Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

Online Video - Where's The Money?

David Carson on the challenges to online video and Web TV: "The Internet is a noisy feedback machine where billions of people can provide input. This is the medium’s inherent strength. People participate, while with television, people observe. This is not the same argument as the old “Lean forward, versus Lean back experiences”. The differences between the two are far greater than simple body positioning. One provides a way to feedback, while the other does not.  So what does this have to do with online video? Everything! People can share, embed, create, and sculpt their own video experiences with extreme ease. They become part of the experience, as opposed to being observers of it. Online video companies try to facilitate and encourage this kind use. The “show” is not the experience, the user’s activity is – not unlike the way we think of the difference between TV and video games. You don’t watch video games - you play them."

Book Review : Crowd Surfing

Crowd Surfing by David Brain and Martin Thomas is the perfect read for busy executives who need a succinct update about networked media and its affect on marketing and business.  All delivered in a refreshing 'let's not get too carried away' tone.  The points that stayed with me were the discussions about Apple, which despite apparently ignoring all the 'rules' of openness and transparency, continues to attract the most passionate levels of brand advocacy and even fascination.  This highlights one of my ongoing themes with clients that there are no rules in new networked media environments and every organisation should be looking to find its own style with sensible experimentation.  IMHO, the reason that Apple works in the modern environment is because they provide the tools that people use to pursue their passions, whatever they may be.  Which is entirely in keeping with the spirit of today's empowered consumer.  And furthermore, Steve Jobs seems to make a habit of understanding the landscape and creating new modern marketplaces that have the old guard begging him to relieve them of their profits.  Which gives the blogging community much to drool over.  So in short, Apple's networked media - or crowdsurfing - strategy is to make the tools that people use to operate in networked environments.  Just like the people who provided the spades during the gold rush.

AppStore + AppMarket - The Pocket Bazaars

Earlier this year, I raved about the iPhone, not for it's groovy accelerometer but its potential as a market maker.  And my, hasn't that potential paid off in the shape of AppStore.  The iTunes mobile widget shop has served up 100m items in a mere sixty days, which is amazing even by the standards of today's mega-web.  The really remarkable aspect is the revenue share that Jobs' service is offering, with developers picking up seventy per cent of any takings, leading to stories such as Steve Demeter picking up a handy $250k for his iPhone game, Trism.  As a client of mine remarked the other day, in terms of business that is, 'like opening up a shop and sitting back as your customers arrive to stock the shelves for you.'  However, AppStore follows the cool-yet-closed Apple model, which means developers are restricted which shelves in the shop they can access.  Google is now looking to blow that thinking out of the water with the Android App Market on October 22nd, a purely open source SDK, where developers can not only provide the goods but also write the merchandising plan.  However, it seems that Google see its mobile OS mainly as a way to build mobile search share.  And even the Big-G might find it difficult to compete with the might of iTunes which is now the biggest music retailer in the US.  Lordy.

Guest Post : Where's The Ad Cycle Going?

Regular commenter Rory MacDonald has kindly written this timely guest post.  After the traders, it is the Trad-Ad’ers who will be the next to go. I was chatting online nearly a year ago about the fact that spend around the Beijing Olympics was the only thing holding up the Big Ad agencies. In an economic downturn, marketing and advertising agencies are always the cat that gets kicked twice as hard by their downtrodden clients. And yes, doom and gloom mongering is just so easy to do at the moment that it is already very tedious. However, as traditional advertising takes its cyclical beating, this time there is someone new on the sidelines watching with a sense of schadenfreude, knowing that the market is actually turning to their advantage and that it may never fully turn back.  It's not just that the big advertising firms don’t get online (James posted that they do when he got back from Cannes).  But I think it is that they don’t want to. Real, Open Source, online marketing brings the same free culture market dynamics to a stagnant, over-monopolised market that Open Source has done to the software world.  We are unlikely to see Sir Martin Sorrell selling the Big Issue any time soon. The Microsoft equivalents of the media and advertising world will we be around for a long time and run alongside the free culture upstarts.  But these monoliths will be faced with the same dilemmas as Microsoft, in that the only way they can collaborate with the new world is to cannibalise significant chunks of their bloated businesses.  And further down the chain there is a whole ecosystem of smaller traditional marketing, PR and advertising businesses that now really do have to evolve to survive, rather than just paying lip service to the online world.  As this recession bites, it will spark off a vicious circle in traditional advertising. Not only is it tougher to find clients, but the clients that persist are increasingly boring to a vast majority of the audience. Magazine pages filled with irrelevant ads for cars and other un-affordables and TV commercial breaks that are the sole preserve of price comparison sites, Unilever and Nestle. So the media itself gets qualitatively worse and in turn becomes less attractive.  As this happens, talent is downsized from the traditional industry and left looking for something more inspiring to do. So real online marketing based on free culture just sits there quietly in the wings, waiting for the inevitable.

Why Not?

When I started Collaborate, a common reaction was 'What?' as people struggled to understand what blogging and networked media was, let alone its potential use to them.  After a year or so of this, people's reactions changed to something more like 'Why?' as they understood what the tools were but didn't know if they were going to be relevant to their daily lives.  There was much talk about innovation, strategic possibilities and opportunities - but more the opportunities associated with jet-packs and space travel than real customers or balance sheets.  Having worked through this phase, and the rise of mega-social networks such as MySpace and its subsequent sale, conversations turned to 'How?'.  This period was often characterised by one or a few individuals in their firms evangelising, aka banging your head against the wall of a small, solitary office.  For the last couple of years, the question has turned to 'When?' as it was accepted that this new stuff was here to stay and the decision became one of timing.  Over the last year I have noticed a new step.  It's when people can clearly identify the job that social media can do for them and it becomes very real.  I've experienced this a few times with clients and it's always a rewarding moment.  It's when the conversation turns to practical steps, and previously theoretical discussions about measurement, ROI and scalability just fade away.  'Why Not?', they sometimes say.

Sea Monsters

While on holiday this summer I went swimming in the sea a few times.  Initially, when I got a short way out I turned back, despite being a decent swimmer.  Not because I was worried about the tides, but because I was concerned about what was beneath me.  I didn't know how deep the water was, but more importantly, I didn't know what was down there.  Irrational I know when swimming off the Atlantic coast of France but my imagination got the better of me.  However, it was also exciting and there was a pull to go out further and further.  It struck me that this sense might be similar to the fear factor that some marketing folk feel about the web and specifically networked media, such as blogs and social networks.  What's out there?  Is the risk worth the reward?  Why not just stay in my comfort zone?  Will I look like a fool compared to the surfers and hardy sea swimmers zooming out to the horizon?  On my holiday, of course, I was easily able to paddle back to shore and as long as that was the case I really had nothing to worry about.  So after a while I found my own space and started to enjoy looking around at the strange creatures nibbling my toes.  And it was a very refreshing change to be away from the hot crowded beach.

The Pivot After The Tragedy

"This isn’t a post about 9/11. It’s about what happened afterwards and the longer term effect on us. In the weeks, months and years after the tragedy, we desperately reached out. We turned to our computers. We emailed, we poured over the thousands of stories on blogs. We searched for the people who had been there or who were sharing their personal stories. We commented, we connected, we asked why. News broke faster over blogs and email than traditional media. At the same time our government quickly learned that their systems weren’t built to connect the dots the way we really needed them to." From the splendid Go Big Always.

Five Billion - The Magic Number

There's so much (very entertaining) noise in the online world that it's sometimes hard to hear the signal and get a sense of quite how big the scale of change taking place is.  However, two figures jumped out at me this week which seem to underline quite how greatly the tectonic plates of marketing and media have shifted.  Apple announced last week that iTunes customers have bought five billion songs making the service America's biggest music retailer.  Whilst in online video world, YouTube served up almost the same number of videos in a single month - July.  Hard to argue with those sort of numbers.  Oh yes, and note iTunes is now serving 50k movies a day!

P2P TV - Now Mainstream?

For many it remains a dirty secret, but downloading mainstream content from P2P Torrents, such as Limewire, is now common practice around the world.  S'truth, in Australia, even the police turn to the Torrents for their movie-watching.  And it's hard to see this behaviour changing as TV-through-a-browser becomes increasingly normal, but the choice of legitimate content remains limited.  In the UK, for example, the BBC's iPlayer is handling 700k daily requests and has made Web TV quite respectable.  However, even the offering of this broadcasting giant is tiny when compared to the ever-growing world of Torrent services.  In the US, a few big studios, having watched their content slowly leak onto the web through P2P and YouTube, have fought back offering 'professional' options, notably Hulu.  This joint venture between NBC and Fox has become popular enough for Viacom to join the fun and even makes money!  However, it's still a drop in the televisual ocean.  More than 2 million hours of TV is broadcast in the UK alone each year, much of which makes the leap onto P2P networks.  Indeed, among some groups, the use of Torrent services is so engrained that even when a free legal alternative is offered, people stick with the underground option.  This was the case recently when the US drama Prison Break (oh the irony) was downloaded more than one million times via P2P, despite being available gratis from Hulu and Fox.com.  Joost, another big player in the web TV space, which spent a lot of its founders Skype dollars building a place for Hollywood to feel safe online, has knocked the walls of its garden down and launched a browser-based version focusing on the social side of television.  (Although it's not offering anything you can't find elsewhere).  And with players like Blinkbox and Kangaroo due to come online and Apple waiting in the wings, Web TV is set to go through some interesting machinations, including many Kafka-like legal battles no doubt.  The changes are partly driven by the fear of becoming the music industry (RIP), but the mega iTunes-style rewards that await the people who get it right is the really big prize.  However, until then, the Torrents keep on flowing...

[UPDATE: Or maybe The Prison Break tale is just about geography. Either way - very interesting.]

The Problem With Free Beer

Free culture makes the modern web tick but it's a concept that the marketing industry struggles with because, borrowing the famous analogy of Richard Stallman, it is still thinking free as in free beer, not free as in free speech.  After all, the marketing industry gives away huge amounts of stuff for free every year.  Free film about products aka adverts, free pamplets aka direct marketing, free information aka PR, even free product aka trialling (which is sometimes literally free beer).  All of these things are offered for the world to consume – at no financial cost to the man on the street.  However, this type of free doesn’t buy much on the social web.  And the type of free that does can seem like a very risky, and therefore expensive, option to big brands.  It’s the type of free that means people are allowed to, indeed encouraged to, react, change, tweak and augment the gifts the brand is offering.  It’s the type of free that comes with a label reading please add your thoughts to this and pass it on.  Not the free that comes with a legal notice saying please pass this on to everyone you know and keep your thoughts to yourself – or else.  The free speech approach is often just dismissed as acidic hippy talk which doesn’t reflect commercial realities.  But in fact, that’s lazy thinking.  Black boxes of content sent onto the web are seriously expensive because they cost a lot to make but are also destined to sink without trace.  However, items that are despatched web wise with the blueprint and assembly instructions included at least have a chance of being picked up by communities of passionate folk, who will add the essential personal touch that makes the P2P world turn.  Alternatively, you can keep on giving away the free beers and be very popular.  Just don’t expect anyone to hang around once the barrel is dry.