Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

Getting Vernacular

About six years ago I was sitting down with Billy, a linguistics professor, talking about the renaissance of the web and how it could come to be the 'dominant type of media' - a horrible expression but you get my point.  Billy's response was typically simple but profound as he pointed out the dominant media would always be what we were doing at the time - having a conversation.  It was a remark which stayed with me.  Today, one of the greatest marketing challenges for brands is to use the conversational language of their customers.  Which is ironic.  Because contrary to some popular belief marketing people are in fact human - and also customers.  But the barrier remains and indeed grows as the conversation economy goes stellar.  In the manifesto Johnnie and I have written, Co-Creation Rules, we make the point by saying that corporates and brands must Get Vernacular, which is a nod in the direction of the ever correct Doc.  I have found the best way to illustrate this is to compare two reports of a football match that took place between Arsenal and Blackburn at the beginning of the year.  The first is from Arsenal's official-but-dull site which reported that, "Many teams would have buckled under those circumstances but Arsenal rolled up their sleeves, stayed true to their footballing principles and ran out worthy winners".  The second report is from Arseblog, the AFC mega-blog, which said of the game, "If you were walking down the street and you saw two buses about to explode, for some reason, and one bus contained a squadron of killer robots who were going to give everyone on earth the plague after they shagged everyone’s wife, and smeared poo all over your freshly painted house and the other bus contained the Blackburn Rovers football team and you had to save one, then there’s no question we’d all get the black death and have stinky walls."  Hugh hits the same territory here as does James Governor here.

Metrics Make The Market

Whoever owns the metrics owns the market.  And in advertising that market is worth hundreds of billions of dollars.  For a long time the largest media market - the US - has been organised by Neilsen's ratings system which determines the flow of something like $70bn annually.  And in the UK BARB's TVR ratings have kept a cartel-type arrangement ticking over for years.  Clearly, Google has managed to  upset this cosy market in a very big way using technology to show up a lot of conventional wisdom for what it is - vested interests.  It's reward has been a $175bn valuation which the DoubleClick deal could build upon.  However, a recent McKinsey report shows that despite the fact that the web can offer data like no other, it still hasn't come up with a metrics package and system that is sufficently user-friendly and stable to attract the really big brand budgets.  Scott Karp says the report shows that sentiment is really what's holding back the advertising world from taking the plunge.  A top media executive described the same idea to me very succinctly as: "We know the bike is broken, but it's the only one we've got".  But as Hugh notes (point 7) brands are offering more money to the online players than they can currently handle - because their models on the metrics side don't scale sufficiently to suck up TV's oceanic budgets.  The breakthrough is likely to come from closer co-operation between the GYM titans et al than they may be comfortable with.  But as it stands, the opportunity remains open - possibly for someone to change the way the whole market is viewed...

Packing Up The Big Top

These days brands are much better viewed as instruments of intelligence to draw information into a company, not as Big Tops to promote the business' latest acts and curiosities.  As information and data accumulates in petabyte-size chunks in online public forums, the insights and ideas of small marketing teams within corporations increasingly sound like distant voices in the wind.  What hope does a brand team have of getting its acrobatics noticed above the ear-bleeding roar of vast online markets trading in gossip, innuendo and scandal?  Not to mention any tasty bones left lying around in corporate cupboards.  The message is now so familiar it's boring.  When people want to know about something they go online and see what everyone else thinks.  They don't rush to the corporate website to check out what gems the guys in marketing have come up with.  Or to see if the new jingle is going to pique their aspirations.  They jump in the bazaar.  Trip Advisor.  Amazon.  Blogs....

Why Free Sells - Timely Example

Considering that my last post was called Why Free Sells, it's timely that O2 have given me one of their new Cocoon phones to do a little test run.  (It's also timely because I smashed my Sony-Ericsson in car door a few weeks ago under pressure from the anti-terrorist squad at Euston station, but that's another story).  Unlike some bloggers I am more than happy to be showered with free stuff on the understanding that I can do whatever I want with the goodies in question.  On this occasion I decided to conduct a little experiment and count how many people I naturally (ie without meaning to) introduced to the phone last week.  The Cocoon is very nice and compact and does everything you'd expect well.  But it has one particular feature that gives it a little show-off-ability aka social objectness.  Rather neatly, the outside casing has a hidden pink, neon-scrolling display that presents messages about who is calling, as well as the time and other such stuff, and it's quite big so you can read it from the other side of the room while the phone sits on a shelf in its little nest.  I have been playing with friends and associates by getting them to call me and then watching their names scroll across the side of the phone.  Quite groovy.  The results were that last week...

Why Free Sells

In commercial terms, giving stuff away for free is suicide, right?  Apparently not.  As I've said before, free is now the only way to work in a world driven by networked media.  It may all sound like happy-clappy, kool-aid nonsense but the data just keeps on coming.  In my post-holiday feed-trawl I was intrigued by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone's comments (could he ever fail with such a moniker?) about the company giving away their data in the shape of an API for others to use: "The API has been arguably the most important, or maybe even inarguably, the most important thing we’ve done with Twitter. It has allowed us, first of all, to keep the service very simple and create a simple API so that developers can build on top of our infrastructure and come up with ideas that are way better than our ideas, and build things like Twitterrific, which is just a beautiful elegant way to use Twitter that we wouldn’t have been able to get to. The API has easily 10 times more traffic than the website," (Via PW).  And in the FT Zuckerberg hits a similar note when describing the effects of freeing up the Facebook platform...