Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

The Web Shreds Brands' Fame (But Only If They're Lucky)

Fame is a biggie in advertising.  One smart agency even built a company around it.  After all, what brand doesn’t want to be famous?  Fame suggests glamour in a way that makes recall and recognition feel like a science lesson.  However, while blockbuster fame through the power of mega-media is a familiar concept, it can take on strange shapes when projected into the shadows of the web and networked media.   Many big brands are shocked to discover that their fame is almost irrelevant online.  The exchange rate for the fame shekel drops off a cliff when moved from broadcast country to the networked environs.  And there’s the rub.  Fame is a massive asset online.  But only if used in the right way.  Brands that arrive, entourage in tow, to share their wonderful insights, experiences and views on world peace look like a wide-eyed reject from the Big Brother house.  People may show up but only to point and snigger.  However, if you take your hard-earned offline recognition and offer it to the world as a ladder up the board, a place for people to show their own star-quality, fame can take on a whole new value.  It’s the equivalent of your favourite actor, sports star or musician, lending you their halo for the day.  Will you look after it?  Oh yes.  Hell, you’ll give it a shine before you hand it back.  But there will be bumps along the way.  In fact, a brand might be shredded - but only if it's lucky.  If a brand puts its fame online, it’s highly likely that someone will rip it apart, if only to prove they can put it back together in better shape.  That will be a disturbing moment for a brand manager, not to mention his or her legal team.  However, this is where the smartest online operators ride powerful peer-to-peer waves straight up the beach and into the bar.  That’s because most remixes of your brand will go unnoticed but the fan you handed over control to will appreciate that you let them have a go.  But the odd one or two will add a special or surprising tweak of their own and enjoy sharing it with friends and family.  And at that point the web has done its magic.  The brand's foreign offline fame wonga will have exchanged into local currency that is instantly recognised, trusted and circulated.  Yes fame is a valuable asset for brands online.  But only if they’re prepared to share the limelight.

Washing Your Assets In Public

"The strategy of moving the same old stuff into a community is a failing strategy. Have you ever been to a community filled with documentation and marketing materials and loved it? No. We can get that same stuff in a million other places, we don’t need another one.  Companies need to spend a lot more time thinking through why they’re doing the community to begin with. The problem is, it’s much easier to justify hanging your laundry out for other people to clean than it is to get people to think differently."  From the splendid Go Big Always.

Hulu Finds The Pirates' Gold

Hulu, the online web TV channel launched by NBC and Fox, is small but growing quickly.  The Economist reports on one technique it's using to guide the service - P2P file sharing as an ad pricing tool.  "Knowing what is popular among file-sharers could help broadcasters and film studios when negotiating with advertisers, for example.  Hulu, a website operated by News Corporation that offers free, advertising-supported video-streaming, already uses file-sharing statistics to design its programming and to set advertising rates.  Many music executives were reluctant to take advantage of file-sharing statistics because of the trouble the technology has caused in the industry. TV stations and film studios, by contrast, are “sprinting through the stages of grief”—and coming to terms with the reality that details of the illegal use of their material can, in fact, be very useful indeed." 

Paul Graham : Let's Fix Advertising

Paul Graham, Mr Y Combinator, has posted 30 big areas that he thinks need improvement and has challenged the world's engineers and entrepreneurs to come up with the answers.  One is simply entitled 'Fix Advertising'.  Graham is super-smart and a serious innovator so his take on the issue is well worth a read: "Advertising could be made much better if it tried to please its audience, instead of treating them like victims who deserve x amount of abuse in return for whatever free site they're getting.  It doesn't work anyway; audiences learn to tune out boring ads, no matter how loud they shout.  What we have now is basically print and TV advertising translated to the web.  The right answer will probably look very different. It might not even seem like advertising, by current standards.  So the way to approach this problem is probably to start over from scratch: to think what the goal of advertising is, and ask how to do that using the new ingredients technology gives us.  Probably the new answers exist already, in some early form that will only later be recognized as the replacement for traditional advertising.  Bonus points if you can invent new forms of advertising whose effects are measurable, above all in sales."  Any ideas...?  This might be a starting point.

Researching Research

"In truth, I'm not sure marketers question the value of research any more than compulsive hand-washers ask hard questions about the value of wash-basins. It's just something you need. Frequently and everywhere." From Rory Sutherland, Ogilvy's Grand Fromage.

Mysterious Case Of DVR Owner Who Watched Ads

Smart comment from the super-smart Mick James on the post below: "So "70% of DVR users skip past TV commercials". Well of course. That's what it's for. Linger over dinner and put it on "chase-play", reclaim those precious minutes of your life.  But invert that stat: 30% don't. Nearly a third of people who went out and bought an expensive DVR sit patiently through the ads even though the fast forward button is only inches from their finger.  Three non-exclusive explanations.  One: there is no limit to human laziness. I find this more and more when I'm online. Drag the mouse all the way up there and click it to get that free content? You must be joking.  Thing weighs a ton.  Two: people are buying into the argument that skipping ads is immoral, stealing even. Soon they'll feel a moral obligation to actually go out and buy the stuff.  Three: This is what television-watching is for a lot of people, with ad breaks part of the natural rhythm of the show. They may well have been the only people who were watching the ads with any attention anyway - just because you can suddenly measure something doesn't mean it's only just happened. Is this a dying habit?  Only time will tell."  Thanks Mick!

News From Adland : TV And The Web Are Different

For the last ten years or so, web agencies around the world have rolled their collective eyeballs as yet another Ad Agency has requested an interactive strategy, ignored it, and insisted that their 30 sec spot is put online for the world to admire.  However, as TV's crown slips and the web becomes more sophisticated, the amazingly obvious fact that TV and the Web are different from each other, is starting to be recognised.  The creators of the Cadbury's Gorilla are busy telling the world that TV is about Fame but the web is about Frequency.  Fallon's story goes that they resisted the urge to buy pricey launch TVRs, opting instead for a few high-profile ad breaks to propel their YouTube-friendly primate flying through the Interwebs.  In other words, TV is best used as a way to generate buzz in the media where people actually engage with ideas and content.  Or a Straight-To-Web Strategy as we called it at the time.  And better still, in media terms, Fallon's plan worked.  Many of you will have noticed that this is not a revolutionary idea.  However, in the super-conservative world of media planning it represents a sea change.  Forever and a day TV has been about Reach and Frequency.  So, for an Adland player to now brag that the web is actually better at Frequency than TV is a big departure from the cosy norm.  Whilst not directly related, this conversion to the web is probably a result of the swirling psychology of Google snaffling ITV's lunch to become the undisputed champion of UK media.  However, there is so much further to go.  The term Fame & Frequency is still very much a Big Media view of the web.  A massive opportunity (still) awaits the outfit which is prepared to recognise the most self-evident of truths.  Yes, TV and the web are completely different beasts.  Yes, weaving together their strengths is better than trying to position the Internet as Free TV.  I still have no idea what the Cadbury's Gorilla advert had to do with chocolate, not least the follow-up.  However, maybe the beast's significance will prove to be less about confectionary and more about convergence.  And, ironically, the greatest beneficiaries of the Gorilla's success might be web agencies who can push back on Ad Agency interactive 'briefs' for the first time.  What a relief!  They've been waiting for this moment for, what feels like, all of their lives....

TV Revenues - Going And Not Coming Back?

It's a sign of the times that Thinkbox are able to maintain their story, whilst other Grand Fromage wonder out loud if old-school, blockbuster media revenues are not only going, but not coming back.  In response to a report from Lehman Bros, NewTeeVee's Liz Gannes doesn't mince her words: "I wouldn’t be as quick to discount advertising, but it’s important to recognize that a lot of advertising numbers have historically been crap, with pricing based on promises of “reach” and other fuzzy math extrapolated from circulation numbers and Nielsen ratings. Advertising will find its place in new media, but it may be a necessarily smaller chunk of its former self because accountability will only continue to improve online."  Maybe Garfield was right?

Thinkbox : Seriously?

Earlier this year, I went to speak to the (very nice) people at Thinkbox, the group charged with making the case for the value of TV advertising in the UK, and backed by the UK commercial broadcasters.  I had a very stimulating conversation but left confused.  Their message appears to be that, despite public opinion, we are not only watching more TV programming but we are also watching more TV advertising.  And they've got the science to prove it.  In fact, they've got video of people enjoying advertising at home.  Hell, they've got video of people watching ads and, "openly expressing wonder at the creative execution!"  The Thinkbox boss, Tess Alps has presented the argument over on the Guardian's Technology blog and isn't getting much support.  In fact she is being shot down in flames.  "I basically stopped watching TV about 7 or 8 years ago when we had children because of the damage on family life and their mental development," notes one commenter.  Aside from the wisdom of launching a pro-TV rant to the Torrenters and Netheads who populate the Guardian's Tech community, Thinkbox are fighting a losing battle.  Even if they are right - they aren't winning many people over.  Not least the markets which are suggesting that ITV is now ripe for a break-up, such is the lost cause of TV advertising.  However, Thinkbox do have a much more interesting argument that, for some reason, they keep tucked away.  It's that TV and web advertising can work better together than they do seperately.  Now that's one I think we can all buy.  In fact, a client was telling me only last week what a powerful combination the TV-to-web model can be.  I've been saying it a lot recently - it's all digital now.

Official : The Web Is A Sink Blockage

If your sink is blocked for a few weeks and you remove the plug to dig out the obstruction, the offending mangled mess of soap, fish bones, human hair and other horrible gunk in which bacteria has set up home, is exactly like the World Wide Web.  That may sound odd but it's how Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Web-inventor and all round good guy, described it in a talk I went to last night at NESTA (which is btw a client).  So that's good enough for me.  He was emphasising the complexity of his creation which he says will see radical changes in the coming months and years - not least the growth of open data.  To understand better the web's gooey tangled mess he has set up the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI), a joint effort between Southampton University and MIT.  TBL said Google's success in creating radically better search was the first serious attempt at web science and the WSRI will be applying similar methodologies.  (Made me wonder if he thinks the Messrs Brin and Page needs some competition).  Other highlights of the evening were his response to a comment that the semantic web was a 'top-down project'.  "Who told you that!?", he asked in disbelief, in a moment of clarification that will surely live with the questioner for some time.  In response to extending third-world web access, Sir Tim made the point that the current web is mainly text and therefore of little use to an illiterate farmer in Africa who needs to find out how to cure his sick cow.  The answer is video which could, TBL noted, mean a major retooling of the cloud.  The great man clearly isn't a fan of the latest release of top-level domain names which he likened to the creation of new real estate for 'boring' commercial reasons.  In fact, he said, he'd like to be able to buy URIs for hundreds of years and give over their management to a massive, slow, international bureaucracy, thereby safeguarding their existence through inertia!  And finally I thought his answer to the notion that too much is expected of the web resonated with everyone.  "The web is merely a reflection of humanity.  I think the danger is not that we expect too much of humanity, but that we expect too little."

[Update : Really, make sure you watch the video here.]