Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

This Message Is Real

Historically, marketing has been about crafting key messages and handing them over to creative teams to wrap up in powerful narratives.  This approach has worked well and in many cases still does.  However, increasingly, the style of the modern web is challenging this process.  People find the social web attractive because it's a very personal sphere where they can share the reality of their lives - without a key message in sight.  And that spontaneous vitality is tough for even the best creative departments to fake.  In other words, it’s difficult to craft 'real’.  But that hasn’t stopped some brands trying.  Take the latest social content from Coors Beers which has created a team of lads who hit venues and parties to demonstrate their beer-pouring skills.  “We brought the Coors Lights,” they announce before going onto perform tricks, including standing on the roof of a house and pouring beer into a glass 30 feet below.  Without spilling a single drop!  But despite their efforts to disguise the keyness of their key messages, they resonate with all the  authenticity of William Hague’s baseball cap.  “It’s not me, it’s the vented wide-mouthed can,” declares the leader of the Smooth Pour Crew.  However, the difficulties of brands trying to enter personal communication environments, such as YouTube, are really brought into sharp relief by the responses to the Coors film.  Because, of course, when people are left alone with beer they don’t run to the nearest bar or BBQ and demonstrate the product's key differentiators in an eccentric, quirky manner.  Nope, the reality is much more random.  For example they may try and disprove what you have told them - in an eccentric, quirky manner.  Or have a detailed technical discussion about how it could have been done better.  They may create imaginative ripostes.  Or ignore your key messages about the new style pouring top, and instead rip the bottom off and shotgun the contents.  And then run to the toilets to throw up.  They may provide product reviews using some very real language.  Or, natch, take your new can into the desert and destroy it with a semi-automatic weapon.  So what to do?  Well there are many exciting creative techniques that will work. However, above all, when it comes the modern web, be aware that while you may supply the beginning of the campaign, the rest of the world will provide the conclusion.

You Can't Make Money From Social Media - But They Can

The FT reports that "Web 2.0 fails to produce cash".  And it's right.  But only if viewed through the narrow lens of traditional media.  In theory, vast social networks offer buckets of reach and frequency.  Which in media terms means dollars.  But in practice the tiny CPMs don't add up - even when they are scaled across empires such as MySpace.  So the verdict is in.  Web 2.0 might be significant, but Cash 2.0 it is not.  However, if you take off those old-school media goggles for a second and look around, the world looks very different - and much more profitable.  Pro-Blogs, such as Boing-Boing and Craftzine, are gathering under ad networks like John Battelle's Federated Media and charging fat CPMs.  Likewise, Nick Denton's Gawker stable pulls in about $15m per year.  How about Last FM which is doing very nicely thank you selling tunes to its music community?  Or YouTube?  It may not be a lot of money compared to the shekel-printing machine that is AdWords - but it's declaring revenues of $100m this year.  Then there's SixApart which collects small monthly payments from millions of bloggers.  Or Flickr Pro accounts at $25 dollar per year?  Let's not forget Etsy with its 1 million dollar profit in '07.  Or SkinnyCorp's Threadless which is turning over $20m a year by helping its community create T-shirts and then whizzing up the ones they like.  And then there's Craig's List which will generate about $80m revenue in 2008 - with 25 staff and no business plan.  So the FT is right.  If you are counting the Web 2.0 beans using the same old metrics - it's not a place to make money.  However, if you are prepared to try a fresh view and some different dynamics - the modern web is full of treasures.

No One Is In Control - But That's OK

David Weinberger has a great habit of throwing light on thorny issues that arise on the modern web and does so again in this Supernova interview with observations such as: "Explicit governance is a second resort online."  It may  sound like a grand statement but it's quite the opposite.  He's simply saying that if it's not fairly clear what's going on in an online group or community after a few minutes - a rulebook probably won't help.  I think we all know the feeling.  You wonder into any social situation and instead of being given time to check out the surroundings and the people there, to see what they are saying and wearing, you are given some directions about how to enjoy yourself.  Certainly a good host to show you the ropes and explain what's happening can be very welcome, but being asked to spell your name, postcode and exact purpose upon arrival feels like Organised Fun.  In fact, encouraging people's willingness to participate in some way, even if that's just an invite to hang around, is better than handing out leaflets about preferred objectives.  "That's why lurking is so important," says Weinberger.  However, no one is saying you can't do anything to help an online network or community develop and grow.  It just requires putting your efforts into the right places.  If your community is flat and you want to encourage participation, more direction probably isn't the answer.  But a greater focus on visitors' behaviour, clear invites and permission to join in may do the trick.  And this all goes for design and coding too.  Focusing on an intuitive space is better than creating a chrome and glass box with extreme signage.  In short, Weinberger suggests, if your online social network is refusing to go social don't reach for the rulebook.  Take a deep breath, drop the clipboard and let The Ooomph Factor grow...

TBL At NESTA

I went to the NESTA Innovation Edge mega-bash yesterday and caught Sir Tim Berners-Lee making a great speech via an equally mega live video screen.  Firstly, he was asked about his reaction to seeing the feedback, 'Vague, but exciting,' on the first paper he wrote about the web, and revealed that this was in fact a personal note scribbled down by his boss Mike Sendall, and only discovered following his death ten years later.  He said the key to such an ambitious project growing was that, while no one had said yes to his revolutionary idea, neither did anyone say no.  He was just given time and space to play around with the notion of hypertext and to 'generalise' a specific problem ie how to let distributed machines share data.  Quoting Einsten, he said that if you know the outcome of a research project before you start then it's not really research.  So 'a long leash' and letting people play around is really important.  His focus is now understanding the different type of 'societies' appearing online and how they affect human behaviour.  Sir Tim then issued a word of warning about the 'stability' of some areas of the web including blogs - or 'social machines' as he calls them.  He wondered if they may eventually become flooded by commercial spam and go the way of email.  Looking ahead, Mr WWW went on to say that he hoped his invention would let people around the world share their thoughts and in doing so tackle some of the really big problems, including AIDS, climate change and poverty.  Or to 'connect humanity' and start a global creative process.  It's amazing to hear an individual talk of such esoteric ambitions and know that he has pretty much delivered!  And it was only afterwards that I realised he hadn't used a single technical term or piece of geekery.  He sounded more like a humanitarian than a technologist.  An amazing man with an amazing story.  (Whereas Johnnie enjoyed the one man life-force that is Geldof.)

So, Is Google Bigger Than TV?

"Let's not kid ourselves, Google is the most impressive and important development in the history of marketing since the invention of television. And I'm not overstating it," said John Battelle last week.  Now he may not be completely impartial but he's got a point.  Which is amazing not least because TV is an industry whereas Google is a single company.  A few figures make the point.  In the UK, it looks like more will be spent on web advertising than on TV ads next year.  And a good chunk of that will be Search revenues of which Google will trouser the lion's share - £1.75bn this year alone.  Or look at the the four main ad groups plying their TV trade.  IPG, WPP, Omnicom and Publicis are together are worth about $40bn currently - by market caps.  Whereas Google is worth more than four times that amount at $180bn.  And Google's revenues continue to grow at 40 per cent while the Big Four Agencies are happy with single figure growth.  Innovation wise ITV brings back Sir Trevor McDonald while Google tries to rewire the industry's business model by sucking it into the AdWords programme.  The only company with anything like the firepower to compete is Microsoft with a market cap that dwarfs even that of Brin & Page Inc - at $282bn.  However, in recent weeks we have seen that even Ballmer & Co has struggled to get to grips with the online media market that Google currently rules.

Spectrum Free TV

I met Miles 'LG15' Beckett last summer to chat over the launch of Kate Modern in the UK.  Gazillions of page views, millions of users and many rave reviews later, Beckett is seen as one of the pioneers in the morphing world of TV.  The LG15 team is now a company called EQAL which has just signed a deal with CBS to build on their vision of community-driven drama.  In the announcement, I was struck by the simplicity of Beckett's vision about what he does: “It’s incredibly exciting how you can take existing TV, make it interactive and create communities around it.”  Makes it sound easy doesn't he?  In my chat last year I was struck that, while it involved huge amounts of work by a group of very clever people, the plans for KateModern weren't complicated.  A couple of backers, some young actors, the starting point for a script, a flat in Whitechapel and some handheld cameras.  Oh, and a deal with Bebo on the back of the LG15 story.  But the really big thing, the broadcasting or spectrum to share stories with the world - that was a given.  It's a kind of if we've got it, we can share it mentality which is hard wired into the brains of webizens and everyone under the age of about 25.  Clay Shirky illustrates the point when he says that the hardest time he has with his students is explaining that (only) ten years ago, you couldn't instantly share your ideas with the world.  This is one of those far-reaching changes that can be difficult for people still stuck in a world of spectrum scarcity to fully understand.  Just compare the ease of Beckett's vision for a brave new world of TV with those of his now boss, CBS Interactive president, Quincy Smith said: “These guys have cracked the code.”  There's no doubt that Beckett and his crew are super-smart and have learnt a lot about the world of community-driven story telling, but I didn't get the impression that they think of themselves as code crackers.  They are just playing with the new toys available to us all.  And having fun along the way.

Passport Control

Data Portability is the type of phrase that only the tech-heads of Silicon Valley get excited about.  In English, it simply means the ability to carry your personal data from place to place on the web, rather than creating similar profiles with many different organisations, websites and social networks.  Today's system is like having different passports for each country of the world that you visit.  Data Portability is the vision that wherever you go online, a single passport is enough to get you through customs and a room for the night.  Simple, right?  Yes, but like everything else happening on the modern web there is a gigantic power struggle going on beneath the surface.  To date, the approach of the mega social networks has been to try and keep users within their walls.  The main tactic they rely on for this is inertia.  Just like a bank, once you have spent so much time and effort finding a lender who does the basics, built a record with them, and designed your life around their products, it becomes a wrench to move elsewhere.  For social networks this inertia is largely driven by the power of the network effect.  And, to date, this dynamic has been enough to sort the men from the boys, leaving just a few social network operators standing including Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and MySpace. However, all of the big players are aware of the scenario where inertia is not enough to keep their customers in place.  If your friends suddenly start deserting a social network for the next big thing, you may well throw inertia to the wind and join them.  It's the equivalent of a run on a bank.  So rather than just be the fashionable country that people may eventually tire of, the next fight is to decide who gets to issue the passports.  Last week, three social nets made announcements designed to give them passport control.  The initiatives were MySpace MySpace Data Availability, Facebook Connect and Google's Friend Connect.  All have different takes on the same issue.  (Notably, Google are trying to build around you, while the others want you to build around them).  But regardless of strategies, it's still a fight to become the official identity-manger of the web.  And it's that identity brokerage role that is the big prize for social networks, especially as they are still trying to find viable financial models.  Will it work?  Who knows.  Microsoft tried their own passport service a while back and it hasn't really taken off.  And many other such systems have been the victims of over-complexity, aka death-by-a-million-features. But the promise of being the guys who issue the online passports is too tempting.  Expect to hear a lot more about Data Portability.

By The People, For The People

Thanks to Anon for this insightful comment, left on the post below, about the morphing world of users and audience: "The metaphor I keep coming back to on this is Folk Music.  If you look at an open mic session, the "audience" turns up and sometimes, some people join in. People start by foot tapping, after a few ales they might pick up the courage to play an instrument, sing along at a table or even grab the mic. The boundary between audience and artist is practically non-existent. They are also playing, improvising and "remixing" copyright free music. Most importantly, you don't have to do anything, just by being there you feel as if you are participating. Internet participation and the movement from audience to user is creating a new "folk" or "people's" culture."

Is Your Audience A Bunch Of Users?

Last year, I was told by a grand fromage at Microsoft that an important part of the company's shift from software to media was changing its view of customers - from many users to a single audience.  Historically, MS has sold software to individuals who use it for their own disparate needs.  However, now the web has joined all these people together they can be seen as one big group.  And when you put it like that, advertisers are interested and branding bucks follow.  What struck me at the time was that while MS was moving from users to audience, Big Media was going in the opposite direction.  Murdoch & Co are trying to coax their audiences into a more active relationship by giving them tools to voice their views.  To become users of media in fact.  So what's going on?  Are we an audience?  Or is everyone a user now?  Of course, the truth is somewhere in between and everyone needs to find their own place along the spectrum.  For instance, it's perfectly possible to have an audience and users at the same time.  There will be occasions where your ability to serve users will create an audience that in turn pays the bills.  For instance, you can launch a few free web tools, wait for the network effect to kick in, crank-up the ad server and hoover up those AdWord dollars.  The Big Daddy of this model is Search but Mail is in there too.  But even here, some hard lessons are being learnt.  For instance, if you launch tools where everybody is a user, such as social networking, it's difficult to move along to the audience end of the spectrum where the ad revenues live.  (Unless you can persuade someone else to pay up front for the inventory).  In fact, the audience-user debate is a bit like the open-closed discussion.  If you go too open it can be bad, and if you go too closed it can be bad.  But if you are prepared to just keep on trying different recipes, you might hit the sweetspot.  For example, if you create tools which let users find their own audience, you can kick back and let the Ooomph Factor build you a super-community that drives operations elsewhere.  So, in reality, the audience isn't only users, and the users aren't an audience.  They're all people.  Which is where it gets complicated.

Google's TV Strategy Goes Live

The statement, "Television is a great way to reach new customers who might not be familiar with your product or service," is about as bland as it gets - but not when it's coming from Google.  The company has launched its TV media planning and buying service on the Dish network in the US which has 14m subscribers.  A quick peek at the demo shows that its effectively just an extension of AdWords and it must have media execs everywhere choking on their flat whites.  And no doubt there will be a few cappuccino-spillages when their creative brethren check out the the Ad Creation Marketplace, "where you can connect with industry professionals who provide script writing, editing, production, and voice-over talent at an affordable package cost".  In reality, however, this isn't a system that's MegaCorps are going to start using anytime soon.  It's focused on The Long Tail and the viewers aren't there in the required numbers.  But that's the thing about market disruptors.  They always start at that part of the market which appears to be worthless - and then grow creating Innovation Dilemmas for the big boys serving their high-value customers.  But the really interesting (although not surprising) part is that Google are promoting the fact that TV ads drive a lot of search queries.  In effect, Google are taking their mega-cash engine platform and protecting it by entering related industries.  Or in other words using their search 'standard' to 'embrace' new areas of media.  Remind you of anyone?