Big Picture Advertising

Online advertising does work

In case you didn't see this post from Seth Godin;

Usama Fayyad is a genuine rocket scientist. He now runs the Strategic Data Solutions (which includes data mining) division of Yahoo, and he shared some astounding numbers with me today.

There’s one big insight that ought to change everything for anyone who buys clicks online. Here goes:
If you run banner ads, one study for Harris Direct shows that you can increase your brand awareness about 7% after a reasonable buy of banner ads. That’s just fine, though I’m on the record as saying that most banner campaigns are a waste of money. The kicker? In the study, Harris did the banner buy and watched the number of clicks to their contextual ad (you know, the text ads) go up by 249% over the next week.

Pow.

This means that someone answering the ‘brand awareness’ survey says, “no, I never heard of them,” but then, two days later, is more than twice as likely to click on their text ad.

More than twice.

I think that’s very cool.

Of course we all know that joined up online marketing can deliver brand and response - we demonstrated it back in 2001 with a made up brand called YesSirNoSir that we tracked through dynamic logic and showed that exposure to simple banner ads had a big effect. And we showed it with our work for Seth's Big Moo.

Now what proportion of your budget is online?

Usama Fayyad is a genuine rocket scientist. He now runs the Strategic Data Solutions (which includes data mining) division of Yahoo, and he shared some astounding numbers with me today.

There’s one big insight that ought to change everything for anyone who buys clicks online. Here goes:
If you run banner ads, one study for Harris Direct shows that you can increase your brand awareness about 7% after a reasonable buy of banner ads. That’s just fine, though I’m on the record as saying that most banner campaigns are a waste of money. The kicker? In the study, Harris did the banner buy and watched the number of clicks to their contextual ad (you know, the text ads) go up by 249% over the next week.

Pow.

This means that someone answering the ‘brand awareness’ survey says, “no, I never heard of them,” but then, two days later, is more than twice as likely to click on their text ad.

More than twice.

I think that’s very cool.

Of course we all know that joined up online marketing can deliver brand and response - we demonstrated it back in 2001 with a made up brand called YesSirNoSir that we tracked through dynamic logic and showed that exposure to simple banner ads had a big effect. And we showed it with our work for Seth's Big Moo.

Now what proportion of your budget is online?

Slingbox - the future of TV

We met Blake Krikorian, the CEO of Slingbox, last week who gave us a fantastic demonstration of Slingbox.

This little black box plugs into your TV and into your broadband connection, and allows you to watch whatever you want from your TV on your PC - wherever you are in the world. It evens give an image of your remote control to change channel etc.. We saw it working on a laptop and on a mobile phone - and having seen it, everyone in the room wanted one.

As well as allowing you to access any channels you receive on your main set, you can also view programmes recorded on the hard drive of a PVR, so I'll be able to watch all those episodes of West Wing on my Sky+ next time I'm traveling.

Sales are already going well in the US, and in the UK (where its on sale in Dixons for just £180) and we think it has huge potential to be the next piece of mass market technology. We've seen that consumers do adopt new technology where they can see a real benefit, and placeshifting will be just as attractive to consumers as time shifting is.

Its potentially good news for broadcasters as it will increase audience (although measurement may be harder to crack) but it seems like really bad news for all those mobile TV trials - why would I pay £10 a month to access Sky when I can do it for free with Slingbox?

There are also some very interesting new advertising opportunities - watch this space for more detail.

Mobile Internet in Europe

Some interesting new research from ComScore looks at how people use mobile to access the Internet;

% accessing web from mobile phone
US                19%
France          28%
Germany      34%
Italy             34%
Spain           26%
UK               24%

Most popular sites
                               US    France   Germany  Italy  Spain    UK
Online portal            74%    24%      29%         34%    28%     31%
Operator portal          5%    26%      25%         18%    25%     31%
Specific mobile site    0%   17%       17%         23%    4%        0%
Commerce site          4%    2%         8%           7%    6%        8%
News site                   2%   10%        0%         11%    2%        9%
Other                       15%    22%      21%          8%    35%     21%

The data shows just how immature this sector is - and given the US performance of the online portals it suggests the European operators have much to fear from the likes of Google, MSN and Yahoo.
They are all increasingly active in Mobile and can leverage their online traffic. They also are much better able to monetize mobile than the operators are currently.
Interesting times.

Google & YouTube

As the rumours broke about Google buying YouTube, I was interviewed by BBC 5Live on whether this was a good thing or not. The key points I made were;

• The Positives

• Google Video us a distant third after YouTube and MySpace
• Google has $10billion in cash so they can easily afford the $1.6bn price being talked about
• Their last couple of deals have been to secure ad inventory
• $1bn for a stake in AOL and the right to sell ads
• $900m to MySpace for the right to sell ads
• therefore paying $1.6bn to own a site with huge traffic makes some sort of sense
• Google have made their ambition to get involved in TV/video advertising very clear and this would give them great scope for learning what works
• An analyst claimed last week that MySpace could be worth $15bn - so this price looks cheap compared to that

• The Negatives

• Lawyers - lots of the YouTube content breaks copyright. They will take content down if the copyright owner complains but so did napster. No-one sues companies without any money - but the moment they're owned by someone with a fat wallet the lawyers will be all over them. As soon as Napster was bought by Bertelsman the law suits started.

This is all conjecture as we don't know if there is any basis to the completely unsubstantiated rumour, but we wouldn't be too surprised to see it happen. If they can find a way to police the content, they may be able to mitigate the legal threat - we'll see.

UPDATE - Good post by Forrester on how YouTube can deal with the legal issues

The Venice Project

They changed the music industry forever
They changed the telephony industry forever
Are they about to do the same to the TV industry?

Second Life

Everyone is talking about Second Life and this is a good intro.

Exciting News

I want to give you a heads up on some exciting news that will break tomorrow.

I've accepted a fantastic role with Mindshare (probably the worlds leading Media agency) as their first digital Chief Strategy Officer. They have a market leading digital network and fantastic team at Mindshare Interaction and I'll be working to further enhance that reputation.

I'll be working globally with some of the world's biggest brands, looking at how they can use digital to build their business and helping them execute big ideas that drive business success.

We're planning to take Kirsty into Mindshare too, but Simon DT has decided to continue as an entrepreneur and will be launching his own business - which we intend to partner with where appropriate.We'll also be maintaining our relationship with our extended family of talented specialists and freelancers.

This means we're retiring the Big Picture agency, but we'll be keeping the blog going to share news and views. You can read the press release here Download mindshare_hires_first_digital_chief_strategy_officer_29_september_2006.doc .

Wibree - The new bluetooth

As Bluetooth starts to take off as a means of marketing, Nokia have announced Wibree; a new technology that performs a similar function to Bluetooth but is more energy efficient and uses smaller chips - although it is slower.
Along with RFID chips getting trial, technologies like Bluetooth and Wibree mean we will start to see mobile interacting more with the physical world. We already have posters that allow people to download info using bluetooth (Mindshare did a big campaign for Landrover) and this sort of thing will grow very quickly.
An interesting example is the way QR codes are now being intergrated into marketing campaigns outside of Japan, where they have been popular for a number of years. QR codes are a sort of mobile barcode - they use an application that is downloaded to a camera phone which means that when a photo of an image is taken a website automatically opens on the mobile - perhaps an instant win or more information on a product.  Shotcodes is a key player and has just announced a major deal for Sprint in Mexico and the FT cover a Hong Kong based company MyClick.
Minority Report just doesn't seem that futuristic anymore.

Top 10 mobile applications

Saw this on the Mobile Monday mailing list and had to share it. The clever people at wearetheoriginals did a poll on what people thought were the best mobile applications - this is what they found;

1. Shazam
(Dial 2580)
The music identification service we all wish we'd come up with.

2. Yellow Arrows
(yellowarrow.net)
NY art project, with heaps of possible applications.

3. Google Maps
(www.google.com/gmm)
Great on your desktop, even better on your mobile.

4. i-Metro
(metro.nanika.net/imetro. html)
The essential public transport journey planner.

5. National Rail
(wap.nationalrail.co.uk)
A perfect complement to the train operators' policy on punctuality.

6. Wapipedia
(www.wapipedia.org)
Ruin discussion with Wikipedia on your mobile.

7. F365
(www.brightai.net)
Great graphics, very addictive, an excellent way to halt productivity
in your office.

8. The Onion
(mobile.theonion.com/content)
Just as funny on your mobile.

9. BBC
(www.bbc.co. uk/mobile/index.wml)
The BBC doing their thing on your phone.

10. Nokia Sensor
(www.nokia.com/sensor)
Would be great if Nokia pre-installed this.

How long before a brand comes up with something as useful?

UPDATE - an article I wrote on apps ( mobile and otherwise) can be read here