Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

Carnival is Back

The Carnival of the Capitalists is over at Laclan Gemmel's blog.  For those of you not familar with C-o-t-C, it's a collection of essays written by people from all over about business, marketing, politics and commerce.  Think online Economist.  The Modern Marketing article below is included.

Open Source News

The clever people who brought us the open source encyclopedia Wikipedia are planning to launch an open source news service called Wikinews, says Wired.  This means that anyone will be able to write an article about any news item and change the articles written by other people. 

The surprising thing about Wikipedia is the quality of the entries and that no one trashes articles written by other people.  The site now carries more than 1 million entries in 75 languages and Associated Press (AP) has recognised its quality.

It will be fascinating to see how this model can be translated into a massive vehicle for Citizen's Media.  It feels revolutionary.

Lovemarks-Cluetrain

Johnnie Moore and Hugh of Gaping Void have started a deathmatch about Love Marks and The Clue Train.  And now Tony Goodson has joined in.  It's well worth a read.

For my part, I don't think Love Marks offers anything new at all.  If you scratch under the surface of Love Marks you find the advertising industry as it's been for the last fifty years.  The infrastructure is Big Agencies and Big Media shouting about Big Corporates to the rest of the world. 

However, scratch under The Clue Train and it's a completely different set of foundations.  Namely, a networked world where every voice is equal and shouting loudly doesn't mean anyone will listen.  In fact, it just makes people run away or block you out.

Wrong Again Mr Hegarty

John Hegarty (the H in ad agency BBH) writes this article in today's Media Guardian about advertising.  It's really worrying to see an industry leader making statements like:

'Advertising is a proactive function. It's an investment in the future.'

So I have sent this letter.  The last one got published, see if this one does.

Please Don't Interrupt

The excellent Networker in yesterday's Observer (Sunday sister of the Guardian) offered this great explanation about the ways in which Big Media in the US are manipulating Congress to help them protect their ailing business models from the burgeoning networked world. 

It contains this mindblowing nugget:

So the Intellectual Property Protection Act (IPPA) in its current form proposes to make it a criminal offence to skip over adverts in digitally recorded content. If passed, this would mean that American viewers would be allowed to skip or block material containing sex, violence and bad language, but could be prosecuted if they so much as dared to skip an advertisement.

This hamfisted approach is as misguided as the early efforts of the music business to deal with P2P, TiVo's recent woes or the idea of embedding adverts into RSS feeds.

Big Media needs to learn from what has happened.  Here's a quote from the chairman of EMI about his company's experiences:

"Five years ago, very serious players were saying that the internet was irrelevant: three years ago companies were refusing to co-operate or license music to each other.  Now, finally we are getting our act together."

That P2P Feeling

This is a nice piece explaining how BitTorrent is allowing people to timeshift their TV viewing and why this is making TV executives very nervous indeed.... 

While everyone has been thinking that movies are going to be the next industry to get that P2P feeling, the article points out that TV programmes are smaller and easier to download and that most US shows appear on the web shortly after being broadcast.

A Growing Voice

As a marketing consultant in London, I get a lot of blank, glazed looks when I talk about blogs, blogging, the blogosphere or even the much more respectable sounding Citizen's Media or the 5th estate.  So I've written the article below to try and give (business) people a flavour of what's on offer.

As a result many people reading this might want to click on, but feel free to use it next time you get that glazed over look....

Imagine a room with tens of thousands of your customers talking about your company and your products.  That's one way to think about the blogging community (the blogosphere).  The choice for companies is whether they want to be in that room or not.   And increasingly, staying out is just too risky.

Blogs Take Off

A report here states that the blogosphere, the total number of blogs online, is doubling in size every five months.

According to David Sifry, Technorati's chief executive, the current number of blogs is now over 8 times bigger than the 500,000 blogs it measured in June, 2003.

That's one big discussion covering every topic under the sun, from newborn babes to unhappy PVR customers.

TiVo Take Action

It seems that TiVo have stepped in just in time and started talking to their devoted online community (75,000 strong) about their plans to show advertising.  Evidently, the company is going to be introducing ads but not in quite as blatant a way as early reports suggested. 

Reading through the comments here, it seems that the TiVo fans are happy that the company is talking to them but feel disappointed about the apparent U-turn. A few of them have clearly lost that evanglistic streak.  Here's a couple of choice quotes:

If anything, this debacle lets TiVo know they should keep the blogosphere *more* in the loop.

When I buy something...I don't expect it to morph into another product *after* I bring it home. If I bought a microwave, I wouldn't want it turning into a toaster 2 weeks later.

If anyone doubts the power of digital consumers and transparent markets take note.  This has been a fascinating case study.  Modern PR programmes are going to have to start taking a lot of interest in the blogosphere.

Is TiVo the next Kryptonite ?

The incredible story of TiVo's plans to launch advertising on it's advertising avoiding TV recorder, is building on the US.  This great piece from the Church of the Customer suggests the company is in danger of being the next Kryptonite (the bicycle lock manufacturer which has become synonomous with grassroots consumer power, for all the wrong reasons.)  Interestingly it is the 75,000 strong TiVo community that is applying the pressure and creating the publicity.  Digital consumers having real commercial impact.  It will be interesting to see how the company reacts.