Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

Innovate or Litigate - The Choice Is Yours

Umair has summarised the need for more innovation in media organisations in an essay that you can read here.  It's full of pithy quotes such as this: "At the simplest level, media revolutionaries are embracing management innovation by simply learning how to interface productively with connected consumers, rather than get commoditized by them".  In the conversations I have with brands there is a sense that a lot of traditional media no longer offers the value they crave.  However, brands can lack flexibility, wanting sexy innovation, as long as it comes with guaranteed results - which is what BBH's John Hegarty was getting at in his recent speech.  Of course, if the idea of innovation is just too scary, you can always call the lawyers and get them to stop the world turning.

Homework From TBL

"Take the following homework assignment for 2007.  Make an inventory of the data you are reponsible for and think about which parts would be most likely to be re-used if you were to share them on a corporate intranet or on the internet using Semantic web standards.  Just as in the early days of the web ten years ago, the advances in data integration will benefit all those who contribute, often in unexpected ways." Sir Tim Berners-Lee writing in The Economist's The World In 2007.

Community Values

It's not difficult to imagine a time when the most important marketing asset a company has is its community of customers.  What that community thinks of the company, its products, its management and its systems will be the number one defining factor in the company's reputation and brand.  Marketeers will be interested in systems, ideas, and techniques that can help them improve relationships with their community.  There will be a range of metrics used to assess community satisfaction and there will be a clear financial relationship between the community's health and the company's wealth.  Those metrics may even appear on the balance sheet as goodwill does today.  The word-of-mouth created by these communities will be the most powerful driver of sales.  Companies will spend considerable budgets trying to recruit people to their communities and will try and poach individuals who are active within competitors' communities. There won't be such a thing as a standard community.  Every company and brand will be able to create a version to suit the needs of its own customers and products. Moving from command-and-control to community values will involve some very painful reorganisation.

The X-Factor-Factor

In all the recent workshop sessions I have run, someone has asked the question, 'but why?' - questioning the world's insatiable desire to upload their lives and share tiny details of their loves with complete strangers.  It's the most interesting part of what is happening today.  I normally answer the question by describing it as the X-Factor-Factor.  (If that means nothing to you, go here).  In other words the fact that today fame is 'flat' - available to everyone.  It can be broken down further into the age-old needs to share, build reputation, create identity, play and belong.  All very normal, all very non-tech.  Bob Garfield has expanded on these themes in this brilliant article about the impact of YouTube.  On Madison Avenue, Garfield says: "They see the old model collapsing before them, and they have $67 billion to spend and no idea where to spend it."  On Broadcasting: "Without being overly simplistic or melodramatic, the state of the Old Commercial Broadcasting Model can be summarized like this: a spiraling vortex of ruin."  Remind you of anything?

Campaign Culture

In the manifesto I wrote last year, I spoke about the common use of war language in the marketing industry.  So common in fact, that conversations (for example) about, "targeting consumers with shots and collateral in order to penetrate markets," are entirely normal.  Indeed, the bible of the industry is called campaign.  I was reminded about this in a conversation with an FMCG marketeer this week.  He felt one of the big barriers to brands embracing networked marketing is the 'campaign culture' prevalent in many large marketing-led corporations.  When a company is organised to send out huge tsunamis of communication activity around product launch dates, the notion of creating many smaller ripples throughout the year is fraught with problems.  Worse still, when campaign culture is brought to bear in networked media the results can be seriously counter-productive.  Just look at the profile of traffic to Nike's mega Joga project.  Now does that say community or campaign to you?  (Btw, the red line is the one man footy powerhouse Arseblog.)  And what will be the response next time Nike launch a similar project? 

AppleTorrent Anyone?

Red Herring reports that while the big P2P players all want to go legitimate, the content industries want to  work out how to use the technology to reach their customers.  Meanwhile, a representative from the DRM business says, “It’s a game of catching cockroaches.   You shut them down in one country and they show up in another country.”  Sounds like another opportunity for a modern marketeer to clean up.  AppleTorrent anyone?

The DIY Web

My latest round of presentations are called The DIY Web.  The idea is simple: the web is no longer just for the experts. TBL's read-write, mass amateur vision has arrived.  The idea is a good starting point for marketeers and emphasises the huge number of P2P tools that are out there (without getting overly bloggy).  It also makes the point that the tools themselves are about as interesting as the ones you keep in the shed.  Only when used by passionate individuals do they create value.  The next step is to take brands and corps down to the DIY level and show them people tweaking, cutting and pruning their own products and brands.  Then I ask the question, "when your customers are doing it for themselves, what do you do?", which is where it gets really interesting...

IP-TV Nailed

Writing in the Register, Alexander Cameron nails the reality about IP-TV today.  "There is an even more basic problem with IPTV that plagues the content industry, and that is one of definitions. Most people have no idea what it is, and get thoroughly confused between the variants. IPTV is an umbrella term for TV and video distributed using internet technologies. That doesn't mean it has to use the internet, just the technology, as you would find in a normal home or office network. As an umbrella term, it can mean full multi-channel television like Homechoice, Internet TV, Broadband TV, video downloads, or P2P services, and doesn't necessarily have to be viewed on a set-top box or media player."

Prepare To Be Surprised

Asked about the future of the newspaper business at the Society of Editors in Glasgow the ever-articulate Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger summed it up thus: "The honest answer to the question is nobody knows....I think you have to prepared to be surprised and you have to experiment like mad."  It's useful advice for any industry trying to  adjust to the new networked world and reminiscent of the P&G strategy recently described by the company's boss AG Lafley: “Most of our experiments don’t work but we have to be out there, trying.” (Via Greenslade.)

The Invisible Mega-Network

The BitTorrent story is a very interesting one, all the more so because it creates relatively little attention.  Relatively little when you consider that's it an 80 million strong network that, according to CacheLogic, accounts for 35% of all traffic on the Internet - and was created by one man.  It is now trying to find itself a business model, but in the aftermath of Grokster being crushed by the US Supreme Court ruling, it has to tread extremely carefully and not look too much like a P2P service.  However, as Ashwin Navin, the company's commercial brains points out in this interview, "As file sizes get richer and bigger, P2P is fundamentally the only way to deliver content on the internet without breaking the internet itself."  The service may just be suffering from not being seen to be part of the web 2.0 era.  After all, concerns about IP hasn't stopped YouTube.  Or maybe Bittorrent has just taken on too big a business in the shape of Hollywood.