Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

What's The New Normal For Big Brands?

What's the ‘New Normal’ for global brands?  By which I mean that following the collapse of global finance, the ensuing reshuffle of the world’s powerhouse economies and rapid growth of vast technological platforms, what do global brands care about and to which companies and sectors are they turning for assistance? I keep returning to three thoughts. Firstly, that corporations and brand-owners’ aims haven’t really changed a great deal. They want the same business outcomes, such as awareness, sales, loyalty and product differentiation, that create and support Mega-Brands and the shareholder dividends that follow. Secondly, media and marketing remains in the throes of huge waves of what the economist Joseph Schumpeter alluringly called ‘creative destruction’; the painful process by which one economic order is gradually replaced by another.  In the context of media and marketing, creative destruction has come in the form of digital IP technology breaking open the barriers between previously separate industries to create a single global platform upon which vast new networked media oceans surge.  Finally, most global corporates have been quietly shifting their investments into fast-growing markets for years. Now, as growth falters in Europe and the US, these booming economies seem to promise a golden future. Many such as Brazil, India, China and Indonesia see the creative destruction of technology, media and telecomms as a welcome opportunity. They invest enthusiastically in new...  

Will Google Ever Be Cleverer Than Mumsnet?

Now that networked media offers us infinite choice about the way we slice and dice our questions, queries and requests, it’s very easy to become overwhelmed.  While trying to book a holiday this year for myself, my good lady and two small daughters I found myself with so much information and so many options that I felt like I was playing three-dimensional chess.  That country with this accommodation for price one or this country with that accommodation for price two?  Booking through this service directly with separate flights or that agent all-in?  Whilst this country’s currency is strong against the feeble pound its prices are lower than that country which has a weaker exchange rate but is more expensive.  This resort is a longer flight but the weather is good, while this option is nearer but will there be sun?  And last, but not least, there was my five-year old’s very specific request for a pool with a curly-whirly slide.  After a week or so of research using what felt like about four hundred different websites and services, we had narrowed the choices down to about twenty-nine and I don’t mind admitting that my brain froze.  Camping in Wales, I thought? ‘I’ll look on Mumsnet’, said my good lady.  Now I know that Mumsnet is a vast community and has become the UK’s barometer for what is and is not acceptable in terms of parenting, as well as who should be the next Prime Minister.  However, I wasn’t too sure that it would be much help in solving our cryptomatic holiday quandary.  However, about thirty minutes later I received a link to a resort that I opened with very little enthusiasm only to discover the most perfect place imaginable that met all the criteria and some.  ‘It’s got a good write-up on Mumsnet’, was the message that came with it.  And that I believe is what Clay Shirky is referring to when he says that...

Marketing Has An Identity Problem

Digital Identity has long been a fascinating area but it wasn’t really of interest to the mainstream because, for a long while, only geeks had online identities of any significance. Obviously that has now changed. Twitter, blogs, Etsy, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn and Quora are just a few of the many services that people use to maintain their digital IDs.  As a result, the everyday influence of these identities is growing.  Even limiting the view to the professional sphere we can see how important the world of online identity has become.  A LinkedIn profile can get you a new job but a crass comment on Twitter can get you fired.  A great YouTube channel can earn you a living as can a shop on Etsy. An informed blog can help you turn a hobby into a job; whereas a photo on Facebook can be ‘career-limiting’.  And these IDs are here to stay.  In fact, we can expect the range and depth of people's digital identities and the extent to which...

Who Will Survive In The New Networked Media Oceans?

Media companies used to exist in their own separate waters. The newspaper industry was the newspaper industry.  TV was TV and so on and so forth.  Each of these unconnected territories had a few super-predators that were top of their respective food chains, untroubled by the small fry. This was also true of technology and telecoms. However, in recent years, the tectonic plates have shifted to reveal a single networked media ocean into which all media, technology and telecomms companies are gradually being drawn.  The result is a gory realignment of the food chain as these corporate animals, so used to roaming their own backwaters as unchallenged predators, thrash around to establish who will survive.  Some will maintain their status.  Others will be usurped by sleek new species and left to wonder where it all went wrong. The tectonic shift was, of course, driven by rise of the Internet and the Web, and more recently the Moore’s Law-powered growth of online computing power aka the cloud.  The reason the undertow is so powerful is because, increasingly, this new networked media ocean is the sea to which consumers themselves are heading.  But why didn’t every big media and technology beast notice the plates were shifting to create this vast new habitat? Simply because they had...

'They Do What?!'

The recent rise of Quora, the social net based around (mainly) cerebral Q&A, created the customary reactions, including one that I always find interesting. It’s a common outburst from many people upon being introduced to any type of new web service that goes something along the lines of: ‘They do what?! What on earth!?’, ‘What’s the matter with them?’ and at some point quite possibly, ‘Where do they find the time?’ and, if you are lucky, ‘Don’t they have jobs?!’. Sometimes with some spluttering and eye-rolling thrown in for good measure.  I went through almost exactly this train of thought the first time I saw Twitter.  I remember someone showing me a Tweet from one of their pals saying they were waiting in for the plumber because their boiler had broken and they had no hot water.  ‘They do what!?’, I spluttered, ‘Why would anyone be interested in this?!’.  However, I then caught myself and realised I was about to say everything that people had been saying to me about blogging for the previous few years.  (For some reason the blogging version of this outrage often involved people’s pyjamas evidently implying something about the plight of the lonely.  As in,‘blogging is just about people in their pyjamas writing about...

Networked Media Doesn't Do 'Channels'

Do you know what the most annoying thing about builders is?  It’s when they refuse to talk to each other. You’ve probably been there. ‘Guys, why is there water leaking in through the ceiling?’.  ‘Don’t ask me guv, the plasterer probably knocked the pipes upstairs'.  ‘Can you take a look at it?’.  Cue sound of obligatory-sucking-in-of-air-through-teeth.  'Not today mate, ring Mick and ask him if he’s got some waff-wizard’.  ‘Huh? What’s waff-wizard. Actually, never mind, could you ring him?’.  ‘I haven’t got his number mate'.  ‘I can give it to you'.  ‘Bye, make sure to ask about the waff wizard'.  ‘Hi there, John said I should ask you about waff wizard because there’s a leak in the kitchen.  ‘Waff-what?’. ‘Waff-wizard, oh forget it, look there’s a leak in the kitchen'.  ‘Yes I saw that, looks nasty, talk to Gary - tell him he needs to use a pobble-pibble'.  And so it goes on.  What feels like an infinite number of specialists all of whom have their own languages and tools, but who see any other professionals as being inferior or incompetent, feel obliged to contradict any advice they offer and refuse to talk to each other directly.  Whilst flicking through last week’s Campaign Magazine, I had a strange feeling that the marketing industry was showing some similar traits.  There were experts from each part of the business talking about the way they saw the year ahead panning out.  Each was extolling the virtues of newspapers, digital, TV, outdoor, production, direct, sponsorship and many other areas.  All of them made sound, interesting points about their own fields, including lots of technical terms and diagnoses.  However, there was very little, if any, reference to how well they all work together.  These first-class professionals were all deeply dug into their own particular siloes.  Now, this is hardly new.  We’ve all worked in agency networks where...

Marketing's 'Big Bang' Is On The Way

There are some huge technological changes coming down the line that haven’t quite hit the marketing and media industry as yet. However, like massive waves a long way out at sea - they are on the way. Think about the effects of the ‘cloud’, or in other words, the limitless amounts of storage space that the web provides and the speed at which people are filling it up with personal information, creating scrapbooks about every tiny aspect of their lives for clever folk to analyse and decipher. Or the rise of the mobile web driven by new types of groovyware that mean we can log onto digital grapevines wherever we are and snack on a mixture of tips, opinions, offers and suggestions, all personalised to our own specific interests and passions. Or the reality of products being linked to the web and providing information about themselves. All huge waves that are about to crash onto the doorsteps of brands and global businesses seeking to maintain the mainstream audiences that drive their revenues, balance sheets and state-sized market valuations. When trying to understand this kind of epic-style change, I’ve been wondering about other industries that have dealt with similar levels of disruption. The one I keep returning to is the global financial services industry that underwent its so-called ‘Big Bang’ in the middle of the 1980s, with its epicentre in the City of London’s Square Mile. The specific date of the ‘Big Bang’ was the 27th October 1986, an event driven by the Tory government overhauling the way the London Stock Exchange was regulated. The primary changes consisted of...

Web 3.0 Is Virtual Dog Food Says Pincus

When you talk to people about the mega-growth in the sale of online virtual goods, the reaction tends to be similar to the first time they hear about Twitter.  ‘They do what!?’ – followed by rolling of eyeballs and looks around the room for mutual support about this latest round of web craziness.  It’s an entirely understandable response.  Why would anyone spend real money on, for instance, virtual dog food for their virtual pet?   Or more confusing still, why would anyone wish to pay $335,000 in hard cash for a virtual leisure club in Entropia, an online science-fiction world?  One way to move beyond the perplexing notion of people spending their shekels on such apparent lunacy is to stop viewing it as people buying ‘goods’ and start seeing it as people paying for ‘content’.  Albeit of a novel interactive variety.  After all, gazillions each year are spent on media content including cable TV channels, music, books and magazines.   And we don’t hear about the madness of people buying virtual goods from Hollywood.  But, just a minute I hear you cry, people don’t pay for content online do they?  Free is now the default, right?  It's the bugbear of Content Kings everywhere, including the Old Digger Murdoch who has thrown up the paywalls around his valuable content, even though he knows he'll lose most of his online readers.  It’s the reason that Hollywood has blocked Google TV accessing its AAA-productions in case Messrs Brin & Page repeat the havoc they unleashed on the newspaper industry by giving their treasures away for free to a global audience.  So what's going on?  On the one hand we have people paying good money for virtual dog food.  On the other a refusal to pay for the insights of cerebral journalists and the world's finest movies.   With these apparently contradictory trends in mind, I was interested to hear Marc Pincus, the CEO of Zynga, the social gaming empire, describe in this frenetic talk his theory that, ‘the third business plan of the internet will be users paying for things; often digital only, virtual and high-margin; and services that are found as apps.  I believe every major franchise on the Internet is up-for-grabs, just like it was at the beginning of Web 2.0’ (52 mins).  Well he would say that wouldn’t he?  Pincus’ company, Zynga, has made a king’s ransom and...

UK Media - Enjoy This 'Indian Summer' While You Can

I went along to an event this week entitled, ‘Making Money In the On Demand Media Age,’ hosted by consultancy boutique Oliver & Ohlbaum.   The session had the feel of an investment bankers’ world view and, as a result, there were plenty of Grand Fromages in attendance including Lord Hollick, ex-media baron turned VC; the much-admired broadcasting player David Elstein; Patrick Barwise the formidable LBS Professor and Government advisor and new kids on the block such as Richard Halton, CEO of the nascent UK web TV service YouView.  The initial presentation was a Meeker-esque onslaught of macro trends, backed up with some proprietary research that the room lapped up with a verve suggesting sober, grown-up analysis of the new broadcasting world is thin-on-the ground.   My overall impression of the hundred or so people in the room was something akin to a Monaco casino packed with high-rollers working out where to lay their next chips.  You could almost hear the neuro-based balance sheets ticking over as the analysis developed.  Among the many nuggets thrown out for the pack to chew on was that the recent speedier-then-expected recovery in the UK’s media markets might be something of a mirage.  One effect of the corporate axe being wielded in recent years is that profits have bounced back and there is a natural inclination for many big brands to invest straight back into what they know.  However, Oliver & Ohlbaum see this as being an, ‘Indian Summer’ before the realities of, ‘long-term structural change’ take grip in a couple of years and a, ‘new industry structure’ emerges.  What will this new world order look like?  In short, no one knows and in the follow-on session...

Google TV - Marketing's Missing Link?

Computers aren’t made for watching TV on, are they?  This low-level epiphany came to me the other day whilst viewing a thirty-minute show from BBC’s iPlayer on a laptop balanced on my knee. As the programme began my MacBook was a comfortable few degrees above room temperature. Twenty minutes in, however, the whirring machine felt more like a scalding cup of tea gently griddling the skin on my thighs.   Luckily, that’s all about to change as TV is sucked onto the global networked media platform, currently dominated by Search and Social.  Sony’s decision to roll the dice with everyone’s best frenemy Google, now looks like the shot from the starting pistol, with Apple and several well-funded start-ups like Roku and Boxee as the early race entrants.  For the marketing industry it's a change that offers the chance to seriously reinvent its business.  A business that’s still reeling from Silicon Valley’s realisation that global media budgets were up for grabs, rather than the Mad Men’s birthright.  The big change will be based on a very straightforward tweak in consumers' behaviour.  People will be able to merge web services and mainstream TV content on a single large screen in their living room, rather than juggling a red-hot laptop in addition to their three remotes.  Which means that when people see any type of advertising within their personalised, socially-driven schedules they will be able to drop into the brand’s virtual showroom, without leaving their armchair, let alone their living room, whilst their favourite show rolls on without interruption.  They can just click-on the in-show link and a second screen or AppStore will appear where they can read a few customer reviews, pop the brand goodies in their Amazon basket and pay with those Facebook Credits they were sent last Christmas.  Yeah, yeah, so what.  You can do all this now, right?  Interactive television has been around forever and most people combine a smartphone with the TV, rather than put up with laptop-induced skin grafts.  Well, yes.  However, as the ever-prescient Mick James once commented on this blog : ‘There is no limit to human laziness. I find this more and more when I'm online. Drag the mouse all the way up there and click it to get that free content? You must be joking. Thing weighs a ton.’  Whilst additional kit is a boon for geeks and the gadget-crazed, it’s an unwelcome pain for...