to explain that digital and offline are in many ways the same and need to be treated as such.  Creatively, an art director doesn’t know how a TV camera of edit suite works, but I bet most of them can draw a storyboard and write a script.  Why do they then get all confused when working online?  Just because you don’t know how ActionScript works, or what the compression differences are between a GIF and JPG doesn’t mean you can’t draw a black & white scamp or write copy.

There is hope though.  Even though the kids referred to in the article on Brand Republic still draw that distinction between browsing the web, watching “movies” (i deliberately don’t use DVD) and listening to music, the very fact that the music and films they’re watching are delivered in a highly technical manner and yet they don’t recognise that as being the same as using a computer means that slowly, and in a very indirect fashion, that geek-vs-non-geek gap, the view of what is techy stuff and what isn’t, is disappearing and matters less and less. 

In a few years time, when a new generation of bebo savvy kids who grew up with firefox graduate from uni and start their careers in marketing the cries of “I don’t know how a banner works” will be long, long gone, and it’s really not that far away - so offline types get thinking because digital is no longer creeping up - it’s sprinting up behind you with a mouse in one hand and a stack of scratched blue-ray discs in another. there won’t be on and offline marketing.  there will just be marketing, and trust me, those kids we’re talking about - they’ll just get it and hit the ground running.

Kids aren’t interested in tech claims the post.  Really?  OK - so in a few years time when they’re watching a movie download on their mobile, or listening to a DRM-free MP3 on their iPhone that they got via bittorrent and a wifi connection you come back to me and tell me they’re not interested in tech or the internet, and then we’ll have another chat.

Howard
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Tags: digital, divide, technology, normality, geek

Why aren’t there more techy planners?

We all know planning is the buzzy side of the industry at the moment - everywhere you look someone is saying something about planning.  Whether it’s bringing it into the fold with creative earlier on (good idea by the way) or how much bad planners are simply good bloggers (I am neither) it’s the topic on a lot of peoples lips.

So, why are planners who get technology so thin on the ground? 

Come on!  We need planners who know why face-book is the new Dr Evil.

We need planners who know not just what twitter is, but why it’s seen by many as so revolutionary.

We need planners who understand technology, live with it, love it, and know how it works, as well as knowing all the other stuff planners need to know.

I know a few of them, or know of, but I know a hell of a lot more who are just plain disinterested.

There’s a shed load of cash in the planosphere right now.  But I tell you what, if it were me hiring, I’d be giving you a shed load more if you could have a conversation with me about pownce’s implementation of AIR vs Twitter and twitterific!

Howard
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Tags: digital, planning, planners, planosphere, technology, integrated

Big day in the Apple TV world yesterday.  No, not the DRM free update.  Not the Jobs/Gates conference at D5 either.  Certainly not the YouTube announcement or the 160gb BTO option (seemingly US only?).

No, it was a big day because…

…Apple killed my AppleTV!

Just as I was settling down to an evening of quality streamed video entertainment
I turn on the unit and get stuck in an infinite rebooting loop.  No menu, or perhaps a menu for a split second, followed by the Apple logo over and over and over again.

No luck turning it off and on five times.  No luck resetting the factory state when the menu’s stayed on long enough for me to do it.

Turns out that when Apple released the iTunes update yesterday, they forgot to do some QA on the server side of things and killed all of the Apple TV units globally in one foul swoop.

They seem to have sorted it out now according to this post, but for a very long hour late last night I was in a very bad mood - so much so I packed the device into my bag today and was all ready to go over to Regent street and demand a replacement.

First strike AppleTV!  You best be on your guard if I’m not to start looking at the PS3 with eager eyes (even if it is £500!)

Howard
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