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Writing in the New York Times, Nat Ives wraps up the current trend for home-made marketing, or Open
Source Marketing as we like to refer to it. We are sure to see a tidal wave of this activity in '05 and beyond. It's amazing that Big Agency world hasn't caught up yet. However, as Johnnie Moore mentioned to me yesterday the old guard don't ever 'get it', they just die.
And for a real look forward check out this video. Very provocative.
The FT reports today about the growth of blogging. There is an interesting study about how Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, a very conservative German investment bank, uses blogs internally.
DKW has set up about 120 internal blogs to promote discussion and distribute information, including some that encourage users to share ideas, requests and criticisms of in-house information technology systems. Traders use the medium to share information and research. "We think of it as the open-source marketplace for ideas," says JP Rangaswami, chief information officer. "It lets us expose concepts or issues to a wide audience and discuss them dispassionately."
Tom Hespos has put his list of predictions together for 2005. It's very US-centric but I'd agree with most of the trends. (Mediapost was suffering at time of posting so it's below in full). 
It seems to me that our American friends have been ahead of the game this year and there is a much bigger buzz around the 'new web' (ie post dot-com) than here in UK and Europe. But expect that buzz to hit our shores big time in 2005.
Here's a great quote taken from Dan Gillmore's We The Media about the benefits of giving, 'control to the edges'.
"Most of the brightest people don't work for one organisation. Tapping the power of everyone is the best approach." Bill Joy, Sun Microsystems.
Converse, the old-school trainer manufacturer owned by Nike, has instigated a great campaign
inviting amateur film makers to submit short films based around the legendary sneaker. The company received more than 500 submissions which can all be viewed on their website, to which traffic has jumped.
But this is the clever bit. The winners are going to be turned into TV adverts, with the successful directors receiving $10,000 per spot.
It's a great example of open source marketing where you invite your customers into the business to help direct the brand (or anything else for that matter). It creates passion, interest and community and probably cost less than a campaign directed by a big agency/name.
Stephen Newton, a regular contributor to this blog, and I had a lively discussion here about what would happen if a brand was hijacked by an open source community and if it would be a good thing or not.
Stephen raised the possibility that a far-right party could take the FCUK brand and launch t-shirts with messages inciting racial hatred, such as FCUK Jews. It actually got me in a little bit of American hot water, but I thought it was an interesting, if left field, strand to the open source marketing discussion currently emerging. (One that Stephen vehemently disagrees with btw).
However, it seems that it was in fact not that crazy at all. Today's Observer reports that the UK pro-hunt lobby, the new British militancy, has done exactly what Stephen and I were discussing.
Otis Ferry, son of Bryan and pin-up of the crazed right has co-opted the FCUK brand by printing up T-shirts with 'FCUK Yer Ban' on the front and posing in the UK press wearing one. And French Connection aren't impressed. In fact they are going legal. It seems like a wrong move to me. I would say Otis is extending the brand. But maybe French Connection don't want to be linked with the crazed Countryside Alliance.
Sometimes, the truth really is stranger than fiction.
I am guessing that we are going to be hearing a lot about Bittorrent in 2005. It's like a Napster for films and it's getting pretty big. One sure sign of its success, as Wired reports, is that Hollywood is gearing itself up just like the music industry did to bring this P2P technology down. Of course, it's likely that they will be about as successful using a legal route. It will be interesting to see who what they have learnt from their audio bretheren.
It's called marketing guys! When the market changes, you change!
Such is the interest in blogs in the US that TIME Magazine is considering making bloggers their TIME
person of 2004, as Steve Rubel reports. Here's the snippet from the interview with TIME boss Jim Kelly:
IWM: Are bloggers leading contenders to be Persons of the Year?
Kelly: I would say that they are contenders, yes. You could name one blog and call it Blog of the Year, or name a group of people and call them Blogs of the Year. There are six or seven people who clearly have a lot of influence.
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