Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

'Information Wants To Be Paid For'

In discussion about Chris Anderson's article suggesting that the web is dead, Catherine Fitzpatrick's comment caught my eye over at the NYT Bits Blog : "Oh, of course not, that's silly. Where do people *go* with their lovely aps on their i-phones and droids? They go...to the web. To Facebook, to Twitter. That is, those websites might now be aps accessing servers and not "the web" in the same way, but they are still open public spaces. As aps mature and develop and take people to more log-on closed spaces, then you might start talking about a big change to the web. And that's ok. That's where the commerce is, and that's where people can make a living. Chris Anderson is wailing because Web 2.5 and Web 3.0 aren't the free opensource sandbox that it was in 1.0's day, hating on "walled gardens" and vandalizing them with technocommunistic formulas of "information wanting to be free". But eventually, organic human society prevails, and doesn't want to live in an open-sourced open culture that is so open that value is lost, that musicians, newspapers, book authors, artists all lose their intellectual property rights and all lose their livlihoods as a result. With the phones, capitalism returns to the web and flourishes on the ashes of the old 1.0 communism. It restores software and its contents as products you can buy with code that is protected and not forced free. It introduces the concept of hooks into proprietary software as API engineers, and not opensource mindless cultism. So it's all good. All sorts of things will start to thrive. Privacy and identity also have a powerful basis in dedicated phone numbers you pay for and which telephone companies, separate from the Googlized web, maintain for you, so that you data isn't scraped and datamined at least by all the IT giants. It's all good. Ads are fine. Put more in. Information wants to be paid for."

Google TV - If The Vikings Don't Deliver, The Pirates Will

The technology and media industries have been at war for the last decade. In no small part due to Google reinventing the media marketplace, or ‘f**king with the magic’, as Ken Auletta so memorably noted. Messrs Brin and Page snaffled the lunches of content kings all over the world to create a $160bn corporation. Ever since, their algorithmic tanks have been parked on the manicured lawns of global players, such as Time Warner and Vivendi. Launching salvo after salvo into their infinity swimming pools. Including sucking up vast swathes of the media industry’s treasured IP and giving it away for free, whilst collecting gazillions of Adwords dollars. In short, there’s been plenty to keep the battle raging and the legal eagles billing. With such history, the recent announcement about Google TV felt like another howitzer blast in the direction of the marketing industry’s Tuscan holiday villas. Mountain View’s last surge into the media world’s ultimate stronghold to grab its most valuable real estate. One slight change to the script is that this time Google has brought along a friend. One with bonafide Hollywood credentials. The Google TV bandwagon includes Sony (owners of MGM, Columbia and Tri-Star), which will be making the kit for the Android powered web TVs. That could help the thawing of relations between Big Media and Big Tech. Maybe a first step in recognising the reality that the geeks of San Jose will never actually produce blockbuster content. While the players of Santa Monica will never actually develop global technology platforms. However, as with all these wonderful new media possibilities, the real options are not restrained by the technology, but by the backroom double-dealings and the beancounters’ carving up the juicy new revenue streams. The world’s media markets are worth something in the order of $600bn annually. And that’s the prize that the execs of Beverley Hills and Sand Hill Road have their respective high-powered sights set upon. As a result, suspicions will remain that Google TV is looking to grab media’s ultimate mega-market. Just as Google Search absorbed the revenues of its beloved print businesses. Or, worse still, that Page & Brin plan to unbundle those pricey 500-channel cable and satellite TV packages, where must-see sports comes complete with never-to-be viewed shopping channels. And that Google TV is actually a kind of giant Hulu. But one where TV execs aren’t pulling the strings. However, a pot of gold remains within sight. Whenever Hollywood Players and Bay Area Geeks sit...

The Joy Of A Gated Community

A couple of years ago, I heard Sir Tim Berners-Lee describe the muddled state of his splendid creation in  this way : ‘If your sink is blocked for a few weeks and you remove the plug to dig out the obstruction, the offending mangled mess of soap, fish bones, human hair and other horrible gunk in which bacteria has set up home, is exactly like the World Wide Web’.  Now, for many tech-heads, geeks, tinkerers, everyone in Silicon Valley and other early-adopters it didn’t get much better than this organic mush.  And the gooey paradise remained intact for a long time.  However, for the mainstream (aka Everyone Else In The World) the web remained a mysterious, slightly sad place where only-the-lonely gathered.  But the online social revolution has blown away this view.  In part, by throwing up some gated communities, such as AppStores and Social Networks, where regular folk can talk to each other without fear of their Gucci loafers getting sullied by geek-grime.  In fact, for many, it even became rather exciting to mix with the technorati and let some of their magic coding dust rub off.  But not too much.  And certainly none of the whiffy stuff.  Personally speaking, gated communities where the comfortably-off huddle from the excrutiating ravages of real life, such as potholes and unmown lawns, always sound pretty dull to me.  However, there are times when we’d all like to withdraw into sanctuaries of expert topiary and poo-free paving, away from the open clutter of the real world.  In such harbours of tranquillity there are no worries about unsightly neighbours or anti-social viruses.  The no-nonsense management are constantly poised, ready to pulverise any shady individual who dares to disturb the peace.  For some, such walled gardens become claustrophobic as they tire of the same faces and fences.  The security guards start to look like prison screws and the disorderly streets where the everyday folk dwell begin to look enticingly vibrant.  (Not that I’ve ever spent anytime in a gated community you understand.  Although I did once spend two weeks at Centre Parcs and was very relieved to escape, er, I mean depart).  However, for many these well-ordered suburban enclaves that consist of friends, family and neighbours is exactly what’s required.  All the time.  And this is what the early-adopters, geeks and webnorati struggle to understand.  The gurus who rail against the vice-like grip of Steve Jobs brighter, lighter, whiter Appstore, or Zuckerberg’s perfectly manicured Facebook empire, overlook that most people don’t want to see what’s blocking their sinks.  And they don't mind if that hardwired convenience means the management is watching over them.  They just want to get on with their happy, gunk-free lives.

New Money

A couple of months ago I had the good fortune to hear Douglas Rushkoff expound his ideas about the changing nature of money and how private currencies could shift the way in which society organises its resources, loosening the grip of MegaCorps and even BigGov.  It was inspirational stuff and all very timely coming fresh on the heels of a financial meltdown driven by tricky derivatives traders and faceless ratings agencies plundering the goodwill of widows and orphans.  However, at the end of the talk Rushkoff, maybe suspecting his sober Swiss audience weren’t entirely convinced, found himself pressing that these ideas weren’t just pie-in-the-sky.  Now, while I don’t expect the world’s currency exchanges and the pound in your pocket to go anywhere soon, I was very happy to raise my hand and offer the room a few examples of where I thought Rushkoff’s private currencies were in action – albeit at a micro-level.  Firstly, I mentioned the Chinese Q coin, which is used by the 300 million users of the QQ instant messaging site to buy virtual goods.  Tencent, the owners of QQ recently revealed that 'internet value-added services,' or virtual goods, made up 78% of the company’s total revenue at the end of last year.  Enough to raise the company's international ambitions, including buying a stake in DST, the Russian company that owns a chunk of Facebook.  And Q Coins are now being accepted in exchange for ‘real’ goods on 3rd party sites, sufficiently broadly to raise the concern of the Chinese government.  I also highlighted the Second Life economy wrap-up that reads like a surreal corporate annual report, including tracking Linden Dollars and their transformation into ‘real money’ through the exchanges, LindeX or the Xstreet SL Exchange.  And, while not operating private currencies, I pointed to Etsy, Zopa and Betfair as examples of private marketplaces that are challenging the traditional corporate structures that Rushkoff believes will come under pressure.  These marketplaces range wildly in scale and nature.  Etsy is a giant P2P flea market where people sell each other about $22m of (often beautiful) homemade items, such as soaps they’ve made in their garden sheds.  Betfair is a vast £300m peer-to-peer gambling exchange.  Whereas Zopa is a P2P lending service.  All tiny in comparison to the industries in which they operate.  However, all very successful and growing like topsy.  And now we have Facebook Credits, the attempt by Mark Zuckerberg to create a currency in his world, that as it approaches 500m users is more populus than most countries.  Once again it’s all very early days.  At its outset, Facebook Credits is a way to unify...

Get Real - No More Dogs

There are powerful online trends at work sweeping away anonymity as a default position, creating many commercial opportunities for those with a light enough touch.  Firstly, there's Facebook, the web’s 800lb social gorilla.  Zuckerberg's service has given four hundred million people around the world an online identity and the norm is for users to provide 'real' information.  And it's an identity that increasingly follows you around the web, thanks to Facebook Connect.  Then there's the booming mobile web.  While PAYG allows people to disguise themselves, anyone using a contracted service instantly ties their data habits to some type of billing system, thus allowing certified transactions to occur.  Another mega-trend that will encourage people to 'get real' online is Rupert Murdoch’s decision to throw up paywalls around his online content.  Previously, people have been allowed to read the Digger’s content for free – and without flagging who they are.  However, now everyone behind the News International paywall will be attending a party where names badges are checked on the way in.  Then there’s ever faster broadband and the continuing march of Moore’s Law, making YouTube-style and webcam communication increasingly common, thus letting people see each other all too clearly.  And finally, but perhaps most powerfully, the law, in the UK at least, is swinging behind the anti-anonymity drive.  Lord Mandelson’s much-derided Digital Economy Bill may be heavy-handed in the eyes of many, but one effect it has is to batter the walls of the ISPs where, to date, anonymity has been standard fare.  All of which creates a self-reinforcing norm.  Transparency and genuine online identity becomes widespread, brushing aside the previous default so perfectly captured by Peter Steiner’s famous cartoon, ‘on the internet no one knows you’re a dog.’  This in turn creates an environment where people feel comfortable adding ever-more revealing layers of information to their online identities.  Including location, financial habits and information that, even a few years ago, would have seemed positively reckless to publish online.   As John Battelle writes, the Database of Intentions is extending beyond, ‘What I Want’, to ‘What I Buy’, ‘Who I Am’, ‘Who I Know’, ‘What I Am Doing’, ‘What’s Happening’ and ‘Where I Am’.  Of course, digital consumption habits have always linked to an IP address making it theoretically possible to identify who was snacking on what binary bytes.  However, this world was murky, with plenty of ways to conceal who was who, including floating IP addresses.  So what does this new transparent world mean for the marketing industry?   Well, increasingly, the vast oceans of data that flow around the web...

Nothing New Under The Sun

For a long time the marketing industry closed its eyes to the impact of networked media.  And while it looked the other way, Messrs Brin & Page ate its lunch and built the largest media company in the world.  Over the last year or so, however, possibly because of the Google experience, the marketing industry has done a U-turn and the consensus is now that the world has indeed changed forever.  So which view is right?  Unsurprisingly, the reality is somewhere in between.  A thread of my client work over the last few years has been challenging the notion that the maturing web means we should forget everything we’ve ever known and start again.  Forget the idea of brands, stop using TV as a medium, assume that the customer has morphed into a new type of being, accept that complete transparency is the only choice, believe that the only workable price point is free.  Only a total reboot will do, some claim.  However, this binary view of the world overlooks that while much has changed, more has stayed the same.  Corporations are still operating in markets where consumers are looking for value and trustworthy suppliers.  People are still motivated by the same needs – keeping up with the Jones’, caring for their families, exploring the world, self-expression, ambition, fun.  It’s just that the markets they use to find satisfaction have been rewired. ‘The problems which are not changing are human problems - which remain the same,’ noted Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google last year.  Take for instance, the social net de jour - Chatroulette.  It’s a perfect example of the many new wonderful and unexpected things that are emerging as a result of open networked media and widespread broadband access.  Built by an individual, using powerful distributed technology that now sits in bedrooms all around the world, it offers a P2P-experience that undermines traditional views of private and public identity and drives new types of social interaction.  And what is this remarkable bleeding-edge innovation used for?  Letting young men check out hot girls!  Whizzy new kit, same old motivations.  However, that's not to underestimate the ingenuity and scale of the new markets that people will build when they find their needs unmet.  I was lucky enough to meet Douglas Rushkoff last week and hear him speak about his belief that...

You Sell, Or Else...

I have moths in my house.  They are a real pain and as the Spring appears I know they will be making a reappearance after the cold winter months.  For the last couple years I have become involved in a Holy War against these little critters that has involved escalating levels of tit-for-tat violence.  They take out a treasured cashmere sweater.  I up the number of traps, sprays and any other type of micro-ordnance.  And guess which retailer has become my greatest friend in this battle against the pesky garb-munchers?  Rentokill?  Pest Control?  Mothball Express?  Nope, my accomplices in the clearance of my foe is Amazon.  A comrade that not only provides me with a wide range of munitions, but is also my accomplice, suggesting tactics and new devices 'used by others' to help me seek-and-destroy.  Now I’ve long been aware that Bezos’ empire was growing beyond books, but it was my battle against these flying clothes-gobblers that brought home the changing nature of retail in the networked media era.  Just 1-Click™ and my house is free of meddlesome midges.  What does this have to do with modern marketing, you ask?  In short, that most crucial aspect of markets and marketing, the Point-Of-Purchase (P-o-P) is changing quickly and in some very surprising ways.  In doing so, this shift is throwing light on some long-standing weaknesses of the marketing industry, whilst throwing down new challenges.  For example, I have a client who is fascinated by the fact that Apple now holds 100m active credit cards, primarily through iTunes.  The client in question runs a very significant online business himself, with about two million UK customers.  So he is fully versed in the value of those billing relationships that Apple has garnered.  He also has a theory that Murdoch’s insistence on a paywall for his online media is motivated by a similar vision to that which Apple has intentionally or accidentally executed.  If The Old Digger can use juicy new media content to gather micro-payments and therefore credit card details, it won’t matter if the newspapers are profitable or not.  They will become giant magnets for billing info, allowing Murdoch to sell wine and insurance products to the readers of The Sunday Times.  Even the forward-looking games sector has been surprised by the skewing of the P-o-P.  In his must-see presentation at this year's DICE, Jesse Schell, a game design professor at Carnegie Mellon University, summed up the rapidly changing nature of transactions.  He explained how the games development industry has been caught completely off guard by...

Talk To The Brand, Because We’re Not Listening

For brands, advertising has always involved finding a third-party shop and letting the young guns rip on a riveting, inspirational concept that can be worked up by the art-crew into a striking visual nugget and blasted out across the mediasphere.  Central to that process has been the relationship a Marketing Director has with his Agency.  The effectiveness of which can easily determine the future wage-packets, postcodes and kids' schools of everyone concerned.  However, like many others aspects of marketing, that’s changing.  ‘The unwritten rule used to be three decent TV campaigns and you’re on the Board,’ an ambitious brand manager from an FMCG Mega-Corp whispered to me last year, under cover of his cappuccino.  ‘But not any more,’ he said with the glint in his eye of someone who has realised the goal posts have been moved but that not everyone has noticed.  So what’s the future for the upwardly mobile brand manager?  And indeed, the ambitious Agency Chieftan?  Will the pivotal relationship between the two survive as the media landscape shifts?  As ever, it’s a question of balance.  Third-party suppliers will always be a vital part of the marketing industry.  If only because the economics make it sensible to use an agency that’s beating media owners over the head with a bigger stick.   Or wise to buy into a PR company’s network or a creative hotshop’s spark.  However, the growth of networked media may well start a shift away from branding created by third party suppliers to marketing driven by internal teams.   In networked markets customers don’t want to talk to the brand, they want to be heard by the business.  And that might be difficult to achieve when the customer hotline goes through to a PR company in Soho.  For marketeers, the way to the top table could then be more about smart investment in new assets that sit on the company’s balance sheet (even if they are white-labelled from GoogleBook).  And less about buffing up the agency’s awards cupboard.  Indeed, P&G’s Tremor network, a product sampling platform, is not only shifting goods but is rented out to other companies as a service, thereby adding to the bottom line.  Of course, the future will always be about results and who can deliver.   However, even the vast media players will admit they don’t have the iron-like grip over the new media barons such as Brin, Page & Schmidt, whose revenues are largely made up of thousands of smaller direct customers, as they did over the old guard.   ‘We used to show up at ITV and say if we don’t sign this cheque, you are going out of business’, a Media Grand Fromage once told me. ‘You can’t do that at Google,’ he added pointedly.  Furthermore, Google’s Adwords system has educated the marketplace in the ways of media self-service, a development that Facebook...

Rusbridger On 'Us Against Them'...

Alan Rusbridger, Editor of The Guardian : "BookArmy – though it avoids saying so – is an offshoot of Harper Collins. The two enterprises point in completely different directions. As it was explained to me, the point of BookArmy is to get as many avid book readers engaged as possible and learn as much as possible about their likes and dislikes. At some point in the future (the theory goes) publishers will no longer need to spend a fortune on marketing Max Hastings’ next book by lavishing money on Waterstones or in print. They will go to BookArmy and say, 'We know you have a database of the 80,000 people in the country who read books of military history. We’ll give you our targeted marketing spend instead.'  BookArmy is a telling illustration of two aspects of the digital world.  One is the ability of digital disrupters (in this case, even within the same company) to take one bit of a newspaper and do it with a conviction, range, depth and passion that a portmanteau print-based newspaper cannot match, especially in digital form. It is the unbundling of newspapers.  And the second is the only hope of matching the power of the these digital disrupters is to harness the same energy and technologies which they are using.'  See the rest here.  Excellent insights from a man right in the middle of the change being created by networked media.

The Rise Of Anti-Social Behaviour

At the beginning of last year, I helped put together an event at NESTA, where I detected for the first time an undercurrent of suspicion about social media and particularly social media consultants.  I remember the room recoiling at the suggestion that anyone in attendance was a social media advisor.  Perish the thought!  And again, at a bash I helped out with at the IPA, there was plenty of good discussion about social media.  However, also the same concerns.  As illustrated by this film - 'The Social Media Guru'.  Well worth a quick viewing if you haven’t already.  Since then, Business Week has advised wariness about ‘social media snake oil’, reporting that, ‘Critics complain that many of the new experts have adopted an orthodoxy that provides little flexibility for differing situations—or outcomes.  Their pronouncements follow a rigid gospel : Be transparent, engage with your customers, break down silos.’  Which has led one or two social media consultants to defend their practices as both professional and good value.  So why is this?  Is it just a case of caveat emptor applying to a new market as much as any other?  Or a natural backlash against the relentless hype of new social widgets and the rise of Facebook - the social world’s own 800-pound gorilla?  Personally, I wonder if this suspicion is because it’s not yet clear what role social media will have in the broader communications industry - particularly for brands.  At that IPA evening, the interesting part of the chit-chat, for me at least, was exactly on this issue.  Are we talking interesting new...