Big Picture Advertising

Is time dying?

Seeing that Facebook has launched IM, I'm interested in seeing how having two speeds of communication changes the way people use FB. "Sitemail" is often slow and leisurely but with the way people constantly use facebook it can also be very quick, whilst IM is, well, instant. On the day this launched I heard Michael Tchong say that "kids use IM to talk to their friends and email to talk to old people" and this recent data from Morgan Stanley supports that.

This need for instantness chimes with a good post from Chartreuse saying Time is dead. The key quote is

        They are not going to be looking for Molly’s great post about the Zune today. Or any links to it.

        They are going to be looking for it when they are looking to buy a Zune.

        Today they will be looking for something else.

And this sums up the problem with most traditional marketing - which work on the basis of time and have a lifespan of 4 or 6 weeks. Great for those people in the market right now, but no good to those who start thinking about it in a few weeks time. Because the footprints of the campaign stay alive online - the microsite appears in the search results even when the brand has turned off the light and gone home, the bebo profile is still there even the brand has stopped monitoring it, the blog comments don't go away.

The challenge then is how to create marketing that stays relevant and doesn't die when an arbitrary date is reached. To take the view that a brand has to be visible in search all year round and that expensive creative assets should be kept alive.

Of course that's difficult. But the whole problem with time based campaigns was brought home to me at Easter. In the UK there is a long established tradition that Easter marks the launch of advertising for gardening products - so seeing a number of ads for lawn treatment wasn't too surprising until one looked out of the window at the weather -cold, wet and windy. A smarter business might have decided that, given this was the earliest Easter for 90 years, it would make sense to rethink the timing.

Google gets the Value Exchange

The thinking behind the MindShare reboot is that all marketing is driven by a value exchange.
At its most simple, citizens (lets remember they're not consumers - thats just wishful thinking on our part) give their attention to advertising that offers value - in the form of either entertainment, relevance or usefulness. If ads don't offer value in any of these ways citizens withhold their attention.
So we're in the business of creating value exchanges.
Therefore its nice to see that Eric Schmidt of Google gets this too - this quote comes from a CNBC interview to be broadcast later today  (courtesy of Silicon Alley Insider);

"Google believes that advertising itself has value. The ads literally are valuable to consumers. Not just to the advertisers, but the consumers."

The full corporate line on the reboot can be found here

The inexorable rise of social media

Mary Meeker has produced another of her killer decks on internet trends. It's all worth reading but this chart sums up so much.
What did everyone do before Facebook, MySpace et al?

What is digital and what is traditional?

If one thing shows how much the world has changed it is this.The UK's Five TV station is to start showing Sofia's Diary - a show that Bebo commissioned and shows on its website.
This sort of thing highlights the dissolving barriers between digital media and traditional. Marooned in Bali for a week I read the reports of Leeds vs Milwall on the Telegraph website, I listened to Gilles Peterson on the BBC site and I could have watched the Apprentice (after a bit of work on my firefox settings to thwart the IP restrictions).
In the classic sense that is all deemed as digital media. Yet essentially I was just accessing traditional media in a different way - and for an advertiser how much does that matter? Someone buying ads in the Telegraph wants to reach the audience that the Telegraph has aggregated - does it matter whether I read the paper or saw it on the website? The key issue is that the message can be delivered in a more impactful way - they could actually use a TV commercial to reach newspaper readers online.
This news from the US suggests everyone needs to rethink the definitions of media.

The best consumer generated content ever?

Privacy - the next big issue?

A New York politician is so concerned over web privacy he is pushing legislation that would make it a crime "to use personal information about consumers for advertising without their consent".

Phorm, a new company, has announced an advertising service that uses data from ISPs to "track every single online action of a given consumer" As might be expected they have had lots of attention from privacy groups

Google is working with privacy advocates to allay concerns over its takeover of DoubleClick

I think the industry sort of understands the benefits of using cookies to target advertising for our clients.  And I think some of us understand the benefits of targeted advertising for citizens - rather than being bombarded with irrelevant advertising people start to just see ads that are relevant to them.

But unless we find a way of demonstrating this to people, we may never get a chance. Esther Dyson ( who as well as being an industry veteran sits on the board of WPP my ultimate employer) ran a competition to find a way of describing cookies and this video won.



We can do two things

• get this video in front of as many people as possible so people understand the issues
• make sure we use these tools responsibly

Google trends

Using search habits to gains insights is set to be a major influence on marketing in the coming years. Knowing what people search for, how they phrase their searches and the sort of volumes involved can be far more useful than the traditional methods of research - plus it's real time and it's free.
As an example look at this;

Yesterday there was a Blackberry service problem in the US - and what do people do when their Blackberry dies? - first they panic, then they turn to Google. 5 of the top 50 searches in Google hot trends yesterday were blackberry related yesterday.
John Battelle called search a database of intentions in his excellent book Search. What is Google saying about your brand?

Reinventing the agency model

Anyone who has spent any time on this blog will know I think the traditional agency model is broken.
Being a factory dedicated to producing 30 second commercials, websites, banners and buttons or mail packs is not a viable business in an age where consumers are AdAvoiders and media is evolving so fast.
So when Forrester produce a new report ( register and you should get a free copy free copies are all gone its now $279 - money well spent) saying agencies have to embrace and facilitate communities if they are to survive, I'm really interested. The main premise of the report is that agencies will need to be able to connect their brands with appropriate communities - and that the best way to do that is by becoming an integral part of those. communities

Peter Kim (one of the authors) says "I don't think agencies are going away,"  "They're going to be the ones that help marketers to communities of mutual interest."

I think this is right on the money and picks up on thinking from one of my favourite books - Net Gain by John Hagel. Written in 1997 Hagel sees that facilitating communities of interest and then finding appropriate products and services for them is a very interesting business model. Saga is probably the best example of this is Europe; they attracted a huge proportion of baby boomers and go out and find products the community want - resulting in a  business worth $5billion.
It's a good report and makes lots of sense. And I have a lot of time for Forrester and particularly Peter Kim, whose blog I read regularly. But I'm a little surprised they didn't talk to any media agencies in their research (the companies interviewed include HSBC (a MindShare client) and a number of our WPP friends - Y&R, RMG, Wunderman and Ogilvy).
Smart media agencies are much closer to being able to recognise this sort of radical future and evolve towards it. They have both the relationships (strong ties with the media owners and content producers that will fuel these communities) and the scale needed to make this transition.
When I made the decision to switch back to media, after a dozen years running digital creative agencies, I was a bit concerned about culture shock, yet the sheer energy and ambition of MindShare dwarfs that of any other agency I know.
For example, on Saturday morning, getting off a plane, I ran into an old friend now representing some of the biggest shows on US TV - he told me that of the 6 integrations they were considering for one new show, 5 were proposals from MindShare. We create award winning  creative campaigns and help brands understand the value of their marketing spend
In the last year we've bought (through GroupM) two agencies who really get social media (M80 in LA and LaComunicad in Amsterdam) and are partnering WPP investments in this space such as VideoEgg, LiveWorld and Visible Technologies. We've hired a whole bunch of smart people from outside media to help evolve the agency and recently bought probably the best digital agency in the world  - Schematic
So whilst not wanting to turn this into a puff piece for my company, I do think its hard to consider the future of the agency business without recognising that the media agencies (or at least some of them) are driving real change for their clients.
Like everyone else we have a legacy business that is still pretty traditional (and throws off the cash to allow for the necessary investment) but I do think we're more open to the new future of the connected agency than most others. And we're very focused on getting there.
I'm not sure we're in a race here, but we all need to keep evolving if we are to keep our skills relevant to the new marketing world.

Reinventing advertising

There is a good article in Fortune profiling Irwin Gotleib, CEO of GroupM ( the holding company that MindShare is part of) and my ultimate boss.
Its well worth reading to understand where the advertising industry is heading.

Brand Curated Content

I'm a huge fan of Amazon and they just keep on delivering - in every sense of the word. As well as defining online retail ( they reported record Christmas sales), they're now establishing themselves as a platform through offering their data services to start ups.

In terms of marketing they don't do that much; I worked on the launch of Amazon.co.uk at Modem Poppe and we did some great work - creative by Mark Cridge and Steve Vranakis, media by Pete Robins and account management by Lee Wright (whatever happened to those guys?) - but since then remarkably little.

But now they have done one of the smartest pieces of marketing I've seen for a while; they have paid almost £2m for a copy of the last Harry Potter book The Tales of Beedle the Bard. Given there are only 7 copies of this book there is a lot of interest from Harry Potter fans and Amazon will get a lot of attention from a valuable audience. (They sold 2.5 million copies of the last Harry Potter). There is also a great business opportunity - Amazon could sell an exclusive ebook ( or an audio book? )and make huge money for the charity JK Rowling is supporting through the original sale.

This idea of facilitating access to content that your customers will enjoy - essentially curating it - has lots of potential for brands and we expect to see much more.

Advertising has always appropriated content through the choice of music in ads and the way the art direction is so influenced by film and music video. Curating the right sort of content is an excellent way of demonstrating the personality of a brand - or positioning it - and much cheaper than creating or funding content.

With You Tube acting as a repository for huge amounts of content, brands can act as curators and point people to content that positions their brands. For example whilst you can now buy the rights to use a Beatles track for an ad it would be much less expensive to create some Beatles related content that featured some of the thousands of Beatles videos on You Tube. Or, remembering that the 20 year old who bought the Sex Pistols Anarchy in the UK single is now 51, maybe some financial services company could curate some Sex Pistols content.

Brand Curated content has a bright future