Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

'Openness Is Fuel For New Economies'

I really liked Matt McAlister's take on the nuances in development of the semantic web, open data and Sir Tim Berner-Lee's new mission:  "The semantic web folks, including Sir Tim Berners-Lee, have been saying for years that the Internet could become significantly more compelling by cooking more intelligence into the way things link around the network.  The movement is getting some legs to it these days, but the solution doesn’t look quite like what the visionaries expected it to look like. It’s starting to look more human.  The more obvious journey toward a linked data world starts with releasing data publicly on the Internet.  Many startups have proven that opening data creates opportunity. And now the trend has turned into a movement within government in the US, the UK and many other countries.  Sir Tim Berners-Lee drove home this message at his 2009 TED talk where he got the audience to shout “Raw data now!”: “Before you make a beautiful web site, first give us the unadulterated data. You have no idea the number excuses people come up with to hang on to their data and not give it to you even though you’ve paid for it as a taxpayer.”  Openness makes you more relevant. It creates opportunity. It’s a way into people’s hearts and minds. It’s empowering. It’s not hard to do. And once it starts happening it becomes apparent that it mustn’t and often can’t stop happening.  The forward-thinking investors and politicians even understand that openness is fuel for new economies in the future...'.

The Mobile Industry’s ‘Galapagos’ & Murdoch’s Big Bet

Japan can be a kind of a glimpse into the future to see what we’ll will be doing in about five years time.  And this is certainly the case with regards to the mobile industry.  Some go as far as calling Japan, ‘the Galapagos Islands of the cell phone world.'  A reference to the Pacific islands where many unique species have developed in the benign isolated conditions.  Take for instance i-mode, the open mobile service that was launched, complete with developers’ platform, in 1999 whilst we were all scratching our heads at WAP – and a full nine years before Apple’s App Store.  Today, the service has about fifty million users who pay for a whole range of different content including games, fortune telling, ringtones, wallpapers and other virtual goods.  Initially, NTT Docomo, i-mode’s parent, didn’t believe that anyone would pay for such mobile trinkets, and that voice was their only purpose.  However, data now provides more than one third of the industry’s vast revenues.  As a result, when the iPhone arrived in Japan people didn’t quite know what to make of it.  It seemed to lack so many features that Japanese consumers were used to, including mobile TV.  However, sales have since taken off with i-mode’s creator himself, Takeshi Natsuno, summing up the product’s popularity from a Japanese perspective: 'The iPhone is not a good phone. It’s terrible, but it’s a great internet computer'.  He also believes that Steve Jobs’ baby and other smart phones will take over from his own creation due to their use of the TCP/IP global web standard.  One key aspect of i-mode, and the copycat platforms that followed, was the baked-in, easy-to-use micropayment systems that allowed people to snack on virtual goods and gifts.  All without the bother of subscription services, whilst also letting content producers easily pick up a fee for their work.  And it is this habit of paying for mobile content that has created the...

Advertising’s Omerta Begins To Crack

A Grand Fromage from a big agency network broke the advertising omerta with me over coffee the other day.  ‘Of course, we’ve never really been able to link campaigns to sales or ROI’, he whispered.  Let me tell you, I nearly choked on my almond croissant.  It’s the unwritten law among GF advertising executives that no one mentions how random the effect of brand advertising is.  When under scrutiny from client procurement executives the Big Ad industry has ensured success by rounding the wagons and sticking to the BARB-Nielsen script, or pointing to the latest Thinkbox research.  However, just as I was getting over this blatant breach of the rules another industry GF broke the code!  Writing on his blog Steve Henry blurted out that: 'I'm getting sick of saying this, but 90% of advertising goes out there and does nothing at all. (I heard a figure the other day for what the average ROI is for marketing in this country. I can't tell you the figure because I've been sworn to secrecy for now - but it's diabolically low)'.  What’s going on?  Maybe it’s just a case of a few loose tongues.  They’ll probably disappear next week as the Farm St lawyers hand out the super-injunctions.  However, maybe, just maybe, it’s because a few brave souls have noticed that technology is slowly making the mass marketing argument impossible to maintain.  For forever and a day, any ad executive worth their salt could deliver - with feeling - some variation on: ‘Maximum reach-and-frequency is the only way to build brand awareness thus creating equity that drives sales.’  Which paved the way for vast media spends that in turn justified chunky production budgets and maybe even an exotic location or two.  However, as all media, including TV, is slowly sucked onto one IP platform or another, thereby becoming highly measurable, the black box that the marketing industry used to keep its metrics in has been exposed to the digital sunlight.  The battering ram of reach-and-frequency is being replaced by granular laser targeting.  First there was Google and its ‘database of intentions’ where only people who were searching for something were targeted with related commercial messages.  Then came the rise of applications where people could choose content to run on their social networks, iPhones, iTouches and now Droids.  More recently, we’ve had Facebook and its ‘people not pages’ approach, where advertisers can target individuals who have expressed a particular interest through their profile.  Even the impregnable metrics maze that has driven TV’s vast global revenues has begun to open up.  Social networks make it all too easy to see what people are actually watching – and what they are not.  And finally, the promise of behavioural advertising looms large, where commercial messages are targeted according to the digital data trails that people leave behind them – not thrown over the nation like a blanket.  Now these developments do of course bring their own Big Brother issues.  But that can all all wait.  The Grand Fromage of advertising are finally taking notes.  And a few are talking outside of the old school too...

'You Can’t Step Into The Same Market Twice'

David Weinberger captures the complexity of networked markets:  "Traditional markets consist of  demographic slices, i.e., “social groups” of people who have never met one another. We choose particular demographics because we think they are susceptible to the same message. Thus, traditional markets are not real things to which we send messages. Rather, messages make markets.  Now, markets are networks…networks of people who converse and interact, spread out across the Internet. For example, at any one moment there are some number of parents with sick children who are on the Net talking and posting, on blogs, discussion boards, social networking sites, Twitter, etc. etc. etc. But that networked market is substantially different in 12 hours because their kids are getting better. And of course 12 hours is an extremely long periodicity for these networked markets. They change constantly. Think of how ideas ripple through Twitter. Furthermore, not everyone in the market of parents with sick kids are in it the same way. The illnesses vary, the seriousness of the illnesses vary, the relationships vary. Think about the gay network in this regard: I’m sometimes in this network because I blog about gay marriage. But if you, as marketer, fail to recognize the complexity of the interests in this group, then you’ll be sending gay dating solicitations to people who don’t want them, including some who are in this network because they’re posting homophobic comments. Networked markets are rippling, ever-changing, hugely complex, inherently unstable, and thus thoroughly unlike traditional markets. In short: You can’t step into the same market twice."

Fanning, Cohen And Now Kan

One of the remarkable, recurring themes of our times is how an individual can take an idea onto the web and, often through the power of naïve enthusiasm, accidentally force a billion-dollar media industry to rethink everything it does - whoops!.  This, of course, is what happened when Shawn Fanning unleashed his college dorm project – Napster - onto the world.  Devastating the music business wasn’t Fanning's goal.  He just wanted to help his friends find their favourite tracks more easily.  But the Big Labels never recovered and even though Napster wasn’t the only P2P service offering music downloads, Fanning became the unfortunate public enemy number one of the powerful RIAA and its crazed legal battles.  Then came Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, a P2P protocol that allowed people to share large software files online more easily, by breaking them up across networks of participants’ computers then making them easy to find and reassemble.  Rather than relying on one machine to sit at the centre of a network and do all of the hard work.  Such was the success of Cohen’s brainchild that at one point BitTorrent was thought to account for one third of all internet traffic.  The result was the disembowelment of the movie industry’s distribution model and the eternal wrath of the MPAA.  However, like Fanning, profits didn’t seem to be Cohen’s motivating factor.  The only visible source of income from the BitTorrent project has been the T-shirts he has sold to its fans, emblazoned with the slogan, ‘Give And Ye Shall Receive’.  And now we have Justin Kan, creator of Justin.tv.  Kan’s original experiment in 2007 involved wiring himself up to a mobile camcorder that streamed live onto the web.  His motivation was to let people create their own ‘livestreams’, with the undercurrent ideal that CCTV shouldn’t be available only to the authorities.  However, Justin.tv has quickly developed into a service that allows anyone to create a live TV channel.  Today the site attracts more than 41 million visitors per month and has 428,000 'channels'.  Some of which are dull feeds of people sitting at their desk working, others are vibrant niche channels of hobbyists.  However, a few are feeds of live sports events that individuals are uploading from their paid subscription services, complete with community tools such as chat.  Sound familiar?  The difference may be that Shawn Fanning and Bram Cohen were the pioneers who taught the legal profession that the world has actually changed.  And Kan’s service is already joining a burgeoning, web TV ecosystem.  For instance, Fanning financed his project with the help of his uncle while Cohen had no commercial aspirations at all.  However, Kan’s project is supported by Silicon Valley’s respected technologist Paul Graham and his fund Y-Combinator.  The fly-in-the-p2p-ointment is that live events, particularly sports, are meant to be one of the last bastions of broadcast TV’s superiority.  So it seems unlikely the industry will just sit on the sidelines.  However, the trend of passionate individuals unknowingly wreaking havoc on global industries continues.  And Justin Kan looks like he might just be the next innovator to keep media executives' heads spinning.