Big Picture Advertising

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?

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 - 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.

Politics 2.0

This mashup of Hilary Clinton and the 1984 Apple ad demonstrate just how much politics is changing due to web2.0

And Barack Obama's website is about as 2.0 as you can get - create your own profile, write a blog etc etc.

As the US elections proceed people are going to see a very different type of politics - and marketers can learn a lot from this.

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

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.

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.

Unsettling

“The media industry has been rather static for 40 years. Now, even in just the last year, there has been more change in media behaviour than at any time since the invention of television. This is leaving many of our clients unsettled.”

The Media Director of US agency Goodby Silverstein, in a very good FT article (sub req.) looking at how young people are rejecting TV in favour of online and mobile.

Is it really any different in Europe?

Google CEO on mobile

Mobile is going to be the next big internet phenomenon. It holds the key to greater access for everyone – with all the benefits that entails.

From an FT article by Eric Schmidt

Blogging goes mobile

Our friends at Refresh have an interesting promotion geared around the World Cup, where they are trying to develop blogging in mobile by offering bloggers a chance to get their views on the World Cup onto a World Cup Mobizine.

And as its being run in conjunction with the Shiny Media blog network - the UKs answer to Gawker and Federated - it should deliver lots of traffic. Full details here.

BTW - There will be a World Cup Mobizine with all the news and views from a FIFA recognised content partner and Refresh are looking for a sponsor. If you're interested drop me a mail.