Big Picture Advertising

GroupM partnership with Yahoo

The press are already covering the story of the new partnership ( of GroupM of which my employer MindShare is part) with Yahoo, but we can delve a little deeper here.

By developing a unique technology partnership between Yahoo's Right Media Exchange and our own 24/7 we can offer clients more targeted digital advertising - whilst reducing the friction inherent in using a wide range of websites.

Yahoo bought Right Media just over a year ago and it is the largest advertising exchange, with over 45000 active buyers and sellers who traded 193 billion impressions in March alone! The advantage for us in partnering is that the more inventory that 24/7 can access, the cleverer the technology gets.

“Basically, the network gets smarter and smarter the more data points it gets added to it,” said Rob Norman, the chief executive of GroupM Interaction, which handles GroupM’s online buying. “We believe we’ll be able to do greater customization of campaigns.”

We expect to add other similar media partnerships in the future and its worth stressing that this starts to demonstrate the benefits of having 24/7 technology within the group. As we said when WPP bought 24/7 this is part of the reinvention of advertising - and much of our "competition" are merely onlookers. 

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?

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 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

Interesting times for TV

A few bits of news from the last few days demonstrate just how much is changing in the world of TV.

Here in the UK there has been surprisingly little coverage of the announcement of Kangaroo - a broadband service jointly funded by ITV, Channel 4 and the BBC will offer 'catch up' for recent TV shows across all the channels plus archive material. The service will encompass a number of business models (free, pay to rent, buy to own) and will probably ( in our view) be a destination that eventually replaces the current broadband offerings of the stations.

Some parts of the picture are still unclear - the role for Five and even for Sky ( giving a service an Australian name and hiring a former Sky director is interesting given how powerful Sky is in UK television).

At around the same time we read a senior NBC executive quoted at an event organised by the excellent Jack Myers saying;

"it turns out full-length streaming of TV series drives incremental viewing of the series [on TV]."

At the same event Tim Armstrong of Google said;

"People would watch more content if it fits into their schedule and getting content to the right users with a business model attached is the highest scale success you can have"

The industry clearly sees that TV content has a value outside of traditional TV - the question is whether the current industry structure remains valid. Independent producers are keen to take more value from their work and opportunities to go direct to emerging platforms will be attractive to them. And news today shows that Google intend to be a major player in TV advertising - at their presentation to the UBS conference Tim Armstrong said it would "take Google 3-5 years to become a force in traditional TV advertising"

He also said Google TV is actively looking to expand inventory beyond EchoStar's Dish Network; he described a recent well-attended "advertiser day" at Google for TV and agency execs. "They are at a point now where they believe more measurement is actually good," he said.

TV is going to remain hugely important, but the shape of the industry is far from clear.

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

Truly Global

Mary Meeker gave her annual presentation at the Web2.0 conference this week and, as usual, its full of great facts.
But this chart showing how usage for many categories is now lead by non US markets, evidences just how global the web is.
We're seeing strong businesses and media properties emerging in local markets and our work is increasingly about balancing the contribution of the global players with local ones.
You can get the full deck here