Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

Get Real - No More Dogs

There are powerful online trends at work sweeping away anonymity as a default position, creating many commercial opportunities for those with a light enough touch.  Firstly, there's Facebook, the web’s 800lb social gorilla.  Zuckerberg's service has given four hundred million people around the world an online identity and the norm is for users to provide 'real' information.  And it's an identity that increasingly follows you around the web, thanks to Facebook Connect.  Then there's the booming mobile web.  While PAYG allows people to disguise themselves, anyone using a contracted service instantly ties their data habits to some type of billing system, thus allowing certified transactions to occur.  Another mega-trend that will encourage people to 'get real' online is Rupert Murdoch’s decision to throw up paywalls around his online content.  Previously, people have been allowed to read the Digger’s content for free – and without flagging who they are.  However, now everyone behind the News International paywall will be attending a party where names badges are checked on the way in.  Then there’s ever faster broadband and the continuing march of Moore’s Law, making YouTube-style and webcam communication increasingly common, thus letting people see each other all too clearly.  And finally, but perhaps most powerfully, the law, in the UK at least, is swinging behind the anti-anonymity drive.  Lord Mandelson’s much-derided Digital Economy Bill may be heavy-handed in the eyes of many, but one effect it has is to batter the walls of the ISPs where, to date, anonymity has been standard fare.  All of which creates a self-reinforcing norm.  Transparency and genuine online identity becomes widespread, brushing aside the previous default so perfectly captured by Peter Steiner’s famous cartoon, ‘on the internet no one knows you’re a dog.’  This in turn creates an environment where people feel comfortable adding ever-more revealing layers of information to their online identities.  Including location, financial habits and information that, even a few years ago, would have seemed positively reckless to publish online.   As John Battelle writes, the Database of Intentions is extending beyond, ‘What I Want’, to ‘What I Buy’, ‘Who I Am’, ‘Who I Know’, ‘What I Am Doing’, ‘What’s Happening’ and ‘Where I Am’.  Of course, digital consumption habits have always linked to an IP address making it theoretically possible to identify who was snacking on what binary bytes.  However, this world was murky, with plenty of ways to conceal who was who, including floating IP addresses.  So what does this new transparent world mean for the marketing industry?   Well, increasingly, the vast oceans of data that flow around the web...

Nothing New Under The Sun

For a long time the marketing industry closed its eyes to the impact of networked media.  And while it looked the other way, Messrs Brin & Page ate its lunch and built the largest media company in the world.  Over the last year or so, however, possibly because of the Google experience, the marketing industry has done a U-turn and the consensus is now that the world has indeed changed forever.  So which view is right?  Unsurprisingly, the reality is somewhere in between.  A thread of my client work over the last few years has been challenging the notion that the maturing web means we should forget everything we’ve ever known and start again.  Forget the idea of brands, stop using TV as a medium, assume that the customer has morphed into a new type of being, accept that complete transparency is the only choice, believe that the only workable price point is free.  Only a total reboot will do, some claim.  However, this binary view of the world overlooks that while much has changed, more has stayed the same.  Corporations are still operating in markets where consumers are looking for value and trustworthy suppliers.  People are still motivated by the same needs – keeping up with the Jones’, caring for their families, exploring the world, self-expression, ambition, fun.  It’s just that the markets they use to find satisfaction have been rewired. ‘The problems which are not changing are human problems - which remain the same,’ noted Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google last year.  Take for instance, the social net de jour - Chatroulette.  It’s a perfect example of the many new wonderful and unexpected things that are emerging as a result of open networked media and widespread broadband access.  Built by an individual, using powerful distributed technology that now sits in bedrooms all around the world, it offers a P2P-experience that undermines traditional views of private and public identity and drives new types of social interaction.  And what is this remarkable bleeding-edge innovation used for?  Letting young men check out hot girls!  Whizzy new kit, same old motivations.  However, that's not to underestimate the ingenuity and scale of the new markets that people will build when they find their needs unmet.  I was lucky enough to meet Douglas Rushkoff last week and hear him speak about his belief that...

The Database Of Intentions Part II

John Battelle updates his seminal idea - The Database of Intentions: "Search was a pristine signal, an eruption of oxygen in the anoxic ocean of the early web, and an entire ecosystem grew in its bloom. The first implication was already manifest: Google had launched AdWords and AdSense, Overture (later to become Yahoo Search Marketing) was thriving, and a burgeoning paid search ecosystem was in the early stages of becoming a multi-billion commercial expression of the Database of Intention's power.  But as anyone who's been reading this site already knows, web search as a pure signal has been attenuating of late - overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of data on the web, for one, and secondly by our own increasingly complicated expectations.  Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does the Internet. In the past year I've come to the conclusion that "web search" was just the first of many fields in the Database of Intentions. For those of you who are not database geeks, and to further pad the metaphor, a field in a database is colloquially defined as a specific type of information in that database. Sets of fields are called records, and sets of records make up the database.  My mistake in 2003 was to assume that the entire Database of Intentions was created through our interactions with traditional web search. I no longer believe this to be true. In the past five or so years, we've seen "eruptions" of entirely new fields, each of which, I believe, represent equally powerful signals - oxygen flows around which massive ecosystems are already developing. In fact, the interplay of all of these signals (plus future ones) represents no less than the sum of our economic and cultural potential."

You Sell, Or Else...

I have moths in my house.  They are a real pain and as the Spring appears I know they will be making a reappearance after the cold winter months.  For the last couple years I have become involved in a Holy War against these little critters that has involved escalating levels of tit-for-tat violence.  They take out a treasured cashmere sweater.  I up the number of traps, sprays and any other type of micro-ordnance.  And guess which retailer has become my greatest friend in this battle against the pesky garb-munchers?  Rentokill?  Pest Control?  Mothball Express?  Nope, my accomplices in the clearance of my foe is Amazon.  A comrade that not only provides me with a wide range of munitions, but is also my accomplice, suggesting tactics and new devices 'used by others' to help me seek-and-destroy.  Now I’ve long been aware that Bezos’ empire was growing beyond books, but it was my battle against these flying clothes-gobblers that brought home the changing nature of retail in the networked media era.  Just 1-Click™ and my house is free of meddlesome midges.  What does this have to do with modern marketing, you ask?  In short, that most crucial aspect of markets and marketing, the Point-Of-Purchase (P-o-P) is changing quickly and in some very surprising ways.  In doing so, this shift is throwing light on some long-standing weaknesses of the marketing industry, whilst throwing down new challenges.  For example, I have a client who is fascinated by the fact that Apple now holds 100m active credit cards, primarily through iTunes.  The client in question runs a very significant online business himself, with about two million UK customers.  So he is fully versed in the value of those billing relationships that Apple has garnered.  He also has a theory that Murdoch’s insistence on a paywall for his online media is motivated by a similar vision to that which Apple has intentionally or accidentally executed.  If The Old Digger can use juicy new media content to gather micro-payments and therefore credit card details, it won’t matter if the newspapers are profitable or not.  They will become giant magnets for billing info, allowing Murdoch to sell wine and insurance products to the readers of The Sunday Times.  Even the forward-looking games sector has been surprised by the skewing of the P-o-P.  In his must-see presentation at this year's DICE, Jesse Schell, a game design professor at Carnegie Mellon University, summed up the rapidly changing nature of transactions.  He explained how the games development industry has been caught completely off guard by...