ad funded programming, broadcasting, television, viewing

Opening up the store: how Sainsbury’s gave us an authentic and balanced window into their world

brilliant bit of PR from Sainsbury's last night in the form of I'm Running Sainsbury's on Channel 4. in the first of four episodes, Becky Craze aimed to prove that her idea of bagging a meal would not only deliver on Sainsbury's feed your family for a fiver efforts, but would help the coffers of the supermarket giant, which we were reliably informed are to the tune of £30k per minute.

described by C4 head of factual
entertainment Andrew Mackenzie as "a look at the psychology of shopping and an opportunity to understand
the institutions where we spend our money" the show – made by Silver River – was a genuinely balanced view of life working at the retailer.

overnights are reasonable – pulling in 1.6 million viewers and an 8% share, with a further
284,000 watching on catchup service Channel 4+1 an hour later (source MediaGuardian). and the show seems to be generating a fair amount of chatter online.

positives were the genuine support that colleagues seemed to give each other (especially in the stores) and the enthusiasm of Becky to make a real difference to the company for which she works. negatives were the patronising looks and comments from more senior figures within the company. but with such negatives came credibility, the programme had an authenticity which I suspect will do well for the retailer.

but the real insight for me was the growth of own label. Sainsbury's products in Sainsbury's now number 15,000 lines and account for half of all the sales in the supermarket. one in every two items sold in Sainsbury's is own label. and they're clearly holding their margin – the own label reportedly count for – nearly – half of all revenues). enough to make any doubters of the continued rise of the retailer think twice.

next week should be fun, the show will feature an enthusiastic employee who takes the store to the customer – "it's not really stalking" she observes, "it's targeting".

broadcasting, cinema, content creating, viewing

The danger of applying old models to new technologies: why brands need to make the most of cinema’s platinum future

Monsters vs Aliens; Hollywood's latest digital offering

Pearl & Dean are hosting their first annual Film Festival today… think presentations interrupted by movies (or vice versa depending on your attitude). Mediation popped along this morning and heard a couple of cracking presentations.

the first – Peter Buckingham from the UK Film Council – outlined the Council's view of cinema's future. he observed that whilst "cinema has stubbornly maintained its analogue status", digital technologies would herald a new "platinum age" for the industry. its predicted (by Charlotte Jones of Screen Digest) that there will be 250 x 3D cinemas in the UK by 2010, up from the 172 on which Monsters vs Aliens (above) launched earlier this month. a good job too, considering Jerry Katzenberg – who knows a thing or two – has apparently predicted that within 5-7 years all movies will be 3D.

but 3D is only one aspect of cinema's revolution in the making: archive films are proving popular, as are "more obscure films" such as Man on Wire, indeed as Buckingham noted, "the big alternative content success [in cinema] is live Opera". add to this live sport in 3D (as being trialled by Sky) and the concept as cinema-as-studio (broadcasting the Shine a Light premiere to other cinemas for example) and you get an idea of where cinema could be heading.

at the heart of the UK Film Council's digital cinema vision is community; cinema "in the hands of local audiences", with cinema as "facilitator as well as curator". Buckingham cited locally produced UGC from schools and collages, Nollywood movies making it big in East London, and broadcasting of events such as Royal Society lectures as further evidence of this "democratisation of culture".

unfortunately talk moved on to brands, where the vision is apparently a little more limited in its scope. producer Phil Streather observed that brands had the opportunity to make ads that made full use of the 3D 'punch'. why is it that we can't attach some of the "platinum age" thinking to brands?

why settle for ads? if the vision and hope is that cinemas become locally-centric centres of culture and content, why are we slapping the outdated and outmoded format of an ad on the front of them. cinema's opportunity is the same for brands… how can we use these screens as platforms for our points of view on the world? what could we create and curate for these screens that say more about us than 30" of stuff with an awareness aim.

we're better than this, and if the promise that digital cinema offers is realised, audiences will expect better; platinum brand work for a platinum channel.

broadcasting, innovating, television, viewing

One email chain about Whedon’s Doll House: Two great hopes from Mediation about marketing TV shows

there follows a genuine email chain from my inbox today, names have been initialised to protect the innocent:

OB: "Dollhouse, the new Joss Whedon show, has started in the US. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollhouse_(TV_series) Hopefully over here soon…
CS: has had a lot of critical slating but lovely premise, can't wait to see it. Cx
AK:Oh how very exciting. I like Dushku. Can't wait to see it. Ax
JG: I saw the ads whilst out in Ottawa earlier this year. I do hope
it gets picked up here. The likes of Battle Star Galactica (great show) were
part funded by Sky… they’d do well to get behind some of Whedon’s stuff too.
OB: We stopped watched BSG half-way thru
second series, just didn’t grab us. May try again.
JG:You’ll have to catch repeats then as it finished last night! It didn’t really change style or quality through the series so I’m
not optimistic you’ll enjoy it much more if you go back to it.
HDL: I really enjoyed the first series of BSG and then it all got a bit a silly. V exciting re Dollhouse though sounds weird even for JW. I miss Firefly…
JG: Dollhouse is coming here very soon, maybe on FX I caught the
tail end of an advert for it yesterday – hope it’s good J
OB: In my efforts to find a date for Dollhouse
in the UK
I noticed that Knight Rider has been re-made too. Will def. be watching that!
JG: Not found an exact date – it’s going to be on the Sci-fi channel
in May (Dollhouse that is) Sci-fi have got Knight Rider too.
OB: Thanks, will keep an eye out for it. It’s
great that US TV comes over here so quickly these days rather than having to
wait ages…

I hope two things. one, that somewhere out there Sc-Fi is planning some media beyond it's own channel to tell people about this programme. too many shows languish for too long with too small an audience because of the perceived difficulty – and cost – of promoting them.

this is because in the main, promoting programmes beyond your own channel is expensive and is most likely to pay back in the medium or even long term. but Doll House is one of those rare exceptions to this rule: its a TV project which, because its from Whedon, is genuinely anticipated by a core fan base. something on which I hope and pray that Sci-Fi are planning to capitalise on.

secondly I hope that for not too much longer the world doesn't have to live without some software that tracks what I like and tells me when TV shows that I may like are coming my way. or indeed coming back. I was on the phone to a lovely lady from Sky yesterday week (part of the flat move trauma) who informed me that Fringe was back on Sky. if she hadn't have said something I may never have known.

this is an application waiting to be written, first brand to write it wins the prize. watch this space; I will be…

broadcasting, innovating, television, viewing

Doing digital on TV: How lastminute plan to get us all channel-hopping on Saturday night

thanks Emily for the heads up on this brilliant bit of thinking from lastminute.com who – fresh to to TV advertising for the first time in four years – are playing for a media first on Saturday night. an emailer to their database explains:

"On Saturday 28 February at 9.50pm, watch us on telly and win a big bundle of
good stuff.

We're creating a television first – and we want you to be
part of it. Tune into ITV on Saturday 28 February at 9.50pm. Three 60 second
adverts will be aired, straight after each other, starting on ITV, moving to
Channel 4 and then ending on Channel 5.

It's going to be the world's
first Mexican wave of thumbs up… spanning the channels and spreading the good
stuff, right around the UK. Watch the three adverts and guess the number of
thumbs you see.
Come back here and tell us
how many thumbs you think you saw. Simple!

You
could win a great big bundle of good stuff"

everything is in place here; (1) an dCRM and PR strategy to get this onto people's radars, (2) an innovative bit of media thinking that is consistent with and relevant to the campaign aims and (3) incentive to get involved, in the form of prizes to be won after the event.

but what's most smart is the line of thinking that got them to this idea in the first place. Simon Thompson, chief marketing officer at lastminute explained in a Guardian article that "because Lastminute.com is a digital-based brand we have to go on to telly with a digital mentality … To follow this ad consumers need to participate". a brilliantly simple bit of logic that has gotten them to a very smart place indeed.

so it's all good – unless you're the OMD TV buyer, in which case 9.49pm on Saturday night may be a very nervous moment indeed ;o)

blogging, branding, broadcasting, listening, social networking

Twitter’s ascent: why the emergence of this best kind of media space means brands have never had it so good

and so to Twitter, which – thanks to, in part, Obama, Ross and Fry – post a 27-fold increase in the last 12 months is now the seventh most popular SN site in the UK. with such growth has come the inevitable and necessary Campaign article on how brands can capitalise on this particular bit of media evolution.

some sense talked by Robin "have genuine conversations with people … show your real personality and allow people to connect with you" Grant and Faris "we've got to earn attention by being entertaining, useful and also nice" Yakob.

but also some craziness bounded about by Dare's Flo "create a fake receptionist" Heiss and internet consultant David "don't anthropomorphise it, what if an inanimate object was to Tweet" Bain. the question of how much fun a social network would be if inanimate objects Tweeted aside, (although its not entirely mad – my fridge for example; "feeling great today post a thorough defrosting and clean out yesterday, brrrrr – life good" or my Wii "exhausted post Chris playing for sixteen hours non-stop on Super Mario Galaxy – still at least he's completed it now and he and I can get back on with our lives"), the question remains why, when and how should brands enter the Twittersphere?

the debate is picked up in a post on Robin's We Are Social blog, where he makes two important points: (1) a brand's Twitter strategy should be built around the business objectives its trying to achieve, and (2) the hard work only really begins when you're up and out there creating and managing the day after day micro-interactions with real
people.

its worth reading down the comments, one by Adriana Lukes struck me as particularly relevant:

"If you think about brand as identity and branding as behaviour lots of
the idiotic advice rightly ridiculed in the post just looks absurd.
Fictional or inanimate characters' behaviour fools no one and is just
another tool in the messaging toolbox. And one-way communication is
messaging, two-way communication is behaviour. Twitter is rather
supercharged on that front…"

the evolution of media and communications and the fragmentation of
channels and empowerment of consumers that has come with it, is not a
beast to be grappled with. rather its a gift to be embraced.

we need to change our collective idea of what 'broadcasting our brand communications' means. from… a single-minded focus on one-to-many (with things like Twitter playing around the edge), to… having and using a tapestry of touchpoints by which to reach existing and potential customers.

TV ads and Twitter should be part of the same plan, because they come from the same place – the brand, and more specifically the reason for being & idea that sit behind that brand. understanding and continually and consistently articulating that idea is what will align 'one-to-many' as well as 'many-to-many' touchpoints.

Twitter isn't something 'else'… like so many emerging platforms its the best kind of brand space; a space where you're forced to be relevant, interesting and polite, but most of all a space where the people you're so desperate to talk to, can talk back. we've never had it so good.

advertising, blogging, branding, broadcasting, content creating, converging, engaging, listening, planning, regulating, researching, social networking, user-generating

Fighting the Future: reaching a rose-tinted concensus at the IPA 44 Club’s Future of Advertising in a Networked Society

A short history of marketing from jabi on Vimeo.

the rather lovely above video – by jabi – neatly sums up the collective dilemma of how brands, marketers and, specifically, agencies address the challenge of social media. the issue was the topic of discussion last night at the IPA 44 Club's inaugural event of 2009:
The future of advertising in a networked society. quite the session it was… here's the gist:

part one – report findings

social media = the online tools and platforms people use to share information, thoughts, opinions, content etc
problems is that brands are "crashing the party rather than hosting it" (Russell Davies)
many brands are experimenting but not getting traction in the area
we need a model of comms that reflects 'ME' as opposed to 'brand'
a model that's about conversation and participation rather than interruption and engagement
a model that incorporates David Armano's thinking about 'influence ripples'
Johnny X by Dare is a cracking example
which succeeded in concentrating the feeds into and out of it's online space (64% of upstream and 84% of downstream feeds came from 10 sites each)
planning social media should focus on targeting the few, that demonstrate: (1) expansiveness (propensity to chatter), (2) popularity (propensity to filter and target) and (3) reciprocity (likelihood to act)
network size is predictable, as is network flow, as is circulation

part two – agency survey

brands in a socially-networked world are more responsible for creating and disseminating the right information – brands should be more discretionary in what they produce [Mediation found this less than substantiated and at odds with Clay Shirky's comments at the MGEITF this year on filtering in a content-abundant world being after the fact, ie produce then allow the network to filter]
the way to reward brand advocates is not through financial incentive
the industry disagrees on two areas: (1) that advertising principles are the same in a networked society and (2) that social media behaves in a fundamentally new way
it is believed that most revenue is up for grabs in content creation, then data & insight, then market research & insight gathering (amongst others)
these new revenue streams represent £11bn of additional revenue opportunity, with another £5bn potentially
…which would be (exactly!) enough to meet the £16bn shortfall in industry revenues by 2016 predicted by the IPA's Future of Advertising and Agencies report of two years ago (£16bn = the difference between the IPA's 'Central' and 'Consumer' Scenarios)

part three – the discussion

I won't bullet this because it's getting late and you had to be there, but this was the better part of the evening with discussion ranging between philosophy of brands in a social media space to the (inevitable) measurement and accountability of such activity.

for me a kind of rose-tinted consensus was reached; consensus that went along the lines of:

marketing has always been about great social networking, the challenge is the same – getting the right content in the right place, its just that…
(1) people power is more potent (we have 500 networked connections not 50 disparate ones) and (2) we need to react to the context our message are in rather than control the context our messages are in
it's brilliant because we can react to real people in real time in the context of a real conversations
social media isn't a bolt on, it has to be woven into every brand touchpoint
brands need to behave differently, and understand that their relationship with consumers is – to consumers – much less important than consumers' relationships with other consumers

so in a nutshell social media is great because it's as old as the hills, better than the disruption model, measurable …and there's a freak-off big commercial opportunity for the brands and agencies that get it right.

I just don't think that it' that easy. our industry is woefully
unprepared for the future. there's some brilliant thinking and debate
going on, but the commercial models, joined-up industry measurement
systems, and marketing best practice principles – from a 'what works'
as opposed to a 'self-regulatory' point of view – just aren't moving
fast enough.

most importantly, not enough consideration was given
to the integration of broadcast and social media. they're not going to
exist in isolation and broadcast media is going nowhere. iTunes didn't
kill CDs and Amazon didn't kill Waterstones. social media certainly
won't kill mainstream broadcast media; the same mainstream broadcast
media that in the vast majority of instances provides social media
users with the content they comment on, pass on, or reappropriate for
their own ends.

the other interesting question is how the
behaviour of digital natives will evolve… we're familiar with the
media 'hubs' that are the current crop of adolescent's bedrooms;
they're multi-tasking away across ten devices and infinite bits of
content. but what happens when they grow-up? how much of their social
media behaviour will they take with them into adulthood and how much
will they replace with the aggregated broadcast consumption of their
parents?

we live in interesting times; and I guess we wouldn't have it any other way.

one last word, I urge you to read JVW's post
about the event and specifically his debate on how the IPA can use social media
to get their social media report into more people's hands whilst not
impacting on revenues. a pleasure and a joy.

broadcasting, television, viewing

Taking the lead: how Doctor Who and Matt Smith prove the potent ability of broadcast TV to amplify a message in the digital age

two established and respected TV programmes. two significant cast changes. and that's about where the similarities end. just before Christmas Channel 4 introduced us to the new cast of Skins, and on Saturday the BBC introduced us to the man who'll play the Doctor post his tenth regeneration in about a years time.

both aim to achieve the same two objectives: one, mitigate against viewer decline when an established lead or leads leave; and two, capitalise on any potential positive PR that results from the casting of the new guy or guys on the block.

but the ways in which each programme went about achieving those aims couldn't have been more different. the principles undying the BBC's approach to Doctor Who were uber traditional from a commissioning pov. hold back information (only 6 people knew prior to the announcement in a DW Confidential special on Saturday night), and broadcast to maximum effect.

Skins on the other hand has maintained the approach that has served it so well hereto: establish communities, seed information to them, and allow / use the community to spread the message. the two approaches could be summarised as:

is one right? …or at least more right than the other? well no, each channel is communicating as is right for that programme brand and its audience. but a comparison of the results of each – as measured on Google Insights for Search – does show a clear benefit, at least in one regard, of one model versus the other.

comparative searches for skins, new skins, doctor who, new doctor who and matt smith as reported on Google Insights for Search application

both Skins terms (light blue and red) stay very consistent, the announcement of the new cast didn't seem to generate any significant interest (as measured by number of Google searches) at the time of release. compare that with the BBC's broadcast approach… searches for 'Doctor Who' (yellow) and 'New Doctor Who' (green) increased 5.2 and 7.5-fold respectively between Friday 2nd and Saturday 3rd Jan, the day the announcement was broadcast.

the real winner of course in Matt Smith, searches (shown above in purple) for whom increased one hundred fold (the maximum on the Google index); interest that Mr Smith should probably get used to.

broadcast TV sometimes seems rather under siege. the dual forces of digital switchover and the evolution of on-demand hardware (including the humble desktop) sometimes paint an incorrect picture of the decline of the power broadcast TV. but the power to amplify a message remains as potent as ever. as this blog has argued before, the ability to broadcast a message to millions of people (over six million for Matt Smith according to the Guardian) becomes more rather than less important in a digital world. TV may be changing in many ways, but it's unique ability to excite and unite around new news remains as powerful as ever.

advertising, broadcasting, cinema, praising

Contextualising communications for their media home: why the Orange Gold Spot gets Mediation’s vote in DCM’s ad-off

to celebrate their new on-screen identity, DCM (formerly Carlton Screen Media) are asking the industry to vote on their favourite ever cult cinema ad. an panel of illustrious experts has narrowed the list down to ten finalists which you can view and then vote for here.

it's quite a list – everything from Kylie's 2001 jaunt on a red velvet rodeo bull for Agent Provocateur to Tony Kaye's surreal effort for Dunlop in 1994. the best of the Diet Coke break ads is in there, as is Carling's Dam Busters, some Guinness Surfers and a reworked Bullitt chase with Steve McQueen behind the wheel of a Ford Puma.

but for me there can only be one winner. in a cinema ad-off, the vote has to go to on-screen communications that have become as integral a part of the modern cinema experience as popcorn and Green and Blacks… communications that have embraced not just the cinema screen but the Hollywood dream sprawling behind it. comms that took said Hollywood dream and subverted it to within an inch of it's life – much to our collective amusement.

over the last five years Carrie Fisher, Snoop Dogg, Alan Cumming, Steven Seagal, Sean Aston, Daryl Hannah, Spike Lee, John Cleese, Macaulay Culkin and even Darth Vader have had their projects subjected to the interference of Mr Dresden and co. the result for Orange is credibility in and associations with cinema that go far beyond the mere placement of an ad. they own this particular bit of media real-estate in a way few other brands have achieved anywhere, let alone on cinema…

in combination with a BAFTA association and Orange Wednesdays, the Orange spot is the result of a determined focus from a marketing team and associated agencies that demonstrate the power of creating content that is contextualised for the channel in which it's appearing. the Orange spot could only work in cinema, it's what gives it it's power. and it's why it's getting Mediation's vote.

advertising, broadcasting, television

The ten tonne zeotrope: how Sony continue to master the art of advertising the advertising

so what do you do when you've done balls, paint, plasticine (and Daniel Craig) in your ads? you build the world's biggest zeotrope of course. Sony's next effort was filmed in Italy earlier this month and is set to hit screens in the spring.

but the true success of the Bravia efforts is less the ads, and more the advertising of the ads. the original balls ad was spontaneously snapped when it was shot on the streets of San Francisco. since then the back story has been rigorously planned. for paint – as Faris highlighted in his IPA Excellence Diploma thesis:

"the film was first released online and then screened on television, consciously catering to the differing needs of youth and the Massive Passives. Online, the assets of the film were made available for remixing. The campaign was transmedia, recombinant and collective."

for the zeotrope effort, the above video was shot by Shortlist, loaded by then up on YouTube and written up in editorial on their website and in this morning's edition. Fallon et al are really starting to master the art of advertising buzz… now using smart media partnerships to amplify the story. neat, smart, and of course never forgetting the golden rule – have an engaging enough idea and content to build the model around. looking forward to the ad already.

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negotiating the future of media and communications

Category Archives: broadcasting