Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

We All Love The Bazaar Now

Eric Raymond’s seminal essay The Cathedral & The Bazaar remains one of the most powerful analogies for the world of media and marketing today. In case you aren’t familiar with Raymond’s work, he explained how in the world of software design, for many years, engineers spent long periods locked away creating huge operating systems in institutional settings that were then wheeled out into the real world for people to admire and to obey.  However, the open source movement changed all that with online systems much more like global street bazaars allowing programmers to gather in informal networks and collaborate on technical projects in an organic manner, adding a little stitch here and a patch there, and always feeding their knowledge back into the main market, which remained forever in public ownership.  For many years Big Brands operated in exactly the manner of Raymond's Cathedrals, building towering spires that required Brand Architects and Guardians to maintain their sanctity.  However, in the shadows of these vast edifices grew global online Bazaars made up of people who found they could organise themselves around their passions, as oppose to the demographical pews ordained by the marketeers.  And gradually the flocks flocked out of the Mainstream Media Cathedrals into the hustle-and-bustle of these online markets.  However, this was just the beginning and people quickly realised that they could not only hang out in the Bazaars but could also bring their own soapboxes along in the shape of blogs.  And eventually, as these little soapboxes grew into giant social networking sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, the Bazaar morphed into a global conversation.  One where people trashed the Big Brand Cathedrals as they pleased, or even helped build new ones, ignoring the pained grimaces of the Brand Guardians and Architects who could only see desecration wherever they looked.  However, that’s now all changed.  Big Brands have come our from behind their lecterns and are fully signed-up...

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.

'He Did Not Sell The News'

It's always a pleasure when a provocative comment appears on this blog.  And the splendid Brad Bell has left this response to my thoughts about the changing nature of anonymity online.  Here it is: "While I don't question the trend toward increasingly valuable (to everyone) real world identities, I don't see any possible reason anonymity is going away. 'On the internet, no one knows you are so many people.' (Anyone who wants to rid the network of anonymity, implicitly desires tyranny.) The ideal is a mix of multiple identities based on roles (professional, personal, familial, consumer, etc) and anonymity - as well as simply having the spectrum of choices. On the topic of 'free': despite crazy Rupert, it seems cultural belief systems have much less impact than real economic factors. Rupert seems to think there is a culture of 'free,' which can be changed with PR and leadership. Of course, that ignores the actual technological value of the global network: it radically lowers transaction costs. *That's* were the culture of free comes from. The costs of sharing information drop to the point where it resembles a glass of water in a restaurant. Secondly - it's *digital* information. People like Rupert and Mandelson seem to struggle to see that digital media implies the end of the analog business of selling content. (In the analog world, selling content worked because copies of copies introduced noise, whereas copies of digital media are clones of the original.) Like 'free', this is often presented as a cultural belief, like a kind of negative consumer demand. This kind of thinking leads to attempts to legislate digital devices in an attempt to stop them from acting like digital devices, and legislating people into a digital panopticon, relying on dataveillance to solve problems ranging from outmoded business models to terrorism. In fact, we are being asked to buy into a technological fairy tale in order to preserve the status quo - and the costs to us are simply staggering. It's easy to forget Rupert sold paper with news printed on it. He did not sell the news."  Certainly got me thinking.

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...

The Database Of Intentions Part II

John Battelle updates his seminal idea - The Database of Intentions: "Search was a pristine signal, an eruption of oxygen in the anoxic ocean of the early web, and an entire ecosystem grew in its bloom. The first implication was already manifest: Google had launched AdWords and AdSense, Overture (later to become Yahoo Search Marketing) was thriving, and a burgeoning paid search ecosystem was in the early stages of becoming a multi-billion commercial expression of the Database of Intention's power.  But as anyone who's been reading this site already knows, web search as a pure signal has been attenuating of late - overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of data on the web, for one, and secondly by our own increasingly complicated expectations.  Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does the Internet. In the past year I've come to the conclusion that "web search" was just the first of many fields in the Database of Intentions. For those of you who are not database geeks, and to further pad the metaphor, a field in a database is colloquially defined as a specific type of information in that database. Sets of fields are called records, and sets of records make up the database.  My mistake in 2003 was to assume that the entire Database of Intentions was created through our interactions with traditional web search. I no longer believe this to be true. In the past five or so years, we've seen "eruptions" of entirely new fields, each of which, I believe, represent equally powerful signals - oxygen flows around which massive ecosystems are already developing. In fact, the interplay of all of these signals (plus future ones) represents no less than the sum of our economic and cultural potential."

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...

Time To Spread The Love (Not Blow Your Wad)

With the mind-boggling degree of innovation occurring in digital technology and networked media, it’s very easy to forget that, in commercial terms, we are still only talking about markets. And markets are still just made up of people.  The other commercial task that hasn’t changed is the need to deploy resources to work within the marketplace to realise specific aims effectively.  Such as building sales and keeping shareholders content.  What is changing, as every marketeer worth his Cluetrain now knows, is the nature of that marketplace.  However, these changes are still yet to be fully reflected in the marketing industry because the most important cog of the business - media finance - continues to lag the trends driving networked markets.  Big marketing shekels remain driven by two words – reach and frequency.  An approach akin to asking as many people as possible out on a date until one or more of them falls for the smooth new chat-up line.  And this view of the world is all about size.  Bigger.  Louder.  Harder.  The problem is that in the new marketplace this approach doesn't build relationships - it wrecks them.  Of course, awareness is absolutely vital for any brand, particularly a new one.  And there’s always going to be a need to get out the big guns out and fire away at the marketplace to remind the world that a brand still means business.  But consumers (aka people) are fed up with brands only offering them a one-night stand, time after time.  Just think about the financial services industry where enticing offers are sprayed around, only for the love to be slowly withdrawn once the deal is done.  The bank’s rate of interest gets lower and lower until it just fizzles away and the corporate desire for new accounts on the bedpost grows.  Which leaves consumers more cynical and determined to stay footloose.  Or to become ‘rate tarts’ as they are tellingly known by the industry.  For brands to break this Tiger Woods lifestyle, they have to change not only their ways but also, crucially, their means.  And that means a very serious redistribution of their cash.  For if a corporate or brand is only in town occasionally for a night out on the campaigning tiles its long-term reputation suffers.  These days consumers see reliable brands as being there for them 24x7 - when they need the help and support.  And how can a brand do that if it spends its marketing wad on the first night?  It’s not easy changing long-standing behaviour.  But unless brands spread their love, attention and cash throughout the year, and are able to hold some back to respond to people's demands, no one will believe their clever words and lovely promises.  In the world of marketing and brands, the size of your wad still counts.  But in marketplaces driven by networked media, people are more interested than ever before in how you use it.