Big Picture Advertising

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 the agency model

Anyone who has spent any time on this blog will know I think the traditional agency model is broken.
Being a factory dedicated to producing 30 second commercials, websites, banners and buttons or mail packs is not a viable business in an age where consumers are AdAvoiders and media is evolving so fast.
So when Forrester produce a new report ( register and you should get a free copy free copies are all gone its now $279 - money well spent) saying agencies have to embrace and facilitate communities if they are to survive, I'm really interested. The main premise of the report is that agencies will need to be able to connect their brands with appropriate communities - and that the best way to do that is by becoming an integral part of those. communities

Peter Kim (one of the authors) says "I don't think agencies are going away,"  "They're going to be the ones that help marketers to communities of mutual interest."

I think this is right on the money and picks up on thinking from one of my favourite books - Net Gain by John Hagel. Written in 1997 Hagel sees that facilitating communities of interest and then finding appropriate products and services for them is a very interesting business model. Saga is probably the best example of this is Europe; they attracted a huge proportion of baby boomers and go out and find products the community want - resulting in a  business worth $5billion.
It's a good report and makes lots of sense. And I have a lot of time for Forrester and particularly Peter Kim, whose blog I read regularly. But I'm a little surprised they didn't talk to any media agencies in their research (the companies interviewed include HSBC (a MindShare client) and a number of our WPP friends - Y&R, RMG, Wunderman and Ogilvy).
Smart media agencies are much closer to being able to recognise this sort of radical future and evolve towards it. They have both the relationships (strong ties with the media owners and content producers that will fuel these communities) and the scale needed to make this transition.
When I made the decision to switch back to media, after a dozen years running digital creative agencies, I was a bit concerned about culture shock, yet the sheer energy and ambition of MindShare dwarfs that of any other agency I know.
For example, on Saturday morning, getting off a plane, I ran into an old friend now representing some of the biggest shows on US TV - he told me that of the 6 integrations they were considering for one new show, 5 were proposals from MindShare. We create award winning  creative campaigns and help brands understand the value of their marketing spend
In the last year we've bought (through GroupM) two agencies who really get social media (M80 in LA and LaComunicad in Amsterdam) and are partnering WPP investments in this space such as VideoEgg, LiveWorld and Visible Technologies. We've hired a whole bunch of smart people from outside media to help evolve the agency and recently bought probably the best digital agency in the world  - Schematic
So whilst not wanting to turn this into a puff piece for my company, I do think its hard to consider the future of the agency business without recognising that the media agencies (or at least some of them) are driving real change for their clients.
Like everyone else we have a legacy business that is still pretty traditional (and throws off the cash to allow for the necessary investment) but I do think we're more open to the new future of the connected agency than most others. And we're very focused on getting there.
I'm not sure we're in a race here, but we all need to keep evolving if we are to keep our skills relevant to the new marketing world.

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

NewTeeVee

Whilst TV companies look at their online strategies, we're also seeing an increasing trend by TV platform brands to take ownership of PVRS. We saw Sky buy Amstrad and now DirecTV (34% owned by News Corp) has bought the assets of replayTV, who were an early mover in the PVR market but lost a significant court battle with Hollywood.
So why the vertical integration? NewTV offers new advertising opportunities and formats as well as the possibility of addressable TV ads - and the broadcasters are keen to own that space.
But new players want to be involved and are developing new approaches and technologies - GroupM (the operating company that MindShare is part of) has just invested in Invidi, one of the leading companies in this space.
TV is not going away but it is going to be very different

Forrester define the opportunity

Fascinating quote from Forrester talking about their latest review of web agencies.

"The interactive agencies are in a position where all their staff is focused on executing on digital," he said. "They need people who understand that broader relationship between online and offline media."

Thats what we do at MindShare.

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.

Widgets

My next bit of travel is a little less long haul than usual.
Next Thursday I'm off to Brighton to take part in the WidgetyGoodness conference that Ivan Pope has arranged.
There is a good mix of speakers, so hopefully we'll get past the hype and onto the substance of what's really going on.
Well worth a visit

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