Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

Content Kings Look Away Now

TorrentFreak gives us a figure sure to chill the blood of content kings everywhere: "75 percent of all traffic on the Internet is due to file sharing, with 59 percent of that file sharing attributed to people swapping video files. Music tracks account for 33 percent of the file-sharing traffic. E-mail, it turns out, accounts for just 9 percent of the total traffic. The total internet traffic is a brain-twisting 40 petabytes - a 4 followed by 16 zeros."

The Listening Business

AdAge's Bob Garfield is expanding his Chaos I and II and Listenomics essays into a book called Listen and he's putting bits up as he goes along: "Listening is the future of everything.  In fact, if you wish to survive for long in media, marketing or politics it is the right now of everything – institutionalizing dialogue with all of your potential constituencies and sometimes total strangers for the purpose of market research, product development, customer relationships, corporate image and transactions themselves. The last of those benefits is especially important, because when you sell goods or services, you get money."  James Murdoch is on board and talks here about how Sky are doing lots of listening and why its working - and profitable - for them (particularly interesting from 15.00 onwards): "It's more than just tweaking the mix."

Heinz Opens Sauce And Discovers Free Speech

Heinz is running a user-gen campaign over at YouTube which the NYT has used to highlight that amateur ads are - wait for it - not like professional ads!  And what's worse, they're not even free! "Many entries are mediocre, if not downright bad, and sifting through them requires full-time attention."  Imagine!  It's all turning into a fascinating example of a brand testing its own control threshold but clearly Heinz needs to re-read their open source cookbooks.  Firstly, as any Linux programmer will tell you, it's only free if you don't put any value on your time.  So yes, "inviting consumers to create their advertising is often more stressful, costly and time-consuming than just rolling up their sleeves and doing the work themselves".  And secondly, it's free as in free speech not free beer.  So yes, "some contestants say in interviews that they prefer mustard or mayonnaise".  The cheek!  Really, why bother?  Well hard as it is to believe, some crazy folk actually like this free speech stuff.  Weird, eh?

Music Industry's New Business Model: Paranoia

You know you are in trouble when the only publication that can provide accurate insights into your strategy is the satirical Onion which this week reports that: "the RIAA is going to aggressively prosecute individuals who attempt to pirate our property by generating 'buzz' about proprietary music, movies, or software, or enjoy same in the company of anyone other than themselves."  Which leaves the industry open to new blood such as the private financiers currently looking to trouser the ever-ailing EMI and its supersonic roster (Beatles, Robbie Williams, Coldplay, Norah Jones, Lilly Allen, Kylie) with the idea that, "a business model that pays more attention to the internet than previous owners," might change the company's fortunes.  Hardly a radical notion in a world increasingly driven by networked media, but it goes to show how difficult it is for music executives locked in their traditional silos to peek above the parapet without legal eagles sounding the alarm.  In fact the harder reality bites, the more terrifying change becomes as illustrated by this comment from Jupiter: "If you are a file-sharer, you know the likelihood of you being caught is very similar to that of being hit by an asteroid." 

Guardian Editor Tells Reporters To "Grow Up"

“They can come in in the morning and check Technorati for what is being said about their work. Reporters are just going to have to grow up like big boys and girls and take it on the chin.”  Jeff Jarvis reports on some wonderful advice from Guardian Editor, Alan Rusbridger, to his reporters about the challenges of readers pitching in their opinions en masse.

Tremor In Cincinnati Felt In Adland

Kevin Dugan writes about P&G's Vocalpoint (part of the Tremor system) being used to encourage soccer moms to visit downtown Cincinnati with great success.  Tremor is an intriguing - and closely guarded - part of the modern marketing landscape.  But is also a best case study.  So much so that the system is bought into by brands beyond P&G's own stable including WD-40, Animal Planet and People’s Choice Awards.  ABC TV even uses the system to get input into its programming feedback.  It's no surprise as the system has signed up 225,000 teens and 500,000 mums across the US.  All of which are handled with the type of care and attention that shows up the common marketing 'eyeballs' parlance.  However, Tremor isn't magic - it's a well-organised, useful social network which, as we are all very aware by now, people like.  The question is what does this all mean for the marketing industry?  An example given by Bob Garfield in his recent AdAge article illustrates the issue:  "Listen carefully to Jan Leth, executive creative director of OgilvyInteractive North America, as he tells a funny little story about an agency assignment for Six Flags:  'They had a promotion for their 45th anniversary. They wanted to give away 45,000 tickets for opening day to drive traffic. So we got a brief to do whatever: ads, microsite, whatever. But our interactive creative director just went off and posted it on Craigslist. Five hours later, 45,000 tickets were spoken for. No photo shoot. No after-shoot drinks at Shutters,' he adds, with faux regret. Then, with somewhat less irony: "Now, the trick is, how do you get paid?"

Sorrell On Competing With Google

“If I add up the market caps of the four parent companies in our industry, I get to about $50 billion. If I add all their revenues together… I get to about 33 [billion dollars]. Google has a third of the revenues at 11 [billion dollars] and a market cap three times the size, so they have considerably more firepower. They can breeze in and pay $3.1 billion for DoubleClick. We’re sort of a little bit handicapped in comparison so our ambitions would be substantially more modest.” Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO, WPP talking to Reuters, May 15th 2007.

"Ad Hoc Crap Groups"

This month's Research magazine runs a special report on the future of market research and features an article I wrote about the uncomfortable relationship that brands have with online communities.  Like every other sector of the marketing services industry the research business is wrestling with new technologies which are making existing techniques look very tired.  A couple of articles from the report caught my eye.  Firstly, the Interactive Advertising Bureau's President in the US, which represents the interests of online advertisers, has challenged two of the big web measurement houses Netratings and Comscore, about their use of outdated panel measurement systems:  "A media measurement technique invented for the radio industry exactly seven decades ago".  Secondly, a research project into the lives of young German mothers found that giving them access to a range of simple blogs and networked media to record their days and, "raising their status...to co-researcher", had dramatic effects.  "They started to reveal the most intimate details of their lives," described Eva Caspary, the MD of Insight, rather than the results from the, "artificial ad hoc crap groups that we all usually do".  Which must have delighted the guys in her ad hoc crap group department!

Open Source Is Here For Good (Just So We Are Clear)

A few years ago I tried to capture my thoughts about how the marketing industry was at an incredibly exciting moment in its evolution, rather than the general doom-mongery that prevailed at the time.  I called the essay, "What Is Open Source Marketing" because while marketeers were wringing their hands, a hugely powerful project - The Open Source Movement - was well underway producing results that were slowly changing the world.  And it was all completely relevant to the marketing business.  Most of the reaction at the time was that marketing is for good-looking glamour pusses on Madison Avenue while Open Source is about the socks and sandals brigade tinkering around with daft projects in the shed.  And never the twain shall meet.  So I smiled when reading this post about what a day without Open Source would be like: "For starters, the Internet would disappear for the average user."  And I chuckled when reading this article in the Washington Post about how the OS tentacles have reached out into the marketing industry in the last few years: "A culture of open-source software and Wikipedia and online interactivity is reconfiguring the business of selling."  Who would have thought it, eh? ;-)

Bud's TV Cathedral

TV continues to morph.  Anheuser-Busch's decision to create the $30m Bud TV cathedral rather than set up stall in the bazaar was ambitious but has come back to haunt them.  The attractions of corporate walled gardens continues to be alluring with all the promise of inbuilt command and control. In fact it's an enormously risky strategy in a world where successful networked media requires an Oomph Factor that can only be delivered by letting people take your content in unscripted, unexpected directions.  Meanwhile, Publicis have invested large wads into Honeyshed, a branded content channel.  It's one of those ideas that sounds good on paper but launch comments like this, "Honeyshed will make brands the life of the party rather than the uninvited guest," give it a doomed-before-its-started feel. Umair's certainly not impressed and gives it his normal pithy treatment: "People don't love brands. This is an elemental economic truth. If they did, firms wouldn't have to pay for advertising."