Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

Kate Modern

I met up with Miles Beckett today, the creator of LonelyGirl15, to discuss the launch of Kate Modern, the UK version of his US mega-series which is launching on Bebo this summer.  Prepare yourselves people, it's going to be huuuge.  Go here.

Lego's Listening Factory

Yesterday, I attended a great talk by Helen Venge from Lego Factory - a giant experiment in the world of user-innovation.  She started by saying that when she joined Lego she was struck that, in comparison to her previous role at Levis, she hardly ever heard the word 'brand'.  Her colleagues just spoke about customers and users all the time.  Internally, Lego Factory is seen as a start-up within a corporation - one designed to explore the new territory of customer collaboration.  Right at the heart of this innovation is that Lego Factory allows users to design and publish the products they would like to see - and that other people can see them and buy them.  So we are not talking about Nike-ID personalisation - but a marketplace. Helen explained that Lego had always been aware of a large 'shadow market' of customers collaborating creatively among themselves.  For instance, the amazing Brickfilms and Brick Journal.  But only with the development of a broadband world has it become conceivable to address this spectrum of niches as a commercial opportunity.  Key to Lego Factory's success is the sophistication of its customer collaboration.  No lazy customer profiling here...

Alice In Upfront Land

Scott Karp summarises the alice-in-wonderland quality of the US upfront process which this year secured $9.3bn dollars for the five networks, an annual increase of 5 per cent.  It seems that this price inflation will continue until a new reliable metrics driven market appears for digital video - which is what Google is effectively trying to do with its EchoStar deal.  This was recently described to me as: "We know the bike's a bit wobbly but it's the only one we've got".  Karp has also written up this helpful analysis of the post-DoubleClick online advertising market and how niches are starting to appear, including the intriguing open-source offering Openads.

The Pull Game

I popped into the Online Marketing '07 conference today, courtesy of Immediate Future, and caught a chat featuring Stefan Glanzer, chairman of Last FM.  With the type of confidence that comes from hitting paydirt 1.0 and 2.0, he summarised the current seismic marketing shifts very nicely: "It's the pull game now, if you don't want to play, stick with the old, pre-moderated model".  He went onto throw out the hugely-wooly-but-quotable stat that user generated web content is doubling in size every six months and in a few years time, "eighty to ninety per cent of digital knowledge will be user generated," or in other words it will be the norm.  Just for good measure he threw in the notion that Vodafone is as much a social network as any other, or in other words, a dumb network that people use to connect.  Interesting chappie.  I then went to see a brilliant talk by Helene Venge, from Lego Factory which I'll write up later.

Market Matters Most

Since starting his blog a few weeks ago Marc Andreessen has offered a ridiculous amount of insight.  His latest post is absolutely brilliant in its simplicity and unmissable for modern marketeers.  "Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.  You can always feel when product/market fit isn't happening. The customers aren't quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn't spreading, usage isn't growing that fast, press reviews are kind of "blah", the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close.  And you can always feel when it's happening."

Children Of The Web

I have been helping Steve Hamm at Business Week with an article package called,"Children of the Web".  It's a very wide ranging account of how digital natives around the world are using networked media to break down geographical barriers.  "Flying blind is the unavoidable consequence of coming to terms with today's most important demographic group: the tens of millions of digital elite who are in the vanguard of a fast-emerging global youth culture."  Well worth a read, especially this part...

Big Moment If Dove Wins Cannes' Big Gong

It's won viral honours at Cannes, but will the grand fromages of world advertising give the major Grand Prix gong to the Dove evolution campaign?  It's a big moment because if they do, it will be (another) point at which the advertising old guard admits the world has changed.  That's because the Dove campaign is classified as a viral.  In fact it's a lot more than that but let's not get bogged down in semantics.  Suffice to say - it's not a 30sec spot.

[UPDATE:And the big moment arrives....]

[BONUS: Pete Blackshaw looks at why it works.]

The Perfect Social Object?

Doritos has launched a packet of crisps without specifying the flavour.  Instead they've called it X13D and left it to the customer to decide what it is.  Here's their explanation: "This is the X13 deep flavour experiment where we created a bold new mystery flavour and then decided to do something we've never done before - leave the rest up to you."  It's a brilliant example of a physical social object and open source marketing.  I mentioned it at a session Johnnie and I did this morning where we presented our Co-Creation Rules manifesto and everyone immediately smiled.  And of course, the online buzz is off and running.  Best piece of modern marketing in 2007 for me.

Resist The Dark Side

Thanks to Chinwag and everyone who showed up at their event - The Dark Side of Social Media - last night where I was on an excellently diverse panel discussing the issues that arise as people splurge their life stories onto a web which never forgets.  It's complex stuff so we were never going to get that far in an hour but Sam Michel did a good job of keeping the audience questions coming.  For my part, I tried to offer the briefest analysis of the Kathy Sierra controversy and the insights it offered about the times we live in.  The most astounding aspect was that three days after seeing the post that started it all I watched Jeremy Paxman interview Tessa Jowell about it on Newsnight.  I think what happened was the bottom-up kerfuffle caused by the strange idea of a bloggers code of conduct (lesson: don't ask technologists to deal with social issues - they'll just try and codify them) met with the top-down paranoia about the planet web and its evil nature. This provided Jowell a PR opportunity that ticked almost every box including women's rights, money-laundering, child abuse, scary-future-tech and, of course, the moral high ground.  Meanwhile, Paxman got the chance to jump on multiple bandwagons with the introduction: 'Minister Calls For Bloggers Code of Conduct'. All, undoubtedly, a taste of things to come.  Equally interesting was that last night in a room of about 80 people only a few had heard of Sierra's tale.  The lesson being for those of us that live in what we think of as the blogopshere - get out more.

Control Thresholds

I am really enjoying Garfield's post-by-post book: "The biggest argument for going to consumers and asking them to think deeply about your brand is the experience it gives a marketer in going to consumers and asking them to think about their brands." 

[UPDATE: This post is even better - particularly insightful!]