Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

Creaking TV

At a session at yesterday's Forecast 2005 entitled "Disruptive Technologies", a group of panelists debated the impact of various technologies such as DVRs and targeting software on the media business.

One interesting comment came from Adam Gerber, director of media strategy at MediaVest. When asked about one of the apparent heirs to the ad slot crown, product placement, Gerber's response was, "You can't squeeze a 60 billion dollar marketplace into product placement," Gerber said. "People will turn their sets off."

Modern Marketing believes that the media landscape is about to change in a way much more significant that an upturn in the product placement industry and Gerber would seem to agree.

Modern Mitsibushi

Mitsibushi appear to have taken on the role of the little boy and pointed out to Madison Avenue its naked, vulnerable, position.

The New York Times on the 26th of September reported that Mitsibushi is going to be pulling $120m of budget out of network advertising because of its suspect value. The budget will be put into Internet advertising, cable and magazines.

Mitsibushi appear to just be the first to explicitly recognise a long term trend. Company spending on broadcast TV ads had a compound annual growth of just 1.5 percent from 1998 to 2003, while spending on consumer Internet sites swelled 30.6 percent, according to Veronis Suhler Stevenson and PQ Media.

And others agree. "Every year, [TV ads] have less and less of our interest because we're aware that it's intrusive," said Jim McDowell, BMW's vice president of marketing. "We want to increasingly be involved in situations where our prospects invite us into their homes. "

CGM

The excellent Networker in yesterday's Observer newspaper gives a great example of the power of CGM.

It refers to the company Kryptonite that makes bike locks. When it emerged one day that the company's most fearsome deterrent could in fact be opened with a bic pen, word spread rapidly on the web through biking communities such as bikeforums.net. In a few days 400k people read a notice on the board and 3 million downloads of a video demonstrating the product's fallibility were recorded.

The next day Big Media got hold of the story and shelves were cleared and product returned.

Networker's point is that the product had been around since 1992. It was the new enhanced power of CGM that nailed it.

Or in the article's words:

"There are lessons to be learned from this episode. The first is for company executives: if you screw up badly then the world will know and there is nothing you can do about it. The good old bad days when duff or unsafe products could be sold for years before some law enforcement or customer standards authority acted are gone for good. And because of the net it can happen in a week."

Digital consumers roll on...

Consumer Generated Media

Digital consumers which this blog writes about create thousands of conversations, dialogue, websites, chat, commercial activity and countless others types of communications online.

In the US this has become known as consumer generated media or CGM. Proponents of the blog world such as Jeff Jarvis of buzzmachine.com, also refer to it as citizen's media.

Whatever term is used it means the millions of individuals who use cheap, accessible internet tools to publish and communicate with each other on the web in increasingly sophisticated ways such as blogging communities.

The most interesting aspect of CGM is that people really do trust one another's opinions. Think of Amazon book reviews. You know they are likely to be true because you know the person that has written the review is completely unbiased and probably similar to yourself. It's like asking a friend or the friend of a friend for a recommendation about a good hotel in a new area or country.

This has considerable implications for the modern marketeer. Any company must be very sure about claims that it makes for itself or its products because you can guarantee that someone, somewhere will test it out and make a comment on the web. And that message will be read by thousands of other people - who will believe it.

The answer is to embrace these indicudals as important opinion-formers and listen to what they are saying. This is something that the modern PR industry has always done. It has just never used these techniques on normal people on the street because they have never existed as organised groups, in the way that digital consumers do today.

Return of the Soap Opera?

Both Colgate-Palmolive and Unilever announced profit warnings this week. And the answer for both FMCG giants is to increase marketing spend. This looks like the classic cycle of companies cutting back on promotional spend during a recession and only starting to spend when sales begin to suffer.

What will be interesting is what the companies spend their promotional dollars on. The FMCG companies were once inventive enough to create their own housewife dramas -- soap operas. Will they be inventive again and explore the new media landscpe or just revert back to the comfort blanket of the 30 sec slot ?

Poor Google III

Wall St may continue to moan (see below) about the apparent failure of the Google IPO but the search engine's float seems to have encouraged the rest of the world's investment community about the web.

Along with the rocketing figures for online advertising, the Google float seems to have galvanised slowly improving semtiment of the last year.

The following was taken from an article in yesterday's media guardian and is the most upbeat public stsrtement from a big investor that I have read for years.

According to the British Venture Capital Association, in 2003 the number of companies financed at the start-up stage increased by 12% from 2002, representing investment of £73m. Moreover e-commerce companies received £399m, almost seven times higher than the £60m invested in 2002.

http://media.guardian.co.uk/mediaguardian/story/0,7558,1302970,00.html