Big Picture Advertising

Product Placement in the news again

The UK Culture secretary Andy Burnham has come out against product placement and revived the debate about this topic. Most of the industry feels that product placement is inevitable and it is (was ) expcted that the EU Television without Frrontiers initiative would open the door to product placement within a clear legal framework.
As we've discussed before this is a tactic that can work well - but not always in the way people think; as this chart shows the main benefit of Coke sponsoring American Idol is that the ads in that show track much higher than in other shows - suggesting that the placment works in a sort of low involvement processing way.

The Guardian has a good article berating shows for including brands and highlighting how obvious it can be when done badly.

Our view is that it can be a very useful tactic if done tactfully.

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

End of advertising as we know it

The final report from IBM on the End of Advertising is now available - building on previous reports and drawing data from all the usual sources, there are few surprises. But it is still interesting reading and reminds us all that we're living in interesting times.
This chart shows that all the future growth in advertising is coming from  "new" channels.
It highlights our belief that new media is the wrong description - this is all about Now Media

End of Advertising as we know it - IBM research

Following on from their end of TV research IBM have released some more interesting research - which is going to be part of their End of Advertising as we know it report to be published this autumn.

The research covers the US, Japan, Germany, Australia and the UK. Again well worth digging through - we were struck by just how dominant social networking and User Generated Content is in the all the markets other than Japan. There UGC is big, but social networks are not so popular - yet.

New Ofcom research on PVRs - and everything else

The new Ofcom Communications Market Report is published today, and as ever, its a wealth of fascinating info on how the UK media market is developing.

Its a huge document and the easiest way to get into it is to read the key points which gives a good topline.

One thing that leaps out is the findings about usage of PVRs;

Fifteen percent of individuals now have a digital video recorder (DVR) and up to 78% of adults who own them say they always, or almost always, fast-forward through the adverts when watching recorded programmes.

As you can see from the chart fast forwarding through ads is amongst the most popular uses of PVRs or DVRs - even though the figures are lower when asked as part of a long list. I'm a big fan - and a big user - of Sky+ and whilst I love ads, I always fast forward through the ads. And so does everyone I know who has one.

We have to accept that people are ad avoiders and create marketing communications that they actually choose to engage with.

In the Motherhood

Our latest branded entertainment project In the Motherhood has got off to a great start in the US - lots of submissions from consumers and lots of traffic.
This interview with David Lang of MindShare Entertainment gives some background to the project and some of our past successes.

Branded Utility in Contagious

The excellent Contagious magazine published our article on Branded Utility in their latest issue. If you're not a subscriber you can download the article here - Download branded_utility.doc .

Hey There Lonely Girl

William Gibson is probably most famous for his quote; "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed"

But he also writes some good books and Pattern Recognition was one of our favourite reads last year. The books characters try to determine the meaning of some odd film that turn up on the internet. And it turns out to be a sort of viral marketing.

Which all seems rather familiar now that the story about LonelyGirl15 is starting to  break. Lonely Girl15 is one of the biggest draws on YouTube (with over a million viewers) as a young girl called Bree talks about what she and her friend Daniel have been doing.

The videos are very well shot and this raised suspicion that this was some form of marketing rather than kids messing around.

Now Coolzr points to a story that Hollywood talent agency CAA is replying to emails sent to Bree. And there is speculation that these videos are promotion for an upcoming film called Danielle. And there is also a theory that its an art project - but we don't believe that one.

Is LonelyGirl 15 the new Blair Witch Project? The new I Love Bees? (the brilliant marketing campaign for Halo 2) Or is it the face of new marketing, where anyone with a few thousand dollars and a brilliant idea can use social networks to build brands?

Brands have the money; they just need to find someone with the brilliant ideas.

Update - as per Simons comment, the truth is out. And its very interesting.

Branded Utility

Chroma points out a fascinating AdAge article on the future of advertising. The key quote is from Benjamin Palmer of US agency/production company Barbarian;

"I believe the next stage of brand advertising is going to be in the realm of 'branded utility,"' says Palmer. (He co-credits Anomaly partner Johnny Vulcan with coining the phrase.)

Creating something that people need, not aping existing applications because you can, is key, says Palmer. "For the same budget and energy as we expend on current forms of advertising, we could be making something more tangible, useful and reusable that plays a more integral part in the consumer's life. This is 'interactive,' which is not synonymous with 'online,' by the way."

This is exactly what we mean when we talk about branded applications - brands creating something that is useful/valuable to their customers. The SharePriceAlert we did for Halifax last year is a good example of this approach and StattoStatto also fits into the space (although we did it for ourselves rather than a brand). We're currently working on similar projects - including some with a focus on social media such as MySpace and our growing interest in widgets, gadgets and bots is part of this.

It's an interesting area, as it can feel more like branded content than advertising - but we believe that the role of advertising will increasingly be to invite interaction - and these branded utilities will give advertising something interesting to say.

Ads thats say our beans are great, are ignored by consumers - they're just not believed. So why not have ads that say - we've 100 great ideas for feeding your kids using our great beans.

And rather than saying our home insurance is cheaper why not offer an application that allows you to find the real value of your house contents (most homes are drastically under insured) and use that to drive higher value quotes.

Thinking about what your customers would find useful and then giving to them, is a great way of getting competitive advantage.

UPDATE - James at ModernMarketing reminds me of our conversation yesterday about object centered sociality. Could branded utility be the object?

A new Big Picture project

We've just launched a new project - StattoStatto.

This is our own initiative where we try and make football even better. The site tells you where you can watch World Cup matches with a teams supporters - see a Brazil game with the Brazilian community at Guanabara or a Swiss game at the Swiss Church.

We want people to add content - to tell us other venues we might have missed, to tell us what the games were like and to add photos to a Flickr page.

StattoStatto will also be running a football trivia game - on this site for the World Cup and from the start of the Premiership season an SMS service will launch, with the chance to win some great prizes. We're planning to offer the SMS service as as additional option for score alerts services and we'll keep you informed as we sign partnerships.

Take a look and let us know what you think - and tell your friends.