Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

What's The Answer To Marketing's Chicken & Egg Dilemma?

I had a really interesting discussion the other day with two very experienced creatives from a large London network agency.  ‘All the digital stuff is great, but where’s the excitement?’, one commented.  I asked him what he meant. Surely there’s enough excitement to go around at the moment I thought, what with the entire world’s media industry gradually being sucked onto a single IP platform. But then I understood.  He was talking about excitement beyond the technology itself.  Of course, if you are involved in anyway at all these days in the vast bubble that is the technology business, you’ll have all the excitement that you want. However, if the ins and outs of Silicon Valley basically sound like a lot of geeks talking about widgets, technology offers all the thrills of a cold bath.  So, as the man said, where's the excitement?  Chatting around the subject we came up with a few examples of 'big' brand ideas using creative technologies that were genuinely exciting.  Many of the usual suspects were included.  Then we moved onto why there were so few ideas to choose from.  One of the creatives ventured that it was because clients still can’t see, aside from PPC, how they can measure the value of online channels.  This meant that they wouldn’t put any significant investment behind a digital idea, even if they thought it was fantastic.  So there is a tendency for ideas in traditional media – that can be measured or have the perception of measurability – to gain priority over ideas in new digital channels and snaffle the big budgets.  And, unsurprisingly, an OK idea with $10m of backing is likely to outperform an amazing one with a budget of $20k and lots of goodwill.  The traditional ideas almost always look more effective because they have the inherent advantage of...

Who Will Survive In The New Networked Media Oceans?

Media companies used to exist in their own separate waters. The newspaper industry was the newspaper industry.  TV was TV and so on and so forth.  Each of these unconnected territories had a few super-predators that were top of their respective food chains, untroubled by the small fry. This was also true of technology and telecoms. However, in recent years, the tectonic plates have shifted to reveal a single networked media ocean into which all media, technology and telecomms companies are gradually being drawn.  The result is a gory realignment of the food chain as these corporate animals, so used to roaming their own backwaters as unchallenged predators, thrash around to establish who will survive.  Some will maintain their status.  Others will be usurped by sleek new species and left to wonder where it all went wrong. The tectonic shift was, of course, driven by rise of the Internet and the Web, and more recently the Moore’s Law-powered growth of online computing power aka the cloud.  The reason the undertow is so powerful is because, increasingly, this new networked media ocean is the sea to which consumers themselves are heading.  But why didn’t every big media and technology beast notice the plates were shifting to create this vast new habitat? Simply because they had...

Evil Plans & Global Microbrands

Hugh 'Gapingvoid' MacLeod was kind enough to send me an advance of his latest book – 'Evil Plans - Having Fun On The Road To World Domination'. It’s a great read. As a long time reader of Hugh's blog I was familiar with many of the ideas in the book, but there are some very juicy nuggets that are well worth revisiting. One of them, that I have always found really helpful, is the Global Microbrand. To me, this means that today’s world of networked media gives individuals and small companies a voice in the world.  And that’s a really significant opportunity.  It’s an idea I’ve used to help shape Collaborate Marketing.  In spite of being a one-man consultancy, the company has a disproportionately extensive online footprint.  One that brings lots of advantages which have made it possible for me to operate successfully and, crucially, build a positive reputation around the world.  This is probably best illustrated when an American media corporation called me up and asked me to come in and discuss an engagement.  They had found Collaborate Marketing online and only had one stipulation – ‘Please don’t bring a massive team of people to the first meeting, we really find that a turn-off.’  I explained that this was unlikely as Collaborate was, in fact, just me.  This seemed to go down well, maybe just by being different from the approach of traditional Mega-Consultants, and I was very happy to be engaged on an exciting strategy project.  However, creating a Global Microbrand is easier said than done which is where Hugh’s latest book comes in giving lots of ideas and encouragement.  However, it’s also what it doesn’t do that I think makes it genuinely helpful.  There aren’t any checklists or planning tools.  It really just poses the challenge to find out what your personal aims and strengths are and challenges you to bring those to life using the myriad of online services available to anyone in 2011.  All very refreshing.