Big Picture Advertising

Google really doesn't like Microsoft

On one of the rare occasions I use Internet Explorer I spotted this message.

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.

Microsoft spoofs the ad business

This is the follow up to the Break Up video that Microsoft did last year. Both amusing and thought provoking.

Mobile marketing at its best

This D&AD winner is a perfect example of how new marketing works. The video explains the idea in full and is a must watch.
There is more good background at Wireless Watch Japan and Communities dominate Brands

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. 

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?

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?